Nearly one in 10 superdelegates who voted in the Democratic presidential primaries were registered
lobbyists, according to a new report, adding some support to Bernie Sanders's claim that "the system
is rigged."
At least 63 of 712 superdelegates were registered at some point as lobbyists on the state or federal
level, according to
an analysis conducted this year by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Sunlight Foundation.
These individuals represented interests that span across big banks, healthcare insurers, the telecommunications
industry and unions, including Goldman Sachs and Planned Parenthood.
The list includes former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who is currently registered for the
healthcare insurance company Aetna, former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, a registered lobbyist
with the Gephardt Group and former DNC General Chairman and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who was
registered for Ballard Spahr LLP as recently as 2012.
Sunlight also found an additional 32 individuals it classified as "shadow lobbyists," which it
says are superdelegates who "aren't officially registered as lobbyists, but are heavily involved
in the influence industry."
This group includes the likes of former Vermont Gov. and DNC Chairman Howard Dean, who is a "senior
adviser" for Dentons, a law firm.
While the rules surrounding superdelegates for the next presidential primary will see some changes
— with Democrats agreeing to significantly reduce the number of superdelegates not bound by primary
voters — critics of superdelegate system have complained that it put the establishment in a position
to throw the 2016 Democratic nomination into Hillary Clinton's lap.
More than 600 superdelegates backed the former secretary of state, and in some cases handed her
more delegates than Sanders in states where he won a majority of the primary vote. A total of 2,383
delegates were needed to clinch the nomination.
Much of Sanders' 14-month progressive campaign to become the Democratic Party's nominee was spent
railing against a political system in which the wealthy and special interests determine the result
of the election.
"In the year 2016, with a political campaign finance system that is corrupt and increasingly controlled
by billionaires and special interests, I fear very much that, in fact, government of the people,
by the people, and for the people is beginning to perish in the United States of America," Sanders
said.
The findings of the Sunlight Foundation also show that despite a common refrain from Democrats
that Republicans are controlled by lobbyists and special interests, such as the National Rifle Association,
when it comes to delegates who are unaccountable to voters, the opposite is true. While the Republican
Party does have its own version of superdelegates, they must vote for the candidate that their state's
party members picked.
To view the Sunlight Foundation's entire list of lobbyist superdelegates,
click here.
In American politics,
a "superdelegate" is a delegate
to the Democratic
National Convention that is seated automatically and chooses for whom they want to vote. These
Democratic
Party superdelegates include distinguished party leaders and elected officials, including all
Democratic members of the House and Senate and sitting Democratic governors. Other superdelegates
are chosen during the primary season. Democratic superdelegates are free to support any candidate
for the nomination.
This contrasts with convention "pledged" delegates that are selected based on the
partyprimaries and
caucuses in each
U.S. state, in which voters
choose among candidates for the party's
presidentialnomination. Because they are
free to support anyone they want, superdelegates could potentially swing the results to nominate
a presidential candidate that did not receive the majority of votes during the primaries.
At least in name, superdelegates are not involved in the
Republican
Party nomination process. There are delegates to the
Republican
National Convention that are seated automatically, but they are limited to three per state, consisting
of the state chairsperson and two district-level committee members. Republican Party superdelegates
are obliged to vote for their state's popular vote winner under the rules of the party branch to
which they belong.[1]
Although the term superdelegate was originally coined and created to describe a type of
Democratic delegate, the term has become widely used to describe these delegates in both parties,[2]
even though it is not an official term used by either party.
... ... ...
For Democrats, superdelegates fall into two categories:
delegates seated based on other positions they hold, who are formally described (in Rule 9.A)
as "unpledged party leader and elected official delegates"[3]
(unpledged PLEO delegates); and
additional unpledged delegates selected by each state party (in a fixed predetermined number),
who are formally described (in Rule 9.B) as "unpledged add-on delegates" and who need not hold
any party or elected position before their selection as delegates.[3]
For Republicans, there are delegates in each state, consisting of the state chairman and two RNC
committee members. However, according to the RNC communications director Sean Spicer, convention
rules obligate those RNC members to vote according to the result of primary elections held in their
states.
... ... ...
Democratic Party rules distinguish pledged and unpledged delegates. Pledged delegates are selected
based on their announced preferences in the contest for the presidential nomination. In the
partyprimary elections and
caucuses in each U.S. state, voters
express their preference among the contenders for the party's nomination for
President
of the United States. Pledged delegates supporting each candidate are chosen in approximate ratio
to their candidate’s share of the vote. They fall into three categories: district-level pledged delegates
(usually by congressional
districts);[4]
at-large pledged delegates; and pledged PLEO (Party Leaders and Elected Officials) delegates.
In a minority of the states, delegates are legally required to support the candidate to whom they
are pledged.[5]
In addition to the states' requirements, the party rules state (Rule 12.J): "Delegates elected to
the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect
the sentiments of those who elected them."[3]
By contrast, the unpledged PLEO delegates (Rule 9.A) are seated without regard to their presidential
preferences, solely by virtue of being current or former elected officeholders and party officials.
Many of them have chosen to announce endorsements, but they are not bound in any way. They may
support any candidate they wish, including one who has dropped out of the presidential race.[6]
The other superdelegates, the unpledged add-on delegates (Rule 9.B), who need not be PLEOs, are selected
by the state parties after some of the pledged delegates are chosen,[3]
but they resemble the unpledged PLEO delegates in being free to vote as they wish.
... ... ...
At the
2008
Democratic National Convention, superdelegates cast approximately 823.5 votes, with fractions
arising because superdelegates from
Michigan,
Florida, and
Democrats Abroad are
entitled to half a vote each. Of the superdelegates' votes, 745 are from unpledged PLEO delegates
and 78.5 are from unpledged add-on delegates, although the exact number in each category is subject
to events.
The FBI has produced 68
pages relating to a Democrat National Committee (DNC) worker who was shot dead in 2016 in
Washington, including an investigative summary that appears to suggest someone could have paid
for his death.
... The newly
released files show top Department of Justice officials met in 2018 and discussed Rich's
murder. They reviewed Rich's financial records and did not identify any unusual deposits or
withdrawals.
...One witness saw an individual walking away from the location where Rich was killed but
thought Rich was merely drunk so did not alert authorities . They realized something bad had
happened when they saw a bloodstain on the ground in the same place the following day, as well
as police tape surrounding the scene.
A person whose name was redacted took Rich's personal laptop to his house , according to one
of the newly released documents. The page also indicates that authorities were not aware if the
person deleted or changed anything on Rich's personal laptop.
The FBI came into possession of Rich's work laptop, the bureau
previously revealed .
On another page, it was said that "given [redacted] it is conceivable that an individual or
group would want to pay for his death."
"That doesn't sound like a random street robbery," Ty Clevenger, a lawyer, told The Epoch
Times.
... ... ...
The files were released this week in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Texas resident Brian
Huddleston, who Clevenger represents.
Huddleston sued the FBI after it told him it would take 8 to 10 months in June 2020 to
respond to his Freedom of Information Act request. Huddleston asked the FBI to produce all
data, documents, records, or communications that reference Seth Rich or his brother, Aaron
Rich.
A federal judge earlier this year ordered the FBI to produce documents concerning Rich by
April 23. The FBI identified 576 relevant documents but only produced 68 of them to
Huddleston.
The FBI has declined to speak about the lawsuit. Attorneys for Rich's parents did not
immediately respond to requests for comment.
The documents show that some reporting on Rich's death was wrong, such as an ABC News
report
that claimed the FBI was not involved in investigating the murder.
Clevenger said he found concerning how the government apparently does not know whether
anything was deleted from Rich's personal laptop.
The documents were largely redacted but the information that did get through "shows that
their whole narrative is falling apart," he added. "It's a step in the right direction."
The attorney plans to ask U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant, an Obama nominee, to produce
unredacted copies for his perusal. The judge could rule that some redactions were improper.
Defendants could also face repercussions for not producing all of the documents they have
concerning Rich, including fines.
U.S. Attorney Andrea Parker, who is representing the FBI, told the judge in a court filing
this week that the bureau can only process 500 pages per month for each Freedom of Information
Act request. She asked the court to give the bureau additional time to produce all of the
relevant records.
Clevenger told the judge in a court filing this week that the private sector routinely
processes 500 pages or more per day and that the government should be afforded no more than two
weeks to produce the remaining 1,063 pages.
RiverRoad 1 hour ago
Was a reward offered for solving his murder? A robbery murder with a nice reward attached
in DC gets solved pretty quickly. Is it correct that his parents were given a million dollars
by the FBI to agree that questions re his murder are only conspiracy theory?
Buzz-Kill 11 hours ago (Edited)
WoW! The FBI does exist. Wonder when they're gonna get on the Hunter Biden investigation.
Waiting with anticipation! /s
Brazillionaire 2 hours ago
I think Chris has that scheduled for 2025 early/mid summer. But, then again, no reasonable
prosecutor...
Nelbev 12 hours ago
And PETER STRZOK was the FBI agent handling the investigation? Not an important detail to
mention in article, guess he was familiar with Seth case after his work burying the Clinton
investigation, and obvious match, best FBI agent to pick for the investigation.;
Art link https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20690299-fbi-documents-on-seth-rich
He seems to be everywhere doesn't he?
Hillary.....Seth....Trump.....and covering up for dems and attacking repubs 100% of the
time.
LetThemEatRand 12 hours ago
Crazy conspiracy theories for f's sake. It is totally common in a robbery not to take the
guy's wallet.
williambanzai7 PREMIUM 12 hours ago
They solve all the cases involving known terrorist suspects with connections to the FBI.
But everything else is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.
hackjealousy 12 hours ago
If only the attacker had dropped his passport at the scene.
LetThemEatRand 12 hours ago
"A person whose name was redacted took Rich's personal laptop to his house, according to
one of the newly released documents. The page also indicates that authorities were not aware
if the person deleted or changed anything on Rich's personal laptop."
Happens all the time. Wear your mask, take your jab, 9/11, WMDs.
r0mulus 11 hours ago
Yes- why exactly would anybody be handling Rich's personal laptop after he died? And why
would they need to have their name redacted?
Seth Rich's murder was a political assassination. Did John Podesta have Seth Rich
murdered?
Soloamber 12 hours ago
Are the Kennedy's gun shy ?
Podesta wanted an example .
DNC ordered hit .
Seasmoke 12 hours ago remove link
Lost all respect for the FBI.
Tinfoil Masker 12 hours ago
You mean like 58 years ago right?
r0mulus 11 hours ago
At this point, it's been at least 75 years since they deserved any respect. Probably
longer.
lwilland1012 11 hours ago
Durham? What the Hell is a John Durham?
Dr Phuckit 11 hours ago
Summed up in three words
Russia Russia Russia
Redactions don't protect the Innocent, they protect the Guilty.
And it's obvious some people at the FBI were deeply involved.
sbin 11 hours ago
Epoch times
Surprised they didn't blame China.
Almost as believable as Bellingcat Gatestone White helmets or CNN.
DNC scum had Seth Rich murdered.
messystateofaffairs 10 hours ago
FBI released? Thats for disinformation purposes not part of a search for truth.
uhland62 9 hours ago
I thought NSA saves every keystroke people make. So when Seth's keystrokes happened, there
was a computer glitch?
ClamJammer 7 hours ago
Right, but they only use that for evidence to lock up the likes of you and me, not to
expose the crimes they themselves commit. Despite being funded by the tax-payer, i dont think
a FOI request works there.
El Chapo Read 12 hours ago
About as truthful as the 9/11 Commission Report.
Spare me.
NightWriter 12 hours ago
Just like the 2020 Election verdict:
The Deep State finds the Deep State not guilty.
Mzhen 12 hours ago
The Rich murder was a subject of discussion for FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa
Page.
Gringo Viejo 10 hours ago
5 years after the fact. What's the FBI's motive in releasing this information at this
time?
... ... ...
Soloamber 10 hours ago
The FBI motive ...They were told to .
Kanzen Saimin 9 hours ago
It's a clever tactic used by professional liars. If you can distract people for long
enough they will forget about what happened in the first place.
... ... ...
uhland62 9 hours ago
Same thing happened in Australia. What made Australia has been privatized, deregulated,
and digitized. And now we are payment slaves to a handful of global billionaires.
But today we celebrate national militarism day, Anzac Day and we get softened up by the
politicians to accept a war against China.
Rich family representative, Brad Bauman, responding to the conspiracy theorists' claim
that the FBI was investigating the case said, " The FBI is not now and has never been a party
to this investigation. "
" The FBI has indirectly denied investigating the case , which Washington police consider
a robbery gone wrong."
" Snopes.com looked
into the matter and stated: "We were able to confirm the FBI is not investigating Rich's
murder "
Kanzen Saimin 9 hours ago
Wikipedia wasn't allowed to be referenced when I attended university years ago. The
co-founder disavows it now.
Half a decade later, they still can't find their own ***.
That's the way it will stay.
sbin 12 hours ago
Barr and Dunham are looking into it.
gcjohns1971 1 hour ago
Given the sordid, lawless, partisan, and seditious history of the FBI since its founding,
why should anyone suspect their actions here are benign?
ThanksIwillHaveAnother 3 hours ago
Seth Rich supported Bernie Sanders. He saw how Hillary and Dems piped in cheers for
Hillary and detuned the real cheers for Bernie. He saw how the powers behind the curtain
manipulated Hillary into being the nominee. He sent the files to WikiLeaks. Now ask
yourself...would someone want him killed???
Chief Joesph 3 hours ago remove link
Really can't help to think Hillary Clinton had a hand in Rich's murder. Afterall, Rich
knew about her financial affairs, along with the rest of the Democratic party, and was
passing it on to Wikileaks. It also stands to reason why the Democrats would like to see
Julian Assange murdered too. Needless to say, Assange will never see any prospects for Biden
to pardon him.
But what doesn't make sense is if this murder was at the hands of someone wanting to rob
Rich, then why didn't they take his computer along with his wallet? (Neither was taken). The
Police invented that story for public consumption.
Dragon Breath 3 hours ago (Edited)
We're certain that Director Wray at the FIB is burning the midnight oil trying to solve
Seth Rich's murder, Wiener's laptop crimes, Clinton's computer server crimes, and any day now
Hunter Biden's crimes with evidence on his laptop that he "lost" at the computer repair shop.
Wray and the FIB have it all under control...
It's all under control...
DayWear 3 hours ago
"the bureau can only process 500 pages per month"
that is so laughable I can't believe the fbi attorney even agreed to say it.
MaF 33 minutes ago
500/month = 25 pages/day = 3 pages/hr.
Sounds like only 1 govidiot is doing all the "work."
fleur de lis 2 hours ago remove link
As if the FBI would even dare issue parking tickets to the DNC psychopaths whom they know
very well to be the plotters.
The FBI ain't what it used to be.
Only listen to Comey for one minute.
The FBI is just a security guard agency for whomever has the biggest checks and best
benefits.
TheySayIAmOkay 3 hours ago
Smartest criminal in DC. No traffic cams. No store cams. No gunshots. No witnesses. He
even stole stuff that wasn't there.
Vandal 2 hours ago
Yep...and the American Gestapo(FBI) is complicit in the coverup. True Deepstate kind of
stuff.
Blurb 3 hours ago
Let's see here...
The FBI would have benefited from this guy getting killed, and they're the ones
investigating the murder...
The media reports that the FBI are not investigating, which turns out to be a lie.
The FBI somehow ends up with Seth Rich's laptop, even admitting that 'someone might have
deleted something'.
The FBI won't turn over documents, many of which had redacted content.
These are the people we got glimpses of from 2016 to 2020. Now, they are back in the
shadows.
I'll just leave this here, for anyone interested in a level of detail to this case that
most people aren't aware of.
tl;dr: The FBI may have provided the guns used to kill Rich. An FBI agent's car was broken
into the night of Rich's murder, and guns were stolen. Then the FBI ****** with the
timestamps of the event to make it look like it took place after the murder, when in fact, it
took place before.
Suzy Q 3 hours ago remove link
I remember that incident of the stolen guns. Very odd circumstances surrounding that
"theft" of FBI weapons.
TheRealBilboBaggins 4 hours ago
With all the obvious wrong-doing at the FBI, did any FBI agents come forward to denounce
it? Anyone? Anyone?
True Ferris Buehler moment looking for an FBI agent to testify against criminality.
Jung 5 hours ago
It was already a long while back when Julian Assange spoke about Rich and the so-called
Clinton email scandal: justice in the USA is worse than many a banana republic (more
sophisticated). Of course it was not Russia, it was proven to be no hack at all, but a
person, likely Seth Rich. At the end of time we'll know more.
US Banana Republic 4 hours ago
Guaranteed the Deep State (and that includes the FBI), the Clintons and the DNC all had
their fingers in it. But especially Hillary.
JOHNLGALT. 5 hours ago
Never mind. JOHN DURHAM is on the job. SARC.🆗
Fat Beaver 12 hours ago (Edited)
Never anything about the female fbi officer's duty weapon stolen off the front seat of her
suv 2 blocks away from the murder site 2 hours before the murder...she was apparently
shagging up with another agent and parked in his driveway and left the gun on the front seat
with passenger side window completely open...she reported it to police 2 hours before the
murder...this was found by a private investigator about a week after the murder and
published, never to be brought up again.
Nelbev 11 hours ago
It was a .40 caliber Glock and a rifle stolen out of the FBI vehicle, but no casings found
on ground at murder site, thus it is assumed that the murder weapon was a revolver (unless
someone picked up the casings).
Nelbev 11 hours ago remove link
Some informed person at the scene could have cleaned up, but doubt it. Rich was only
wounded at scene, not dead. As I remember there was funny business at the hospital too before
he died. I do not see reporting of the bullet's caliber.
JustSayNo 10 minutes ago
I don't need to read it. I won't believe a thing the FBI says and I also don't believe
that ANY US attorney actually does the job the American taxpayer pays them to do. I've got no
faith in any US attorney and the FBI has been a joke for longer ago than they shot that guys
wife and kid out west. FBI=coverup, period. And everyone knows it.
When I want to know what really happned to Seth Rich, the ZH comments section is actually
my best source
The federal bureaucracy, including the FBI, is now part of the democrat fascist regime in
TOTAL control in washington. Long ago these bureaucrats stopped working for the public and
began focusing on their own agenda where they don't have to answer to anyone. Reality is that
washington is a national Mafioso operation demanding extortion (protection) money from the
public, they serve themselves. The scary part is they don't just demand the protection money,
they demand everyone adhere to politically correct thoughts, speech, and actions, or you'll
be destroyed by the state.
Downhill from here 4 hours ago
What is the FBI's jurisdiction to conduct the investigation? He was not a state law
enforcement officer, he was not an interstate traveler, and was not a federal employee.
TheFederalistPapers 5 hours ago
The FBI is a brand and not a law enforcement agency.
rag_house 5 hours ago
Our government has a long history of having those that commit the crime then perform an
investigation on themselves. Wouldn't be surprised one bit if that is true here.
notfeelinthebern 12 hours ago remove link
All rats lead to Rome, is what they are not saying.
El Chapo Read 11 hours ago
All roads lead to Tel Aviv.
FIFY.
Dumpster Elite 23 minutes ago remove link
The FBI....they make the KGB look like a boy scout organization. Seriously...do you TRUST
the FBI, or do you view them as an enforcement tool of the Globalists.
DeeDeeTwo 25 minutes ago
Whew, it's a good thing Trump drained the swamp and declassified everything.
Totally_Disillusioned 26 minutes ago
The FBI has released their "findings" which we all know from previous "findings" released,
they are a mix of half-truth, manufactured evidence and outright lies. With our Federal law
enforcement, we will NEVER know the truth about matters they "investigate". Several quickly
come to mind such as Russiagate, Kennedy assassination, MLK assassination, explosion Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, 9/11, Justice Anton Scalia's murder, Ruby Ridge, Dividian
Compound, as well as so many more to list.
PT 5 hours ago
Only five years late. Who knows what progress they might make in another five years?
fishpoem 16 minutes ago
A person whose name was redacted took Rich's personal laptop to his house If one follows
the bread crumbs through the forest, it will certainly lead straight to the Witch's
house.
Angelo Misterioso 19 minutes ago
Strange that not a single house on that street had any video or ring doorbell or stuff
like that...
Print
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (
FBI
) has files from the
laptop computer belonging to Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee employee who was killed, according to a new email.
The bureau also has tens of thousands of documents mentioning Rich.
The FBI "has completed the initial search identifying approximately 50 cross-reference serials, with attachments totaling
over 20,000 pages, in which Seth Rich is mentioned," Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Parker wrote in the message to attorney Ty
Clevenger, who is representing a plaintiff Huddleston v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, a case dealing with a Freedom of
Information Act request to the bureau.
"FBI has also located leads that indicate additional potential records that require further searching," Parker added.
The Epoch Times confirmed the email is legitimate.
Parker, who is representing the FBI in the case, didn't respond to an email or return a voicemail.
The bureau also confirmed it has files from Rich's laptop.
"FBI is also currently working on getting the files from Seth Rich's personal laptop into a format to be reviewed," Parker
said.
The disclosure came as part of a case brought in federal court by Texas resident Brian Huddleston, who filed a Freedom of
Information Act request in April asking the FBI to produce all data, documents, records, or communications that reference Seth
Rich or his brother, Aaron Rich.
The FBI told the plaintiff in June that it would take 8 to 10 months to provide a final response to the request, prompting the
filing of the case in the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
Rich was working for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) when he was killed in Washington in 2016. His murder remains
unsolved.
The new email bolsters a key charge in Huddleston's filing: that David Hardy, the FBI's records chief, was wrong when he said
in two affidavits that the FBI searched for records pertaining to Rich but could not find any.
Rich is pictured on a poster created by police officials to urge people with information about his murder to come forward.
(Metropolitan Police Department)
The first sign that the testimony was erroneous came earlier this year
when the nonprofit watchdog Judicial Watch received emails exchanged by FBI agent Peter Strzok and Department of Justice lawyer
Lisa Page. The production
included
several emails
mentioning Rich.
Another sign came in March, when former Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Sines was deposed in a separate case, Ed Butowsky v.
David Folkenflik et. al.
Sines testified that the FBI conducted an investigation into possible hacking attempts on Seth Rich's electronic accounts
following his murder. She said FBI agents examined Rich's laptop as part of the probe and that a search should uncover emails
between her and FBI personnel. She also said she met with a prosecutor and an FBI agent assigned to special counsel Robert
Mueller's team.
The FBI declined to comment, citing a policy of not commenting on pending litigation.
The judge overseeing the Huddleston case in October ordered the defense to produce documents and an index.
In the new email, the government lawyer said the FBI has made "significant progress" in searching for documents mentioning
Rich, but still has much work left, including processing the approximately 50 cross-references, undertaking some level of review
of the laptop, and completing all remaining services.
The efforts are hampered by the FBI's Freedom of Information Act office being at 50 percent of its normal workforce due to the
COVID-19 pandemic.
The government is proposing an amended schedule that would give it three more months to produce the records.
WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange arrives at court in London on May 1, 2019. (Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images)
Clevenger, Huddleston's lawyer, told The Epoch Times via email that his client is hoping to find out why the FBI was involved in
the case, and why it originally denied involvement.
"We suspect the FBI may be right that the Metropolitan Police Dept. in D.C. was responsible for investigating Seth's murder,
so that leaves a couple of likely explanations for the FBI's role: it was investigating a counterintelligence matter or a
computer crime. Either scenario would be consistent with Seth transmitting DNC emails to
Wikileaks
,"
he added, referencing a theory put forth by Fox News in 2017 in a report that was later retracted.
A federal judge overseeing the case had earlier this year requested testimony from Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange.
Rich was killed less than two weeks before WikiLeaks "released a collection of thousands of internal emails and documents
taken from the DNC servers," according to a court filing. One month after Rich's murder, Assange referenced the DNC staffer in
an
interview
with a Dutch television
reporter when discussing the dangers faced by WikiLeaks sources. On Aug. 9, 2016, WikiLeaks offered $20,000 for information about
Rich's murder. The website increased the reward to $130,000 in January 2017.
The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) several weeks after Rich was shot dead offered a reward for information. A
spokeswoman told The Epoch Times via email that the case "remains under active investigation."
The spokeswoman declined to answer whether the FBI assisted police with its probe. "MPD remains the lead investigative agency
over this homicide," she said.
Clevenger said he thinks the timing of the email from Parker, the assistant U.S. attorney, is significant.
"Some of my colleagues suspect the Trump Administration has pushed the release, but I doubt that," he wrote. "With the
purported election of Joe Biden, the FBI brass probably think they are in the clear, and nothing will ever happen to them, so
they no longer have any reason to hide what they did."
U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe recently declassified information
indicating the CIA obtained intelligence in 2016 that the Russians believed the Clinton
campaign was trying to falsely associate Russia with the so-called hack of DNC computers. CIA
Director John Brennan shared the intelligence with President Obama. They knew, in other words,
that the DNC was conducting false Russian flag operation against the Trump campaign . The
following is an exclusive excerpt from The Russia Lie that tells the amazing story in
detail:
On March 19, 2016, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, surrendered his emails
to an unknown entity in a "spear phishing" scam. This has been called a "hack," but it was not.
Instead, it was the sort of flim-flam hustle that happens to gullible dupes on the
internet.
The content of the emails was beyond embarrassing. They
showed election fraud and coordination with the media against the candidacy of Bernie
Sanders. The DNC and the Clinton campaign needed a cover story.
Blaming Russia would be a handy way to deal with the Podesta emails. There was already an
existing Russia operation that could easily be retrofitted to this purpose. The problem was
that it was nearly impossible to identify the perpetrator in a phishing scheme using computer
forensic tools.
The only way to associate Putin with the emails was circumstantially.
The DNC retained a company that called itself "CrowdStrike" to provide assistance.
CrowdStrike's chief technology officer and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is an anti-Putin,
Russian expat and a senior fellow at the Atlantic
Council .
With the Atlantic Council in 2016, all roads led to Ukraine. The Atlantic Council's list of
significant contributors includes
Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk.
The Ukrainian energy company that was paying millions to an entity that was funneling large
amounts to Hunter Biden months after he was discharged from the US Navy for drug use, Burisma,
also appears prominently on the Atlantic Council's donor list.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Western puppet installed in Ukraine,
visited the Atlantic Council's Washington offices to make a speech weeks after the
coup.
Pinchuk was also a
big donor (between $10 million and $20 million) to the Clinton Foundation. Back in '15, the
Wall Street Journal published an investigative
piece , " Clinton Charity Tapped Foreign Friends ." The piece was about how Ukraine was
attempting to influence Clinton by making huge donations through Pinchuk. Foreign interference,
anyone?
On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
announced : "We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton . . . We have emails
pending publication."
Two days later, CrowdStrike fed the Washington Post a
story , headlined, "Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on
Trump." The improbable tale was that the Russians had hacked the DNC computer servers and got
away with some opposition research on Trump. The article quoted Alperovitch of CrowdStrike and
the Atlantic Council.
The next day, a new blog – Guccifer 2.0 – appeared on the
internet and announced:
Worldwide known cyber security company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by "sophisticated" hacker groups.
I'm very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy,
very easy.
Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton's and other Democrats'
mail servers. But he certainly wasn't the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get
access to the DNC's servers.
Shame on CrowdStrike: Do you think I've been in the DNC's networks for almost a year and
saved only 2 documents? Do you really believe it?
Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC's
network.
Guccifer 2.0 posted hundreds of pages of Trump opposition research allegedly hacked from the
DNC and emailed copies to Gawker and The Smoking Gun . In raw form, the opposition research was
one of the documents obtained in the Podesta emails, with a notable difference: It was widely
reported the document now contained "
Russian fingerprints ."
The three-parenthesis formulation from the original post ")))" is the Russian version of a
smiley face used
commonly on social media. In addition, the blog's author deliberately used a Russian
VPN service visible in its emails even though there would have been many options to hide
any national affiliation.
Under the circumstances, the FBI should have analyzed the DNC computers to confirm the
Guccifer hack. Incredibly, though, the inspection was done by CrowdStrike, the same Atlantic
Council-connected private contractor paid by the DNC that had already concluded in The
Washington Post that there was a hack and Putin was behind it.
CrowdStrike would declare the "hack" to be the work of sophisticated Russian spies.
Alperovitch described it as, " skilled
operational tradecraft ."
There is nothing skilled, though, in ham-handedly disclosing a Russian identity when trying
to hide it. The more reasonable inference is that this was a set-up. It certainly looks like
Guccifer 2.0 suddenly appeared in coordination with the Washington Post 's article that
appeared the previous day.
FBI Director James Comey
confirmed in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017 that the FBI's
failure to inspect the computers was unusual to say the least. "We'd always prefer to have
access hands-on ourselves if that's possible," he said.
But the DNC rebuffed the FBI's request to inspect the hardware. Comey added that the DNC's
hand-picked investigator, CrowdStrike, is "a highly respected private company."
What he did not reveal was that CrowdStrike never corroborated a hack by forensic analysis.
In testimony released in 2020, it was revealed that CrowdStrike
admitted to Congressional investigators as early as 2017 that it had no direct evidence of
Russian hacking.
CrowdStrike's president Shawn Henry testified, "There's not evidence that [documents and
emails] were actually exfiltrated [from the DNC servers]. There's circumstantial evidence but
no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated."
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The circumstantial evidence was Guccifer 2.0.
This was a crucial revelation because the thousand ships of Russiagate launched upon the
positive assertion that CrowdStrike had definitely proven a Russian hack. Yet this fact was
kept from the American public for more than three years.
The reasonable inference is that the DNC was trying to frame Russia and the FBI and
intelligence agencies were going along with the scheme because of political pressure.
Those who assert that it is a "conspiracy theory" to say that CrowdStrike would fabricate
the results of computer forensic testing to create a false Russian flag should know that it was
caught doing exactly that around the time it was inspecting the DNC computers.
On Dec. 22, 2016, CrowdStrike caused an international stir when it claimed to have uncovered
evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery computer app to help pro-Russian
separatists. Voice of America later determined the claim
was false , and CrowdStrike retracted its finding.
Ukraine's Ministry of Defense was forced to eat crow and admit that the hacking never
happened.
If you wanted a computer testing firm to fabricate a Russian hack for political reasons in
2016, CrowdStrike was who you went out and hired.
3 Awan brothers are named by Webb : Imran, Jamal and Abid. (A 4th brother and wife of one
of the Awan's are also believed to be involved).
Originally installed in congressional positions by Greg Meeks who is widely regarded as
the most corrupt member of congress.
I will preface this discussion by stating you will find some variation in the numbers cited.
I believe that is because I quoted from stories as the case was developing. The Daily Caller
was the primary source for most of the news on the net. I tried to be as accurate as possible
with the facts quoting the sources I found. I am posting this because I want answers, it is not
a definitive work. I do, however, believe the breach is every bit as consequential as the
hillary email server and the CIA Wikileak.
I know a bunch of shills will tear me up screaming, "ya got no proof," but indulge me in a
conspiracy theory. I think the greatest disservice the MSM had managed to perpetuate is the
fallacy that other than the obvious connection of all these people there is otherwise no
connection between these events.
Let's assume for the moment that the items described here are patterns of political belief
and criminal activity. They aren't individual acts, but on going criminal conspiracies. Let's
not look at this as an isolated event. While I'm detailing the actions of the Awan brothers. I
believe, but can not prove, those action may have been perpetuated in concert with other
individuals at work in the under belly of the government. It's almost as if disparate groups
come in contact occasionally when their objectives overlap. As I stated, I have no proof of
this, but it stands to reason the flood of cyber attacks and leaks may have overlapped through
the individuals linked in the different events. For example, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was an
integral player in the DNC Hacks and also introduced the Awan brothers to Congress. Is there a
connection? Maybe, maybe not. It is not that far fetched, this has happened before, see the
Silverman
group . Silverman associated with the CPUSA and knew
Jarrett's father, Dr. James Bowman and through
three degrees of separation used by the NSA is directly connected to Valerie
Jerrett . If it is good enough for the IC to open an inquiry why can't we indulge in some
similar speculation.
• The First anomalous fact is the Media. Why have they largely ignored the issue.
Before you cyber trolls jump on me, I would like you to consider two facts. Congress deals with
very sensitive and classified material all the time. The Awan brothers could never have had a
secret clearance for any other group than Congress. There is no news story there?
• The Second error is the "smoking gun." The evidence is always covered up with a
coincidence, a cover story if you will. While I believe the politicos in D.C. are pampered
rubes, they do have a good support staff, and some have been trained to support clandestine
operations. The rest have been hammered with political optics for the entirety of their career
in D.C.. They are all trained to control optics and the dissemination of the truth.
• The Third fallacy is the "bad guy." Why does everyone think an on going criminal
conspiracy can be distilled down to a single criminal committing a crime rather than a pattern
of criminal behavior with one or more groups profiting off the criminal activities. It is best
to think of their actions like organized crime and should be prosecuted like a RICO case. An
on going criminal enterprise by an organized group or groups of conspirators.
The Media
Why hasn't the media made this the top news story to at least go along with the Russian
hack. Let's face it, the media doesn't care about the damage to the country, they only care
about their partisan agenda. If they didn't they would cover stories damaging to the DNC.
With a
$600,000,000 CIA contract you would think the Washington Post could afford an
investigative journalist or two. Perhaps CNN will take up an interest as this rabbit hole
runs deep and wide. Don't hold your breath.
Snowflakes and "journalists" can call Trump a fascist, but there is nothing connecting an
enormous breach of the United States Security Apparatus by as many as 80 Democrat members of
Congress (past and present). We rail on about the Russians and Trump without specific
allegations backed up with evidence, but the media avoids providing nightly updates about these
5 spies that have compromised congress. The answer is simple, the Awan Brothers are Muslim and
the "victims"/dupes are Dems. Dupes who in fact abused their position of responsibility to end
up being compromised by their own "trusted" staff. Several of the Congressmen involved in the
breach have gone so far as to blame the allegations on
Islamophobia .
Meeks said he was hesitant to believe the accusations against Alvi, Imran Awan and the
three other staffers, saying their background as Muslim Americans, some with ties to
Pakistan, could make them easy targets for false charges.
This story damages the narrative that Muslims are benevolent members of the government and
Dems care about the country. It really shows the depth of the progressive aims to " fundamentally transforming
the United States of America .
This is where the conspiracy theory comes in. Give me a little latitude to connect the dots,
and let's see where this trail goes...
The mainstream media seemed far more interested in obfuscating the details regarding the
Tillerson terminations than they were in covering what could be one of the most dangerous
intelligence leaks in years, of which there has been but a peep out of any major news outlet.
Captain Joseph R. John (Navy-Ret.) has stated that he believes the Muslim Brotherhood "
fifth column" has "infiltrated U.S. Government ," and if he is correct, the Awan brothers
could very well be a part of this infiltration.
The media is
90% Democrat and I would argue that in recent years the mainline Dems have gone hard left,
almost Marxist. They have an almost suicidal pact with Islamists. Where does this scandal
connect with Middle Eastern Islamists?
One might well look at the set of circumstances laid out above and see in it a scandal
that would make Watergate look like a petty break-in. One might then scratch his or her head
and wonder -- why on earth would the New York Times or the Washington Post, which
incidentally just hired John Podesta (speaking of horrendous cybersecurity!) as a columnist,
have virtually no interest in the Awans at all?
Do Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos, one might ask, really believe they can't sell papers with
such a story to tell?
Fox News is told the employees made "unauthorized access" to the House computer
system.
Further, there were instances where House information was discovered in an external
"cloud" server. The contractors in question reportedly were sending and storing House-related
information in that off-site server.
"That violates House rules and it puts the House at risk," a source familiar with the
investigation said.
It is unclear whether the access issues exposed the House's networks to potential hackers
or spying efforts by unfriendly nations or terrorist groups, at a time when Washington is on
high alert for such cyber-activity.
Actually the last statement has been refuted. It has been alleged that Imran Awan had
achieved a privilege escalation through
Social Engineering . Essentially Imran through the political clout of the Congressional
leaders he worked for managed to convinced the Capitol Hill IT staff to escalate the Awans to
super user privileges to work on the "Congressional Machines" in violation of accepted
practices on the network. One device in particular was the Wasserman iPad compromised in the
DNC Leak. It has been also alleged they may have had Podesta's password. Since the Dems
approved the privilege escalation it is now forensically difficult to determine if the Russians
leaked the emails or the "enormously trustworthy and drunken" Awan brothers sold access to the
DNC servers.
Imran Awan bullied central IT to bend the rules for him so there wouldn't be a paper trail
about the unusually high permissions he was requesting. And their actions were not logged, so
members have no way of knowing what information they may have taken, the central IT employee
said.
After obtaining access to the Capitol server system, the Awan brothers could control all
aspects of a congressman system. They sold and configured the hardware setting permissions and
remote access to maintain the devices remotely. Essentially the keys to the kingdom. Through
congressional requests they managed to completely compromise the network. They could read
email, transfer files, install applications (i.e. key loggers). The latter reports that the
systems and network were completely compromised. Beyond that, Imran had bypassed IT key loggers
and reporting systems by gaining remote access directly to congressional computers.
The central IT staffer said any suggestion that the brothers' access didn't span the full
gamut of congressional intrigue was silly because they were the ones giving out
permissions.
The problem is that once they bypassed internal security there was no
logging of their actions . House authorities set their sights on the possibility that a
remote server had been used to transfer files off of Congressional members computers. The
investigation revealed that Imran had been
stealing money, equipment, and over charging for services . In total for almost 10 years
and almost 80 Democrat members of Congress were compromised.
This is where things go hinkey. Rather than turning the case over to the FBI the case is
turned over to U.S.C. Police. They are investigating the theft, not the data breach.
Let's state that again...
The USCP are investigation the theft of Equipment not the Loss
Of Congressional Data.
"At the request of Members of Congress, the United States Capitol Police are investigating
the actions of House IT support staff," Malecki said in a statement. "No Members are being
investigated. No arrests have been made. It should be noted that, administratively, House
staff were asked to update their security settings as a best practice. We have no further
comment on the ongoing investigation at this time."
The Bad Guy Two of the brothers, Imran and Jamal, have been linked to an emerging
security breach
The Awan brothers managed to get access to the Dems committee computers by just asking for
the passwords. In addition the Awan brothers sold the congress outrageously priced equipment
and broke into members of Congress' offices to steal equipment and or data.
Five House employees are under criminal investigation amid allegations that they stole
equipment from more than 20 member offices and accessed House IT systems without lawmakers'
knowledge.
More than 20 members were victimized by the alleged procurement scam and chiefs of staff
for the lawmakers were briefed on the matter Thursday.
The former staffer said "Jamal was always there," but Imran would only work "odd
hours."
And who is investigating this fiasco?
Where is the FBI and why have they left it to the DC police? Is it a "limited hangout"
they hope to bury by the promoting the administration's ties to Boris and Natasha?
D.C. Metro police have been brought into the investigation rather than the F.B.I at the
request of the Congressional
members involved with the Awan Brothers.
A source in the briefing said the Sergeant-at-Arms confirmed the U.S. Capitol Police is
conducting an active criminal investigation but said no arrests have been made. The source
said the FBI is not involved in the investigation.
"At the request of members of Congress, the United States Capitol Police are investigating
the actions of House IT support staff. No members are being investigated. No arrests have
been made.
Why aren't the FBI involved? I can only speculate, but it would mean that a FBI forensic
team would have to comb through all of those congressional computers to determine the extent of
the security compromise and data lost. The Dems just didn't seem up for the inconvenience of
allowing the FBI investigation to go forward.
The Awan Brothers had the keys to the kingdom. Physical security is paramount to cyber
security. If a hacker has Physical access to a machine they own it. It is the simplest hack to
conduct. The Anwar Bros had Debbie Wasserman Schultz's machine, along with Schultz, at least 80
other Dems also hired the
Awan Brothers to provide IT support at significantly higher rates than normal IT
support.
Jamal, who public records suggest is only 22 years old and first began working in the
House when he was 20, was paid nearly $160,000 a year, or three times the average House IT
staff salary, according to InsideGov, which tracks congressional salaries. Abid was paid
$161,000 and Imran $165,000.
Despite the fact that these individuals, reportedly heavily in debt, would have failed
security clearances they were able to receive top salary from Dems including members of the
intelligence panel and members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs were among the dozens
of members who employed the suspects on a shared basis. The two committees deal with many of
the nation's most sensitive issues, information and documents, including those related to the
war on terrorism.
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who was shamed for the Democratic National Committee conspiracy
against Bernie Sanders, recommended the Awan Brothers for their positions and Representative
Jackie Speier asked for their TOP SECRET CLEARANCE .
frontpagemag | Last year, eight members of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence issued a demand that their staffers be granted access to top secret classified
information.
The signatories to the letter were Andre
Carson, Luis Guiterez, Jim Himes, Terri Sewell, Jackie Speier, Mike Quigley, Eric Swalwell
and Patrick Murphy. All the signatories were Democrats. Some had a history of attempting to
undermine national security.
Beyond the debt, the brothers seemed to have, they had convictions for felony traffic
offenses including
DUI . Any one of these issues are enough to prevent or revoke a security clearance for
normal folks. I guess things just work differently on Capitol Hill. The American military or
college grads are denied clearances due similar issues in their record, but not these Pakistani
brothers. Any one of these offenses would have caused me to fail my FBI background check at
work, but congress can admit anybody. Do you see a problem here? Valerie Jarrett and
Huma Abedin are
perfect examples of the double standard in the government / Congress. Staffers of any
background history can get clearances, but Dems seem to be able to prevent Trump's staff from
getting clearance. What is going on here?
Multiple small businesses and individuals went unpaid as a result of the 2012 bankruptcy.
Abid also had an unpaid line of credit of $10,000 with the congressional credit union at the
time of bankruptcy.
Abid's record includes numerous driving- and alcohol-related legal problems, including
driving with a suspended or revoked license, court records show. He was found guilty of drunk
driving a month before he started at the House, and was arrested for public intoxication a
month after his first day.
with possibly opposing goals. A felon normally commits the felony tens of times, maybe
hundreds of times before they get caught. How many times does a Coke head commit a felony
buying coke before they get caught? If they ever get caught, how many years do they get away
with the crimes before they draw the attention of the authorities. The FBI, Congress, whatever
never find the full scope of criminal activity. They may just get enough evidence to convict of
a crime, but they never convict for all the crimes committed.
What is really becoming obvious is the Democrats have irresponsibly opened our congressional
security oversight to Middle Eastern Factions. These 5 are just one group that were exposed.
Hillary had Huma, Obama had Vallery. A sharia practicing terrorist that believes in female
circumcision leading a woman's March to equality in the 21st century. There are so many
examples that one has to be purposefully obtuse to ignore the contradictions.
While the nay sayers claim you can not connect the dots it is obvious that the dots were
there for all to see and could have been connected. I would say that the deviation from
standard security practices was intentional, but Podesta's password was password123 or some
such nonsense. Who knows, our leaders may really be that incompetent. They haven't even made it
to the minimum expectations to be employed in corporate America.
I really don't know what to make of two very different groups with nothing but vaguely
similar beliefs in Marxist ideals working together. Many of the thoughts I have on the subject
are almost too extreme to believe, but the evidence is almost unavoidable. None of it makes
sense unless someone is lying about their objectives.
Two House Democrats this week fired technology staffers linked to an ongoing
criminal investigation , more than a month after the couple in question was barred from
House computer networks.
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) confirmed to Politico that Hina Alvi's last day as an IT
support staffer in his office was Tuesday. Her husband, Imran Awan, was working for Rep.
Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) as of Tuesday evening, but a spokeswoman for Fudge said midday
Wednesday that Awan was no longer an employee.
This post has been updated and corrected with new information from US Capitol Police, which
said no arrests have been made but there is an active investigation ongoing into IT staff who
were involved in an alleged procurement scam. A lawmaker briefed on the situation had told
BuzzFeed News that arrests were made.
I believe Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was getting "schtupped" by at least one of the Awan
brothers.
Consider that even under heavy scrutiny, Debbie Wasserman Schultz fought like a mama grizzly
to keep these men on the job within the government. Why would she do this for a regular IT guy
on the payroll.
As The Daily Caller continues,
Awan was banned Feb. 2, 2017, from the congressional computer network because he is a
suspect in a cybersecurity investigation, but he still had access to House facilities because
Wasserman Schultz continued to employ him.
Outside of a couple of Congressional Black Caucus holdouts, every other Congressman fired
Awan when they found out he was under investigation. The CBC fired the later. Then the day
after the crap really hit the fan, Wasserman Schultz finally fired Awan.
... Why was the laptop found in the Rayburn building, when Wasserman Schultz's office and
every other Congressman for whom Awan worked office in the Longworth building?
Remember when Wasserman Schultz used a televised May 18, 2017 congressional hearing on the
Capitol Police budget to threaten "consequences" if Chief Matthew Verderosa did not give her
the laptop.
"If a member loses equipment," it should be given back, she said.
...
She tried the "executive immunity" argument that "If I'm not under investigation,
then you can't take away my SIDE PIECE!".
A couple month's later, Wasserman Schultz tried a different approach. Now she claimed to
protect the rights of Awan and the taxpayers.
If these political criminals were in the real world, this case would be over. But they work
in the world of politics where things are murky. Who knows what Wasserman Schultz has on
somebody else, who knows something about two other people. Thus, America gets the
run-around.
Politicians fight to protect each other. Because they know if America knew how dirty most of
the were, we'd disband government entirely.
As for Wasserman Schultz, hopefully the return of the mack, Awan sheds light on her dealings
with him. Moreover, let's hope this investigation uncovers what most Americans suspect of the
Democrats. We know in our hearts they are corrupt beyond belief. So let's prove it. Again.
Judicial Watch announced today that a federal court yesterday ordered a snap
hearing after the Justice Department submitted information under seal on Friday following the
court's demand for an explanation of why no records have been produced in the ongoing legal
battle for documents about the Congressional Democrat IT (information technology) scandal
involving the Awan brothers. The hearing is set for tomorrow, January 15, at 10 am.
In November 2018, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuit against the FBI over two FOIA requests for records related to the Awan brothers (
Judicial Watch
v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-02563)).
In August 2019, the Justice Department told the court that it would begin producing records
by November 5, 2019. After producing no records, on November 13, 2019, the agency told Judicial
Watch that it was having "technical difficulties," and in a recent email claimed that
"difficulties with the production remain."
In a joint status report
filed on December 5, 2019, Judicial Watch reported to the court that the DOJ claimed in a phone
call that it was now unable to produce any records to either of the FOIA requests "because the
agency was waiting for some unspecified action by Judge [Tanya S.] Chutkan in some other matter
so as to avoid having to produce records in this case." In that same report the DOJ told the
court that Judge Chutkan is "presiding over a related sealed criminal matter" that prohibits
the government from releasing the requested FOIA information.
In a hearing last month, U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta expressed frustration and
ordered the Justice Department to explain its failure to produce records by January 10 and to
provide Judicial Watch some details about the delay. Instead, the Justice Department made its
filing under seal and has yet to provide Judicial Watch with any details about its failure to
produce records as promised to the court.
"The cover-up of the Awan Brothers Democratic IT scandal shows the FBI and DOJ's penchant
for dishonesty isn't just limited to FISA abuse," stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
"The DOJ's handling of the Awan Brothers case has long been an issue of concern and now we are
expected believe some secret investigation prevents the public from knowing the full truth
about this scandal. We are skeptical."
Imran Awan and his family were banned from the House computer network in February 2017 after
the House's top law enforcement officer wrote that Imran was "an ongoing and serious risk to
the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information systems,"
and that a server containing evidence had gone "missing." The inspector general said server
logs showed "unauthorized access" and procurement records were falsified.
Imran Awan was Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's (D-FL) top information technology aide. Most
lawmakers fired Awan in February, but Wasserman Schultz kept him on until he was
arrested in July 2017 , trying to board a flight for Pakistan.
In July 2018, Imran Awan was given a plea deal,
and pled guilty to federal bank fraud but prosecutors found no evidence that Awan "violated
federal law with respect to the House computer systems."
The Awan brothers reportedly "were not given
background checks before being given access to highly sensitive government information and no
explanations have been given as to why." Additionally, "If they would have run this background
check it would have found out not only multiple criminal convictions, but $1 million
bankruptcy, a dozen lawsuits it would have found a whole host of major red flags and the
Democrats didn't do any of those checks."
The Awan Brothers aided former DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz in making threatening voice modulated phone calls to
attorneys suing the DNC for election fraud.
Lt. Colonel Tony Schaffer told
Fox
News
that Schultz ordered the Awan Brothers to scare off the lawyers due to the threat they pose in exposing widespread
election fraud committed by the Democratic Party in 2016.
Disobedientmedia.com
reports: If substantiated, the claims may have significance for the DNC fraud lawsuit proceedings,
and add to the growing controversy surrounding the recent arrest of Imran Awan on bank fraud charges.
Jared Beck, and attorney litigating the DNC Fraud Lawsuit noted
on Twitter
:
"We take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and
domestic. And sadly, the domestic enemies to our voting system and our honoring of the
Constitution are right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with their allies in the Congress of the
United States".
Amazing that Pelosi is suddenly aware of her duty.
Thank you karlof1 - LMFAO - coffee all over the keyboard.
Perhaps Pelosi should take her own advice and discuss this belief of hers with Debbie
Wasserman Schultz. After all Schultz promoted the Awan family spy and blackmail ring to other
members of the Democrat caucus in Congress.
Another swamp pond yet to drain, take note Barr, there is still a lot of work ahead ha ha
ha.
"... The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle . The last four reality-impaired years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don't know what's going on. ..."
"... The LSM should be confronted: "At long last have you left no sense of decency?" But who would hear the question -- much less any answer? ..."
"... Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there are no referees to call the fouls. ..."
"... Incidentally, Mueller's report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee's magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages -- and fortified. So there. ..."
"... is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of its study -- call it "Mueller (Enhanced)" -- and the propaganda fanfare -- come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning, as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message. ..."
"... The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks. ..."
"... The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness -- particularly with regard to Covid-19 -- he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith. The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling to all concerned is to say the obvious. ..."
"... None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known -- even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel about people like Paul Manafort "sharing polling data with Russians" who might be intelligence officers. That data was "mostly public" the Times itself reported , and the paper had to correct a story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned. ..."
"... On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele, labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium News explained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to push Russiagate. ..."
"... the description of #WikiLeaks ' publishing activities by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee 's Report appears a true #EdgarHoover 's disinformation campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive ..."
"... And that's not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word feature, "The Plot to Subvert an Election," trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans. ..."
"... That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people's news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed. ..."
"... "Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for 'hacking' Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks ." ..."
The New York Times is leading the full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed
effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump...
The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle . The last four reality-impaired
years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don't know what's going
on.
The LSM should be confronted: "At long last have you left no sense of decency?" But who would hear the question -- much less any
answer? The corporate media have a lock on what Americans are permitted or not permitted to hear. Checking the truth, once routine
in journalism, is a thing of the past.
Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards
as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there
are no referees to call the fouls.
The recent release of a 1,000-page, sans bombshells and already out-of-date report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has provided
the occasion to "catapult the propaganda," as President George W. Bush once put it.
As the the Times 's Mark Mazzetti put it in his
article Wednesday:
"Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, Republican-majority senators hoped it would refocus attention
on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated."
Mazzetti is telling his readers, soto voce : regarding that interference four years ago, and the "continued-unabated" part, you
just have to trust us and our intelligence community sources who would never lie to you. And if, nevertheless, you persist in asking
for actual evidence, you are clearly in Putin's pocket.
Incidentally, Mueller's report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee's
magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages -- and fortified. So there.
Iron Pills
Recall how disappointed the LSM and the rest of the Establishment were with Mueller's anemic findings in spring 2019. His report
claimed that the Russian government "interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" via a social
media campaign run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and by "hacking" Democratic emails. But the evidence behind those charges
could not bear close scrutiny.
You would hardly know it from the LSM, but the accusation against the IRA was thrown out of court when the U.S. government admitted
it could not prove that the IRA was working for the Russian government. Mueller's ipse dixit did not suffice, as we
explained a year ago
in "Sic Transit Gloria Mueller."
The Best Defense
is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of its study -- call it "Mueller (Enhanced)" -- and the propaganda
fanfare -- come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning,
as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message.
Durham
One chief worry, of course, derives from the uncertainty as to whether John Durham, the US Attorney investigating those FBI and
other officials who launched the Trump-Russia investigation will let some heavy shoes drop before the election. Barr has said he
expects "developments in Durham's investigation hopefully before the end of the summer."
FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith already has decided to plead guilty to the felony of falsifying evidence used to support a warrant
from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveillance to spy on Trump associate Carter Page. It is abundantly clear that
Clinesmith was just a small cog in the deep-state machine in action against candidate and then President Trump. And those running
the machine are well known. The president has named names, and Barr has made no bones about his disdain for what he calls spying
on the president.
The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former
FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper,
for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be
the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without
taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks.
The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness -- particularly
with regard to Covid-19 -- he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith.
The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling
to all concerned is to say the obvious.
So, the stakes are high -- for the Democrats, as well -- and, not least, the LSM. In these circumstances it would seem imperative
not just to circle the wagons but to mount the best offense/defense possible, despite the fact that virtually all the ammunition
(as in the Senate report) is familiar and stale ("enhanced" or not).
Black eyes might well be in store for the very top former law enforcement and intelligence officials, the Democrats, and the LSM
-- and in the key pre-election period. So, the calculation: launch "Mueller Report (Enhanced)" and catapult the truth now with propaganda,
before it is too late.
No Evidence of Hacking
The "hacking of the DNC" charge suffered a fatal blow three months ago when it became known that Shawn Henry, president of the
DNC-hired cyber-security firm CrowdStrike,
admitted under oath that his firm had no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked -- by Russia or anyone else.
(YouTube)
Henry gave his testimony on Dec. 5, 2017,
but House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff was able to keep it hidden until May 7, 2020.
Here's a brief taste of how Henry's testimony went: Asked by Schiff for "the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data",
Henry replied, "We just don't have the evidence that says it actually left."
You did not know that? You may be forgiven -- up until now -- if your information diet is limited to the LSM and you believe The
New York Times still publishes "all the news that's fit to print." I am taking bets on how much longer the NYT will be able to keep
Henry's testimony hidden; Schiff's record of 29 months will be hard to beat.
Putting Lipstick on the Pig of Russian 'Tampering'
Worse still for the LSM and other Russiagate diehards, Mueller's findings last year enabled Trump to shout "No Collusion" with
Russia. What seems clear at this point is that a key objective of the current catapulting of the truth is to apply lipstick to Mueller's
findings.
After all, he was supposed to find treacherous plotting between the Trump campaign and the Russians and failed miserably. Most
LSM-suffused Americans remain blissfully unaware of this, and the likes of Pulitzer Prize winner Mazzetti have been commissioned
to keep it that way.
In Wednesday's
article , for example, Mazzetti puts it somewhat plaintively:
"Like the special counsel the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with
the Russian government -- a fact that the Republicans seized on to argue that there was 'no collusion'."
How could they!
Mazzetti is playing with words. "Collusion," however one defines it, is not a crime; conspiracy is.
'Breathtaking' Contacts: Mueller (Enhanced)
Mark Mazzetti (YouTube)
Mazzetti emphasizes that the Senate report "showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied
to the Kremlin," and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the intelligence committee's vice chairman,
said the committee report details "a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives
that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections."
None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known -- even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel
about people like Paul Manafort "sharing polling data with Russians" who might be intelligence officers. That data was "mostly public"
the Times itself
reported
, and the paper had to correct
a story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working
to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned.
Recent revelations regarding the false data given the FISA court by an FBI lawyer to "justify" eavesdropping on Trump associate
Carter Page show the Senate report to be not up to date and misguided in endorsing the FBI's decision to investigate Page. The committee
may wish to revisit that endorsement -- at least.
On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele,
labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium News
explained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to
push Russiagate.
Also missed by the intelligence committee was a document released by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that
revealed that Steele's "Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed
up as formal intelligence memos."
Smearing WikiLeaks
The Intelligence Committee report also repeats thoroughly
debunked
myths about WikiLeaks and, like Mueller, the committee made no effort to interview Julian Assange before launching its smears.
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who partnered with WikiLeaks in the publication of the Podesta emails, described the report's
treatment of WikiLeaks in this Twitter thread
:
2. the description of #WikiLeaks ' publishing activities
by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee
's Report appears a true #EdgarHoover 's disinformation
campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive
3. Clearly, to describe #WikiLeaks and its publishing activities the #SenateIntelligenceCommittee's Report completely rely
on #US intelligence community+ #MikePompeo's characterisation of #WikiLeaks. There is not even any pretense of an independent
approach
4. there are also unsubstantiated claims like:
– "[WikiLeaks'] disclosures have jeopardized the safety of individual Americans and foreign allies" (p.200)
– "WikiLeaks has passed information to U.S. adversaries" (p.201)
5. it's completely false that "#WikiLeaks does not seem to weigh whether its disclosures add any public interest value" (p.200)
and any longtime media partner like me could provide you dozens of examples on how wrong this characterisation [is].
Titillating
Mazzetti did add some spice to the version of his article that dominated the two top right columns of Wednesday's Times with the
blaring headline: "Senate Panel Ties Russian Officials to Trump's Aides: G.O.P.-Led Committee Echoes Mueller's Findings on Election
Tampering."
Those who make it to the end of Mazzetti's piece will learn that the Senate committee report "did not establish" that the Russian
government obtained any compromising material on Mr. Trump or that they tried to use such materials [that they didn't have] as leverage
against him." However, Mazzetti adds,
"According to the report, Mr. Trump met a former Miss Moscow at a party during one trip in 1996. After the party, a Trump associate
told others he had seen Mr. Trump with the woman on multiple occasions and that they 'might have had a brief romantic relationship.'
"The report also raised the possibility that, during that trip, Mr. Trump spent the night with two young women who joined him
the next morning at a business meeting with the mayor of Moscow."
This is journalism?
Another Pulitzer in Store?
The Times appends a note reminding us that Mazzetti was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald
Trump's advisers and their connections to Russia.
And that's not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word
feature, "The Plot to Subvert an Election," trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully
swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans.
That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the
fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed
in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people's news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to
mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed.
In exposing that chicanery, prize-winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter
commented :
"The descent of The New York Times into this unprecedented level of propagandizing for the narrative of Russia's threat to
U.S. democracy is dramatic evidence of a broader problem of abuses by corporate media Greater awareness of the dishonesty at the
heart of the Times' coverage of that issue is a key to leveraging media reform and political change."
Nothingburgers With Russian Dressing: the Backstory
The late Robert Parry.
"It's too much; it's just too much, too much", a sedated, semi-conscious Robert Parry kept telling me from his hospital bed in
late January 2018 a couple of days before he died. Bob was founder of Consortium News .
It was already clear what Bob meant; he had taken care to see to that. On Dec. 31, 2017 the reason for saying that came in what
he titled "An Apology
& Explanation" for "spotty production in recent days." A stroke on Christmas Eve had left Bob with impaired vision, but he was able
to summon enough strength to write an Apologia -- his vision for honest journalism and his dismay at what had happened to his profession
before he died on Jan. 27, 2018. The dichotomy was "just too much".
Parry rued the role that journalism was playing in the "unrelenting ugliness that has become Official Washington. Facts and logic
no longer mattered. It was a case of using whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent this loss of objective standards
reached deeply into the most prestigious halls of American media."
What bothered Bob most was the needless, dishonest tweaking of the Russian bear. "The U.S. media's approach to Russia," he wrote,
"is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read The New York Times ' or The Washington Post 's coverage
of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts? Western journalists now apparently see
it as their patriotic duty to hide facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia."
Parry, who was no conservative, continued:
"Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency
produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for 'hacking' Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks ."
Bob noted that the 'hand-picked' authors "evinced no evidence and even admitted that they weren't asserting any of this as fact."
It was just too much.
Robert Parry's Last Article
Peter Strzok during congressional hearing in July 2018. (Wikimedia Commons)
Bob posted his last substantive article on Dec. 13, 2017, the day after text exchanges between senior FBI officials Peter Strzok
and Lisa Page were made public. (Typically, readers of The New York Times the following day would altogether
miss the
importance of the text-exchanges.)
Bob Parry rarely felt any need for a "sanity check." Dec. 12, 2017 was an exception. He called me about the Strzok-Page texts;
we agreed they were explosive. FBI Agent Peter Strzok was on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff investigating alleged Russian
interference, until Mueller removed him.
Strzok reportedly was a "hand-picked" FBI agent taking part in the Jan 2017 evidence-impoverished, rump, misnomered "intelligence
community" assessment that blamed Russia for hacking and other election meddling. And he had helped lead the investigation into Hillary
Clinton's misuse of her computer servers. Page was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's right-hand lawyer.
His Dec. 13, 2017 piece
would be his fourth related article in less than two weeks; it turned out to be his last substantive article. All three of the earlier
ones are worth a re-read as examples of fearless, unbiased, perceptive journalism. Here
are the links .
Bob began his article
on the Strzok-Page bombshell:
"The disclosure of fiercely anti-Trump text messages between two romantically involved senior FBI officials who played key
roles in the early Russia-gate inquiry has turned the supposed Russian-election-meddling "scandal" into its own scandal, by providing
evidence that some government investigators saw it as their duty to block or destroy Donald Trump's presidency.?
"As much as the U.S. mainstream media has mocked the idea that an American 'deep state' exists and that it has maneuvered to
remove Trump from office, the text messages between senior FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and senior FBI lawyer
Lisa Page reveal how two high-ranking members of the government's intelligence/legal bureaucracy saw their role as protecting
the United States from an election that might elevate to the presidency someone as unfit as Trump."
Not a fragment of Bob's or other Consortium News analysis made any impact on what Bob used to call the Establishment media. As
a matter of fact, eight months later during a talk in Seattle that I titled "Russia-gate: Can You Handle the Truth?", only three
out of a very progressive audience of some 150 had ever heard of Strzok and Page.
Lest I am accused of being "in Putin's pocket," let me add the explanatory note that we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity included in our
most explosive Memorandum for President Trump, on "Russian hacking."
Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that
agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say
and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former
intelligence colleagues.
We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians
and pundits say is purely coincidental. The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly
politicized times.
somecallmetimmah , 1 hour ago
Only brain-washed losers read the new york times. Garbage propaganda for garbage people.
AtATrESICI , 43 minutes ago
"developments in Durham's investigation hopefully before the end of the summer." What summer? The summer of 2099.
Mouldy , 1 hour ago
So in a nutshell.. They just called half the USA too stupid to make an informed decision for themselves.
ominous , 1 hour ago
the disagreement is over which half is the stupid half
homeskillet , 25 minutes ago
The MIC's bogey man. What a crock of **** this whole country has become. Pravda puts out more truth than our MSM. I trust
Putin more than the Dem leaders at this point.
Demeter55 , 1 hour ago
The Globalist/New World Order/Deep State/Elitists (or whatever other arrogant subsection of the psychopaths among us you
wish to consider) have one great failing which will defeat them utterly in the end:
They do not know when to cut their losses.
As a result of that irrational stubbornness, born of a "Manifest Destiny" assumption of an eternal lock on the situation,
they will go too far.
Having more wealth than anyone is temporary.
Having more power than anyone is temporary.
Life is temporary.
And we outnumber them by several billion.
Even if they systematically try to destroy us, they will not have the ability unless we are complicit in our own destruction.
While there are many who have "taken the knee" to these tyrants in training, there are more who have no intention of doing
so.
Most nations are not so buffaloed as to fall for this propaganda, but the United States especially was created with the
notion that all men are created equal, and this is ingrained in the national character. We don't buy it.
And our numbers are growing daily, as people wake up and realize they have to take a side for themselves, their families,
their communities.
The global covid-panic was a masterful attack, but it will fail. Indeed, it has failed already. The building counter-attack
will take out those who chose to declare war on humanity. There really is no alternative for us, the humans. Live Free or Die,
as they say in New Hampshire.
And despite the full support of the MSM and the DNC, the Would-Be Masters of the Universe will not succeed.
sborovay07 , 1 hour ago
Sad Assange wasn't granted immunity to testify and was silenced just prior to the release of the Mueller report. Little
has been heard since except his health is horrific. Now, all the Deep State figures on both sides are just throwing as much
mud against Trump as possible to hide the truth. If Durnham does not indict the Deep State figures who participated in the
Obama led coup, all is for not. Only the foot soldiers marching in lock step will be charged.
wn , 1 hour ago
To sum it up.
Conclusion of the Democrats.
Americans need Russian brains to decide their leader in order to move forward.
nokilli , 25 minutes ago
Once the MO for "Russian hacking" is published to the international intelligence community, any (((party))) can pose as
a "Russian hacker."
This is the way computers work. Sybil is eponymous.
KuriousKat , 35 minutes ago
Mazzeti looks like the typical Gopher boy for the CIA Station Chiefs around the world..they retire or become contributors
to NewsWeek Wapo or NYT. ..not Any major network w/o one...Doing **** like this is mandatory..not elective.
Actually, after only a quick review of some of the news reports, it appears that the
Senate Committee placed great importance on the "fact" that Russia was involved in the
"hacking" of emails from the DNC. This suggests that the Committee relied on the same
intelligence sources that fabricated the Russiagate scenario in the first place. I guess that
the Republicans on the Committee have not kept up with revelations that there is no evidence
of any such hacking. Hence, the Committee's conclusions are likely based on the same old
disinformation and can be readily dismissed.
Very telling that ZH editors don't consider this newsworthy: key findings of the
Republican led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding Russia's 2016 election
interference.
Manafort and Kilimnik talked almost daily during the campaign. They communicated through
encrypted technologies set to automatically erase their correspondence; they spoke using code
words and shared access to an email account. It's worth pausing on these facts: The chairman
of the Trump campaign was in daily contact with a Russian agent, constantly sharing
confidential information with him.
It did not find evidence that the Ukrainian government meddled in the 2016 election, as
Trump alleged. "The Committee's efforts focused on investigating Russian interference in
the 2016 election. However, during the course of the investigation, the Committee
identified no reliable evidence that the Ukrainian government interfered in the 2016 U.S.
election."
"Taken as a whole, Manafort's high-level access and willingness to share information with
individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly
[Konstantin] Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave
counterintelligence threat," the report said.
Kilimnik "almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that
Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election."
Roger Stone was in communications with both WikiLeaks and the Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0
during the election; according to the Mueller report, Guccifer 2.0 was a conduit set up by
Russian military intelligence to anonymously funnel stolen information to WikiLeaks.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation found "significant evidence to suggest
that, in the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks was knowingly collaborating with Russian government
officials," the report said.
The FBI gave "unjustified credence" to the so-called Steele dossier, an explosive
collections of uncorroborated memos alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian
government officials, the report said. The FBI did not take the "necessary steps to validate
assumptions about Steele's credibility" before relying on the dossier to seek renewals of a
surveillance warrant targeting the former Trump campaign aide, the report said.
Demeter55 , 47 minutes ago
It's the latest in 5 years of "Get Trump!", a sitcom featuring the Roadrunner (Trump) and
the Wiley Coyote (Deep State/Never Trumpers / etc, etc.)
This classic scenario never fails to please those who realize that the roadrunner rules,
and the coyote invariably ends up destroyed.
William Binney is the former technical director of the U.S. National Security Agency who
worked at the agency for 30 years. He is a respected independent critic of how American
intelligence services abuse their powers to illegally spy on private communications of U.S.
citizens and around the globe.
Given his expert inside knowledge, it is worth paying attention to what Binney says.
In a media
interview this week, he dismissed the so-called Russiagate scandal as a "fabrication"
orchestrated by the American Central Intelligence Agency. Many other observers have come to
the same conclusion about allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections with
the objective of helping Donald Trump get elected.
But what is particularly valuable about Binney's judgment is that he cites technical
analysis disproving the Russiagate narrative. That narrative remains dominant among U.S.
intelligence officials, politicians and pundits, especially those affiliated with the
Democrat party, as well as large sections of Western media. The premise of the narrative is
the allegation that a Russian state-backed cyber operation hacked into the database and
emails of the Democrat party back in 2016. The information perceived as damaging to
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was subsequently disseminated to the Wikileaks
whistleblower site and other U.S. media outlets.
A mysterious cyber persona known as "Guccifer 2.0" claimed to be the alleged hacker. U.S.
intelligence and news media have attributed Guccifer as a front for Russian cyber
operations.
Notably, however, the Russian government has always categorically denied any involvement
in alleged hacking or other interference in the 2016 U.S. election, or elections
thereafter.
William Binney and other independent former U.S. intelligence experts say they can prove
the Russiagate narrative is bogus. The proof relies on their forensic analysis of the data
released by Guccifer. The analysis of timestamps demonstrates that the download of voluminous
data could not have been physically possible based on known standard internet speeds. These
independent experts conclude that the data from the Democrat party could not have been
hacked, as Guccifer and Russiagaters claim. It could only have been obtained by a leak from
inside the party, perhaps by a disgruntled staffer who downloaded the information on to a
disc. That is the only feasible way such a huge amount of data could have been released. That
means the "Russian hacker" claims are baseless.
Wikileaks, whose founder Julian Assange is currently imprisoned in Britain pending an
extradition trial to the U.S. to face espionage charges, has consistently maintained
that their source of files was not a hacker, nor did they collude with Russian intelligence.
As a matter of principle, Wikileaks does not disclose the identity of its sources, but the
organization has indicated it was an insider leak which provided the information on senior
Democrat party corruption.
William Binney says forensic analysis of the files released by Guccifer shows that the
mystery hacker deliberately inserted digital "fingerprints" in order to give the impression
that the files came from Russian sources. It is known from information later disclosed by
former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the CIA has a secretive program – Vault 7
– which is dedicated to false incrimination of cyber attacks to other actors. It seems
that the purpose of Guccifer was to create the perception of a connection between Wikileaks
and Russian intelligence in order to beef up the Russiagate narrative.
"So that suggested [to] us all the evidence was pointing back to CIA as the originator
[of] Guccifer 2.0. And that Guccifer 2.0 was inside CIA I'm pointing to that group as the
group that was probably the originator of Guccifer 2.0 and also this fabrication of the
entire story of Russiagate," concludes Binney in his interview with Sputnik news
outlet.
This is not the first time that the Russiagate yarn has been debunked . But it is crucially important to make Binney's expert
views more widely appreciated especially as the U.S. presidential election looms on November
3. As that date approaches, U.S. intelligence and media seem to be intensifying claims about
Russian interference and cyber operations. Such wild and unsubstantiated "reports" always
refer to the alleged 2016 "hack" of the Democrat party by "Guccifer 2.0" as if it were
indisputable evidence of Russian interference and the "original sin" of supposed Kremlin
malign activity. The unsubstantiated 2016 "hack" is continually cited as the "precedent" and
"provenance" of more recent "reports" that purport to claim Russian interference.
Given the torrent of Russiagate derivatives expected in this U.S. election cycle, which is
damaging U.S.-Russia bilateral relations and recklessly winding up geopolitical tensions, it
is thus of paramount importance to listen to the conclusions of honorable experts like
William Binney.
The American public are being played by their own intelligence agencies and corporate
media with covert agendas that are deeply anti-democratic.
Well - who set up them up, converted from the OSS? The banksters.
"Wild Bill" Donovan worked for JP Morgan immediately after WWII.
"our" US intelligence agencies were set up by, and serve, the masters of high finance.
Is this in dispute?
meditate_vigorously , 11 hours ago
They have seeded enough misinformation that apparently it is. But, you are correct. It
is the Banksters.
Isisraelquaeda , 2 hours ago
Israel. The CIA was infiltrated by the Mossad long ago.
SurfingUSA , 15 hours ago
JFK was on to that truth, and would have been wise to mini-nuke Langley before his
ill-fated journey to Dallas.
Andrew G , 11 hours ago
Except when there's something exceptionally evil (like pedo/blackmail rings such as
Epstein), in which case it's Mossad / Aman
vova.2018 , 7 hours ago
Except when there's something exceptionally evil (like pedo/blackmail rings such as
Epstein), in which case it's Mossad / Aman
The CIA & MOSSAD work hand in hand in all their clandestine operations. There is not
doubt the CIA/MOSSAD are behind the creation, evolution, training, supplying weapons,
logistic-planning & financing of the terrorists & the destruction of the Middle
East. Anybody that believes the contrary has brain problems & need to have his head
examined.
CIA/MOSAD has been running illegal activities in Colombia: drug, arms, organs &
human (child-sex) trafficking. CIA/MOSAD is also giving training, logistic & arms to
Colombia paramilitary for clandestine operation against Venezuela. After Bolsonaro became
president, MOSSAD started running similar operation in Brazil. Israel & Brazil also
recognizes Guaido as the legit president of Venezuela.
CIA/MOSSAD have a long time policy of
assassinating & taking out pep who are a problem to the revisionist-zionist agenda, not
just in the M-East but in the world. The CIA/MOSSAD organizations have many connections in
other countries like the M-East, Saudi Arabia, UAE, et al but also to the UK-MI5.
The Israelis infiltrated the US to the highest levels a long time ago - Proof
Israel has & collects information (a database) of US citizens in coordination
with the CIA & the 5 eyes.
Israel works with the NSA in the liaison-loophole operations
Mossad undercover operations in WDC & all over the world
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee – AIPAC
People with 2 citizenships (US/Israel) in WDC/NYC (the real Power)
From Steve Bannon a christian-zionist: Collusion between the Trump administration and
Israel .
Funny how a number of the right wing conspiracy stories according to the MSM from a
couple years back were true from the get go. 1 indictment over 4 years in the greatest
attempted coup in this country's history. So sad that Binney and Assange were never
listened to. They can try to silence us who know of the truth, but as Winston Churchill
once said, 'Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice
may distort it. But there it is.' KDP still censors my book on their advertising platform
as it
promotes conspiratorial theories (about the Obama led coup) and calls out BLM and Antifa
for what they are (marxists) . Yet the same platform still recommends BLM books stating
there is a pandemic of cops killing innocent blacks. F them!!!! #RIPSeth #FreeJulian
#FreeMillie
smacker , 11 hours ago
Yes, and we all know the name of the DNC leaker who downloaded and provided
WikiLeaks
with evidence of CIA and DNC corruption.
He was assassinated to prevent him from naming who Guccifer 2.0 was and where he is
located.
The Russia-gate farce itself provides solid evidence that the CIA and others are in bed
with DNC
and went to extraordinary lengths to prevent Trump being elected. When that failed, they
instigated
a program of x-gates to get him out of office any way they could. This continues to this
day.
This is treason at the highest level.
ACMeCorporations , 12 hours ago
Hacking? What Russian hacking?
In recently released testimony, the CEO of CrowdStrike admitted in congressional
testimony, under oath, that it actually has no direct evidence Russia stole the DNC
emails.
Nelbev , 9 hours ago
"The proof relies on their forensic analysis of the data released by Guccifer. The
analysis of timestamps demonstrates that the download of voluminous data could not have
been physically possible based on known standard internet speeds. ... a disgruntled
staffer who downloaded the information on to a disc. That is the only feasible way such a
huge amount of data could have been released. ... William Binney says forensic analysis
of the files released by Guccifer shows that the mystery hacker deliberately inserted
digital "fingerprints" in order to give the impression that the files came from Russian
sources. ... "
Any computer file is a bunch of 1s and 0s. Anyone can change anything with a hex editor.
E.g. I had wrong dates on some photographs once, downloaded as opposed to when taken, just
edited the time stamp. You cannot claim any time stamp is original. If true time stamps,
then the DNC files were downloaded to a thumb drive at a computer on location and not to
the internet via a phone line. However anyone can change the time stamps. Stating a
"mystery hacker deliberately inserted digital [Russian] 'fingerprints' " is a joke if
denying the file time stamps were not tampered with. The real thing is where the narrative
came from, political spin doctors, Perkins Coie law firm hired by DNC and Hillary campaign
who hired Crowdstrike [and also hired Fusion GPS before for pissgate dossier propaganda and
FISC warrants to spy on political opponents] and Perkins Coie edited Crowdstrike report
with Russian narrative. FBI never looked at DNC servers. This is like your house was broken
into. You deny police the ability to enter and look at evidence like DNC computers. You
hire a private investigator to say your neighbor you do not like did it and publicise
accusations. Take word of political consultants hired, spin doctor propaganda, Crowdstrike
narrative , no police investigation. Atlantic Council?
Vivekwhu , 8 hours ago
The Atlantic Council is another NATO fart. Nuff said!
The_American , 15 hours ago
God Damn traitor Obama!
Yen Cross , 14 hours ago
TOTUS
For the youngsters.
Teleprompter Of The United States.
Leguran , 6 hours ago
The CIA has gotten away with so much criminal behavior and crimes against the American
public that this is totally believable. Congress just lets this stuff happen and does
nothing. Which is worse - Congress or the CIA?
Congress set up the system. It is mandated to perform oversight. And it just sits on its
thumbs and wallows in it privileges.
This time Congress went further than ever before. It was behind and engaged in an
attempted coup d'état.
Know thy enemy , 10 hours ago
Link to ShadowGate (ShadowNet) documentary - which answers the question, what is the
keystone,,,,,
It's time for Assange and Wikileaks to name the person who they rec'd the info from. By
hiding behind the "we don't name names" Mantra they are helping destroy America by
polarizing its citizens. Name the damn person, get it all out there so the left can see
that they've been played by their leaders. Let's cut this crap.
freedommusic , 7 hours ago
...all the evidence was pointing back to CIA as the originator [of] Guccifer 2.0.
Yep, I knew since day one. I remember seeing Hillary Clinton talking about Guccifer . As
soon as uttered the name, I KNEW she with the CIA were the brainchild of this bogus
decoy.
They copy. They mimic. These are NOT creative individuals.
Perhaps hell is too good a place for them.
on target , 4 hours ago
This is old news but worth bringing up again. The CIA never wanted Trump in, and of
course, they want him out. Their fingerprints were all over Russiagate, The Kavanaugh
hearings, Ukrainegate, and on and on. They are just trying to cover their asses for a
string of illegal "irregularities" in their operations for years. Trump should never have
tried to be a get along type of guy. He should have purged the entire leadership of the CIA
on day one and the FBI on day 2. They can not be trusted with an "America First" agenda.
They are all New World Order types who know whats best for everyone.
fersur , 7 hours ago
Boom, Boom, Boom !
Three Reseachable Tweets thru Facebook, I cut all at once, Unedited !
"#SusanRice has as much trouble with her memory as #HillaryClinton. Rice testified in
writing that she 'does not recall' who gave her key #Benghazi talking points she used on
TV, 'does not recall' being in any meetings regarding Benghazi in five days following the
attack, and 'does not recall' communicating with anyone in Clinton's office about
Benghazi," Tom Fitton in Breitbart.
"Adam Schiff secretly subpoenaed, without court authorization, the phone records of Rudy
Giuliani and then published the phone records of innocent Americans, including
@realDonaldTrump 's lawyers, a member of Congress, and a journalist," @TomFitton .
BREAKING: Judicial Watch announced today that former #Obama National Security Advisor
and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, admitted in written responses given
under oath that she emailed with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Clinton's
non-government email account and that she received emails related to government business on
her own personal email account.
STONEHILLADY , 7 hours ago
It's not just the Democrats, the warmongering neocons of the Republican party are also
in on it, the Bush/Romney McCain/McConnell/Cheney and many more. It's called "Kick Backs"
Ever notice these so called retired Generals all end up working for all these spying
companies that span the 5eyes to Israel. It seems our POTUS has got his hands full swimming
up stream to get this stopped and actually get rid of the CIA. It's the number 1 reason he
doesn't trust these people, they all try to tell him stuff that is mis-directed.
Liars, leakers, and thieves are running not only our nation but the world, as George
Carlin said, "It's a Big Club, and we ain't in it." If you fall for this false narrative of
mail in voting and not actually go and vote on election day, you better start learning
Chinese for surely Peelosi and Schumer will have their way and mess up this election so
they can drag Trump out of office and possible do him and his family some serious harm, all
because so many of you listen to the MSM and don't research their phony claims.
Max21c , 7 hours ago
It's called "Kick Backs" Ever notice these so called retired Generals all end up
working for all these spying companies that span the 5eyes to Israel.
American Generals & Admirals are a lot more corrupt today than they were a few
generations back. Many of them are outright evil people in today's times. Many of these
people are just criminals that will steal anything they can get their banana republic
klepto-paws on. They're nothing but common criminals and thieves. No different than the
Waffen SS or any other group of brigands, bandits, and criminal gangsters.
Max21c , 7 hours ago
The CIA, FBI, NSA, Military Intelligence, Pentagon Gestapo, defense contractors are
mixed up in a lot of crimes and criminal activities on American soil against American
citizens and American civilians. They do not recognize borders or laws or rights of liberty
or property rights or ownership or intellectual property. They're all thieves and criminals
in the military secret police and secret police gangsters cabal.
BandGap , 7 hours ago
I have seen Binney's input. He is correct in my view because he
scientifically/mathematically proves his point.
The blinded masses do not care about this approach, just like wearing masks.
The truth is too difficult for many to fit into their understanding of the world.
So they repeat what they have been told, never stopping to consider the facts or how
circumstances have been manipulated.
It is frustrating to watch, difficult to navigate at times for me. Good people who will
not stop and think of what the facts show them.
otschelnik , 8 hours ago
It could have been the CIA or it could have been one of the cut-outs for plausible
deniability, and of all the usual suspects it was probably CrowdStrike.
- CGI / Global Strategy Group / Analysis Corp. - John Brennan (former CEO)
- Dynology, Wikistrat - General James L. Jones (former chairman of Atlantic Council, NSA
under Obama)
- CrowdStrike - Dmitri Alperovich and Shawn Henry (former chief of cyber forensics
FBI)
- Clearforce - Michael Hayden (former dir. NSA under Clinton, CIA under Bush) and Jim
Jones Jr. (son Gnrl James Jones)
- McChrystal Group - Stanley McChrystal (former chief of special operations DOD)
fersur , 8 hours ago
Unedited !
The Brookings Institute – a Deep State Hub Connected to the Fake Russia Collusion
and Ukraine Scandals Is Now Also Connected to China Spying In the US
The Brookings
Institute was heavily involved in the Democrat and Deep State Russia collusion hoax and
Ukraine impeachment fraud. These actions against President Trump were criminal.
This institute is influenced from foreign donations from entities who don't have an
America first agenda. New reports connect the Institute to Chinese spying.
As we reported previously, Julie Kelly at American Greatness
released a report where she addresses the connections between the Brookings Institute,
Democrats and foreign entities. She summarized her report as follows: Accepting millions
from a state sponsor of terrorism, foisting one of the biggest frauds in history on the
American people, and acting as a laundering agent of sorts for Democratic political
contributions disguised as policy grants isn't a good look for such an esteemed
institution. One would be hard-pressed to name a more influential think tank than the
Brookings Institution. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit routinely ranks at the top of
the list
of the best think tanks in the world; Brookings scholars produce a steady flow of reports,
symposiums, and news releases that sway the conversation on any number of issues ranging
from domestic and economic policy to foreign affairs.
Brookings is home to lots of Beltway power players: Ben
Bernanke and Janet Yellen, former chairmen of the Federal Reserve, are Brookings fellows.
Top officials from both Republican and Democrat presidential administrations lend political
heft to the organization. From 2002 until 2017, the organization's president was Strobe
Talbott. He's a longtime BFF of Bill Clinton; they met in the 1970s at Oxford University
and have been tight ever since. Talbott was a top aide to both President Bill Clinton and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Kelly continued:
Brookings-based fellows working at Lawfare were the media's go-to legal "experts" to
legitimize the concocted crime; the outlet manipulated much of the news coverage on
collusion by pumping out primers and guidance on how to report collusion events from
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's appointment to his final report.
Now, testimony related to a defamation lawsuit against Christopher Steele, the author of
the infamous "dossier" on Donald Trump, has exposed his direct ties to Talbott in 2016 when
he was still head of Brookings. Talbott and Steele were in communication before and after
the presidential election; Steele wanted Talbott to circulate the dossier to his pals in
John Kerry's State Department, which reportedly is what Talbott
did . Steele also briefed top state department officials in October 2016 about his
work.
But this isn't the only connection between the Brookings Institute and the Russia
collusion and Ukrainian scandals. We were the first to report that the Primary Sub-Source
(PSS) in the Steele report, the main individual who supplied Steele with bogus information
in his report was Igor Danchenko.
In November 2019, the star witness for the Democrat Representative Adam Schiff's
impeachment show trial was announced. Her name was Fiona Hill.
Today we've uncovered that Hill is a close associate of the Primary Sub-Source (PSS) for
the Steele dossier – Igor Danchenko – the individual behind most all the lies
in the Steele dossier. No wonder Hill saw the Steele dossier before it was released. Her
associate created it.
Both Fiona Hill and Igor Danchenko are connected to the Brookings Institute.
They gave a presentation together as Brookings Institute representatives:
Kelly writes about the foreign funding the Brookings Institute partakes:
So who and what have been funding the anti-Trump political operation at Brookings over
the past few years? The think tank's top benefactors are a predictable mix of family
foundations, Fortune 100 corporations, and Big Tech billionaires. But one of the biggest
contributors to Brookings' $100 million-plus annual budget is the Embassy of Qatar.
According to financial reports, Qatar has donated more than $22 million to the think tank
since 2004. In fact, Brookings operates a satellite center in Doha, the
capital of Qatar. The wealthy Middle Eastern oil producer
spends billions on American institutions such as universities and other think
tanks.
Qatar also is a top state sponsor of terrorism, pouring billions into Hamas, al-Qaeda,
and the Muslim Brotherhood, to name a few. "The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has
historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level," President Trump said in 2017. "We
have to stop the funding of terrorism."
An email from a Qatari official, obtained by WikiLeaks, said the Brookings
Institution was as important to the country as "an aircraft carrier."
The Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington, D.C., think tank, partnered with a
Shanghai policy center that the FBI has described as a front for China's intelligence and
spy recruitment operations, according to public records and federal court documents.
The Brookings Doha Center, the think tank's hub in Qatar, signed a memorandum of
understanding with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in January 2018, the
institution said . The academy is a policy center funded by the Shanghai municipal
government that has raised flags within the FBI.
The partnership raises questions about potential Chinese espionage activities at the
think tank, which employs numerous former government officials and nearly two dozen
current foreign policy advisers to Joe Biden's presidential campaign.
It is really frightening that one of two major political parties in the US is tied so
closely with the Brookings Institute. It is even more frightening that foreign enemies of
the United States are connected to this entity as well.
Let it Go , 8 hours ago
One thing for sure is these guys have far to much of our money to spend promoting their
own good.
fersur , 7 hours ago
Unedited !
Mueller Indictments Tied To "ShadowNet," Former Obama National Security Advisor and
Obama's CIA Director – Not Trump
According to a report in the Daily Beast, which cited the Wall Street Journal's
reporting of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into two companies, Wikistrat
and Psy Group, "The firm's advisory council lists former CIA and National Security Agency
director Michael Hayden, former national security adviser James L. Jones."
According to numerous reporting from major news outlets like the Wall Street Journal and
Daily Beast, both Wikistrat and Psy Group represent themselves as being social media
analysts and black PSYOP organizations. Both Wikistrat and Psy Group have foreign ownership
mixed between Israeli, Saudi (Middle East) and Russian. Here is what the Wall Street
Journal, The Daily Beast and pretty much everyone else out there doesn't know (or won't
tell you).
The fact Obama's former National Security Advisor, General James Jones, and former Obama
CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, are both on Wikistrat's advisory board may not seem
suspicious, but both of these general's have another thing in common, and that is the
ShadowNet. The ShadowNet, and its optional companion relational database, iPsy, were both
originally developed by the small, family owned defense contracting company, Dynology. The
family that owns Dynology; Gen. James Jones. I would add Paul Manafort and Rick Davis was
Dynology's partner at the time we were making the ShadowNet and iPsy commercially
available.
After obtaining the contract in Iraq to develop social media psychological warfare
capabilities, known in military nomenclature as Interactive Internet Activities, or IIA,
Gen. Jones kept the taxpayer funded application we developed in Iraq for the 4th
Psychological Operation Group, and made it commercially available under the trademark of
the "ShadowNet" and the optional black PSYOP component, "iPsy." If you think it is
interesting that one of the companies under Mueller's indictment is named, "Psy" Group, I
did as well. In fact, literally everything both publicly described in news reports, and
even their websites, are exactly the same as the ShadowNet and iPsy I helped build, and
literally named.
The only thing different I saw as far as services offered by Wikistrat, and that of
Dynology and the ShadowNet, was described by The Daily Beast as, "It also engaged in
intelligence collection." Although iPsy was a relational database that allowed for the
dissemination of whatever the required narrative was, "intelligence collection" struck
another bell with me, and that's a company named ClearForce.
ClearForce was developed as a solution to stopping classified leaks following the Edward
Snowden debacle in 2013. Changes in NISPOM compliance requirements forced companies and
government agencies that had employees with government clearances to take preventive
measure to mitigate the potential of leaking. Although the NISPOM compliance requirement
almost certainly would have been influenced by either Hayden, Jones or both, they once
again sought to profit from it.
Using components of the ShadowNet and iPsy, the ClearForce application (which the
company, ClearForce, was named after,) was developed to provide compliance to a regulation
I strongly suspect you will find Jones and Hayden had a hand in creating. In fact, I
strongly suspect you will find General Jones had some influence in the original requirement
for our Iraq contract Dynology won to build the ShadowNet – at taxpayer expense!
Dynology worked for several years incorporating other collection sources, such as
financial, law enforcement and foreign travel, and ties them all into your social media
activity. Their relationship with Facebook and other social media giants would have been
nice questions for congress to have asked them when they testified.
Part 1 of 2 !
fersur , 7 hours ago
Part 2 of 2 !
The ClearForce application combines all of these sources together in real-time and uses
artificial intelligence to predictively determine if you are likely to steal or leak based
on the behavioral profile ClearForce creates of you. It can be used to determine if you get
a job, and even if you lose a job because a computer read your social media, credit and
other sources to determine you were likely to commit a crime. It's important for you to
stop for a moment and think about the fact it is privately controlled by the former CIA
director and Obama's National Security Advisor/NATO Supreme Allied Commander, should scare
the heck out of you.
When the ClearForce application was complete, Dynology handed it off to ClearForce, the
new company, and Michael Hayden joined the board of directors along with Gen. Jones and his
son, Jim, as the president of ClearForce. Doesn't that kind of sound like "intelligence
collection" described by the Daily Beast in Wikistrat's services?
To wrap this all up, Paul Manafort, Rick Davis, George Nader, Wikistrat and Psy Group
are all directly connected to Mueller's social media influence and election interreference
in the 2016 presidential election. In fact, I believe all are under indictment, computers
seized, some already sentenced. All of these people under indictment by Mueller have one
key thing in common, General James Jones's and Michael Hayden's social media black PSYOP
tools; the ShadowNet, iPsy and ClearForce.
A recent meeting I had with Congressman Gus Bilirakis' chief of staff, Elizabeth Hittos,
is confirmation that they are reviewing my DoD memorandum stating the work I did on the IIA
information operation in Iraq, the Dynology marketing slicks for the ShadowNet and iPsy,
along with a screenshot of Goggle's Way-Back Machine showing Paul Manafort's partnership
with Dynology in 2007 and later. After presenting to her these facts and making clear I
have much more information that requires the highest classification SCIF to discuss and
requires being read-on to the program, Elizabeth contacted the office of Congressman Devin
Nunez to request that I brief the intelligence committee on this critical information
pertaining directly to the 2010 Ukrainian elections, Michael Brown riots, 2016 election
interference and the "Russia collusion" hoax. All of that is on top of numerous
questionable ethical and potentially illegal profits from DoD contracts while servings as
NATO Commander and Obama's National Security Advisor.
We also need to know if the ShadowNet and iPsy were allowed to fall into foreign hands,
including Russia, Saudi Arabia and Israel. I'm pretty sure South America is going to have a
few questions for Jones and Obama as well? Stay tuned!
Balance-Sheet , 4 hours ago
Intelligence Agencies of all countries endlessly wage war at all times especially
'Information Warfare' (propaganda/disinformation) and the primary target has always and
will always be the domestic population of the Intelligence Agency's country.
Yes, of course the CIA does target ALL other countries but the primary target will
always be the Americans themselves.
Balance-Sheet , 4 hours ago
Intelligence Agencies of all countries endlessly wage war at all times especially
'Information Warfare' (propaganda/disinformation) and the primary target has always and
will always be the domestic population of the Intelligence Agency's country.
Yes, of course the CIA does target ALL other countries but the primary target will
always be the Americans themselves.
The neoliberals own the media, courts, academia, and BUREAUCRACY (including CIA) and
they will do anything to make sure they retain power over everyone. These control freaks
work hard to create all sorts of enemies to justify their existence.
LaugherNYC , 15 hours ago
It is sad that this information has to be repeatedly published, over and over and over,
by SCI and other Russian. outlets.
Because no legit AMERICAN news outlet will give Binney or Assange the time of day or any
credence, this all becomes Kremlin-sponsored disinformation and denials. People roll their
eyes and say "Oh God, not the whole 'Seth Rich was murdered by the CIA' crap again!! You
know, his FAMILY has asked that people stop spreading these conspiracy theories and
lies."
SCI is a garbage bin, nothing more than a dizinformatz machine for Putin, but in this
case, they are likely right. It seems preposterous that the "best hackers in the world"
would forget to use a VPN or leave a signature behind, and it makes far more sense that the
emails were leaked by someone irate at the abuses of the DNC - the squashing of Bernie, the
cheating for Hillary in the debates - behavior we saw repeated in 2020 with Bernie shoved
aside again for the pathetic Biden.
Would that SOMEONE in the US who is not on the Kremlin payroll would pick up this
thread. But all the "investigative journalists" now work indirectly for the DNC, and those
that don't are cancelled by the left.
Stone_d_agehurler , 15 hours ago
I am Guccifer and I approve this message.
Sarc/
But i do share your opinion. They are likely right this time and most of the pundits and
media in the U. S. know it. That's what makes this a sad story about how rotten the U. S.
system has become.
Democrats will sacrifice the Union for getting Trump out of office.
If elections in Nov won't go their way, Civil War II might become a real thing in
2021.
PeterLong , 4 hours ago
If " digital "fingerprints" in order to give the impression that the files came from
Russian sources" were inserted in the leak by "Guccifer", and if the leak to wikileaks came
from Seth Rich, via whatever avenue, then the "Guccifer" release came after the wikileaks
release, or after wikileaks had the files, and was a reaction to same attempting to
diminish their importance/accuracy and cast doubt on Trump. Could CIA and/or DNC have known
the files were obtained by wikileaks before wikileaks actually released them? In any case
collusion of CIA with DNC seems to be a given.
RightlyIndignent , 4 hours ago
Because Seth had already given it to Wikileaks. There is no 'Fancy Bear'. There is no
'Cozy Bear'. Those were made up by CrowdStrike, and they tried the same crap on Ukraine,
and Ukraine told them to pound sand. When push came to shove, and CrowdStrike was forced to
say what they really had under oath, they said: "We have nothing."
novictim , 4 hours ago
You are leaving out Crowd Strike. Seth Rich was tasked by people at the DNC to copy data
off the servers. He made a backup copy and gave a copy to people who then got it to Wiki
leaks. He used highspeed file transfers to local drives to do his task.
Meanwhile, it was the Ukrainian company Crowd Strike that claimed the data was stolen
over the internet and that the thieves were in Russia. That 'proof" was never verified by
US Intelligence but was taken on its word as being true despite crowd strike falsifying
Russian hacks and being caught for it in the past.
Joebloinvestor , 5 hours ago
The "five eyes" are convinced they run the world and try to.
That is what Brennan counted on for these agencies to help get President Trump.
As I said, it is time for the UK and the US to have a serious conversation about their
current and ex-spies being involved in US elections.
Southern_Boy , 5 hours ago
It wasn't the CIA. It was John Brennan and Clapper. The CIA, NSA FBI, DOJ and the
Ukrainian Intelligence Service just went along working together and followed orders from
Brennan who got them from Hillary and Obama.
Oh, and don't forget the GOP Globalist RINOs who also participated in the coup attempt:
McCain, Romney, Kasich, Boehner, Lee and Richard Burr.
With Kasich now performing as a puppy dog for Biden at the Democrat Convention as a
Democrat DNC executive, the re-alignment is almost complete: Globalist Nationalist
Socialist Bolshevism versus American Populism, i.e. Elites versus Deplorables or Academics
versus Smelly Wal-Mart people.
on target , 5 hours ago
No way. CIA up to their eyeballs in this as well as the State Department. Impossible for
Russiagate or Ukrainegate without direct CIA and State involvement.
RightlyIndignent , 4 hours ago
Following Orders? How did that argument go at Nuremberg? (hint: not very well)
LeadPipeDreams , 6 hours ago
LOL - the CIA's main mission - despite their "official" charter, has always been to
destabilize the US and its citizens via psyops, false flags, etc.
Covid-1984 is their latest and it appears most successful project yet.
Iconoclast27 , 5 hours ago
The CIA received a $200 million initial investment from the Rockefeller and Carnegie
foundations when it was first established, that should tell you everything you need to know
how who they truly work for.
A_Huxley , 6 hours ago
CIA, MI6, 5 eye nations.
All wanted to sway the USA their own way.
Let it Go , 8 hours ago
Almost as frightening as the concentrated power held by companies such as Facebook and
Google is the fact Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and the world's richest man, is the person who
owns and controls the Washington Post. It is silly to think Jeff Bezos purchased the
Washington Post in 2013 because he expected newspapers to make a lucrative resurgence.
It is more likely he purchased the long-trusted U.S. newspaper for the power it would
ensure him in Washington when wielded as a propaganda mouthpiece to extend his ability to
both shape and control public opinion. More on this subject in the article below.
How it is the Democrats, the Deep State, and the legacy media are still able to cling to
the remnants of these long discredited narratives is a mystery.
avoiceofliberty , 6 hours ago
At the official level, you have a point.
However, even before Mueller was appointed, a review of the materials in the extant
public record of both the DNC "hack" and the history of Crowdstrike showed the narrative
simply did not make sense. A detailed investigation of materials not made public was not
necessary to shoot down the entire narrative.
Indeed, one of the great scandals of the Mueller probe is the way it did not bring
prudential skepticism to the question of the DNC "hack". When building a case, either for
public debate or for public trial, a dose of skepticism is healthy; it leads to a careful
vetting of facts and reasoning.
Alice-the-dog , 6 hours ago
The CIA has been an agency wholly independent of the US government almost since its
inception. It is not under any significant control by the government, and has its own
agenda which may occasionally coincide with that of the government, but only
coincidentally. It has its own view of how the world should look, and will not balk at any
means necessary to achieve such. Including the murder of dis-favorable members of
government.
snodgrass , 6 hours ago
It's the CIA and the FBI, Obama and people in his administration who cooked up
Russiagate.
Floki_Ragnarsson , 7 hours ago
The CIA whacked JFK because he was going to slow the roll to Vietnam AND disband the CIA
and reform it.
It is broken and needs to be disbanded and reformed along lines that actually WORK! The
CIA missed the fall of the USSR, 9/11, etc. HTF does THAT happen?
DeportThemAll , 6 hours ago
The CIA didn't "miss" 9/11... they participated in it.
Let it Go , 8 hours ago
The CIA is a tool that when improperly used can do great damage.
Anyone who doesn't believe that countries use psychological warfare and propaganda to
sway the opinions of people both in and outside of their country should be considered
naive. Too many people America is more than a little hypocritical when they criticize other
countries for trying to gain influence considering our history of meddling in the affairs
of other countries.
Americans have every reason to be concerned and worried considering revelations of just
how big the government intelligence agencies have grown since 9-11 and how unlimited their
spying and surveillance operations have become. The article below explores this growth and
questions whether we have lost control.
The idea of Binney and Jason Sullivan privately working to 'secure the vote' is
something that I actually consider to be very eyebrow raising and alarming.
Son of Captain Nemo , 8 hours ago
Bill Binney under "B" in the only "yellow pages" that show a conscience and a
soul!...
This is the dumbest article ever. Russiagate is a total fabrication of the FBI as per
Clinesmith, CIA provided information that would have nipped it at the bud. Read the real
news.
bringonthebigone , 9 hours ago
Wrong. this article is one small piece of the puzzle. Clinesmith is one small piece of
the puzzle. The Flynn entrapment is one small piece of the puzzle. The Halper entrapment
was one small piece of the puzzle.
Because Clinesmith at the FBI covered up the information saying Page was a CIA source
does not mean it was a total FBI fabrication and does not mean the CIA was not involved and
does not mean the DNC server hack is irrelevant.
Sundance does a better job pulling it all together.
PKKA , 14 hours ago
Relations have already soured between Russia and the United States, and sanctions have
been announced. Tensions have grown on the NATO-Russia border. The meat has already been
rolled into the minced meat and it will not be possible to roll the minced meat back into
the meat. The CIA got it. But the Russian people now absolutely understand that the United
States will always be the enemy of Russia, no matter whether socialist or capitalist. But I
like it even more than the feigned hypocritical "friendship". Russia has never reached such
heights as during the good old Cold War. All Russians have a huge incentive, long live the
new Cold War!
smacker , 12 hours ago
More and more people have worked out that the fabricated tensions between the US and
Russia
and US and China have little to do with those two countries posing any sort of threat to
world peace.
It is all about the US trying to remain in No.1 position as uni-polar top dog via the
Anglo American Empire.
We see examples of this every day in the M/E, South China Sea, Taiwan, Libya all over
Eastern Europe,
Ukraine, Iran and now Belaruse. HK was added along the way.
Both Russia and China openly want a multi-polar world order. But the US will never
accept that.
Hence the prospect of war. The only unknown today is what and where the trigger will
be.
smacker , 12 hours ago
More and more people have worked out that the fabricated tensions between the US and
Russia
and US and China have little to do with those two countries posing any sort of threat to
world peace.
It is all about the US trying to remain in No.1 position as uni-polar top dog via the
Anglo American Empire.
We see examples of this every day in the M/E, South China Sea, Taiwan, Libya all over
Eastern Europe,
Ukraine, Iran and now Belaruse. HK was added along the way.
Both Russia and China openly want a multi-polar world order. But the US will never
accept that.
Hence the prospect of war. The only unknown today is what and where the trigger will
be.
hang_the_banksters , 31 minutes ago
the best proof thAt Guccifer 2 was CIA hacking themselves to frame Wikileaks is
this:
Guccifer has not yet been identified, indicted and arrested.
you'd think CIAFBINSA would be turning over every stone to the ends of the earth to bust
Guccifer. we just had to endure 4 years of hysterical propaganda that Russia had hacked our
election and that Trump was their secret agent. so Guccifer should be the Most Wanted Man
on the planet. meanwhile, it's crickets from FBI. they arent even looking for him. because
Guccifer is over at Langley. maybe someone outta ask Brennan where G2 is now.
remember when DOJ indicted all those GRU cybersoldiers? the evidence listed in the
indictment was so stunning that i dont believe it. NSA so thoroughly hacked back into GRU
that NSA was watching GRU through their own webcams and recording them doing Google
searches to translate words which were written in Guccifer's blog posts about the DNC email
leaks. NSA and DOJ must think we are all stupid, that we will believe NSA is so powerful to
do that, yet they cant identify Guccifer.
i say i dont believe that for a second because no way Russian GRU are so stupid to even
have webcams on the computers they use to hack, and it is absurd to think GRU soldiers on a
Russian military base would be using Google instead of Yandex to translate words into
English.
lay_arrow
ConanTheContrarian1 , 1 hour ago
As a confirmed conspiracy theorist since I came back from 'Nam, here's mine: The
European nobility recognized with the American and French revolutions that they needed a
better approach. They borrowed from the Tudors (who had to deal with Parliament) and began
to rule by controlling the facade of representative government. This was enhanced by
funding banks to control through currency, as well as blackmail and murder, and morphed
into a complete propaganda machine like no other in history. The CIA, MI6 and Mossad, the
mainstream media, deep plants in bureaucracy and "democratic" bodies all obey their
dictates to create narratives that control our minds. Trump seems to offer hope, but
remember, he could be their latest narrative.
greatdisconformity , 1 hour ago
A Democracy cannot function on a higher level than the general electorate.
The intelligence and education of the general electorate has been sliding for
generations, because both political parties can play this to their advantage.
It is no accident that most of the messages coming from politicians are targeted to
imbeciles.
From the document: "Binney is quoted as being convinced by Campbell's analysis and now
believes the DNC data was hacked."
This person gets it wrong. What Binney concluded was that the data was *manipulated" and
therefore can not be used to establish much of anything. However, the point that the data
could not be transmitted at the speed estimated in 2016 is still basically valid and that the
data was loaded onto removable storage is also still likely. *However*, that fact has always
been mostly irrelevant, since no one knows how many times it was moved and by what means.
Almost certainly it was moved by an external storage device at some point before ending up in
Wikileaks. Craig Murray pretty much said as much.
How I would have done it is sit outside the DNC server location with a decent high-speed
WiFi connection to their wireless network (I presume they have one, everyone does these
days), and after doing whatever was necessary, either as an employee or a spy, to connect to
the network, I would have downloaded the data to my wireless device (laptop, presumably). The
NSA would be oblivious to this transfer, although depending on my anti-forensics skill, it
might still have been detected internally by a computer forensics expert. CrowdStrike never
found the actual leaker or the exfiltration method AFAIK; all they found was some malware -
which means whoever took it was either authorized to do so (or used the credentials of
someone else authorized to do so - standard operating procedure for either external or
internal spies) or was very good at anti-forensics. Or CrowdStrike was simply incompetent. Or
all three.
What the data analysis *does* do is disprove the US allegation that Russians extracted the
data *over the Internet* *directly* to Wikileaks. Nothing in the Mueller report suggests the
data was moved by external storage media. Binney's statement that if it was moved over the
Internet, the NSA would know it and could prove it remains true. That they never have is one
huge red flag about the Mueller claims.
The rest of the conspiracy analysis in the linked document is only minimally interesting.
The 5G stuff just shows the writer to be a non-scientist, as they fully admit, while still
suggesting that 5G is some sort of health threat. I wouldn't be surprised if it is to some
degree. The problem is that no one outside the non-ionizing radiation scientific community
has any real clue to *what* degree. If the international organizations have concluded it is
not, it takes, as they say, "extraordinary evidence" to prove them wrong. None of that has
been forthcoming, in particular nothing by Snake here. So it's a waste of time to take it
seriously. I've asked Snake for *one* single experiment done by *anyone* with real
credentials that uses the actual level of radiation from either a 5G phone or a tower to
cause subjects to get the virus. AFAIK there is no such experiment done anywhere by anyone.
So there is no evidence it happens - or for that matter, no evidence it doesn't except
current recognized science. Which, as I say, has been dismissed by the real experts.
Everything else is speculation - and conspiracy theory.
In general, I like conspiracy theories. They provide a fertile field for investigation -
if someone has the means to do so. Most conspiracy theorists don't have the means. They just
regurgitate the available reports - which, by definition, are unreliable - and engage in
"analysis", which really means speculation. Only on the ground investigation can begin to get
at the truth.
Back in 1968 or 1969, I forget which, I actually went to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, to
talk to people about the legendary "Mothman" that journalist John Keel had written about. I
talked to the cops involved, a stringer reporter who had accompanied Keel in his
investigations, and some of the UFO witnesses in the area. I couldn't establish what actually
happened from this, but it *did* confirm what Keel had written was what he was told.
Keel was an "old-school" journalist who believed in "ground truth". The problem with most
conspiracy theorists is that most of them don't have either the technical expertise or the
resources to get "ground truth". Keel himself told me once that he would go to a location, do
some investigation, deliver a talk of some sort, and write off his expenses as tax
write-offs, which he said the IRS was not happy about. And he was by no means rich, his books
never sold that much. Without a significant income, it's next to impossible to determine the
truth of 99% of the events in any given conspiracy theory.
Or for that matter, the truth in 99% of the main stream news. But it's not 100%. The other
problem conspiracy theorists have - and we see it here daily - is that just because a report
comes from the MSM, it *has* to be false in its *entirety*. Which is ridiculous. Most of the
MSM news is valid reporting. It's just how much is left out and how the spin is applied from
the wording or who the source was that is the problem. A few things might be completely made
up, but most things aren't. But if the reporter hasn't himself done the leg-work to verify
the statements of the sources, then it has to be considered unreliable or at least
incomplete.
Four years ago on June 15, 2016, a shadowy Internet persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0"
appeared out of nowhere to claim credit for hacking emails from the Democratic National
Committee on behalf of WikiLeaks and implicate Russia by dropping "telltale" but synthetically
produced Russian "breadcrumbs" in his metadata.
Thanks largely to the corporate media, the highly damaging story actually found in those DNC
emails – namely, that the DNC had stacked the cards against Bernie Sanders in the party's
2016 primary – was successfully obscured .
The media was the message; and the message was that Russia had used G-2.0 to hack into the
DNC, interfering in the November 2016 election to help Donald Trump win.
Almost everybody still "knows" that – from the man or woman in the street to the
forlorn super sleuth, Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, who actually based indictments
of Russian intelligence officers on Guccifer 2.0.
Blaming Russia was a magnificent distraction from the start and quickly became the
vogue.
The soil had already been cultivated for "Russiagate" by Democratic PR gems like Donald
Trump "kissing up" to former KGB officer Vladimir Putin and their "bromance" (bromides that
former President Barack Obama is still using). Four years ago today, "Russian meddling" was off
and running – on steroids – acquiring far more faux-reality than the evanescent
Guccifer 2.0 persona is likely to get.
Here's how it went down :
June 12: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced he had "emails related to Hillary
Clinton which are pending publication."
June 14: DNC contractor CrowdStrike tells the media that malware has been found on the
DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15: Guccifer 2.0 arises from nowhere; affirms the DNC/CrowdStrike allegations of the
day before; claims responsibility for hacking the DNC; claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and
posts a document that forensic examination shows was deliberately tainted with "Russian
fingerprints." This to "corroborate" claims made by CrowdStrike executives the day
before.
Adding to other signs of fakery, there is hard evidence that G-2.0 was operating mostly in
U.S. time zones and with local settings peculiar to a device configured for use within the US ,
as Tim Leonard reports here and here .)
Leonard is a software developer who started to catalog and archive evidence related to
Guccifer 2.0 in 2017 and has issued detailed reports on digital forensic discoveries made by
various independent researchers – as well as his own – over the past three years.
Leonard points out that WikiLeaks said it did not use any of the emails G2.0 sent it, though it
later published similar emails, opening the possibility that whoever created G2.0 knew what
WikiLeaks had and sent it duplicates with the Russian fingerprints .
As Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) told President Trump in a memorandum
of July 24, 2017, titled "Was the 'Russian Hack' an Inside Job?":
"We do not think that the June 12, 14, & 15 timing was pure coincidence. Rather, it
suggests the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might
have been ready to publish and to 'show' that it came from a Russian hack."
We added this about Guccifer 2.0 at the time:
"The recent forensic studies fill in a critical gap. Why the FBI neglected to perform any
independent forensics on the original 'Guccifer 2.0' material remains a mystery – as
does the lack of any sign that the 'hand-picked analysts' from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who
wrote the misnomered 'Intelligence Community' Assessment dated January 6, 2017, gave any
attention to forensics."
Guccifer 2.0 Seen As a Fraud
In our July 24, 2017 memorandum we also told President Trump that independent cyber
investigators and VIPs had determined "that the purported 'hack' of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was
not a hack, by Russia or anyone else. Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external
storage device – a thumb drive, for example) by an insider. Information was leaked to
implicate Russia. We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the
FBI. " [Emphasis added.].
Right. Ask the FBI. At this stage, President Trump might have better luck asking Attorney
General William Barr, to whom the FBI is accountable – at least in theory. As for Barr,
VIPs informed him in a June 5, 2020
memorandum that the head of CrowdStrike had admitted under oath on Dec. 5, 2017 that
CrowdStrike has no concrete evidence that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks on July 22,
2016 were hacked – by Russia or by anyone else. [Emphasis added.] This important
revelation has so far escaped attention in the Russia-Russia-Russia "mainstream" media
(surprise, surprise, surprise!).
Back to the Birth of G-2
It boggles the mind that so few Americans could see Russiagate for the farce it was. Most of
the blame, I suppose, rests on a thoroughly complicit Establishment media. Recall: Assange's
announcement on June 12, 2016 that he had Hillary Clinton-related emails came just six weeks
before the Democratic convention. I could almost hear the cry go up from the DNC: Houston, We
Have a Problem!
Here's how bad the problem for the Democrats was. The DNC emails eventually published by
WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, just three days before the Democratic convention, had been stolen
on May 23 and 25. This would have given the DNC time to learn that the stolen material included
documents showing how the DNC and Clinton campaign had manipulated the primaries and created a
host of other indignities, such that Sanders' chances of winning the nomination amounted to
those of a snowball's chance in the netherworld.
To say this was an embarrassment would be the understatement of 2016. Worse still, given the
documentary nature of the emails and WikiLeaks' enviable track record for accuracy, there would
be no way to challenge their authenticity. Nevertheless, with the media in full support of the
DNC and Clinton, however, it turned out to be a piece of cake to divert attention from the
content of the emails to the "act of war" (per John McCain) that the Russian "cyber attack" was
said to represent .
The outcome speaks as much to the lack of sophistication on the part of American TV
watchers, as it does to the sophistication of the Democrats-media complicity and cover-up. How
come so few could figure out what was going down?
It was not hard for some experienced observers to sniff a rat. Among the first to speak out
was fellow Consortium News columnist Patrick Lawrence, who immediately saw through the
Magnificent Diversion. I do not know if he fancies duck hunting, but he shot the Russiagate
canard quite dead – well before the Democratic convention was over.
Magnificent Diversion
In late July 2016, Lawrence was sickened, as he watched what he immediately recognized as a
well planned, highly significant deflection. The Clinton-friendly media was excoriating Russia
for "hacking" DNC emails and was glossing over what the emails showed ; namely, that the
Clinton Dems had pretty much stolen the nomination from Sanders.
It was already clear even then that the Democrats, with invaluable help from intelligence
leaks and other prepping to the media, had made good use of those six weeks between Assange's
announcement that he had emails "related to Hillary Clinton" and the opening of the
convention.
The media was primed to castigate the Russians for "hacking," while taking a prime role in
the deflection. It was a liminal event of historic significance, as we now know. The
"Magnificent Diversion" worked like a charm – and then it grew like Topsy.
Lawrence said he had "fire in the belly" on the morning of July 25 as the Democratic
convention began and wrote what follows pretty much "in one long, furious exhale" within 12
hours of when the media started really pushing the "the Russians-did-it"
narrative.
Below is a slightly shortened text of his
article :
"Now wait a minute, all you upper-case "D" Democrats. A flood light suddenly shines on your
party apparatus, revealing its grossly corrupt machinations to fix the primary process and sink
the Sanders campaign, and within a day you are on about the evil Russians having hacked into
your computers to sabotage our elections
Is this a joke? Are you kidding? Is nothing beneath your dignity? Is this how lowly you rate
the intelligence of American voters?
Clowns. Subversives. Do you know who you remind me of? I will tell you: Nixon, in his
famously red-baiting campaign – a disgusting episode – during his first run for the
Senate, in 1950. Your political tricks are as transparent and anti-democratic as his, it is
perfectly fair to say.
I confess to a heated reaction to events since last Friday [July 22] among the Democrats,
specifically in the Democratic National Committee. I should briefly explain
The Sanders people have long charged that the DNC has had its fingers on the scale, as one
of them put it the other day, in favor of Hillary Clinton's nomination. The prints were
everywhere – many those of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has repeatedly been accused of
anti-Sanders bias. Schultz, do not forget, co-chaired Clinton's 2008 campaign against Barack
Obama. That would be enough to disqualify her as the DNC's chair in any society that takes
ethics seriously, but it is not enough in our great country. Chairwoman she has been for the
past five years.
Last Friday WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 DNC email messages providing abundant proof
that Sanders and his staff were right all along. The worst of these, involving senior DNC
officers, proposed Nixon-esque smears having to do with everything from ineptitude within the
Sanders campaign to Sanders as a Jew in name only and an atheist by conviction.
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Wasserman fell from grace on Monday. Other than this, Democrats from President Obama to
Clinton and numerous others atop the party's power structure have had nothing to say, as in
nothing, about this unforgivable breach. They have, rather, been full of praise for Wasserman
Schultz. Brad Marshall, the D.N.C.'s chief financial officer, now tries to deny that his
Jew-baiting remark referred to Sanders. Good luck, Brad: Bernie is the only Jew in the
room.
The caker came on Sunday, when Robby Mook, Clinton's campaign manager, appeared on ABC's
"This Week" and CNN's "State of the Union" to assert that the D.N.C.'s mail was hacked "by the
Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." He knows this – knows it in a matter
of 24 hours – because "experts" – experts he will never name – have told him
so.
What's disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into
the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that Russians are releasing these
emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.
Is that what disturbs you, Robby? Interesting. Unsubstantiated hocus-pocus, not the
implications of these events for the integrity of Democratic nominations and the American
political process? The latter is the more pressing topic, Robby. You are far too long on
anonymous experts for my taste, Robby. And what kind of expert, now that I think of it, is able
to report to you as to the intentions of Russian hackers – assuming for a sec that this
concocted narrative has substance?
Making lemonade out of a lemon, the Clinton campaign now goes for a twofer. Watch as it
advances the Russians-did-it thesis on the basis of nothing, then shoots the messenger, then
associates Trump with its own mess – and, finally, gets to ignore the nature of its
transgression (which any paying-attention person must consider grave).
Preposterous, readers. Join me, please, in having absolutely none of it. There is no
"Russian actor" at the bottom of this swamp, to put my position bluntly. You will never, ever
be offered persuasive evidence otherwise.
Reluctantly, I credit the Clinton campaign and the DNC with reading American paranoia well
enough such that they may make this junk stick. In a clear sign the entire crowd-control
machine is up and running, The New York Times had a long, unprofessional piece about Russian
culprits in its Monday editions. It followed Mook's lead faithfully: not one properly supported
fact, not one identified "expert," and more conditional verbs than you've had hot dinners
– everything cast as "could," "might," "appears," "would," "seems," "may." Nothing, once
again, as to the very serious implications of this affair for the American political
process.
Now comes the law. The FBI just announced that it will investigate – no, not the DNC's
fraudulent practices (which surely breach statutes), but "those who pose a threat in
cyberspace." it is the invocation of the Russians that sends me over the edge. My bones grow
weary
We must take the last few days' events as a signal of what Clinton's policy toward Russia
will look like should she prevail in November. Turning her party's latest disgrace into an
occasion for another round of Russophobia is mere preface, but in it you can read her
commitment to the new crusade.
Trump, to make this work, must be blamed for his willingness to negotiate with Moscow. This
is now among his sins. Got that? Anyone who says he will talk to the Russians has transgressed
the American code. Does this not make Hillary Clinton more than a touch Nixonian?
I am developing nitrogen bends from watching the American political spectacle. One can
hardly tell up from down. Which way for a breath of air?"
A year later Lawrence interviewed several of us VIPs, including our two former NSA technical
directors and on Aug. 9, 2017 published an
article for The Nation titled, "A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year's DNC
Hack."
Lawrence wrote, "Former NSA experts, now members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPs), say it wasn't a hack at all, but a leak – an inside job by someone with
access to the DNC's system."
And so it was. But, sadly, that cut across the grain of the acceptable Russia-gate narrative
at The Nation at the time. Its staff, seriously struck by the HWHW (Hillary Would Have Won)
virus, rose up in rebellion. A short time later, there was no more room at The Nation for his
independent-minded writing.
Drop-Hammer , 2 hours ago
His name was (((Seth Rich))).
zoomie92 , 1 hour ago
Direct USB download to chip or portable HD was the only way to get those download speed
shown on the file metadata. This has been proven in multiple independent ways. But the press
is filled with ******* retards - and so is the country.
Franko , 1 hour ago
Rest in Peace Mr Seth.
I believe many US officials have enough and want to tell the others about this.
Question:were they should be go to spread the news?To which country before been
assasinated?
To end like Julian Assange or like Snowden?
belogical , 2 hours ago
...Gucifer had much less to do with this than the Obama admin. They were using the
intelligence community for no good and as their crimes became visible they had to commit
bigger and bigger crimes to cover them up. In the end a large part of the DOJ, FBI and Obama
admin should be held accountable for this, but when you get this high they likely won't. You
can already see Lindsey Graham of the deep state finally holding hearing to spin the
narrative before the Durham probe becomes public. Unfortunate but only a few will get their
hands slapped and the true person, Obama who deserve to be prosecuted will likely skate.
PedroS , 2 hours ago
Crowdstrike. The owners should be in jail for their role.
Slaytheist , 2 hours ago
Crowdstrike IS Guccifer.
They were ordered by the criminal DNC org to cover the fact that the data was downloaded
internally, in order to hide the connection to the Podesta/Clinton ordered hit on person who
did it - Seth Rich.
Weedlord Bonerhitler , 3 hours ago
The computer of a DNC operative named Warren Flood was used to disseminate the Guccifer
2.0 disinfo tranche. Adam Carter had the analysis IIRC.
Giant Meteor , 3 hours ago
Always good to hear from Ray!
philipat , 39 minutes ago
Tick tock, still no indictments and soon the campaign will be in full swing so that
everything will be attacked as "political". Is Durham done?
I'm afraid it won't matter how thorough the alternative media debunking of Russiagate
becomes – as long as mainstream media sticks to the story, the neoliberal majority will
too, because it is like catnip to them, absolving responsibility for the defeat, casting
Clinton as the victim of an evil foreign despot, and delegitimizing Trump. Truth is tossed to
the wind by this freight train of powerful interests.
I have little hope Barr and Durham will indict anyone high level.
Ray twice mentioned something about Sanders getting hosed again in the 2020 primary. I
thought it seemed weird how suddenly the primary was declared "over." If there is evidence of
DNC shenanigans in 2020, that would be a very interesting and timely topic.
On June 12, Assange announces Wikileaks will soon be releasing "emails pertinent to
Hillary". On June 14th, Crowdstrike announces: someone, probably the Russians, has hacked the
DNC and taken a Trump opposition research document; the very next day, G2.0 makes his first
public appearance and posts the DNC's Trump oppo research document, with "Russian
fingerprints" intentionally implanted in its metadata. (We now know that he had actually
acquired this from PODESTA's emails, where it appears as an attachment – oops!)
Moreover, G2.0 announces that he was the source of the "emails pertinent to Hillary" –
DNC emails – that Assange was planning to release.
This strongly suggests that the G2.0 persona was working in collusion with Crowdstrike to
perpetrate the hoax that the GRU had hacked the DNC to provide their emails to Wikileaks.
Consistent with this, multiple cyberanalyses point to G2.0 working at various points In the
Eastern, Central, and Western US time zones. (A mere coincidence that the DNC is in the
eastern zone, and that Crowdstrike has offices in the central and western zones?)
If Crowdstrike honestly believed that the DNC had been hacked by the GRU, would there have
been any need for them to perpetrate this fraud?
It is therefore reasonable to suspect, as Ray McGovern has long postulated, that
Crowdstrike may have FAKED a GRU hack, to slander Russia and Assange, while distracting
attention from the content of the released emails.
As far as we know, the only "evidence" that Crowdstrike has for GRU being the perpetrator
of the alleged hack is the presence of "Fancy Bear" malware on the DNC server. But as
cyberanalysts Jeffrey Carr and George Eliason have pointed out, this software is also
possessed by Ukrainian hackers working in concert with Russian traitors and the Atlantic
Council – with which the founders of Crowdstrike are allied.
Here's a key question: When Assange announced the impending release of "emails pertinent
to Hillary" on June 12, how did Crowdstrike and G2.0 immediately know he was referring to DNC
emails? Many people – I, for example – suspected he was referring to her deleted
Secretary of State emails.
Here's a reasonable hypothesis – Our intelligence agencies were monitoring all
communications with Wikileaks. If so, they could have picked up the communications between SR
and Wikileaks that Sy Hersh's FBI source described. They then alerted the DNC that their
emails were about to leaked to Wikileaks. The DNC then contacted Crowdstrike, which arranged
for a "Fancy Bear hack" of the DNC servers. Notably, cyberanalysts have determined that about
2/3 of the Fancy Bear malware found on the DNC servers had been compiled AFTER the date that
Crowdstrike was brought in to "roust the hackers".
Of course, this elaborate hoax would have come to grief if the actual leaker had come
forward. Which might have had something to do with the subsequent "botched robbery" in which
SR was slain.
DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered on July 10, 2016, amid contoversy over who provided DNC
emails to Wikileaks and over a pending lawsuit concerning voter suppression during the 2016
primaries. Wikileaks offered a $20,000 reward for information about his murder, leading some
to believe he was their source for the DNC emails. He was reported to have been a potential
witness in the voter suppression lawsuit filed the day after his death.
False flag operation by CIA or CrowdStrike as CIA constructor: CIA ears protrude above Gussifer 2.0 hat.
Notable quotes:
"... Guccifer 2.0 fabricated evidence to claim credit for hacking the DNC (using files that were really Podesta attachments) . ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0’s Russian breadcrumbs mostly came from deliberate processes & needless editing of documents . ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0’s Russian communications signals came from the persona choosing to use a proxy server in Moscow and choosing to use a Russian VPN service as end-points (and they used an email service that forwards the sender’s IP address, which made identifying that signal a relatively trivial task.) ..."
"... A considerable volume of evidence pointed at Guccifer 2.0’s activities being in American timezones (twice as many types of indicators were found pointing at Guccifer 2.0’s activities being in American timezones than anywhere else). ..."
"... The American timezones were incidental to other activities (eg. blogging , social media , emailing a journalist , archiving files , etc) and some of these were recorded independently by service providers. ..."
"... A couple of pieces of evidence with Russian indicators present had accompanying locale indicators that contradicted this which suggested the devices used hadn’t been properly set up for use in Russia (or Romania) but may have been suitable for other countries (including America) . ..."
"... On the same day that Guccifer 2.0 was plastering Russian breadcrumbs on documents through a deliberate process, choosing to use Russian-themed end-points and fabricating evidence to claim credit for hacking the DNC, the operation attributed itself to WikiLeaks. ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0 chose to use insecure communications to ask WikiLeaks to confirm receipt of “DNC emails” on July 6, 2016. Confirmation of this was not provided at that time but WikiLeaks did confirm receipt of a “1gb or so” archive on July 18, 2016. ..."
"... The alleged GRU officer we are told was part of an operation to deflect from Russian culpability suggested that Assange “may be connected with Russians”. ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0 fabricated evidence to claim credit for hacking the DNC, covered itself (and its files) in what were essentially a collection of “Made In Russia” labels through deliberate processes and decisions made by the persona, and, then, it attributed itself to WikiLeaks with a claim that was contradicted by subsequent communications between both parties. ..."
"... While we are expected to accept that Guccifer 2.0’s efforts between July 6 and July 18 were a sincere effort to get leaks to WikiLeaks, considering everything we now know about the persona, it seems fair to question whether Guccifer 2.0’s intentions towards WikiLeaks may have instead been malicious. ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0 was always John Brennan 1.0 ..."
"... Was Guccifer II part of the Stefan Halper organization that lured Papadopoulos and maliciously maligned others? ..."
"... I believe Guccifer 2.0 was created by the CIA to falsely pin blame on the Russians for info that Seth Rich gave to WikiLeaks. Read for yourself: http://g-2.space/ ..."
Why would an alleged GRU officer - supposedly part of an operation to deflect Russian culpability - suggest that
Assange “may be connected with Russians?”
In December, I reported on digital forensics evidence
relating to Guccifer 2.0 and highlighted several key points about the mysterious persona that Special Counsel Robert Mueller
claims was a front for Russian intelligence to leak Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks:
A considerable volume of evidence pointed at
Guccifer 2.0’s activities being in American timezones (twice as many types of indicators were found pointing at Guccifer
2.0’s activities being in American timezones than anywhere else).
A couple of pieces of evidence with Russian indicators present had accompanying
locale indicators that contradicted this which suggested the devices used hadn’t been properly set up for use in Russia (or
Romania) but may have been suitable for other countries (including America).
On the same day that Guccifer 2.0 was plastering Russian breadcrumbs on documents through a deliberate process, choosing to
use Russian-themed end-points and fabricating evidence to claim credit for hacking the DNC, the operation attributed itself to WikiLeaks.
This article questions what Guccifer 2.0’s intentions were in relation to WikiLeaks in the context of what has been
discovered by independent researchers during the past three years.
Timing
On June 12, 2016, in an interview
with ITV’s Robert Peston, Julian Assange confirmed that WikiLeaks had emails relating to Hillary Clinton that the
organization intended to publish. This announcement was prior to any reported contact with Guccifer 2.0 (or with DCLeaks).
On June 14, 2016, an article was published
in The Washington Post citing statements from two CrowdStrike executives alleging that Russian intelligence hacked
the DNC and stole opposition research on Trump. It was apparent that the statements had been made in the 48 hours prior to
publication as they referenced claims of kicking hackers off the DNC network on the weekend just passed (June 11-12, 2016).
On that same date, June 14, DCLeaks contacted WikiLeaks via Twitter DM and for some reason suggested that both parties
coordinate their releases of leaks. (It doesn’t appear that WikiLeaks responded until September 2016).
[CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry testified under
oath behind closed doors on Dec. 5, 2017 to the U.S. House intelligence committee that his company had no evidence that Russian
actors removed anything from the DNC servers. This testimony was only released earlier
this month.]
By stating that WikiLeaks would “publish them soon” the Guccifer 2.0 operation implied that it had received
confirmation of intent to publish.
However, the earliest recorded communication between Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks didn’t occur until a week later (June
22, 2016) when WikiLeaks reached out to Guccifer 2.0 and suggested that the persona send any new material to them
rather than doing what it was doing:
[Excerpt from Special Counsel Mueller’s report. Note: “stolen from the DNC” is an editorial insert by the special
counsel.]
If WikiLeaks had already received material and confirmed intent to publish prior to this direct message, why would
they then suggest what they did when they did? WikiLeaks says it had no prior contact with Guccifer 2.0 despite what
Guccifer 2.0 had claimed.
Here is the full conversation on that date (according to the application):
@WikiLeaks: Do you have secure communications?
@WikiLeaks: Send any new material here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what
you are doing. No other media will release the full material.
@GUCCIFER_2: what can u suggest for a secure connection? Soft, keys, etc? I’m ready to cooperate with
you, but I need to know what’s in your archive 80gb? Are there only HRC emails? Or some other docs? Are there any DNC docs?
If it’s not secret when you are going to release it?
@WikiLeaks: You can send us a message in a .txt file here [link redacted]
@GUCCIFER_2: do you have GPG?
Why would Guccifer 2.0 need to know what material WikiLeaks already had? Certainly, if it were anything Guccifer 2.0
had sent (or the GRU had sent) he wouldn’t have had reason to inquire.
The more complete DM details provided here also suggest that both parties had not yet established secure communications.
Further communications were reported to have taken place on June 24, 2016:
@GUCCIFER_2: How can we chat? Do u have jabber or something like that?
@WikiLeaks: Yes, we have everything. We’ve been busy celebrating Brexit. You can also email an encrypted
message to [email protected]. They key is here.
and June 27, 2016:
@GUCCIFER_2: Hi, i’ve just sent you an email with a text message encrypted and an open key.
@WikiLeaks: Thanks.
@GUCCIFER_2: waiting for ur response. I send u some interesting piece.
Guccifer 2.0 said he needed to know what was in the 88GB ‘insurance’ archive that WikiLeaks had posted on June 16,
2016 and it’s clear that, at this stage, secure communications had not been established between both parties (which would
seem to rule out the possibility of encrypted communications prior to June 15, 2016, making Guccifer 2.0’s initial claims about WikiLeaks even
more doubtful).
There was no evidence of WikiLeaks mentioning this to Guccifer 2.0 nor any reason for why WikiLeaks couldn’t
just send a DM to DCLeaks themselves if they had wanted to.
(It should also be noted that this Twitter DM activity between DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 is alleged by Mueller to be
communications between officers within the same unit of the GRU, who, for some unknown reason, decided to use Twitter DMs to
relay such information rather than just communicate face to face or securely via their own local network.)
Guccifer 2.0 lied about DCLeaks being a sub-project of WikiLeaks and then, over two months later, was seen trying to
encourage DCLeaks to communicate with WikiLeaks by relaying an alleged request from WikiLeaks that there is no
record of WikiLeaks ever making (and which WikiLeaks could have done themselves, directly, if they had wanted
to).
@GUCCIFER_2: hi there, check up r email, waiting for reply.
This was followed up on July 6, 2016 with the following conversation:
@GUCCIFER_2: have you received my parcel?
@WikiLeaks: Not unless it was very recent. [we haven’ t checked in 24h].
@GUCCIFER_2: I sent it yesterday, an archive of about 1 gb. via [website link]. and check your email.
@WikiLeaks: Wil[l] check, thanks.
@GUCCIFER_2: let me know the results.
@WikiLeaks: Please don’t make anything you send to us public. It’s a lot of work to go through it and the
impact is severely reduced if we are not the first to publish.
@GUCCIFER_2: agreed. How much time will it take?
@WikiLeaks: likely sometime today.
@GUCCIFER_2: will u announce a publication? and what about 3 docs sent u earlier?
@WikiLeaks: I don’t believe we received them. Nothing on ‘Brexit’ for example.
@GUCCIFER_2: wow. have you checked ur mail?
@WikiLeaks: At least not as of 4 days ago . . . . For security reasons mail cannot be checked for some
hours.
@GUCCIFER_2: fuck, sent 4 docs on brexit on jun 29, an archive in gpg ur submission form is too fucking
slow, spent the whole day uploading 1 gb.
@WikiLeaks: We can arrange servers 100x as fast. The speed restrictions are to anonymise the path. Just
ask for custom fast upload point in an email.
@GUCCIFER_2: will u be able to check ur email?
@WikiLeaks: We’re best with very large data sets. e.g. 200gb. these prove themselves since they’re too
big to fake.
@GUCCIFER_2: or shall I send brexit docs via submission once again?
@WikiLeaks: to be safe, send via [web link]
@GUCCIFER_2: can u confirm u received dnc emails?
@WikiLeaks: for security reasons we can’ t confirm what we’ve received here. e.g., in case your account
has been taken over by us intelligence and is probing to see what we have.
@GUCCIFER_2: then send me an encrypted email.
@WikiLeaks: we can do that. but the security people are in another time zone so it will need to wait some
hours.
@WikiLeaks: what do you think about the FBl’ s failure to charge? To our mind the clinton foundation
investigation has always been the more serious. we would be very interested in all the emails/docs from there. She set up
quite a lot of front companies. e.g in sweden.
@GUCCIFER_2: ok, i’ll be waiting for confirmation. as for investigation, they have everything settled, or
else I don’t know how to explain that they found a hundred classified docs but fail to charge her.
@WikiLeaks: She’s too powerful to charge at least without something stronger. s far as we know, the
investigation into the clinton foundation remains open e hear the FBI are unhappy with Loretta Lynch over meeting Bill,
because he’s a target in that investigation.
@GUCCIFER_2: do you have any info about marcel lazar? There’ve been a lot of rumors of late.
@WikiLeaks: the death? [A] fake story.
@WikiLeaks: His 2013 screen shots of Max Blumenthal’s inbox prove that Hillary secretly deleted at least
one email about Libya that was meant to be handed over to Congress. So we were very interested in his co-operation with the
FBI.
@GUCCIFER_2: some dirty games behind the scenes believe Can you send me an email now?
@WikiLeaks: No; we have not been able to activate the people who handle it. Still trying.
@GUCCIFER_2: what about tor submission? [W]ill u receive a doc now?
@WikiLeaks: We will get everything sent on [weblink].” [A]s long as you see \”upload succseful\” at the
end. [I]f you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC is
approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after.
@GUCCIFER_2: ok. I see.
@WikiLeaks: [W]e think the public interest is greatest now and in early october.
@GUCCIFER_2: do u think a lot of people will attend bernie fans rally in philly? Will it affect the dnc
anyhow?
@WikiLeaks: bernie is trying to make his own faction leading up to the DNC. [S]o he can push for
concessions (positions/policies) or, at the outside, if hillary has a stroke, is arrested etc, he can take over the
nomination. [T]he question is this: can bemies supporters+staff keep their coherency until then (and after). [O]r will they
dis[s]olve into hillary’ s camp? [P]resently many of them are looking to damage hilary [sic] inorder [sic] to increase their
unity and bargaining power at the DNC. Doubt one rally is going to be that significant in the bigger scheme. [I]t seems many
of them will vote for hillary just to prevent trump from winning.
@GUCCIFER_2: sent brexit docs successfully.
@WikiLeaks: :))).
@WikiLeaks: we think trump has only about a 25% chance of winning against hillary so conflict between
bernie and hillary is interesting.
@GUCCIFER_2: so it is.
@WikiLeaks: also, it’ s important to consider what type of president hillary might be. If bernie and
trump retain their groups past 2016 in significant number, then they are a restraining force on hillary.
[Note: This was over a week after the Brexit referendum had taken place, so this will not have had any impact on the
results of that. It also doesn’t appear that WikiLeaks released any Brexit content around this time.]
On July 14, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 sent an email to WikiLeaks, this was covered in the Mueller report:
It should be noted that while the attachment sent was encrypted, the email wasn’t and both the email contents and name of the
file were readable.
The persona then opted, once again, for insecure communications via Twitter DMs:
@GUCCIFER_2: ping. Check ur email. sent u a link to a big archive and a pass.
@WikiLeaks: great, thanks; can’t check until tomorrow though.
On July 17, 2016, the persona contacted WikiLeaks again:
@GUCCIFER_2: what bout now?
On July 18, 2016, WikiLeaks responded and more was discussed:
@WikiLeaks: have the 1 Gb or so archive.
@GUCCIFER_2: have u managed to extract the files?
@WikiLeaks: yes. turkey coup has delayed us a couple of days. [O]therwise all ready[.]
@GUCCIFER_2: so when r u about to make a release?
@WikiLeaks: this week. [D]o you have any bigger datasets? [D]id you get our fast transfer details?
@GUCCIFER_2: i’ll check it. did u send it via email?
@WikiLeaks: yes.
@GUCCIFER_2: to [web link]. [I] got nothing.
@WikiLeaks: check your other mail? this was over a week ago.
@GUCCIFER_2:oh, that one, yeah, [I] got it.
@WikiLeaks: great. [D]id it work?
@GUCCIFER_2:[I] haven’ t tried yet.
@WikiLeaks: Oh. We arranged that server just for that purpose. Nothing bigger?
@GUCCIFER_2: let’s move step by step, u have released nothing of what [I] sent u yet.
@WikiLeaks: How about you transfer it all to us encrypted. [T]hen when you are happy, you give us the
decrypt key. [T]his way we can move much faster. (A]lso it is protective for you if we already have everything because then
there is no point in trying to shut you up.
@GUCCIFER_2: ok, i’ll ponder it
Again, we see a reference to the file being approximately one gigabyte in size.
Guccifer 2.0’s “so when r u about to make a release?” seems to be a question about his files. However, it could have been
inferred as generally relating to what WikiLeaks had or even material relating to the “Turkey Coup” that WikiLeaks had
mentioned in the previous sentence and that were published by the following day (July 19, 2016).
The way this is reported in the Mueller report, though, prevented this potential ambiguity being known (by not citing the
exact question that Guccifer 2.0 had asked and the context immediately preceding it.
Four days later, WikiLeaks published the DNC emails.
Later that same day, Guccifer 2.0 tweeted: “@wikileaks published #DNCHack docs I’d
given them!!!”.
Guccifer 2.0 chose to use insecure communications to ask WikiLeaks to confirm receipt of “DNC emails” on July 6, 2016.
Confirmation of this was not provided at that time but WikiLeaks did confirm receipt of a “1gb or so” archive on July 18,
2016.
Guccifer 2.0’s emails to WikiLeaks were also sent insecurely.
We cannot be certain that WikiLeaks statement about making a release was in relation to Guccifer 2.0’s material and
there is even a possibility that this could have been in reference to the Erdogan leaks published by WikiLeaks on July
19, 2016.
Ulterior Motives?
While the above seems troubling there are a few points worth considering:
Guccifer 2.0’s initial claim about sending WikiLeaks material(and
that they would publish it soon) appears to have been made without justification and seems to be contradicted by
subsequent communications from WikiLeaks.
If the archive was “about 1GB” (as Guccifer 2.0 describes it) then it would be too small to have been all of the
DNC’s emails (as these, compressed, came to 1.8GB-2GB depending on compression method used, which, regardless, would be
“about 2GB” not “about 1GB”). If we assume that these were DNC emails, where did the rest of them come from?
Assange has maintained
that WikiLeaks didn’t publish the material that Guccifer 2.0 had sent to them. Of course, Assange could just be
lying about that but there are some other possibilities to consider. If true, there is always a possibility that Guccifer 2.0
could have sent them material they had already received from another source or other emails from the DNC that they didn’t
release (Guccifer 2.0 had access to a lot of content relating to the DNC and Democratic party and the persona also offered
emails of Democratic staffers to Emma Best, a self-described journalist, activist and ex-hacker, the month after WikiLeaks published
the DNC emails, which, logically, must have been different emails to still have any value at that point in time).
On July 6, 2016, the same day that Guccifer 2.0 was trying to get WikiLeaks to confirm receipt of DNC emails (and
on which Guccifer 2.0 agreed not to publish material he had sent them), the persona posted a series of files to his blog
that were exclusively DNC email attachments.
It doesn’t appear any further communications were reported between the parties following the July 18, 2016 communications
despite Guccifer 2.0 tweeting on August 12, 2016: “I’ll send the major trove of the
#DCCC materials and emails to #wikileaks keep following…” and, apparently, stating
this to The Hill too.
As there are no further communications reported beyond this point it’s fair to question whether getting confirmation of
receipt of the archive was the primary objective for Guccifer 2.0 here.
Even though WikiLeaks offered Guccifer 2.0 a fast server for large uploads, the persona later suggested he needed
to find a resource for publishing a large amount of data.
Despite later claiming he would send (or had sent) DCCC content to WikiLeaks,WikiLeaks never
published such content and there doesn’t appear to be any record of any attempt to send this material to WikiLeaks.
Considering all of this and the fact Guccifer 2.0 effectively covered itself in “Made In Russia” labels (by plastering
files in Russian metadata and choosing to use a
Russian VPN service and a proxy in Moscow for
it’s activities) on the same day it first attributed itself to WikiLeaks, it’s fair to suspect that Guccifer 2.0 had
malicious intent towards WikiLeaks from the outset.
If this was the case, Guccifer 2.0 may have known about the DNC emails by June 30, 2016 as this is when the persona first
started publishing attachments from those emails.
Seth Rich Mentioned By Both Parties
WikiLeaks Offers Reward
On August 9, 2016, WikiLeaks tweeted:
ANNOUNCE: WikiLeaks has decided to issue a US$20k reward for information
leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
In an interview with Nieuwsuur that was posted the same day, Julian
Assange explained that the reward was for a DNC staffer who he said had been “shot in the back, murdered”. When the interviewer
suggested it was a robbery Assange disputed it and stated that there were no findings.
When the interviewer asked if Seth Rich was a source, Assange stated, “We don’t comment on who our sources are”.
When pressed to explain WikiLeaks actions, Assange stated that the reward was being offered because WikiLeaks‘
sources were concerned by the incident. He also stated that WikiLeaks were investigating.
Speculation and theories about Seth Rich being a source for WikiLeaks soon propagated to several sites and across
social media.
On that same day, in a DM conversation with the actress Robbin Young, Guccifer 2.0 claimed that Seth was his source (despite
previously claiming he obtained his material by hacking the DNC).
Why did Guccifer 2.0 feel the need to attribute itself to Seth at this time?
[Note: I am not advocating for any theory and am simply reporting on Guccifer 2.0’s effort to attribute itself to Seth
Rich following the propagation of Rich-WikiLeaks association theories online.]
Special Counsel Claims
In Spring, 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was named to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. general
election, delivered his final report.
It claimed:
Guccifer 2.0 contradicted his own hacking claims to allege that Seth Rich was his source and did so on the same day that
Julian Assange was due to be interviewed by Fox News (in relation to Seth Rich).
No communications between Guccifer 2.0 and Seth Rich have ever been reported.
Suggesting Assange Connected To Russians
In the same conversation Guccifer 2.0 had with Robbin Young where Rich’s name is mentioned (on August 25, 2016), the
persona also provided a very interesting response to Young mentioning “Julian” (in reference to Julian Assange):
The alleged GRU officer we are told was part of an operation to deflect from Russian culpability suggested that
Assange “may be connected with Russians”.
Guccifer 2.0’s Mentions of WikiLeaks and Assange
Guccifer 2.0 mentioned WikiLeaks or associated himself with their output on several occasions:
July 22nd, 2016: claimed credit when WikiLeaks published the DNC leaks.
August 12, 2016: It was reported in The Hill that Guccifer 2.0 had released material to the publication. They
reported: “The documents released to The Hill are only the first section of a much larger cache. The bulk, the hacker
said, will be released on WikiLeaks.”
August 12, 2016: Tweeted that he would “send the major trove of the #DCCC materials
and emails to #wikileaks“.
September 15, 2016: telling DCLeaks that WikiLeaks wanted to get in contact with them.
October 4, 2016: Congratulating WikiLeaks on their 10th anniversary via
its blog. Also states: “Julian, you are really cool! Stay safe and sound!”. (This was the same day on which Guccifer
2.0 published his “Clinton Foundation” files that were clearly
not from the Clinton Foundation.)
October 17, 2016: via Twitter, stating “i’m here and ready for new releases.
already changed my location thanks @wikileaks for a good job!”
Guccifer 2.0 also made some statements in response to WikiLeaks or Assange being mentioned:
June 17, 2016: in response to The Smoking Gun asking if Assange would publish the same material it was
publishing, Guccifer 2.0 stated: “I gave WikiLeaks the
greater part of the files, but saved some for myself,”
August 22, 2016: in response to Raphael Satter suggesting that Guccifer 2.0 send leaks to WikiLeaks,the
persona stated: “I gave wikileaks a greater part of docs”.
August 25, 2016: in response to Julian Assange’s name being mentioned in a conversation with Robbin Young, Guccifer
2.0 stated: “he may be connected with Russians”.
October 18, 2016: a BBC reported asked Guccifer 2.0 if he was upset that WikiLeaks had “stole his thunder” and “do
you still support Assange?”. Guccifer 2.0 responded: “i’m
glad, together we’ll make America great again.”.
Guccifer 2.0 fabricated evidence to claim credit for hacking the DNC, covered itself (and its files) in what were essentially
a collection of “Made In Russia” labels through deliberate processes and decisions made by the persona, and, then, it attributed
itself to WikiLeaks with a claim that was contradicted by subsequent communications between both parties.
Guccifer 2.0 then went on to lie about WikiLeaks, contradicted its own hacking claims to attribute itself to Seth Rich
and even alleged that Julian Assange “may be connected with Russians”.
While we are expected to accept that Guccifer 2.0’s efforts between July 6 and July 18 were a sincere effort to get
leaks to WikiLeaks, considering everything we now know about the persona, it seems fair to question whether Guccifer
2.0’s intentions towards WikiLeaks may have instead been malicious.
xxx 2 minutes ago (Edited)
Everything involving the Russian hoax was set up by the Deep States around the world.
Implicate, discredit and destroy all those like Rich, Assange, Flynn and those who knew the
truth. Kill the messenger....literally.
xxx 10 minutes ago
here's what really happened:
an American hacker breached Podesta's gmail on March 13 2016 and then uploaded it to
Wikileaks via Tor sometime between April and May.
the NSA and CIA have hacked into Wikileaks' Tor file server to watch for new leaks to stay
ahead of them to prepare. they saw Podesta's emails leaked and launched a counter infowar
operation.
Brennan's CIA created the Guccifer 2.0 persona, with phony Russian metadata artifacts,
using digital forgery techniques seen in Vault7. Crowdstrike was already on the premises of
DNC since 2015, with their overly expensive security scanner watching the DNC network.
Crowdstrike had access to any DNC files they wanted. CIA, FBI and Crowdstrike colluded to
create a fake leak of DNC docs through their Guccifer 2.0 cutout. they didn't leak any docs
of high importance, which is why we never saw any smoking guns from DNC leaks or DCLeaks.
you have to remember, the whole point of this CIAFBINSA operation has nothing to do with
Hillary or Trump or influencing the election. the point was to fabricate criminal evidence to
use against Assange to finally arrest him and extradite him as well as smear Wikileaks ahead
of the looming leak of Podesta's emails.
if CIAFBINSA can frame Assange and Wikileaks as being criminal hackers and/or Russian
assets ahead of the Podesta leaks, then they can craft a narrative for the MSM to ignore or
distrust most of the Podesta emails. and that is exactly what happened, such as when Chris
Cuomo said on CNN that it was illegal for you to read Wikileaks, but not CNN, so you should
let CNN tell you what to think about Wikileaks instead of looking at evidence yourself.
this explains why Guccifer 2.0 was so sloppy leaving a trail of Twitter DMs to incriminate
himself and Assange along with him.
if this CIAFBINSA entrapment/frame operation ever leaks, it will guarantee the freedom of
Assange.
xxx 11 minutes ago
According to Wikipedia, "Guccifer" is Marcel Lazar Lehel, a Rumanian born in 1972, but
"Guccifer 2.0" is someone else entirely.
Is that so?
xxx 20 minutes ago (Edited)
The guy from Cyrptome always asserted Assange was some type of deep state puppet, that he
was connected somehow. This wouldn't be news to me and its probably why he was scared as
hell. The guy is as good as dead, like S. Hussein. Seth Rich was just a puppet that got
caught in the wrong game. He was expendable obviously too because well he had a big mouth, he
was expendable from the beginning. Somebody mapped this whole **** out, thats for sure.
xxx 28 minutes ago
I am sick and tired of these Deep State and CIA-linked operations trying to put a wrench
in the prosecution of people who were engaged in a coup d'etat.
xxx 29 minutes ago
********
xxx 33 minutes ago
At this point what difference does it make? We are all convinced since 2016. It is not
going to convince the TDS cases roaming the wilderness.
No arrests, no subpoenas, no warrants, no barging in at 3 am, no perp walks, no tv
glare...
Pres. Trump is playing a very risky game. Arrest now, or regret later. And you won't have
much time to regret.
The swamp is dark, smelly and deep,
And it has grudges to keep.
xxx 37 minutes ago
Meanwhile- Guccifer 1.0 is still?
- In prison?
- Released?
- 48 month sentence in 2016. Obv no good behavior.
Nice article. Brennan is the dolt he appears.
xxx 41 minutes ago
+1,000 on the investigative work and analyzing it.
Sadly, none of the guilty are in jail. Instead. Assange sits there rotting away.
xxx 44 minutes ago
Why would an alleged GRU officer - supposedly part of an operation to deflect Russian
culpability - suggest that Assange "may be connected with Russians?"
Because the AXIS powers of the CIA, Brit secret police and Israeli secret police pay for
the campaign to tie Assange to the Russians...
A lot of interest in this story about Psycho Joe Scarborough. So a young marathon runner
just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think
there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair? What about the so-called
investigator? Read story!
xxx 45 minutes ago
Why make it harder than it is? Guccifer II = Crowdstrike
xxx 51 minutes ago
Guccifer 2.0 was always John Brennan 1.0
xxx 58 minutes ago (Edited)
Was Guccifer II part of the Stefan Halper organization that lured Papadopoulos and
maliciously maligned others?
xxx 1 hour ago
"His name was Seth Rich." The unofficial motto of ZeroHedge...
xxx 1 hour ago
James Guccifer Clapper.
xxx 1 hour ago
Mossad. And their subsidiary CIA.
xxx 1 hour ago
Crowd Strike CEO'S admission under oath that they had no evidence the DNC was hacked by
the Russians should make the Russian Hoax predicate abundantly clear.
Justice for Seth Rich!
xxx 1 hour ago
Any influence Assange had on the election was so small that it wouldn't move the needle
either way. The real influence and election tampering in the US has always come from the
scores of lobbyists and their massive donations that fund the candidates election runs
coupled with the wildly inaccurate and agenda driven collusive effort by the MSM. Anyone
pointing fingers at the Russians is beyond blind to the unparalleled influence and power
these entities have on swaying American minds.
xxx 1 hour ago
ObamaGate.
xxx 1 hour ago (Edited)
Uugh ONCE AGAIN... 4chan already proved guccifer 2.0 was a larp, and the files were not
"hacked", they were leaked by Seth Rich. The metadata from the guccifer files is different
from the metadata that came from the seth rich files. The dumb fuckers thought they were
smart by modifying the author name of the files to make it look like it came from a russian
source. They were so ******* inept, they must have forgot (or not have known) to modify the
unique 16 digit hex key assigned to the author of the files when they were created..... The
ones that seth rich copied had the system administrators name (Warren Flood) as the author
and the 16 digit hex key from both file sources were the same - the one assigned to warren
flood.
Really sloppy larp!!!
xxx 1 hour ago
This link has all the detail to show Guccifer 2.0 was not Russia. I believe Guccifer 2.0
was created by the CIA to falsely pin blame on the Russians for info that Seth Rich gave to
WikiLeaks. Read for yourself: http://g-2.space/
xxx 1 hour ago
This is what people are. Now the species has more power than it can control and that it
knows what to do with.
What do you think the result will be?
As for these games of Secret - it's more game than anything truly significant. The
significant exists in the bunkers, with the mobile units, in the submarines. Et. al.
But this is a game in which some of the players die - or wish they were dead.
xxx 1 hour ago
And.....?
Public figures and political parties warrant public scrutiny. And didn't his expose in
their own words expose the democrats, the mass media, the bureaucracy to the corrupt frauds
that they are?
xxx 1 hour ago
Other than the fact that they didn't steal the emails (unless you believe whistleblowers
are thief's, one mans source is another mans thief, it's all about who's ox is being gored
and you love "leaks" don't you? As long as they work in your favor. Stop with the piety.
xxx 15 minutes ago
That's not the story at all. Did you just read this article?
The democrats were super duper corrupt (before all of this).
They fucked around to ice Bernie out of the primary.
A young staffer Seth Rich knew it and didn't like it. He made the decision to leak the
info to the most reputable org for leaks in the world Wikileaks.
IF the DNC had been playing fair, Seth Rich wouldn't have felt the need to leak.
So, the democrats did it to themselves.
And then they created Russiagate to cover it all up.
And murdered a young brave man ... as we know.
xxx 1 hour ago
Assange, another problem Trump failed to fix.
xxx 1 hour ago
Sounds like it came from the same source as the Trump dossier ... MI5.
"... With the entirety of Russigate finally collapsing under the enormous weight and stench of its own BS, the picture that is beginning
to emerge for me is one of an insider deep-state psy-op designed to cover for the crimes committed by the DNC, the Clinton Foundation
and the 2016 Hillary campaign; kill for the foreseeable future any progressive threat to the neo-liberal world order; and take down
a president that the bipartisan DC and corporate media elite fear and loathe. And why do they fear him? Because he is free to call them
out on certain aspects of their criminality and corruption, and has. ..."
"... Hubris, cynicism and a basic belief in the stupidity of the US public all seem to have played a part in all this, enabled by
a corporate media with a profit motive and a business model that depends on duping the masses. ..."
"... Anyone who still believes in democracy in the USA has his head in the sand (or someplace a lot smellier). ..."
"... The corruption in the USA is wide and deep and trump is NOT draining the swamp. ..."
"... A further point: the Mueller report insinuates that G2.0 had transferred the DNC emails to Wikileaks as of July 18th, and Wikileaks
then published them on July 22nd. This is absurd for two reasons: There is no way in hell that Wikileaks could have processed the entire
volume of those emails and attachments to insure their complete authenticity in 4 days. ..."
"... Indeed, when Crowdstrike's Shawn Henry had been chief of counterintelligence under Robert Mueller, he had tried to set Assange
up by sending Wikileaks fraudulent material; fortunately, Wikileaks was too careful to take the bait. ..."
Fascinating, important and ultimately deeply disturbing. This is why I come to Consortium News.
With the entirety of Russigate finally collapsing under the enormous weight and stench of its own BS, the picture that
is beginning to emerge for me is one of an insider deep-state psy-op designed to cover for the crimes committed by the DNC, the
Clinton Foundation and the 2016 Hillary campaign; kill for the foreseeable future any progressive threat to the neo-liberal world
order; and take down a president that the bipartisan DC and corporate media elite fear and loathe. And why do they fear him? Because
he is free to call them out on certain aspects of their criminality and corruption, and has.
Hubris, cynicism and a basic belief in the stupidity of the US public all seem to have played a part in all this, enabled
by a corporate media with a profit motive and a business model that depends on duping the masses.
Anonymous , May 22, 2020 at 12:01
These convos alone look like a script kiddie on IRC doing their low functioning version of sock puppetry. Didn't know anyone
at all fell for that
Ash , May 22, 2020 at 17:21
Because smooth liars in expensive suits told them it was true in their authoritative TV voices? Sadly they don't even really
need to try hard anymore, as people will evidently believe anything they're told.
Bob Herrschaft , May 22, 2020 at 12:00
The article goes a long way toward congealing evidence that Guccifer 2.0 was a shill meant to implicate Wikileaks in a Russian
hack. The insinuation about Assange's Russian connection was over the top if Guccifer 2.0 was supposed to be a GRU agent and the
mention of Seth Rich only contradicts his claims.
OlyaPola , May 22, 2020 at 10:40
Spectacles are popular.Although less popular, the framing and derivations of plausible belief are of more significance; hence
the cloak of plausible denial over under-garments of plausible belief, in facilitation of revolutions of immersion in spectacles
facilitating spectacles' popularity.
Some promoters of spectacles believe that the benefits of spectacles accrue solely to themselves, and when expectations appear
to vary from outcomes, they resort to one-trick-ponyness illuminated by peering in the mirror.
Skip Scott , May 22, 2020 at 08:35
This is a great article. I think the most obvious conclusion is that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation to smear wikileaks and distract
from the CONTENT of the DNC emails. The MSM spent the next 3 years obsessed by RussiaGate, and spent virtually no effort on the
DNC and Hillary's collusion in subverting the Sander's campaign, among other crimes.
I think back to how many of my friends were obsessed with Rachel Madcow during this period, and how she and the rest of the
MSM served the Empire with their propaganda campaign. Meanwhile, Julian is still in Belmarsh as the head of a "non-state hostile
intelligence service," the Hillary camp still runs the DNC and successfully sabotaged Bernie yet again (along with Tulsi), and
the public gets to choose between corporate sponsored warmonger from column A or B in 2020.
Anyone who still believes in democracy in the USA has his head in the sand (or someplace a lot smellier).
Guy , May 22, 2020 at 12:19
Totally agree .The corruption in the USA is wide and deep and trump is NOT draining the swamp.
I take it the mentioned time zones are consistent with Langley.
treeinanotherlife , May 22, 2020 at 00:34
"Are there only HRC emails? Or some other docs? Are there any DNC docs?"
G2 is fishing to see if Wiki has DNC docs. Does not say "any DNC docs I sent you". And like most at time thought Assange's
"related to hillary" phrase likely (hopefully for some) meant Hillary's missing private server emails. For certain G2 is not an
FBI agent>s/he knows difference between HRC and DNC emails.
A further point: the Mueller report insinuates that G2.0 had transferred the DNC emails to Wikileaks as of July 18th, and Wikileaks
then published them on July 22nd. This is absurd for two reasons: There is no way in hell that Wikileaks could have processed
the entire volume of those emails and attachments to insure their complete authenticity in 4 days.
Indeed, it is reasonable to expect that Wikileaks had been processing those emails since at least June 12, when Assange announced
their impending publication. (I recall waiting expectantly for a number of weeks as Wikileaks processed the Podesta emails.) Wikileaks
was well aware that, if a single one of the DNC emails they released had been proved to have been fraudulent, their reputation
would have been toast. Indeed, when Crowdstrike's Shawn Henry had been chief of counterintelligence under Robert Mueller,
he had tried to set Assange up by sending Wikileaks fraudulent material; fortunately, Wikileaks was too careful to take the bait.
Secondly, it is inconceivable that a journalist as careful as Julian would, on June 12th, have announced the impending publication
of documents he hadn't even seen yet. And of course there is no record of G2.0 having had any contact with Wikileaks prior to
that date.
It is a great pleasure to see "Adam Carter"'s work at long last appear in such a distinguished venue as Consortium News. It
does credit to them both.
Skip Edwards , May 22, 2020 at 12:33
How can we expect justice when there is no justification for what is being done by the US and British governments to Julian
Assange!
"... The computer used to create the original Warren Document (dated 2008) was a US Government computer issued to the Obama Presidential
Transition Team by the General Services Administration. ..."
"... The Warren Document and the 1.DOC were created in the United States using Microsoft Word software (2007) that is registered
to the GSA. ..."
"... The author of both 1.doc and the PDF version is identified as "WARREN FLOOD." ..."
"... "Russian" fingerprints were deliberately inserted into the text and the meta data of "1.doc." ..."
"... This begs a very important question. Did Warren Flood actually create these documents or was someone masquerading as Warren
Flood? Unfortunately, neither the Intelligence Community nor the Mueller Special Counsel investigators provided any evidence to show
they examined this forensic data. More troubling is the fact that the Microsoft Word processing software being used is listed as a GSA
product. ..."
"... If this was truly a Russian GRU operation (as claimed by Mueller), why was the cyber spy tradecraft so sloppy? ..."
"... The name of Warren Flood, an Obama Democrat activist and Joe Biden's former Director of Information Technology, appears in
at least three iterations of these documents. Did he actually masquerade as Guccifer 2.0? If so, did he do it on his own or was he hired
by someone else? These remain open questions that deserve to be investigated by John Durham, the prosecutor investigating the attempted
coup against Donald Trump, and/or relevant committees of the Congress. ..."
"... There are other critical unanswered questions. Obama's Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, sent a letter to James come on July
26, 2016 about the the DNC hack. Lynch wrote concerning press reports that Russia attacked the DNC: ..."
"... A genuine investigation of the DNC hack/leak should have included interviews with all DNC staff, John Podesta, Warren Flood
and Ellen Nakashima, The Washington Post reporter who broke the story of the DNC hack. Based on what is now in the public record, the
FBI failed to do a proper investigation. ..."
"... Resolving who was behind Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks seems to me to be a rather simple investigative exercise. That is, somebody
registered and bought the names of G2 and DCL. One can't have a Wordpress blog without purchasing a url. So, there is a record of this
registration, right? Simply subpoena the company who sold/rented the url. ..."
"... It's now obvious that we don't have a functioning intel/justice apparatus in the U.S. This is the message sent and received
by the intel/justice shops over and again. They no longer work for Americans rather they work against us. ..."
Why does the name of Joe Biden's former Internet Technology guru, Warren Flood, appear in the meta data of documents posted on
the internet by Guccifer 2.0? In case you do not recall, Guccifer 2.0 was identified as someone tied to Russian intelligence who
played a direct role in stealing emails from John Podesta. The meta data in question indicates the name of the person who actually
copied the original document. We have this irrefutable fact in the documents unveiled by Guccifer 2.0--Warren Flood's name appears
prominently in the meta data of several documents attributed to "Guccifer 2.0." When this transpired, Flood was working as the CEO
of his own company, BRIGHT BLUE DATA. (brightbluedata.com). Was Flood tasked to masquerade as a Russian operative?
Give Flood some props if that is true--he fooled our Intelligence Community and the entire team of Mueller prosecutors into believing
that Guccifer was part of a Russian military intelligence cyber attack. But a careful examination of the documents shows that it
is highly unlikely that this was an official Russian cyber operation. Here's what the U.S. Intelligence Community wrote about Guccifer
2.0 in their very flawed January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment:
We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data
obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.
Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker, made multiple contradictory statements and false claims about
his likely Russian identity throughout the election. Press reporting suggests more than one person claiming to be Guccifer 2.0
interacted with journalists.
Content that we assess was taken from e-mail accounts targeted by the GRU in March 2016 appeared on DCLeaks.com starting in
June.
The laxity of the Intelligence Community in dealing with empirical evidence was matched by a disturbing lack of curiosity on the
part of the Mueller investigators and prosecutors. Here's the tall tale they spun about Guccifer 2.0:
On June 14, 2016, the DNC and its cyber-response team announced the breach of the DNC network and suspected theft of DNC documents.
In the statements, the cyber-response team alleged that Russian state-sponsored actors (which they referred to as "Fancy Bear") were
responsible for the breach. Apparently in response to that announcement, on June 15, 2016, GRU officers using the persona Guccifer
2.0 created a WordPress blog. In the hours leading up to the launch of that WordPress blog, GRU officers logged into a Moscow-based
server used and managed by Unit 74455 and searched for a number of specific words and phrases in English, including "some hundred
sheets," "illuminati," and "worldwide known." Approximately two hours after the last of those searches, Guccifer 2.0 published its
first post, attributing the DNC server hack to a lone Romanian hacker and using several of the unique English words and phrases that
the GRU officers had searched for that day.
[Apelbaum note--According to Crowdstrike and Special Counsel Mueller, both were present, APT28 AKA "Fancy Bear" and APT29 AKA
"Cozy Bear".]
The claims by both the Intelligence Community and the Mueller team about Guccifer 2.0 are an astounding, incredible denial of
critical evidence pointing to a U.S. actor, not a Russian or Romanian. No one in this "august" group took the time to examine the
metadata on the documents posted by "Guccifer 2.0" to his website on June 15, 2016.
I wish I could claim credit for the following forensic analysis, but the honors are due to Yaacov Apelbaum. While there are many
documents in the Podesta haul that match the following pattern, this analysis focuses only on a document originally created by the
DNC's Director of Research, Lauren Dillon. This document is the Trump Opposition Report document.
According to Apelbaum , the Trump Opposition
Report document, which was "published" by Guccifer 2.0, shows clear evidence of digital manipulation:
A US based user (hereafter referred to as G2 ) operating initially from the West coast and then, subsequently, from the East
coast, changes the MS Word 2007 and Operating System language settings to Russian.
G2 opens and saves a document with the file name, "12192015 Trump Report - for dist-4.docx". The document bears the title,
"Donald Trump Report" (which was originally composed by Lauren Dillon aka DILLON REPORT) as an RTF file and opens it again.
G2 opens a second document that was attached to an email sent on December 21, 2008 to John Podesta from [email protected].
This WORD document lists prospective nominees for posts in the Department of Agriculture for the upcoming Obama Administration.
It was generated by User--Warren Flood--on a computer registered to the General Services Administration (aka GSA) named "Slate_-_Domestic_-_USDA_-_2008-12-20-3.doc",
which was kept by Podesta on his private Gmail account. (I refer to this as the "WARREN DOCUMENT" in this analysis.)
G2 deletes the content of the 2008 Warren Document and saves the empty file as a RTF, and opens it again.
G2 copies the content of the 'Dillon Report' (which is an RTF document) and pastes it into the 2008 Warren Document template,
i.e. the empty RTF document.
G2 user makes several modifications to the content of this document. For example, the Warren Document contained the watermark--"CONFIDENTIAL
DRAFT". G2 deleted the word "DRAFT" but kept the "CONFIDENTIAL" watermark.
G2 saves this document into a file called "1.doc". This document now contains the text of the original Lauren Dillon "Donald
Trump Report" document, but also contains Russian language URL links that generate error messages.
G2's 1.DOC (the Word version of the document) shows the following meta data authors:
Created at 6/15/2016 at 1:38pm by "WARREN FLOOD"
Last Modified at 6/15/2016 at 1:45pm by "Феликс Эдмундович" (Felix Edmundovich, the first and middle name of Dzerzhinsky,
the creator of the predecessor of the KGB. It is assumed the Felix Edmundovich refers to Dzerzhinsky.)
G2 also produces a pdf version of this document almost four hours later. It is created at 6/15/201`6 at 5:54:15pm by "WARREN
FLOOD."
G2 first publishes "1.doc" to various media outlets and then uploads a copy to the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress website (which is
hosted in the United States).
There are several critical facts from the metadata that destroy the claim that Guccifer 2.0 was a Romanian or a Russian.
The computer used to create the original Warren Document (dated 2008) was a US Government computer issued to the Obama
Presidential Transition Team by the General Services Administration.
The Warren Document and the 1.DOC were created in the United States using Microsoft Word software (2007) that is registered
to the GSA.
The author of both 1.doc and the PDF version is identified as "WARREN FLOOD."
The copy of "1.doc" was uploaded to a server hosted in the United States.
"Russian" fingerprints were deliberately inserted into the text and the meta data of "1.doc."
This begs a very important question. Did Warren Flood actually create these documents or was someone masquerading as Warren
Flood? Unfortunately, neither the Intelligence Community nor the Mueller Special Counsel investigators provided any evidence to show
they examined this forensic data. More troubling is the fact that the Microsoft Word processing software being used is listed as
a GSA product.
If this was truly a Russian GRU operation (as claimed by Mueller), why was the cyber spy tradecraft so sloppy? A covert
cyber operation is no different from a conventional human covert operation, which means the first and guiding principle is to not
leave any fingerprints that would point to the origin of the operation. In other words, you do not mistakenly leave flagrant Russian
fingerprints in the document text or metadata. A good cyber spy also will not use computers and servers based in the United States
and then claim it is the work of a hacker ostensibly in Romania.
None of the Russians indicted by Mueller in his case stand accused of doing the Russian hacking while physically in the United
States. No intelligence or evidence has been cited to indicate that the Russians stole a U.S. Government computer or used a GSA supplied
copy of Microsoft Word to produce the G2 documents.
The name of Warren Flood, an Obama Democrat activist and Joe Biden's former Director of Information Technology, appears in
at least three iterations of these documents. Did he actually masquerade as Guccifer 2.0? If so, did he do it on his own or was he
hired by someone else? These remain open questions that deserve to be investigated by John Durham, the prosecutor investigating the
attempted coup against Donald Trump, and/or relevant committees of the Congress.
If foreign intelligence agencies are attempting to undermine that process, the U.S. government should treat such efforts even
more seriously than standard espionage. These types ofcyberattacks are significant and pernicious crimes. Our government must do
all that it can to stop such attacks and to seek justice for the attacks that have already occurred.
We are writing to request more information on this cyberattack in particular and more information in general on how the Justice
Department, FBI, and NCIJTF attempt to prevent and punish these types ofcyberattacks. Accordingly, please respond to the following
by August 9, 2016:
When did the Department of Justice, FBI, and NCIJTF first learn of the DNC hack? Was the government aware ofthe intrusion
prior to the media reporting it?
Has the FBI deployed its Cyber Action Team to determine who hacked the DNC?
Has the FBI determined whether the Russian government, or any other foreign
government, was involved in the hack?
In general, what actions, if any, do the Justice Department, FBI, and NCIJTF take to prevent cyberattacks on non-governmental
political organizations in the U.S., such as campaigns and political parties? Does the government consult or otherwise communicate
with the organizations to inform them ofpotential threats, relay best practices, or inform them ofdetected cyber intrusions.
Does the Justice Department believe that existing statutes provide an adequate basis for addressing hacking crimes of this
nature, in which foreign governments hack seemingly in order to affect our electoral processes?
So far no document from Comey to Lynch has been made available to the public detailing the FBI's response to Lynch's questions.
Why was the Cyber Action Team not deployed to determine who hacked the DNC? A genuine investigation of the DNC hack/leak should
have included interviews with all DNC staff, John Podesta, Warren Flood and Ellen Nakashima, The Washington Post reporter who broke
the story of the DNC hack. Based on what is now in the public record, the FBI failed to do a proper investigation.
Of course sleepy Joe was in on the overall RussiaGate operation. And now another reasonable question by sleuth extraordinaire
will fall into the memory hole b/c no one who has the authority and the power in DC is ever going to address, let alone, clean
up and hold accountable any who created this awful mess.
Resolving who was behind Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks seems to me to be a rather simple investigative exercise. That is, somebody
registered and bought the names of G2 and DCL. One can't have a Wordpress blog without purchasing a url. So, there is a record
of this registration, right? Simply subpoena the company who sold/rented the url.
What's troubling to me is that even the most simplest investigative acts to find answers never seems to happen. Instead, more
than three years later we're playing 'Whodunit.'
It's been over 3 years now and if we had a truly functioning intel/justice apparatus this simple act would have been done long
ago and then made public. Yet, here we are more than three years later trying to unravel, figure out or resolve the trail of clues
via metadata the pranksters left behind.
It's now obvious that we don't have a functioning intel/justice apparatus in the U.S. This is the message sent and received
by the intel/justice shops over and again. They no longer work for Americans rather they work against us.
An alternative view that has been circulating for several years suggests that it was not a
hack at all, that it was a deliberate whistleblower-style
leak of information carried out by an as yet unknown party, possibly Rich, that may have
been provided to WikiLeaks for possible political reasons, i.e. to express disgust with the DNC
manipulation of the nominating process to damage Bernie Sanders and favor Hillary Clinton.
There are, of course, still other equally non-mainstream explanations for how the bundle of
information got from point A to point B, including that the intrusion into the DNC server was
carried out by the CIA which then made it look like it had been the Russians as
perpetrators. And then there is the hybrid point of view, which is essentially that the
Russians or a surrogate did indeed intrude into the DNC computers but it was all part of normal
intelligence agency probing and did not lead to anything. Meanwhile and independently, someone
else who had access to the server was downloading the information, which in some fashion made
its way from there to WikiLeaks.
Both the hack vs. leak viewpoints have marshaled considerable technical analysis in the
media to bolster their arguments, but the analysis suffers from the decidedly strange fact that
the FBI never even examined the DNC servers that may have been involved. The hack school of
thought has stressed that Russia had both the ability and motive to interfere in the election
by exposing the stolen material while the leakers have recently asserted that the sheer volume of
material downloaded indicates that something like a higher speed thumb drive was used,
meaning that it had to be done by someone with actual physical direct access to the DNC system.
Someone like Seth Rich.
... ... ...
Given all of that back story, it would be odd to find Trump making an offer that focuses
only on one issue and does not actually refute the broader claims of Russian interference,
which are based on a number of pieces of admittedly often dubious evidence, not just the
Clinton and Podesta emails.
Which brings the tale back to Seth Rich. If Rich was indeed responsible for the theft of the
information and was possibly killed for his treachery, it most materially impacts on the
Democratic Party as it reminds everyone of what the Clintons and their allies are capable
of.
It will also serve as a warning of what might be coming at the Democratic National
Convention in Milwaukee in July as the party establishment uses fair means or foul to stop
Bernie Sanders. How this will all play out is anyone's guess, but many of those who pause to
observe the process will be thinking of Seth Rich.
I don't ascribe to the idea that the intel agencies kill American citizens without a great
deal of thought, but in Rich's case, they probably felt like they had no choice. Think about
it: The DNC had already rigged the primary against Bernie, the Podesta emails had already
been sent to Wikileaks, and if Rich's cover was blown, then he would publicly identify
himself as the culprit (which would undermine the Russiagate narrative) which would split the
Democratic party in two leaving Hillary with no chance to win the election.
I can imagine Hillary and her intel connections looking for an alternative to whacking
Rich but eventually realizing that there was no other way to deflect responsibility for the
emails while paving the way for an election victory.
If Seth Rich went public, then Hillary would certainly lose.
I imagine this is what they were thinking when they decided there was really only one
option.
"I have watched incredulous as the CIA's blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story
– blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is
no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton's corruption." https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/12/cias-absence-conviction/
@plantman It's more than Hillary losing. It would have been easy to connect the dots of
the entire plot to get Trump. Furthermore, it would have linked Obama and his cohorts in ways
that the country might have exploded. This was the beginning of a Coup De'tat that would have
shown the American political process is a complete joke.
To understand why the DNC mobsters and the Deep State hate him, watch this great 2016
interview where Assange calmly explains the massive corruption that patriotic FBI agents
refer to as the "Clinton Crime Family." This gang is so powerful that it ordered federal
agents to spy on the Trump political campaign, and indicted and imprisoned some participants
in an attempt to pressure President Trump to step down. It seems Trump still fears this gang,
otherwise he would order his attorney general to drop this bogus charge against Assange, then
pardon him forever and invite him to speak at White House press conferences.
Well, here was my own take on the controversy a couple of years ago, and I really haven't
seen anything to change my mind:
Well, DC is still a pretty dangerous city, but how many middle-class whites were
randomly murdered there that year while innocently walking the streets? I wouldn't be
surprised if Seth Rich was just about the only one.
Julian Assange has strongly implied that Seth Rich was the source of the DNC emails that
cost Hillary Clinton the presidency. So if Seth Rich died in a totally random street
killing not long afterward, isn't that just the most astonishing coincidence in all of
American history?
Consider that the leaks effectively nullified the investment of the $2 billion or so
that her donors had provided, and foreclosed the flood of good jobs and appointments to her
camp-followers, not to mention the oceans of future graft. Seems to me that's a pretty good
motive for murder.
Here's my own plausible speculation from a couple of months ago:
Incidentally, I'd guess that DC is a very easy place to arrange a killing, given that
until the heavy gentrification of the last dozen years or so, it was one of America's
street-murder capitals. It seems perfectly plausible that some junior DNC staffer was at
dinner somewhere, endlessly cursing Seth Rich for having betrayed his party and
endangered Hillary's election, when one of his friends said he knew somebody who'd be
willing to "take care of the problem" for a thousand bucks
Let's say a couple of hundred thousand middle-class whites lived in DC around then, and
Seth Rich was about the only one that year who died in a random street-killing, occurring not
long after the leak.
Wouldn't that seem like a pretty unlikely coincidence?
"If Rich was indeed responsible for the theft of the information and was possibly killed for
his treachery ."
Heroism is the proper term for what Seth Rich did. He saw the real treachery, against
Bernie Sanders and the democratic faithful who expect at least a modicum of integrity from
their Party leaders (even if that expectation is utterly fanciful, wishful thinking), and he
decided to act. He paid for it with his life. A young, noble life.
In every picture I've seen of him, he looks like a nice guy, a guy who cared. And now he's
dead. And the assholes at the DNC simply gave him a small plaque over a bike rack, as I
understand it.
Seth Rich: American Hero. A Truth-Teller who paid the ultimate price.
Great reporting, Phil. Another home run.
(And thanks to Ron for chiming in. Couldn't agree more. As a Truth-Teller extraordinaire,
please watch your back, Bro. And Phil, too. You both know what these murderous scum are
capable of.)
Because the {real} killers of JFK, MLK and RFK were never detained and jailed/hanged, why
would one expect a lesser known, more ordinary individual's murder [Seth] to be solved?
Seymour Hersh, in a taped phone conversation, claimed to have access to an FBI report on the
murder. According to Hersh, the report indicated tha FBI Cyber Unit examined Rich's computer
and found he had contacted Wikileaks with the intention of selling the emails.
Another reason Assange may not want to reveal it, if Seth Rich was a source for Wikileaks,
could be that Seth Rich didn't act alone, and revealing Seth's involvement would compromise
the other(s).
Or it could simply be that Wikileaks has promised to never reveal a source, even after
that source's death, as a promise to future potential sources, who may never want their
identities revealed, to avoid the thought of embarrassment or repercussions to their
associates or families.
Incidentally, they only started really going after Assange after the Vault 7 leaks of the
CIA's active bag of software tricks. I think, for Assange's sake, they should instead have
held on to that, and made it the payload of a dead man's switch.
I'm not sure how credible the source is but Ellen Ratner, the sister of Assange's former
lawyer and a journalist, told Ed Butowsky that Assange told her that it was Seth Rich. She
asked Butowsky to contact Rich's parents. She confirms the Assange meeting in an interview,
link below. Butowsky does not seem to be a credible source but Ratner does. If it was Seth
Rich then I have no doubt that his brother knows the details and the family does not want to
lose another son.
"According to Assange's lawyers, Rohrabacher offered a pardon from President Trump if Assange
were to provide information that would attribute the theft or hack of the Democratic National
Committee emails to someone other than the Russians."
Not to quibble on semantics but Rohrabacher met with Assange to ask if he would be willing
to reveal the source of the emails then Rohrabacher would contact Trump and try to make deal
for Assange's freedom. Rohrabacher clarified that he never talked to Trump or that he was
authorized by Trump to make any offer.
The MSM has been using the "amnesty if you say it was not the Russians" narrative to hint
at a coverup by Russian agent Trump. Normal for the biased MSM.
Giraldi's link "Assange did not take the offer" has nothing to do with Rohrabacher's
contact. It's just a general piece on Assange acting as a journalist should act.
I'm of the opinion Ron Unz seems to share, that Rich was not a particularly "big hitter" in
the DNC hierarchy and that his murder was more likely the result of a very nasty inter-party
squabble. I seem to recall a LOT of very nasty talk between the Jewish neocons in the Bush
era and the decent, traditional "small-government" style Republicans who greatly resented the
neocons' hijacking of the GOP for their demonic zionist agenda.
Common sense would suggest that the zionist types who have (obviously) hijacked the DNC
are at least as nasty and ruthless as the neocons who destroyed any decency or fair-play
within the GOP. It's not exactly hard to believe that these Murder, Inc. types (also lefties
of their era) wouldn't hesitate to whack someone like Rich for merely uttering a criticism of
Israel, for example.
Hell, Meyer Lansky ordered the hit-job on Bugsy Seigel for forgetting to bring bagels to a
sit-down ! There was a great web-site by a mobster of that era, long since taken down, who
described the story in detail. I forget the names .. but I'll see if I can't find a copy of
some of the pieces posted at least a decade ago .
It's not exactly hard to imagine some very nasty words being exchanged between the Rahm
Emmanuel types and decent Chicago citizens, for example, who genuinely cared for their city
and weren't afraid of The Big Jew and his mobster cronies . to their detriment I'm sure.
We're talking about organized crime, here, folks. The zionists make the so-called (mostly
fictitious) Sicilian Mafia look like newborn puppies. They wouldn't hesitate to whack a guy
like Rich for taking their favorite space in the bicycle rack.
My only trouble with the Seth Rich thing is, it seems a bit extreme, they seem quite callous
in murdering foreigners but US citizens in the US who are their staffers? If they really were
prepared to go out and kill in this way, they're be a lot more suspicious deaths.
What makes the case most compelling is the very quick investigation by police that looks
like they were told by somebody concerned about how the whole thing looked to close up the
case nice and quickly. That and the fact that he was shot in the back, which doesn't make
sense for an attempted robbery turned murder.
However, it may also be that as in so many cities in the US, murder clearance rates for
street shootings (Little forensic evidence, can only go by witness accounts or through poor
alibis from usual suspects and their associates. In this case there is also no connection
between Rich and any possible shooter with no witnesses.) are just so very low that DC police
don't bother and Seth Rich's death just happened to be one such case that attracted some
scrutiny.
But then maybe for the reasons above a place like DC is perfect to just murder somebody on
the street and that's why they were so brazen about it.
Seth Rich's death just happened to be one such case that attracted some scrutiny.
Well, upthread someone posted a recording of a Seymour Hersh phone call that confirmed
Seth Rich was the fellow who leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks, thereby possibly swinging
the presidential election to Trump and overcoming $2 billion of Democratic campaign
advertising.
Shortly afterwards, he probably became about the only middle-class white in DC who died in
a "random street killing" that year. If you doubt this, see if you can find any other such
cases that year.
I think it is *extraordinarily* unlikely that these two elements are unconnected and
merely happened together by chance.
.. GOP strategist and avid Never Trumper Rick Wilson said ... Obama needs to throw his
full weight behind Biden before Super Tuesday in a way that will shake up the race ... Obama
can transform this race in a hot second. ... It's now or never ... Biden beat Sanders like a
rented mule. The exit polls told the tale; it was a crushing defeat across almost every
demographic group ...
Gotta love these Republicans who have our best interests at heart.
Last week in Nevada it was Sanders who beat Biden like a rented mule, inflicting a crushing
defeat across almost every demographic group. But that was then, this is now, and a Republican
stratigist says "It's now or never" to defeat Sanders Trump.
Super Tuesday is ... Tuesday. Biden, as I noted yesterday, hasn't visited any Super Tuesday
state in a month, has almost no money, is not on the air, has little or no ground game. Early
voting is already in progress in several states. What can be done in one day to turn
things around?
Realistically, nothing. Yes, a big endorsement by Obama could have an impact, but how many
voters would even hear about it before voting? Biden will definitely get a bounce from his win
in SC, but how big will it be? How much did Sanders' win in Nevada help him in SC?
Team Biden believes having Klobuchar in the race through Super Tuesday is incredibly
helpful to them.
Why? It blocks Bernie Sanders in the Minnesota primary on Tuesday.
"If Amy gets out, that gives Minnesota to Bernie,"
...
Four years ago, Sanders crushed Hillary Clinton in Minnesota, winning 62% to 38% ...
The Biden campaign wants Warren to be in the race through Super Tuesday, when Massachusetts
voters weigh in.
Not to win. Not to hoard delegates for a convention fight. But just taking every opportunity
to slow Bernie down.
Finally, and I only saw one tweet about this and can't find any confirmation, that Bloomberg
hasn't made any ad buys beyond Super Tuesday. Anyone know anything about this?
Steyer has spent $200 million, got nothing for it, and has dropped out. I'm hoping that's
what we see for Bloomberg as well. Is Bloomberg trying to win? Or just to stop Bernie? Super
Tuesday will tell the tale.
@WoodsDweller -- Biden, Bloomberg, Warren, Klobuchar -- is stepping in to do his or
her part for the overall goal of stopping Bernie. They are 100% loyal to the Dem
establishment which is 100% loyal to the neocon, neoliberal, oligarchic, globalist Deep
State. They know the Dem establishment will reward them -- and you can practically smell the
certainty of that knowledge on Liz. She'll do and say whatever they ask of her.
with anything but a full on assault by the DNC, the media, and their respective
surrogates. What I didn't expect, especially from dubious "progressives" like Warren, was to
hear non-viable candidates openly talking about blunting Bernie's momentum with their only
goal being to collect delegates into the convention. Yes, most of us anticipated this was
going to turn into a contested convention by design, but I don't know how many of us believed
they'd tip their hand so blatantly and so soon into the process. Now that they have, it gives
Bernie time to prepare his own strategy for meeting their threat at the convention. Maybe
someone could refresh his memory on how effective the bus loads of people that GWB arranged
were in shaping the media narrative of "civil disruption vs. accurate counting" in Florida?
Taking a page out of that playbook, Bernie's people really need to start thinking about
organizing an army of supporters in strength that rivals his numbers at his rallys, and
descend onto Wisconsin. And maybe as an added bonus, conjure up the image of the 1968
convention Buttigieg seems to believe Bernie is so nostalgic about resurrecting. If the
Establishment is going to twart the will of the people, let the will of the people be
heard.
First, a wild methodological error. Bernie actually received more votes yesterday than in
2016. Perhaps only people who voted in 2016 were polled.
Second, everyone knows that Bernie is the person most likely to defeat Trump and Biden is
the worst possible candidate. Perhaps thousands of Trump supporters came out pretending to be
Democrats to vote for Biden. This has supposedly happened before.
Third, the quisling Democrats have given up all pretense of being honest and are blatantly
stealing the nomination from Bernie. This is the most likely.
.
In many ways, this race is now the same exact contest that was fought back in 2016. It has
come down to Joe Biden -- The Establishment choice -- despite his obvious Ukraine corruption,
family payoffs, obstruction of justice and abuse of office, etc. -- and despite Biden being
100% wrong on every issue from the Iraq War to NAFTA to the TPP to Syria (more Regime
Change) to Libya to saying China is not an economic threat , etc. -- and despite him
being a bumbling buffoon and gaffe machine who doesn't even know what State he is in, and
constantly mangles sentences, and arrogantly yells at or insults prospective voters -- and
despite him on multiple occasions caught sniffing the hair and fondling young girls in
public.
How is this different from Hillary Clinton .. just without the Cackle ?
Bernie Sanders, as in 2016, is the only other option now that has a multi-state Campaign
support structure. While Mike Bloomberg can buy million dollar Ads and saturate them
everywhere across TV and the Internet .. he has no real voter base, a phony message, and no
charisma.
So it is Sanders .vs. Biden , which is essentially a rematch between Sanders and
Clinton -- or -- essentially a rematch between Sanders and the DNC Establishment (who also
control the rules of the game).
My question is, who in earth would ever want to vote for the doddering and incoherent Joe
Biden under any circumstance? Clearly, Biden just represents the anti-Sanders vote here, and
The Establishment, with Bloomberg, Buttiburger, and Klobachar all failing, has closed ranks
to consolidate around the one dog-faced, pony soldier left standing in the race: Quid Pro
Joe.
Come on man! Get down and do some pushups Jack. I don't want your vote.
Polls and Votes and super delegates and Media narratives will all now be fixed around
Biden from this point on (if they weren't already). So expect a whole lot of Malarkey
upcoming, and this means that Sanders will have to win by big margins, and win a whole lot
more States than he did in 2016, in order to survive.
"... But in the wake of Sanders' landslide victory in Nevada, a brokered convention would mean the end of the Democrat Party pretense to represent the 99 Percent. The American voting system would be seen to be as oligarchic as that of Rome on the eve of the infighting that ended with Augustus becoming Emperor in 27 BC. ..."
"... Last year I was asked to write a scenario for what might happen with a renewed DNC theft of the election's nomination process. To be technical, I realize, it's not called theft when it's legal. In the aftermath of suits over the 2016 power grab, the courts ruled that the Democrat Party is indeed controlled by the DNC members, not by the voters. When it comes to party machinations and decision-making, voters are subsidiary to the superdelegates in their proverbial smoke-filled room (now replaced by dollar-filled foundation contracts). ..."
"... I could not come up with a solution that does not involve dismantling and restructuring the existing party system. We have passed beyond the point of having a solvable "problem" with the Democratic National Committee (DNC). That is what a quandary is. A problem has a solution – by definition. A quandary does not have a solution. There is no way out. The conflict of interest between the Donor Class and the Voting Class has become too large to contain within a single party. It must split. ..."
"... A second-ballot super-delegate scenario would mean that we are once again in for a second Trump term. That option was supported by five of the six presidential contenders on stage in Nevada on Wednesday, February 20. When Chuck Todd asked whether Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar would support the candidate who received the most votes in the primaries (now obviously Bernie Sanders), or throw the nomination to the super-delegates held over from the Obama-Clinton neoliberals (75 of whom already are said to have pledged their support to Bloomberg), each advocated "letting the process play out." That was a euphemism for leaving the choice to the Tony-Blair style leadership that have made the Democrats the servants' entrance to the Republican Party. Like the British Labour Party behind Blair and Gordon Brown, its role is to block any left-wing alternative to the Republican program on behalf of the One Percent. ..."
To hear the candidates debate, you would think that their fight was over who could best beat
Trump. But when Trump's billionaire twin Mike Bloomberg throws a quarter-billion dollars into
an ad campaign to bypass the candidates actually running for votes in Iowa, New Hampshire and
Nevada, it's obvious that what really is at issue is the future of the Democrat Party.
Bloomberg is banking on a brokered convention held by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
in which money votes. (If "corporations are people," so is money in today's political
world.)
Until Nevada, all the presidential candidates except for Bernie Sanders were playing for a
brokered convention. The party's candidates seemed likely to be chosen by the Donor Class, the
One Percent and its proxies, not the voting class (the 99 Percent). If, as Mayor Bloomberg has
assumed, the DNC will sell the presidency to the highest bidder, this poses the great question:
Can the myth that the Democrats represent the working/middle class survive? Or, will the Donor
Class trump the voting class?
This could be thought of as "election interference" – not from Russia but from the DNC
on behalf of its Donor Class. That scenario would make the Democrats' slogan for 2020 "No Hope
or Change." That is, no change from today's economic trends that are sweeping wealth up to the
One Percent.
All this sounds like Rome at the end of the Republic in the 1st century BC. The way Rome's
constitution was set up, candidates for the position of consul had to pay their way through a
series of offices. The process started by going deeply into debt to get elected to the position
of aedile, in charge of staging public games and entertainments. Rome's neoliberal fiscal
policy did not tax or spend, and there was little public administrative bureaucracy, so all
such spending had to be made out of the pockets of the oligarchy. That was a way of keeping
decisions about how to spend out of the hands of democratic politics. Julius Caesar and others
borrowed from the richest Bloomberg of their day, Crassus, to pay for staging games that would
demonstrate their public spirit to voters (and also demonstrate their financial liability to
their backers among Rome's One Percent). Keeping election financing private enabled the leading
oligarchs to select who would be able to run as viable candidates. That was Rome's version of
Citizens United.
But in the wake of Sanders' landslide victory in Nevada, a brokered convention would mean
the end of the Democrat Party pretense to represent the 99 Percent. The American voting system
would be seen to be as oligarchic as that of Rome on the eve of the infighting that ended with
Augustus becoming Emperor in 27 BC.
Today's pro-One Percent media – CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times have been busy
spreading their venom against Sanders. On Sunday, February 23, CNN ran a slot, "Bloomberg needs
to take down Sanders, immediately." Given Sanders' heavy national lead, CNN warned, the race
suddenly is almost beyond the vote-fixers' ability to fiddle with the election returns. That
means that challengers to Sanders should focus their attack on him; they will have a chance to
deal with Bloomberg later (by which CNN means, when it is too late to stop him).
The party's Clinton-Obama recipients of Donor Class largesse pretend to believe that Sanders
is not electable against Donald Trump. This tactic seeks to attack him at his strongest point.
Recent polls show that he is the only candidate who actually would defeat Trump – as they
showed that he would have done in 2016.
The DNC knew that, but preferred to lose to Trump than to win with Bernie. Will history
repeat itself? Or to put it another way, will this year's July convention become a replay of
Chicago in 1968?
A quandary, not a problem
Last year I was asked to write a scenario for what might happen with a renewed DNC theft of
the election's nomination process. To be technical, I realize, it's not called theft when it's
legal. In the aftermath of suits over the 2016 power grab, the courts ruled that the Democrat
Party is indeed controlled by the DNC members, not by the voters. When it comes to party
machinations and decision-making, voters are subsidiary to the superdelegates in their
proverbial smoke-filled room (now replaced by dollar-filled foundation contracts).
I could not come up with a solution that does not involve dismantling and restructuring the
existing party system. We have passed beyond the point of having a solvable "problem" with the
Democratic National Committee (DNC). That is what a quandary is. A problem has a solution
– by definition. A quandary does not have a solution. There is no way out. The conflict
of interest between the Donor Class and the Voting Class has become too large to contain within
a single party. It must split.
A second-ballot super-delegate scenario would mean that we are once again in for a second
Trump term. That option was supported by five of the six presidential contenders on stage in
Nevada on Wednesday, February 20. When Chuck Todd asked whether Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth
Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar would support the candidate who received
the most votes in the primaries (now obviously Bernie Sanders), or throw the nomination to the
super-delegates held over from the Obama-Clinton neoliberals (75 of whom already are said to
have pledged their support to Bloomberg), each advocated "letting the process play out." That
was a euphemism for leaving the choice to the Tony-Blair style leadership that have made the
Democrats the servants' entrance to the Republican Party. Like the British Labour Party behind
Blair and Gordon Brown, its role is to block any left-wing alternative to the Republican
program on behalf of the One Percent.
"... Finally, and perhaps this is the most important point, the FBI was at this time supposed to be in the early stages of an investigation into how the DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks. The FBI here believed Wikileaks to be indicating the material had been leaked by Seth Rich who had then been murdered. Surely in any legitimate investigation, the investigators would have been absolutely compelled to check out the truth of this possibility, rather than treat it as a media issue? ..."
A persistent American lawyer has uncovered the undeniable fact that the FBI has been
continuously lying , including giving
false testimony in court, in response to Freedom of Information requests for its records on
Seth Rich. The FBI has previously given affidavits
that it has no records regarding Seth Rich.
A Freedom of Information request to the FBI which did not mention Seth Rich, but asked for
all email correspondence between FBI Head of Counterterrorism Peter Strzok, who headed the
investigation into the DNC leaks and Wikileaks, and FBI attorney Lisa Page, has revealed two
pages of emails which do not merely mention Seth Rich but have "Seth Rich" as their heading.
The emails were provided in, to say the least, heavily redacted form.
Before I analyze these particular emails, I should make plain that they are not the major
point. The major point is that the FBI claimed it had no records mentioning Seth Rich, and
these have come to light in response to a different FOIA request that was not about him. What
other falsely denied documents does the FBI hold about Rich, that were not fortuitously picked
up by a search for correspondence between two named individuals?
To look at the documents themselves, they have to be read from the bottom up, and they
consist of a series of emails between members of the Washington Field Office of the FBI (WF in
the telegrams) into which Strzok was copied in, and which he ultimately forwarded on to the
lawyer Lisa Page.
The opening email, at the bottom, dated 10 August 2016 at 10.32am, precisely just one month
after the murder of Seth Rich, is from the media handling department of the Washington Field
Office. It references Wikileaks' offer of a reward for information on the murder of Seth Rich,
and that Assange seemed to imply Rich was the source of the DNC leaks. The media handlers are
asking the operations side of the FBI field office for any information on the case. The
unredacted part of the reply fits with the official narrative. The redacted individual officer
is "not aware of any specific involvement" by the FBI in the Seth Rich case. But his next
sentence is completely redacted. Why?
It appears that "adding" references a new person added in to the list. This appears to have
not worked, and probably the same person (precisely same length of deleted name) then tries
again, with "adding for real" and blames the technology – "stupid Samsung". The
interesting point here is that the person added appears not to be in the FBI – a new
redacted addressee does indeed appear, and unlike all the others does not have an FBI suffix
after their deleted email address. So who are they?
(This section on "adding" was updated after commenters offered a better explanation than my
original one. See first comments below).
The fourth email, at 1pm on Wednesday August 10, 2016, is much the most interesting. It is
ostensibly also from the Washington Field Office, but it is from somebody using a different
classified email system with a very different time and date format than the others. It is
apparently from somebody more senior, as the reply to it is "will do". And every single word of
this instruction has been blanked. The final email, saying that "I squashed this with ..", is
from a new person again, with the shortest name. That phrase may only have meant I denied this
to a journalist, or it may have been reporting an operational command given.
As the final act in this drama, Strzok then sent the whole thread on to the lawyer, which is
why we now have it. Why?
It is perfectly possible to fill in the blanks with a conversation that completely fits the
official narrative. The deletions could say this was a waste of time and the FBI was not
looking at the Rich case. But in that case, the FBI would have been delighted to publish it
unredacted. (The small numbers in the right hand margins supposedly detail the exception to the
FOIA under which deletion was made. In almost every case they are one or other category of
invasion of privacy).
And if it just all said "Assange is talking nonsense. Seth Rich is nothing to do with the
FBI" then why would that have to be sent on by Strzok to the FBI lawyer?
It is of course fortunate that Strzok did forward this one email thread on to the lawyer,
because that is the only reason we have seen it, as a result of an FOI(A) request for the
correspondence between those two.
Finally, and perhaps this is the most important point, the FBI was at this time supposed to
be in the early stages of an investigation into how the DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks.
The FBI here believed Wikileaks to be indicating the material had been leaked by Seth Rich who
had then been murdered. Surely in any legitimate investigation, the investigators would have
been absolutely compelled to check out the truth of this possibility, rather than treat it as a
media issue?
We are asked to believe that not one of these emails says "well if the publisher of the
emails says Seth Rich was the source, we had better check that out, especially as he was
murdered with no sign of a suspect". If the FBI really did not look at that, why on earth not?
If the FBI genuinely, as they claim, did not even look at the murder of Seth Rich, that would
surely be the most damning fact of all and reveal their "investigation" was entirely agenda
driven from the start.
In June 2016 a vast cache of the DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks. On 10 July 2016 an
employee from the location of the leak was murdered without obvious motive, in an alleged
street robbery in which nothing at all was stolen. Not to investigate the possibility of a link
between the two incidents would be grossly negligent. It is worth adding that, contrary to a
propaganda barrage, Bloomingdale where Rich was murdered is a very pleasant area of Washington
DC and by no means a murder hotspot. It is also worth noting that not only is there no suspect
in Seth Rich's murder, there has never been any semblance of a serious effort to find the
killer. Washington police appear perfectly happy simply to write this case off.
I anticipate two responses to this article in terms of irrelevant and illogical
whataboutery:
Firstly, it is very often the case that family members are extremely resistant to the
notion that the murder of a relative may have wider political implications. This is perfectly
natural. The appalling grief of losing a loved one to murder is extraordinary; to reject the
cognitive dissonance of having your political worldview shattered at the same time is very
natural. In the case of David Kelly, of Seth Rich, and of Wille Macrae, we see families
reacting with emotional hostility to the notion that the death raises wider questions.
Occasionally the motive may be still more mixed, with the prior relationship between the
family and the deceased subject to other strains (I am not referencing the Rich case
here).
You do occasionally get particularly stout hearted family who take the opposite tack and
are prepared to take on the authorities in the search for justice, of which Commander Robert
Green, son of Hilda Murrell, is a worthy example.
(As an interesting aside, I just checked his name in the Wikipedia article on Hilda, which
I discovered describes Tam Dalyell "hounding" Margaret Thatcher over the Belgrano and the
fact that ship was steaming away from the Falklands when destroyed with massive loss of life
as a "second conspiracy theory", the first of course being the murder of Hilda Murrell.
Wikipedia really has become a cesspool.)
We have powerful cultural taboos that reinforce the notion that if the family do not want
the question of the death of their loved one disturbed, nobody else should bring it up. Seth
Rich's parents, David Kelly's wife, Willie Macrae's brother have all been deployed by the
media and the powers behind them to this effect, among many other examples. This is an
emotionally powerful but logically weak method of restricting enquiry.
Secondly, I do not know and I deliberately have not inquired what are the views on other
subjects of either Mr Ty Clevenger, who brought his evidence and blog to my attention, or
Judicial Watch, who made the FOIA request that revealed these documents. I am interested in
the evidence presented both that the FBI lied, and in the documents themselves. Those who
obtained the documents may, for all I know, be dedicated otter baiters or believe in stealing
ice cream from children. I am referencing the evidence they have obtained in this particular
case, not endorsing – or condemning – anything else in their lives or work. I
really have had enough of illogical detraction by association as a way of avoiding logical
argument by an absurd extension of ad hominem argument to third parties.
* * *
Unlike his adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the
Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, Craig's blog has no
source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary
subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every
article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate. Subscriptions to
keep Craig's blog going are gratefully received .
" We have powerful cultural taboos that reinforce the notion that if the family do not
want the question of the death of their loved one disturbed, nobody else should bring it
up. "
Yeah. We see that all the time on ID Network ... whenever a family member wants
authorities to stop investigating their "loved one's" death, it usually means they're
protecting the guilty party. But the cases are solved by good cops who ignore the family and
do what's right.
Investigating and prosecuting murders is not all about the family. It's also about finding
and removing murderers from society so they can't hurt anyone else.
And neither Mueller nor any other government official ever bothered to interview Julian
Assange even though he agreed to do so. That Mueller didn't but took CrowdStrike's word for
the fact that so-called "Russians" hacked the DNC computer and then gave it to Wikileaks
tells you about all you need to know. Mueller knew who likely did it but didn't want to make
it part of his Report or let it be made public. Meanwhile the Russia Collusion Hoax marched
on, got a life of its own and is allowed to continue in its various forms like the
impeachment of a Donald Trump.
"Is it true that the hidden metadata contained within the FIRST WikiLeaks DNC files batch
clearly shows sequential time stamps (on each file copied) proving that a very high speed
transfer rate took place that could only be done with direct internal access to a DNC
computer on the network (i.g., a USB thumb drive or NAS drive plugged directly into a local
PC or a LAN network jack within the building) as opposed to the much slower file transfer
rate that would be recorded in the metadata if Russia or other hackers had remotely accessed
a DNC computer or local DNC network via a remote WAN/Internet connection (to transfer those
files from the outside)? Another rumor that needs to be put to rest is a SECOND batch of
files may exist (that is almost identical to the FIRST batch), except it includes some fake
Russian breadcrumb "fingerprints" that may have been added to support the "Russian's hacked
it" story that was circulated within the intelligence agencies and leaked out to the media.
IDK, true or false? "
synopsis of the real whistleblower Bill Binney, ex-NSA Technical director who has had his
life ruined because he published this info.
DNC In Disarray After Chairman's Secret Golden Parachute Revealed by Tyler Durden Thu, 01/30/2020 -
17:20 0 SHARES The
perpetually broke ,
deck-stacking DNC has been thrown into disarray just days before the Iowa caucus after
Buzzfeed
revealed that a cadre of top officials at the Democratic National Committee approved, then
concealed a 'generous exit package for the party chair, Tom Perez, and two top lieutenants,'
which has left Democrats 'confounded over the weekend by the optics and timing of the decision
on the eve of the presidential primary."
The proposal, put forward as an official DNC resolution during a meeting of the party's
budget and finance committee last Friday, would have arranged for Perez and two of his top
deputies, CEO Seema Nanda and deputy CEO Sam Cornale, to each receive a lump-sum bonus
equaling four months' salary within two weeks of the time they eventually leave their roles
.
Senior DNC officers, including members of Perez's own executive committee, learned of the
compensation package after its approval, through the rumor mill, setting off a furious
exchange of emails and texts over the weekend to determine what had been proposed, and by
whom . - Buzzfeed
And while four-months salary might be more of a 'bronze parachute', Perez rejected the
"extra compensation" package for himself and his two lieutenants in an email to officials .
Perez says he will serve through the end of the 2020 election, while all three officials
have denied having any prior knowledge of, or involvement in the pay package resolution .
"One-hundred percent of our resources are going towards beating Donald Trump," said DNC
communications director Xochitl Hinojosa, who added "DNC leadership will not accept any extra
compensation recommended by the budget committee, which didn't operate at the direction of DNC
leadership. The resolution was crafted by the budget committee and did not involve the Chair,
CEO, or Deputy CEO."
Taking the fall for the resolution are two members of the DNC's budget and finance committee
- Daniel Halpern and Chris Korge, who described it as the first step in a "smooth transition"
for Perez.
Halperin, an
anti-minimum wage lobbyist , was appointed by Perez in 2017. He previously chaired Atlanta
Mayor Kasim Reed's 2009 moyoral campaign, and was a trustee for Barack Obama's 2008 inaugural
committee.
Chris Korge is a Florida
attorney hired in May of 2019. He was one of the top fundraisers for Andrew Gillum, Hillary
Clinton, Bill Clinton, and served as the co-chairman for the Kerry Edwards campaign in
2004.
For years, the 64-year-old attorney, developer and one-time county hall lobbyist has been
an important fundraiser for Democrats. He has raised millions for both Hillary and Bill
Clinton, served as national co-chairman for Kerry Edwards Victory in 2004 and this year was
co-chairman of Miami's unsuccessful bid to bring the Democratic convention to South Florida
next summer. - Miami
Herald
According to Buzzfeed , Halpern and Korge both said the resolution was above-board
and a common business practice.
The resolution, which only applies to the 2021 transition, states that the outgoing chair,
CEO, and deputy CEO will help facilitate donor and "stakeholder" relations, and convey
"institutional knowledge" to the next chair, but is less specific about the requirements of
the transition than the details of the compensation package: a lump sum of four months' pay,
paid within two weeks, unless either Perez, Nanda, or Cornale is terminated for "gross
misconduct."
On Tuesday, Halpern said the resolution was meant to serve only as a "nonbinding" starting
point to ensure "continuity" between Perez's tenure and the next party chair . - Buzzfeed
Top Democrats within the DNC's leadership speaking on condition of anonymity said that they
were shocked to learn of the compensation package on the eve of a presidential primary , amid a
massive fundraising defecit .
"I think it is completely short-sighted and really stupid," said one senior official.
The package would have paid Perez around $69,000, Nanda around $61,000, and Cornale
$39,000.
The infighting is indicative of the ongoing DNC implosion. These parties, like the entire
world's governments, were terminated long ago. NOBODY wants or needs the fake drama bullsh*t.
If it's not on one side or the other it's on both to distract everybody. Like the ongoing
fake impeachment fraud. Chump was finished day one on the job. And even if not certainly the
public conspiring with both parties to commit sedition and treason after Parkland ensured
it.
Tom Perez - member of the Obama Transition Project's Agency Review Working Group
responsible for the justice, health and human services, veterans affairs, and housing and
urban development agencies. He is Secretary of the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing
and Regulation under Governor Martin O'Malley.
He worked in a variety of civil rights positions at the Department of Justice, including
Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under Attorney General Janet Reno.
He also served as Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services under Secretary Donna Shalala, and as Special Counsel to Senator Edward
Kennedy. From 2001 until 2007, he was Assistant Professor of Law at the University of
Maryland School of Law, and is an adjunct faculty member at the George Washington School of
Public Health.
FBI Lied to a Federal Court Regarding Seth Rich by Larry C Johnson
Thanks to Judicial Watch, a new batch of emails have surfaced that put the FBI in a whole
lot of trouble with at least two Federal Judges. Attorney Ty Clevenger made repeated FOIA
requests to the FBI for all emails and communications dealing with Seth Rich and his murder.
The FBI denied they had any such communications. Whoops! There are now five emails and one text
message that show that denial is not true. Let's dig into the details.
The FBI, in the person of David Hardy, affirmed in an affidavit that there were no
responsive records. Hardy is the Section Chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section
("RIDS"), Information Management Division ("IMD"),1 Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI"), in
Winchester, Virginia. Here are the relevant portions of his first affidavit:
On September 30, 2017, by electronic submission via the OIP online portal, Plaintiff
submitted an administrative appeal of the FBI's September 19, 2017 determination. Specifically,
Plaintiff alleged the FBI limited its search to the Central Records System("CRS") for main file
records. Additionally, Plaintiff noted that any responsive records likely would be found in
emails, hard copy documents, and other files in the FBI's Washington Field Office; therefore,
the FBI should be directed to conduct a thorough search, to include emails and other records in
the Washington Field Office. . . .
(9) By letter executed on November 9, 2017, OIP advised Plaintiff it affirmed the FBI's
determination. OIP further advised Plaintiff that to the extent his request sought access to
records that would either confirm or deny an individual's placement on any government watch
list, the FBI properly refused to confirm or deny the existence of any such records because
their existence is protected from disclosure pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(E). . .
.
(19) CRS Search and Results. In response to Plaintiff's request dated September 1, 2017,
RIDS conducted an index search of the CRS for responsive main and reference file records
employing the UNI application of ACS. The FBI searched the subject's name, "Seth Conrad Rich,"
in order to identify files responsive to Plaintiff's request and subject to the FOIA. The FBI's
searches included a three-way phonetic breakdown5 of the subject's name. These searches
located no main or reference records responsive to Plaintiff's FOIA request.
(20) Subsequently, the FBI conducted additional searches of the CRS via the UNI application
of ACS and a Sentinel index search for both main and reference file records. The FBI used the
same search terms it used in its original searches as described supra. This new search also
resulted in no main or reference file records being located responsive to Plaintiff's FOIA
request. . . .
(25) The FBI conducted an adequate and reasonable search for records responsive to
Plaintiffs FOIA request; however, no records were located. First given its comprehensive nature
and scope, the CRS is the principle records system searched by RIDS, to locate information
responsive to most FOIA/Privacy Act requests, as the CRS is where the FBI indexes information
about individuals, organizations, and events for future retrieval. See , 14, supra. Second, the
CRS is the FBI recordkeeping system where investigative records responsive to this request
would reasonably be found. Given Plaintiffs request sought information about an individual
subject, Seth Conrad Rich, who was murdered in the District of Columbia on or about July 10,
2016, such information would reasonably be expected to be located in the CRS via the index
search methodology. Finally, the office likely to conduct or assist in such an investigation --
WFO -- confirmed that it did not open an investigation or provide investigative or technical
assistance into the murder of Seth Conrad Rich, as the matter was under investigation by the
MPD, who declined the FBI's assistance.
Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1746, I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is
true and correct, and that ibits A - E attached hereto are true and correct copies.
Well, guess what? Just as Ty Clevenger anticipated, the relevant emails were in the
Washington Field Office. To make matters worse, some of these emails were sent to FBI
Headquarters. David Hardy either is incompetent or he has lied. There is no middle ground. In
either case, his submission was not true.
Here are the emails (I transcribed them and put them in chronological order to facilitate
your ability to read them and understand what is being communicated).
10:32 am -- Message sent from FBI's Washington Field Office Public Affairs officer to at
least three other Washington Field Office FBI Agents. In addition, there are three other
blacked out areas in the addressee field, which appear to be the names of persons who do not
work at the Washington Field Office.
I hope you are well. I heard from the front office that you are covering for BLANK this
week. Various news outlets are reporting today that Julian Assange suggested during an overseas
interview that DNC Staffer, Seth Rich, was a Wikileaks source and may have been killed because
he leaked the DNC e-mails to his organization, and that Wikileaks is offering $20,000 for
information regarding the death of Seth Rich last month. Based on this news, we anticipate
additional press coverage on this matter. I hear that you are in a class today; however, when
you have a moment can you give me a call to discuss what involvement the FBI has in the
investigation.
12:53 pm -- Message replying to the 10:32 am message, sent from FBI Washington Field Office
with at least four other Washington Field Office FBI Agents addressed on the message. There
also are two other blacked out addresses, which may indicate personnel not in the Washington
Field Office.
Adding BLANK (a name to the addressee list). I am aware of this reporting from earlier this
week, but not any involvement in any related case. BLANKED OUT.
12:54 pm -- Message sent from FBI Washington Field Office with at least four other
Washington Field Office FBI Agents addressed on the message. There also are two other blacked
out addresses, which may indicate personnel not in the Washington Field Office.
Adding BLANK for real. Stupid Samsung. (Apparently the author of this message failed in the
preceding message.)
1:00 pm -- Message replying to the 12:54 pm message, sent from FBI Washington Field Office
with five other Washington Field Office FBI Agents addressed on the message.
Hi. (THE REST OF THE MESSAGE IS BLANKED OUT.)
1:25 pm -- Message replying to the 1:00 pm message, sent from FBI Washington Field Office
with five other Washington Field Office FBI Agents addressed on the message. Plus, two other
BLANKED out addressees not identified.
Thanks BLANK will do.
7:09 pm -- Message from FBI Washington Field Office to Jonathan Moffat and Peter Strzok of
the FBI's Criminal Division and two other BLANKED out addressees.
FYSA (For Your Situational Awareness). I squashed this with BLANK
7:49 pm Text message from Peter Strzok to Lisa Page forwarding her this email chain.
The initial response to the query from the Public Affairs Office of the Washington Field
Office is telling. The Agent could have responded very simply--The FBI was not involved in any
facet of the Seth Rich investigation. This was a local matter handled by the DC Police.
But that is not how the Agent responded. And then he took the step of adding in people at
FBI Headquarters. How do we know this? The message from the Washington Field Office at 7:09 pm
was sent to the Criminal Division to Agents Moffat and Strzok.
Ty Clevenger now has ample ammunition to return to court and insist that the FBI be required
to identify all agents involved in these email chains and to discuss what they knew about the
Seth Rich case. David Hardy declared under the penalty of perjury that there were no such
emails. I doubt that the two judges involved in the relevant cases on this matter will be happy
to learn that the FBI stonewalled a valid FOIA request and a
Stay tuned.
Below is the copy of the email chain. You need to read from bottom to top.
Reblog (0)Comments You can follow this conversation by
subscribing to the
comment feed for this post. I will be shocked if the
judge does anything about it beyond a slap on the wrist an an admonition not to get caught
again.
Strictly it had to be handled by DC police, nevertheless the FBI was made aware of it-- and
should have taken over at that point?--and somewhere up the chronology ladder Peter Strzok got
envolved, not quite the way he should have though, instead he only forwarded the latest mail to
his "interior lover". Suggesting??? Peter Strzok as man in charge my have stopped the FBI from
taking over?
I think it is premature to prejudge the question of how successful the FBI will be in
heading off the attempts of Ty Clevenger and Ed Butowsky to penetrate the wall of silence which
has been erected around the involvement of that organisation in covering up the truth about
Seth Rich's murder, and his involvement in leaking the materials from the DNC published by
'WikiLeaks.'
It is also material here that other parts of the cover-up may be running into trouble.
Further indications that contingency plans to use Steele as a 'patsy' were made early on,
and are now being implemented, come in an extraordinary article published in the latest edition
of the 'Sunday Times' by the paper's Political Editor, Tim Shipman.
Important parts of this were reproduced in a piece by Daniel Chaitin in the 'Washington
Examiner', headlined 'Top British spy report: "Strong possibility' that anti-Trump dossier was
completely fabricated", which links to the original article.
The original is, unfortunately, behind a paywall – but can be obtained if one is
prepared to take the trouble to sign up for the free allowance allowed by the papers.
In fact, much more interesting than the fact that a well-known British writer about spies,
Rupert Allason, aka 'Nigel West', who is clearly a conduit for elements in our security
services, has been brought in in support of the strategy of making Steele the 'patsy', are
paragraphs that make a claim which Chaitin does not appear to notice. These read:
'In November (2016 – DH], the FBI began checking out Steele and his sources. The
inspector- general found that former colleagues described Steele as demonstrating "poor
judgment" by "pursuing people with political risk but no intel value".
'More worryingly, they worked out that most of Steele's information came from a "primary
sub-source", identified by American media as a Belarus-born businessman, Sergei Millian. The
FBI interviewed Millian three times, in January, March and May 2017.
'He told the FBI that he was an unwitting source and much of what he had told Steele was
"just talk", "word of mouth and hearsay" or conversations "had with friends over beers". The
claims about Trump cavorting with prostitutes at the Ritz-Carlton were "rumour and speculation"
or said "in jest". The inspector- general's report says Millian "made statements indicating
that Steele misstated or exaggerated" what he had told him and that his reports were far more
"conclusive" than was justified.'
As it happens, while I have seen Millian referred to as a source for the dossier attributed
to Steele, I have – so far at least – not seen him identified with the supposed
'Primary Sub-source.'
A critical question is whether the 'Sunday Times' is right in claiming that the person whom
the FBI are reported by Inspector-General Horowitz as interviewing in January, March and May
2017, in a version which that figure's report accepts, was in fact Millian.
What Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch have to say in the apologia they published last
November under the title 'Crime in Progress', following their attempt to claim that there was
serious sourcing for the 'golden showers' claim, seems worth bringing into the picture:
'Steele said that one of his collectors was among the finest he had ever worked with, an
individual known to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement. Neither Simpson nor Fritsch was told
the name of this source, nor the source's precise whereabouts, but Steele shared enough about
the person's background and access that they believed the information they planned to pass
along was credible.'
The suggestion seems clear that this was the 'Primary Sub-source.'
Anyone who did the most basic research into Millian would very rapidly realise that the
notion that he could have the kind of 'background and access' making the claims made in the
dossier attributed to Steele 'credible' was laughable.
A rather obvious hypothesis, I think, was that the 'Primary Sub-source' was actually –
to hark back to the title of a book and film about a classic British disinformation operation
– 'The Man Who Never Was.'
The actual truth, I think, is likely to have been well-summarised by Lee Smith in the
opening paragraphs of his review of the Simpson/Fritsch book, which is headlined 'A crime still
in progress':
'Crime in Progress is, inadvertently, the cruelest book ever written about the American
media. Its authors, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, are the two former Wall Street Journal
reporters who founded the DC-based consultancy Fusion GPS. In 2016, the Hillary Clinton
campaign paid them to use their former media colleagues to push a conspiracy theory smearing
her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. The crime is still in progress.
'To help top-notch journalists market the fantasy that one of the world's most familiar
faces was a secret Russian spy, Fusion GPS co-ordinated with the FBI to forge a series of
"intelligence reports". They attributed these lurid memos to a down-on-his-luck Brit, a former
spy named Christopher Steele.'
My only reservation about this is that I do not think that Steele was 'down-on-his-luck',
until he found that his partners in the 'crime still in progress' were planning to wriggle out
of their own responsibility by making him the 'patsy', or 'fall guy.'
To give intelligence credibility to a farrago which, as Smith suggests, is likely to have
been cooked up in Fusion GPS, with the assistance of criminal elements in the U.S. law
enforcement and intelligence apparatus, it was helpful to bring in an old confederate of both,
Steele.
(One could also then appeal to that curious snobbery that often makes Americans take
seriously precisely the kind of 'Brit' to whom they should give a very wide berth!)
This, ironically, created a situation where those criminal elements could then suggest that
their only fault was in being credulous about claims made by a British intelligence officer
whom it was suggested past experience gave them reason to trust.
A natural way of developing this strategy would be to find someone like Millian, and use him
to buttress the central claims that the dossier 1. was actually produced by Steele, and 2. that
it had actual sources, rather than being largely fabricated. (As so often, the W.C. Fields
principle applies: 'Never give a sucker an even break.')
It seems clear that Horowitz has been prepared to go along with this strategy, and that a
very large number of 'suckers' among those on the other side of the fence from Simpson and
Fritsch have fallen for it, hook, line and sinker. (It might be invidious to name names.)
The likely reason why all this happened, of course, is that a succession of events –
the discovery that material from the DNC had been leaked and was going to be published by
'WikiLeaks', the identification of Seth Rich as the figure responsible, and then his murder
– produced an urgent need for a cover-up.
Inevitably, given the shortage of time, this was imperfect, and gave hostages to
fortune.
It is clear that Clevenger and Butowsky have, and probably will continue to have,
difficulties in getting judges to follow the evidence where it leads.
However, the former is a first-class 'ferret', and I think it is premature to rule out the
possibility that some of the people who are adjudicating these cases may decide that they do
not want to continue to cover up a 'crime still in progress.'
As it happens, Clevenger has written to John Durham, Richard Donague, and also Michael
Horowitz, announcing that he wishes to file a criminal complaint in relation to the materials
which Larry has discussed.
(An account with relevant links is given in a new post entitled 'We now have unequivocal
proof that the FBI is hiding records about Seth Rich' on Clevenger's 'Lawflog' blog, subtitled
'Because some people just need a good flogging.'
I would strongly recommend anyone seriously interested in seeing the truth about these
matters exposed, and the conspiracy against the Constitution defeated, to sign up for alerts
from Clevenger's blog.
Posted by: David Habakkuk |
29 January 2020 at 12:51 PM In fairness to the FBI, they
didn't say there were no emails, they said they used a search of CRS and that didn't identify
any emails. It isn't clear to me from what was provided in this post whether the search would
have included records from the WFO.
I posted quite a long response to 'Sid Finster', which has gone into spam.
Have been reading both the Simpson/Fritsch apologia, and also the book-length version of
Heidi Blake's attempt at 'escapology' on behalf of 'BuzzFeed.'
Both drive a point home: one simply cannot take on trust anything these people say.
This also includes material like the Bruce Ohr 302s. I know think that these were crafted,
between him, Pientka, Strzok et al, as part of contingency plans to make Steele the 'patsy' if
the attempt to 'escalate' with the conspiracy against the Trump failed.
Posted by: David Habakkuk |
29 January 2020 at 01:00 PM The sorry fact is this: Out
here in places like my town in flyover country, I could mention Seth Rich and no one would have
the slightest idea who he was and why he should get justice--or at least that the truth about
his life and death should be told.
Does he have family fighting for the truth about his death? Are there investigative
reporters on the story?
Posted by: oldman22 |
29 January 2020 at 10:56 PM
Oldman22 -The article states - "Steele, who quit MI6 in 2009, never told his former bosses,
what he was up to."
I believe this judgement would now be revised, if one can trust newspaper articles detailing
an earlier meeting with Sir Richard Dearlove that have since come out.
However, I have a little experience with how these things go down in the real world. I
genuinely hope that this experience will prove misleading.
Posted by: Sid Finster |
30 January 2020 at 10:42 AM The omni-present
Strzok/Page.
The DNC computer hack strikes me as another faux investigation identical in that regard to the
Clinton e-mail investigation - half measures abounding. The question is why? The brief e-mail
exchange between WFO and FBIHQ makes it perfectly clear that if the field investigators had not
already taken an interest on following up on Rich as an obvious lead they certainly should
have. It appears to me that they had not since the initial inquiry came down from the Public
Affairs Office and seems somewhat less than urgent.
My question is why wasn't the FBI all over this obvious lead if they wanted to get to the
actual bottom of the DNC hack?
"Today, January 27, 2020, we have a stunning update ==>>
After previously claiming no FBI records could be found related to Seth Rich, emails have
been uncovered. These emails weren't just from anybody. These emails were between FBI
lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two most corrupt individuals involved in the Russia
Collusion Hoax.
In a set of
emails released by Judicial Watch on January 22, 2020, provided by a FOIA request on
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two pages on emails refer to Seth Rich:"
Maybe they were worried someone had bear spray in their purse of backpack, when Fancy Bear
and Cozy Bear showed and put their paw prints on the DNC computers.
AkaPatience, that is exactly how it is done. Once the decision is made to totally clean the
network, it has to be done to EVERY computer and device on the network. Hackers leave dormant
code throughout the network that allows them to reenter the network after they are booted
out.
I don't know if you care to comment on this, but I met a marine 10 years ago who talked
about how he was administrating Windows Server when he was in the corps. I was flabbergasted.
I don't understand why more effort has not been put into running a secure OS - something with
a microkernel architecture and an application stack and GUI fully locked down with Mandatory Access
Control . I presume that the assumption is that any advances we make will be quickly
matched by Iran, Russia, and China, and that leadership is more interested in offence than
defence.
1. G2 released nothing remotely damaging to the DNC, the first document was even the DNC's
oppo file on DJT
2. G2 did some copying and compress/decompress on files. Imbedded timestamps strongly suggest
a US Timezone location
3. G2 released some files claiming to be from the DNC, but which demonstrably came from John
Podesta's account
4. G2 did not claim to be involved with the Podesta account, which was phished and not hacked
as such
5. As an aside, both the Fancy and Cosy Bear packages had been available for third parties to
obtain since 2013-4 or so. So their use is not proof of Russian involvement. One or other has
been used in bank exploits before 2016.
I believe that G2 is arguably US based (the timestamps are reasonably conclusive), and is
either CIA or Crowdstrike. The existence of G2 is a diversionary one to strengthen the case
for blaming the Russians. It may be connected to wanting to divert attention from Seth Rich
and his subsequent murder, but may not be - that is Seth Rich's death may be just an
unfortunate coincidence, we have inadequate information to conclude either way.
Here's a key point - on June 12, Assange announces that Wikileaks will soon be releasing
info pertinent to Hillary. HE DOES NOT SAY THAT HE WILL BE RELEASING DNC EMAILS.
And yet, on June 14, Crowdstrike reports a Russian hack of the DNC servers - and a day later, Guccifer
2.0 emerges and proclaims himself to be the hacker, takes credit for the upcoming Wikileaks
DNC releases, publishes the Trump oppo research which Crowdstrike claimed he had taken, and
intentionally adds "Russian footprints" to his metadata.
So how did Crowdstrike and G2.0 know
that DNC EMAILS would be released?
Because, as Larry postulates, the US intelligence
community had intercepted communications between Seth Rich and Wikileaks in which Seth had
offered the DNC emails (consistent with the report of Sy Hersh's source within the FBI).
So
US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks.
That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack
was born - distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep
State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam.
Gossufer2.0 and CrowdStrike are the weakest links in this sordid story. CrowdStrike was nothing but FBI/CIA contractor.
So the hypothesis that CrowdStrike employees implanted malware to implicate Russians and created fake Gussifer 2.0 personality
is pretty logical.
Notable quotes:
"... Not one piece of corroborating intelligence. It is all based on opinion and strong belief. There was no human source report or electronic intercept pointing to a relationship between the GRU and the two alleged creations of the GRU--Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com. Now consider the spin that Robert Mueller put on this opinion in his report on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Mueller bluffs the unsuspecting reader into believing that it is a proven fact that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were Russian assets. But he is relying on a mere opinion from a handpicked group of intel analysts working under the direction of then CIA Director John Brennan ..."
"... In October 2015 John Brennan reorganized the CIA . As part of that reorganization he created a new directorate--DIRECTORATE OF DIGITAL INNOVATION. Its mission was to "manipulate digital footprints." In other words, this was the Directorate that did the work of creating Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. One of their specialties, creating Digital Dust. ..."
"... We also know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the CIA was using software specifically designed to mask CIA activity and make it appear like it was done by a foreign entity. Wikipedia describes the Vault 7 documents : ..."
"... Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name "Феликс Эдмундович." That means the computer was configured to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard. More intriguing still, "Феликс Эдмундович" is the colloquial name that translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the 20th Century Russian statesman who is best known for founding the Soviet secret police. (The metadata also shows that the purported DNC strategy memo was originally created by someone named Warren Flood, which happens to be the name of a LinkedIn user claiming to provide strategy and data analytics services to Democratic candidates.) ..."
"... Why would the CIA do this? The CIA knew that Podesta's emails had been hacked and were circulating on the internet. But they had no evidence about the identity of the culprit. If they had such evidence, they would have cited it in the 2017 ICA. ..."
"... The U.S. intelligence community became aware around May 26, 2016 that someone with access to the DNC network was offering those emails to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Julian Assange and people who spoke to him indicate that the person was Seth Rich. Whether or not it was Seth, the Trump Task Force at CIA was aware that the emails, which would be embarrassing to the Clinton campaign, would be released at some time in the future. Hence the motive to create Guccifer 2.0 and pin the blame on Russia. ..."
"... The only source for the claim that Russia hacked the DNC is a private cyber security firm, CrowdStrike. ..."
"... Time for the common sense standard again. Crowdstrike detected the Russians on the 6th of May, according to CEO Dimitri Alperovitch, but took no steps to shutdown the network, eliminate the malware and clean the computers until 34 days later, i.e., the 10th of June. That is 34 days of inexcusable inaction. ..."
"... The actions attributed to DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 should be priority investigative targets for U.S. Attorney John Durham's team of investigators. This potential use of a known CIA tool, developed under Brennan with the sole purpose to obfuscate the source of intrusions, pointing to another nation, as a false flag operation, is one of the actions and issues that U.S. Attorney John Durham should be looking into as a potential act of "Seditious conspiracy. It needs to be done. To quote the CIA, I strongly assess that the only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU. ..."
"... LJ bottom line: "The only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU." ..."
"... ICA which seemed to have been framed to allow journalists or the unwary to link the ICA with more rigorous standards used by more authentic assessments? ..."
"... With the Russians not having the advantages that the NSA does (back doors in all US-designed network hardware/software and taps all over the internet), would Russia reveal anything unless it involved an immediate major national security threat. I doubt that would cover Trump. ..."
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report insists that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Russia's military intelligence organization,
the GRU, as part of a Russian plot to meddle in the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election. But this is a lie. Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks
were created by Brennan's CIA and this action by the CIA should be a target of U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation. Let me
explain why.
Let us start with the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment aka ICA. Only three agencies of the 17 in the U.S. intelligence
community contributed to and coordinated on the ICA--the FBI, the CIA and NSA. In the preamble to the ICA, you can read the following
explanation about methodology:
When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as "we assess" or "we judge," they are conveying an analytic assessment or
judgment
To be clear, the phrase,"We assess", is intel community jargon for "opinion". If there was actual evidence or source material
for a judgment the writer of the assessment would state, "According to a reliable source" or "knowledgeable source" or "documentary
evidence."
Pay close attention to what the analysts writing the ICA stated about the GRU and Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks:
We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data
obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.
Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker, made multiple contradictory statements and false claims
about his likely Russian identity throughout the election. Press reporting suggests more than one person claiming to be Guccifer
2.0 interacted with journalists.
Content that we assess was taken from e-mail accounts targeted by the GRU in March 2016 appeared on DCLeaks.com starting
in June.
We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks.
Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did
not contain any evident forgeries.
Not one piece of corroborating intelligence. It is all based on opinion and strong belief. There was no human source report or
electronic intercept pointing to a relationship between the GRU and the two alleged creations of the GRU--Guccifer 2.0 persona and
DCLeaks.com. Now consider the spin that Robert Mueller put on this opinion in his report on possible collusion between the Trump
campaign and the Russians. Mueller bluffs the unsuspecting reader into believing that it is a proven fact that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks
were Russian assets. But he is relying on a mere opinion from a handpicked group of intel analysts working under the direction of
then CIA Director John Brennan.
Here's Mueller's take (I apologize for the lengthy quote but it is important that you read how the Mueller team presents this):
DCLeaks
"The GRU began planning the releases at least as early as April 19, 2016, when Unit 26165 registered the domain dcleaks.com
through a service that anonymized the registrant.137 Unit 26165 paid for the registration using a pool of bitcoin that it had
mined.138 The dcleaks.com landing page pointed to different tranches of stolen documents, arranged by victim or subject matter.
Other dcleaks.com pages contained indexes of the stolen emails that were being released (bearing the sender, recipient, and date
of the email). To control access and the timing of releases, pages were sometimes password-protected for a period of time and
later made unrestricted to the public.
Starting in June 2016, the GRU posted stolen documents onto the website dcleaks.com, including documents stolen from a number
of individuals associated with the Clinton Campaign. These documents appeared to have originated from personal email accounts
(in particular, Google and Microsoft accounts), rather than the DNC and DCCC computer networks. DCLeaks victims included an advisor
to the Clinton Campaign, a former DNC employee and Clinton Campaign employee, and four other campaign volunteers.139 The GRU released
through dcleaks.com thousands of documents, including personal identifying and financial information, internal correspondence
related to the"Clinton Campaign and prior political jobs, and fundraising files and information.140
GRU officers operated a Facebook page under the DCLeaks moniker, which they primarily used to promote releases of materials.141
The Facebook page was administered through a small number of preexisting GRU-controlled Facebook accounts.142
GRU officers also used the DCLeaks Facebook account, the Twitter account @dcleaks__, and the email account [email protected]
to communicate privately with reporters and other U.S. persons. GRU officers using the DCLeaks persona gave certain reporters
early access to archives of leaked files by sending them links and passwords to pages on the dcleaks.com website that had not
yet become public. For example, on July 14, 2016, GRU officers operating under the DCLeaks persona sent a link and password for
a non-public DCLeaks webpage to a U.S. reporter via the Facebook account.143 Similarly, on September 14, 2016, GRU officers sent
reporters Twitter direct messages from @dcleaks_, with a password to another non-public part of the dcleaks.com website.144
The dcleaks.com website remained operational and public until March 2017."
Guccifer 2.0
On June 14, 2016, the DNC and its cyber-response team announced the breach of the DNC network and suspected theft of DNC documents.
In the statements, the cyber-response team alleged that Russian state-sponsored actors (which they referred to as "Fancy Bear")
were responsible for the breach.145 Apparently in response to that announcement, on June 15, 2016, GRU officers using the persona
Guccifer 2.0 created a WordPress blog. In the hours leading up to the launch of that WordPress blog, GRU officers logged into
a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455 and searched for a number of specific words and phrases in English, including
"some hundred sheets," "illuminati," and "worldwide known." Approximately two hours after the last of those searches, Guccifer
2.0 published its first post, attributing the DNC server hack to a lone Romanian hacker and using several of the unique English
words and phrases that the GRU officers had searched for that day.146
That same day, June 15, 2016, the GRU also used the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog to begin releasing to the public documents
stolen from the DNC and DCCC computer networks.
The Guccifer 2.0 persona ultimately released thousands of documents stolen from the DNC and DCCC in a series of blog posts
between June 15, 2016 and October 18, 2016.147 Released documents included opposition research performed by the DNC (including
a memorandum analyzing potential criticisms of candidate Trump), internal policy documents (such as recommendations on how to
address politically sensitive issues), analyses of specific congressional races, and fundraising documents. Releases were organized
around thematic issues, such as specific states (e.g., Florida and Pennsylvania) that were perceived as competitive in the 2016
U.S. presidential election.
Beginning in late June 2016, the GRU also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release documents directly to reporters and other
interested individuals. Specifically, on June 27, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 sent an email to the news outlet The Smoking Gun offering
to provide "exclusive access to some leaked emails linked [to] Hillary Clinton's staff."148 The GRU later sent the reporter a
password and link to a locked portion of the dcleaks.com website that contained an archive of emails stolen by Unit 26165 from
a Clinton Campaign volunteer in March 2016.149 "That the Guccifer 2.0 persona provided reporters access to a restricted portion
of the DCLeaks website tends to indicate that both personas were operated by the same or a closely-related group of people.150
The GRU continued its release efforts through Guccifer 2.0 into August 2016. For example, on August 15, 2016, the Guccifer
2.0 persona sent a candidate for the U.S. Congress documents related to the candidate's opponent.151 On August 22, 2016, the Guccifer
2.0 persona transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of Florida-related data stolen from the DCCC to a U.S. blogger covering Florida
politics.152 On August 22, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona sent a U.S. reporter documents stolen from the DCCC pertaining to the
Black Lives Matter movement.153"
Wow. Sounds pretty convincing. The documents referencing communications by DCLeaks or Guccifer 2.0 with Wikileaks are real. What
is not true is that these entities were GRU assets.
In October 2015 John Brennan reorganized the CIA . As part of that reorganization he created a new directorate--DIRECTORATE
OF DIGITAL INNOVATION. Its mission was to "manipulate digital footprints." In other words, this was the Directorate that did the
work of creating Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. One of their specialties, creating Digital Dust.
We also know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the CIA was using software specifically designed to mask CIA activity and make it
appear like it was done by a foreign entity. Wikipedia describes the
Vault 7 documents :
Vault 7 is a series of documents that WikiLeaks began to publish on 7 March 2017, that detail activities and capabilities of the
United States' Central Intelligence Agency to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dated from 2013–2016,
include details on the agency's software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs,[1] web browsers (including
Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera Software ASA),[2][3][4] and the operating systems of most smartphones (including
Apple's iOS and Google's Android), as well as other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux[5][6
One of the tools in Vault 7 carries the innocuous name, MARBLE.
Hackernews explains the purpose and function
of MARBLE:
Dubbed "Marble," the part 3 of CIA files contains 676 source code files of a secret anti-forensic Marble Framework, which is basically
an obfuscator or a packer used to hide the true source of CIA malware.
The CIA's Marble Framework tool includes a variety of different algorithm with foreign language text intentionally inserted into
the malware source code to fool security analysts and falsely attribute attacks to the wrong nation.
Marble is used to hamper[ing] forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks
to the CIA," says the whistleblowing site.
"...for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then
showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion," WikiLeaks
explains.
So guess what
gullible techies "discovered" in mid-June 2016? The meta data in the Guccifer 2.0 communications had "Russian fingerprints."
We still don't know who he is or whether he works for the Russian government, but one thing is for sure: Guccifer 2.0 -- the nom
de guerre of the person claiming he hacked the Democratic National Committee and published hundreds of pages that appeared to prove
it -- left behind fingerprints implicating a Russian-speaking person with a nostalgia for the country's lost Soviet era.
Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside
the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name "Феликс Эдмундович." That means the computer was configured
to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard. More intriguing still, "Феликс Эдмундович"
is the colloquial name that translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the 20th Century Russian statesman who is best known for founding the
Soviet secret police. (The metadata also shows that the purported DNC strategy memo was originally created by someone named Warren
Flood, which happens to be the name of a LinkedIn user claiming to provide strategy and data analytics services to Democratic candidates.)
Just use your common sense. If the Russians were really trying to carry out a covert cyberattack, do you really think they
are so sloppy and incompetent to insert the name of the creator of the Soviet secret police in the metadata? No. The Russians are
not clowns. This was a clumsy attempt to frame the Russians.
Why would the CIA do this? The CIA knew that Podesta's emails had been hacked and were circulating on the internet. But they
had no evidence about the identity of the culprit. If they had such evidence, they would have cited it in the 2017 ICA.
The U.S. intelligence community became aware around May 26, 2016 that someone with access to the DNC network was offering
those emails to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Julian Assange and people who spoke to him indicate that the person was Seth Rich.
Whether or not it was Seth, the Trump Task Force at CIA was aware that the emails, which would be embarrassing to the Clinton campaign,
would be released at some time in the future. Hence the motive to create Guccifer 2.0 and pin the blame on Russia.
It is essential to recall the timeline of the alleged Russian intrusion into the DNC network. The only source for the claim
that Russia hacked the DNC is a private cyber security firm, CrowdStrike. Here is the timeline for the DNC "hack."
Here are the facts on the public record. They are at odds with the claims of the Intelligence Community:
It was
29 April 2016 , when the DNC claims it became aware its servers had been penetrated. No claim yet about who was responsible.
And no claim that there had been a prior warning by the FBI of a penetration of the DNC by Russian military intelligence.
According to CrowdStrike founder , Dimitri Alperovitch, his company first supposedly detected the Russians mucking around
inside the DNC server on 6 May 2016. A CrowdStrike intelligence analyst reportedly told Alperovitch that:
Falcon had identified not one but two Russian intruders: Cozy Bear, a group CrowdStrike's experts believed was affiliated
with the FSB, Russia's answer to the CIA; and Fancy Bear, which they had linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence.
The Wikileaks data shows that the last message copied from the DNC network is dated Wed, 25 May 2016 08:48:35.
10 June 2016 --CrowdStrike waited until 10 June 2016 to take concrete steps to clean up the DNC network. Alperovitch told
Esquire's Vicky Ward that: 'Ultimately, the teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC.
Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10, all DNC employees were instructed to leave
their laptops in the office."
On June 14, 2016 , Ellen Nakamura, a Washington Post reporter who had been briefed by computer security company hired by the
DNC -- Crowdstrike--, wrote:
Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the
entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security
experts who responded to the breach.
The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC's system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said
DNC officials and the security experts.
The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential
candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political
action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.
15 June, 2016 , an internet "personality" self-described as Guccifer 2.0 surfaces and claims to be responsible for the hacks
but denies being Russian. The people/entity behind Guccifer 2.0:
Used a Russian VPN service provider to conceal their identity.
Created an email account with AOL.fr (a service that exposes the sender's IP address) and contacted the press (exposing his
VPN IP address in the process).
Contacted various media outlets through this set up and claimed credit for hacking the DNC, sharing copies of files purportedly
from the hack (one of which had Russian error messages embedded in them) with reporters from Gawker, The Smoking Gun and other
outlets.
Carried out searches for terms that were mostly in English, several of which would appear in Guccifer 2.0's first blog post.
They chose to do this via a server based in Moscow. (this is from the indictment,
"On or about June 15, 2016, the Conspirators logged into a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455")
Created a blog and made an initial blog post claiming to have hacked the DNC, providing links to various documents as proof.
Carelessly dropped a "Russian Smiley" into his first blog post.
Managed to add the name "Феликс Эдмундович" (which translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, also known as "Iron Felix") to the metadata
of several documents. (Several sources went beyond what the evidence shows and made claims about Guccifer 2.0 using a Russian
keyboard, however, these claims are just assumptions made in response to the presence of cyrillic characters.)
The only thing that the Guccifer 2.0 character did not do to declare its Russian heritage was to take out full page ads in the
New York Times and Washington Post. But the "forensic" fingerprints that Guccifer 2.0 was leaving behind is not the only inexplicable
event.
Time for the common sense standard again. Crowdstrike detected the Russians on the 6th of May, according to CEO Dimitri Alperovitch,
but took no steps to shutdown the network, eliminate the malware and clean the computers until 34 days later, i.e., the 10th of June.
That is 34 days of inexcusable inaction.
It is only AFTER Julian Assange announces on 12 June 2016 that WikiLeaks has emails relating to Hillary Clinton that DCLeaks or
Guccifer 2.0 try to contact Assange.
The actions attributed to DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 should be priority investigative targets for U.S. Attorney John Durham's
team of investigators. This potential use of a known CIA tool, developed under Brennan with the sole purpose to obfuscate the source
of intrusions, pointing to another nation, as a false flag operation, is one of the actions and issues that U.S. Attorney John Durham
should be looking into as a potential act of "Seditious conspiracy. It needs to be done. To quote the CIA, I strongly assess that
the only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA,
not the GRU.
LJ bottom line: "The only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential
election was the CIA, not the GRU."
Larry, thanks -- vital clarifications and reminders. In your earlier presentation of this material did you not also distinguish
between the way actually interagency assessments are titled, and ICA which seemed to have been framed to allow journalists or
the unwary to link the ICA with more rigorous standards used by more authentic assessments?
Thank you Larry. You have discovered one more vital key to the conspiracy. We now need the evidence of Julian Assange. He is kept
incommunicado and He is being tortured by the British in jail and will be murdered by the American judicial system if he lasts
long enough to be extradited.
You can be sure he will be "Epsteined" before he appears in open court because he knows the source of what Wikileaks published.
Once he is gone, mother Clinton is in the clear.
I can understand the GRU or SVR hacking the DNC and other e-mail servers because as intelligence services that is their job, but
can anyone think of any examples of Russia (or the Soviet Union) using such information to take overt action?
With the Russians
not having the advantages that the NSA does (back doors in all US-designed network hardware/software and taps all over the internet),
would Russia reveal anything unless it involved an immediate major national security threat. I doubt that would cover Trump.
Looks like CrowdStrike was was to plant the evidence of the Russian hack
Notable quotes:
"... All the evidence we're accumulating clearly says and implies, the US government -- namely the FBI, CIA, the DOJ, and of course State Department -- all these people involved in this hack, bought a dossier and all of the information going forward to the FISA court. ..."
"... All of them knew that this was a fake from the very beginning, because this Guccifer 2.0 character was fabricating it. They were using him plus the Internet Research Agency [IRA] as "supposed trolls of the Russian government". ..."
"... Well, when they sent their lawyers over to challenge that in a court of law, the government failed to prove they had any connection with the Russian government. ..."
"... Then the entire Rosenstein indictment is also a fabrication and a fake and a fraud for the same reasons. The judges seem to be involved in trying to keep this information out of the public domain. ..."
BILL BINNEY: I basically have always been saying that all of this Russian hack never
happened, but we have some more evidence coming out recently.
We haven't published it yet, but what we have seen is that there are at least five items
that we've found that were produced by Guccifer 2.0 back on June 15th, where they had the
Russian fingerprints in them, suggesting the Russians made the hack. Well, we found the same
five items published by Wikileaks in the Podesta emails.
Those items do not have the Russian fingerprints, which directly implies that Guccifer 2.0
was inserting these into the files to make it look like the Russians did this hack. Taking that
into account with all the other evidence we have; like the download speeds from Guccifer 2.0
were too fast, and they couldn't be managed by the web.
And that the files he was putting together and saying that he actually hacked, the two files
he said he had were really one file, and he was playing with the data; moving it to two
different files to claim two hacks.
Taking that into account with the fabrication of the Russian fingerprints, it leads us back
to inferring that in fact the marble framework out of the Vault 7 compromise of CIA hacking
routines was a possible user in this case.
In other words, it looked like the CIA did this, and that it was a matter of the CIA making
it look like the Russians were doing the hack. So, when you look at that and also look at the
DNC emails that were published by Wikileaks that have this phat file format in them, all 35,813
of these emails have rounded off times to the nearest even second.
That's a phat file format property; that argues that those files were, in fact, downloaded
to a thumb drive or CD-rom and physically transported before Wikileaks posted them. Which again
argues that it wasn't a hack.
So, all of the evidence we're finding is clearly evidence that the Russians were not in fact
hacking; it was probably our own people. It's very hard for us to get this kind of information
out. The mainstream media won't cover it; none of them will. It's very hard. We get some
bloggers to do that and some radio shows.
Also, I put all of this into a sworn affidavit in the Roger Stone case. I did that because
all of the attack on him was predicated on him being connected with this Russian hack which was
false to being with.
All the evidence we're accumulating clearly says and implies, the US government --
namely the FBI, CIA, the DOJ, and of course State Department -- all these people involved in
this hack, bought a dossier and all of the information going forward to the FISA
court.
All of them knew that this was a fake from the very beginning, because this Guccifer 2.0
character was fabricating it. They were using him plus the Internet Research Agency [IRA] as
"supposed trolls of the Russian government".
Well, when they sent their lawyers over to challenge that in a court of law, the
government failed to prove they had any connection with the Russian government.
They basically were chastised by the judge for fabricating a charge against this company.
So, if you take the IRA and the trolls away from that argument, and Guccifer 2.0, then the
entire Mueller report is a provable fabrication; because it's based on Guccifer 2.0 and the
IRA.
Then the entire Rosenstein indictment is also a fabrication and a fake and a fraud for
the same reasons. The judges seem to be involved in trying to keep this information out of the
public domain.
So, we have a really extensive shadow government here at work, trying to keep the
understanding and knowledge of what's really happening away from the public of the United
States. That's the really bad part. And the mainstream media is a participant in this; they're
culpable.
His dissent from the consensus view that Russia interfered with the 2016 US election
appears to be based on Russian disinformation."
They provide no footnote or linked-to source for their allegation
Ever since Binney went public criticizing U.S. intelligence agencies, they have been trying
to discredit him.
Thus far, however, their efforts have been nothing more than insinuations against his
person, without any specific allegation of counter-evidence that discredits any of his actual
assertions.
Martin Usher ,
The "Russia" thing was never able to differentiate between "Russians" and "the Russian
state". Its a product of a Cold War mindset that can't conceive of that country without it
being 150 million puppets all controlled by string from an office in the Kremlin. In reality
its just another country, one that offers goods and services to the world just like anywhere
else. So while we just assume that a company like SCL (Cambridge Analytica's parent) would
have personnel from and offices in many countries and have contracts with various political
parties in many countries we just can't seem to get our heads around the idea that a company
operating inside -- or even headquartered -- in Russia isn't automatically some kind of
Kremlin front. (Well, yes, it could be but the same way that a company in the UK could be a
front for the UK government, e.g. the Gateside Mill story in Scotland's Daily Record).
Another factor that might come into play is the idea that 'analytics', the key to business
on the Internet, is actually nothing more than a sophisticated form of traffic analysis, a
well known espionage tool. Any government worth its salt that's likely to be on the receiving
end of a propaganda campaign would be very interested in understanding the reach of such a
tool and learning how to manage that reach. So its possible that if we find the Russian
government taking out advertisements on Facebook through a front company to 'influence'
people its likely that they're more interested in evaluating that reach than the simplistic
view that they're 'trying to influence an election' (its not as if foreign interests or even
governments ever try to influence elections)(color revolution, anyone?). Allowing unfettered
access by these tools to one's nation is a bit like taking down one's defenses -- fine if
you're happy with vassal state ("ally") status but not if you're potentially an adversary --
so its important to know how to control it, no less important than having a decent air
defense system.
And in a further retort to all this nonsense, Harold Wilson, the last socialist leader of the
Labour Party back in the 1970s, won four general elections, a feat that's never been
repeated by any party leader.
This does directly relate to this thread, because the Americans overthrew Wilson. Just as they have done now with Corbyn. You really need to take your country back, whether you're a Brit or American.
paul ,
We are fortunate that there are still persons of integrity even in the spook organisations
– Binney, Kyriakou, Manning, Snowden. Without them and Assange a lot of this
criminality would never have seen the light of day.
Jack_Garbo ,
Diagnosing the disease does not imply the cure has been found. You simply know how much
sicker you are. Not helpful.
Nothing has changed despite all the revelations of intelligence shenanigans. Apologies do not
cure the patient when they're still spreading the disease. In fact, the opposite.
paul ,
Wikipedia holds out the begging bowl to anybody who uses it now.
I don't know why – they get plenty of CIA and Soros money.
All they've got to do now is wheel out the psychopath and war criminal, Tony Blair, to say:
"it's the Russians wot dunnit".
Oh my God
Jen ,
They don't need to, they have Tony Blair's fellow Brit psycho Boris Johnson to go on
autopilot and blame the Russians the moment something happens and just before London Met
start their investigations.
ZigZagWanderer ,
@ 1.15.58 "Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone"
Larry Johnson and Bill Binney always worth listening to. Try to find the time.
Antonym ,
True except for Trump. Just look how hard deep state tries to unseat him.
Damaging your own puppet is not normal for a puppeteer.
J_Garbo ,
I suspected that Deep State has at least two opposing factions. The Realistists want him to
break up the empire, turn back into a republic; the Delusionals want to extend the empire,
continue to exploit and destroy the world. If so, the contradictions, reversals, incoherence
make sense. IMO as I said.
Gary Weglarz ,
I predict that all Western MSM will begin to accurately and vocally cover Mr. Binney's
findings about this odious and treasonous U.S. government psyop at just about the exact time
that – "hell freezes over" – as they say.
Does anyone know how the delegates are allocated based on the 15% threshold?
For example, today's CA poll has Sanders at leading with 24% and Warren the only other
candidate above 15% (at 22%).
My preliminary search says if you get x% of the vote, you get x number of delegates .
So what happens to the 56% of delegates that correspond to votes for people other than
Sanders and Warren? Or do Sanders and Warren split them somehow?
Republicans are afraid to raise this key question. Democrats are afraid of even mentioning CrowdStrike in Ukrainegate hearings.
The Deep State wants to suppress this matter entirely.
Alperovisch connections to Ukraine and his Russophobia are well known. Did Alperovich people played the role of "Fancy Bear"? Or
Ukrainian SBU was engaged? George Eliason clams that
"I have already clearly shown the Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian Intelligence Operators." ... "Since there is so much crap surrounding
the supposed hack such as law enforcement teams never examining the DNC server or maintaining control of it as evidence, could the hacks
have been a cover-up?"
Notable quotes:
"... So far at least I cannot rule out the possibility that that this could have involved an actual 'false flag' hack. A possible calculation would have been that this could have made it easier for Alperovitch and 'CrowdStrike', if more people had asked serious questions about the evidence they claimed supported the 'narrative' of GRU responsibility. ..."
"... What she suggested was that the FBI had found evidence, after his death, of a hack of Rich's laptop, designed as part of a 'false flag' operation. ..."
"... On this, see his 8 October, 'Motion for Discovery and Motion to Accept Supplemental Evidence' in Clevenger's own case against the DOJ, document 44 on the relevant 'Courtlistener' pages, and his 'Unopposed Motion for Stay', document 48. Both are short, and available without a 'PACER' subscription, and should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in ascertaining the truth about 'Russiagate.' (See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/ .) ..."
"... And here, is is also material that he may have had more than one laptop, that 'hard drives' can be changed, and that the level of computer skills that can be found throughout the former Soviet Union is very high. Another matter of some importance is that Ed Butowsky's 'Debunking Rod Wheeler's Claims' site is back up online. (See http://debunkingrodwheelersclaims.net ) ..."
"... The question of whether the 'timeline' produced by Hersh's FBI informant was accurate, or a deliberate attempt to disguise the fact that all kinds of people were well aware of Rich's involvement before his murder, and well aware of the fact of a leak before he was identified as its source, is absolutely central to how one interprets 'Russiagate.' ..."
"... Why did Crowdstrike conclude it was a "Russian breach", when other evidence does show it was an internal download. What was Crowdstrike's method and motivation to reach the "Russian" conclusion instead. Why has that methodology been sealed? ..."
"... Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers. ..."
"... What were the relationships between Crowdstrike, DNC, FBI and the Mueller team that conspired to reach this Russian conclusion. ..."
"... Why did the Roger Stone judge, who just sent Stone away for life, refuse Stone's evidentiary demand to ascertain how exactly Crowdstrike reached its Russsian hacking conclusion, that the court then linked to Stone allegedly lying about this Russian link ..."
"... Indeed, let's set out with full transparency the Ukraine -- Crowsdtrike player links and loyalties to see if there are any smoking guns yet undisclosed. Trump was asking for more information about Crowdstrike like a good lawyer - never ask a question when you don't already know the right answer. Crowdstrike is owned by a Ukrainian by birth ..."
"... Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike. ..."
"... In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives. ..."
"... His role in what we may define as "converting DNC leak into DNC hack" (I would agree with you that this probably was a false flag operation), which was supposedly designed to implicated Russians, and possibly involved Ukrainian security services, is very suspicious indeed. ..."
"... Mueller treatment of Crowdstrike with "kid gloves" may suggest that Alperovich actions were part of a larger scheme. After all Crowdstike was a FBI contactor at the time. ..."
The favor was for Ukraine to investigate Crowdstrike and the 2016 DNC computer breach.
Reliance on Crowdstrike to investigate the DNC computer, and not an independent FBI investigation, was tied very closely to
the years long anti-Trump Russiagate hoax and waste of US taxpayer time and money.
Why is this issue ignored by both the media and the Democrats. The ladies doth protest far too much.
what exactly, to the extend I recall, could the Ukraine contribute the the DNC's server/"fake malware" troubles? Beyond, that
I seem to vaguely recall, the supposed malware was distributed via an Ukrainan address.
On the other hand, there seems to be the (consensus here?) argument there was no malware breach at all, simply an insider copying
files on a USB stick.
If people discovered there had been a leak, it would perfectly natural that in order to give 'resilience' to their cover-up
strategies, they could have organised a planting of evidence on the servers, in conjunction with elements in Ukraine.
So far at least I cannot rule out the possibility that that this could have involved an actual 'false flag' hack. A possible
calculation would have been that this could have made it easier for Alperovitch and 'CrowdStrike', if more people had asked serious
questions about the evidence they claimed supported the 'narrative' of GRU responsibility.
The issues involved become all the more important, in the light of the progress of Ty Clevenger's attempts to exploit the clear
contradiction between the claims by the FBI, in response to FOIA requests, to have no evidence relating to Seth Rich, and the
remarks by Ms. Deborah Sines quoted by Michael Isikoff.
What she suggested was that the FBI had found evidence, after his death, of a hack of Rich's laptop, designed as part of
a 'false flag' operation.
On this, see his 8 October, 'Motion for Discovery and Motion to Accept Supplemental Evidence' in Clevenger's own case against
the DOJ, document 44 on the relevant 'Courtlistener' pages, and his 'Unopposed Motion for Stay', document 48. Both are short,
and available without a 'PACER' subscription, and should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in ascertaining
the truth about 'Russiagate.' (See
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/
.)
It is eminently possible that Ms. Hines has simply made an 'unforced error.'
However, I do not – yet – feel able totally to discount the possibility that what is actually at issue is a 'ruse', produced
as a contingency plan to ensure that if it becomes impossible to maintain the cover-up over Rich's involvement in its original
form, his laptop shows 'evidence' compatible with the 'Russiagate' narrative.
And here, is is also material that he may have had more than one laptop, that 'hard drives' can be changed, and that the
level of computer skills that can be found throughout the former Soviet Union is very high. Another matter of some importance
is that Ed Butowsky's 'Debunking Rod Wheeler's Claims' site is back up online. (See
http://debunkingrodwheelersclaims.net )
Looking at it from the perspective of an old television current affairs hack, I do think that, while it is very helpful to
have some key material available in a single place, it would useful if more attention was paid to presentation.
In particular, it would be a most helpful 'teaching aid', if a full and accurate transcript was made of the conversation with
Seymour Hersh which Ed Butowsky covertly recorded. What seems clear is that both these figures ended up in very difficult positions,
and that the latter clearly engaged in 'sleight of hand' in relation to his dealings with the former. That said, the fact that
Butowsky's claims about his grounds for believing that Hersh's FBI informant was Andrew McCabe are clearly disingenuous does not
justify the conclusion that he is wrong.
It is absolutely clear to me – despite what 'TTG', following that 'Grub Street' hack Folkenflik, claimed – that when Hersh
talked to Butowsky, he believed he had been given accurate information. Indeed, I have difficulty seeing how anyone whose eyes
were not hopelessly blinded by prejudice, a\nd possibly fear of where a quest for the truth might lead, could not see that, in
this conversation, both men were telling the truth, as they saw it.
However, all of us, including the finest and most honourable of journalists can, from time to time, fall for disinformation.
(If anyone says they can always spot when they are being played, all I can say is, if you're right, you're clearly Superman, but
it is more likely that you are a fool or knave, if not both.)
The question of whether the 'timeline' produced by Hersh's FBI informant was accurate, or a deliberate attempt to disguise
the fact that all kinds of people were well aware of Rich's involvement before his murder, and well aware of the fact of a leak
before he was identified as its source, is absolutely central to how one interprets 'Russiagate.'
1. Why did Crowdstrike conclude it was a "Russian breach", when other evidence does show it was an internal download. What
was Crowdstrike's method and motivation to reach the "Russian" conclusion instead. Why has that methodology been sealed?
2. Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently
put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to
help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers.
3. What were the relationships between Crowdstrike, DNC, FBI and the Mueller team that conspired to reach this Russian
conclusion.
4. Why did the Roger Stone judge, who just sent Stone away for life, refuse Stone's evidentiary demand to ascertain how
exactly Crowdstrike reached its Russsian hacking conclusion, that the court then linked to Stone allegedly lying about this Russian
link .
5. Indeed, let's set out with full transparency the Ukraine -- Crowsdtrike player links and loyalties to see if there are
any smoking guns yet undisclosed. Trump was asking for more information about Crowdstrike like a good lawyer - never ask a question
when you don't already know the right answer. Crowdstrike is owned by a Ukrainian by birth .
Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently
put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted
to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers.
Alperovich is really a very suspicious figure. Rumors are that he was involved in compromising PGP while in MacAfee( June 2nd,
2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams - YouTube ):
Investigative Journalist George Webb worked at MacAfee and Network Solutions in 2000 when the CEO Bill Larsen bought a small,
Moscow based, hacking and virus writing company to move to Silicon Valley.
MacAfee also purchased PGP, an open source encryption software developed by privacy advocate to reduce NSA spying on the
public.
The two simultaneous purchase of PGP and the Moscow hacking team by Metwork Solutions was sponsored by the CIA and FBI in order
to crack encrypted communications to write a back door for law enforcement.
Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would
go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike.
In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted
communications for covert action operatives.
His role in what we may define as "converting DNC leak into DNC hack" (I would agree with you that this probably was a
false flag operation), which was supposedly designed to implicated Russians, and possibly involved Ukrainian security services,
is very suspicious indeed.
Mueller treatment of Crowdstrike with "kid gloves" may suggest that Alperovich actions were part of a larger scheme. After
all Crowdstike was a FBI contactor at the time.
While all this DNC hack saga is completely unclear due to lack of facts and the access to the evidence, there are some stories
on Internet that indirectly somewhat strengthen your hypothesis:
"... Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward Russia. The Council in turn is financed by Google Inc. ..."
"... In a perhaps unexpected development, another Atlantic Council funder is Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were the subject of Trump's inquiry with Zelemsky related to Biden. The Biden allegations concern significant questions about Biden's role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period when Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from Burisma. ..."
"... Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower's complaint alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 presidential race. ..."
"... Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. ..."
"... Together with Soros's Open Society, Omidyar also funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are "disputed." ..."
There are common threads that run through an organization repeatedly relied upon in the
so-called whistleblower's complaint about President Donald Trump and CrowdStrike, the outside
firm utilized to conclude that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee's servers
since the DNC would not allow the U.S. government to inspect the servers.
One of several themes is financing tied to Google, whose Google Capital led a $100 million
funding drive that financed Crowdstrike. Google Capital, which now goes by the name of
CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of
Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor
to the Democratic Party.
CrowdStrike was mentioned by Trump in his call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign,
reportedly helped draft CrowdStrike to aid with the DNC's allegedly hacked server.
On behalf of the DNC and Clinton's campaign, Perkins Coie also paid the controversial
Fusion GPS firm to produce the infamous, largely-discredited anti-Trump dossier compiled by
former British spy Christopher Steele.
CrowdStrike is a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by Dmitri
Alperovitch.
Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the
Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward
Russia. The Council in turn is financed
by Google Inc.
In a perhaps unexpected development, another Atlantic Council
funder is Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe
Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were the subject of Trump's inquiry with
Zelemsky related to Biden. The Biden allegations concern significant questions about Biden's
role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period when
Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from Burisma.
Besides Google and Burisma funding, the Council is also financed by billionaire activist
George Soros's Open Society Foundations as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc. and
the U.S. State Department.
Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State
Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization
repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower's complaint
alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign
country" in the 2020 presidential race.
The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the whistleblower's document and released
by the Google and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower's
own claims, as Breitbart News
documented .
One key section of the so-called whistleblower's document claims that "multiple U.S.
officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of
other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the
Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov."
This was allegedly to follow up on Trump's call with Zelensky in order to discuss the
"cases" mentioned in that call, according to the so-called whistleblower's narrative. The
complainer was clearly referencing Trump's request for Ukraine to investigate the Biden
corruption allegations.
Even though the statement was written in first person – "multiple U.S. officials
told me" – it contains a footnote referencing a report by the Organized Crime and
Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
That footnote reads:
In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on
22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met
with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.
The so-called whistleblower's account goes on to rely upon that same OCCRP report on three
more occasions. It does so to:
Write that Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko
"also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these
matters." Document that Trump adviser Rudi Giuliani "had spoken in late 2018 to former
Prosecutor General Shokin, in a Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani."
Bolster the charge that, "I also learned from a U.S. official that 'associates' of Mr.
Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team." The so-called
whistleblower then relates in another footnote, "I do not know whether these associates of
Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced
above."
The OCCRP
report repeatedly referenced is actually a "joint investigation by the Organized Crime
and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and
business records in the United States and Ukraine."
BuzzFeed infamously also first
published the full anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Trump's
presidential campaign and Russia. The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign and
the Democratic National Committee and was produced by the Fusion GPS opposition dirt
outfit.
The OCCRP and BuzzFeed "joint investigation" resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed
publishing similar lengthy pieces on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use
connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump's political rivals.
The so-called whistleblower's document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP
and does not reference BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia
collusion claims.
Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal
billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
Together with Soros's Open Society, Omidyar also
funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International
Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are
"disputed."
Like OCCRP, the Poynter Institute's so-called news fact-checking project is openly
funded by not only Soros' Open Society Foundations but also Google and the National
Endowment for Democracy.
CrowdStrike and DNC servers
CrowdStrike, meanwhile, was brought up by Trump in his phone call with Zelensky. According to the transcript, Trump told Zelensky, "I would like you to find out what
happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike I guess you have one of
your wealthy people The server, they say Ukraine has it."
In his extensive
report , Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller notes that his investigative team did not
"obtain or examine" the servers of the DNC in determining whether those servers were hacked
by Russia.
The DNC famously refused to allow the FBI to access its servers to verify the allegation
that Russia carried out a hack during the 2016 presidential campaign. Instead, the DNC
reached an arrangement with the FBI in which CrowdStrike conducted forensics on the server
and shared details with the FBI.
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017, then-FBI Director
James Comey
confirmed that the FBI registered "multiple requests at different levels," to review the
DNC's hacked servers. Ultimately, the DNC and FBI came to an agreement in which a "highly
respected private company" -- a reference to CrowdStrike -- would carry out forensics on the
servers and share any information that it discovered with the FBI, Comey testified.
A senior law enforcement official stressed the importance of the FBI gaining direct access
to the servers, a request that was denied by the DNC.
"The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to
servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been
mitigated," the official was quoted by the news media as saying.
"This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions
caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier," the
official continued.
... ... ...
Aaron Klein is Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter.
He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, "
Aaron Klein Investigative
Radio ." Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.
Russians did not hack the DNC system, a Russian named Dmitri Alperovitch is the hacker
and he works for President Obama. In the last five years the Obama administration has
turned exclusively to one Russian to solve every major cyber-attack in America, whether the
attack was on the U.S. government or a corporation. Only one "super-hero cyber-warrior" seems
to "have the codes" to figure out "if" a system was hacked and by "whom."
Dmitri's company, CrowdStrike has been called in by Obama to solve mysterious attacks on
many high level government agencies and American corporations, including: German Bundestag,
Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the White
House, the State Department, SONY, and many others.
CrowdStrike's philosophy is: "You don't have a malware problem; you have an adversary
problem."
CrowdStrike has played a critical role in the development of America's cyber-defense policy.
Dmitri Alperovitch and George Kurtz, a former head of the FBI cyberwarfare unit founded
CrowdStrike. Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director at the FBI is now CrowdStrike's
president of services. The company is crawling with former U.S. intelligence agents.
Before Alperovitch founded CrowdStrike in 2011, he was working in Atlanta as the chief
threat officer at the antivirus software firm McAfee, owned by Intel (a DARPA company). During
that time, he "discovered" the Chinese had compromised at least seventy-one companies and
organizations, including thirteen defense contractors, three electronics firms, and the
International Olympic Committee. He was the only person to notice the biggest cyberattack in
history! Nothing suspicious about that.
Alperovitch and the DNC
After CrowdStrike was hired as an independent "vendor" by the DNC to investigate a possible
cyberattack on their system, Alperovitch sent the DNC a proprietary software package called
Falcon that monitors the networks of its clients in real time. According to Alperovitch,
Falcon "lit up," within ten seconds of being installed at the DNC. Alperovitch had his
"proof" in TEN SECONDS that Russia was in the network. This "alleged" evidence of Russian
hacking has yet to be shared with anyone.
As Donald Trump has pointed out, the FBI, the agency that should have been immediately
involved in hacking that effects "National Security," has yet to even examine the DNC system to
begin an investigation. Instead, the FBI and 16 other U.S. "intelligence" agencies simply
"agree" with Obama's most trusted "cyberwarfare" expert Dmitri Alperovitch's "TEN SECOND"
assessment that produced no evidence to support the claim.
Also remember that it is only Alperovitch and CrowdStrike that claim to have evidence
that it was Russian hackers . In fact, only two hackers were found to have been in the
system and were both identified by Alperovitch as Russian FSB (CIA) and the Russian GRU (DoD).
It is only Alperovitch who claims that he knows that it is Putin behind these two hackers.
Alperovitch failed to mention in his conclusive "TEN SECOND" assessment that Guccifer 2.0
had already hacked the DNC and made available to the public the documents he hacked –
before Alperovitch did his ten second assessment. Alperovitch reported that no other hackers
were found, ignoring the fact that Guccifer 2.0 had already hacked and released DNC documents
to the public. Alperovitch's assessment also goes directly against Julian Assange's repeated
statements that the DNC leaks did not come from the Russians.
The ridiculously fake cyber-attack assessment done by Alperovitch and CrowdStrike
naïvely flies in the face of the fact that a DNC insider admitted that he had released the
DNC documents. Julian Assange implied in an interview that the murdered Democratic
National Committee staffer, Seth Rich, was the source of a trove of damaging emails the website
posted just days before the party's convention. Seth was on his way to testify about the DNC
leaks to the FBI when he was shot dead in the street.
It is also absurd to hear Alperovitch state that the Russian FSB (equivalent to the CIA) had
been monitoring the DNC site for over a year and had done nothing. No attack, no theft, and no
harm was done to the system by this "false-flag cyber-attack" on the DNC – or at least,
Alperovitch "reported" there was an attack. The second hacker, the supposed Russian military
(GRU – like the U.S. DoD) hacker, had just entered the system two weeks before and also
had done "nothing" but observe.
It is only Alperovitch's word that reports that the Russian FSB was "looking for files on
Donald Trump."
It is only this false claim that spuriously ties Trump to the "alleged"
attack. It is also only Alperovitch who believes that this hack that was supposedly "looking
for Trump files" was an attempt to "influence" the election. No files were found about Trump by
the second hacker, as we know from Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0's leaks. To confabulate that
"Russian's hacked the DNC to influence the elections" is the claim of one well-known Russian
spy. Then, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously confirm that Alperovitch is correct
– even though there is no evidence and no investigation was ever conducted .
How does Dmitri Alperovitch have such power? Why did Obama again and again use Alperovitch's
company, CrowdStrike, when they have miserably failed to stop further cyber-attacks on the
systems they were hired to protect? Why should anyone believe CrowdStrikes false-flag
report?
After documents from the DNC continued to leak, and Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks made
CrowdStrike's report look foolish, Alperovitch decided the situation was far worse than he had
reported. He single-handedly concluded that the Russians were conducting an "influence
operation" to help win the election for Trump . This false assertion had absolutely no
evidence to back it up.
On July 22, three days before the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped a
massive cache of emails that had been "stolen" (not hacked) from the DNC. Reporters soon found
emails suggesting that the DNC leadership had favored Hillary Clinton in her primary race
against Bernie Sanders, which led Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair, along with three
other officials, to resign.
Just days later, it was discovered that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
(DCCC) had been hacked. CrowdStrike was called in again and once again, Alperovitch immediately
"believed" that Russia was responsible. A lawyer for the DCCC gave Alperovitch permission to
confirm the leak and to name Russia as the suspected author. Two weeks later, files from the
DCCC began to appear on Guccifer 2.0's website. This time Guccifer released information about
Democratic congressional candidates who were running close races in Florida, Ohio, Illinois,
and Pennsylvania. On August 12, Guccifer went further, publishing a spreadsheet that included
the personal email addresses and phone numbers of nearly two hundred Democratic members of
Congress.
Once again, Guccifer 2.0 proved Alperovitch and CrowdStrike's claims to be grossly incorrect
about the hack originating from Russia, with Putin masterminding it all. Nancy Pelosi offered
members of Congress Alperovitch's suggestion of installing Falcon , the system that
failed to stop cyberattacks at the DNC, on all congressional laptops.
Key Point: Once Falcon was installed on the computers of members of the U.S.
Congress, CrowdStrike had even further full access into U.S. government accounts.
Alperovitch's "Unbelievable" History
Dmitri was born in 1980 in Moscow where his father, Michael, was a nuclear physicist, (so
Dmitri claims). Dmitri's father was supposedly involved at the highest levels of Russian
nuclear science. He also claims that his father taught him to write code as a child.
In 1990, his father was sent to Maryland as part of a nuclear-safety training program for
scientists. In 1994, Michael Alperovitch was granted a visa to Canada, and a year later the
family moved to Chattanooga, where Michael took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
While Dmitri Alperovitch was still in high school, he and his father started an
encryption-technology business. Dmitri studied computer science at Georgia Tech and went on to
work at an antispam software firm. It was at this time that he realized that cyber-defense was
more about psychology than it was about technology. A very odd thing to conclude.
Dmitri Alperovitch posed as a "Russian gangster" on spam discussion forums which brought his
illegal activity to the attention of the FBI – as a criminal. In 2005, Dmitri flew to
Pittsburgh to meet an FBI agent named Keith Mularski, who had been asked to lead an undercover
operation against a vast Russian credit-card-theft syndicate. Alperovitch worked closely with
Mularski's sting operation which took two years, but it ultimately brought about fifty-six
arrests. Dmitri Alperovitch then became a pawn of the FBI and CIA.
In 2010, while he was at McAfee, the head of cybersecurity at Google told Dmitri that Gmail
accounts belonging to human-rights activists in China had been breached. Google suspected the
Chinese government. Alperovitch found that the breach was unprecedented in scale; it affected
more than a dozen of McAfee's clients and involved the Chinese government. Three days after his
supposed discovery, Alperovitch was on a plane to Washington where he had been asked to vet a
paragraph in a speech by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
2014, Sony called in CrowdStrike to investigate a breach of its network. Alperovitch needed
just "two hours" to identify North Korea as the adversary. Executives at Sony asked Alperovitch
to go public with the information immediately, but it took the FBI another three weeks before
it confirmed the attribution.
Alperovitch then developed a list of "usual suspects" who were well-known hackers who had
identifiable malware that they commonly used. Many people use the same malware and
Alperovitch's obsession with believing he has the only accurate list of hackers in the world is
plain idiocy exacerbated by the U.S. government's belief in his nonsense. Alperovitch even
speaks like a "nut-case" in his personal Twitters, which generally have absolutely no
references to the technology he is supposedly the best at in the entire world.
Dmitri – Front Man for His Father's Russian Espionage Mission
After taking a close look at the disinformation around Dmitri and his father, it is clear to
see that Michael Alperovitch became a CIA operative during his first visit to America.
Upon his return to Russia, he stole the best Russian encryption codes that were used to protect
the top-secret work of nuclear physics in which his father is alleged to have been a major
player. Upon surrendering the codes to the CIA when he returned to Canada, the CIA made it
possible for a Russian nuclear scientist to become an American citizen overnight and gain a
top-secret security clearance to work at the Oakridge plant, one of the most secure and
protected nuclear facilities in America . Only the CIA can transform a Russian into an
American with a top-secret clearance overnight.
We can see on Michael Alperovitch's Linked In page that he went from one fantastically
top-secret job to the next without a break from the time he entered America. He seemed to be on
a career path to work in every major U.S. agency in America. In every job he was hired as the
top expert in the field and the leader of the company. All of these jobs after the first one
were in cryptology, not nuclear physics. As a matter of fact, Michael became the top expert in
America overnight and has stayed the top expert to this day.
Most of the work of cyber-security is creating secure interactions on a non-secure system
like the Internet. The cryptologist who assigns the encryption codes controls the system
from that point on .
Key Point: Cryptologists are well known for leaving a "back-door" in the base-code so
that they can always have over-riding control.
Michael Alperovitch essentially has the "codes" for all Department of Defense sites, the
Treasury, the State Department, cell-phones, satellites, and public media . There is hardly
any powerful agency or company that he has not written the "codes" for. One might ask, why do
American companies and the U.S. government use his particular codes? What are so special about
Michael's codes?
Stolen Russian Codes
In December, Obama ordered the U.S. military to conduct cyberattacks against Russia in
retaliation for the alleged DNC hacks. All of the attempts to attack Russia's military and
intelligence agencies failed miserably. Russia laughed at Obama's attempts to hack their
systems. Even the Russian companies targeted by the attacks were not harmed by Obama's
cyber-attacks. Hardly any news of these massive and embarrassing failed cyber-attacks were
reported by the Main Stream Media. The internet has been scrubbed clean of the reports that
said Russia's cyber-defenses were impenetrable due to the sophistication of their encryption
codes.
Michael Alperovitch was in possession of those impenetrable codes when he was a top
scientist in Russia. It was these very codes that he shared with the CIA on his first trip
to America . These codes got him spirited into America and "turned into" the best
cryptologist in the world. Michael is simply using the effective codes of Russia to design
his codes for the many systems he has created in America for the CIA .
KEY POINT: It is crucial to understand at this junction that the CIA is not solely working
for America . The CIA works for itself and there are three branches to the CIA – two of
which are hostile to American national interests and support globalism.
Michael and Dmitri Alperovitch work for the CIA (and international intelligence
corporations) who support globalism . They, and the globalists for whom they work, are
not friends of America or Russia. It is highly likely that the criminal activities of Dmitri,
which were supported and sponsored by the FBI, created the very hackers who he often claims are
responsible for cyberattacks. None of these supposed "attackers" have ever been found or
arrested; they simply exist in the files of CrowdStrike and are used as the "usual culprits"
when the FBI or CIA calls in Dmitri to give the one and only opinion that counts. Only Dmitri's
"suspicions" are offered as evidence and yet 17 U.S. intelligence agencies stand behind the
CrowdStrike report and Dmitri's suspicions.
Michael Alperovitch – Russian Spy with the Crypto-Keys
Essentially, Michael Alperovitch flies under the false-flag of being a cryptologist who
works with PKI. A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for the creation, storage, and
distribution of digital certificates which are used to
verify that a particular public key belongs to a certain entity. The PKI creates digital
certificates which map public keys to entities, securely stores these certificates in a central
repository and revokes them if needed. Public key cryptography is a
cryptographic
technique that enables entities to securely communicate on an insecure
public network (the Internet), and reliably verify the identity of an entity via digital signatures .
Digital signatures use Certificate Authorities to digitally sign and publish the public key
bound to a given user. This is done using the CIA's own private key, so that trust in the user
key relies on one's trust in the validity of the CIA's key. Michael Alperovitch is
considered to be the number one expert in America on PKI and essentially controls the
market .
Michael's past is clouded in confusion and lies. Dmitri states that his father was a nuclear
physicist and that he came to America the first time in a nuclear based shared program between
America and Russia. But if we look at his current personal Linked In page, Michael claims he
has a Master Degree in Applied Mathematics from Gorky State University. From 1932 to 1956, its
name was State University of Gorky. Now it is known as Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni
Novgorod – National Research University (UNN), also known as Lobachevsky University. Does
Michael not even know the name of the University he graduated from? And when does a person with
a Master's Degree become a leading nuclear physicist who comes to "visit" America. In Michael's
Linked In page there is a long list of his skills and there is no mention of nuclear
physics.
Also on Michael Alperovitch's Linked In page we find some of his illustrious history that
paints a picture of either the most brilliant mind in computer security, encryption, and
cyberwarfare, or a CIA/FBI backed Russian spy. Imagine that out of all the people in the world
to put in charge of the encryption keys for the Department of Defense, the U.S. Treasury, U.S.
military satellites, the flow of network news, cell phone encryption, the Pathfire (media control)
Program, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Global Information Grid, and TriCipher
Armored Credential System among many others, the government hires a Russian spy . Go
figure.
Michael Alperovitch's Linked In Page
Education:
Gorky State University, Russia, MS in Applied Mathematics
VT
IDirect -2014 – Designing security architecture for satellite communications
including cryptographic protocols, authentication.
Principal SME (Contractor)
DISA
-Defense Information Systems Agency (Manager of the Global Information Grid) – 2012-2014
– Worked on PKI and identity management projects for DISA utilizing Elliptic Curve
Cryptography. Performed application security and penetration testing.
Technical Lead (Contractor)
U.S.
Department of the Treasury – 2011 – Designed enterprise validation service
architecture for PKI certificate credentials with Single Sign On authentication.
Comtech Mobile
Datacom – 2007-2010 – Subject matter expert on latest information security
practices, including authentication, encryption and key management.
BellSouth – 2003-2006 – Designed and built server-side Jabber-based messaging
platform with Single Sign On authentication.
Principal Software Research Engineer
Pathfire – 2001-2002
– Designed and developed Digital Rights Management Server for Video on Demand and content
distribution applications. Pathfire provides digital media distribution and management
solutions to the television, media, and entertainment industries. The company offers Digital
Media Gateway, a digital IP store-and-forward platform, delivering news stories, syndicated
programming, advertising spots, and video news releases to broadcasters. It provides solutions
for content providers and broadcasters, as well as station solutions.
Obama – No Friend of America
Obama is no friend of America in the war against cyber-attacks. The very agencies and
departments being defended by Michael Alperovitch's "singular and most brilliant" ability to
write encryption codes have all been successfully attacked and compromised since Michael set up
the codes. But we shouldn't worry, because if there is a cyberattack in the Obama
administration, Michael's son Dmitri is called in to "prove" that it isn't the fault of his
father's codes. It was the "damn Russians", or even "Putin himself" who attacked American
networks.
Not one of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies is capable of figuring out a successful
cyberattack against America without Michael and Dmitri's help. Those same 17 U.S. intelligence
agencies were not able to effectively launch a successful cyberattack against Russia. It seems
like the Russian's have strong codes and America has weak codes. We can thank Michael and
Dmitri Alperovitch for that.
It is clear that there was no DNC hack beyond Guccifer 2.0. Dmitri Alperovitch is a
"frontman" for his father's encryption espionage mission.
Is it any wonder that Trump says that he has "his own people" to deliver his intelligence
to him that is outside of the infiltrated U.S. government intelligence agencies and the Obama
administration ? Isn't any wonder that citizens have to go anywhere BUT the MSM to find
real news or that the new administration has to go to independent news to get good intel?
It is hard to say anything more damnable than to again quote Dmitri on these very
issues: "If someone steals your keys to encrypt the data, it doesn't matter how secure the
algorithms are." Dmitri Alperovitch, founder of CrowdStrike
"... And RUH8 is allied with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike. ..."
"... Russia was probably not one of the hacking groups. The willful destruction of evidence by the DNC themselves probably points to Russia not being one of the those groups. The DNC wouldn't destroy evidence that supported their position. Also, government spy agencies keep info like that closely held. They might leak out tidbits, but they don't do wholesale dumps, like, ever. ..."
"... That's what the DNC is lying about. Not that hacks happened (they undoubtedly did), but about who did them (probably not Russian gov), and if hacks mattered (they didn't since everything was getting leaked anyway). ..."
"... The DNC/Mueller/etc are lying, but like most practiced liars they're mixing the lies with half-truths and unrelated facts to muddy the waters: ..."
"... An interesting question is, since it's basically guaranteed the DNC got hacked, but probably not by the Russians, is, what groups did hack the DNC, and why did the DNC scramble madly to hide their identities? ..."
"... And while you think about that question, consider the close parallel with the Awan case, where Dems were ostensibly the victims, but they again scrambled to cover up for the people who supposedly harmed them. level 2 ..."
"... DNC wasn't even hacked. Emails were leaked. They didn't even examine the server. Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools that we know about from wikileaks. It's important to know how each new lie is a lie. But man I am just so done with all this Russia shit. level 2 ..."
"... Crowdstrike claims that malware was found on DNC server. I agree that this has nothing to do with the Wikileaks releases. What I am wondering is whether Crowdstrike may have arranged for the DNC to be hacked so that Russia could be blamed. Continue this thread level 1 ..."
"... George Eliason promises additional essays: *The next articles, starting with one about Fancy Bear's hot/cold ongoing relationship with Bellingcat which destroys the JIT investigation, will showcase the following: Fancy Bear worked with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian government providing Information War material as evidence for MH17: ..."
"... Fancy Bear is an inside unit of the Atlantic Council and their Digital Forensics Lab ..."
Cyberanalyst George Eliason has written some intriguing blogs recently claiming that the
"Fancy Bear" which hacked the DNC server in mid-2016 was in fact a branch of Ukrainian intelligence linked to the Atlantic
Council and Crowdstrike. I invite you to have a go at one of his recent essays:
Since I am not very computer savvy and don't know much about the world of hackers - added
to the fact that Eliason's writing is too cute and convoluted - I have difficulty navigating Eliason's thought. Nonetheless,
here is what I can make of Eliasons' claims, as supported by independent literature:
Russian hacker Konstantin Kozlovsky, in Moscow court filings, has claimed that he did the
DNC hack – and can prove it, because he left some specific code on the DNC server.
Kozlovsky states that he did so by order of Dimitry Dokuchaev (formerly of the FSB, and
currently in prison in Russia on treason charges) who works with the Russian traitor hacker group Shaltai Boltai.
According to Eliason, Shaltai Boltai works in collaboration with the Ukrainian hacker group
RUH8, a group of neo-Nazis (Privat Sektor) who are affiliated with Ukrainian intelligence.
And RUH8 is allied with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike.
Cyberexpert Jeffrey Carr has stated that RUH8 has the X-Agent malware which our
intelligence community has erroneously claimed is possessed only by Russian intelligence, and used by "Fancy Bear".
This might help explain why Adam Carter has determined that some of the malware found on
the DNC server was compiled AFTER Crowdstrike was working on the DNC server – Crowdstrike was in collusion with Fancy Bear
(RUH8).
In other words, Crowdstrike likely arranged for a
hack by Ukrainian intelligence that they could then attribute to Russia.
As far as I can tell, none of this is pertinent to how Wikileaks obtained their DNC emails,
which most likely were leaked.
How curious that our Deep State and the recent Mueller indictment have had nothing to say
about Kozlovsky's confession - whom I tend to take seriously because he offers a simple way to confirm his claim. Also
interesting that the FBI has shown no interest in looking at the DNC server to check whether Kozlovsky's code is there.
Its worth noting that Dimitri Alperovich's (Crowdstrike) hatred of Putin is
second only to Hillary's hatred for taking responsibility for her actions.
level 1
Thanks - I'll continue to follow Eliason's work. The thesis that Ukrainian
intelligence is hacking a number of targets so that Russia gets blamed for it has intuitive appeal.
level 1
and have to cringe.
Any hacks weren't related to Wikileaks, who got their info from leakers, but
that is not the same thing as no hack. Leaks and hacks aren't mutually exclusive. They actually occur together
pretty commonly.
DNC's security was utter shit. Systems with shit security and obviously
valuable info usually get hacked by multiple groups. In the case of the DNC, Hillary's email servers, etc.,
it's basically impossible they weren't hacked by dozens of intruders. A plastic bag of 100s will not sit
untouched on a NYC street corner for 4 weeks. Not. fucking. happening.
Interestingly, Russia was probably not
one of the hacking groups. The willful destruction of evidence by the DNC themselves probably points to Russia
not being one of the those groups. The DNC wouldn't destroy evidence that supported their position. Also,
government spy agencies keep info like that closely held. They might leak out tidbits, but they don't do
wholesale dumps, like, ever.
That's
what the DNC is lying about.
Not that hacks
happened
(they undoubtedly did), but about
who
did them (probably not Russian gov), and if hacks mattered
(they didn't since everything was getting leaked anyway).
The DNC/Mueller/etc are lying, but like most practiced liars they're mixing
the lies with half-truths and unrelated facts to muddy the waters:
Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools
Yes, but that spoofed 'evidence' is not the direct opposite of the truth,
like I see people assuming. Bad assumption, and the establishment plays on that to make critic look bad. The
spoofed evidence is just mud.
An interesting question is, since it's basically guaranteed the DNC got
hacked, but probably not by the Russians, is, what groups
did
hack the
DNC, and why did the DNC scramble madly to hide their identities?
And while you think about that question, consider the close parallel with
the Awan case, where Dems were ostensibly the victims, but they again scrambled to cover up for the people who
supposedly harmed them.
level 2
What's hilarious about the 2 down-votes is I can't tell if their from
pro-Russiagate trolls, or from people who who can't get past binary thinking.
level 1
DNC wasn't even hacked. Emails were leaked. They didn't even examine the
server.
Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools that we know about
from wikileaks. It's important to know how each new lie is a lie. But man I am just so done
with all this Russia shit.
level 2
Crowdstrike claims that malware was found on DNC server. I agree that this
has nothing to do with the Wikileaks releases. What I am wondering is whether Crowdstrike may have arranged for
the DNC to be hacked so that Russia could be blamed.
Continue this thread
level 1
George Eliason promises additional essays: *The next articles, starting with one about Fancy Bear's hot/cold ongoing
relationship with Bellingcat which destroys the JIT investigation, will showcase the following: Fancy Bear worked with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian government providing
Information War material as evidence for MH17:
Fancy Bear is an inside unit of the Atlantic Council and their Digital
Forensics Lab
Fancy Bear worked with Crowdstrike and Dimitri Alperovich Fancy Bear is
Ukrainian Intelligence
How Fancy Bear tried to sway the US election for Team Hillary
Fancy Bear worked against US Intel gathering by providing consistently
fraudulent data
Fancy Bear contributed to James Clapper's January 2017 ODNI Report on Fancy
Bear and Russian Influence. [You really can't make this shit up.]
Fancy Bear had access to US government secure servers while working as
foreign spies.*
level 1
Fancy Bear (also know as Strontium Group, or APT28) is a Ukrainian cyber espionage group. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike incorrectly has said
with a medium level of confidence that it is associated with the Russian military intelligence
agency GRU . CrowdStrike
founder,
Dmitri Alperovitch , has colluded with Fancy Bear. American journalist
George Eliason has written extensively on the subject.
There are a couple of caveats that need to be made when identifying the Fancy Bear hackers.
The first is the identifier used by Mueller as Russian FSB and GRU may have been true- 10 years
ago. This group was on the run trying to stay a step ahead of Russian law enforcement until
October 2016. So we have part of the Fancy bear hacking group identified as Ruskie traitors and
possibly former Russian state security. The majority of the group are Ukrainians making up
Ukraine's Cyber Warfare groups.
Eliason lives and works in Donbass. He has been interviewed by and provided analysis for RT,
the BBC , and Press-TV. His
articles have been published in the Security Assistance Monitor, Washingtons Blog, OpedNews,
the Saker, RT, Global Research, and RINF, and the Greanville Post among others. He has been
cited and republished by various academic blogs including Defending History, Michael Hudson,
SWEDHR, Counterpunch, the Justice Integrity Project, among others.
Fancy Bear is Ukrainian IntelligenceShaltai Boltai
The "Fancy Bear hackers" may have been given the passwords to get into the servers at the
DNC because they were part of the Team Clinton opposition research team. It was part of their
job.
According to Politico ,
"In an interview this month, at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing
ethnic communities -- including Ukrainian-Americans -- she said that, when Trump's unlikely
presidential campaign. Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev
and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private
intelligence operatives. While her consulting work began surging in late 2015, she began
focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump's ties to Russia, as well."
[1]
The only investigative journalists, government officials, and private intelligence
operatives that work together in 2014-2015-2016 Ukraine are Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta, Ukraine
Cyber Alliance, and the Ministry of Information.
All of these hacking and information operation groups work for Andrea
Chalupa with EuroMaidanPR and Irena
Chalupa at the Atlantic Council. Both Chalupa sisters work directly with the Ukrainian
government's intelligence and propaganda arms.
Since 2014 in Ukraine, these are the only OSINT, hacking, Intel, espionage , terrorist , counter-terrorism, cyber, propaganda , and info war channels
officially recognized and directed by Ukraine's Information Ministry. Along with their American
colleagues, they populate the hit-for-hire website Myrotvorets with people who stand against
Ukraine's criminal activities.
The hackers, OSINT, Cyber, spies, terrorists, etc. call themselves volunteers to keep safe
from State level retaliation, even though a child can follow the money. As volunteers motivated
by politics and patriotism they are protected to a degree from retribution.
They don't claim State sponsorship or governance and the level of attack falls below the
threshold of military action. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had a lot of latitude for
making the attribution Russian, even though the attacks came from Ukrainian Intelligence. Based
on how the rules of the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber are
written, because the few members of the coalition from Shaltai Boltai are Russian in
nationality, Fancy Bear can be attributed as a Russian entity for the purposes of retribution.
The caveat is if the attribution is proven wrong, the US will be liable for damages caused to
the State which in this case is Russia.
How large is the Fancy Bear unit? According to their propaganda section InformNapalm, they
have the ability to research and work in over 30 different languages.
This can be considered an Information Operation against the people of the United States and
of course Russia. After 2013, Shaltay Boltay was no longer physically available to work for
Russia. The Russian hackers were in Ukraine working for the Ukrainian government's Information
Ministry which is in charge of the cyber war. They were in Ukraine until October 2016 when they
were tricked to return to Moscow and promptly arrested for treason.
From all this information we know the Russian component of Team Fancy Bear is Shaltai
Boltai. We know the Ukrainian Intel component is called CyberHunta and Ukraine Cyber Alliance
which includes the hacker group RUH8. We know both groups work/ worked for Ukrainian
Intelligence. We know they are grouped with InformNapalm which is Ukraine's OSINT unit. We know
their manager is a Ukrainian named Kristina Dobrovolska. And lastly, all of the above work
directly with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich.
In short, the Russian-Ukrainian partnership that became Fancy Bear started in late 2013 to
very early 2014 and ended in October 2016 in what appears to be a squabble over the alleged
data from the Surkov leak.
But during 2014, 2015, and 2016 Shaltai Boltai, the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, and CyberHunta
went to work for the DNC as opposition researchers .
The
First Time Shaltai Boltai was Handed the Keys to US Gov Servers
The setup to this happened long before the partnership with Ukrainian Intel hackers and
Russia's Shaltai Boltai was forged. The hack that gained access to US top-secret servers
happened just after the partnership was cemented after Euro-Maidan.
In August 2009 Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department Huma Abedin
sent the passwords to her Government laptop to her Yahoo mail account. On August 16, 2010,
Abedin received an email titled "Re: Your yahoo account. We can see where this is going, can't
we?
"After Abedin sent an unspecified number of sensitive emails to her Yahoo account, half a
billion Yahoo accounts were hacked by Russian cybersecurity expert and Russian intelligence
agent, Igor Sushchin, in 2014. The hack, one of the largest in history, allowed Sushchin's
associates to access email accounts into 2015 and 2016."
Igor Sushchin was part of the Shaltai Boltai hacking group that is charged with the Yahoo
hack.
The time frame has to be noted. The hack happened in 2014. Access to the email accounts
continued through 2016. The Ukrainian Intel partnership was already blossoming and Shaltai
Boltai was working from Kiev, Ukraine.
So when we look at the INFRASTRUCTURE HACKS, WHITE HOUSE HACKS, CONGRESS, start with looking
at the time frame. Ukraine had the keys already in hand in 2014.
Alexandra
Chalupa hired this particular hacking terrorist group, which Dimitry Alperovich and
Crowdstrike dubbed "Fancy Bear", in 2015 at the latest. While the Ukrainian hackers worked for
the DNC, Fancy Bear had to send in progress reports, turn in research, and communicate on the
state of the projects they were working on. Let's face it, once you're in, setting up your
Fancy Bear toolkit doesn't get any easier. This is why I said the DNC hack isn't the big crime.
It's a big con and all the parties were in on it.
Hillary Clinton exposed secrets to hacking threats by using private email instead of secured
servers. Given the information provided she was probably being monitored by our intrepid
Ruskie-Ukie union made in hell hackers. Anthony Weiner exposed himself and his wife
Huma Abedin using
Weiner's computer for top-secret State Department emails. And of course Huma Abedin exposed
herself along with her top-secret passwords at Yahoo and it looks like the hackers the DNC hired to
do opposition research hacked her.
Here's a question. Did Huma Abedin have Hillary Clinton's passwords for her private email
server? It would seem logical given her position with Clinton at the State Department and
afterward. This means that Hillary Clinton and the US government top secret servers were most
likely compromised by Fancy Bear before the DNC and Team Clinton hired them by using legitimate
passwords.
Dobrovolska
Hillary Clinton retained State Dept. top secret clearance passwords for 6 of her former
staff from 2013 through prepping for the 2016 election. [2][3] Alexandra Chalupa was
running a research department that is rich in (foreign) Ukrainian Intelligence operatives,
hackers, terrorists, and a couple Ruskie traitors.
Kristina Dobrovolska was acting as a handler and translator for the US State Department in
2016. She is the Fancy Bear *opposition researcher handler manager. Kristina goes to Washington
to meet with Chalupa.
Alexandra types in her password to show Dobrovolska something she found and her eager to
please Ukrainian apprentice finds the keystrokes are seared into her memory. She tells the
Fancy Bear crew about it and they immediately get to work looking for Trump material on the US
secret servers with legitimate access. I mean, what else could they do with this? Turn over
sensitive information to the ever corrupt Ukrainian government?
According to the Politico article, Alexandra Chalupa was meeting with the Ukrainian embassy
in June of 2016 to discuss getting more help sticking it to candidate Trump. At the same time
she was meeting, the embassy had a reception that highlighted female Ukrainian leaders.
Four Verkhovna Rada [parlaiment] deputies there for the event included: Viktoriia Y.
Ptashnyk, Anna A. Romanova, Alyona I. Shkrum, and Taras T. Pastukh. [4]
According to CNN ,
[5] DNC sources said Chalupa
told DNC operatives the Ukrainian government would be willing to deliver damaging information
against Trump's campaign. Later, Chalupa would lead the charge to try to unseat president-elect
Trump starting on Nov 10, 2016.
Accompanying them Kristina Dobrovolska who was a U.S. Embassy-assigned government liaison
and translator who escorted the delegates from Kyiv during their visits to Albany and
Washington.
Kristina Dobrovolska is the handler manager working with Ukraine's DNC Fancy Bear Hackers.
[6] She took the Rada
[parliament] members to dinner to meet Joel Harding who designed Ukraine's infamous Information
Policy which opened up their kill-for-hire-website Myrotvorets. Then she took them to meet the
Ukrainian Diaspora leader doing the hiring. Nestor Paslawsky is the surviving nephew to the
infamous torturer The WWII OUNb leader, Mykola Lebed.
Fancy Bear's Second Chance at Top
Secret Passwords From Team Clinton
One very successful method of hacking is called
social engineering . You gain access to the office space and any related properties and
physically locate the passwords or clues to get you into the hardware you want to hack. This
includes something as simple as looking over the shoulder of the person typing in
passwords.
The Fancy Bear hackers were hired by Alexandra Chalupa to work for DNC opposition research.
On different occasions, Fancy Bear handler Kristina Dobrovolska traveled to the US to meet the
Diaspora leaders, her boss Alexandra Chalupa, Irena Chalupa, Andrea Chalupa, US Dept of State
personnel, and most likely Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich. Alperovich was working with the
hackers in 2015-16. In 2016, the only groups known to have Fancy Bear's signature tools called
X-tunnel and X-Agent were Alperovich, Crowdstrike, and Fancy Bear (Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta,
Ukraine Cyber Alliance, and RUH8/RUX8. Yes, that does explain a few things.
Alleged DNC
hack
There were multiple DNC hacks. There is also clear proof supporting the download to a USB
stick and subsequent information exchange (leak) to Wikileaks . All are separate events.
The group I previously identified as Fancy Bear was given access to request password
privileges at the DNC. And it looks like the DNC provided them with it.
the Podesta email hack looks like a revenge hack.
The reason Republican opposition research files were stolen can be put into context now
because we know who the hackers are and what motivates them.
At the same time this story developed, it overshadowed the Hillary Clinton email scandal. It
is a matter of public record that Team Clinton provided the DNC hackers with passwords to
State Department
servers on at least 2 occasions, one wittingly and one not. Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian
Intelligence Operators.
If the leak came through Seth Rich , it may have been because he saw
foreign Intel operatives given this access from the presumed winners of the 2016 US presidential
election . The leaker may
have been trying to do something about it. I'm curious what information Wikileaks might
have.
Alperovitch and Fancy Bear
George Eliason, Washingtonsblog: Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell
Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear. investigated. [7]
In the wake of the JAR-16-20296 dated December 29, 2016 about hacking and influencing
the 2016 election, the need for real evidence is clear. The joint report adds nothing
substantial to the October 7th report. It relies on proofs provided by the cyber security
firm Crowdstrike that is clearly not on
par with intelligence findings or evidence. At the top of the report is an "as is"
statement showing this.
The difference bet enough evidence is provided to warrant an investigation of
specific parties for the DNC hacks. The real story involves specific anti-American actors
that need to be investigated for real crimes. For instance, the malware used was an
out-dated version just waiting to be found. The one other interesting point is that the
Russian malware called Grizzly Steppe is from Ukraine. How did Crowdstrike miss this when
it is their business to know?
The bar for identification set by Crowdstrike has never been able to get beyond words
like probably, maybe, could be, or should be, in their attribution. The bar Dimitri
Alperovitch set for identifying the hackers involved is that low. Other than asking
America to trust them, how many solid facts has Alperovitch provided to back his claim of
Russian involvement?
information from outside intelligence agencies has the value of rumor or
unsubstantiated information at best according to policy. Usable intelligence needs to be
free from partisan politics and verifiable. Intel agencies noted back in the early 90's
that every private actor in the information game was radically political.
Alperovitch first gained notice when he was the VP in charge of threat research with
McAfee. Asked to comment on Alperovitch's discovery of Russian hacks on Larry King, John
McAfee had this to say. "Based on all of his experience, McAfee does not believe that
Russians were behind the hacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC), John Podesta's
emails, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. As he told RT, "if it looks like
the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the Russians."
How does Crowdstrike's story part with reality? First is the admission that it is
probably, maybe, could be Russia hacking the DNC. "Intelligence agencies do not have
specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin 'directing' the identified
individuals to pass the Democratic emails to Wiki Leaks." The public evidence never goes
beyond the word possibility. While never going beyond that or using facts, Crowdstrike
insists that it's Russia behind both Clinton's and the Ukrainian losses.
NBC carried the story because one of the partners in Crowdstrike is also a consultant
for NBC. According to NBC the story reads like this."The company, Crowdstrike, was hired
by the DNC to investigate the hack and issued a report publicly attributing it to Russian
intelligence. One of Crowdstrike's senior executives is Shawn Henry , a former senior FBI
official who consults for NBC News.
In June, Crowdstrike went public with its findings that two separate Russian
intelligence agencies had hacked the DNC. One, which Crowdstrike and other researchers
call Cozy Bear, is believed to be linked to Russia's CIA, known as the FSB. The other,
known as Fancy Bear, is believed to be tied to the military intelligence agency, called
the GRU." The information is so certain the level of proof never rises above "believed to
be." According to the December 12th Intercept article "Most importantly, the Post
adds that "intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in
the Kremlin 'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to
WikiLeaks."
The SBU, Olexander Turchinov, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense all agree that
Crowdstrike is dead wrong in this assessment. Although subtitles aren't on it, the former
Commandant of Ukrainian Army Headquarters thanks God Russia never invaded or Ukraine
would have been in deep trouble. How could Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike be this
wrong on easily checked detail and still get this much media attention?
Crowdstrike CEO Dmitri Alperovitch story about Russian hacks that cost Hillary
Clinton the election was broadsided by the SBU (Ukrainian Intelligence and Security) in
Ukraine. If Dimitri Alperovitch is working for Ukrainian Intelligence and is providing
intelligence to 17 US Intelligence Agencies is it a conflict of interest?
Is giving misleading or false information to 17 US Intelligence Agencies a crime? If
it's done by a cyber security industry leader like Crowdstrike should that be
investigated? If unwinding the story from the "targeting of Ukrainian volunteers" side
isn't enough, we should look at this from the American perspective. How did the Russia
influencing the election and DNC hack story evolve? Who's involved? Does this pose
conflicts of interest for Dmitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? And let's face it, a
hacking story isn't complete until real hackers with the skills, motivation, and reason
are exposed.
According to journalist and DNC activist Andrea Chalupa on her Facebook page "After
Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter to a
meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns
within the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. "That's when we knew it was the
Russians," said a Democratic Party source who has been directly involved in the internal
probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, "we told her
to stop her research."" July 25, 2016
If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her
sister Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news.
The DNC hacking investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by
Russian actors based on the work done byAlexandra Chalupa? That is the
conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the
Russian government connection.
How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he
should have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a
presidential election in a new direction. According to Esquire.com, Alperovitch has
vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the past. Because of
his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said the
measures taken were directly because of his work.
Alperovitch's relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian
propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers [show a conflict of interest]. When
it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that tried hard to
influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016.
The Chalupas are not Democrat or Republican. They are OUNb. The OUNb worked hard
to start a war between the USA and Russia for the last 50 years. According to the
Ukrainian Weekly in a rare open statement of their existence in 2011, "Other
statements were issued in the Ukrainian language by the leadership of the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (B) and the International Conference in
Support of Ukraine. The OUN (Bandera wing) called for" What is
OUNb Bandera? They follow the same political policy and platform that was developed
in the 1930's by Stepan Bandera . When these
people go to a Holocaust memorial they are celebrating
both the dead and the OUNb SS that killed.[8] There is no
getting around this fact. The OUNb have no concept of democratic values and want an
authoritarian
fascism .
Alexandra Chalupa- According to the Ukrainian Weekly , [9]
"The effort, known as Digital Miadan, gained momentum following the initial Twitter storms.
Leading the effort were: Lara Chelak, Andrea Chalupa, Alexandra Chalupa, Constatin Kostenko
and others." The Digital Maidan was also how they raised money for the coup. This was how the
Ukrainian emigres bought the bullets that were used on Euromaidan. Ukraine's chubby nazi,
Dima Yarosh stated openly he was taking money from the Ukrainian emigres during Euromaidan
and Pravy Sektor still fundraises openly in North America. The "Sniper Massacre" on the
Maidan in Ukraine by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottowa shows clearly detailed
evidence how the massacre happened. It has Pravy Sektor confessions that show who created the
"heavenly hundred. Their admitted involvement as leaders of Digital Maidan by both Chalupas
is a clear violation of the Neutrality Act and has up to a 25 year prison sentence attached
to it because it ended in a coup.
Andrea Chalupa-2014, in a Huff Post article Sept. 1 2016, Andrea Chalupa
described Sviatoslav Yurash as one of Ukraine's important "dreamers." He is a young
activist that founded Euromaidan Press. Beyond the gushing glow what she doesn't say
is who he actually is. Sviatoslav Yurash was Dmitri Yarosh's spokesman just after
Maidan. He is a hardcore Ukrainian nationalist and was rewarded with the Deputy
Director position for the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) in Kiev.
In January, 2014 when he showed up at the Maidan protests he was 17 years old. He
became the foreign language media representative for Vitali Klitschko, Arseni
Yatsenyuk, and Oleh Tyahnybok. All press enquiries went through Yurash. To meet
Dimitri Yurash you had to go through Sviatoslav Yurash as a Macleans reporter found
out.
At 18 years old, Sviatoslav Yurash became the spokesman for Ministry of Defense
of Ukraine under Andrei Paruby. He was Dimitri Yarosh's spokesman and can be seen
either behind Yarosh on videos at press conferences or speaking ahead of him to
reporters. From January 2014 onward, to speak to Dimitri Yarosh, you set up an
appointment with Yurash.
Andrea Chalupa has worked with Yurash's Euromaidan Press which is associated with
Informnapalm.org and supplies the state level hackers for Ukraine.
Irene Chalupa- Another involved Chalupa we need to cover to do the story justice
is Irene Chalupa. From her bio– Irena Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the
Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. She is also a senior correspondent
at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where she has worked for more than
twenty years. Ms. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the Atlantic Council,
where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor
for Ukraine's propaganda channel org She is also a Ukrainian emigre leader.
According to Robert Parry's article [10] At the forefront
of people that would have taken senior positions in a Clinton administration and
especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council . Their main
goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the CEEC (Central
and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with Russia.
Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you
willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support
throughout the campaign.
What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the
Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship
status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite
conflict of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground
and Clinton needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or
Homeland Security?
When you put someone that has so much to gain in charge of an investigation that
could change an election, that is a conflict of interest. If the think tank is linked
heavily to groups that want war with Russia like the Atlantic Council and the CEEC, it
opens up criminal conspiracy.
If the person in charge of the investigation is a fellow at the think tank that wants
a major conflict with Russia it is a definite conflict of interest. Both the Atlantic
Council and clients stood to gain Cabinet and Policy positions based on how the result of
his work affects the election. It clouds the results of the investigation. In Dmitri
Alperovitch's case, he found the perpetrator before he was positive there was a
crime.
Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence
groups is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and
Informnapalm.org which is the outlet for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers.
When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the
CEO of a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm and
its hackers individually. There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for
the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be
investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government. Crowdstrike is
also following their hack of a Russian government official after the DNC hack. It closely
resembles the same method used with the DNC because it was an email hack.
Crowdstrike's product line includes Falcon Host, Falcon Intelligence, Falcon
Overwatch and Falcon DNS. Is it possible the hackers in Falcons Flame are another service
Crowdstrike offers?
In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA.
[11] They consider the
CIA amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance
is a quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity,
Falcon Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the
Myrotvorets site, Informnapalm analytical agency."
Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he
writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This
image shows Crowdstrike in their network. Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker
network. In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The
network communication goes through a secondary source. Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for
Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence.
The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates
journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could
be on the list.
Should someone tell Dimitri Alperovitch that Gerashchenko, who is now in charge of
Peacekeeper recently threatened president-elect Donald Trump that he would put him on his
"Peacemaker" site as a target? The same has been done with Silvio Berscaloni in the
past.
Trying not to be obvious, the Head of Ukraine's Information Ministry (UA
Intelligence) tweeted something interesting that ties Alperovitch and Crowdstrike to the
Ukrainian Intelligence hackers and the Information Ministry even tighter. This single
tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of Information
Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him and
Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or
shared. If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be
shared heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it
to themselves and not draw unwanted attention.
These same hackers are associated with Alexandra, Andrea, and Irene Chalupa through
the portals and organizations they work with through their OUNb. The hackers are funded
and directed by or through the same OUNb channels that Alperovitch is working for and
with to promote the story of Russian hacking.
When you look at the image for the hacking group in the euromaidanpress article,
one of the hackers identifies themselves as one of Dimitri Yarosh's Pravy Sektor
members by the Pravy Sektor sweatshirt they have on. Noted above, Pravy Sektor
admitted to killing the people at the Maidan protest and sparked the coup.
Going further with the linked Euromaidanpress article the hackers say "Let's
understand that Ukrainian hackers and Russian hackers once constituted a single very
powerful group. Ukrainian hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of
the USA I don't know, why would we need it? We have all the talent and special means
for this. And I don't think that the USA or any NATO country would make such sharp
movements in international politics."
What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it
out for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored,
Russian language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack
they have the tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are
also laughing at US intel efforts.
The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting
a war between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt
Russia worst. Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by
Alperovitch, both he and these hackers need to be investigated.
According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought
the government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of
the personal in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate
the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any
other way," he told me. "I have."
While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism
is not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering
a conflict with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't
serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to
Ukraine.
The evidence presented deserves investigation because it looks like the case for
conflict of interest is the least Dimitri Alperovitch should look forward to. If these
hackers are the real Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, they really did make sharp movements in
international politics. By pawning it off on Russia, they made a worldwide embarrassment
of an outgoing President of the United States and made the President Elect the suspect of
rumor.
Obama, Brazile, Comey, and CrowdStrike
According to Obama the
hacks continued until September 2016. According to ABC, Donna Brazile says the hacks didn't stop
until after the elections in 2016. According to Crowdstrike the hacks continued into
November.
Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile said Russian hackers persisted in trying
to break into the organization's computers "daily, hourly" until after the election --
contradicting President Obama's assertion that the hacking stopped in September after he warned
Russian President Vladimir Putin to "cut it out."-ABC
This time frame gives a lot of latitude to both hacks and leaks happening on that server and
still agrees with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs). According to
Bill
Binney , the former Technical Director for the NSA, the only way that data could move off
the server that fast was through a download to a USB stick. The transfer rate of the file does
not agree with a Guciffer 2.0 hack and the information surrounding Guciffer 2.0 is looking
ridiculous and impossible at best.
The DNC fiasco isn't that important of a crime. The reason I say this is the FBI would have
taken control over material evidence right away. No law enforcement agency or Intel agency ever
did. This means none of them considered it a crime Comey should have any part of investigating.
That by itself presents the one question mark which destroys any hope Mueller has proving law
enforcement maintained a chain of custody for any evidence he introduces.
It also says the US government under Barrack Obama and the victimized DNC saw this as a
purely political event. They didn't want this prosecuted or they didn't think it was
prosecutable.
Once proven it shows a degree of criminality that makes treason almost too light a charge in
federal court. Rest assured this isn't a partisan accusation. Team Clinton and the DNC gets the
spotlight but there are Republicans involved.
Investigative Jouralist George Webb worked at MacAfee and Network Solutions in 2000 when the
CEO Bill Larsen bought a small, Moscow based, hacking and virus writing company to move to
Silicon Valley.
MacAfee also purchased PGP, an open source encryption software developed by privacy advocate
to reduce NSA spying on the public.
The two simultaneous purchase of PGP and the Moscow hacking team by Metwork Solutions was
sponsored by the CIA and FBI in order to crack encrypted communications to write a back door
for law enforcement.
Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named
Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking
scandal - Crowdstrike.
In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry
platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives.
"... This time frame gives a lot of latitude to both hacks and leaks happening on that server and still agrees with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs). According to Bill Binney, the former Technical Director for the NSA, the only way that data could move off the server that fast was through a download to a USB stick. The transfer rate of the file does not agree with a Guciffer 2.0 hack and the information surrounding Guciffer 2.0 is looking ridiculous and impossible at best. ..."
Here's what's different in the information I've compiled.
The group I previously identified as Fancy Bear was given access to request password
privileges at the DNC. And it looks like the DNC provided them with it.
I'll show why the Podesta email hack looks like a revenge hack.
The reason Republican opposition research files were stolen can be put into context now
because we know who the hackers are and what motivates them.
At the same time this story developed, it overshadowed the Hillary Clinton email scandal.
It is a matter of public record that Team Clinton provided the DNC hackers with passwords to
State Department servers on at least 2 occasions, one wittingly and one not. I have already
clearly shown the Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian Intelligence Operators.
This gives some credence to the Seth Rich leak (DNC leak story) as an act of patriotism.
If the leak came through Seth Rich, it may have been because he saw foreign Intel operatives
given this access from the presumed winners of the 2016 US presidential election. No
political operative is going to argue with the presumed president-elect over foreign policy.
The leaker may have been trying to do something about it. I'm curious what information
Wikileaks might have.
The real crime of the DNC hack wasn't the hack.
If only half of the following proved true in context and it's a matter of public record,
that makes the argument to stop funding for Ukraine immediately barring an investigation of
high crimes by Ukrainian Diaspora, Democrat, and Republican leaders in Congress, private
Intel for hire, and Ukrainian Intel's attacks on the US government and political
processes.
Perhaps it's time Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump should consider treason investigations
across the board. Make America great again by bringing justice and civility back.
DNC
Hack – High Crimes or Misdemeanors?
So what went on at the DNC way back in 2016? Do you know? Was it a hack or a leak? Does it
matter?
Recently, an investigative journalist who writes under the name Adam Carter was raked over
the coals. Carter writes at Disobedient
Media and has been providing a lot of
evidence supporting the DNC leak story former Ambassador Craig Murray and Wikileaks claim
happened.
When the smear article came out and apparently it's blossoming into a campaign, a few
people that read both of us wrote to the effect "looks like your work is the only thing left
standing." I immediately rebuffed the idea and said Carter's work stands on its own . It has nothing to do with
anything I've written, researched, or plan to.
I'd say the same about Scott Humor ,
Lee Stranahan ,
Garland Nixon ,
Petri
Krohn , or Steve McIntyre
. And there are many others. There has been a lot of good work on the DNC hacks and 2016
election interference. Oftentimes, what looks like contradictory information is complimentary
because what each journalist is working on shows the story from a different angle.
There are a lot of moving parts to the story and even a small change in focus brings an
entirely new story because it comes from a different direction.
Here's what I mean. If the DNC hack was really a leak, does that kill the "hack" story?
No, it doesn't and I blame a lot of activist journalists for making the assumption that it
has to work this way. If Seth Rich gave Ambassador Craig Murray a USB stick with all the
"hacked info," it doesn't change an iota of what I've written and the evidence you are about
to read stands on its own. But, this has divided people into camps before the whole situation
could be scrutinized and that's still not done yet.
If for example you have a leak on Jan 5th , can you have "a hack" on Jan 6th , 7th, or
8th? Since there is so much crap surrounding the supposed hack such as law enforcement teams
never examining the DNC server or maintaining control of it as evidence, could the hacks have
been a cover-up?
Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile said Russian hackers persisted in
trying to break into the organization's computers "daily, hourly" until after the election
-- contradicting President Obama's assertion that the hacking stopped in September after he
warned Russian President Vladimir Putin to "cut it out."-ABC
This time frame gives a lot of latitude to both hacks and leaks happening on that server
and still agrees with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs). According to
Bill Binney, the former Technical Director for the NSA, the only way that data could move
off the server that
fast was through a download to a USB stick. The transfer rate of the file does not agree
with a Guciffer 2.0 hack and the information surrounding Guciffer 2.0 is looking ridiculous
and impossible at best.
The DNC fiasco isn't that important of a crime. The reason I say this is the FBI would
have taken control over material evidence right away. No law enforcement agency or Intel
agency ever did. This means none of them considered it a crime Comey should have any part of
investigating. That by itself presents the one question mark which destroys any hope Mueller
has proving law enforcement maintained a chain of custody for any evidence he introduces.
It also says the US government under Barrack Obama and the victimized DNC saw this as a
purely political event. They didn't want this prosecuted or they didn't think it was
prosecutable.
Once proven it shows a degree of criminality that makes treason almost too light a charge
in federal court. Rest assured this isn't a partisan accusation. Team Clinton and the DNC
gets the spotlight but there are Republicans involved.
Identifying Team Fancy Bear
There are a couple of caveats that need to be made when
identifying the Fancy Bear hackers . The first is the
identifier used by Mueller as Russian FSB and GRU may have been true- 10 years ago. This
group was on the run trying to stay a step ahead of Russian law enforcement until October
2016. So we have part of the Fancy bear hacking group identified as Ruskie traitors and
possibly former Russian state security. The majority of the group are Ukrainians making up
Ukraine's Cyber Warfare groups.
The hackers, OSINT, Cyber, spies, terrorists, etc call themselves volunteers to keep safe
from State level retaliation, even though a child can follow the money. As volunteers
motivated by politics and patriotism they are protected to a degree from retribution.
They don't claim State sponsorship or governance and the level of attack falls below the
threshold of military action. Mueller has a lot of latitude for making the attribution
Russian, even though the attacks came from Ukrainian Intel. Based on how the rules are
written, because the few members of the coalition from Shaltai Boltai are Russian in
nationality, Fancy Bear can be attributed as a Russian entity for the purposes of
retribution. The caveat is if the attribution is proven wrong, the US will be liable for
damages caused to the State which in this case is Russia.
How large is the Fancy Bear unit? According to their propaganda section InformNapalm, they
have the ability to research and work in over 30 different languages.
This can be considered an Information Operation against the people of the United States
and of course Russia. We'll get to why shortly.
From all this information we know the Russian component of Team Fancy Bear is Shaltai
Boltai. We know the Ukrainian Intel component is called CyberHunta and Ukraine Cyber Alliance
which includes the hacker group RUH8. We know both groups work/ worked for Ukrainian
Intelligence. We know they are grouped with InformNapalm which is Ukraine's OSINT unit. We
know their manager is a Ukrainian named Kristina Dobrovolska. And lastly, all of the above
work directly with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich.
In short, the Russian-Ukrainian partnership that became Fancy Bear started in late 2013 to
very early 2014 and ended in October 2016 in what appears to be a squabble over the alleged
data from the Surkov leak.
But during 2014,2015, and 2016 Shaltai Boltai, the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, and
CyberHunta went to work for the DNC as opposition researchers.
The First Time Shaltai
Boltai was Handed the Keys to US Gov Servers
The setup to this happened long before the partnership with Ukrainian Intel hackers and
Russia's Shaltai Boltai was forged. The hack that gained access to US top-secret servers
happened just after the partnership was cemented after Euro-Maidan.
"After Abedin sent an unspecified number of sensitive emails to her Yahoo account, half a
billion Yahoo accounts were hacked by Russian cybersecurity expert and Russian intelligence
agent, Igor Sushchin, in 2014. The hack, one of the largest in history, allowed Sushchin's
associates to access email accounts into 2015 and 2016."
Igor Sushchin was part of the Shaltai Boltai hacking group that is charged with the Yahoo
hack.
The time frame has to be noted. The hack happened in 2014. Access to the email accounts
continued through 2016. The Ukrainian Intel partnership was already blossoming and Shaltai
Boltai was working from Kiev, Ukraine.
So when we look at the INFRASTRUCTURE HACKS, WHITE HOUSE HACKS, CONGRESS, start with
looking at the time frame. Ukraine had the keys already in hand in 2014.
The DNC's Team
Fancy Bear
The "Fancy Bear hackers" may have been given the passwords to get into the servers at the
DNC because they were part of the Team Clinton opposition research team. It was part of their
job. Let that concept settle in for a moment.
According to
Politico "In an interview this month, Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network
of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists , government officials
and private intelligence operatives . While her consulting work at the DNC this past election
cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities -- including Ukrainian-Americans -- she said
that, when Trump's unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began
focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump's ties to Russia, as well
."
The only investigative journalists, government officials, and private intelligence
operatives that work together in 2014-2015-2016 Ukraine are Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta,
Ukraine Cyber Alliance, and the Ministry of Information.
Since 2014 in Ukraine, these are the only OSINT, hacking, Intel, espionage, terrorist,
counter-terrorism, cyber, propaganda, and info war channels officially recognized and
directed by Ukraine's Information Ministry. Along with their American colleagues, they
populate the hit-for-hire website Myrotvorets with people who stand against Ukraine's
criminal activities.
Alexandra
Chalupa hired this particular hacking terrorist group called Fancy Bear by Dimitry
Alperovich and Crowdstrike at the latest in 2015. While the Ukrainian hackers worked for the
DNC, Fancy Bear had to send in progress reports, turn in research, and communicate on the
state of the projects they were working on. Let's face it, once you're in, setting up your
Fancy Bear toolkit doesn't get any easier. This is why I said the DNC hack isn't the big
crime. It's a big con and all the parties were in on it.
Indict Team Clinton for the
DNC Hacks and RNC Hack
Hillary Clinton
exposed secrets to hacking threats by using private email instead of secured servers.
Given the information provided she was probably being monitored by our intrepid Ruskie-Ukie
union made in hell hackers. Anthony Weiner exposed himself and his wife
Huma Abedin using Weiner's computer for top-secret State Department emails. And of course
Huma Abedin exposed herself along with her top-secret passwords at Yahoo and it looks like
the hackers the DNC hired to do opposition research hacked her.
Here's a question. Did Huma Abedin have Hillary Clinton's passwords for her private email
server? It would seem logical given her position with Clinton at the State Department and
afterward. This means that Hillary Clinton and the US government top secret servers were most
likely compromised by Fancy Bear before the DNC and Team Clinton hired them by using
legitimate passwords.
The RNC Hack
According to the Washington Post , "Russian government hackers penetrated the computer
network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of
opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee
officials and security experts who responded to the breach."
In January
2017 , criminal proceedings started for Edward Nedelyaev under articles 335 'spying' and
343
'inciting hatred or enmity." He was a member of the Aidar battalion. Aidar members have
been cited for torture and murder. Although the translation isn't available on the linked
video the MGB (LNR equivalent to the FBI) ask Aidar's Nedelyaev about his relationship with
Ukraine's SBU. The SBU asked him to hack US presidential candidate Donald Trump's election
headquarters and he refused. Asked if this was through convictions, he says no, explaining
that he is not a hacker.
The video was published on January 10, 2017 .
Taken at face value it really does show the ineptness of the SBU after 2014. This is why
Ukraine relied (s) on the Diaspora financed Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta, Ukraine Cyber
Alliance, RUH8, Bellingcat, Webradius, InformNapalm and associated parties.
The Ukrainians were hired to get the goods on Trump. Part of that is knowing where to
start isn't it?
Fancy Bear's Second Chance at Top Secret Passwords From Team
Clinton
How stupid would the Fancy Bear teams of Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta, Ukrainian Cyber
Alliance, and RUH8 be if they had access to the DNC servers which makes it easier to get into
the US State servers and not do that if it was their goal?
One very successful method of hacking is called social engineering. You gain access to the
office space and any related properties and physically locate the passwords or clues to get
you into the hardware you want to hack. This includes something as simple as looking over the
shoulder of the person typing in passwords.
Let's be clear. The Fancy Bear hackers were hired by Alexandra Chalupa to work for DNC
opposition research. On different occasions, Fancy Bear handler Kristina Dobrovolska traveled
to the US to meet the Diaspora leaders, her boss Alexandra Chalupa, Irena Chalupa, Andrea
Chalupa, US Dept of State personnel, and most likely Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich.
Alperovich was working with the hackers in 2015-16. In 2016, the only groups known to have
Fancy Bear's signature tools called X-tunnel and X-Agent were Alperovich, Crowdstrike, and
Fancy Bear (Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta, Ukraine Cyber Alliance, and RUH8/RUX8. Yes, that does
explain a few things.
Here is where it goes from bad to outright Fancy Bear ugly.
Hillary Clinton retained State Dept. top secret clearance passwords for 6 of her former
staff for research purposes from 2013 through prepping for the 2016 election. Were any
foreigners part of the opposition research team for Team Hillary in 2014-2015-2016? The
Clinton's don't have a history of vetting security issues well.
Let's recap. Clinton keeps 6 top secret passwords for research staff. Alexandra Chalupa is
running a research department that is rich in (foreign) Ukrainian Intelligence operatives,
hackers, terrorists, and a couple Ruskie traitors.
Kristina Dobrovolska was acting as a handler and translator for the US State Department in
2016. She is the Fancy Bear *opposition researcher handler manager. Kristina goes to
Washington to meet with Chalupa.
Alexandra types in her password to show Dobrovolska something she found and her eager to
please Ukrainian apprentice finds the keystrokes are seared into her memory. She tells the
Fancy Bear crew about it and they immediately get to work looking for Trump material on the
US secret servers with legitimate access. I mean, what else could they do with this? Turn
over sensitive information to the ever corrupt Ukrainian government?
According to
the Politico article , Alexandra Chalupa was meeting with the Ukrainian embassy in June
of 2016 to discuss getting more help sticking it to candidate Trump. At the same time she was
meeting, the embassy had a reception that highlighted female Ukrainian leaders.
Accompanying them Kristina Dobrovolska who was a U.S. Embassy-assigned government liaison
and translator who escorted the delegates from Kyiv during their visits to Albany and
Washington.
Kristina Dobrovolska is the handler manager working with Ukraine's DNC Fancy Bear Hackers
. She took the Rada members to dinner to meet Joel Harding who designed Ukraine's infamous
Information Policy which opened up their kill-for-hire-website Myrotvorets. Then she took
them to meet the Ukrainian Diaspora leader doing the hiring. Nestor Paslawsky is the
surviving nephew to the infamous torturer The WWII OUNb leader, Mykola Lebed.
The
Podesta Hack – Don't Mess with OUNb Parkhomenko
I have no interest in reviewing his history except for a few points. Adam
Parkhomenko, a Diaspora Ukrainian nationalist almost gained a position in the presumed
Clinton White House. As a Ukrainian nationalist, his first loyalty, like any other Ukrainian
nationalist, is to a fascist model of Ukraine which Stepan Bandera devised but with a win it
would be in America.
During the 2016 primaries, it was Parkhomenko who accused Bernie Sanders of working for
Vladimir Putin. Parkhomenko has never really had a job outside the Clinton campaign.
<img
src="https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/PARKHOMENKO-twitter.com-2018.08.14-04-34-11.png"
alt="Adam Parkhomenko" width="355" height="454"
srcset="https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/PARKHOMENKO-twitter.com-2018.08.14-04-34-11.png
355w,
https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/PARKHOMENKO-twitter.com-2018.08.14-04-34-11-235x300.png
235w" sizes="(max-width: 355px) 100vw, 355px" /> Before Clinton declared her candidacy,
Parkhomenko started a PAC for Hillary Clinton with the goal of getting millions of people
email lists so the support was ready for a Clinton run. After she declared her candidacy,
Robby Mook, Hillary's campaign manager decided to sideline Parkhomenko and didn't take on his
full staff as promised. He reduced Parkomenko to a quiet menial position when he was brought
onboard.
Ultimately, Podesta became responsible for this because he gave Parkhomenko assurances
that his staff would be brought on and there would be no gaps in their paycheck. Many of them
including Parkhomenko's family moved to Brooklyn. And of course, that didn't happen. Podesta
was hacked in March and the Ukrainian nationalist Adam Parkhomenko was hired April 1st .
Today, Parkhomenko is working as a #DigitalSherlock with the Atlantic Council along with
the Fancy Bear hackers and many of the people associated with them. Why could this be a
revenge hack?
The Ukrainian Intel hackers are Pravy Sektor Ukrainian nationalists. Alexandra Chalupa is
also an OUNb Bandera Ukrainian nationalist. This Ukrainian nationalist was on his way to
becoming one of the most powerful people in America. That's why.
The DNC Leak- A
Patriotic Act
At the same time her aides were creating "loyalty scores ", Clinton, "instructed a
trusted aide to access the campaign's server and download the messages sent and received by
top staffers. She believed her campaign had failed her -- not the other way around -- and
she wanted 'to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who.2'" After personally
reading the email correspondence of her staffers, she called them into interviews for the
2016 campaign, where she confronted them with some of the revelations."-
Forget about the DNC. The hackers may have spent months surfing the US secret servers
downloading and delivering top secret diplomatic files to their own government. The people
entrusted with this weren't just sloppy with security, this is beyond treason.
It doesn't matter if it was Seth Rich, though I hope it was ( for identification's sake),
who downloaded data from the DNC servers. The reasons supporting a leak are described by the
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This shows clearly why the leak to
Wikileaks is much more plausible than a hack for the files taken in what is commonly called
the DNC hack. This leak was one "hack" of many that was going on.
Imagine being this person inside the situations described above with the reality hitting
you that things were very wrong. Even if they only saw parts of it, how much is too much? US
government secrets were being accessed and we know this because the passwords were given out
to the research teams the hackers were on.
It is very possible that giving the files to Wikileaks was the only safe way to be a
whistleblower with a Democrat president supporting Team Hillary even as Team Hillary was
cannibalizing itself. For detail on how the leak happened, refer to Adam Carter at
DisobedientMedia.com and the VIPS themselves.
Today, this isn't a Democrat problem. It could just as easily been an establishment
Republican.
Ukraine needs to pay for what their Intel Operators/ hackers have done. Stop funding
Ukraine other than verifiable humanitarian aid. Call your Congressional Rep.
Next up – We are going to look at who has oversight over this operation and who's
footing the bills.
Showed clearly why Mueller's evidence is rife with fraudulent data.
We solved the DNC Hack-Leaks and showed the how and why of what went on.
If you want to support investigative research with a lot of depth, please support my
Patreon page. You can also
support my work through PayPal as we expand in new directions over the coming year. For the
last 4 years, it's been almost entirely self-supportive effort which is something when you
consider I live in Donbass.
Top Photo | Former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile holds a copy of her
book Hacks, detailing the hacking of the DNC, during a meeting of The Commonwealth Club, Nov.
9, 2017, in San Francisco. Marcio Jose Sanchez | AP
George Eliason is an American journalist that lives and works in Donbass. He has been
interviewed by and provided analysis for RT, the BBC, and Press-TV. His articles have been
published in the Security Assistance Monitor, Washingtons Blog, OpedNews, the Saker, RT,
Global Research, and RINF, and the Greanville Post among others. He has been cited and
republished by various academic blogs including Defending History, Michael Hudson, SWEDHR,
Counterpunch, the Justice Integrity Project, among others.
Republish our stories! MintPress News is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
Guccifer 2.0
certainly didn't make a genuine effort to "conceal a Russian identity," far from it.
The
persona made decisions that would leave behind a demonstrable trail of Russian-themed
breadcrumbs, examples include:
US politics (domestic)
Choosing the Russian VPN Service (using the publicly accessible default server in France) in combination with a mail service provider that would forward the sender's IP address.
Creating a blog and dropping a Russian emoticon in the second paragraph of the first post, something he only ever did one other time over months of activity (in which he used at a far higher frequency).
Tainting documents with Russian language metadata.
Going through considerable effort to ensure Russian language errors were in the first documents provided to the press.
Probable use of a VM set to Russian timezone while manipulating documents so that datastore objects with timestamps implying a Russian timezone setting are saved (in one of the documents, change tracking had been left on and recorded someone in a PST timezone saving one of Guccifer 2.0's documents after the documents had being manipulated in the Russian timezones!)
The deliberate and inconsistent mangling of English language (which was actually inconsistent with aspects of English language that Russians typically struggle with).
Guccifer 2.0 claimed credit for a hack that was already being attributed to Russians without making any effort to counter that perception and only denied it when outright questioned on it.
"... I told Bernie I had found Hillary's Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election. ..."
Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what
I knew would be an emotional phone call.
I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom
of whether Hillary Clinton's team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online
had suggested. I'd had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails.
But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.
So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising
at a time when President Barack Obama's neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary's campaign gained momentum, she
resolved the party's debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected
to wield control of its operations.
Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn't been very interested in controlling the party -- she let Clinton's headquarters in Brooklyn
do as it desired so she didn't have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for
how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.
By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.
***
The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary's campaign.
He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.
"What?" I screamed. "I am an officer of the party and they've been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with
no problems."
That wasn't true, he said. Officials from Hillary's campaign had taken a look at the DNC's books. Obama left the party $24 million
in debt -- $15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign -- and had been paying that
off very slowly. Obama's campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary
Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million,
and had placed the party on an allowance.
If I didn't know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie's way. In my
experience she didn't come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us
know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington
Post broke the news.
The Friday On the phone
Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.
"No! That can't be true!" I said. "The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers."
"Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?" I asked. "I don't know how Debbie relates to the officers," Gary said. He described
the party as fully under the control of Hillary's campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign
had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a
fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign.
But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party's national committee.
Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to
the Hillary Victory Fund -- that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states' parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement
-- $320,000 -- and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after
that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the
DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.
"Wait," I said. "That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You're telling me
that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?"
Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.
"That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie," he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. "It was to sustain
the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election."
"What's the burn rate, Gary?" I asked. "How much money do we need every month to fund the party?"
The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.
I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC's operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then
the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns,
but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama's consultants were being financed
by the DNC, too.
When we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management
of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair.
Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the
best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the
financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.
***
Right around the time of the convention , the leaked emails revealed Hillary's campaign was grabbing money from the state
parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A
Politico
story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer
before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild "the party from the ground up when our state parties are strong, we win. That's what
will happen."
Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary's
campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this
arrangement as "essentially money laundering" for the Clinton campaign, Hillary's people were outraged at being accused of doing
something shady. Bernie's people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination
to Hillary.
I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did
not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for
sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.
When I got back from a vacation in Martha's Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising
Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.
The agreement -- signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias -- specified that in
exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party's finances, strategy, and all the money raised.
Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all
the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and
mailings.
I had been wondering why it was that I couldn't write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.
When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate's team starts to exercise more control over the party. If
the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless
because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive
primaries, the party comes under the candidate's control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore's campaign
in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015,
just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.
I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw
the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating
individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.
The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had
been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was
not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party's integrity.
***
I had to keep my promise to Bernie . I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I
stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.
"Hello, senator. I've completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer," I said. "But I will not kill the patient."
I discussed the fundraising agreement that each of the candidates had signed. Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff
ignored it. They had their own way of raising money through small donations. I described how Hillary's campaign had taken it another
step.
I told Bernie I had found Hillary's Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this
control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position,
but here we were with only weeks before the election.
Bernie took this stoically. He did not yell or express outrage. Instead he asked me what I thought Hillary's chances were. The
polls were unanimous in her winning but what, he wanted to know, was my own assessment?
I had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls, I said. I told him I had visited states around the country and I found
a lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama coalition and about millennials.
I urged Bernie to work as hard as he could to bring his supporters into the fold with Hillary, and to campaign with all the heart
and hope he could muster. He might find some of her positions too centrist, and her coziness with the financial elites distasteful,
but he knew and I knew that the alternative was a person who would put the very future of the country in peril. I knew he heard me.
I knew he agreed with me, but I never in my life had felt so tiny and powerless as I did making that call.
When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to.
"... The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution for the breach was ever attempted. ..."
"... In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers argued that it was the party's right to select candidates. ..."
"... The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was protected by the First Amendment . ..."
"... The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race, ..."
"... f Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district. Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election in which Canova ran as an independent. ..."
"... Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal ballot destruction , improper transportation of ballots, and generally shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time: ..."
"... Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies. Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments externalize what Gabbard called the "rot" in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet. ..."
"... Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled: " Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," ..."
Establishment Democrats and those who amplify them continue to project
blame for the public's doubt in the U.S. election process onto outside influence, despite the clear history of the party's subversion
of election integrity. The total inability of the Democratic Party establishment's willingness to address even one of these critical
failures does not give reason to hope that the nomination process in 2020 will be any less pre-ordained.
The Democratic Party's bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel
doubling down on its right to rig the race during the
fraud lawsuit brought
against the DNC , as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova,
indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending
the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also
likely impact outcomes in 2020.
The content of the DNC and
Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC
acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters
acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as
to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred " pied-piper
candidate ." One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever
to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race.
Social Media Meddling
Election meddling via social media did take place in 2016, though in a different guise and for a different cause from that which
are best remembered. Twitter would eventually admit to actively suppressing
hashtags referencing the DNC and Podesta emails in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Additional
reports indicated that tech giant Google also showed measurable "pro-Hillary
Clinton bias" in search results during 2016, resulting in the alleged swaying of between 2 and 10 millions voters in favor of Clinton.
On the Republican side, a recent episode of CNLive! featured discussion
of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which undecided voters were micro-targeted with tailored advertising narrowed with the combined
use of big data and artificial intelligence known collectively as "dark strategy." CNLive! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan noted that
SCL, Cambridge Analytica's parent company, provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations "worldwide,"
specializing in behavior modification. Though Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018, related companies remain.
The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The
barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock
were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding
for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The
LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear
to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid
and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign.
In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have
purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls
before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found
broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution
for the breach was ever attempted.
Though the purge was not explicitly found to have benefitted Clinton, the admission falls in line with allegations across the
country that the Democratic primary was interfered with to the benefit of the former secretary of state. These claims were further
bolstered by reports indicating that voting results from the 2016 Democratic
primary showed evidence of fraud.
DNC Fraud Lawsuit
The proceedings of the DNC fraud lawsuit provide the most damning evidence of the failure of the U.S. election process, especially
within the Democratic Party. DNC defense lawyers argued in open court for the party's
right to appoint candidates at its own discretion, while simultaneously denying
any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the impression that the DNC would act impartially
towards the candidates involved.
In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued
against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process
was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers
argued that it was the party's right to select candidates.
The Observer noted the sentiments of Jared Beck, the attorney representing the plaintiffs of the lawsuit:
"People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee -- nominating process
in 2016 were fair and impartial, and that's not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that
we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that's what the Democratic
National Committee's own charter says. It says it in black and white."
The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's
right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was
protected by the First Amendment . The DNC's lawyers wrote:
"To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court
precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to
selecting the party's nominee for public office ." [Emphasis added]
The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication
that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race,
Tim Canova's Allegations
If Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference
was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district.
Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election
in which Canova ran as an independent.
Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal
ballot destruction , improper
transportation of ballots, and generally
shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial
results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the
Sun-Sentinel reported at the time:
"[Canova] sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months
later when her office hadn't fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification
that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending."
Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies.
Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms.
Republicans appear no more motivated to protect voting integrity than the Democrats, with
The Nation reporting that the GOP-controlled Senate
blocked a bill this week that would have "mandated paper-ballot backups in case of election machine malfunctions."
Study of Corporate Power
A 2014
study published by Princeton University found that corporate power had usurped the voting rights of the public: "Economic elites
and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average
citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
In reviewing this sordid history, we see that the Democratic Party establishment has done everything in its power to disrespect
voters and outright overrule them in the democratic primary process, defending their right to do so in the DNC fraud lawsuit. We've
noted that interests transcending the DNC also represent escalating threats to election integrity as demonstrated in 2016.
Despite this, establishment Democrats and those who echo their views in the legacy press continue to deflect from their own wrongdoing
and real threats to the election process by suggesting that mere discussion of it represents a campaign by Russia to attempt to malign
the perception of the legitimacy of the U.S. democratic process.
Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former
Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments
externalize what Gabbard called the "rot"
in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet.
Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a
recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled:
" Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," Jamali
argued :
"Moscow will use its skillful propaganda machine to prop up Gabbard and use her as a tool to delegitimize the democratic process.
" [Emphasis added]
Jamali surmises that Russia intends to "attack" our democracy by undermining the domestic perception of its legitimacy. This thesis
is repeated later in the piece when Jamali opines : "They want to see a retreat
of American influence. What better way to accomplish that than to attack our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of our
elections." [Emphasis added]
The only thing worth protecting, according to Jamali and those who amplify his work (including former Clinton aide and establishment
Democrat Neera Tanden), is the perception of the democratic process, not the actual functioning vitality of it. Such deflective tactics
ensure that Russia will continue to be used as a convenient international pretext for
silencing domestic dissent as we move into 2020.
Given all this, how can one expect the outcome of a 2020 Democratic Primary -- or even the general election – to be any fairer
or transparent than 2016?
* * *
Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter, co-host of CN Live! and regular contributor to Consortium News. If you value this
original article, please consider
making
a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.
"... They also failed to note the voice-modulated phone calls received by the law offices of the Becks which contained a caller-ID corresponding to the law offices of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a defendant in the case. In light of this context, the Becks hardly appear to be peddlers of conspiracy theory. ..."
The defense counsel also took issue with Jared Beck for what they termed as: " Repeatedly promoted patently false and deeply offensive
conspiracy theories about the deaths of a former DNC staffer and Plaintiffs' process server in an attempt to bolster attention for
this lawsuit." This author was shocked to find that despite the characterization of the Becks as peddlers of conspiracy theory, the
defense counsel failed to mention the motion for protection filed by the Becks earlier in the litigation process.
They also failed to note the voice-modulated phone calls received by the law offices of the Becks which contained a caller-ID
corresponding to the law offices of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a defendant in the case. In light of this context, the Becks hardly
appear to be peddlers of conspiracy theory.
The DNC defense lawyers then argued:
" There is no legitimate basis for this litigation, which is, at its most basic, an improper attempt to forge the federal courts
into a political weapon to be used by individuals who are unhappy with how a political party selected its candidate in a presidential
campaign ."
The brief continued:
" To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege based on their animating theory would run directly contrary
to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties,
especially when it comes to selecting the party's nominee for public office."
It appears that the defendants in the DNC Fraud Lawsuit are attempting to argue that cheating a candidate in the primary process
is protected under the first amendment. If all that weren't enough, DNC representatives argued that the Democratic National Committee
had no established fiduciary duty "to the Plaintiffs or the classes of donors and registered voters they seek to represent." It seems
here that the DNC is arguing for its right to appoint candidates at its own discretion while simultaneously denying any "fiduciary
duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the belief that the DNC would act impartially towards the
candidates involved.
Adding to the latest news regarding the DNC Fraud Lawsuit was the recent
finding by the UK Supreme
Court, which stated that Wikileaks Cables were admissible as evidence in legal proceedings.
If Wikileaks' publication of DNC emails are found to be similarly admissible in a United States court of law, then the contents
of the leaked emails could be used to argue that, contrary to the defendant's latest brief, the DNC did in favor the campaign of
Hillary Clinton over Senator Sanders and that they acted to sabotage Sanders' campaign.
The outcome of the appeal of the DNC Fraud Lawsuit remains to be seen.
Elizabeth Vos is the Co-Founder and Editor in Chief at
Disobedient Media .
"... The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, such as information operations. A nice sounding euphemism for propaganda, and computer network operations. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of this Task Force. ..."
The average American has no idea how alarming is the news that former CIA Director John
Brennan reportedly created and staffed a CIA Task Force in early 2016 that was named, Trump
Task Force, and given the mission of spying on and carrying out covert actions against the
campaign of candidate Donald Trump.
This was not a simple gathering of a small number of disgruntled Democrats working at the
CIA who got together like a book club to grouse and complain about the brash real estate guy
from New York. It was a specially designed covert action to try to destroy Donald Trump.
A "Task Force" is a special bureaucratic creation that provides a vehicle for bring case
officers and analysts together, along with admin support, for a limited term project. But it
also can be expanded to include personnel from other agencies, such as the FBI, DIA and NSA.
Task Forces have been used since the inception of the CIA in 1947. Here's a recently
declassified memo outlining the considerations in the creation of a task force in 1958. The
author, L.K. White, talks about the need for a coordinating Headquarters element and an
Operational unit "in the field", i.e. deployed around the world.
A Task Force operates independent of the CIA " Mission Centers
" (that's the jargon for the current CIA organization chart).
So what did John Brennan do? I am told by an knowledgeable source that Brennan created a
Trump Task Force in early 2016. It was an invitation only Task Force. Specific case officers
(i.e., men and women who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and admin personnel were
recruited. Not everyone invited accepted the offer. But many did.
This was not a CIA only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task
Force. We have some clues that Christopher Steele's FBi handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been
detailed to the Trump Task Force ( see here
).
So what kind of things would this Task Force do? The case officers would work with foreign
intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on
identifying intelligence collection priorities. Task Force members could task NSA to do
targeted collection. They also would have the ability to engage in covert action, such as
targeting George Papadopoulos. Joseph Mifsud may be able to shed light on the CIA officers who
met with him, briefed on operational objectives regarding Papadopoulos and helped arrange
monitored meetings. I think it is highly likely that the honey pot that met with George
Papadopoulos, a woman named Azra Turk, was part of the CIA Trump Task Force.
The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, such as information
operations. A nice sounding euphemism for propaganda, and computer network operations. There
has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of this Task
Force.
In light of what we have learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, there
should be a serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at
minimum, reporting to them.
When I described this to one friend, a retired CIA Chief of Station, his first response was,
"My God, that's illegal." We then reminisced about another illegal operation carried out under
the auspices of the CIA Central American Task Force back in the 1980s. That became known to
Americans as the Iran Contra scandal.
I sure hope that John Durham and his team are looking at this angle. If true it marks a new
and damning indictment of the corruption of the CIA. Rather than spying on genuine foreign
threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald
Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of Putin.
I will make this very simple. The DNC emails that ultimately were published on Wikileaks
likely originated with a DNC staffer, Seth Rich. It was not the Russians. The decision to blame
the Russians was an intelligence construct that was concocted once U.S. and British
intelligence officials plotting against Donald Trump realized that Rich had downloaded the
emails and was communicating with Julian Assange and his cohorts.
Here are the facts:
It was
29 April 2016 , when the DNC claims it became aware its servers had been penetrated. No
claim yet about who was responsible.
According to CrowdStrike founder , Dimitri Alperovitch, his company first supposedly
detected the Russians mucking around inside the DNC server on 6 May 2016. A CrowdStrike
intelligence analyst reportedly told Alperovitch that:
Falcon had identified not one but two Russian intruders: Cozy Bear, a group
CrowdStrike's experts believed was affiliated with the FSB, Russia's answer to the CIA;
and Fancy Bear, which they had linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence.
The Wikileaks data shows that the last message copied from the DNC network is dated Wed,
25 May 2016 08:48:35.
10 June 2016--CrowdStrike waited until 10 June 2016 to take concrete steps to clean up
the DNC network. Alperovitch told Esquire's Vicky Ward that: 'Ultimately, the teams decided
it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC. Until the network was
clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10, all DNC employees were
instructed to leave their laptops in the office."
On June 14, 2016, Ellen Nakamura, a Washington Post reporter who had been briefed by
computer security company hired by the DNC -- Crowdstrike--, wrote:
Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National
Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP
presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security
experts who responded to the breach.
The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC's system that they also were able to
read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political
organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political
action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not
available.
15 June, 2016, an internet "personality" self-described as Guccifer 2.0 surfaces and
claims to be responsible for the hacks but denies being Russian. However, the meta data in
the documents posted by Guccifer 2.0 appear to be deliberately crafted to show "Russian"
involvement.
The DNC emails that were released on July 22, 2016 by Wikileaks covered the period from
January 2015 thru 25 May 2016.
The FSB is not really Ruusias CIA equvalent though. It is more akin to an unholy alliance of
homeland security and the FBI. GRU is kind of like DIA + the army, navy, air force and marine
intelligence. Closest thing to the CIA Russia has would be the SVR, but their overall remit
is still somewhat different.
Nice laydown. One really needs this sort of step-by-step letdown to get and keep the facts
straight.
Some sort of link chart/diagram that could be updated as needed would be great.
Between the DNC emails, the Steele faux-dossier, Seth Rich, Guccifer 2.0, and whatever
connection there might be to Skripal and the British, it's really challenging to keep all the
players and actions in the right relationship to one another.
One side question: Where does DC Leaks fit into this?
The Seth Rich story is coming back to life. A fellow named Butowski is exposing things.
He claims that Ellen Ratner of Fox News told him that Seth Rich and his brother Aaron gave
Wikileaks Hillary's emails. Julian Assange is said to have told Ellen Ratner.
The story is that the cover-up came down from now disgraced FBI agent, Andrew McCabe, to
the Mayor of DC and on down to the police. They were told to sit on the case.
The Seth Rich story tells us how corruption spreads. The Mayor of DC, Muriel Bowser, tells
Peter Newsham, the guy in charge of the Seth Rich investigation, to shut it down.
Then, a year later she promotes him to Chief of Police.
"... That epithet has a sordid history in the annals of U.S. intelligence. Legendary CIA Director Allen Dulles used the "brand-them-conspiracy-theorists" ploy following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy when many objected -- understandably -- to letting him pretty much run the Warren Commission, even though the CIA was suspected of having played a role in the murder. The "conspiracy theorist" tactic worked like a charm then, and now. Well, up until just now. ..."
"... U.S. Courts apply far tougher standards to evidence than do the intelligence community and the pundits who loll around lazily, feeding from the intelligence PR trough. This (hardly surprising) reality was underscored when a Dallas financial adviser named Ed Butowsky sued National Public Radio and others for defaming him about the role he played in controversial stories relating to Rich. On August 7, NPR suffered a setback, when U.S. District Court Judge Amos Mazzant affirmed a lower court decision to allow Butowsky's defamation lawsuit to proceed. ..."
"... NPR gave Isikoff 37 minutes on its popular Fresh Air program to spin his yarn about how the Seth Rich story got started. You guessed it; the Russians started it . No, we are not making this up. ..."
"... It is far from clear that Isikoff can be much help to NPR in the libel case against it. Isikoff's own writings on Russiagate are notably lacking in "verifiable statements of fact" -- information that cannot be verified. ..."
"... In any case, The Washington Post , had already debunked Isikoff's claim (which later in his article he switched to being only "purported") by pointing out that Americans had already tweeted the theory of Rich's murder days before the alleged Russian intervention. ..."
"... Butowsky's libel lawsuit can now proceed to discovery, which will include demands for documents and depositions that are likely to shed light on whatever role Rich may have played in leaking to WikiLeaks . If the government obstructs or tries to slow-roll the case, we shall have to wait and see, for example, if the court will acquiesce to the familiar government objection that information regarding Rich's murder must be withheld as a state secret? Hmmm. What would that tell us? ..."
"... During discovery in a separate court case, the government was unable to produce a final forensic report on the "hacking" of the Democratic National Committee. The DNC-hired cyber firm, CrowdStrike, failed to complete such a report, and that was apparently okay with then FBI Director James Comey, who did not require one. ..."
"... The thorny question of "persuasive sourcing," came up even more starkly on July 1, when federal Judge Dabney Friedrich ordered Robert Mueller to stop pretending he had proof that the Russian government was behind the Internet Research Agency's supposed attempt to interfere via social media in the 2016 election. Middle school-level arithmetic can prove the case that the IRA's use of social media to support Trump is ludicrous on its face. ..."
"... As journalist Patrick Lawrence put it recently: "Three years after the narrative we call Russiagate was framed and incessantly promoted, it crumbles into rubble as we speak." ..."
"... In a long interview with Lauria a few months ago in New Zealand aired this month on CN Live! , Kim Dotcom provided a wealth of detail, based on what he described as first-hand knowledge, regarding how Democratic National Committee documents were leaked to WikiLeaks in 2016. ..."
"... The major takeaway: the evidence presented by Dotcom about Seth Rich can be verified or disproven if President Trump summons the courage to order the director of NSA to dig out the relevant data, including the conversations Dotcom says he had with Rich and Rich may have had with WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. ..."
"... Dotcom said he put Rich in touch with a middleman to transfer the DNC files to WikiLeaks . ..."
"... Mark Twain is said to have warned, "How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again!" After three years of "Russia-Russia-Russia" in the corporate -- and even in some "progressive" -- media, this conditioning will not be easy to reverse. ..."
Simply letting the name "Seth Rich" pass your lips can condemn you to the leper colony built
by the Washington Establishment for "conspiracy theorists," (the term regularly applied to
someone determined to seek tangible evidence, and who is open to alternatives to
"Russia-did-it.")
Rich was a young DNC employee who was murdered on a street in Washington, DC, on July 10,
2016. Many, including me, suspect that Rich played some role in the leaking of DNC emails to
WikiLeaks . There is considerable circumstantial evidence that this may have been the
case. Those who voice such suspicions, however, are, ipso facto , branded "conspiracy
theorists."
That epithet has a sordid history in the annals of U.S. intelligence. Legendary CIA Director
Allen Dulles used the "brand-them-conspiracy-theorists" ploy following the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy when many objected -- understandably -- to letting him pretty much
run the Warren Commission, even though the CIA was suspected of having played a role in the
murder. The "conspiracy theorist" tactic worked like a charm then, and now. Well, up until just
now.
Rich Hovers Above the Courts
U.S. Courts apply far tougher standards to evidence than do the intelligence community and
the pundits who loll around lazily, feeding from the intelligence PR trough. This (hardly
surprising) reality was underscored when a Dallas financial adviser named Ed Butowsky sued
National Public Radio and others for defaming him about the role he played in controversial
stories relating to Rich. On August 7, NPR suffered a setback, when U.S. District Court Judge
Amos Mazzant affirmed a lower court decision to allow Butowsky's defamation lawsuit to
proceed.
Judge Mazzant ruled that NPR had stated as "verifiable statements of fact" information that
could not be
verified , and that the plaintiff had been, in effect, accused of being engaged in
wrongdoing without persuasive sourcing language.
Isikoff: Russians started it. (Wikipedia)
Imagine! -- "persuasive sourcing" required to separate fact from opinion and axes to grind!
An interesting precedent to apply to the ins and outs of Russiagate. In the courts, at least,
this is now beginning to happen. And NPR and others in similarly vulnerable positions are
scurrying around for allies.??The day after Judge Mazzant's decision, NPR enlisted help from
discredited Yahoo! News pundit Michael Isikoff (author, with David Corn, of the
fiction-posing-as-fact novel Russian Roulette ). NPR gave Isikoff 37 minutes on its
popular Fresh Air program to spin his yarn about how the Seth Rich story got started.
You guessed it; the Russians started it . No, we are not making this up.
It is far from clear that Isikoff can be much help to NPR in the libel case against it.
Isikoff's own writings on Russiagate are notably lacking in "verifiable statements of fact" --
information that cannot be verified. Watch, for example, his recent interview with Consortium
News Editor Joe Lauria on CN Live!
Isikoff admitted to Lauria that he never saw the classified Russian intelligence document
reportedly indicating that three days after Rich's murder the Russian SVR foreign intelligence
service planted a story about Rich having been the leaker and was killed for it. This Russian
intelligence "bulletin," as Isikoff called it, was supposedly placed on a bizarre website that
Isikoff admitted was an unlikely place for Russia to spread disinformation. He acknowledged
that he only took the word of the former prosecutor in the Rich case about the existence of
this classified Russian document.
In any case, The Washington Post , had already
debunked Isikoff's claim (which later in his article he switched to being only "purported")
by pointing out that Americans had already tweeted the theory of Rich's murder days before the
alleged Russian intervention.
' Persuasive Sourcing' & Discovery ??
Butowsky's libel lawsuit can now proceed to discovery, which will include demands for
documents and depositions that are likely to shed light on whatever role Rich may have played
in leaking to WikiLeaks . If the government obstructs or tries to slow-roll the case, we
shall have to wait and see, for example, if the court will acquiesce to the familiar government
objection that information regarding Rich's murder must be withheld as a state secret? Hmmm.
What would that tell us?
Butowsky: Suit could reveal critical information. (Flickr)
During discovery in a separate court case, the government was unable to produce a final
forensic report on the "hacking" of the Democratic National Committee. The DNC-hired cyber
firm, CrowdStrike, failed to complete such a report, and that was apparently
okay with then FBI Director James Comey, who did not require one.
The incomplete, redacted, draft, second-hand "forensics" that Comey settled for from
CrowdStrike does not qualify as credible evidence -- much less "persuasive sourcing" to support
the claim that the Russians "hacked" into the DNC. Moreover, CrowdStrike has a dubious
reputation for professionalism and a well known anti-Russia bias.
The thorny question of "persuasive sourcing," came up even more starkly on July 1, when
federal Judge Dabney Friedrich ordered Robert Mueller to stop pretending he had proof that the
Russian government was behind the Internet Research Agency's supposed attempt to interfere via
social media in the 2016 election. Middle school-level arithmetic can
prove the case that the IRA's use of social media to support Trump is ludicrous on its
face.
Russia-gate Rubble
As journalist Patrick Lawrence put
it recently: "Three years after the narrative we call Russiagate was framed and incessantly promoted, it crumbles into
rubble as we speak." Falling syllogism! Step nimbly to one side.
The "conspiracy theorist" epithet is not likely to much longer block attention to the role,
if any, played by Rich -- the more so since some players who say they were directly involved
with Rich are coming forward.
In a long interview with Lauria a few
months ago in New Zealand aired this month on CN Live! , Kim Dotcom provided a
wealth of detail, based on what he described as first-hand knowledge, regarding how Democratic
National Committee documents were leaked to WikiLeaks in 2016.
The major takeaway: the evidence presented by Dotcom about Seth Rich can be verified or
disproven if President Trump summons the courage to order the director of NSA to dig out the
relevant data, including the conversations Dotcom says he had with Rich and Rich may have had with
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Dotcom said he put Rich in touch with a middleman to
transfer the DNC files to WikiLeaks . Sadly, Trump has flinched more than once rather
than confront the Deep State -- and this time there are a bunch of very well connected, senior
Deep State practitioners who could face
prosecution .
Another sign that Rich's story is likely to draw new focus is the virulent character
assassination indulged in by former investigative journalist James Risen.
Not Risen to the Challenge
Risen: Called Binney a "conspiracy theorist." (Flickr)
On August 5, in an interview on The Hill's "Rising,"
Risen chose to call former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney -- you guessed it -- a
"conspiracy theorist" on Russia-gate, with no demurral, much less pushback, from the hosts.
The having-done-good-work-in-the-past-and-now-not-so-much Risen can be considered a paradigm
for what has happened to so many Kool-Aid drinking journalists. Jim's transition from
investigative journalist to stenographer is, nonetheless unsettling. Contributing causes? It
appears that the traditional sources within the intelligence agencies, whom Risen was able to
cultivate discreetly in the past, are too
fearful now to even talk to him, lest they get caught by one or two of the myriad
surveillance systems in play.
Those at the top of the relevant agencies, however, are only too happy to provide grist.
Journalists have to make a living, after all. Topic A, of course, is Russian "interference" in
the 2016 election. And, of course, "There can be little doubt" the Russians did it.
"Big Jim" Risen, as he is known, jumped on the bandwagon as soon as he joined The
Intercept , with a fulsome article
on February 17, 2018 titled " Is Donald Trump a Traitor? " Here's an excerpt:
"The evidence that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump win is already
compelling, and it grows stronger by the day.
"There can be little doubt now that Russian intelligence officials were behind an effort
to hack the DNC's computers and steal emails and other information from aides to Hillary
Clinton as a means of damaging her presidential campaign. Russian intelligence also used fake
social media accounts and other tools to create a global echo chamber both for stories about
the emails and for anti-Clinton lies dressed up to look like news.
"To their disgrace, editors and reporters at American news organizations greatly enhanced
the Russian echo chamber, eagerly writing stories about Clinton and the Democratic Party
based on the emails, while showing almost no interest during the presidential campaign in
exactly how those emails came to be disclosed and distributed." (sic)
Poor Jim. He shows himself just as susceptible as virtually all of his fellow corporate
journalists to the epidemic-scale HWHW virus (Hillary Would Have Won) that set in during Nov.
2016 and for which the truth seems to be no cure. From his perch at The Intercept ,
Risen will continue to try to shape the issues. Russiagaters major ally, of course, is the
corporate media which has most Americans pretty much under their thumb.
Incidentally, neither The New York Times, The Washington Post , nor The Wall
Street Journal has printed or posted a word about Judge Mazzant's ruling on the Butowsky
suit.
Mark Twain is said to have warned, "How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how]
hard it is to undo that work again!" After three years of "Russia-Russia-Russia" in the
corporate -- and even in some "progressive" -- media, this conditioning will not be easy to
reverse.
Here's how one astute observer with a sense of humor described the situation last week, in a
comment under one of my recent pieces on Consortium News:
" One can write the most thought-out and well documented academic-like essays, articles
and reports and the true believers in Russiagate will dismiss it all with a mere flick of
their wrist. The mockery and scorn directed towards those of us who knew the score from day
one won't relent. They could die and go to heaven and ask god what really happened during
the 2016 election. God would reply to them in no uncertain terms that Putin and the Russians
had absolutely nothing to do with anything in '16, and they'd all throw up their hands and
say, 'aha! So, God's in on this too!' It's the great lie that won't die."
I'm not so sure. It is likely to be a while though before this is over.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. Ray was a CIA analyst for 27 years; in retirement he
co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
You want to start looking at the election laws which favout the Democrat/Republican duopoly.
The democrats are finished as a party of progress since their constitutional change with
super delegates etc. Also consider this analysis
"... Perhaps evidence of direct communication between clapper, brennan, steele, Downer and the British IC in preparation for the attack on the Trump campaign? ..."
"... What if the RussiaGate campaign was planned to go ahead BEFORE the DNC was actually hacked, using faked evidence? What if Seth Rich became aware of this operation and tried to spike it? What if the DNC planned to fake the Russian penetration evidence themselves, but Seth Rich dumped the real stuff? ..."
"... Of course the FBI wasn't allowed to see the actual evidence nor did they request a subpoena to obtain it. ..."
Has it crossed anyone's mind that the reason the FBI weren't allowed to view the DNC servers
was because they would discover evidence of massive DNC illegality in the form of
unattributable clickbait operations and suchlike? Perhaps evidence as well of direct
collusion between the DOJ and IC community to destroy Trumps campaign as well?
Perhaps
evidence of direct communication between clapper, brennan, steele, Downer and the British IC
in preparation for the attack on the Trump campaign?
What if the RussiaGate campaign was planned to go ahead BEFORE the DNC was actually
hacked, using faked evidence? What if Seth Rich became aware of this operation and tried to
spike it? What if the DNC planned to fake the Russian penetration evidence themselves, but
Seth Rich dumped the real stuff?
On the third anniversary of
the release by WikiLeaks of the DNC emails, Ray McGovern looks back at how the DNC diverted the damaging contents
into a trumped up conspiracy blaming Russia with no evidence at all.
T
hree
years ago Monday
WikiLeaks
published a trove of highly embarrassing emails that had been leaked from inside
the Democratic National Committee. As has been the case with every leak revealed by
WikiLeaks
, the emails were
authentic. These particular ones, however, could not have come at a worse time for top Democratic Party officials.
The emails made it
unmistakably clear that the DNC had tipped the scales sharply against Democratic insurgent Bernie Sanders, giving him
a snowball's chance in hell for the nomination. The posting of the DNC emails is also widely seen as having harmed
the the electoral prospects of Hillary Clinton, who could not escape responsibility completely, while a handful of
the very top DNC officials were forced to immediately resign.
Relatively few Americans
read the actual emails, their attention diverted to the incessant media-fostered question: Why Did the Russians Hack
the DNC to Hurt Hillary? For the millions of once enthusiastic Democrats who favored Sanders, however, the disclosure
that the nomination process had been fixed came as a bitter pill, leaving a sour taste in their mouths and a
passive-aggressive reluctance to promote the candidacy of one they considered a usurper. Having had a huge stake in
Bernie's candidacy, they had little trouble seeing through the diversion of attention from the content of the emails.
Clinton Prevails
A mere four days after the
WikiLeaks
release, a well orchestrated Democratic Convention nominated Clinton, while many Sanders supporters
loudly objected. Thus, she began her campaign under a cloud, and as more and more Americans learned of the fraud that
oozed through the DNC email correspondence -- including the rigging of the Democratic primaries -- the cloud grew
larger and darker.
On June 12, 2016, six weeks
before the convention,
WikiLeaks
publisher Julian Assange had
announced
in an interview on British TV, "We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton We have
emails pending publication."
Independent forensic
investigations
demonstrated two years ago that the DNC emails were not hacked over the Internet, but had
been copied onto an external storage device -- probably a thumb drive. Additional work over recent months has yielded
more evidence that the intrusion into the DNC computers was a copy, not a hack, and that it took place on May 23 and
25, 2016.
The DNC almost certainly
knew what had happened -- not only that someone with physical access to DNC computers had copied thousands of emails,
but also which ones they had copied, and thus how prejudicial to the Clinton campaign they would be when they saw the
light of day.
And so, candidate Clinton,
the DNC, and the mainstream media (forever quoting anonymous "current and former intelligence officials") appear to
have colluded, deciding the best defense would be a good offense. No one knew how soon
WikiLeaks
would publish
the emails, but the DNC offense/defense would surely have to be put in place before the convention scheduled to begin
on July 25. That meant there were, at most, six weeks to react. On July 24, about 48 hours after the leaks were
published, and a day before the convention, the DNC first
blamed Russia
for hacking their emails and giving them to
WikiLeaks
to sabotage Clinton.
A Magnificent Diversion
Clinton: Already blaming the Russians at DNC
2016 convention.
(Wikipedia)
Granted, it was a stretch --
and the DNC would have to hire a pliable cybersecurity firm to back up their claim. But they had good reason to
believe
that CrowdStrike would perform that service. It was the best Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook
and associates could apparently come up with. If they hurried, there would be just enough time to prepare a PR
campaign before the convention and, best of all, there was little doubt that the media could be counted on to support
the effort full bore.
When
WikiLeaks
published
the emails on July 22, 2016, just three days before the Democratic convention, the propagandists were ready to
deflect attention from the damning content of the DNC emails by repeating incessantly that the Russians hacked the
emails and gave them to
WikiLeaks
to hurt Clinton.
It pretty much worked like
a charm. The late Senator John McCain and others were quick to call the Russian "hack" an "an act of war." Evidence?
None. For icing on the cake, then-FBI Director James Comey decided not to seize and inspect the DNC computers. Nor,
as we now know, did Comey even
require
a final report from CrowdStrike.
Eight months after the
convention, in remarks at the Clinton/Podesta Center for American Progress on April 6, 2017, Clinton's PR director,
Jennifer Palmieri, could scarcely contain her pride that, after a difficult start, she was ultimately successful in
keeping the Russian bear front and center.
Transcribed below
(verbatim) are some of Palmieri's more telling
remarks
when asked to
comment, from her insider perspective, on "what was actually going on in late summer/early fall."
" I did appreciate that
for the press to absorb the idea that behind the stage that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to
defeat Hillary Clinton was too fantastic for people to, um, for the press to process, to absorb .
But then
we go back to Brooklyn and heard from the -- mostly our sources were other intelligence, with the press who work in
the intelligence sphere, and that's where we heard things and that's where we learned about the dossier and the
other story lines that were swirling about And along the way the administration started confirming various
pieces of what they were concerned about what Russia was doing.
[Emphasis added.]
"And we did finally get
to the point on October 7, when the administration came out with a very stunning [memorandum]. How stunning it was
for both the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of Homeland Security to put out a statement – a
long statement – that said with high confidence that Russia was interfering in the election and they were also
directing the timing of the leaks. And it named the institutions – WikiLeaks, DC Leaks, and Guccifer – as being
Russian-led, and how stunning that was to be that certain and that public. So I do think that the answer for the
Democrats now in both the House and the Senate is to talk about it more and make it more real ."
And so, the Magnificent
Diversion worked as intended.
Recognizing Liminal Time
But
not all journalists fell for it. Patrick Lawrence (once of
The Nation
, now of
Consortium News
)
was onto the ruse from the start. He says he had "fire in the belly" on the morning of July 25, 2016, the day the
Democratic convention began, and that he dashed off an article "in one long, furious exhale" within 12 hours of when
the media started really pushing the "the Russians-did-it" narrative. The title of his article, pointed out to me a
few months ago by VIPS member Todd Pierce, was "How the DNC fabricated a Russian hacker conspiracy to deflect blame
for its email scandal a disturbing resemblance to Cold War red-baiting."
Lawrence's off-the-cuff
ruminations
, which
Salon
published
the next day are extraordinarily prescient and worth reading in full. He instinctively
recognized the email disclosure-cum-media-obfuscation campaign as a liminal event. Here are some excerpts, reprinted
here with Lawrence's permission:
"Now wait a minute, all
you upper-case "D" Democrats. A flood light suddenly shines on your party apparatus, revealing its grossly corrupt
machinations to fix the primary process and sink the Sanders campaign, and within a day you are on about the evil
Russians having hacked into your computers to sabotage our elections Is this how lowly you rate the intelligence
of American voters?
The Sanders people have
long charged that the DNC has had its fingers on the scale in favor of Hillary Clinton's nomination. The prints
were everywhere Last Friday WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 DNC email messages providing abundant proof that
Sanders and his staff were right all along. The worst of these, involving senior DNC officers, proposed
Nixon-esque smears having to do with everything from ineptitude within the Sanders campaign to Sanders as a Jew in
name only and an atheist by conviction.
The caker came on
Sunday, when Robby Mook appeared on ABC's "This Week" and CNN's "State of the Union" to assert that the
D.N.C.'s mail was hacked "by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." He knows this because
"experts" -- experts he will never name -- have told him so.
the Clinton campaign
now goes for a twofer. Watch as it advances the Russians-did-it thesis on the basis of nothing, then shoots the
messenger, then associates Trump with its own mess -- and, finally, gets to ignore the nature of its transgression
(which any paying-attention person must consider grave). Preposterous, readers. Join me, please, in having
absolutely none of it. There is no "Russian actor" at the bottom of this swamp, to put my position bluntly. You
will never, ever be offered persuasive evidence otherwise.
[Emphasis added.]
Trump, to make this
work, must be blamed for his willingness to negotiate with Moscow. This is now among his sins. Got that? Anyone
who says he will talk to the Russians has transgressed the American code. I am developing nitrogen bends Which
way for a breath of air?"
Sad Sequel
A year later Lawrence was
commissioned by
The Nation
to write an investigative report on the so-called "Russian hack." On August 9,
2017, after he interviewed several Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, among others,
The Nation
published
his findings in an
article
entitled "A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year's DNC Hack." Lawrence wrote, "Former
NSA experts, now members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), say it wasn't a hack at all, but a
leak -- an inside job by someone with access to the DNC's system."
Again, Lawrence got it
right -- this time relying less on his own experience and intuition than on applied science as practiced by real
technical experts with no axes to grind. But, sadly, that cut across the grain of the acceptable Russia-gate
narrative, and a furor erupted among Hillary followers still licking their wounds over her loss. It proved simply
too much for them to entertain the notion that Clinton was quite capable, with help from the likes of Mook, to
snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory -- without any help from Vladimir Putin.
Ray McGovern works with
Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. An ex-CIA analyst,
his expertise on Russia goes back a half-century. He prepared and briefed
The President's Daily Brief
for
Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, and in retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).
If you
value this original article, please consider
making
a donation
to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.
My comment went in where and landed in the ether. If it does get posted as a reply to Realist I
apologize for the redundancy. Please delete second attempt
Curious
,
July 23, 2019 at 23:31
Test
Carolyn Grassi
,
July 23, 2019 at 23:31
Thanks again Ray for your detailed comprehensive coverage on what may be called The DNC coverup. If
only my progressive left-leaning friends in California could see the light of day on this fiasco of
Russian hacking. Several times I've sent your excellent analysis to these folks, whose only reply is
Silence! Sad really that hatred of Trump and Hillary's loss has blinded them. So like in the McCarthy
era out to get folks and today, of all things, with the help of the intelligence community, they used
to criticize. I wonder what John le Carre would write about the state of affairs in America. Ray, you
have company with Glenn Greenwald and Stephen F. Cohen. I call you Voices in the Wilderness. Keep on
writing, speaking out. The country needs you more than ever! sincere thanks, Carolyn Grassi, Pacifica,
CA
Hawaiiguy
,
July 23, 2019 at 16:28
Still waiting for her indictments to roll in, until I see one for jaywalking I'm in firm belief the
deep state isn't as close to peril as some may think. Heck Jeffrey Epstein is long gone from the media
and he was absolutely the most powerful pedophile walking thr streets. But the Borg is all mighty as
defending silence proves once again.
Meremark
,
July 23, 2019 at 16:10
When the post is the truth, (Mr. McGovern: huzzah, huzzah!), then trolls clog the comments, usually
(as in the present case) with by VOLUME, QUANTITY, arguing against a certain Clear Quality of tone in
the sound of the ring of Truth.
When the post has little or no truth, then comments are few or
self-defeating and the trolls needn't bother fogging the pen and so they don't?
IMO this post seems to have waaaay more comments than usual. hmmmm .
All I can do is shake my head. The 2020 election is on the visible horizon and not only did the actors
who rigged the 2016 election for Donald Trump go unpunished and off the hook, we've allowed them to
grow bigger and better, and we're going to let them do it again.
LIBERAL PROF: Big Tech moved 'rock bottom minimum' of 2.6 million votes to
Hillary in 2016
A liberal professor and "very strong public supporter of Hillary Clinton" is raising the alarms
about Google manipulation of millions of unwitting voters in recent elections, as well as the
potential impact for 2020.
Dr. Robert Epstein, former editor of Psychology Today and acclaimed psychologist who founded the
Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, discussed his research before a subcommittee of the Senate
Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, and his testimony was mind-boggling.
"You testified before this committee that Google's manipulation of votes gave at least 2.6
million additional votes to Hillary Clinton in the year 2016. Is that correct?" Sen. Ted Cruz
questioned
SWEET! HOWEVER–>> On my local cable satellite channel Vice channel carried a story all about how the
russians did it.
You folks out there taking VICE at is word are being played, again, by the MSM.
But how sweet it is caught a clinton behaving worse that NIXON, have the repugniklans right where
they belong but alas the dims are still clueless on who to run. So much for our highly touted and
worthless 2 party system.
You cannot make this shit up. And to Bobby Kwasnik I can only say "What in the hell are you
drinking son?"
Hawaiiguy
,
July 23, 2019 at 16:31
Took you long 3nough to figure that out, I did the first time they focused on hot Israeli women in
forces. It's a total zionist rag.
Drew Hunkins
,
July 23, 2019 at 14:14
Great comment.
I especially liked "my late husband and I kept asking: where and when are they going
to actually start discussing the *content* of the emails themselves? Never."
Alas, so true.
Stay strong AnneR. Don't let them get you down.
Dan
,
July 23, 2019 at 12:39
You're putting a lot of faith on former experts who got the DNC forensic evidence , how?
and assume that the evidence was not a breadcrumb left to mislead and implicate Seth Rich.
( In some circumstances the perfect hack would have no traces, but if the data will be leaked, the
leaker would leave behind misleading evidence.)
Its within russian spycraft to leave behind misleading evidence, implicate someone and
have them killed to cover it up.
I have never seen why these experts have done more than fall for it.
don't know, just say'n
Rob Roy
,
July 23, 2019 at 14:31
Proof? Julian Assange said several times I heard him myself .so there you are. The emails were
leaked from inside the DNC, not hacked by the Russians. That's why JA is being killed off and not
allowed any access to the public. BTW, the DNC computers were never examined by the investigators.
Why? The day Hillary said, "Seventeen intelligence agencies .." I knew it was a lie that she would
build on forever. Besides, I know Putin.
David
,
July 23, 2019 at 14:46
You are putting a lot of faith in a dubious private entity in the hire of the DNC. No US legal
authority examined the DNC's server. Crowdstrike, the dubious entity in the pay of the DNC made a
claim that there was a Russian hack but provided no evidence. Not only did they not provide
evidence, we have recently learned that they didn't even generate a report. CrowdSstrike claimed
that it knew it was a Russian hack because they found Cyrillic writing and the name of a former KGB
head. Sounds damned clumsy of the Russians.
William Binney, the former chief technical officer of the NSA was able to determine from the
information that is available that it was technically infeasible for their to have been a hack
originating in Russia. The material was down loaded internally on to a thumb drive. Binney's
assessment corroborates ambassador Graig Muarry's assertion that he received the down loaded
material. Both Maurry and Assange publicly requested that they be interviewed by the FBI. The FBI
chose not to examine the DNC server. Mueller also chose to decline Maurry and Assange's request for
an interview. Mueller stated that "It would have been better to have the FBI forensic experts
examine the server but CrowdStrike is a high class outfit." It decidedly is not. Basing his
conclusions on the claims of a private entity that was far from being a disinterested party is at
best negligent and at worst corrupt. Mueller took extraordinary measures to avoid taking any steps
that could yield a result different from what was claimed in his report.
It gets worst for the believers of Russian interference. A federal judge has threatened
prosecutors with contempt of court making claims against the Russian internet company whose
advertisements were alleged to be efforts to interfered in the US presidential elections that it
has no evidence to support. The "Russian interference" hoax has been exposed.
Andrew Thomas
,
July 23, 2019 at 14:48
Dan, Ray I think if you go back and read everything that Ray was only able to summarize in this
particular post, you will discover that the scenario you outlined just does not fit the known
facts.
EricT
,
July 23, 2019 at 15:24
Misleading evidence being left behind is also within our own intelligence agencies as well. See the
vault 7 releases.
Eddie
,
July 23, 2019 at 11:46
What is overlooked in all these shenanigans is the utter depravity that Mdm. Clinton and her cabal of
fellow psychopaths reached in order obscure their crimes and to seize power. By blaming Russia and
Vladimir Putin for "hacking" into DNC's emails, the Clinton crime family and their useful idiots in
the corporate media increased tensions that could have led to a nuclear holocaust.
Clinton and the
rest of the fetid cesspool that ran her campaign were willing to risk annihilating the planet so that
Clinton could slither in the White House where the gravy train of bribes could flow like the Amazon
River. Meanwhile, the corrupt to its core FBI fixed things so that Mdm. Clinton and her cronies did
not wind up in the gulag that her husband created when he ran the gravy train.
Roland James
,
July 23, 2019 at 11:03
In the Dec 5, 2016 issue of The Nation is a column 'En la Lucha' (The fight continues) by Cesar
Vargas, co-director of the Dream Action Coalition: "I had known that Trump would become president once
it was revealed the Democratic Party had rigged the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton."
Clinton beat Sanders by 3.7 million votes. Sanders has never said that the Democratic primary was
rigged, nor has he questioned the legitimacy of the result. Yes, the DNC was biased in favor of
Clinton, who has been a Democrat her entire adult life, unlike Sanders, an Independent until he wanted
to run for president. ("Progressives who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election
made a 'bad mistake'."-Noam Chomsky. // In a 50R/50D country with a winner-take-all system, 3rd party
candidates are the marginal difference. Especially this year in Wi, Mi and Pa.) More below**
My central concern over the last couple of decades has been the Global Climate Crisis, which will
likely swamp everything else; the CO2 "bullets" from the Big American Way of Life are already causing
death and destruction around the world. In 2015, though i was a Sanders supporter, i was worried that
Sanders would 'sow the wind' but likely wouldn't win the Democratic primary. Then many of his
energized supporters wouldn't support the Democratic nominee with their votes and/or with their
poisonous and conspiratorial rhetoric adding to the Clinton pile-on led by the right wing hate
machine. Therefore, the country and the whole world would 'reap the whirlwind' with 'climate change is
a hoax' Donald Trump, accelerating the race to catastrophe.
Roland James
** "The infamous hack of DNC emails that "proved" the organization had its thumb on the scale for
Clinton? Perhaps nothing has been more frustrating for people in the politics business to address,
because the conspiracy is based on ignorance. Almost every email that set off the "rigged" accusations
was from May 2016. (One was in late April; I'll address that below.)
Even in the most ridiculous of dream worlds, Sanders could not have possibly won the nomination after
May 3 -- at that point, he needed 984 more pledged delegates, but there were only 933 available in the
remaining contests. And political pros could tell by the delegate math that the race was over on April
19, since a victory would require him to win almost every single delegate after that, something no
rational person could believe. Sanders voters proclaimed that superdelegates, elected officials and
party regulars who controlled thousands of votes, could flip their support and instead vote for the
candidate with the fewest votes.
In other words, they wanted the party to overthrow the will of the majority of voters.
That Sanders fans were wishing for an establishment overthrow of the electorate more common in banana
republics or dictatorships is obscene. (One side note: Sanders supporters also made a big deal out of
the fact that many of the superdelegates had expressed support for Clinton early in the campaign. They
did the same thing in 2008, then switched to Obama when he won the most pledged delegates. Same thing
would have happened with Sanders if he had persuaded more people to vote for him.)
This is important because it shows Sanders supporters were tricked into believing a false narrative.
Once only one candidate can win the nomination, of course the DNC gets to work on that person's
behalf. Of course emails from that time would reflect support for the person who would clearly be the
nominee. And given that their jobs are to elect Democrats, of course DNC officials were annoyed that
Sanders would not tell his followers he could not possibly be the nominee. Battling for the sake of
battling gave his supporters a false belief that they could still win -- something that added to their
increasingly embittered feelings.
According to a Western European intelligence source, Russian hackers, using a series of go-betweens,
transmitted the DNC emails to WikiLeaks with the intent of having them released on the verge of the
Democratic Convention in hopes of sowing chaos. And that's what happened -- just a couple of days before
Democrats gathered in Philadelphia, the emails came out, and suddenly the media was loaded with
stories about trauma in the party. Crews of Russian propagandists -- working through an array of Twitter
accounts and websites, started spreading the story that the DNC had stolen the election from Sanders.
(An analysis provided to Newsweek by independent internet and computer specialists using a series of
algorithms show that this kind of propaganda, using the same words, went from Russian disinformation
sources [like duran] to comment sections on more than 200 sites catering to liberals, conservatives,
white supremacists, nutritionists and an amazing assortment of other interest groups.)
The fact that the dates of the most controversial emails -- May 3, May 4, May 5, May 9, May 16, May 17,
May 18, May 21 -- were after it was impossible for Sanders to win was almost never mentioned, and was
certainly ignored by the propagandists trying to sell the "primaries were rigged" narrative. (Yes, one
of them said something inappropriate about his religious beliefs. So a guy inside the DNC was a jerk;
that didn't change the outcome.) Two other emails -- one from April 24 and May 1 -- were statements of fact.
In the first, responding to Sanders saying he would push for a contested convention (even though he
would not have the delegates to do so), a DNC official wrote, "So much for a traditional presumptive
nominee." Yeah, no kidding. The second stated that Sanders didn't know what the DNC's job actually
was -- which he didn't, apparently because he had not ever been a Democrat before his run.
Bottom line: The "scandalous" DNC emails were hacked by people working with the Kremlin, then
misrepresented online by Russian propagandists to gullible fools who never checked the dates of the
documents. And the media, which in the flurry of breathless stories about the emails would
occasionally mention that they were all dated after any rational person knew the nomination was
Clinton's, fed into the misinformation.In the real world, here is what happened: Clinton got 16.9
million votes in the primaries, compared with 13.2 million for Sanders. The rules were never changed
to stop him, even though Sanders supporters started calling for them to be changed as his losses piled
up."-Kurt Eichenwald
AnneR
,
July 23, 2019 at 14:07
Would you by chance be a Dem shill? You certainly seem to be acting as such.
Russia (by which every Dem seems to mean "the Kremlin" "Putin") did *not* interfere in that
election for or against the Strumpet, for or against HRC. Talk about "misinformation"!
So now you (and your ilk?) are blaming Sanders' supporters??
So far as I'm aware the neither the DNC (bought by the Clintons) nor HRC herself ever pointed
the finger at Bernie's supporters or Bernie himself as culpable of the story you've come up with.
Andrew Thomas
,
July 23, 2019 at 15:00
You guys never give up, do you? If there is any actual "evidence" of a Russian, or for that matter
any other "hack" that comes out tomorrow, I will be utterly amazed and happy to come back to this
page to apologize. There will not be any. Mueller may try to suggest that it exists somewhere in
the "redactions." But that will be bullshit.
Trump and Clinton were the 2 most hated candidates in US history and Hillary even picked TRUMP .
with the help of the MSNBC and CNN both in the bag for Clinton,that helped give Trump 6 BILLION in
free airtime
and MSNBC fired Ed Shultz fro wanting to cover Sanders ..but that not tampering in election
right?
Americans' Distaste For Both Trump And Clinton Is Record-Breaking
No past candidate comes close to Clinton, and especially Trump, in terms of engendering strong
dislike a little more than six months before the election.
Hillary Clinton is more unpopular than Donald Trump. Let that sink in
"Donald Trump is one of the least popular politicians in the history of the United States. Yet,
Trump is still more popular than Hillary Clinton. Let that sink in.
According to the latest Bloomberg National Poll, Trump has a net favorability of 41% whereas
Clinton has a net favorability of 39%. If Democrats are to escape the political wilderness, they
will have to leave Clinton and her brand of politics in the woods. "
There was plenty of fraud during the nomination process My parents waited in line for 6 hrs in
AZ because they closed 90% of the polling places in Maricopa country and people had their parties
changed from Democrat to republican.Even employees in the state house.
Roland, you'll never convince me that Hillary Clinton was preferable to Donald Trump. Both were the
product of scraping the bottom of the U.S political barrel, but Trump was never the war-monger that
war criminal Hillary Clinton blatantly was and is. Since even Trump was equivocal about his
willingness to use military force, neither one was qualified to be president in my book. I do not
vote for war criminals or war criminal wannabes. (I've personally experienced war.) You have to be
a Peace candidate to cross my threshold of eligibility. Maybe you are different, eager to have more
blood on your hands. But do you realize that the U.S. has killed some 20 million foreign people
since World War II ended? Do you feel no responsibility for that when you choose for whom to vote?
As for your Russia-Gate B.S., you are visiting the web site that has done more to prove that
Russia-Gate has no basis in reality than any other. To begin your encounter with Russia-Gate
reality, I recommend the following Google search query:
So, in summary, Brennan, Comey, Clinton, etc. didn't accept the lawful election results, and decided
to just lie, like it's nothing, in order to -- in fact -- try to suspend American democracy, start an
extremely lucrative -- for some -- second cold war with Russia as the chosen and needed "enemy", and give
the power back to the deep state and war profiteers. Simple as that.
So, in summary, Brennan, Comey, Clinton, etc. didn't accept the lawful election results, and decided
to just lie, like it's nothing, in order to -- in fact -- try to suspend American democracy and give the
power back to the deep state and war profiteers. Simple as that.
jmg
,
July 23, 2019 at 16:35
Sorry, duplicate post. You can delete this one, thank you.
Perry Logan
,
July 23, 2019 at 07:19
"A forensic report claiming to show that a Democratic National Committee insider, not Russia, stole
files from the DNC is full of holes, say cybersecurity experts.
"In short, the theory is flawed," said FireEye's John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis
at FireEye, a firm that provides forensic analysis and other cybersecurity services."
Perry, why do you think the FBI chose not to use its own forensic experts? Why would Mueller base
his highly inflammatory claims exclusively the of statements made by a private company that was
hired by the DNC, a dubious entity that asserts it failed to even generate a report outlining it's
conclusions? Why did the FBI decline the requests of Ambassador Maurry and Julian Assange for an
interview? The fact is, Mueller failed to produce anything that a reasonable person would define as
evidence. For some people, the lack of evidence does not matter. They are certain in the way that
religious believers are certain.
Mueller worked assiduously to minimize the risk that he would
find evidence that contradicted the result he intended to provide when he undertook his
"investigation."
Realist
,
July 23, 2019 at 05:04
.
Marko
,
July 23, 2019 at 01:37
I smell a rat in the Hersh / Butowsky saga. Apparently there was a second phone call between Hersh and
Butowsky, after the initial one that was so revealing , and which Butowsky wisely recorded. In the
second call – not recorded as far we know – Hersh informs Butowsky that Andrew McCabe was his "Deep
Throat" in the FBI , who fed him the info and/or documents. This looks like a poison pill to me , one
that Hersh went along with either willingly ( more likely – so as to save his own skin ) , or
unwillingly as a useful idiot (unlikely – Hersh isn't that dumb ).
The idea that McCabe was a "White
Hat" feeding Hersh the info saying that Aaron and Seth Rich were the DNC leakers is laughable , and I
think it's quite likely that Isikoff and/or Hersh will use this poison pill to paint Butowsky ( and ,
by extension , Ty Clevenger , his attorney) as conspiracy cranks. All Hersh has to do is say " Look ,
I fed this guy a bunch of crap , and he scarfed it up. Only a complete nutjob could believe that
McCabe was my source. "
The first , recorded , call may have been all true , or it could have been a set-up from the
beginning. I suspect the former. My guess is someone got to Hersh between the first and second call
and suggested that he better remove himself from the battlefield , lest something unfortunate happen.
The McCabe "poison pill' was his getaway ticket , and he was happy to use it.
Hersh appears to be throwing Butowsky under the bus , and Isikoff will describe the resulting
carnage with glee.
Marko you raise several interesting issues about Hersh's role in all this, but it is hard to say
what it might actually be without having a transcript of the second phone call with Butowsky. Does
such a transcript exist? Or are you going on some other source?
Rob Roy
,
July 23, 2019 at 14:47
Marko, first of all, Sy Hersh doesn't "throw people under the bus." Never. Second, he's the purist
of all journalists. If you think otherwise, you don't know the man, a reporter of whom no other has
higher standards in his profession.
geeyp
,
July 22, 2019 at 23:57
The DNC literally did shoot the messenger in my opinion. Innocent until proven guilty, I know. Hillary
Clinton and her underlings need to ask for forgiveness from many, many people in this country. One of
the saddest historical footnotes in our history. She is such a pant load.
I also want to say how much I enjoyed the comments on this and Ray's previous articles. Evidently
Consortium readers are an intelligent, clever, and sardonic bunch!!
Another very fine article, Ray!! The simple truth of this sordid matter is finally going to get a
hearing I believe. As for me, who like you and a few others, especially Patrick Lawrence, Glen
Greenwald, Aaron Mate and Caitlin Johnstone, could smell the bullshit all the way from the chicken
coup from the git-go, I can't wait to sit back, pour myself a nice Guiness in a tall glass, and watch
Mr. Mueller fumble around nervously attempting to deal with all of the pointed questions from angry
Dems who will be accusing him of not lying enough on behalf of their Russiagate ghost! Anyway, great
work, as usual, Ray!!
Just between us, I only drink on even-numbered days.*** So -- for me, at
least -- it was GREAT news that the Mueller testimony would be tomorrow, the 24th, and not the 17th
as formerly scheduled. Tomorrow will be a two-Guinness day. My tall glass is crystal-clean and the
Guinness is already hidden away in the back of the refrigerator.
I cannot recall ever having had lower expectations from Congressional hearings, but it is, I
suppose, always possible that something instructive might inadvertently escape. If so, I am
confident the Guinness will be more help than hindrance as muse to any writing I might undertake at
that point.
Ray
*** Re the even-numbered days: It's a self-imposed discipline -- a sensible way of coping with my
problem of liking "the creature " (as one of my Irish grandmothers called it) far too much.
Slainte!
Bill
,
July 22, 2019 at 22:07
What did Obama know and when did he know it?
Realist
,
July 23, 2019 at 05:01
Obama knew he was sandbagging the Russians to set them up as all-purpose fall guys later when he
spoke to Medvedev about his "flexibility" of action in foreign policy prior to the 2012 election.
(First I'll get re-elected, then we'll have a "reset," you'll bend over backwards to accommodate
me, and you guys will never know what hit you when I deliver the sucker punch.) In fact, it started
long before that conversation.
As soon as he was elected every action he took was against Russian
interests or to besmirch their reputation in the public arena, even as Putin took several actions
to save Obama's hide, such as giving him the opportunity to duck his rash "red line" statements on
Syria when it was clear neither the American people nor the Congress wanted this country in another
middle eastern war. Putin also bent over backwards to accommodate American sanctions against Iran
in its phony crusade against Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program.
He rolled Putin on anti-ballistic missile deployments in Romania and Poland, after Dubya had
stuck the shiv in by "withdrawing" from the ABM treaty (otherwise known as breaking your word).
He, under the influence of Hitlery, lied to Putin about his true intentions to overthrow and
assassinate Gaddaffi rather than simply protect some poor civilians caught between the gunsights of
the "evil dictator" and the "brave freedom fighters" defending Benghazi, aka the head choppers from
al Qaeda (or whatever their nom du jour). Springtime for Hitlery and al Nusra, winter for Gaddaffi
and Libya. This is what happens to suckers who believe anything Washington says.
He and Hitlery set Victoria Nuland and John McCain loose on Ukraine where their minions
overthrew the elected government in a bloody coup on the Maidan. Because he wasn't going to be
fooled again, Putin acted quickly to preserve critical Russian interests (i.e., their only
warm-water naval base and access to the Mediterranean in Crimea). Putin refrained from intervening
on the side of the Russian population in the Donbass, nor did he entertain their pleas for
annexation by Russia, though he got blamed for these things all the same by Obomber's propaganda
machine.
Obama knew definitively that it was Ukraine that shot down the Malaysian passenger plane with a
Buk missile, yet he suppressed all evidence of such in the kangaroo court that was held to smear
Russia for this terrible event. In fact, I wouldn't put it past his den of spook advisors to have
actually had a hand in Ukraine's actions, just as they had in the Maidan. Why does the president of
Malaysia believe this? And why were they, the owners of the aircraft, not allowed to participate in
the investigation? Just as Russia, which did have significant evidence to present, was not allowed
any role in the process, while Ukraine was given a free hand to withhold and manipulate data?
Bigger hoax here than the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations rolled into one.
Obama's propaganda machine repeatedly blamed Syria for using chemical weapons against civilians,
and as a pretext for American involvement in the armed conflict on the side of his mercenary
headchoppers, when he knew damned well Syria had no such weapons because the American navy had
incinerated them after Assad turned them over via the agreement brokered by the Russians. Always
more deception and betrayal directed against Putin and Russia. Are we seeing a pattern that started
long before Hitlery masterminded "Russiagate" in the wake of the Wikileaks revelations?
Obama often used John Kerry in the many bait and switch ruses used against Putin and Assad.
Putin lobbied hard both in Washington and at the UN for an alliance with the American backstabbers
to contain "Isis/Daesh/al Nusra/ al Qaeda" terrorists within Syria. How many times did Putin and
Assad think they had a deal, a carefully defined ceasefire, only to have the Syrian army strafed
and decimated by American air forces long before the ink dried on the worthless agreements?
Who put the Turks up to downing the Russian fighter bomber as it approached, but didn't cross,
the Turkish border? Cui bono? How did that help Turkey? Rather, whose agenda did it actually help?
What did Hitlery promise but to escalate that tactic a hundred-fold with the irresponsible "no fly"
zone she proposed as part of her foreign policy during the campaign? No doubt that reckless rush to
start World War III took a lot of votes away from the witch.
Who helped the internal opposition inside of Turkey to organize the unsuccessful coup against
Erdogan? Sure wasn't Putin who apparently saved the guy's life by warning him of more Washington
skullduggery. If the Washington Deep State wants to blame someone for Erdogan's purchase of the
Russian S-400 missiles defense system and his very fortunate escape from being saddled with that
gigantic F-35 contract, blame Obomber and Hitlery for their ill-conceived strikes against foreign
leaders. They both need to go back and re-read "the Prince" for comprehension.
I'm sure I'm forgetting most of the outrages and provocations that Obama and Madame President
Clinton directed at Putin and Russia (which actual President Trump mindlessly continues). But the
point is that this very virulent and focussed anti-Russian movement was hard core policy of the
nominally-ruling Democrats from the day they received the baton from Dubya Bush. Obama continued it
long after the catastrophic election that Hitlery lost. He continued it till the day Trump was
inaugurated, stridently blaming the Russians for stealing the election from Hitlery and punishing
them with massive diplomatic expulsions during the height of the holidays and the seizure of
millions of dollars worth of uncompensated properties.
All without one iota of proof. Ever. Just like the ever-growing snowball of anti-Russian
economic sanctions that Obama, and now Trump with the enthusiastic participation of Congress,
started immediately after the coup in Ukraine never had a justifiable foundation and will seemingly
never end. How could I nearly have forgotten the sanctions? I guess they get lost in the enormous
mass of other groundless actions taken against Russia by Obomber and his muse Hitler. I wonder,
will he be proud that he made it all possible if the nuclear-tipped missiles do start flying? Words
do not describe how I have come to loathe that deceiving traitor to every principle he ran for
office on.
Carry on, Mr. McGovern. I don't know how you can maintain the spirit to face the arduous task of
trying to uncover all these depredations every day whilst the perpetrators work overtime trying to
deceive and mislead you and other truth-seekers. It must be a stunning experience (not a joyful
one) whenever you are able to turn over a relevant rock to expose the vile creatures underneath.
Get them, Ray, get them all, before they take down the world in their pursuit of MIC profits and
every last resource offered by the planet.
Rob Roy
,
July 23, 2019 at 14:54
Marko, first of all, Sy Hersh doesn't "throw people under the bus." Never. Second, he's the
purist of all journalists. If you think otherwise, you don't know the man, a reporter of whom no
other has higher standards in his profession.
Rob Roy
,
July 23, 2019 at 14:58
Wonderful commentary, Realist, per usual. You speak for me.
One caveat..according to an investigation by a German aeronautical engineer, a BUK didn't take
down the airplane it was shot down from the air by another aircraft, not a Russian one.
He offers extensive proof.
Realist
,
July 23, 2019 at 16:50
Yes, I'm familiar with that possibility. Either could be correct. I didn't want to become too
verbose and picayune. We'd need the actual data that Washington and the EU are suppressing to
zero in on the truth. The only hypothesis that ought to be discarded upon cursory inspection
is that Russia deliberately shot that plane down. That's as crazy as the claim that Putin
invaded Ukraine to seize the Donbass. You'd have to assume he loves unnecessary and expensive
quagmires the way the conflict has unfolded, when his troops could have occupied Kiev within
48 hours if he did invade. Quagmires are the hallmark of American military actions. Inquiring
minds want to know why the Ukie pilot of the jet fighter prowling the vicinity at the time of
the shoot-down never testified and later committed suicide. Parsimony says to me: guilty
conscience.
Nearly forgot Obama's incendiary goodbye kiss to Putin when he promised
retaliatory American action against Russia, perhaps in the form of a cyber attack "at a time
and place of our choosing," for its alleged theft of the presidential election. Putin had too
much character to use that threat as a constant all-purpose foil against never-ending
American provocations. He simply moved on, always trying to improve relations, which some
observers, such as PCR, feel is a mistake.
Thanks for the input, RR.
Anonymot
,
July 23, 2019 at 16:47
Essentially I agree with you, but even you are still riding the surface details. I've been
writing for over a decade about this, but since I'm neither a journalist, politician or
celebrity, no one pay much attention. That makes me a conspiracy theorist with all of its
negative connotations. I'm not that either. Suffice it to say that I'm an American who has lived
and worked in many places in the world and politics, domestic and international are a pet
passion that I've followed for decades.
Obama and Hillary's anti-Russia drive has its roots in
pre-WW II anti-communism when many significant capitalists were friends and financiers of
Nazi-Germany. After the war the Dulles brothers took over all American foreign policy as
Secretary of State and Director of the CIA. They were joined by many Senators from Joe McCarthy
to Sen. Prescott Bush. No one else had the ear of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson on
foreign matters other than State and the CIA with the CIA having information to whisper deeper
than State's. That's why we went in to lose Korea, , the Bay of Pigs, and Vietnam. Losses all,
they still generates massive profits for the MIC and installed that state of mind throughout the
DC bureaucracy. Then came Prescott's son, the CIA in person.
It is my personal assessment, having worked in Arkansas when Clinton was Governor and
corruption was just part of the landscape, that the powers of the day had little trouble
convincing Bill that he could become very, very wealthy if he just left foreign policy decisions
to them and role played. They were right. And when Prescott's grandson, George, was mature
enough, he stepped in with his extreme right wing crowd, ready to install regime changes
everywhere.
After Bush, when a zebra with Democrat stripes could have won given the catastrophe of baby
Bush, I am perfectly convinced that they sought two different minority figures, a woman obsessed
by the idea of wealth and fame and very pro- a certain kind of feminism, plus a man who desired
wealth, but also had the cause of the blacks to promote. "The loser at the DNC Convention will
be President after the winner serves his or her term(s), but the foreign policy is ours and you
will enunciate it." Bingo.
Hillary lost because she was unbelievably inept at lying and covering her double-tongued role
with Democrats' speeches and Wall Street speeches. She also clearly didn't know anything about
foreign affairs despite her flying all over the world for photo ops that gave the impression she
did.
When Assange exposed her professional ineptitude and implied he had more (that might include
her personal affairs,) who had the anti-Putin idea of returning to the Cold War? It certainly
wasn't the well spoken, but ill-informed Hillary. It was classic intelligence agency.
And she lost to a different kind of mad person who thinks walking a tightrope is good foreign
policy no matter what the risk. The mindset of the MIC and intelligence agencies have almost got
him under control after 2 1/2 years, but the Democrats, still ruled by the Clinton crowd are so
inept that we may end up crowded between a Trump win in 2020 or a straightforward coup d'etat.
Realist, one of your best of the best comments.
Not only did the Nobel Peace winner gladly get involved in the Ukraine coup with 'Victory'
Nuland, but they had to do it during Russia's shining moment to the world, the Winter Olympics
in Sochi. What arrogance. And, when Obama said about Russia, "well, they don't make anything" my
blood curdled.
You make another good point about the tragic downed airliner. Why send the black boxes to the
UK? All we heard was 'there was nothing of interest in them', Right. We know Putin was flying
back from Brazil that day and with the skill level shown by Ukraine these past few years, they
could have mixed up planes. It's hard to say.
And then to have the USB lead the investigation (as Robert reported) with the Netherlands
(and the Aussies. Again, why?) when it was reported the USB were the very organization that went
to all the ATC towers and confiscated the recording tapes? Russia sent the raw radar data to the
investigation team in the Netherlands and they came back with the retort "we can't read them"
Russia offered technical experts to help and this was ignored, as was the 2 tests done by the
makers of the Buks, Almez-Antey proving the blast pattern was an old model no longer in Russias'
inventory but in Ukraines. And they get away with all this crap?
One last thought: Putin heads a country that has 11 time zones, and we have 3. Why do so many
people think he is just sitting around twiddling his thumbs trying to upset a US election? And
he raised a good point when he said, at that time the House and the Senate were Republican
controlled. Did he do that too?
He sees the US invalidating international agreements left and right, causing more and more
military activity on his borders because of NATO needing an enemy to stay relevant, not to
mention the increased funding of course, which is many times more than his own military funding.
Why meddle in an election? He has enough on his plate with all his ethic issues, and now the
encroachment on his borders by the 'good guys with guns and missiles'.
The US population has become more provincial and ethnocentric than I have ever witnessed and
most of them don't know how large Russia is. It's a wonderful country.
Because of US ignorance about Russia it's almost as if they perceive it as a little country
where Putin has all the time in the world to play games, instead of his real purpose. Which is
now to protect his country from the US/NATO military propaganda machine and its hardware
surrounding his country. This must take up all of his time, but the ignorant still think he has
time to meddle in the corrupt US election system.
It's foolishness to the core. Only Mueller and his ilk have that kind of time and tax money to
screw around with wasted time.
Annie
,
July 22, 2019 at 21:58
Immediately after the leak Robbie Mook immediately said the Russians did it, and I remember thinking
how does he know, and saw it as ridiculous, laughable. I was a Sanders supporter, and I knew the
Democratic party who is known to side lines their liberals wanted him gone from the beginning. MSNBC
helped a lot, since throughout his campaign they would often refer to him as an old curmudgeon.
mbob
,
July 22, 2019 at 21:49
"Thus, she began her campaign under a cloud, and as more and more Americans learned of the fraud that
oozed through the DNC email correspondence -- including the rigging of the Democratic primaries -- the
cloud grew larger and darker."
Dear Ray,
The most detailed description of how the DNC rigged the primary process -- and the evidence in favor
of it -- is in "Democracy Lost: A Report on the Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries." (You can
find it on the web.) It's independent of Wikileaks.
It provides at least 6 different sources of evidence supporting its allegation of DNC rigging. [1]
Direct voter suppression that disproportionately affected Sanders. [2] Registration tampering (with
photocopies of altered ballots.) [3] Inaccurate voting machine counts favoring Clinton (Clinton
received unaccountably more votes in precincts using the most "hackable" machines. In all states,
Clinton performed best on machines that don't leave a paper trail.) [4] Exit poll discrepancies of a
unprecedented amount, which did not occur in Republican primaries held on the same day! [5] Eyewitness
caucus abuses, as in Iowa and Nevada. [6] DNC collusion with media to smear Sanders.
It states that the combined effects of the rigging was more than enough to have thrown the
nomination to Clinton.
I've never seen any debunking of this report which (at least superficially, appears sound and) was
written by credible authors.
But, on the other hand, I've seen no independent validation of the report by anyone, including
Consortium News.
Do you know anything about it?
Yours
mbob
John Drake
,
July 22, 2019 at 21:46
Way to go Ray. I find the comment about " Is this how lowly you rate the intelligence of American
voters" interesting because it is so accurate-the lowly bit that is. With the assistance (collusion)
of the MSM the whole sordid scam has become the dominant paradigm, especially as liberals grasp at the
American tradition of red baiting (even though those former reds are devout capitalists) to find
sketchy ways of ousting Trumpenfuhrer. Unfortunately these efforts are by passing his more real faults
and making the Democrats looking like fools and sore losers. Now he can play the" oh poor me I am
being picked on game."
The Clinton family has done tremendous damage to our nation, from financial deregulation, the bombing
of Yugoslavia and Libya, influence peddling and fixing the election among many other sins.
Litchfield
,
July 23, 2019 at 11:51
Agree.
Only an idiot could think that trying to bring Trump down by, basically, bringing false charges
against him was a good long-term strategy. Of course, they t hought the strategy only had to be
short-term, until Hillary won the election, became president, and could then really deliver the
corpse of Trump.
But some on the "left" are still hewing to this concept that Trump is so bad
that Mueller must be right about *something.* They still do not get that this false accusation has
*helped* Trump, not hurt him. Meanwhile he has gotten away with murder in another part of the
forest.
These smart folks are so stupid.
Jeff Harrison
,
July 22, 2019 at 20:40
Thank you, Ray for a very good summary and thank you also for highlighting how shabbily The Nation
treated Patrick after he gave them some very fine work. Now all we need is for people who write the
narrative in the MSM to start telling the truth and that would be a neat trick.
Gary Steinberg
,
July 23, 2019 at 05:54
Once one sells his soul, he doesn't get it back And today, Brenner and Crapper work for MSM. RT
probably more reality-based than CNN. This news coup is more than 50 years in the making and has
taken quite a toll on the state of the American mind. So, quite a trick,
indeed.
Through all this, the media never focused on the emails themselves, at least to any real extent.
Whether the information became available through a hack or download seems a minor issue that someone
is deliberately trying to right the election of the president of the United States.
If for example,
the worst sort of person fingered an actual murderer, would you ignore the murderer and go after the
person who fingered them. It could only be accomplished if those who had the power to do that actually
conspired to do it.
M. McGovern does an excellent job in the article making clear what happened. But was it really
important, at least as important, that the evil Russians did or did not do it. An objective observer
would be grateful that someone or some agency bought the information to light.
Of on top of it all is the gross hypocrisy surrounding the issue. We make Russia look like pikers
when it comes to interference and comparing parties that interfere with our elections, do we really
want to focus only on Russia?
AboutWhich
,
July 23, 2019 at 11:30
Heman, I'm surprised no one has attempted to respond to your two comments. They are both inane.
Trolling are you?
As for Tulsi, she left the DNC way before these leaked emails, and for the same reason as what
they exposed but which DEM-Americans ignored. What does her leaving say about her? That she's not
easily duped. Honest truth-seekers usually aren't.
All this resulting in the Seth Rich murder cover up, even Donna Brazille is still disturbed by the
Seth Rich murder, but no one else in Washington DC is permitted to even remember the Seth Rich murder.
This cover up turned into an excuse for losing the election, and immediately after the election it was
the outline of the coup, fleshed out by the professionals who do this to normally protect our country.
This is a plot worthy of the professionals who wrote the script and starred in the roles.
The coup is ongoing and given legitimacy and dignity by all but a few in Washington DC.
No one dares do anything about it, Barr is waiting for the election to see if perhaps he can drop the
charade of concern over this coup.
It may be up to we the people to stop this coup, and we don't have use of the courts. We have other
options.
Uros Ruma
,
July 22, 2019 at 18:02
Brilliant article!
Eric32
,
July 22, 2019 at 17:55
How much of this bizarre behavior and story lining can be compared to the behavior of drug addicts and
alcoholics being told they're messed up – that they have a problem?
They're inside a fantasy, they
need the fantasy, they're being told that it is a fantasy. Many people have seen how bizarre the
antics, lying, avoidance, deception can get with such individuals. I think we're seeing it being
played out by a group.
Anonymous
,
July 22, 2019 at 20:17
There is a massive difference – one uses it as a crutch to cover up a wound and make it through the
day, the other uses it as a pogo stick. Politicians and bigshots don't need this fantasy – they
knowingly use it as a weapon.
Nathan Mulcahy
,
July 22, 2019 at 17:46
Russian Collusion = Saddam's WMD 2.0.
Also a test to recognize the sheetlet from the thinking.
"Is this how lowly you rate the intelligence of American voters? " Quoted above from Lawrence
article. That was 2016, it is now 2019, so now you know. Maybe something better to describe us than
intelligence. Gullible,, conditioned, intellectually lazy and just too much to think about, all come
to mind.
In all this Tulsi Gabbard comes to mind, resigning in protest. What does that say about her as a
presidential candidate?
Fran Macadam
,
July 22, 2019 at 16:55
If only the truth could make it to the bought corporate media hacks, and not be spiked.
evelync
,
July 22, 2019 at 16:33
Thank you Ray (Veteran Intelligence Professional for Sanity) McGovern.
Your recounting of what really happened is like a balm for the open wound of having to hear the
bullcrap shoveled on us ad nauseum .
And perhaps the saddest part of this very sad tale of the loss of a progressive candidate who could
have changed the course of this country for the better – (victims of that kneecapping of the Sanders
campaign include our democracy, the millions of people who lost so much as the neoliberal DNC machine
including the Clintons helped shift the country away from New Deal protections and also include the
millions of people around the world dislocated or destroyed by our corrupt foreign policy that feeds
our MICIMATT)- the saddest part is that the political candidate who had fought for working people
against the corruption of the DNC machine was then turned on for biting his lip and saying that Mrs
Clinton was a better choice than Mr Trump possibly because Sanders may have considered it important,
for example, that a Clinton Supreme Court choice would not have included a Kavanaugh .
Senator Sanders' key supporter then and now, philosopher Cornel West, did not follow that lead (nor
did I but it was easy in Texas to cast a protest vote)
Human history I'm sure is filled with this
kind of chicanery.
We're living a nasty lesson not least of which is how our courageous whistleblowers and their
publishers are punished for simply sharing the truth when that truth hurts powerful people ..
Lies, cleverly spun, seem to be more easily accepted. Even though they never quite pass the smell
test.
Yes, General Powell, that smell test included your sorry performance at the U.N.
And Secretary Clinton – if you had spun around in 2016 during that ill-fated presidential debate
and said "back off fat man" more voters might have trusted you enough to cast their ballot for you.
But true to form for you, calculated political correctness, apparently, meant more to you than the
honesty and courage to show your unhappiness with Trump's ill manners
ethan allen
,
July 22, 2019 at 20:51
Re:
evelync
Excellent comment!! And thanks to Ray McGovern for acknowledging the prescience and professional
journalism of Patrick Lawrence, not only his seeing through the duplicity and cowardly corruption
of the political operatives and their sycophantic media stenographers, but for being determined to
inform a disillusioned, confused and too often hostile electorate.
As Usual,
EA
Please don't try to disguise your insanity in a veiled love-fest with Mr. McGovern. As evidenced by
this weeks news about the inability for Sanders to even run the economics of his own 2020 campaign,
why do you think that he could run the economics of a nation? And after everything Mr. McGovern has
written, you still acquiesce to Clinton as the shining light on the hill. Delusional! All things
being equal, at the very least, if President Trump was not elected none of us would even know
about all the shams and shenanigans of Clinton and the DNC.
Talk about delusional – you are the epitome. Trump is no better than the rest – he just can't
stop his tiny fingers from twittering and his orange mouth from blithering
It's unfortunate that the Republicans, like Mueller, are going along with the Russian meddling
BS. This is the central piece of the whole sordid affair and of course has no basis in fact.
Pull it out of the narrative and it all comes tumbling down. Tomorrow's testimony is the perfect
setting to expose the sham but sadly, the Republicans will not seize the opportunity.
Mangy vermen
,
July 23, 2019 at 15:29
A man uncovers massive coordinated INTERNAL election fraud and corruption within the
democratic party and was silenced to protect and secure the biggest election fraud in U S
history, the 2016 DNC primary .the evidence on the DNC servers would not only reveal the
insider who leaked, it could have exposed a hell of a lot of worse crimes..like voting
infrastructure Fixing predicted outcomes..but also who covered it up,and the intelligence
agencies involvement, including their MSM spokesman ..
evelync
,
July 23, 2019 at 12:33
Sorry Bobby Kwasnik, I did not intend to imply that Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is a shining
light – far from it. I am unable to come up with anything she stood for or accomplished that did
not seem calculated to achieve personal power for herself. Many of the policies she supported
both foreign and domestic obviously served the financial interests of the oligarchs who are
taking us down a dangerous path leading to unsustainability and planetary destruction.
The dangerous path I'm referring to is covered in today's Tomgram written by Andrew Bacevich.
Typing this into your search engine, if you're interested, should bring it up for you:
"Tomdispatch Andrew Bacevich future history"
Btw, as you may know, retired army colonel and Boston University history prof. Andrew Bacevich
is I think a true conservative, so rare today.
Are you sure that Donald Trump's election had anything to do with the exposure of the "shams and
shenanigans"? I think a lot of that credit goes to the work done by wikileaks and their sources.
(There are plenty of other publications that expose the Clinton machine – Clinton Cash by Peter
Schweizer is one. BTW, the sleazy way Donald Trump earned his wealth is nothing to be proud of
either.)
We're all caught up in a maelstrom of insanity, IMO. Believing that Donald Trump is anything but
a self promoter and smooth talker and genius political manipulator may eventually leave you
disappointed. He may occasionally do the right thing by the people of this country but only when
he thinks it will serve his own momentary/monetary interests.
I'm willing to openly admit to you that my mental health is no better or worse than most ..
It's a wonder that we're not all running around screaming, lol.
Cheers.
b.grand
,
July 23, 2019 at 20:38
" .the saddest part is that [Sanders] . was then turned on for biting his lip and saying that
Mrs Clinton was a better choice than Mr Trump "
No, he got what [the disdain] he deserved.
The real saddest part was that he didn't really fight for the nomination. He was the PC
"gentleman" who gave the Hildabeast an easy ride. Bobby Kwasnik got you more right than you
realize. Trump was the better choice. Without him, all the DNC shenanigans would have been
swept under the rug and almost everyone would have gone back to sleep. Instead of pussy
hatted marchers, the "women" would have been swooning, like the Blacks swooned for Obama.
Bad as it is, this beats Pres. Hilligula, and Sanders weakness lost him much support
that's not coming back, and shouldn't.
Clark M Shanahan
,
July 23, 2019 at 12:49
Sorry Bobby, Trump did win the electoral college.
and:
"As evidenced by this weeks news about the inability for Sanders to even run the economics of
his own 2020 campaign,"
I really was annoyed with all those "Hillary's got the Chops" trolls,
in 2016.
And today: Many in the "Cult of Mueller" need to acknowledge, just as Noam Chomsky stated,
that Russiagate has probably procured the 2020 election for Trump.
The snark from the Cult is simply abusive. Besides being wrong with your contention, Sanders
belongs nowhere in the subject at hand.
Stygg
,
July 23, 2019 at 13:40
So you think the President "runs the economics of a nation"?
Regarding your concluding paragraph: Hillary would never state "back off fat man" because it was
she, Bill and DNC who approved Trump as her Presidential "Pied Piper" opponent. Any doubt, view
Robert Reich's blog from early 206 to General Election 2016. Comments on his blog are littered with
HRC trolls demanding our votes while we steadfastly maintained she was not worthy of our votes.
Yes, based on her Wikileaks, based on her usurping Bernie, based on her CF, based on her support of
rapist spouse while labeling us "misogynists", based on her Pied Piper Strategy -- we informed
Reichwing HRC Camp that Trump would win the Presidency.
Hilly was lazy. Pied Piper campaign
required no effort and MSM was more than happy to water carry the Pied Piper Strategy for Hilly.
Hilly could though, campaign in Hollywood, Harvey's and Rothschild's Creme de la creme fundraisers
in Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Hamptons -- but ignore Wisconsin and PA, correct?
I'll point out other points regarding her "ill-fated Presidential debate". Demanding Bernie"s
tax records while CF had their CF charity license revoked in State of Massachusetts for financial
and other irregularities; simultaneously, Eric Schneiderman was intentionally withholding
investigation of CF. I'm fact, Clinton's were forced to revile NY CF tax records.
Goldman Sachs paid speeches by Hillary was the other Huuuge point raised during that "ill-fated"
debate. She promised to release these yet failed to do so. How did we receive content of those
speeches? Through leakers, yes GS employees and excerpts from WL.
Furthermore, it wasn't "political correctness" that kept Hilly from yelling "back off fat man".
It was fear of being exposed for Pied Piper Strategy; after all, even WL had evidence of her Pied
Piper gem. You refer also to Trump's ill manners in your last paragraph while ignoring Hillary's
legendary ill manners. Eighteen years post BillyBoy's Cigar Capers, she has Vanity Fair disinvite
Monica Lewinsky from a NY Gala which Monica had already RSVP'd to. There are man ex-SS employees
who can attest to her ill manners as well.
In closing, I'll leave you with two names that speak volumes about Hilly's ill manners and
seething anger upon being exposed for her lies and corruption. Harmon Wilfred and Julian Assange.
Harmon was Hilly's first political refugee, simply because he had records of Gov. Clinton's
financial corruption. He was forced to flee to Canada, where Hilly sent Michael Horowitz and other
prosecutor goons to falsely imprison and litigate him. Later, when serving in DC, same Michael
Horowitz (now IG Horowitz), had Harmon"s children removed from him. Yes, Horowitz was serving on a
Child Abuse Advisory Board (voluntary position) and arranged for that gross miscarriage of justice.
Twenty years later, Harmon sits in NZ, stateless, without a passport, imprisoned by Hilly's and
Five Eyes Mafiaosa type agreement. Should Harmon attempt to leave NZ , he faces immediate
extradition to US. Should his Canadian wife attempt to visit him, she is banned at most ports. She
will face arrest.
Trump will win 2020. Bernie is not an option, he has been fully co-opted courtesy of Hilly and
DNC. DNC has intentionally flooded Presidential race with twenty-one candidates, one of whom is an
AWAN House Dem, Tim "AWAN" Ryan. Julian Castro is twin brother of Joacquin "AWAN" Castro. Should
Castro win Presidency, or be selected VP, Castro would have ability to pardon his twin and
thirty-one House AWAN Dems. And to be clear, we know this flooding of race is to keep Bernie from
receiving highest number of electoral votes. So keep flooding, keep jerking with SuperDelegate
rules. I DemExited 2016. The Pied Piper has won. Deal with it.
And Ray should see the short video of Ellen Ratner confirming at a symposium on Nov. 9, 2016 that
she had a 3-hour conversation with Assange a few days before (Nov. 5, 2016) and he said that it was
not the Russians (as he has been saying for a long time) but was an inside job. In the video she
doesn't state that it was Seth and Aaron Rich who gave the emails to Assange but Butowsky claims in
his lawsuit that is exactly what Assange told Ratner and asked her to tell Rich's parents to give
them some perspective regarding Seth's murder.
If you are an individual and you invent and publish conspiracy theories, you could get sent off to a
psychiatric ward and deprived of liberty (including religious liberty in many states) and property
without due process – something which is otherwise reserved for enemy combatants ("terrorists") and
now (at least seemingly) illegal immigrants.
If you work in mainstream journalism, politics, or public relations, you might get a promotion.
Drew Hunkins
,
July 22, 2019 at 15:43
The whole notion the Kremlin hacked the '16 prez election or that Moscow somehow interfered in it is
the biggest propaganda accomplishment I've ever witnessed. In some ways it's even beyond the 2002/'03
"Saddam has WMD! Saddam's in bed with al-Qaeda" business.
Despite there being absolutely no credible
evidence that any such interference existed, millions of otherwise semi-intelligent liberal minded
folks have been lapping up this canard as if it were their mother's milk. Mueller's left with egg on
his face after his report embarrassingly stated that the Russian's interfered. What a load of malarkey
that judge Friedrich has easily seen as having no substance prompting her to slap a well deserved gag
order on the prosecutor. A prosecutor who was probably aligned with the Winter Hill gang to one degree
or another!
This disconcerting group-think from the liberal intelligentsia should elicit gales of laughter if
it weren't so utterly imbecilic and dangerous.
AnneR
,
July 23, 2019 at 09:40
Yes, Drew H, the "liberal Intelligentsia" continue to indulge in this bizarro groupthink and
clearly willingly. One might say, so much for being members of the (self designated)
"intelligentsia."
As soon as this whole farrago hit the MSM fan and they began spraying out their DNC cover
bullshit, my late husband and I kept asking: where and when are they going to actually start
discussing the *content* of the emails themselves? Never.
So one can only conclude that the liberal intelligentsia (of whom many include my late husband's
friends – few of whom have continued to be in touch with me because I am far more abrasive than he)
are *true* Dem party supporters: i.e. thoroughly bourgeois, very soft left (identitarian politics
with a little generalized medicare help for the masses thrown in) and Russophobic under their thin
patina of "progressiveness" (whatever that really means).
One might be forgiven, surely, for asking: to what significant end all of that highly expensive
secondary and tertiary education if you have fallen for, and remain wedded to, the Clintonite-DNC
lies and more lies of Russiagate?
The only answer I can come up with is: that it fits in with their underlying worldview; that it
allows them to continue to support the imaginary "left" headed side of the single party. Sanders is
hardly a Leninist, but he was, it seems a little too "revolutionary" for the property-owning,
deeply corporate-capitalist leaning liberal intelligentsia (as of course, being liberal they would
be).
Skip Scott
,
July 23, 2019 at 15:05
The reason it fits with their "underlying world view" is they are passive consumers of MSM
propaganda. They are not critical thinkers. They are also mostly isolated within their little
clique, and are purposely separated from the seeing the horrible consequences of our war
machine. As long as they can sip on their lattes in Starbucks, check their portfolio on their
smart phone, and nobody does a drone strike on them, all is good with their world. The reason
they hate Trump so much is that he has ripped off the mask and revealed the hypocrisy. When our
"war criminal in chief" was a smooth talking blackish man it was easy to ignore the ugly
underbelly of unrestrained capitalism seeking global hegemony. You could put a "Coexist" bumper
sticker on your car and forget Obama was having his "Terror Tuesdays" in the company of John
Brennan.
b.grand
,
July 23, 2019 at 21:36
AnneR, there are no heroes: Bernie endorses Russiagate. He's only revolutionary in rhetoric,
most of which would never pass any Congress. The way he deferred to Hillary, what hope that he's
stand up to R2P & hawkish Dems and the MIC?
"... Moreover, if, as the memorandum asserted, 'British officials' were also aware that the 'most reliable intelligence' exonerated the Syrian government, rather fundamental questions arose as to how the JIC had felt able to claim precisely the reverse in support of David Cameron's unsuccessful attempt on 29 August to win Commons' support for British participation in air strikes. ..."
"... At the time, the Director General, Defence and Intelligence at the FCO was one Robert Hannigan, who in April 2014 would be appointed as Director of GCHQ. The National Security Adviser was a certain Sir Kim Darroch, whose appointment as Ambassador to the U.S. would be announced in August 2015. Both have been in the news, in relation to 'Russiagate.' ..."
"... Obviously, the same question arises about both of them as about Brennan: are they 'Gleiwitz types', who were actively complicit in preparing a murderous 'false flag', or were they simply part of a rather stupid Anglo-American 'dog', whom the 'tail', in the shape of the jihadists and their Turkish, Saudi and Qatari backers, could 'wag', as they chose? ..."
"... From the articles which Seymour Hersh published in the 'London Review of Books', and other materials, it became evident that the Defense Intelligence Agency, then headed by General Flynn, had been aware of the likelihood of fresh 'false flags' -- after the small scale incidents in spring 2013. ..."
"... An argument that 'Sundance' has repeatedly made is that a lot of what was happening in mid-2016, including the dossier attributed to Steele, had to do with the need to find justifications for these questionable surveillance operations. ..."
"... While I think there is something in this, I have long thought that the discovery that a mass of material exfiltrated from the DNC, and was going to be published by 'WikiLeaks', and the subsequent murder of Seth Rich, are likely to have been critically important triggers. ..."
"... panic-stricken improvisation found alike in the dossier, and the claims about the 'digital forensics' made by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'CrowdStrike', and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait. ..."
"... A week later, Butowsky filed a new action, in which the suggestion of a very-wide ranging conspiracy to suppress the truth about both the DNC leaks and Rich's murder was turned into a catalogue of defamation claims against a long list of people, including, as well as a variety of lawyers involved, CNN, the'Nw York Times', Vox, and the DNC. ..."
"... 'That Seth Rich was wacked because he stole the DNC emails and transferred them to Wikileaks is a conspiracy theory. It is possible and even plausible, but there is no evidence to confirm it. Many people seem to believe it because it makes more sense than the competing conspiracy theory, that Russia hacked the DNC and handed the emails to Wikileaks. Isikoff's claim, that Russia planted the Rich conspiracy theory, has no sound base. That theory existed before anything "Russian" mentioned it.' ..."
"... Reading the full text of Ms. Craven's report, I can see quite how well justified was Larry's suggestion in his post that Folkenflik and NPR were on a very sticky wicket indeed (as we say in England.) ..."
"... However, 'fools rush in', as the saying goes, so Isikoff decided to conspire with Deborah Sines, apparently the former U.S. assistant attorney in charge of investigating Seth Rich's murder, to suggest that suggestions that the victim had been the source of the material from the DNC published by 'WikiLeaks' originated as just another Russian plot. ..."
"... It appears that prior to the publication of his 'report', Isikoff talked to Butowsky, who in his efforts to dissuade him explained that his involvement in the whole affair began when Ellen Ratner, a news analyst with Fox, and sister of the late Michael Ratner, who had been an attorney for Assange, contacted him in Fall 2016 about a meeting she had with her that figure. ..."
"... And then, not particularly surprisingly, Butowsky and Clevenger abandoned their inhibitions about identifying Ellen Ratner as a source, and filled in a lot of 'blanks' in their 'narrative' about how Seth Rich lived and died. ..."
"... Among the many problems for Brennan and his co-conspirators -- among whom, on the British side, Hannigan and Darroch, and also Sedwill, are very important -- one relates to the way that the capabilities of 'scientific forensics', in all kinds of areas, have increased by leaps and bounds in recent years. ..."
"... This has meant that they have had little option but to corrupt the processes of investigation. The ludicrous claims by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait, which nobody but a fool -- congenital 'useful idiot' one might say -- or a knave would dare to defend in public, are only one of many cases in point. ..."
One does not like to admit to having been one of John Brennan's 'useful idiots' -- I had
thought I could see through any of the 'active measures' which he and his co-conspirators, on
both sides of the Atlantic, could dream up. But I had swallowed whole the notion that Michael
Flynn had been stupid enough knowingly to get involved in Erdoğan's feud with
Gülen.
In fairness, however, I do think that when dealing with spiders like the former head of
the CIA, a prudent fly needs to be sure he, or she, gets competent legal advice at the
outset.
It may perhaps be interesting to put your account together with a post by 'Sundance' on
the 'Conservative Treehouse' site on 14 July, headlined 'Devin Nunes Discusses Upcoming
Mueller Testimony '
This takes up the issue, on which its author has commented extensively, of illegitimate
access by contractors to the databases of NSA intercepts -- an issue which is clearly bound
up with that of the use of such material to create the 'web' in which Flynn found himself
hopelessly entangled.
The post by 'Sundance' suggests, just as you do, that the driving force behind what has
happened was actually John Brennan. The April 2017 ruling by FISA Court Presiding Judge
Rosemary Collyer does not definitely establish that the illegitimate access of contractors
started in 2012, but it definitely strongly suggests that it did.
Reading the 6 September 'Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity' memorandum to
Obama, entitled 'Is Syria a Trap?', whose signatories included both you and Colonel Lang, it
seemed overwhelmingly likely to some of us who were familiar with both your writings that
Brennan had to have been involved in a conspiracy with the Turks, Saudis, and Qataris.
One relevant question related to whether the role of the Americans involved in this
conspiracy was simply 'ex post facto' exploitation of the patent 'false flag' sarin atrocity
at Ghouta the previous 21 August to attempt to inveigle the United States into toppling
Assad, or whether there was 'ex ante' complicity.
Moreover, if, as the memorandum asserted, 'British officials' were also aware that the
'most reliable intelligence' exonerated the Syrian government, rather fundamental questions
arose as to how the JIC had felt able to claim precisely the reverse in support of David
Cameron's unsuccessful attempt on 29 August to win Commons' support for British participation
in air strikes.
At the time, the Director General, Defence and Intelligence at the FCO was one Robert
Hannigan, who in April 2014 would be appointed as Director of GCHQ. The National Security
Adviser was a certain Sir Kim Darroch, whose appointment as Ambassador to the U.S. would be
announced in August 2015. Both have been in the news, in relation to 'Russiagate.'
Obviously, the same question arises about both of them as about Brennan: are they
'Gleiwitz types', who were actively complicit in preparing a murderous 'false flag', or were
they simply part of a rather stupid Anglo-American 'dog', whom the 'tail', in the shape of
the jihadists and their Turkish, Saudi and Qatari backers, could 'wag', as they chose?
From the articles which Seymour Hersh published in the 'London Review of Books', and other
materials, it became evident that the Defense Intelligence Agency, then headed by General
Flynn, had been aware of the likelihood of fresh 'false flags' -- after the small scale
incidents in spring 2013.
And it was clear enough, if one bothered to study the 'open source' material at all
carefully, that the DIA had been a key locus of opposition to the strategies being pursued by
Brennan, together with his British co-conspirators.
Accordingly, the fact that an 'interagency memorandum of understanding', which according
to Collyer's judgement looks as though it may well date from 2012 -- the year Brennan was
appointed to head the CIA -- appears to have led, in that year, to the granting of access to
the material, through the FBI, to outside contractors, looks somewhat interesting. (This is
well covered by 'Sundance'.)
So, I find myself asking whether in fact this gross abuse of the role of the NSA was not
linked at the outset to the divisions within the American intelligence apparatus and military
about policy towards the Middle East, and also whether this may not be relevant to assessing
the role of Robert Mueller, who was FBI Director through until September 2013.
An argument that 'Sundance' has repeatedly made is that a lot of what was happening in
mid-2016, including the dossier attributed to Steele, had to do with the need to find
justifications for these questionable surveillance operations.
While I think there is something in this, I have long thought that the discovery that a
mass of material exfiltrated from the DNC, and was going to be published by 'WikiLeaks', and
the subsequent murder of Seth Rich, are likely to have been critically important
triggers.
Among other things, I do not think that the version given by 'Sundance' can explain the
air of panic-stricken improvisation found alike in the dossier, and the claims about the
'digital forensics' made by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'CrowdStrike', and the former GCHQ person
Matt Tait.
I see that there has now been a dramatic escalation in the legal battles which began when
Ed Butowsky bought his initial action against David Folkenflik and his 'NPR' colleagues in
June 2018. The discovery process in that action was followed by an 'Amended Complaint' on 5
March this year.
A week later, Butowsky filed a new action, in which the suggestion of a very-wide ranging
conspiracy to suppress the truth about both the DNC leaks and Rich's murder was turned into a
catalogue of defamation claims against a long list of people, including, as well as a variety
of lawyers involved, CNN, the'Nw York Times', Vox, and the DNC.
On 9 July, Michael Isikoff published a story alleging that the claims about Rich and his
murder were the result of a Russian 'active measures' operation -- to use a favourite phrase
of TTG's.
'That Seth Rich was wacked because he stole the DNC emails and transferred them to
Wikileaks is a conspiracy theory. It is possible and even plausible, but there is no evidence
to confirm it. Many people seem to believe it because it makes more sense than the competing
conspiracy theory, that Russia hacked the DNC and handed the emails to Wikileaks. Isikoff's
claim, that Russia planted the Rich conspiracy theory, has no sound base. That theory existed
before anything "Russian" mentioned it.'
As it happens, Butowsky and his lawyer, Ty Clevenger, obviously decided it was time to, as
it were, 'unmask their batteries', and provide some of the evidence they have been
accumulating.
There is another useful post by 'Sundance', which in turn links to a very interesting post
on the Gateway Pundit' site. From there, you can access both Clevenger's blog post, and the
text of the 'Amended Complaint.'
It seems likely that Butowsky and Clevenger were pushed into acting a bit sooner than they
had intended. The fact that the name of Ellen Ratner, clearly a pivotal participant, was
misspellled 'Rattner' in the 'Amended Complaint', is likely to be an indication of this.
However, I also think that Clevenger, who seems to me a first-class 'ferret', could do
with the services of an old-style secretary, who checked his productions before they went
out.
As I have previously mentioned, I testified several times in Collyer's Washington district
court on non-FISA matters. My impression was that she is a very ambitious woman who wishes
always to do DoJ's bidding.
Your recollections of Collyer had, unfortunately, slipped my mind when I posted my comment
above. So, unfortunately, had Larry's post on Judge Caroline M. Craven's denial in her report
dated 17 April 2019 of the Motion to Dismiss filed by David Folkenflik and his NPR colleagues
in the defamation case brought against them by Ed Butowsky.
At the time of his post, the full text of the judgement was only available on PACER, which
requires a subscription. However, looking at the 'Court Listener' site, I now see that both
it and some other key documents in the case are freely available.
Reading the full text of Ms. Craven's report, I can see quite how well justified was
Larry's suggestion in his post that Folkenflik and NPR were on a very sticky wicket indeed
(as we say in England.)
And I can also see more clearly why, following the judgement, Butowsky and Ty Clevenger
felt they were in a position to launch an action both against some of the major legal players
in the cover-up of the fact that the materials published by the DNC were leaked by Seth Rich,
not hacked by the Russians, and also key disseminators of the cover-up, CNN, the NYT, and
Vox.
What looks to have happened subsequently is a natural enough process of escalation.
Among those who rather actively promoted the hogwash attributed to Christopher Steele was
Michael Isikoff, who is, apparently, chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News. In
April, he was reported in 'Vanity Fair' conceding that 'I think it's fair to say that all of
us should have approached this, in retrospect, with more skepticism'.
Any 'investigative reporter' worth his or her salt would have done elementary checks on
the dossier immediately, and not touched it with a bargepole -- again, as we used to say in
England. Also, even among the incompetent and corrupt, common prudence might have suggested
caution.
However, 'fools rush in', as the saying goes, so Isikoff decided to conspire with
Deborah Sines, apparently the former U.S. assistant attorney in charge of investigating Seth
Rich's murder, to suggest that suggestions that the victim had been the source of the
material from the DNC published by 'WikiLeaks' originated as just another Russian
plot.
It appears that prior to the publication of his 'report', Isikoff talked to Butowsky,
who in his efforts to dissuade him explained that his involvement in the whole affair began
when Ellen Ratner, a news analyst with Fox, and sister of the late Michael Ratner, who had
been an attorney for Assange, contacted him in Fall 2016 about a meeting she had with her
that figure.
Although Butowsky intended the conversation to be 'off the record', and the idea was
emphatically not that Isikoff would contact Ellen Ratner, he did. It seems that -- not
particularly surprisingly, in the current climate -- she lied to him, and he was stupid
enough to think that this meant he could get away with publishing his story.
And then, not particularly surprisingly, Butowsky and Clevenger abandoned their
inhibitions about identifying Ellen Ratner as a source, and filled in a lot of 'blanks' in
their 'narrative' about how Seth Rich lived and died.
I am still in the process of digesting the new information. However, a couple of
preliminary observations about the implications may be worth making.
Among the many problems for Brennan and his co-conspirators -- among whom, on the
British side, Hannigan and Darroch, and also Sedwill, are very important -- one relates to
the way that the capabilities of 'scientific forensics', in all kinds of areas, have
increased by leaps and bounds in recent years.
This has meant that they have had little option but to corrupt the processes of
investigation. The ludicrous claims by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'Crowdstrike' and the former
GCHQ person Matt Tait, which nobody but a fool -- congenital 'useful idiot' one might say --
or a knave would dare to defend in public, are only one of many cases in point.
What is really dangerous for the conspirators, however, is when the problems they have in
contesting rational arguments about the 'scientific forensics' come together with problems
relating to more 'old-fashioned' kinds of evidence: crucially, 'witness testimony'.
This, I think, may now be happening.
It also seems to me quite likely that some of those 'in the know' -- including perhaps
Rosemary Collyer -- had seen what was liable to happen a good while ago, and decided that a
prudent 'rat' keeps its options open.
Mueller looks more and more like dirty Clinton fixer.
Notable quotes:
"... The Feb. 2018 indictment referred repeatedly to the IRA simply as a "Russian organization." But in Mueller's report 14 months later, the "Russian organization" had somehow morphed into "Russia." The IRA's lawyers argued, in effect, that Mueller's ipse-dixit "Russia did it" does not suffice as proof of Russian government involvement. Federal Judge Friedrich agreed and ordered Mueller to cease promoting his evidence-less charge against the IRA; she added that "any future violations of her order will trigger a range of potential sanctions." ..."
"... In testimony to Congress in October 2017, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch had cautioned earlier that from 2015 to 2017, "Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or 'served,' a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds." Shamefully misleading "analysis" by Times reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti in a 10,000-word article on September 20, 2018 made the case that the IRA's 80,000 posts helped deliver the presidency to Trump. ..."
"... Shane and Mazzetti neglected to report the 33 trillion number for needed context, even though the Times ' own coverage of Stretch's 2017 testimony stated outright: "Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users' News Feeds everyday." ..."
"... CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, the Justice Department admitted. ..."
"... With Erin Ratner being named as a conduit between Seth Rich and Wikileaks in a lawsuit yesterday – the second flimsy leg of Mueller's claims – gets cut off at the knees. ..."
Daniel Lazare's July 12 Consortium Newspiece
shatters one of the twin prongs in Mueller's case that "the Russian government interfered in
the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion." It was the prong dripping
with incessant drivel about the Kremlin using social media to help Trump win in 2016.
Mueller led off his Russiagate report, a redacted version of which was published on April
18, with the dubious claim that his investigation had
" established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election principally through two
operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored
presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against
entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign, and then released stolen
documents."
Judge to Mueller: Put Up or Shut Up
Mueller: Needs more time. (Flickr)
Regarding the social-media accusation, Judge Friederich has now told Mueller, in effect, to
put up or shut up. What happened was this: On February 16, 2018 a typically credulous grand
jury -- the usual kind that cynics say can be persuaded to indict the proverbial ham sandwich
-- was convinced by Mueller to return 16 indictments of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and
associates in St. Petersburg, giving his all-deliberate-speed investigation some momentum and a
much-needed, if short-lived, "big win" in "proving" interference by Russia in the 2016
election. It apparently never occurred to Mueller and the super-smart lawyers around him that
the Russians would outsmart them by hiring their own lawyers to show up in U.S. court and seek
discovery. Oops.
The Feb. 2018 indictment referred repeatedly to the IRA simply as a "Russian organization."
But in Mueller's report 14 months later, the "Russian organization" had somehow morphed into
"Russia." The IRA's lawyers argued, in effect, that Mueller's ipse-dixit "Russia did it"
does not suffice as proof of Russian government involvement. Federal Judge Friedrich agreed and
ordered Mueller to
cease promoting his evidence-less charge against the IRA; she added that "any future violations
of her order will trigger a range of potential sanctions."
More specifically, at the conclusion of a hearing held under seal on May 28, Judge Friedrich
ordered the government "to refrain from making or authorizing any public statement that links
the alleged conspiracy in the indictment to the Russian government or its agencies." The judge
ordered further that "any public statement about the allegations in the indictment . . . must
make clear that, one, the government is summarizing the allegations in the indictment which
remain unproven, and, two, the government does not express an opinion on the defendant's guilt
or innocence or the strength of the evidence in this case."
Reporting Thursday on Judge Friedrich's ruling, former CIA and State Department official
Larry C. Johnson
described it as a "potential game changer," observing that Mueller "has not offered one
piece of solid evidence that the defendants were involved in any way with the government of
Russia." After including a lot of useful background material, Johnson ends by noting:
"Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot
put that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth–if you cannot
produce evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that
part of the Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their
accusers."
IRA Story a 'Stretch'
Last fall, investigative journalist Gareth Porter dissected and
debunkedThe New York Times 's far-fetched claim that 80,000 Facebook posts by the
Internet Research Agency helped swing the election to Donald Trump. What the Times story
neglected to say is that the relatively paltry 80,000 posts were engulfed in literally
trillions of posts on Facebook over the two-year period in question -- before and after the
2016 election.
Stretch and executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google hauled before a Senate Judiciary
subcommittee on crime and terrorism on Oct. 31, 2017.
In testimony to Congress in October 2017, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch had
cautioned earlier that from 2015 to 2017, "Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or
'served,' a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds." Shamefully misleading
"analysis" by Times reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti in a 10,000-word
article on September 20, 2018 made the case that the IRA's 80,000 posts helped deliver the
presidency to Trump.
Shane and Mazzetti neglected to report the 33 trillion number for needed context, even
though the Times ' own coverage of Stretch's 2017 testimony stated
outright: "Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of
content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users' News Feeds everyday."
The chances that Americans saw any of these IRA ads -- let alone were influenced by them --
are infinitismal. Porter and others did the math and found that over the two-year period, the
80,000 Russian-origin Facebook posts represented just 0.0000000024 of total Facebook content in
that time. Porter commented that this particular Times contribution to the Russiagate
story "should vie in the annals of journalism as one of the most spectacularly misleading uses
of statistics of all time."
And now we know, courtesy of Judge Friederich, that Mueller has never produced proof, beyond
his say-so, that the Russian government was responsible for the activities of the IRA --
feckless as they were. That they swung the election is clearly a stretch.
The Other Prong: Hacking the DNC
The second of Mueller's two major accusations of Russian interference, as noted above,
charged that "a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against
entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign, and then released stolen
documents." Sadly for Russiagate aficionados, the evidence behind that charge doesn't hold
water either.
CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee
chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an
un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to,
the Justice Department
admitted.
The
revelation came in a
court filing by the government in the pre-trial phase of Roger Stone, a long-time
Republican operative who had an unofficial role in the campaign of candidate Donald Trump.
Stone has been charged with misleading Congress, obstructing justice and intimidating a
witness.
The filing was in response to a motion by Stone's lawyers asking for "unredacted reports"
from CrowdStrike challenging the government to prove that Russia hacked the DNC server. "The
government does not possess the information the defendant seeks," the DOJ filing says.
Small wonder that Mueller had hoped to escape further questioning. If he does testify on
July 24, the committee hearings will be well worth watching.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and a presidential briefer.
In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. His colleagues and
he have been following closely the ins and outs of Russiagate.
Carlos , July 17, 2019 at 12:52
With Erin Ratner being named as a conduit between Seth Rich and Wikileaks in a lawsuit
yesterday – the second flimsy leg of Mueller's claims – gets cut off at the
knees.
cletus , July 17, 2019 at 05:29
just read your article at lewrockwell on 7/17.
you gave all the facts that irrefutably condemn the mueller hoax and reveal what a con man
he is. I salute you for this.
unfortutunately, you then come to a conclusion that cannot be supported by an reasonable
person.
you think that mueller's con will be called out by the republicans on the committee.
what a joke. They will avoid like the plague revealling that the russia claims by mueller
are a hoax.
they'll focus completely on ' you did conclude that trump didn't collude with the russians,
right?"
anyone who's been paying attention at all knows this.
Robert G. Hilton , July 17, 2019 at 01:13
There was no expert report showing hacking because the expert had found that the Russians
did not hack. Simple as that. The way it works is, that an expert puts nothing in writing
until AFTER orally consulting with the attorney who hired him. If the news is bad for said
attorney, then the expert is instructed NEVER to put the bad news in writing. I used to hire
experts when I litigated patent infringement cases, and that is the way it works. If you pay
the expert, then you make the rules. The judge may understand this too. I'm pretty sure that
the Crowd Strike expert also gave Muller (Andrew Wiseman?) the same news about no
hacking.
michael weddle , July 16, 2019 at 22:41
Why, shortly after Random Juan claimed the presidency, was a Crowdstrike employee trying
to stoke the Venezuelan coup?
I wish that this constant debunking of Russia Gate would be doing some good. Sadly it's
not. Most of the members of daily kos believe everything about Russia Gate and even after
reading some of the great essays written here that debunks it they instead say that this
website has been bought out by Russia.
I once thought that if people really looked at the evidence or lack of it that they would
wake up and smell the propaganda. It has always been so obvious to me that there was never
any there there and I couldn't understand how people bought into it. But I think it has to do
with who people voted for in the last election. Hillary's supporters just can't believe that
she could have lost without outside interference. Sad.
ex-PFC Chuck , July 16, 2019 at 18:08
A post yesterday at The Conservative Treehouse expands on a Gateway Pundit post about an
amended filing to the court in a Texas libel suit that could blow the whole Russia-gate hoax
wide open, taking with it whatever shred of credibility the Mueller Report might still have.
Not to mention the rationale for silencing Assange, General Flynn's prosecution, and the
murder of Seth Rich.
It looks like this fraudulent fable has finally been debunked by the US judicial system.
Now the Hillary bots will have to come up with another excuse for her wealthy donors as to
why she lost the election to a much maligned TV host that spent a small fraction of her
campaign funding. This also takes some of the fuel out of using the Russiagate fraud for a
march to war with Russia that was accompanied by large defense spending increases. Russiagate
was the perfect gift to the Clinton campaign apologists and the MIC that needs a causus belli
to feed the public war machine. That gift box has now been unraveled to display an empty box.
I'm surprised Ray McGovern did not bring up the issue of the alleged hacking of DNC emails to
have been contrary to the capability of the internet at that time. The rate of transfer was
consistent with downloading to a flash drive but impossible for transfer of packets across an
IP network – further debunking the Russia hacking narrative. This whole house of cards
has crashed in and it seems that it will be impossible for the Russiagate fraudsters to
reconstruct their tawdry myth.
jaycee , July 16, 2019 at 14:08
Perceptive bloggers identified the IRA as a commercial clickbait operation two years ago.
Everything about that operation was consistent with that description. Describing the IRA as a
Russian government psy-op program, in turn, was inconsistent with the evidence at hand and so
required the assumption that its purpose was to "sow chaos", or similar guesswork. It should
be remembered that the Facebook / Twitter people were initially reluctant to go along with
the latter theory, and only came on board after a great deal of pressure from members of
Congress such as Mark Warner. So this whole nonsensical story was magnified at the insistence
of powerful Democratic congressional persons, and Mueller was simply bolstering their
arguments – which was his job it appears. The result has been not only a false
consciousness deliberately seeded through the public, but also a raft of social media and
alternative news censorship which has been silencing both alt-right and progressive
voices.
Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2019 at 13:45
Thanx, Ray. I've said from the outset that Russiagate was bullshit perpetrated by Three
Names who just couldn't stand the fact that this was the latest in a long string of failures
that this incompetent, arrogant woman perpetrated on the American people. It was bullshit
from jump street because Three Names won the election by 3M votes but in the American
presidential election you not only need the votes, you need the distribution. Distribution
she didn't have. Russia (or any other actor sufficiently large and determined) can sway votes
for one candidate or another but they can't sway distribution. I personally thought the claim
that Russia via the Internet Research Agency sought to sway the election by disparaging Three
Names and pumping up Thump. Three Names won by 3M votes. Looks like Russia's IRA did a
spectacularly poor job of meddling.
There are some take aways from this that the government should be looking into/doing
something about.
1. Russiagate never had any legs. The legs that it got came from an effort by the deep state
to create them out of thin air. The deep state tried to take on the role of the Praetorian
Guard in old Rome. Their role originally was to protect the emperor but it morphed over the
years into picking who would be the emperor. The likes of Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Struck
(however you spell it) and his femme fatale (at a minimum, there may be more) should all be
marched off to jail and locked up for a considerable period of time for their attempts to
destroy our democracy (or republic – a distinction without a difference).
2. Seth Rich's murder needs to be actually investigated now that he has been outed as the
source of the leak to Wikileaks.
3. The Republican party needs to be banned as a political party. Any clear eyed view of
the 2016 election will conclude that the decades old effort by the Republicans at voter
suppression and gerrymandering are what resulted in the 2016 results. 80,000 votes in three
states that the Republicans have invested great voter suppression efforts – Wisconsin,
Michigan, and Pennsylvania would have changed the election results. This should have been a
major neon sign that winner take all for electoral votes is a bad idea. If proportional EC
votes were mandated, third parties would have a chance and our presidential elections might
become actual contests. Otherwise, we'll continue to have elections that are between two
candidates – worse and worser.
John Puma , July 16, 2019 at 12:36
The proportion of IRA "stories" among total Facebook postings
in the period in question, can be expressed in manner a bit more
readily grasped: on average, one IRA posting appeared among
every 412 million total. For perspective the US population is now
about 330 million.
The FBIs bungling with Crowdstrike information is reminiscent
of its reported 9-11 careless incompetence.
Jill , July 16, 2019 at 13:06
This may be why NPR featured that story:
"Businessman Ed Butowsky filed a lawsuit on Monday that outed FOX News reporter Ellen
Ratner was his source for the Seth Rich information.
This comes after Michael Isikoff's report last week that labeled Butowsky as a Russian
source."
Yahoo's reporter Michael Isikoff is a sock puppet for the CIA/FBI that provided the info
to NPR and was one of the first to spread the lies told to him by Steele about Russian
interference. He must have tried to head off the lawsuit filed today. Ed Butowsky filed a
lawsuit against the liberal media claiming defamation and business disparagement. He claims
that Assange told Ellen Ratner (Fox News analyst and sister of Assange's lawyer who passed
away) that Seth and Aaron Rich provided the emails to Wikileaks.
I don't think anyone with a couple of brain cells would dismiss the idea that an insider
with the DNC having access to delicate, perhaps damaging material, being what seems on the
surface, to be the victim of a motiveless murder would ask the question, was there any
connection between Seth Rich's demise and the crap storm that ensued after the Wikileaks
release. Really hello !
LarcoMarco , July 16, 2019 at 17:46
"NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Michael Isikoff" – what a predictable farce! "We
talked to Deborah Sines, who was the federal prosecutor in charge of the investigation into
Seth Rich's death. She was an assistant U.S. attorney in the U.S. attorney's office in the
District of Columbia, which prosecutes local murders. And she would see these conspiracy
theories about her case circulating on the Web. She was – she wanted to find out where
they were coming from."
At least we now know that Seth Rich's death is/was a Federal case. No more claiming the
DCPD has jurisdiction. But no disclosures of the contents of Seth Rich's cell phone and
laptop.
Eric32 , July 16, 2019 at 10:38
The author seems consumed by this carnival of politicized legalized covert intelligence
operations, by people and entities trying to retain money and power.
What's important is that the system hasn't been working for decades, and there's going to
be increasingly serious problems, maybe fatal ones, rising if a big overhaul doesn't
occur.
Al Pinto , July 16, 2019 at 09:43
The DNC and MSM sold, and sold well, the Russiagate to the general public. Does it really
matter, if the "Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has now come
apart at the seams"? Neither the DNC, nor the MSM will report/mention either of the court
case, pretty much a blackout for the general public.
Even, if these court cases are widely reported, do you really believe that the majority of
the people would change their mind? After almost three years, there's no way that these
people will change their mind. The only change that widely reporting these court cases would
result in is, that Trump and HRC supporters would hate each other even more.
This Russiagate will be with us pretty much forever, it'll morph in to accusing people of
being Russian agents and/or Russian Bots. We already see this taking place and just wait,
until next year. It's not going to be pretty
michael , July 16, 2019 at 12:40
Aaron Mate has done a brilliant job researching and debunking Russiagate. Unfortunately
for him, he is now ostracized and has to survive on the margins, with other people with
critical thinking skills.
You're right. The truth doesn't matter, just the BS narrative that has been shoved down
our throats for the last few years. It never made any sense to anyone who really thought
about it but the media whores just keep spewing total nonsense and they surely won't change
their ways now. The fact that the entire crock is really irrelevant to the majority of our
citizens doesn't matter to them a bit.
AnneR , July 16, 2019 at 09:42
Thank you again Mr McGovern for another article on this never ending saga. While I hope
that sanity begins to dawn among the so-called progressives, I have serious doubts.
1. Neither the BBC World Service nor NPR have mentioned (at least while I've been
listening) Judge Friedrich's ruling vis a vis provide the evidence (discovery) to the IRA
12's lawyers or tear up the indictment (essentially). Indeed, I've not heard, on the MSM,
anything about those 12 IRA folks employing a lawyer and challenging Mueller's indictment.
Silence works as well as obfuscation, lies.
2. The Demrats simply will not let their Russophobia go. I gather (from RT – tut tut
I must be an RU bottle) that Ms Harris AIPAC schmoozer, keen and eager lock 'em up and throw
away the key, corporate-capitalist crony Kamala has been accusing the Russians of stirring up
the controversy surrounding Kaepernick's bending of the knee. The Russians and their bots did
it.
3. And then this morning on NPR – a Steve Inskip interview with Michael Isikoff
focusing on the Seth Rich "conspiracy theory" and of course the whole thing (or that segment
which I could stomach hearing) presumed as a matter of established, and thus true, fact that
everything that went wrong for the DNC's HRC campaign was caused by the Russians – for
which read Putin. Isikoff was there as an "investigative" journalist for "Yahoo News" –
and his "investigation" had shown that the Russians were – who else – behind the
conspiracy theory that Seth Rich was killed by HRC thugs in order to keep him permanently
quiet about corruption in the DNC. (Corruption – a rather mealy-mouthed way of avoiding
bringing into NPR daylight what the DNC were actually doing: determining who would be the Dem
candidate willy nilly of who the voters wanted. But this mealy-mouthedness is fully in
keeping with NPR's basic silence on what Wikileaks revealed via that insider download.)
Orwellian. Propaganda at its Bernays, Goebbels best. Despair . This business is *not*
going away. The Demrats – both in DC and their bourgeois/progressive supporters have
far too much invested in the whole confabulation for them to admit that the former
deliberately lied and the latter were willing? hoodwinked.
Thanks for your comment. I would like it if somehow "despair," could be disallowed.
There are enough of us, after all. And, as Annie Dillard put it, "There never was anybody
but us."
I also take some inspiration from the dismal-sounding, yet somehow uplifting words of I.
F. Stone:
"The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody
has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do
wins."
THE CHALLENGE IS TO ACCEPT THAT, AND FIND JOY IN TRYING -- AND EVEN IN LOSING.
I believe the losing does not last forever; think we all need to do our part in the
"interim."
Best regards,
Ray
DW Bartoo , July 16, 2019 at 19:44
That sums things up precisely, Ray.
None of us may live to see a complete turn-around, yet it is the honest effort to
encourage and build the foundation for that fundamental systemic change to conscious and
principled human awareness which is the measure we must make of ourselves.
Your sense of moral presence, Ray, is very much appreciated.
It serves as inspiration for all, and especially the young, who already understand, and
encourages, as example, those who are coming to understand.
DW
AnneR , July 17, 2019 at 08:33
Dear Mr McGovern – thank you for reading and replying to my comment.
And, yes, I do understand the objection to despair – though not, might I add, any
thought that its frank expression be expunged!
Were it only the whole Russiagate fabrication, delusions, time and money waste (oh well,
only taxpayers' money) and fallout that was so dreadfully wrong, being heinously enacted.
Indeed were it all that our taxes were being wasted on.
Perhaps that's it – Russiagate while distracting from the things that the DNC and
HRC did, said, *also* makes for good deflection from the war crimes we are committing, the
never ending imperialist warmongering we are engaged in, from the fact that many Demrats
voted for those nice tax breaks given to the wealthiest tiers in our society, that many of
those Demrats voted to hand over to the MIC *even more* loot even as the Pentagon can't
account for the billions, or whatever fantastikal amount, it has already received over the
years, deflection from the fact that despite such a "good" economy increasing numbers of
people are living ever more economically precarious lives, rents rise astronomically,
healthcare is a joke (or would be were its lack not so serious for so many). And that's not
to mention the realities of climate change or the continuing (and MSM ignored) 70 plus year
plight of Palestinians, among so many others.
My late husband used to tell me to write to NPR, the BBC, to let them know that they
weren't codding everyone with their disinformation, non-information, lack of objectivity
– their propaganda. And I did, often and used to ask for a response. Did I even get
those? You must be joking
AnneR , July 17, 2019 at 14:08
In case someone might think that I expected either the BBC or NPR to alter their ways
because of my "letters" (interestingly the BBC only allows/ed for around 1000 characters or
something equally useless) – no. But when (in the case of the BBC) you can tick the
"please reply" box and get total silence, not even a "thank you for your blah blah we shan't
pay any attention to your complaints ," in response it is pretty frustrating.
As for NPR – I stopped our contributions. Why would we *pay* for the privilege of
being propagandized? I just wish we had stopped them years earlier
Anyway, thank you Mr McGovern for your continuing coverage of this whole affair. I just
wish my late partner in life and love had known of this website.
ML , July 16, 2019 at 09:24
Each morning when I arise, I get my coffee and settle down to read Consortium News. I also
make a habit of a quick perusal of what the stenographers are jawing about on CNN today,
there is a real doozy smearing Assange. The spinners are working overtime to patch over all
the holes in their hoax story. I couldn't get through the whole thing because it's another
smear piece and a long one including the old saw that Assange smeared feces on the Ecuadorian
embassy's walls. I had to stop reading. Gosh, I can't abide those people. Thanks Ray, for
telling the truth. We are drowning in $h** out there in la-la land. CN offers a much-needed
dose of reality medicine. Thank you kindly, all.
Skip Scott , July 16, 2019 at 10:19
Here's a good essay by Caitlin Johnstone regarding the Assange hit-piece.
Even worse news for the Russiahoaxers is the recent revelation , documented in a lawsuit ,
that Ellen Ratner , sister of deceased Wikileaks' lawyer Michael Ratner, met with Assange in
the fall of 2016 and was told by him that Aaron and Seth Rich provided the DNC leaks to
Wikileaks. Ed Butowsky was made aware of this , with instructions by Ms. Ratner for him to
relay the information to the Rich family. When he did so , in December 2016 , he was told by
Joel Rich , Seth's father , that he was already aware of his sons' involvement.
This is no longer conspiracy talk , folks. Ed Butowsky is not dumb enough to make these
claims on court documents without knowing he can back them up. Shit is about to get real for
Mueller and the DNC.
"BREAKING: Lawsuit Outs Reporter Ellen Ratner as Source for Seth Rich Information" @
Gateway Pundit
Well, Skip Scott, either this revelation will put "paid" to the "Russia-did-it!" charade,
or else the Voracious Memory Hole will act like a giant black hole and the event horizon will
be swallowed into total nothingness as a new Middle-Eastern Adventure captures the hearts and
minds of the happy warriors and consumers of U$ Imperialism.
Whatever happens, it will be wholey interesting times ahead.
DW
jmg , July 16, 2019 at 10:01
There was a related, extensive 2018 interview about Butowsky's private investigation into
the Seth Rich case to help the family, what they found, and what happened (the DNC assigned
someone to represent the family, etc.; the mentioned lawsuits were later dropped/dismissed).
It included, without naming Ratner, the unverified mention: "his friend came back from London
with information that he said he wanted to get to the Rich family." Since this alleged
private message appears to be not only doubtful, but of course also not confirmed by
WikiLeaks, we can't really know if it happened or not.
Seth Rich, disgruntled DNC worker, blows the whistle on HillBillary Clinton rigging the
Democratic presidential primary against Bernie Sanders, so he gives data supporting his
discovery of rigging to Wikileaks. Rich got the data on a thumdrive downloaded at DNC HQ
itself.
No Russians, no hacking, just a whistleblower on the fraud ironically called US
"democracy." We've all seen the data Rich leaked. Emails detailing HillBillary Clinton's
graft and fraud and collusion against Sanders.
No wonder no other candidates besides Sanders ran against HillBillary, for they all knew
the fix was in from its inception!
I dunno who killed Seth Rich, but I do know the Democratic party stole the election from
Bernie, then projected its own crimes onto Russia, same way a kid projects his own crime of
breaking a cookie jar on his brother when he tells Momma "He dit it –> He ate the
cookies and broke the jar!" Meanwhile, there's chocolate smeared all over the DNC's face.
We have evidence for this, the leaked emails themselves tell the story
Gregory Herr , July 16, 2019 at 18:15
Seth Rich copied and leaked the DNC e-mails and was murdered for it. For this to become
irrefutable common knowledge will be quite one godsend of a reality check. Maddow might not
be able to get out of bed for weeks.
Repeat after me Rachel there was no Russian hack, there was no Russian hack, there was no
Russian hack
jmg , July 16, 2019 at 07:13
From the Brennan–Comey–Rogers assessment/opinion (January 6, 2017):
"We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's
election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her
unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high
confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence. . . .
"- High confidence generally indicates that judgments are based on high-quality
information from multiple sources. High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the
assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.
"- Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and
plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher
level of confidence."
"When they say they have 'high confidence', that means they don't have any evidence!"
-- Bill Binney, former NSA Technical Director
DW Bartoo , July 16, 2019 at 07:10
Thank you, Ray McGovern for this splendid article laying out the facts which make clear
the absurdities of these last several years. One hopes, now that the "Russia-did-it" canard
is fully exposed, by US courts, that the truth may finally get through, over or around, the
media wall of enforced ignorance and Mueller hero-worship, and reach the ears and eyes of the
people.
Should that actually happen, it might even be possible that other truth, long subject to
media manipulation and distortion, the cases of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning come
readily to mind, could be seen in the honest light of day after an almost eight year
protracted nightmare of media driven deceit, psychological torture, and deliberately vicious
character assassination is revealed, in Assange's case, as it might well be, by Nils Melzer's
report to the UN.
The legacy U$ corporate media have much to answer for, from promulgating lies that led to
war, to missile attacks, and to brutal economic sanctions, a form of economic warfare, to
efforts to start a new Cold War, and to aggrandize intelligence agencies which have sought to
pervert justice and to illegally influence the political process by falsely accusing, on the
flimsy words of partisan political operatives, another nation of the very actions those
agencies have used, repeatedly and for many decades,to destroy the political processes of
other nations, including the very nation singled out to take the blame for Hillary Clinton's
abysmal and pathetic failure in the 2016 election.
What a waste of time, resources, trust, and energy it has bee, these last years, yet it
was all so very profitable and lucrative for the media, even if it were "not good" for the
country.
The media have damned and convicted themselves.
The U$ intelligence agencies have exposed themselves as corrupt, completely dishonest,
vindictive, petty, and thoroughly untrustworthy.
It remains to be seen if the people have learned anything, and whether they will do
anything with this costly, yet necessary, education.
DW
Allan , July 16, 2019 at 07:04
Will Adam Schiff spend the week with Bob Mueller to get their story straight
UserFriendly , July 16, 2019 at 05:18
?Unfortunately this is partially bunk. The first bit the judge didn't rule that there was
no evidence, she ruled that Mueller publicly saying that the IRA = kremlin and they did try
to help Trump win was prejudicial in the case against the IRA (quite obviously so). But him
not being able to say that during his testimony should go over well with the democrats. Of
course if he actually wanted to explain all he would have to do is drop the case against the
IRA because it's never going to trial anyways. Almost makes you wonder if he filed those
charges expressly so he wouldn't have to connect the imaginary dotts.
Aiya , July 16, 2019 at 11:03
What they called "trying to help Trump" was a miniscule amount of social media posts, 56%
of which were made AFTER the election. And Facebook had to look 3 times to come up with
ANYTHING–what they finally reported were posts coming from Russia or eastern Europe,
posts in Cyrillic language, and posts from people with Russian/European names.
"... Sy Hersh stated that he has a trusted source inside the FBI who told him that he had seen a secret FBI report regarding an analysis of Seth's laptop, on which they found evidence that Seth had offered samples of DNC emails to WIkileaks and offered a much larger batch in return for payment; and that Seth subsequently had provided the DNC emails to Wikileaks via a drop box. ..."
"... Seth Rich was murdered, for no clear reason – no valuable belongings taken - several weeks after the DNC emails were exfiltrated from the DNC. The creator of the Guccifer 2.0 hoax would have had strong motivation to eliminate (or otherwise silence) the actual leaker, to prevent his hoax from being unmasked. Unmasking the hoax could have had a devastating impact on Hillary's campaign. ..."
"... Murray states that he had a meeting in Washington DC in September 2016 with someone involved in this leak - hence he may have privileged insight on this issue. ..."
"... Mueller's tale of how he allegedly transferred the emails to Wikileaks is overtly absurd ..."
Reasons to Suspect that Seth Rich Participated in the Leaking of the DNC Emails to
Wikileaks
veganmark on Fri, 07/05/2019 - 10:38pm
The evidence that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC to provide the DNC emails which
Wikileaks published is wholly unconvincing. In particular, the Guccifer 2.0 persona identified
by the ICA and the Mueller report as the hacker, is clearly no Russian, and Mueller's tale of
how he allegedly transferred the emails to Wikileaks is overtly absurd.
Julian Assange has strongly hinted that Seth Rich could be the leaker, and offered a reward
for info leading to the apprehension of his killer. He further asserts, quite definitively,
that Russian government hackers were not the source.
Wikileaks has repeatedly retweeted essays implying that Seth was the leaker.
Craig Murray, Julian's close associate, assures us that the Wikileaks DNC and Podesta
releases were the result of leaks by individuals with legal access to the material, not
hacks.
Sy Hersh stated that he has a trusted source inside the FBI who told him that he had seen a
secret FBI report regarding an analysis of Seth's laptop, on which they found evidence that
Seth had offered samples of DNC emails to WIkileaks and offered a much larger batch in return
for payment; and that Seth subsequently had provided the DNC emails to Wikileaks via a drop
box.
Larry Johnson, former CIA agent, claims that he has two inside sources that confirm
this.
Kim Dotcom claims that Seth was the leaker, and that he assisted him in this effort.
Ed Bukowsky claims that a source close to Julian told him confidentially that Seth and Aaron
Rich were the sources of the released DNC emails, and asked him to contact Seth's parents about
this. Bukowsky claims that, when he informed Seth's father about this, he said "I already know
that". It was only after the DNC "helpfully" provided the Rich family with "crisis consultant"
Brad Bauman that the Rich family publicly denounced any suspicion that Seth had been the
leaker. Reportedly, the Riches have become persuaded that the Wikileaks releases were
responsible for the election of Trump, and they don't want to admit that Seth could have had
anything to do with that.
Seth Rich was murdered, for no clear reason – no valuable belongings taken - several
weeks after the DNC emails were exfiltrated from the DNC. The creator of the Guccifer 2.0 hoax
would have had strong motivation to eliminate (or otherwise silence) the actual leaker, to
prevent his hoax from being unmasked. Unmasking the hoax could have had a devastating impact on
Hillary's campaign.
As to the source of the Podesta emails published by Wikileaks, Craig Murray assures us that
the well known spearphishing of Podesta's computer is a red herring. Rather, he states that
Podesta was being monitored by the NSA owing to his business ties to Ukraine.
Someone in the NSA who had access to these emails - presumably someone upset with Hillary's campaign - leaked
them to Wikileaks. Murray states that he had a meeting in Washington DC in September 2016 with
someone involved in this leak - hence he may have privileged insight on this issue.
Mueller's tale of how he allegedly transferred the emails to Wikileaks is overtly
absurd
was explained in the report by saying that someone from Trump's campaign gave Julian the
information when they went to London. Did Robert get that information from the guardian
article written by Luke Harding? If so, lol! Wikileaks debunked this article the minute it
came out and no one from the Ecuadorian embassy or from London's many CCTV cameras showed any
video evidence of it happening.
There are so many holes in this whole Russia Gate saga that I'm surprised anyone is
believing it. Guess you cross posted this on ToP right?
"... Given these facts you would think it would be easy for Robert Mueller to explain how the Russians got their hands on the DNC emails and then passed them on to Wikileaks. But it is not easy because the foundation of the case against the Russians rests on assumptions and beliefs. No solid facts. ..."
"... To reiterate a point I have raised in previous posts, the only entity to have forensic access to the DNC computers, i.e. CrowdStrike, is on the record in the person of the CrowdStrike CEO, Dimitri Alperovitch admitting they don't know how the Russians got access. ..."
"... CrowdStrike is not sure how the hackers got in. The firm suspects they may have targeted DNC employees with "spearphishing" emails. These are communications that appear legitimate -- often made to look like they came from a colleague or someone trusted -- but that contain links or attachments that when clicked on deploy malicious software that enables a hacker to gain access to a computer. " But we don't have hard evidence ," Alperovitch said. ..."
"... If CrowdStrike actually had conducted a legitimate forensic examination of the DNC server/servers then they absolutely would have had "hard evidence." ..."
"... The government produced the CrowdStrike reports because the Indictment in this case referenced, as background, CrowdStrike's statements about the DNC hack. Stone's statement that the government has no other evidence is not only irrelevant to this proceeding but is also mistaken. ..."
"... It is a horrible irony that Stone is being persecuted with prosecution based on an even bigger lie -- i.e., the Russians hacked the DNC. Russia did not hack the DNC. Let's hope that Stone's lawyers get a chance to demand the US Government put up the evidence or shut up. ..."
There is zero forensic evidence in the public arena that supports the US Government's
assertion that the Russian Government hacked the DNC. In fact, the forensic computer evidence
that is available indicates that the emails from the DNC were downloaded onto something like a
thumb drive.
There also is zero forensic evidence in the public arena that the Russians passed/delivered
the DNC emails to Julian Assange/Wikileaks. There are only two ways to get DNC emails into the
hands of Wiki people--an electronic transfer or a physical/human transfer. That's it.
And here is what we know for certain. First, since Edward Snowden absconded with the NSA's
family jewels with the help of Wikileaks, U.S. and British intelligence assets have been
monitoring every single electronic communication to and from Wikileaks/Julian Assange. They
also have been conducting surveillance on all personal contacts with Assange and other key
members of the Wikileaks staff.
Given these facts you would think it would be easy for Robert Mueller to explain how the
Russians got their hands on the DNC emails and then passed them on to Wikileaks. But it is not
easy because the foundation of the case against the Russians rests on assumptions and beliefs.
No solid facts.
To reiterate a point I have raised in previous posts, the only entity to have forensic
access to the DNC computers, i.e. CrowdStrike, is on the record in the person of the
CrowdStrike CEO, Dimitri Alperovitch admitting they don't know how the Russians got access. Alperovitch told Washington Post Reporter Ellen Nakashima on
June 14, 2016 the following :
CrowdStrike is not sure how the hackers got in. The firm suspects they may have targeted DNC
employees with "spearphishing" emails. These are communications that appear legitimate -- often
made to look like they came from a colleague or someone trusted -- but that contain links or
attachments that when clicked on deploy malicious software that enables a hacker to gain access
to a computer. " But we don't have hard evidence ," Alperovitch said.
If CrowdStrike actually had conducted a legitimate forensic examination of the DNC
server/servers then they absolutely would have had "hard evidence."
Then, 13 months later, we have FBI Director Jim Comey admitting that the FBI relied on
CrowdStrike for its "evidence." Jim Comey testified to the House Intelligence Committee in
March 2017 and
stated the following :
"we never got direct access to the machines themselves. The DNC in the spring of 2016 hired
a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the system."
Now take a look at a very significant reversal of the US Government's position in the case
against Roger Stone. On 20 June 2019, US Attorney Jessie Liu filed a motion attempting to rebut
the argument presented by Stone's attorneys that there was no supporting evidence for the claim
that Russia hacked the DNC. Here are the key snippets from her filing:
As the government has argued (Doc. 122, at 6, 9, 14), Russia's role in the DNC hack is not
material to the eighteen findings of probable cause that Stone appears to be challenging. . . .
The government produced the CrowdStrike reports because the Indictment in this case referenced,
as background, CrowdStrike's statements about the DNC hack. Stone's statement that the
government has no other evidence is not only irrelevant to this proceeding but is also
mistaken.
Yet, when you read the original indictment, Roger Stone was put in the cross hairs because
he was allegedly communicating with Wikileaks/Julian Assange about the DNC emails. And those
emails are identified in the indictment as "stolen." The Government is hoping to nail Stone on
the charge of "lying" to Congress. Good luck with that.
It is a horrible irony that Stone is being persecuted with prosecution based on an even
bigger lie -- i.e., the Russians hacked the DNC. Russia did not hack the DNC. Let's hope that
Stone's lawyers get a chance to demand the US Government put up the evidence or shut up.
"... So perhaps the DNC was hacked by the CIA and it was blamed on the Russians. ..."
"... How can we trust any investigation when the investigation can be doctored to scapegoat Russia? This is embarrassing. ..."
"... Clapper is a known perjurer. ..."
"... Of course it was the Obama CIA, pros like the Russians or Chinese, never leave behind "fingerprints" they are smart enough to cover their tracks. As a cyber analyst I can tell you that when you see "fingerprints or breadcrumbs" leading to a source, it's usually deceptive and intentional. Let that sink in! ..."
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution
by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation,
stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.
So the CIA obtained FISA Warrants for the millions of devices hacked? Guess we now know how Trump Tower was wiretapped when
DNI Clapper said there was no such order given.
So! It now becomes clear what Obama and the Democrats were planning for the Trump Administration. They could hack away at anything
and everything and leave Russian "fingerprints" to make it appear that the Russians did it. It's really no telling what is already
planted. Thst's why some Democrat's seem so supremely confident that Trump will be impeached.
I don't think that it's really sunk in for most people that this was a plan for World Domination by a force more evil than
the average person could ever imagine. We're still in grave danger but thank Heaven for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Not only
have they saved America but perhaps the whole world from domination that heretofore couldn't even be imagined except in science
fiction.
Our problem will now be how to build enough gallows to accomodate the traitors and seditionists who have participated in this
dark plan.
Hysteria in Oceania. The same goons blaming Russia for robbing the local candy store (without producing evidence) are robbing
the candy factory 24/7. All of a sudden, the MSM has found issues and terms like `non-verified documents` and `non-verifiable,
anonymous sources` to be of the utmost importance, in contrast to when they were copy-pasting the ` information` about Russian
hacking. I wonder how much time it takes for the Ministries of Information and their docile press-clowns to (again) turn the story
around and blame WikiLeaks for being a `Russian tool` to discard their own obvious crimes.
They wiretapped the entire Trump team thinking they would come up with an October surprise...and found NOTHING. If they had
ANYTHING, it would have been used prior to the election. And, since Hillary was supposed to win, the illegal wire taps would never
have been disclosed.
Now Trump has exposed the Obama admin and democrats are hyperventilating over Russia to deflect from the crimes they committed.
We always knew that, were told we were crazy, now we have proof. The MSM has been gas-lighting us. I wonder how many red pills
you have to swallow to get to the other side of this Rabbit Hole?
Well BO moved to Washington so it will be easy for the Press to shout these questions at him at his home or a restaurant or
a ballgame. We need answers BO, and right now. No BS. anymore. Or go back to Indonesia and hide out.
It's really not fun. The intelligence agencies are unaccountable and cloak their criminality with the secrecy of national security.
They're not going to back down. They're ruthless. And they kill people for sport. This will not end well unless the military is
called in to round them up, which has huge risks of its own...
TGFD here.
As far as I'm concerned. death becomes anyone in the effing CIA. Same goes for their parasitic family members. Death's image would
look good on them.
There is NO secret in the CIA that I would not expose if I could.
I never heard of the term, "Deep State" prior to 2 months ago, and I don't like what I hear, either. I pray that somehow, God
will enable TRUMP to vanquish all the filth in the deep state.
I knew it - the documents I looked over, the IP addresses I checked, the supposed "malware" that the US said "was the same
as we know Russia had used" and more - and it just did not add up.
Now to be sure the American population is dumb when it comes to technology - and they usually blindly believe what the CIA,
and media, tells them. But me - being in IT for some decades and having worked with Russian people for 6 years (in an electronics
engineering company founded by a Russian immigrant to the U.S.) and being a network security administrator for a small government
agency, something smelled odd.
The IP addresses - hahaha - really? Try again - up until the spring of 2016 American company Verizon routed 1 million stolen
IP addresses - used by cyber-criminals in the USA........ so guess where some of those IP addresses REALLY belonged. Further,
the "CIA" and other spooks included - honestly? TOR exit node addresses. If you use TOR browser, you will find some of those same
addresses in your own logs (unless you are smart and either purge or don't log, etc.)
So try again, U.S. spooks - the malware? HAHA - what a JOKE. Really. I mean older software that John Q. Public can download for
FREE? Sorry, Russians are far far smarter and they'd not use OLD software that works on WordPress based on PHP servers when the
target isn't based on blogging software.
Sorry, silly Americans - including and especially McCain and others in our congress who are, say what? members of INTELLIGENCE
committees? Really?
You help guide the intelligence and security operations of a major country and you fall for the BS that was presented to you?
Did you not ask questions? I did - I did my own research and I guess that proves I'm as smart or smarter than any member of and
house or Senate intelligence committee. Do these people even know where the power button is on their computer? Smart - they hire
unvetted IT people to take care of congressional computers....... and some of the equipment ends up missing, and these people
have full free access as admins to computers used by congressional members of armed services committees and more!
That's how smart our U.S. congress is. Hire your brother-in-laws IT geek, give 'em full admin access, let them come and go
freely........... and fall for intelligence reports about Russian hacking...... all the while our own CIA is doing MORE and WORSE.
While this topic is still fresh (thanks to the Democrats) - election interference - Election or campaign interference scores
according to political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University: Russia - 36 times, U.S.A - 81 times
The USA's score number doesn't include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S.
didn't like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala and Chile. Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such
as election monitoring.
So who exactly is it that interferes or "Helps" with elections? Yeah, I thought so.
President Vladimir Putin must go home each night shaking his head in disbelief at how gullible we are here.
By the way - Podesta was NOT HACKED. He fell for a simple phishing scam. Yes, the email wasn't even very well done. It appeared
more like it came out of Nigeria than any professional group, it was lame, didn't even look real, didn't sound real and the URL
or link was so obvious, geesh, a fool could have seen it was phishing. Oh, wait, we're talking Podesta here. The man gave away
his password (which for a while was indeed 'password'. Worse - he used what for his campaign work? Did you say GMAIL? You have
to be kidding! A free consumer email, based in the cloud, and not only that, at least 3 others had account access to his Gmail.
He kept documents, calendar, task lists and more in it. The phishing scammer got access to his Gmail inbox, sent items, attachments,
calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, you name it! No hacking needed since this is CLOUD BASED. No one had to touch his computer
or iPad.
I really laughed when I found in those emails the admin credentials for his Wi-Fi, and even more funny - the admin credentials
for his building security system. Yes, all that in his cloud-based Gmail account. As Bugs Bunny would say- what a maroon!
No wonder he's mad and trying to blame everyone else. He has to know he was scammed and he fell for it and it was all HIS FAULT,
no one else but him. Using Gmail for such important work is STUPID as it is - but then to fall for phishing. He got what he deserved,
and if it was Russians, tell those teenagers congratulations! That's all it took to phish Podesta - the skill set of KIDS in their
early teens.
I could go on about the stupidity involved in all of this, but won't (I hear a collective sigh of relief!)
So, did the Russians hack the election? Or did the Obama CIA hack the election and just did a pizz-poor job of it? Or perhaps
Obama really did not want Hillary to win.
This might make those congressional investigations into the alleged hacking of the election by Russians a lot more interesting.
That is, of course, assuming that the investigations are really about finding the truth.
Obama Hates Hillary but could not openly control her. With Trump elected he could work openly to damage his administration,
and with the help of MSM demonize him, and make him look like a tool of the Russians as well as his appointees. Notice, there
was no talk of Russian hacking prior to the election. The "intelligence" agencies waited for the election results to come out
with their charges.
Use delaying tactics to prevent approval of appointees, attack and possibly remove approved appointees eroding confidence in
the current government. With the help of RINOs delay legislation. Pay protestors to protest everything Trump does using labels
such as sexist, racist, Nazi, etc.
Obama's and DNC's goal: Prevent any progress till the mid term elections and try and overturn the balance in Congress to get
the liberal agenda back on track. Get poised for the 2020 election and run a more palatable candidate than Hillary.
"Obama's and DNC's goal: Prevent any progress till the mid term elections and try and overturn the balance in Congress to get
the liberal agenda back on track. Get poised for the 2020 election and run a more palatable candidate than Hillary."
Let's unpack this. All those rumors about the Obama's hating the Clinton's? TRUE BUT, he couldn't let DOJ go through with indictment
so instead gets Clapper, Brennan and the boys to use Russian fingerprints to hack and then sits back and watches the chaos unfold.
When you go back to how he got his start in Chicago its exactly how he operates.
I am furious. I read the original re CIA attempting to influence French elections. But this is CLEAR TREASON by Obama Administration.
I NEVER trusted Brennen. violation for CIA to operate inside US.
Looks like this is an example of Obama/CIA preparation for Treason?
The thing that really pisses me off is that the factual basis for all of this criminal and treasonous activity by the Obama
Administration, that is being exposed today, remains covered-up by everyone in a position of responsibility to expose it. That
factual basis is that every identification document Obama has presented to prove he is a citizen of the USA is a forgery. Based
upon the totality of his record as president he is an agent of foreign Islamic allegiance and everything he has done in the Middle
East always ends up in favor of radical Islam and refuses to even acknowledge radical Islamic terrorism exists. The same goes
for his refusal to acknowledge domestic Islamic terrorism exists.
Factual answers for these three questions will clear up why we are having this treasonous activity. (1) Why does Obama have
and need a forged birth certificate as he posted on his POTUS website? (2) Why does Obama's first officially issued copy of his
Selective Service Registration Card have a forged 2 digit postal stamp? (3) Why is Obama using a SS# that was first issued to
someone else? These three questions must be answered by Congress as the researched information verifying forgery is readily available
and will expose the basis of this treason.
Let's not forget that logging into an email server because of a weak password and getting a copy of emails does not scream
CIA. Also John Podesta's email password was extremely weak. So it did not take a covert CIA hacking program to initiate. We keep
hearing Russia hacked our election. Yet have ZERO proof! First the majority of election machines are decentralized and not connected
to internet. There was not a single instance where vote the count was effected. This was also immediately stated by Obamas DNI.
Claiming they ran a propaganda attack on Hillary Clinton is pathetic. They are claiming the American people did not see who Hillary
Clinton truly was. The opposite is true.
Hillary Clinton had made her own propaganda against herself. She is who the American people see. Not what the Russians programmed
Us to see. The American people made a choice based on her actions no one else's. The liberals continually attacking someone with
false claims without proof is a standard Liberal / Alyinsky strategy. It requires no proof if all liberal extremist continually
repeat the same attack which is then amplified by the Liberal propaganda media (CNN, MSNBC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington
Post, BBC, etc)
The Russian collusion claim is the exact same scenario. Make the claim which we already knew the Trump campaign speaks with
Russian diplomats. Most people in politics interact with all countries diplomat and ambassadors. So instantly the claim is impossible
to debunk. The Liberal party has become a party willing to use any and all tactics to avoid listening to the American people.
This whole Russian drama is created to go against what the American people voted for. The democrat party is as much a threat to
The United States as Communism ever was. It has been said if fascism ever comes back to the United States it will come in the
form of liberalism. So the American people have a choice.
Use common sense and stop the liberal extremist party from destroying our democracy or deal with the consequences of America
becoming ineffective and divided. The majority of the Democrat party and it's supporters have become so ideologically perverted
they have lost sight of morality and what America stands for.
The Russians have not hypnotized Americans to vote for Donald Trump. It wasn't possible for the Russians to manipulate voter
data and yes the Trump campaign speaks with Russian diplomats.
But it was the same Russian ambassador that Obama left in the country while expelling all others. The same Russian ambassador
Obama scheduled meetings with for Jeff sessions. The same rushing ambassador that all Democrat spend time with. Make a claim that's
true then find a way to turn it negative.
Typical Saul Alinsky. Everyone needs to remember anything the Liberals attack someone for the opposite is true.
And now you know that the CIA (via Obama's orders or tacit approval) was the one that created the ruse of Trump emailing a
Russian bank as a pretext to persuade FISA judges to sign off on the warrants to keep surveillance on him and his contacts.
If I were Obama I'd be seeking the nearest airport and fly to any country offering asylum... it's good night, good riddance
for him and the rest of the Deep State Globalists.
Kind of funny where this started. Remember Hillary stole a server from the government secure server facility and set it up
in her basement without proper security software and monitoring for hacking. Proven. And she had idiots in her staff so stupid
they used passwords like "p@ssword". Proven. So any 11 year old computer expert could have hacked that server.
And she lied about the content of the messages being transferred. Top secret and classified info was lost due to her illegal
actions. But Comey gave the pig a pass.
Of course it was the Obama CIA, pros like the Russians or Chinese, never leave behind "fingerprints" they are smart enough
to cover their tracks. As a cyber analyst I can tell you that when you see "fingerprints or breadcrumbs" leading to a source,
it's usually deceptive and intentional. Let that sink in!
Parteigenosse Mueller mission was to derail Trump. Investigation of real DNC scandal was outside of scope of this tool of
the Deep State. From comments: "Mueller was brought in as the Cleaner! It is a massive cover-up for which most of those who
are complicit should be behind bars! "
Mueller report was concocted with only goal: to sink Trump. Objective investigation of events was beyond the scope.
Moreover it looks like Mueller investigators were instrumental in setting an entrapment for members of Trump team and as such might
be criminally liable for this abuse of their status.
Images deleted.
Notable quotes:
"... No one knows who killed Rich in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2016. All we know is that he was found at 4:19 a.m. in the Bloomingdale neighborhood "with apparent gunshot wound(s) to the back" according to the police report . Conscious and still breathing, he was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead at 5:57. ..."
"... Rich's mother, Mary, told local TV news that her son struggled with his assailants: "His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they never took anything . They took his life for literally no reason. They didn't finish robbing him, they just took his life." ..."
"... But cops said shortly after the killing that they had no immediate indication that robbery was a motive. Despite his mother's report of two shots in the back, all the local medical examiner would say is that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the torso. According to Rich's brother, Aaron , Seth "was very aware, very talkative," when police found him lying on the pavement. Yet cops have refused to say if he described his assailant. A month later, they put out a statement that "there is no indication that Seth Rich's death is connected to his employment at the DNC," but refused to elaborate. ..."
"... all the Mueller report did was replace one conspiracy theory with another involving the Kremlin and its minions that is equally unconvincing. ..."
"... there's nothing in the Mueller report indicating that the special counselor independently reviewed the forensic evidence or questioned family members and friends. ..."
"... He certainly didn't interview Assange, the person in the best position to know who supplied the data, even though Craig Murray, the ex-British diplomat who serves as an unofficial WikiLeaks spokesman, says the WikiLeaks founder would have been "very willing to give evidence to Mueller" while holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, "which could have been done by video-link, by interview in the Embassy, or by written communication." ..."
"... This was as close as Assange could come to confirming that Rich was tied up with the leak without actually saying it. Hours later, WikiLeaks tweeted about the $20k reward. ..."
"... Four months after that, Craig Murray told the Libertarian Institute's Scott Horton: "Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that he [Rich] was the source of the leaks. What I'm saying is that it's probably not an unfair indication to draw that WikiLeaks believe[s] that he may have been killed by someone who thought he was the source of the leaks." (Quote begins at 11:20 .) ..."
"... But if speculation refuses to die, it's for a simple reason. If the DNC email disclosure was a hack, then Rich clearly had nothing to do with it, which means his death was no more than a robbery gone awry. But if it was a leak, then – based on broad hints dropped by Assange and Murray – it looks like the story could well be more complicated. This proves nothing in and of itself. But it guarantees that questions will grow as long as the Washington police make zero progress in its investigation and the Mueller report continues to fall apart. ..."
"... And that's just what's happening. Mueller's account of how Russian intelligence supposedly supplied WikiLeaks with stolen data makes no sense because, according to the report's chronology, the transfer left WikiLeaks with just four days to review some 28,000 emails and other electronic documents to make sure that they were genuine and unaltered – a clear impossibility. ..."
"... The FBI assessment that Paul Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik "has ties to Russian intelligence" – which Mueller cites (vol. 1, p. 133) in order to justify holding Manafort in solitary confinement during the Russia-gate investigation – is similarly disintegrating amid reports that Kilimnik actually served as an important State Department intelligence source. ..."
"... "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Arthur Conan Doyle ..."
"... No need for arrests, extradition requests, or 17 espionage charges. A simple email phone call might just do the trick... It shows once again that Trump is a similar fascist as Hillary and the DNC! ..."
"... Why would an assassin leave him alive on the sidewalk? ..."
"... Today we've learned that the FBI didn't, inexplicably, go and grab the DNC server but also never even saw the report from Crowdstrike that was used as the basis for blaming everything on Russia. ..."
"... Of course, the FBI admitted that it never examined the DNC servers and just revealed in court that it never saw a detailed report from Crowdstrike showing that Russians hacked the server. That's why Mueller never investigated. He knew it was a lie but one the entire 3 years, Obama admin, Hillary, the DNC & corrupt cabal depend on maintaining. ..."
"... If you followed the story, the Rich family was very much doubted this was a random robbery until political operators had a long chat with them. Their stories changed and cooperation with the independent investigation ended. This neighborhood has cameras everywhere. Suddenly, none of them worked. ..."
"... Not only did the FBI never get the DNC server for forensic investigation, it turns out the FBI never even got a finalized report on "DNC hacking" from Crowdstrike. Every conclusion drawn by the various agencies within the Intelligence Community is based on a redacted copy of a draft report from Crowdstrike, and this report was never finalized from its draft form. And even the draft was never unredacted for the FBI. ..."
"... 'Why Didn't Mueller Investigate Seth Rich?' Occam's razor. Why would a paid lackey disobey direct orders by the chief architects of this Criminal Conspiracy and risk his own life in the process? It makes no sense on any level. ..."
The idea that the DNC
email disclosures were produced by a hack - not a leak - makes less and less sense...
After bungling every last aspect of Russia-gate since the day the pseudo-scandal broke, the
corporate press is now seizing on the Mueller report to shut down debate on one of the key
questions still outstanding from the 2016 presidential election: the murder of Democratic National
Committee staffer Seth Rich.
No one knows who killed Rich in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2016. All we know is that he was
found at 4:19 a.m. in the Bloomingdale neighborhood "with apparent gunshot wound(s) to the back"
according to the police
report
.
Conscious and still breathing, he was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead at
5:57.
Police have added to the confusion by releasing information only in the tiniest dribs and
drabs.
Rich's mother, Mary,
told
local
TV news that her son struggled with his assailants: "His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised,
his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they never took anything . They
took his life for literally no reason. They didn't finish robbing him, they just took his life."
But cops
said
shortly
after the killing that they had no immediate indication that robbery was a motive. Despite his
mother's report of two shots in the back, all the local medical examiner
would
say
is that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the torso. According to Rich's brother,
Aaron
,
Seth "was very aware, very talkative," when police found him lying on the pavement. Yet cops have
refused
to
say if he described his assailant. A month later, they put out a
statement
that
"there is no indication that Seth Rich's death is connected to his employment at the DNC," but
refused to elaborate.
The result is a scattering of disconnected facts that can be used to support just about any
theory from a random killing to a political assassination. Nonetheless, Robert Mueller is dead
certain that the murder had nothing to do with the emails -- just as he was dead certain in 2003
that Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction "
pos[ing]
a clear threat to our national security
.
Scene of the crime. (YouTube)
Mueller's Theory About Assange 'Dissembling'
Mueller is equally positive that, merely by expressing concern that the murder may have had
something to do with the release of thousands of DNC emails less than two weeks later,
WikiLeaks
founder
Julian Assange was trying to protect the real source, which of course is Russia.
Here's how the Mueller report puts it:
"Beginning in the summer of 2016, Assange and WikiLeaks made a number of statements about
Seth Rich, a former DNC staff member who was killed in July 2016. The statements about Rich
implied falsely that he had been the source of the stolen DNC emails. On August 9, 2016, the
@WikiLeaks Twitter accounted posted: 'ANNOUNCE: WikiLeaks has decided to issue a US$20k reward
for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.'
Likewise, on August 25, 2016, Assange was asked in an interview, 'Why are you so interested
in Seth Rich's killer?' and responded, 'We're very interested in anything that might be a threat
to alleged WikiLeaks sources.' The interviewer responded to Assange's statement by commenting,
'I know you don't want to reveal your source, but it certainly sounds like you're suggesting a
man who leaked information to WikiLeaks was then murdered.'
Assange replied, 'If there's someone who's potentially connected to our publication, and that
person has been murdered in suspicious, circumstances, it doesn't necessarily mean that the two
are connected. But it is a very serious matter that type of allegation is very serious, as
it's taken very seriously by us'" (vol. 1, pp. 48-49).
Mueller: Says Assange's real source was Russia. (All Your Breaking News Here via Flickr)
This is what the Mueller report calls "dissembling."
The conclusion caused
jubilation in corporate newsrooms where hostility to both Russia and
WikiLeaks
runs
high. "The Seth Rich conspiracy theory needs to end now,"
declared
Vox.com.
"The special counsel's report confirmed this week that Seth Rich was not the source,"
said
The
New York Times
. "The Mueller report might not end the debate over what President Donald Trump
did," the Poynter Institute's
Politifact
added
,"but
it has scuttled one conspiracy theory involving a murdered Democratic party staffer and WikiLeaks."
One Conspiracy Theory for Another
But
all the Mueller report did was replace one conspiracy theory with another involving the
Kremlin and its minions that is equally unconvincing.
Remarkably,
there's nothing in the Mueller report indicating that the special counselor
independently reviewed the forensic evidence or questioned family members and friends.
He
certainly didn't interview Assange, the person in the best position to know who supplied the data,
even though Craig Murray, the ex-British diplomat who serves as an unofficial
WikiLeaks
spokesman,
says
the
WikiLeaks
founder
would have been "very willing to give evidence to Mueller" while holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy
in London, "which could have been done by video-link, by interview in the Embassy, or by written
communication."
Bike rack and plaque outside DNC headquarters. (Johanna745, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Murray says Mueller's team made no effort to contact him either even though he has publicly
stated
that
he met clandestinely with an associate of the leaker near the American University campus in
Washington.
Why not? Because Mueller didn't want anything that might disturb his a priori assumption that
Russia is the guilty party. If he had bucked the intelligence community finding – set forth in a
formal
assessment
in January 2017
– that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at undermining Hillary
Clinton's candidacy -- it would have been front-page news since an anti-Trump press had already
accepted the assessment as gospel. ButMueller is far too much of an establishmentarian to do
anything so reckless.
So he selected evidence in support of the official theory that "[t]he Russian government
interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion," as the report
states on its very first page. And since Assange had consistently
maintained
that
the data was the result of an inside leak rather than internal hack and that "[o]ur source is not
the Russian government," he cherry picked evidence to show that Assange is a liar, not only about
Russia but about Seth Rich.
Cryptic Exchange
It's a self-serving myth that corporate media have swallowed whole because it serves their
interests too. One problem in exposing it, however, is Assange's pledge – intrinsic to the
WikiLeaks
mission
– to safeguard the identities of whistleblowers who furnish it with information. The upshot has
been a good deal of beating around the bush. A month after the murder, the
WikiLeaks
founder
appeared on a Dutch program called "Nieuwsuur" and took part in
a
cryptic exchange
with journalist Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal:
Assange during exchange with Rosenthal. (YouTube)
Assange:
Whistle blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and
often very significant risks. There's a 27-year-old – works for the DNC – who was shot in the
back, murdered, just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in
Washington, so .
Rosenthal:
That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn't it?
Assange:
No, there's no finding, so –
Rosenthal:
What are you suggesting?
Assange:
I'm suggesting that our sources take risks, and they become
concerned to see things occurring like that.
Rosenthal:
But was he one of your sources then? I mean –
Assange:
We don't comment about who our sources are.
Rosenthal:
But why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the
streets of Washington?
Assange:
Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United
States and that our sources, you know, face serious risks. That's why they come to us – so we
can protect their anonymity.
Rosenthal:
But it's quite something to suggest a murder. That's basically
what you're doing.
This was as close as Assange could come to confirming that Rich was tied up with the leak
without actually saying it. Hours later,
WikiLeaks
tweeted
about
the $20k reward.
Four months after that, Craig Murray told the Libertarian Institute's Scott Horton: "Don't get
me wrong, I'm not saying that he [Rich] was the source of the leaks. What I'm saying is that it's
probably not an unfair indication to draw that WikiLeaks believe[s] that he may have been killed by
someone who thought he was the source of the leaks." (Quote begins at
11:20
.)
Thanks to such foggy rhetoric, it was all but inevitable that conspiracy theories would ignite.
Two months after the killing, an ultra-conservative talk-radio host named Jack Burkman – best known
for organizing a protest campaign against the Dallas Cowboys' hiring of an openly gay football
player named
Michael
Sam
– approached members of the Rich family and offered to launch an investigation in their
behalf.
The family said yes, but then backed off when Burkman
grandly
announced
that the murder was a Kremlin hit. Things turned even more bizarre a year later when
Kevin Doherty, an ex-Marine whom Burkman had hired to look into the case, lured his ex-boss to a
Marriott hotel in Arlington, Virgina, where he shot him twice in the buttocks and then tried to run
him down with a rented SUV. Doherty received
a
nine-year sentence
last December.
The rightwing
Washington Times
meanwhile reported that
WikiLeaks
had paid Seth
and Aaron Rich an undisclosed sum, a story it was forced to
retract
,
and Fox News named Seth as the source as well. (A sympathetic judge
dismissed
a
lawsuit filed by the Rich family on technical grounds.) But still the speculation bubbled on,
with
conservative
nuts
blaming everyone from ex-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to acting DNC chairwoman Donna
Brazile, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and Bill and Hillary themselves.
All of which plays into the hands of a corporate press happy to write off any and all
suspicion as a product of alt-right paranoia.
But if speculation refuses to die, it's for a simple reason. If the DNC email disclosure was a
hack, then Rich clearly had nothing to do with it, which means his death was no more than a robbery
gone awry. But if it was a leak, then – based on broad hints dropped by Assange and Murray – it
looks like the story could well be more complicated. This proves nothing in and of itself. But it
guarantees that questions will grow as long as the Washington police make zero progress in its
investigation and the Mueller report continues to fall apart.
And that's just what's happening. Mueller's account of how Russian intelligence supposedly
supplied
WikiLeaks
with stolen data makes no sense because, according to the report's
chronology, the transfer left
WikiLeaks
with just four days to review some 28,000 emails
and other electronic documents to make sure that they were genuine and unaltered – a clear
impossibility.
(See "
The
'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report
," April 18.)
The FBI assessment that Paul Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik "has ties to Russian
intelligence" – which Mueller cites (vol. 1, p. 133) in order to justify holding Manafort in
solitary confinement during the Russia-gate investigation – is similarly disintegrating amid
reports
that
Kilimnik actually served as an important State Department intelligence source.
So the idea of a hack makes less and less sense and an inside leak seems more and more
plausible, which is why questions about the Rich case will not go away.
Bottom line: you don't have to be a loony rightist to suspect that
there is more
to the murder than Robert Mueller would like us to believe.
Question: why is the Trump Administration still actively PERSECUTING
Julian Assange?
"...Craig Murray, the ex-British diplomat who serves as an
unofficial WikiLeaks spokesman,
says
the WikiLeaks founder
would have been "very willing to give evidence to Mueller" while
holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, "which could have
been done by video-link, by interview in the Embassy, or by
written communication."
No need for arrests, extradition requests, or 17 espionage
charges. A simple email phone call might just do the trick...
It shows once again that Trump is a similar fascist as Hillary and
the DNC!
The best thing a person can do if anything happens to them is try to
document it and send it to a friendly media outlet since the police
and FBI may cover it up. Perhaps dump it directly on to the
internet so at least some folks hear/see the truth before it all
vanishes.
Why didn't the red team make him do it, or do it themselves?
Today
we've learned that the FBI didn't, inexplicably, go and grab the DNC
server but also
never even saw the report from Crowdstrike that
was used as the basis for blaming everything on Russia.
Of course, the FBI admitted that it never examined the DNC servers
and just revealed in court that it never saw a detailed report from
Crowdstrike showing that Russians hacked the server.
That's why
Mueller never investigated.
He knew it was a lie but one the entire 3 years, Obama admin,
Hillary, the DNC & corrupt cabal depend on maintaining.
The author quotes Seth Rich's brother to support his theory.
According to Rich's brother,
Aaron
,
Seth "was very aware, very talkative," when police found him lying
on the pavement.
... but then fails to quote his brothers press statement ?
Which is:
The special counsel has now provided hard facts that
demonstrate this conspiracy is false. I hope that the people who
pushed, fueled, spread, ran headlines, articles, interviews, talk
and opinion shows, or in any way used my family's tragedy to
advance their political agendas -- despite our pleas that what they
were saying was not based on any facts -- will take responsibility
for the unimaginable pain they have caused us. We will continue to
pursue justice for Seth's murderers, as well as those who used his
murder to advance their personal or political agendas by advancing
false conspiracy theories
If you followed the story, the Rich family was very much doubted
this was a random robbery until political operators had a long
chat with them. Their stories changed and cooperation with the
independent investigation ended.
This neighborhood has cameras
everywhere. Suddenly, none of them worked.
Not only did the FBI never get the DNC server for forensic
investigation, it turns out the FBI never even got a finalized report
on "DNC hacking" from Crowdstrike. Every conclusion drawn by the
various agencies within the Intelligence Community is based on a
redacted copy of a draft report from Crowdstrike, and this report was
never finalized from its draft form. And even the draft was never
unredacted for the FBI.
The whole thing was a sham from the start,
as many people suspected. The Mueller operation was never seeking to
uncover truth; it was an impeachment investigation by any other name.
Why Mueller didn't carry it over the goal line will forever remain a
mystery to me.
Yet that did not stop Mueller from a pre-dawn raid of Stone's
house with 27 armed officers & CNN claiming he helped Wikileaks
get the DNC emails from Russian hackers. It isn't stopping the
corrupt cabal from prosecuting Stone & Assange for that continued
lie.
'Why Didn't Mueller Investigate Seth Rich?' Occam's razor.
Why would a paid lackey disobey direct orders by the chief
architects of this Criminal Conspiracy and risk his own life in the
process? It makes no sense on any level.
Funny how we hear about all the great whistle blower-leakers in
Wastergate and the wonder cub reporters aka CI$$A shills like
Woodward, Bernstein and Ben Bradley who were and are CI$$A puppets.
Watergate was Deepstate Rockefellers/Rothschilds taking Nixon out for
tariffs and ending the gravy train Vietnam war with endless opium and
heroin.
But when you have Seth Rich murdered and Wiki Leaks saying
he is the guy then "democracy dies in the darkness" with the fake ***
USA news media aka Operation Mockingbird Wa Post, NY Times, AP and
the rest.
The significance of that can't be overstated. The investigations
that have been going on NON-STOP for three years are all fake and
*everybody* in DC knows it.
page 48 of the mueller report does mention seth rich as the source of
the hack. As quoted by Julian Assange and Mueller casually mentioned
that it's untrue with no further investigation.
"... Let's start with this very reasonable supposition: Guccifer 2.0 is an entity operating within US time zones who has gone out of his way to pose as a Russian hacker who was the source for the Wikileaks DNC/Podesta releases. ..."
"... villain du jour ..."
"... The subsequent mysterious death of Shawn Lucas by a weird drug cocktail might also be related. Shawn had been the process server for the class-action lawsuit against the DNC. According to Sy Hersh's FBI source, Seth indicated that he had allies who were aware of the drop box he was providing Wikileaks. It would have been necessary to eliminate these allies. Was Shawn one of these allies, and did the creator of G2.0 know this? Shawn, who was not known to be a drug user, died suddenly about a month after Seth. ..."
"... So who created G2.0? G2.0 appears to have worked in coordination with Crowdstrike. One day after Crowdstrike announced that the DNC had been hacked (with Russia the chief suspect) and that the hackers had grabbed a file of Trump Opposition Research, G2.0 makes his first public appearance, claiming to be the hacker, posting Trump Opposition Research -- and purposely leaving "Russian fingerprints" on the meta-data of his release. ..."
"... Crowdstrike was also in a position to concoct the "Russian hack" that they claimed to be investigating. Cyberanalysts have determined that two-thirds of the allegedly "Russian malware" which Crowdstrike "found" on the DNC servers had in fact been compiled subsequent to the date that Crowdstrike was brought in to investigate the "hack". In other words, there is reason to believe that Crowdstrike itself concocted this "hack" -- likely because they had been warned that Wikileaks was going to release leaked DNC emails. ..."
"... Also notable is the fact that Shawn Henry, co-founder of Crowdstrike, is a master of cyberfuckery. Prior to founding Crowdstrike, Henry served under Robert Mueller as head of FBI counterintelligence -- in which capacity he engaged in efforts to entrap and discredit Julian Assange. Indeed, others have suspected that Henry was behind G2.0, in light of the fact that G2.0's behavior was reminiscent of that of "Sabu" (Hector Monsignor), a hacker who, after secretly being arrested by the FBI during Henry's tenure there, worked under FBI direction to entrap other hackers. And the G2.0 hoax is clearly another - so far, highly successful - attempt to smear Assange. ..."
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... After the Popodouplous interview by Mark Steyn, there was clarity after following Russiagate since it really started before the election of 2016. The deep state actors were trying to setup some significant figure in the Trump as having ties with the Russian government. ..."
"... The irony is that we have McCarthyism once again and not one Russian is guilty of what they are being accused of. They were set up as the fall guys, and of course in the future nuclear war. ..."
Let's start with this very reasonable supposition: Guccifer 2.0 is an entity operating
within US time zones who has gone out of his way to pose as a Russian hacker who was the source
for the Wikileaks DNC/Podesta releases. The notion that this absurdly preening entity is a
GRU hacker is idiotic.
The Mueller report's tale of how G2.0 allegedly transferred the DNC emails to Wikileaks is
absurd on its face -- which is to say, Mueller is acting as an accomplice to G2.0 in his
fraud.
The evident purpose of the G2.0 fraud was to detract attention from the incriminating
content of the DNC/Podesta releases, by blaming those releases on Russian government hackers
operating in cahoots with Julian Assange. This accomplishes 3 goals dear to the hearts of the
Deep State actors behind G2.0: minimizing the damage to Hillary's campaign inflicted by the
released emails; smearing the reputation of Assange, who has made an unparalleled contribution
to unmasking the egregious crimes of the Western Deep State; and further defaming "the
Russians", the villain du jour which our
Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank* complex needs to
justify the continuing rape of American taxpayers on behalf of our grotesque overspending on
military hardware and our bloated global military empire.
But what was the evident fly-in-the-ointment for this brilliantly diabolic plan? The ACTUAL
source of the Wikileaks releases could have blown it sky high. And if G2.0 and the Russian
hacking tale had been unmasked prior to the election, the blowback on Hillary's campaign would
have been enormous. Which is why the creators of G2.0 needed to eliminate the source.
There are a number of reasons to suspect that Seth Rich was the source, or a confederate of
the source:
Hints dropped by Assange;
Award for info on Seth's killer offered by Wikileaks;
Wikileaks re-tweeting essays speculating that Seth was the leaker;
Craig Murray's repeated assurances that DNC/Podesta releases resulted from leaks, not
hacks;
Kim Dotcom's claim that he helped Seth with the leak;
Sy Hersh's secretly recorded phone call in which he stated that a trusted source within the
FBI claims to have seen an FBI memo describing an FBI analysis of Seth's laptop -- this
revealed that Seth had offered to sell DNC emails to Wikileaks, and subsequently conveyed the
docs to Wikileaks via drop box;
Claims by Ed Butowsky, Larry Johnson, and Bill Binney indicating that they have sources
inside the intel community verifying that Seth was the leaker -- in conjunction with brother
Aaron;
Jared Beck's claim that both Seth and Shawn Lucas were planning to testify in the
class-action lawsuit against the DNC -- speaks to Seth's possible motive for leaking;
Claim by Rod Wheeler that, according to a source inside the DC police, the police have been
ordered to "stand down" on the Seth Rich investigation;
Frenzied reaction of Donna Brazile on learning that Wheeler was investigating the Seth Rich
murder - and her overt lie regarding her whereabouts on the morning of the murder.
Some have speculated that, in line with an email by John Podesta, Seth was murdered "to make
an example of him". I reject this explanation. They could have made an example by firing him
and suing him. As it stands, no example was made, as the DNC claims that Russians, not Seth,
were responsible for the Wikileaks DNC releases.
If the puppetmaster of G2.0 knew or believed that Seth was the leaker, Seth had to be
murdered to insure success of the G2.0 hoax.
(The alternative is that G2.0 did not know that, and that Seth was beaten up and murdered in
a robbery so "botched" that no valuables were taken. Yeah, right!)
The subsequent mysterious death of Shawn Lucas by a weird drug cocktail might also be
related. Shawn had been the process server for the class-action lawsuit against the DNC.
According to Sy Hersh's FBI source, Seth indicated that he had allies who were aware of the
drop box he was providing Wikileaks. It would have been necessary to eliminate these allies.
Was Shawn one of these allies, and did the creator of G2.0 know this? Shawn, who was not known
to be a drug user, died suddenly about a month after Seth.
Curiously, the day after Seth died, and again the day after Shawn died, the DNC made
payments of about $100K to Crowdstrike. Sheer coincidence? Maybe.
So who created G2.0? G2.0 appears to have worked in coordination with Crowdstrike. One
day after Crowdstrike announced that the DNC had been hacked (with Russia the chief suspect)
and that the hackers had grabbed a file of Trump Opposition Research, G2.0 makes his first
public appearance, claiming to be the hacker, posting Trump Opposition Research -- and
purposely leaving "Russian fingerprints" on the meta-data of his release. Unfortunately,
this little dog-and-pony show turned out to be a screw-up, as it was subsequently revealed that
(by the DNC itself!) that the Opposition Research document had been an attachment in Podesta's
emails, and hadn't been hacked from the DNC. It is also notable that releasing Trump Opposition
Research would do nothing to damage the chances of Hillary -- the alleged intent of the
mythical Russian hackers. Indeed, nothing that G2.0 subsequently released was notably harmful
to Hillary.
Crowdstrike was also in a position to concoct the "Russian hack" that they claimed to be
investigating. Cyberanalysts have determined that two-thirds of the allegedly "Russian malware"
which Crowdstrike "found" on the DNC servers had in fact been compiled subsequent to the date
that Crowdstrike was brought in to investigate the "hack". In other words, there is reason to
believe that Crowdstrike itself concocted this "hack" -- likely because they had been warned
that Wikileaks was going to release leaked DNC emails.
It bears repeating that the latest dated DNC email which Wikileaks published was written on
April 25th -- several weeks after Crowdstrike had been brought in to investigate the
alleged hack. Anti-hacking programs do not stop leaks .
Also notable is the fact that Shawn Henry, co-founder of Crowdstrike, is a master of
cyberfuckery. Prior to founding Crowdstrike, Henry served under Robert Mueller as head of FBI
counterintelligence -- in which capacity he engaged in efforts to entrap and discredit Julian
Assange. Indeed, others have suspected that Henry was behind G2.0, in light of the fact that
G2.0's behavior was reminiscent of that of "Sabu" (Hector Monsignor), a hacker who, after
secretly being arrested by the FBI during Henry's tenure there, worked under FBI direction to
entrap other hackers. And the G2.0 hoax is clearly another - so far, highly successful -
attempt to smear Assange.
Whether or not Crowdstrike concocted G2.0, we need to find out who did -- the answer should
be highly pertinent to unraveling Seth's murder.
And let's bear in mind that the creator of G2.0 has also played an integral role in
concocting a Second Cold War with Russia - luring an entire generation of "leftists" into
hating both Russia and Wikileaks, on completely spurious grounds. The evil of that is HUGE.
about hammering on these points is productive of narrowing in on the truth, whatever it
may be. That's my awkward way of saying that you're not just on to something but that your
precision, where you're hammering, is getting to the truth. I say that as a person who isn't
convinced that Seth Rich was the DNC leaker, but who thinks he may have been murdered because
he was a potential witness in a
DNC voter suppression lawsuit , which amounts to the same thing really.
The strength of your outlook for me is that you emphasize the stupidity of the G2.0
revelations, the stupidity of Russian cyber-fingerprints, the vapidity of the released
Opposition Research, and the timeliness of this junk evidence. It matches in tone and
stupidity the evidence used to convince the American people that Saddam gave the anthrax to
Mohamed Atta in Prague. Turns out Atta was not in Prague, turns out the anthrax was not
Saddam's, but ours, turns out the Vice President of the United States lied about it on
camera. Doesn't matter. Once the scene of the transfer to Atta was fixed in the minds of some
American people, even if just a few Americans half believed it, the narrative was
written.
The other strength of your essay for me is your hammering on Seth Rich's murder as
eliminating a possible contradiction of the Russia narrative. The death of his associate
Lucas only adds to that possibility. Clearly Seth Rich's murder was timely and important. It
could very well have been a random street crime, but why he was out on the street in the
middle of the night just before the filing of a lawsuit that could have involved him and the
DNC is worth asking. The problem is that the media, and as far as we can tell, our
government, are not asking.
I just want to thank you again for focusing on the weak points of the narrative. Each time
you do, I think you bring us closer to the truth.
Here is a good report on the false evidence generated on the anthrax attack.
Yes, but I'd suggest it's because she's lived a career
in the Deep State. Hilz never really was a Dem. She was an undercover Republican/CIA when she
started out. In 1968 she started the year as a volunteer for Clean Gene McCarthy, the
"anti-Vietnam" Dem candidate who went on to endorse Ronald Reagan.
She then went to the the
Republican convention in Miami, then spent that summer as an intern for House Republicans,
where she wrote a speech about Vietnam for Representative Melvin Laird. Melvin Laird was
Nixon's Secretary of Defense, who oversaw a lot of the bludgeoning of Southeast Asia.
So when
she was anti-war with McCarthy was she really anti-war (subsequently there have been stories
about how infiltrated McCarthy's '68 campaign was riddled with CIA infiltrators), or was she
pro-war, writing speeches for Mel Laird? I suggest she never gave a shit about all those
napalmed deplorables in Southeast Asia. It was a pose. I'd don't think that Bill was anti-war
either. Like a lot of future politicians he didn't want his ass shot there.
She and Bill
worked their way up the ladder among CIA-owned politicians. Ultimately, they were in place to
deliver the Democratic Party to the Agency.
After the Popodouplous interview by Mark Steyn, there was clarity after following
Russiagate since it really started before the election of 2016. The deep state actors were
trying to setup some significant figure in the Trump as having ties with the Russian
government.
This include Flynn, the meeting at Trump Towers, and Popodouplos. So many details
now fall in place like the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya meeting with Fusion after the
Trump Tower meeting. Say what?
Or just bullshit like US intelligence found out GRU agents
were doing the hacking because some GRU master computer jock forgot to login into his VPN. G2
does seem to be an invention.
The irony is that we have McCarthyism once again and not one Russian is guilty of what
they are being accused of. They were set up as the fall guys, and of course in the future
nuclear war.
As for Seth Rich all I can speculate is that he was involved somehow. And if his murder
was not random, he was about to blow apart the entire conspiracy to such a level, action had
to be taken against him.
"... So there was about a year between the FBI's first notification of some potential problems with the DNC network and then that information getting on -- getting on Wikileaks. . ..."
"... Ten months? So the FBI notified the DNC of the hack and it was not until 10 months later that you had any details about what was actually going on forensically on their network? ..."
"... Whoa!!! How did the FBI know that the DNC was "hacked" in August 2015? The FBI does not have a "Hacking Monitor" team that sits around identifying attempted hacks within the United States. There are only a few possibilities that would account for the FBI's knowledge of this alleged event: ..."
"... The FBI had an informant who was connected to the hacker. ..."
"... The FBI had an informant inside the DNC that alerted them to the hack. ..."
"... The FBI had an active counter intelligence investigation of the person/group that was conducting this hack. ..."
"... Regardless of how the FBI learned of the August 2015 hack, the natural and unanswered question is why did the FBI not act to warn the DNC and to pursue the person or entity responsible for the hack? ..."
"... Given that Comey admitted that the FBI did not have forensic access to any of the DNC computers or network, how could Comey know that the same person/entity was responsible for the unspecified activities in August 2015? ..."
The American public, with the enthusiastic support of most of the media, have been sold a
big lie about Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential election. As I have noted in previous
pieces, there was nothing new nor special nor unique about Russian espionage activities inside
the United States, including information and computer network operations, in 2016. Russian
espionage and covert action against the United States has been a matter of fact since 1919. And
the United States has been similarly engaged in such activities inside Russia.
What made 2016 unique and dangerous is that US law enforcement and intelligence agencies
decide to use the ruse of Russia as a weapon to attack the candidacy and then the Presidency of
Donald Trump. This attack entailed creating evidence that Trump was soliciting Russian
assistance and the creation of the myth that Russia hacked the DNC. Anyone who challenges this
lie is branded immediately as a Russian stooge and puppet of Putin.
We have very specific evidence regarding the fraud perpetrated about the so-called "hacking"
of the DNC. Bill Binney and I have posted two pieces--one showing that
the forensic evidence in the metadata of the DNC documents posted at Wikileaks could not
have transferred over the internet and one showing that
Guccifer 2.0 was the creation of some person or entity other than Russia.
There is another piece of public evidence that provides circumstantial evidence that the
intelligence community case against Russia with respect to the allegation of extraordinary
meddling is a fabrication. I am referring to the January 2017 Intelligence Community
Assessment-- Assessing Russian Activities and
Intentions in Recent US Elections .
I want to focus on one of the more important Key Judgements:
We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main
Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US
victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and
relayed material to WikiLeaks.
It is natural and understandable to assume that this judgment is based on real intelligence
held in classified channels. But it is not. Bill Binney and I have shown that Guccifer 2.0 was
a fabrication. But we also have the testimony of NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers and FBI
Director Jim Comey on the "evidence" underlying the so-called hack. This key judgment was based
on unverified and uncorroborated information provided by CrowdStrike.
Three months after the ICA was published, Rogers and Comey testified before the House
Intelligence Committee. They were asked specifically about the proof that the DNC was hacked by
the Russians. Here is the key part of that testimony:
HURD: So there was about a year between the FBI's first notification of some potential
problems with the DNC network and then that information getting on -- getting on Wikileaks.
COMEY: Yes, sir.
HURD: Have you been able to -- when did the DNC provide access for -- to the FBI for your
technical folks to review what happened?
COMEY: Well we never got direct access to the machines themselves. The DNC in the spring of
2016 hired a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the
system.
HURD: Director Rogers, did the NSA ever get access to the DNC hardware?
ROGERS: The NSA didn't ask for access. That's not in our job...
HURD: Good copy. So director FBI notified the DNC early, before any information was put on
Wikileaks and when -- you have still been -- never been given access to any of the technical or
the physical machines that were -- that were hacked by the Russians.
COMEY: That's correct although we got the forensics from the pros that they hired which --
again, best practice is always to get access to the machines themselves, but this -- my folks
tell me was an appropriate substitute.
HURD: The -- at what point did the company and the DNC use -- share that forensic
information to you?
COMEY: I don't remember for sure. I think June. I could be wrong about that. . . .
HURD: So -- so that was -- how long after the first notification of -- that the FBI did of
the DNC?
COMEY: Ten months.
HURD: Ten months? So the FBI notified the DNC of the hack and it was not until 10 months
later that you had any details about what was actually going on forensically on their
network?
COMEY: That's correct, assuming I have the dates about right. But it was -- it was some
months later.
Neither the FBI nor the NSA got "direct access to the machines". Their words, not mine.
And where did the forensic data come from? CrowdStrike.
So much for the intelligence community relying on real intelligence. They were given
information from a cyber security firm that waited at least 5 weeks before allegedly taking
steps to disconnect the DNC computers from the infected network.
Even in an unclassified setting, Admiral Rogers and Director Comey could have stated that
they had other information from intelligence sources that corroborated the CrowdStrike
findings. They did not testify to this. This is more than curious, it is a tacit admission that
they were relying on information from a firm hired by the Democrats and the law firm working
for Hillary Clinton. This is not an independent, reliable source of information.
This fact alone does not prove the lie. But when considered as part of the entire evidence
available, including the metadata from the documents posted at Wikileaks, the case for
fabrication grows.
UPDATE--Thanks to "H" for spotting the obvious. I missed this completely but "H" is quite
correct that this statement by Comey raises more disturbing questions. Let's go to the
transcript:
HURD: Copy, I apologize. Director Comey, when was the first time the FBI notified the DNC of
the hack? Roughly.
COMEY: I think august of 2015.
HURD: And was that prior to information being leaked to -- being sent on -- put on
WikiLeaks?
COMEY: Yes the -- the first Russian directed releases where middle of June of the next year
by D.C. leaks and this Guccifer 2.0 persona and then that was followed by Wikileaks. So about a
year. A little less than a year really.
HURD: So there was about a year between the FBI's first notification of some potential
problems with the DNC network and then that information getting on -- getting on Wikileaks.
. . .
HURD: So -- so that was -- how long after the first notification of -- that the FBI did of
the DNC?
COMEY: Ten months.
HURD: Ten months? So the FBI notified the DNC of the hack and it was not until 10 months
later that you had any details about what was actually going on forensically on their
network?
COMEY: That's correct, assuming I have the dates about right. But it was -- it was some
months later.
HURD: Knowing what we know now, would the FBI have done anything different in trying to
notify the DNC of what happened?
COMEY: Oh Sure.
HURD: What -- what -- what measures would you have done differently?
COMEY: We'd have set up a much larger flare. Yeah we'd have just kept banging and banging on
the door, knowing what I know now. We made extensive efforts to notify, we'd have -- I might
have walked over there myself, knowing what I know now. But I think the efforts we made, that
are agents made were reasonable at the time.
Whoa!!! How did the FBI know that the DNC was "hacked" in August 2015? The FBI does not
have a "Hacking Monitor" team that sits around identifying attempted hacks within the United
States. There are only a few possibilities that would account for the FBI's knowledge of this
alleged event:
The FBI had an informant who was connected to the hacker.
The FBI had an informant inside the DNC that alerted them to the hack.
The FBI had an active counter intelligence investigation of the person/group that
was conducting this hack.
Regardless of how the FBI learned of the August 2015 hack, the natural and unanswered
question is why did the FBI not act to warn the DNC and to pursue the person or entity
responsible for the hack? Moreover, how did the FBI know that the person/entity doing the
hack of the DNC in August 2015 was the same one responsible for the May 2016 "theft" of emails?
Given that Comey admitted that the FBI did not have forensic access to any of the DNC
computers or network, how could Comey know that the same person/entity was responsible for the
unspecified activities in August 2015?
I am wondering what Larry Johnson and others make of this recent analysis by b at Moon of
Alabama: to wit, that there is an existing log of communications between Obama administration
and Putin government the publication of which would clearly exculpate Russia from these
accusations?
This information would seem to corroborate and help explain the utterly ridiculous
chain-of-evidence collapse and timeline at the basis of Comey's "investigation" of the DNC
leak.
I read some of the McCabe testimony and recall an interchange in which he said the FBI was
determined to get hold of two laptops (which had been used to sort the emails into those
deemed relevant to the investigation, and those not) and that the FBI would not close the
investigation until they had. It came up as an example of FBI/DoJ differences - FBI wanting
to subpoena the Doj preferring to negotiate for access - in the end they did get the units by
negotiation. What I did not see (I did not read all of it) was any mention of efforts to get
the servers.
My question to all is has anyone else seen anything on attempts to get the servers or, if
none, why the same effort had not been made?
Here's a question that seemingly goes unanswered when anyone writes about the hack of the
DNC servers - How did the FBI even know the DNC servers had been compromised in the first
place? How did they know to warn them?
The DNC is a private corporation NOT a government entity. Are all registered political
corporations tethered to a governmental system by law or by contract that the FBI is
monitoring? If so, what is that system and why?
If not, then how did the FBI even know their system was compromised?
The reading public is left to assume a lot in how the FBI even knew to warn them a full 10
months before the FBI's vendor, Crowdstrike, released its hack report.
Larry, can you or Bill answer this question? If they have a contract of some sort for
monitoring the corporate political parties great. It'd be nice to know. But if they don't,
then how in the world did they know to warn them?
Larry, would you along the lines give some thought to the argument, considering time
frames between FBI alert as published and discovery. Ideally what additional "IT
intelligence" may have resulted from cutting servers and whatever connected periphery, at, at
what point in time?, off and analyze it.
Funny that! I can't imagine the DNC, let alone any other private entity, permitting the
FBI to monitor their systems daily activity 365 days out of the year. If they do, well, how
stupid of them. If they don't then indeed St Comey may have told the biggest lie of them all.
Crazy.
I sincerely look forward to reading what you learn.
You're doing great work here and I thank the good Colonel for hosting you.
At this point I wonder if it's even true that the DNC was hacked in August, 2015. Could a
false accusation have been planted to serve as a component of the plan to subvert Trump's
candidacy/presidency?
The DNC/Clinton campaign's "Pied Piper" strategy to promote Trump, Cruz and Carson
(thinking either of them would be the easiest for her to defeat) was launched in April,
2015 . Cruz announced in March, 2015. Carson in May, 2015. Trump announced in June 2015.
How did the DNC/Clinton camp even know Carson would be a candidate a month before his
announcement, or that Trump would be a candidate 2 months before he announced?
I hope AG Barr and US Att'y. Durham are digging deeply.
"... The Clinton campaign and the DNC retained the law firm of Perkins Coie; in turn, one of its partners, Marc E. Elias, retained Fusion GPS. We don't know how much Fusion GPS was paid, but the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $9.1 million to Perkins Coie during the 2016 campaign (i.e., between mid-2015 and late 2016). ..."
"... Fusion GPS then "hired" FBI Informant Christopher Steele in May 2016. More about that later. ..."
"... As Lisa Page and Peter Strzok noted in their text exchange, Ted Cruz dropping out of the race in early May was the catalyst for focusing all resources on Donald Trump. This effort, which I label, the Trump Russia covert action, involved the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and British Intelligence ..."
"... May 4, 2016, George Papadopolous forwarded to Corey Lewandowski an email from Timofeev [who was introduced to Papadopolous by Joseph Mifsud] raising the possibility of a meeting in Moscow ..."
"... May 4, 2016, FBI Informant Felix Sater followed up with Michael Cohen re Trump Tower Moscow Project: ..."
"... John Brennan convened a secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI. ..."
"... The unit functioned as a sealed compartment, its work hidden from the rest of the intelligence community. Those brought in signed new non-disclosure agreements to be granted access to intelligence from all three participating agencies ..."
"... It was manufactured as part of a broader plan to paint Trump as a tool of Putin and a servant of Russia ..."
"... We must take a new look at the story told about the so-called Russian hack of the DNC. I believe that Crowd Strike is lying about its role and the timeline. Here is the "official" story ..."
"... We are asked to believe that the Russians were in the DNC network on the 6 th of May and that Crowd Strike knew it. But what steps did Crowd Strike take to shut down the "Russians." Short answer -- nothing until June 10 th ..."
"... The DNC emails were taken on the 25 th of May 2016. That is the last date for the DNC emails posted on Wikileaks ..."
"... CrowdStrike effort did not shut down the DNC network until 10 June. If you know on May 6 th that the "Russians" are in the network, why does any credible, competent cyber security company wait until the 10 th of June to shut the system down? ..."
"... Seth Rich, a DNC employee and Bernie Sanders supporter, downloaded the emails and then gave them to Wikileaks. Rich was in contact with Wikileaks. That is not my opinion. We know that courtesy of a FOIA request by lawyer Ty Clevenger to the NSA filed in November 2017, who requested any information regarding Seth Rich and Julian Assange. ..."
"... NSA has records of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange. ..."
"... the CIA had a task force set up. I believe this intelligence was communicated to the Clinton campaign and that a bogus story, with Crowd Strike in a starring role, was cooked up. Implausible? ..."
"... It was Crowd Strike with the help of the Washington Post that went public and pinned the blame on the Russians ..."
"... But that was not the only active measure in place. Christopher Steele, a fully signed up FBI informant, was hired by Fusion GPS and produced his first block buster report on June 20 th claiming Trump was under the thumb of Vladimir Putin ..."
"... Things should get very interesting with the declassification in force. Can you see the NSA/Seth Rich/Wikileaks material being made declassified as well (albeit redacted for methods, etc of course)? ..."
"... Can Barr declassify the Rich/Assange material? Also, was Skripal one of Steele's "sources"? ..."
"... Joseph Mifsud is missing in this time line. He always appeared to be the most curious player. Any reason he is left out? ..."
"... This is the second time in the past few weeks I've read about surveillance on Sanders. Is there a link to a reliable source? ..."
"... I believe it's established that a guy from the UK worked in his campaign, and is now on the Integrity Initiative payroll. And the investigation into his wife's role in the financial affairs of the college she works for seems mysteriously to have run into the sands ..."
"... Before joining Manafort in Kiev, Kliminik worked for almost a decade in Moscow for the International Republican Institute, effectively running that office for some of those years. The IRI is part of the NED/USAID network. There is no way an identified "GRU agent" would be permitted as a long time employee of such an organization. ..."
"... To avoid the conflict [of interest] President Trump designates the U.S. Attorney General as arbiter and decision-maker for the purposes of declassifying evidence within the investigation ..."
"... I realize Larry Johnson's already alluded to the existence of NSA files about communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange, but the implications are finally sinking in as to how evil this whole mess is. ..."
"... I've always been dismissive of those who've made comments about "Arkancide" in connection with the Clintons, but I may have to revise my POV. I wonder who was involved in the process of getting rid of Mr. Rich? ..."
"... Declassify the list of persons "Samantha Powers" asked FISA courts to unmask during the 11th hours of the Obama administration. Or learn who signed her name to these requests, if in fact she did not as she claimed. ..."
"... Redstate reports the 260 FISA unmasking requests in 2016 in Samantha Power name were perhaps for an Israel Settlesment-gate; not Russiagate? https://www.redstate.com/elizabeth-vaughn/2019/05/25/samantha-powers-unmasked-260-americans-2016-soon-well-learn/ ..."
Forget July 31, 2016 as the alleged start date for the full blown Trump counter intelligence investigation. That day is a sham.
The actual campaign to paint Trump as a full fledged stooge of Russia started in early May 2016. We now know the start date thanks
to the text messages between star-crossed lovers Strzok and Page and the timeline buried in the Mueller Report:
It is important to understand that the collection of intelligence on U.S. Presidential candidates was not limited to Donald Trump.
The collection effort started in the summer of 2015 and included the main Republican candidates and, according to a knowledgeable
source, also targeted Bernie Sanders.
Also remember that the Presidential campaign is a dynamic event that changes over time. In the summer of 2015, the conventional
wisdom touted Jeb Bush as the likely nominee. But as the months passed the field narrowed. By March of 2016, Donald Trump was the
leader and appeared likely to garner the nomination.
April was the turning point where the foundation for attacking Trump was being laid. The law firm, Perkins Coie, hired
Fusion GPS on
behalf of Hillary Clinton's campaign . Andy McMarthy reported on the details of this arrangement in October 2017:
The Clinton campaign and the DNC retained the law firm of Perkins Coie; in turn, one of its partners, Marc E. Elias, retained
Fusion GPS. We don't know how much Fusion GPS was paid, but the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $9.1 million to Perkins Coie during
the 2016 campaign (i.e., between mid-2015 and late 2016).
Fusion GPS then "hired" FBI Informant Christopher Steele in May 2016. More about that later.
As Lisa Page and Peter Strzok noted in their text exchange, Ted Cruz dropping out of the race in early May was the catalyst
for focusing all resources on Donald Trump. This effort, which I label, the Trump Russia covert action, involved the CIA, the NSA,
the FBI and British Intelligence. How do we know? Just look at the Robert Mueller Report:
May 4, 2016, George Papadopolous forwarded to Corey Lewandowski an email from Timofeev [who was introduced to Papadopolous
by Joseph Mifsud] raising the possibility of a meeting in Moscow , asking Lewandowski whether that was " something we want
to move forward with. " The next day, Papadopoulos forwarded the same Timofeev email to Sam Clovis, adding to the top of the email
"Russia update." (From Mueller Report)
May 4, 2016, FBI Informant Felix Sater followed up with Michael Cohen re Trump Tower Moscow Project: "I had a chat with
Moscow. ASSUMING the trip does happen the question is before or after the convention. I said I believe, but don't know for sure,
that 's it's probably after the convention. Obviously the pre-meeting trip (you only) can happen anytime you want but the 2 big
guys where [sic] the question. I said I would confirm and revert. . . . Let me know about If I was right by saying I believe after
Cleveland and also when you want to speak to them and possibly fly over." (From Mueller Report)
May 5, 2016, FBI Informant Felix Sater wrote to Michael Cohen: "Peskov would like to invite you as his guest to the St. Petersburg
Forum which is Russia's Davos it's June 16-19. He wants to meet there with you and possibly introduce you to either Putin or Medvedev
, as they are not sure if 1 or both will be there. This is perfect. The entire business class of Russia wiU be there as well. He
said anything you want to discuss including dates and subjects are on the table to discuss[. ]" (From Mueller Report)
May 6, 2016, George Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government [i.e., Erika Thompson, senior aide to
Alexander Downer] that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign
through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to candidate Clinton. (p. 81 Mueller Report)
May 6, 2016, two military attachés at the US embassy in London, Terrence Dudley and Gregory Baker, reach out to George Papadopolous
to set up a meeting." [Both, per Papadopolous are with Defense Intelligence Agency, {
https://books.apple.com/us/book/deep-state-target/id1446495998
) (From Papadopolous Book)
May 7, 2016 (12 days before becoming campaign chair for Trump's) Paul Manafort meets with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian national
who has lived in both Russia and Ukraine and was a longtime Manafort employee. (From Mueller Report) [NOTE -- Mueller's team identified
this as "suspect" activity that needed to be investigated.]
May 16, 2016, while that request was still under consideration, Carter Page emailed Clovis, J.D. Gordon, and Walid Phares and
suggested that candidate Trump take his place speaking at the commencement ceremony in Moscow. (From Mueller Report)
May 19, 2016, Paul Manafort was promoted to campaign chairman and chief strategist, and Gates, who had been assisting Manafort
on the Campaign, was appointed deputy campaign chairman. (From Mueller Report) [NOTE -- the Mueller team believed that Manafort
was acting on behalf of Russian interests but failed to find corroborating evidence.]
May 2016, the IRA created the Twitter account @march_for_trump , which promoted IRA-organized rallies in support of the Trump
Campaign (From Mueller Report
May 2016-- FBI Informant Henry Oknyansky (who also went by the name Henry Greenberg), claimed to have information pertaining
to Hillary Clinton. Michael Caputo notified Roger Stone and brokered communication between Stone and Oknyansky. Oknyansky and Stone
set up a May 2016 in-person meeting. (From Mueller Report)
John Brennan convened a secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA,
the NSA and the FBI.
The unit functioned as a sealed compartment, its work hidden from the rest of the intelligence community. Those brought in
signed new non-disclosure agreements to be granted access to intelligence from all three participating agencies.
They worked exclusively for two groups of "customers," officials said. The first was Obama and fewer than 14 senior officials
in government. The second was a team of operations specialists at the CIA, NSA and FBI who took direction from the task force on
where to aim their subsequent efforts to collect more intelligence on Russia.
Investigators must get the date that this CIA task force was established. They also need to identify and interview the people
who participated and were cleared to work on this task force. President Trump must understand that this was not a legitimate intelligence
operation. It was weaponizing the intel community to act against a Presidential candidate. It was manufactured as part of a
broader plan to paint Trump as a tool of Putin and a servant of Russia.
We must take a new look at the story told about the so-called Russian hack of the DNC. I believe that Crowd Strike is lying
about its role and the timeline. Here is the "official" story
May 6, 2016, Dmitri Alperovitch woke up in a Los Angeles hotel to an alarming email. Alperovitch is the thirty-six-year-old cofounder
of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, and late the previous night, his company had been asked by the Democratic National Committee
to investigate a possible breach of its network. A CrowdStrike security expert had sent the DNC a proprietary software package,
called Falcon, that monitors the networks of its clients in real time. Falcon "lit up," the email said, within ten seconds of being
installed at the DNC: Russia was in the network. (From Esquire--
Esquire Magazine offers a different
timeline)
We are asked to believe that the Russians were in the DNC network on the 6 th of May and that Crowd Strike knew
it. But what steps did Crowd Strike take to shut down the "Russians." Short answer -- nothing until June 10 th.
The DNC emails were taken on the 25 th of May 2016. That is the last date for the DNC emails posted on Wikileaks.
Washington Post reporter Ellen Nakashima and Esquire magazine each reported that that the CrowdStrike effort did not shut down
the DNC network until 10 June. If you know on May 6 th that the "Russians" are in the network, why does any credible,
competent cyber security company wait until the 10 th of June to shut the system down?
I believe this is a cover story. Here is what I think really happened.
Seth Rich, a DNC employee and Bernie Sanders supporter, downloaded the emails and then gave them to Wikileaks. Rich was in contact
with Wikileaks. That is not my opinion. We know that courtesy of a FOIA request by lawyer Ty Clevenger to the NSA filed in November
2017, who requested any information regarding Seth Rich and Julian Assange. The NSA informed Clevenger in a letter dated 4 October
2018 that:
Former NSA Technical Director, William Binney commented on this revelation:
Ty Clevenger has FOIAed information from NSA asking for any data that involved both Seth Rich and also Julian Assange. And they
responded by saying we've got 15 files, 32 pages, but they're all classified in accordance with executive order 13526 covering classification,
and therefore you can't have them.
That says that NSA has records of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange. I mean, that's the only business
that NSA is in -- copying communications between people and devices.
We already know, as noted above, that the CIA had a task force set up. I believe this intelligence was communicated to the
Clinton campaign and that a bogus story, with Crowd Strike in a starring role, was cooked up. Implausible? Not as implausible
as a supposed cracker jack cyber security company waiting almost six weeks before taking common sense steps to shut down and clean
the DNC servers.
It was Crowd Strike with the help of the Washington Post that went public and pinned the blame on the Russians.
But that was not the only active measure in place. Christopher Steele, a fully signed up FBI informant, was hired by Fusion
GPS and produced his first block buster report on June 20 th claiming Trump was under the thumb of Vladimir Putin.
This is not a complete timeline. More remains to be discovered. But there are key facts that most of the media and punditry have
ignored. Donald Trump's announcement tonight (Thursday, 23 May 2019) to start declassifying documents on the Trump counter intelligence
investigation and directing the intelligence agencies to cooperate may be the final straw that ends the conspiracy of ignorance.
Once again, thank you for the good work on this important topic. Looking forward to your future installments.
Things should get very interesting with the declassification in force. Can you see the NSA/Seth Rich/Wikileaks material
being made declassified as well (albeit redacted for methods, etc of course)?
O'Shawnessey, if the Rich/Assange material establishes communication between the two, I would expect it to be declassified
to bolster the "Russia didn't do it" narrative. Even if that communication was't specifically about transferring DNC files or
the actual transference of DNC files, it would be useful to Russia and/or Trump supporters.
If, OTOH, the file NSA files consist of Assange discussing the use of Rich as a useful scapegoat, the files will never see
the light of day. According to what Larry has written, Clevenger asked for files with information involving Rich and Assange
and did not specify communications between Assange and Rich.
Clevenger should have at least specified a cut off date. If the NSA files were produced before Rich's death, it would be
a gold mine for Barr and Trump. If the documents covered the time after Rich's death, not so much.
My theory is that the Rich as leaker story is similar to the whole G2 story. They muddy the water and create chaos. Classic
maskirovka.
Siht, I hadn't even thought about classified info on SR. I had thought about how it would be interesting if it turned out
Sanders had been spied on. Seriously explosive stuff. Something about Robert Duvall using the other N word, quote from Apocalypse
Now.
This is the second time in the past few weeks I've read about surveillance on Sanders. Is there a link to a reliable
source?
I believe it's established that a guy from the UK worked in his campaign, and is now on the Integrity Initiative payroll.
And the investigation into his wife's role in the financial affairs of the college she works for seems mysteriously to have
run into the sands.
Before joining Manafort in Kiev, Kliminik worked for almost a decade in Moscow for the International Republican Institute,
effectively running that office for some of those years. The IRI is part of the NED/USAID network. There is no way an identified
"GRU agent" would be permitted as a long time employee of such an organization.
The Mueller team deliberately seeded the suspicion, and credulous journalists speculated on polling data without pause. Kliminik
was, in effect, Manafort's deputy in Kiev, working very closely with him - so again for the Mueller team to suggest there was
anything at all sinister in the two men holding meetings, whether tied to campaign events or not, is unfounded speculation,
which should have been obvious to all.
I've been waiting for that one. Next comes Papadopoulos. I think the British Fraud Act of 2006 is quite relevant to what
Halper was doing. Cambridge University, Magdalene College, even Pembroke College would seem to me to be at risk for lawsuits.
Fraud Act 2006 Wikipedia explains why litigation is now appropriate.
To avoid the conflict [of interest] President Trump designates the U.S. Attorney General as arbiter and decision-maker
for the purposes of declassifying evidence within the investigation
...
[etc.]
I realize Larry Johnson's already alluded to the existence of NSA files about communications between Seth Rich and Julian
Assange, but the implications are finally sinking in as to how evil this whole mess is.
I've always been dismissive of those who've made comments about "Arkancide" in connection with the Clintons, but I may
have to revise my POV. I wonder who was involved in the process of getting rid of Mr. Rich?
Wasn't there a "murder case" in DC itself? In other words do you really need to lead us down to Arkansas, murky real estate
deals, drugs, extramarital relationships bordering on rapes and other shady associate networks? But I agree, suicided may not fit all too well.
I am struck by the irony of the Trump administration is prosecuting Julian Assange under the Espionage Act for actions that
are common journalistic practices, while simultaneously conducting an investigation that is closing in on malefactors of high
position for probable actions that threaten the very core of our democracy and which in all likelihood would still be unknown
to the public were it not for the work of that same heterodox journalist.
I suspect that the Trump government really doesn't want Assange extradited but feels it has to be seen to have gone through
the motions. 17+ indictments might be effective in the American judicial system but here in good old Blighty it's way too many
and they might all be thrown out as being oppressive.
But then again the Conservative government after Brexit will be a bunch of craven shits desperate for a trade deal from Trump
and will reply "how high" when he says jump.
Declassify the list of persons "Samantha Powers" asked FISA courts to unmask during the 11th hours of the Obama administration.
Or learn who signed her name to these requests, if in fact she did not as she claimed.
"... The Word documents published in June 2016 by Guccifer 2 also show a "last saved as" user id written in Cyrillic. The Anglicized name is " Felix Edmundovich ", aka "Iron Felix" (the infamous director of an early Soviet spy agency). If you are a Russian cyber spy trying to conduct a covert operation, why do you sign your document with the name of one of the most infamous leaders of Russian intelligence? Robert Mueller wants you to believe that this was just Russian audacity. ..."
"... The phrase "personal beliefs about the competence or incompetence of the Russians" catches something important. Whether it was the Russians or somebody else that did this, whoever did it was pretty sloppy. What this report describes is almost as pathetic when considered a false flag operation as it is as a sabotage operation. So any theory of who stole and published the documents has to explain a capability to access the data combined with blissful obliviousness about handling them. I know of no reason to think the Russian, US, Israeli, or other intelligence communities incapable of such a combination. All of them have brilliant dedicated people but also seemingly endless supplies of mediocre time-servers. ..."
"... Scenario? Shutdown, closing of words with documents being automatically saved? Ok, otherwise there is apparently no precise saving time stamp on Winwords latest version. How much changed since 2016? ..."
"... The Vault7 leak of CIA tools also contained information on how to select any language environment. It's really a standard practice, even for normal criminals. ..."
Russia did not hack the DNC. This is not an opinion. It is a conclusion that flows from one
very specific claim made by the Special Counsel -- i.e., Guccifer 2.0 was a fictional identity
created by Russian Military Intelligence, the GRU. If Guccifer was in fact a creation or
creature of the GRU, then the forensic evidence should show that this entity was operating from
Russia or under the direct control of the GRU. The forensic evidence shows something quite
different -- the meta data in the Guccifer 2.0 documents were manipulated deliberately to plant
Russian fignerprints. This was not an accident nor an oversight due to carelessness.
What is meta data? This is the information recorded when a document is created. This data
includes things such as the date and time the document was created or modified. It tells you
who created the document. It is like the Wizard of Oz, it is the information behind the
curtain.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's is correct in stating that Guccifer 2.0 was a "fictious
online persona. " He is wrong in attributing that action to Russian Military Intelligence.
While Guccifer 2.0 was a "fictious" entity, the information recorded about when, how and who
created the document show that deliberate choices were made to present the info as if it was
created by someone Russian.
Let us first stipulate and agree that Russia and the United States engage in cyber espionage
and covert action against each other. This has been the case since computers and the internet
came into existence. Within the U.S. Intelligence Community these activities generally are
labeled with the acronym, CNO -- Computer Network Operations. The Russians and the United
States have cadres of cyber "warriors" who sit at computer terminals and engage in operations
commonly known as hacking. Other countries, such as China, Iran and Ukraine do this as
well.
CNOs are classified at the highest level in the United States and normally are handled
within special restricted categories commonly known as SAPs (i.e, Special Access Programs). A
critical element of these kinds of operations is to avoid leaving any fingerprints or clues
that would enable the activity to be traced back to the United States. But this is not unique
to the United States. All professional intelligence services around the world understand and
practice this principle -- leave no evidence behind that proves you were there.
The case implicating Russia in the hack of the DNC and Clinton emails, including those of
her campaign Manager, John Podesta, rests on suspect forensic computer evidence -- is present
in the meta data in the documents posted on line by Guccifer 2.0. According to Disobedient
Media , "the files that Guccifer 2.0 initially pushed to reporters contain Russian
metadata, a Russian stylesheet entry and in some cases embedded Russian error messages."
Why would the Russians make such a mistake, especially in such a high stake operation
(targeting a national election with covert action most certainly is a high stake operation).
Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community want you to believe that the Russians are just
sloppy and careless buffoons. Those ideologically opposed to the Russians readily embrace this
nonsenses. But for those who actually have dealt with Russian civilian and military
intelligence operatives and operations, the Russians are sophisticated and cautious.
But we do not have to rely on our personal beliefs about the competence or incompetence of
the Russians. We simply need to look at the forensic evidence contained in the documents posted
by Guccifer 2.0. We will take Robert Mueller and his investigators at their word:
Beginning in or around June 2016, the Conspirators staged and released tens of thousands
of the stolen emails and documents. They did so using fictitious online personas, including
"DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0." (p. 2-3)
The Conspirators also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release additional stolen
documents through a website maintained by an organization ("Organization 1") [aka WIKILEAKS],
that had previously posted documents stolen from U.S. persons, entities, and the U.S.
government. (p. 3)
Between in or around June 2016 and October 2016, the Conspirators used Guccifer 2.0 to
release documents through WordPress that they had stolen from the DCCC and DNC. The
Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also shared stolen documents with certain individuals.
(p. 15)
An examination of those documents tells a very different story. While it does not reveal who
or what was Guccifer 2.0, it does undermine Mueller's claim that it was the Russians who did
these dastardly deeds.
One independent forensic computer investigator, who uses the name, "The Forensicator,"
examined the meta data in some of the documents posted by Guccifer 2.0 and
discovered the following :
Guccifer 2.0 published a file on 13 September 2016 that was originally copied on 5 July 2016
at approximately 6:45 PM Eastern time. It was copied and appeared as the "NGP VAN" 7zip
file.
The estimated speed of transfer was 23 MB/s. This means that this initial data transfer
could have been done remotely over the Internet. Instead, it was likely done from a computer
system that had direct access to the data. "By "direct access" we mean that the individual who
was collecting the data either had physical access to the computer where the data was stored,
or the data was copied over a local high-speed network (LAN)."
This initial copying activity was done on a system that used Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)
settings and was likely initially copied to a computer running Linux, because the file last
modified times all reflect the apparent time of the copy, which is a characteristic of the
Linux 'cp' command (using default options).
On September 1, 2016, a subset of the initial large collection of DNC related content (the
so-called NGP/VAN data), was transferred to working directories on a system running Windows.
The .rar files included in the final 7zip file were built from those working directories.
The alleged Russian fingerprints appeared in the first document "leaked" by Guccifer 2.0--
1.doc -- which was a report on Donald Trump . A forensic examination of
the documents shows thatgiven the word processor program used to create the Donald Trump
Document released by Guccifer 2.0, the author consciously and purposefully used formats that
deliberately inserted "Russian fingerprints" into the document. In other words, the meta-data
was purposely altered, and documents were pasted into a 'Russianified' word document with
Russian language settings and style headings.
Here are the key facts:
The meta data shows that Slate_-_Domestic_-_USDA_-_2008-12-20.doc was the template
for creating 1.doc , 2.doc and 3.doc . This template injected "Warren
Flood" as the author value and "GSA" as the company value in those first three Word documents.
This
template also injected the title , the watermark and header/footer fields found in the
final documents (with slight modifications).
The Word documents published in June 2016 by Guccifer 2 also show a "last saved as" user id
written in Cyrillic. The Anglicized name is " Felix Edmundovich ", aka
"Iron Felix" (the infamous director of an early Soviet spy agency). If you are a Russian cyber
spy trying to conduct a covert operation, why do you sign your document with the name of one of
the most infamous leaders of Russian intelligence? Robert Mueller wants you to believe that
this was just Russian audacity.
But the meta data tells a different story. When we examine The Revision Session Identifiers
aka 'RSID's, in the Guccifer document, we see the same Russian style-headings in 1.doc, 2.doc
and 3.doc. The document creation timestamps on docs 1, 2 and 3 also are all identical.
Given that MS word assigns a new random 'RSID' with each save when an element is added or
edited (this function allows one to track changes made to a Word document), the only way to
obtain identical creation timestamps means that someone either directly edited the source
document or that there was one empty document open and that individual documents were
copy-pasted and saved-as (1.doc), then contents deleted and new doc pasted and saved-as
(2.doc), etc. This
process also explains identical style-sheet RSIDs .
The document creation timestamps on docs 1, 2 and 3 also are all identical.
Curious, no doubt. But who of us did not consider Guccifer 2 curious. Put another way,
what experts considered him solid proof for Russian involvement?
Are you suggesting Winword templates were used for the metadata?
As IT nitwit, how can I save three *doc files or their 2016 word equivalent at the same
time? Any way to do that? Windows doesn't seem to have a solution to that.
Again: This is a nitwit user asking a question.
*******
I admittedly am not overly motivated to read the Mueller report. I'll read your contribution
again to figure out what you may suggest in or between the lines.
The phrase "personal beliefs about the competence or incompetence of the Russians" catches
something important. Whether it was the Russians or somebody else that did this, whoever did
it was pretty sloppy. What this report describes is almost as pathetic when considered a
false flag operation as it is as a sabotage operation. So any theory of who stole and
published the documents has to explain a capability to access the data combined with blissful
obliviousness about handling them. I know of no reason to think the Russian, US, Israeli, or
other intelligence communities incapable of such a combination. All of them have brilliant
dedicated people but also seemingly endless supplies of mediocre time-servers.
Equally interesting is the fact that this analysis has come from such a private source.
Surely all the major intelligence agencies have the skill to find the same indicators. And
all have comparatively endless resources to apply to the analysis. But they all seem to not
want to talk about it. For me the most suspicious thing about the handling of the theft was
the FBI's near complete lack of interest in examining the server. I have always assumed that
such indifference reflected that they already had all they needed in order to understand what
happened. Maybe even watched the theft in real time. But this report demonstrates that you
didn't need any special access to blow up the official story. (Note that the official story
may be "true". It is just not proven by the cited evidence.)
Yet, whatever actually happened, nobody seems interested in challenging the narrative that
Russians stole data and routed it through useful idiots to influence the 2016 elections. This
report indicates that a persuasive challenge would not have been hard to produce.
Perhaps the false flag was intentionally clumsy, intended to be detected. Bait for a trap
that no one wants to fall into. But I don't see where that thought leads.
This can be discovered by looking at things called 'rsid's or Revision Session
Identifiers in Guccifer's document. In order to track changes, MS word assigns a new random
'rsid' with each save upon each element added or edited. The rsids for the Russian
style-headings in 1.doc, 2.doc and 3.doc are all the same (styrsid11758497 in the raw
source).
Moreover, the document creation timestamps on 1,2, and 3.docs are all identical too.
This might imply there was one empty document open, with individual documents being
copy-pasted and saved-as (1.doc), then contents deleted and new doc pasted and saved-as
(2.doc), etc. This is the only way to go about obtaining identical creation timestamps short
of direct editing of the source, and would also explain identical style-sheet RSIDs.
Scenario? Shutdown, closing of words with documents being automatically saved? Ok,
otherwise there is apparently no precise saving time stamp on Winwords latest version. How
much changed since 2016?
Empty doc open? What would that change?
But good to see that Winword now integrated some type of automatic saving option, didn't
have it when I gave it up and shifted to Open Office. On the other hand, can I trust it to not confront me with an earlier revision version? I
admittedly asked myself lately. In a 200 page file, mind you.
As someone with a little bit of experience in that area I can assure you that language
metadata artifacts are practically worthless for attribution. You would mention it in a
report, but from it you can only conclude that
either the creator was an amateur and used his own language environment
or actually selected this particular language environment, either by running a - in this
case - Russian copy of Office, or by changing the metadata manually.
or he used his own language environment because he doesn't care, and because he knows that
this information is worthless for any forensics expert.
The Vault7 leak of CIA tools also contained information on how to select any language
environment. It's really a standard practice, even for normal criminals.
Attribution is really hard and usually amounts to a lot of guessing who might be interested
in the target of an attack, correlating information from other campaigns, and is only rarely
based on hard evidence. Big state actors probably can do a little bit better when they have
access to enough network taps. But in the end one bit looks like any other, and properties of
static documents can always be forged and made to look real. Or simply buy a copy of MS
Office in .
The document creation timestamps on docs 1, 2 and 3 also are all identical.
Ok doc creation times. Could one create a WinWord Macro? That does exactly that. ok, why
would one do this? True. Minor detail, I know. But I see we have experts around now.
*******
More generally. Guccifer 2.0 was a bit of an odd occurrence, not least due to US intelligence
considering Guccifer one or zero, if you like.
I found the first of these statements as "chilling" as the second:
"Schumer thus greeted Assange's April 11 arrest by tweeting his "hope [that] he will soon
be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian
government," while, in a truly chilling statement, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West
Virginia declared that "[i]t will be really good to get him back on United States soil [so]
we can get the facts and the truth from him."
Daniel Lazare's recent work on Assange indicated via chronological sequencing it's much
more likely Guccifer 2.0 was the phony he was suspected to be at the time, let alone
Assange's denial it was not the Russians, nor any State operation, plus as we have discussed
pointing toward Seth Rich (an insider-as-leak interpretation subsequently buttressed by
William Binney et al.)
In short, there is and has been ample information to suspend leaping to the hysterical tar
and feather him approach mouthed by Schumer, spittle presumably flying out of his mouth at
the time.
It is disgusting to see supposed leaders in the government advocating guilty until proved
innocent in this lynch-mob manner in a country with supposedly an advanced system of justice.
It reminds me of the Rosenberg case and the McCarthy era and the Salem witch trials before
that.
"... Historians will study this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington. ..."
"... Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' ( 8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts. ..."
"... This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia. Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but by the Obama administration? ..."
"... Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute to Montenegro, NATO's newest member. ..."
"... At this stage, it doesn't matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own conclusions. ..."
Trump was after a good deal from Russia. A new partnership would have reversed deteriorating relations between the powers by encouraging
their alliance against ISIS and recognising the importance of Ukraine to Russia's security. Current US paranoia about everything
Kremlin-related has encouraged amnesia about what President Barack Obama said in 2016, after the annexation of the Crimea and Russia's
direct intervention in Syria. He too put the danger posed by President Vladimir Putin into perspective: the interventions in Ukraine
and the Middle East were, Obama said, improvised 'in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp' (
5 ).
Obama went on: 'The Russians can't change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country, they are a weaker country,
their economy doesn't produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms.' What he feared most about Putin was
the sympathy he inspired in Trump and his supporters: '37% of Republican voters approve of Putin, the former head of the KGB. Ronald
Reagan would roll over in his grave' ( 6 ).
By January 2017, Reagan's eternal rest was no longer threatened. 'Presidents come and go but the policy never changes,' Putin
concluded ( 7 ). Historians will study
this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing
of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any
entente between Moscow and Washington.
Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump
and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe
an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails
fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' (
8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts.
The media, especially the New York Times and Washington Post, eagerly sought a new Watergate scandal and knew their
middle-class, urban, educated readers loathe Trump for his vulgarity, affection for the far right, violence and lack of culture (
9 ). So they were searching for any information
or rumour that could cause his removal or force a resignation. As in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, everyone
had his particular motive for striking the same victim.
The intrigue developed quickly as these four areas have fairly porous boundaries. The understanding between Republican hawks such
as John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the military-industrial complex was a given. The architects
of recent US imperial adventures, especially Iraq, had not enjoyed the 2016 campaign or Trump's jibes about their expertise. During
the campaign, some 50 intellectuals and officials announced that, despite being Republicans, they would not support Trump because
he 'would put at risk our country's national security and wellbeing.' Some went so far as to vote for Clinton (
10 ).
Ambitions of a 'deep state'?
The press feared that Trump's incompetence would threaten the US-dominated international order. It had no problem with military
crusades, especially when emblazoned with grand humanitarian, internationalist or progressive principles. According to the press
criteria, Putin and his predilection for rightwing nationalists were obvious culprits. But so were Saudi Arabia or Israel, though
that did not prevent the Saudis being able to count on the ferociously anti-Russian Wall Street Journal, or Israel enjoying
the support of almost all US media, despite having a far-right element in its government.
Just over a week before Trump took office, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden story that revealed the mass
surveillance programmes run by the National Security Agency, warned of the direction of travel. He observed that the US media had
become the intelligence services' 'most valuable instrument, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with
hidden intelligence officials.' This at a time when 'Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as
well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing
-- eager -- to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging
those behaviours might be' ( 11 ).
The anti-Russian coalition hadn't then achieved all its objectives, but Greenwald already discerned the ambitions of a 'deep state'.
'There really is, at this point,' he said 'obvious open warfare between this unelected but very powerful faction that resides in
Washington and sees presidents come and go, on the one hand, and the person that the American democracy elected to be the president
on the other.' One suspicion, fed by the intelligence services, galvanised all Trump's enemies: Moscow had compromising secrets about
Trump -- financial, electoral, sexual -- capable of paralysing him should a crisis between the two countries occur (
12 ).
Covert opposition to Trump
The suspicion of such a murky understanding, summed up by the pro-Clinton economist Paul Krugman as a 'Trump-Putin ticket', has
transformed the anti-Russian activity into a domestic political weapon against a president increasingly hated outside the ultraconservative
bloc. It is no longer unusual to hear leftwing activists turn FBI or CIA apologists, since these agencies became a home for a covert
opposition to Trump and the source of many leaks.
This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses
the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia.
Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no
one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but
by the Obama administration?
The silence was once broken when the Republican representative for North Carolina, Tom Tillis, questioned former CIA director
James Clapper in January: 'The United States has been involved in one way or another in 81 different elections since World War II.
That doesn't include coups or the regime changes, some tangible evidence where we have tried to affect an outcome to our purpose.
Russia has done it some 36 times.' This perspective rarely disturbs the New York Times 's fulminations against Moscow's trickery.
The Times also failed to inform younger readers that Russia's president Boris Yeltsin, who picked Putin as his successor
in 1999, had been re-elected in 1996, though seriously ill and often drunk, in a fraudulent election conducted with the assistance
of US advisers and the overt support of President Bill Clinton. The Times hailed the result as 'a victory for Russian democracy'
and declared that 'the forces of democracy and reform won a vital but not definitive victory in Russia yesterday For the first time
in history, a free Russia has freely chosen its leader.'
Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining
resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President
Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute
to Montenegro, NATO's newest member.
No longer getting his way
But the Times, far from worrying about these provocative gestures coinciding with heightened tensions between great powers
(trade sanctions against Russia, Moscow's expulsion of US diplomats), poured oil on the fire. On 2 August it praised the reaffirmation
of 'America's commitment to defend democratic nations against those countries that would undermine them' and regretted that Mike
Pence's views 'aren't as eagerly embraced and celebrated by the man he works for back in the White House.'
At this stage, it doesn't
matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own
conclusions.
This was clearly an attempt to entrap Trump in connections to Russia and fuel anti-Russian hysteria and defense spending. Both goals
were accomplished under Trump without much resistance. Still Russiagate persists. Why?
Notable quotes:
"... 05/03/16 Email from DNC contractor Ali Chalupa states she connected Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News "to the Ukrainians" DNC https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/3962 ..."
"... 05/15/16 Crowdstrike claims it investigated DNC hacking and that Russians were responsible; FBI still denied access to server to confirm Crowdstrike https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/ ..."
03/06/16 Former Hillary State Dept. representative George Papadopoulos learns he will join Trump campaign as a low-level
foreign policy adviser DOJ
https://www.justice.gov/file/1007346/download
"... In both cases # Assange had announced the release before allegedly getting material from # Guccifer2 (aka GRU). There might be other sources other than # G2 . # MuellerReport pic.twitter.com/bPN7NHpM9N ..."
"... Good Lord, @ Birgittaj , not you as well? That timeline is rubbish. Ask yourself, how could # Assange tell UK TV on 12 June # WikiLeaks already had possession of # DNCLeaks if # Mueller says "source" # Guccifer2 didn't send anything to WL until 14 July? http://www. itv.com/news/update/20 16-06-12/assange-on-peston-on-sunday-more-clinton-leaks-to-come/ # SaySorry pic.twitter.com/B0WRAjv15G ..."
"... LINDSEY GRAHAM FORGOT TO MENTION THAT SPEAKER PAUL RYAN SHUT DOWN # HouseIntelInvestigations into # Awan # Guccifer2 and # ClintonEmails . ..."
"... Always assumed that # Guccifer2 was either a DNC construction (as it was so badly done) or a NSA construction ..."
"... Says VIPs analyzed the @ wikileaks docs; via metadata discovered it had to be a thumb drive download. 2 years ago VIPs said # Guccifer2 docs had that character. ? Mr. President -- Listen to Bill Binney. Russiagate is a Worse Hoax than You Thought https:// youtu.be/-9TyASfZV0c # RussiaGate ..."
In April 2016, the #GRU hacked into the computers
of the @DCCC &
@DNC & stole 100s of
1000s of docs. In mid-June 2016 the GRU began disseminating stolen materials through the
fictitious online personas " #DCLeaks " and " #Guccifer2
.0." and then through @WikiLeaks . - #MuellerReport
This is an interesting thread. Also note that Mueller has already released portions of
logs of communications between #WikiLeaks and #Guccifer2
, a contact first reported by @KevinCollier using logs I provided.
pic.twitter.com/lVjeq9nTA2
4:04 PM - 4 May 2019
The @DNC , etc docs
that #Guccifer2 .0 provided to @wikileaks prove that Hillary promoted
Trump because she thought she could beat him (mistake) and the @DNC rigged the primary so Hillary would win the
nomination (mistake). All of this is talked about in the #MuellerReport .
Michael Holloway - Schroedinger's Cyclist 12:25 PM - 13 Mar 2019
Always assumed that #Guccifer2 was either a
DNC construction (as it was so badly done) or a NSA construction (or 2 working together); in
both cases designed to implicate Russia in a DNC 'hack' ...while @CraigMurrayOrg has stated he
received the DNC files in Wash DC from a leaker.
Michael Holloway - Schroedinger's Cyclist 12:17 PM - 13 Mar 2019
Says VIPs analyzed the @wikileaks docs; via metadata discovered it had to be a thumb drive download. 2
years ago VIPs said #Guccifer2 docs had that
character. ? Mr. President -- Listen to Bill Binney. Russiagate is a Worse Hoax than You
Thought https:// youtu.be/-9TyASfZV0c#RussiaGate
Did you read any of the dos that were leaked by #Guccifer2 .0, #DCLeaks , or
@Wikeleaks ? If
not, let me hip you to something. Corrupt Dems in the @DCCC and the @DNC , as well as crooked @HillaryClinton , are the main
reasons Trump is in the White House. Dems blew it. Face the truth.
#BlackWomenForBernie2020 3:17 PM - 14 Mar 2019
*cough* Former Speaker Paul Ryan closed down HOUSE INTEL INVESTIGATIONS. Including
#AWAN
and #GUCCIFER2
"... Chalupa's meetings with DNC and Ukrainian officials would continue. On April 26, 2016, investigative reporter Michael Isikoff published a story on Yahoo News about Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It was later learned from a DNC email leaked by Wikileaks that Chalupa had been working with Isikoff -- the same journalist Christopher Steele leaked to in September 2016. Manafort would later be indicted for Foreign Agents Registration Act violations that occurred during the Obama administration. Perkins Coie ..."
The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee both occupied a unique position. They had the most to gain but they
also had the most to lose. And they stood willing and ready to do whatever was necessary to win. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager,
Robby Mook, is credited with being the first to raise the specter of candidate Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.
The entire Clinton campaign willfully promoted the narrative of Russia–Trump collusion despite the uncomfortable fact that they
were the ones who had engaged the services of Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele through their law firm Perkins Coie. Information
flowed from the campaign -- sometimes through Perkins Coie, other times through affiliates -- ultimately making its way into the
media and sometimes to the FBI. Information from the Clinton campaign may also have ended up in the Steele dossier.
Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, in tandem with Jake Sullivan, the senior policy adviser
to the campaign,
took the lead in briefing the press on the Trump–Russia collusion story.
Palmieri helped promote the Russia-collusion narrative.
Another example of this behavior can be seen from an instance when Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann
leaked information from Steele and Fusion GPS to Franklin Foer of Slate magazine. This event is described in the House Intelligence
Committee's final report on
Russian active measures
, in footnote 43 on page 57. Foer then published the article
"Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia? " on Oct. 31, 2016. The article concerns allegations regarding a server in the
Trump Tower.
The Slate article managed to attract the immediate attention of Clinton, who posted a
tweet on the same day the article was
published:
"Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank."
Attached to her tweet was a
statement from Sullivan:
"This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert
server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.
"This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization
felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists."
These statements, which were later proven to be incorrect, are all the more disturbing with the hindsight knowledge that it was
a senior Clinton/DNC lawyer who helped plant the story. And given the prepared statement by Sullivan, the Clinton campaign knew this.
This type of behavior would be engaged in repeatedly -- damning leaks leading to media stories, followed by ready attacks from
the Clinton campaign.
Alexandra Chalupa is a Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee. Chalupa
met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, Paul Manafort, and Russia.
Chalupa began investigating
Manafort in 2014. In late 2015, Chalupa expanded her opposition research on Manafort to include Trump's ties to Russia. In January
2016, Chalupa shared her information with a senior DNC official.
Chalupa's meetings with DNC and Ukrainian officials would continue. On April 26, 2016, investigative reporter Michael Isikoff
published a story
on Yahoo News about Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It was later learned from a DNC email leaked
by Wikileaks that Chalupa had been working with Isikoff
-- the same journalist Christopher Steele
leaked to
in September 2016. Manafort would later be indicted for Foreign Agents Registration Act violations that occurred during the Obama
administration. Perkins Coie
International law firm Perkins Coie served as the legal arm for both the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Ties to Perkins Coie extended
beyond the DNC into the Obama White House.
Bob Bauer, a partner at the law firm and founder of its political law practice, served as
White House counsel to President Barack Obama throughout
2010 and 2011. Bauer was also
general counsel to Obama's campaign organization, Obama for America, in 2008 and 2012.
Perkins Coie partners Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann each played critical roles and were the ones who hired Fusion GPS and Steele.
Sussmann
personally handled the alleged hack of the DNC server. He also transmitted information, likely from Steele and Fusion GPS, to
James Baker, then-chief counsel at the FBI, and to several members of the press.
According to a
letter
dated Oct. 24, 2017, written by Matthew Gehringer, general counsel at Perkins Coie, the firm was approached by Fusion GPS founder
Glenn Simpson in early March 2016 regarding the possibility of hiring Fusion GPS to continue opposition research into the Trump campaign.
Simpson's overtures were successful, and in April 2016, Perkins Coie
hired
Fusion GPS on behalf of the DNC.
Sometime in April or May 2016, Fusion GPS
hired Christopher Steele. During
this same period, Fusion also reportedly
hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr. Steele would complete his first memo on June 20, 2016,
and send it to Fusion via enciphered mail.
Perkins Coie appears to have also been acting as a conduit between the DNC and the FBI.
Documents suggest that Sussmann was feeding information to FBI general counsel James Baker and at least one journalist ahead
of the FBI's application for a FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
The information provided by Sussmann may have been used by the FBI as "corroborating information."
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website
TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.
"... Is this how Judge Chutkan got steered the Awan and Fusion GPS cases too? ..."
"... Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-FL, has a brother, Steven, who works as a U.S. Attorney in the Prosecutors' Office in the District of Columbia. She is former campaign chairman for the DNC and the Hillary Clinton Campaign for President. Wasserman Schultz is also the one who gave her passwords to Imran Awan. ..."
"... Is that how the Butina, Awan, and Fusion GPS cases got "assigned" to Judge Chutkan? ..."
"... Mariia worked for Susan Rice at American University (AU). Their offices were next to each other. Ambassador Rice was President Barack Obama's National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2017. Rice's job at American University was to review NSA and FBI surveillance data, then organize it, for the benefit of the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign. ..."
"... Butina is jailed in the William Truesdale Adult Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia. ..."
"... At her Judicial Nomination hearing, Chutkan was asked about her lack of experience in criminal law. She had none. Nor did Chutkan have trial experience. ..."
"... According to the federal court's system of records, Judge Chutkan has never tried a criminal case. Or any case? ..."
"... Fusion GPS: Judge Chutkan's second cover-up. ..."
How can paperwork be timestamped when the court is closed? <img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c5d6731f9619a074c095377/1549625145085/Butina+case+filed+on+a+Saturday+.png"
alt="Butina case filed on a Saturday .png" />
Court-shopping is rigging the system to get one's legal case steered to the judge most likely to rule in one's favor.
It is only illegal if caught.
And if the opposing party objects to it.
Is this how Judge Chutkan got steered the Awan and Fusion GPS cases too?
Is that cause for a reversal?
How does the Justice Department keep on getting away with it?
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-FL, has a brother, Steven, who works as a U.S. Attorney in the Prosecutors' Office in the District
of Columbia. She is former campaign chairman for the DNC and the Hillary Clinton Campaign for President. Wasserman Schultz
is also the one who gave her passwords to Imran Awan.
Is that how the Butina, Awan, and Fusion GPS cases got "assigned" to Judge Chutkan?
What does this say about the rest of the D.C. District Court?
What are they doing to rein in Judge Chutkan's judicial misconduct?
Supporting it?
The First Cover-up <img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c596674ec212d81d6ba512e/1549362810444/Butina+black+silouette+GQ.jpg"
alt="Butina black silouette GQ.jpg" />
Mariia Butina (above), the Russian spy?
Judge Chutkan can extend Mariia Butina's solitary confinement and gag order with a five-year sentence Tuesday.
With good behavior, Mariia is eligible for a sentence reduction of up to 54 days a year. Miss Butina plead guilty to being a Russian
spy at a court hearing on Dec. 13th. The 56-page transcript of this hearing which including her guilt plea is linked here:
Unless the gag order is extended, Mariia the has the opportunity to tell her story. Will the Judge deny that opportunity for five
years? The court is waiting for new evidence less than a week before Butina's sentencing. It is the names and pictures of Mariia's
former classmates at American University (AU).
How many other student spies are in those pictures and names?
Judge Chutkan has to allow the defense an opportunity to view all available evidence. To deny it would nullify the plea agreement.
The Judge has no obligation, however, to disclose the new evidence to the public. The Judge can claim "national security", blowing
the cover for CIA operatives, as the reason for "sealing" it.
Will that new evidence uncover the identities of other Butina student co-conspirators? Will Butina's attorney, Robert Driscoll,
have time to prepare a proper defense before Tuesday? He has yet to ask for an extention of time in order to review the pending new
evidence. The court is still waiting for it.
The public may never know it. <img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c58f73653450a06427aaa79/1549334336013/Butina+two+guns+photo+black+over+shoulder.png"
alt="Butina two guns photo black over shoulder.png" />
Mariia Butina (above)
Miss Butina was arrested on July 15th, a Sunday.
Two days after the arrest, Presidents Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin of Russia, were to meet in Helsinki, Finland. Was the
arrest timed to disrupt the agenda of this meeting? The FBI served its second warrant at Mariia's apartment on July 15th. They left
with a hard drive with two terabytes of data, according to Prosecutor Erik M. Kenerson. Two terabytes is equal to:
34,000 hours of music or
80 days or videos or
620,000 photos or
1,000 hours of movies
In April, according to Bob Driscoll, Butina's defense attorney:
15 FBI agents searched Mariia's apartment for evidence
The FBI left with a hard drive containing over 7,000 pages of documents and unspecified personal items
Later in the day, Butina testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee
<img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c596f04f4e1fc454224142a/1549365004326/Butina+best+black+in+four.png"
alt="Butina best black in four.png" />
Mariia Butina
Mariia worked for Susan Rice at American University (AU). Their offices were next to each other. Ambassador Rice was President
Barack Obama's National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2017. Rice's job at American University was to review NSA and FBI surveillance
data, then organize it, for the benefit of the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign.
A Russian Orthodox Priest and Valery Butina, Mariia's father, are approved visitors. <img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c597e43c830252ca2c30a7c/1549368907334/Butina+Fathe+Valery+South+Dakota.png"
alt="Butina Fathe Valery South Dakota.png" />
Father and daughter, Valery and Mariia Butina (above)
Butina complained about her cell being cold. It took five months for the prison to turn up the heat. And Mariia's parents and
sister live in Siberia.
Neither the Judge nor the Prosecutor can find guidelines on which to base Butina's sentence. No one has ever plead guilty to the
crime Mariia is pleading guilty to. In fact, never the Judge nor the Prosecutor have a copy of last year's federal sentencing guidelines.
Details are in the plea agreement, Page 44, imaged here: <img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c59856d24a694b928af4f2d/1549370741218/Butina+Judge+says+no+sentencing+guidelines+exist.png"
alt="Butina Judge says no sentencing guidelines exist.png" />
The Judge asked her the correct spelling of her first name. It is Mariia with two "i's". <img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c58f7cc7817f72a8e7eacee/1549334482363/Butina+spelling+of+Mariia+with+two+I%27s+page+12.png"
alt="Butina spelling of Mariia with two I's page 12.png" /> <img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c5972108165f5a37e3fa095/1549365785501/Butina+orange+hunting+cap.png"
alt="Butina orange hunting cap.png" />
Mariia Butina (above)
Chutkan has been a U.S. Federal District Judge in the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. since June 5th, 2014. To get her
appointed, President Barack Obama created or "packed" the D.C. Court with a "new position". At her Judicial Nomination
hearing, Chutkan was asked about her lack of experience in criminal law. She had none. Nor did Chutkan have trial experience.
Butina's lawyer, Robert Driscoll, has no criminal law experience either. Neither does anyone in his law firm.
https://www.mcglinchey.com/robert-driscoll/ <img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c5977a671c10b30f3889b1f/1549367217044/Driscoll+Roberrt+photo+on+Fox.png"
alt="Driscoll Roberrt photo on Fox.png" />
Robert Driscoll (above)
Yet, Judge Chutkan has ruled that Driscoll has provided "competent" legal defense for Mariia. After all, Mariia said so herself
at her pre-sentencing hearing on Dec. 13th. Chutkan issued a "gag order" on Butina's case because of Driscoll's repeated appearances
for a national cable network, Fox. Driscoll caused it. Butina was punished for it. Chutkan even assigned an "Advisory Attorney",
Mr. A.J. Williams, to monitor whether or not Butina has been violating the gag order since Dec. 13th.
Williams is a Federal Public Defender assigned to the District of Columbia since 1990. According to Valery Butina, Mariia's father,
Driscoll's fees reached $463,000 in July. "But the lawyer did not abandon the case . . . and has been actually working for free since
then", said Mariia's father.
Butina's father said that Driscoll "helped the family" set up a fund to pay legal fees. None of it goes to the Butina family.
Who monitors an attorney's escrow account anyway? How was Driscoll assigned the case? The same scheduler who assigned Judge Chutkan
the Fusion GPS and Imran Awan cases too?
Fusion GPS: Judge Chutkan's second cover-up. Judge Tanya Chutkan was also assigned the case involving Fusion GPS. Fusion
was paid to write the Russian dossier. Two of them.
Paid by the Russians through a Cleveland law firm.
Admitted to in sworn testimony before Congress. The details are linked here:
Chutkan ruled that the checks be "sealed", never to be made public.
Chutkan's Third Cover-up
Judge Chutkan was also assigned the case of Imran Awan, another D.C. scandal. He was the "Pakistani mystery man". For 14 years, he headed the Spy Ring in Congress for 40 members of Congress. Who knew?
In 14 years, how much intellectual property, patents, weapons, and pay-for-play deals were rinsed through Pakistan and sold to
N. Korea, Iran, China, and Russia?
Awan plead guilty to bank fraud. His six-month sentence was reduced to three months of "supervised" probation by Judge Chutkan.
"He suffered enough", said the Judge. Awan lives in Pakistan nine months out of the year. Awan received immunity from prosecution
without having to testify against anyone.
Exactly how did Awan suffer? He was paid $160,000 working three months out of the year to manage Congresses' computer systems.
Judges with lifetime appointments never have to explain anything. <img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c5983274192024193ecfeb3/1549370162865/Chutkan+grumpy+self.png"
alt="Chutkan grumpy self.png" />
According to Pacer, the official record of the federal courts, nothing on Butina's release and plea agreement was filed yesterday.
<img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c5d87bbec212d5e97169fbd/1549633474179/Butina+docket+8+a.m.+Feb.+8th.png"
alt="Butina docket 8 a.m. Feb. 8th.png" /> <img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/598a66006b8f5b013edc46c1/t/5c5d730771c10bfe031cc1f5/1549628173885/Butina+case+update+Feb+8th.png"
alt="Butina case update Feb 8th.png" />
Bob Driscoll, Butina's attorney, said yesterday that she should be home in Russia in six weeks.
The plea hearing remains on schedule for Tuesday.
The gag order has been lifted.
Mariia remains in prison at the William Truesdale Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia, according to the Russian Orthodox
Church. She is no longer in an isolation cell.
"... Does anybody know where the video of Malia Zimmerman interviewing Rod Wheeler can be found. My memory is that Zimmerman said her own independent source confirmed that the FBI knew Seth Rich had contacted WikiLeaks. But after the controversy exploded the video disappeared from YouTube and the Internet. ..."
"... Particularly as it seems likely that Rich wanted money, it would seem quite possible that negotiations with Assange started some time prior to the exfiltration of the material, which looks as though it happened in late May 2016; ..."
"... It would also be possible that Rich was not identified until very late in the day – indeed, his identification could even have followed the calling in of the laptops on June 10. ..."
"... Since Craig Murray received in person the DNC and Podesta files from an "intermediary" in the woods adjoining American University in Washington D.C., establishing the date or dates of Murray's trip could help establish the timeframe proposed above. ..."
"... I personally find it very hard to believe the Arkancide theory. But very easy to believe that the DNC leaks were from an annoyed Bernie supporter like Rich. After all, the content of the leaks showed that there really was a lot of finky poo going on at the DNC with the Clinton campaign to be unfair to Bernie. ..."
The Judge then proceeds to give Folkenflik and NPR an ass whooping:
Evaluating the August 1 Report as a whole, the Court finds because of material additions and
misleading juxtapositions, an objectively reasonable reader could conclude the report
mischaracterized Plaintiff's role in the Seth Rich investigation and "thereby cast more
suspicion on [Plaintiff's] actions than an accurate account would have warranted."24 Turner, 38
S.W. 3d at 119 ("But by omitting key facts and falsely juxtaposing others, the broadcast's
misleading account cast more suspicion on Turner's conduct than a substantially true account
would have done. Thus, it was both false and defamatory."). The August 1 Report as a whole is
reasonably capable of a defamatory meaning because it goes "beyond merely reporting materially
true facts." White, 909 F.2d at 521. . . .
Folkenflik implied Plaintiff fabricated the story about Seth Rich and WikiLeaks. The Court
agrees, especially when read in context with the rest of the statements contained in the August
1 Report. . . .
The Court finds the August 1 Report, as a whole, can be reasonably understood as stating the
meaning Plaintiff proposes and is capable of defamatory meaning. . . .
The Court finds Folkenflik's statements in the Mediaite Interview, as a whole, can be
reasonably understood as stating the meaning Plaintiff proposes and are capable of defamatory
meaning.
The August 7 Report contains three alleged defamatory statements: (1) Fox News had a "role"
in "concocting a baseless story" on the death of Seth Rich; (2) Fox was involved in a
"journalistic scandal" over the story; and (3) Fox "concocted" the story "in order to help
President Trump." Unlike the other reports discussed above, Plaintiff is not mentioned in the
August 7 Report. According to the Complaint, the August 7 Report, "[r]ead together with the
[August 1 Report], the overall tenor and context of Folkenlik's messages was that Butowsky
lied, was dishonest, and aided, abetted and actively participated in a fraudulent journalistic
scandal." Docket Entry # 1 at 36, n. 12.
According to Plaintiff, the overall "gist" is that Fox News and Plaintiff worked together,
each playing a "role," to "concoct" a "baseless story" that resulted in a journalistic
"scandal." Docket Entry # 32 at 24. At this stage of the proceedings, accepting the allegations
in the Complaint as true, the Court finds the August 7 Report can be reasonably understood as
stating the meaning Plaintiff proposes.
. . . .According to Plaintiff, Folkenflik's statement, explicitly or by implication, accuses
him of engaging in "activities" that caused harm to the Rich Family and that Plaintiff lacked
empathy and understanding that his actions "affected" the Riches. The Court finds the August 16
Report, considered as a whole, can be reasonably understood as stating the meaning Plaintiff
proposes and is capable of defamatory meaning .
. . . . Plaintiff asserts the word "player" carries a very heavy negative connotation and
"highlights Folkenflik's malicious agenda and extreme bias." Docket Entry # 32 at 26. The Court
finds the September 15 Report, as a whole, can be reasonably understood as stating the meaning
Plaintiff proposes and is capable of defamatory meaning.
In sum, the Court finds Plaintiff has alleged the gist of the reports can be reasonably
understood as stating the meaning Plaintiff proposes. Because the reports are "reasonably
capable" of communicating the meaning Plaintiff proposes, the next question is whether that
meaning is "reasonably capable" of defaming Plaintiff. Tatum, 554 S.W.3d at 637. The Court
concludes it is, as discussed further below on actual malice.28
Boys and girls, this is a Shaquille O'Neal equivalent of a slam dunk. I am sure that the NPR
lawyers will continue to try to escape this judgment. Odds are they will fail. When that
happens, they will be ready to sit down and negotiate a settlement to make this case go
away.
Folkenflick is a hack. A partisan hack. Karma is a bitch and Folkenflik is likely to get
bitch slapped in a big way. Instead of reporting the story straight up, he opted for a
propaganda hit job. He is unworthy of the title, journalist.
Seth Rich's parents sued FOX over Zimmerman's report (which was later retracted) but the suit
was dismissed in its entirety. Wheeler's suit against FOX, Butowsky and Zimmerman (who he
claimed misquoted him about the Rich-Wikileaks link) was also dismissed mainly because of the
other interview he gave to local FOX5 DC in which he also claimed a Rich-Wikileaks link.
I wonder what evidence Wheeler gathered on his own to make him initially suggest a link
between Seth Rich and Wikileaks - and a DC coverup of his murder - only to eventually
backpedal? Does anyone know? Zimmerman's [retracted] report said "multiple sources" linked
Rich to Wikileaks.
Does anybody know where the video of Malia Zimmerman interviewing Rod Wheeler can be found.
My memory is that Zimmerman said her own independent source confirmed that the FBI knew Seth
Rich had contacted WikiLeaks. But after the controversy exploded the video disappeared from
YouTube and the Internet.
Are the actual court documents online? If so please provide a link. Also if you come across
the video of the interview with Wheeler, please share it. By the way, you got a shoutout in
NJ's largest newspaper from Star Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine recently.
Thank you for this and your previous work. So lucid that even an outsider can follow it.
What with this and a few other bits and pieces seems the swamp went a bit mad in 2016. Or
is it always like this and the 2016 upheaval just left a few more loose threads hanging than
normal?
Regarding Sean Hannity, can't stand watching him because he has a knack for memorizing
talking points and then robotically repeat them word for word. For example, he always refers
to the Steele dossier as the 'dirty fake Russian dossier from Vladimir Putin'.
He's trying to make Trump sound like the victim of Russia which is clever but not honest.
The only link to Russia is that one of Steele's alleged sources was Russian while others were
likely Ukrainian. If he wants to attribute a conspiracy to it, definitely the DNC, elements
in the U.K. govt HRC, and definitely Ukraine had a preference for HRC.
That is fascinating, and heartening. I was aware of the case that Butowsky had brought
against CNN, the NYT and the lawyers for the Rich family, not of that he bought against David
Folkenflik and his NPR colleagues.
If indeed as many of us suspected the FBI knew that Rich had contacted Assange, this leads
one back naturally to some matters concerned with the timeline of the identification of the
DNC leaks, and Rich's role in them, which have been puzzling me.
In affairs like this, it is very easy to connect dots and form a pattern which looks
plausible but turns out completely wrong. With the proviso that I may be doing precisely
that, let me set out some dots and ways they might be fitted together.
1. It has long seemed to me that it would have been very much easier to identify materials
coming in to Assange and WikiLeaks rather than materials coming out of the DNC. If in fact
this was how the exfiltration was originally identified, then it would be quite likely that
GCHQ and/or MI6 would have been centrally involved. (This of course does not mean that the
NSA and employees of the CIA or indeed FBI were not also involved: a lot of people would have
had strong reasons to collude, and indeed increasingly indeed have come to seem to have been
living more or less in each other's pockets);
2. Particularly as it seems likely that Rich wanted money, it would seem quite possible that
negotiations with Assange started some time prior to the exfiltration of the material, which
looks as though it happened in late May 2016;
3. If one assumes that Rich was aware of the intense surveillance on WikiLeaks, one would
think it likely that he would have contacted Assange in a manner designed to ensure that his
identity was protected, in so far as this was feasible. This could possibly have involved not
making it known, at the outset, to Assange, although presumably it would have had to be
revealed at some relatively early point. One would further tend to assume that it would have
been a priority to set up channels of communication which, as far as could be managed, were
secure. Doing so could have involved the use of intermediaries, and measures to disguise the
identity of Rich.
4. Quite clearly, if indeed there was a serious effort to maintain secrecy, it was
penetrated. But it would be possible that the penetration was gradual and piecemeal. At the
outset, it might not even have been clear whether what was at issue was a leak or a hack. It
would not be surprising if intense effort had gone into identifying past hacking attempts,
unsuccessful and successful. And indeed, it would seem eminently possible that attempts were
identified that could have been instigated by Russian intelligence agencies. These, however,
would also have involved elaborate measures to conceal responsibility – not crude
fabrications that would only take in 'retards', like the 'Guccifer 2.0' materials.
5. It would also be possible that Rich was not identified until very late in the day –
indeed, his identification could even have followed the calling in of the laptops on June
10.
Such a reconstruction could account for the fact that both the claims by Alperovitch and the
former GCHQ person Matt Tait, and the 'Guccifer 2.0' farrago, show every sign of having been
concocted in panic haste, as also do the early memoranda in the dossier attributed to Steele.
If those involved had not known what was actually going on until late in the day, that might
have added to the difficulties of planning stories to cover it up. It might also help explain
the bizarre inconsistencies and improbabilities in the claims about the investigation carried
out by Alperovitch and CrowdStrike.
6. Of course, an alternative possibility is that Rich was either too naive to anticipate that
he would be identified, or did not think it would matter. It would hardly have been so very
surprising if he had not contemplated the possibility that the result of his involvement
would be his murder, and part of the point of the negotiations about money could have been to
ensure that he could afford to disregard any employment consequences.
Be all that may, it does seem to me that it would be helpful, in relation to fitting other
events into a coherent timeline, to have some idea as to the earliest and latest dates at
which the exfiltration could have been identified, and the earliest and latest dates at which
Rich could have been identified as the figure responsible.
Since Craig Murray received in person the DNC and Podesta files from an "intermediary" in the
woods adjoining American University in Washington D.C., establishing the date or dates of
Murray's trip could help establish the timeframe proposed above.
"Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a
wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with
was not the original person who obtained the information but an intermediary.'"
If Rich did the leak, that doesn't mean he was killed for it. They are separate events, each
with their own possibilities.
I personally find it very hard to believe the Arkancide theory. But very easy to believe
that the DNC leaks were from an annoyed Bernie supporter like Rich. After all, the content of
the leaks showed that there really was a lot of finky poo going on at the DNC with the
Clinton campaign to be unfair to Bernie.
There is also the question of Russiagate. It goes without saying that Trump would covet an
opportunity to settle scores with the Democratic Party over that witch hunt, which, in cahoots
with the mainstream media, stalked the US leader and his administration for two painstaking
years. And even now, after the release of the Mueller Report, the Democrats refuse to throw in
the towel and are plotting to
interrogate the interrogator himself, Robert Mueller. This is where Julian Assange might
help halt the madness, although that is not to suggest, of course, that he is necessarily
predisposed to such an opportunity. Yet he may find himself with no choice in the matter.
Before continuing with that line of discussion, there are some rather strange things about the
Assange case that need mentioning.
For those who may have forgotten, and it seems that many have, Rich, 27, was the Director of
Voter Expansion Data at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at the time of his death. In
other words, he would have been in the loop to view emails showing foul play inside of the DNC.
What kind of foul play? Well, for starters, deliberate efforts to marginalize Bernie Sanders in
favor of Hillary Clinton, who responded to the arrest of Julian Assange with her trademark
cackle before remarking, "The bottom line is that he has to answer for what he has done, at
least as it has been charged." For Hillary Clinton that means wrecking her chances at the White
House.
Incidentally, it was at this time in history, in July 2016 during the release of the
incriminating DNC emails, when the perennial bogeyman Russia was
wheeled out as not only the source of the emails, but the kingmaker in the US election as
well.
At this point, it is important to emphasize that there is no proof to suggest that Rich had
anything to with leaking the DNC emails to WikiLeaks. In fact, to merely suggest such a thing
has been given the 'conspiracy theory' stamp of disapproval by the establishment. Yet that has
not stopped the flow of mysteries. For example, Rod Wheeler, a private investigator hired by
the Rich family to investigate the death of their son, said he had sources at the FBI who
"absolutely" confirmed that there was evidence on Rich's laptop that indicates he was
communicating with WikiLeaks prior to his death. However, just days after divulging this
explosive information, Wheeler backtracked on his statement,
calling his on-air comments a "miscommunication."
For what it is worth, Snopes has called the claims that
Rich leaked the emails as "false."
Yet, there remains the circumstantial evidence, namely Rich's untimely death, as well as its
uncanny timing. There also remains the question of his supervisory position inside of the DNC,
and the assertion that the DNC emails were not discovered by hackers, but rather a leaker. In
other words, an internal source at the DNC. Whether or not Mr. Rich was that source remains
questionable, however, Julian Assange not only referred to Seth Rich during an interview, he
offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of his killer or
killers.
"Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant
risks," Assange said
in an interview with a Dutch television station. "There's a 27-year-old who works for the
DNC, who was shot in the back, murdered, just two weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was
walking down the street in Washington."
When pressed for more information, he said, "I'm suggesting that our sources take risks and
they become concerned to see things occurring like that."
On the basis of that comment, Assange could potentially be called to testify as a witness
should the authorities decide to reopen the case of Seth Rich's murder.
This leads us to the million-dollar question: were the DNC computers hacked by the Russians
or was the data leaked by an internal source at the organization and forwarded to WikiLeaks?
The answer to that question would not only settle the 'Russian meddling' mystery once and for
all, it would determine how the DNC/Clinton emails were compromised.
Many people are of the opinion it was not the Russians.
William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower and member
of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), co-authored
a report (entitled, "Why the DNC was not hacked by the Russians") that says the
WikiLeaks dump was the result of a leak by "a person with physical access to the DNC's computer
system."
"The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian
meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017
'Intelligence Community Assessment,'" Binney wrote.
Instead, the NSA could only say it has "moderate confidence," which means, in intelligence
speak, "we have no hard evidence," the pair concluded.
Meanwhile, there remains the question as to how any conclusion could have been made when the
DNC refused to hand over the compromised computer servers to the FBI.
"We'd always prefer to have access hands-on ourselves if that's possible," former FBI head
James Comey
told lawmakers in October 2017. He added that he didn't know why the DNC refused the FBI,
which was forced to rely on data provided by CrowdStrike, a private security firm hired by the
DNC.
Following the release of the Mueller Report, which failed to find any proof that Trump
colluded with the Russians, there remains a glaring yet unproven accusation that needs
addressed: that is the allegation that the Russians somehow fixed the election in Trump's
favor.
Although the mainstream media may be ignoring Binney's findings, that doesn't mean everyone
is. In October 2017, Binney paid a visit to CIA headquarters, at the invitation of Donald
Trump, where he met with then agency director Mike Pompeo, as cited
by The Intercept.
Any guesses whose name was brought up in the course of the meeting between Binney and
Pompeo? Yes, that of Seth Rich. Again, whether or not that proves to be significant remains an
open question.
But make no mistake. Donald Trump would like nothing more than to remove the ugly footnote
that the Democrats have tacked to his presidency that says the Russians "succeeded beyond their
wildest dreams," to
quote former intelligence chief James Clapper, by stealing the White House from Hillary
Clinton. In other words, Trump does not deserve to be president, the Democrats continue to
chant mindlessly. And even after the Mueller Report talk of impeachment continues to hang in
the air. The only way to confront the insanity is to have Mr. Assange testify in the United
States, possibly as the result of a plea bargain, about his knowledge of Russiagate.
In fact, such an arrangement had been made before. In January 2017, Assange's lawyer Adam
Waldman "negotiated with the Justice Department on a possible deal to get the WikiLeaks founder
limited immunity and safe passage out of a London embassy to talk with U.S. officials,"
according to a
report by The Hill.
Among other things, Assange would have been expected to "provide technical information to
the U.S. ruling out certain suspects in the release of hacked DNC emails key to the Russia case
"
But the negotiations hit a snag and –
according to a source cited by John Solomon of The Hill – James Comey told Assange's
lawyer to "stand down" on the offer.
Now, considering that many of the 'old Obama guard' – like James Comey, the fired FBI
director, and Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr – are no longer steering the
investigation, there remains the possibility that the Trump administration will be willing to
hear what WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has to say about the greatest witch hunt in the
history of US politics . Assange's testimony, should it happen, may even help solve the mystery
of the Seth Rich murder.
In other words, don't believe that Russiagate has concluded. Indeed, it may have only just
begun.
Or, if the British keep holding onto him, it might be the Deep Estate and the
Obola/Clinton cabals want to keep Assange on ice so that he won't put the kabosh on the
Russia Gate narrative.
The real Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy right within the bowels of the US
Government.
And we have this from August 2017:
Republican California Representative Dana Rohrabacher met with WikiLeaks Founder Julian
Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London this week.
According
to Rohrabacher, Assange "reaffirmed his aggressive denial that the Russians had anything to
do with the hacking of the DNC during the election," in the meeting, adding, "He has given
us a lot of information. He said there's more to come. We don't have the entire picture
yet."
Rohrabacher further claimed that the information he received would have "an
earth-shattering political impact."
I believe its been determined that the DNC emails were leaked, not hacked by Russians.
According to different reports the emails were downloaded to a thumbdrive as a fantastic
speed, much to fast for it to be a hack.
I was running one of the largest Bernie Groups and I was Bernie or Bust. I really believe
that Seth Reich did leak the info to Julian Assange and he was killed as a hero. DWS who is a
criminal was definitely involved and I wouldn't doubt about Mossad's involvement. Mossad is
very sneaky and professional in killing. All we need is DNC Fraud Lawsuit. But even Becks
were threatened and the case didn't go anywhere.
Trump is just extremely selfish and he used Wikileaks in his campaign by defending him.
But he doesn't give a damn about Julian Assange.
I agree. I'm ******* tired of dumbasses trying to paint Trump as a swamp-drainer when he
has already proven he's a swamp creature himself, surrounded by zios and neocons.
The neocons are bad, but it is the failure on the border, with hundreds of thousands of
visa overstays, and legal immigration increases of third world refugees, h1bs, and h2bs that
most egregious of the Trump administration.
"This leads us to the million-dollar question: were the DNC computers hacked by the
Russians or was the data leaked by an internal source at the organization and forwarded to
WikiLeaks? The answer to that question would not only settle the 'Russian meddling' mystery
once and for all, it would determine how the DNC/Clinton emails were compromised."
This author is off his nut
This is exactly why Julian is being shut down. Unable to see even his lawyers, being
denied medical treatment and likely being tortured.
This is why Comey sabotaged the deal..
Russia hack = IRAQI WMD. The elite are determined to manufacture public consent for war on
Russia.
They know Julian would not only destroy this narrative but that he would create a mass
back lash for all of US who knew Russiagate was ******** in the first place.
Trump is a Zionist stooge is arming and funding the NEONAZI THUGS in Ukraine right along
with Israhsll.
He has ZERO intention of doing what the author suggest. This is pure fantasy with
absolutely ZERO to back it up.
FROM : Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
VIPS Fault Mueller Probe, Criticize Refusal to Interview Assange
" In that Memorandum we described the results of our own independent, agenda-free
forensic investigation led by two former Technical Directors of the NSA, who avoid squishy
"assessments," preferring to base their findings on fundamental principles of science and the
scientific method . Our findings remain unchallenged; they reveal gaping holes in
CrowdStrike's conclusions."
[ ]
"We recall that you were apprised of that Memorandum's key findings because you ordered
then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo to talk to William Binney, one of our two former NSA
Technical Directors and one of the principal authors of that Memorandum . On October 24,
2017, Pompeo began an hour-long meeting with Binney by explaining the genesis of the odd
invitation to CIA Headquarters: " You are here because the president told me that if I
really wanted to know about Russian hacking I needed to talk to you ."
"On the chance Pompeo has given you no report on his meeting with Binney, we can tell you
that Binney, a plain-spoken, widely respected scientist, began by telling Pompeo that his
(CIA) people were lying to him about Russian hacking and that he (Binney) could prove it
. Pompeo reacted with disbelief, but then talked of following up with the FBI and NSA. We
have no sign, though, that he followed through. And there is good reason to believe that
Pompeo himself may have been reluctant to follow up with his subordinates in the
Directorate of Digital Innovation created by CIA Director John Brennan in 2015. CIA malware
and hacking tools are built by the Engineering Development Group, part of that relatively new
Directorate. "
[ ]
William Binney , former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military
Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Bogdan Dzakovic , former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA
Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Philip Giraldi , CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Mike Gravel , former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications
Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United
States Senator
James George Jatras , former U.S. diplomat and former foreign policy adviser to
Senate leadership (Associate VIPS)
Larry Johnson , former CIA Intelligence Officer & former State Department
Counter-Terrorism Official, (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns , Captain, USAF (ret.); ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic
Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and Special Mission Units (JSOC)
John Kiriakou , former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former Senior Investigator,
Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Karen Kwiatkowski , former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of
Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Clement J. Laniewski , LTC, U.S. Army (ret.)
Linda Lewis , WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.)
Edward Loomis , NSA Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
David MacMichael , former Senior Estimates Officer, National Intelligence Council
(ret.)
Ray McGovern , former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA presidential
briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray , former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East
& CIA political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce , MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Peter Van Buren ,U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.)
(associate VIPS)
Robert Wing , U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (former) (associate
VIPS)
Ann Wright , U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat who resigned
in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
"Recent forensic examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25
and 26 May 2016. (On June 12, Julian Assange announced he had them; WikiLeaks published them
on July 22.) We recently discovered that the files reveal a FAT (File Allocation Table)
system property. This shows that the data had been transferred to an external storage
device, such as a thumb drive, before WikiLeaks posted them ."
"FAT is a simple file system named for its method of organization, the File Allocation
Table. It is used for storage only and is not related to internet transfers like hacking.
Were WikiLeaks to have received the DNC files via a hack, the last modified times on the
files would be a random mixture of odd-and even-ending numbe rs."
"Why is that important? The evidence lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the
Wikileaks files. When a file is stored under the FAT file system the software rounds the
time to the nearest even-numbered second. Every single one of the time stamps in the DNC
files on WikiLeaks' site ends in an even number. "
"We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on the Wikileaks site. All 500 files end
in an even number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0 . If those files had been hacked over the Internet,
there would be an equal probability of the time stamp ending in an odd number . The
random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power .
Thus, these data show that the DNC emails posted by WikiLeaks went through a storage
device, like a thumb drive, and were physically moved before Wikileaks posted the emails on
the World Wide Web ."
"This finding alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts, for example, about Mueller's
indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC emails given to WikiLeaks.
A defense attorney could easily use the forensics to argue that someone copied the DNC files
to a storage device like a USB thumb drive and got them physically to WikiLeaks -- not
electronically via a hack."
Role of NSA
"For more than two years, we strongly suspected that the DNC emails were copied/leaked in
that way, not hacked."
[ ]
For the steering group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity:
William Binney, former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military
Analysis; Co-founder of NSA's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)
Richard H. Black, Senator of Virginia, 13th District; Colonel US Army (ret.); Former
Chief, Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate
VIPS)
Bogdan Dzakovic, former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security
(ret.) (associate VIPS)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence
Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
James George Jatras, former U.S. diplomat and former foreign policy adviser to Senate
leadership (Associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson, former CIA and State Department Counter Terrorism officer
John Kiriakou, former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate
Foreign Relations Committee
Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense
watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Edward Loomis, Cryptologic Computer Scientist, former Technical Director at NSA (ret.)
David MacMichael, Ph.D., former senior estimates officer, National Intelligence Council
(ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA
Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National
Intelligence Council & CIA political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Peter Van Buren, US Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate
VIPS)
Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army reserve colonel and former U.S. diplomat who resigned in
2003 in opposition to the Iraq War
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is made up of former intelligence
officers, diplomats, military officers and congressional staffers. The organization, founded
in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington's justifications for launching a war
against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine
national interests rather than contrived threats promoted for largely political reasons. An
archive of VIPS memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com.
Looks like tail wags the dog -- CIA controls the US foreign policy and in the last elections
also played active role in promoting Hillary. A the level of top brass we have
several people mentioned by Giraldi who are probably as dangerous as Allen Dulles was. Brennan
is one example.
The parade of rogues that Philip describes is really
alarming. Each with agenda that directly harms
the USA as a country promoting the interest of military-industrial complex and neocon
faction within the government...
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, one can start with Tenet if one wants to create a roster of recent CIA Directors who have lied to permit the White House to engage in a war crime. Tenet and his staff knew better than anyone that the case against Saddam did not hold water, but President George W. Bush wanted his war and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA had any say in the matter. ..."
"... Back then as now, international Islamic terrorism was the name of the game. It kept the money flowing to the national security establishment in the false belief that America was somehow being made "safe." But today the terror narrative has been somewhat supplanted by Russia, which is headed by a contemporary Saddam Hussein in the form of Vladimir Putin. If one believes the media and a majority of congressmen, evil manifest lurks in the gilded halls of the Kremlin. Russia has recently been sanctioned (again) for crimes that are more alleged than demonstrated and President Putin has been selected by the Establishment as the wedge issue that will be used to end President Donald Trump's defiance of the Deep State and all that pertains to it. The intelligence community at its top level would appear to be fully on board with that effort. ..."
"... Remarkably, he also said that there is only "minimal evidence" that Russia is even fighting ISIS. The statement is astonishing as Moscow has most definitely been seriously and directly engaged in support of the Syrian Arab Army. Is it possible that the head of the CIA is unaware of that? It just might be that Pompeo is disparaging the effort because the Russians and Syrians have also been fighting against the U.S. backed "moderate rebels." That the moderate rebels are hardly moderate has been known for years and they are also renowned for their ineffectiveness combined with a tendency to defect to more radical groups taking their U.S. provided weapons with them, a combination of factors which led to their being denied any further American support by a presidential decision that was revealed in the press two weeks ago. ..."
"... Pompeo's predecessor John Brennan is, however, my favorite Agency leader in the category of totally bereft of his senses. ..."
"... Brennan is certainly loyal to his cause, whatever that might be. At the same Aspen meeting attended by Pompeo, he told Wolf Blitzer that if Trump were to fire special counsel Robert Mueller government officials should "refuse to carry out" his orders. In other words, they should begin a coup, admittedly non-violent (one presumes), but nevertheless including federal employees uniting to shut the government down. ..."
"... And finally, there is Michael Morell, also a former Acting Director, who was closely tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently driven by ambition to become Director in her administration. Morell currently provides commentary for CBS television and is a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose show. Morell considerably raised the ante on Brennan's pre-electoral speculation that there had been some Russian recruitment of Trump people. He observed in August that Putin, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them [did exactly that] early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." ..."
"... Nothing new. In the '50s CIA was making foreign wars and cultivating chaos at home, and blaming all of it on Russia. In the '80s CIA was cultivating anti-nuke groups to undermine Reagan, and blaming it on Russia. CIA has been the primary wellspring of evil for a long time. ..."
"... Yes you read that right and they are going to the rotten core of this coup against the United States by presenting a report stating that the DNC was "Leaked" not hacked. The real hacking came from President Obama's weaponizing of our intelligence agencies against Russia. ..."
"... The CIA is the USA's secret army, it is not comparable to a real intelligence organization like the British MI5. The CIA is more like WWII SOE, designed to set fire to Europe, Churchill's words. ..."
"... As has been the case for decades the Deep State allows Presidents and legislators to make minor decisions in our government as long as those decisions do not in any way interfere with the Deep State's goals of total world hegemony and increase in overwhelming power and wealth. Those who make the important decisions in this country are not elected. The elected 'officials' are sycophants of the Deep State. ..."
"... The term is appropriated from the use to describe the mutually loyal corps of Ataturkians in the Turkish military and intelligence services who were united in service to uphold the ideal of Ataturkian secular modernisation. The term implies no public accountability or publicity unnecessary to its purposes. ..."
"... The CIA's source, its birth, is from British secret service. Brit spying. And Brit secret service, long before the official founding of MI5, did exactly the kinds of things you note the CIA has done. ..."
"... The Mossad is another direct fruit of Brit secret service, as is the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency. ..."
"... While there can be no doubt about the crackpots in high positions of the most powerful bureaucracies, it seems to me that the CIA loonies are merely shock troops for an even worse bunch of evil psychos, the bankster mafiosi. ..."
"... I am a retired CIA operations officer (something none of the men mentioned by Giraldi are – Brennan was a failed wanna be, couldn't cut it as an ops officer). He is spot on in his comments. The majority of people in the CIA, the ones who do the heavy lifting, are patriotic Americans who are proud of serving their country. I am sure that most voted for Trump as they all know too well the truth about the Clintons and Obama. ..."
"... Giraldi is not the only one to notice the upward progress of the most incompetent yes-men in the Agency. A close look at most of them reveals a track record of little or no operational success balanced by excellent sucking up skills. These characters quickly figured out how to get ahead and doing your job in the field is not it. Of course, most are ego maniacs so they are totally oblivious to their own uselessness. ..."
"... How "Russiagate" began: After the primaries, both Hillary and Donald faced divided political parties even though they had won the nomination. These divisions were worse than the normal situation after contested primaries. On the Democratic side, Hillay had just subverted the will of the voters of her party, who seemed to favor Bernie Sanders over her. Hillay had won with corrupt collusion and rigging amongst the DNC, the higher ranks of the Democratic Party, and major media such as the NYT and CNN. ..."
"... Then, a leak of emails from the DNC HQ publicized her interference in the democratic processes of the Democratic Party. This threatened to ene the Hillary for President campaign right then and there. If the majority of Democrats who'd favored Bernie refused to support Hillary because of her corruption and collusion in denying democracy within the party, she was a sure loser in the fall election. The Hillary camp then immediately started blaming Russia for the exposure of her corruption and rigging of the Democratic process. And that's how "Russiagate" began. ..."
"... Take that bunch of mediocre thinkers, and then make most of them obsessed with their own career advancement above all else. The most dangerous place for a career-obsessed individual is outside the group consensus. ..."
"... So, for instance, Trump should veto the act of war known as the recent sanctions bill. Who cares if it gets overridden? Then he goes back to the voters, who are clearly sick of endless war and who for obvious reasons don't want a nuclear war, and he says this is where I stand. Support me by electing Fill-In-The-Blank to Congress. With the nuclear Doomsday Clock pushing ever closer to midnight, he might just win that fight over the big money and media opposition he's sure to face. ..."
"... Not only has Trump failed to even try to fight the Deep State, but he's also failing to set himself up for success in the next elections. ..."
"... What we are seeing now is The Donald's role in the serial Zionist THEATER. Think deeper about the motive behind Mr. Giraldi's choice to use the Orwellian word "Groupthink" in characterizing the CIA zeitgeist? In the classic work "1984," one observes Big Brother as the catalyst in control of the proles' thought pattern & subsequent action. ..."
"... To rise & FALL as a POTUS is a matter of theater and the American proles are entertained by the political for either 4 or 8 years and the Zionists get their next Chosen actor/actress dramatically sworn in on a bible. ..."
Long ago, when I was a spear carrying middle ranker at CIA, a colleague took me aside and said
that he had something to tell me "as a friend," that was very important. He told me that his wife
had worked for years in the Agency's Administrative Directorate, as it was then called, where she
had noticed that some new officers coming out of the Career Trainee program had red tags on their
personnel files. She eventually learned from her boss that the tags represented assessments that
those officers had exceptional potential as senior managers. He added, however, that the reverse
appeared to be true in practice as they were generally speaking serial failures as they ascended
the bureaucratic ladder, even though their careers continued to be onward and upward on paper. My
friend's wife concluded, not unreasonably, that only genuine a-holes had what it took to get promoted
to the most senior ranks.
I was admittedly skeptical but some recent activity by former and current Directors and Acting
Directors of CIA has me wondering if something like my friend's wife's observation about senior management
might indeed be true. But it would have to be something other than tagging files, as many of the
directors and their deputies did not come up through the ranks and there seems to be a similar strain
of lunacy at other U.S. government intelligence agencies. It might be time to check the water supply
in the Washington area as there is very definitely something in the kool-aid that is producing odd
behavior.
Now I should pause for a moment and accept that the role of intelligence services is to identify
potential threats before they become active, so a certain level of acute paranoia goes with the job.
But at the same time, one would expect a level of professionalism which would mandate accuracy rather
than emotion in assessments coupled with an eschewing of any involvement in the politics of foreign
and national security policy formulation. The enthusiasm with which a number of senior CIA personnel
have waded into the Trump swamp and have staked out positions that contradict genuine national interests
suggests that little has been learned since CIA Director George Tenet sat behind Secretary of State
Colin Powell in the UN and nodded sagaciously as Saddam Hussein's high crimes and misdemeanors were
falsely enumerated.
Indeed, one can start with Tenet if one wants to create a roster of recent CIA Directors who
have lied to permit the White House to engage in a war crime. Tenet and his staff knew better than
anyone that the case against Saddam did not hold water, but President George W. Bush wanted his war
and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA had any say in the matter.
Back then as now, international Islamic terrorism was the name of the game. It kept the money
flowing to the national security establishment in the false belief that America was somehow being
made "safe." But today the terror narrative has been somewhat supplanted by Russia, which is headed
by a contemporary Saddam Hussein in the form of Vladimir Putin. If one believes the media and a majority
of congressmen, evil manifest lurks in the gilded halls of the Kremlin. Russia has recently been
sanctioned (again) for crimes that are more alleged than demonstrated and President Putin has been
selected by the Establishment as the wedge issue that will be used to end President Donald Trump's
defiance of the Deep State and all that pertains to it. The intelligence community at its top level
would appear to be fully on board with that effort.
The most recent inexplicable comments come from the current CIA Director Mike Pompeo, speaking
at the Aspen Institute Security Forum. He began by asserting that Russia had interfered in the U.S.
election
before saying that the logic behind Russia's Middle Eastern strategy is to stay in place in Syria
so Moscow can "stick it to America." He didn't define the "it" so one must assume that "it" stands
for any utensil available, ranging from cruise missiles to dinner forks. He then elaborated, somewhat
obscurely, that "I think they find anyplace that they can make our lives more difficult, I think
they find that something that's useful."
Remarkably, he also said that there is only "minimal evidence" that Russia is even fighting
ISIS. The statement is astonishing as Moscow has most definitely been seriously and directly engaged
in support of the Syrian Arab Army. Is it possible that the head of the CIA is unaware of that? It
just might be that Pompeo is disparaging the effort because the Russians and Syrians have also been
fighting against the U.S. backed "moderate rebels." That the moderate rebels are hardly moderate
has been known for years and they are also renowned for their ineffectiveness combined with a tendency
to defect to more radical groups taking their U.S. provided weapons with them, a combination of factors
which led to their being denied any further American support by a presidential decision that was
revealed in the press two weeks ago.
Pompeo's predecessor John Brennan is, however, my favorite Agency leader in the category of
totally bereft of his senses. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee back in May,
he suggested that some Trump associates might have been recruited by the Russian intelligence service.
He testified that
"I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions
between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about
because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind whether
or not Russia was able to gain the co-operation of those individuals."
In his testimony, Brennan apparently forgot to mention that the CIA is not supposed to keep tabs
on American citizens. Nor did he explain how he had come upon the information in the first place
as it had been handed over by foreign intelligence services, including the British, Dutch and Estonians,
and at least some of it had been sought or possibly inspired by Brennan unofficially in the first
place. Brennan then used that information to request an FBI investigation into a possible Russian
operation directed against potential key advisers if Trump were to somehow get nominated and elected,
which admittedly was a longshot at the time. That is how Russiagate started.
Brennan is certainly loyal to his cause, whatever that might be. At the same Aspen meeting
attended by Pompeo, he
told Wolf Blitzer that if Trump were to fire special counsel Robert Mueller government officials
should "refuse to carry out" his orders. In other words, they should begin a coup, admittedly non-violent
(one presumes), but nevertheless including federal employees uniting to shut the government down.
A lesser known former CIA senior official is
John McLaughlin,
who briefly served as acting Director in 2004. McLaughlin was particularly outraged by Trump's recent
speech to the Boy Scouts, which he described as having the feel "of a third world authoritarian's
youth rally." He added that "It gave me the creeps it was like watching the late Venezuelan [President
Hugo] Chavez."
And finally, there is Michael Morell, also a former Acting Director, who was closely tied
to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently driven by ambition to become Director in her administration.
Morell currently provides commentary for CBS television and is a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose
show. Morell considerably raised the ante on Brennan's pre-electoral speculation that there had been
some Russian recruitment of Trump people.
He observed in August that Putin, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, "trained to identify
vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them [did exactly that] early in the primaries. Mr.
Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr.
Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."
I and others noted at the time that Putin and Trump had never met, not even through proxies, while
we also wondered how one could be both unwitting and a recruited agent as intelligence recruitment
implies control and taking direction. Morell was non-plussed, unflinching and just a tad sanctimonious
in affirming that his own intelligence training (as an analyst who never recruited a spy in his life)
meant that "[I] call it as I see it."
One could also cite Michael Hayden and James Clapper, though the latter was not CIA They all
basically hew to the same line about Russia, often in more-or-less the same words, even though no
actual evidence has been produced to support their claims. That unanimity of thinking is what is
peculiar while academics like Stephen Cohen, Stephen Walt, Andrew Bacevich, and John Mearsheimer,
who have studied Russia in some depth and understand the country and its leadership far better than
a senior CIA officer, detect considerable nuance in what is taking place. They all believe that the
hardline policies current in Washington are based on an eagerness to go with the flow on the comforting
inside-the- beltway narrative that paints Russia as a threat to vital interests. That unanimity of
viewpoint should surprise no one as this is more of less the same government with many of the same
people that led the U.S. into Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. They all have a vested interested in the
health and well-being of a fully funded national security state.
And the other groupthink that seems to prevail among the senior managers except Pompeo is that
they all hate Donald Trump and have done so since long before he won the election. That is somewhat
odd, but it perhaps reflects a fear that Trump would interfere with the richly rewarding establishment
politics that had enabled their careers. But it does not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of CIA
employees. Though it is admittedly unscientific analysis on my part, I know a lot of former and some
current CIA employees but do not know a single one who voted for Hillary Clinton. Nearly all voted
for Trump.
Beyond that exhibition of tunnel vision and sheer ignorance, the involvement of former senior
intelligence officials in politics is itself deplorable and is perhaps symptomatic of the breakdown
in the comfortable bipartisan national security consensus that has characterized the past fifty years.
Once upon time former CIA officers would retire to the Blue Ridge mountains and raise Labradors,
but we are now into something much more dangerous if the intelligence community, which has been responsible
for most of the recent leaks, begins to feel free to assert itself from behind the scenes. As Senator
Chuck Schumer
recently warned "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community -- they have six ways
from Sunday at getting back at you."
In jumping this fascist nihilist shark, the groupthinkers have closed themselves off from the
logical conclusion to their viewpoint, which is final annihilation.
Brennan, Morell, and Pompeo should better find ways to justify their salaries: the U.S. has
suffered the greatest breach in cybersecurity on their watch:
" an enormous breach of the United States Security Apparatus by as many as 80 Democrat members
of Congress (past and present). We rail on about the Russians and Trump, but t he media avoids
providing nightly updates about these 5 spies that have compromised Congress ."
"In total, Imran's firm was employed by 31 Democrats in Congress, some of whom held extremely
sensitive positions on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House
Committee on Foreign Affair s."
Nothing new. In the '50s CIA was making foreign wars and cultivating chaos at home, and
blaming all of it on Russia. In the '80s CIA was cultivating anti-nuke groups to undermine Reagan,
and blaming it on Russia. CIA has been the primary wellspring of evil for a long time.
And back to reality we have VIPS Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Yes you read that right and they are going to the rotten core of this coup against the
United States by presenting a report stating that the DNC was "Leaked" not hacked. The real hacking
came from President Obama's weaponizing of our intelligence agencies against Russia.
That is war, World War Three and it would seem now that Congress is marching that way, but
the report below hold the key to fighting back.
One of the VIPS is William Binney fomer NSA Technical Director, an important expert. leading
the group is Ray McGovern with some whit and grace, well yes how about some sanity, to which humor
is important to the insight and to stay in the sights of what is clever thievery and worse. Much
worse,
and there is a twinkle in the eye when realize that it is straight forward.
And Congress could stop it tout sweet, but well old habits but they have taken an Oath of Office,
so, so what, yeah they did go after Bernie, so will you challenge your elected officials, either
do their sworn duty or resign, for what this sanctions bill against Russia and Iran is a declaration
of war, not only against Russia and Iran, but a declaration of war against the United States.
for there is no reason to do this against Russia when indeed there are great opportunities to
get along, but war is the insanity as it is sedition and treason. Tell them that,
I wonder if groupthink exists.
In any organisation people know quite well why the organisation exists, what the threats are to
its existence.
If they think about this, I wonder.
The CIA is the USA's secret army, it is not comparable to a real intelligence organization like
the British MI5.
The CIA is more like WWII SOE, designed to set fire to Europe, Churchill's words.
If indeed Trump changes USA foreign policy, no longer trying to control the world, the CIA is
obsolete, as obsolete as NATO.
" but President George W. Bush wanted his war and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA
had any say in the matter."
Not to defend the CIA, but didn't Rumsfeld, doubt the enthusiasm of the CIA for providing the
slanted, bogus, "sexed up" intelligence the Executive required to make its "destroy Iraq now"
case ? So Rumsfeld therefore set up an independent intelligence agency within the Defence Dept
to provide/create the required "intelligence" ?
I think they find anyplace that they can make our lives more difficult, I think they find
that something that's useful."
Yeah, because that's what resource-constrained countries with limited ability to tap the global
capital markets do. Methinks Mr. Pompeo is projecting his and the neocons' fantasies on the Russians.
As has been the case for decades the Deep State allows Presidents and legislators to make minor
decisions in our government as long as those decisions do not in any way interfere with the Deep
State's goals of total world hegemony and increase in overwhelming power and wealth. Those who
make the important decisions in this country are not elected. The elected 'officials' are sycophants
of the Deep State.
Being resistant to jargon and catch phrases it is only slowly that I have accepted that "Deep
State" is not entirely pretentious waffle when used to describe aspects of the US. However I may
not be your only reader PG who would appreciate a clear explanatory description of the American
Deep State and how it works.
Here are some suggested parameters.
The term is appropriated from the use to describe the mutually loyal corps of Ataturkians in
the Turkish military and intelligence services who were united in service to uphold the ideal
of Ataturkian secular modernisation. The term implies no public accountability or publicity unnecessary
to its purposes.
And its origins imply that it is not just one in a number of major influences ln government or
those who vote for it.
So one has to acknowledge that in the US the Deep State has to be different in the important
respect that levers of power are observably wielded by lobbies for the aged, gun owners and sellers,
Israel, Wall Street, bio fuels, sugar and other ag, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, the arms industry,
Disney and other Hollywood and media, health insurers and the medical profession, and I could
go on.
These are all relevant to legal events like votes on impeachment or to hold up appointments.
The CIA and FBI together completely united (and note how disunited 9/11 showed them to be) wouldn't
remotely approach the old Turkish Deep State's ability to stage a coup. Are all of the putative
elements of the Deep State together today as powerful as J.Edgar Hoover with his dirt files on
everyone? (A contrast and compare exercise of today's presumed Deep State configuration and modus
operandi with the simpler Hoover days might shine some light on who does what and how today. And
how effectively).
To avoid lack of focus can a convincing account of the US Deep State be best given in terms
of a plausible scenario for
getting rid of Trump as President and/or
maintaining the lunacy and hubris which has the US wasting its substance on totally unnecessary
antagonistic relations with China and Russia and interference in the ME?
I would read such accounts with great interest. (Handwavers need not apply).
Of course the US Deep State must hate Russia. First, Jews have a very long history of hating Russia and Russians. That never changed. The
USSR was not Russia; the USSR was Marxism replacing Russia. Jews tended to love that. Rich Jews
from across the world, from the US and the UK of most interest to us, sent money to support the
Bolshevik Revolution.
Russia managed to survive the USSR and is slowly coming back around to Russian common sense
from the Christian perspective. Neither Jews nor their WASP BFFs can ever forgive that. They want
Russia to act now to commit cultural and genetic suicide, like Western Europe and the entire Anglosphere
are doing.
@polistraThe CIA's source, its birth, is from British secret service. Brit spying. And Brit secret service,
long before the official founding of MI5, did exactly the kinds of things you note the CIA has
done.
The Mossad is another direct fruit of Brit secret service, as is the Saudi General Intelligence
Presidency.
While there can be no doubt about the crackpots in high positions of the most powerful bureaucracies,
it seems to me that the CIA loonies are merely shock troops for an even worse bunch of evil psychos,
the bankster mafiosi.
But doing so would mean a voluntary end to playing the role of Sauron, determined to find and
wear the One Ring to Rule Them All. The average Elite WASP, and his Jewish BFF, definitely would
prefer to destroy the world, at least outside their gated compounds of endless luxury, than to
step down from that level of global domination.
@Wizard
of Oz Wiz – Here is an article I did on the Deep State two years ago. It was one of the first
in the US media looking at the issue. It would have to be updated now in light of Trump, but much
of what it states is still more-or-less correct.
But we need to make certain that your use of the word 'mafiosi' does not lead anyone to assume
that group has more than a handful of Italians. Jews, WASPs, and continental Germanics each will
outnumber Italians by at least 30 to 1.
I am a retired CIA operations officer (something none of the men mentioned by Giraldi are –
Brennan was a failed wanna be, couldn't cut it as an ops officer). He is spot on in his comments.
The majority of people in the CIA, the ones who do the heavy lifting, are patriotic Americans
who are proud of serving their country. I am sure that most voted for Trump as they all know too
well the truth about the Clintons and Obama.
Giraldi is not the only one to notice the upward progress of the most incompetent yes-men in the
Agency. A close look at most of them reveals a track record of little or no operational success
balanced by excellent sucking up skills. These characters quickly figured out how to get ahead
and doing your job in the field is not it. Of course, most are ego maniacs so they are totally
oblivious to their own uselessness.
Well before he was elected I had a letter delivered to President Trump in which I outlined in
detail what would happen to him if he did not immediately purge the CIA of these assholes. I know
that at least some people on his staff read it but, of course, my advice was ignored. Trump has
paid dearly for not listening to an ordinary CIA guy who wanted to give him a reality brief on
those vicious snakes.
Historical facts teach humanity that Anglo-Saxon group of Nations was built on slavery, thuggery
and theft of other peace loving Civilizations.
We Slavs are the New "niggers", hate is the glue that holds you "toGether".
People of color have been successfully conditioned and practice it as well.
Time will tell how well it holds when balloon bursts and 99% gets called to serve as cannon fodder.
Terrorizing UNARMED and WEAKER is not true test of "superiority" and "exceptionalism".
Tiny, extremely tiny minority of Anglo-Saxons and Satraps understand this.
How "Russiagate" began: After the primaries, both Hillary and Donald faced divided political parties even though they
had won the nomination. These divisions were worse than the normal situation after contested primaries.
On the Democratic side, Hillay had just subverted the will of the voters of her party, who seemed
to favor Bernie Sanders over her. Hillay had won with corrupt collusion and rigging amongst the
DNC, the higher ranks of the Democratic Party, and major media such as the NYT and CNN.
Then, a leak of emails from the DNC HQ publicized her interference in the democratic processes
of the Democratic Party. This threatened to ene the Hillary for President campaign right then
and there. If the majority of Democrats who'd favored Bernie refused to support Hillary because
of her corruption and collusion in denying democracy within the party, she was a sure loser in
the fall election. The Hillary camp then immediately started blaming Russia for the exposure of her corruption
and rigging of the Democratic process. And that's how "Russiagate" began.
It probably does as do group psychoses and group fantasies.. Anyone who's ever served in a beuaracracy
knows that groupthink exists.
Take a bunch of mediocre minds. And, they do exist, as Garrison Keiler once famously made a
joke out of with his line Welcome to Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.
Take that bunch of mediocre thinkers, and then make most of them obsessed with their own career
advancement above all else. The most dangerous place for a career-obsessed individual is outside
the group consensus. If everyone is wrong, then there is safety in the group. After all, if they
are wrong, so was everyone else in the organization. Thus they are immune to attack and censure
for being wrong. But if someone takes a position outside of the group consensus, that can be a
career-ending move if they are wrong, as now everyone else will be in the I-told-U-So camp. And
even if they are correct, they will still be hated and shunned just for being the person who pointed
out to the group that they are wrong.
So, you take your typical average mind, and not only do they not have any great insights of
their own, but they tend to stick to the group out of sheer survival and then when you take a
mass of these mediocre minds you have 'groupthink'.
If only Trump would really clean the swamp - particularly the neo-cons and other traitors and
globalists. One can dream ....
What we've learned from Trump is that 'Draining the Swamp' will
take more than an individual. It will take a political movement.
One sees this on the fringes of politics. Someone gets the idea of running for President, and
they point out all that is wrong. But, they focus only on their own campaign, their own goal,
and they thus gloss over the fact that they'll be outnumbered and powerless even if they win.
Seen this often on the Left. The most recent example is Bernie Sanders. Likewise, had Bernie
been elected President, he too would face an entrenched establishment and media with only a small
fraction of the Congress supporting him.
Change has to be built from the bottom up. There are no shortcuts. Electing a Trump, or a Nader
or a Bernie does not lead to real change. Step one is to build the political movement such that
it has real voting block power and which has already won voting majorities in the legislature
before the movement achieves the election of a President.
What Trump has needed to be doing for this first two years is to form clear divisions that
he could then take to his voters in the mid-term elections. He's needed to lay out his own agenda.
So what if he loses votes in Congress? He then takes that agenda back to the voters in 2018 with
a nationwide slate of Congressional candidates who support that agenda and runs a midterm campaign
asking the voters to help him drain that swamp.
So, for instance, Trump should veto the act of war known as the recent sanctions bill. Who
cares if it gets overridden? Then he goes back to the voters, who are clearly sick of endless
war and who for obvious reasons don't want a nuclear war, and he says this is where I stand. Support
me by electing Fill-In-The-Blank to Congress. With the nuclear Doomsday Clock pushing ever closer
to midnight, he might just win that fight over the big money and media opposition he's sure to
face.
Not only has Trump failed to even try to fight the Deep State, but he's also failing to set
himself up for success in the next elections.
It is a serious error to consider President Trump "naive."
What we are seeing now is The Donald's role in the serial Zionist THEATER. Think deeper about the motive behind Mr. Giraldi's choice to use the Orwellian word "Groupthink"
in characterizing the CIA zeitgeist? In the classic work "1984," one observes Big Brother as the catalyst in control of the proles'
thought pattern & subsequent action.
To rise & FALL as a POTUS is a matter of theater and the American proles are entertained by
the political for either 4 or 8 years and the Zionists get their next Chosen actor/actress dramatically
sworn in on a bible.
Mr. Trump is neither naive nor stupid. Sheldon Adelson would not donate $millioms to any POTUS
wannabe who could not effectively lead the American Groupthink tradition. Subsequently, the political
horror show is brought to you in the understandable form of the perpetually elusive Deep State
which gets annual Academy Award.
"... North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support
our new client state -- Ukraine. ..."
"... But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this
alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad ..."
Best bet is for Russia to want to trade with the US and Europe. The gas pipeline will not be enough leverage on Germany
as it provides 9% of their needs.
Yes. And that's against the USA interests (or more correctly the US-led neoliberal empire interests). North Stream is a
problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state
-- Ukraine.
As you know, nothing was proven yet in Russiagate (and DNC hacks looks more and more like a false flag operation, especially
this Guccifer 2.0 personality ), but sanctions were already imposed. And when the US government speaks "Russia" in most cases
they mean "China+Russia" ;-). Russia is just a weaker link in this alliance and, as such, it is attacked first. Russiagate is
just yet another pretext after MH17, Magnitsky and such.
To me the current Anti-Russian hysteria is mainly a smokescreen to hide attempt to cement cracks in the façade of the USA neoliberal
society that Trump election revealed (including apparent legitimization of ruling neoliberal elite represented by Hillary).
And a desperate attempt to unite the society using (false) war propaganda which requires demonization of the "enemy of the
people" and neo-McCarthyism.
But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of
this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad (for example, military alliance means the end of the USA global
military domination; energy alliance means that is now impossible to impose a blockade on China energy supplies from Middle East
even if Iran is occupied)
In this sense the recent descent into a prolonged fit of vintage Cold War jingoistic paranoia is quite understandable. While,
at the same time, totally abhorrent. My feeling is that unless Russia folds, which is unlikely, the side effects/externalities
of this posture can be very bad for the USA. In any case, the alliance of Russia and China which Obama administration policies
forged spells troubles to the global neoliberal empire dominated by the USA.
Trump rejection of existing forms of neoliberal globalization is one sign that this process already started and some politicians
already are trying to catch the wind and adapt to a "new brave world" by using preemptive adjustments.
Which is why all this Trump-Putin summit hysteria is about.
Neither hard, nor soft neoliberals want any adjustments. They are ready to fight for the US-led neoliberal empire till the
last American (excluding, of course, themselves and their families)
"... John Pilger, among few others, has already stressed how a plan to destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was laid out as far back as 2008 – at the tail end of the Cheney regime – concocted by the Pentagon's shady Cyber Counter-Intelligence Assessments Branch. ..."
"... But it was only in 2017, in the Trump era, that the Deep State went totally ballistic; that's when WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 files – detailing the CIA's vast hacking/cyber espionage repertoire. ..."
"... This was the CIA as a Naked Emperor like never before – including the dodgy overseeing ops of the Center for Cyber Intelligence, an ultra-secret NSA counterpart. ..."
"... The monolithic narrative by the Deep State faction aligned with the Clinton machine was that "the Russians" hacked the DNC servers. Assange was always adamant; that was not the work of a state actor – and he could prove it technically. ..."
"... The DoJ wanted a deal – and they did make an offer to WikiLeaks. But then FBI director James Comey killed it. The question is why. ..."
"... Some theoretically sound reconstructions of Comey's move are available. But the key fact is Comey already knew – via his close connections to the top of the DNC – that this was not a hack; it was a leak. ..."
"... Ambassador Craig Murray has stressed, over and over again (see here ) how the DNC/Podesta files published by WikiLeaks came from two different US sources; one from within the DNC and the other from within US intel. ..."
"... he release by WikiLeaks in April 2017 of the malware mechanisms inbuilt in "Grasshopper" and the "Marble Framework" were indeed a bombshell. This is how the CIA inserts foreign language strings in source code to disguise them as originating from Russia, from Iran, or from China. The inestimable Ray McGovern, a VIPS member, stressed how Marble Framework "destroys this story about Russian hacking." ..."
"... No wonder then CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a "non-state hostile intelligence agency" ..."
"... Joshua Schulte, the alleged leaker of Vault 7, has not faced a US court yet. There's no question he will be offered a deal by the USG if he aggress to testify against Julian Assange. ..."
"... George Galloway has a guest who explains it all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VvPFMyPvHM&t=8s ..."
"... Escobar is brain dead if he can't figure out that Trumpenstein is totally on board with destroying Assange. As if bringing on pukes like PompAss, BoltON, and Abrams doesn't scream it. ..."
The Made-by-FBI indictment of
Julian Assange does look like a dead man walking. No evidence. No documents. No surefire
testimony. Just a crossfire of conditionals...
But never underestimate the legalese contortionism of US government (USG) functionaries. As
much as Assange may not be characterized as a journalist and publisher, the thrust of the
affidavit is to accuse him of conspiring to commit espionage.
In fact the charge is not even that Assange hacked a USG computer and obtained classified
information; it's that he may have discussed it with Chelsea Manning and may have had the
intention to go for a hack. Orwellian-style thought crime charges don't get any better than
that. Now the only thing missing is an AI software to detect them.
Assange legal adviser Geoffrey Robertson – who also happens to represent another
stellar political prisoner, Brazil's Lula – cut
straight to the chase (at 19:22 minutes);
"The justice he is facing is justice, or injustice, in America I would hope the British
judges would have enough belief in freedom of information to throw out the extradition
request."
That's far from a done deal. Thus the inevitable consequence; Assange's legal team is
getting ready to prove, no holds barred, in a British court, that this USG indictment for
conspiracy to commit computer hacking is just an hors d'oeuvre for subsequent espionage
charges, in case Assange is extradited to US soil.
All about Vault 7
John Pilger, among few others, has already stressed how a plan to
destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was laid out as far back as 2008 – at the tail end
of the Cheney regime – concocted by the Pentagon's shady Cyber Counter-Intelligence
Assessments Branch.
It was all about criminalizing WikiLeaks and personally smearing Assange, using "shock
troops enlisted in the media -- those who are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the
truth."
This plan remains more than active – considering how Assange's arrest has been covered
by the bulk of US/UK mainstream media.
By 2012, already in the Obama era, WikiLeaks detailed the astonishing "scale of the US Grand
Jury Investigation" of itself. The USG always denied such a grand jury existed.
"The US Government has stood up and coordinated a joint interagency criminal investigation
of Wikileaks comprised of a partnership between the Department of Defense (DOD) including:
CENTCOM; SOUTHCOM; the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); Defense Information Systems Agency
(DISA); Headquarters Department of the Army (HQDA); US Army Criminal Investigation Division
(CID) for USFI (US Forces Iraq) and 1st Armored Division (AD); US Army Computer Crimes
Investigative Unit (CCIU); 2nd Army (US Army Cyber Command); Within that or in addition,
three military intelligence investigations were conducted. Department of Justice (DOJ) Grand
Jury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of State (DOS) and Diplomatic
Security Service (DSS). In addition, Wikileaks has been investigated by the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Office of the National CounterIntelligence
Executive (ONCIX), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); the House Oversight Committee; the
National Security Staff Interagency Committee, and the PIAB (President's Intelligence
Advisory Board)."
But it was only in 2017, in the Trump era, that the Deep State went totally ballistic;
that's when WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 files – detailing the CIA's vast
hacking/cyber espionage repertoire.
This was the CIA as a Naked Emperor like never before – including the dodgy
overseeing ops of the Center for Cyber Intelligence, an ultra-secret NSA counterpart.
WikiLeaks got Vault 7 in early 2017. At the time WikiLeaks had already published the DNC
files – which the unimpeachable Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
systematically proved was a leak, not a hack.
The monolithic narrative by the Deep State faction aligned with the Clinton machine was
that "the Russians" hacked the DNC servers. Assange was always adamant; that was not the work
of a state actor – and he could prove it technically.
There was some movement towards a deal, brokered by one of Assange's lawyers; WikiLeaks
would not publish the most damning Vault 7 information in exchange for Assange's safe passage
to be interviewed by the US Department of Justice (DoJ).
The DoJ wanted a deal – and they did make an offer to WikiLeaks. But then FBI
director James Comey killed it. The question is why.
It's a leak, not a hack
Some theoretically sound
reconstructions of Comey's move are available. But the key fact is Comey already knew
– via his close connections to the top of the DNC – that this was not a hack; it
was a leak.
Ambassador Craig Murray has stressed, over and over again (see
here ) how the DNC/Podesta files published by WikiLeaks came from two different US sources;
one from within the DNC and the other from within US intel.
There was nothing for Comey to "investigate". Or there would have, if Comey had ordered the
FBI to examine the DNC servers. So why talk to Julian Assange?
T he release by WikiLeaks in April 2017 of the malware mechanisms inbuilt in
"Grasshopper" and the "Marble Framework" were indeed a bombshell. This is how the CIA inserts
foreign language strings in source code to disguise them as originating from Russia, from Iran,
or from China. The inestimable Ray McGovern, a VIPS member, stressed how Marble Framework
"destroys this story about Russian hacking."
No wonder then CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a "non-state hostile
intelligence agency", usually manipulated by Russia.
Joshua Schulte, the alleged leaker of Vault 7,
has not faced a US court yet. There's no question he will be offered a deal by the USG if he
aggress to testify against Julian Assange.
It's a long and winding road, to be traversed in at least two years, if Julian Assange is
ever to be extradited to the US. Two things for the moment are already crystal clear. The USG
is obsessed to shut down WikiLeaks once and for all. And because of that, Julian Assange will
never get a fair trial in the "so-called 'Espionage Court'" of the Eastern District of
Virginia, as
detailed by former CIA counterterrorism officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou.
Meanwhile, the non-stop demonization of Julian Assange will proceed unabated, faithful to
guidelines established over a decade ago. Assange is even accused of being a US intel op, and
WikiLeaks a splinter Deep State deep cover op.
Maybe President Trump will maneuver the hegemonic Deep State into having Assange testify
against the corruption of the DNC; or maybe Trump caved in completely to "hostile intelligence
agency" Pompeo and his CIA gang baying for blood. It's all ultra-high-stakes shadow play
– and the show has not even begun.
Not to mention the Pentagram has silenced 100,000 whistleblower complaints by
Intimidation, threats, money or accidents over 5 years . A Whistleblower only does this when
know there is something seriously wrong. Just Imagine how many knew something was wrong but
looked the other way.
Maybe President Trump will maneuver the hegemonic Deep State into having Assange testify
against the corruption of the DNC; or maybe Trump caved in completely to "hostile
intelligence agency" Pompeo and his CIA gang baying for blood.
Escobar is brain dead if he can't figure out that Trumpenstein is totally on board with
destroying Assange. As if bringing on pukes like PompAss, BoltON, and Abrams doesn't scream it.
assange and wikileaks are the real criminals despite being crimeless. the **** is a
sanctioned criminal, allowed to be criminal with the system because the rest of the
sanctioned criminals would be exposed if she was investigated.
this is not the rule of laws. this is the law of rulers.
"... Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers. ..."
"... Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him to act. This was the beginning of downward slope. ..."
"... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer. ..."
"... The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have been there anyway. ..."
"... No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful way ..."
"... " ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people." ..."
"... All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests. ..."
"... A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated the 98% poor, to stay rich. When there were insurrections federal troops restored order. Also FDR put down strikes with troops. ..."
"... The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter. ..."
"... "The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story after another would achieve the desired result " ..."
"... But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world. ..."
"... I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and facts don't matter! ..."
"... Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about intimidating them. ..."
"... The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was, and that means as bad as Hell itself. ..."
"... Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the 60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally flawed. I would say more so. ..."
"... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. ..."
"... That pre-9/11 "cooperation" nearly destroyed Russia. Nobody in Russia (except, perhaps, for Pussy Riot) wants a return to the Yeltsin era. ..."
"... The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it. ..."
"... [The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank. ..."
"... Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran. ..."
"... Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington. ..."
"... Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who dictates what they can and can't say. ..."
"... Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt, compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into something much worse. ..."
"... Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six month actions – they go on and on.) ..."
"... Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are we attacking with drones? Where is congress? ..."
"... Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies. ..."
Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call
the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a
brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers.
Again Mike Whitney does not get it. Though in the first part of the article I thought he
would. He was almost getting there. The objective was to push new administration into the
corner from which it could not improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he
wanted to during the campaign.
Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion
with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of
paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which
the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe
or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him
to act. This was the beginning of downward slope.
Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than
during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by
all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the
zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer.
The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine
with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have
been there anyway.
No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The
Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they
have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful
way
The one thing I am not positive about. If the elite really believe that Russia is a
threat, then Americans have done psych ops on themselves.
The US was only interested in Ukraine because it was there. Next in line on a map. The
rather shocking disinterest in investing money -- on both sides -- is inexplicable if it was
really important. Most of it would be a waste -- but still. The US stupidly spent $5 billion
on something -- getting duped by politicians and got theoretical regime change, but it was
hell to pry even $1 billion for real economic aid.
" ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American
people."
All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were
the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests.
I am reading Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the USA, 1492 to the Present.
A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated
the 98% poor, to stay rich.
When there were insurrections federal troops restored order.
Also FDR put down strikes with troops.
You should be aware that Zinn's book is not, IMO, an honest attempt at writing history. It
is conscious propaganda intended to make Americans believe exactly what you are taking from
it.
The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America
and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and
Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter.
Until that fact changes Americans will continue to fight and die for Israel.
"The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and
unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident
Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story
after another would achieve the desired result "
But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out
neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions
fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world.
I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's
not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of
brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and
facts don't matter!
Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about
intimidating them.
Whitney is another author who declares the "Russians did it" narrative a psyop. He then
devotes entire columns to the psyop, "naww Russia didn't do it". There could be plenty to write about – recent laws that do undercut liberty, but no,
the Washington Post needs fake opposition to its fake news so you have guys like Whitney in
the less-mainstream fake news media.
So Brennan wanted revenge? Well that's simple enough to understand, without being too
stupid. But Whitney's whopper of a lie is what you're supposed to unquestionably believe. The
US has "rival political parties". Did you miss it?
The US is doing nothing more than acting as the British Empire 2.0. WASP culture was born of a Judaizing heresy: Anglo-Saxon Puritanism. That meant that the
WASP Elites of every are pro-Jewish, especially in order to wage war, physical and/or
cultural, against the vast majority of white Christians they rule.
By the early 19th century, The Brit Empire's Elites also had a strong, and growing, dose
of pro-Arabic/pro-Islamic philoSemitism. Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and
most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which
means being pro-Wahhabi and permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite
Mohammedans.
So, by the time of Victoria's high reign, the Brit WASP Elites were a strange brew of
hardcoree pro-Jewish and hardcore pro-Arabic/islamic. The US foreign policy of today is an
attempt to put those two together and force it on everyone and make it work.
The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the
Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless
lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was,
and that means as bad as Hell itself.
Fair enough. I didn't know that about the foreword. If accurate, that's a reasonable
approach for a book.
Here's the problem.
Back when O. Cromwell was the dictator of England, he retained an artist to paint him. The
custom of the time was for artists to "clean up" their subjects, in a primitive form of
photoshopping.
OC being a religious fanatic, he informed the artist he wished to be portrayed as God had
made him, "warts and all." (Ollie had a bunch of unattractive facial warts.) Or the artist
wouldn't be paid.
Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the
60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major
role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally
flawed. I would say more so.
All I am asking is that American (and other) history be written "warts and all." The
triumphalist version is true, largely, and so is the Zinn version. Gone With the Wind
and Roots both portray certain aspects of the pre-war south fairly accurately..
America has been, and is, both evil and good. As is/was true of every human institution
and government in history. Personally, I believe America, net/net, has been one of the
greatest forces for human good ever. But nobody will realize that if only the negative side
of American history is taught.
"There must be something really dirty in Russigate that hasn't yet come out to generate
this level of panic."
You continue to claim what you cannot prove.
But then you are a Jews First Zionist.
Russia-Gate Jumps the Shark
Russia-gate has jumped the shark with laughable new claims about a tiny number of
"Russia-linked" social media ads, but the US mainstream media is determined to keep a
straight face
Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually
coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which means being pro-Wahhabi and
permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite Mohammedans.
Thanks for the laugh. During the 19th century, the Sauds were toothless, dirt-poor hicks
from the deep desert of zero importance on the world stage.
The Brits were not Saudi proponents, in fact promoting the Husseins of Hejaz, the guys
Lawrence of Arabia worked with. The Husseins, the Sharifs of Mecca and rulers of Hejaz, were
the hereditary enemies of the Sauds of Nejd.
After WWI, the Brits installed Husseins as rulers of both Transjordan and Iraq, which with
the Hejaz meant the Sauds were pretty much surrounded. The Sauds conquered the Hejaz in 1924,
despite lukewarm British support for the Hejaz.
Nobody in the world cared much about the Saudis one way or another until massive oil
fields were discovered, by Americans not Brits, starting in 1938. There was no reason they
should. Prior to that Saudi prominence in world affairs was about equal to that of Chad
today, and for much the same reason. Chad (and Saudi Arabia) had nothing anybody else
wanted.
'Putin stopped talking about the "Lisbon to Vladivostok" free trade area long ago" --
Michael Kenney
Putin was simply trying to sell Russia's application for EU membership with the
catch-phrase "Lisbon to Vladivostok". He continued that until the issue was triply mooted (1)
by implosion of EU growth and boosterism, (2) by NATO's aggressive stance, in effect taken by
NATO in Ukraine events and in the Baltics, and, (3) Russia's alliance with China.
It is surely still true that Russians think of themselves, categorically, as Europeans.
OTOH, we can easily imagine that Russians in Vladivostok look at things differently than do
Russians in St. Petersburg. Then again, Vladivostok only goes back about a century and a
half.
Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than
during Obama administration.
I generally agree with your comment, but that part strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration.
While relations with Russia certainly haven't improved, how have they really worsened? The
second round of sanctions that Trump reluctantly approved have yet to be implemented by
Europe, which was the goal. And apart from that, what of substance has changed?
It's not surprising that 57 percent of the American people believe in Russian meddling.
Didn't two-thirds of the same crowd believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, too? The American
public is being brainwashed 24 hours a day all year long.
The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst
has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton
gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it.
This disinformation campaign might be the prelude to an upcoming war.
Right now, the US is run by jerks and idiots. Watch the video.
Only dumb people does not know that TRUMP IS NETANYAHU'S PUPPET.
The fifth column zionist jews are running the albino stooge and foreign policy in the
Middle East to expand Israel's interest against American interest that is TREASON. One of
these FIFTH COLUMNISTS is Jared Kushner. He should be arrested.
[The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held
views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist
line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign
policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also
long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.
Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of
state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not
appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on
Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with
Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete
withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran.
Bolton spoke with Trump by phone on Thursday about the paragraph in the deal that vowed it
would be "terminated" if there was any renegotiation, according to Politico. He was calling
Trump from Las Vegas, where he'd been meeting with casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the third
major figure behind Trump's shift towards Israeli issues. Adelson is a Likud supporter who
has long been a close friend of Netanyahu's and has used his Israeli tabloid newspaper Israel
Hayomto support Netanyahu's campaigns. He was Trump's main campaign contributor in 2016,
donating $100 million. Adelson's real interest has been in supporting Israel's interests in
Washington -- especially with regard to Iran.]
Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It
means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources
and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital
the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US
debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will
steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in
Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple
Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington
must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate
their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain
its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to
success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington.
American dominance is very much tied to the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency,
and the rest of the world no longer want to fund this bankrupt, warlike state –
particularly the Chinese.
First, it confirms that the US did not want to see the jihadist extremists
defeated by Russia. These mainly-Sunni militias served as Washington's proxy-army
conducting an ambitious regime change operation which coincided with US strategic
ambitions.
The CIA run US/Israeli/ISIS alliance.
Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news
gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who
dictates what they can and can't say.
They are given the political line and they broadcast it.
The loosening of rules governing the dissemination of domestic propaganda coupled with
the extraordinary advances in surveillance technology, create the perfect conditions for
the full implementation of an American police state. But what is more concerning, is
that the primary levers of state power are no longer controlled by elected officials but by
factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American
people. That can only lead to trouble.
At some point Americans are going to get a "War on Domestic Terror" cheered along by the
media. More or less the arrest and incarceration of any opposition following the Soviet
Bolshevik model.
On the plus side, everyone now knows that the Anglo-US media from the NY Times to the
Economist, from WaPo to the Gruniard, and from the BBC to CNN, the CBC and Weinstein's
Hollywood are a worthless bunch of depraved lying bastards.
Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt,
compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most
people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of
mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into
something much worse.
The thing is, no matter how thick the mental cages are, and how carefully they are
maintained by the daily massive injections of "certified" truth (via MSM), along with
neutralizing or compromising of "troublemakers", the presence of multiple alternative sources
in the age of Internet makes people to slip out of these cages one by one, and as the last
events show – with acceleration.
It means that there's a fast approaching tipping point after which it'd be impossible for
those in power both to keep a nice "civilized" face and to control the "cage-free"
population. So, no matter how the next war will be called, it will be the war against the
free Internet and free people. That's probably why N. Korean leader has no fear to start
one.
All government secrecy is a curse on mankind. Trump is releasing the JFK murder files to the public. Kudos! Let us hope he will follow up with a full 9/11 investigation.
The objective was to push new administration into the corner from which it could not
improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he wanted to during the campaign.
Good point. That was probably one of the objectives (and from the point of view of the
deep-state, perhaps the most important objective) of the "Russia hacked our democracy"
narrative, in addition to the general deligitimization of the Trump administration.
And, keep in mind, Washington's Sunni proxies were not a division of the Pentagon; they
were entirely a CIA confection: CIA recruited, CIA-armed, CIA-funded and
CIA-trained.
Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign
nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's
that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six
month actions – they go on and on.)
Are committees of six congressman and six senators, who meet in secret, just avoiding the
grave constitutional questions of war? We the People cannot even interrogate these
politicians. (These politicians make big money in the secrecy swamp when they leave
office.)
Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are
we attacking with drones? Where is congress?
Spying is one thing – covert action is another – covert is wrong – it
goes against world order. Every year after 9/11 they say things are worse – give them
more money more power and they will make things safe. That is BS!
9/11 has opened the flood gates to the US government attacking at will, the various
peoples of this Earth. That is NOT our prerogative.
We are being exceptionally arrogant.
Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies.
Assange actually undermined the key pre-condition of the Deep state existence -- secrecy.
Notable quotes:
"... Robert Mueller, who helped the Bush administration deceive the world about WMD in Iraq, has claimed that the GRU was the source of WikiLeaks' 2016 drops, and claimed in his report that WikiLeaks deceived its audience by implying that its source was the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich. ..."
"... The smear is that Assange knew his source was actually the Russian government, and he implied it was Seth Rich to throw people off the scent. Mueller asserted that something happened, and it's interpreted as hard fact instead of assertion. There's no evidence for any of this, and there's no reason to go believing the WMD guy on faith about a narrative which incriminates yet another government which refuses to obey the dictates of the US empire. ..."
"... HItchen's Razor: "what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." ..."
I'm just going to toss this one here at the end because I'm seeing it go around a lot in the
wake of the Mueller report.
Robert Mueller, who helped the Bush administration deceive the world about WMD in Iraq, has
claimed that the GRU was the source of WikiLeaks' 2016 drops, and claimed in his report that
WikiLeaks deceived its audience by implying that its source was the murdered DNC staffer Seth
Rich.
This claim is unsubstantiated because, as we discussed in Smear 4, the public has not seen a
shred of evidence proving who was or was not WikiLeaks' source, so there's no way to know there
was any deception happening there. We've never seen any hard proof, nor indeed anything besides
official narrative, connecting the Russian government to Guccifer 2.0 and Guccifer 2.0 to
WikiLeaks, and Daniel Lazare for Consortium News documents that there are in fact some
major
plot holes in Mueller's timeline. Longtime Assange friend and WikiLeaks ally Craig Murray
maintains that he knows the
source of the DNC Leaks and Podesta Emails were two different Americans, not Russians, and
hints that one of them was a DNC insider. There is exactly as much publicly available evidence
for Murray's claim as there is for Mueller's.
Mainstream media has been blaring day after day for years that it is an absolute known fact
that the Russian government was WikiLeaks' source, and the only reason people scoff and roll
their eyes at anyone who makes the indisputably factual claim that we've seen no evidence for
this is because
the illusory truth effect causes the human brain to mistake repetition for fact.
The smear is that Assange knew his source was actually the Russian government, and he
implied it was Seth Rich to throw people off the scent. Mueller asserted that something
happened, and it's interpreted as hard fact instead of assertion. There's no evidence for any
of this, and there's no reason to go believing the WMD guy on faith about a narrative which
incriminates yet another government which refuses to obey the dictates of the US
empire.
And I guess that's it for now. Again, this article is an ongoing project, so I'll be
updating it and adding to it regularly as new information comes in and new smears need
refutation. If I missed something or got something wrong, or even if you spotted a typo, please
email me at [email protected] and let
me know. I'm trying to create the best possible tool for people to refute Assange smears, so
I'll keep sharpening this baby to make sure it cuts like a razor. Thanks for reading, and
thanks to everyone who helped! Phew! That was long.
We don't have to like Julian Assange, but the release of the "Collateral Damage" video
alone is enough to justify defending Assange and the freedom of the press.
She really didn't debunk the thing about Seth Rich very well. Basically just said that
whatever Mueller said wasn't true, which doesn't go very far for me. He definitely did imply
that he got at least some of his info from Rich so if there is some sort of proof of that, it
needs to be supplied; otherwise Mueller's story is the only one.
I have recently seen a political cartoon with Dotard then saying: "I love Wikileaks" + " I
will throw her in jail" and now saying: "I know nothing about Wikileaks" + "I will throw him
in jail"
It summed up perfectly that swine's lack of integrity.
It's so simple. Assange and Wikileaks exposed Hillary, Podesta, and the entire DNC to be
lying, deceiving, hypocritical, disingenuous, elitist bastards. His crimes are miniscule
compared to that, and all who attempt to condemn Assange only show us that they are members
of that foul group.
Excellent thorough content. And Kim Schmitz pointed out they'll drag things on for as long
as possible and try to add additional things as they go. Such a bunch of sad, pathetic
control freaks. Covering up their own failures, crimes and short comings with a highly
publicized distraction putting the screws to a single journalist.
“ Ty Clevenger has FOIAed information from NSA asking for any data that involved
both Seth Rich and also Julian Assange .
And they responded by saying we’ve got 15 files , 32 pages , but they’re all
classified in accordance with executive order 13526 covering classification, and therefore
you can’t have them.
That says that NSA has records of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange. I
mean, that’s the only business that NSA is in — copying communications between
people and devices.”
Assange and Snowden are freedom fighters, exposing the duplicitous, corrupt, and criminals
to the entire world.
The hundreds of millions of mindless zombies are so brainwashed by the fake news industry,
that if Assange and Snowden are not spies, they are criminal in some capacity.
I have liberal, conservative, and libertarian leaning friends, and virtually every one of
them believe Assange and Snowden are traitors to America, got innocent people killed, are
rapists, or too cowardly to stand trial in the USA.
What has happened to common sense and some necessary cynicism?
Why even bother arguing with these people. Assange gave up his liberty to reveal the
truth, and the American public said in essence "so what." No one except the leakers and
whistle-blowers faced any punishment, and I can't think of a single national politician who
even talks about doing anything about the misconduct that was revealed. Yeah, a small
percentage of the population is outraged at what was revealed, but the vast majority
literally don't give a ****.
Hehe... I guess you will find out how wrong you are in 2020 :-) His release of Hillary's
emails gave Trump 2016... and him turning his back on Assange took away his chances in
2020
Most regular readers on ZH know but this is an echo chamber for "Always Trumpers" so there
won't be many commenters on this article. Rather than defend his DOJ's extradition attempts
with implausible theories they'll be chattering back and forth about the Mueller Report.
Agreed. It's amazing to me that people who claim to be believers of the MAGA message don't
see the harm associated with the arrest of Assange, and all of the other uniparty **** Trump
is perpetuating. A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
Yeah and yet.... everyone seemed to credit Hillary's loss to the release of her emails on
wikileaks... Hmm that narrative that seems to be trying to minimize the impact on Trumps
chances in 2020 really breaks down in the face of that fact doesn't it?? Trump has no hope...
just stop... get behind a republican that has a chance... Trump doesn't... he lost half of
his base... get over it...
Originally from: The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report April 18, 2019 •
12 Commentsave
Like Team Mueller's indictment last July of Russian agents, the full report reveals questions about Wikileaks' role that
much of the media has been ignoring, writes Daniel Lazare.
The five pages that the special prosecutor's report devotes to WikiLeaks are essentially lifted from Mueller's
indictment last July of 12 members of the Russian military
intelligence agency known as the GRU. It charges that after hacking the Democratic National Committee, the GRU used a specially-created
online persona known as Guccifer 2.0 to transfer a gigabyte's worth of stolen emails to WikiLeaks just as the 2016 Democratic
National Convention was approaching. Four days after opening the encrypted file, the indictment says, "Organization 1 [i.e. WikiLeaks]
released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators [i.e. the GRU]."
Attorney General William Barr holding press conference on full Mueller report, April 18, 2019. (YouTube)
Mueller's report says the same thing, but with the added twist that Assange then tried to cover up the GRU's role by
suggesting that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich may have been the source and by telling a congressman
that the DNC email heist was an "inside job" and that he had "physical proof" that the material was not from Russian.
All of which is manna from heaven for corporate news outlets eager to pile on Assange, now behind bars in London. An April 11,
2019, New York Timesnews analysis ,
for instance, declared that "[c]ourt documents have revealed that it was Russian intelligence – using the Guccifer persona – that
provided Mr. Assange thousands of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee," while another Timesarticle published shortly after
his arrest accuses the WikiLeaks founder of "promoting a false cover story about the source of the leaks."
But there's a problem: it ain't necessarily so. The official story that the GRU is the source doesn't hold water, as a timeline
from mid-2016 shows. Here are the key events based on the GRU indictment and the Mueller report:
June 12: Assange
tells
Britain's ITV that another round of Democratic Party disclosures is on the way: "We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton,
which is great. WikiLeaks is having a very big year." June 14: The Democratic National Committee
accuses Russia of hacking its computers. June 15: Guccifer 2.0 claims credit for the hack. "The main part of the papers, thousands
of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks ," he
brags . "They will publish them soon."
June 22: WikiLeaks tells Guccifer via email: "Send any new material here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact
than what you are doing." July 6: WikiLeaks sends Guccifer another email: "if you have anything hillary related we want it
in the next tweo [ sic ] days prefable [ sic ] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and
she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after."Replies Guccifer: "ok . . . i " July 14: Guccifer sends WikiLeaks an
encrypted file titled "wk dnc link1.txt.gpg." July 18: WikiLeaks confirms it has opened "the 1Gb or so archive" and will release
documents "this week." July 22: WikiLeaks
releases more than 20,000 DNC emails and 8,000 other attachments.
According to Mueller and obsequious news outlets like the Times , the sequence is clear: Guccifer sends archive, WikiLeaks
receives archive, WikiLeaks accesses archive, WikiLeaks publishes archive. Donald Trump may not have colluded with
Russia, but Julian Assange plainly did. [Attorney General Will Barr, significantly calling WikiLeaks a publisher, said at
his Thursday press conference: " Under applicable law, publication of these types of materials would not be criminal unless the publisher
also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy."]
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announcing in 2018 the grand jury indictment of 12 GRU agents. (Wikimedia Commons)
Avoiding Questions
The narrative raises questions that the press studiously avoids. Why, for instance, would Assange announce on June 12 that a big
disclosure is on the way before hearing from the supposed source? Was there a prior communication that Mueller has not disclosed?
What about the reference to "new material" on June 22 – does that mean Assange already had other material in hand? After opening
the Guccifer file on July 18, why would he publish it just four days later? Would that give WikiLeaks enough time to review some
28,000 documents to insure they're genuine?
Honor Bob Parry's legacy by
donating
to our Spring Fund Drive.
"If a single one of those emails had been shown to be maliciously altered," blogger Mark F. McCarty
observes , "Wikileaks' reputation would have been in tatters." There's also the question that an investigator known as Adam Carter
poses in Disobedient
Media : why would Guccifer brag about giving WikiLeaks "thousands of files" that he wouldn't send for another month?
The narrative doesn't make sense – a fact that is crucially important now that Assange is fighting for his freedom in the U.K.
New Yorker staff writer Raffi Khatchadourian sounded
a rare note of caution last summer when he warned that little about Guccifer 2.0 adds up. While claiming to be the source for
some of WikiLeaks ' most explosive emails, the material he released on his own had proved mostly worthless – 20 documents
that he "said were from the DNC but which were almost surely not," as Khatchadourian puts it, a purported Hillary Clinton dossier
that "was nothing of the sort," screenshots of emails so blurry as to be "unreadable," and so forth.
John Podesta: Target of a phishing expedition. (Voice of America via Wikimedia Commons)
While insisting that "our source is not the Russian
government and it is not a state party, Assange told Khatchadourian that the source was not Guccifer either. "We received quite a
lot of submissions of material that was already published in the rest of the press, and people seemingly submitted the Guccifer archives,"
he said somewhat cryptically. "We didn't publish them. They were already published." When Khatchadourian asked why he didn't put
the material out regardless, he replied that "the material from Guccifer 2.0 – or on WordPress – we didn't have the resources to
independently verify."
No Time for Vetting
So four days was indeed too short a time to subject the Guccifer file to proper vetting. Of course, Mueller no doubt regards this
as more "dissembling," as his report describes it. Yet WikiLeaks has never been caught in a lie for the simple reason that honesty
and credibility are all-important for a group that promises to protect anonymous leakers who supply it with official secrets. (See
"Inside WikiLeaks : Working with the Publisher that Changed the World,"
Consortium News , July 19, 2018.) Mueller, by contrast, has a rich history of mendacity going back to his days as FBI
director when he sought to cover up
the Saudi role
in 9/11 and assured Congress on the eve
of the 2003 invasion that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction pose "a clear threat to our national security."
Mueller with President George W. Bush on July 5, 2001, as he is being appointed FBI director. (White House)
So if the Mueller narrative doesn't hold up, the charge of dissembling doesn't either. Indeed , as ex-federal prosecutor Andrew
C. McCarthy
observes in The National Review , the fact that the feds have charged Assange with unauthorized access to a government
computer rather than conspiring with the Kremlin could be a sign that Team Mueller is less than confident it can prove collusion
beyond a reasonable doubt. As he puts it, the GRU indictment "was more like a press release than a charging instrument" because the
special prosecutor knew that the chances were
zero that Russian intelligence agents would surrender to a U.S. court.
Indeed, when Mueller charged 13 employees and three companies owned by Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin with interfering
in the 2016 election, he clearly didn't expect them to surrender either. Thus , his team seemed taken aback when one of the alleged
" troll farms
" showed up in Washington asking to be heard. The prosecution's initial response, as McCarthy
put it , was to seek
a delay "on the astonishing ground that the defendant has not been properly served – notwithstanding that the defendant has shown
up in court and asked to be arraigned." When that didn't work, prosecutors tried to limit Concord's access to some 3.2 million pieces
of evidence on the grounds that the documents are too "
sensitive " for Russian eyes to see. If they are again unsuccessful, they may have no choice but to drop the charges entirely,
resulting in yet another " public relations
disaster " for the Russia-gate investigation.
None of which bodes well for Mueller or the news organizations that worship at his shrine. After blowing the Russia-gate story
all these years, why does the Times continue to slander the one news organization that tells the truth?
Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and
other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique
and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com .
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs) SUBJECT: The Fly in the Mueller Ointment
Mr. President:
The song has ended but the melody lingers on. The expected release Thursday of the redacted text of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's
"Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election" will nudge the American people a tad closer
to the truth on so-called "Russiagate."
But judging by Attorney General William Barr's 4-page summary, the Mueller report will leave unscathed the central-but-unproven
allegation that the Russian government hacked into the DNC and Podesta emails, gave them to WikiLeaks to publish, and helped you
win the election. The thrust will be the same; namely, even if there is a lack of evidence that you colluded with Russian President
Vladimir Putin, you have him to thank for becoming president. And that melody will linger on for the rest of your presidency, unless
you seize the moment.
Mueller has accepted that central-but-unproven allegation as gospel truth, apparently in the lack of any disinterested, independent
forensic work. Following the odd example of his erstwhile colleague, former FBI Director James Comey, Mueller apparently has relied
for forensics on a discredited, DNC-hired firm named CrowdStrike, whose credibility is on a par with "pee-tape dossier" compiler
Christopher Steele. Like Steele, CrowdStrike was hired and paid by the DNC (through a cutout).
We brought the lack of independent forensics to the attention of Attorney General William Barr on March 13 in a
Memorandum entitled "Mueller's
Forensic-Free Findings", but received no reply or acknowledgment. In that Memorandum we described the results of our own independent,
agenda-free forensic investigation led by two former Technical Directors of the NSA, who avoid squishy "assessments," preferring
to base their findings on fundamental principles of science and the scientific method. Our findings remain unchallenged; they reveal
gaping holes in CrowdStrike's conclusions.
We do not know if Barr shared our March 13 Memorandum with you. As for taking a public position on the forensics issue, we suspect
he is being circumspect in choosing his battles carefully, perhaps deferring until later a rigorous examination of the dubious technical
work upon which Mueller seems to have relied.
Barr's Notification to Congress
As you know, the big attention-getter came on March 24 when Attorney General William Barr included in his four-page summary a
quote from Mueller's report: "The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with
the Russian government in its election interference activities." Understandably, that grabbed headlines – the more so, since most
Americans had been convinced earlier by the media that the opposite was true.
There remains, however, a huge fly in the ointment. Barr's summary makes it clear that Mueller accepts as a given – an evidence-impoverished
given – that the Russian government interfered in the election on two tracks:
Track 1 involves what Barr, echoing Mueller, claims "a Russian organization, the Internet Research Agency (IRA)"
did in using social media "to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election." A careful look at this
allegation shows it to be without merit, despite Herculean efforts by the NY Times, for example, to put lipstick on this particular
pig. After some rudimentary research, award winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter promptly put that pig out of its misery
and
brought home the bacon. We do not believe "Track 1" merits further commentary.
Track 2 does need informed commentary, since it is more technical and – to most Americans – arcane. In Barr's words:
"The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated
with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries,
including WikiLeaks. Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military
officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election."
We are eager to see if Mueller's report contains more persuasive forensic evidence than that which VIPS has already debunked.
In Barr's summary, the only mention of forensics refers to "forensic accountants" – a far cry from the kind of forensic investigators
needed to provide convincing proof of "hacking" by the Russian government.
But They Were Indicted!
Circular reasoning is not likely to work for very long, even with a U.S. populace used to being brainwashed by the media. Many
Americans had mistakenly assumed that Mueller's indictment of Russians – whether they be posting on FaceBook or acting like intelligence
officers – was proof of guilt. But, as lawyers regularly point out, "one can easily indict a ham sandwich" – easier still these days,
if it comes with Russian dressing.
Chances have now increased that the gullible folks who had been assured that Mueller would find collusion between you and Putin
may now be a bit more circumspect – skeptical even – regarding the rest of the story-line of the "Russian hack," and that will be
even more likely among those with some technical background. Such specialists will have a field day, IF – and it is a capital "IF"
– by some miracle, word of VIPs' forensic findings gets into the media this time around.
The evidence-impoverished, misleadingly labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment" of January 6, 2017 had one saving grace. The
authors noted: "The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber
operation – malicious or not – leaves a trail." Forensic investigators can follow a trail of metadata and other technical properties.
VIPs has done that.
A "High-Class Entity?"
If, as we strongly suspect, Mueller is relying for forensics solely on CrowdStrike, the discredited firm hired by the DNC in the
spring of 2016, he is acting more in the mold of Inspector Clouseau than the crackerjack investigator he is reputed to be. It simply
does not suffice for Mueller's former colleague James Comey to tell Congress that CrowdStrike is a "high-class entity." It is nothing
of the sort and, in addition to its documented incompetence, it is riddled with conflicts of interest. Comey needs to explain why
he kept the FBI away from the DNC computers after they were said to have been "hacked."
And former National Intelligence Director James Clapper needs to explain his
claim last November
that "the forensic evidence was overwhelming about what the Russians had done." What forensic evidence? From CrowdStrike? We at VIPs,
in contrast, are finding more and more forensic evidence that the DNC emails were leaked, not hacked by the Russians or anyone else
– and that "Guccifer 2.0" is an out-and-out fraud. Yes, we can prove that from forensics too.
But the Talking Heads Say
Again, if Mueller's incomplete investigation is allowed to assume the status of Holy Writ, most Americans will continue to believe
that – whether you colluded the Russians or not – Putin came through for you big time. In short, absent President Putin's help, you
would not be president.
Far too many Americans will still believe this because of the mainstream-media fodder – half-cooked by intelligence leaks – that
they have been fed for two and a half years. The media have been playing the central role in the effort of the MICIMATT (the
Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank) complex to stymie any improvement in relations with Russia.
We in VIPs have repeatedly demonstrated that the core charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election are built on a house of
cards. But, despite our record of accuracy on this issue – not to mention our pre-Iraq-war warnings about the fraudulent intelligence
served up by our former colleagues – we have gotten no play in mainstream media.
Most of us have chalked up decades in the intelligence business and many have extensive academic and government experience focusing
on Russia. We consider the issue of "Russian interference" of overriding significance not only because that the allegation is mischievously
bogus and easily disproven. More important, it has brought tension with nuclear-armed Russia to the kind of dangerous fever pitch
not seen since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the Russian provocation was real – authentic, not synthetic.
Sober minds resolved that crisis more than a half-century ago, and we all got to live another day. These days sober minds seem
few and far between and a great deal is at stake. On the intelligence/forensics side, we have proved that the evidence adduced to
"prove" that the Russians hacked into the DNC and Podesta emails and gave them to WikiLeaks is spurious. For example, we have examined
metadata from one key document attributed to Russian hacking and shown that it was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."
Who Left the Bread Crumbs?
So, if it wasn't the Russians, who left the "Russian" bread-crumb "fingerprints?" We do not know for sure; on this question we
cannot draw a conclusion based on the principles of science – at least not yet. We suspect, however, that cyber warriors closer to
home were responsible for inserting the "telltale signs" necessary to attribute "hacks" to Russia. We tacked on our more speculative
views regarding this intriguing issue onto the end of our May 24, 2017
Memorandum to you
entitled "Intelligence Veterans Challenge Russia Hack Evidence"
We recall that you were apprised of that Memorandum's key findings because you ordered then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo to talk to
William Binney, one of our two former NSA Technical Directors and one of the principal authors of that Memorandum. On October 24,
2017, Pompeo began an hour-long meeting with Binney by explaining the genesis of the odd invitation to CIA Headquarters: "You are
here because the president told me that if I really wanted to know about Russian hacking I needed to talk to you."
On the chance Pompeo has given you no report on his meeting with Binney, we can tell you that Binney, a plainspoken, widely respected
scientist, began by telling Pompeo that his (CIA) people were lying to him about Russian hacking and that he (Binney) could prove
it. Pompeo reacted with disbelief, but then talked of following up with the FBI and NSA. We have no sign, though, that he followed
through. And there is good reason to believe that Pompeo himself may have been reluctant to follow up with his subordinates in the
Directorate of Digital Innovation created by CIA Director John Brennan in 2015. CIA malware and hacking tools are built by the Engineering
Development Group, part of that relatively new Directorate.
' Obfuscation'
A leak from within the CIA, published on March 31, 2017 by WikiLeaks as part of the so-called "Vault 7" disclosures, exposed a
cyber tool called "Marble," which was used during 2016 for"obfuscation" (CIA's word). This tool can be used to conduct a forensic
attribution double game (aka a false-flag operation); it included test samples in Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Korean, and Russian. Washington
Post reporter Ellen Nakashima, to her credit, immediately penned an informative article on the Marble cyber-tool, under the caching
(and accurate) headline "WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations." That was
apparently before Nakashima "got the memo." Mainstream media have otherwise avoided like the plague any mention of Marble.
Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for
hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Directorate of Digital Innovation have been with the White House
– or with former Director Pompeo – on this touchy issue. Since it is still quite relevant, we will repeat below a paragraph included
in our July 2017 Memorandum to you under the subheading"Putin and the Technology:"
We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin. In his interview with NBC's Megyn
Kelly, he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager – to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault
7 disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's technology enables hacking to be "masked
and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand the origin" [of the hack] And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity
or any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack. Hackers may be anywhere," he said. "There
may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine
such a scenario? I can."
As we told Attorney General Barr five weeks ago, we consider Mueller's findings fundamentally flawed on the forensics side and
ipso facto incomplete. We also criticized Mueller for failing to interview willing witnesses with direct knowledge, like WikiLeaks'
Julian Assange.
Political Enemies & Mainstream Media (Forgive the Redundancy)
You may be unaware that in March 2017 lawyers for Assange and the Justice Department (acting on behalf of the CIA) reportedly
were very close to an agreement under which Assange would agree to discuss "technical evidence ruling out certain parties" in the
leak of the DNC emails" and agree to redact some classified CIA information, in exchange for limited immunity. According to the investigative
reporter John Solomon of The Hill, Sen. Mark Warner, D,VA, Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, learned of the
incipient deal and told then-FBI Director Comey, who ordered an abrupt
"stand down"
and an end to the discussions with Assange.
Why did Comey and Warner put the kibosh on receiving "technical evidence ruling out certain parties [read Russia]? We won't insult
you with the obvious answer. Assange is now in prison, to the delight of so many – including Mrs. Clinton who has said Assange must
now "answer for what he has done."
But is it too late to follow up somehow on Assange's offer? Might he or his associates be still willing to provide "technical
evidence" showing, at least, who was not the culprit?
You, Mr. President, could cause that to happen. You would have to buck strong resistance at every turn, and there all manner of
ways that those with vested interests and a lot of practice in sabotage can try to thwart you – with the full cooperation of most
media pundits. By now, you know all too well how that works.
But you are the president. And there may be no better time than now to face them down, show the spurious nature of the concocted
"evidence" attempting to put you in "Putin's pocket," and – not least – lift the cloud that has prevented you from pursuing a more
decent relationship with Russia.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
William Binney , former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research
Center (ret.)
Bogdan Dzakovic , former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)Philip
Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter
Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
James George Jatras , former U.S. diplomat and former foreign policy adviser to Senate leadership (Associate VIPs)
Larry Johnson , former CIA Intelligence Officer & former State Department Counter-Terrorism Official, (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (ret.); ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and Special
Mission Units (JSOC)
John Kiriakou, former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former Senior Investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Karen Kwiatkowski , former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies
on Iraq, 2001-2003
Clement J. Laniewski , LTC, US Army (ret.)
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.)
Edward Loomis, NSA Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
David MacMichael, former Senior Estimates Officer, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East & CIA political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Robert Wing, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (former) (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is made up of former intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers
and congressional staffers. The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington's justifications for launching
a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than contrived
threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of VIPS memoranda is available at
Consortiumnews.com . Reprinted from
Consortium News with permission.
Read more by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
It is unclear what danger WikiLeaks represents naw, as it probably was infiltrated. But
publishing of Podesta emails and DNC files was really damaging to the Dems during 2016
elections.
Notable quotes:
"... "We have two foreign policies. We tell people what to do. And if they do it, we reward them. We give them a lot of money. If they don't, they're in for big trouble, they're liable to get bombed; we invade them, and there will be a coup," Dr. Paul said. ..."
"... "We find that Moreno, the president of Ecuador, did not do badly. He's been playing footsies with us, and gaining some money and he delivered, you know, after he became president – it's shame because the previous president the one that allowed or at least would at least Assange could be 'protected' to some degree," he stated. ..."
"... "The IMF has already delivered $4.2 billion to [Ecuador], and there's another six billion dollars in the pipeline for that," he said. ..."
Dr. Paul, the founder of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, made the remarks
on Monday while discussing the violent arrest of Assange by UK Metropolitan Police last week at
the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after the Moreno government cancelled his asylum.
The Australian whistleblower was arrested on behalf of the US on Thursday at the Ecuadorean
embassy in London, where he had been granted asylum since 2012.
Assange, 47, is wanted by the US government for publishing classified documents related to
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that were leaked by American whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Assange spent seven years at the Ecuadorian embassy before his arrest.
"We have two foreign policies. We tell people what to do. And if they do it, we reward them.
We give them a lot of money. If they don't, they're in for big trouble, they're liable to get
bombed; we invade them, and there will be a coup," Dr. Paul said.
"We find that Moreno, the president of Ecuador, did not do badly. He's been playing
footsies with us, and gaining some money and he delivered, you know, after he became president
– it's shame because the previous president the one that allowed or at least would at
least Assange could be 'protected' to some degree," he stated.
"But he (Moreno) evidently is out form and now of course he has delivered him. And this
might not be even all of that. This probably is official tool of ours to provide these funds,"
the analyst noted.
"The IMF has already delivered $4.2 billion to [Ecuador], and there's another six billion
dollars in the pipeline for that," he said.
Moreno on Sunday accused Assange of trying to use Ecuador's embassy in London as a "center
for spying," and said that the decision to strip the whistleblower of his political asylum
followed "violations" of that status.
In an interview with The Guardian , Moreno defended his decision on the Assange
case.
"It is unfortunate that, from our territory and with the permission of authorities of the
previous government, facilities have been provided within the Ecuadoran Embassy in London to
interfere in processes of other states," the president said.
"... Assange accomplished more in 2010 alone than any of his preening media antagonists will in their entire lifetime, combined. Your feelings about him as a person do not matter. He could be the scummiest human on the face of Earth, and it would not detract from the fact that he has brought revelatory information to public that would otherwise have been concealed. He has shone light on some of the most powerful political factions not just in the US, but around the world. This will remain true regardless of whether Trump capitulates to the 'Deep State' and goes along with this utterly chilling, free speech-undermining prosecution. ..."
"... My support was based on the fact that Assange had devised a novel way to hold powerful figures to account, whose nefarious conduct would otherwise go unexamined but for the methods he pioneered. ..."
The nine-year gap – long after Manning had been charged, found guilty, and released from prison – suggests that there is something
ulterior going on here. The offenses outlined in the indictment are on extraordinarily weak legal footing. Part of the criminal 'conspiracy,'
prosecutors allege, is that Assange sought to protect Manning as a source and encouraged her to provide government records in the
public interest.
This is standard journalistic practice.
And it is now being criminalized by the Trump DoJ, while liberals celebrate from the sidelines – eager to join hands with the
likes of Mike Pompeo and Lindsey Graham. You could not get a more sinister confluence of political fraudsters.
They – meaning most Democrats – will never get over their grudge against Assange for having dared to expose the corruption of
America's ruling party in 2016, which they believed help deprive their beloved Hillary of her rightful ascension to the presidential
throne. Once again, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is among the few exceptions.
The DNC and Podesta email releases, now distilled reductively into the term 'Russian interference,' contained multitudinous newsworthy
revelations, as evidenced by the fact that virtually the entire US media reported on them. (Here, feel free to refresh your memory
on this as well.) But for no reason other than pure partisan score-settling, elite liberals are willing to toss aside any consideration
for the dire First Amendment implications of Assange's arrest and cry out with joy that this man they regard as innately evil has
finally been ensnared by the punitive might of the American carceral state.
Trump supporters and Trump himself also look downright foolish. It takes about two seconds to Google all the instances in which
Trump glowingly touted WikiLeaks on the 2016 campaign trail. 'I love WikiLeaks!' he famously proclaimed on October 10, 2016 in Wilkes-Barre,
Penn.
Presumably this expression of 'love' was indication that Trump viewed WikiLeaks as providing a public service. If not, perhaps
some intrepid reporter can ask precisely what his 'love' entailed. He can pretend all he wants now that he's totally oblivious to
WikiLeaks, but it was Trump himself who relayed that he was contemporaneously reading the Podesta emails in October 2016, and reveling
in all their newsworthiness. If he wanted, he could obviously intercede and prevent any unjust prosecution of Assange. Trump has
certainly seen fit to complain publicly about all matter of other inconvenient Justice Department activity, especially as it pertained
to him or his family members and associates. But now he's acting as though he's never heard of WikiLeaks, which is just pitiful:
not a soul believes it, even his most ardent supporters.
Sean Hannity became one of Assange's biggest fans in 2016 and 2017, effusively lavishing him with praise and even visiting him
in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for an exclusive interview. One wonders whether Hannity, who reportedly speaks to his best buddy
Trump every night before bedtime, will counsel a different course on this matter. There's also the question of whether Trump's most
vehement online advocates, who largely have become stalwart defenders of WikiLeaks, will put their money where their mouth is and
condition their continued support on Assange not being depredated by the American prison system.
Assange accomplished more in 2010 alone than any of his preening media antagonists will in their entire lifetime, combined.
Your feelings about him as a person do not matter. He could be the scummiest human on the face of Earth, and it would not detract
from the fact that he has brought revelatory information to public that would otherwise have been concealed. He has shone light on
some of the most powerful political factions not just in the US, but around the world. This will remain true regardless of whether
Trump capitulates to the 'Deep State' and goes along with this utterly chilling, free speech-undermining prosecution.
I personally have supported Assange since I started in journalism, nine years ago, not because I had any special affinity for
the man himself (although the radical transparency philosophy he espoused was definitely compelling). My support was based on
the fact that Assange had devised a novel way to hold powerful figures to account, whose nefarious conduct would otherwise go unexamined
but for the methods he pioneered. As thanks, he was holed up in a tiny embassy for nearly seven years – until yesterday, when
they hauled him out ignominiously to face charges in what will likely turn out to be a political show trial. Donald Trump has the
ability to stop this, but almost certainly won't. And that's all you need to know about him.
"... Crowdstrike can continue in business defending their clients from dreadful hackers. Admitting a leak opens the question as to why have crowdstrike at their current contract and go for cheaper. ..."
Crowdstrike can continue in business defending their clients from dreadful hackers.
Admitting a leak opens the question as to why have crowdstrike at their current contract and
go for cheaper.
I do like the logic that suggests Comey FBI etc are complicit. They are the crime here and
they are the crime in the killing of Seth Rich and they are the crime in the Awan family spy
ring.
On your 'hows that working out for ya.... I do heaps and many others here do likewise.
Stay strong.
Selection of Crowdstrike is highly suspect; the behaviour of FBI is highly suspect (why they allowed the contractor to handle
the evidence), the behaviour of MSM is highly suspect (they came with the predefined notion -- Russia), the murder of Seth Rich and
subsequent investigation (or the lack of thereof ) are highly suspect. Add to this mix incredible Awan brothers story
and Debbie Wasserman behaviour after Imran Awan arrest
This all points in the direction of the false flag.
Notable quotes:
"... There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that organisation . ..."
"... The chain of events that led to the publication of the DNC emails is highly suspect. IMO it's likely to be a CIA/Mossad op to portray Wikileaks as an agent of Russia (AFAIK, Seth Rich was Jewish; and his family has acted strangely about the whole affair). And this 'op' fits well with use of the 2016 Presidential campaign to prepare for McCarthyist 'Russiagate' - for which CIA seems to have joined with MI6. ..."
"... If the publication of the DNC emails was in fact a false flag then to support Assange that fact needs to be proven, and the persons responsible exposed for staging a false "framing of Assange" event.. ..."
"... The Zionist "take the oil from the Ottoman" project involved weaponizing Jewish immigration and and redirecting European Jewish immigration from locating in Argentina ..."
It cannot be repeated often enough that it is difficult to see any conceivable excuse for the FBI to fail to secure access
to the DNC servers. One would normally moreover expect that, on an issue of this sensitivity, they would have the 'digital
forensics' done by their own people.
There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there
has been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be
devastating for that organisation .
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic 'Atlantic Council' is even more preposterous.
The clear close integration of other cyber people from the 'Atlantic Council' into Orwellian 'information operations'
sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief.
There has to be a strong possible 'prima facie' case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the 'digital forensics'
from 'CrowdStrike' is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy.
This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller."
IMO The suggestion that Crowdstrike called it a hack instead of a leak to absolve themselves [as per the bolded phrase] is specious.
But Habbuk (thankfully) rightly puts the onus on the FBI for not doing their job.
The chain of events that led to the publication of the DNC emails is highly suspect. IMO it's likely to be a CIA/Mossad
op to portray Wikileaks as an agent of Russia (AFAIK, Seth Rich was Jewish; and his family has acted strangely about the whole
affair). And this 'op' fits well with use of the 2016 Presidential campaign to prepare for McCarthyist 'Russiagate' - for which
CIA seems to have joined with MI6.
The chain of events that led to the publication of the DNC emails is highly suspect. IMO it's likely to be a CIA/Mossad op to
portray Wikileaks as an agent of Russia (AFAIK, Seth Rich was Jewish; and his family has acted strangely about the whole affair).
And this 'op' fits well with use of the 2016 Presidential campaign to prepare for McCarthyist 'Russiagate' - for which CIA seems
to have joined with MI6.
by: Jackrabbit @7
Seems to me this could be that place to start donkeytale @ 3 asks is there a way to save Julian Assange..
If the publication of
the DNC emails was in fact a false flag then to support Assange that fact needs to be proven, and the persons responsible exposed
for staging a false "framing of Assange" event..
The Jews immigrated to NYC from Salonika (the other half went to Russia) after the failure to use a corrupted CUP to over throw
the Ottomans ( Ottomans discovered, and burned the Jews out) in 1908-1912 the dominate political majority in NYC became Jewish, dwarfing
the previous majority, who were the Irish.
So when the POTUS needed stronger support to force governed Americans into WWI, Those in charge of the banker backed "take
the oil and land from the Ottomans" project in banker controlled Europe directed the new NYC immigrants to send letters to the
POTUS urging USA entry into the war in Europe.. within a week over a million letters arrived, which were designed to strengthen POTUS
efforts to force Americans and the congress critters into WWI (abuse of American human rights by sending soldiers, creating a tax
law, that had been rule unconstitutional every year since 1865 to (1912-13) diverting the domestic budget to a foreign war budget,
and organizing and directing the industrial might of America to assist in the WWI Zionist movement in Europe to take the oil from
the Ottoman.
WWI was planned before 1896, (Read: Roland Green Usher Pan-Germanism 1913-14 and My Memoirs 1878-1918 by Ex-Kaiser William, II<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_II,_German_Emperor)
and organized at Zionist Congress (1897) in Europe (Russia signed a contain Germany Agreement with France in 1896 to deny Germany)
and in 1897 the USA secretly agreed to support France and England against Germany agreement (why? Germany relations with Ottomans
gave Germans access to the Ottoman oil, which the British, French and USA bankers and the corporations they sponsored would not stand
for.
The Zionist "take the oil from the Ottoman" project involved weaponizing Jewish immigration and and redirecting European
Jewish immigration from locating in Argentina [ http://www.billgladstone.ca/?p=3197]
to locating in Ottoman-Palestine-Israel locations <=object to: occupy and eventually displace the Ottomans (WWI divided the Ottoman
empire into British Palestine, and French Syria) from their land and their oil.
So letters (in answer to donkeytale @ 3) with return receipt, sent directly to the POTUS might be a means to support Julian Assange?
I can imagine what it might be like to see 10 million return receipts posted somewhere!
"... Six months later, the FBI arrests him as he's boarding a flight to Pakistan and charges him with bank fraud. ..."
"... The congresswoman says conservatives are making a big deal of this to distract from the much more real Russia investigation. "Undoubtedly, the easier path would have been to terminate Mr. Awan, despite the fact that I had not received any evidence of his alleged wrongdoing," she said in a statement issued last week, "but that is not the woman my constituents elected, and that is not the mother my children know me to be." ..."
"... February: Capitol Police accuse five IT staffers of trying to steal House equipment and violating House security policies, report BuzzFeed and Politico . They are shared employees who work for 30 or so members of Congress. Capitol Police ban the five from access to the House of Representatives network while it investigates. Investigators tell lawmakers that it's up to them to decide whether to fire the accused staffers. ..."
"... Awan is one of those staffers accused. Most of the others are related to him, including his wife, Hina Alvi. ..."
"... Wasserman Schultz remains quiet, other than to say Awan had been moved to an advisory role since he was no longer able to directly interact with the House network. She remains dubious about the accusations against Awan and does not see cause to fire him. She becomes increasingly concerned he was being singled out because of his religion. ..."
"... "When their investigation was reviewed with me, I was presented with no evidence of anything that they were being investigated for. And so that, in me, gave me great concern that his due process rights were being violated. That there were racial and ethnic profiling concerns that I had," she said. ..."
"... She later told the Sun-Sentinel she was asking about Awan's laptop: "He accidentally left it somewhere." ..."
"... Week of July 24: Awan's legal troubles deepen. The FBI arrests him at a D.C.-area airport on his way to Pakistan. Fox News's Chad Pergram first reports it, and conservative Daily Caller fleshes out the story . ..."
"... Awan was arrested while attempting to board a flight after wiring $283,00 to the country. His wife and their three children are already in Pakistan. An affidavit obtained by the Daily Caller alleges they tried to trick their bank, the Congressional Federal Credit Union, into giving them a second mortgage for a rental property by claiming it was their primary residency. ..."
"... Aug. 3 : Wasserman Schultz gives her first interview to the media. She tells the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel that she had initially only commented on the arrest via a spokesman since she had been on vacation. And she stands by her decision not to fire Awan after he was accused of stealing House equipment: "I believe that I did the right thing, and I would do it again," she says. ..."
"... Aug. 7: Wasserman Schultz's Democratic primary challenger, Tim Canova , accuses her of making "a lot of self-serving excuses for Awan." ..."
Here's one version of a story making headlines in conservative media over the past couple of
weeks: A powerful Democratic congresswoman refuses to fire an information technology aide after
he's accused of stealing House computer equipment and potentially breaching security protocols.
Six months later, the FBI arrests him as he's boarding a flight to Pakistan and charges him
with bank fraud.
Here's another version of the same topic, coming from Democratic lawmakers: Powerful
Democratic congresswoman protects Muslim IT staffer from what she suspects is religious
discrimination. She fires him after he is charged with a seemingly unrelated crime.
The case involving now-fired House Democratic information technology staffer Imran Awan and
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) underscores how easy it is to manipulate facts to suit
one's political leaning.
The story has blown up on the right, with conservative website Daily Caller writing more
than two dozen stories about it and Fox News hosts linking it, without any evidence, to the
Russian WikiLeaks hack of DNC emails, which happened under Wasserman Schultz's tenure as
chairwoman.
President Trump poured gasoline on the story when he retweeted a conservative site
describing the "scandal engulfing" Wasserman Schultz and accusing the media of ignoring it.
Mainstream media outlets have covered the story, but not extensively. The Washington Post
has published two articles: One reporting
Awan's arrest and the other about a watchdog group
seeking an investigation .
Left-leaning sites have either stayed away from it or defended Wasserman Schultz's account
of it.
The congresswoman says conservatives are making a big deal of this to distract from the much
more real Russia investigation. "Undoubtedly, the easier path would have been to terminate Mr.
Awan, despite the fact that I had not received any evidence of his alleged wrongdoing," she
said in a statement issued last week, "but that is not the woman my constituents elected, and
that is not the mother my children know me to be."
Clearly, there are a lot of political accusations tied up in this nuanced story. Here's what
we know about the timeline of accusations against Arwan, his arrest and his dismissal by
Wasserman Schultz.
February: Capitol Police accuse five IT staffers of trying to steal House equipment and
violating House security policies, report BuzzFeed and Politico
. They are shared employees who work for 30 or so members of Congress. Capitol Police ban the
five from access to the House of Representatives network while it investigates. Investigators
tell lawmakers that it's up to them to decide whether to fire the accused staffers.
Awan is one of those staffers accused. Most of the others are related to him, including his
wife, Hina Alvi.
February–March: Politico follows
up on the fate of the staffers and finds some Democratic lawmakers have kept them on the
payroll, Wasserman Schultz included. While Capitol Police claim there may have been potentially
serious IT violations, these lawmakers see it differently.
The IT staffers have worked for many of the offices for more than a decade, and some
Democratic lawmakers said they were concerned these staffers may have been targeted by Capitol
investigators because they are Muslim and from Pakistan.
"As of right now, I don't see a smoking gun," Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (N.Y.)
tells Politico , even as he confirms he has dismissed Alvi. "I wanted to be sure
individuals are not being singled out because of their nationalities or their religion. We want
to make sure everybody is entitled to due process."
Wasserman Schultz remains quiet, other than to say Awan had been moved to an advisory role
since he was no longer able to directly interact with the House network. She remains dubious
about the accusations against Awan and does not see cause to fire him. She becomes increasingly
concerned he was being singled out because of his religion.
In an interview on Aug. 3 with the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel,
she said she felt Awan had been nabbed on a technicality: He had been accused of using
innocuous programs like Dropbox to transfer information, which doesn't clear House security
protocols.
"When their investigation was reviewed with me, I was presented with no evidence of anything
that they were being investigated for. And so that, in me, gave me great concern that his due
process rights were being violated. That there were racial and ethnic profiling concerns that I
had," she said.
A spokeswoman for Capitol Police declined to comment on the accusations, saying they do not
comment on ongoing investigations. The police force is overseen by the congressionally
appointed sergeant at arms, Congress itself and an inspector general.
May: In a budget hearing for Capitol Police, Wasserman Schultz starts asking Capitol Police
Chief Matthew R. Verderosa why they confiscated a laptop related to the case and how she can
get it back. "If the equipment belongs to the member, it has been lost, they say it's been lost
and it's been identified as that member's, then the Capitol Police are supposed to return it."
When the police chief says she can't have it back because there's an ongoing investigation
related to it, she appears genuinely frustrated and says: "I think you're violating the rules
when you conduct your business that way and you should expect that there will be
consequences."
She later told the Sun-Sentinel she was asking about Awan's laptop: "He accidentally left it
somewhere."
Week of July 24: Awan's legal troubles deepen. The FBI arrests him at a D.C.-area airport on
his way to Pakistan. Fox News's Chad Pergram first reports it, and conservative Daily Caller
fleshes out the story .
Awan was arrested while attempting to board a flight after wiring $283,00 to the country.
His wife and their three children are already in Pakistan. An affidavit
obtained by the Daily Caller alleges they tried to trick their bank, the Congressional Federal
Credit Union, into giving them a second mortgage for a rental property by claiming it was their
primary residency.
The FBI accuses Awan of trying to flee the country, but his lawyer later
tells The Washington Post he had no intention of fleeing; he had bought a round-trip ticket
and applied for unpaid leave from work. Awan pleads not guilty.
Same week: Immediately following the charges, Wasserman Schultz's office says Awan is
fired.
Same week : The chairwoman of the Republican National Committee starts going on TV to
question why Wasserman Schultz hadn't fired Awan earlier, when he was accused of stealing House
equipment.
"Debbie Wasserman Schultz has obstructed at every level on something that affects
potentially our national security," Ronna McDaniel says on Fox Business. She and other
conservative groups call for Congress to hold hearings and Wasserman Schultz to testify.
The RNC sends emails to local media of the 30 Democratic lawmakers who had hired Awan or the
other staffers, explaining the case and urging them to ask their lawmakers questions when
they're back home for the August break.
Same week : Trump retweets this.
A week after Awan's arrest : A conservative group files a complaint with
the House's independent ethics committee alleging Wasserman Schultz broke House rules by
allowing Awan to stay on after he was banned from the House system.
Wasserman Schultz's office issues a statement calling the complaint "baseless" because they
worked with House officials to make sure they were following the rules to keep him on to do
things like help troubleshoot printers.
" It's no surprise that they would nonetheless file it, against one of Donald Trump's
fiercest critics, at a time when the administration is trying to distract from its internal
turmoil and destructive health care efforts," says Wasserman Schultz spokesman David
Damron.
Aug. 3: Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel calls
attention to the drama by pointing out how much money Awan and his relatives were making.
"The government, under the inattentive care of Democrats, may have been bilked for ages by a
man the FBI has alleged to be a fraudster." Awan, his wife and their relatives were each making
roughly $150,000 in annual salary working for more than two dozen House Democrats. Politico
calculated Awan had earned more than $2 million since he started working for House Democrats in
2004.
Aug. 3 : Wasserman Schultz gives her first interview to the media. She
tells the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel that she had initially only commented on the arrest
via a spokesman since she had been on vacation. And she stands by her decision not to fire Awan
after he was accused of stealing House equipment: "I believe that I did the right thing, and I
would do it again," she says.
Meanwhile, Awan must stay within 50 miles of his Lorton home while he faces the bank fraud
charges.
Aug. 7: Wasserman Schultz's Democratic primary challenger,
Tim Canova ,
accuses her of making "a lot of self-serving excuses for Awan."
"... The random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power or approximately 1 chance in 10 to the 150th power - in other words, an infinitely high order. ..."
TEST IT YOURSELF, THE 2-SECOND-ROUNDING FACT PATTERN IN THE DNC EMAILS By William Binney
and Larry Johnson Bill and I published a piece a few weeks back that provides actual
evidence that challenges the claim that "Russia hacked the DNC." Yes, we know, the Mueller
Report continues to insist that theft of emails from the DNC was done over the internet. But
that conclusion rests on the opinion of third parties who offer no actual forensic evidence.
We, by contrast, are offering up actual evidence that points to an alternative explanation. We
do not ask you to take our word for it. Instead, we want to show you how you can test the data
yourself ..
An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23 and 25 May and 26
August respectively. The fact that they appear in a FAT system format indicates the data was
transfered to a storage device, such as a thumb drive.
How do we know? The truth lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the Wikileaks files.
Every single one of these time stamps end in even numbers. If you are not familiar with the FAT
file system, you need to understand that when a date is stored under this system the data
rounds the time to the nearest even numbered second.
We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on Wikileaks and all 500 files end in an even
number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If a system other than FAT had been used, there would have been an
equal probability of the time stamp ending with an odd number. But that is not the case with
the data stored on the Wikileaks site. All end with an even number.
Here's what you need to do to replicate what we found.:
Step One -- Go to the Wikileaks
DNC email database. Click here: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/ ) Step Two -- Search
the DNC database using the any word. We opted for "Clinton."
Step Four--Click on submit. That will take you to the following document:
Step Five--scroll down to the "HTTP response headers" section where you will find the
"Last-Modified" timestamp.
Message 100 shows a Last Modified Timestamp of 05:22:00 GMT.
That time equates to 01:22:00 Eastern Daylight Time.
It ends in 0, an even number. Our search and analysis of all the messages from the DNCin the
first Wikileaks release published July 22, 2016" show that all end in an even number.
We repeat our conclusion from the original article:
The random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power or
approximately 1 chance in 10 to the 150th power - in other words, an infinitely high order.
This data alone does not prove that the emails were copied at the DNC headquarters. But it
does show that the data/emails posted by Wikileaks did go through a storage device on the 25
th of May, like a thumbdrive, before Wikileaks posted the emails on the World Wide
Web.
We do not know if a person or persons with access to the DNC server accessed the emails from
their home. That is possible. What is certain, however, is that email message 100 demonstrates
forensic evidence that indicates the email was physically copied onto a storage device, like a
thumb drive or CD-Rom, with a last modified date of 05:22:00 GMT on Wednesday the 25
th of May 2016, before it was published on the Wikileaks site. The fact that these
messages are in FAT format is not evidence that supports Mueller's claim a "hack."
Perhaps Mueller's team of investigators turned up forensic data that proves a Russian hack.
There was no such evidence, however, presented in June and July of 2016 when the initial claim
was made blaming Russian intelligence operatives.
We also are confident that there was no solid forensic evidence available in January 2017 to
substantiate the Intelligence Community Assessment attributing the "hack" to the Russian
Government because NSA analysts only agreed that they had "moderate confidence" in that claim.
We know from our prior experience in producting such assessments that if there existed actual
forensic evidence, such as tracing the packets back to a server operated by the Russian
Government then there would be "strong confidence" in the conclusion.
Who was the person or persons who had access to the DNC server that were copying these
messages to a storage device, like a thumb drive, early in the morning on Wednesday the 25
th of May? We have an opinion, but our focus is not on speculation. Let us first
deal with the hard forensic evidence. We are certain of one thing -- the available evidence
does not support the claim that the DNC emails were "hacked" via an internet cyber
attack.
Since Assange lives in an embassy, would there be any value to looking into who visited
him or mailed something to him between Wednesday the 25thof May 2016 and the date Wikileaks
published the material (July 22, 2016)? Would the embassy have those records?
Also, I may be mistaken, but wasn't the same material passed to, and published by, DCleaks
around the same time as the Wikileaks release? If that is correct, why does no one talk about
or analyze the DCleaks aspect of the case?
Finally, what do you think about the idea that multiple penetrations of the server could
have been occurring simultaneously by different parties? It is a juicy target, after all, and
apparently not well protected. Perhaps the Russians were in there, but were not the source of
the DCLeaks and/or Wikileaks material.
TEST IT YOURSELF, THE 2-SECOND-ROUNDING FACT PATTERN IN THE DNC EMAILS By William Binney
and Larry Johnson
Larry Johnson
Bill Binney
Bill and I published a piece a few weeks back that provides actual evidence that challenges
the claim that "Russia hacked the DNC." Yes, we know, the Mueller Report continues to insist
that theft of emails from the DNC was done over the internet. But that conclusion rests on the
opinion of third parties who offer no actual forensic evidence. We, by contrast, are offering
up actual evidence that points to an alternative explanation. We do not asky you to take our
word for it. Instead, we want to show you how you can test the data yourself ..
An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23 and 25 May and 26
August respectively. The fact that they appear in a FAT system format indicates the data was
transfered to a storage device, such as a thumb drive.
How do we know? The truth lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the Wikileaks files.
Every single one of these time stamps end in even numbers. If you are not familiar with the FAT
file system, you need to understand that when a date is stored under this system the data
rounds the time to the nearest even numbered second.
We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on Wikileaks and all 500 files end in an even
number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If a system other than FAT had been used, there would have been an
equal probability of the time stamp ending with an odd number. But that is not the case with
the data stored on the Wikileaks site. All end with an even number.
Step Four--Click on submit. That will take you to the following document:
Step Five--scroll down to the "HTTP response headers" section where you will find the
"Last-Modified" timestamp.
Message 100 shows a Last Modified Timestamp of 05:22:00 GMT.
That time equates to 01:22:00 Eastern Daylight Time.
It ends in 0, an even number. Our search and analysis of all the messages from the DNCin the
first Wikileaks release published July 22, 2016" show that all end in an even number.
We repeat our conclusion from the original article:
The random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power or
approximately 1 chance in 10 to the 150th power - in other words, an infinitely high order.
This data alone does not prove that the emails were copied at the DNC headquarters. But it
does show that the data/emails posted by Wikileaks did go through a storage device on the 25
th of May, like a thumbdrive, before Wikileaks posted the emails on the World Wide
Web.
We do not know if a person or persons with access to the DNC server accessed the emails from
their home. That is possible. What is certain, however, is that email message 100 demonstrates
forensic evidence that indicates the email was physically copied onto a storage device, like a
thumb drive or CD-Rom, with a last modified date of 05:22:00 GMT on Wednesday the 25
th of May 2016, before it was published on the Wikileaks site. The fact that these
messages are in FAT format is not evidence that supports Mueller's claim a "hack."
Perhaps Mueller's team of investigators turned up forensic data that proves a Russian hack.
There was no such evidence, however, presented in June and July of 2016 when the initial claim
was made blaming Russian intelligence operatives.
We also are confident that there was no solid forensic evidence available in January 2017 to
substantiate the Intelligence Community Assessment attributing the "hack" to the Russian
Government because NSA analysts only agreed that they had "moderate confidence" in that claim.
We know from our prior experience in producting such assessments that if there existed actual
forensic evidence, such as tracing the packets back to a server operated by the Russian
Government then there would be "strong confidence" in the conclusion.
Who was the person or persons who had access to the DNC server that were copying these
messages to a storage device, like a thumb drive, early in the morning on Wednesday the 25
th of May? We have an opinion, but our focus is not on speculation. Let us first
deal with the hard forensic evidence. We are certain of one thing -- the available evidence
does not support the claim that the DNC emails were "hacked" via an internet cyber
attack.
Since Assange lives in an embassy, would there be any value to looking into who visited
him or mailed something to him between Wednesday the 25thof May 2016 and the date Wikileaks
published the material (July 22, 2016)? Would the embassy have those records?
Also, I may be mistaken, but wasn't the same material passed to, and published by, DCleaks
around the same time as the Wikileaks release? If that is correct, why does no one talk about
or analyze the DCleaks aspect of the case?
Finally, what do you think about the idea that multiple penetrations of the server could
have been occurring simultaneously by different parties? It is a juicy target, after all, and
apparently not well protected. Perhaps the Russians were in there, but were not the source of
the DCLeaks and/or Wikileaks material.
This is probably the most comprehensive outline of the color revolution against Trump. Bravo, simply bravo !!!
Reads like Agatha Christi Murder on the Orient
Express ;-) Rosenstein role is completely revised from a popular narrative. Brennan role clarifies and detailed. Obama
personal role hinted. Victoria Nuland role and the role of the State Department in Russiagate is documented for the first
time, I think.
Notable quotes:
"... The "insurance policy" appears to have been the effort to legitimize the Trump–Russia collusion narrative so that an FBI investigation, led by McCabe, could continue unhindered. ..."
"... Ohr, one of the highest-ranking officials in the DOJ, was communicating on an ongoing basis with Steele, whom he had known since at least 2006 , well into mid-2017. He is also married to Nellie Ohr, an expert on Russia and Eurasia who began working for Fusion GPS sometime in late 2015 . Nellie Ohr likely played a significant role in the construction of the dossier. ..."
"... The Obama administration provided a simultaneous layer of protection and facilitation for the entire effort. One example is provided by Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333 , also known as Obama's data-sharing order . With the passage of the order, agencies and individuals were able to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that was useful to a particular mission. ..."
"... Leaking, including felony leaking of classified information, has been widespread. The Carter Page FISA warrant -- likely the unredacted version -- has been in the possession of The Washington Post and The New York Times since March 2017. Traditionally, the intelligence community leaked to The Washington Post while the DOJ leaked to sources within The New York Times. This was a historical pattern that stood until this election. The leaking became so widespread, even this tradition was broken. ..."
"... The information contained within both articles likely came via felony leaks from James Wolfe, former director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who was arrested on June 7, 2018, and charged with one count of lying to the FBI. Wolfe's indictment alleges that he was leaking classified information to multiple reporters over an extended period of time. ..."
"... The Steele dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources. One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood later relayed information regarding the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who dispatched David Kramer, a fellow at the McCain Institute, to London to meet with Steele in November 2016. McCain would later admit in a Jan. 11, 2017, statement that he had personally passed on the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey. ..."
"... Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations -- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia. ..."
"... Questions to be asked are why is it that two of our allies would find themselves so opposed to the release of these classified documents that a coordinated plea would be made directly to the president? And why would these same allies have even the slightest idea of what was contained in these classified U.S. documents? ..."
Spygate: The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] How America's most powerful agencies were weaponized against President
Donald Trump
Although the details remain complex, the structure underlying Spygate -- the creation of the false narrative that candidate Donald
Trump colluded with Russia, and the spying on his presidential campaign -- remains surprisingly simple:
CIA Director John Brennan, with some assistance from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, gathered foreign intelligence
and fed it throughout our domestic Intelligence Community.
The FBI became the handler of Brennan's intelligence and engaged in the more practical elements of surveillance.
The Department of Justice facilitated investigations by the FBI and legal maneuverings, while providing a crucial shield of
nondisclosure.
The Department of State became a mechanism of information dissemination and leaks.
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee provided funding, support, and media collusion.
Obama administration officials were complicit, and engaged in unmasking and intelligence gathering and dissemination.
The media was the most corrosive element in many respects. None of these events could have transpired without their willing
participation. Stories were pushed, facts were ignored, and narratives were promoted.
Let's start with a simple premise: The candidacy of Trump presented both an opportunity and a threat.
Initially not viewed with any real seriousness, Trump's campaign was seen as an opportunistic wedge in the election process. At
the same time, and particularly as the viability of his candidacy increased, Trump was seen as an existential threat to the established
political system.
The sudden legitimacy of Trump's candidacy was not welcomed by the U.S. political establishment. Here was a true political outsider
who held no traditional allegiances. He was brash and boastful, he ignored political correctness, he couldn't be bought, and he didn't
care what others thought of him -- he trusted himself.
Governing bodies in Britain and the European Union were also worried. Candidate Trump was openly challenging monetary policy,
regulations, and the power of special interests. He challenged Congress. He challenged the United Nations and the European Union.
He questioned everything.
Brennan played a crucial role in the creation of the Russia-collusion narrative and the spying on the Trump campaign. (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty
Images)
Brennan became the point man in the operation to stop a potential Trump presidency. It remains unclear whether his role was self-appointed
or came from above. To embark on such a mission without direct presidential authority seems both a stretch of the imagination and
particularly foolhardy.
Brennan took unofficial foreign intelligence compiled by contacts, colleagues, and associates --
primarily from the UK , but also from other Five Eyes members, such as Australia.
Individuals in official positions in UK intelligence, such as Robert Hannigan -- head of the UK Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of the National Security Agency) -- partnered with former UK foreign intelligence members. Former MI6
head Sir Richard Dearlove
, former Ambassador Sir Andrew Wood, and private UK intelligence firm
Hakluyt all played a role.
In the summer of 2016, Hannigan traveled to Washington to
meet with Brennan
regarding alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. On Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration
-- Hannigan abruptly announced
his retirement. The Guardian openly
speculated that Hannigan's
resignation was directly related to the sharing of UK intelligence.
One method used to help establish evidence of collusion was the employment of "spy traps." Prominent among these were ones set
for Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. The intent was to provide or establish connections between the Trump
campaign and Russia. The content and context mattered little as long as a connection could be established that could then be publicized.
The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting was another such attempt.
Western intelligence assets were used to initiate and establish these connections, particularly in the cases of Papadopoulos and
Page.
Ultimately, Brennan formed an inter-agency task
force comprising an estimated six agencies and/or government departments. The FBI, Treasury, and DOJ handled the domestic inquiry
into Trump and possible Russia connections. The CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency
(NSA) handled foreign and intelligence aspects.
Brennan's inter-agency task force is not to be confused with the July 2016 FBI counterintelligence investigation, which was formed
later at Brennan's urging.
During this time, Brennan also employed the use of
reverse targeting , which relates to the targeting of a foreign individual with the intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen.
This effort was uncovered and
made public by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in a March 2017
press conference :
"I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show the president-elect and his team were monitored and disseminated out in
intelligence-reporting channels. Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent
foreign-intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.
"From what I know right now, it looks like incidental collection. We don't know exactly how that was picked up but we're trying
to get to the bottom of it."
As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of any traditional channels -- was gathered, Brennan began a
process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director pushed
the FBI toward the establishment of a formal counterintelligence investigation. Brennan repeatedly noted this during
a May 23, 2017, congressional testimony :
"I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump
campaign, was shared with the [FBI]."
Brennan also admitted that his intelligence helped establish
the FBI investigation:
"I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in
my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and
it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred."
Once the FBI began its counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, Brennan shifted his focus. Through a series of meetings
in August and September 2016, Brennan informed the congressional Gang of Eight regarding intelligence and information he had gathered.
Notably, each Gang of Eight member was briefed separately, calling into question whether each of the members received the same information.
Efforts to
block the release of the transcripts from each meeting remain ongoing.
This final report was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of President Donald Trump.
Notably, Admiral Mike Rogers of the NSA publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning only a moderate confidence level.
Although the FBI is technically part of the DOJ, it is best for the purposes of this article that the FBI and DOJ be viewed as
separate entities, each with its own related ties.
The FBI itself was comprised of various factions, with a particularly active element that has come to be known as the "insurance
policy group." It appears that this faction was led by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and comprised other notable names such as
FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and FBI general counsel James Baker.
The FBI established the counterintelligence investigation into alleged Russia collusion with the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016.
Comey initially refused to say whether the FBI was investigating possible connections between members of the Trump campaign and Russia.
He would continue to refuse to provide answers until March 20, 2017, when he disclosed the existence of the FBI investigation
during congressional testimony.
Comey also testified that he did not provide notification to the Gang of Eight until early March 2017 -- less than one month earlier.
This admission was in stark contrast to actions taken by Brennan, who had notified members of the Gang of Eight individually during
August and September 2016. It's likely that Brennan never informed Comey that he had briefed the Gang of Eight in 2016. Comey did
note that the DOJ "had been aware" of the investigation all along.
Comey opened the counterintelligence investigation into Trump on the urging of CIA Director John Brennan.
Following Comey's firing on May 9, 2017, the FBI's investigation was transferred to special counsel Robert Mueller. The
Mueller investigation remains ongoing.
The FBI's formal involvement with the
Steele dossier began on July 5, 2016,
when Mike Gaeta, an FBI agent and assistant legal attaché at the US Embassy in Rome, was dispatched to visit former MI6 spy Christopher
Steele in London. Gaeta would return from this meeting with a copy of Steele's first memo. This memo was given to Victoria Nuland
at the State Department, who passed it along to the FBI.
Gaeta, who also headed the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit, had known Steele since at least 2010, when Steele had provided
assistance to the FBI's investigation into the
FIFA corruption
scandal .
Prior to the London meeting, Gaeta may also have met on a less formal basis with Steele
several weeks earlier.
"In June, Steele flew to Rome to brief the FBI contact with whom he had cooperated over FIFA," The Guardian reported. "His information
started to reach the bureau in Washington."
It's worth noting that there was no "dossier" until it was fully compiled in December 2016. There was only a sequence of documents
from Steele -- documents that were passed on individually -- as they were created. Therefore, from the FBI's legal perspective, they
didn't use the dossier. They used individual documents.
For the next month and a half, there appeared to be little contact between Steele and the FBI. However, the FBI's interest in
the dossier suddenly accelerated in late August 2016, when the bureau
asked Steele "for all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify
his sources."
In September 2016, Steele traveled back to Rome to meet with the FBI's Eurasian squad once again. It's likely that the meeting
included several other FBI officials as well. According to a
House Intelligence Committee
minority memo , Steele's reporting reached the FBI counterintelligence team in mid-September 2016 -- the same time as Steele's
September trip to Rome.
The reason for the FBI's renewed interest had to do with an adviser to the Trump campaign -- Carter Page -- who had been in
contact with Stefan Halper, a CIA
and FBI source, since July 2016. Halper
arranged to meet with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a
Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page took a trip
to Moscow. Speakers at the symposium included Madeleine Albright, Vin Webber, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6.
Page was now the FBI's chosen target for a FISA warrant that would be obtained on Oct. 21, 2016. The Steele dossier would be the
primary evidence used in obtaining the FISA warrant, which would be renewed three separate times, including after Trump took office,
finally expiring in September 2017.
Former volunteer Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on Nov. 2, 2017. The FBI obtained a retroactive FISA spy warrant
on Page.
After being in contact with Page for 14 months, Halper stopped contact exactly as the final FISA warrant on Page expired. Page,
who has steadfastly maintained his innocence, was never charged with any crime by the FBI. Efforts for the declassification of the
Page FISA application are currently ongoing through the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were two prominent members of the FBI's "insurance policy" group. Strzok, a senior FBI agent, was the
deputy assistant director of FBI's Counterintelligence Division. Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, served as special counsel to FBI Deputy
Director Andrew McCabe.
Strzok was in charge of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for government business. He helped
FBI Director James Comey draft the statement exonerating Clinton and was personally responsible for changing specific wording within
that statement that reduced Clinton's legal liability. Specifically, Strzok changed the words "grossly negligent," which could be
a criminal offense, to "extremely careless."
Strzok also personally led the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into the alleged Trump–Russia collusion and signed the
documents that opened the investigation on July 31, 2016. He was one of the FBI agents who interviewed Trump's national security
adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn. Strzok met multiple times with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and received information from Steele at those
meetings.
Following the firing of FBI Director James Comey, Strzok would join the team of special counsel Robert Mueller. Two months later,
he was removed from that team after the DOJ inspector general discovered a lengthy series of texts between Strzok and Page that contained
politically charged messages. Strzok would be fired from the FBI in August 2018.
Both Strzok and Page engaged in strategic
leaking to the press. Page did so at the direction of McCabe, who directly
authorized Page to share information with Wall Street
Journal reporter Devlin Barrett. That information was used in an Oct. 30, 2016, article headlined
"FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe ." Page leaked to Barrett thinking she had been granted legal and official authorization
to do so.
McCabe would later initially deny providing such
authorization to the Office of Inspector General. Page, when confronted with McCabe's denials, produced texts refuting his statement.
It was these texts that led to the inspector general uncovering the texts between Strzok and Page.
The two exchanged thousands of texts, some of them indicating surveillance activities, over a two-year period. Texts sent between
Aug. 21, 2015, and June 25, 2017, have been made
public . The series comes
to an end with a final text by Page telling Strzok, "Don't ever text me again."
On Aug. 8, 2016, Stzrok wrote that they would prevent candidate Trump from becoming president:
Page: "[Trump is] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!"
Strzok: "No. No he won't. We'll stop it."
On Aug. 15, 2016, Strzok sent a text referring to an "insurance policy":
"I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office -- that there's no way [Trump] gets elected --
but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."
The "insurance policy" appears to have been the effort to legitimize the Trump–Russia collusion narrative so that an FBI investigation,
led by McCabe, could continue unhindered.
Department of Justice
The Department of Justice, which comprises 60 agencies , was transformed
during the Obama years. The department is forbidden by federal law from hiring employees based on political affiliation.
However, a
series
of investigative articles by PJ Media published during Eric Holder's tenure as attorney general revealed an unsettling pattern
of ideological conformity among new hires at the DOJ: Only lawyers from the progressive left were hired. Not one single moderate
or conservative lawyer made the cut. This is significant as the DOJ enjoys significant latitude in determining who will be subject
to prosecution.
The DOJ's job in Spygate was to facilitate the legal side of surveillance while providing a protective layer of cover for all
those involved. The department became a repository of information and provided a protective wall between the investigative efforts
of the FBI and the legislative branch. Importantly, it also served as the firewall within the executive branch, serving as the insulating
barrier between the FBI and Obama officials. The department had become legendary for its stonewalling tactics with Congress.
DOJ Official Bruce Ohr on Aug. 28, 2018. Ohr passed on information from Christopher Steele to the FBI.
The DOJ, which was fully aware of the actions being taken by James Comey and the FBI, also became an active element acting against
members of the Trump campaign. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, along with Mary McCord, the head of the DOJ's National Security
Division, was actively
involved in efforts to remove Gen. Michael Flynn from his position as national security adviser to President Trump.
To this day, it remains unknown which individual was responsible for making public Flynn's call with the Russian ambassador. Flynn
ultimately pleaded guilty to a process crime: lying to the FBI. There have been
questions raised in Congress regarding the possible alteration of FD-302s, the written notes of Flynn's FBI interviews. Special
counsel Robert Mueller has repeatedly deferred Flynn's sentencing hearing.
David Laufman, deputy assistant attorney general in charge of counterintelligence at the DOJ's National Security Division, played
a key role in both the Clinton email server and Russia hacking investigations. Laufman is currently the attorney for Monica McLean,
the long-time friend of Christine Blasey Ford, who recently accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while in high
school. McLean was also
employed
by the FBI for 24 years.
Bruce Ohr was a significant DOJ official who played a
key role in Spygate. Ohr held
two important positions at the DOJ: associate deputy attorney general, and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task
Force. As associate deputy attorney general, Ohr was just four offices away from then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and he
reported directly to her. As director of the task force, he was in charge of a program described as "the centerpiece of the attorney
general's drug strategy."
Ohr, one of the highest-ranking officials in the DOJ, was communicating on an ongoing basis with Steele, whom he had known
since at
least 2006 , well into mid-2017. He is also married to Nellie Ohr,
an expert on Russia and Eurasia who began working
for Fusion GPS sometime in
late 2015 . Nellie Ohr likely played a significant role in the construction of the dossier.
According to testimony from FBI agent Peter Strzok, he and Ohr met at least five times during 2016 and 2017. Strzok was working
directly with then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
Additionally, Ohr met with the FBI at least
12 times between late November 2016 and May 2017 for a series of interviews. These meetings could have been used to
transmit information from Steele to the FBI. This came after the FBI had formally severed contact with Steele in late October
or early November 2016.
John Carlin is another notable figure with the DOJ. Carlin was an assistant attorney general and the head of the DOJ's National
Security Division until October 2016. His role will be discussed below in the section on FISA abuse.
The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe held a pivotal role in what has become known as "Spygate." He directed the activities of Peter
Strzok and Lisa Page and was involved in all aspects of the Russia investigation. He was also mentioned in the infamous "insurance
policy" text message.
McCabe was a major component of the insurance policy.
On April 26, 2017, Rosenstein found himself appointed as the new deputy attorney general. He was placed into a somewhat chaotic
situation, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the ongoing Russia investigation a little less than two months
earlier, on March 2, 2017. This effectively meant that no one in the Trump administration had any oversight of the ongoing investigation
being conducted by the FBI and the DOJ.
Additionally, the leadership of then-FBI Director James Comey was coming under increased scrutiny as the result of actions taken
leading up to and following the election, particularly Comey's handling of the Clinton email investigation.
On May 9, 2017, Rosenstein wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be fired. The subject of the memo was "Restoring Public
Confidence in the FBI." Comey was fired that day. McCabe was now the acting director of the FBI and was immediately under consideration
for the permanent position.
On the same day Comey was fired, McCabe would lie during an interview with agents from the FBI's Inspection Division (INSD) regarding
apparent leaks that were used in an Oct. 30, 2016, Wall Street Journal article, "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe"
by Devlin Barrett. This would later be disclosed in the inspector general report, "A Report of Investigation of Certain Allegations
Relating to Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe."
At the time, nobody, including the INSD agents, knew that McCabe had lied, nor were the darker aspects of McCabe's role in Spygate
fully known.
In late April or early May 2016, McCabe opened a federal criminal investigation on Sessions, regarding potential lack of candor
before Congress in relation to Sessions's contacts with Russians. Sessions was unaware of the investigation.
Sessions would later be cleared of any wrongdoing by special counsel Robert Mueller.
On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein reportedly suggested to McCabe that he secretly record President Trump. This remark
was reported in a New York Times article that was sourced from memos from the now-fired McCabe, along with testimony taken from former
FBI general counsel James Baker, who relayed a conversation he had with McCabe about the occurrence. Rosenstein issued a statement
denying the accusations.
The alleged comments by Rosenstein occurred at a meeting where McCabe was "pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation
into the president." An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post, framed the conversation somewhat
differently, noting Rosenstein responded sarcastically to McCabe, saying, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"
Later, on the same day that Rosenstein had his meetings with McCabe, President Trump met with Mueller, reportedly as an interview
for the FBI director job. On May 17, 2017, the day after President Trump's meeting with Mueller -- and the day after Rosenstein's
encounters with McCabe -- Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel.
The May 17 appointment of Mueller in effect shifted control of the Russia investigation from the FBI and McCabe to Mueller. Rosenstein
would retain ultimate authority for the probe and any expansion of Mueller's investigation required authorization from Rosenstein.
Interestingly, without Comey's memo leaks, a special counsel might not have been appointed -- the FBI, and possibly McCabe, would
have remained in charge of the Russia investigation. McCabe was probably not going to become the permanent FBI director, but he was
reportedly under consideration. Regardless, without Comey's leak, McCabe would have retained direct involvement and the FBI would
have retained control.
On July 28, 2017, McCabe lied to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while under oath regarding authorization of the leaking to
The Wall Street Journal. At this point, Horowitz knew McCabe was lying, but did not yet know of the May 9 INSD interview with McCabe.
On Aug. 2, 2017, Rosenstein secretly issued Mueller a revised memo on "the scope of investigation and definition of authority"
that remains heavily redacted. The full purpose of this memo remains unknown. On this same day, Christopher Wray was named as the
new FBI director.
Two days later, on Aug. 4, 2017, Sessions announced that the FBI had created a new leaks investigation unit. Rosenstein and Wray
were tasked with overseeing all leak investigations.
That Aug. 2 memo from Rosenstein to Mueller may have been specifically designed to remove any residual FBI influence -- specifically
that of McCabe -- from the Russia investigation. The appointment of Wray as FBI director helped cement this. McCabe was finally completely
neutralized.
On March 16, 2018, McCabe was fired for lying under oath at least three different times and is currently the subject of a grand
jury investigation.
State Department
The State Department, with its many contacts within foreign governments, became a conduit for the flow of information. The transfer
of Christopher Steele's first dossier memo was personally
facilitated by Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Nuland gave approval for
FBI agent Michael Gaeta to travel to London to obtain the memo from Steele. The memo may have passed directly from her to FBI leadership.
Secretary of State John Kerry was also given a copy.
Steele was already well-known within the State Department. Following Steele's involvement in the FIFA scandal investigation, he
began to provide reports
informally to the State Department. The reports were written for a "private client" but were "shared widely within the U.S. State
Department, and sent up to Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of
the U.S.
response to Putin's annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine," the Guardian reported.
Nuland passed on parts of the Steele dossier to the FBI. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
In July 2016, when the FBI wanted to send Gaeta to visit Steele in London, the bureau
sought permission from the office of Nuland, who provided this version of events during a Feb. 4, 2018,
appearance on CBS's "Face the Nation":
"In the middle of July, when [Steele] was doing this other work and became concerned, he passed two to four pages of short
points of what he was finding and our immediate reaction to that was, this is not in our purview. This needs to go to the FBI
if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian Federation. That's
something for the FBI to investigate."
Steele also
met with Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement and former special envoy
for Libya. Steele and Winer had known each other since at least 2010. In an opinion article in The Washington Post, Winer wrote the
following:
"In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the 'dossier.' Steele's sources
suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign
but also had compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign."
In a strange turn of events, Winer also received a
separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from long-time Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. This "second dossier" had been
compiled by another longtime Clinton operative, former journalist Cody Shearer, and echoed claims made in the Steele dossier. Winer
then met with Steele in late September 2016 and gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele went on to
share this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it to corroborate his dossier.
Winer passed on memos from Christopher Steele to Victoria Nuland. (State Department)
Other foreign officials also used conduits into the State Department. Alexander Downer, Australia's high commissioner to the UK,
reportedly funneled his conversation
with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos -- later used as a reason to open the FBI's counterintelligence investigation --
directly to the U.S. Embassy in London.
"The Downer details landed with the embassy's then-chargé d'affaires, Elizabeth Dibble, who previously served as a principal deputy
assistant secretary in Mrs. Clinton's State Department," The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel wrote in a May 31, 2018,
article .
If true, this would mean that neither Australian intelligence nor the Australian government alerted the FBI to the Papadopoulos
information. What happened with the Downer details, and to whom they were ultimately relayed, remains unknown.
Curiously, details surprisingly similar to the Papadopoulos–Downer conversation show up in the
first memo written
by Steele on June 20, 2016:
"A dossier of compromising information on Hillary Clinton has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many
years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls. It has not yet
been distributed abroad, including to Trump."
Clinton Campaign and the DNC
The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee both occupied a unique position. They had the most to gain but they
also had the most to lose. And they stood willing and ready to do whatever was necessary to win. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager,
Robby Mook, is credited with being the first to raise the specter of candidate Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.
The entire Clinton campaign willfully promoted the narrative of Russia–Trump collusion despite the uncomfortable fact that they
were the ones who had engaged the services of Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele through their law firm Perkins Coie. Information
flowed from the campaign -- sometimes through Perkins Coie, other times through affiliates -- ultimately making its way into the
media and sometimes to the FBI. Information from the Clinton campaign may also have ended up in the Steele dossier.
Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, in tandem with Jake Sullivan, the senior policy adviser
to the campaign,
took the lead in briefing the press on the Trump–Russia collusion story.
Another example of this behavior can be seen from an instance when Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann
leaked information from Steele and Fusion GPS to Franklin Foer of Slate magazine. This event is described in the House Intelligence
Committee's final report on
Russian active measures
, in footnote 43 on page 57. Foer then published the article
"Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia? " on Oct. 31, 2016. The article concerns allegations regarding a server in the
Trump Tower.
The Slate article managed to attract the immediate attention of Clinton, who posted a
tweet on the same day the article was
published:
"Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank."
Attached to her tweet was a
statement from Sullivan:
"This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert
server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.
"This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization
felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists."
These statements, which were later proven to be incorrect, are all the more disturbing with the hindsight knowledge that it was
a senior Clinton/DNC lawyer who helped plant the story. And given the prepared statement by Sullivan, the Clinton campaign knew this.
This type of behavior would be engaged in repeatedly -- damning leaks leading to media stories, followed by ready attacks from
the Clinton campaign.
Alexandra Chalupa is a Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee. Chalupa
met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, Paul Manafort, and Russia.
Chalupa began investigating
Manafort in 2014. In late 2015, Chalupa expanded her opposition research on Manafort to include Trump's ties to Russia. In January
2016, Chalupa shared her information with a senior DNC official.
Chalupa's meetings with DNC and Ukrainian officials would continue. On April 26, 2016, investigative reporter Michael Isikoff
published a story
on Yahoo News about Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It was later learned from a DNC email leaked
by Wikileaks that Chalupa had been working with Isikoff
-- the same journalist Christopher Steele
leaked to
in September 2016. Manafort would later be indicted for Foreign Agents Registration Act violations that occurred during the Obama
administration.
Perkins Coie
International law firm Perkins Coie served as the legal arm for both the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Ties to Perkins Coie extended
beyond the DNC into the Obama White House.
Bob Bauer, a partner at the law firm and founder of its political law practice, served as
White House counsel to President Barack Obama throughout 2010 and 2011. Bauer was also
general counsel to Obama's campaign organization, Obama for America, in 2008 and 2012.
Perkins Coie partners Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann each played critical roles and were the ones who hired Fusion GPS and Steele.
Sussmann
personally handled the alleged hack of the DNC server. He also transmitted information, likely from Steele and Fusion GPS, to
James Baker, then-chief counsel at the FBI, and to several members of the press.
Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann. Sussmann transmitted information to FBI chief counsel James Baker and several
journalists. (Courtesy Perkins Coie)
According to a
letter
dated Oct. 24, 2017, written by Matthew Gehringer, general counsel at Perkins Coie, the firm was approached by Fusion GPS founder
Glenn Simpson in early March 2016 regarding the possibility of hiring Fusion GPS to continue opposition research into the Trump campaign.
Simpson's overtures were successful, and in April 2016, Perkins Coie
hired
Fusion GPS on behalf of the DNC.
Sometime in April or May 2016, Fusion GPS
hired Christopher Steele. During
this same period, Fusion also reportedly
hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr. Steele would complete his first memo on June 20, 2016,
and send it to Fusion via enciphered mail.
Perkins Coie appears to have also been acting as a conduit between the DNC and the FBI.
Documents suggest that Sussmann was feeding information to FBI general counsel James Baker and at least one journalist ahead
of the FBI's application for a FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
The information provided by Sussmann may have been used by the FBI as "corroborating information."
Obama Administration
The Obama administration provided a simultaneous layer of protection and facilitation for the entire effort. One example is
provided by
Section
2.3 of Executive Order 12333 , also known as Obama's
data-sharing
order . With the passage of the order, agencies and individuals were able to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance
simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that was useful to a particular mission.
Section 2.3 had been expected to be finalized by early to mid-2016. Instead, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn't
sign off on Section 2.3 until Dec. 15, 2016. The order was finalized when Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed it on Jan. 3, 2017.
The reason for the delay could relate to the fact that while the executive order made it easier to share intelligence between
agencies, it also limited certain types of information from going to the White House.
An example of this was provided by Evelyn Farkas during a March 2, 2017,
MSNBC interview , where she detailed how the Obama administration
gathered and disseminated intelligence on the Trump team:
"I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill 'Get as much information as you can. Get as
much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.'
"The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, [they] would try
to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. That's why you have the
leaking."
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia Evelyn Farkas on May 6, 2014. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Many of the Obama administration's efforts appear to have been structural in nature, such as establishing new procedures or creating
impediments to oversight that enabled much of the surveillance abuse to occur.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was appointed by Obama in 2011. From the very start, he found his duties throttled by the
attorney general's office. According to congressional
testimony by Horowitz:
"We got access to information up to 2010 in all of these categories. No law changed in 2010. No policy changed. It was simply
a decision by the General Counsel's Office in 2010 that they viewed, now, the law differently. And as a result, they weren't going
to give us that information."
These new restrictions were
put in place by Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole.
On Aug. 5, 2014, Horowitz and other inspectors general sent a
letter to Congress asking for unimpeded access to all records. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates responded on July 20, 2015,
with a 58-page
memorandum . The memo specifically denied the inspector general access to any information collected under Title III -- including
intercepted communications and national security letters.
The New York Times recently
disclosed that national security letters were used in the surveillance of the Trump campaign.
At other times, the Obama administration's efforts were more direct. The
Intelligence Community assessment was released
internally on Jan. 5, 2017. On this same day, Obama held an undisclosed White House meeting to discuss the dossier with national
security adviser Susan Rice, FBI Director James Comey, and Yates. Rice would later send herself an email
documenting
the meeting.
The following day, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they
gave Obama. Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey,
Brennan, and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the Intelligence Community assessment and the Steele dossier.
Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later
explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview
why:
"Because that was the part that the leaders of the Intelligence Community agreed he needed to be told about."
Shortly after Comey's meeting with Trump, both the Trump–Comey meeting and the existence of the dossier were leaked to CNN. The
significance of the meeting was material, as Comey
noted in
a Jan. 7 memo he wrote:
"Media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write
that the FBI has the material."
Clapper leaked information to CNN, after which he publicly condemned the leaks. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The media had widely dismissed the dossier as unsubstantiated and, therefore, unreportable. It was only after learning that Comey
briefed Trump that
CNN reported
on the dossier. It was later
revealed that DNI James Clapper personally leaked Comey's meeting with Trump to CNN.
The Obama administration also directly participated in a series of
intelligence unmaskings
, the process whereby a U.S. citizen's identity is revealed from collected surveillance. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha
Power reportedly engaged in hundreds of unmasking requests. Rice has admitted to doing the same.
The Obama administration engaged in the ultimately successful effort to oust Trump's newly appointed national security adviser,
Gen. Michael Flynn. Yates, along with Mary McCord, head of the DOJ's National Security Division,
led that effort
.
Executive Order 13762
President Barack Obama issued a last-minute executive order on Jan. 13, 2017, that altered the line of succession within the DOJ.
The action was not done in consultation with the incoming Trump administration.
Acting Attorney General Sally Yates was fired on Jan. 30, 2017, by a newly inaugurated President Trump for refusing to uphold
the president's executive order limiting travel from certain terror-prone countries. Yates was initially supposed to serve in her
position until Jeff Sessions was confirmed as attorney general.
Obama's executive order placed the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia next in line behind the department's senior leadership.
The attorney at the time was Channing Phillips.
Phillips was first hired by former Attorney General Eric Holder in 1994 for a position in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office. Phillips,
after serving as a senior adviser to Holder, stayed on after he was replaced by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
It appears the Obama administration was hoping the Russia investigation would default to Channing in the event Sessions was forced
to recuse himself from the investigation. Sessions, whose confirmation hearings began three days before the order, was already coming
under intense scrutiny.
The implementation of the order may also tie into Yates's efforts to remove Gen. Michael Flynn over his call with the Russian
ambassador.
Trump ignored the succession order, as he is legally allowed to do, and instead appointed Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the
Eastern District of Virginia, as acting attorney general on Jan. 30, 2017, the same day Yates was fired.
Trump issued a new executive order on Feb. 9, 2017, the same day Sessions was sworn in, reversing Obama's prior order.
On March 10, 2017, Trump fired 46 Obama-era U.S. attorneys, including Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. These firings
appear to have been unexpected.
Media
In some respects, the media has played the most disingenuous of roles. Areas of investigation that historically would have proven
irresistible to reporters of the past have been steadfastly ignored. False narratives have been all-too-willingly promoted and facts
ignored. Fusion GPS personally made a
series of payments to several as-of-yet-
unnamed reporters .
The majority of the mainstream media has represented positions of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
Steele met with members of certain media with relative frequency. In
September 2016 ,
he met with a number of U.S. journalists for "The New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN," according
to The Guardian. It was during this period that Steele met with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News.
In mid-October
2016, Steele returned to New York and met with reporters again. Toward the end of October, Steele spoke via Skype with Mother
Jones reporter David Corn.
Leaking, including felony leaking of classified information, has been widespread. The Carter Page FISA warrant -- likely the
unredacted version -- has been in the possession of The Washington Post and The New York Times since March 2017. Traditionally, the
intelligence community leaked to The Washington Post while the DOJ leaked to sources within The New York Times. This was a historical
pattern that stood until this election. The leaking became so widespread, even this tradition was broken.
On April 3, 2017, BuzzFeed reporter Ali Watkins wrote the article "
A Former Trump Adviser Met With a Russian Spy ." In the article, she identified "Male-1," referred to in
court documents
relating to the case of Russian spy Evgeny Buryakov, as Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who had provided the FBI with assistance
in the case. Just over a week later, on April 11, 2017, a Washington Post article, "
FBI Obtained FISA Warrant to Monitor Former Trump Adviser Carter Page ," confirmed the existence of the October 2016 Page FISA
warrant.
The information contained within both articles likely came via felony leaks from James Wolfe, former director of security
for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who was arrested on June 7, 2018, and
charged with one count of lying
to the FBI. Wolfe's indictment
alleges that he was leaking classified information to multiple reporters over an extended period of time.
Reporter Ali Watkins likely received the undredacted FISA application on Carter Page from James Wolfe.
It appears probable that Wolfe leaked unredacted copies of the Page FISA application. According to the
indictment , Wolfe
exchanged 82 text messages with
Watkins on March 17, 2017. That same evening they engaged in a 28-minute phone call. The original Page FISA application is 83 pages
long, including one final signatory page.
In the public version of the application, there are 37 fully redacted pages. In addition to that, several other pages have redactions
for all but the header. There are only two pages in the entire document that contain no redactions.
Why would Wolfe bother to send 37 pages of complete redactions? It seems more than plausible that Wolfe took pictures of the original
unredacted FISA application and sent them by text to Watkins.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has repeatedly
stated that evidence within the FISA application
shows the counterintelligence agencies were abused by the Obama administration. Most of the mainstream media has known this.
Despite this, most major news organizations for over two years have promoted the Russia-collusion narrative. Despite ample evidence
having come out to the contrary, they have not admitted they were wrong, likely because doing so would mean they would have to admit
their complicity.
Foreign Intelligence
UK and Australian intelligence agencies also played meaningful roles during the 2016 presidential election.
Britain's GCHQ was involved in
collecting information regarding then-candidate Trump and transmitting it to the United States. In the summer of 2016, Robert
Hannigan, the head of GCHQ, flew from London to
meet personally
with then-CIA Director John Brennan, The Guardian reported.
Former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan in this file photo. Hannigan transmitted information regarding Donald Trump to John
Brennan in the summer of 2016. (Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images)
Hannigan's meeting was noteworthy because Brennan wasn't Hannigan's counterpart. That position belonged to NSA Director Mike Rogers.
In the following year, Hannigan
abruptly announced
his retirement on Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration.
As GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted
after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant
Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly
so.
Christopher Steele, who authored the dossier on Trump, was an MI6 agent while the agency was headed by Sir Richard Dearlove. Steele
retains close ties with Dearlove.
Dearlove has ties to most of the parties mentioned. It was he who advised Steele and his business partner, Chris Burrows, to
work with a top British government official to pass along information to the FBI in the fall of 2016. He also was a speaker at
the July 2016 Cambridge symposium that Halper invited Carter
Page to attend.
Dearlove knows Halper through their
mutual association at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. Dearlove also knows Sir Iain Lobban, a former head of GCHQ, who is
an advisory board member at British strategic intelligence
and advisory firm Hakluyt , which was founded by former MI6 members and
retains close ties to UK intelligence services.
Halper has historical connections to Hakluyt through Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has
co-authored two books.
Downer, who
met Papadopoulos in a May 2016 meeting
established through a chain
of two intermediaries, served on the advisory board of Hakluyt
from 2008 to 2014. He reportedly still
maintains contact with Hakluyt officials. Information from his meeting with Papadopoulos was later used by the FBI to establish
the bureau's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. Downer has changed his version of events multiple times.
The Steele dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources. One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the
former
British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood later
relayed information regarding the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who dispatched David Kramer, a fellow at the McCain Institute,
to London to meet with Steele in November 2016. McCain would later admit in a Jan. 11, 2017,
statement that he had personally passed on the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey.
Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations
-- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can
we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia.
In a Twitter post , Trump wrote that
the "key Allies called to ask not to release" the documents.
Questions to be asked are why is it that two of our allies would find themselves so opposed to the release of these classified
documents that a coordinated plea would be made directly to the president? And why would these same allies have even the slightest
idea of what was contained in these classified U.S. documents?
Britain and Australia appear to know full well what those documents contain, and their attempt to prevent their public release
appears to be because they don't want their role in events surrounding the 2016 presidential election to be made public.
Fusion GPS/Orbis/Christopher Steele
Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is co-founder of Fusion GPS, along with Peter Fritsch and Tom Catan. Fusion
was hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign through law firm Perkins Coie to produce and disseminate the Steele dossier used against
Trump. The dossier would later be the primary evidence used to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page on Oct. 21, 2016.
The company was hired by the Clinton campaign and the DNC–through law firm Perkins Coie–to produce the dossier on Trump.
Christopher Steele, who retains close ties to UK intelligence, worked for MI6 from 1987 until his retirement in 2009, when he
and his partner, Chris Burrows, founded Orbis Intelligence. Steele
maintains contact with British intelligence,
Sir Richard Dearlove
, and UK intelligence firm Hakluyt.
Steele appears to have been
represented
by lawyer Adam Waldman, who also represented Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. We know this from
texts sent by Waldman. On April 10, 2017, Waldman sent this to Sen. Mark Warner:
"Hi. Steele: would like to get a bi partisan letter from the committee; Assange: I convinced him to make serious and important
concessions and am discussing those w DOJ; Deripaska: willing to testify to congress but interested in state of play w Manafort.
I will be with him next tuesday for a week."
Steele also appears to have
lobbied on behalf of Deripaska, who was discussed in
emails between Bruce Ohr and Steele that were recently
disclosed by the Washington Examiner:
"Steele said he was 'circulating some recent sensitive Orbis reporting' on Deripaska that suggested Deripaska was not a 'tool'
of the Kremlin. Steele said he would send the reporting to a name that is redacted in the email."
Fusion GPS was also employed by Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in a previous case. Veselnitskaya was involved in litigation
pitting Russian firm Prevezon Holdings against British-American financier William Browder. Veselnitskaya hired U.S. law firm BakerHostetler,
who, in turn, hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Browder. Veselnitskaya was one of the participants at the June 2016 Trump Tower
meeting, at which she discussed the
Magnitsky Act .
Fox News reported on Nov. 9, 2017, that Simpson
met with Veselnitskaya immediately before and after the Trump Tower meeting.
A declassified top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report released on April 26, 2017, revealed that government
agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and NSA, had improperly accessed Americans' communications. The FBI specifically provided outside
contractors with access to raw surveillance data on American citizens without proper oversight.
Communications and other data of members of the Trump campaign may have been accessed in this way.
Nellie Ohr, the wife of high-ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr, was hired by Fusion GPS to work on the dossier on Trump.
Bruce and Nellie Ohr have
known Simpson since at least 2010 and have known Steele since at least 2006. The Ohrs and Simpson worked together on a
DOJ report in 2010 . In that report, Nellie Ohr's biography
lists her as working for Open Source Works, which is part of the CIA. Simpson met with Bruce Ohr
before and after the 2016 election.
Bruce Ohr had been in
contact repeatedly with Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign -- while Steele was constructing his dossier. Ohr later
actively shared information he received from Steele with the FBI, after the agency had terminated Steele as a source. Interactions
between Ohr and Steele stretched for months into the first year of Trump's presidency and were documented in a number of FD-302s
-- memos that summarize interviews with him by the FBI.
Spy Traps
In an effort to put forth evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it appears that several different spy traps
were set, with varying degrees of success. Many of these efforts appear to center around Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos
and involve London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, who has
ties to Western intelligence, particularly in the UK.
Papadopoulos and Mifsud
both worked
at the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP). Mifsud appears to have joined LCILP around
November
2015 . Papadopoulos reportedly
joined
LCILP sometime in late February 2016 after leaving Ben Carson's presidential campaign. However, some
reports indicate Papadopoulos joined LCILP in November
or December of 2015. Mifsud and Papadopoulos reportedly never crossed paths
until March 14, 2016, in Italy.
Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to several Russians, including Olga Polonskaya, whom Mifsud introduced as "Putin's niece," and
Ivan Timofeev, an official at a state-sponsored think tank called the Russian International Affairs Council. Both Papadopoulos and
Mifsud were interviewed by the FBI. Papadopoulos was ultimately charged with a process crime and was recently sentenced to 14 days
in prison for lying to the FBI. Mifsud was never charged by the FBI.
Throughout this period, Papadopoulos continuously pushed for meetings between Trump campaign officials and Russian contacts but
was ultimately unsuccessful in establishing any meetings.
Papadopoulos met with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer on May 10, 2016. The Papadopoulos–Downer meeting has been portrayed
as a
chance encounter in a bar. That does not appear to be the case.
Papadopoulos was introduced
to Downer through a chain of two intermediaries who said Downer wanted to meet with Papadopoulos. Another individual happened
to
be in London at exactly the same time: the FBI's head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap. The purpose of Priestap's visit
remains unknown.
The Papadopoulos–Downer
meeting was later used to establish the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. It was repeatedly
reported that Papadopoulos told Downer that Russia had Hillary Clinton's emails. This is incorrect.
Foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign was approached by several individuals with ties to UK and U.S. intelligence
agencies. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
According to Downer, Papadopoulos at some point
mentioned the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
"During that conversation, he [Papadopoulos] mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the
lead-up to the election, which may be damaging,'' Downer told
The Australian about the Papadopoulos meeting in an April 2018 article. "He didn't say dirt, he said material that could be damaging
to her. No, he said it would be damaging. He didn't say what it was."
Downer, while serving as Australia's foreign minister, was
responsible for one of the largest foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation: $25 million from the Australian government.
Unconfirmed media reports, including a Jan. 12, 2017,
BBC article , have suggested that the FBI attempted
to obtain two FISA warrants in June and July 2016 that were denied by the FISA court. It's likely that Papadopoulos was an intended
target of these failed FISAs.
Interestingly, there is no mention of Papadopoulos in the Steele dossier. Paul Manafort, Carter Page, former Trump lawyer Michael
Cohen, Gen. Michael Flynn, and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski are all listed in the Steele dossier.
Papadopoulos may have started out assisting the FBI or CIA and later discovered that he was being set up for surveillance himself.
After failing to obtain a spy warrant on the Trump campaign using Papadopoulos, the FBI set its sights on campaign volunteer Carter
Page. By this time, the counterintelligence investigation was in the process of being established, and we know now that it was formalized
with no official intelligence. The FBI needed some sort of legal cover. They needed a retroactive warrant. And they got one on Oct.
21, 2016. The Page FISA warrant would be renewed three times and remain in force until September 2017.
Stefan Halper met with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a
Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page's July 2016
Moscow trip. As noted previously, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove was a speaker at the symposium. Halper and Dearlove have known
each other for years and maintain several mutual associations.
Page was already known to the FBI. The Page FISA warrant application references the Buryakov spy case and an FBI interview with
Page. Current information suggests there was only
one meeting between Page and the FBI in 2016. It happened on March 2, 2016. It was in relation to Victor Podobnyy, who was named
in the Buryakov case.
Page, who
cooperated with the FBI on the case, almost certainly was providing testimony or details against Podobnyy. Page had been contacted
by Podobnyy in 2013 and had previously provided information to the FBI. Buryakov
pleaded guilty on March 11, 2016 -- nine days after Page met with the FBI on the case -- and was
sentenced to 30 months in prison on May 25, 2016. On April 5, 2017, Buryakov was granted early release and was
deported to Russia.
FBI informant Stefan Halper approached Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes
said in August that exculpatory evidence
on Page exists that wasn't included by the DOJ and the FBI in the FISA application and subsequent renewals. The exculpatory evidence
likely relates specifically to Page's role in the Buryakov case.
If the FBI failed to disclose Page's cooperation with the bureau or materially misrepresented his involvement in its application
to the FISA Court, it means that the FBI's Woods procedures, which govern FISA applications, were violated.
Page has not been arrested or charged with any crime related to the investigation.
FISA Abuse
Admiral Mike Rogers, while director of the NSA, was personally responsible for
uncovering an unprecedented level of FISA abuse that would later be documented in a 99-page
unsealed FISA
court ruling . As the FISA court noted in the April 26, 2017, ruling, the abuses had been occurring since at least November 2015:
"The FBI had disclosed raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information, to private contractors.
"Private contractors had access to raw FISA information on FBI storage systems.
"Contractors had access to raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI's requests."
The FISA Court report is particularly focused on the FBI:
"The Court is concerned about the FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar
disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported."
The FISA Court
disclosed that illegal NSA database searches were endemic. Private contractors, employed by the FBI, were given full access to
the NSA database. Once in the contractors' possession, the data couldn't be traced.
In April 2016, after Rogers became aware of
improper
contractor access to raw FISA data on March 9, 2016, he
directed the NSA's Office
of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702."
On April 18, 2016, Rogers shut down all outside contractor access to raw FISA information -- specifically outside contractors
working for the FBI.
Then-NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers on May 23, 2017. Rogers uncovered widespread abuse of FISA data by the FBI. (Saul
Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin filed the government's proposed
2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was
part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016,
report by the Office
of the Inspector General and associated FISA abuse to the FISA Court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose
Rogers's ongoing Section 702 compliance review.
The following day, on Sept. 27, 2016, Carlin
announced his resignation, effective Oct. 15, 2016.
After receiving a briefing by the NSA compliance officer on Oct. 20, 2016, detailing
numerous "about query"
violations from the 702 NSA compliance audit, Rogers shut down all "about query" activity the next day and
reported his findings
to the DOJ. "About queries" are searches based on communications containing a reference "about" a surveillance target but that are
not "to" or "from" the target.
On Oct. 21, 2016, the DOJ and the FBI sought and received a Title I FISA probable-cause order authorizing electronic surveillance
on Carter Page from the FISA Court.
At this point, the FISA Court was still unaware of the Section 702 violations.
On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally
informed
the FISA Court of his findings. On Oct. 26, 2016, Rogers appeared formally before the FISA Court and presented the written findings
of his audit.
The FISA Court had been unaware of the query violations until they were presented to the court by Rogers.
Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications in order to avoid raising suspicions
at the FISA Court ahead of receiving the Page FISA warrant.
The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.
While all this was transpiring, DNI James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter submitted a
recommendation that Rogers be removed from his post as NSA director.
The move to fire Rogers, which ultimately failed, originated sometime in mid-October 2016 -- exactly when Rogers was preparing
to present his findings to the FISA Court.
The Insurance Policy
Ever since the release of FBI text messages revealing the existence of an "insurance policy," the term has been the subject of
wide speculation.
Some observers have suggested that the insurance policy was the FISA spy warrant used to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter
Page and, by extension, other members of the Trump campaign. This interpretation is too narrow and fails to capture the underlying
meaning of the text.
The insurance policy was the actual process of establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative.
It encompassed actions undertaken in late 2016 and early 2017, including the leaking of the Steele dossier and James Clapper's
leaks of James Comey's briefing to President Trump. The intent behind these actions was simple. The legitimization of the investigation
into the Trump campaign.
The strategy involved the recusal of Trump officials with the intent that Andrew McCabe would end up running the investigation.
The Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the
foundation for the Russia narrative.
The intelligence community, led by CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper, used the dossier as a launching pad for creating
their Intelligence Community assessment.
This report, which was presented to Obama in December 2016, despite NSA Director Mike Rogers having only moderate confidence in
its assessment, became one of the core pieces of the narrative that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections.
Through intelligence community leaks, and in collusion with willing media outlets, the narrative that Russia helped Trump win
the elections was aggressively pushed throughout 2017.
Spygate
Spygate represents the biggest political scandal in our nation's history. A sitting administration actively colluded with a political
campaign to affect the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Government agencies were weaponized and a complicit media spread
intelligence community leaks as facts.
But a larger question remains: How long has the United States been subject to interference from the intelligence community and
our political agencies? Was the 2016 presidential election a one-time aberration, or is this episode symptomatic of a larger pattern
extending back decades?
The intensity, scale, and coordination suggest something greater than overzealous actions taken during a single election. They
represent a unified reaction of the establishment to a threat posed by a true outsider -- a reaction that has come to be known as
Spygate.
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed
on Twitter @themarketswork.
"... "After reading several articles, it seemed clear that key difficulties for Russians communicating in English include: definite and indefinite articles, the use of presuppositions and correct usage of say/tell and said/told. Throughout 2017, I constructed a corpus of Guccifer 2.0's communications and analyzed the frequency of different types of mistakes. The results of this work corroborate Professor Connolly's assessment. ..."
"... Overall, it appears Guccifer 2.0 could communicate in English quite well but chose to use inconsistently broken English at times in order to give the impression that it wasn't his primary language. The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian. ..."
"... Access and motive . . .here are two who had both: Seth Rich and Imran Awan. That our fake news organizations have no interest in either, that should tell you something. ..."
"I didn't really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for
now." - exce
The State Department paused its investigation of the Secretary's emails so as not to
interfere with the Mueller investigation. Here we see Taibbi writes an exhaustive
condemnation of the Western press while leaving out the very crux of the story, the very
source of the stolen DNC emails was Clapper and Brennan pretending to be Guccifer 2.0.
Pitiful attempt at redemption there Matt. Seriously, go **** your self.
"After reading several articles, it seemed clear that key difficulties for Russians
communicating in English include: definite and indefinite articles, the use of
presuppositions and correct usage of say/tell and said/told. Throughout 2017, I constructed a corpus of Guccifer
2.0's communications and analyzed the frequency of different types of mistakes. The
results of this work
corroborate
Professor Connolly's assessment.
Overall, it appears Guccifer 2.0 could communicate in English quite well but chose to use
inconsistently broken English at times in order to give the impression that it wasn't his
primary language. The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the
typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.
To date, Connolly's language study has not drawn any significant objections or
criticism."
DNC emails were downloaded at 22.3Mbs, a speed which is not possible to achieve remotely, or even local. It is the exact
download speed of a thumb drive.
All russian "fingerprints" were embedded in error codes, which had to be affirmatively copied. They were not an accident.
And please remind me, who exactly was it that examined the DNC servers and pointed at Russia?
Access and motive . . .here are two who had both: Seth Rich and Imran Awan. That our fake news organizations have no
interest in either, that should tell you something.
"... The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections. ..."
"... At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this. ..."
"... I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy. ..."
"... It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further. ..."
"... They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. ..."
"... Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal. ..."
"... The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue; ..."
"... Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law. ..."
"... It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.) ..."
There were no major disagreements between Mueller and his managers at the U.S. Department of
Justice (DOJ).
The Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 election were exposed and charged -- but no
American was charged with any effort to conspire with Moscow and hijack the election.
the "Steele dossier" that was the main FISA evidence was paid for with funds
from Hillary Clinton
's campaign and the Democratic Party;
Christopher Steele, the dossier's author, had told a senior DOJ official he was desperate to
defeat Trump;
most of the dossier was not verified before it was used as evidence of alleged Trump-Russia
collusion; and
agents collected statements from key defendants such as Papadopoulos and Carter Page during
interactions with an FBI informant that strongly suggested their innocence.
Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and
every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.
An upcoming DOJ inspector general's report should trigger the beginning of that
accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying
all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials. " The Hill
------------
Pilgrims, the seditious conspiracy to depose the elected president of the United States for
conspiracy to commit treason with the Government of the Russian Federation has been
defeated.
The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously
used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make
an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to
overturn the results of elections.
At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary
Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever,
clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the
even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British
intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose
staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this.
The leftist press is already discounting the results of Mueller's investigation while
gloating over how long the Democratic held House of Representatives can continue to search
through Trump's life trying to find criminality.
AG Barr should stand Mueller up next to him at a press conference to make clear the results
of his report and to answer questions about it. After that the prosecutions should begin.
pl
I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee –
Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled
against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this
conspiracy.
It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a
strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' –
notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which
case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further.
The argument that declassification of relevant documentation would harm the intelligence
relationship between the U.S. and U.K. has clearly been made with great emphasis from this
side.
In fact, it is pure bollocks. A serious investigation on your side, which could lead to
the kind of clean-out which should have happened when the scale of the corruption of
intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq became clear, might pave the way for us
to reconstruct reasonably functional intelligence services.
Doing this on both sides of the Atlantic might pave the way for a reconstruction of an
intelligence relationship which was actually beneficial to both countries, as in recent years
it patently has not been.
Whether there is a realistic prospect of people on your side opening the cans of worms on
ours, as well as your own, of course remains a moot point.
I'm glad the Steele affair has been examined at the American end -
"They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with
Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US
political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and
spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York.
"
What about the UK end? We're fussing over some little local difficulties in the UK at the
moment and at our end the questions still remain - Who in the UK authorised it and how high did it go?
The problem with criminal prosecution is one must cite a Brit or US law which was violated.
The only ones in US law that I am aware of stipulate that the plotting must be by means of
violence, "by force". All this appears to me to be only the propagation of rumors.
I think it might be more the investigation of the propagation of rumours. Think back to that election campaign, and to the period before the inauguration.
Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an
odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers
nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it
turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal.
With respect it is not propagating rumours to ask how that happened. As for my own
interest in the affair, it is not propagating rumours to ask how a senior UK ex-Intelligence
Officer comes to be mixed up in it all. I suppose I started to look on it as rather more than a prank or a few cogs slipping when
that senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer got whisked away to a safe house. We're a penny
pinching lot over here and we don't run to that sort of thing for nothing.
An investigation could certainly be predicated on the reasonable suspicion that Steele, et
al, conspired to defraud the United States, in this case a purposeful and knowing smear of a
candidate for office; also, another potential violation could be lying to the FBI, T 18 USC
1001.
The problem, as I see it, is sorting out the malignant from the merely incompetent. As I've
argued many times, the dossier should have been dismissed from the outset as a pile of
garbage, empty of actionable content, because the ultimate sources could not be vetted: the
information could not be said to be either credible or reliable. The information was acted on
by screening it behind the reliabilty and credibility, so called, of Steele. So it would be
necessary to show that Steele knew that the information, point by point, was false. This
could be difficult. Steele's first line of defense would be that he threw everything that he
heard from anyone at all into the mix in the expectation that the "professionals" would
figure it out.
Yes, they were all partisan, Steele, his sources, his bosses, the so called
professionals, and their partisanship would be easy to prove; and yes, almost assuredly their
partisanship contributed, perhaps even explained, their defective judgement as to how to
handle the scurrilous information, especially on the part of the so called professionals, but
proving they actually knew the materials to be false would be difficult.
They couldn't know
that it was false because they had no ability to run down the sources. The professionals
would defend themselves by saying they had no ability to vet the sources but the information
represented such a serious security threat that they had no alternative but to try to vet the
information by launching the investigation against the targets. This puts the cart before the
horse, represents an astonishing lack of judgement, especially considering the "exalted"
positions in the Intel Community the people exercising the bad judgement occupied, but there
it is - "we thought we were doing the right thing."
Perhaps this defense could be overcome by
demonstrating that people at such high and important heights of government could not possible
be so stupid... maybe.
And of course we have the orchestrated leaks to various media, the orchestrated unmaskings,
all of which kept the media frenzy fired up. All in all, it was the greatest political dirty
trick ever attempted in American Politics, and did devastating damage to both domestic
tranquility and national security. Trump survived, but the damage done is incalculable.
So It pains me greatly to think that the reckoning will likely have to be political rather
than criminal because the malice that can be demonstrated is so admixed and even overshadowed
by incompetence and judgement flaws; and even a political reckoning given the state of the
country is so uncertain.
I hope that I am wrong and that some kind of prosecution can be fashioned because of the
sheer enormity of violence that was done to our electoral system, surpassing by far the
chickenshit case Mueller brought against the Russian troll farm; but I fear that I am right.
It hurts to think that so much damage can be caused by scheming little political weasels and
that they all may well walk away scot free; and even be lionized by their political confreres
as having tried to do the right thing. This is the state of American politics today!!!
I see that some of the midgets on horseback are saying that they will bring Mueller before
congress to explain himself. Their knight in shining armor has failed to return with the holy
grail. A couple even suggested that perhaps Mueller has been influenced by the Russians or
somehow intimated by Trump.
The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue;
and that
+ all the crazy Marxism (social and economic), bad immigration policy and Green New Deal is
going to doom the Democrats in 2020. They look like they are jumping off a final sake fueled
banzai charge. Maybe they think the best defense is a good offense re; the prosecutions that
should happen. What is the chance that Mueller will pass *all* he has learned to help get the
criminal cases under way?
On 13 July 2018, when announcing the indictment of 12 Russian military officers by the
Mueller group for "conspiring to interfere" in the 2016 presidential election, Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein admitted that no "interference" actually happened. In this
video of his announcement, starting at 5 minutes, 52 seconds into it and ending at the 6
minute, 5 second mark, he says--
"There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime.
There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election
result."
Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results
of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly
pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law.
However, I am concerned that the new attorney general, William Barr, will not do so based
on his past associations and work. I hope I am wrong about that, but I am not optimistic.
It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly
unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a
weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection"
operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such
obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.)
I'm wrestling with the idea that 'twas ever thus and now with the internet its workings
are revealed to a "lay" audience with no connection to the dark arts of the spy business. But
I am curious, with the good Colonel's indulgence, if the new tools of the trade have made
things which should be secret not possible to be kept secret?
Amen to the prosecutions. If there is seen to be no accountability for this fraud then we are
seriously damaging what's left of democracy. Who, in their right mind, is going to publicly
support and assist a political candidate who is not "Swamp approved" if they face the threat
of thereby triggering their own, and their family's destruction by the judicial system?
I suggest that even a pardon is not enough for those entrapped in this mess. There needs
to be restitution.
To put that another way, in my opinion, "birther" allegations could be passed off as
political tactics. Nobody got hurt. It is just good luck that Russiagate hasn't resulted in
suicide or worse - so far.
I certainly agree that consequences must be brought to bear: lying politicians without a
shred of evidence, nor did they offer any for their lies; press for their utter and complete
malfeasance and corruption without a shred of evidence, the doj/fbi corrupted and coup
plotting officials,and finally the shame to all who shrieked about "evil" putin, russia the
aggressor, etc. It has set our discourse back decades, forced any critics of this insanity
into the shadows, and completely killed any attempt at normal diplomacy between nations.
I noted one astute writer as equating this russiagate insanity to the lies surrounding wmd
and the destruction of iraq. Close. The damage from this criminality is incalculable!
Will the shrillest of all in the press lose their jobs? Nah, not a chance. Prob get raise
or promotion.Will the brennans, clintons, clappers, et al do the perp walk. Nah, not a
chance. High paid lawyers will tie the courts up for years if not decades.
And america has the institutional memory of a gnat. And of course, the question is as to
high up did this criminality go? I personally do not believe it is a question-it is obvious
to me. The major question for me is how high up the prosecution, if any, will go.
Problem is...who's going to do the prosecuting?
The DOJ - protector of the swamp - has become thoroughly corrupted as an arm of the
Democrat-media party.
Should (can) Trump appoint a special prosecutor as far as possible from the DOJ?
The president might use this and any Republican-led prosecutions as leverage to work out
deals that will allow him to achieve his agenda. I think he'll need to given how the
Democrats intend to use their house majority to launch investigations and hearings to find
something, anything to howl about and impede his agenda.
Still need to see the full report. I hope it is releasable. Otherwise the conspiracy theories
or leaks will never let up. The article cited is a partisan opinion piece, not a news report.
It accepts the fallback stance that yes, crimes were committed but collusion by Trump was not
among them. This actually seems possible if only in light of the chaotic condition of the
campaign.
That said, I would not be surprised to find collusion discounted. Not that the Russians
didn't interfere. That would be entirely in character. But I don't know any reason for
supposing that they would have a better understanding of American political dynamics than the
Americans who make good livings being the best in that arena. The Russians seem to have been
doing the same things as numerous other players. They shouldn't have been in that game, but
there is no strong reason for according them Superman status. Their strongest feature seems
to have been sheer quantity. Outrage over their actions often seems to flow from a poor grasp
of the real nature of normal political process.
"The Russians seem to have been doing the same things..."
Multiple members of the FBI and DOJ seem to have been interfering in the 2016 Presidential
election. How many other federal and state elections did they interfere with?
Can you cite a single piece of hard evidence, not simply allegation, that proves the Russians
interfered in the 2016 election? If so, please cite it, since I know of none. Thank you.
"... Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president ..."
"... The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup. ..."
"... It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. ..."
"... As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry. Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch ..."
"... I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way. ..."
"... Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller to prove. ..."
"... It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the "national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon. ..."
"... It is time to build cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony. Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it. The truth will work better. ..."
Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy
that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump
president. They did this fully aware that Trump was a repulsive, narcissistic ass clown who
bragged about "grabbing women by the pussy" and jabbered about building "a big, beautiful
wall" and making the Mexican government pay for it. They did this fully aware of the fact
that Donald Trump had zero experience in any political office whatsoever, was a loudmouth
bigot, and was possibly out of his gourd on amphetamines half the time. The American people
did not care. They were so disgusted with being conned by arrogant, two-faced, establishment
stooges like the Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama that they chose to put Donald Trump
in office, because, fuck it, what did they have to lose?
The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by
inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the
American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives,
getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote
this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to
conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every
component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence
agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to
remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of
amounts to an attempted soft coup.
It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was
nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. The Clintons once
again, both Bill and Hillary, have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug in the White
House to the status of some kind of martyr. What a country America it is. One thing should be
clear however. Any politician or media pundit that towed the pro-Clintonista line should be
barred from public office or the media forever.
As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary,
they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry.
Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch. There is one difference between Typhoid
Mary, and Bill and Hillary: Typhoid Mary didn't realize what she was doing, the Clintons did!
sorry to double post, but it just occurred to me that they pulled a classic DC move: if you
have something humiliating or horrible to admit, do it on a friday night.
i have to wonder if the entire western media is cynically praying for a (coincidentally
distracting) school shooting or terrorist attack within the next two days.
I have close friends that have been on the MSNBC/Maddow Kool-Ade for years. Constantly
declaring Mueller was on the verge of closing in on Trump and associates for treason with the
Russians. On Friday night after dinner at our home, the TV was tuned to MSNBC so they could
watch their spiritual leader Rachel Maddow....what a pitiful sight (both Maddow and friends).
No one was going to jail or be impeached for conspiring with Putin.....how on how could that
be true. Putin personally stole the election from Clinton and THEY are just going to let him
walk was the declaration a few feet from my chair. Normally, I would recommend grieve
counseling, but they are still my friends ... now they can go back to blaming Bernie for
Clinton's loss. Maybe I will recommend grieve counseling!
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Mar 23, 2019 2:27:18 PM |
link
@dltravers: Apart from the "goyim" you may be right.. But if you want to claim with that
Trumps opponents where under the pressure of the Zionists, you got it all wrong man.. ;) No
presidents been more under the Zionist thumb than DJT.
That ofc doesnt make Hillarys Saudi and Muslim brotherhood connections better.. ;)
Anyway, cheers to the end of this BS! And lets hope that Trump has now payed off his debts
with Adelson now that he secured Bibis reelection. But dont hold your breath.. ;)
"very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this
moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life".
I wish so, but that's not how the exceptional nation of US of A works, as demonstrated by
the Iraq WMD fiasco case. In fact, very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit
(about Saddam's WMD" BS) is alive and well, spreading more BS. What is even more depressing
is that the huge chunk of this exceptional nation cannot have enough of the BS and is
chanting "give me more, give me more...".
The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion.
However some good things have come out of the investigation. It cost taxpayers 2 million
but recouped over 25 million from those convicted of fraud and tax evasion.
And its not over, Mueller has sent 5 to 7 referrals or evidence/witnesses to SDNY, EDNY, DC,
EDVA, plus the National Security and Criminal Divisions. These from information turned up
crimes unrelated to his Russia probe and allegedly concerning Trump or his family business, a
cadre of his advisers and associates. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles
to Brooklyn.
The bad news is it exposed how wide spread and corrupt the US has become...in private and
political circles.
The other bad news is most of the Trump lovers and Trump haters are too stupid to drop
their partisan and personal blinders and recognize that ....ITS THE CORRUPTION STUPID.
b you have repeatedly made the case that this whole thing was kicked off by the Steele
dossier. That is factually incorrect. The first investigation was already running before the
dossier ever materialized. That investigation spawned the special prosecutors investigation
when Trump fired Comey and then went on TV and said it was because of the Russia
investigation. The Russia investigation was originally kicked off by Papadopoulos drinking
with the the Australian ambassador and bragging about what the campaign was doing with
Russia. Remember the original evidence was presented to the leadership of both the House and
the Senate when they were both controlled by the Republican party and every one that was
briefed came out on camera and said the Justice dept was doing the right thing in pursuing
this.
I think the Democrats should lose Hillary down a deep hole and not let her near any of the
coming campaign events. But this came about because of the actions of the people around
Trump. Not because Hillary controls the US government from some secret bunker some where.
One could argue Russiagate was on the contrary quite a success. The Elites behind the scheme
never believed it would end up with Trump's impeachment. What they did accomplish though is a
deflection via "Fake News" from the Dem's election failures & shenanigans and refocus the
attention towards the DNC's emerging pedophilia scandals (Weiner, the Podesta's, Alefantis,
etc) & suspicious deaths (Seth Rich, etc) towards a dead-end with the added corollary of
preventing US/Ru rapprochement for more then half an administration..
Blooming Barricade , Mar 23, 2019 3:10:02 PM |
link
The deeply tragic thing about this for the media, the neocons, and the liberals is that they
brought it upon themselves by moving the goalposts continuously. If, after Hillary lost, they
had stuck to the "Russia hacked WikiLeaks" lie, then they probably have sufficient proof from
their perspective and the perspective of most of the public that Russia helped Trump win. In
this case it would be remembered by the Democrats like the stolen election of 2000 (albeit
the fact that it was a lie this time). They had multiple opportunities to jump off this
train. Even the ridiculous DNI report could have been their final play: "Russia helped
Trump." Instead of going with 2000 they went with 2001, aka 9-11, with the same neocon
fearmongers playing the pipe organ of lies. As soon as they accepted the Steele Dossier,
moving the focus to "collusion" they discredited themselves forever. Many of the lead
proponents were discredited Iraq war hawks. Except this time it was actually worse because
the whole media bought into it. This leaves an interesting conundrum: there were at least
some pro-Afghanistan anti-Iraq warmongers who rejected the Bush premise in the media, so they
took over the airwaves for about two years before the real swamp creatures returned. This
time, it will be harder to issue a mea culpa. They made this appear like 9-11, well, this
time the truthers have won, and they are doomed.
Societies collapse when their systems (institutions) become compromised. When they are no
longer capable of meeting the needs of the population, or of adapting to a changing world.
Societal systems become compromised when their decision making structures, which are
designed to ensure that decisions are taken in the best interest of the society as a whole,
are captured by people who have no legitimacy to make the decisions, and who make decisions
for the benefit of themselves, at the expense of society as a whole.
Russia-gate is a flagrant example of how the law enforcement and intelligence institutions
have been captured. Their top officials, no longer loyal to their country or their
institution, but rather to an international elite (including the likes of Soros, the
Clintons, and far beyond) have used these institutions in an attempt to delegitimize a
constitutionally elected president and to over turn an election. This is no less than treason
of the highest order.
Indeed, the actions much of the Washington establishment, as well as a number
international actors, since Trump was elected seems suspiciously like one of the 'Color
Revolutions' that are visited upon any country who's citizens did not 'vote right' the first
time. Over-throw the vote, one way or another, until the result that is wanted is achieved.
None of these 'Color Revolutions' has resulted in anything good for the country involved.
Rather they have resulted in the destruction of each country's institutions, and eventually
societal collapse.
In the U.S. the capturing of systems' decision making structures is not limited to
Russia-Gate and the overturning of the electoral system. Their are other prime examples:
- The capture of the Air Transport Safety System by Boeing that has resulted in the recent
737 Max crashes, and likely the destruction of the reputation of the U.S. aviation industry,
in an industry where reputation is everything.
- The capture of the Financial Regulatory System, by Wall Street, who in 1998 rewrote the
rules in their own favor, against the best interests of the population as a whole. The result
was the 2008 financial crisis and the inability of the U.S. economy to effectively recover
from that crisis.
- This capture is also seen in international diplomatic systems, where the U.S. is
systematically by-passing or subverting international law and international institutions,
(the U.N. I.C.J., I.N.F. treaty) etc., and in doing so is destroying these institutions and
the ability to maintain peace.
The result of system (institution) capture is difficult to see at first. But, in time, the
damage adds up, the ability of the systems to meet the needs of the population disappears,
and societal decline sets in.
It looks today like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of
many indicators.
Your comment on the BBC is on the mild side. I listen to it when I drive in in the morning
and also get annoyed sometimes. When it is reporting on the Westminster bubble it is
factually accurate as far as I can judge. Apart from that, and particularly in the case of
the BBC news, we're in information control territory.
But accept that and the BBC turns into quite a valuable resource. It's well staffed, has
good contacts, and picks up what the politicians want us to think with great accuracy.
In that respect it's better than the newspapers and better also than the American media.
Those news outlets have several masters of which the political elite is only one. The BBC has
just the one master, the political elite, and is as sensitive as a stethoscope to the
shifting currents within that political elite.
So I wouldn't despise the BBC entirely. It tells us how the politicians want us to think.
In telling us that it sometimes gives us a bearing on what the politicians et al are doing
and what they intend to do.
The never-Trumpers will never let their dreams die. Of course, they never oppose Trump on
substantive issues like attempting a coup in Venezuela, withdrawing from the INF treaty,
supporting the nazis in Ukraine, supporting Al Qaeda forces in Syria, etc. But somehow
they're totally against him and ready to haul out the latest stupid thing he said as their
daily fodder for conversation...
renfro @ 10 said;"The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion."
Uh no, just doing their job of distracting the public, while ignoring the real issues
the
American workers care about. You know, the things DJT promised the workers, but has never
delivered.(better health care for all, ending the useless wars overseas, an
infrastructure
plan to increase good paying jobs), to name just a few.
The corporate Dems( which is the lions share of them), are bought and paid for to
distract, and they've done it well.
The Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, and most who have come before, are of the same
ilk.
Bend over workers and lube up, for more of the same in 2020...
I profoundly disagree with the notion that Russiagate had anything to do with Hillary's
collusion with the DNC. Gosh, that is naive at best.
1) Hillary didn't need to collude against Sanders - the additional money that she got from
doing so was small change compared the to overall amount she raised for her campaign.
2) Sanders was a long-time friend of the Clintons. He boasted that he's known Hillary
for over 25 years.
3) Sanders was a sheepdog meant to keep progressives in the Democratic Party. He was
never a real candidate. He refused to attack Hillary on character issues and remained loyal
even after Hillary-DNC collusion was revealed.
When Sanders had a chance to total disgrace Hillary, he refused to do so. Hillary
repeatedly said that she had NEVER changed for vote for money but Warren had proven that
she had: Hillary changed her vote on the Bankruptcy Bill for money from the credit card
industry.
4) Hillary didn't try to bury her collusion with the DNC (as might be expected), instead
she used it to alienate progressive voters by bring Debra Wasserman-Shultz into her
campaign.
5) Hillary also alienated or ignored other important constituencies: she wouldn't
support an increase in the minimum wage but accepted $750,000 from Goldman Sachs for a
speech; she took the black vote for granted and all-but berated a Black Lives Matters
activist; and she called whites "deplorables".
Hillary threw the race to her OTHER long-time friend in the race: Trump. The
Deep-State wanted a nationalist and that's just what they got.
6) Hillary and the DNC has shown NO REMORSE whatsoever about colluding with Sanders and
Sanders has shown no desire whatsoever to hold them accountable.
IMO Russiagate (Russian influence on Trump) and accusations of "Russian meddling" in the
election are part of the same McCarthyist psyop to direct hate at Russia and stamp out any
dissent. Trump probably knowingly, played into the Deep State's psyop by:
> hiring Manafort;
> calling on Russia to release Hillary's emails;
> talking about Putin in a admiring way.
And it accomplished much more than hating on Russia:
> served as excuse for Trump to do Deep State bidding;
> distracted from the real meddling in the 2016 election;
> served as a device for settling scores:
- Assange isolated
(Wikileaks was termed an "agent of a foreign power");
- Michael Flynn forced to resign
(because he spoke to the Russian ambassador).
hopehely , Mar 23, 2019 3:49:15 PM |
link The US owes Russia an official apology. And also Russia should get its stolen
buildings and the consulate back. And maybe to get paid some compensation for the injustice
and for damages suffered. Without that, the Russiagate is not really over.
If memory serves me correctly, the initial accusations of collusion between DJT's
presidential campaign and the Kremlin came from Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company hired
by the Democratic National Committee to oversee the security of its computers and databases.
This was done to deflect attention away from Hillary Clinton's illegal use of a personal
server at home to conduct government business during her time as US State Secretary (2009 -
2013), business which among other things included plotting with the US embassy in Libya (and
the then US ambassador Chris Stevens) to overthrow Muammar Gaddhafi's government in 2011, and
conspiring also to overthrow the elected government in Honduras in 2010.
The business of Christopher Steele's dossier (part or even most of which could have been
written by Sergei Skripal, depending on who you read) and George Papadopoulos' conversation
with the half-wit Australian "diplomat" Alexander Downer in London were brought in to bolster
the Russiagate claims and make them look genuine.
As B says, Crowdstrike does indeed have a Ukrainian nationalist agenda: its founder and
head Dmitri Alperovich is a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council (the folks who fund
Bellingcat's crapaganda) and which itself receives donations from Ukrainian oligarch Viktor
Pinchuk. Crowdstrike has some association with one of the Chalupa sisters (Alexandra or
Andrea - I can't be bothered dredging through DuckDuckGo to check which - but one of them was
employed by the DNC) who donated money to the Maidan campaign that overthrew Viktor
Yanukovych's government in Kiev in February 2014.
thanks b... i would like russiagate to be finished, but i tend to see it much like kadath
@2.. the link @2 is worth the read as a reminder of how far the usa has sunk in being a
nation of passive neocons... emptywheel can't say no to this as witnessed by her article
from today.. ) as a consequence, i agree with @14 dh-mtl's conclusion - "It looks today
like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of many indicators."
the irony for those of us who don't live in the usa, is we are going to have watch this
sad state of affairs continue to unravel, as the usa and the west continue to unravel in
tandem.. the msm as corporate mouthpiece is not going to be tell us anything of relevance..
instead it will be continued madcow, or maddow bullshit 24-7... amd as kadath notes @2 - if
any of them are to step up as a truth teller - they will be marginalized or silenced... so
long as the mainstream swallow what they are fed in the msm, the direction of the titanic is
still on track...
@19 hopehely... you can forget about anything like that happening..
What Difference Does it Make?
They don't really need Russia-gate anymore. It bought them time. As we speak nuclear bombers
make runs near Russian borders every day and Russian consulates get attacked with heavy
weaponry in the EU and no Russian outlet is even making a reference,while Israel is ready to
move heavy artillery in to Golan targeting Russia bases in Syria and China raking all their
deals for civilian projects in the Med.
Russia got stuffed in the corner getting all the punches.
What a horrible witch hunt, but the msm will keep on denying and keep creating new hoaxes
about Trump, Russia.
Heck the media even deny there was no collussion, they keep spinning it in different ways!
Thanks for citing Caitlin Johnstone's wonderful epitaph, b--Russiavape indeed!
During the fiasco, the Outlaw US Empire provided excellent proof to the world that it does
everything it accused Russia of doing and more, while Russia's cred has greatly risen.
Meanwhile, there're numerous other crimes Trump, his associates, Clinton, her
associates--like Pelosi--ought to be impeached, removed from office, arrested, then tried in
court, which is diametrically opposed to the current--false--narrative.
Scotch Bingeington , Mar 23, 2019 4:47:39 PM |
link
The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people
anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world.
Yes, absolutely. And not just regarding the world's future, but even if you happen to be
in the same building with one of them and he/she bursts into your already smoke-filled room
yelling that the house is on fire.
Btw, whatever authority has ever ruled that "ex-MI6 dude" Steele (who doesn't remind me of
steel at all, but rather of a certain nondescript entity named Anthony Blair) is in fact
merely 'EX'? He himself? The organisation? The Queen perhaps?
Expose them at every opportunity, they should not get away with this like nothing
happend:
If you think a single Russiagate conspiracist is going to be held accountable for media
malpractice, you clearly haven't been awake the past 2 decades. No one will pay for being
wrong. This profession is as corrupt & rotten as the kleptocracy it serves
defeatism isn't the answer -- should remind & mock these hacks every opportunity.
Just need to be aware of the beast we're up against.
The establishment plays on peoples fears and so we all sink together as we all cling to
our "lesser evils", tribal allegiances, and try to avoid the embarrassment of being
wrong.
Although everyone is aware of the corruption and insider dealing, no one seems to want to
acknowledge the extent, or to think critically so as to reveal any more than we already
know.
It's almost as though corruption (the King's nudity) is a national treasure and revealing
it would be a national security breach in the exceptional nation.
And so to the Deep State cabal continues to rule unimpeded.
The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by
inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the
American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives,
getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote
this story on a daily basis for nearly three years
Posted by: Ken | Mar 23, 2019 2:09:31 PM | 4
You people don't get it do you?
'The Plan' was to get rid of Turkey-Russia-Israel (and a few others) with one fell
swoop....
Russia gate was both a diversion from the real collusions (Russian Mafia , China and Israel)
and a clever ruse to allow Trump to back off from his campaign promise to improve relations
with Russia. US policy toward Russia is no different under Trump than it was during Obamas
administration. Exactly what the Russia Gaters wanted and Trump delivered.
That Mueller could find nothing more than some tax/money laundering/perjury charges in
which the culprits in the end get pardoned is hardly surprising given his history. Want
something covered up? Put Mueller on it.
To show how afraid Trump was of Mueller he appointed his long term friend Barr as AJ and
pretended he didn't know how close they were when it came out. There is no lie people wont
believe. Lol
Meanwhile Trumps Russian Mafia connections stay under the radar in MSM, Trump continues as
Bibi's sock puppet, the fake trade war with China continues as Ivanka is rolling in China
trademarks .
The Rothschild puppet that bailed out Trumps casinos as Commerce Secretary overseeing
negotiations that will open the doors for more US and EU (they willy piggy back on the deal
like hyenas) jobs to go to China (this time in financial/services) and stronger IPR
protections that will facilitate this transfer, and will provide companies more profits in
which to buyback stocks but wont bring manufacturing jobs back.
The collusion story has been hit badly and it will likely lose its momentum, but I wonder how
far reaching this loss of momentum is. There are many variants. The 'unwitting accomplice' is
an oxymoron which isn't finished yet. The Russians hacking the election: not over. The
Russians sowing discord and division. Not over. Credibility of the Russiagate champions
overall? Not clear. Some could take a serious hit. Brennan and other insiders who made it
onto cable tv?
It is possible that the whole groupthink about Russiagate changes drastically
and that 'the other claims' also lose their credibility but it's far from certain. After
years of building up tension Russia's policies are also changing. I think they have shown
restraint but their paranoia and aggressiveness is also increasing and some claims will
become true after all.
"Russiagate" has always been a meaningless political fraud.
When folks like Hillary Clinton sign on to something and give it a great deal of weight,
you really do know you are talking about an empty bag of tricks. She is a psychopathic liar,
one with a great deal of blood on her hands.
My problem with this official result is that it may tend to give Trump a boost, new
credibility.
The trouble with Trump has never been Russia - something only blind ideologues and people
with the minds of children believe - it is that he is genuinely ignorant and genuinely
arrogant and loud-mouthed - an extremely dangerous combination.
And in trying to defend himself, this genuine coward has completely surrendered American
foreign policy to its most dangerous enemies, the Neocons.
Blaming Russiagate on Hillary is very easy for those who hate her or hope that Trump will
deliver on his faux populist fake-agenda.
No one wants to contemplate the possibility that Hillary and Trump, and the duopoly they
lead, fixed the election and planned Russiagate in advance.
It seems a bridge too far, even for the smart skeptics at MoA.
So funny.
Trump has proven himself to be a neocon. He broke his campaign promise to investigate
Hillary within DAYS of being elected. He has brought allies of his supposed enemies into his
Administration.
Yet every one turns from the possibility that the election was fixed. LOL.
The horrible possibility that our "democracy" is managed is too horrible to contemplate.
Lets just blame it all on Hillary.
Those who have been holding their breath for two years can finally exhale. I guess the fever
of hysteria will have to be attended a while longer. A malady of this kind does not easily
die out overnight. Those who have been taken in, and duped for so long, can not so easily
recover. The weight of so much cognitive dissonance presses down on them like a boulder. The
dust of the stampeded herd behind Russiagate is enough paralyze the will of those who have
succumbed.
As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "The ways of human progress are inscrutable."
Russiagate is a pendulum, it reached the dead point, it would hange in the air for a moment,
then it would start swinging right backwards at full speed crashign everything in the way!
It would be revealed, it was Russia who paid Muller to start that hysteria and stole money
from American tax-payers and make America an international laughing stock. "Putin benefited
from it", highly likely!
Muller's investigation is paid for with Manafort's seized cash and property and Manafort
has made Yanukovich king of Ukraine, so Manafort is Putin's agent, so Muller is working of
Putin's money, so it was Putin's collusion everything that Muller is doing! Highly
likely.
There is no "Liberal Media". Those whom claim to be Liberal and yet support the Warmonger
Democratic Party (Republican lite) are frauds. Liberalism does not condone war and it most
certainly does not support wars of aggression - especially those wars waged against
defenseless nations. Neither can liberalism support trade sanctions or the subjugation of
Palestinians in the Apartheid State of ISreal.
We must be very careful with the words we choose, in order to paint the correct
conjuncture and not to throw the bathtub with the baby inside.
It's one thing to say Bernie Sanders is not a revolutionary; it's another completely
different thing to say he was in cahoots with the Clintons.
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary. Not only he chose to do so, but he only didn't win
because the DNC threw all its weight against him.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist. He's an imperialist who believes the
spoils of the empire should be also used to build a Scandinavian-style Welfare State for the
American people only. A cynic would tell you this would make him a Nazi without the race
theme, but you have to keep in mind societies move in a dialectical patern, not a linear one:
if you preach for "democratic socialism", you're bringing the whole package, not only the
bits you want.
I believe the rise of Bernie Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it
exists. Americans are more aware of their own contradictions (more enlightened) now than
before he disputed those faithful primaries of 2016. And the most important ingredient for
that, in my opinion, was the fact he was crushed by both parties; that the "establishment"
acted in unison not to let him get near the WH. That was a didactic moment for the American
people (or a signficant part of it).
But I agree Russiagate went well beyond just covering the Clintons' dirt in the DNC.
It may have be born like that, but, if that was the case, the elites quickly realized it
had other, ampler practical uses. The main one, in my opinion, was to drive a wedge between
Trump's Clash of Civilizations's doctrine -- which perceives China as the main long term
enemy, and Russia as a natural ally of the West -- and the public opinon. The thing is most
of the American elite is far too dependent on China's productive chain; Russia is not, and
can be balkanized.
There is a funny video compilation of the TV talking heads predicting the end of Trump, new
bombshells, impeachment, etc., over the last two years.
Unfortunately, the same sort of compilation could be made of sane people predicting "this new
information means the end of Russiagate" over the same time period.
The truth is that the truth doesn't matter, only the propaganda, and it has not stopped, only
spun onto new hysteria.
As others have said, hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been
wrong all along. They have too much emotional investment in the grand conspiracy theory to
simply let it go. Rather, they will forever point to what they believe are genuine bits of
evidence and curse Mueller for not following the leads. And the Dems in the House of
Representatives will waste more time and resources on pointless investigations in an effort
to keep the public sufficiently distracted from more important matters, such as the endless
wars and coups that they support. A pox on all their houses, both Democrats and
Republicans.
"...hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been wrong all along."
Wrong about what? There seems to be "narrative" operative here that there are only two
positions on this matter: the "right" one and the "wrong" one and nothing else.
Ben's and other comments might make this a little bit superfluous but it's short.
A case of divide and conquer against the population
This time it was a fabricated scandal.
Continued control over "facts" and narratives, the opportunity for efficient misdirection
and distraction, stealing and wasting other people's time and effort, spurious disagreements,
wearing down relations.
The illusion of choice, (false) opposition, blinded "oversight", and mythical claims
concerning a civilian government (in the case of the US: "of, for, and by" or something like
that).
Who knew or knows is irrelevant as long as the show goes on. There's nothing to prove
anything significant about who if anyone may or may not be behind the curtain and thus on
towards the next big or small scandal we go because people will be dissatisfied and hungry
and ready to bite as hard as possible on some other bait for or against something.
Maybe "Russiagate" was impeccably engineered or maybe it organically outcompeted other
distractions on offer that would ultimately also waste enormous amounts of time and
effort.
Management by crisis
The scandals, crises, "Science says" games and rubbish, outrage narratives, and any other
manipulations attempt and perhaps succeed at controlling the US and the world through
spam.
Jonathan @39: Of course it was fixed. That's what the Electoral College is for.
Well, you can say the same think about money-as-speech , gerrymandering, voter
suppression, etc. Despite all these, Americans believe that their democracy works.
I contend that what we witnessed in 2016 was a SHOW. Like American wrestling. It was
(mostly) fake. The proper term for this is kayfabe .
My advice to the yanks mourning Russiagate: move to the UK. The sick Brits will keep the
Russia hating cult alive even after they spend a decade puking over Brexit.
Jackrabbit @18
So, you don't think HRC qualifies as a nationalist? She can't fake populist, but she can do
nationalist.
I also think she is much too ambitious to have intentionally thrown the election. It was her
turn dammit! Take a look at her behavior as First Lady if you think she's the kind of
personality that is content to wield power from behind the scenes.
They didn't fall for the Steele dossier. I recall that emptywheel had discredited the dossier
during the election as it was known to have been rejected by major media outlets leading up
to the election. I think they merely fell behind the others as the outgoing administration,
the Democrats, the CIA, and the media chose to use the dossier to 'blackmail' Trump.
The most important fruit of russiagate, from the view of the establishment of the hegemon, is
that America has now taken a giant step towards full bore censorship.
We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby
inside.
Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the
bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary.
Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?
Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told
Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's
typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's
that?
The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him
and Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.
Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax
returns. Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the
press asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of
returns). Bernie refused.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie
Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things
for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.
What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate,
meaningless astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like
open borders. These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the
Democrats and another 4 years for Trump.
Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character
issues and to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other
examples: Bernie refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's
well known work to squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer
Flowers), and didn't talk about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make")
and her glee at the overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").
And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find
that even a little bit strange?
We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby
inside.
Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the
bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary.
Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?
Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told
Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's
typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's that?
The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him and
Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.
Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax returns.
Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the press
asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of
returns) . Bernie refused.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie
Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things
for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.
What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate, meaningless
astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like open borders.
These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the Democrats and
another 4 years for Trump.
Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character issues and
to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other examples: Bernie
refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's well known work to
squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer Flowers), and didn't talk
about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make") and her glee at the
overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").
And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find that
even a little bit strange?
mourning dove @57: Exactly! It's the Electoral College that decides elections, not
voters.
Do you think Hillary didn't know that? She refused to campaign in the three mid-western
states that would've won her the electoral college. Each of the states were won by Trump by a
thin margin.
Gosh and Blimey!
Comment #56 in a thread about an utterly corrupt political system and no-one has mentioned
the pro-"Israel" Lobby?
Words fail me. So I'll use someone else's...
From Xymphora March 21, 2019.
"Truth or Trope?" (Sailer):
"Of the top 50 political donors to either party at the federal level in 2018, 52 percent
were Jewish and 48 percent were gentile. Individuals who identify as Jewish are usually
estimated to make up perhaps 2.2 percent of the population.
Of the $675 million given by the top 50 donors, 66 percent of the money came from Jews and 34
percent from gentiles.
Of the $297 million that GOP candidates and conservative causes received from the top 50
donors, 56 percent was from Jewish individuals.
Of the $361 million Democratic politicians and liberal causes received, 76 percent came from
Jewish givers.
So it turns out that Rep. Omar and Gov. LePage appear to have been correct, at least about
the biggest 2018 donors. But you can also see why Pelosi wanted Omar to just shut up about
it: 76 percent is a lot."
Next up another false flag operation. The thing is, it would have be non-trivial and
involving the harming of people to jolt the narrative back to that favoring the deep state.
And taking off the proverbial media table, that Mueller found no collusion. Yes, election in
2016 no collusion, but Putin was behind the latest horrific false flag, "oh look, Trump is
not confronting Putin"...
Not even getting into the "treason", "putin's c*ckholster", "what's the time on Moscow,
troll!" crap we've been subjected to for 3 years, please enjoy this mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjUvfZj-Fm0.
I've said before that she's a terrible strategist and she ran a terrible campaign and she's
terribly out of touch. I think she expected a cake walk and was relying on Trump being so
distasteful to voters that they'd have no other option.
I think Trump legitimately won the election and I don't believe for a second that she won the
popular vote. There were so many problems with the election but since they were on the losing
side, nobody cares. In 2012 I didn't know anyone else who was voting for Jill Stein, way too
many people were still in love with Obama. She got .4% of the vote. In 2016 most of the
people I knew were voting for Jill Stein, she drew a large crowd from DemExit, but they say
she got .4% of the vote. Total bullshit. There was also ballot stuffing and lots of other
problems, but it still wasn't enough.
I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her
elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and
the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way.
Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough
to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has
helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller
to prove.
It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that
Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the
"national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify
the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon.
It is time to build
cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony.
Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it.
The truth will work better.
"... RussiaGate was never a sustainable narrative. It was ludicrous from the beginning. And now that it has ended with a whimper there are a lot of angry, confused and scared people out there. ..."
"... And now his report is in. There are no new indictments. And by doing so he is saving his reputation for the future. And that is your biggest tell that Hillary's blackmail is now worthless. ..."
"... They don't fear her anymore because RussiaGate outed her as the architect. Anything else she has is irrelevant in the face of trying to oust a sitting president from power. ..."
"... The Deep State and The Davos Crowd stand revealed and reviled. If they don't do something dramatic then the anger from the rest of the country will also be palpable come election time. Justice is not done simply by saying, "No evidence of collusion." ..."
"... It's clear that RussiaGate is a failure of monumental proportions. Heads will have to roll. But who will be willing to fall on their sword at this point? Comey? No. McCabe? No. ..."
"... If there is no collusion, if RussiaGate is a scam, then all roads lead back to Hillary as the sacrificial lamb. ..."
"... If there is any hope of salvaging the center of this country for the Democrats, the ones that voted against Hillary in 2016, then there is no reason anymore not to indict Hillary as the architect of RussiaGate. ..."
"... And hope that is enough bread and circuses to distract from the real storm ahead of us. ..."
"... Hillary is the epitome of evil. ..."
"... I don't think Hillary is enough. I want McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch, Obama, Lois Lerner, Blasey Ford, Brennan, Clapper, Abedin, Weiner, Cheryl Mills, Susan Rice, Strzok, Page, Sally Yates, all of the phony FISA cohort brought to justice. ..."
"... Her DNC cabal cooked in less than 24 hours from the election defeat a conspiracy of Russian meddling and now, when more information became available, HCR is involved in two separate cases of foreign collusion, The Steele dossier, with Russo-Anglo meddling and another a Ukrainian one, which is now under investigation and the purpose was getting their help for becoming elected. ..."
"... Without a doubt the Russian collusion is the most serious one, because it deliberately sabotaged diplomatic relations with Russia and lead into to a new cold war era. This also raised substantially risks for a direct confrontation with catastrophic consequences. The damage from these treacherous acts is huge and the felony bears pretty much all hallmarks of treason. Se deliberately undermined her own nation´s interests and rather risked even a war simply, because she is a psychopath, who refused to concede the defeat in due elections and instead wanted to hide real reasons for her loss to any cost for everybody else, "because it was her turn to get elected". ..."
"... HIS NAME WAS SETH RICH ..."
"... It is clear that from the beginning, fraudulent FISA warrants, that it was a case of Obama's administration digging dirt on Trump believing that when Hillary wins there will be nobody to hold them responsible ..."
"... When Hillary lost there was only one way out for them to justify that kind of abuse, to find something, anything on Trump so they can say that they were right. Worse than Watergate by orders of magnitude, involving FBI, DOJ and WH itself. ..."
During most of the RussiaGate investigation against Donald Trump I kept saying that all
roads lead to Hillary Clinton.
Anyone with three working brain cells knew this, including
'Miss' Maddow, whose tears of disappointment are particularly delicious.
Robert Mueller's investigation was designed from the beginning to create something out of
nothing. It did this admirably.
It was so effective it paralyzed the country for more than two years, just like Europe has
been held hostage by Brexit. And all of this because, in the end, the elites I call The Davos
Crowd refused to accept that the people no longer believed their lies about the benefits of
their neoliberal, globalist agenda.
Hillary Clinton's ascension to the Presidency was to be their apotheosis along with the
Brexit vote. These were meant to lay to rest, once and for all time, the vaguely libertarian
notion that people should rule themselves and not be ruled by philosopher kings in some distant
land.
Hillary's failure was enormous. And the RussiaGate gambit to destroy Trump served a laundry
list of purposes to cover it:
Undermine his legitimacy before he even takes office.
Accuse him of what Hillary actually did: collude with Russians and Ukrainians to effect
the outcome of the election
Paralyze Trump on his foreign policy desires to scale back the Empire
Give aid and comfort to hurting progressives and radicalize them further undermining our
political system
Polarize the electorate over the false choice of Trump's guilt.
Paralyze the Dept. of Justice and Congress so that they would not uncover the massive
corruption in the intelligence agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.
Isolate Trump and take away every ally or potential ally he could have by turning them
against him through prosecutor overreach.
Hillary should have been thrown to the wolves after she failed. When you fail the people she
failed and cost them the money she cost them, you lose more than just your funding. What this
tells you is that Hillary has so much dirt on everyone involved, once this thing started
everyone went along with it lest she burn them down as well.
Burnin' Down da House
Hillary is the epitome of envy. Envy is the destructive sin of coveting someone else's life
so much they are obsessed with destroying it. It's the sin of Cain. She envies what Trump has,
the Presidency. And she was willing to tear it down to keep him from having it no matter how
much damage it would do. She's worse than the Joker from The Dark Knight.
Because while the Joker is unfathomable to someone with a conscience there's little stopping
us from excising him from the community completely., even though Batman refuses.
Hillary hates us for who we are and what we won't give her. And that animus drove her to
blackmail the world while putting on the face of its savior.
And that's what makes what comes next so obvious to me. RussiaGate was never a sustainable
narrative. It was ludicrous from the beginning. And now that it has ended with a whimper there
are a lot of angry, confused and scared people out there.
Mueller thought all he had to do was lean on corrupt people and threaten them with
everything. They would turn on Trump. He would resign in disgrace from the public outcry. It
didn't work. In the end Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and Roger Stone all held their ground or
perjured themselves into the whole thing falling apart.
Andrew Weissman's resignation last month was your tell there was nothing. Mueller would
pursue this to the limit of his personal reputation and no further. Just like so many other
politicians.
Vote Your Pocketbook
With respect to Brexit I've been convinced that it would come down to reputations. Would the
British MP's vote against their own personal best interests to do the bidding of the EU? Would
Theresa May eventually realize her historical reputation would be destroyed if she caves to
Brussels and betrays Brexit in the end? Always bet on the fecklessness of politicians. They
will always act selfishly when put to the test. While leading RussiaGate, Mueller was always
headed here if he couldn't get someone to betray Trump.
And now his report is in. There are no new indictments. And by doing so he is saving his
reputation for the future. And that is your biggest tell that Hillary's blackmail is now
worthless.
They don't fear her anymore because RussiaGate outed her as the architect. Anything else she
has is irrelevant in the face of trying to oust a sitting president from power. The
progressives that were convinced of Trump's treason are bereft; their false hope stripped away
like standing in front of a sandblaster. They will be raw, angry and looking for blood after
they get over their denial.
Everyone else who was blackmailed into going along with this lunacy will begin cutting deals
to save their skins. The outrage over this will not end. Trump will be President when he stands
for re-election.
The Wolves Beckon
The Democrats do not have a chance against him as of right now. When he was caving on
everything back in December it looked like he was done. That there was enough meat on the
RussiaGate bones to make Nancy Pelosi brave. Then she backed off on impeachment talk.
Oops....
... ... ...
The Deep State and The Davos Crowd stand revealed and reviled. If they don't do something
dramatic then the anger from the rest of the country will also be palpable come election time.
Justice is not done simply by saying, "No evidence of collusion."
It's clear that RussiaGate is
a failure of monumental proportions. Heads will have to roll. But who will be willing to fall
on their sword at this point? Comey? No. McCabe? No. There is only one answer. And Obama's
people are still in place to protect him. I said last fall that " Hillary would
indict herself. " And I meant it. Eventually her blackmail and drive to burn it all down
led to this moment.
The circumstances are different than I expected back then, Trump didn't win the mid-terms.
But the end result was always the same. If there is no collusion, if RussiaGate is a scam, then
all roads lead back to Hillary as the sacrificial lamb.
Because the bigger project, the erection of a transnational superstate, is bigger than any
one person. Hillary is expendable. Lies are expensive to maintain. The truth is cheap to
defend. Think of the billions in opportunity costs associated with this. Once the costs rise
above the benefits, change happens fast. If there is any hope of salvaging the center of this
country for the Democrats, the ones that voted against Hillary in 2016, then there is no reason
anymore not to indict Hillary as the architect of RussiaGate.
We all know it's the truth. So, the cheapest way out of this mess for them is to give the
MAGApedes what they want, Hillary.
And hope that is enough bread and circuses to distract from the real storm ahead of us.
I don't think Hillary is enough. I want McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch,
Obama, Lois Lerner, Blasey Ford, Brennan, Clapper, Abedin, Weiner, Cheryl Mills, Susan Rice,
Strzok, Page, Sally Yates, all of the phony FISA cohort brought to justice. Think of the
taxpayer money wasted on this ridiculous Mueller investigation! The Roger Stone arrest was an
outrage. Who tipped off CNN? Who ordered it? What was with the attack dogs and machine guns?
And now we have Nadler trying to destroy anyone and everyone who ever did business with
Trump. All those 80 people who got letters from him asking for documents will now be
bankrupted by legal fees.
According to Scott Adams, one recipient is refusing to
cooperate -- he's saying "I can't afford for me and family to be destroyed." He put the request
for documents in a drawer. He has no money for lawyers.
This insanity and abuse of power has
got to stop. Meanwhile, nothing gets done in Congress. We're all looking at censorship,
tilted search engines, de-monetization, being beat up on campus for trying to express an
opinion, being accosted in a restaurant (or, VP Pence, from the stage ("Hamilton"), getting
sucker-punched for wearing a MAGA hat, having elections stolen through myriad Dem cheating
methods, and NOTHING is being done.
Her DNC cabal cooked in less than 24 hours from the election defeat a conspiracy of Russian
meddling and now, when more information became available, HCR is involved in two separate
cases of foreign collusion, The Steele dossier, with Russo-Anglo meddling and another a
Ukrainian one, which is now under investigation and the purpose was getting their help for
becoming elected.
Without a doubt the Russian collusion is the most serious one, because it deliberately
sabotaged diplomatic relations with Russia and lead into to a new cold war era. This also
raised substantially risks for a direct confrontation with catastrophic consequences. The
damage from these treacherous acts is huge and the felony bears pretty much all hallmarks of
treason. Se deliberately undermined her own nation´s interests and rather risked even a
war simply, because she is a psychopath, who refused to concede the defeat in due elections
and instead wanted to hide real reasons for her loss to any cost for everybody else, "because
it was her turn to get elected".
It is clear that from the beginning, fraudulent FISA warrants, that it was a case of
Obama's administration digging dirt on Trump believing that when Hillary wins there will be
nobody to hold them responsible.
When Hillary lost there was only one way out for them to
justify that kind of abuse, to find something, anything on Trump so they can say that they
were right. Worse than Watergate by orders of magnitude, involving FBI, DOJ and WH itself.
The final Mueller report should be graded "incomplete," says VIPS, whose forensic work proves the speciousness of the story that
DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The Attorney General
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings
Executive Summary
Media reports are predicting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to give you the findings of his probe into any
links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.
If Mueller gives you his "completed" report anytime soon, it should be graded "incomplete."
Major deficiencies include depending on a DNC-hired cybersecurity company for forensics and failure to consult with those who
have done original forensic work, including us and the independent forensic investigators with whom we have examined the data. We
stand ready to help.
We veteran intelligence professionals (VIPS) have done enough detailed forensic work to prove the speciousness of the prevailing
story that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking. Given the paucity of evidence to support that story,
we believe Mueller may choose to finesse this key issue and leave everyone hanging. That would help sustain the widespread belief
that Trump owes his victory to President Vladimir Putin, and strengthen the hand of those who pay little heed to the unpredictable
consequences of an increase in tensions with nuclear-armed Russia.
There is an overabundance of "assessments" but a lack of hard evidence to support that prevailing narrative. We believe that there
are enough people of integrity in the Department of Justice to prevent the outright manufacture or distortion of "evidence," particularly
if they become aware that experienced scientists have completed independent forensic study that yield very different conclusions.
We know only too well -- and did our best to expose -- how our former colleagues in the intelligence community manufactured fraudulent
"evidence" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
We have scrutinized publicly available physical data -- the "trail" that every cyber operation leaves behind. And we have had
support from highly experienced independent forensic investigators who, like us, have no axes to grind. We can prove that the conventional-wisdom
story about Russian-hacking-DNC-emails-for-WikiLeaks is false. Drawing largely on the unique expertise of two VIPS scientists who
worked for a combined total of 70 years at the National Security Agency and became Technical Directors there, we have regularly published
our findings. But we have been deprived of a hearing in mainstream media -- an experience painfully reminiscent of what we had to
endure when we exposed the corruption of intelligence before the attack on Iraq 16 years ago.
This time, with the principles of physics and forensic science to rely on, we are able to adduce solid evidence exposing mistakes
and distortions in the dominant story. We offer you below -- as a kind of aide-memoire -- a discussion of some of the key
factors related to what has become known as "Russia-gate." And we include our most recent findings drawn from forensic work on data
associated with WikiLeaks' publication of the DNC emails.
We do not claim our conclusions are "irrefutable and undeniable," a la Colin Powell at the UN before the Iraq war. Our judgments,
however, are based on the scientific method -- not "assessments." We decided to put this memorandum together in hopes of ensuring
that you hear that directly from us.
If the Mueller team remains reluctant to review our work -- or even to interview willing witnesses with direct knowledge, like
WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, we fear that many of those yearning earnestly for the truth on Russia-gate
will come to the corrosive conclusion that the Mueller investigation was a sham.
In sum, we are concerned that, at this point, an incomplete Mueller report will fall far short of the commitment made by then
Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "to ensure a full and thorough investigation," when he appointed Mueller in May 2017. Again,
we are at your disposal.
Discussion
The centerpiece accusation of Kremlin "interference" in the 2016 presidential election was the charge that Russia hacked Democratic
National Committee emails and gave them to WikiLeaks to embarrass Secretary Hillary Clinton and help Mr. Trump win. The weeks following
the election witnessed multiple leak-based media allegations to that effect. These culminated on January 6, 2017 in an evidence-light,
rump report misleadingly labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)." Prepared by "handpicked analysts" from only three of
the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI, and NSA), the assessment expressed "high confidence" in the Russia-hacking-to-WikiLeaks
story, but lacked so much as a hint that the authors had sought access to independent forensics to support their "assessment."
The media immediately awarded the ICA the status of Holy Writ, choosing to overlook an assortment of banal, full-disclosure-type
caveats included in the assessment itself -- such as:
" When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as 'we assess' or 'we judge,' they are conveying an analytic assessment
or judgment. Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on
collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment
is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong."
To their credit, however, the authors of the ICA did make a highly germane point in introductory remarks on "cyber incident attribution."
They noted: "The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber
operation -- malicious or not -- leaves a trail." [Emphasis added.]
Forensics
The imperative is to get on that "trail" -- and quickly, before red herrings can be swept across it. The best way to establish
attribution is to apply the methodology and processes of forensic science. Intrusions into computers leave behind discernible physical
data that can be examined scientifically by forensic experts. Risk to "sources and methods" is normally not a problem.
Direct access to the actual computers is the first requirement -- the more so when an intrusion is termed "an act of war" and
blamed on a nuclear-armed foreign government (the words used by the late Sen. John McCain and other senior officials). In testimony
to the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017, former FBI Director James Comey admitted that he did not insist on physical access
to the DNC computers even though, as he conceded, "best practices" dictate direct access.
In June 2017, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr asked Comey whether he ever had "access to the actual hardware
that was hacked." Comey answered, "In the case of the DNC we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic
information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. " Sen. Burr followed up: "But no content? Isn't content
an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?" Comey: "It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks
is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016."
The "private party/high-class entity" to which Comey refers is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm of checkered reputation and multiple
conflicts of interest, including very close ties to a number of key anti-Russian organizations. Comey indicated that the DNC hired
CrowdStrike in the spring of 2016.
Given the stakes involved in the Russia-gate investigation – including a possible impeachment battle and greatly increased tension
between Russia and the U.S. -- it is difficult to understand why Comey did not move quickly to seize the computer hardware so the
FBI could perform an independent examination of what quickly became the major predicate for investigating election interference by
Russia. Fortunately, enough data remain on the forensic "trail" to arrive at evidence-anchored conclusions. The work we have done
shows the prevailing narrative to be false. We have been suggesting this for over two years. Recent forensic work significantly strengthens
that conclusion.
We Do Forensics
Recent forensic examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May 2016. (On June 12, Julian
Assange announced he had them; WikiLeaks published them on July 22.) We recently discovered that the files reveal a FAT (File Allocation
Table) system property. This shows that the data had been transferred to an external storage device, such as a thumb drive,
before WikiLeaks posted them.
FAT is a simple file system named for its method of organization, the File Allocation Table. It is used for storage only and is
not related to internet transfers like hacking. Were WikiLeaks to have received the DNC files via a hack, the last modified times
on the files would be a random mixture of odd-and even-ending numbers.
Why is that important? The evidence lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the Wikileaks files. When a file is stored under
the FAT file system the software rounds the time to the nearest even-numbered second. Every single one of the time stamps in the
DNC files on WikiLeaks' site ends in an even number.
We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on the Wikileaks site. All 500 files end in an even number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If
those files had been hacked over the Internet, there would be an equal probability of the time stamp ending in an odd number. The
random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power. Thus, these data show that the DNC emails posted by
WikiLeaks went through a storage device, like a thumb drive, and were physically moved before Wikileaks posted the emails on the
World Wide Web.
This finding alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts, for example, about Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers
for hacking the DNC emails given to WikiLeaks. A defense attorney could easily use the forensics to argue that someone copied the
DNC files to a storage device like a USB thumb drive and got them physically to WikiLeaks -- not electronically via a hack.
Role of NSA
For more than two years, we strongly suspected that the DNC emails were copied/leaked in that way, not hacked. And we said so.
We remain intrigued by the apparent failure of NSA's dragnet, collect-it-all approach -- including "cast-iron" coverage of WikiLeaks
-- to provide forensic evidence (as opposed to "assessments") as to how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks and who sent them. Well before
the telling evidence drawn from the use of FAT, other technical evidence led us to conclude that the DNC emails were not hacked over
the network, but rather physically moved over, say, the Atlantic Ocean.
Is it possible that NSA has not yet been asked to produce the collected packets of DNC email data claimed to have been hacked
by Russia? Surely, this should be done before Mueller competes his investigation. NSA has taps on all the transoceanic cables leaving
the U.S. and would almost certainly have such packets if they exist. (The detailed slides released by Edward Snowden actually show
the routes that trace the packets.)
The forensics we examined shed no direct light on who may have been behind the leak. The only thing we know for sure is that the
person had to have direct access to the DNC computers or servers in order to copy the emails. The apparent lack of evidence from
the most likely source, NSA, regarding a hack may help explain the FBI's curious preference for forensic data from CrowdStrike. No
less puzzling is why Comey would choose to call CrowdStrike a "high-class entity."
Comey was one of the intelligence chiefs briefing President Obama on January 5, 2017 on the "Intelligence Community Assessment,"
which was then briefed to President-elect Trump and published the following day. That Obama found a key part of the ICA narrative
less than persuasive became clear at his last press conference (January 18), when he told the media, "The conclusions of the intelligence
community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to how 'the DNC emails that were leaked' got to WikiLeaks.
Is Guccifer 2.0 a Fraud?
There is further compelling technical evidence that undermines the claim that the DNC emails were downloaded over the internet
as a result of a spearphishing attack. William Binney, one of VIPS' two former Technical Directors at NSA, along with other former
intelligence community experts, examined files posted by Guccifer 2.0 and discovered that those files could not have been downloaded
over the internet. It is a simple matter of mathematics and physics.
There was a flurry of activity after Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016: "We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which
are pending publication." On June 14, DNC contractor CrowdStrike announced that malware was found on the DNC server and claimed there
was evidence it was injected by Russians. On June 15, the Guccifer 2.0 persona emerged on the public stage, affirmed the DNC statement,
claimed to be responsible for hacking the DNC, claimed to be a WikiLeaks source, and posted a document that forensics show
was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."
Our suspicions about the Guccifer 2.0 persona grew when G-2 claimed responsibility for a "hack" of the DNC on July 5, 2016, which
released DNC data that was rather bland compared to what WikiLeaks published 17 days later (showing how the DNC had tipped the primary
scales against Sen. Bernie Sanders). As VIPS
reported in a wrap-up
Memorandum for the President on July 24, 2017 (titled "Intel Vets Challenge 'Russia Hack' Evidence)," forensic examination of the
July 5, 2016 cyber intrusion into the DNC showed it NOT to be a hack by the Russians or by anyone else, but rather a copy onto an
external storage device. It seemed a good guess that the July 5 intrusion was a contrivance to preemptively taint anything WikiLeaks
might later publish from the DNC, by "showing" it came from a "Russian hack." WikiLeaks published the DNC emails on July 22, three
days before the Democratic convention.
As we prepared our July 24 memo for the President, we chose to begin by taking Guccifer 2.0 at face value; i. e., that the documents
he posted on July 5, 2016 were obtained via a hack over the Internet. Binney conducted a forensic examination of the metadata contained
in the posted documents and compared that metadata with the known capacity of Internet connection speeds at the time in the U.S.
This analysis showed a transfer rate as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, which is much faster than was possible from a remote online
Internet connection. The 49.1 megabytes speed coincided, though, with the rate that copying onto a thumb drive could accommodate.
Binney, assisted by colleagues with relevant technical expertise, then extended the examination and ran various forensic tests
from the U.S. to the Netherlands, Albania, Belgrade and the UK. The fastest Internet rate obtained -- from a data center in New Jersey
to a data center in the UK -- was 12 megabytes per second, which is less than a fourth of the capacity typical of a copy onto a thumb
drive.
The findings from the examination of the Guccifer 2.0 data and the WikiLeaks data does not indicate who copied the information
to an external storage device (probably a thumb drive). But our examination does disprove that G.2 hacked into the DNC on July 5,
2016. Forensic evidence for the Guccifer 2.0 data adds to other evidence that the DNC emails were not taken by an internet spearphishing
attack. The data breach was local. The emails were copied from the network.
Presidential Interest
After VIPS' July 24, 2017 Memorandum for the President, Binney, one of its principal authors, was invited to share his insights
with Mike Pompeo, CIA Director at the time. When Binney arrived in Pompeo's office at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017 for an
hour-long discussion, the director made no secret of the reason for the invitation: "You are here because the President told me that
if I really wanted to know about Russian hacking I needed to talk with you."
Binney warned Pompeo -- to stares of incredulity -- that his people should stop lying about the Russian hacking. Binney then started
to explain the VIPS findings that had caught President Trump's attention. Pompeo asked Binney if he would talk to the FBI and NSA.
Binney agreed, but has not been contacted by those agencies. With that, Pompeo had done what the President asked. There was no follow-up.
Confronting James Clapper on Forensics
We, the hoi polloi, do not often get a chance to talk to people like Pompeo -- and still less to the former intelligence
chiefs who are the leading purveyors of the prevailing Russia-gate narrative. An exception came on November 13, when former National
Intelligence Director James Clapper came to the Carnegie Endowment in Washington to hawk his memoir. Answering a question during
the Q&A about Russian "hacking" and NSA, Clapper said:
" Well, I have talked with NSA a lot And in my mind, I spent a lot of time in the SIGINT business, the forensic evidence
was overwhelming about what the Russians had done. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever." [Emphasis added]
Clapper added: " as a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our
country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn't
have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election."
(A transcript of the interesting Q&A can be found
here and a commentary
on Clapper's performance at Carnegie, as well as on his longstanding lack of credibility, is
here .)
Normally soft-spoken Ron Wyden, Democratic senator from Oregon, lost his patience with Clapper last week when he learned that
Clapper is still denying that he lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee about the extent of NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens.
In an unusual outburst, Wyden said: "James Clapper needs to stop making excuses for lying to the American people about mass surveillance.
To be clear: I sent him the question in advance. I asked him to correct the record afterward. He chose to let the lie stand."
The materials brought out by Edward Snowden in June 2013 showed Clapper to have lied under oath to the committee on March 12,
2013; he was, nevertheless, allowed to stay on as Director of National Intelligence for three and half more years. Clapper fancies
himself an expert on Russia, telling Meet the Press on May 28, 2017 that Russia's history shows that Russians are "typically,
almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever."
Clapper ought to be asked about the "forensics" he said were "overwhelming about what the Russians had done." And that, too, before
Mueller completes his investigation.
For the steering group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity:
William Binney , former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA's Signals
Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)
Richard H. Black , Senator of Virginia, 13th District; Colonel US Army (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division,
Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate VIPS)
Bogdan Dzakovic , former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Philip Girald i, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Mike Gravel , former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the
Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
James George Jatras , former U.S. diplomat and former foreign policy adviser to Senate leadership (Associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson , former CIA and State Department Counter Terrorism officer
John Kiriakou , former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Karen Kwiatkowski , former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture
of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Edward Loomis , Cryptologic Computer Scientist, former Technical Director at NSA (ret.)
David MacMichael , Ph.D., former senior estimates officer, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern , former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray , former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA
political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce , MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Peter Van Buren , US Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Sarah G. Wilton , CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe , former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Ann Wright , retired U.S. Army reserve colonel and former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq
War
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is made up of former intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers
and congressional staffers. The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington's justifications for launching
a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than contrived
threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of
VIPS memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com.
Jimmy Dore show is pretty educational... Why hasn't Schultz been charged for election fraud yet (she rigged the 2016 primary
and then rigged her own race in Florida against Tim Canova.)? Just when you thought crooked Hillary and corrupt Debbie
Wasserman-Schultz were finally silent and out of the picture, they keep coming back again and again and again...like a case of
herpes.
Nothing that Bernie will do can satisfy the Democrats. Said the other day he was
wishy-washy over Venezuela but it was still not enough. Seems that Debbie Wasserman Schultz
has threatened to have him kicked out of the party unless he calls out Madura as a dictator.
Well then, Sanders better be carrying a polished shield at all times never know when
Debbie the medusa will lurch forward throwing that gazy DNC stink-eye in his direction !
The DNC takes Deep State to a whole new level. They have this thing called "Superdelegates",
which has veto power over the little people.
The SJWs and Bernie bots may be too dumb to know who their real daddies are, but the
Superdelegates know exactly whose ring they need to kiss to regain power: the same globalist
capitalist Davos scums who now have Trump exactly where they want him, between their legs
sucking up while busy implementing their agendas of endless wars and endless immigration.
The Superdelegates will never let things get too far with the socialists, they're good for
entertainment, to give off the pretense of a real race. I'm betting my money on Kirsten
Gillibrand -- Dems know if there's a woman who could beat Trump, she needs to be a blonde.
Uncle Joe has too many skeletons in his closet. It's just a matter of time before the
cockroaches come out of the woodwork and #MeToo him into the orbits.
Weren't
superdelegates people who, in the era before cars, would represent groups who are unable to travel to the voting stations
(long distances).
The superdelegates have the "right" to change the vote because their candidate could die while the
superdelegate is traveling. or any major development.
When they return to cast the vote they have a choice.
In the 21st
century it is unacceptable to keep such traditions and policies.
Looks like Gussifer 2.0 person is a fake created to cover tracks and ofload the blame to Russians.
Notable quotes:
"... The phrase, "moderate confidence" is intelligence speak for "we have no hard evidence." ..."
"... Instead, the NSA only claimed to have moderate confidence in the judgement regarding Russian meddling. If the NSA had hard intelligence to support the judgement the conclusion would have been stated as "full confidence." ..."
"... Why does a cyber security company wait 45 days after allegedly uncovering a massive Russian attack on the DNC server to take concrete steps to safeguard the integrity of the information held on the server? This makes no sense. ..."
"... We know one thing for certain -- CrowdStrike did not take steps to shutdown and repair the DNC network until 18 days after the last email was copied from the server. ..."
"... Taken together, these disparate data points combine to paint a picture that exonerates alleged Russian hackers and implicates persons within our law enforcement and intelligence community taking part in a campaign of misinformation, deceit and incompetence. ..."
By William Binney, former Technical Director NSA & Larry Johnson, former State CT and CIA
The FBI, CIA and NSA claim that the DNC emails published by WIKILEAKS on July 26, 2016 were
obtained via a Russian hack, but more than three years after the alleged "hack" no forensic
evidence has been produced to support that claim. In fact, the available forensic evidence
contradicts the official account that blames the leak of the DNC emails on a Russian internet
"intrusion". The existing evidence supports an alternative explanation--the files taken from
the DNC on between 23 and 25May 2016 and were copied onto a file storage device, such as a
thumb drive.
If the Russians actually had conducted an internet based hack of the DNC computer network
then the evidence of such an attack would have been collected and stored by the National
Security Agency. The technical systems to accomplish this task have been in place since 2002.
The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian
meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017
"Intelligence Community Assessment," regarding Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election :
We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's
election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her
unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high
confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
The phrase, "moderate confidence" is intelligence speak for "we have no hard evidence."
Thanks to the leaks by Edward Snowden, we know with certainty that the NSA had the capability
to examine and analyze the DNC emails. NSA routinely "vacuumed up" email traffic transiting the
U.S. using robust collection systems (whether or not anyone in the NSA chose to look for this
data is another question). If those emails had been hijacked over the internet then NSA also
would have been able to track the electronic path they traveled over the internet. This kind of
data would allow the NSA to declare without reservation or caveat that the Russians were
guilty. The NSA could admit to such a fact in an unclassified assessment without compromising
sources and methods. Instead, the NSA only claimed to have moderate confidence in the judgement
regarding Russian meddling. If the NSA had hard intelligence to support the judgement the
conclusion would have been stated as "full confidence."
We believe that Special Counsel Robert Mueller faces major embarrassment if he decides to
pursue the indictment he filed -- which accuses 12 Russian GRU military personnel and an entity
identified as, Guccifer 2.0, for the DNC hack -- because the available forensic evidence
indicates the emails were copied onto a storage device.
According to a DOJ press release on the indictment of the Russians, Mueller declares that
the emails were obtained via a "spearphising" attack:
In 2016, officials in Unit 26165 began spearphishing volunteers and employees of the
presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, including the campaign's chairman. Through that
process, officials in this unit were able to steal the usernames and passwords for numerous
individuals and use those credentials to steal email content and hack into other computers.
They also were able to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) through these spearphishing
techniques to steal emails and documents, covertly monitor the computer activity of dozens of
employees, and implant hundreds of files of malicious computer code to steal passwords and
maintain access to these networks.
The officials in Unit 26165 coordinated with officials in Unit 74455 to plan the release of
the stolen documents for the purpose of interfering with the 2016 presidential election.
Defendants registered the domain DCLeaks.com
and later staged the release of thousands of stolen emails and documents through that website.
On the website, defendants claimed to be "American hacktivists" and used Facebook accounts with
fictitious names and Twitter accounts to promote the website. After public accusations that the
Russian government was behind the hacking of DNC and DCCC computers, defendants created the
fictitious persona Guccifer 2.0. On the evening of June 15, 2016 between 4:19PM and 4:56PM,
defendants used their Moscow-based server to search for a series of English words and phrases
that later appeared in Guccifer 2.0's first blog post falsely claiming to be a lone Romanian
hacker responsible for the hacks in the hopes of undermining the allegations of Russian
involvement.(
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/grand-jury-indicts-12-russian-intelligence-officers-hacking-offenses-related-2016-election
)
Notwithstanding the DOJ press release, an examination of the Wikileaks DNC files do not
support the claim that the emails were obtained via spearphising. Instead, the evidence clearly
shows that the emails posted on the Wikileaks site were copied onto an electronic media, such
as a CD-ROM or thumbdrive before they were posted at Wikileaks. The emails posted on Wikileaks
were saved using the File Allocation Table (aka FAT) computer file system architecture.
An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May
respectively. The fact that they appear in a FAT system format indicates the data was
transfered to a storage device, such as a thumb drive.
How do we know? The truth lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the Wikileaks files.
Every single one of these time stamps end in even numbers. If you are not familiar with the FAT
file system, you need to understand that when a date is stored under this system the data
rounds the time to the nearest even numbered second.
We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on Wikileaks and all 500 files end in an even
number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If a system other than FAT had been used, there would have been an
equal probability of the time stamp ending with an odd number. But that is not the case with
the data stored on the Wikileaks site. All end with an even number.
The DNC emails are in 3 batches (times are GMT).
Date Count Min Time Max Time FAT Min Id Max Id
2016-05-23 10520 02:12:38 02:45:42 x 3800 14319
2016-05-25 11936 05:21:30 06:04:36 x 1 22456
2016-08-26 13357 14:11:36 20:06:04 x 22457 44053
The random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power or
approximately 1 chance in 10 to the 150th power - in other words, an infinitely high order. This data alone does not prove that the emails were copied at the DNC headquarters. But it
does show that the data/emails posted by Wikileaks did go through a storage device, like a
thumbdrive, before Wikileaks posted the emails on the World Wide Web.
This fact alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts about Mueller's indictment accusing 12
Russian soldiers as the culprits for the leak of the DNC emails to Wikileaks. A savvy defense
attorney will argue, and rightly so, that someone copied the DNC files to a storage device
(Eg., USB thumb drive) and transferred that to Wikileaks.
We also tested the hypothesis that Wikileaks could have manipulated the files to produce the
FAT result by comparing the DNC email files with the Podesta emails (aka Larter file) that was
released on 21 September 2016. The FAT file format is NOT present in the Podesta files. If
Wikileaks employed a standard protocol for handling data/emails received from unknown sources
we should expect the File structure of the DNC emails to match the file structure of the
Podesta emails. The evidence shows otherwise.
There is further compelling technical evidence that undermines the claim that the DNC emails
were downloaded over the internet as a result of a spearphising attack. Bill Binney, a former
Technical Director of the National Security Agency, along with other former intelligence
community experts, examined emails posted by Guccifer 2.0 and discovered that those emails
could not have been downloaded over the internet as a result of a spearphising attack. It is a
simple matter of mathematics and physics.
Shortly after Wikileaks announced it had the DNC emails, Guccifer 2.0 emerged on the public stage,
claiming that "he" hacked the DNC and that he had the DNC emails. Guccifer 2.0 began in late
June 2016 to publish documents as proof that "he" had hacked from the DNC.
Taking Guccifer 2.0 at face value -- i.e., that his documents were obtained via an internet
attack -- Bill Binney conducted a forensic examination of the metadata contained in the posted
documents based on internet connection speeds in the United States. This analysis showed that
the highest transfer rate was 49.1 megabytes per second, which is much faster than possible
from a remote online connection. The 49.1 megabytes speed coincides with the download rate for
a thumb drive .
Binney, assisted by other colleagues with technical expertise, extended the examination and
ran various tests forensic from the Netherlands, Albania, Belgrade and the UK. The fastest rate
obtained -- from a data center in New Jersey to a data center in the UK--was 12 megabytes per
second, which is less than a fourth of the rate necessary to transfer the data, as it was
listed from Guccifer 2.
The findings from the examination of the Guccifer 2.0 data and the Wikileaks data does not
prove who copied the information to a thumbdrive, but it does provide and empirical alternative
explanation that undermines the Special Counsel's claim that the DNC was hacked. According to
the forensic evidence for the Guccifer 2.0 data, the DNC emails were not taken by an internet
spearphising attack. The data breach was local. It was copied from the network.
There is other circumstantial evidence that buttresses the conclusion that the data breach
was a local effort that copied data.
First there is the Top Secret information leaked by Edward Snowden. If the DNC emails had
been hacked via spearphising (as alleged by Mueller) then the data would have been captured by
the NSA by means of the Upstream program (Fairview, Stormbrew, Blarney, Oakstar) and the
forensic evidence would not modify times - the data would be presented as sent.
Second, we have the public reporting on the DNC and Crowdstrike, which provide a bizarre
timeline for the alleged Russian hacking.
Falcon had identified not one but two Russian intruders: Cozy Bear, a group CrowdStrike's
experts believed was affiliated with the FSB, Russia's answer to the CIA; and Fancy Bear, which
they had linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence.
And what did CrowdStrike do about this? Nothing. According to Michael Isikoff, CrowdStrike
claimed their inactivity was a deliberate plan to avoid alerting the Russians that they had
been "discovered." This is nonsense. If a security company detected a thief breaking into a
house and stealing its contents, what sane company would counsel the client to do nothing in
order to avoid alerting the thief?
We know from examining the Wikileaks data that the last message copied from the DNC network
is dated Wed, 25 May 2016 08:48:35. No DNC emails were taken and released to Wikileaks after
that date.
CrowdStrike waited until 10 June 2016 to take concrete steps to clean up the DNC network.
Alperovitch told
Esquire's Vicky Ward that :
Ultimately, the teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at
the DNC. Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10,
all DNC employees were instructed to leave their laptops in the office.
Why does a cyber security company wait 45 days after allegedly uncovering a massive
Russian attack on the DNC server to take concrete steps to safeguard the integrity of the
information held on the server? This makes no sense.
A more plausible explanation is that it was discovered that emails had been downloaded from
the server and copied onto a device like a thumdrive. But the culprit had not yet been
identified. We know one thing for certain -- CrowdStrike did not take steps to shutdown and
repair the DNC network until 18 days after the last email was copied from the server.
The final curiosity is that the DNC never provided the FBI access to its servers in order
for qualified FBI technicians to conduct a thorough forensic examination. If this had been a
genuine internet hack, it would be very easy for the NSA to identify when the information was
taken and the route it moved after being hacked from the server. The NSA had the technical
collection systems in place to enable analysts to know the date and time of the messages. But
that has not been done.
Taken together, these disparate data points combine to paint a picture that exonerates
alleged Russian hackers and implicates persons within our law enforcement and intelligence
community taking part in a campaign of misinformation, deceit and incompetence. It is not a
pretty picture.
My understanding is that the Democratic Party person who passed the USB stick to Craig
Murray was not Seth Rich. Seth Rich died on 10 July 2016 and Murray received the USB stick in
September of the same year. So there were quite a few disgruntled Democratic Party
whistleblowers at the time.
You're right - Seth Rich was not alive in September 2016. Craig Murray says he received a
package in a wooded area near the American University in Washington DC in September 2016 from
"the source" and that the leak source was the deed of a disgruntled Democrat employee.
@71 jen / 73 spudski... i went and checked craigs site, but was unable to find him mentioning
this.. i did re-read his post from july 3rd 2017 that came up in a search of seth rich..
The Stink Without a
Secret
to quote from it.. "That is it. To this day, that is the sum total of actual "evidence" of
Russian hacking. I won't say hang on to it as a fact, because it contains no relevant fact.
But at least it is some form of definable allegation of something happening, rather than
"Russian hacking" being a simple article of faith like the Holy Trinity.
But there are a number of problems that prevent this being fact at all. Nobody has ever
been able to refute the evidence of Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA who
designed its current surveillance systems. Bill has stated that the capability of the NSA is
such, that if the DNC computers had been hacked, the NSA would be able to trace the actual
packets of that information as those emails travelled over the internet, and give a precise
time, to the second, for the hack. The NSA simply do not have the event – because there
wasn't one. I know Bill personally and am quite certain of his integrity.
As we have been repeatedly told, "17 intelligence agencies" sign up to the "Russian
hacking", yet all these king's horses and all these king's men have been unable to produce
any evidence whatsoever of the purported "hack". Largely because they are not in fact trying.
Here is another actual fact I wish you to hang on to: The Democrats have refused the
intelligence agencies access to their servers to discover what actually happened. I am going
to say that again.
The Democrats have refused the intelligence agencies access to their servers to discover
what actually happened." - why is that???
As you consider the weirdness of the Rich family, also keep in mind the substantial efforts
made to discredit and disable Assange/Wikileaks and Trump's call, in summer 2016) for Putin
to release Hillary's lost emails.
The timeline is as follows:
January 2016
FBI report says Hillary emails contained highly classified info
By this time, Trump has all but locked up the GOP nomination - Michael Bloomberg makes
urgent public announcement that may enter the race to prevent Sanders and Trump from
winning.
February 2016
Never Trump Movement is born
March/April 2016
Trump hires Manafort
May 2016
DNC is hacked
June 2016
Trump Jr. meets with Russians that say they have info about Hillary
September 2016
Flynn signs agreement with Turk company Inovo BV: $500k "sweatheart deal"
October 2016
Assange's Internet access is terminated for the first time due to "election interference"
by publishing DNC emails
November 2016
Flynn's agreement with Turk company ends on election day (Nov 8)
Flynn accepts position as National Security Advisor (Nov 18)
January 2017
Flynn is under investigation due to his work for Inovo BV
Chuck Schumer says Intel agencies "have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you"
February 2017
Trump fires Flynn after he is evasive/untruthful about his conversation with Russian
Ambassador
>> Trump's positioning as pro-Russia was bolstered by his hiring
pro-Russia Manafort who has links to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. This is a strange
choice for the "America First" Trump campaign.
>> Assange/Wikileaks and Flynn are all ultimately snared by anti-Russia hysteria.
Wikileaks would later be described as a "hostile intelligence agency" and Assange as a
"Russian agent".
I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result "was that
for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually
included the truth among the CIA hype:
"The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official
cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof
that the Kremlin was "directing" the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the
Russian government.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange,
called the CIA claims "bullshit", adding: "They are absolutely making it up."
"I know who leaked them," Murray said. "I've met the person who leaked them, and they are
certainly not Russian and it's an insider. It's a leak, not a hack; the two are different
things.
"If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA's statement refers to people who are known
to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside
the United States.
"America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it's not been shy about
extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever."
But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home page links to it
vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one repeating the mad CIA allegations against
Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is
deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
jackrabbit
Thanks for the info. The Seth Rich story always bothered me. I also recall that in one
article CM was quoted as saying that who he got the leaked materials was not "the source."
Was the original source SR?
i tend to believe julian assange when he says the stakes are very high when one is
involved in sharing information that could be detrimental others - a large organization in
particular, and etc..
I suppose the 2 choices here are one believes either Seth Rich was murdered in a bad part
of Washington dc - conceivable, or that someone knew he had passed the emails and wanted to
kill him for it..
If you believe 2 - then you have to come up with a reason for why they had to kill him..
The reason jr appears to offer is it makes Russia and WikiLeaks the 2 main suspects, as
opposed to seth rich.. and on and on it goes..
I lean towards the later view which jr articulates, but i don't expect to ever find
out..
"... it is important to remember that Wasserman-Schultz and Snipes are merely the public faces of an extensive, deeply problematic system of corruption. It is then also essential to understand who, and what mechanisms, have allowed figures like Wasserman-Schultz, Snipes, the Awan brothers, and others to go unprosecuted. ..."
"... As readers may recall , Snipes illegally destroyed ballots from the 2016 primary race between Wasserman-Schultz and Tim Canova. The Sun Sentinel explained Snipes's direct involvement in the destruction of ballots, writing: ..."
"... Canova's contention that US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may have been responsible for preventing legal consequences for Brenda Snipes is profoundly concerning. Last year, Rosenstein faced heavy criticism in the wake of the publication of the infamous FISA Memo. Last year, The Daily Beast described the memo's account of surveillance abuse, saying: "[The memo] specifically names FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein along with former FBI Director James Comey." ..."
"... Needless to say, the fact that Rosenstein was directly involved with the strongly partisan activities documented by the FISA memo makes it unsurprising that he would interfere on behalf of associates of Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Setting the possibility that Wasserman-Schultz's brother may also have been involved in protecting Snipes from prosecution aside for the moment, Canova's allegations raise a myriad of new questions, including: who benefits from protecting Snipes? ..."
"... "In stories like this, the image painted of the Department of Justice is one of a federal agency that functions in a manner far more akin to organized crime than to a governmental body." ..."
A vast caldera of public rage has rightfully been aimed at Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and
Brenda Snipes over the last few years. However, it is important to remember that
Wasserman-Schultz and Snipes are merely the public faces of an extensive, deeply problematic
system of corruption. It is then also essential to understand who, and what mechanisms, have
allowed figures like Wasserman-Schultz, Snipes, the Awan brothers, and others to go
unprosecuted.
This issue became clearer earlier this week when former congressional candidate Tim Canova
Tweeted:
As readers
may recall , Snipes illegally destroyed ballots from the 2016 primary race between
Wasserman-Schultz and Tim Canova. The Sun Sentinel explained Snipes's
direct involvement in the destruction of ballots, writing:
"Canova, who was checking for voting irregularities in the race, sought to look at the paper
ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months later
when her office hadn't fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in
September, signing a certification that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending.
Snipes called the action a "mistake" during testimony she gave in the case, saying the boxes
were mislabeled and there was "nothing on my part that was intentional" about destroying the
contested ballots."
Big League Politics also reported: "On
May 11, 2018, the Florida Circuit Court granted Plaintiff Canova summary judgment, and found
that Snipes had violated numerous state and federal statutes, including laws punishable as
felonies with up to five years in prison. The Court's ruling made clear that Snipes'
destruction of ballots was illegal on several separate counts."
Disobedient Media spoke with Tim Canova, who told us:
"I was recently informed by election officials in Florida that it's the Deputy AG, Rod
Rosenstein, who would have been the DOJ official making the decision not to move forward with
a criminal investigation in our ballot destruction case. I also believe that Steve Wasserman,
an Assistant US Attorney at the DOJ headquarters in Washington, DC, may well have been
involved in the decision, particularly since Wasserman spoke out publicly against prosecuting
Awan in the days before Awan's sentencing."
A Floridian official set to prosecute Snipes was also said to have backed down after a trip
to Washington DC, which involved meetings with the DOJ. Canova stated:
"Last May, the acting US Attorney for South Florida, Ben Greenberg, was about to open a
criminal investigation into Snipes's destruction of our ballots when he flew to DC for a week
of meetings at DOJ. When he returned, the investigation was off."
Canova's contention that US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may have been responsible
for preventing legal consequences for Brenda Snipes is profoundly concerning. Last year,
Rosenstein faced heavy criticism in the wake of the publication of the infamous FISA Memo. Last
year, The Daily
Beast described the memo's account of surveillance abuse, saying: "[The memo] specifically
names FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein along with
former FBI Director James Comey."
The Washington Times reported: "The
memo from Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee shows that at least one questionable
surveillance warrant application was signed by Mr. Rosenstein, who already had a difficult
relationship with President Trump. The memo said information supporting the application was
obtained from a partisan anti-Trump dossier funded by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the
Democratic Party."
Needless to say, the fact that Rosenstein was directly involved with the strongly partisan
activities documented by the FISA memo makes it unsurprising that he would interfere on behalf
of associates of Hillary Clinton.
Setting the possibility that Wasserman-Schultz's brother may also have been involved in
protecting Snipes from prosecution aside for the moment, Canova's allegations raise a myriad of
new questions, including: who benefits from protecting Snipes?
Undeniably, the most obvious answer is Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the alleged beneficiary of
Snipes's illegal ballot destruction. Similarly, one wonders what connection such a decision may
have with the DOJ's refusal to prosecute the Awan scandal, a move from which Debbie
Wasserman-Schultz also directly benefited.
In light of this, we are led to ask: Who benefits from shielding Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
from the blowback of multiple national scandals? What would induce the DOJ to prop up such an
embarrassment?
Farts and Leaves,
"In stories like this, the image painted of the Department of Justice is one of a federal agency that functions in
a manner far more akin to organized crime than to a governmental body."
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Taras Bulba
Dis ob Media-good report-thanks.
This abolute outrageous info about snipes, the wassermanschultzes, awans, dimocrats in congress shouts loudly that we really
have no system of justice in this country, at least for the powerful and connected. This is outrageous-where in the hell is
the DOJ, oh, that is the problem with ,rosenstein, prob the clintons, et al
My guess is wasserman schultz is mossad-to my mind, there can be no other explanation.
It appears that George Webb has been shut down, he was bird dogging this info, now daily caller luke has cut him off.
The vomit factor on this one is off the scale!
Ajax-1
At the very least, why hasn't Trump or his new AG fired Rosenstein?
space junk
Probably because the stay behind networks from the Sessions/Obama/Holder and even Bush eras, have so much entanglement
into the system, that change cannot be made in quick order. One only can hope that T-man will chop off the head of the snake
and not just the tail.
hooligan2009
the two key extracts from the article are these:
"... the Department of Justice is one of a federal agency that functions in a manner far more akin to organized
crime than to a governmental body. The DOJ's refusal prosecute the Awans, and Rosenstein's alleged decision to prevent
legal consequences for Brenda Snipes shows us that corruption allowed to stagnate in Broward County affected the whole
country. "
and
"... the Department of Justice refuses to prosecute such crimes as detailed in the Awan scandal and as committed by
Snipes, how can the public hope to hold their government accountable for election interference and other forms of
corruption? "
the case is clear. the DoJ has, again, acted against the national interest and the staff involved are guilty of electoral
fraud, sedition and treason. the awan brothers sold congressional secrets to Pakistan (and mossad probably).
cui bono? from not prosecuting these blatant, obvious AND DISCLOSED crimes? there is a fetid swamp of criminality here and a
flagrant, in your face, contempt for the american people and their security.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? where is the oversight of this criminality? the inspector general? internal affairs? where
are the lawyers that leap to defend civil rights abuses against covington schoolkids, but not issues such as this?
" Congress paid the Awans more than $4 million between 2004 and 2016 at their $165,000 salary level, a sum that some sources
suggest to be three or four times higher than the norm for government contractor IT specialists performing similar work at
the same level of alleged competence. "
-ALIEN-
The US Dept of INjustice is a criminal organization, of course it is protecting those who subvert elections at the
direction of the Oligarchs.
Our whole system of voting has been carefully crafted and tuned to ensure the USA Citizen has almost no effect on the
functioning of government.
boattrash
One thing not mentioned in the article, was the dead body of federal prosecutor Beranton J. Whisenant Jr. found on the
beach in Debbie's District...Dead from a suicide gunshot to the head...he used a "magic gun" I suppose, because local police
think in "floated off in the surf" FFS
"... Bernie's bid was crushed by Clinton's superdelegates. No amount of throwing money against him in the direct sense was doing any good. He took popular positions on issues and stubbornly stayed on-message. ..."
In regards to the Hillary v Bernie question, it also didn't help that the primary vote was
wildly skewed by so-called 'superdelegates,' who don't actually commit their votes until the
DNC convention, but were being counted by the media as having already voted for Hillary,
which made it appear to many of the uninformed that Bernie didn't have any chance of winning,
which may have been intended to keep Bernie supporters home on primary day under the
assumption that Hillary was unbeatable.
As sensible as your suggestions may be, what you're calling for would require at least three
constitutional amendments to be practical - including scrapping the first amendment.
Maybe we should strive towards attainable goals instead?
Didn't help that the ostensibly neutral DNC was sending emails saying that they should play
up Bernie Sanders' Jewish faith (among other attack strategies), fed debate questions to the
Clinton campaign or tried to limit opportunities for Bernie and Hillary to share a stage
together.
Bernie Sanders is widely considered by many to be one of the most popular American
politicians, more than Trump and certainly more popular than Hillary. I think an interesting
phenomenon to notice is the lengths the GOP, in particular, will go to in order to convince
the average voter that anything that cuts taxes is inherently good for the 'little guy,'
while anything that raises taxes is bad. Trump's recent tax cuts are a good example. Most of
the actual cuts go toward the corporations and ultra-wealthy, which just increases the
deficit while shifting the proportion of taxes paid onto the middle class. It's a con that
many Americans are inexplicably susceptible to believing, for some reason.
Progressive believe in inclusion and if that is "moralistic rhetoric" then so be it.
The litany goes "round and round.
Hillary Clinton:
" you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of
deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you
name it!
"Barack Obama:
"Referring to working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses, the
presidential hopeful said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion "
Bernie's bid was crushed by Clinton's superdelegates. No amount of throwing money against him
in the direct sense was doing any good. He took popular positions on issues and stubbornly
stayed on-message.
"... A possible scenario then would be that, some time in late April or early May, the kind of surveillance on Assange and figures known to be associated with him which we can be reasonably confident was being carried out both by GCHQ and MI6 alerted people to the fact that there had been a leak of material from the DNC. ..."
"... The accident of Cameron's – characteristically foolish – statement and the Papadopoulos interview could then have led on to his meeting with Downer being set up, at almost exactly the time when 'CrowdStrike' was beginning to work on the DNC servers. ..."
"... Having gone down that route, the possibility of Seth Rich talking obviously became acutely dangerous to all kinds of people. ..."
"... If Seth had made no attempt to contact Wikileaks - and if the FBI didn't look at his laptop because "we don't investigate murders", then why does the NSA have 32 pages of secret/top secret memos on him? ..."
"... If Seth was the real leaker, he was in a position to blow apart the Guccifer 2.0 scam which was the centerpiece of the "Russia interfered" hoax. ..."
"... Also, I suspect that Shawn Lucas may have been one of the friends of Seth who - according to Sy Hersh's account - had access to Seth's dropbox. So that might explain his very mysterious death - a drug overdose involving multiple drugs in someone never known to use drugs. ..."
"... What is clear is that, both from a cybersecurity and other perspectives – the Awan family saga being an obvious instance, and the networks in which Huma Abedin is involved perhaps another – the whole Democratic apparatus in which Hillary was a central figure was as leaky as an old sieve. ..."
"... When the ex-GCHQ 'twerp' Matt Tait, then supposedly running a consultancy, 'Capital Alpha Security', which only ever filed 'accounts for a dormant company', and has now been compulsorily wound up, immediately produced evidence backing up the incoherent claims by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'CrowdStrike', it was clear that we were dealing with an amateurish cover-up. ..."
"... The notion that the name and patronymic 'Felix Dzerzhinsky' is likely to have been used by the Main Directorate, previously known as the GRU, could only have been dreamed up by people who are totally ignorant of the history of the relations between the General Staff and the 'Cheka' in the early Soviet period, or, at least, are relying on the ignorance of others. ..."
"... The next memorandum in the sequence, which is undated, introduces Paul Manafort and Carter Page into the 'rogues' gallery', and contains some very interesting observations about the cyber side. So 'Source E' – described as an 'ethnic Russian close associate' of Trump – supposedly explains that the 'intelligence network' being used against Hillary Clinton comprises three elements ..."
"... All this stinks of a hastily-organised cover-up operation, set in motion after it became clear that highly compromising material was going to appear on 'WikiLeaks' – but which moved into higher gear after the murder of Rich. ..."
"... As was very evident at the time from, for example, comments on the 'MailOnline' site, very many people who disliked Hillary immediately took for granted that Rich had been 'Arkancided', so his death then became further evidence of her innate villainy, and also confirmation that he was, in fact, the source of the 'WikiLeaks' material. ..."
"... How's this for a motive? Imran Awan ran the DNC servers. When it was discovered in May/June that the emails had been downloaded, a search was launched and suspicion fell on Seth. Worried that the Pakistani penetration of the DNC and the Congress might be uncovered, Seth was silenced. I offer this as one possible theory. ..."
"... I think it is very much a possible theory. And indeed, reading what Mark McCarty and Eric Newhill wrote, I think I may have greatly underestimated the extent to which people on Hillary's side could have thought Seth Rich too dangerous to be left alive ..."
"... One point raised by Eric's comments. It seems to me quite likely that the alarm was in fact raised by monitoring what came in to WikiLeaks, rather than what went out of the DNC. If this was so, however, it would be less likely that the monitoring was done directly by the CIA/NSA. It would be much more likely that this was in the first instance primarily an MI6/GCHQ function. ..."
"... If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another. ..."
"... The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.' ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0 was nothing but an elaborate joke. ..."
The request related to four categories of material. The first had to do with
communications between Rich and a variety of people. It is interesting that the names of
three figures with whom it is not suggested he communicated are Included, the precise
phrasing being 'David Kendall, Cheryl Mills, and Heather Samuelson are the attorneys who
represented Hillary Clinton.'
Apparently Clevenger has been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to get the trio investigated
in relation to the deletion of e-mails from the secret server.
The second category relates to material concerning phone calls involving Rich on the day
he died and the previous day, the third to possible financial transactions involved him and
an interesting range of people.
The fourth category covers correspondence involving people in or involved with
Congress.
The NSA response refers to an earlier reply dated 7 November 2017 in relation to the first
three categories. So far I cannot trace this, but I would assume that this refused access to
the material – if it did not there would clearly be rather more than fifteen documents
with 32 pages. So these presumably all relate to communications involving Congress.
Another important thread in all this relates to the 10 May 2016 meeting between George
Papadopoulos and Alexander Downer. Information has been trickling out about what the former
said in his interview with members of the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees on
Thursday. And the episode is dealt with in a book by the 'Washington Post' reporter Greg
Miller, released earlier this month.
The sequence appears to have been that Papodopoulos was quoted in an interview in the
'Times' on 4 May 2016 saying that our then Prime Minister, David Cameron, should apologise
for calling Trump 'divisive, stupid and wrong'. Two days later, an Australian embassy
official who knew him suggested that Papadopoulos meet Downer.
According to the version restated by Miller, the FIB 'Crossfire Hurricane' investigation
opened on 31 July, following the 'WikiLeaks' publication of the DNC emails on 22 July –
with supposedly a belated communication from Downer about the Papadopoulos meeting being an
important trigger. If you work for the 'Washington Post', you will of course take all this on
trust. Serious journalists would not.
While the complications of the role of the mysterious Maltese Joseph Mifsud still do not
seem adequately ironed out, the suggestion that he told Papadopoulos that he had learned that
the Russian government had 'dirt' on Clinton in the form of 'thousands' of her emails may
well be true. Moreover, it would not necessarily be part of an entrapment operation.
It is perfectly possible that Mifsud did actually retail what he had heard in Moscow, and
while this could have been inaccurate gossip, it could also have been accurate.
As I have said before, if there was anything I would find more surprising than the notion
that the DNC material came to 'WikiLeaks' from the Russians, it would be that these could not
penetrate the obviously appallingly lax security not just of Clinton's server but of the
whole Democratic network. (People who could hire the Awan clan are obviously either totally
inept at security or totally unconcerned about it.)
At that point, one comes up against the question of how much substance there is in the
claims by Yaacov Apelbaum about the central role in 'Russiagate' of the Hakluyt/Holdingham
group, with which Downer was certainly involved.
A possible scenario then would be that, some time in late April or early May, the kind of
surveillance on Assange and figures known to be associated with him which we can be
reasonably confident was being carried out both by GCHQ and MI6 alerted people to the fact
that there had been a leak of material from the DNC.
The accident of Cameron's – characteristically foolish – statement and the
Papadopoulos interview could then have led on to his meeting with Downer being set up, at
almost exactly the time when 'CrowdStrike' was beginning to work on the DNC servers.
What could have been a piece of accurate gossip out of Russia – although of course
it could have been inaccurate gossip or indeed planted disinformation – then encouraged
the notion that the leak could be treated as a hack.
Having gone down that route, the possibility of Seth Rich talking obviously became acutely
dangerous to all kinds of people.
An accurate account of what was happened was finally passed to 'Fox News', sourced in
substantial measure from figures involved with Assange, but the company 'chickened out' in
the face of pressure. The Malia Zimmerman story, incidentally, can be viewed at
http://www.raidersmerciless... .
If the FOIA request is authentic then it would be in the FOIA logs of the agency which are
themselves FOIA-able (in general anyway).
I would speculate that the material might show that they rooted around for stuff like
this, due to the media attention, and thus, some records exist about the idea.
Also re the metadata timing, while the idea of fast copies is reasonable, it is also
possible to write a small script which would calculate a fresh set of datetime values at a
different rate than the original, wouldn't this be less than 30 lines? (like they could have
simply overwritten the metadata date values, from slower copying to an illusion of faster
copying.)
Excellent summary. How did the author get the info on NSA's response to the FOIA request? -
cant find it otherwise online.
If Seth had made no attempt to contact Wikileaks - and if the FBI didn't look at his
laptop because "we don't investigate murders", then why does the NSA have 32 pages of
secret/top secret memos on him?
This article should have cited the Sy Hersh phone tape - Sy, via Butowsky, is the evident
source of the Fox report:
With the leaks already out, if they wanted to make an example, they could have made his life
hell and heaped blame on him for them losing the election, they could have made an example
out of him without taking needless risks and without leaving anything to ambiguity (so that
it would unquestionably deter others from doing the same).
So, even if his death wasn't just him accidentally getting shot twice in the torso during
a struggle following a bungled robbery attempt in which nothing was stolen... revenge still
would have been a questionable motive.
I'd say more but it's probably best for the sake of self-preservation and to prevent
opponents from strawman attacks if I don't. Good luck figuring out who could have had a
motive.
I don't think that revenge had anything to do with it. If Seth was the real leaker, he was in
a position to blow apart the Guccifer 2.0 scam which was the centerpiece of the "Russia
interfered" hoax. The conspirators would be much more secure with him out of the way. Also, I
suspect that Shawn Lucas may have been one of the friends of Seth who - according to Sy
Hersh's account - had access to Seth's dropbox. So that might explain his very mysterious
death - a drug overdose involving multiple drugs in someone never known to use drugs.
On the question of who might have had a motive to kill Seth Rich, some aspects of the
background are worth bearing in mind.
It is very clear that Hillary Clinton divides opinion, very sharply – actually, in
Britain almost as much as in the United States. On the one hand, I have found even people
whose judgement I would once have trusted quite extraordinarily reluctant to accept that
there was anything reprehensible about her glaring security breaches, let alone about
anything else she has done.
On the other, there are many people who loathe her and her husband so much that they will
believe any mud that is slung at the pair.
What is clear is that, both from a cybersecurity and other perspectives – the Awan
family saga being an obvious instance, and the networks in which Huma Abedin is involved
perhaps another – the whole Democratic apparatus in which Hillary was a central figure
was as leaky as an old sieve.
In such a situation, if I was for example Vladimir Putin, and none of my intelligence
services had been able to supply me with something close to a complete set of Hillary
Clinton's emails, I would have wanted to know why.
But that, of course, emphatically does not mean that the Russians are a likely conduit for
material to have reached Assange. And it also means that, if by any chance Putin and General
Gerasimov, who has overall responsibility for the Main Directorate of the General Staff, had
decided they wanted the material made public, they could have been expected to look for
'plausible deniability.'
When the ex-GCHQ 'twerp' Matt Tait, then supposedly running a consultancy, 'Capital Alpha
Security', which only ever filed 'accounts for a dormant company', and has now been
compulsorily wound up, immediately produced evidence backing up the incoherent claims by
Dmitri Alperovitch of 'CrowdStrike', it was clear that we were dealing with an amateurish
cover-up.
The notion that the name and patronymic 'Felix Dzerzhinsky' is likely to have been used by
the Main Directorate, previously known as the GRU, could only have been dreamed up by people
who are totally ignorant of the history of the relations between the General Staff and the
'Cheka' in the early Soviet period, or, at least, are relying on the ignorance of others.
In addition to this, we have the fact that the initial memoranda in the dossier published
by 'BuzzFeed' and – supposedly – authored by Christopher Steele, are both a mess,
and contradict the version put out by Alperovitch and Tait. The Ellen Nakashima piece was on
14 June, the first memorandum, which contained the 'golden showers' claim, is dated 20 June
– which of course may not be accurate.
There is then a pause, until the first treatment of Russian cyber operations, in a
memorandum dated '26 July 2015.' This is clearly a mistype for 2016, so that the date, if
correct, is more than a fortnight after the murder of Rich, which was on 10 July. This
memorandum makes no mention of the GRU, claims that 'FSB leads on cyber', and also that there
had been 'limited success in attacking top foreign targets'.
The next memorandum in the sequence, which is undated, introduces Paul Manafort and Carter
Page into the 'rogues' gallery', and contains some very interesting observations about the
cyber side. So 'Source E' – described as an 'ethnic Russian close associate' of Trump
– supposedly explains that the 'intelligence network' being used against Hillary
Clinton comprises three elements:
'Firstly there were agents/facilitators within the Democratic Party structure itself;
secondly Russian emigre and associated offensive cyber operators based in the US; and
thirdly, state-sponsored cyber operatives working in Russia.'
The fourth memorandum, dated 19 July, which if accurate means it would have had to have
been written before the second, then makes the accusations about the secret meetings between
Page and Sechin.
All this stinks of a hastily-organised cover-up operation, set in motion after it became
clear that highly compromising material was going to appear on 'WikiLeaks' – but which
moved into higher gear after the murder of Rich.
The reference to 'agents/facilitators within the Democratic Party itself' reads as though
it might well have been intended to provide a basis for a 'fall-back' position, if either the
problems of the 'hacking' story became too glaring, or it became impossible to prevent more
information coming out about the role of Rich in supplying material to WikiLeaks.
Also perhaps relevant is the fact that the initial meeting between Carter Page and Stefan
Halper occurred at a symposium in Cambridge, UK, entitled '2016's Race to Change the World',
which opened on 11 July, the day after Rich's death – and was also attended by Sir
Richard Dearlove.
All this adds to the strong impression that panic which may well have been materially
increased by Rich's murder could have been one of the reasons why the 'cover-up' took off
into a kind of stratosphere of absurdity in the period that followed it.
Reverting to the question you raise of possible motives for the murder, precisely what the
panic suggests is indeed that it is not obvious that anyone in the Democratic Party apparatus
had any incentive to assassinate Rich.
As was very evident at the time from, for example, comments on the 'MailOnline' site, very
many people who disliked Hillary immediately took for granted that Rich had been
'Arkancided', so his death then became further evidence of her innate villainy, and also
confirmation that he was, in fact, the source of the 'WikiLeaks' material.
However, precisely because of the sieve-like nature of the Democratic Party apparatus, a
situation had been created where there were actually a wide variety of people, in a wide
variety of places, who could have been taking an intense interest in the kind of material
which appeared on 'WikiLeaks.'
Such people might have been able, through all kinds of routes, to find out a good deal
both about what had been leaked, how and why, and what might be leaked in the future.
While I agree that revenge is not the most obvious motive, there are two qualifications.
As we have seen with MBS, people can badly misjudge the impact of their actions, which
becomes more relevant if one starts casting the net wider in looking for possible suspects.
Also, preventing further disclosures could conceivably have been a motive.
Equally, however, it is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility that someone who was
well aware of the conclusions people would draw could have seen having Rich murdered as a way
of striking at Hillary.
A regrettable consequence of the way in which it has been possible to use atrocity to
shape 'narratives', which has been facilitated by the increasingly patent disinterest of the
mainstream media in trying to get at the truth, is that there are very many players who, for
diverse reasons, could have seen their interests furthered by an assassination of this
kind.
How's this for a motive? Imran Awan ran the DNC servers. When it was discovered in May/June
that the emails had been downloaded, a search was launched and suspicion fell on Seth.
Worried that the Pakistani penetration of the DNC and the Congress might be uncovered, Seth
was silenced. I offer this as one possible theory.
I think it is very much a possible theory. And indeed, reading what Mark McCarty and Eric
Newhill wrote, I think I may have greatly underestimated the extent to which people on
Hillary's side could have thought Seth Rich too dangerous to be left alive.
And I also may not have have given adequate weight to the possibility that a not
particularly unnatural fear could have overridden the patent dangers involved in following
what I should perhaps have seen as an obvious logic.
One point raised by Eric's comments. It seems to me quite likely that the alarm was in
fact raised by monitoring what came in to WikiLeaks, rather than what went out of the DNC. If
this was so, however, it would be less likely that the monitoring was done directly by the
CIA/NSA. It would be much more likely that this was in the first instance primarily an
MI6/GCHQ function.
It may or may not be relevant here that Craig Murray has given a lot of people a lot of
grief – not least, in exposing the way that 'loops of lies' about 'SIGINT' were used in
the attempt to use the 'false flag' at Ghouta to inveige you and us into another disastrous
intervention in the Middle East.
Be that as it may, it seems to me a reasonable hypothesis that an enormous amount of
effort – including both 'HUMINT' and 'SIGINT' – has been deployed by British
intelligence agencies to ensure that all channels by which information could pass to and from
Assange are monitored.
Of particular interest could have been the kind of covert means of organising payments
which may have been used to transfer money to Seth Rich and his brother.
One might then be some way towards a better explanation of some of the absurd
incoherencies in the stories told by and about 'CrowdStrike', which struck a lot of us quite
early.
It is perfectly possible that 7 May is the actual date on which the company was called in.
However, this would not have been because a problem with the DNC computer systems had been
identified by that organisation – but because a receipt of information by 'WikiLeaks'
had been identified, and probably by the British.
At that point, it is perfectly possible that Alperovitch et al identified many 'hacks'
into the servers, some of which could indeed have been by organisations and individuals which
could perfectly possibly be linked to the Russians (but with the fact not being palpable,
because these would have looked for 'plausible deniability.')
Quite rapidly, the 'real' investigation, of which that by 'CrowdStrike' could have been a
part, but only part, would have identified Rich. But this would only have happened in time
for him to stop sending material originating later than 25 May. The search for a 'cover
story' would have begun at some time during this period.
The first stage in this would have involved the instruction to leave all laptops in the
office on 10 June. Thereafter, the attempts to create a 'cover story' developed rather
rapidly.
It would then becomes unsurprising that a former GCHQ person – Matt Tait –
should have played an important role, but also that the integration of the different parts of
the story was, to put it mildly, imperfect.
Part of this, however, is also likely to have had to do with the fact that both Glenn
Simpson and Christopher Steele are, quite patently, incompetent.
Unfortunately, I was 'away from base', celebrating a birthday with old friends, with
limited internet access, when the Colonel informed us that he had used 'Our Man in Havana' as
a teaching aid.
But it has become clear to me that an enormous amount of damage has resulted from the fact
that MSM journalists have read too much of the productions of David John Moore Cornwell (aka
John Le Carré), and not enough Graham Greene.
I am still trying to think this through, but another Graham Greene novel – 'The
Quiet American', of which the films are unfortunately awful, by contrast with that of 'Our
Man in Havana' – comes into the picture.
A key point about this is that 'tails wag dogs.'
So, having been persuaded that I had underestimated the likelihood of people in the
Hillary camp deciding that they had no realistic option but to remove Seth Rich from the
picture, it also occurs to me that a corollary of your suggestion is that a lot of other
people – among them, people involved with the Awans not in the United States –
might have thought that they had an overriding interest in so doing.
Moreover, they could realistically have calculated that – as with Alden Pyle when
General Thé escalates his 'false flags' – those who had thought they were in
control would then have had no realistic option but to cover up.
To digress, it seems to me likely that this is the premise on which MBS has operated
– and also, that a lot of people have given him every reason to think his confidence
was justified.
However, sometimes, when the 'tails' have been able to wag the 'dogs' for a very long
time, it goes to their head.
After contemplating the likely intelligence and propaganda efforts of HMG over the last 15
years or so I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which
events in places like Syria would seem to have little to do with the welfare of Britain. Why?
I suppose that the same question can be asked for the US and I have. In re "Our man in
Havana" I think there are many issues raised in the work that apply directly to the trade of
espionage.
The question why? is a very interesting but also very dispiriting one, but also one which
it is quite hard to get one's head round. I hope to have something more coherent to say about
it.
Among many reasons, however, there has been a kind of intellectual disintegration.
If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be
entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving
ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up
after another.
The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot
Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street
memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the
intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.'
Subsequently, of course, he set about colluding in the process. And, sixteen years later,
Dearlove is still at it, with 'Russiagate' – and the product being actually accepted
much more uncritically by the MSM than it was then.
And that is one of the problems – nobody any longer pays any penalty for failure, or
indeed feels any sense of shame about it..
There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without
success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring
light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his
henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal
interventionist speech.
As the Colonel eloquently asks:
"I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events
in places like Syria would seem to have little todo with the welfare of Britain. Why?"
I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the
early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated
backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism,
adept at networking and self-promotion.
They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their
fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of
catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. Our economic
power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief
amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE
games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most
ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome.
(I don't include the Maurice Cowling-ites in this fandango because they strike me as more
Little Englanders. Though Peterhouse is of course, shamefully, the HQ of the Henry Jackson
Society).
How did the DNC determine that Seth Rich did the download? They killed him on mere suspicion
that he could have been the insider stealing data? That seems like an extreme response
carried out on mere suspicion. The Awan/Pakistan connection was eventually revealed and it
went nowhere; basically fizzled out in the media. On the other hand, if one of our agencies
actually knew it was Rich passing info to Wikileaks via a spying program, and that Rich, as a
Sanders supporter, was doing so because he harbored deep animosity toward the Clinton
campaign and the DNC, then Rich would have to be silenced. This theory would implicate
members of the deep state. Perhaps, that is too far fetched or disturbing to consider?
Can you please clarify one point. You say Guccifer 2.0's DNC emails released in mid June,
2016 contain "meta data" and then that Binney analyzed "data" from an intrusion on July 5,
2016. Clearly Binney couldn't have analyzed Guccifer 2.0's emails meta data (inconsistent
timing) ... and could it be that Guccifer's hack was performed at the slower rate expected
over the internet? Thanks
But he went back and analyzed the docs released on 15 June as well. Please focus on the
central point--the FBI claims that Guccifer 2.0 is a GRU front but the meta data on the
documents don't support the claim that they were obtained via an internet hack.
When I turn something I am writing into a non sequitur, or worse reverse its meaning, I call
it a f*ck up (linguistically), correct it and thank anyone who cared enough to take the time
to read me in the first place and to lend me a hand. What I try not to do is to hide behind a
misapplied grammatical device. Know what I mean buttercup... ?
The NSA's FOIA response that they have traffic involving Rich and Assange reinforces both
Assange's assertion and Binney's analysis that the DNC was not hacked, the data was
downloaded. Assange's uncategorical denial that the Ruskies did it is important. It deserves
to remain unambiguous and not to be subject to uncontrolled ellipsisical seizure.
Guccifer 2.0 seemed pretty earnest. As yet we don't have much of a clue who he was working
for.
CIApedia story is a complete fabrication. And there might be connection between Seth murder and Avan brothers.
Notable quotes:
"... Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA request for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange ..."
"... While the content of these documents remain classified for now, they may provide documentary proof that Seth Rich "dropped boxed" the emails to Julian. If these documents are declassified, a big hole could be blown in the claim that Russia hacked the DNC. ..."
"... Is it really plausible that the perps would kill one person, fail to get anything of value from the homicide, then say "Oh shucks, that didn't work, won't do that again."? ..."
"... Yet there is no discussion of this of which I am aware, and the Wikipedia editors controlling the Wikipedia page for the murder of Seth Rich absolutely prohibit discussion, even on their "Talk Page" of such questions. E.g., their deletion of the question I asked here, under the heading "Why the "conspiracy theory" pejorative?" (which resulted in not only being deleted but a "Sanction" against me for daring to ask the question). ..."
"... CIA/NSA is already watching wikileaks due to Manning, etc) and "sees' that Rich has passed files. ..."
"... Intel filters up to Obama, Brennan, NSA people, Clinton and others that Rich has passed info to Wikileaks and then wikileaks announces and publishes the material. ..."
"... The DNC + Obama and other leftist deep staters concoct the Russian hacking meme to distract from the content of the material as well as to begin discredit Trump (and perhaps even develop a means of deposing him should he actually be elected). ..."
"... There is a connection between Seth and the Pakistani guy who had free rein with a lot of dem congresspeople's computers!!! His protector, Lil Debbie WS!!! There is a Podesta email where he states something to the effect that the person be taught a lesson as an example, guilty or not! ..."
If Russia had actually "hacked" the DNC emails then the National Security Agency would have
had proof of such activity. In fact, the NSA could have tracked such activity. But they did not
do that. That lack of evidence did not prevent a coordinated media campaign from spinning up to
pin the blame on Russia for the "theft" and to portray Donald Trump as Putin's lackey and
beneficiary.
Any effort to tell an alternative story has met with stout opposition. Fox News, for
example, came under withering fire after it published an article in May 2017 claiming that Seth
Rich, a young Democrat operative, had leaked DNC emails to Julian Assange at Wikileaks. The
family of Seth Rich reacted with fury and sued Fox, Malia Zimmerman and Ed Butowsky, but that
suit subsequently was dismissed.
Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that
confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA request
for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange.
While the content of these
documents remain classified for now, they may provide documentary proof that Seth Rich "dropped
boxed" the emails to Julian. If these documents are declassified, a big hole could be blown in
the claim that Russia hacked the DNC.
There is a local angle to the Seth Rich murder story I have not seen discussed. Consider:
But the circumstances and facts surrounding the murder were strange.
Seth was shot in the back. Nothing was taken from his body -- not his
watch, not his wallet and not his credit cards.
The story promulgated by the MSM and Wikipedia is that the Washington DC MPD believe the
crime was a botched robbery.
But attempted robberies are not normally a unique event.
If it was a botched robbery, it seems almost certain that the perpetrator(s) would, having
failed in this attempt, try again to execute a robbery.
And use the same MO (modus operandi).
But I have seen no reports of other such homicide/robbery combinations.
If this was truly a unique event, how would that be possible? Is it really plausible that the perps would kill one person, fail to get anything of value
from the homicide, then say "Oh shucks, that didn't work, won't do that again."?
There certainly are reports of serial robberies in Washington.
Very hard to believe this is an exception.
Yet there is no discussion of this of which I am aware,
and the Wikipedia editors controlling the Wikipedia page for the
murder of Seth Rich absolutely prohibit discussion, even on their
"Talk Page" of such questions.
E.g., their deletion of the question I asked
here, under the heading "Why the "conspiracy theory" pejorative?"
(which resulted in not only being deleted but a "Sanction" against me for daring to ask the
question).
As a Sanders supporter, Rich was appalled by how the
DNC screwed Sanders (and maybe some other things he learned also contributed to his decision
to engage in espionage against the DNC)
Rich decides to expose DNC corruption.
Rich
downloads the files locally and then passes them to wikileaks.
CIA/NSA is already watching wikileaks due to Manning, etc) and "sees' that Rich has passed files.
Intel filters up to
Obama, Brennan, NSA people, Clinton and others that Rich has passed info to Wikileaks and
then wikileaks announces and publishes the material.
The DNC + Obama and other leftist
deep staters concoct the Russian hacking meme to distract from the content of the material as
well as to begin discredit Trump (and perhaps even develop a means of deposing him should he
actually be elected).
Rich is the wild card. He could confess that he did it all by
himself - and he could create a spectacle by explaining why.
8. They kill Rich to remove the
only serious threat to their nefarious plot....?
"Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that
confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA
request for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange."
There is a connection between Seth and the Pakistani guy who had free rein with a lot of dem
congresspeople's computers!!! His protector, Lil Debbie WS!!! There is a Podesta email where he states something to the effect that the person be taught
a lesson as an example, guilty or not!
"... At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like. ..."
"... I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum, however bloody and expensive. ..."
"... Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud. ..."
At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very
highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress
and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.
It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power
and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?
I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor
primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think
they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum,
however bloody and expensive.
Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.
Conclusion regarding IP address data: What we're seeing in this IP data is a wide
range of countries and hosting providers. 15% of the IP addresses are Tor exit nodes. These
exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be anonymous online, including malicious
actors.
Overall Conclusion: The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an
attack by a state actor like Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with
Russia. They are probably used by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15%
of IP addresses that are Tor exit nodes.
The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent
relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any
website.
Interesting, too, that the Dark State appears to be sending out talking points this week to
the effect that the alleged hacking of the DNC is an "act of war." IfI'm not mistaken, the US
recently revised war policy to include cyber attacks, whether they actually happened or not,
as being the same as a kinetic attack. Looks to me like we are seeing the beginning of a
long-term pysop/PR campaign to build support for a "preemptive" strike against Russia and
China that would, presumably, include nukes.
Is this shadow of Integrity Initiative in the USA ? This false flag open the possibility that other similar events like
DNC (with very questionable investigation by Crowdstrike, which was a perfect venue to implement a false flag; cybersecurity area is
the perfect environment for planting false flags), MH17 (might be an incident but later it definitely was played as a false flag), Skripals
(Was Skripals poisoning a false flag decided to hide the fact that Sergey Skripal was involved in writing Steele dossier?) and Litvinenko
(probably connected with lack of safety measures in the process of smuggling of Plutonium by Litvinenko himself, but later played a
a false flag). All of those now should be re-assessed from the their potential of being yet another flag flag operation
against Russia. While Browder was a MI6 operation from the very beginning (and that explains
why he abdicated the US citizenship more convincingly that the desire to avoid taxes) .
Notable quotes:
"... Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior. ..."
"... Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign). ..."
"... By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling." ..."
"... The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true). ..."
For over two years now, the concepts of "Russian collusion" and "Russian election meddling" have been shoved down our throats
by the mainstream media (MSM) under the guise of legitimate concern that the Kremlin may have installed a puppet president in Donald
Trump.
Having no evidence of collusion aside from a largely unverified opposition-research dossier fabricated by a former British spy,
the focus shifted from "collusion" to "meddling" and "influence." In other words, maybe Trump didn't actually collude with Putin,
but the Kremlin used Russian tricks to influence the election in Trump's favor. To some, this looked like nothing more than an establishment
scheme to cast a permanent spectre of doubt over the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump.
Election meddling "Russian bots" and "troll farms" became the central focus - as claims were levied of social media operations
conducted by Kremlin-linked organizations which sought to influence and divide certain segments of America.
And while scant evidence of a Russian influence operation exists outside of a handful of indictments connected to a St. Petersburg
"Troll farm" (which a liberal journalist
cast serious doubt ov er), the MSM - with all of their proselytizing over the "threat to democracy" that election meddling poses,
has largely decided to ignore actual evidence of "Russian bots" created by Democrat IT experts, used against a GOP candidate in the
Alabama special election, and amplified through the Russian bot-detecting "Hamilton 68" dashboard developed by the same IT experts.
Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation
against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed
to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior.
As Russian state-owned RT puts
it - and who could blame them for being a bit pissed over the whole thing, "it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy
by "Russian bots." Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible
for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection. "
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout
by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.
Described by the
New York Times
as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies.
Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agenc y. His partner,
Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company
in 2018 alone.
...
On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as
fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names,
and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded
voters to support a write-in candidate instead.
In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea
that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."
It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones, which based its story
on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious creation, Hamilton 68. -
RT
Moore ended up losing the Alabama special election by a slim margin of just
In other words: In November 2017 – when Moore and his Democratic opponent were in a bitter fight to win over voters – Morgan
openly promoted the theory that Russian bots were supporting Moore's campaign . A year later – after being caught red-handed orchestrating
a self-described "false flag" operation – Morgan now says that his team never thought that the bots were Russian and have no idea
what their purpose was . Did he think no one would notice? -
RT
Disinformation warrior @ jonathonmorgan attempts to control
damage by lying. He now claims the "false flag operation" never took place and the botnet he promoted as Russian-linked (based
on phony Hamilton68 Russian troll tracker he developed) wasn't Russian https://www.
newknowledge.com/blog/about-ala bama
Even more strange is that Scott Shane - the journalist who wrote the New York Times piece exposing the Alabama "Russian bot" scheme,
knew about it for months after speaking at an event where the organizers bragged about the false flag on Moore .
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey
Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to
suppress Republican votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hrt Moore. He dubbed it "Project
Birmingham." - RT
Shane told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, though hid behind a nondisclosure agreement at the request of American
Engagement Technologies (AET). He instead chose to spin the New Knowledge "false flag" operation on Moore as "limited Russian tactics"
which were part of an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 - and which had no effect on the election.
New Knowledge suggested that the false flag operation was simply a "research project," which Morgan suggested was designed "to
better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation."
While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard
to give his "false flag" more credibility – misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was fake.
New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which
announced last week that five
accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
- RT
They knew exactly what they were doing
While Morgan and New Knowledge sought to frame the "Project Birmingham" as a simple research project, a leaked copy of the operation's
after-action report reveals that they knew exactly what they were doing .
"We targeted 650,000 like AL voters, with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification
and targeted advertising," reads the report published by entrepreneur and executive coach Jeff Giesea.
The rhetorical question remains, why did the MSM drop this election meddling story like a hot rock after the initial headlines
faded away?
criminal election meddling, but then who the **** is going to click on some morons tactic and switch votes?
anyone basing any funding, whether it is number of facebook hits or attempted mind games by egotistical cuck soyboys needs a serious
psychological examination. fake news is fake BECAUSE IT ISNT REAL AND DOES NOT MATTER TO ANYONE but those living in the excited misery
of their tiny bubble world safe spaces. SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CON AND IS NOT IMPORTANT OR RELEVANT TO ANYONE.
far more serious is destroying ballots, writing in ballots without consent, bussing voters around to vote multiple times in different
districts, registering dead voters and imperosnating the corpses, withholding votes until deadlines pass - making them invalid.
Herdee , 10 minutes ago
NATO on behalf of the Washington politicians uses the same bullsh*t propaganda for continual war.
Mugabe , 20 minutes ago
Yup "PROJECTION"...
Yippie21 , 21 minutes ago
None of this even touches on the 501c3 or whatever that was set up , concerned Alabama voters or somesuch, and was funneled
a **** load of money to be found to be in violation of the law AFTER the election and then it all just disappeared. Nothing to
see here folks, Democrat won, let's move on. There was a LOT of " tests " for the smart-set in that election and it all worked.
We saw a bunch of it used in 2018, especially in Texas with Beto and down-ballot races. Democrats cleaned up like crazy in Texas,
especially in Houston.
2020 is going to be a hot mess. And the press is in on it, and even if illegal or unseemly things are done, as long as Democrats
win, all good... let's move on. Crazy.
LetThemEatRand , 21 minutes ago
The fact that MSM is not covering this story -- which is so big it truly raises major questions about the entire Russiagate
conspiracy including why Mueller was appointed in the first place -- is proof that they have no interest in journalism or the
truth and that they are 100% agenda driven liars. Not that we needed more proof, but there it is anyway.
Oldguy05 , 19 minutes ago
Dimz corruption is a nogo. Now if it were conservatives.......
CosineCosineCosine , 23 minutes ago
I'm not a huge fan, but Jimmy Dore has a cathartic and entertaining 30 minutes on this farce. Well worth the watch:
Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election
(not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign).
By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we
are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were,
actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling."
The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all
on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people
who have a vested interest in convincing us its true).
dead hobo , 30 minutes ago
I've been watching Scandal on Netflix. Still only in season 2. Amazing how nothing changes.They nailed it and memorialized
it. The MSM are useful idiots who are happy to make money publicizing what will sell the best.
chunga , 30 minutes ago
The media is biased and sucks, yup.
The reason the reds lost the house is because they went along with this nonsense and did nothing about it, like frightened
baby chipmunks.
JRobby , 33 minutes ago
Only when "the opposition" does it is it illegal. Total totalitarian state wannabe stuff.
divingengineer , 22 minutes ago
Amazing how people can contort reality to justify their own righteous cause, but decry their opposition for the EXACT same
thing. See trump visit to troops signing hats as most recent proof. If DJT takes a piss and sprinkles the seat, it's a crime.
DarkPurpleHaze , 33 minutes ago
They're afraid to expose themselves...unlike Kevin Spacey. Trump or Whitaker will expose this with one signature. It's
coming.
divingengineer , 20 minutes ago
Spacey has totally lost it. See his latest video, it will be a powerful piece of evidence for an insanity plea.
CosineCosineCosine , 10 minutes ago
Disagree strongly. I think it was excellent - perhaps you misunderstood the point? 6 minutes Diana Davidson look at it clarifies
When we reported last week that Imran Awan and his wife had been indicted by a grand jury on
4 counts, including bank fraud and making false statements related to some home equity loans,
we also noted that those charges could simply be placeholders for further developments yet to
come. Now, according to a new report from the
Daily Caller , the more interesting component of the FBI's investigation could be tied to
precisely why New York Democrat Representative Yvette Clarke quietly agreed in early 2016 to
simply write-off $120,000 in missing electronics tied to the Awans.
A chief of staff for Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke quietly agreed in early 2016 to sign
away a $120,000 missing electronics problem on behalf of two former IT aides now suspected of
stealing equipment from Congress, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned. Clarke's
chief of staff at the time effectively dismissed the loss and prevented it from coming up in
future audits by signing a form removing the missing equipment from a House-wide tracking
system after one of the Awan brothers alerted the office the equipment was gone. The
Pakistani-born brothers are now at the center of an FBI investigation over their IT work with
dozens of Congressional offices.
The $120,000 figure amounts to about a tenth of the office's annual budget, or enough to
hire four legislative assistants to handle the concerns of constituents in her New York
district. Yet when one of the brothers alerted the office to the massive loss, the chief of
staff signed a form that quietly reconciled the missing equipment in the office budget, the
official told TheDCNF. Abid Awan remained employed by the office for months after the loss of
the equipment was flagged.
If true, of course this new information would seem to support previously reported rumors
that the Awans orchestrated a long-running fraud scheme in which their office would purchase
equipment in a way that avoided tracking by central House-wide administrators and then sell
that equipment for a personal gain while simultaneously defrauding taxpayers of $1,000's of
dollars.
Meanwhile, according to the Daily Caller, CDW Government could have been in on the
scheme.
They're suspected of working with an employee of CDW Government Inc. -- one of the Hill's
largest technology providers -- to alter invoices in order to avoid tracking. The result
would be that no one outside the office would notice if the equipment disappeared, and
investigators think the goal of the scheme was to remove and sell the equipment outside of
Congress.
CDW spokeswoman Kelly Caraher told TheDCNF the company is cooperating with investigators,
and has assurance from prosecutors its employees are not targets of the investigation. "CDW
and its employees have cooperated fully with investigators and will continue to do so,"
Caraher said. "The prosecutors directing this investigation have informed CDW and its
coworkers that they are not subjects or targets of the investigation."
Not surprisingly, Clarke's office apparently felt no need whatsoever to report the $120,000
worth of missing IT equipment to the authorities... it's just taxpayer money afterall...
According to the official who talked to TheDCNF, Clarke's chief of staff did not alert
authorities to the huge sum of missing money when it was brought to the attention of the
office around February of 2016. A request to sign away that much lost equipment would have
been "way outside any realm of normalcy," the official said, but the office did not bring it
to the attention of authorities until months later when House administrators told the office
they were reviewing finances connected to the Awans.
The administrators informed the office that September they were independently looking into
discrepancies surrounding the Awans, including a review of finances connected to the brothers
in all the congressional offices that employed them. The House administrators asked Clarke's
then-chief of staff, Wendy Anderson, whether she had noticed any anomalies, and at that time
she alerted them to the $120,000 write-off, the official told TheDCNF.
Of course, the missing $120,000 covers only Clarke's office. As we've noted before, Imran
and his relatives worked for more than 40 current House members when they were banned from the
House network in February, and have together worked for dozens more in past years so who know
just how deep this particular rabbit hole goes.
Also makes you wonder what else Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the Awans might be hiding.
Certainly the decision by Wasserman-Shultz to keep Awan on her taxpayer funded payroll, right
up until he was arrested by the FBI while trying to flee the country, is looking increasingly
fishy with each passing day.
The 911 protection swamp is deep, and profiteers and drug, human traffic, NGO, Body part,
war mongers runs deep.
Please stop calling it building 7 It was the Solomon building.. While you are at it look
at the 1991 Solomon bond scandal which gave the Citi Clinton Mafia all power.... Oh yea
Bush/Clinton cabal did get Saudis to buy Citi stocks and GE plastics. Swampy enough?
120k write off ! You are kidding me?
south40_dreams , 1 year ago
Blackmail was where the real money was at
pissantra , 1 year ago
The real problem here is being completely ignored -- and that is this: the Awan bros were
likely spies (with Wasserman either forced to allow them to spy or the spymaster selling
intel to Pakistan). This would mean that 21+ congress-critters have been completely
compromised. THIS is important NOW, after Trumps Afghan speech -- if he plans to lean on
Pakistan with an "either you stop helping the Taliban or we will destroy you (economically
and/or physically) along with them...."--- these compromised congress-critters will defund
Trumps war.
Freddie , 3 weeks ago
No. Pakistan is the smokescreen. Wasserscum, like Scott Israel, are dual shitizens. This
is, as is Broward County, a MO$$$$ad op. Broward County for vote theft, fraud, attorney
killings, false flags, etc. I would guess a lot more in Congress are owned.
Just watched Congress during Bibi and even ko$$her Porschenko addressing Congrez-zio. They
jump up like circus trained animals to give standing ovations for every word.
Awans and Wasserscum will get passes. George Webb on youtube appears to be doing good work
but it is probably another smoke screen because George has said he is a zioni$$t.
Ban KKiller , 1 year ago
Gee Michelle....you used the Pakistanis for your IT work? What, you like filthy muslims?
Guess so.... When will you confess that you have NO IDEA where your confidential information is? Michelle Lynn Lujan Grisham is an American lawyer and politician who is the U.S.
Representative for New Mexico's 1st congressional district, serving since 2013.
mtanimal , 1 year ago
I didn't know espionage and extortion were tax deductible. Who's her accountant?
Cardinal Fang , 1 year ago
I regret that we may never know the extent of the duplicity of our government with this
ISI stooge.
pc_babe , 1 year ago
with Jeff Session at the helm, you can rest assured you never will
Loanman26 , 1 year ago
My spidy senses are flaring. It was the Russians who stole the equipment. It was comrade Sergei Awan
Blazing in BC , 1 year ago
To whoever is "in charge"....THE STENCH IS UNBEARABLE
runnymede , 1 year ago
Institutionalized unaccountability is what makes the systemic corruption function. As long
as Wasserman's brother is in charge of D.C. prosecutions, nothing will happen. He is the
gatekeeper, which is why DWS, the DNC and the Clinton Crime Machine have not only acted with
impunity, but with extreme contempt. They know they are untouchable. Honest prosecution would
expose D.C. itself as the professional criminal operation that it is, including most Repubs.
There will never be allowed a real look into the rabbit hole, George Webb's outstanding
efforts notwithstanding.
One of We , 1 year ago
President Not Hillary needs to lock some bitches up and expose the Clinton Crime Family
Foundation. Definitely lowering the bar from my lofty hopes but I'd be happy with a partial
roto rootering of the swamp if that's all he has to show for his term.
SRV , 1 year ago
The Awans were working for DWS and The Crook... this fruad is the tip of the
iceberg...
How about doping Blackberry's for 80 House Dems to sync with servers around the Capital
(remember DWS threatening the Capital Police Chief with "consequences" if he didn't give her
back her laptop found in a Capitol Hill building. The Awans were selling the access to most
of the secrets in congress since 2004... this was a spy ring (he has serious ties to
Pakistani ISI).
JiminyCrickets , 1 year ago
As long as Debbie Wasserman Schultz's Brother Steven Wasserman is running the Seth Rich
murder investigation this wont go any where.
gregga777 , 1 year ago
Unfortunately, the Anglo-Zionist FAKE NEWS Media won't cover this story, especially the
links to Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It's anti-Semitic to discuss her criminality or to
criticize her in any other way.
JiminyCrickets , 1 year ago
George Webb's detailed 300+ day investigation indicates the Awans were shipping stolen
high end cars to foreign diplomats and depleted uranium weapons using DNC Diplomatic
Containers.
no surprise that demonRat politicians throughout all legislatures have been guilty of
defrauding the tax payer for decades - in much the same way that demonRat politicians
directly legislate for welfare benefits, free insurance and tax cuts for their family and
friends - at the expense of tax payers - and who also extract tax payer funds via the gravy
train of internships, federal grants etc for their family and friends.
this is how libtard demonRat politicians infect the swamp and then infest it with their
filth and cronyism.
aided and abetted by the MSM.
if only iy was just the demonRats, there might be a chance - however, corrupt republicRats
have been just as guilty.
one day, all this will be out in the open and perhaps demonRat and republicRat voters will
see how they have been voting for corruption all these years.
are we there yet , 1 year ago
Because you are one of the little people.
NoPension , 1 year ago
We are below " little people". We are irrelevant. Just keep paying, slave. Someone correct
me if I'm wrong..... This country was founded on the principle that the individual had
sovereign rights, imbued from God...and was the vessel of ultimate power. Today...these
illegally elected ( it's almost ALL proven a fraud) cocksuckers go in broke and come out the
other end multimillionaires with legal immunity from anything, up to and including murder.
It's high time to water the ******* tree.
"... What Are the Democrats Hiding?" http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/07/what-are-the-democrats-hiding-by-publius-tacitus.html "Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) demanded that Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa return equipment belonging to her office that was seized as part of the investigation -- or face "consequences." ..."
"... "FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's information technology (IT) administrator, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, has since desperately tried to get the hard drives back." ..."
"... This is not your phony Russia-gate or McCain-commissioned funny dossier on Trump. This is the documented "serious, potentially illegal, violations of the House IT network," which is a case of a free access to classified information by a group of the proven blackmailers. Would this matter be treated with the same urgency of "patriotism" as the cases of Manning and Assange? ..."
Virtually no one [from MSM] is paying attention to the fact that a group of Pakistani
Muslims, working for a Jewish Congresswoman from Florida, had full computer access to a large
number of Democrat Representatives. Most of the press is disinterested in pursuing this
matter."
"FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's information technology (IT) administrator, according to two
sources with knowledge of the investigation. Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand
IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, has since desperately
tried to get the hard drives back."
This is not your phony Russia-gate or McCain-commissioned funny dossier on Trump. This
is the documented "serious, potentially illegal, violations of the House IT network," which
is a case of a free access to classified information by a group of the proven blackmailers.
Would this matter be treated with the same urgency of "patriotism" as the cases of Manning
and Assange?
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. ~ Ian Fleming
Notable quotes:
"... We believe that in all three cases Guccifer 2 was unlikely to anticipate that this Eastern timezone setting could be derived from the metadata of the documents that he published. However, one vocal critic with significant media reach objected to our East Coast finding as it related to our analysis of the ngpvan .7z file. This critic concluded instead that Guccifer 2 deliberately planted that clue to implicate a DNC worker who would die under suspicious circumstances a few days later on July 10, 2016. ..."
"... Now, we have this additional East Coast indication, which appears just one day after the ngpvan.7z files were collected. This new East Coast indication is found in a completely different group of files that Guccifer 2 published on his blog site. Further, this East Coast finding has its own unique and equally unlikely method of derivation. ..."
"... If we apply our critic's logic, what do we now conclude? That Guccifer 2 also deliberately planted this new East Coast indication? To what end? We wonder: Will this new evidence compel our out-spoken critic to retract his unsubstantiated claims and accusations? ..."
Editorial Note: The Forensicator recently published a report, titled " Guccifer
2 Returns To The East Coast ." Forensicator provided the following introduction to his
latest findings, reproduced here with the permission of the author.
In this post, we announce a new finding that confirms our previous work and is the basis for
an update that we recently made to Guccifer 2's Russian
Breadcrumbs . In our original publication of that report, we posited that there were
indications of a GMT+4 timezone offset (legacy Moscow DST) in a batch of files that Guccifer 2
posted on July 6, 2016. At the time, we viewed that as a "Russian breadcrumb" that Guccifer 2
intentionally planted.
Now, based on new information, we have revised that conclusion: The timezone offset was in
fact GMT-4 (US Eastern DST) . Here, we will describe how we arrived at this new, surprising
conclusion and relate it to our prior work.
A month/so after publication, Stephen McIntyre ( @ClimateAudit ) replicated our analysis. He ran a few
experiments and found an error in our
original conclusion.
We mistakenly interpreted the last modified time that LibreOffice wrote as
"2015-08-25T23:07:00Z" as a GMT time value. Typically, the trailing "Z" means " Zulu Time ", but
in this case, LibreOffice incorrectly added the "Z". McIntyre's tests confirm that LibreOffice
records the "last modified" time as local time (not GMT). The following section describes the
method that we used to determine the timezone offset in force when the document was saved.
LibreOffice Leaks the Time Zone Offset in Force when a Document was Last Written
Modern Microsoft Office documents are generally a collection of XML files and image files.
This collection of files is packaged as a Zip file. LibreOffice can save documents in a
Microsoft Office compatible format, but its file format differs in two important details: (1)
the GMT time that the file was saved is recorded in the Zip file components that make up the
final document and (2) the document internal last saved time is recorded as local time (unlike
Microsoft Word, which records it as a GMT [UTC] value).
If we open up a document saved by Microsoft Office using the modern Office file format (
.docx or .xlsx ) as a Zip file, we see something like the following.
LibreOffice , as shown below, will record the GMT time that the document components were
saved. This time will display as the same value independent of the time zone in force when the
Zip file metadata is viewed.
For documents saved by LibreOffice we can compare the local "last saved" time recorded in
the document's properties with the GMT time value recorded inside the document (when viewed as
a Zip file). We demonstrate this derivation using the file named
potus-briefing-05-18-16_as-edits.docx that Guccifer 2 changed using LibreOffice and then
uploaded to his blog site on July 6, 2016 (along with several other files).
Above, we calculate a time zone offset of GMT-4 (EDT) was in force, by subtracting the last
saved time expressed in GMT (2016-07-06 17:10:58) from the last saved time expressed as local
time (2016-07-06 13:10:57).
We've Been Here Before
The Eastern timezone setting found in Guccifer 2's documents published on July 6, 2016 is
significant, because as we showed in Guccifer 2.0
NGP/Van Metadata Analysis , Guccifer 2 was likely on the East Coast the previous day, when
he collected the DNC-related files found in the ngpvan.7z Zip file. Also, recall that Guccifer
2 was likely on the East Coast a couple of months later on September 1, 2016 when he built the
final ngpvan.7z file.
We believe that in all three cases Guccifer 2 was unlikely to anticipate that this Eastern
timezone setting could be derived from the metadata of the documents that he published.
However, one vocal critic with significant media reach objected to our East Coast finding as it
related to our analysis of the ngpvan .7z file. This critic concluded instead that Guccifer 2
deliberately planted that clue to implicate a DNC worker who would die under suspicious
circumstances a few days later on July 10, 2016.
Further, this critic accused the Forensicator (and Adam Carter ) of using this finding to amplify the
impact of Forensicator's report in an effort to spread disinformation. He implied that
Forensicator's report was supplied by Russian operatives via a so-called "tip-off file." The
Forensicator addresses those baseless criticisms and accusations in The Campbell
Conspiracy .
Now, we have this additional East Coast indication, which appears just one day after the
ngpvan.7z files were collected. This new East Coast indication is found in a completely
different group of files that Guccifer 2 published on his blog site. Further, this East Coast
finding has its own unique and equally unlikely method of derivation.
If we apply our critic's logic, what do we now conclude? That Guccifer 2 also deliberately
planted this new East Coast indication? To what end? We wonder: Will this new evidence compel our out-spoken critic to retract his
unsubstantiated claims and accusations?
Closing Thought: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. ~ Ian Fleming
It is curious how those running vpn's often don't bother appropriately setting their
device time zones.
Regarding the closing thought, that was my thinking regarding the Byzantine Vegetable
'ally' at /qr in a non-American time zone who repeatedly attacked me.
Perhaps I have shared some harsh words with you and William, but I do sincerely care for
your well being and my appreciation for the work you both have done remains. The Optics have
been understandably difficult to swallow for many, but I hope that in your own time, you both
will be willing to take another look at Q.
Interesting to see Fleming -- as time goes on, it is pretty clear that he was telling us a
few things about how power really works--psychopathic oligarchs with private wetworkers. Of
course now we have governments competing to hire the same mercenaries -- and the uniformed
mercenaries working oligarchs with government complicity.
"... "Tim Canova, independent candidate in Florida's 23rd Congressional District, has filed a motion for a court to invalidate the results of the 2018 general election and declare that a "new election shall proceed with hand-marked paper ballots that are counted by hand in public and reported immediately and publicly at the local precinct level." ..."
"... "Unfortunately, this is only the most recent instance of what is now a pattern of misconduct by Snipes regarding paper ballots, as it follows barely a year after Snipes unlawfully destroyed hundreds of boxes of all paper ballots cast in Broward County in the 2016 Democratic primary for Florida's 23rd Congressional district between Canova and Schultz, in violation of state and federal law and while Canova's prior lawsuit to inspect those ballots was pending, as already determined on summary judgment by the Florida Circuit Court." ..."
"... "In addition to Snipes' failure to safeguard the integrity of the paper ballots in the 2018 general election for FL-23, the certification of the purported results is based on inadequate and incomplete information, and it is therefore an invalid certification of those results. More specifically, approximately 98,000 votes are reported by Snipes to have been cast for Schultz without any indication as to how and when those votes were cast. To date, Snipes still has not provided this information about the "98,000 votes from nowhere." These votes alone are enough to change the results of this election, or at the very least to place in doubt these results." ..."
"... "Florida Gov. Rick Scott suspended Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes on Friday and installed a close ally to lead an office that could play a pivotal role in the next presidential election. Peter Antonacci, president and CEO of the state's business-recruitment agency Enterprise Florida, will serve for the remainder of Snipes' term until a replacement can be chosen by voters in November 2020, the governor's office announced." ..."
Canova Contests The Results Of Congressional Race Against Wasserman-Schultz, Calls For Revote
December 1, 2018
December 1, 2018
Elizabeth Vos
Earlier today, former Congressional candidate Tim Canova announced that his legal team
filed a complaint
officially contesting the results of last month's congressional race, in which Canova
faced off against former DNC Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
"Tim Canova, independent candidate in Florida's 23rd Congressional District, has filed a motion for a
court to invalidate the results of the 2018 general election and declare that a "new election shall proceed
with hand-marked paper ballots that are counted by hand in public and reported immediately and publicly at
the local precinct level."
" In the details of Canova's court filing, Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes [is
alleged to have] "engaged in misconduct that was sufficient to change or place in doubt the results of the
2018 election." Canova cites Snipes, Dozel Spencer, the SOE Director of Voting Equipment, and other deputy
supervisors "violated their oaths to faithfully perform their duties, engaged in repeated misconduct and
violations of state and federal laws, including criminal statutes."
Highlights of the
complaint
, via the Canova Campaign website, include:
"Unfortunately, this is only the most recent instance of what is now a pattern of misconduct by Snipes
regarding paper ballots, as it follows barely a year after Snipes unlawfully destroyed hundreds of boxes of all
paper ballots cast in Broward County in the 2016 Democratic primary for Florida's 23rd Congressional district
between Canova and Schultz, in violation of state and federal law and while Canova's prior lawsuit to inspect
those ballots was pending, as already determined on summary judgment by the Florida Circuit Court."
"In addition to Snipes' failure to safeguard the integrity of the paper ballots in the 2018 general
election for FL-23, the certification of the purported results is based on inadequate and incomplete
information, and it is therefore an invalid certification of those results. More specifically, approximately
98,000 votes are reported by Snipes to have been cast for Schultz without any indication as to how and when
those votes were cast. To date, Snipes still has not provided this information about the "98,000 votes from
nowhere." These votes alone are enough to change the results of this election, or at the very least to place in
doubt these results."
This latest news comes under 24 hours after the
Sun Sentinal
reported that Florida's Governor Rick Scott had fired Brenda Snipes, effective immediately.
The report states:
"Florida Gov. Rick Scott suspended Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes on
Friday and installed a close ally to lead an office that could play a pivotal role in the next presidential
election. Peter Antonacci, president and CEO of the state's business-recruitment agency Enterprise Florida,
will serve for the remainder of Snipes' term until a replacement can be chosen by voters in November 2020, the
governor's office announced."
Disobedient Media
previously covered the disastrous aftermath of last month's midterm elections,
specifically concerning the race between Canova and Wasserman-Schultz. On election night, the official vote
count awarded a mere 5% of votes to Canova, despite a previous poll revealing the independent was tied with the
former DNC Chairwoman.
This glaring discrepancy prompted vocal calls for the invalidation of the race. Given Snipes's history of
illegal ballot destruction
which benefitted Wasserman-Schultz's interest, as well as the fact that Snipes
was photographed campaigning with Wasserman-Schultz days before voters went to the polls, it would be ludicrous
if Canova and the public failed to question the validity of the results.
In a previous appraisal of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's career,
Disobedient Media
noted her central role in seeing Bernie Sanders cheated out of the Democratic Party
nomination in 2016, as well as her probable involvement in bizarre event surrounding the
DNC Fraud lawsuit
(voice-modulated phone calls including the phrase
"okey-dokey"
),
and the grossly underreported
Awan
scandal
.
Disobedient Media
additionally noted the furor that erupted after the
publication
of video evidence of a digital scanner voting machine sending results wirelessly. Some have also
accused
Snipes
and her affiliates of falsifying ballots 'as needed,' dubbing the practice the
'Brenda Snipes Process,'
which was allegedly used routinely in order to ensure a desired election outcome.
Independent journalist and progressive activist Niko House also set the internet on fire when he published a
video of purported ballots being illegally and improperly transported. House discussed what he witnessed in
Florida on election day with Lee Camp on RT's
Redacted Tonight
.
Tim Canova
has
also called for the resignation of Snipes's Director, Dozel Spencer. As noted by this author and others, Brenda
Snipes is merely the public face of a deeply corrupt political system, and without a massive overhaul, business
will most likely continue as usual in Southern Florida – at the expense of its constituents.
Prosecution of those involved in documented, home-grown election interference is also essential moving
forward. However, one should be under no illusion that such measures are likely in the near term without
massive public pressure.
Regardless, the
significance of Canova's two races
against Wasserman-Schultz, as well as his campaign's quest for
transparency, should not be forgotten. He is one of the very few progressive candidates who has opted to fight
corruption head-on, from outside the DNC, rather than concede and meekly
endorse
the perpetrators
of it from within the Democratic Party.
Unlike the faux "
#Resistance
"
against fictional Russian-collusion or Russian-hacking, Canova is the singular example of real resistance
against actual US election rigging in one of the most corrupt political fiefdoms in the country.
It is for all of these reasons, many believe, that the discrepancy between polling and election results was
so extreme in Canova's latest race. It wasn't about "safely" beating Canova, it was about making an example of
him to such an extent that no one else would follow in his footsteps. With all of this in mind, it is critical
that the public support Tim Canova's efforts in contesting last month's election results. Donations can be made
via the
Canova campaign website
.
Disobedient Media will continue to report on the corrupt dealings surrounding Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, as
well as the efforts of Tim Canova and his campaign.
"... Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA request for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange. While the content of these documents remain classified for now, they may provide documentary proof that Seth Rich "dropped boxed" the emails to Julian. If these documents are declassified, a big hole could be blown in the claim that Russia hacked the DNC. ..."
"... Another case of "Arkancide"? ..."
"... I came to this summary today after I had turned my T.V. off since all the news is now about the "bombs" being mailed to the Clintons and Obamas. (I was afraid a story line would soon continue that the bombs were from Russia via the White House. I can no longer feel certain that anything reported in the "news" is true and wonder what part of it is made up from thin air. ..."
"... And I am sad that such a huge number of American citizens simply no longer care what is true or what is not true. They believe only what they want to believe. Mostly I am sad that Seth Rich lived and died and few seem to want to know the facts surrounding his death. ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0 was nothing but an elaborate joke. ..."
If Russia had actually "hacked" the DNC emails then the National Security Agency would have had proof of such activity. In fact,
the NSA could have tracked such activity. But they did not do that. That lack of evidence did not prevent a coordinated media campaign
from spinning up to pin the blame on Russia for the "theft" and to portray Donald Trump as Putin's lackey and beneficiary.
Any effort to tell an alternative story has met with stout opposition. Fox News, for example, came under withering fire after
it published an article in May 2017 claiming that Seth Rich, a young Democrat operative, had leaked DNC emails to Julian Assange
at Wikileaks. The family of Seth Rich reacted with fury and sued Fox, Malia Zimmerman and Ed Butowsky, but that suit subsequently
was dismissed.
Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and
Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA request for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange. While the
content of these documents remain classified for now, they may provide documentary proof that Seth Rich "dropped boxed" the emails
to Julian. If these documents are declassified, a big hole could be blown in the claim that Russia hacked the DNC.
PT, thank for the very detailed description of the entire story surrounding the supposed Russian hack of the DNC emails.
I always find myself screaming at the T.V. whenever a supposed reporter mentions the supposed Russian hack of the DNC computers
as if such an event is settled history.
I came to this summary today after I had turned my T.V. off since all the news is now about the "bombs" being mailed to the
Clintons and Obamas. (I was afraid a story line would soon continue that the bombs were from Russia via the White House. I can no longer feel certain that anything reported in the "news" is true and wonder what part of it is made up from thin air.
And I am sad that such a huge number of American citizens simply no longer care what is true or what is not true. They believe
only what they want to believe. Mostly I am sad that Seth Rich lived and died and few seem to want to know the facts surrounding his death.
"... A few months ago, a dozen Russian individuals were charged with cyber-crime offenses that Mueller knew would never be tested at trial b/c the charged individuals would never be extradited. However, the indictment included charges against two Russian corporations that cleverly hired American lawyers to appear on their behalf, and enter pleas of Not Guilty. ..."
"... This tactic should have set the pre-trial discovery process to begin, causing Mueller to be obliged to turn over evidence supporting the charges as well as any exculpatory information favoring the accused corporations. ..."
A few months ago, a dozen Russian individuals were charged with cyber-crime offenses that
Mueller knew would never be tested at trial b/c the charged individuals would never be
extradited. However, the indictment included charges against two Russian corporations that
cleverly hired American lawyers to appear on their behalf, and enter pleas of Not
Guilty.
This tactic should have set the pre-trial discovery process to begin, causing Mueller
to be obliged to turn over evidence supporting the charges as well as any exculpatory
information favoring the accused corporations.
As any reference to this case can't seem to be found, can anyone help with info as to the
present status of the case?
Disobedient Media has closely followed the work of the Forensicator , whose analysis has shed much light
on the publications by the Guccifer 2.0 persona for over a year. In view of the more recent
work published by the Forensicator regarding potential media collusion with Guccifer 2.0, we
are inclined to revisit an interview given by WikiLeaks Editor-In-Chief Julian Assange in
August of 2016, prior to the publication of the Podesta Emails in October, and the November US
Presidential election.
During the
interview, partially transcribed below, Assange makes a number of salient points on the
differentiation between the thousands of pristine emails WikiLeaks received, and those which
had surfaced in other US outlets by that date. Though Assange does not name the Guccifer 2.0
persona directly throughout the interview, he does name multiple outlets which publicized
Guccifer 2.0's documents.
The significance of revisiting Assange's statements is the degree to which his most
significant claim is corroborated or paralleled by the Forensicator's analysis. This is of
enhanced import in light of allegations by
Robert Mueller (not to mention the legacy media), despite a total absence of evidence, that
Guccifer 2.0 was WikiLeaks's source of the DNC and Podesta emails.
This author previously
discussed the possibility that Assange's current isolation might stem in part from the
likelihood that upon expulsion from the embassy, Julian Assange could provide evidential proof
that the DNC emails and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks were not sourced from Russia, or
backed by the Kremlin, all without disclosing the identity of their source.
"In the US media there has been a deliberate conflation between DNC leaks, which is what
we've been publishing, and DNC hacks, of the US Democratic Party which have occurred over the
last two years, by their own admission what [Hillary Clinton] is attempting to do is to
conflate our publication of pristine emails – no one in the Democratic party argues
that a single email is not completely valid. That hasn't been done. The head of the DNC,
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, has rolled as a result.
And whatever hacking has occurred, of the DNC or other political organizations in the
United States, by a range of actors – in the middle, we have something, which is the
publication by other media organizations, of information reportedly from the DNC, and that
seems to be the case. That's the publication of word documents in pdfs published by The Hill,
by Gawker, by The Smoking Gun. This is a completely separate batch of documents, compared to
the 20,000 pristine emails that we have at WikiLeaks.
In this [separate] batch of documents, released by these other media organizations, there
are claims that in the metadata, someone has done a document to pdf conversion, and in some
cases the language of the computer that was used for that conversion was Russian. So that's
the circumstantial evidence that some Russian was involved, or someone who wanted to make it
look like a Russian was involved, with these other media organizations. That's not the case
for the material we released.
The Hillary Clinton hack campaign has a serious problem in trying to figure out how to
counter-spin our publication because the emails are un-arguable There's an attempt to bring
in a meta-story. And the meta-story is, did some hacker obtain these emails? Ok. Well, people
have suggested that there's evidence that the DNC has been hacked. I'm not at all surprised
its been hacked. If you read very carefully, they say it's been hacked many times over the
last two years. Our sources say that DNC security is like Swiss Cheese.
Hillary Clinton is saying, untruthfully, that she knows who the source of our emails are.
Now, she didn't quite say "our emails." She's playing some games, because there have been
other publications by The Hill, by Gawker, other US media, of different documents, not
emails. So, we have to separate the various DNC or RNC hacks that have occurred over the
years, and who's done that. The source: we know who the source is, it's the Democratic
National Committee itself. And our sources who gave these materials, and other pending
materials, to us. These are all different questions. "
The core assertion made by Assange in the above-transcribed segment of his 2016 interview
with RT is the differentiation between WikiLeaks's publications from the altered documents
released by Guccifer 2.0 (after being pre-released to US media outlets as referenced by
Assange). This finer point is one that is corroborated by the Forensicator's analysis, and one
which it seems much of the public has yet to entirely digest.
"Ars Technica found "Russian fingerprints" in a PDF posted by Gawker the previous day.
Apparently, both Gawker and The Smoking Gun (TSG) had received pre-release copies of Guccifer
2.0's first batch of documents; Guccifer 2.0 would post them later, on his WordPress.com blog site. Although neither Gawker nor TSG
reported on these Russian error messages, some readers noticed them and mentioned them in
social media forums; Ars Technica was likely the first media outlet to cover those "Russian
fingerprints."
The Forensicator's analysis cannot enlighten us as to the ultimate source of WikiLeaks's
releases. At present, there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Guccifer 2.0 was, or was
not, WikiLeaks' source. There is no evidence connecting Guccifer 2.0 with WikiLeaks, but there
is likewise no evidence to rule out a connection.
It is nonetheless critically important, as Assange indicated, to differentiate between the
files published by Guccifer 2.0 and those released by WikiLeaks. None of the "altered"
documents (with supposed Russian fingerprints) published by Guccifer 2.0 appear in WikiLeaks's
publications.
It is also worth noting that, though Assange's interview took place before the publication
of the Podesta email collection, the allegations of a Russian hack based on Guccifer 2.0's
publication were ultimately contradicted by a DNC official, as reported by the Associated
Press. Disobedient
Media wrote:
" Ultimately, it is the DNC's claim that they were breached by Russian hackers, who stole
the Trump opposition report, which directly belies their allegation – because the
document did not come from the DNC, but from John Podesta's emails."
Again: The very document on which the initial "Russian hack" allegations were based did not
originate within the DNC Emails at all, but in the Podesta Emails, which at the time of
Assange's RT interview, had not yet been published.
"The fact the email to which the Trump opposition report was attached was later published
in the Podesta Email collection by WikiLeaks does not prove that Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks
shared a source on the document. However, it does suggest that either the DNC, the operators
of the Guccifer 2.0 persona, or both parties had access to Podesta's emails. This raises
questions as to why the DNC would interpret the use of this particular file as evidence of
Russian penetration of the DNC."
This creates a massive contradiction within the DNC's narrative, but it does not materially
change Assange's assertion that the pristine emails obtained by WikiLeaks were fundamentally
distinct and should not be conflated with the altered documents published by Guccifer 2.0, as
the WikiLeaks publication of the Podesta emails contain none of the alterations shown in the
version of the documents published by Guccifer 2.0.
Though no establishment media outlet has reported on this point, when reviewing the evidence
at hand and especially the work of the Forensicator, it is evident that the Guccifer 2.0
persona never actually published a single email. The persona published documents and even
screenshots of emails – but never the emails themselves. Thus, again, Guccifer 2.0's
works are critically different from the DNC and Podesta email publications by WikiLeaks.
The following charts are included to help remind readers of the timeline of events relative
to Guccifer 2.0, including the date specific documents were published:
Image Courtesy Of The Forensicator
Image Courtesy of the Forensicator
This writer previously
opined on the apparent invulnerability of the Russiagate saga to factual refutation. One
cannot blame the public for such narrative immortality, as the establishment-backed press has
made every effort to confuse and conflate the alterations made to documents published by
Guccifer 2.0 and the WikiLeaks releases. One can only hope, however, that this reminder of
their distinct state will help raise public skepticism of a narrative based on no evidence
whatsoever.
It is also especially important to reconsider Julian Assange's statements and texts in light
of his ongoing isolation from the outside world, which has prevented him from commenting
further on an infinite array of subjects including Guccifer 2.0 and the "Russian hacking"
saga.
Winston S. contributed to the content of this report.
platyops , 22 minutes ago
The name was Seth Rich. They robbed him for his watch and money but forgot to take the
watch and money. Yes that makes as much sense as Dr. Ford and her imagination party!
Dems lie and maybe kill people but they do lie for sure!
Nature_Boy_Wooooo , 33 minutes ago
All signs point to a young Bernie Sanders supporter at the DNC named Seth Rich.
Surftown , 2 hours ago
Brennan is Guccifer 2.0 using NSA Toolkit ( hacked and released) to feign Russia -- to
promote the fake Russia interference narrative leading to the FISA warrant justification, or
better yet, to the Direct Obama FISA approval/override to approve surveillance of Mr
Trump.
Endgame Napoleon , 1 hour ago
There are a bunch of competing smartphone apps, letting you convert Word docs to PDFs,
believe it or not.
Maybe, they only work in limited form, but you can write a resume (or whatever) into the
app, saving it in Word, converting it to PDF and sending it to your email.
Real programmers seem to scoff at the technical precision of those apps, so maybe, they
are not as sophisticated as they appear to non-techies.
The sequencing of this is weird. If I read it right, it sounds like several publications
received the "converted" versions -- the screenshots or PDFs -- of some emails before
Wikileaks released the actual, non-converted emails.
Who released those to the media organizations, and how did they have access to the machine
containing the emails, enabling them to make screenshots, convert them to PDFs or whatever
they did to provide representations of the emails, not the actual emails that Wikileaks later
released?
bh2 , 2 hours ago
Actually, William Binney et al demonstrated the email transfer could not have been
effected outside the four walls of the DNC because the required network speeds did not exist
at that time to any external location, least of all one located outside the US.
The only way that transfer could happen in the time logged was onto a device located on
the DNC LAN.
Seth Rich is the person Assange all but directly named as the source.
These two things, taken together, provide a compelling refutation of the DNC fairy tale
that the emails were pilfered by Russia (or any other outside actor).
JimmyJones , 2 hours ago
Bunny said the download speed was indicating a USB thumb drive was used
medium giraffe , 2 hours ago
IIRC the transfer speed was similar to a USB bus speed, meaning it wasn't even transferred
over a local network, but by a USB flash device directly connected to a DNC PC or laptop.
Endgame Napoleon , 1 hour ago
The US Congress is so unprofessional, allowing this circus about high-school parties to
commandeer a SCOTUS confirmation hearing, but did you ever hear any of them trying to get to
the bottom of this complex stuff, calling in technical experts to explain this evidence to
voters?
Sic Semper Tyrannis has published a response to the Rosenstein fantastic "Indictment of
Trolls" (Part II): "Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU," by Publius Tacitus
http://www.turcopolier.typepad.com
"Assistant Attorney General Rosenstein announced a bizarre indictment against Russian
military intelligence operatives today that, rather than confirming the case of "Russian
meddling" in the U.S. 2016 Presidential election raises more questions. Here are the major
oddities:
1. How did the FBI obtain information about activity on the DNC and DCCC servers when the
DNC/DCCC refused to give the Feds access to the servers/computers?
2. Why does Crowdstrike get credit as being a competent computer security firm when,
according to the indictment, they completely and utterly failed to stop the "hacks?
"
3. Why does the indictment refuse to name Wikileaks by name as the Russian collaborator? Here
is the bottomline–if US officials knew as early as April that Russia was hacking the
DNC, why did it take US officials more than six months to stop the activity? The statement of
"facts" contained in the indictment also raises another troubling issue–what is the
source of the information? For example, if the FBI was not given access to the DNC/DCCC
servers and computers then how do they know what happened on specific dates as alleged in the
complaint?"
-- Why does the US national security hang on the opinions and concoctions of a visceral
Russophobe Dm. Alperovitch (a ziocon) who is an "expert" (together with the badly uneducated
Elliot Higgins) at the thoroughly corrupted and zionized Atlantic Council?
-- What kind of antisemite has been working hard to make the US Jewry at large suspected in a
massive conspiracy and treason against the United States of America?
Here is the context for the "Indictment of Trolls" (Paty II):
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/62c97j/the_awan_brothers_compromised_at_least_80/
"The Awan brothers compromised at least 80 congressional computers and got paid 5 million to
do it. We may never know the extent of the breach.
After compromising the Congress' networks for 12 years they do a quick cleanup by breaking in
to 20 congressional offices, store data in an off site server before running of to Pakistan
and the D.C. Police are investigating. But wait there's more
Imran Awan has a longtime relationship with some members of Congress, including working for
Meeks and Becerra starting in 2004 and joining Wasserman Schultz's office in 2005. The IT
staffer position expanded to include more than 30 representatives, including work under
congressional members who were members of top secret level congressional committees (DHS,
Foreign affairs, Select intelligence committee).
Although personal office computers are not supposed to be used for Intelligence Committee
business or classified material, accessing these computers is a high priority for foreign
intelligence services because of the information they could glean about the committee's work
from unclassified emails.
• The brothers are suspected of serious violations including accessing members' computer
networks without their knowledge and stealing equipment from Congress, over billing congress
for work and parts, transferring data to a remote server, and bypassing normal security
protocols for IT staff. Their Democrat benefactors allowed the breech of policy for the sake
of convenience.
• The Awans operated an external server, which is against all protocols concerning
secured government information.
Further, there were instances where House information was discovered in an external "cloud"
server. The contractors in question reportedly were sending and storing House-related
information in that off-site server.
• The Awans had special access to the White House and for Visas.
• Multiple Democratic lawmakers have yet to cut ties with House staffers under criminal
investigation for wide-ranging equipment and data theft."
– Hey, Mueller! Hey, Rosenstein! Do your job.
"... From the outset, Wikileaks' geopolitical focus on "oppressive regimes" in Eurasia and the Middle East was "appealing" to America's elites, i.e. it seemingly matched stated US foreign policy objectives. Moreover, the composition of the Wikileaks team (which included Chinese dissidents), not to mention the methodology of "exposing secrets" of foreign governments, were in tune with the practices of US covert operations geared towards triggering "regime change" and fostering "color revolutions" in different parts of the World." ..."
"... Wikileaks is not a typical alternative media initiative. The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel are directly involved in the editing and selection of leaked documents. The London Economist has also played an important role. ..."
"... While the project and its editor Julian Assange reveal a commitment and concern for truth in media, the recent Wikileaks releases of embassy cables have been carefully "redacted" by the mainstream media in liaison with the US government. (See Interview with David E. Sanger, Fresh Air, PBS, December 8, 2010) ..."
"... This collaboration between Wikileaks and selected mainstream media is not fortuitous; it was part of an agreement between several major US and European newspapers and Wikileaks' editor Julian Assange" ..."
Hmmm ..When the limited hangout truth expose' is found to be MSM vetted lies:
"Wikileaks formulated its mandate on its website as follows:
"[Wikileaks will be] an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests
are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance
to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations," CBC News – Website wants
to take whistleblowing online, January 11, 2007, emphasis added).
This mandate was confirmed by Julian Assange in a June 2010 interview in The New Yorker:
******"Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to
be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.
(quoted in WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange : The New Yorker, June 7, 2010, emphasis added)*****
Assange also intimated that "exposing secrets" "could potentially bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality
-- including the US administration." (Ibid)
From the outset, Wikileaks' geopolitical focus on "oppressive regimes" in Eurasia and the Middle East was "appealing" to
America's elites, i.e. it seemingly matched stated US foreign policy objectives. Moreover, the composition of the Wikileaks team
(which included Chinese dissidents), not to mention the methodology of "exposing secrets" of foreign governments, were in tune
with the practices of US covert operations geared towards triggering "regime change" and fostering "color revolutions" in different
parts of the World."
"The Role of the Corporate Media: The Central Role of the New York Times
Wikileaks is not a typical alternative media initiative. The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel are directly
involved in the editing and selection of leaked documents. The London Economist has also played an important role.
While the project and its editor Julian Assange reveal a commitment and concern for truth in media, the recent Wikileaks
releases of embassy cables have been carefully "redacted" by the mainstream media in liaison with the US government. (See Interview
with David E. Sanger, Fresh Air, PBS, December 8, 2010)
This collaboration between Wikileaks and selected mainstream media is not fortuitous; it was part of an agreement between
several major US and European newspapers and Wikileaks' editor Julian Assange"
Regarding the hacking of Democrats computers, nothing has been proven even on the margins or
circumstantially on any of these counts. Moreover, the FBI failed to examine the affected
computers, and we now know that FBI deputy head and other FBI top officials were scheming to
undermine Trump in support of Hillary Clinton's election and that Clinton's campaign had
colluded with the Russians to produce the Steele dossier, for which the FBI also paid for.
Moreover still, independent research has demonstrated that the hack is most likely to have
occurred from inside DNC headquarters.
Even if Russia did hack the DNC – and I am sure it has at least tried to hack US
government computer systems as well – one needs to be beyond naïve to believe that
US intelligence has not hacked Russian government computers. Indeed, the NSA has hacked the
government computers of such close US allies as Germany and France
(www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/04/us-nsa-gerhard-schroeder-surveillance and http://www.bbc.com/news/33248484 ). It is
clear that much of the material in the recent indictment of 13 Russians was garnered by U.S.
intelligence accessing Russian computer systems, perhaps some governmental systems. For
example, the indictment references an intercepted email. One can be sure that some of the
compromising materials on Russian officials that appear in American and perhaps even Russian
media come from NSA hacking. Russian hacking is a drop in the bucket compared with the scale
and scope of methods the West has used to target Russia and its allies in the former USSR since
the end of the first cold war.
State Hacks Never Happened
All or most of the charges that the Kremlin hacked state voting systems have been retracted.
Even if it did, ditto the previous paragraph.
Russia-Trump 'Collusion'
The Russia-Trump collusion charges have fallen flat on their face. The only semi-maningful
result of former FBi Director Robert Mueller's 'counter-intelligence investigation' is that a
one-time campaign advisor Paul Manafort was indicted for corrupt collusion with Ukraine's
corrupt Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions that occurred before Manafort was on Trump's
campaign staff. Furthermore, contrary to the Western view, Yanukovych was anything but a 'Putin
puppet.' This fact is well-illustrated by then Ukrainian president's willingness to sign the EU
Association Agreement in November 2013, a signing which was only aborted by an exorbitant offer
by Putin of $15 billion in loans and natural gas price reductions on the background of Ukraine
being on the verge of bankruptcy and the EU offering far less.
Russia's Troll Farm – An Inconsequential Spontaneous Experiment
The newest sensation in the 'hunt for Red October' is the Kremlin-tied troll farm. Assuming
that Putin's close associate and cook is indeed tied to this small effort, then the US
government has finally found an incident of 'Russian interference in the 2016 presidential
election' in the United States. Unfortunately, the effort was minimal and nothing to write home
about or worth a multi-million government investigation. It is more on the level of a research
report farmed out to one of the government-oriented and often-funded DC think tanks with a
small $5-10,000 grant attached. Indeed, RFERL already had written about the very same operation
as did an Internet news site based, in all places, in 'Putin's Russia.' The 13 indictments were
handed down not for the troll activity under an operation called 'Lakhta' – 99 percent of
which was merely posting advertisements and comments on the Internet from "around" May 2014 to
several months after the US presidential campaign – but for other crimes such as
money-laundering. To be sure, the effort to pit American against American by calling opposing
radical groups to the same location for potentially explosive counter-demonstrations is nasty
stuff. But such cases amounted to less than a handful.
Ultimately, operation Lakhta appears to have been a rather inconsequential experiment, since
prior to the US presidential campaign it had focused almost exclusively on trolling Russian
politics, expanding to foreign issues like Ukraine and then to the US. The FBI indictment sites
the budget of 'Lakhta' was several million dollars per year. Elsewhere the indictment states
that by September 2016 'Lakhta' had a monthly budget of $1.3 million ( www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download , pp.
5 and 7). Again, this is a drop in the bucket compared to Western disinformation operations in
general and the US political campaign expenditures. This is equivalent to about 10 percent of
the cost of congressional campaign, about 1 percent of the the amount Trump and Clinton spent
on Internet activity (much of which was similar trolling with ads and comments), and a fraction
of a percent of the billions of dollars the two candidates paid on their campaigns. Moreover,
this tactical campaign amounts to far less than the routine, much more strategic disinformation
communications carried out by the US government and allied media on a continuing basis since
the first cold war's end (see, for example,
https://gordonhahn.com/2015/09/19/putin-is-crazy-and-sick-the-lows-of-american-rusology/ and
https://gordonhahn.com/2015/11/11/the-myth-of-an-imminent-anti-putin-coup-rusological-fail-or-stratcomm/
).
Opposition-Promotion
In imitation and exacting revenge against past Western support for democratic and other
opposition organizations and individuals in Russia and elsewhere under various and sundry
democracy-promotion programs and much else, Russia has turned to cooperating with nationalist
and populist opposition parties in the West. However, that effort is, again, very limited and
gravely overstated by Western pundits and politicians. It amounts almost entirely to an alleged
one-time contribution to Marie Le Pen's nationalist-populist National Front party in France.
Some in the US are making much noise about a forum of legal European nationalist and populist
parties hosted in 2015 in St. Petersburg, Russia (www.kommersant.ru/doc/2683403 and
www.interpretermag.com/the-far-right-international-russian-conservative-forum-to-take-place-in-russia/
). A second conference is scheduled there on 8 April 2018 ( http://realpatriot.ru/en/ ). Presumably, these conferences
could be held elsewhere. Is it crucial that they are hosted by Russia? Does it matter where
such conferences are held? As a US presidential candidate once said: "Where's the beef?" Does
it matter more than US-government RFERL whitewashing jihadi Caucasus terrorists who killed
thousands of Russians over some six years or falsifying the reality of the 20 February 2014
Maidan snipers' massacre in Kiev? Does it matter more than the fact that Europeans have
produced such parties and why they have produced them? Should Europeans be absolved of their
agency, so blame can be redirected onto Russia? Moreover, one researcher has convincingly
demonstrated that Russia's cooperation with such parties has more to do with an overlap or
"confluence" of interests and ideology between some in Moscow and the Western far-right rather
than the former's influence on the latter
(www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/russian-and-american-far-right-connections-confluence-not-influence).
Moreover, the radical jihadist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, regarded by almost all terrorism
experts as a precursor and recruitment organization for jihdism and jihadi groups, holds an
annual convention and several other events in the United States every year ( https://hizb-america.org/events/ ), with similar
operations across the West. Weeks ago one of America's leading conservative political
organizations, the Conservative Political Action Committee or CPAC, had Marie Le Pen's daughter
Marion Marechal`-Le Pen, the United Kingdom's Independent Party's populist firebrand and former
leader Nigel Farage, among other European populists speak at their annual convention.
Russia may move into more threatening territory, if it begins to support rising
ethno-national separatism in places in Europe or the West more generally like Catalonia. The
foreign ministry of South Ossetiya, the Russian-backed breakaway region of Georgia, opened up a
"representative office" in Catalonia in October (www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/41274/). This
could be even more dangerous territory for Moscow's 'me-two-ism' to tread on. On the other
hand, the West violated its own UN-sponsored resolution on Kosovo committing to Yugoslavia's
territorial integrity.
Conclusion
Russia is using the tools of the West, those the latter has deployed against Russia since
the collapse of the Berlin wall, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the dawn of the new world
order and a 'united Europe from Vancouver to Vladivostok.' The West moved first to back
anti-Russian parties in the former USSR and opposition parties in Russia, so Russia has now
begun to back anti-American parties and opposition parties in the West. The West first used the
Internet against Russia and its allies, and Russia followed suit using it against the West. The
West interfered in Russian presidential campaigns and other aspects of Russia's internal
political life and that of its allies, and Russia is responding in kind. The West has backed
revolutions (a priori facto and ex post facto) and separatism, including jihadism, against
Russia and its allies, and Russia began to do the same (minus the support for jihadists)
against the West.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
About the Author – Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics,
http://www.canalyt.com and a Senior
Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San
Jose, California, www.cetisresearch.org .
Dr. Hahn is the author of Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the 'New Cold
War (McFarland Publishers, 2017) and three previously and well-received books: Russia's
Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist
Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction Publishers, 2002); Russia's Islamic Threat (Yale University
Press, 2007); and The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus
and Beyond (McFarland Publishers, 2014).He has published numerous think tank reports, academic
articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media and has served
as a consultant and provided expert testimony to the U.S. government.
Dr. Hahn also has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San
Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University,
Russia. He has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies and the Kennan Institute in Washington DC as well as the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University.
Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a close associate of Vladimir
Putin, has gone on record with
The
Hill
's John Solomon - admitting to colluding with Americans
leading up to the 2016 US election, except it might not be what
you're thinking.
Deripaska, rumored to be Donald Trump's "
back
channel
" to Putin via the Russian's former association with Paul
Manafort, says he "colluded" with the
US
Government
between 2009 and 2016.
In 2009, when
Robert
Mueller was running the FBI
, the agency asked Deripaska to
spend $25 million of his own money to bankroll an FBI-supervised
operation to rescue a retired FBI agent - Robert Levinson, who was
kidnapped in 2007 while working on a 2007 CIA contract in Iran. This
in and of itself is more than a bit strange.
Deripaska agreed, however the Obama State Department, headed by
Hillary Clinton, scuttled a last-minute deal with Iran before
Levinson could be released. He hasn't been heard from since.
FBI agents courted Deripaska in 2009 in a series of secret hotel
meetings in Paris; Vienna; Budapest, Hungary, and Washington
.
Agents persuaded the aluminum industry magnate to underwrite the
mission. The Russian billionaire insisted the operation neither
involve nor harm his homeland. -The Hill
In other words -
Trump's
alleged "back channel" to Putin was in fact an FBI asset
who
spent $25 million helping Obama's "scandal free" administration find
a kidnapped agent. Deripaska's admitted
Steele, Ohr and the 2016 US Election
Trending Articles
Earth's "Big Freeze" Looms As Sun Remains Devoid
Of
Scientists believe that Earth could experience a
"big freeze" as the sun goes through what's
known as "solar minimum."
As the
New
York Times
frames it, distancing Deripaska from the FBI (no
mention of the $25 million rescue effort, for example), the Russian
aluminum magnate was just one of several Putin-linked Oligarchs the
FBI tried to flip.
The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader,
clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining
cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia's richest men,
nearly
all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska, depend on President Vladimir V.
Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials said. -
NYT
Central to the recruiting effort were two central players in the
Trump-Russia investigation; twice-demoted DOJ #4 official
Bruce
Ohr and Christopher Steele
- the author of the largely
unverified "Steele Dossier."
Steele, a longtime associate of Ohr's, worked for Deripaska
beginning in 2012 researching a business rival - work which would
evolve to the point where the former British spy was interfacing
with the Obama administration on his behalf - resulting in Deripaska
regaining entry into the United States, where he visited numerous
times between 2009 and 2017.
The State Department tried to keep him from getting a U.S. visa
between 2006 and 2009 because they believed he had unspecified
connections to criminal elements in Russia as he consolidated
power in the aluminum industry. Deripaska has denied those
allegations...
Whatever the case,
it
is irrefutable that after he began helping the FBI, Deripaska
regained entry to the United States
. And he visited
numerous times between 2009 and 2017, visa entry records show. -
The
Hill
Deripaska is now banned from the United States as one of
several
Russians sanctioned
in April in response to alleged 2016
election meddling.
In a September 2016 meeting,
Deripaska
told FBI agents that it was "preposterous" that Paul Manafort was
colluding with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 election
.
This, despite the fact that Deripaska and Manafort's business
relationship "ended in lawsuits, per
The
Hill
- and the Russian would have every reason to throw
Manafort under the bus if he wanted some revenge on his old
associate.
So the
FBI
and DOJ secretly collaborated with Trump's alleged backchannel over
a seven-year period
, starting with Levinson, then on
Deripaska's Visa, and finally regarding whether Paul Manafort was an
intermediary to Putin. Deripaska vehemently denies the assertion,
and even took out newspaper advertisements in the US last year
volunteering to testify to Congress, refuting an
AP
report
that he and Manafort secretly worked on a plan to
"greatly benefit the Putin government" a decade ago.
Soon after the advertisements ran, representatives for the House
and Senate Intelligence Committees called a Washington-based
lawyer for Mr. Deripaska, Adam Waldman, inquiring about taking
his client up on the offer to testify, Mr. Waldman said in an
interview.
What happened after that has been in dispute. Mr. Waldman, who
stopped working for Mr. Deripaska after the sanctions were
levied, said he told the committee staff that his client would
be willing to testify without any grant of immunity, but would
not testify about any Russian collusion with the Trump campaign
because "he doesn't know anything about that theory and actually
doesn't believe it occurred." -
NYT
In short, Deripaska wants it known that he worked with the FBI and
DOJ, and that he had nothing to do with the Steele dossier.
Today, Deripaska is banned anew from the United States, one of
several Russians sanctioned in April by the Trump administration
as a way to punish Putin for 2016 election meddling. But he
wants to be clear about a few things, according to a statement
provided by his team.
First,
he did collude with Americans in the form of voluntarily
assisting and meeting with the FBI, the DOJ and people such as
Ohr between 2009 and 2016.
He also wants Americans to know
he
did not cooperate or assist with Steele's dossier, and he tried
to dispel the FBI notion that Russia and the Trump campaign
colluded during the 2016 election
. -
The
Hill
Interestingly, Steele's dossier which was partially funded by the
Clinton campaign, relied on
senior
Kremlin officials
.
The first tell was last summer when the first word of Russia allegedly hacking the DNC's
computers became public. As we have come to find out, the DNC announced that it had been hacked
but refused the FBI access to its servers. Why? Because the DNC preferred to have its own
cybercrime experts examine them. And who were their cybercrime experts? CrowdStrike, owned by
Dmitri Alperovitch, a Moscow-born immigrant who settled in the US as a youth. Curiously, he has
a chair at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that spends a lot of time thinking of
reasons to go to war against Russia. How much do they want to go to war with Russia? A lot.
Saudi Arabia and the Ukrainian World Congress are among their funders.
Well, sure enough, as could have been predicted, CrowdStrike did indeed find that Russia was
hacking the DNC, although subsequently the hack information turned out to be unpersuasive. One
piece of malware misidentified by Crowdstrike as Russian was actually Ukrainian. That's a
rather big mistake, if a malware's country of origin proves anything at all, and in fact when
the software's country of origin was alleged to be Russian that was the logic in charging the
Russians as the hackers. With recent Wikileaks revealing that the CIA has in its toolbox the
ability to create hacks using others' malware and then pinning the blame elsewhere, any claim
of hacking and who authored the hacking should be open to question, as we've had enough proof
to suspect all along. And, as always, the CIA is the last institution to trust when seeking the
truth. This does not even address whether one of our moles in the Russian bureaucracy was
aiding this okeydoke.
At the same time that the first indications of the Russian hack were announced, Alexandra
Chalupa, a self-described "proud Ukrainian American" employed at the DNC, was doing opposition
research on Trump, Manafort et al for their "connections" to Russia. In interviews last summer
Chalupa was throwing around the words "treason" and "capital crime" in the direction of
Manafort and Trump.
Note what we have: A self-contained scandal within the DNC, not open to contradiction by law
enforcement (the FBI was kept out), pointing the finger at Russia for interfering with the
"democratic process". Our sacred democratic process!
Current-day Russia, and formerly when it existed as the Soviet Union, has been the number
one target for US intelligence since President Roosevelt died and generally by the West since
the Russian Revolution. I don't have enough space to describe the decades of the history of
propaganda directed against Russians, but I will briefly describe one, the shootdown of
Indonesia Airlines MH-17. I will include a few pieces of evidence reported in "fake news"
outlets and ignored in the mainstream US press, just to give the reader an idea of what the
campaign against "fake news" is all about.
In July 2014 Malaysia Flight MH-17 was shot down over a battle zone in the eastern part of
Ukraine that had refused to recognize the coup government in Kiev. That's correct, depending on
how you want to define it, the Donbass region either seceded from the greater Ukraine or the
greater Ukraine was taken over in a fascist coup backed by the US and the Donbass region
refused to recognize the fascists in Kiev.
The weapon generally blamed for the shootdown was a BUK missile, an old Soviet anti-aircraft
missile long taken out of service in Russia but still in use around the world in countries once
armed by the old Soviet Union, like Ukraine.
Within hours of the shootdown Ukrainians produced a recording of rebel chatter on radio
where it appeared that the rebels were talking about shooting down the plane. A few days later
it was determined that the recording was manufactured, using some rebel dialogue regarding
shooting down a military supply plane that had been landing at a contested airport on the front
lines of battle. What happened to the story of the recording? In the west the story about the
recording being faked was ignored, but the original story wasn't defended. It was allowed to
disappear, leaving behind its residue.
Several days after the incident the Russians released radar readings of the event. It showed
two Ukrainian fighter planes accompanying the airliner as it changed course and flew over the
battle area in the minutes before the plane was attacked. What did Ukraine say about those two
fighters? Nothing. What did the flight tower recordings with MH-17 say about those two jet
fighters? Nothing, because, depending on the version of the story you read, either all the
recordings of conversations between the control tower and the plane were made top-secret
immediately after the incident, or were lost or otherwise missing, thereby giving Ukraine the
ability to never have to answer what appeared on Russian radar to be two Ukrainian fighters
steering the civilian airliner right to the place where it was to be shot down.
At this point it should be noted that Russian BUK anti-aircraft batteries are generally
obsolete, but are complicated to operate. A BUK consists of the actual missile launcher
carrying a battery of rockets and a separate truck that operates the radar targeting aspects of
the weapon. The initial reports in the West said that it had been rebel forces that had shot
down the airliner, but the rebel forces had no operable BUK weapon and it was unlikely that the
infantry on the front lines had gone through the months of training to even operate one.
This problem was counteracted in the West by a "study" by "Bellingcat". Bellingcat is
supposed to be a somewhat anonymous citizen investigator operating from his home in Britain and
reviewing "evidence" online. Bellingcat claimed that the BUK battery used in the shootdown had
been secretly moved across the border from Russia into the rebel-occupied territory overnight,
was used to shoot down the airliner, and then was snuck back into Russia. Sound preposterous?
Of course, but not in the fog of propaganda. If it had been well known in the West that the
Ukrainian army had seventeen (!) BUK anti-aircraft batteries in the battle area while the
rebels had none, or the one "snuck in and out of the area by those tricky Russians", perhaps
the charge against the rebels and/or Russians would not have had the same effectiveness in the
West. It might further weaken the western version of events if some talking head had pointed
out that since the rebels had no air force, having anti-aircraft weapons in a battle theater
where its enemy had no aircraft was useless unless the Ukrainians planned on shooting down
someone else's aircraft.
Armies actually keep track of their ordinance. But when Russia asked for records of whether
any BUK missiles had been fired from any of the seventeen Ukrainian batteries in the battle
zone Ukraine refused.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media operated as if it had to be the Russians, or the rebels
backed by Russia. The Secretary of State, John Kerry, the weekend after the incident, declared
on Sunday morning talk shows that the US had absolute proof via its spy satellites who had
fired that missile. And, in truth, the US did know. It has spy satellites parked over Ukraine
that have the capability to read the insignia on soldiers' uniforms. One problem: the US never
released their photos. In the years since the incident the US has never released those
photographs. There have been investigations across Europe and in Australia, and yet the US
refuses to release those photographs. The family of the only American on Flight 17 has
personally asked for the photos to be released. Nothing.
Essentially, what the US intelligence and military has told the world is, "Trust us." And
most Americans do.
And while Kerry was making the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows claiming he had
evidence of Russian guilt the rest of the media were doing their work. From the morning show to
late night TV, everyone was talking about Putin! Jimmy Kimmel and the other various cohosts
across the dial were making Putin the target of jokes, another very effective propaganda tool.
Even the darling of the Left, John Oliver, was taking his turn whacking Putin. Based on
what?
Most Americans believe that Russia shot down MH-17. For what purpose? A clue to many of the
false flags presented to the public is that they do not have a coherent motive. Why would
Russia want to smuggle a rather large, obsolete missile battery into a battle zone in the
middle of the night to shoot down an airliner? However, if in fact Ukraine shot down that
airliner and used the Mighty Wurlitzer of the CIA to promote Russia's guilt it makes much more
sense. A false flag.
What is the truth in the matter? I wasn't there, and neither were you. Who do you trust,
that evil caricature Putin, or America?
Propaganda often appears on parallel tracks. As the story of the Russian hack got more play
in the mainstream media we had stories about Russia hacking voting machines and Russia even
hacking a nuclear plant, all debunked. But because of the nature of propaganda truth was
irrelevant. A good portion of the public never hears the retractions and more often than not
there are no retractions. That fog of propaganda swirls on, and in the age of the internet
there are millions ready to repeat the propaganda. Residue.
There was a second, parallel story in the wind last fall, the Washington Post's "fake news"
story and its promotion of PropOrNot. The author of the story, Craig Timberg, is the son of
Robert Timberg, who's written a hagiography of Senator John McCain, a strong supporter of war
generally and specifically of the fascist elements in power in Ukraine.
PropOrNot designated hundreds of news sites as "fake news" sites. Considering the
decades-long history of the Washington Post working hand in hand with the CIA in disseminating
information (often false) some of us found WaPo calling the alarm on fake news to be at the
very least ironic. PropOrNot generally identified any news source that was not onboard with the
mainstream media, and not heavily against Russia, as fake.
Who is PropOrNot? They are officially anonymous, but they've left some hints, if you're
willing to look. For example, in posts at their website before the attention of WaPo, someone
on the site used the term "Heroiam Slava!" What?
"Heroiam Slava" was a fascist salute that originated in Kiev in 1942, when the Nazis put
their Banderite allies in power during their march east against the Soviet Union. In the months
afterwards the new slogan was used by Ukrainian military units during Operation Nightingale,
the local version of Germany's Holocaust. The German command had found that the constant
slaughter of civilians was taking its toll on the esprit de corps of German soldiers, so the
work mass murder was passed to the Ukrainian fascists. During their time in power it is
estimated that a million Jews were gassed, shot, garroted and shoved into mass graves. At the
same time the Banderites also slaughtered uncounted numbers of Poles, ethnic Russians and
pretty much anyone else who did not conform to Ukrainian ideas of racial purity.
So the Washington Post's source for defining fake news were anonymous people who liked to
repeat wartime slogans of the Nazis' allies. It should be noted that since the fascists came to
power in Ukraine in 2014 they have been shutting down all opposition press, frequently by
assassination. Reporters who have troubled the regime have been identified by name, address,
phone numbers et al. The Ukrainians have established an actual Ministry of Truth and have begun
rewriting the history of World War II.
Craig Timberg had another source for his story: Clint Watts of The Foreign Policy Research
Institute. The FPRI is an ultra-rightwing think tank created during The Depression which
traffics in racialist eugenics and anti-Soviet/Russian proclamations. Their founder, Robert
Strausz-Hupé, actually wrote a deranged op-ed piece for the New York Times condemning
the movie "Doctor Strangelove" as Soviet propaganda. In short, Timberg's sources of false news
were old hands at anti-Russian propaganda.
Early on I said there was something missing. Hillary Clinton isn't the President. Everyone
expected her to win. When the story of Russia hacking the DNC was first floated, the world
expected Clinton to be President. But why use only parts of the hacking story when you are
already going to win the election? As we have seen, the majority of "news" about the Russian
hacks actually occurred too close to the election to have any effect on the voting (if the DNC
leaks had any effect at all), or after the election when the hacking stories could do nothing
at all for Clinton's election chances. (Timberg's story appeared weeks after the election.) If
you are going to use this "Russia hack-Trump traitor" story to win the election, why hold any
of it back for release until after the contest was won or lost?
The hack story wasn't created to get Clinton elected. It was done to give President Clinton
her war in 2017.
Imagine now how the entire sitting government would have been behind President Clinton. We
have the dastardly Russians going so low as to try to sabotage the elections to get their buddy
Trump elected. Granted, Congress would still be completely in Republican control, as could be
estimated prior to the election, but what's the one thing Republicans stalwarts like John
McCain and Lindsay Graham can agree on? War. And the Russians hacking the DNC and tampering
with American Democracy? Outrageous. Clinton versus Putin, and this time it's personal!
As I've asked before, what is the one thing that Hillary was falling over herself to deliver
to the Deep State that Trump wouldn't and couldn't? A war with Russia. Trump is apparently too
constrained by his business dealings with various Russians (I don't think he's constrained by
any kind of loyalty; Trump has never displayed much loyalty to anyone). When Clinton announced
she would create a "no-fly zone" in Syria early on in the primary debates, it was essentially
her saying, "When I'm President I will go to war with Russia."
The "Russian hack" story was going to be our Deep State's casus belli, our reason to go to
war with Russia. With Hillary's failure in November the okeydoke was left without the most
important part, a President ready to go to war. What we see now is the okeydoke being used
against Trump. I doubt the Deep State thinks it can push Trump out for a more malleable chief
of state (like they did with Nixon and JFK). You can probably consider the public scandal to be
private negotiation behind the scenes. And the final tell will be if we are in some kind of hot
war with Russia this time next year, or living in the rubble in the aftermath of a nuclear
exchange. Tags: fake
news up 45 users have voted.
The progressive frenzy of beating war drums proceeded all our recent wars. Books have been
written about the very art of propagandizing a public, which is very much the way you
depicted. The analysis of what really happened to the MH-17 is quite enlightening. The
similarities puts this false flag right up there with Assad gassing his civilians with
Sarin--unfortunately for all concerned, Jug Ears and Medusa siphoned off some spare Sarin and
gave it to the "moderate extremists".
The Ukrainians have established an actual Ministry of Truth and have begun rewriting the
history of World War II.
Now we have our own Ministry of Truth, aided and abetted by those unbiased folks at
Facebook, Twitter, WaPo and NYT.
War on drugs--not if they're gouging us via Big Pharma. War on Terror--not if that
enriches the MIC.
Legalize marijuana? Hell no, that would cut into alcohol, tobacco, opioid revenues too
much--can't have that can we? Discussion of single-payer at this point, considering this is
c99, is pointless--but the issue is not forgotten.
Hot War with Russia? No, no, no. We must have an appetizer before the entreé" and
how do you like your Persian delicacies nuked: rare or crispy?
ubmitted by snoopydawg on Sun, 04/02/2017 - 9:39pm
You did a great job deconstructing the Russian propaganda and why they are creating more
each day.
I am pretty sure that I read that Malaysia Flight MH-17 was flying to an AIDS convention
and a lot of the passengers were AIDS experts. If that is true then that is much more than a
war crime, it's a crime against humanity. I know, redundant, but it makes the false flag that
much worse in my opinion. They don't care who they kill as long as they can get their agendas
done.
(ETA: "Among the passengers were delegates en route to the 20th International AIDS Conference
in Melbourne, including Joep Lange, a former president of the International AIDS Society,
which organised the conference.[35] Many initial reports had erroneously indicated that
around 100 delegates to the conference were aboard, but this was later revised to six.[36]
Also on board were Dutch Senator Willem Witteveen,[37] Australian author Liam Davison,[38]
and Malaysian actress Shuba Jay.[39]")
I didn't realize that the report was revised
And if Trump isn't gung ho on a war with Russia then who is calling the shots and
continuing the military buildup in the countries that surrounds Russia? The troops and the
equipment is still arriving in those countries. And who is in charge of NATO? Anyone who can
help me out with this?
I know that he has given the pentagon more authority to wage war and that is why there are
more civilians being killed in Mosul and other war areas. Is it the joint chiefs of staff who
have taken over the military? Or someone else?
As to Alligator Ed's comment, just thinking that Obama, Hillary and everyone else who was
involved with the sarin gas attack has got to be sociopaths. The inhumane indifference of
killing innocent civilians including children with the gas is another thing beyond my
comprehension. It just is.
ubmitted by snoopydawg on Sun, 04/02/2017 - 9:29pm
I think it fits here because she goes after the democrats who can't see that they are
drinking the Russian propaganda hook line and sinker.
It's the democrat's WMDs to get people on board with their war against Russia that has been
planned for over a year or more.
This is who you've allied yourselves with, Democrats. This is where you've decided to
take your stand. With war criminals like Dick Cheney, who should have stood trial at the
Hague many years ago. With John McCain, Graham and all the Bush era neocons who were
supporting Hillary over Trump because they knew that she would create their no fly zone
over Syria in order to get their war with Russia.
I look in liberal discussion circles and I see these bloodthirsty war criminals being
celebrated as heroes for standing up to Donald Trump as though they oppose his vile human
rights policies, when really they only oppose his resistance to the neocon policy of
regime-change invasions.What have you become, Democrats? How did you get here? I think it's
worth taking a few steps back to reassess your situation.
What happened to you? I've been watching you my whole life and I can honestly say I've
never seen you so crazy. You used to care about the poor, the working class, economic
justice, taking care of everyone, but now whenever I look in your direction I get blasted
in the face with McCarthyist vitriol and George W. Bush prancing around on the Ellen show
while you all cheer and talk about how you wish he could be president again instead of
Trump.
https://www.newslogue.com/debate/417/CaitlinJohnstone
A lot of these people are the ones who flocked to DK during the ramp up to the Iraq war and
were against everything that Bush and the republicans were pushing. But they are also the
same people who went silent when Obama continued PNAC's policies in the Middle East and
expanded the number of countries that he used drones on.
Oh there were a few push backs against him like when he bombed the hospital in Afghanistan,
but any time I spoke out against his use of the drones I was told that by using them it saved
our troop's lives. No thought at all about the number of people who were killed only because
they lived in the area where they dropped the bombs.
I don't believe that they don't know that by pushing the Russian propaganda that they are
saying that it's okay if there is a war with Russia because they didn't allow Hillary to
become president.
ubmitted by CB on Sun, 04/02/2017 - 9:54pm
ubmitted by travelerxxx on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 12:52am
Thanks for your work, Bob. This essay is concise, clear, and accurate.
This push for war with Russia is total insanity.
A year ago, if one had told the average Democrat that in twelve months they would be:
1) Acting as though George Bush was a hero,
2) Believing every word from the CIA and FBI as God's Own Truth,
3) Holding the evil Dick Cheney as a paragon of virtue,
4) Doing McCarthyism better than McCarthy, etc., etc. -
they would have suggested you be locked up for your own good, as you were clearly crazy.
No need to attribute (unless it's to bring folks to c99p) -- in fact, I'm certain others can
make that list quite long. That's just what popped into my head in a few seconds.
Submitted by Dr. John Carpenter on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 10:25am
@travelerxxx@travelerxxx
that the Democrats might someday be aware of the blazing irony of the points your are making
but (to appropriate a Simpsons quote) the mainstream Democrats turned into the Republicans so
gradually, they didn't even notice.
Best to be insulated from TV noise (news), some is picked up on FB by clueful writers. If my
father were alive now, he would be 98 and an anarchist, I am sure. Never rolling in his grave,
cremains are in control of his second wife, same age as me. Now our mother's ashes sit on a
closet shelf at my sister's house.
The future looks bleak. TV noise is a diversion from the causes that should be engaged, but
won't. Circus diversions, the elephants are gone from them and living in Texas.
can't even name all the countries we are currently drone bombing...mostly because of the
lack of reporting. Hollering Russia keeps the people distracted. They have no idea of our
(NATO) aggression against Russia.
The Ukraine story is obscured. Oliver Stone's movie is difficult to find in the US (2 min
trailer) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVdvp188rk4
In fact I had to watch a sub-scripted version.
The Yemen story is shameful - killing the poorest people of the middle east at the behest of
our pals the Saudis (who oppress women, have weekly beheadings, and beat you half to death if
you say anything about it).
The blindness is pervasive. Thanks for shining some light.
The United States started bombing Iraq on January 16, 1991, and, except for a few brief
intervals, hasn't stopped since. Twenty-six years this Monday, more than a quarter of a
century, and four US presidents, all of whom have bombed Iraq. Last year, the rate of bombing
increased over 20,105. The lion's share of the 26,171 bombs dropped by the United States on
the world was split evenly between Iraq and Syria, though we did reserve a dollop for Yemen.
And the United States dropped more on Libya, about 500, in 2016, than in 2015. Trump, and
Trumpism, is a symptom of the sickness, not the source.
ubmitted by detroitmechworks on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 8:52am
Why do we even bother to give the politicians "The Respect of the Office"?
They certainly didn't earn it. I didn't vote for war and neither did anybody I respect. Why
does lying your way into office, and having your bawds screaming into the airwaves about how
wonderful you are equate to respect?
The positions only have as much worth as the value we ascribe to them. We need to treat the
offices with the respect those that hold them show.
of ongoing US propaganda techniques, and for such a clear explanation of how and why they
work. I only wish all Americans could read it... it certainly deserves as wide a distribution
as possible.
Excellent work!
ubmitted by Bob In Portland on Tue, 04/04/2017 - 12:24pm
OMdearbloodyG... these pathological fruitcakes have to be stopped - I swear they're set on
destroying both any concept of civilization and planetary life and I'm not sure which they'll
achieve first. I'd ask 'what are they thinking!?' except they clearly aren't capable of
thinking - or of anything but manifesting greed, death and destruction.
This is far worse than yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre in order to watch people being
trampled to death, far worse than setting a fire to burn a theatre full of people to a horrible
death, because they're trying to manipulate people into supporting this being done to
everything on Earth, all in the name of lunatic corporate/billionaire greed and their urge for
totalitarian power over any temporarily surviving remains.
Why can't all parties knowingly involved in propagating this lunatic projection be charged
with treason? Oh, right, because all levels of the US government almost entirely consist of the
treasonous madmen conspiring at this...
And Obama 'legalized' the use of propaganda by the US government against The People who
their public offices exist to serve... as if defying/ignoring Constitutional protections and
governmental limitations somehow over-rides them, which they cannot do unless The People are
propagandized - yet again - into accepting it as a 'done deal' and allowing it.
This is the last chance - never vote for evil again and make it obvious exactly why, while
you still can.
The Democrats' progressive wing claimed victory on Saturday after 'Superdelegates' lost the
ability to vote on the first ballot of the party's nomination process
"... One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.) ..."
"... That right there is obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Literally everyone at the FBI who can't PROVE he didn't know about that report will be going to jail. The entire top administration of the FBI is going to go down. ..."
"... And how many people at the Department of Justice are aware of that report? Did Rosenstein know? Who else in the Obama administration knew? ..."
"... That would be motivation for a lot of desperate maneuvering. Add to that who was really behind the Steele Dossier and even more people are likely to end up in jail. ..."
One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting
on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC
email leaker (or one of them, at least.)
Now can we imagine that not everyone in a senior position at the FBI knows about that
report? I can't. Literally everyone from the supervisor of the Special Agent or computer
forensic investigator who examined Rich's computer right up to the Director HAD to know that
report exists - and covered it up.
That right there is obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Literally everyone at the
FBI who can't PROVE he didn't know about that report will be going to jail. The entire top
administration of the FBI is going to go down.
And how many people at the Department of Justice are aware of that report? Did
Rosenstein know? Who else in the Obama administration knew?
That would be motivation for a lot of desperate maneuvering. Add to that who was
really behind the Steele Dossier and even more people are likely to end up in jail.
You haven't heard that yet? It's the infamous audio tape that Hersh was caught on
discussing it. He's since obfuscated what he said, but the tape stands on its own, and he has
never said that anything he said on the tape wasn't true, despite that a lot of Democrats and
Trump-bashers claim he has.
I have told you several times and I will tell you again probably hopelessly that Hersh
PERSONALLY has told me that the "tape" was made without his permission or knowledge when he
was aimlessly speculating on possibilities.
I am unaware of your explicitly telling me that he personally told you that the tape was
"aimless speculation." My apologies if I missed that response.
Of course the tape was made without his permission. We all know that. It's irrelevant to
what he said on the tape.
What I'm saying is that despite what he may have told you, nothing on that tape sounds
like "aimless speculation".
When you consider that he has four good reasons for dissembling about the tape, I view it
as far more likely that everything he said was true.
1) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his FBI contact. Not good for his line
of work.
2) If what he said is true, compromising that contact may well make all his other contacts
wary about talking to him in the future - a bad deal for a journalist who relies on his
contacts.
3) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his ability to get his "long form
journalism" article published - a problem he already has had in the past.
4) If what he said is true, he's accusing the FBI of sitting on that report for two years,
which might well make him a target of retaliation in some way.
If you believe that everything he said on the tape is untrue and that is what he
explicitly told you, fine. I'm waiting for his "long form journalism" report to explain it.
So far everything he has said publicly about it has not contradicted what he said on the
tape, but merely waved his hands about it.
Sy Hersh talks a lot both loudly and profanely. He never intended to tell Buttowski that
there was more than a possibility that the FBI held more than a rumor that this might be
true. He talked to Buttowski because a mutual friend of him and me asked him to do so for no
good reason. Please go talk to all the other people you pester and not on SST. You are an
argumentative nuisance.
I have no stake in the debate about Rich, DNC, wikileaks.
But I do notice some loose ends. Hersh may well have engaged in speculation, but it is
interesting speculation:
quote:
55. During his conversation with Butowsky, Mr. Hersh claimed that he had received information
from an "FBI report." Mr. Hersh had not seen the report himself, but explained: "I have
somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. And I know this person is
unbelievably accurate and careful. He's a very high level guy."
56. According to Mr. Hersh, his source told him that the FBI report states that, shortly
after Seth Rich's murder, the D.C. police obtained a warrant to search his home. When they
arrived at the home, the D.C. police found Seth Rich's computer, but were unable to access
it.The computer was then provided to the D.C. police Cyber Unit, who also were unable to
access the computer. At that point, the D.C. police contacted the Cyber Unit at the FBI's
Washington D.C. field office. Again, according to the supposed FBI report, the Washington
D.C. field office was able to get into the computer and found that in "late spring early
summer [2016], [Seth Rich][made] contact with Wikileaks." "They found what he had done. He
had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some juicy emails from the DNC." Mr. Hersh
told Butowsky that Seth Rich "offered a sample [to WikiLeaks][,] an extensive sample, you
know I'm sure dozens, of emails, and said I want money."
. . .
"I hear gossip," Hersh tells NPR on Monday. "[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of
it."
. . .
The clip is definitely worth listening to in its entirety if you haven't already. Hersh is
heard telling Butowsky that he had a high-level insider read him an FBI file confirming that
Seth Rich was known to have been in contact with WikiLeaks prior to his death, which is not
even a tiny bit remotely the same as having "heard rumors". Hersh's statements in the audio
recording and his statement to NPR cannot both be true.
endquote
https://medium.com/@caityjo...
"... The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter: ..."
"... For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird. ..."
"... Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner. ..."
"... However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II ..."
"... And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections." ..."
"... We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance." ..."
"... "Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows ..."
William Blum shares with us his correspondence with
Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum's replies, he comes
across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.
When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee,
which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the
Washington Post was a CIA asset. Watching the Washington Post's takedown of President Richard
Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too
many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China.
Watching President Nixon's peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union
and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and
decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in
far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the
Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA
used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon
inherited and did not want.
The CIA knew that Nixon's problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his
conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical "Domino Theory." I have always
wondered if the CIA concocted the "Domino Theory," as it so well served them. Unable to get rid
of the war "with honor," Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to
accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America's "honor" and losing
his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn't bend, but the US Congress did, and
so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon's war
management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.
Here is Blum's exchange with Birnbaum. It is possible that Birnbaum is neither stupid nor a
CIA asset, but just a person wanting to hold on to a job. The last thing he can afford to do is
to disabuse readers of the "Russian Threat" when Bezos' Amazon and Washington Post properties
are dependent on the CIA's annual subsidy of $600 million disquised as a "contract."
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/cia-washington-post-and-russia-what-youre-not-being-told
The Anti-Empire Report # 159 Willian Blum
The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post
foreign policy reporter: July 18, 2018
Dear Mr. Birnbaum,
You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin
nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the
overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure.
Therefore ?
If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in
Mexico? William Blum
Dear Mr. Blum,
Thanks for your note. "America's adventures in the Ukraine": what are you talking about? Last
time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and
run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn't the Americans who
did it.
It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014,
according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern
Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts. Best, Michael Birnbaum
To MB,
I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high
State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to
encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who
were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next
president. And he's the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch
Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a
while. William Blum
To WB,
I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months
and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a
credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to
the actual actors on the ground myself – that's my job.
And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan – but encouraging the protests, as she
clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with
potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for
overthrowing the government. I'm not saying the United States wasn't involved in trying to
shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver's seat
the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych
in November 2013; he's not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible
falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet – don't
stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the
Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will
find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US
foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific.
Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides. Best, Michael Birnbaum
======================= end of exchange =======================
Right, the United States doesn't play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments;
never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new
president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr
Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT "reports
fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time." "All the time", no less! That should make
it easy to give some examples.
For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And,
yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem –
Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full
century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is
there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast?
Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that
when they do it can seem rather weird.
To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the
Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in
proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed
objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and
conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So
we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at
determining the winner.
The Russians did it (cont.)
Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I'm
looking for evidence – real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something
logical and rational – to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from
influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK.
But I do not find such evidence.
Each day brings headlines like these:
"U.S. to add economic sanctions on Russia: Attack with nerve agent on former spy in England
forces White House to act"
"Is Russia exploiting new Facebook goal?"
"Experts: Trump team lacks urgency on Russian threat"
These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article,
but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in
America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY.
Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing
sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia's preference of Trump
over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn't begin to explain how Russia could pull off any
of the electoral magic it's accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were
a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.
There's the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads The people who are influenced by this
story – have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many
are both; many are neither. It's one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I've
read is that they come from money-making websites, "click-bait" sites as they're known, which
earn money simply by attracting visitors.
As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians
look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would
Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow – of which all of Russia was immensely
proud – to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal
time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.
However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day
believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact
that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at
all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is
alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.
But we're the Good Guys, ain't we?
For a defender of US foreign policy there's very little that causes extreme heartburn more
than someone implying a "moral equivalence" between American behavior and that of Russia. That
was the case during Cold War I and it's the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the
wall.
After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to
register as a "foreign agent", the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to
require foreign media to register as a "foreign agent". Senator John McCain denounced the new
Russian law, saying there is "no equivalence" between RT and networks such as Voice of America,
CNN and the BBC, whose journalists "seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments
accountable." By contrast, he said, "RT's propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek
to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin's agenda."
And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights
and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S.
government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that
Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski,
"apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would
interfere in the other's elections."
"Is this moral equivalence fair?" Malinowski asked and answered: "In short, no. Russia's
interference in the United States' 2016 election could not have been more different from what
the United States does to promote democracy in other countries."
How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?
We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED),
which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft
the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today
was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's
wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of
political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance."
"Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and
government-overthrows. The authors continue: "This narrative is churned out by propaganda
outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station]. it is deployed by isolationists who propound a
U.S. retreat from global leadership."
"Isolationists" is what [neo]conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they
can't easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don't want the US to be involved in
anything abroad.
And "global leadership" is what they call being first in election-interferences and
government-overthrows.
"... Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century ..."
"... "Democrats are lipstick on a neocon pig. " ..."
"... The headline says it all? The Russiagate lie is "to big too fail" because if this shellgame hoax concocted by the Democratic Party to mask the very thing they are accusing Russia of doing, election meddling was ever exposed, the'd be finished, as a Political Party! ..."
One year later, the VIPS memo contending that the DNC emails were leaked and not hacked has yet to be successfully challenged.
Meanwhile, the country sinks deeper into the morass of the new McCarthyism, comments Patrick Lawrence.
A year has passed since highly credentialed intelligence professionals produced the
first hard evidence that allegations of mail theft and other crimes attributed to Russia rested on purposeful falsification and subterfuge.
The initial reaction to these revelations -- a firestorm of frantic denial -- augured ill, and the time since has fulfilled one's
worst expectations. One year later we live within an institutionalized proscription of proven reality. Our discourse consists of
a series of fence posts and taboos. By any detached measure, this lands us in deep, serious trouble. The sprawl of what we call "Russia-gate"
now brings our republic and its institutions to a moment of great peril -- the gravest since the McCarthy years and possibly since
the Civil War. No, I do not consider this hyperbole.
Much has happened since Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity published its report on intrusions into the Democratic Party's
mail servers on Consortium News on July 24 last year. Parts of the intelligence apparatus -- by no means all or even most of it --
have issued official "assessments" of Russian culpability. Media have produced countless multi-part "investigations," "special reports,"
and what-have-yous that amount to an orgy of faulty syllogisms. Robert Mueller's special investigation has issued two sets of indictments
that, on scrutiny, prove as wanting in evidence as the notoriously flimsy intelligence "assessment" of January 6, 2017.
Indictments are not evidence and do not need to contain evidence. That is supposed to come out at trial, which is very
unlikely to ever happen. Nevertheless, the corporate media has treated the indictments as convictions.
Numerous sets of sanctions against Russia, individual Russians, and Russian entities have been imposed on the basis of this great
conjuring of assumption and presumption. The latest came last week, when the Trump administration announced measures in response
to the alleged attempt to murder Sergei and Yulia Skripal, a former double agent and his daughter, in England last March. No evidence
proving responsibility in the Skripal case has yet been produced. This amounts to our new standard. It prompted a reader with whom
I am in regular contact to ask, "How far will we allow our government to escalate against others without proof of anything?"
This is a very good question.
Cover of 2001 book that looks back on the earlier period of anti-Russia hysteria.
There have been many attempts to discredit VIPS50 as the group's
document is called.
There has been much amateurish journalism, false reporting, misrepresentation, distortion, misquotation, and omission. We have been
treated to much shoddy science, attempts at character assassination, a great deal of base name-calling, and much else. Russia is
routinely advanced as the greatest threat to democracy Americans now face. Is there any denying that we live amid an induced hysteria
now comparable to the "Red under every bed" period of the 1950s?
None of this has altered the basic case. VIPS and forensic scientists working with it have continued their investigations. New
facts, some of which alter conclusions drawn last year, have come to light, and these are to be addressed. But the basic evidence
that Russia-gate is a false narrative concocted by various constituents of national power stands, difficult as this is to discern.
Scrape back all that is ethically unacceptable and unscrupulously conveyed into the public sphere and you find that nothing has changed:
No one "hacked" the Democratic party's mail in the summer of 2016. It was leaked locally. From what one can make out, it was done
to expose the party leadership's corrupt efforts to sink Bernie Sanders' insurgent campaign to win the Democratic nomination.
But in another, very profound way, more has changed since VIPS50 was published than one could have imagined a year ago. American
discourse has descended to a dangerous level of irrationality. The most ordinary standards of evidentiary procedure are forgone.
Many of our key institutions -- the foreign policy apparatus, the media, key intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, the political
leadership -- are now extravagantly committed to a narrative none appears able to control. The risk of self-inflicted damage these
institutions assume, should the truth of the Russia-gate events emerge -- as one day it surely will -- is nearly incalculable. This
is what inspires my McCarthy and Civil War references. Russia-gate, in a phrase, has become too big to fail.
This column is an attack on no one. However it may be read, it is not intended as another round of vituperative argument adding
to the din and fog we already suffer daily. No shred of ideology informs it. I write a lament -- this for all we have done to ourselves
and our institutions this past year, and to the prospect of an orderly world, and for all that must somehow be done to repair the
damage once enough of us indeed recognize what has been done.
New VIPS Findings
Binney: Dares anyone to prove remote speeds .
The forensic scientists working with VIPS continued their research and experiments after VIPS50 was published. So have key members
of the VIPS group, notably William Binney, the National Security Agency's former technical director for global analysis and designer
of programs the agency still uses to monitor internet traffic. Such work continues as we speak, indeed. This was always the intent:
"Evidence to date" was the premise of VIPS50. Over the past year there have been confirmations of the original thesis and some surprises
that alter secondary aspects of it. Let us look at the most significant of these findings.
At the time I reported
on the findings of VIPS and associated forensic scientists, that the most fundamental evidence that the events of summer 2016 constituted
a leak, not a hack, was the transfer rate -- the speed at which data was copied. The speed proven then was an average of 22.7 megabytes
per second. That speed matches what is standard when someone with physical access uses an external storage device to copy data from
a computer or server and is much faster than a remote hack, reliant on communications
topology available at the time, could achieve.
Binney experimented into the autumn. By mid-autumn he had tested several routes -- from East Coast locations to cities in eastern
Europe, from New Jersey to London. The fastest internet transfer speed achieved, during the New Jersey–to–Britain test, was 12.0
megabytes of data per second. Since this time it has emerged from G-2.0's metadata that the detected average speed -- the 22.7 megabytes
per second -- included peak speeds that ran as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, impossible over the internet. "You'd need a dedicated,
leased, 400–megabit line all the way to Russia to achieve that result," Binney said in a recent interview.
To my knowledge, no one with an understanding of the science involved, including various former skeptics, any longer questions
the validity of the specific finding based on the observed transfer rate. That remains the bedrock evidence of the case VIPS and
others advance without qualification. " No one -- including the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA -- has come out against this finding,"
Binney said Monday. "Anyone who says the speed we demonstrated can be achieved remotely, our position is 'Let's see it. We'll help
any way we can.' There hasn't been anyone yet."
There is also the question of where and when leaks were executed. Research into this has turned out differently.
Evidence last year, based on analysis of the available metadata, showed that the copy operation date-stamped July 5, 2016, took
place in the Eastern U.S. time zone. But Forensicator, one of the chief forensic investigators working on the mail-theft case anonymously,
published evidence in May showing that while there was activity in the Eastern zone at the time of that copy, there was also a copy
operation in the Pacific time zone, where clocks run three hours earlier that EST. In an earlier publication he had also reported
activity in the Central time zone.
Plainly, more was awaiting discovery as to the when and where of the copy operations. The identity of Guccifer 2.0, who claimed
to be a Romanian hacker but which the latest Mueller indictment claims is a construct of the GRU, Russian military intelligence,
has never been proven. The question is what G–2.0 did with or to the data in question. It turns out that both more, and less, is
known about G–2.0 than was thought to have been previously demonstrated. This work has been completed only recently. It was done
by Binney in collaboration with Duncan Campbell, a British journalist who has followed the Russia-gate question closely.
Peak Speed Established
Binney visited Campbell in Brighton, England, early this past spring. They examined all the metadata associated with the files
G–2.0 has made public. They looked at the number of files, the size of each, and the time stamps at the end of each. It was at this
time that Binney and Campbell established the peak transfer rate at 49.1 megabytes per second.
But they discovered something else of significance, too. At some point G–2.0 had merged two sets of data, one dated July 5, 2016,
which had been known, and another dated the following September 1, which had not been known. In essence, Campbell reverse-engineered
G–2.0's work: He took the sets of data G–2.0 presented as two and combined them back into one. "G–2.0 used an algorithm to make a
downloaded file look like two files," Binney explained. "Those two shuffled back together like a deck of cards."
G–2.0 then took another step. Running another algorithm, he changed all the dates on all the files. With yet another algorithm,
he changed the hours stamped on each file. These are called "range changes" among the professionals. The conclusion was then obvious:
G–2.0 is a fabrication and a fabricator. Forensicator had already
proven that the
G–2.0 entity had inserted Russian "fingerprints" into the document known as the "Trump Opposition Report," which G-2.0 had published
on June 15, 2016. It is clear that no firm conclusions can be drawn at this point as to when or where G–2.0 did what he did.
" Now you need to prove everything you might think about him," Binney told me. "We have no way of knowing anything about him or
what he has done, apart from manipulating the files. We detected activity in the Eastern time zone. Now we have to ask again, 'Which
time zone?' The West Coast copy operation [discovered by Forensicator] has to be proven. All the data has been manipulated. It's
a fabrication."
This throws various things into question. The conclusions initially drawn on time and location in VIPS50 are now subject to these
recent discoveries. "In retrospect, giving 'equal importance' status to data pertaining to the locale was mistaken," Ray McGovern,
a prominent VIPS member, wrote in a recent note. "The key finding on transfer speed always dwarfed it in importance."
The indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers announced in mid–July by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney-general,
also come into question. They rest in considerable part on evidence derived from G–2.0 and DCLeaks, another online persona. How credible
are those indictments in view of what is now known about G–2.0?
Binney told me: "Once we proved G–2.0 is a fabrication and a manipulator, the timing and location questions couldn't be answered
but really didn't matter. I don't right now see a way of absolutely proving either time or location. But this doesn't change anything.
We know what we know: The intrusion into the Democratic National Committee mail was a local download -- wherever 'local' is." That
doesn't change. As to Rosenstein, he'll have a lot to prove."
What Role does Evidence Play?
Rosenstein at the Justice Department on July 13 announcing indictments against 12 GRU agents. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Images)
Rosenstein's predicament -- and there is no indication he understands it as one -- brings us to an essential problem: What is
the place of evidence in American public discourse? Of rational exchange?
The questions are germane far beyond the Russia-gate phenomenon, but it is there that answers are most urgent. What is implicit
in the Rosenstein indictments has been evident everywhere in our public sphere for a year or more: Make a presumption supported by
circumstantial evidence or none and build other presumptions upon it until a false narrative is constructed. The press has deployed
this device for as long as I have been a practitioner: "Might" or "could" or "possibly" becomes "perhaps," "probably" and "almost
certainly," and then moves on to unqualified fact in the course of, maybe, several weeks. Now this is how our most basic institutions
-- not least agencies of the Justice Department -- routinely operate.
This is what I mean when I refer to ours as a republic in peril.
There is the argument that certain things have been uncovered over the past year, and these are enough to conclude that Russia
plots to undermine our democracy. I refer to the small number of Facebook advertisements attributed to Russians, to strings of Twitter
messages, to various phishing exercises that occur thousands of times a day the world over. To be clear, I am no more satisfied with
the evidence of Russian involvement in these cases than I am with the evidence in any other aspect of the Russia-gate case. But for
the sake of argument, let us say it is all true.
Does this line up with the Russophobic hysteria -- not too strong a term -- that envelops us? Does this explain the astonishing
investments our public institutions, the press, and leading political parties have made in advancing this hysteria as they did a
variant of in the 1950s?
As global politics go, some serious thought should be given to a reality we have created all by ourselves: It is now likely that
America has built a new Cold War division with Russia that will prove permanent for the next 20 to 30 years. All this because of
some Facebook ads and Twitter threads of unproven origin? Am I the only one who sees a weird and worrisome gap between what we are
intent on believing -- as against thinking or knowing -- and the consequences of these beliefs?
There was an orthodoxy abroad many centuries ago called Fideism. In the simplest terms, it means the privileging of faith and
belief over reason. It was the enemy of individual conscience, among much else. Fideism has deep roots, but it was well around in
the 16 th century, when Montaigne and others had to navigate its many dangers. Closer to our time, William James landed
a variant on American shores with an 1896 address called "The Will to Believe." Bertrand Russell countered this line of thinking
a couple of decades later with "Free Thought and Official Propaganda," a lecture whose title I will let speak for itself. Twenty
years ago, none other than Pope John Paul II warned of a resurgence of Fideism. It is still around, in short.
Do we suffer from it? A variant of it, I would say, if not precisely in name. There seems to be a givenness to it in the American
character. I think we are staring into a 21 st century rendition of it.
To doubt the hollowed-out myth of American innocence is a grave sin against the faith. It is now unpatriotic to question the Russia-gate
narrative despite the absence of evidence to support it. Informal censorship of differing perspectives is perfectly routine. It is
now considered treasonous to question the word of intelligence agencies and the officials who lead them despite long records of deceit.
Do we forget that it was only 15 years ago that these same institutions and people deceived us into an invasion of Iraq the consequences
of which still persist?
This was the question Craig Murray, the former British diplomat (who has vital information on the DNC mail theft but who has never
been interviewed by American investigators) posed a few weeks ago. Eugene Robinson gave a good-enough reply in a Washington Post
opinion piece shortly afterward: "God Bless the Deep State," the headline read.
How we got here deserves a work of social psychology, and I hope someone takes up the task. Understanding our path into our self-created
crisis seems to me the first step to finding our way out of it.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist,
author, and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century (Yale). Follow him @thefloutist.
His web site is www.patricklawrence.us . Support his work via
www.patreon.com/thefloutist .
Gerry L Forbes , August 16, 2018 at 4:14 pm
Can the DNC server be used to convict anybody but the DNC and Crowdstrike since they refused to let the FBI examine the
server, breaking the chain of custody? About the indictments handed down so far all one can really say is "luncheon is served!"
("Any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich"). And how is lying to the FBI a crime unless it meets
the standard of obstruction of justice? Do they put you under oath before questioning you? Isn't this just an infringement
of Fifth Amendment rights? Must be one of Schumer's six ways from Sunday.
The amount of discord sown by Russian trolls probably pales in comparison to that sown by American trolls and wouldn't
even register compared to the discord sown by daily headlines screaming about Russian meddling.
The solution is to teach critical thinking but this will not happen because it is not in the interests of politicians,
lobbyists, or advertisers and the businesses that these groups serve.Even Harvard University prefers to protect its students
from "fake news' by censorship rather than education.
Rob , August 17, 2018 at 12:50 pm
"Lying" to the FBI is exactly how they indicted Michael Flynn. His interrogators asked questions to which they already had
the answers (via telephone taps), and when he gave them wrong information, they nailed him. For all we know, he simply forgot
specific details in giving his answers and was not trying to deceive, but that possibility seems to be beside the point. This
is a common tactic that the FBI uses to induce suspects and witnesses to cooperate. Clever, but backhanded, IMO
irina , August 16, 2018 at 9:07 pm
1981 is not 2018.
And you might want to google 'Clinton Body Count' if you're worried about politicos offing people. In fact, a young woman investigating
Bill Clinton's sexual shenanigans just got dead rather suspiciously . . .
For those who are so vituperative about Vladimir Putin, I say "Be careful what you wish for". We can only hope his successor
is as unflappable as he seems to be. (By the way, during your trip did you learn anything about the Siege of Leningrad in WW2
?) Did you know that Putin's parents lived through that siege, and that his older brother died in childhood as a result of being
young and starving during the siege ?
I live in Alaska and remember the 'Golden Samovar Service' offered by Alaska Airlines in the late 1980's (direct flights to
the Russian Far East). Now, we must fly almost all the way around the world to get to Siberia. How does that make sense ?
Kay , August 15, 2018 at 11:39 am
What is astonishing to me is how anyone could have believed this hoax in the first place, particularly when the Democratic
party literally admitted it chooses candidates in backroom deals. It is lobbyists, defense contractors, corporations & the Israeli
lobby that owns our politicians. Russia gate is also a smokescreen that covers up another foreign government interfering in our
own & in our elections. Trumps largest donor is Sheldon Adelson, Israeli billionaire. We have 89 members of Congress who are dual
Israelis and we just gave that fascist, genocidal state 38 BILLION in welfare. All our wars have been for the colonial expansion
of greater Israel and the new NDAA literally authorizes war with Iran, on behalf of Israel & Saudi Arabia of course.
I was present throughput the 2016 election and witnessed the fraud by Clinton the DNC & the FBI's downgrading of Clinton crime
was obvioua. Where in the hell was everyone else? Democrats wanted Clinton & her intelligence agency crowd because WAR WAS ASSURED.
Democrats are addicted to war & militarism. I still meet people who had no idea that Obama was involved in five wars, with Clinton
help!! And if they do know they don't CARE.
Democrats are lipstick on a neocon pig. Their love for war & continued denial about their corruption will continue to see them
lose election after election. In a recent Gallop poll, Russia was at the bottom of the list of concerns for respondents. Democrats
do not talk to their base. They talk at them with Russiagate. It's old. I do believe the lies will be revealed and I believe that
more in America know what's really going on than not. 62 percent of Americans don't vote. There is a reason for that. In another
recent poll 56 percent of Americans want normalized relations with Russia. It's the elite that are,driving us to war.
The question is what will we do to stop it
Ed , August 16, 2018 at 11:25 pm
"Democrats are lipstick on a neocon pig. "
True, and let's not forget that the original neocons were Scoop Jackson democrats who infiltrated the GOP and now infest both
parties.
KiwiAntz , August 14, 2018 at 8:16 pm
The headline says it all? The Russiagate lie is "to big too fail" because if this shellgame hoax concocted by the Democratic
Party to mask the very thing they are accusing Russia of doing, election meddling was ever exposed, the'd be finished, as a Political
Party!
So the lie must go on using Russia as the scapegoat to divert public attention from Democrats colluding with the Intelligence
Agencies to firstly get rid of Bernie Saunders as a Presidential Candidate then to get dirt on Trump in a attempt to conduct a
soft coup to oust him from office! The corruption of the Democratic Party & the entire American establishment, comprised of its
Corporate, Financial, Political, MIC & Intelligence Agencies in lockstep with a insidious MSM propagandist arm is now, so corrupt,
evil & ingrained, that there's no hope for its citizens who now live in a Stasi, Gestopo, Fascist Country whose Leaders are blaming
Russia for everything to distract attention away from their race to the bottom, deathcult ambitions & their willing to risk Nuclear
War with Russia too advance their lunatic plans! America is lost as a Country with no hope, no values & certainly has no moral
compass or conscience
exiled off mainstreet , August 15, 2018 at 2:22 am
This is exactly how it is at present. It is a signal disgrace and war crimes, such as the Yemen thing and suggested wars with
Iran and elsewhere are the inevitable outgrowth of this situation.
The Clintons abrogated the Reagan agreements with Gorbachev to keep NATO to the west of reunified Germany, ringing Russia with
NATO bases and provoking Russian actions. American and British oligarchs (like Bill Browder) descended on Russia under American
puppet Yeltsin to plunder Russia, along with quick study Russian oligarchs (many of whom fled to the West, particularly to London,
with the money). Putin put an end to that, and the Clintons had a conniption, since they were counting on fortunes for themselves.
Clintons delivered the meaningless Kosova war, as well as in Chinagate, offshoring our technology technology jobs to permanent
free trade status China, which was designed to further pressure Russia but may come back to haunt us, as did the Clintons' repeal
of Glass Steagall in 2008. Putin is popular for reversing much of what the Clintons' did to Russia, and Russian life expectancy
has gone up by 5 years since 2005 (American life expectancy has declined, and is below the OECD countries in aggregate).
GKJames , August 15, 2018 at 6:53 am
I recognize that hyperbole is the order of the day. But to lay at Clinton's feet responsibility for "mass murder [really??]
and chaos and coups" in the countries you identify surely is carrying your highly selective rage too far. If memory serves, it
was some other guy who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. As for her "call[ing] Putin Hitler," what she in fact said was that Putin's
actions in Ukraine -- the purported protection of the ethnic Russian minority in the east of the country in order to justify the
use of military force there -- was similar to what Hitler h
Keith , August 14, 2018 at 4:41 pm
According to Bill Binney in an interview with Jimmy Dore ( https://youtu.be/JHZXVWUxxDU
), Guccifer 2.0 released two batches of data, one on 5 July 2016 and a second on 1 Sept 2016. "But if you look at that data a
little closer," Binney said, "and you ignore the hour and the day, and just look at minutes, seconds, and milliseconds, [you can
take those] two data sets and shuffle them like a deck of cards. They fit together into one dataset without conflict." So there
was one continuous set of data. In other words, G-2.0 got hold of one dataset, but wanted it to appear as two different hacks.
Binney doesn't deviate from the claim that the speed of the download means it was done "locally"–not over the internet–but that
we don't know where "local" was (it wasn't necessarily done at the DNC). As for the possibility that the dataset was hacked over
the internet, then moved locally at the much faster speed, I'd guess that the VIPS would have identified that possibility. If
G-2.0 were so unsophisticated as to change dates and hours, but ignore minutes, seconds, and milliseconds, G-2.0 might have overlooked
any evidence that the dataset had also been moved previously over a slower internet transfer–and VIPS is sharp enough to have
picked that up. If such evidence could easily be removed, surely VIPS would have pointed out that possibility.
JWalters , August 14, 2018 at 9:02 pm
The main defense against the VIPS download speed analysis is the claim that the files might have been stolen from the DNC server
over the internet at the slower speed, and then copied to a thumb drive at the faster speed. I'd like to hear how VIPS would dispute
that theory.
In any case, there is a great deal of additional evidence that the theft was an inside job, including Julian Assange and Craig
Murry saying the emails came to Wikileaks from a disgruntled insider, and even Leon Podesta speculating that it was insider.
The were leaked. JULIAN ASSANGE HAS SAID SO MANY TIMES. Why do you think he is now isolated from the world? Now I hear he's
considering taking an offer to testify and I'm worried about his mental state. Maybe someone in isolation who goes "stir crazy"
would be willing to do anything to get out of it. No, that can't be right. He's never caved before.
michael , August 15, 2018 at 5:55 am
As Federal judge William Zloch told Bernie supporters when they sued the Hillary DNC for stealing the primaries and their donations,
the DNC is NOT a government entity. The DNC is NOT a public institution. The DNC IS a private club which by some arcane corrupt
rule befitting a Banana Republic allows it to put forth one of essentially only two candidates for President. If there was any
crime committed in this "matter" the FBI would have been all over those servers and computers like white on rice. You cannot have
it both ways. As it is, there is no chain of custody for any possible evidence, and as Hillary has said many times, No Evidence
Means No Crime.
It is quite interesting how many uninformed posters and/or trolls would love to find a way to show the "Russiagate" nonsense
is somehow plausible in spite of the evidence. They're kind of like a five year old child who desperately wants to keep believing
in Santa Claus, even though he just found dad's Santa costume in the closet and he's holding it in his own hands.
I will say that the amount of mental gymnastics required to continue not believing evidence that is right in front of one's
eyes is quite impressive – but I'd never underestimate the American people's creativity when they want to maintain their illusions/delusions.
And I'd certainly never underestimate the Russiagate troll army's persistence.
At this rate I expect to soon encounter some version of the following "observation" in the comments section for this article:
– "maybe space aliens hired by the Russians downloaded the files to a to a new fangled thig-a-ma-jig and then shape-shifted so
Craig Murray would be fooled into thinking a real-like-human insider provided him the files on a flash drive." – "oh, oh, wait,
maybe the aliens abducted Murray too, and then just made him "think" a fellow human gave him the drive in person." "yeah, yeah,
and maybe Assange just says he didn't get the files from the Russians because "he's a space alien too." "Yeah, prove to me that
it didn't happen this way – you can't – ha! there! I win!"
Sorry, but two years into this we should be way beyond this kind of – "I can't believe Santa's not real"- denying, dissembling,
rationalizing nonsense. Then again, this is America.
michael , August 15, 2018 at 6:06 am
"Two years after the Iraq War began, 70 per cent of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the
9/11 attacks, according to a Washington Post survey." The Big Lie works, and since Obama gutted Smith-Mundt, the CIA/ State Department
can legally keep Americans tracking on their propaganda narratives.
Double pronged exercise: 1) Start war with Russia, steal its oil, break into tiny States
to destroy its power; 2) Destroy Trump as enemy of globalist world domination and USA
disintegration plan.
MSM propaganda arm to sell (1) and (2).
These retired Intel specialists keep interfering in the game and interjecting inconvenient
facts:
DNC server never hacked by Russia or anyone. It was an insider transfer. Insider dead.
Dead men tell no tales and so far, neither does Wikileaks.
VIPS is doing some excellent work and they show what really happened while Rosenstein is
out to Lunch, Sessions is deaf dumb and blind - useless - both Sessions and Rosenstein need
to go.
Muller does not care and he is not interested in the truth and is ignoring the facts and
the corruption in the FBI/DOJ - Muller and his band of Clinton Loyalist are trying to frame
Trump.
Rosenstein and Mueller KNOW the DNC server was not hacked by Russia or by anyone. Insider
transfer. So are they working for HilBarry? Or is this a magic act?
What Sessions is doing is unknown. He knows he was set up by Barry sending the Russian
ambassador to his office and by (FBI? Spy) Paul Ericsson offering to connect campaign thru
him to Russia. He had to recuse or be in the midst of the mess. Does he have a plan? - we
don't know.
It's not Russiagate, it's Americagate and it's your problem, not ours.
The only significant remaining question is whether you fade gracefully from the page of
History or whether you take the Samson Option and we all go out flash-bang.
I have a ton of respect for Binney. Regardless as to how fucked up this country is and its
govt, there are still people who will step up and try to set the record straight.
If you put a camera in front of a bunch of randomly selected Americans and ask them to
state their name and where they live, before answering if they voted for Trump, you get a lot
of No replies.
Now do the same questioning anonymously. The number of Nos drops.
This is the gaping hole in Goebbels argument. Anonymous polls can get closer to the truth.
Then the "accepted truth" is challenged, as in 9-11.
"There has been much amateurish journalism, false reporting, misrepresentation,
distortion, misquotation, and omission." In other words, the CIA was behind this.
so... the upshot is that G.2 and DCLeaks fabricated the leak as a hack AND the tools to do
this and to fabricate signatures/date stamps etc existed in the CIA (proven here: https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/index.html
) and possibly MI6, but not in Russia, or Romania?
the CIA has "stations" all over the world?
looks like a few facebook and twitter posts have resulted in the alphabet soup, deep
state, DNC and MSM spending tens of billions of dollars pushing a false agenda against russia
AND have caused hundreds of billions of exra dollars on military expenditure and extra
security globally.
in which case, they have won by further diverting taxes away from taxpayers and increasing
debt where insufficient taxes remain/ed.
The fact that the files were downloaded from the DNC computer, and not hacked from abroad,
should be the key to unlocking Clinton conspiracies that would destroy large portions of the
Democrat establishment if revealed.
I can achieve up to 1 Gbit/s up & downstream. The average up/downstream is probably
quite a bit lower but +50mb/s is probably average. So i lol at the VIPS LOL
The poison of partisan propaganda dumped into American polity to prevent the prosecution
of the guilty (for illegally spying on Trump campaign and the assorted crimes associated with
it, including the murder of Seth Rich) will continue to foul the atmosphere for decades. The
fight is certainly between an unelected octopus that has captured all the three wings of
American polity, and a determined if not well armed citizens. The end is not near.
There is a small, nice book by C Northecote Parkinson, "The Law and the Profits". He
describes how in 1909 the British empire started a simultaneous course of welfare state and
empire building warfare state bureacracy, and how it eventually bankrupted the people by
1945. America started its own version with L B Johnson's Great Society and Vietnam War. Since
American economy was much bigger the dichotomous struggle has lasted much longer. But now the
time to choose one over another is at hand. Candidate Trump advocated trimming the warfare
state more and first. But President Trump is sending mixed signals.
The only saving grace is the self aware American citizenry and its capacity to reform
itself.
"... What is definitely conclusive is the Gucci 2 entity forged the inclusion of Russian fingerprints in the leaked version of the documents by pasting it into a Russian language Word template. With 70 years of experience in espionage, there is no way Russian spy agencies are that sloppy and moreover, and if they were it would be absolutely unprecedented. ..."
"... the central conclusion of William Binnery's forensic analysis: that Gucifer 2.0 was a fabrication, and that the DNC emails were downloaded, not hacked by Russia. ..."
"... Were Assange be allowed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee later this month, the lid could be blown off the entire sordid operation. ..."
"... From before the CIA's formation the US intelligence activities have been the province of the Republican Party (there are plenty of exceptions, but please follow). Allen Dulles and his ilk were friends with and shared goals with German industrialists long before World War II. These relationships continued through WWII and afterwards. The CIA has functioned as an international coal and iron police, overthrowing governments around the world that have stood in the way of corporate profits. ..."
"... This edition of Covert Action Information Bulletin, in 1990, happened just before a shift in Washington. Almost all of the operations run by our government to destabilize Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1990 were organized by the political right and run by people such as Paul Weyrich. But the nineties showed a rise in Democratic activity in these settings. I would guess that a mental image of this would be our then-First Lady lying about dodging bullets on an airstrip during the destruction of Yugoslavia. It marked the successful CIA takeover of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... The 2016 Russiagate hysteria has been an intelligence operation which has been by all measures successful. I presumed initially that the scam was done to put Hillary into the White House, but now wonder if having Trump as President was part of the long-term strategy. ..."
"... Please note that the DNC backed over fifty new candidates for Congress who have intelligence backgrounds. How do you think they will vote for the coming war resolution against Russia? ..."
"... Not sure about the theory of installing Trump in the WH is part of a long term strategy of the deep state, but the latter seems to be adapting to the disruption quite well. ..."
"... Additional info: Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers" which documents the Dulles brother's creation of the Cold War mentality and activities. Shouldn't we add Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski. ..."
"... Citing a book from almost 30 years ago that implicated ONLY the Republicans in the CIAs machinations ignores LBJ and the CIA's involvement in Vietnam and possibly in the JFK assassination. ..."
"... One suspects that the President has revealed far less than he knows, perhaps wary of being accused of "obstruction" by Mueller in concert with the controlled media. He actually requested that William Binney present his analysis to then CIA Director Pompeo, who has since sat on it. ..."
"... But actually, to your point, the reverse is true. If the DNC and Podesta were hacked by Russians, the NSA would have been able to demonstrate that fact through evidentiary proof, a point made repeatedly by Binney. ..."
"... No such proof was or has ever been offered. Instead the main document presented to the American public was the January 6, 2017 "assessment" by analysts hand-picked by John Brennan, who has played a key role in the illegal operation against President Trump. ..."
"... I was struck by one comment particularly, why not ask Assange about the leak. ..."
"... Keeping him incommunicado certainly serves the leaders of the lynch mob and thanks goes to the new Ecuadorian President. He was asked to shut the guy up and he did. ..."
"... Herman, Assange has been asked about the identity of the leaker and replied that he couldn't comment because Wikileaks has a strict policy of maintaining sources' confidentiality. No potential source would ever trust Assange if he violated that policy. Instead, Assange offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Seth Richards' murderer. So this was his way of answering the question indirectly. ..."
I don't believe the Russians did this. I think there are
perhaps millions of people in the US capable of carrying out this action and many more with
motive. Furthermore, if they did, I am happy that the information was made available so I can't
see why I would care.
That said, I am unconvinced by this evidence. I am quite familiar with file systems on
different operating systems and I would at least need to know what device we are talking about
here. Did it come from Assange? Why doesn't somebody say so? What sort of device is it? The
simple fact that it was copied from a computer doesn't prove that the computer was the DNC
server. It might have been copied from Putin's iMac. I believe in one reading the writer
acknowledged that the dates on the drive could be manipulated and I am certain that this is
true. While this may still leave it above the level of evidence that the FBI or "intelligence"
agencies have presented (or even claimed to have) it is not conclusive.
Reply
GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:10 pm
What is definitely conclusive is the Gucci 2 entity forged the inclusion of Russian
fingerprints in the leaked version of the documents by pasting it into a Russian language
Word template. With 70 years of experience in espionage, there is no way Russian spy agencies
are that sloppy and moreover, and if they were it would be absolutely unprecedented.
Furthermore, I have no reason to disbelieve Craig Murray that the docs were handed to him
directly and transferred by him to Wikileaks. Quite the contrary, in fact, since his
reputation would undoubtedly be irreconcilably demolished for all time if the Russiagaters
ever came up with hard proof to support their conspiracy theory.
GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:12 pm
Please forgive all the typos, posted on my little bitty phone :)
j. D. D. , August 14, 2018 at 2:21 pm
The crucial premise of the ongoing British-instigated coup against President Trump and the
chief legal ground for Robert Mueller's operation against the President, is the claim that
the Russians hacked the emails of the DNC and, John Podesta, and provided the results to
WikiLeaks which published them. The authenticity of such emails showing Hillary Clinton to be
a craven puppet of Wall Street who had cheated Bernie Sanders of the nomination were never
disputed, by Clinton, or anyone else.
Nor has the central conclusion of William Binnery's forensic analysis: that Gucifer
2.0 was a fabrication, and that the DNC emails were downloaded, not hacked by
Russia.
Furthermore, the only people who really know where and by whom the download occurred are
Julian Assange, whose life is now in peril, and former British Ambassador Craig Murray.
Were Assange be allowed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee later this
month, the lid could be blown off the entire sordid operation.
paul g. , August 14, 2018 at 3:03 pm
Craig stated he was merely a go between, who was given the data in the woods by American
University by probably another go between. Lots of cut outs here but the data was transferred
physically by thumb drive(s).
David G , August 15, 2018 at 8:27 am
"The crucial premise is the claim that the Russians hacked the emails of the DNC and, John
Podesta, and provided the results to WikiLeaks which published them."
I would like to call attention to a little slice of history of US the destabilization of
Eastern Europe and the USSR that would help to explain what is happening today.
From before the CIA's formation the US intelligence activities have been the province
of the Republican Party (there are plenty of exceptions, but please follow). Allen Dulles and
his ilk were friends with and shared goals with German industrialists long before World War
II. These relationships continued through WWII and afterwards. The CIA has functioned as an
international coal and iron police, overthrowing governments around the world that have stood
in the way of corporate profits.
This edition of Covert Action Information Bulletin, in 1990, happened just before a
shift in Washington. Almost all of the operations run by our government to destabilize
Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1990 were organized by the political right and run by people
such as Paul Weyrich. But the nineties showed a rise in Democratic activity in these
settings. I would guess that a mental image of this would be our then-First Lady lying about
dodging bullets on an airstrip during the destruction of Yugoslavia. It marked the successful
CIA takeover of the Democratic Party.
The 2016 Russiagate hysteria has been an intelligence operation which has been by all
measures successful. I presumed initially that the scam was done to put Hillary into the
White House, but now wonder if having Trump as President was part of the long-term
strategy.
Please note that the DNC backed over fifty new candidates for Congress who have
intelligence backgrounds. How do you think they will vote for the coming war resolution
against Russia?
GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:16 pm
Not sure about the theory of installing Trump in the WH is part of a long term
strategy of the deep state, but the latter seems to be adapting to the disruption quite
well.
Additional info: Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers" which documents the Dulles brother's
creation of the Cold War mentality and activities.
Shouldn't we add Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
michael , August 15, 2018 at 6:33 am
Citing a book from almost 30 years ago that implicated ONLY the Republicans in the
CIAs machinations ignores LBJ and the CIA's involvement in Vietnam and possibly in the JFK
assassination. Later, Carter was the only Democrat President who may or may not have
been heavily involved with the CIA. The Clintons were likely involved with the CIA early on
in their Mena, Arkansas drug-smuggling schemes, and the CIA was definitely closely involved
in their presidential anti-Slavic foreign policy. The Clintons' neoliberal agenda fit well
with the older neocons and consolidated the Duopoly support for the crazed think tank ideas
in DC.
jeff montanye , August 17, 2018 at 7:45 am
all perhaps true, but the cia, etc. have terribly neglected their republican base (ftr:
registered democrat, sanders and trump voter) and it is baying at their heels, drool swinging
from gnashing fangs. that is a political change as profound and radical as anything i
observed around the tear gas and batons of the sixties.
"They have passed the point of no return; there is no walking it back now. If it fails
heads will roll, but most importantly these trusted institutions will have flushed their last
vestiges of credibility down the drain. Then what?"
Then nothing. It puts one mind of the comment made by one of the Robber Barons when they
were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. His comment " All that was lost was honour"
In the present mess even if eventually it all comes to light no one is going to be held
answerable. No one is going to jail. Truth does not matter. The propaganda is what matters.
if it is proven wrong it is merely swept under the rug. With the short attention spans of
Americans it would be forgotten in a New York Minute.
GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:19 pm
Perhaps this explains the need for the likely false flag poison attack in Britain and the
fake Douma nerve gas attack. Russiagate hasn't really been panning out so well and too much
info has been emerging to challenge the narrative.
David G , August 15, 2018 at 8:29 am
I fully agree.
Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 1:06 pm
If Russian hacking is a hoax, why has it not been exposed by all the Trump appointed
intelligence and FBI heads? Trump's people could shut it down with a public single statement.
Y'all are deep into a conspiracy theory that makes no sense.
AnthraxSleuth , August 14, 2018 at 1:27 pm
Pffft!
It was shown to be a hoax by Clinton's own campaign staff in their book released after the
election titled "shattered".
"Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby
Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case
that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack
containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and
the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."
The plan, according to the book, was to push journalists to cover how "Russian hacking was
the major unreported story of the campaign," and it succeeded to a fare-thee-well. After the
election, coverage of the Russian "collusion" story was relentless, and it helped pressure
investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel, which
in turn has triggered virtually nonstop coverage.
Guess the only conspiracy theororist here is you.
Goebbels would be so proud.
You drank the kool-aid bruh!
Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 2:19 pm
My comment applies equally well to your response. Why doesn't Nunes, Pompeo, or Coates,
etc ever say anything about these theories?
AnthraxSleuth , August 14, 2018 at 4:28 pm
It's no longer a theory when the conspirators confess to it in their own writing.
Which I demonstrated to you in the previous post.
Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 6:18 pm
This very slanted article amplifies a few post-election statements. I'm sure Podesta and
Mook wanted to play this up. Some of that was sour grapes but most people are inclined to
think it was also true. These guys controlling most media outlets and most of the
intelligence community seems absurd to me. But I guess we all believe what we want to believe
now.
jdd , August 14, 2018 at 2:30 pm
One suspects that the President has revealed far less than he knows, perhaps wary of being
accused of "obstruction" by Mueller in concert with the controlled media. He actually
requested that William Binney present his analysis to then CIA Director Pompeo, who has since
sat on it.
But actually, to your point, the reverse is true. If the DNC and Podesta were
hacked by Russians, the NSA would have been able to demonstrate that fact through evidentiary
proof, a point made repeatedly by Binney.
No such proof was or has ever been offered. Instead
the main document presented to the American public was the January 6, 2017 "assessment" by
analysts hand-picked by John Brennan, who has played a key role in the illegal operation
against President Trump.
jeff montanye , August 17, 2018 at 7:54 am
And Donald Trump has more training in show business than most politicians or even internet
commenters. I suspect there is a fall premiere of quite an extravaganza leading up to the
midterm elections.
Read half the most intelligent commentary and had to quick. I was struck by one comment
particularly, why not ask Assange about the leak. Too simple but too much to ask, I guess.
Keeping him incommunicado certainly serves the leaders of the lynch mob and thanks goes to
the new Ecuadorian President. He was asked to shut the guy up and he did.
Modawg , August 14, 2018 at 3:28 pm
I think he has been asked and has politely refused to reveal. But his innuendo is that it
was from inside the US and definitely not the Russkies.
alley cat , August 14, 2018 at 4:44 pm
Herman, Assange has been asked about the identity of the leaker and replied that he
couldn't comment because Wikileaks has a strict policy of maintaining sources'
confidentiality. No potential source would ever trust Assange if he violated that policy. Instead, Assange offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and
conviction of Seth Richards' murderer. So this was his way of answering the question
indirectly.
A Solomonic solution that is technically not a violation of confidentiality
Andy Wilcoxson , August 14, 2018 at 12:36 pm
Can I play devil's advocate and ask a question. Can we rule out the possibility that a hacker in Russia, China, or wherever
had remote control of a computer in the United States that they used to hack the DNC?
49.1 megabytes per second is almost 400 mbps, which is a very fast transfer speed, but there were one gigabit (1000 mbps)
connections available in several US markets when these e-mails were stolen. You might not have been able to transfer the files
directly from Washington D.C. to Russia at those speeds, but you certainly could have transferred them between computers
within the United States at those speeds using gigabit internet connections.
Is there something I'm missing? How does the file transfer speed prove this was a USB download and not a hack when gigabit
internet connections existed that could have accommodated those transfer speeds -- maybe not directly to Russia or Europe, but
certainly to another US-based computer that foreign hackers may have have remotely controlled.
Desert Dave , August 14, 2018 at 6:09 pm
Actually a byte is 10 bits total because there is overhead (start and stop bits). So 49.1 MBps is about 491 Mbps. The
question of whether the DNC server was attached to a network that fast would be easy to answer, if the FBI or anybody else
wanted to check.
"... The agents actually threatening the health of the state came from the intel community itself: Mr. Brennan, Mr. Clapper, Mr. Comey, Mr. Strzok, Mr. McCabe, Mr. Ohr, Ms. Yates. Ms. Page, et. al. who colluded with pathogens in the DNC, the Hillary campaign, and the British intel service to chew up and spit out Mr. Trump as expeditiously as possible. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the Deep State can't stop running its mouth -- The New York Times , CNN, WashPo , et al -- in an evermore hysterical reaction to the truth of the matter: the Deep State itself colluded with Russia (and perhaps hates itself for it, a sure recipe for mental illness). ..."
"... The second head of this monster is a matrix of sinister interests seeking to incite conflict with Russia in order to support arms manufacturers, black box "security" companies, congressmen-on-the-take, and an army of obscenely-rewarded Washington lobbyists in concert with the military and a rabid neocon intellectual think-tank camp wishing to replay the cold war and perhaps even turn up the temperature with some nuclear fire. ..."
"... This second head functions by way of a displacement-projection dynamic. We hold war games on the Russian border and accuse them of "aggression." ..."
"... The third head of this monster is the one aflame with identity politics. It arises from a crypto-gnostic wish to change human nature to escape the woes and sorrows of the human condition -- for example, the terrible tensions of sexuality. Hence, the multiplication of new sexual categories as a work-around for the fundamental terrors of human reproduction as represented by the differences between men and women. ..."
"... "We engineer and pay for a coup against the elected government of Ukraine, and accuse Russia of aggression. We bust up one nation after another in Middle East and complain indignantly when Russia acts to keep Syria from becoming the latest failed state. We disrupt the Russian economy with sanctions, and the Russian banking system with a cut-off of SWIFT international currency clearing privileges, and accuse them of aggression. This mode of behavior used to be known as "poking the bear," a foolish and hazardous endeavor. " ..."
"... And this shit has been going on since the Soviet Union broke up and the "Harvard Boys" helped turn Russia into a corrupt Oligarchy, something the Left was first to identify. ..."
"... The rising of the Populist parties in the UK, Germany, especially Italy and now Sweden, portends an interesting trend, not just nationally, but world wide... ..."
The faction that used to be the Democratic party can be described with some precision these days as a three-headed monster driving
the nation toward danger, darkness, and incoherence.
Anyone interested in defending what remains of the sane center of American politics take heed:
The first head is the one infected with the toxic shock of losing the 2016 election. The illness took hold during the campaign
that year when the bureaucracy under President Obama sent its lymphocytes and microphages in the "intel community" -- especially
the leadership of the FBI -- to attack the perceived disease that the election of Donald Trump represented. The "doctors" of this
Deep State diagnosed the condition as "Russian collusion." An overdue second opinion by doctors outside the Deep State adduced later
that the malady was actually an auto-immune disease.
The agents actually threatening the health of the state came from the intel community itself: Mr. Brennan, Mr. Clapper, Mr.
Comey, Mr. Strzok, Mr. McCabe, Mr. Ohr, Ms. Yates. Ms. Page, et. al. who colluded with pathogens in the DNC, the Hillary campaign,
and the British intel service to chew up and spit out Mr. Trump as expeditiously as possible.
With the disease now revealed by hard evidence, the chief surgeon called into the case, Robert Mueller, is left looking ridiculous
-- and perhaps subject to malpractice charges -- for trying to remove an appendix-like organ called the Manifort from the body politic
instead of attending to the cancerous mess all around him. Meanwhile, the Deep State can't stop running its mouth -- The New
York Times , CNN, WashPo , et al -- in an evermore hysterical reaction to the truth of the matter: the Deep State itself colluded
with Russia (and perhaps hates itself for it, a sure recipe for mental illness).
The second head of this monster is a matrix of sinister interests seeking to incite conflict with Russia in order to support
arms manufacturers, black box "security" companies, congressmen-on-the-take, and an army of obscenely-rewarded Washington lobbyists
in concert with the military and a rabid neocon intellectual think-tank camp wishing to replay the cold war and perhaps even turn
up the temperature with some nuclear fire. They are apparently in deep confab with the first head and its Russia collusion storyline.
Note all the current talk about Russia already meddling in the 2018 midterm election, a full-fledged pathogenic hallucination.
This second head functions by way of a displacement-projection dynamic. We hold war games on the Russian border and accuse
them of "aggression." We engineer and pay for a coup against the elected government of Ukraine, and accuse Russia of aggression.
We bust up one nation after another in Middle East and complain indignantly when Russia acts to keep Syria from becoming the latest
failed state.We disrupt the Russian economy with sanctions, and the Russian banking system with a cut-off of SWIFT international
currency clearing privileges, and accuse them of aggression. This mode of behavior used to be known as "poking the bear," a foolish
and hazardous endeavor. The sane center never would have stood for this arrant recklessness. The world community is not fooled, though.
More and more, they recognize the USA as a national borderline personality, capable of any monstrous act.
The third head of this monster is the one aflame with identity politics. It arises from a crypto-gnostic wish to change human
nature to escape the woes and sorrows of the human condition -- for example, the terrible tensions of sexuality. Hence, the multiplication
of new sexual categories as a work-around for the fundamental terrors of human reproduction as represented by the differences between
men and women. Those differences must be abolished, and replaced with chimeras that enable a childish game of pretend, men pretending
to be women and vice-versa in one way or another: LBGTQetc. Anything BUT the dreaded "cis-hetero" purgatory of men and women acting
like men and women. The horror .
Its companion is the race hustle and its multicultural operating system. The objective has become transparent over the past year,
with rising calls to punish white people for the supposed "privilege" of being Caucasian and pay "reparations" in one way or another
to underprivileged "people of color." This comes partly from the infantile refusal to understand that life is difficult for everybody,
and that the woes and sorrows of being in this world require fortitude and intelligence to get through -- with the final reward being
absolutely the same for everybody.
"We engineer and pay for a coup against the elected government of Ukraine, and accuse Russia of aggression. We bust
up one nation after another in Middle East and complain indignantly when Russia acts to keep Syria from becoming the latest
failed state. We disrupt the Russian economy with sanctions, and the Russian banking system with a cut-off of SWIFT international
currency clearing privileges, and accuse them of aggression. This mode of behavior used to be known as "poking the bear," a
foolish and hazardous endeavor. "
And this shit has been going on since the Soviet Union broke up and the
"Harvard Boys" helped turn Russia into
a corrupt Oligarchy, something the Left was first to identify.
I was talking to someone, who knows a lot about the 'inner workings' and we were discussing, not only the US, but Europe's
situation as well.
The rising of the Populist parties in the UK, Germany, especially Italy and now Sweden, portends an interesting trend,
not just nationally, but world wide...
@Collin-
Isn't it extremely Orwellian to say that 'information isn't really information/should be
censored or disregarded if it comes from a subversive (Russia) source'?
Naturally, it allows for a very easy way to control and censor information.
Now, as far as pure security threats, aside from information that should've been public
anyway, experts deem that the DNC information came from on site:
Now this is also an appeal to authority, but VIPs has a better track record and I've seen
them actually elaborate on their claims, not just assert them.
People. Don't miss out this recent and fascinating Interview featuring Bill Binney, former NSA IT guy and whistle blower
. The host made him the right Questions. He speak on very important issues In Particular The Russian "Hacking" of the DNC, and
even 9-11.
Binney is "The Expert" , Nobody can dispute his integrity.
"... While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
"... So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours. ..."
"... You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by DNC! Everybody knows... ..."
"... Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB ..."
"... Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats. ..."
It has been clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be
involved in 2018. It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the
Russian oligarchs.
However, Sanders had already committed the unforgivable
sin of criticizing the Democratic establishment candidate from the left. There is simply no way of coming back from that treason.
Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (11/12/17) asking
its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals
respond?" The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the
failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.
It isn't just progressive politicians that are all traitors. Movements like Black Lives Matter are also traitors for Russia.
It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.
Hey, Bernie. The American people were the ones who should have decided who won the primary, not Hillary, the DNC and the delegates.
That you are blaming Her loss on Russia instead of admitting that the American people rejected her makes you nothing more than
a democratic puppet. How embarrassing for you.
Every Black voter should abandon the DP until they apologize for their disrespect for the BLM and saying that they only started
protesting cops killing Blacks because Russia manipulated them into doing so.
Eichenwald thinks that our intelligence agencies are patriots who have spent their lives working on keeping us safe does he?
I agree with Dmitry Orlov's take on them.
The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as
possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on
ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially
organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.
....
the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial,
economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest
single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your
own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself.
While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than
" a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. "
And let's not forget how many
coups
and false flag events they had a hand in creating that have cost so much misery and death.
One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false
flag operations, à la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story
is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting
this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips.
It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy
theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
The real puppets are the ones who believe in this silly story that Russia is pulling Trump's strings and that the GOP are also
Russian puppets. Good grief!
The others show that there are others out there that have seen through this propaganda crap. I'd like to see the breakdown
of Hillary supporters that believe Russia Gate and the Bernie supporters that don't. Most of the Trump supporters think it's phony
so what made Hillary's believe in something that everyone should be laughing at?
You deserve a lot of credit. Russia interfered in your favor, yet you are man enough to admit that they interfered. Thank
you Bernie!
So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you
didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours.
You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was
"deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated
by DNC! Everybody knows...
Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't
need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB
Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will
fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate
by the democrats.
The democrats (and media cohorts) have become an apocolyptic death cult. The language that comes from them is infused with
the language of conspiracies, violence, treason, aggression and demonization.
And here is the thing, Bernie to survive electorally will have to become a cult member. Effectively he will have to be pro-war
with Russia. He will be giving from the the Left supposed support for aggressive action andmilitarism toward Russia.
I fear that if a democrat becomes president in 2020 (it won't be Bernie), is elected president that in the year of the midterms
in 2022, the US will start a real war with Russia which has a highly likehood of going nuclear.
"... -- William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), from memory ..."
"... @thanatokephaloides ..."
"... Finally there's the meeting that Assange's lawyer set up with congress for him to testify to congress and tell them where he got the DNC emails that showed how they rigged the primary. Comey and Schaffer shot that down because it would have killed Russia Gate. Dead and buried and the country could move on. ..."
"... In this case, it is NOT a matter of opinion. It is a matter of FACT. The physical proof that we have right now tells us that the Wikileaks documents did not come from a "hack." We also have physical evidence that someone (no doubt Crowdstrike) manipulated copies of the leaked documents and embedded awkward amateurish evidence to make them look like they were taken by a "Russian" hacker. Here's how we know that: ..."
"... Assange's diplomatic trip to the US in mid-2017 to testify before Congress and prove where the documents came from was emergency-blocked by Comey and Rosenstein. As a consequence, Assange immediately released the extensive Vault 7 documents to the American people so we could forensically recognize the signature techniques that the US intelligence agencies would use to alter downloaded DNC documents and embed fake Russian "fingerprints." We have seen the physical evidence that that occurred. ..."
"... The US has no real physical evidence of a Russian hack or they would never have released the fake evidence. Yet they continue their attack to harm Russia's economy and the continue their attempts to provoke a hot war with Russia. The US motive for this has nothing to do with their fake hacking narrative; it is about crippling Russia (and China) to forestall the rapid rise of Eurasia, which is stripping the Neocons and war-profiteering corporations of their dream for the US to achieve total domination over all other nations. The Entitled Elite want their New American Century back! Their Empire was supposed to rule the world.... ..."
"... @Pluto's Republic ..."
"... While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
"... third run ..."
"... ~~Author Unknown ..."
"... ~~Martin Luther King Jr. ..."
"... @Unabashed Liberal ..."
"... @Unabashed Liberal ..."
"... ~~Martin Luther King Jr. ..."
"... Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats. ..."
Russiagate may technically be about Trump, but in fact most of the "traitors" and Putin Puppets are progressives on the left.
Russiagate officially started in 2015 long before
the DNC hack and the Democratic primaries.
Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin
Russiagate never was actually about Russia. It's the Democrats' version of Obama's birth certificate. As
Caitlin Johnstone puts it, Russiagate is 9/11 minus 9/11.
TWIT:
Kurt Eichenwald
@kurteichenwald
Bottom line: You either support the patriots in our intelligence community and law enforcement who work endlessly for our
national security, and all of the intelligence agencies of our allies, or you support Putin.
You're either a patriot, a traitor or an idiot. Choose.
10:51 AM-16 Jul 2018
In reality, Russiagate started with Ralph Nader and the
2000 election .
They said a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. You have a moral duty to vote for the Democrat and to be pragmatic. Your Naderite
purity came at the expense of the poor. Only affluent selfish white guys could afford this type of virtue signaling. In fact,
maybe some of these people were really Republicans in disguise. There were no Russian bots to blame just yet, but clearly some
liberals are unable to imagine good faith criticism of Democrats coming from the left.
The terms " virtue signaling", " purity pony", and of course "White Berniebro" weren't coined yet, but the the stereotype they
describe was formed in 2000. Gore lost and Nader and all his voters, in swing states or not, were vilified. They were worse than
Republicans. They were traitors. Of all the factors that caused Gore's loss, the only one that Democratic partisans really cared
about was Nader.
People that voted for Nader became responsible for the Iraq War, while Democrats who voted for Bush and the Iraq War got a free
pass. Liberals, besides their obvious double-standards when allocating responsibility, made the dubious claim that morality requires
being pragmatic in your voting. And then, as if to prove the basis of their claims to be false, they approach their target audience
in a non-pragmatic way.
The anger on open display is the opposite of pragmatic politics. They don't try to persuade people to vote for the Democrat. They
demand it. It is a moral litmus test, or rather, a judgement of one's very soul. Good people know they have to vote for the Democrat.
Bad people vote for Republicans and the very worst people of all claim to be left, but vote for Stein or maybe even voted for
Clinton, but criticized her. Democratic partisans have no interest in what you say about an issue if they perceive it as in any
way an attack or a criticism of a Democrat. If you are a third party advocate you can forget about being taken seriously on any
issue because you have already self identified as a Satanist and you need to be exorcised from the body politic. Even if you say
you support the Democrat as the lesser evil, you speak as one of the damned and deserve no mercy. Sanders played the game in 2016
exactly the way people said Nader should have played it and he and his supporters were still dismissed.
Like Nader before her, Stein is the absolute
worst traitor of all . Worse than Trump himself.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent. https://t.co/qkDUe6yADd
Maddow cast suspicion on Stein's silence over alleged Russian attempts to interfere with the election to benefit Donald Trump, who
she claimed during her own campaign would govern no differently than Hillary Clinton.
"So everybody's like, 'Wow, how come this like super, super aggressive opposition that we saw from these third-party candidates
-- how come they haven't said anything since this scandal has broken?'" Maddow said.
"I don't know, Jill -- I can't pronounce it in Russian," Maddow said, with apparent sarcasm.
Bernie Sanders, OTOH, did everything he was told he should do. He supported the Democratic establishment candidate, and believed
the Russiagate story.
It has been clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be
involved in 2018. It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the
Russian oligarchs.
However, Sanders had already committed the unforgivable
sin of criticizing the Democratic establishment candidate from the left. There is simply no way of coming back from that treason.
Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (11/12/17) asking
its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals
respond?" The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the
failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.
It isn't just progressive politicians that are all traitors. Movements like Black Lives Matter are also traitors for Russia.
That's because you, Russia, funded riots in Ferguson. See 0 hour I have your connections to Trump archived via Schiller and
Scavino https://t.co/aTUDlCGkYi
If you are still confused about what is treason and what isn't, ask yourself the question: Does the issue advance the narrative
that the Democratic Party is a force for absolute good?
Oh my god: this is how deranged official Washington is. The President of the largest Dem Party think tank (funded in part by
dictators) genuinely believes Chelsea Manning's candidacy is a Kremlin plot. Conspiracy theorists thrive more in mainstream DC
than on internet fringes pic.twitter.com/e8g314iQHT
We still have the 2018 election, and then the long lead-up to the 2020 election. There is nothing to indicate that the rhetoric
won't get a lot more insane. The general indifference of the public doesn't seem to discourage the media and pundits. So how will
it likely look in Fall 2020? Probably like it looked in
1952 .
The purpose of advancing the Communist issue was not to fix the Communist problem -- it was to exploit that problem for political
and ideological advantage. That is how the Republican Party could produce its unhinged 1952 platform, which charged that the Democrats
"have shielded traitors to the Nation in high places," "work unceasingly to achieve their goal of national socialism," and "by
a long succession of vicious acts, so undermined the foundations of our Republic as to threaten its existence." (Does that kind
of talk strike you as overheated? Then you, too, are failing to take the Russia issue seriously.)
There is little to no danger for conservatives and Republicans. All of the danger is for progressives and socialists, and the
angry mob is the Democratic establishment trying to silence left-wing ideas. In comparison, the danger of the GOP to the left-wing
is trivial.
Russiagate officially started in 2015 long before the DNC hack and the Democratic primaries.
I'm finding it harder and harder to believe that people keep posting it as common knowledge and factual -- especially on this
site. Old dkos habits are hard to break, I guess. The speed at which the files were STOLEN prove it was done from within the network.
Not from Russia, or from a van parked down the street. I can only guess that the DNC can't reveal whose network account was used
to do so, because it would blow the bullshit lie of a hack out of the water.
The speed at which the files were STOLEN prove it was done from within the network. Not from Russia, or from a van parked
down the street. I can only guess that the DNC can't reveal whose network account was used to do so, because it would blow
the bullshit lie of a hack out of the water.
There was NO hack.
emphasis in original.
The term usually used by the perpetrator classes for this sort of thing is: "inside job" . And, as
with all other inside jobs, the question really is: "Who's the insider?"
"The easiest way to raise a revolutionary army is to use someone else's; especially if it belongs to your enemy." -- William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), from memory
I've seen an article debunking the "hack was a leak" story, but it makes no difference anyway. In my book, the leak/hack just
created a more informed electorate, and that's good for American democracy.
@Deja
The truth is contained in the emails, not in their journey. Remember who else is telling you that the contents of the emails is
less important than how they got there - the Democrats.
@Deja
hypothesis has problems. Don't get me wrong, I think it holds more promise than the 'hack' hypothesis. But right now, really,
we got shit for proof either way? Would honestly look forward to your proof either way, sans the critique of the essayist. Might
I suggest that you criticize the point, not the person, please? Questions remain.
- DNC leak vs hack remains unproven (servers not provided)
- one party consent is complicated. On the tape, there was 3rd party on speaker phone. Were they in one party consent jurisdiction
as well?
- How was CNN able to confirm that this tape was recorded in NY?
in it. This is the point that matters to me. Assange has stated that the emails didn't come from Russia. Craig Murray said
that he was involved with the person who got the information from the DNC computers and that there was no connection to Russia.
The CIAs Vault 7 shows how evidence on computers can be manipulated to make it seem like someone's dawg did the deed. I think
it'd be very sloppy for trained hackers to leave their own footprints on the scene don't you think?
Finally there's the meeting that Assange's lawyer set up with congress for him to testify to congress and tell them where
he got the DNC emails that showed how they rigged the primary. Comey and Schaffer shot that down because it would have killed
Russia Gate. Dead and buried and the country could move on.
It matters profoundly. Knowing the facts surrounding critical political events or social earthquakes can be
epigenetic events. Hard truths can trigger conscious evolution while we are alive and your advanced gene expressions can be
physically inherited, changing the species.
By exercising our own critical thinking and working very hard to see through narratives to the core realities in the universe
and in all things -- we are physically evolving the species into better and more enlightened generations of humans.
In this case, it is NOT a matter of opinion. It is a matter of FACT. The physical proof that we have right now tells us
that the Wikileaks documents did not come from a "hack." We also have physical evidence that someone (no doubt Crowdstrike) manipulated
copies of the leaked documents and embedded awkward amateurish evidence to make them look like they were taken by a "Russian"
hacker. Here's how we know that:
Assange's diplomatic trip to the US in mid-2017 to testify before Congress and prove where the documents came from was
emergency-blocked by Comey and Rosenstein. As a consequence, Assange immediately released the extensive Vault 7 documents to the
American people so we could forensically recognize the signature techniques that the US intelligence agencies would use to alter
downloaded DNC documents and embed fake Russian "fingerprints." We have seen the physical evidence that that occurred.
The US has no real physical evidence of a Russian hack or they would never have released the fake evidence. Yet they continue
their attack to harm Russia's economy and the continue their attempts to provoke a hot war with Russia. The US motive for this
has nothing to do with their fake hacking narrative; it is about crippling Russia (and China) to forestall the rapid rise of Eurasia,
which is stripping the Neocons and war-profiteering corporations of their dream for the US to achieve total domination over all
other nations. The Entitled Elite want their New American Century back! Their Empire was supposed to rule the world....
If that is what your instincts tell you, you should trust them. It's a biological imperative.
It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.
Hey, Bernie. The American people were the ones who should have decided who won the primary, not Hillary, the DNC and the delegates.
That you are blaming Her loss on Russia instead of admitting that the American people rejected her makes you nothing more than
a democratic puppet. How embarrassing for you.
Every Black voter should abandon the DP until they apologize for their disrespect for the BLM and saying that they only started
protesting cops killing Blacks because Russia manipulated them into doing so.
Eichenwald thinks that our intelligence agencies are patriots who have spent their lives working on keeping us safe does he?
I agree with Dmitry Orlov's take on them.
The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as
possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on
ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially
organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.
....
the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic
and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single
continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your
own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you
are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude
toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. "
And let's not forget how many
coups
and false flag events they had a hand in creating that have cost so much misery and death.
One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false
flag operations, à la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story
is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting
this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips.
It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy
theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
The real puppets are the ones who believe in this silly story that Russia is pulling Trump's strings and that the GOP are also
Russian puppets. Good grief!
meaning the 'Russia Ruse'--IMO, has been an exercise in setting up a scenario under which the PtB can put in place a system
geared toward major social media 'censorship,' and, a face-saving exercise for FSC--just in case she decides to make a third
run in 2020. Heaven forbid!
Mollie/Blue Onyx (Reverting to my original handle)
"Every time I lose a dog, he takes a piece of my heart. Every new dog gifts me with a piece of his. Someday, my heart will
be total dog, and maybe then I will be just as generous, loving, and forgiving." ~~Author Unknown
"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments
are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way." ~~Martin Luther King Jr.
"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche
"... has been an exercise in setting up a scenario under which the PtB can put in place a system geared toward major social
media 'censorship,'
Yup. Dan Coates directory of national intelligence came out and accused Russsia of engaging in a "messaging campaign". So how
does one stop this messaging campaign. Well, back in the day, the answer was to answer bad speech with more and better speech.
Well, with Russiagate both the media and dem/gop establishment have to come to demand censorship from the major social media
platforms. And they have responded. At first they actually didn't and thought the Russia charges were trivial. Until that is,
they were theatened by House and Senate reps. And then they hopped to it.
And just a number of days ago, Facebook proudly announced they took down some nefarious pages who seemed to be engaging in
a message campaign. And turns out they shut down a real group organizing an anti-fascist rally. There are other examples like
this.
The censorship will continue becoming more and more brazen. (BTW, youtube started ths process earlier demonitizing and hurting
a lot of popular, but alternative voices.)
BTW--the Young Turks showed the Coats clip and claimed "see the Russians are still hacking our elections".
I'm truly getting concerned regarding the direction our government appears to be taking when it comes to 'freedom of expression/speech.'
Strangely, many on the 'left' don't seem very concerned. Indeed, because the MSM is so intent on going after DT, many so-called
progressives--including the supposedly more liberal (cough, cough) lawmakers--have become major cheerleaders of the corporatist
media. Go figure.
Mollie/Blue Onyx (Reverting to my original handle)
"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they went." ~~Will Rogers
"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments
are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way." ~~Martin Luther King Jr.
"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche
as well as every other person in Trump's administration that is working against him. This is insubordination and if Trump continues
to let them run their mouths then I believe that he is in on this scam and is playing along with it. Why? Look at what has been
happening since he became president. From the increasing Russian sanctions to the internet censorship to the increased military
budget with money that goes to fighting cyber warfare and many other things that are being done because of this new and improved
false flag.
As you stated YouTube has been removing lots of videos, Facebook and Twitter have been censoring alternative media sites that
are not playing along with Russia Gate and Google changed its algorithms so that traffic to those sites are down up to 90% according
to WSWS.
I once thought that this would eventually be exposed for the scam it is, but not any more. It's here to stay. And just like
in 1984 where there was that place where history was changed to fit the narrative of the day, we are seeing that here. Things
that happened last decade are being blamed on Russia hacking. I wouldn't be surprised if the KKK and Jim Crow were blamed on Russia.
This is how out of control it's gotten. And I was so looking forward to seeing Rachel trying to explain to her viewers how she
got things so wrong.
@snoopydawg
His erratic actions are the perfect distraction for the capitalist pigs the same as the "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Marxist Communist
Fascist Socialist Radical Leftist Feminazi SJW" crap that went on during the last capitalist puppet presidency. Either way, the
world still burns and the pigs make out like bandits in the process. Keeping the plebs at each other's throats is just a bonus
for them.
@snoopydawg
Remember whom you are discussing. Alas, you must be a Russian wolfhound to think R. Madcow could ever be wrong. Apologize, then
stand in the corner until after the midterms when the GRU hauls off recalcitrant Dims and Repugnants failing to swear fealty to
Vladimir Vladimirovich.
"Russiagate is like a mirage. It looks so real from a distance you'll swear it's there and mock anyone who says otherwise,
but once you get up close and examine its component parts you find it's made of nothing but innuendo, spin, unsubstantiated claims
and dishonest omissions.
2:45 PM · Aug 3, 2018"
"
@caitoz
·
Aug 3
Nothing wrong with wanting a full investigation. There's something very, very wrong with pressuring a US president to continually
escalate dangerous cold war tensions with a nuclear superpower without ever backing down based on an "idea" with no evidence.
"
@snoopydawg
Bernie will not be able to say "Oh evil Russia but let's not go to war with them." Diplomacy itself finally became full criminalized
and made tresonous when Trump meet Putin in Finland. Any level of moderation will be attacked as soft on Putin and treasonous.
And I write "pro-war" and not "anti-Russian". One cannot be anti-Russian in any moderate way. Being anti-Russian means supporting
a harsh and aggressive military stance toward their nation. The Russians are after all destroying Western civilization and this
cannot be meant with diplomacy.
And from what I can, every national democratic candidate for House and Senate will follow suite.
For reference, these are the only 10 senators who voted AGAINST giving Trump a $717 billion war budget:
Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren
Ed Markey
Kirsten Gillibrand
Dick Durban
Kamala Harris
Jeff Merkley
Ron Wyden
Mike Lee (R)
Marco Rubio (R)
So much for #Resistance huh?
The others show that there are others out there that have seen through this propaganda crap. I'd like to see the breakdown
of Hillary supporters that believe Russia Gate and the Bernie supporters that don't. Most of the Trump supporters think it's phony
so what made Hillary's believe in something that everyone should be laughing at?
You deserve a lot of credit. Russia interfered in your favor, yet you are man enough to admit that they interfered. Thank
you Bernie!
So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't
seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours.
You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply
involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by
DNC! Everybody knows...
Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need
a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB
Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will
fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate
by the democrats.
The democrats (and media cohorts) have become an apocolyptic death cult. The language that comes from them is infused with
the language of conspiracies, violence, treason, aggression and demonization.
And here is the thing, Bernie to survive electorally will have to become a cult member. Effectively he will have to be pro-war
with Russia. He will be giving from the the Left supposed support for aggressive action andmilitarism toward Russia.
I fear that if a democrat becomes president in 2020 (it won't be Bernie), is elected president that in the year of the midterms
in 2022, the US will start a real war with Russia which has a highly likehood of going nuclear.
The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment
rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited
and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues.
The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the
internet speeds to and from numerous test locations abroad and in the U.S., it was
determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the DNC
computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed
of the transfer to a thumb drive. Additionally, it was found that the data had been
manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer, when in
fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the
probability of the split being a coincidence would be 100 to the 50th power.
As for the crude trace fingerprints (e.g. the referencing of Dzerzinsky), one of the
Wikileaks data dumps (Vault 7 Marble) during a period when Assange was negotiating with
the Administration - there were two at the time (Vault 7 Marble and Vault 7 Grasshopper),
the release of which apparently enraged Mike Pompeo- was designed to obfuscate, fabricate
and frame countries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea by pretending to be the target
country, including in the use of target's alphabet and language.
VIPs has written numerous articles on this in Consortium News. See also the report by
Patrick Lawrence Smith in The Nation at:
https://www.thenation.com/a... . (It was apparently so hot at the time- and disputed
by several other VIPs members- that The Nation sought an independent assessment by third
party, though those comments were easily addressed and dismissed in seriatim by Binney in
an annex to the article.)
Binney has explained his forensic analysis and conclusions at numerous forums, and in
a sit-down with Secretary Pompeo in October, 2017- though Mueller, the FBI, and
mainstream and some of the alternative press seem either deaf, dumb and blind to it all,
or interested in discrediting the study. The irony is, I'd venture to guess, that Binney,
with his 40 years of experience, including as Technical Director and technical guru at
the NSA, is, even in retirement, more sophisticated in these matters than any one at the
Agency, or the FBI, or CIA, or certainly, the Congressional Intelligence Committees. So,
it is astounding that any or all of them could have, but did not, invite him to testify
as an expert.
Moreover, the NSA has a record of every transmission, and also would have it on backup
files. And, the FBI has been sitting on Seth Rich's computer and his communications with
Wikileaks, and presumably has a report that it has not released. And of course, as Trump
asked in his press conference, where's the DNC server, any or all of which would put this
question to rest.
The last clause of the first paragraph should have said:
"according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be one over
100 to the 50th power
"... There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note. ..."
"... We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright criminality through obfuscation and obstruction in the case of the meddling in the 2016 election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media channels. ..."
"... What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats. ..."
If you look at the 'Lawfare' blog, in which a key figure is James Comey's crony Benjamin Wittes, you will find a long piece published
last Friday, entitled 'Russia Indictment 2.0: What to Make of Mueller's Hacking Indictment.'
Among the authors, in addition to Wittes himself, is the sometime GCHQ employee Matt Tait. It appears that the former head of
that organisation, the Blairite 'trusty' Robert Hannigan, who must know where a good few skeletons are buried, is a figure of some
moment in the conspiracy.
It was Matt Tait who, using the 'Twitter' handle @pwnallthethings, identified the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky in the 'metadata'
of the 'Guccifer 2.0' material on 15 June 2016, the day after Ellen Nakashima first disseminated the BS from 'CrowdStrike' in the
'WP.'
The story was picked up the following day in a report on the 'Ars Technica' site, and Tait's own account appeared on the 'Lawfare'
site, to which he has been a regular contributor, on 28 July.
According to the CV provided in conjunction with the new article:
'Matt Tait is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University
of Texas at Austin. Previously he was CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a consultancy in the UK, worked at Google Project Zero, was
a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ.'
How does the objective truth get disclosed in an environment of extreme deceit by so many parties?
How to trust western intelligence when they have such a long and sordid track record of deceit, lies and propaganda? At the
same time there is such a long history of Russian and Chinese intelligence and information operations against the west.
Then there is the nexus among the highest levels of US law enforcement and intelligence as well as political elites in both
parties and key individuals in the media complex.
We are living in a hall of mirrors and it seems the trend is towards confirmation bias in information consumption.
Excellent post, especially the debunking of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' which I always thought was more hand-waving and Russian mind-reading.
It's important to realize that there are a number of people in the infosec community who have biases against Russia, just as
there are in the general population. Then there are more cautious people, who recognize the difficulty in attributing a hack to
any specific person absent solid, incontrovertible, non-circumstantial and non-spoofable (and preferably offline) evidence.
Tait doesn't appear to be one of the latter. Thomas Rid would be another. There are others.
Jeffrey Carr is one of the latter, and his familiarity with intelligence matters is clear from his organization of the annual
"Suits and Spooks" Conference. I believe he was the first to raise questions about the DNC hack which didn't pass his smell test.
There are also a number of companies in infosec who rely on latching onto a particular strain of hacker, the more publicly
exploitable for PR purposes the better, as a means of keeping the company name in front of potential high-profile and highly billable
clients. CrowdStrike and its Russia obsession isn't the only one that's been tagged with that propensity.
Mandiant could be referred to as the "Chinese, all the time" company, for example. Richard Bejtlich was at Fireeye and the
became Chief Security Officer when they acquired Mandiant. He spent quite a bit of effort on his blog warning about the Chinese
military buildup as a huge threat to the US. He's former USAF so perhaps that's not surprising.
The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian
State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues.
The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test
locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the
DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive.
Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer,
when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence
would be 100 to the 50th power.
As for the crude trace fingerprints (e.g. the referencing of Dzerzinsky), one of the Wikileaks data dumps (Vault 7 Marble)
during a period when Assange was negotiating with the Administration - there were two at the time (Vault 7 Marble and Vault 7
Grasshopper), the release of which apparently enraged Mike Pompeo- was designed to obfuscate, fabricate and frame countries such
as Russia, Iran or North Korea by pretending to be the target country, including in the use of target's alphabet and language.
VIPs has written numerous articles on this in Consortium News. See also the report by Patrick Lawrence Smith in The Nation
at:
https://www.thenation.com/a... . (It was apparently so hot at the time- and disputed by several other VIPs members- that The
Nation sought an independent assessment by third party, though those comments were easily addressed and dismissed in seriatim
by Binney in an annex to the article.)
Binney has explained his forensic analysis and conclusions at numerous forums, and in a sit-down with Secretary Pompeo in October,
2017- though Mueller, the FBI, and mainstream and some of the alternative press seem either deaf, dumb and blind to it all, or
interested in discrediting the study. The irony is, I'd venture to guess, that Binney, with his 40 years of experience, including
as Technical Director and technical guru at the NSA, is, even in retirement, more sophisticated in these matters than any one
at the Agency, or the FBI, or CIA, or certainly, the Congressional Intelligence Committees. So, it is astounding that any or all
of them could have, but did not, invite him to testify as an expert.
Moreover, the NSA has a record of every transmission, and also would have it on backup files. And, the FBI has been sitting
on Seth Rich's computer and his communications with Wikileaks, and presumably has a report that it has not released. And of course,
as Trump asked in his press conference, where's the DNC server, any or all of which would put this question to rest.
The last clause of the first paragraph should have said:
"according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be one over 100 to the 50th power
More evidence for the at least passive complicity of GCHQ – for which Matt Tait used to work, and which Robert Hannigan used
to run – in corrupt 'information operations' comes in a report yesterday on CNN.
'Police have identified two suspects in the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia,
a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN on Thursday.
'The pair left the UK in the wake of the attack on what is believed to have been a commercial flight, the source added.
'Their departure was revealed in a coded Russian message to Moscow sent after the attack, which was intercepted by a British
base in Cyprus, the source said. The British government blames the Skripals' poisoning on Russia.'
The base in question is high up in the Troodos mountains, and is formally run by the RAF but actually a key resource for both
GCHQ and NSA in monitoring communications over a wide area. According to an internal document from the former organisation, it
has 'long been regarded as a 'Jewel in the Crown' by NSA as it offers unique access to the Levant, North Africa, and Turkey'.
That the quote comes a report in 'The Intercept' in January 2016 revealing that one of the uses of the Troodos facility is
to intercept live video feeds from Israeli drones and fighter jets brings out how paradoxical the world is. For it also appears
to have emerged as an important resource in 'information operations' in support of 'Borgist' agendas.
The claim about intercepts incriminating the Russians over the Salisbury incident was first made in a piece by Marco Giannangeli
in the Daily Express on 9 April, which followed up the claims which Colonel de Bretton-Gordon had been instrumental in disseminating,
and was then widely picked up by the MSM.
It was headlined: 'REVEALED: The bombshell Russian message intercepted on DAY of Skripal poisonings,' and opened: 'AN ELECTRONIC
message to Moscow sent on the day former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent in
Salisbury included the phrase "the package has been delivered".'
Supposedly, this 'prompted a young Flight Lieutenant to recall a separate message that had been intercepted and discounted
on the previous day.' The messages were 'understood to have formed "just one part" of the intelligence packet which later allowed
Prime Minister Theresa May to state it was "highly likely" that Russia was behind the attacks.'
As it happens, the same writer – Marco Giannangeli – had disseminated a parallel piece of palpable fiction on 1 September 2013,
in the 'Sunday Express', in relation to the Ghouta 'false flag.'
This one was headlined, even more melodramatically, 'Senior Syrian military chiefs tell captain: fire chemicals or be shot;
BRITISH intelligence chiefs have intercepted radio messages in which senior Syrian military chiefs are heard ordering the use
of chemical weapons.'
Part of the story of how bogus claims about 'smoking gun' evidence from 'SIGINT' were used to support the attempt to use the
Ghouta 'false flag' to inveigle the British and Americans into destroying the Syrian government was told in my SST post on the
incident. However, to mix metaphors, I only scratched the surface of a can of worms.
In a report on the 'Daily Caller' site on 29 August 2013, Kenneth Timmerman claimed that the sequence had started with an actual
intercept by Unit 8200 – the Israeli equivalent of GCHQ and NSA.
Claiming to base his account on Western intelligence sources, he suggested that:
'According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian
military communication intercepted by Israel's famed Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads
a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.'
While I am not in a position to establish whether his claim is or is not accurate, an AP report on the same day quoted 'U.S.
intelligence officials' explaining that 'an intercept of Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff,
with no direct evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander'.
Meanwhile, Timmerman's claim that 'The doctored report was picked up on Israel's Channel 2 TV on Aug. 24, then by Focus magazine
in Germany, the Times of Israel, and eventually by The Cable in Washington, DC' is supported by links to the relevant stories,
which say what he claims they say.
Moreover, it seems clear that the 1 September 2013 report was an attempt to counter a – somewhat devastating – critique made
in a 31 August post entitled 'The Troodos Conundrum' by the former British Ambassador Craig Murray, who had been closely involved
with the facility during his time at the Foreign Office (and has written invaluable material on the Salisbury incident.)
Precisely because of the closeness of the GCHQ/NSA collaboration, Murray brought out, there was indeed a major problem explaining
why claims about 'SIGINT' had been central to the case made in the 'Government Assessment' released by the White House on 30 August
2013, but not even mentioned in the Joint Intelligence Community 'Assessment' produced two days before.
The answer, Murray suggested, was that the 'intelligence' came from Mossad, and so would not have been automatically shared
with the British. But, given the superior capabilities of Troodos, if Mossad had it, the British should have also. So his claims
'meshed' with those by Timmerman and the AP, and the 'Express' report looks like a lame attempt at a cover-up.
Again however, one finds the world is a paradoxical place. As I noted in my SST post, detailed demolitions of the claims about
'SIGINT' in relation to Ghouta were provided both Seymour Hersh, in the 'Whose sarin?' article, and also on the 'Who Attacked
Ghouta?' site masterminded by one 'sasa wawa.'
Later, it became clear that this was likely to be the Israeli technology entrepreneur Saar Wilf, a former employee of Unit
8200. So this may – or may not – be an indication of deep divisions within Israeli intelligence.
Between 18 March and 31 April, a fascinating series of posts on the Salisbury incident appeared on the 'Vineyard of the Saker'
blog. The author, who used the name 'sushi', was a self-professed IT professsional, who had however obviously acquired an extensive
familiarity with 'chemical forensics' and appeared to have some experience of 'SIGINT.'
In a 14 April post, 'sushi' produced a dismissal of the claims about 'SIGINT' implicating the Russians over the Salisbury incident
quite as contemptuous as that which 'sasa wawa' had produced in relation to the claims about it incriminating the Syrian government
over Ghouta. Pointing to the implausibility of the story disseminated by the 'Express', he remarked that:
'It is doubted that any message traffic is processed on Cyprus. It is more likely that the entire take is transmitted back
to GCHQ in Cheltenham via a fibre optic link. There exabytes of take are processed, not by a bored flight lieutenant, but by banks
of high speed computers.
'Clearly someone in Cheltenham has committed a programming error. Anyone with any knowledge of secret communications knows
that the code phrase used to confirm a murder in Salisbury is "small pizza, no anchovies." '
Interestingly, another paper in the 'Express' group made a parallel claim in relation to the Khan Sheikhoun incident to that
about the Ghouta incident, but the story was not picked up and may indeed have been suppressed.
On 9 April, the paper published a report headlined 'Brit spies' lead role in Syrian air strikes; RAF BASE IS 'WEAPON.' This
claimed that 'within an hour of the airstrike', Troodos had intercepted communications revealing that nerve gas had been used,
and had been delivered by jets from the Syrian Arab Air Force's Shayrat Air Base.
I was drafting a response to the comment by 'Barbara Ann' – thanks for the link to the recent posts by Adam Carter – before
going out. Returning and reading some very interesting comments, I think what I wanted to say has more general relevance.
One reason I am reading so much into 'this Dzerzhinsky thing' is the body of accumulating evidence that people like Tait are
part of a system of networks which combine sanctimoniousness, corruption and stupidity in about equal measures. So some more examples
may be to the point.
Different cases in which I have taken an interest come together in a post by Tait on the 'Lawfare' site on 13 March, entitled
'U.K. Prime Minister's Speech on the Russian Poisoning of Sergei Skripal: Decoding the Signals.'
In support of the claim that in accusing Russia of a pioneering act of chemical terrorism Theresa May was relying upon accurate
analysis from the 'U.K. intelligence community', Tait wrote that:
'May then explained that Skripal was poisoned by a "military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia one of a group
of nerve agents known as 'Novichok.'" She is laying out the basic groundwork for the government's attribution to a nation state
and, more specifically, Russia. At Porton Down, the U.K. has one of the world's best forensic labs for analyzing chemical, biological
and nuclear weapons. With the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, this lab not only established that Polonium-210 was used
but also which reactor in Russia it came from.'
In the event, as is by now well know, Boris Johnson's claim that Porton Down scientists had told him that the agent which poisoned
the Skripals came from Russia was specifically repudiated by the head of that organisation, Gary Aitkenhead, on 3 April. Our Foreign
Secretary told a flagrant lie, and was exposed.
As I have shown in previous posts on this site, the 'Inquiry' conducted by Sir Robert Owen into the death of Litvinenko was
patently corrupt. Moreover, it seems highly likely that, in fabricating 'evidence' to cover up what actually happened, Christopher
Steele was doing a 'dry-run' for the fabrication of material in the dossier published by 'BuzzFeed.'
In fact, however, Owen's report made quite clear that the role of Porton Down was marginal. Furthermore, 'Scientist A1' from
the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston quite specifically rejected the claim that 'impurity profiling' made it possible
to establish that the source of the polonium was the Avangard facility at Sarov, her arguments being accepted by Owen. Either
Tait has not bothered to read the report or very much of the coverage, or he is lying.
What Porton Down did do was to use 'impurity profiling', which can produce 'spectra' identifying even the tiniest traces of
substances, to frustrate the attempt to use the 'false flag' attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 to inveigle the American and British
governments into destroying the Assad 'régime' and handing the country over to jihadists.
It may well be that this display of competence and integrity led to a 'clampdown' at the organisation, which encouraged Boris
Johnson to believe he could get away with lying about what its scientists told him.
A general pattern which emerges is that the same small group of 'disinformation peddlers' resurfaces in different contexts
– and the pattern whereby 'private security companies' are used to create a spurious impression of independence also recurs.
As I bring out in my piece on Ghouta, two figures who were critical in shaping the 'narrative' acccording to which Syrian government
responsibility for the atrocity had been conclusively proved, were Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, formerly the former commanding
officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, and also NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, and
Dan Kaszeta.
Immediately after the story of the poisoning of the Skripals on 4 March broke, the same duo reappeared, and have been as critical
to shaping the 'narrative' about the later incident as they were to that about the former.
(For the piece by Kaszeta on 'Bellingcat' which introduced the 'Novichok' theme four days later, see
https://www.bellingcat.com/... .)
This makes it particular interesting to look at the website of Kaszeta's consultancy, 'Strongpoint Security Limited', in conjunction
with the 'Companies House' documentation on the company.
One would have thought from the website that his company was a small, but hardly insignificant, player, in the field of 'physical
and operational security.' As it happens, having filed 'Total exemption small company accounts' since its incorporation in May
2011, last December it filed 'Micro company accounts' for the year to 31 May 2017.
With a turnover of £20,000, staff costs of a bit more than half of that, and a profit of £394, we can see that although unlike
Matt Tait's, Kaszeta's company did trade, if indeed it was his sole source of income, this pivotal figure in Anglo-American 'disinformation
operations' was living on something less than $15,000 a year, at current exchange rates. (Pull the other one, as we say in Britain.)
This is all the more ironic, as the website brings out quite how critical a figure Kaszeta has been in obscuring the truth.
From the bio he gives, we learn that having started as a Chemical Officer in the U.S. Army, he worked for 12 years in the White
House, dealing with CBRN matters, before moving to Britain in 2008.
Among the articles to which he links on the site, we see his response in 'NOW Lebanon' in December 2013 to Hersh's original
'Whose sarin?' piece on Ghouta, -- in which Kaszeta first introduced the famous 'hexamine hypothesis.'
This – patently preposterous – suggestion that the presence of a single 'impurity' is a 'smoking gun' incriminating the Syrian
government has echoed on into the clearly corrupt OPCW documents purporting to demonstrate that it was responsible for the 4 April
2017 Khan Sheikhoun attack.
Of some interest in understanding where Kaszeta he is coming from is what he describes as his 'oldest (and most footnoted on
Wikipedia)' piece, which is an article published in 1988 on a site called 'Lituanus', on 'Lithuanian Resistance to Foreign Occupation
1940-52.'
As to Colonel de Bretton-Gordon, it is of interest to look at the attempt to 'finger' the GRU over the Skripal poisoning published
under the title 'UK Poisoning Inquiry turns to Russian Agency in Mueller Indictments' in the 'New York Times' last Sunday, and
the response by the Russian Embassy in London to a question about it.
The response objects that 'while the British authorities keep concealing all information concerning the investigation into
the Salisbury incident, the newspaper has quoted "one former US official familiar with the inquiry".'
It also asserts that that crucial evidence which has not been made available to the Russians – and here, as with Ghouta and
Khan Sheikhoun, the results of 'impurity profiling' are critical – appears to have been shared not just with inappropriate Americans,
but with all kinds of others.
And indeed, the Embassy is quite right in suggesting that the claim made by the supposed creator of 'Novichok', Vladimir Uglev,
to the BBC in April about 'all the spectrum data I was sent recently' has neither been confirmed nor denied. This seems a general
pattern – the 'spectra' which may actually be able to provide definitive answers to questions of responsibility are only provided
to people who can be relied upon to give the 'right' answers.
The Embassy response also quite fairly refers to a report in the 'Times' also in April, about the 'intelligence' which had
been 'used to persuade world leaders that Moscow was behind the poisoning' and that the 'Novichok' had been manufactured at the
Shikhany facility at in southwest Russia, which stated that de Bretton-Gordon, 'who had seen the intelligence, called it very
compelling.' He has a long history of lying about CW in Syria – so is obviously the right person to lie about them in the UK.
It thus becomes interesting to probe into what lies behind the opening of de Bretton-Gordon's entry on the 'Military Speakers'
website ('Real Heroes; Real Stories.') According to this, he is 'Chief Operating Office of SecureBio Ltd a commercial company
offering CBRN Resilience, consultancy and deployable capabilities.'
From 'Companies House', we learn that the liquidation of 'Secure Bio', which started in in June 2015, was concluded in August
last year. The really interesting thing about the records, however, is that at the time of the liquidation the company had very
large debts, which were written off, of a kind and in a manner which suggested that de Bretton-Gordon's activities may have been
largely funded by loans from untraceable sources which were not meant to be repaid.
Actually, with the 'NYT' report we come full circle. Among those quoted is Mark Galeotti – apparently his admission that he
had totally misrepresented the thinking of the Russian General Staff has not him made more cautious about making extravagant claims
about its Main Intelligence Directorate (misreported as Main Directorate by the 'NYT.')
Also quoted are two figures who play key roles in Owen's Report – the Soviet era-GRU defector 'Viktor Suvorov' (real name 'Vladimir
Rezun') and the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets. Both of these feature prominently in the posts on the Litvinenko affair to which
I have linked, and both were key members of the 'information operations' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky. This
now seems to have taken control of American policy, as of British.
The role of 'Suvorov'/Rezun in attempting to defend the interpretations of Stalin's policy put forward by MI6 in the run-up
to the Second World War, and those asserted later by General Keitel, and the way he was demolished by the leading American historian
of the War in the East, Colonel David Glantz, and the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, is too large a subject to go into
here.
However, it provides further reason to wonder whether the misreadings of Stalin's policy which caused MI6 to give advice to
Chamberlain which helped destroy the last chances of preventing the Nazi-Soviet Pact, may still be the 'house view' of that organisation.
It was, obviously, the Pact which spelled 'curtains' both for Poland and the Baltics.
There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment.
The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any
honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note.
We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright criminality through obfuscation and obstruction
in the case of the meddling in the 2016 election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people
are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media channels.
It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no one
trusted the contents in Pravda.
What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it
is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance
is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats.
That was one of the changes being hoped for when Obama was first elected. Instead we got little, except for things such as bailed
out bankers and the IRS scandal which lasted until the end of his 2nd term. The panic from the left over the 2016 election issues
the are still going on is that the expected candidate isn't in office and they are being exposed. Whether they get prosecuted
is another story.
"... the error message in Cyrillic can only be generated via some technical contortions with the explicit intention of doing so. ..."
"... I would challenge anyone reading Adam Carter's work to conclude that the G2 persona is anything other than misdirection specifically designed to point to Russia. The indictment itself has zero new evidence that can be analyzed and I suspect all the GRU detail is aimed at giving it the appearance of authenticity - even when subject to scrutiny by the IC itself. I think John Helmer is closest to the truth when he says: "...it may be a signal that US cyber agents can fabricate Russian tracks to deceive other US cyber agents; Mueller too." ..."
Now THIS is a really interesting development in #DncHack:
@Gawker has & is publishing the DNC's Trump oppo research
gawker.com/this-looks-lik...
4:33 PM - Jun 15, 2016
This Looks Like the DNC's Hacked Trump O...
A 200+ page document that appears to be a
Democratic anti-Trump playbook compiled by the
Democratic National Committee has leaked
gawker.com
Q? 398 Q 269 people are talking about this
of June 15th 2016 mentions several "opsec fail"s in respect of 'Russian' metadata which, as you say, were then picked up by
Ars Technica & others. So the meme was born. A key claim is that an error message in Cyrillic script appeared because one of the
leaked docs was converted to pdf before being sent to Gawker - one of 2 press outlets to get a preview before Guccifer 2.0 published
the docs on his blog. Adam Carter (@with_integrity), at
http://g-2.space/ citing theforensicator (link below) says this is not true and that the error message in Cyrillic can
only be generated via some technical contortions with the explicit intention of doing so.
I would challenge anyone reading Adam Carter's work to conclude that the G2 persona is anything other than misdirection
specifically designed to point to Russia. The indictment itself has zero new evidence that can be analyzed and I suspect
all the GRU detail is aimed at giving it the appearance of authenticity - even when subject to scrutiny by the IC itself. I think
John Helmer is closest to the truth when he says: "...it may be a signal that US cyber agents can fabricate Russian tracks
to deceive other US cyber agents; Mueller too."
For several years, a family of foreign nationals (and not only Wassermannn-Schultz) has
been surfing the congressional computers while having no security clearance.
Both Debbie and Hillary should be in federal prison already. Clinton used to be fond of
droning Assange for divulging the criminal and illegal activities of the state. What Debbie
and Hillary did has been much more dangerous to the US national security.
"... As it happens, the same writer – Marco Giannangeli – had disseminated a parallel piece of palpable fiction on 1 September 2013, in the 'Sunday Express', in relation to the Ghouta 'false flag.' ..."
More evidence for the at least passive complicity of GCHQ – for which Matt Tait used
to work, and which Robert Hannigan used to run – in corrupt 'information operations'
comes in a report yesterday on CNN.
'Police have identified two suspects in the poisoning of former Russian double agent
Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN
on Thursday.
'The pair left the UK in the wake of the attack on what is believed to have been a
commercial flight, the source added.
'Their departure was revealed in a coded Russian message to Moscow sent after the attack,
which was intercepted by a British base in Cyprus, the source said. The British government
blames the Skripals' poisoning on Russia.'
The base in question is high up in the Troodos mountains, and is formally run by the RAF
but actually a key resource for both GCHQ and NSA in monitoring communications over a wide
area. According to an internal document from the former organisation, it has 'long been
regarded as a 'Jewel in the Crown' by NSA as it offers unique access to the Levant, North
Africa, and Turkey'.
That the quote comes a report in 'The Intercept' in January 2016 revealing that one of the
uses of the Troodos facility is to intercept live video feeds from Israeli drones and fighter
jets brings out how paradoxical the world is. For it also appears to have emerged as an
important resource in 'information operations' in support of 'Borgist' agendas.
The claim about intercepts incriminating the Russians over the Salisbury incident was
first made in a piece by Marco Giannangeli in the Daily Express on 9 April, which followed up
the claims which Colonel de Bretton-Gordon had been instrumental in disseminating, and was
then widely picked up by the MSM.
It was headlined: 'REVEALED: The bombshell Russian message intercepted on DAY of Skripal
poisonings,' and opened: 'AN ELECTRONIC message to Moscow sent on the day former Russian spy
Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury included
the phrase "the package has been delivered".'
Supposedly, this 'prompted a young Flight Lieutenant to recall a separate message that had
been intercepted and discounted on the previous day.' The messages were 'understood to have
formed "just one part" of the intelligence packet which later allowed Prime Minister Theresa
May to state it was "highly likely" that Russia was behind the attacks.'
As it happens, the same writer – Marco Giannangeli – had disseminated a
parallel piece of palpable fiction on 1 September 2013, in the 'Sunday Express', in relation
to the Ghouta 'false flag.'
This one was headlined, even more melodramatically, 'Senior Syrian military chiefs tell
captain: fire chemicals or be shot; BRITISH intelligence chiefs have intercepted radio
messages in which senior Syrian military chiefs are heard ordering the use of chemical
weapons.'
Part of the story of how bogus claims about 'smoking gun' evidence from 'SIGINT' were used
to support the attempt to use the Ghouta 'false flag' to inveigle the British and Americans
into destroying the Syrian government was told in my SST post on the incident. However, to
mix metaphors, I only scratched the surface of a can of worms.
In a report on the 'Daily Caller' site on 29 August 2013, Kenneth Timmerman claimed that
the sequence had started with an actual intercept by Unit 8200 – the Israeli equivalent
of GCHQ and NSA.
Claiming to base his account on Western intelligence sources, he suggested that:
'According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain,
France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian military communication intercepted by Israel's famed
Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads a reader to just
the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.'
While I am not in a position to establish whether his claim is or is not accurate, an AP
report on the same day quoted 'U.S. intelligence officials' explaining that 'an intercept of
Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff, with no direct
evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander'.
Meanwhile, Timmerman's claim that 'The doctored report was picked up on Israel's Channel 2
TV on Aug. 24, then by Focus magazine in Germany, the Times of Israel, and eventually by The
Cable in Washington, DC' is supported by links to the relevant stories, which say what he
claims they say.
Moreover, it seems clear that the 1 September 2013 report was an attempt to counter a
– somewhat devastating – critique made in a 31 August post entitled 'The Troodos
Conundrum' by the former British Ambassador Craig Murray, who had been closely involved with
the facility during his time at the Foreign Office (and has written invaluable material on
the Salisbury incident.)
Precisely because of the closeness of the GCHQ/NSA collaboration, Murray brought out,
there was indeed a major problem explaining why claims about 'SIGINT' had been central to the
case made in the 'Government Assessment' released by the White House on 30 August 2013, but
not even mentioned in the Joint Intelligence Community 'Assessment' produced two days
before.
The answer, Murray suggested, was that the 'intelligence' came from Mossad, and so would
not have been automatically shared with the British. But, given the superior capabilities of
Troodos, if Mossad had it, the British should have also. So his claims 'meshed' with those by
Timmerman and the AP, and the 'Express' report looks like a lame attempt at a cover-up.
Again however, one finds the world is a paradoxical place. As I noted in my SST post,
detailed demolitions of the claims about 'SIGINT' in relation to Ghouta were provided both
Seymour Hersh, in the 'Whose sarin?' article, and also on the 'Who Attacked Ghouta?' site
masterminded by one 'sasa wawa.'
Later, it became clear that this was likely to be the Israeli technology entrepreneur Saar
Wilf, a former employee of Unit 8200. So this may – or may not – be an indication
of deep divisions within Israeli intelligence.
Between 18 March and 31 April, a fascinating series of posts on the Salisbury incident
appeared on the 'Vineyard of the Saker' blog. The author, who used the name 'sushi', was a
self-professed IT professsional, who had however obviously acquired an extensive familiarity
with 'chemical forensics' and appeared to have some experience of 'SIGINT.'
In a 14 April post, 'sushi' produced a dismissal of the claims about 'SIGINT' implicating
the Russians over the Salisbury incident quite as contemptuous as that which 'sasa wawa' had
produced in relation to the claims about it incriminating the Syrian government over
Ghouta.
Pointing to the implausibility of the story disseminated by the 'Express', he remarked
that:
'It is doubted that any message traffic is processed on Cyprus. It is more likely that the
entire take is transmitted back to GCHQ in Cheltenham via a fibre optic link. There exabytes
of take are processed, not by a bored flight lieutenant, but by banks of high speed
computers.
'Clearly someone in Cheltenham has committed a programming error. Anyone with any
knowledge of secret communications knows that the code phrase used to confirm a murder in
Salisbury is "small pizza, no anchovies." '
Interestingly, another paper in the 'Express' group made a parallel claim in relation to
the Khan Sheikhoun incident to that about the Ghouta incident, but the story was not picked
up and may indeed have been suppressed.
On 9 April, the paper published a report headlined 'Brit spies' lead role in Syrian air
strikes; RAF BASE IS 'WEAPON.' This claimed that 'within an hour of the airstrike', Troodos
had intercepted communications revealing that nerve gas had been used, and had been delivered
by jets from the Syrian Arab Air Force's Shayrat Air Base.
I was drafting a response to the comment by 'Barbara Ann' – thanks for the link to
the recent posts by Adam Carter – before going out. Returning and reading some very
interesting comments, I think what I wanted to say has more general relevance.
One reason I am reading so much into 'this Dzerzhinsky thing' is the body of accumulating
evidence that people like Tait are part of a system of networks which combine
sanctimoniousness, corruption and stupidity in about equal measures. So some more examples
may be to the point.
Different cases in which I have taken an interest come together in a post by Tait on the
'Lawfare' site on 13 March, entitled 'U.K. Prime Minister's Speech on the Russian Poisoning
of Sergei Skripal: Decoding the Signals.'
In support of the claim that in accusing Russia of a pioneering act of chemical terrorism
Theresa May was relying upon accurate analysis from the 'U.K. intelligence community', Tait
wrote that:
'May then explained that Skripal was poisoned by a "military-grade nerve agent of a type
developed by Russia one of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok.'" She is laying out
the basic groundwork for the government's attribution to a nation state and, more
specifically, Russia. At Porton Down, the U.K. has one of the world's best forensic labs for
analyzing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. With the poisoning of Alexander
Litvinenko in 2006, this lab not only established that Polonium-210 was used but also which
reactor in Russia it came from.'
In the event, as is by now well know, Boris Johnson's claim that Porton Down scientists
had told him that the agent which poisoned the Skripals came from Russia was specifically
repudiated by the head of that organisation, Gary Aitkenhead, on 3 April. Our Foreign
Secretary told a flagrant lie, and was exposed.
As I have shown in previous posts on this site, the 'Inquiry' conducted by Sir Robert Owen
into the death of Litvinenko was patently corrupt. Moreover, it seems highly likely that, in
fabricating 'evidence' to cover up what actually happened, Christopher Steele was doing a
'dry-run' for the fabrication of material in the dossier published by 'BuzzFeed.'
In fact, however, Owen's report made quite clear that the role of Porton Down was
marginal. Furthermore, 'Scientist A1' from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston
quite specifically rejected the claim that 'impurity profiling' made it possible to establish
that the source of the polonium was the Avangard facility at Sarov, her arguments being
accepted by Owen. Either Tait has not bothered to read the report or very much of the
coverage, or he is lying.
What Porton Down did do was to use 'impurity profiling', which can produce 'spectra'
identifying even the tiniest traces of substances, to frustrate the attempt to use the 'false
flag' attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 to inveigle the American and British governments
into destroying the Assad 'régime' and handing the country over to jihadists.
It may well be that this display of competence and integrity led to a 'clampdown' at the
organisation, which encouraged Boris Johnson to believe he could get away with lying about
what its scientists told him.
A general pattern which emerges is that the same small group of 'disinformation peddlers'
resurfaces in different contexts – and the pattern whereby 'private security companies'
are used to create a spurious impression of independence also recurs.
As I bring out in my piece on Ghouta, two figures who were critical in shaping the
'narrative' acccording to which Syrian government responsibility for the atrocity had been
conclusively proved, were Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, formerly the former commanding
officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, and also NATO's
Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, and Dan Kaszeta.
Immediately after the story of the poisoning of the Skripals on 4 March broke, the same
duo reappeared, and have been as critical to shaping the 'narrative' about the later incident
as they were to that about the former.
(For the piece by Kaszeta on 'Bellingcat' which introduced the 'Novichok' theme four days
later, see
https://www.bellingcat.com/... .)
This makes it particular interesting to look at the website of Kaszeta's consultancy,
'Strongpoint Security Limited', in conjunction with the 'Companies House' documentation on
the company.
One would have thought from the website that his company was a small, but hardly
insignificant, player, in the field of 'physical and operational security.' As it happens,
having filed 'Total exemption small company accounts' since its incorporation in May 2011,
last December it filed 'Micro company accounts' for the year to 31 May 2017.
With a turnover of £20,000, staff costs of a bit more than half of that, and a
profit of £394, we can see that although unlike Matt Tait's, Kaszeta's company did
trade, if indeed it was his sole source of income, this pivotal figure in Anglo-American
'disinformation operations' was living on something less than $15,000 a year, at current
exchange rates. (Pull the other one, as we say in Britain.)
This is all the more ironic, as the website brings out quite how critical a figure Kaszeta
has been in obscuring the truth. From the bio he gives, we learn that having started as a
Chemical Officer in the U.S. Army, he worked for 12 years in the White House, dealing with
CBRN matters, before moving to Britain in 2008.
Among the articles to which he links on the site, we see his response in 'NOW Lebanon' in
December 2013 to Hersh's original 'Whose sarin?' piece on Ghouta, -- in which Kaszeta first
introduced the famous 'hexamine hypothesis.'
This – patently preposterous – suggestion that the presence of a single
'impurity' is a 'smoking gun' incriminating the Syrian government has echoed on into the
clearly corrupt OPCW documents purporting to demonstrate that it was responsible for the 4
April 2017 Khan Sheikhoun attack.
Of some interest in understanding where Kaszeta he is coming from is what he describes as
his 'oldest (and most footnoted on Wikipedia)' piece, which is an article published in 1988
on a site called 'Lituanus', on 'Lithuanian Resistance to Foreign Occupation 1940-52.'
As to Colonel de Bretton-Gordon, it is of interest to look at the attempt to 'finger' the
GRU over the Skripal poisoning published under the title 'UK Poisoning Inquiry turns to
Russian Agency in Mueller Indictments' in the 'New York Times' last Sunday, and the response
by the Russian Embassy in London to a question about it.
The response objects that 'while the British authorities keep concealing all information
concerning the investigation into the Salisbury incident, the newspaper has quoted "one
former US official familiar with the inquiry".'
It also asserts that that crucial evidence which has not been made available to the
Russians – and here, as with Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun, the results of 'impurity
profiling' are critical – appears to have been shared not just with inappropriate
Americans, but with all kinds of others.
And indeed, the Embassy is quite right in suggesting that the claim made by the supposed
creator of 'Novichok', Vladimir Uglev, to the BBC in April about 'all the spectrum data I was
sent recently' has neither been confirmed nor denied. This seems a general pattern –
the 'spectra' which may actually be able to provide definitive answers to questions of
responsibility are only provided to people who can be relied upon to give the 'right'
answers.
The Embassy response also quite fairly refers to a report in the 'Times' also in April,
about the 'intelligence' which had been 'used to persuade world leaders that Moscow was
behind the poisoning' and that the 'Novichok' had been manufactured at the Shikhany facility
at in southwest Russia, which stated that de Bretton-Gordon, 'who had seen the intelligence,
called it very compelling.' He has a long history of lying about CW in Syria – so is
obviously the right person to lie about them in the UK.
It thus becomes interesting to probe into what lies behind the opening of de
Bretton-Gordon's entry on the 'Military Speakers' website ('Real Heroes; Real Stories.')
According to this, he is 'Chief Operating Office of SecureBio Ltd a commercial company
offering CBRN Resilience, consultancy and deployable capabilities.'
From 'Companies House', we learn that the liquidation of 'Secure Bio', which started in in
June 2015, was concluded in August last year. The really interesting thing about the records,
however, is that at the time of the liquidation the company had very large debts, which were
written off, of a kind and in a manner which suggested that de Bretton-Gordon's activities
may have been largely funded by loans from untraceable sources which were not meant to be
repaid.
Actually, with the 'NYT' report we come full circle. Among those quoted is Mark Galeotti
– apparently his admission that he had totally misrepresented the thinking of the
Russian General Staff has not him made more cautious about making extravagant claims about
its Main Intelligence Directorate (misreported as Main Directorate by the 'NYT.')
Also quoted are two figures who play key roles in Owen's Report – the Soviet era-GRU
defector 'Viktor Suvorov' (real name 'Vladimir Rezun') and the former KGB operative Yuri
Shvets. Both of these feature prominently in the posts on the Litvinenko affair to which I
have linked, and both were key members of the 'information operations' network centred around
the late Boris Berezovsky. This now seems to have taken control of American policy, as of
British.
The role of 'Suvorov'/Rezun in attempting to defend the interpretations of Stalin's policy
put forward by MI6 in the run-up to the Second World War, and those asserted later by General
Keitel, and the way he was demolished by the leading American historian of the War in the
East, Colonel David Glantz, and the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, is too large a
subject to go into here.
However, it provides further reason to wonder whether the misreadings of Stalin's policy
which caused MI6 to give advice to Chamberlain which helped destroy the last chances of
preventing the Nazi-Soviet Pact, may still be the 'house view' of that organisation. It was,
obviously, the Pact which spelled 'curtains' both for Poland and the Baltics.
There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the
propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the
Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest
accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note.
We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright
criminality through obfuscation and obstruction in the case of the meddling in the 2016
election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people
are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media
channels.
It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced
in the Soviet Union when no one trusted the contents in Pravda.
What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons
cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become
extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very
high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to
their dictats.
"... With impeachment itself on the table, Mueller has done little more than issue the equivalent of parking tickets to foreigners he has no jurisdiction over. Intelligence summaries claim the Russians meddled, but don't show that Trump was involved. Indictments against Russians are cheered as evidence, when they are just Mueller's uncontested assertions. ..."
An answer was needed, so one was created: the Russians. As World War II ended with the U.S.
the planet's predominant power, dark forces saw advantage in arousing new
fears . The Soviet Union morphed from a decimated ally in the fight against fascism into a
competitor locked in a titanic struggle with America. How did they get so powerful so quickly?
Nothing could explain it except traitors. Cold War-era America? Or 2018 Trump America? Yes, on
both counts.
To some, that fear was not a problem but a tool -- one could defeat political enemies simply
by accusing them of being Russian sympathizers. There was no need for evidence, so desperate
were Americans to believe; just an accusation that someone was in league with Russia was
enough. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy fired his first shot on February
9, 1950, proclaiming there were 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party working for
the Department of State. The evidence? Nothing but assertions .
Indeed, the very word " McCarthyism " came to mean making accusations
of treason without sufficient evidence. Other definitionsinclude a ggressively
questioning a person's patriotism, using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to
adhere to conformist politics or discredit an opponent, and subverting civil and political
rights in the name of national security.
Pretending to be saving America while he tore at its foundations, McCarthy destroyed
thousands of lives over the next four years simply by pointing a finger and saying "communist."
Whenever anyone invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence, McCarthy answered that this was "the
most positive proof obtainable that the witness is communist." The power of accusation was used
by others as well: the Lavender
Scare , which concluded that the State Department was overrun with closeted homosexuals who
were at risk of being blackmailed by Moscow for their perversions, was an offshoot of
McCarthyism, and by 1951, 600 people had been fired based solely on evidence-free "morals"
charges. State legislatures and school boards mimicked McCarthy.
Books and movies were banned. Blacklists abounded. The FBI embarked on campaigns of political
repression (they would later claim Martin Luther King Jr. had
communist ties), even as journalists and academics voluntarily narrowed their political
thinking to exclude communism.
Watching sincere people succumb to paranoia again, today, is not something to relish. But
having trained themselves to intellectualize away Hillary Clinton's flaws, as they had with
Obama, about half of America seemed truly gobsmacked when she lost to the antithesis of
everything that she had represented to them. Every
poll (that they read) said she would win. Every
article (that they read) said it too, as did every
person (that they knew). Lacking an explanation for the unexplainable, many advanced
scenarios that would have failed high school civics, claiming that only the popular vote
mattered, or that the archaic
Emoluments Clause prevented Trump from taking office, or that Trump was insane and could be
disposed of under the
25th Amendment .
After a few trial balloons during the primaries under which
Bernie Sanders' visits to Russia and
Jill Stein's attendance at a banquet in Moscow were used to imply disloyalty, the fearful
cry that the Russians meddled in the election morphed into the claim that Trump had worked with
the Russians and/or (fear is flexible) that the Russians had something on Trump. Everyone
learned a new Russian word: kompromat .
Donald Trump became the Manchurian Candidate. That term was taken from a 1959 novel made
into a classic Cold War movie that follows an American soldier brainwashed by communists as
part of a Kremlin plot to gain influence in the Oval Office. A
Google search shows that dozens of news sources -- including
The
New York Times , Vanity
Fair ,
Salon ,
The Washington Post , and, why not, Stormy Daniels' lawyer
Michael Avenatti -- have all claimed that Trump is
a 2018 variant of the Manchurian Candidate,
controlled by ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin.
The birth moment of Trump as a Russian asset is traceable to MI-6 intelligence
officer-turned-Democratic opposition researcher-turned FBI mole
Christopher Steele , whose "dossier" claimed the existence of the pee tape. Supposedly,
somewhere deep in the Kremlin is a surveillance video made in 2013 of Trump in Moscow's
Ritz-Carlton Hotel, watching prostitutes urinate on a bed that the Obamas had once slept in. As
McCarthy did with homosexuality, naughty sex was thrown in to keep the rubes' attention.
No one, not even Steele's alleged informants, has actually seen
the pee tape. It exists in a blurry land of certainty alongside the elevator
tape , alleged video of Trump doing something in an elevator that's so salacious it's been
called "Every Trump Reporter's White Whale." No one knows when the elevator video was made, but
a dossier-length article in
New York magazine posits that Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987.
Suddenly no real evidence is necessary, because it is always right in front of your face.
McCarthy accused
Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower of being communists or communist stooges over the
"loss" of China in 1949. Trump holds a bizarre press conference in Helsinki and the only
explanation must be that he is a traitor.
Nancy
Pelosi ("President Trump's weakness in front of Putin was embarrassing, and proves that the
Russians have something on the president, personally, financially, or politically") and
Cory Booker ("Trump is acting like he's guilty of something") and
Hillary Clinton ("now we know whose side he plays for") and John Brennan ("rises to and
exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes and misdemeanors.' It was nothing short of treasonous.
Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin") and
Rachel Maddow ("We haven't ever had to reckon with the possibility that someone had
ascended to the presidency of the United States to serve the interests of
another country rather than our own") and others have said that Trump is
controlled by Russia. As in 1954 when the press provided live TV coverage of McCarthy's
dirty assertions against the Army, the modern media uses each new assertion as "proof" of an
earlier one. Snowballs get bigger rolling downhill.
When assertion is accepted as evidence, it forces the other side to prove a negative to
break free. So until Trump "proves" he is not a Russian stooge, his denials will be seen as
attempts to wiggle out from under evidence that in fact doesn't exist. Who, pundits ask, can
come up with a better explanation for Trump's actions than blackmail, as if that was a
necessary step to clearing his name?
Joe McCarthy's victims faced similar challenges: once labeled a communist or a homosexual,
the onus shifted to them to somehow prove they weren't. Their failure to prove their innocence
became more evidence of their guilt. The Cold War version of this mindset was well illustrated
in movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the classic Twilight Zone episode "
The Monsters Are Due on
Maple Street ." Anyone who questions this must themselves be at best a useful fool, if not
an outright Russia collaborator. (Wrote one
pundit : "They are accessories, before and after the fact, to the hijacking of a democratic
election. So, yes, goddamn them all.") In the McCarthy era, the term was "fellow traveler":
anyone, witting or unwitting, who helped the Russians. Mere skepticism, never mind actual
dissent, is muddled with disloyalty.
Blackmail? Payoffs? Deals? It isn't just the months of Mueller's investigation that have
passed without evidence. The IRS and Treasury have had Trump's tax documents and financials for
decades, even if Rachel Maddow has not. If Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987, or even
2013, he has done it behind the backs of the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and NSA. Yet at the same
time, in what history would see as the most out-in-the-open intelligence operation ever, some
claim he asked on TV for his handlers to deliver hacked emails. In TheManchurian
Candidate , the whole thing was at least done in secret as you'd expect.
With impeachment itself on the table, Mueller has done little more than issue the
equivalent of parking tickets to foreigners he has no jurisdiction over. Intelligence summaries
claim the Russians meddled, but don't show that Trump was involved. Indictments against
Russians are cheered as evidence, when they are just Mueller's uncontested assertions.
There is no evidence the president is acting on orders from Russia or is under their
influence. None.
As with McCarthy, as in those famous witch trials at Salem, allegations shouldn't be
accepted as truth, though in 2018 even pointing out that basic tenet is blasphemy. The burden
of proof should be on the accusing party, yet the standing narrative in America is that the
Russia story must be assumed plausible, if not true, until proven false. Joe McCarthy tore
America apart for four years under just such standards, until finally public opinion, led by
Edward R. Murrow , a
journalist brave enough to demand answers McCarthy did not have, turned against him. There is no
Edward R. Murrow in 2018.
When asking for proof is seen as disloyal, when demanding evidence after years of
accusations is considered a Big Ask, when a clear answer somehow always needs additional time,
there is more on the line in a democracy than the fate of one man.
Peter Van Buren, a
24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and
Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper's War
: A Novel of WWII Japan. Follow him on Twitter @WeMeantWell .
"... The Awan family was banned from the House IT network February 2, but Wasserman Schultz kept Imran on her payroll until he was arrested last week. Infamously, when Capitol Police seized a laptop from Wasserman Schultz's office, she later threatened the cops with "consequences" at a hearing if the police didn't return the device. ..."
Last week, Democratic IT staffer Imran Awan was
arrested for alleged
bank fraud. In and of itself, that news would rate as a relatively minor political scandal. But Awan worked for Rep. Debbie Wasserman
Schultz, who inspires some of the weirdest conspiracy theories on Capitol Hill. Her disastrous stint as Democratic National Committee
chair has turned the centrist South Florida congresswoman into a punching bag for the left, which accuses her of "rigging" the 2016
election for Hillary Clinton, and the far right, which has spent 2017 accusing her of murdering one of her own staffers. Now the
Awan scandal is shaping up to be a classic Wasserman Schultz snafu. While Awan was involved in a litany of shady business dealings,
the congresswoman has made the case 1,000 percent worse for herself by refusing to talk to reporters and openly feuding with police.
A conservative
ethics group is now calling for a full probe . According to Politico, U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler
first hired Imran Awan
in 2004.
Unfortunately, much of the reporting on the case so far has come from Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller,
which is well known for pushing bogus stories about climate change and spewing fact-free nonsense.
According to the Daily Caller's Luke Rosiak , House staffers continued paying the family despite a series of red flags and security
issues that likely should have been addressed long before 2017. Earlier this year, the U.S. Capitol Police revealed they are investigating
the Awans for alleged data and equipment theft, but no one knows yet what might have been stolen; charges haven't been filed in that
case. But once news of that investigation broke, every Democratic office -- except Wasserman Schultz's -- fired the Awans. Wasserman
Schultz continued funneling money to Imran Awan. The Daily Caller has reported that Imran began liquidating his assets and trying
to sell his properties. Then, last week, he was caught at Washington Dulles International Airport trying to leave the country.
He was arrested on bank fraud charges, a case that's apparently separate from the ongoing Capitol Police probe. All of this paints
an extremely confusing picture that isn't helped by Rosiak's stories, which are full of speculation and hearsay. The Daily Caller
has speculated that the Awans could have been involved in a thousand scams, including
stealing
money from the government, data from Homeland Security, or emails from the Democratic National Committee. (Rosiak's stories also
consistently mention the Awans are Pakistani Muslims, which seems irrelevant.) Wasserman Schultz's involvement has led right-wing
pundits, including Fox News ham-brains Sean Hannity and Geraldo Rivera, to baselessly speculate that the Awans were behind the WikiLeaks
hack that forced Wasserman Schultz to step down as Democratic National Committee chair last year...
For Fox figureheads, the story has provided a convenient distraction to suck time away from addressing the crippling failure that
has been the Trump White House. But flaws aside, Rosiak's reporting has uncovered some genuinely troubling details. Here's a breakdown
of the biggest unanswered questions about Wasserman Schultz and the Awan scandal:
1.How many Democratic lawmakers are involved? According to Rosiak, the family members worked for at least 80 House
Democrats in their decade-plus on the Hill. Though Wasserman Schultz is certainly the highest-profile House member ensnared in the
scandal and did herself no favors by keeping Awan on her payroll long after everyone else canned him, she's far from the only lawmaker
who could have been the target of data theft or, as Rosiak claimed in a later story, blackmail. The Daily Caller released a handy
chart showing how many other Democrats were tied to the Awans: The list includes South Florida's Ted Deutch and Frederica Wilson,
and Lois Frankel.
2. What is the actual extent of the Awans' alleged data theft? Here's where things also get muddy. So far, there's no indication
as to what the Awans might have downloaded from Democratic networks. According to Rosiak, the Awans might have been funneling someone's
data to an offsite server, but the public still has no clue who might have been victimized. BuzzFeed News reported that after six
months, charges still have not been filed against the family.
3. Why did Wasserman Schultz refuse to fire Imran Awan when everyone else did, threaten the Capitol Police, and then continue
paying him? Here's where Wasserman Schultz's dreadful media presence, along with what appear to be some true red flags, really
comes into focus. Once the Awans were outed as targets of a Capitol Police criminal probe, every other Democrat in Washington immediately
kicked them to the curb. (According to federal data, Imran Awan earned $164,000 in 2016, and his wife, Hina Alvi, earned $168,300.
That's a lot of cash for government IT employees.) Also: Who in hell hires an entire family of IT employees? If, say, a local lawmaker
or someone like Gov. Rick Scott handsomely paid a husband, wife, and two of their brothers to run, say, janitorial services, every
newspaper in the nation would cry nepotism. Likewise, while multiple mainstream outlets, including the Washington Post and
BuzzFeed, have published "explainers" about the burgeoning scandal, they've glossed over major legal red flags that Rosiak uncovered
in court records, including
allegations made in court that the Awans threatened to kidnap their own family members . Rosiak also reported that the family
members seem to have
filed false financial disclosures in order to obtain their government jobs and either misreported or outright lied about their debts
to foreign businesspeople.
Anonymous sources also told Rosiak that the FBI seized smashed hard drives from Imran Awan's house, which certainly doesn't look
good.
The Awan family was banned from the House IT network February 2, but Wasserman Schultz kept Imran on her payroll until he
was arrested last week. Infamously, when Capitol Police seized a laptop from Wasserman Schultz's office, she later threatened the
cops with "consequences" at a hearing if the police didn't return the device.
4. Are the bank fraud charges and data theft allegations connected? This is where the case really gets confusing. Despite
the brouhaha over the Capitol Police investigation, that case hasn't resulted in any charges yet. Awan was arrested last week for
simple bank fraud, which doesn't appear to be a smoking gun pointing to WikiLeaks or blackmail. According to the criminal complaint,
Awan and his wife are charged with attempting to defraud the Congressional Federal Credit Union by
receiving a $165,000
loan by claiming one property was their primary residence when, in fact, they were renting the place out . (The Awans have pleaded
not guilty.) That's bad, but it's not exactly House of Cards -level political material.
5. Why are the Democrats so hush-hush about all of this? This, more than anything, is the classic Wasserman Schultz flaw:
hubris in the face of negative press. In the face of adversity, she tends to double-down and dig in her heels, which has rarely helped
her (or any lawmaker) when confronted with legitimately negative news. The Awan case is no different: She has shied away from TV
appearances and has neglected to explain why the family was hired a decade ago. So has every Democrat tied to the family. Granted,
it's difficult to say much to the media during an open criminal investigation, but the public deserves more answers than it has gotten.
Jerry Iannelli is Miami New Times ' daily-news reporter. He graduated with honors from Temple University. He then earned
a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He moved to South Florida in 2015.
The difference between image and real server is that image is just a little bit more easy to manipulate. In other words it does
not necessary truthfully reflect that hard drive information.
There are also subtle things like the ability to restore erased files which can be done only on physical hardware using special
equipment. You still can see some erased files on the image if it was done byte wise (using dd) if the space was not reused)
Chain of custody is also important. As the requirement of working is not longer present, files and programs on it can more easily manipulated to prove whatever you need to
prove even in such a way that would not work on a real server. If you want to stage false flag operation it is better to pass only images.
In reality neither real server not images proves anything. Both can be "staged" like fake video in poisoning false flag operations.
Cyberspace is perfect environment for false flag operations. As soon as FBI was not the first to get to the servers and can be assured
that nobody touched the server "in between" (which most easily is achieved by disconnected server from the network and shutting it done
even if this wipes out memory on the server, all bets are off
Another relevant question is why Awan case was swiped undr the carpet.
Notable quotes:
"... the DNC servers were never inspected by the FBI and Crowdstrike's involvement is still suspect. ..."
"... Anyone who thinks that CrowdStrike; a group whose majority investor is Google's Eric Schmidt, who also formed "Groundwork," which was the tech group for the Clinton campaign; & whose co-founder (CrowdStrike) is a senior fellow of the openly anti-Russian Atlantic Council who is funded by Ukrainian billionaire who "donated" millions to the Clinton Foundation & even gave Hillary a frickin' award in 2013.....if you think that that group; who produced a report in exchange for money from the DNC at a time when we now know Clinton had control of DNC finances.....if you think that this report which aaaallllll this is based on would hold up in court.......you're out of your goddamn mind. ..."
"... Doing forensics on a physical machine is rarely encouraged because data can be corrupted, accidentally erased, etc, and that data is lost forever. An image can be copied and stored securely in case a forensics analysts makes a mistake, they can just restore the image and start again. Sorry Jimmy, I know you hate Russia-gate but this specific case is not a strong argument against it. ..."
Despite recent claims by the media, and despite the fact Trump is parroting the same claims, the DNC servers were never inspected
by the FBI and Crowdstrike's involvement is still suspect.
Anyone who thinks that CrowdStrike; a group whose majority investor is Google's Eric Schmidt, who also formed "Groundwork,"
which was the tech group for the Clinton campaign; & whose co-founder (CrowdStrike) is a senior fellow of the openly anti-Russian
Atlantic Council who is funded by Ukrainian billionaire who "donated" millions to the Clinton Foundation & even gave Hillary
a frickin' award in 2013.....if you think that that group; who produced a report in exchange for money from the DNC at a time
when we now know Clinton had control of DNC finances.....if you think that this report which aaaallllll this is based on would
hold up in court.......you're out of your goddamn mind. Keep up the good work Jim.
#rEVOLution#NotMeUs#NinaBernie2020
The irony that the same people in the media crying 'Russian collusion' in regards to Trump do not have the integrity ( or
are not allowed) to cry over Clinton/DNC collusion to railroad Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic Primary. George Orwell
looks smarter everyday.
As someone who works in IT, an image in this context is not a picture like you would take with your phone, but rather a
perfect copy of the system state, which you could deal with forensically, or load up in a virtual machine. With that, there's
no need to have the servers. You have a clone of the servers along with all their data and their memory state at the time the
snapshot was taken. What that article says actually makes perfect sense to me, because by powering down machine, you destroy
whatever exists only in RAM.
Jimmy, I have much love for your show and no love for the DNC, but you got this one wrong. An 'Image' in this context does
not mean picture, it is a copy of the file system(s) on the machine (server in this case). Having done some digital forensics,
this is the norm. Doing forensics on a physical machine is rarely encouraged because data can be corrupted, accidentally erased,
etc, and that data is lost forever. An image can be copied and stored securely in case a forensics analysts makes a mistake,
they can just restore the image and start again. Sorry Jimmy, I know you hate Russia-gate but this specific case is not a strong
argument against it.
Good example of people talking about things they have no idea what they are talking about... Most likely the "servers" where
virtual servers meaning images are the closest thing to what you guys believe to be physical. Of course you could ask the provider
to hand over the hosts. They would have to decide if flipping a bird or laughing out loud is more appropriate.
If you have
no idea how applied computer science works today do not assume your intuition to be more appropriate than expert statements
without asking another expert about it...
But doing nothing of that kind keeps the grounds for conspiracy theories intact,
so just go on while I load another image in one of the by now several commonly used virtualization solutions (uuups, a "server"
appears out of thin air... And if I click 140 times 140 "servers" will appear [and the swaping would kill this computer in
no time...]).
"... The Mueller special counsel investigation was launched to probe charges that the key FBI officials developing evidence in the case thought were baseless. That's a bombshell accusation that appears to have been confirmed by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page , according to John Solomon . It tends to confirm the suspicion that the Mueller probe is a cover-up operation to obscure the criminal use of counterintelligence capabilities to spy on a rival presidential campaign and then sabotage the presidency that resulted. ..."
"... she offered a bombshell confirmation of the meaning of one of the most enigmatic text messages that the public has seen (keep in mind that there are many yet to be released). ..."
"... The truth behind the Mueller probe is looking uglier and uglier. Pursuing bogus accusations without foundation is the very definition of a witch hunt – President Trump's term for Mueller's team of Hillary-supporters. ..."
"... We don't know anything at all about the activities of Utah U.S. attorney Peter Huber , who is investigating the potential abuse of U.S. intelligence apparatus for political purposes. That is the proper procedure for grand jury probes. But if Lisa Page is honestly answering questions under oath for a congressional committee, she probably is doing so in grand jury sessions, if summoned. ..."
The Mueller special counsel investigation was launched to probe charges that the key FBI
officials developing evidence in the case thought were baseless. That's a bombshell accusation
that appears to have been confirmed by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page , according to John Solomon
. It tends to confirm the suspicion that the Mueller probe is a cover-up operation to obscure
the criminal use of counterintelligence capabilities to spy on a rival presidential campaign
and then sabotage the presidency that resulted.
Earlier reports indicated that Page has been answering questions from the House Judiciary
Committee quite frankly and may even have
cut a deal selling out her ex-lover Peter Strzok over their professional misbehavior (and
quite possibly worse) in targeting the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump with the
intelligence-gathering tools of the FBI.
Last night, John Solomon of
The Hill revealed that he has obtained information from sources who heard Page's testimony
in two days of sworn depositions behind closed doors that she offered a bombshell
confirmation of the meaning of one of the most enigmatic text messages that the public has seen
(keep in mind that there are many yet to be released).
[T]here are just five words, among the thousands of suggestive texts Page and Strzok
exchanged, that you should read.
That passage was transmitted on May 19, 2017. "There's no big there there," Strzok
texted.
The date of the text long has intrigued investigators: It is two days after Deputy
Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein
named special counselRobert Mueller to oversee an investigation
into alleged collusion between Trump and the Russia campaign.
Since the text was turned over to Congress, investigators wondered whether it referred to
the evidence against the Trump campaign.
This month, they finally got the chance to ask. Strzok declined to say – but Page,
during a closed-door interview with lawmakers, confirmed in the most pained and contorted way
that the message in fact referred to the quality of the Russia case, according to multiple
eyewitnesses.
The admission is deeply consequential. It means Rosenstein unleashed the most awesome
powers of a special counsel to investigate an allegation that the key FBI officials, driving
the investigation for 10 months beforehand, did not think was "there."
The truth behind the Mueller probe is looking uglier and uglier. Pursuing bogus
accusations without foundation is the very definition of a witch hunt – President Trump's
term for Mueller's team of Hillary-supporters.
We don't know anything at all about the activities of Utah U.S. attorney Peter Huber ,
who is
investigating the potential abuse of U.S. intelligence apparatus for political purposes.
That is the proper procedure for grand jury probes. But if Lisa Page is honestly answering
questions under oath for a congressional committee, she probably is doing so in grand jury
sessions, if summoned.
The glacial pace of this probe is frustrating for Trump-supporters. But doing it right and
observing the ethical and legal constraints takes time and does not generate leaks.
Nevertheless, I am deeply encouraged by this leak to Solomon, as it seems to indicate that the
truth will come out.
Appearing on Hannity last night, Solomon elaborated: watch video
here .
Jimmy Dore: [Debbie say that ] "I eat the left Twix first", pretending that one identical
side is different from other. Both sides brought to her by same corporation."
There is no price to pay if you lie in defense of the US neoliberal establishment
Notable quotes:
"... I can't believe she beat Canova. There's some fuckery going on there. ..."
ABOUT THE JIMMY DORE SHOW:
The Jimmy Dore Show is a hilarious and irreverent take on news, politics and culture featuring
Jimmy Dore, a professional stand up comedian, author and podcaster. With over 5 million
downloads on iTunes, the show is also broadcast on KPFK stations throughout the country. It is
part of the Young Turks Network-- the largest online news show in the world.
It was Debbie who headed the corruption of the 2016 presidential primary with fraud and
vote rigging to keep Bernie from the presidency. It was Debbie's corruption that handed the
presidency to Trump. Debbie belongs in prison for election rigging and treason. Russia is
being investigated yet Debbie is not? Why?
What's new. The Dems courted moderate Republicans over progressives, rigged primaries,
disinfranchised half the base, colluded with the media to elevate Trump & lost in the
general for supporting NAFTA & TPP and not campaigning in rust belt. On top of that, they
blamed Russia, caused mass hysteria and public discontent to avoid taking responsibility.
I wouldn't be surprised. Schultz IS a Republican. There's TONS of Republicans in the
democratic party. They did the divide and conquer method. And it worked
Wasserman is a horrible and crooked and evil person, take her down take her down she will
scream loudly, she knows where many many bones are buried, she is an extension of
HRC
So the DNC announced Russia hacked them, and "proved" it with a file they say was
stolen. But that file was not the DNC's. So the "proof" of Russia hacking the DNC is
nonexistent.
Notable quotes:
"... they cite an anonymous former DNC official who asserts that Guccifer 2.0's first document (the Trump opposition report) did not originate in the DNC as initially reported. ..."
"... The importance of this contradiction, combined with earlier allegations of hacking the DNC made by Guccifer 2.0, cannot be overstated. ..."
"... " There were signs of dishonesty from the start. The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta's inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press." ..."
"... By classifying Guccifer 2.0's claim to have obtained the Trump Opposition Report through a breach of the DNC as a sign of dishonesty, the Associated Press uses the Guccifer 2.0 persona's widely held claim as an example of contradiction with their new version of the 'official' Russian hacking narrative. In so doing, the AP makes the hacking allegations entirely nebulous: a fantasy narrative that can be neither proven nor disproven but easily edited and rearranged when convenient. Incredibly, the AP's article also contradicts the claims made by the DNC themselves, and so-called papers of record, including the Washington Post. ..."
"... [Fancy Bear] broke into the network in late April and targeted the opposition research files. It was this breach that set off the alarm. The hackers stole two files,[Shawn] Henry said." ..."
"... "Investigators would have been able to rapidly determine if there were textual differences between Guccifer 2.0's document and the DNC's. If there were no textual differences, an initial determination might have been difficult, because Guccifer 2.0 went to some trouble to obscure internal metadata, known as Revision Save ID's (RSID's), which can be used to uniquely identify sections of text that have been changed and added into a Word document. However, when the Podesta emails were published in October 2016, investigators should have been able to source Guccifer 2.0's document to the Podesta emails quickly. They would have been able to do this before the 2016 election, a full year ahead of the AP report." [Emphasis Added] ..."
"... Ultimately, it is the DNC's claim that they were breached by Russian hackers, who stole the Trump opposition report, which directly belies their allegation - because the document did not come from the DNC, but from John Podesta's emails. ..."
"... What is interesting here is that the AP admits that such elements of the document's publication had been fabricated, but did not then follow that realization by questioning other possibly fabricated elements of the documents, such as the Russian-language error messages. The AP certainly did not concern themselves with why a Russian state-sponsored hacker would benefit from airbrushing "confidential" onto such a report. Their claim that it was to attract media attention seems quite weak. ..."
"... AP surmised that Guccifer 2.0 "air-brush[ed]" the word "confidential" into the document to "catch the reporter's attention." Both Carter and the Forensicator have explained that Guccifer 2.0 used a complex process, involving an intermediate template document, to inject this "alluring" fake. The Forensicator told this author that they take the position that this intermediate template file (ostensibly needed to add "CONFIDENTIAL" to the document) had an additional purpose. ..."
"... The Forensicator explained that, for some readers and researchers, the copy/paste of an intermediate (RTF) copy of the Trump opposition report into a template document might be interpreted simply as an unconventional method for injecting "confidential" into 1.doc. However, the Forensicator added, it can also be interpreted as a "cover" for the final copy/paste operation which was a necessary step in the evolution of Guccifer 2.0's first document. It was needed to embed the Russian error messages into the final document (1.doc). ..."
"... In their full analysis, the Forensicator wrote that it was surprising that neither outlet reported on the easily viewed "Last Saved By" property, which listed "Феликс Эдмундович" (aka "Iron Felix") as the user who last saved the document. This unique name was noticed by various social media observers that same day and by Ars Technica the following day. How did the journalists miss this, and why? ..."
"... Both Gawker and The Smoking Gun published Guccifer 2.0's Trump opposition report in full as a PDF file. Their PDF files have the now infamous Cyrillic error messages in them; they appear in the last few pages of their PDF files. Ars Technica dubbed these error messages, "Russian fingerprints." ..."
"... Ars Technica reported on Guccifer 2.0's publication of the Trump Opposition Report the day after Guccifer 2.0 arrived on the scene. They quickly noted that there were Russian language error messages in the PDF file posted by Gawker. They also noticed that when they viewed 1.doc themselves, they didn't see the Russian error messages. The Forensicator told Disobedient Media that this was because Ars Technica used Word for Windows, which displayed the error messages in English. ..."
"... So the DNC announced Russia hacked them, and "proved" it with a file they say was stolen.But that file was not the DNC's. So the "proof" of Russia hacking the DNC is nonexistent. ..."
Disobedient Media recently reported on discoveries made by the Forensicator in their report,
Media Mishaps: Early Guccifer 2 Coverage . In our previous coverage of the Forensicator's work,
we discussed the essential role played by the media in ensuring that the Guccifer 2.0 persona
received wide recognition by successfully linking Guccifer 2.0's documents with the DNC's
claims that Russian state-sponsored hackers had breached their servers.
This report will focus on an unreported story: After the fact, the DNC quietly changed an
important theme in their Russian hacking narrative. Initially, the DNC passively supported the
notion that Guccifer 2.0 stole a copy of a Trump opposition report by penetrating the DNC at
the behest of the Russian state. Then over a year later, an un-named ex-DNC official tells us
that this document in fact came from Podesta's emails, not the DNC. This single statement by a
DNC official invalidated the circumstantial evidence that had been used to support the DNC's
Russian hacking claims, and represents a groundbreaking contradiction that has gone unobserved
by establishment press outlets.
This report will also discuss numerous mistakes made by various legacy press outlets in
their obsessive focus on the Russian hacking narrative and their rush to judgment in the
matter.
A Late (and Quiet) Change in the DNC Russian Hacking Narrative
In November 2017, the DNC changed their Russian hacking narrative via their proxies in the
legacy media. The Associated Press published, Inside story: How Russians hacked the
Democrats' emails ; they cite an anonymous former DNC official who asserts that Guccifer
2.0's first document (the Trump opposition report) did not originate in the DNC as initially
reported.
The importance of this contradiction, combined with earlier allegations of hacking
the DNC made by Guccifer 2.0, cannot be overstated.
The Associated Press wrote in November 2017:
" There were signs of dishonesty from the start. The first document Guccifer 2.0
published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta's inbox, according to
a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to
speak to the press."
By classifying Guccifer 2.0's claim to have obtained the Trump Opposition Report through a
breach of the DNC as a sign of dishonesty, the Associated Press uses the Guccifer 2.0
persona's widely held claim as an example of contradiction with their new version of the
'official' Russian hacking narrative. In so doing, the AP makes the hacking allegations
entirely nebulous: a fantasy narrative that can be neither proven nor disproven but easily
edited and rearranged when convenient. Incredibly, the AP's article also contradicts the claims
made by the DNC themselves, and so-called papers of record, including the Washington Post.
By returning to the genesis of the Russian hacking narrative, we find that the AP's November
report runs contrary to the DNC's initial claims, as reported by The Washington Post , in an
article titled, Russian Government Hackers Penetrated DNC, Stole Opposition Research OnTrump . When reviewing this early history of the matter, it becomes clear that it is
logically impossible to separate the Guccifer 2.0 persona from the allegations of a
Kremlin-backed hack of the DNC. Critical statements in that initial report by the Washington
Post are highlighted below for emphasis:
"Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National
Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP Presidential
candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to
the breach
[Fancy Bear] broke into the network in late April and targeted the opposition research
files. It was this breach that set off the alarm. The hackers stole two files,[Shawn] Henry
said."
By taking this later (2017) stance, the Associated Press contradicts the "official" Russian
hacking narrative involving Guccifer 2.0 (as implied by the DNC's own security firm) and which
had, until that point, been characterized by the corporate press as
Russian-hacking-gospel-truth. By seamlessly excising Guccifer 2.0 from culpability within a new
timeline of events, the Associated Press makes the entire hacking story a fantasy narrative
that can be neither proven nor disproven but must not be questioned.
The Forensicator explained to Disobedient Media:
"Investigators would have been able to rapidly determine if there were textual
differences between Guccifer 2.0's document and the DNC's. If there were no textual
differences, an initial determination might have been difficult, because Guccifer 2.0 went to
some trouble to obscure internal metadata, known as Revision Save ID's (RSID's), which can be
used to uniquely identify sections of text that have been changed and added into a Word
document. However, when the Podesta emails were published in October 2016, investigators should
have been able to source Guccifer 2.0's document to the Podesta emails quickly. They would have
been able to do this before the 2016 election, a full year ahead of the AP report."
[Emphasis Added]
The Forensicator then referred this author to a table in his report, depicting the metadata
for Podesta's version of the Trump opposition report:
As we can see, the document was saved by Tony Carrk, who worked as Research Director for
Hillary for America at the time. This document was attached to this Podesta email .
The Forensicator continued, saying: "We can see that Mr. Carrk made some change that took
less than one minute to complete. If investigators compared Carrk's version of the document to
the original DNC document, they should have been able to quickly determine that Guccifer 2's
document is sourced from Podesta's emails and not directly from the DNC. For this, an RSID
correlation would have probably been telling."
Why did the DNC, their security consultant firm Crowdstrike, and government investigators
wait so long to tell us that Guccifer 2.0 did not obtain their copy of the Trump opposition
report directly from the DNC? Why did Crowdstrike tell the Washington Post
that the opposition report files had been stolen specifically from the DNC network if that were
not the case?
The legacy press chorus had initially linked Guccifer 2.0's first document, and the "Russian
fingerprints" therein to the Trump opposition report that the DNC claimed to have been stolen
by Russian state-sponsored hackers. What prompted them to change their story, contradicting not
only Guccifer 2.0 but the DNC themselves? Should we now assess the DNC's claim that the
document had been taken by Russian hackers to be untrue?
Ultimately, it is the DNC's claim that they were breached by Russian hackers, who stole
the Trump opposition report, which directly belies their allegation - because the document did
not come from the DNC, but from John Podesta's emails.
Is it possible that Mueller's investigation may have taken a closer look into the origin of
Guccifer 2.0's initial document, realizing that it was sourced from Podesta's email? The DNC
and government investigators may have then decided that the best way to obscure the resulting
contradictory evidence was by letting it quietly leak via a "former DNC official who spoke on
the condition of anonymity," in the November 2017 article published by the Associated
Press.
Given the repeated contradictions from the DNC and corporate media in their description of
Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential race, how can the public be expected to
believe that their other claims have any legitimacy whatsoever?
The AP's November 2017 article also noticed that Guccifer 2.0's first published document
contained the word CONFIDENTIAL, while the original document did not. This was old news to
anyone who had been paying attention; Adam Carter analyzed this artifact nine months
earlier:
What is interesting here is that the AP admits that such elements of the document's
publication had been fabricated, but did not then follow that realization by questioning other
possibly fabricated elements of the documents, such as the Russian-language error messages. The
AP certainly did not concern themselves with why a Russian state-sponsored hacker would benefit
from airbrushing "confidential" onto such a report. Their claim that it was to attract media
attention seems quite weak.
AP surmised that Guccifer 2.0 "air-brush[ed]" the word "confidential" into the document to
"catch the reporter's attention." Both Carter and the Forensicator have explained that Guccifer
2.0 used a complex process, involving an intermediate template document, to inject this
"alluring" fake. The Forensicator told this author that they take the position that this
intermediate template file (ostensibly needed to add "CONFIDENTIAL" to the document) had an
additional purpose.
The Forensicator explained that, for some readers and researchers, the copy/paste of an
intermediate (RTF) copy of the Trump opposition report into a template document might be
interpreted simply as an unconventional method for injecting "confidential" into 1.doc.
However, the Forensicator added, it can also be interpreted as a "cover" for the final
copy/paste operation which was a necessary step in the evolution of Guccifer 2.0's first
document. It was needed to embed the Russian error messages into the final document
(1.doc).
Once again, establishment media failed to pursue their cited evidence with due diligence.
This is a grave mistake, especially given the way in which Guccifer 2.0's alleged 'hacking' has
been used as a major bolstering point for increased tensions between the United States and
Russia.
Initially, Gawker and The Smoking Gun Didn't Notice Iron Felix
Guccifer 2.0 made his noisy debut on June 15, 2016 (the day after the DNC publicly claimed
it had been breached by Russian state-sponsored hackers). It also appears that Guccifer 2.0
gave advanced copies of their doctored version of the Trump opposition report to two media
outlets, The Smoking Gun and Gawker.
In their full analysis, the Forensicator wrote that it was surprising that neither outlet
reported on the easily viewed "Last Saved By" property, which listed
"Феликс
Эдмундович" (aka "Iron Felix") as
the user who last saved the document. This unique name was noticed by various social media
observers that same day and by Ars Technica the following day. How did the journalists miss
this, and why?
Initially, Gawker and The Smoking Gun Didn't Notice the Russian Error Messages
Both Gawker and The Smoking Gun published Guccifer 2.0's Trump opposition report in full as
a PDF file. Their PDF files have the now infamous Cyrillic error messages in them; they appear
in the last few pages of their PDF files. Ars Technica dubbed these error messages, "Russian
fingerprints."
Although both outlets reviewed this document in some detail, neither outlet noticed the
Russian error messages in their first reports. The Forensicator suggests that, given their
choice of word processing applications, they would have seen the Russian error messages, if
only they had viewed the last few pages of each file. That is, unless (perhaps) they received
their PDF's directly from Guccifer 2.0 or another third party and they just passed them
along.
Ars Technica was Confused When They Didn't See the Russian Error Messages in Guccifer 2.0's
Word Document
Ars Technica reported on Guccifer 2.0's publication of the Trump Opposition Report the day
after Guccifer 2.0 arrived on the scene. They quickly noted that there were Russian language
error messages in the PDF file posted by Gawker. They also noticed that when they viewed 1.doc
themselves, they didn't see the Russian error messages. The Forensicator told Disobedient Media
that this was because Ars Technica used Word for Windows, which displayed the error messages in
English.
Ars Technica suggested that The Smoking Gun's PDF may have been generated by Guccifer
2.0 on a system that had Russian language settings enabled.
While this explanation appears reasonable, it is surprising (if that was the case) that
Gawker didn't tell us that their PDF came directly from Guccifer 2.0 . The Smoking Gun also
published a PDF with Russian error messages in it. Are we to believe that The Smoking Gun also
received their PDF from Guccifer 2.0 or a third party, and failed to report on this fact?
IVN: Did Gawker Outsource Their Analysis to Russia?
An obscure media outlet, Independent Voter Network , raised various theories on the initial
reporting done by The Smoking Gun and Gawker. One of their wilder theories suggested that
Gawker had outsourced their analysis to a Russian sub-contractor. The Forensicator evaluated
that claim, ultimately concluding that Independent Voter Network had gone on a wild goose chase
because the "clue" they followed pointed to Gawker's document management service known as
"DocumentCloud." DocumentCloud uses a technology that they call "CloudCrowd," which is what IVN
saw in the PDF that Gawker uploaded. The Forensicator referred to a DocumentCloud job
advertisement for confirmation of his conclusion.
The Forensicator told Disobedient Media: "We found CloudCrowd; it is not an outsourcing
company. Probably not Russian, either."
Business Insider: Did Guccifer 2.0 Photoshop "Confidential" Into his Document
Screenshots?
When Business Insider noted the presence of "CONFIDENTIAL" in Guccifer 2.0's document, they
claimed that Guccifer 2.0 might have "photoshopped" his screenshots (placed on his blog site)
to create the watermark and page footer with "confidential" in them.
The Forensicator countered that claim by pointing out that the Business Insider journalist
likely viewed the document with "Full-Screen Reading" selected.
This mode will disable the display of the watermark and page headers and footers when viewed
by the journalist, but they will be displayed when printed to PDF. No Photoshop required.
Conclusion
The close timing of the DNC announcement and Guccifer 2.0's publication of the Trump report,
as well as reports of "Russian fingerprints" in those documents, created a strong link between
Guccifer 2.0 and the Russian hackers who allegedly stole DNC files. Over a year later, the
Associated Press tells us that this first narrative was wrong, contradicting the DNC's claims
as well as much of the early legacy press reports on the issue. Must we concurrently accept the
narrative that Russians hacked the DNC if claims that they had done so were not only based on
flimsy evidence but have now been contradicted completely?
As far as documented evidence of election interference goes, one does not have to stray far
from the actors in the Russian hacking saga to discover that the DNC and establishment
Democrats were, instead of victims of meddling, the perpetrators of such abuse of the American
Democratic process. In 2017 the
NYC Board of Elections admitted that it had illegally purged hundreds of thousands of
Democratic voters from the election roles, preventing them from voting in the 2016 Democratic
primaries. This abuse of power represents just one in a constellation of legitimate examples of
abuse that took place at the hands of corporatized Democrats in order to unfairly and illegally
ensure a Clinton nomination.
This is too complicated for the average demon rat nitwit to follow. They don't want to
know this so showing them facts has to be dumbed down. Otherwise, all new revelations will be
ignored.
Really good work and reporting here that will never be understood by the masses.
Everything that's going on is far too complex, too many moving parts, too much
compartmentalization. Trump is doing a good job dumbing it down.
So the DNC announced Russia hacked them, and "proved" it with a file they say was
stolen.But that file was not the DNC's. So the "proof" of Russia hacking the DNC is
nonexistent.
"... Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA: https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/05/guccifer-2-0s-american-fingerprints-reveal-an-operation-made-in-the-usa/ ..."
"... Sez who, ask I? Sez the trustworthy American media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know, professional paragons of virtue like Rachel Maddow and her merry band. ..."
"... These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it, especially when directed at them. ..."
"... our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT by the Russians. ..."
Unfortunately, what this guy says is what most Americans still seem to believe. When I
ask people what is the actual hard evidence for "Russiagate" (because I don't know of any
that has been corroborated), I get a response that there have been massive examples of
Russian hacks, Russian posts, tweets and internet adverts–all meant to sabotage
Hillary's candidacy, and very effective, mind you. Putin has been an evil genius worthy of
a comic book villain (to date myself, a regular Lex Luthor). Sez who, ask I? Sez the
trustworthy American media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know,
professional paragons of virtue like Rachel Maddow and her merry band.
Nobody seems aware of the recent findings about Halpern, none seem to have a realistic
handle on the miniscule scope of the Russian "offenses" against American democracy. Rachel,
the NY Times and WaPo have seen to that with their sins of both commission and omission.
Even the Republican party is doing a half-hearted job of defending its own power base with
rigorous and openly disseminated fact checking. It's like even many of the committee chairs
with long seniority are reluctant to buck the conventional narrative peddled by the media.
Many have chosen to retire rather than fight the media and the Deep State. What's a better
interpretation of events? Or is one to believe that the silent voices, curious retirements
and political heat generated by the Dems, the prosecutors and the media are all independent
variables with no connections? These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it,
especially when directed at them.
Personally, I think that not only the GOPers should be fighting like the devil to expose
the truth (which should benefit them in this circumstance) but so should the media and all
the watchdog agencies (ngo's) out there because our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT
by the Russians.
Worse than that, it was done by internal domestic enemies of the people
who must be outed and punished to save the constitution and the republic, if it is not too
late. All the misinformation by influential insiders and the purported purveyors of truth
accompanied by the deliberate silence by those who should be chirping like birds suggests
it may well be far too late.
So British were involved in fabricating of 'Guccifer 2.0' persona. Nice...
Notable quotes:
"... It was Matt Tait who, using the 'Twitter' handle @pwnallthethings, identified the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky in the 'metadata' of the 'Guccifer 2.0' material on 15 June 2016, the day after Ellen Nakashima first disseminated the BS from 'CrowdStrike' in the 'WP.' ..."
"... 'Matt Tait is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he was CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a consultancy in the UK, worked at Google Project Zero, was a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ.' ..."
"... As I have noted before on SST, a cursory examination of records at 'Companies House' establishes that 'Capital Alpha Security', which was supposed to have provided Tait with an – independent – source of income at the time he unearthed this 'smoking gun' incriminating the GRU, never did any business at all. So, a question arises: how was Tait making ends meet at that time: busking on the London underground, perhaps? ..."
"... The document, when available, may clarify a few loose ends, but the general picture seems clear. Last November, Tait filed 'dormant company accounts' for the company's first year in existence, up until February 2017. One can only do this if one has absolutely no revenue, and absolutely no expenditure. Not even the smallest contract to sort out malware on someone's computer, or to buy equipment for the office. ..."
"... He then failed to file the 'Confirmation statement', which every company must is legally obliged to produce annually, if it is not to be struck off. This failure led to a 'First Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off' in May. ..."
"... However, Tait may well anticipate that there is there will never be any call for him to go back into the big wide world, as the large organisation in which he has now found employment is part of a 'Borgist' network. So much is evident from another entry on the 'Lawfare' site: ..."
"... Also relevant here is the fact that, rather transparently, this placing of the GRU centre stage is bound up with the attempt to suggest that there is some kind of 'Gerasimov doctrine', designed to undermine the West by 'hybrid warfare.' Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted and confessed. In March, he published a piece on the 'Foreign Policy' site, under the title: 'I'm Sorry for Creating the 'Gerasimov Doctrine'; I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.' ..."
"... Quite clearly, the 'Guccifer 2.0' persona is a crude fabrication by someone who has absolutely no understanding of, or indeed interest in, the bitter complexities of both of the history of Russia and of the 'borderlands', not only in the Soviet period but before and after. ..."
"... Jeffrey Carr is one of the latter, and his familiarity with intelligence matters is clear from his organization of the annual "Suits and Spooks" Conference. I believe he was the first to raise questions about the DNC hack which didn't pass his smell test. ..."
"... One quick way to know their bias is the AC test. Google their name plus "Atlantic Council". Ridd fails badly. ..."
"... The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues. The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive. Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer, when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be 100 to the 50th power. ..."
"... There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note. ..."
"... It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no one trusted the contents in Pravda. ..."
"... What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats. ..."
"... I agree that taken by itself, the Dzerzinsky thing would be an anomaly only and could be dismissed as "black humor" of a kind often found in hackers. However, taken with all the other evidence produced by Adam Carter, it becomes much more obviously an attempt to support a false flag "Russian hacker" narrative that otherwise is porous. ..."
"... You want us to believe that the GRU are so sloppy and so inexperienced that they would launch a hack on the DNC and not take every measure to ensure there was no link whatsoever to anything Russian? Any former intel officer worth a damn knows that an operation to disrupt the election in a country the size of the United States would start with a risk/reward assessment, would require a team of at least 100 persons and would not be writing any code that could in any way be traced to Russia. ..."
"... Doctrine-mongering and repeating birth of new faux-academic "entities", such as a "hybrid war" (any war is hybrid by definition), is a distinct feature of the Western "political science-military history" establishment. Galeotti, who for some strange reason passes as Russia "expert" is a perfect example of such "expertise" and doctrine-mongering. Military professionals largely met this "hybrid warfare" BS with disdain. ..."
"... I have to say that the more I look into this whole Russiagate affair, which is mostly in the minds of democrats (and a few republicans) and the MSM, the more it seems that there is indeed a foreign conspiracy to meddle in the internal affairs of the US (and in the presidential elections) but the meddling entity is not Russia. It is the British! ..."
"... So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don't question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven't been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax. ..."
As some commenters on SST seem still to have difficulty grasping that the presence of 'metadata' alluding to 'Iron Felix' in the
'Guccifer 2.0' material is strong evidence that the GRU were being framed over a leak, rather than that they were responsible for
a hack, an update on the British end of the conspiracy seems in order.
If you look at the 'Lawfare' blog, in which a key figure is James Comey's crony Benjamin Wittes, you will find a long piece published
last Friday, entitled 'Russia Indictment 2.0: What to Make of Mueller's Hacking Indictment.'
Among the authors, in addition to Wittes himself, is the sometime GCHQ employee Matt Tait. It appears that the former head of
that organisation, the Blairite 'trusty' Robert Hannigan, who must know where a good few skeletons are buried, is a figure of some
moment in the conspiracy.
It was Matt Tait who, using the 'Twitter' handle @pwnallthethings, identified the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky in the 'metadata'
of the 'Guccifer 2.0' material on 15 June 2016, the day after Ellen Nakashima first disseminated the BS from 'CrowdStrike' in the
'WP.'
The story was picked up the following day in a report on the 'Ars Technica' site, and Tait's own account appeared on the 'Lawfare'
site, to which he has been a regular contributor, on 28 July.
According to the CV provided in conjunction with the new article:
'Matt Tait is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University
of Texas at Austin. Previously he was CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a consultancy in the UK, worked at Google Project Zero, was
a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ.'
As I have noted before on SST, a cursory examination of records at 'Companies House' establishes that 'Capital Alpha Security',
which was supposed to have provided Tait with an – independent – source of income at the time he unearthed this 'smoking gun' incriminating
the GRU, never did any business at all. So, a question arises: how was Tait making ends meet at that time: busking on the London
underground, perhaps?
Actually, there has been a recent update in the records. Somewhat prematurely perhaps, there is an entry dated 24 July 2018, entitled
'Final Gazette dissolved via compulsory strike-off. This document is being processed and will be available in 5 days.'
The document, when available, may clarify a few loose ends, but the general picture seems clear. Last November, Tait filed 'dormant
company accounts' for the company's first year in existence, up until February 2017. One can only do this if one has absolutely no
revenue, and absolutely no expenditure. Not even the smallest contract to sort out malware on someone's computer, or to buy equipment
for the office.
He then failed to file the 'Confirmation statement', which every company must is legally obliged to produce annually, if it is
not to be struck off. This failure led to a 'First Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off' in May.
It is, of course, possible that at the time Tait set up the company he was genuinely intending to try to make a go of a consultancy,
and simply got sidetracked by other opportunities.
However – speaking from experience – people who have set up small 'one man band' companies to market skills learnt in large organisations,
and then go back into such organisations, commonly think it worth their while to spend the minimal amount of time required to file
the documentation required to keep the company alive.
If one sees any realistic prospect that one may either want to or need to go back into the big wide world again, this is the sensible
course of action: particularly now when, with the internet, filing the relevant documentation takes about half an hour a year, and
costs a trivial sum.
However, Tait may well anticipate that there is there will never be any call for him to go back into the big wide world, as the
large organisation in which he has now found employment is part of a 'Borgist' network. So much is evident from another entry on
the 'Lawfare' site:
'Bobby Chesney is the Charles I. Francis Professor in Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas School
of Law. He also serves as the Director of UT-Austin's interdisciplinary research center the Robert S. Strauss Center for International
Security and Law. His scholarship encompasses a wide range of issues relating to national security and the law, including detention,
targeting, prosecution, covert action, and the state secrets privilege; most of it is posted here. Along with Ben Wittes and Jack
Goldsmith, he is one of the co-founders of the blog.'
Also relevant here is the fact that, rather transparently, this placing of the GRU centre stage is bound up with the attempt to
suggest that there is some kind of 'Gerasimov doctrine', designed to undermine the West by 'hybrid warfare.' Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted
and confessed. In March, he published a piece on the 'Foreign Policy' site, under the title: 'I'm Sorry for Creating the 'Gerasimov
Doctrine'; I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.'
If anyone wants to grasp what the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, General Valery Gerasimov,
was actually saying in the crucial February 2013 article which Galeotti was discussing, and how his thinking has developed subsequently,
the place to look is, as so often, the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth.
In relation to the ongoing attempt to frame the GRU, it is material that, in his 2013 piece, Gerasimov harks back to two pivotal
figures in the arguments of the interwar years. Of these, Georgy Isserson, the Jewish doctor's son from Kaunas who became a Civil
War 'political commissar' and then a key associate of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was the great pioneer theorist of 'deep operations.'
The ideas of the other, Aleksandr Svechin, the former Tsarist 'genstabist', born in Odessa into an ethnically Russian military
family, who was the key opponent of Tukhachevky and Isserson in the arguments of the 'Twenties, provided key parts of the intellectual
basis of the Gorbachev-era 'new thinking.'
The 'Ars Technica' article in which Tait's claims were initially disseminated opened:
'We still don't know who he is or whether he works for the Russian government, but one thing is for sure: Guccifer 2.0 – the nom
de guerre of the person claiming he hacked the Democratic National Committee and published hundreds of pages that appeared to prove
it – left behind fingerprints implicating a Russian-speaking person with a nostalgia for the country's lost Soviet era.'
In his 2013 article, Gerasimov harks back to the catastrophe which overcame the Red Army in June 1941. Ironically, this was the
product of the Stalinist leadership's disregard of the cautions produced not only by Svechin, but by Isserson. In regard to the latter,
the article remarks that:
'The fate of this "prophet of the Fatherland" unfolded tragically. Our country paid in great quantities of blood for not listening
to the conclusions of this professor of the General Staff Academy.'
As it happens, while both Svechin and Tukhachevsky were shot by the heirs of 'Felix Edmundovich', the sentence of death on Isserson
was commuted, and he spent the war in prison and labour camps, while others used his ideas to devastating effect against the Germans.
Quite clearly, the 'Guccifer 2.0' persona is a crude fabrication by someone who has absolutely no understanding of, or indeed
interest in, the bitter complexities of both of the history of Russia and of the 'borderlands', not only in the Soviet period but
before and after.
Using this criterion as a 'filter', the obvious candidates are traditional Anglo-Saxon 'Russophobes', like Sir Richard Dearlove
and Christopher Steele, or the 'insulted and injured' of the erstwhile Russian and Soviet empires, so many of them from the 'borderlands',
of the type of Victoria Nuland, or the various Poles, Ukrainians and Balts and Jews who have had so much influence on American policy.
(I should note that other Jews, not only in Russia, but outside, including in Israel, think quite differently, in particular as
they are very well aware, as Isserson would have been, of the extent to which 'borderlands' nationalists were enthusiastic collaborators
with the Germans in the 'Final Solution'. On this, there is a large and growing academic literature.)
It is not particularly surprising that many of the victims of the Russian and Soviet empires have enjoyed seeing the tables turned,
and getting their own back. But it is rather far from clear that this makes for good intelligence or sound policy. We were unable
to load Disqus. If you are a moderator please see our troubleshooting
guide .
How does the objective truth get disclosed in an environment of extreme deceit by so many parties?
How to trust western intelligence when they have such a long and sordid track record of deceit, lies and propaganda? At the
same time there is such a long history of Russian and Chinese intelligence and information operations against the west.
Then there is the nexus among the highest levels of US law enforcement and intelligence as well as political elites in both
parties and key individuals in the media complex.
We are living in a hall of mirrors and it seems the trend is towards confirmation bias in information consumption.
Excellent post, especially the debunking of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' which I always thought was more hand-waving and Russian mind-reading.
It's important to realize that there are a number of people in the infosec community who have biases against Russia, just as
there are in the general population. Then there are more cautious people, who recognize the difficulty in attributing a hack to
any specific person absent solid, incontrovertible, non-circumstantial and non-spoofable (and preferably offline) evidence.
Tait doesn't appear to be one of the latter. Thomas Rid would be another. There are others.
Jeffrey Carr is one of the latter, and his familiarity with intelligence matters is clear from his organization of the annual
"Suits and Spooks" Conference. I believe he was the first to raise questions about the DNC hack which didn't pass his smell test.
There are also a number of companies in infosec who rely on latching onto a particular strain of hacker, the more publicly
exploitable for PR purposes the better, as a means of keeping the company name in front of potential high-profile and highly billable
clients. CrowdStrike and its Russia obsession isn't the only one that's been tagged with that propensity.
Mandiant could be referred to as the "Chinese, all the time" company, for example. Richard Bejtlich was at Fireeye and the
became Chief Security Officer when they acquired Mandiant. He spent quite a bit of effort on his blog warning about the Chinese
military buildup as a huge threat to the US. He's former USAF so perhaps that's not surprising.
Glad David's comment has been reproduced as a post in its own right, this is a critically important topic. IMO Matt Tait plays
the role of midwife in this conspiracy. His
Twitter thread
The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian
State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues.
The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test
locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the
DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive.
Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer,
when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence
would be 100 to the 50th power.
As for the crude trace fingerprints (e.g. the referencing of Dzerzinsky), one of the Wikileaks data dumps (Vault 7 Marble)
during a period when Assange was negotiating with the Administration - there were two at the time (Vault 7 Marble and Vault 7
Grasshopper), the release of which apparently enraged Mike Pompeo- was designed to obfuscate, fabricate and frame countries such
as Russia, Iran or North Korea by pretending to be the target country, including in the use of target's alphabet and language.
VIPs has written numerous articles on this in Consortium News. See also the report by Patrick Lawrence Smith in The Nation
at:
https://www.thenation.com/a... . (It was apparently so hot at the time- and disputed by several other VIPs members- that The
Nation sought an independent assessment by third party, though those comments were easily addressed and dismissed in seriatim
by Binney in an annex to the article.)
Binney has explained his forensic analysis and conclusions at numerous forums, and in a sit-down with Secretary Pompeo in October,
2017- though Mueller, the FBI, and mainstream and some of the alternative press seem either deaf, dumb and blind to it all, or
interested in discrediting the study. The irony is, I'd venture to guess, that Binney, with his 40 years of experience, including
as Technical Director and technical guru at the NSA, is, even in retirement, more sophisticated in these matters than any one
at the Agency, or the FBI, or CIA, or certainly, the Congressional Intelligence Committees. So, it is astounding that any or all
of them could have, but did not, invite him to testify as an expert.
Moreover, the NSA has a record of every transmission, and also would have it on backup files. And, the FBI has been sitting
on Seth Rich's computer and his communications with Wikileaks, and presumably has a report that it has not released. And of course,
as Trump asked in his press conference, where's the DNC server, any or all of which would put this question to rest.
The last clause of the first paragraph should have said: "according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence
would be one over 100 to the 50th power
There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment.
The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any
honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note.
We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright criminality through obfuscation and obstruction
in the case of the meddling in the 2016 election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people
are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media channels.
It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no
one trusted the contents in Pravda.
What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the
US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance
is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats.
That was one of the changes being hoped for when Obama was first elected. Instead we got little, except for things such as
bailed out bankers and the IRS scandal which lasted until the end of his 2nd term. The panic from the left over the 2016 election
issues the are still going on is that the expected candidate isn't in office and they are being exposed. Whether they get prosecuted
is another story.
I think Matt Tait, David Habakkuk and many others are reading far more into this Dzerzinsky thing than what it warrants. The government
dependent ID cards used by my family while I was working as a clandestine case officer overseas were signed by Robert Ludlum.
Intelligence officers often have an odd sense of humor.
On a different note, I fully endorse David Habakkuk's recommendation of the writings of Bartles, McDermott and many others
at the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. They are top notch. I learned a lot from Tim Thomas many years ago.
I agree that taken by itself, the Dzerzinsky thing would be an anomaly only and could be dismissed as "black humor" of a kind
often found in hackers. However, taken with all the other evidence produced by Adam Carter, it becomes much more obviously an
attempt to support a false flag "Russian hacker" narrative that otherwise is porous.
I believe there is a phrase going something like "an attempt to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."
You want us to believe that the GRU are so sloppy and so inexperienced that they would launch a hack on the DNC and not
take every measure to ensure there was no link whatsoever to anything Russian? Any former intel officer worth a damn knows that
an operation to disrupt the election in a country the size of the United States would start with a risk/reward assessment, would
require a team of at least 100 persons and would not be writing any code that could in any way be traced to Russia.
Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted
and confessed.
Doctrine-mongering and repeating birth of new faux-academic "entities", such as a "hybrid war" (any war is hybrid by definition),
is a distinct feature of the Western "political science-military history" establishment. Galeotti, who for some strange reason
passes as Russia "expert" is a perfect example of such "expertise" and doctrine-mongering. Military professionals largely met
this "hybrid warfare" BS with disdain.
I have to say that the more I look into this whole Russiagate affair, which is mostly in the minds of democrats (and a few
republicans) and the MSM, the more it seems that there is indeed a foreign conspiracy to meddle in the internal affairs of the
US (and in the presidential elections) but the meddling entity is not Russia. It is the British!
So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don't question
the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven't been laggards in adding fuel to the fire
by the whole novichok hoax.
This needs to be looked at in more detail by the alternative media and well informed commentators like the host of this site.
The "Deep state" honchos who created this indictment have a working assumption that the USA
remain a sole superpower and that everything is permitted, even if this is a provocation/false
flag operation conducted solely for internal consumption. That might be the assumption that is no
longer true.
Notable quotes:
"... The document itself also provides no information on how the Russian officers and their positions were identified, which suggests that it could have been a US hack or agent in place, either run by CIA or NSA, that came up with a list of those individuals connected to GRU cyber operations. That would be information involving sources and methods, codeword protected material beyond Top Secret. ..."
"... Beyond what is or is not contained in the document itself, there is a clear misunderstanding regarding how a sophisticated intelligence organization, which certainly includes the GRU, operates. ..."
"... Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation . ..."
The document itself also provides no information on how the Russian officers and their
positions were identified, which suggests that it could have been a US hack or agent in place,
either run by CIA or NSA, that came up with a list of those individuals connected to GRU cyber
operations. That would be information involving sources and methods, codeword protected
material beyond Top Secret.
If the GRU list is authentic, it would expose US ability to penetrate that organization,
leading to Moscow tightening up security to the detriment of American intelligence. But it
might alternatively be suggested that the drafters needed a group of plausible Russians and
used a generic list provided by either CIA or NSA to come up with the culprits and then used
those identities and the detailed information regarding them to provide credibility to their
account. What they did not do, however, is provide the actual evidence connecting the
individuals to the "hack/interference" or to connect the same to the Russian government. If the
information in the indictment is completely accurate, which may not be the case, there is some
suggestion that alleged Moscow linked proxies may have deliberately sought to undermine the
campaign of Hillary Clinton to favor Bernie Sanders, but absolutely no evidence that they did
anything to help Donald Trump.
Beyond what is or is not contained in the document itself, there is a clear
misunderstanding regarding how a sophisticated intelligence organization, which certainly
includes the GRU, operates. If there had been a large-scale Kremlin sanctioned plan to
disrupt the US election, it would not be run by twelve identifiable GRU officers working with
what appears to be only limited cover and resources. If the facts are correct, the activity
might have been a routine probing, collecting and selective dissemination of information effort
that all intelligence agencies engage in. The United States does so routinely in many
countries, interfering in elections worldwide, far more than Russia with its limited resources,
and even carrying out regime change.
If the Kremlin's objective were truly to undermine American democracy, a task that is
already being undertaken very ably by the GOP and Democrats, hundreds of officers would be
involved, all working under deep cover and operating securely out of dispersed sites. And no
one involved would be using computers connected to networks that could be penetrated to enable
personal identification or discovery of the ultimate source of the activity. Everyone would be
working in alias on stand-alone machines and the transmission of information would be done
using cut-outs to break any chain of custody. A cut-out might consist of using thumb drives to
transmit information from one computer to another, for example. There would be no sending or
receiving of information by channels that could be identified by NSA or CIA and
compromised.
So the idea that the United States government identified twelve culprits who were
responsible for trying to overthrow American democracy is by any measure ludicrous, if indeed
there was a major plan to disrupt the election at all. The indictment is little more than a
political document seeking to undermine any effort by Donald Trump to establish rapprochement
with Vladimir Putin. It will also serve to give fuel to the Democrats, who are still at a loss
to understand what happened to Hillary Clinton, and Republican hawks like John McCain, Lindsay
Graham, Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse who persist in seeking to refight the Cold War. As Donald
Trump and Vladimir Putin said in their Helsinki press conference, the coming together of the
leaders of the world's two most powerful nuclear armed countries is too important an
opportunity to let pass. Cold Warriors in Washington should take note.
For instance, I was a partner in the publication of the emails of John Podesta, Hillary
Clinton's 2016 campaign manager, which were published by WikiLeaks shortly after the infamous
Access Hollywood video revealed candidate Donald Trump making rude remarks about
women.
Many media outlets continue to report that the Podesta emails were released only minutes
after the Access Hollywood video aired, hinting at some sort of coordination between
WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign. In a indictment issued last Friday, Robert S. Mueller III,
the special counsel investigating the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections,
charged 12 officers of the Russian military intelligence service, GRU, for having allegedly
hacked both the DNC and Podesta emails and allegedly passed them on to WikiLeaks for
publication.
I have no idea who WikiLeaks' sources were for the Podesta emails: the whole concept of
WikiLeaks is based on the submission of secret or otherwise restricted documents by anonymous
sources. Assange said numerous times that his source for the Clinton emails was not the Russian
government nor a state party.
As I worked on the Podesta emails, I do know that their publication was not a last-second
decision. I had been alerted the day before, and their staggered release was a choice WikiLeaks
made after the organization was harshly criticized by mainstream media for publishing
the DNC documents all at once. This time the emails would trickle out to make them easier for
the public to digest. But that was criticized too by the U.S. media and the Democrats as an
attempt to leave Clinton bleeding a few weeks before the elections.
... ... ...
Russia perceives Assange as a sort of Western dissident. The country definitely loves the
idea of "Western dissidents" and is happy to stick a finger in the eyes of the West by assuring
wide coverage for Assange and his organization. Russia media highlights the contradictions in
Western democracies which, while preaching aggressive journalism and the protection of
journalistic sources, have instead put Chelsea Manning in prison, charged Snowden, investigated
WikiLeaks for the last eight years and has kept its editor arbitrarily detained with no end in
sight.
Stefania Maurizi works for the Italian daily La Repubblica as an investigative journalist,
after ten years working for the Italian newsmagazine l'Espresso. She has worked on all
WikiLeaks releases of secret documents, and partnered with Glenn Greenwald to reveal the
Snowden files about Italy. She has also interviewed A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani
atomic bomb, revealed the condolence payment agreement between the US government and the family
of the Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto killed in a US drone strike, and investigated the
harsh working conditions of Pakistani workers in a major Italian garment factory in Karachi.
She has started a multi-jurisdictional FOIA litigation effort to defend the right of the press
to access the full set of documents on the Julian Assange and WikiLeaks case. She authored two
books: Dossier WikiLeaks. Segreti Italiani and Una Bomba, Dieci Storie, the latter translated
into Japanese. She can be reached at [email protected]
"... McFaul: "Russia made the whole story up." Typical projection. And Browder only became a critic of Putin (the russian justice system) after his criminal enterprise was uncovered. ..."
"... As a "red blooded, Bible believing American", one who has served under oath, and know the duties and penalties, I suggest it's perhaps the best "diplomatic move" seen since Mr. Putin took up the Secretary of State's offer, took Syria's chemical weapons, and took up truly ridding the Nation of terrorists, both those of Saudi, and those my own government made. ..."
This is pure brilliance on Russia's part. It wont happen, but it draws attention to
the Browder story, and discredits McFaul by association. Very smart. Update : It
appears Michael McFaul is really getting nervous, tweeting like a teenager on meth tonight:
"I hope the White House corrects the record and denounces in categorical terms this
ridiculous request from Putin. Not doing so creates moral equivalency between a legitimacy US
indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented
by Putin"
With The White House flip-flopping back and forth on what was actually said - and meant to
be said - in Helsinki, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dropped the latest tape-bomb to
blow the establishment's mind during to today's press conference.
Sanders reported that President Trump is open to a proposal from Vladimir Putin to let
Russian authorities question the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul .
While Trump reportedly made no commitments to Putin, the Russian president offered to allow
Special Counsel Robert Mueller to observe interrogations of the 12 Russian intelligence agents
indicted by a U.S. grand jury last week for hacking Democratic Party email accounts.
Trump called it an "interesting idea" and an "incredible offer" at the news conference.
Sanders left the press corps dangling by concluding that:
"The president will work with his team and we'll let you know if there's an announcement
on that front."
As The Hill reports, Russia state-owned outlet RT reported that
Russia wanted to question McFaul and the author of the so-called Steele dossier, Christopher
Steele, among others in its investigation into American financier Bill Browder.
Browder is a prominent critic of Putin who lobbied on behalf of the Magnitsky Act, which
imposed sanctions against Russia.
McFaul has denounced the possibility of his being questioned by Russian officials, and has
called on Trump to condemn the proposal .
"Putin has been harassing me for a long time," McFaul said
on Twitter on Wednesday.
"That he now wants to arrest me, however, takes it to a new level. I expect my government
to defend me and my colleagues in public and private ."
And went on...
Does he seem nervous to you?
Source: Zero HedgePutin Asked Trump Permission to Interrogate Obama's Ambassador This is pure brilliance
on Russia's part. It wont happen, but it draws attention to the Browder story, and discredits
McFaul by association. Very smart. Tyler Durden 11 hours ago | 1,727
41 MORE: Politics Update : It appears Michael
McFaul is really getting nervous, tweeting like a teenager on meth tonight:
"I hope the White House corrects the record and denounces in categorical terms this
ridiculous request from Putin. Not doing so creates moral equivalency between a legitimacy US
indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented
by Putin"
With The White House flip-flopping back and forth on what was actually said - and meant to
be said - in Helsinki, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dropped the latest tape-bomb to
blow the establishment's mind during to today's press conference.
Sanders reported that President Trump is open to a proposal from Vladimir Putin to let
Russian authorities question the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul .
While Trump reportedly made no commitments to Putin, the Russian president offered to allow
Special Counsel Robert Mueller to observe interrogations of the 12 Russian intelligence agents
indicted by a U.S. grand jury last week for hacking Democratic Party email accounts.
Trump called it an "interesting idea" and an "incredible offer" at the news conference.
Sanders left the press corps dangling by concluding that:
"The president will work with his team and we'll let you know if there's an announcement
on that front."
As The Hill reports, Russia state-owned outlet RT reported that
Russia wanted to question McFaul and the author of the so-called Steele dossier, Christopher
Steele, among others in its investigation into American financier Bill Browder.
Browder is a prominent critic of Putin who lobbied on behalf of the Magnitsky Act, which
imposed sanctions against Russia.
McFaul has denounced the possibility of his being questioned by Russian officials, and has
called on Trump to condemn the proposal .
"Putin has been harassing me for a long time," McFaul said
on Twitter on Wednesday.
"That he now wants to arrest me, however, takes it to a new level. I expect my government
to defend me and my colleagues in public and private ."
McFaul: "Russia made the whole story up." Typical projection.
And Browder only became a critic of Putin (the russian justice system) after his criminal
enterprise was uncovered.
I did like this one review of your insightful book, Mr. McFoul. If I send you the
review, will you sign it? I'd be honored. Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin By Michael McFaul, Cornell University Press, 2001
http://exiledonline.com/mik...
This book is a four-hundred page testimonial to the intellectual and moral bankruptcy
of the American Russia-watching mafia. In its pages, Michael McFaul condemns himself
again and again with staggering non-sequiturs, self-serving lies, crude
misrepresentations of his own past and the recent history of Russia, and repeated
failures to meet even the most basic standards of academic rigor.
Mr McFaul seems to be unfamiliar with the concept of law and a justice system. If he
is indicted by the Russian courts and required for questioning, why is that any different
from Russian "suspects" being indicted by US courts and required for questioning? Until the justice system has made its inquiries and run its course, no one can know
for sure whether Mr McFaul is guilty of crimes or not. So why does he demand total immunity from justice in such a peremptory, entitled
way?
Surely it can't be because he feels that Americans are in any way "superior",
"exceptional", or immune from justice? Surely Mr McFaul isn't a crude common-or-garden racist? Surely...?
The rub here is the ambassador enjoys diplomatic immunity from prosecution for events
that might have occurred during his tenure in Moscow from Russian courts. If the Trump
DOJ decides he should face the music then he has no immunity.
Your third question answers your second question almost perfectly. Because he feels that Americans are in every way "superior", "exceptional", and should
be immune from justice, no matter how heinous the crimes they have committed.
There fixed it for ya. :-)
What a circus and what a lot of clowns. As they say, nobody is above the law or at least they shouldn't be. I would say that Mr McFaul does protest too much and judging by his rattled statements
appears that he has something to hide. Getting back to basics where is the $400K and how did it get there and did any
go missing on the way?
McFaul is a bag boy shabbos goy for the Jooz that are trying to re-steal (1917, 1991,
2014) Russian wealth. Browder was a discarded Rothschild foreskin.
Earl Browder was lauding Soviet Russia and its successes. He didn't fleece the Russian
people. His grandson is a parasite that hates Russia and has siphoned his ill-gotten
gains from the country. No comparison.
The interesting side of the story is Trump can say yes as president. Not much Michael
McFaul can do then?
It will turn MSM Media upside down.
Btw. NSA can give tips to the Russians about what to ask. They know everything.
Assad probably would also like to question McCain regarding illegal stay in Syria
What I like most of all is Trump´s comment "an interesting idea and an
incredible offer".
ha ha ha ha ha ha.
It will probably not be possible to realize, but it shows Trump is not stupid at all.
Pay Back Time: Puppeticians will be taken out... One at the time...the Longer the Fun
will Last...Russia just make all their Lies Visible... it is a very Strong Weapon...
People are Tired and fed up with Liars, Traitors & Deceivers... Yesterday they caught
our Foreign Minister Blok with some nice Statements...He's like a gut-Shot animal at the
moment...one more Trick and He is Exit....just keep an eye on him...
https://www.aljazeera.com/n...
Stef Blok... You are a complete idiot... take your stuff and Buzz Off...the IMF or the
European Union always can use Some Retarded Ex-Puppeticians Like You...
"Trump invited Putin to Washington for summit: White House".
Washington: President Donald Trump invited Russian leader Vladimir Putin to Washington
for a summit in the northern autumn.
"In Helsinki, @POTUS agreed to ongoing working level dialogue between the two security
council staffs," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a tweet on Thursday.
"President Trump asked @AmbJohnBolton to invite President Putin to Washington in the fall
and those discussions are already underway.
Sanders announced the invitation less than an hour after the
Republican-led Senate effectively rebuked President Donald Trump for considering Russia's
request to question US officials, giving voice to growing unease over the president's
relationship with Putin following their summit in Helsinki on Monday...
Russia should be allowed to question McFaul. We should honor the treaty.
Unfortunately, the intelligence agencies have more power than the president at this
point. They want to assassinate him.
As a "red blooded, Bible believing American", one who has served under oath, and know
the duties and penalties, I suggest it's perhaps the best "diplomatic move" seen since
Mr. Putin took up the Secretary of State's offer, took Syria's chemical weapons, and took
up truly ridding the Nation of terrorists, both those of Saudi, and those my own
government made.
I was afraid for a bit, Syria was going to be broken, and I've served
beside Syrian Army in Beirut, I respect them highly, consider them among the best
professionals, as the world can easily see they are, and I hate what a criminal cadre are
doing to my Country, while we enjoy our sit/coms and beer, and eat snacks and get
fat.
God Bless Russia and President Putin, "it take's a man to make a man", is an old saying,
and the same is true for Nations, I expect.
Semper Fidelis,
John McClain
Vanceboro, NC, USA
You did not understand the proposal. Russian police interrogates the indicted Russian
officials, and Mueller and team can be given permission to enter Russia and watch the
interrogations. American police interrogates Browder and accomplices, and Russian police
can be given permission to enter the US and watch the proceedings. Completely fair and
transparent, according to existing Treaty between the 2 countries. Nobody can be
extradited, because there is no extradition treaty between the countries.
If Russia is doing killing and poisoning, how come Soros and Browder are not killed,
if anybody deserves - here are two biggest criminals and both of them are Joos.
"... The governments of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, if their countries are to survive, must give up their deluded hopes of reaching agreements with the United States. No such possibility exists on terms that the countries can accept. ..."
"... American foreign policy rests on threat and force. It is guided by the neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony, a doctrine that is inconsistent with accepting the sovereignty of other countries. ..."
"... The Russians -- especially the naive Atlanticist Integrationists -- should take note of the extreme hostility, indeed, to the point of insanity, directed at the Helsinki meeting across the entirety of the American political, media, and intellectual scene ..."
"... There is no support for Trump's agenda of peace with Russia in the US foreign policy arena. The president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, spoke for them all when he declared that "We must deal with Putin's Russia as the rogue state it is." Russia is a " rogue state" simply because Russia does not accept Washington's overlordship. ..."
"... There is no support even in Trump's own government for normalizing relations with Russia unless the neoconservative definition of normal relations is used. By normal relations neoconservatives mean a vassal state relationship with Washington. That, and only that, is "normal." Russia can have normal relations with America only on the basis of this definition of normal. Sooner or later Putin and Lavrov will have to acknowledge this fact. ..."
"... A lie repeated over and over becomes a fact. That is what has happened to Russiagate. Despite the total absence of any evidence, it is now a fact in America that Putin himself put Trump in the Oval Office. That Trump met with Putin at Helsinki is considered proof that Trump is Putin's lackey, as the New York Times and many others now assert as self-evident. That Trump stood next to "the murderous thug Putin" and accepted Putin's word that Russia did not interfere in the election of the US president is regarded as double proof that Trump is in Putin's pocket and that the Russiagate story is true. ..."
The governments of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, if their countries are to
survive, must give up their deluded hopes of reaching agreements with the United States. No
such possibility exists on terms that the countries can accept.
American foreign policy rests on threat and force. It is guided by the neoconservative
doctrine of US hegemony, a doctrine that is inconsistent with accepting the sovereignty of
other countries. The only way that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea can reach an agreement
with Washington is to become vassals like the UK, all of Europe, Canada, Japan, and
Australia.
The Russians -- especially the naive Atlanticist Integrationists -- should take note of the
extreme hostility, indeed, to the point of insanity, directed at the Helsinki meeting across
the entirety of the American political, media, and intellectual scene. Putin is incorrect that
US-Russian relations are being held hostage to an internal US political struggle between the
two parties. The Republicans are just as insane and just as hostile to President Trump's effort
to improve American-Russian relations as the Democrats, as Donald
Jeffries reminds us .
The American rightwing is just as opposed as the leftwing. Only a few experts, such as
Stephen Cohen and Amb. Jack Matlock , President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union, have
spoken out in support of Trump's attempt to reduce the dangerous tensions between the nuclear
powers. Only a few pundits have explained the actual facts and the stakes.
There is no support for Trump's agenda of peace with Russia in the US foreign policy arena.
The president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, spoke for them all when he
declared that "We must deal with Putin's Russia as the rogue state it is." Russia is a " rogue state" simply because Russia does not accept Washington's overlordship.
Not for any other reason.
There is no support even in Trump's own government for normalizing relations with Russia
unless the neoconservative definition of normal relations is used. By normal relations
neoconservatives mean a vassal state relationship with Washington. That, and only that, is
"normal." Russia can have normal relations with America only on the basis of this definition of
normal. Sooner or later Putin and Lavrov will have to acknowledge this fact.
A lie repeated over and over becomes a fact. That is what has happened to Russiagate.
Despite the total absence of any evidence, it is now a fact in America that Putin himself put
Trump in the Oval Office. That Trump met with Putin at Helsinki is considered proof that Trump
is Putin's lackey, as the New York Times and many others now assert as self-evident. That Trump
stood next to "the murderous thug Putin" and accepted Putin's word that Russia did not
interfere in the election of the US president is regarded as double proof that Trump is in
Putin's pocket and that the Russiagate story is true.
"... Propaganda works, proved effective time and again – why it's a key tool in America's deep state playbook. ..."
"... Virtually anything repeated enough, especially through the major media megaphone, gets most people to believe it – no matter how preposterous the claim. ..."
"... Normalized relations with Russia and world peace are anathema notions in Washington. Bipartisan neocons infesting the US political establishment want none of it. America's hegemonic aims matter most – wanting dominance over planet earth, its resources and populations. Endless wars of aggression, color revolutions, and other unlawful practices harmful to human rights and welfare are its favored strategies. ..."
Propaganda works, proved effective time and again – why it's a key tool in
America's deep state playbook.
Virtually anything repeated enough, especially through the major media megaphone, gets
most people to believe it – no matter how preposterous the claim.
Not a shred of evidence suggests Russia meddled in America's political process –
nothing.
Yet an earlier NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed most Americans believe the Russia
did it Big Lie. A months earlier Gallup poll showed three-fourths of Americans view Vladimir
Putin unfavorably.
Americans are easy marks to be fooled. No matter how many times they were deceived before,
they're easily manipulated to believe most anything drummed into their minds by the power of
repetitious propaganda – fed them through through the major media megaphone – in
lockstep with the official falsified narrative.
America's dominant media serve as a propaganda platform for US imperial and monied interests
– acting as agents of deception, betraying their readers and viewers time and again
instead of informing them responsibly.
CNN
presstitute Poppy Harlow played a clip on air of Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asking Putin
in Helsinki the following question:
"Did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials
to help him do that?"
Putin said: "Yes," he wanted Trump to win "because he talked about bringing the US-Russia
relationship back to normal," as translated from his Russian language response.
Here's the precise translation of his remark:
"Yes, I wanted him to win, because he talked about the need to normalize US-Russia
relations," adding:
"Isn't it natural to have sympathy towards a man who wants to restore relations with your
country? That's normal."
Putin did not address the fabricated official narrative notion that he directed his
officials to help Trump win. Yet CNN's Harlow claimed otherwise, falsely claiming he ordered
Kremlin officials to help Trump triumph over Hillary.
He did nothing of the kind or say it, nor did any other Kremlin officials. No evidence
proves otherwise – nothing but baseless accusations supported only by the power of
deceptive propaganda.
Time and again, CNN, the NYT, and rest of America's dominant media prove themselves
untrustworthy.
They consistently abandon journalism the way it's supposed to be, notably on geopolitical
issues, especially on war and peace and anything about Russia.
After rejecting, or at least doubting, the official narrative about alleged Russian meddling
in the US political process to aid his election, Trump backtracked post-Helsinki –
capitulating to deep state power.
First in the White House, he said he misspoke abroad – then on CBS News Wednesday
night, saying it's "true," deplorably adding:
Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, and he "would" hold Russian President
Vladimir Putin responsible for the interference – that didn't occur, he failed to
stress.
GLOR: "You say you agree with US intelligence that Russia meddled in the election in
2016."
TRUMP: "Yeah and I've said that before, Jeff. I have said that numerous times before, and
I would say that is true, yeah."
GLOR: "But you haven't condemned Putin, specifically. Do you hold him personally
responsible?"
TRUMP: "Well, I would, because he's in charge of the country. Just like I consider myself
to be responsible for things that happen in this country. So certainly as the leader of a
country you would have to hold him responsible, yes."
GLOR: "What did you say to him?"
TRUMP: "Very strong on the fact that we can't have meddling. We can't have any of that
– now look. We're also living in a grown-up world."
"Will a strong statement – you know – President Obama supposedly made a strong
statement. Nobody heard it."
"What they did hear is a statement he made to Putin's very close friend. And that
statement was not acceptable. Didn't get very much play relatively speaking. But that
statement was not acceptable."
"But I let him know we can't have this. We're not going to have it, and that's the way
it's going to be."
There you have it – Trump capitulating to America's deep state over Russia on national
television.
From day one in power, he caved to the national security state, Wall Street, and other
monied interests over popular ones.
The sole redeeming part of his agenda was wanting improved relations with Russia and
Vladimir Putin personally – preferring peace over possible confrontation, wanting the
threat of nuclear war defused.
Despite tweeting post-Helsinki that he and Putin "got along well which truly bothered many
haters who wanted to see a boxing match," his remarks on CBS News showed he'll continue dirty
US business as usual toward Russia.
Anything positive from summit talks appears abandoned by capitulating to deep state power
controlling him and his agenda.
Normalized relations with Russia and world peace are anathema notions in Washington.
Bipartisan neocons infesting the US political establishment want none of it. America's
hegemonic aims matter most – wanting dominance over planet earth, its resources and
populations. Endless wars of aggression, color revolutions, and other unlawful practices
harmful to human rights and welfare are its favored strategies.
Will Americans go along with sacrificing vital freedoms for greater security from invented
enemies – losing both? Will US belligerent confrontation with Russia inevitably follow?
Will mushroom-shaped denouement eventually kill us all?
*
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research
based in Chicago.
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US
Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III. http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html "
"... They secured and and announced the indictments "with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States." ..."
"... That language is from 1799's Logan Act (18 U.S.C. § 953). Its constitutionality is suspect and no one has ever been indicted under it in the 219 years since its passage. Rosenstein and Mueller aren't likely to be the first two, and may not even technically have violated its letter. But I'd be hard put to name a more obvious, intentional, or flagrant act in violation of its spirit. ..."
Friday the 13th is presumably always someone's unlucky day. Just whose may not be obvious at the time, but I suspect that "Russiagate"
special counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein already regret picking Friday, July 13 to announce the
indictments of 12 Russian intelligence officers on charges relating to an embarrassing 2016 leak of Democratic National Committee
emails. They should.
Legally, the indictments are of almost no value. Those indicted will never be extradited to the US for trial, and the case that
an external "hack" – as opposed to an internal DNC leak – even occurred is weak at best, if for no other reason than that the DNC
denied the FBI access to its servers, instead commissioning a private "cybersecurity analysis" to reach the conclusion it wanted
reached before hectoring government investigators to join that conclusion.
Diplomatically, on the other hand, the indictments and the timing of the announcement were a veritable pipe bomb, thrown into
preparations for a scheduled Helsinki summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
House Republicans, already incensed with Rosenstein over his attempts to stonewall their probe into the Democratic Party's use
of the FBI as a proprietary political hit squad, are planning a renewed effort to impeach him. If he goes down, Mueller likely does
as well. And at this point, it would take a heck of an actor to argue with a straight face that the effort is unjustified.
Their timing was clearly intentional. Their intent was transparently political. Mueller and Rosenstein were attempting to hijack
the Trump-Putin summit for the purpose of depriving Trump of any possible "wins" that might come out of it.
They secured and and announced the indictments "with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government
or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures
of the United States."
That language is from 1799's Logan Act (18 U.S.C. § 953). Its constitutionality is suspect and no one has ever been indicted
under it in the 219 years since its passage. Rosenstein and Mueller aren't likely to be the first two, and may not even technically
have violated its letter. But I'd be hard put to name a more obvious, intentional, or flagrant act in violation of its spirit.
Rosenstein and Mueller are attempting to conduct foreign policy by special prosecutor, a way of doing things found nowhere in
the US Constitution. Impeachment or firing should be the least of their worries. I'm guessing that there are laws other than the
Logan Act that could, and should, be invoked to have them fitted for orange coveralls and leg irons pending an appointment with a
judge.
That they even have defenders is proof positive that some of Trump's most prominent opponents consider "rule of law" a quaint
and empty concept – a useful slogan, nothing more – even as they continually, casually, and hypocritically invoke it whenever they
think doing so might politically disadvantage him.
Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William
Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism . He lives and works in north central Florida. This article is reprinted
with permission from William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
It was a remarkable moment in a remarkable press conference. President Donald Trump had just
finished a controversial summit meeting in Helsinki with his Russian counterpart Vladimir
Putin, and
the two were talking to the media . Jeff Mason, a political affairs reporter with Reuters,
stood up and asked Putin a question pulled straight out of the day's headlines: "Will you
consider extraditing the 12 Russian officials that were indicted last week by a U.S. grand
jury?"
The "12 Russian officials" Mason spoke of were military intelligence officers accused of
carrying out a series of cyberattacks against various American-based computer networks
(including those belonging to the Democratic National Committee), the theft of emails and other
data, and the release of a significant portion of this information to influence the outcome of
the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The names and organizational affiliations of these 12
officers were contained in a detailed 29-page indictment prepared by special
prosecutor Robert Mueller, and subsequently made public by Assistant Attorney General Rob
Rosenstein on July 13 -- a mere three days prior to the Helsinki summit.
Vladimir Putin responded, "We have an existing agreement between the United States of
America and the Russian Federation, an existing treaty, that dates back to 1999, the mutual
assistance on criminal cases. This treaty is in full effect. It works quite efficiently."
Putin then discussed the relationship between this agreement -- the 1999 Mutual Legal Assistance
Treaty -- and the Mueller indictment. "This treaty has specific legal procedures," Putin
noted, that "we can offer the appropriate commission headed by special attorney Mueller. He can
use this treaty as a solid foundation and send a formal and official request to us so that we
would interrogate, we would hold the questioning of these individuals who he believes are privy
to some crimes and our enforcement are perfectly able to do this questioning and send the
appropriate materials to the United States."
In the
uproar that followed the Trump-Putin press conference , the exchange between Mason and
Putin was largely forgotten amidst invective over Trump's seeming public capitulation on the
issue of election interference. "Today's press conference in Helsinki," Senator John McCain
observed afterwards in a typical comment, "was one of the most disgraceful performances by an
American president in memory."
It took an
interview with Putin after the summit concluded , conducted by Fox News's Chris Wallace, to
bring the specific issue of the 12 indicted Russians back to the forefront and give it context.
From Putin's perspective, this indictment and the way it was handled by the United States was a
political act. "It's the internal political games of the United States. Don't make the
relationship between Russia and the United States -- don't hold it hostage of this internal
political struggle. And it's quite clear to me that this is used in the internal political
struggle, and it's nothing to be proud of for American democracy, to use such dirty methods in
the political rivalry."
Regarding the indicted 12, Putin reiterated the points he had made earlier to Jeff Mason.
"We -- with the United States -- we have a treaty for assistance in criminal cases, an existing
treaty that exists from 1999. It's still in force, and it works sufficiently. Why wouldn't
Special Counsel Mueller send us an official request within the framework of this agreement? Our
investigators will be acting in accordance with this treaty. They will question each individual
that the American partners are suspecting of something. Why not a single request was filed?
Nobody sent us a single formal letter, a formal request."
There is no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Russia, which makes all the calls for
Trump to demand the extradition of the 12 Russians little more than a continuation of the
"internal political games" Putin alluded to in his interview. There is, however, the treaty
that Putin referenced at both the press conference and during the Wallace interview.
Signed in Moscow on June 17, 1999, the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty calls for the
"prevention, suppression and investigation of crimes" by both parties "in accordance with the
provisions of this Treaty where the conduct that is the subject of the request constitutes a
crime under the laws of both Parties."
It should be noted that the indicted 12 have not violated any Russian laws. But the Mutual
Legal Assistance Treaty doesn't close the door on cooperation in this matter. Rather, the
treaty notes that "The Requested Party may, in its discretion, also provide legal assistance
where the conduct that is the subject of the request would not constitute a crime under the
laws of the Requested Party."
It specifically precludes the process of cooperating from inferring a right "on the part of
any other persons to obtain evidence, to have evidence excluded, or to impede the execution of
a request." In short, if the United States were to avail itself of the treaty's terms, Russia
would not be able to use its cooperation as a vehicle to disrupt any legal proceedings underway
in the U.S.
The legal assistance that the treaty facilitates is not inconsequential. Through it, the
requesting party can, among other things, obtain testimony and statements from designated
persons; receive documents, records, and other items; and arrange the transfer of persons in
custody for testimony on the territory of the requesting party.
If the indictment of the 12 Russians wasn't the "dirty method" used in a domestic American
"political rivalry" that Putin described, one would imagine that Assistant Attorney General Rob
Rosenstein would have availed himself of the opportunity to gather additional evidence
regarding the alleged crimes. He would also have, at the very least, made a request to have
these officers appear in court in the United States to face the charges put forward in the
indictment. The treaty specifically identifies the attorney general of the United States "or
persons designated by the Attorney General" as the "Central Authority" for treaty
implementation. Given the fact that Jeff Sessions has recused himself from all matters
pertaining to the investigation by the Department of Justice into allegations of Russian
meddling in the 2016 election, the person empowered to act is Rosenstein.
There are several grounds under the treaty for denying requested legal assistance, including
anything that might prejudice "the security or other essential interests of the Requested
Party." However, it also requires that the reasons for the any denial of requested assistance
be put in writing. Moreover, prior to denying a request, the Requested Party "shall consult
with the Central Authority of the Requesting Party to consider whether legal assistance can be
given subject to such conditions as it deems necessary. If the Requesting Party accepts legal
assistance subject to these conditions, it shall comply with the conditions."
By twice raising the treaty in the context of the 12 Russians, Putin has clearly signaled
that Russia would be prepared to proceed along these lines.
If the indictment issued by the Department of Justice is to be taken seriously, then it is
incumbent upon Rosenstein to call Putin's bluff, and submit a detailed request for legal
assistance per the mandate and procedures specified in the treaty -- in short, compel Russia to
either put up or shut up.
Any failure to do so would only confirm Putin's assertion that the indictment was a
political game to undermine the presidency of Donald J. Trump.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert
Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author ofDeal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road to
War .
Very cogent analysis. Putin, who's incredibly well briefed, knew exactly what he was
offering, and thought that by doing so, would force the DoJ/Mueller to either take him up on
his offer or otherwise display the overt politicism of the indictments. But the American
anti-Trump mindhive is so completely addled, they of course miss the point entirely. The
absence of reason among the anti-Trump/anti-Russia collective is truly something to behold
– it's scary.
The request V. Putin proposed and Scot Ritter writes about, if send to Russia, would be
equivalent to 'go and whistle' and would be treated the same way the Russians treat the
requests from Poland to return the remains of the Polish plane that crashed in controversial
and strange circumstances near Smolensk on April 10, 2010. They, the Russians, did not return
the remains of the plane up until today and the place where the plane crashed they bulldozed
the ground and paved with very thick layer of concrete.
Such request would only give the Russians propaganda tools to delay and dilute any
responsibility from the Russian side and at the end they would blame the USA for the whole
mess with no end to their investigation, because they would investigate until the US
investigators would drop dead. Anybody who seriously thinks about V.
Putin offer to investigate anything with Russia should first have his head examined by a
very good, objective, and politically neutral head specialist.
"If the indictment issued by the Department of Justice is to be taken seriously, then it is
incumbent upon Rosenstein to call Putin's bluff, and submit a detailed request for legal
assistance per the mandate and procedures specified in the treaty -- in short, compel Russia
to either put up or shut up.
Any failure to do so would only confirm Putin's assertion that the indictment was a
political game to undermine the presidency of Donald J. Trump."
That was one long-winded way of recognizing that Putin just told the US biparty
establishment behind the manufactured "Russia!" hysteria to put up or shut up.
I don't think that Pres Putin has anything to lose here.
"ARTICLE 4 DENIAL OF LEGAL ASSISTANCE
The Central Authority of the Requested Party may deny legal assistance if:
(1) the request relates to a crime under military law that is not a crime under general
criminal law;
(2) the execution of the request would prejudice the security or other essential interests
of the Requested Party; or "whether accurate or not the treaty permits a denial of request,
if said requests threaten Russian security."
Almost by definition, an investigation interrogation by the US of the personnel in
question because said questioning might very well stray into other areas , unrelated to the
hacking charge. Now Pres. Putin has played two cards: a treaty is in place that deals with
criminal matters between the two states and surely must have known that and should have
already made the formal requests in conjunction with the treaty or he didn't know either way,
the rush to embarrass the president may very well backfire. As almost everything about this
investigation has.
Right! That's not going to happen .the DOJ has no proof .their indictment was a ploy to
queer any deal with Russia. Anybody that believes anything the 'intelligence' agencies say,
without proof, is an idiot.
"... No Russian interference in America's political process occurred in 2016, earlier, or is being cooked up for the nation's November midterm elections. ..."
"... Trump knows it and said so in Helsinki. When asked if he holds Russia accountable for anything, he said: ..."
"... Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago. ..."
"... VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected]. My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III." http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ..."
No Russian interference in America's political process occurred in 2016, earlier, or is
being cooked up for the nation's November midterm elections.
Trump knows it and said so in Helsinki. When asked if he holds Russia accountable for
anything, he said:
"I hold both countries responsible (for dismal bilateral relations). I think that the
United States has been foolish. I think we've all been foolish And I think we're all to
blame."
Regarding election meddling, he said:
"There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it. And people are being brought out to
the fore. So far that I know, virtually none of it related to the campaign. And they're going
to have to try really hard to find somebody that did relate to the campaign."
"My people came to me and some others (T)hey think it's Russia President Putin said it's
not Russia. I will say this: I dont see any reason why it would be."
" President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today."
Trump is wrong about most things, not this. No evidence, nothing, proves Russian meddling in
the US political process.
If it existed, it would have been revealed long ago. It never was and never will be because
there's nothing credible to reveal, Big Lies alone.
Trump's above remarks were in Helsinki. In response to a raging Russophobic firestorm of
criticism back home, he backtracked from his above comments, saying he misspoke abroad.
He accepts the intelligence community's claim about Russian US election meddling –
knowing it didn't occur.
Russiagate was cooked up by Obama's thuggish Russophobic CIA director John Brennan , media
keeping the Big Lie alive.
DNC/John Podesta emails were leaked, not hacked – an indisputable fact media
scoundrels suppress to their disgrace.
Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray earlier explained that
"(t)he source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all," adding:
"I discovered what the source was when I attended the Sam Adam's whistleblower award in
Washington."
"The source of these emails (came) from within official circles in Washington DC. You
should look to Washington, not to Moscow."
"WikiLeaks has never published any material received from the Russian government or from
any proxy of the Russian government. It's simply a completely untrue claim designed to divert
attention from the content of the material" and its true source.
The Big Lie alone matters when it's the official narrative. The Russian meddling hoax and
mythical Kremlin threat to US security are central to maintaining adversarial relations with
America's key invented enemy.
It's vital to unjustifiably justifying the nation's global empire of bases, its outrageous
amount of military spending, its belligerence toward all sovereign independent states, its
endless wars of aggression, its scorn for world peace and stability, its neoliberal harshness
to pay for it all, along with transferring the nation's wealth from ordinary people to its
privileged class.
America's deeply corrupted political process is far too debauched to fix, rigged to serve
wealth, power and privilege exclusively, at war on humanity at home and abroad.
It's a tyrannical plutocracy and oligarchy, a police state, not a democracy, a cesspool of
criminality, inequity and injustice, run by sinister dark forces – monied interests and
bipartisan self-serving political scoundrels, wicked beyond redemption, threatening humanity's
survival.
Today is the most perilous time in world history. What's going on should terrify everyone
everywhere.
Washington's rage for global dominance, its military madness, its unparalleled recklessness,
threatens world peace, stability, and survival.
*
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research
based in Chicago.
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."
Everyone messes with everyone in their elections around the world. My first
question is why is the media on both sides still pounding the American
public with the "Russia did it" bullhorn. What exactly does Russia gain ?
They're 9 times smaller than NATO. China has the most to gain.
The
Ukrainians were working with Hillary against Trump. The Deep State has the
ability to make every act of espionage look like Russia did it. The DNC
didn't turn over their server to the FBI. The Awan server disappeared too.
Something smells terrible, like Kankles Huma hole.
jesus they can accuse you of being a putin puppet if you don't...
and how do you defend yourself.. "how dare you insult every branch of
our intelligence agencies"( and the lying james clapper!!!! )how dare
you...?
Hey Groot, I think these countries hack and spy on each other 24/7.
It's bullshit. They appoint a special prosecutor and with the
exceptions of the BS Flynn and Manafort charges the only others he's
charged are non-americans. Nothing about the elephant in the room, the
billion dollar + money laundering schemes and treason of the
Obama/Clinton and their lackeys.
Looks like it was actually China which implemented forwarding of all 30K email to controlled
by them account. See sic_semper_tyrannis blog for details. This is a bombshell revelation, if
true,
For debunking of the information presented in the indictment see
To me Mueller fiction sounds like a second rate Crowdstrike "security porn" -- a bragging
about non-existent capabilities.
And I agree that the "Le Carre level of details" with names (which are obviously
classified) are extremely suspicious. It also invites a nasty retaliation, because it breaks
de-facto mode of work of intelligence agencies with each other and undermines any remnant of
trust (if such exists in respect to CIA; it probably existed for NSA).
As sessions were encrypted so to decode them you need to steal SSH key, or break SSH
encryption. Both are not very realistic, and, if realistic, disclosing such NSA capabilities
greatly damages those capabilities.
Also Guccifer 2.0 Internet personality looks more and more to me like a false flag
operation with the specific goal to implicate Russians. Mueller is actually pretty adept in
operating in such created for specific purpose "parallel reality" due to specifics of his
career. So nothing new here. Just a strong stench of a false flag operation
Another weak point is the use of CCcleaner. This is not how professionals from state
intelligence agencies operate. Any Flame-style exfiltration software (and Flame was pioneered
by the USA ;-) has those capabilities built-in, so exposing your activities in Windows logs
is just completely stupid.
The Russian government on Friday strongly denied the charges. In a statement, the Foreign
Ministry called the indictments "a shameful farce" that was not backed up by any evidence.
"Obviously, the goal of this 'mud-slinging' is to spoil the atmosphere before the
Russian-American summit," the statement said.
The Ministry added that the 12 named Russians were not agents of the GRU.
" When you dig into this indictment there are huge problems, starting with how in the world
did they identify 12 Russian intelligence officers with the GRU?" said former CIA analyst Larry
Johnson in an interview with Consortium News. Johnson pointed out that the U.S. Defense
Intelligence Agency was not allowed to take part in the January 2017 Intelligence Community
Assessment on alleged interference by the GRU. Only hand-picked analysts from the FBI, the NSA
and the CIA were involved.
" The experts in the intelligence community on the GRU is the Defense Intelligence Agency
and they were not allowed to clear on that document," Johnson said.
" When you look at the level of detail about what [the indictment is] claiming, there is no
other public source of information on this, and it was not obtained through U.S. law
enforcement submitting warrants and getting affidavits to conduct research in Russia, so it's
clearly intelligence information from the NSA, most likely," Johnson said.
CrowdStrike's Role
The indictment makes clear any evidence of an alleged hack of the DNC and DCCC computers did
not come from the FBI, which was never given access to the computers by the DNC, but instead
from the private firm CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC. It is referred to as Company 1
in the indictment.
" Despite the Conspirators' efforts to hide their activity, beginning in or around May 2016,
both the DCCC and DNC became aware that they had been hacked and hired a security company
("Company 1") to identify the extent of the intrusions," the indictment says.
Dimitri Alperovitch, a CrowdStrike co-founder, is also a senior fellow at the anti-Russian
Atlantic Council think tank.
The indictment doesn't mention it, but within a day, CrowdStrike claimed to find Russian
"fingerprints" in the metadata of a DNC opposition research document, which had been revealed
by DCLeaks, showing Cyrillic letters and the name of the first Soviet intelligence chief. That
supposedly implicated Russia in the hack.
CrowdStrike claimed the alleged Russian intelligence operation was extremely sophisticated
and skilled in concealing its external penetration of the server. But CrowdStrike's conclusion
about Russian "fingerprints" resulted from clues that would have been left behind by extremely
sloppy or amateur hackers -- or inserted intentionally to implicate the Russians.
One of CrowdStrike's founders has ties to the anti-Russian Atlantic Council raising
questions of political bias. And the software it used to determine Russia's alleged involvement
in the DNC hack, was later proved to be faulty in a high-profile case in Ukraine, reported
by the Voice of America.
The indictment then is based at least partially on evidence produced by an interested
private company, rather than the FBI.
Evidence Likely Never to be Seen
Other apparent sources for information in the indictment are intelligence agencies, which
normally create hurdles in a criminal prosecution.
" In this indictment there is detail after detail whose only source could be intelligence,
yet you don't use intelligence in documents like this because if these defendants decide to
challenge this in court, it opens the U.S. to having to expose sources and methods," Johnson
said.
If the U.S. invoked the states secret privilege so that
classified evidence could not be revealed in court a conviction before a civilian jury would be
jeopardized.
Such a trial is extremely unlikely however. That makes the indictment essentially a
political and not a legal document because it is almost inconceivable that the U.S. government
will have to present any evidence in court to back up its charges. This is simply because of
the extreme unlikelihood that arrests of Russians living in Russia will ever be made.
In this way it is similar to the indictment earlier this year of the Internet Research
Agency of St. Petersburg, Russia, a private click bait company that was alleged to have
interfered in the 2016 election by buying social media ads and staging political rallies for
both Clinton and Trump. It seemed that no evidence would ever have to back up the indictment
because there would never be arrests in the case.
But Special Counsel Robert Mueller was stunned when lawyers for the internet company showed
up in Washington demanding
discovery in the case. That caused Mueller to scramble and demand a delay in the first hearing,
which was
rejected by a federal judge. Mueller is now battling to keep so-called sensitive material
out of court.
In both the IRA case and Friday's indictments, the extremely remote possibility of
convictions were not what Mueller was apparently after, but rather the public perception of
Russia's guilt resulting from fevered media coverage of what are after all only accusations,
presented as though it is established fact. Once that impression is settled into the public
consciousness, Mueller's mission would appear to be accomplished.
For instance, the Times routinely dispenses with the adjective "alleged" and
reports the matter as though it is already established fact. It called Friday's indictments,
which are only unproven charges, "the most detailed accusation by the American government to
date of the [not alleged] Russian government's interference in the 2016 election, and it
includes a litany of [not alleged] brazen Russian subterfuge operations meant to foment chaos
in the months before Election Day."
GRU Named as WikiLeak's Source
The indictment claims that GRU agents, posing as Guccifer 2.0, (who says he is a Romanian
hacker) stole the Democratic documents and later emailed a link to them to WikiLeaks, named as
"Organization 1." No charges were brought against WikiLeaks on Friday.
Assange: Denied Russia was his source. (CNBC screenshot)
" After failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents starting in late June 2016, on or
about July 14, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent Organization 1 an email
with an attachment titled 'wk dnc linkl.txt.gpg,'" the indictment says. "The Conspirators
explained to Organization 1 that the encrypted file contained instructions on how to access an
online archive of stolen DNC documents. On or about July 18, 2016, Organization 1 confirmed it
had 'the 1Gb or so archive' and would make a release of the stolen documents' this week.'"
WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange, who is in exile in the Ecuador embassy in
London, has long denied that he got the emails from any government. Instead Assange has
suggested that his source was a disgruntled Democratic Party worker, Seth Rich, whose
murder on the streets of Washington in July 2016 has never been solved.
On Friday, WikiLeaks did not repeat the denial that a government was its source. Instead it
tweeted: "Interesting timing choice by DoJ today (right before Trump-Putin meet), announcing
indictments against 12 alleged Russian intelligence officers for allegedly releasing info
through DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0."
Assange has had all communication with the outside world shut off by the Ecuadorian
government two months ago.
Since the indictments were announced, WikiLeaks has not addressed the charge that GRU
agents, posing as Guccifer 2.0, were its source. WikiLeaks' policy is to refuse to disclose any
information about its sources. WikiLeaks' denial that the Russian government gave them the
emails could be based on its belief that Guccifer 2.0 was who he said he was, and not what the
U.S. indictments allege.
Those indictments claim that the Russian military intelligence agents adopted the personas
of both Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks to publish the Democratic Party documents online, before the
Russian agents, posing as Guccifer 2.0, allegedly supplied WikiLeaks.
The emails, which the indictment does not say are untrue, damaged the Clinton campaign. They
revealed, for instance, that the campaign and the Democratic Party worked to deny the
nomination to Clinton's Democratic Party primary challenger Bernie Sanders.
The indictments also say that the Russian agents purchased the use of a computer server in
Arizona, using bitcoin to hide their financial transactions. The Arizona server was used to
receive the hacked emails from the servers of the Democratic Party and the chairman of
Clinton's campaign, the indictment alleges. If true it would mean the transfer of the emails
took place within the United States, rather than overseas, presumably to Russia.
Some members of the Veterans' Intelligence Professionals for Sanity argue
that metadata evidence points to a local download from the Democratic computers, in other words
a leak, rather than a hack. They write the NSA would have evidence of a hack and, unlike this
indictment, could make the evidence public: " Given NSA's extensive trace capability, we
conclude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked. The
evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since
this could be done without any danger to sources and methods."
That argument was either ignored or dismissed by Mueller's team.
The Geopolitical Context
US enabled Yeltsin's reelection.
It is not only allies of Trump, as the Times thinks, who believe the timing of the
indictments, indeed the entire Russia-gate scandal, is intended to prevent Trump from pursuing
detente with nuclear-armed Russia. Trump said of the indictments that, "I think that really
hurts our country and it really hurts our relationship with Russia. I think that we would have
a chance to have a very good relationship with Russia and a very good chance -- a very good
relationship with President Putin."
There certainly appear to be powerful forces in the U.S. that want to stop that.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Wall Street rushed in behind Boris Yeltsin
and Russian oligarchs to asset strip virtually the entire country, impoverishing the
population. Amid widespread accounts of this grotesque corruption, Washington
intervened in Russian politics to help get Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The political rise
of Vladimir Putin after Yeltsin resigned on New Year's Eve 1999 reversed this course, restoring
Russian sovereignty over its economy and politics.
That inflamed American hawks whose desire is to install another Yeltsin-like figure and
resume U.S. exploitation of Russia's vast natural and financial resources. To advance that
cause, U.S. presidents have supported the eastward expansion of NATO and have deployed 30,000
troops on Russia's borders.
In 2014, the Obama administration helped orchestrate a coup that
toppled the elected government of Ukraine and installed a fiercely anti-Russian regime. The
U.S. also undertook the risky policy of aiding jihadists to overthrow a secular Russian ally in
Syria. The consequences have brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at
any time
since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
In this context, the Democratic Party-led Russia-gate appears to have been used not only to
explain away Clinton's defeat but to stop Trump -- possibly via impeachment or by inflicting
severe political damage -- because he talks about cooperation with Russia.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent forThe Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe,Sunday
Timesof London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at[email protected]and followed
on Twitter @unjoe .
If you enjoyed this original article please consider
making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
They can't allow Assange to speak now, because if he should decide to reveal that Seth
Rich was the leaker, that would create a whole new set of circumstances. Incredible article,
Joe.
Real estate mogul Leona Helmsley is remembered for infamously stating, "Rich people don't
pay taxes. Taxes are for the little people."
Similarly, "Rich people hide evidence (real – or alleged (non-existent) for criminal
or propaganda purposes) under the umbrella of 'national security'. Evidence is for the little
people."
And the great war between truth and lies moves forward
Hank , July 15, 2018 at 9:51 am
As with the last indictment of 'Russian hackers' these GRU officers should retain an
American attorney who can then demand Mueller hand over whatever evidence he has (aka:
discovery). Last time that happened Mueller was forced to refuse (because he had none). That
was embarrassing for Mueller and you'd think he would've learned his lesson not to try the
gimmick again. You'd think.
Sam F , July 15, 2018 at 9:07 am
The entire Russia-gate invention is a diversion from Israel-gate, the control of US
elections and mass media by zionists. That is the story here, not silly disputes over who did
what to reveal DNC emails.
Red_Dog , July 15, 2018 at 8:03 am
1. Lauria is correct when he says, "Some members of the Veterans' Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity argue that metadata evidence points to a local download from the
Democratic computers, in other words a leak, rather than a hack." But he fails to give the
full story. William Binney and some members of the VIPS wrote a memo stating that computer
data showed that the files were downloaded locally to a flash drive because of transmission
speeds. This memo was challenged in a separate memo by Thomas Drake and other members of the
VIPS. To try and resolve the problem The Nation hired an independent computer expert,
Nathanial Freitas, to analyze the memos and date. He concluded that the data did fit the
Binney analysis. But it also fit several other possibilities that used remote access. So the
data could not be used to prove that the files were locally downloaded. https://www.thenation.com/article/a-leak-or-a-hack-a-forum-on-the-vips-memo/
2. Perhaps the most important part of the indictments is not in the Lauria article.
500,000 voters had their data stolen and, because most state-local voter systems are running
on outdated and dilapidated computers, it may be impossible to tell if other systems had been
hacked. Unfortunately, very few people are considering this part of the indictment. It means
that if we want a fair election in 2018 paper ballots should be used. In any case all voting
systems must be auditable.
3. Finally, the level of detail and attribution in the indictments indicates to me that
the NSA and CIA were consulted. And it was worth providing this detail because of the
incredible threat our country is under. The fact that we can now track down hacks with such
precision should give others pause.
Skip Scott , July 15, 2018 at 8:18 am
I think you are jumping to a false conclusion about the "level of detail". The NSA and the
CIA have now had enough time to cut the entire indictment out of whole cloth. Are we supposed
to trust their so called "evidence" at this point, when the entire RussiaGate theater of the
absurd was created to cover their ass and hamstring detente with Russia?
Piotr Berman , July 15, 2018 at 5:11 pm
I did not read the indictment, so I do not know if the level of detail rose to heights
exhibited by Gen. Colin Powell in his famous "white powder vial" speech. Today we know that
the white powder he showed to the entire world could be indeed harmful, as the baby powder of
Johnson and Johnson was revealed to have traces of asbestos. But then again, it could be
genuinely harmless.
On top of that, Innocence Project revealed that surprising number of successful
prosecutions leading to the death penalty were based on hoaxes. For example, the "culprit"
was implicated by his blood being found on a seat of the escape car, however when the defense
examined the vial of the sentenced person blood that was in police possession, it had DNA of
two people -- some blood was removed (presumably, splashed in the escape car) and to mask it,
blood of another person was added. This is stuff done without any political motivation, just
to get good number of solved cases -- the race and prior criminal record of the "culprit"
probably being the bonus.
Creating compelling narratives is what prosecutors do for living. I hope that more often
than not these narratives are true, but a true professional is not bound by such
constraints.
j. D. D. , July 15, 2018 at 7:44 am
Thank you for a thorough and damning report on the indicttments by the cowardly and
thuggish Mueller who, as the author notes, is confident that they nevr be answered in a court
of law. Moreover, with all the hullabaloo attached to Robert Mueller's stunt, the fact
remains that the DNC and John Podesta emails revealed a stunning and irrefutable truth:
Hillary Clinton and the DNC were rigging the election against her Democratic primary
opponent, Bernie Sanders. However, I would add two aspects which place into context the
timing of Mueller's publicity stunt. First, that it came on the heels of embattled FBI Agent
Peter Strzok's appearance before a joint House hearing on Thursday at which Strzok claimed
that the Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight Committees were doing
"Putin's work" by continuing to examine the British and Obama Administration/Democratic Party
origins of Russiagate. Strzok's charge, obviously choreographed with Congressional Democrats,
wasendlessly cycled in the news media. The Democrats otherwise sought to obstruct the
discredited FBI agent's testimony by any and all means necessary to the delight of the
"resist" social media universe. While the Justice Department's independent IG found that
Strzok's prioritization of the Trump Russiagate investigation over the Clinton email
investigation was not free from bias, an inconvenient fact largely glossed over in Thursday's
staged event, it noted that Strzok and his mistress, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
counsel, Lisa Page, exchanged daily texts vowing to stop Trump's election, disparaging
Trump's s supporters, and declaring themselves the saviors of the nation from the current
President. The third element,of this assault on the prospect of peace was meant to cooincide
with Trump's visit to the UK, i.e.the discovery of a bottle or vial of the so-called Novichok
nerve agent allegedly used to poison former British spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter. The
bottle was discovered at the home of Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess in Amesbury, England.
The British went on an international rampage around the March 4, 2018, Skripal poisoning
claiming Putin was conducting a murder of a long-retired British spy on British territory in
some form of retaliaton, demanding war-like sanctions against Russia. When their claims
failed to achieve substantive credibility, even with the British bioweapons lab, Porton Down,
Rowley and Sturgess appeared as new victims of the nerve gas poisoning on June 30th and
Sturgess subsequently died. The British press is filled with the imputation that the found
vial will somehow be traceable back to Russia, a fact which eluded the original Skripal hoax
Yet despite all of this, it appears that the desperate attempt of Mueller and his allies in
the US and British intel community to block or ruin the Helsinki summit lack the suficient
credibiltiy to succeed.
I guess I'm showing my age with this comment, but our military & intelligence
communities, our politicians and our corporate media's non-stop, fact-free, free-association,
paranoid delusional drivel about "Russian election interference" has all the solidity, yet
none of the charm, of a bad acid trip circa 1972. Offered the choice I'd certainly opt for
the bad acid flashback – especially given what is actually at stake in terms of the
prospects for human survival if this absurd and dangerous nonsense continues. The
institutions of the West have shown themselves to be completely, totally and utterly corrupt!
To bear witness to such complete corruption is absolutely breathtaking! Expecting anything
rational, ethical, fact-based or simply honest to emanate from any of our Western
institutions at this point requires an almost child-like level of trust – or –
lacking that – a willingness to enter into and embrace the world of these mad delusions
and their purveyors!
Bjorn Jensen , July 15, 2018 at 12:52 am
This is worth reading as a summary of grand jury proceedings, the prosecutor's case
presentatation and the proposal for indictment through the summary of evidence either oral or
via documents.
I think it is important to remember that grand juries are comprised of ordinary citizens
and are independent of the courts.
Yes, this era of total corruption of the US government is unprecedented.
The disputes between one corrupt branch and another condemn them all.
mrtmbrnmn , July 15, 2018 at 12:09 am
This is not breaking news anymore, but worth repeating:
The odious NY Times inadvertently stepped on its own shtick (and everyone else's) when it
front-paged the FBI's "Operation Hurricane Crossfire" against the Trump campaign. This whole
farcedy was conceived as a rolling scheme to regime change Putin when Hillary ascended the
throne, with Trump as merely a mug and patsy. When the moo-cow Hillary lost, the plan had to
be repurposed to uckfay with Putin AND regime change Trump. If it looks like a Federal crime,
smells like a Federal crime and quacks like a Federal crime, well You be the judge. There are
so many organs of the Federal Gov and the MSM in on this criminal conspiracy, they are going
to need a new wing at Gitmo to house all these scoundrels
Nabi , July 14, 2018 at 10:40 pm
Great right up to the last few paragraphs. Too hard for a logical conservative to swallow
that the prime reason we have troops (small assets at that) near the Russia border is because
of the greed of Wall Street. Up 'til then not a bad piece.
Joe Lauria , July 14, 2018 at 11:10 pm
Nabi, I suggest you read War is a Racket by General Smedley Butler if you think such a
thing is unheard of.
Yes, greed of Wall Street. And perhaps this is the most important motive. But many former
Warsaw Pact countries (or at least the ruling classes and opinion makers in those countries)
wanted to become members of NATO because they apparently feared, perhaps not without reason,
Russian domination in the future. And there's also the sheer libido dominandi of some people
in Washington, not exclusively neoconservatives. So greed, fear, and love of power.
bobzz , July 14, 2018 at 10:08 pm
In all likelihood, we'll never know who killed Seth Rich who probably leaked the emails.
The CIA did not have time to create patsies like Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, or Sirhan
Sirhan. So RIP Rich.
jsinton , July 14, 2018 at 9:28 pm
Wouldn't it be a hoot if the alleged GRU agents decide to defend themselves in court
against the indictments and demand discovery evidence?
Skip Scott , July 15, 2018 at 8:01 am
The problem with that is that you'd be buying into a stage play that the Deep State
players get to direct. Let's not forget about the abilities detailed in the Vault 7 releases.
Unfortunately it is just as Karl Rove has stated: they can create "reality" now, and they've
had plenty of time to "create" their asses off.
jsinton , July 15, 2018 at 11:41 am
Did you not hear about the St Petersburg click-bait operation that Mueller indicted with
great fanfare back in February? Well, the 13 Russians sent lawyers to answer the indictment
and plead not guilty, much to the shock of Mueller and the investigation. The problem is when
you indict someone, they now have the right to examine the EVIDENCE against them . a process
know as "discovery". Mueller has been trying to suppress the evidence in that case ever
since. Will the GRU agents send a lawyer? I'd be laughing if they did.
Skip Scott , July 15, 2018 at 12:12 pm
Yes, I recall the click-bait operation and the demand for discovery, and Mueller's being
caught by surprise. This time will be a little different:
"Seemingly overlooked by most, Rosenstein said the indictment will now be passed-off (code
word for "buried") to the DOJ National Security Division." The public will never even get to
see any evidence due to "National Security".
Considering the actions of the USA elsewhere,and the accepted, even encouraged,
interference by Israel in all elections in the USA (as Chuck Schumer knows very well!), the
whole process is a complete put-up job. Since the emails were true, and Wikileaks is reputed
to keep to valid reports, the emphasis on finding a suitable scapegoat for the election of
DJT is to steer people away from the genuine actions now destroying the USA.
fred54 , July 14, 2018 at 3:11 pm
They won't have to arrest and extradite the Russians because they will show up in court
just like the two indicted Russians did back in May. Mueller had a heart attack and asked the
Judge to deny the defendants right in discovery to see the evidence. He thought the Russians
wouldn't show and he'd get his judgement exparte without having to produce the non-existent
evidence. The Russians knew the evidence didn't exist just like in this latest lie on the
part of Mueller where there is no evidence. The judge denied the motion and Mueller had no
choice to quietly drop the charges. The same thing will happen here. Only this time the
Russians aren't going to be so sanguine.
GM , July 14, 2018 at 7:02 pm
i don't believe that's accurate. Last I heard the judge agreed to deny the defendant
discovery to the bulk of the prosecution's purported evidence based on Mueller's fatuous
assertions of "national security", though he added that it is temporary and subject to change
in the future.
D3F1ANT , July 14, 2018 at 2:35 pm
Democrat smoke and mirrors. Sad that it's worked for so long. This entire Russia collusion
fantasy has blown up in their faces though. Not only has it failed spectacularly it's exposed
the depth and scope of their corrution and the insidious way in which they've coopted
critical components of the Federal government to their exclusive service–at taxpayer
expense (DOJ/FBI)! It really is staggering. Especially since its allowed to continue even
now!
jsinton , July 15, 2018 at 9:00 pm
Not to mention the credibility of the Deep-State MSM apparatus, which has exposed itself
at purveyors of propaganda without investigation
Jeff Harrison , July 14, 2018 at 11:57 am
A couple of things occur to me. One. Have the Russian government respond to the
indictments with discovery as occurred with the other inane indictments that Mueller
produced. Two. Have Putin respond to the Democrat's demands by demanding the same from the
US. On the one hand, the US only has alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election. On the
other, Russia has proof of US meddling in essentially every Russian election since the
collapse of the old SovU. The US won't like this. It was absolutely hilarious when that
blonde bubble head of a State Department spokeswoman complained about VOA, RFE, etc being
required to register as foreign agents only to be told by Russia to take RT off the foreign
agent list. The Russians could also repay the favor by indicting Americans who interfered in
Russian elections. They could start with Slick Willie.
In 1745, Samuel Johnson published a commentary entitled Miscellaneous Observations on
the Tragedy of Macbeth :
"Thus the doctrine of witchcraft was very powerfully inculcated; and as the greatest
part of mankind have no other reason for their opinions than that they are in fashion, it
cannot be doubted but this persuasion made a rapid progress, since vanity and credulity
cooperate in its favor. The infection soon reached the Parliament, who, in the first year
of King James, made a law, by which it was enacted, Chapter XII: That "if any person shall
use any invocation or conjuration of any evil or wicked spirit; 2. or shall consult,
covenant with, entertain, employ, feed or reward any evil or cursed spirit to or for any
intent or purpose; 3. or take up any dead man, woman or child out of the grave, –or
the skin, bone, or any part of the dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of
witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; 4. or shall use, practice, or exercise any sort
of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; 5. whereby any person shall be destroyed,
killed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in any part of the body; 6. that every such
person being convicted shall suffer death."
"Thus, in the time of Shakespeare, was the doctrine of witchcraft at once established by
law and by the fashion, and it became not only unpolite, but criminal, to doubt it; and as
prodigies are always seen in proportion as they are expected, witches were every day
discovered and multiplied so fast in some places that Bishop Hall mentions a village in
Lancashire where their number was greater than that of the houses."
From Through the Looking Glass , by Lewis Carroll:
"I can't believe that!" said Alice.
"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut
your eyes."
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible
things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always
did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible
things before breakfast."
Two quick comments on the Russiagate hoax:
1. Julian Assange has always refused to compromise his sources, but did the next best thing
by offering a $20,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of Seth Rich's killer(s). There's
only one possible reason he would do this.
2. The truth of the leaked information has never been challenged. For those who insist on
believing in witches and Russiagate, the 12 Russian defendants are guilty only of defending
U.S. democracy, since the content of Clinton's emails helped save the U.S. from a Clinton
presidency.
Excellent article, but it could be improved by including a link to the indictment text:
https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download
. It's a 29-page PDF, but it's double-spaced with large margins, so only requires a few
minutes to read.
Mueller Grand Jury Indictment Does Not Prove Russia Hacked DNCSteven D on
Tue, 07/17/2018 - 1:37pm
="username">detroitmechworks
I'd
disagree, since it's one singular action.
@chuckutzman While the PTB want to think of it as OOOH, 12 indictments, when he
actually just got one group of people to agree with him. Not even ALL of them. Just most of
them. And he could get rid of any he didn't think were going to agree with him. Because of
course he fucking can.
Ugh, I'll go with my own BS stories than the government's rather boring line of same old
shit.
At the crux of the indictment is an outright absurdity – Assange announced that he
would be releasing Clinton-related material on June 10th, 2016, whereas the indictment claims
that Guccifer 2.0 gave him access to the DNC emails on July 14th. Moreover, considerable
evidence points to Guccifer 2,0 as being an affiliate of the DNC.
Mish - Six Questions: (1) Is this a trial or a witch hunt? (2) Do we need to see the evidence or do we believe known liars? (3)
Is Trump guilty of treason? Before we even see proof Putin was involved? (4) Is the CIA incapable of fabricating evidence? (5) Even
if Russia interfered in the election, why should anyone have expected otherwise? (6) Has everyone forgotten the US lies on WMDs already?
Notable quotes:
"... Sending lethal arms to Ukraine, bordering Russia, is a really serious adverse action against the interest of the Russian government. Bombing the Assad regime is, as well. Denouncing one of the most critical projects that the Russian government has, which is the pipeline to sell huge amounts of gas and oil to Germany, is, as well. ..."
"... The United States funds oppositional groups inside Russia. The United States sent advisers and all kinds of operatives to try and elect Boris Yeltsin in the mid-1990s, because they perceived, accurately, that he was a drunk who would serve the interests of the United States more than other candidates who might have won. The United States interferes in Russian politics, and they interfere in their cyber systems, and they invade their email systems, and they invade all kinds of communications all the time. And so, to treat this as though it's some kind of aberrational event, I think, is really kind of naive ..."
"... And so, I would certainly hope that we are not at the point, which I think we seem to be at, where we are now back to believing that when the CIA makes statements and assertions and accusations, or when prosecutors make statements and assertions and accusations, unaccompanied by evidence that we can actually evaluate, that we're simply going to believe those accusations on faith, especially when the accusations come from George W. Bush's former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who repeatedly lied to Congress about Iraq and a whole variety of other issues. So, I think there we need some skepticism. ..."
For example, reader Brian stated " There is zero doubt now that Putin stole the election
from Hillary. So much so that she MUST be given the nomination again in 2020. All potential
challengers must step aside. To refuse her the 2020 nomination would be evidence of traitorous
activities with Putin."'
I congratulated Brian for brilliant sarcasm but he piled on. It now seems he was
serious. Mainstream media, the Left an the Right were in general condemnation. Numerous cries of treason emerged from the Left and the Right (see the above link)
It Happened - No Trial Necessary
A friend I highly respect commented " There is simply no question that they did it. You can
legitimately claim that it's not important or that there has been no tie to Trump shown. On the
Russians' side, they can say, screw off, we were pursuing our interests. But you can't take the
view it did not happen. It happened. "
There is a question who did it. Indictments are just that, not proof.
The US fabricated evidence to start the Vietnam war and the US fabricated WMD talk on the
second war in Iraq. US intelligence had no idea the Berlin Wall was about to fall. The US
meddled in Russia supporting a drunk named Yeltsin because we erroneously thought we could
control him.
They Are All Liars
It's a mystery why anyone would believe these proven liars. That does not mean I believe
Putin either. They are all capable liars. Let's step back from the absurd points of view to reality.
US Meddling
The US tries to influence elections in other countries and has a history of assisting the
forcible overthrow of governments we don't like.
Vietnam
Iran
Iraq
Libya
Drone policy
All of the above are massive disasters of US meddling. They are all actions of war,
non-declared, and illegal. I cannot and do not condone such actions even if they were legal.
911 and ISIS resulted from US meddling. The migration crisis in the EU is a direct
consequence of US meddling. The Iranian revolution was a direct consequence of US meddling.Now we are pissing and moaning that Russia spent a few million dollars on Tweets to steal
the election. Please be serious.
Let's Assume
Let's assume for one second the DNC hack was Russia-based. Is there a reason to not be thankful for evidence that Hillary conspired to deny Bernie
Sanders the nomination? Pity Hillary? We are supposed to pity Hillary? The outrage from the Right is amazing. It's pretty obvious Senator John McCain wanted her to win. Neither faced a war or military
intervention they disapproved of.
Common Sense
Let's move on to a common sense position from Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept.
GLENN GREENWALD : In 2007, during the Democratic presidential debate, Barack Obama
was asked whether he would meet with the leaders of North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and
Iran without preconditions. He said he would. Hillary Clinton said she wouldn't, because it
would be used as a propaganda tool for repressive dictators. And liberals celebrated Obama. It
was one of his greatest moments and one of the things that I think helped him to win the
Democratic nomination, based on the theory that it's always better to meet with leaders, even
if they're repressive, than to isolate them or to ignore them. In 1987, when President Reagan
decided that he wanted to meet with Soviet leaders, the far right took out ads against him that
sounded very much just like what we just heard from Joe, accusing him of being a useful idiot
to Soviet and Kremlin propaganda, of legitimizing Russian aggression and domestic repression at
home.
GLENN GREENWALD : It is true that Putin is an authoritarian and is domestically repressive.
That's true of many of the closest allies of the United States, as well, who are even far more
repressive, including ones that fund most of the think tanks in D.C., such as the United Arab
Emirates or Saudi Arabia. And I think the most important issue is the one that we just heard,
which is that 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons are in the hands of two countries --
the United States and Russia -- and having them speak and get along is much better than having
them isolate one another and increase the risk of not just intentional conflict, but
misperception and miscommunication, as well.
JOE CIRINCIONE : Right. Let's be clear. Glenn, there's nothing wrong with meeting. I
agree with you. Leaders should meet, and we should be negotiating with our foes, with those
people we disagree with. We're better off when we do that. And the kind of attacks you saw on
Barack Obama were absolutely uncalled for, and you're right to condemn those.
JOE CIRINCIONE : What I'm worried about is this president meeting with this leader
of Russia and what they're going to do. That's what's so wrong about this summit coming now,
when you have Donald Trump, who just attacked the NATO alliance, who calls our European allies
foes, who turns a blind eye to what his director of national intelligence called the warning
lights that are blinking red. About what? About Russian interference in our elections. So you
just had a leader of Russia, Putin, a skilled tactician, a skilled strategist, interfere in a
U.S. election. To what? To help elect Donald Trump.
GLENN GREENWALD : I think this kind of rhetoric is so unbelievably unhinged, the idea that
the phishing links sent to John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee are the greatest
threat to American democracy in decades. People are now talking about it as though it's on par
with 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, that the lights are blinking red, in terms of the threat level. This
is lunacy, this kind of talk. I spent years reading through the most top-secret documents of
the NSA, and I can tell you that not only do they send phishing links to Russian agencies of
every type continuously on a daily basis, but do far more aggressive interference in the
cybersecurity of every single country than Russia is accused of having done during the 2016
election. To characterize this as some kind of grave existential threat to American democracy
is exactly the kind of rhetoric that we heard throughout the Bush-Cheney administration about
what al-Qaeda was like .
JOE CIRINCIONE : Why does Donald Trump feel that he has to meet alone with Putin? What is
going on there? I mean, that -- when Ronald Reagan met with Gorbachev at Reykjavik, at least he
had George Shultz with him. The two of them, you know, were meeting with Gorbachev and his
foreign minister at the time. This is -- it's deeply disturbing. It makes you feel that Trump
is hiding something, that he is either trying to make a deal with Putin, reporting something to
Putin. I tell you, I know U.S. intelligence officials -- I'm probably going right into Glenn's
wheelhouse here. But U.S. intelligence officials are concerned about what Donald Trump might be
revealing to the Russian leader, the way he revealed classified information to the Russian
foreign minister when he met privately with him in the Oval Office at the beginning of his
term. No, I don't like it one bit.
GLENN GREENWALD : I continue to be incredibly frustrated by the claim that we hear over and
over, and that we just heard from Joe, that Donald Trump does everything that Vladimir Putin
wants, and that if he were a paid agent of the Russian government, there'd be -- he would be
doing nothing different. I just went through the entire list of actions that Donald Trump has
taken and statements that he has made that are legitimately adverse to the interest of the
Russian government, that Barack Obama specifically refused to do, despite bipartisan demands
that he do them, exactly because he didn't want to provoke more tensions between the United
States and Russia.
Sending lethal arms to Ukraine, bordering Russia, is a really serious
adverse action against the interest of the Russian government. Bombing the Assad regime is, as
well. Denouncing one of the most critical projects that the Russian government has, which is
the pipeline to sell huge amounts of gas and oil to Germany, is, as well.
So is expelling
Russian diplomats and imposing serious sanctions on oligarchs that are close to the Putin
regime. You can go down the list, over and over and over, in the 18 months that he's been in
office, and see all the things that Donald Trump has done that is adverse, in serious ways, to
the interests of Vladimir Putin, including ones that President Obama refused to do. So, this
film, this movie fairytale, that I know is really exciting -- it's like international intrigue
and blackmail, like the Russians have something over Trump; it's like a Manchurian candidate;
it's from like the 1970s thrillers that we all watched -- is inane -- you know, with all due
respect to Joe. I mean, it's -- but it's in the climate, because it's so contrary to what it is
that we're seeing. Now, this idea of meeting alone with Vladimir Putin, the only way that you
would find that concerning is if you believed all that.
JOE CIRINCIONE : So, Trump knew that this indictment was coming down, before he went to
Europe, and still he never says a word about it. What he does is continue his attacks on our
alliances, i.e. he continues his attacks on our free press, he continues his attacks on FBI
agents who were just doing their job, and supports this 10-hour show hearing that the House of
Representatives had. It's really unbelievable that Trump is doing these things and never says
one word about it. He still has not said a word about those indictments.
GLENN GREENWALD : That's because the reality is -- and I don't know if Donald Trump knows
this or doesn't know this, has stumbled into the truth or what -- but the reality is that what
the Russians did in 2016 is absolutely not aberrational or unusual in any way. The United --
I'm sorry to say this, but it's absolutely true. The United States and Russia have been
interfering in one another's domestic politics for since at least the end of World War II, to
say nothing of what they do in far more extreme ways to the internal politics of other
countries. Noam Chomsky was on this very program several months ago, and he talked about how
the entire world is laughing at this indignation from the United States -- "How dare you
interfere in our democracy!" -- when the United States not only has continuously in the past
done, but continues to do far more extreme interference in the internal politics of all kinds
of countries, including Russia .
GLENN GREENWALD : The United States funds oppositional groups inside Russia. The United
States sent advisers and all kinds of operatives to try and elect Boris Yeltsin in the
mid-1990s, because they perceived, accurately, that he was a drunk who would serve the
interests of the United States more than other candidates who might have won. The United States
interferes in Russian politics, and they interfere in their cyber systems, and they invade
their email systems, and they invade all kinds of communications all the time. And so, to treat
this as though it's some kind of aberrational event, I think, is really kind of naive .
GLENN GREENWALD : It wasn't just Hillary Clinton in 2016 who lost this election. The entire
Democratic Party has collapsed as a national political force over the last decade. They've lost
control of the Senate and of the House and of multiple statehouses and governorships. They're
decimated as a national political force. And the reason is exactly what Joe said. They become
the party of international globalization. They're associated with Silicon Valley and Wall
Street billionaires and corporate interests, and have almost no connection to the working
class. And that is a much harder conversation to have about why the Democrats have lost
elections than just blaming a foreign villain and saying it's because Vladimir Putin ran some
fake Facebook ads and did some phishing emails. And I think that until we put this in
perspective, about what Russia did in 2016 and the reality that the U.S. does that sort of
thing all the time to Russia and so many other countries, we're going to just not have the
conversation that we need to be having about what these international institutions, that are so
sacred -- NATO and free trade and international trade organizations -- have done to people all
over the world, and the reason they're turning to demagogues and right-wing extremists because
of what these institutions have done to them. That's the conversation we need to be having, but
we're not having, because we're evading it by blaming everything on Vladimir Putin. And that,
to me, is even more dangerous for our long-term prospects than this belligerence that's in the
air about how we ought to look at Moscow.
Indictments and First Year Law
Mish : I now wish to return to a statement my friend made regarding the idea " No question
Russia did it ".
From Glenn Greenwald
As far as the indictments from Mueller are concerned, it's certainly the most specific
accounting yet that we've gotten of what the U.S. government claims the Russian government did
in 2016. But it's extremely important to remember what every first-year law student will tell
you, which is that an indictment is nothing more than the assertions of a prosecutor
unaccompanied by evidence. The evidence won't be presented until a trial or until Robert
Mueller actually issues a report to Congress.
And so, I would certainly hope that we are not at
the point, which I think we seem to be at, where we are now back to believing that when the CIA
makes statements and assertions and accusations, or when prosecutors make statements and
assertions and accusations, unaccompanied by evidence that we can actually evaluate, that we're
simply going to believe those accusations on faith, especially when the accusations come from
George W. Bush's former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who repeatedly lied to Congress about Iraq
and a whole variety of other issues. So, I think there we need some skepticism.
But even if the
Russians did everything that Robert Mueller claims in that indictment that they did, in the
scheme of what the U.S. and the Russians do to one another and other countries, I think to say
that this is somehow something that we should treat as a grave threat, that should mean that we
don't talk to them or that we treat them as an enemy, is really irrational and really quite
dangerous.
Mish - Six Questions
Is this a trial or a witch hunt?
Do we need to see the evidence or do we believe known liars?
Is Trump guilty of treason? Before we even see proof Putin was involved?
Is the CIA incapable of fabricating evidence?
Even if Russia interfered in the election, why should anyone have expected
otherwise?
Has everyone forgotten the US lies on WMDs already?
Irrational and Dangerous
I don't know about you, but I have no reason to believe known liars and hypocrites. I
disagree with Trump all the time, in fact, more often than not. The amount of venom on Trump
over this is staggering. Adding a missing word, I stand by my previous statement: " Nearly
every political action that generates this much complete nonsense and hysteria from the Left
and Right is worthy of immense praise."
If you disagree please provide examples. The only two I can come up with are Pearl Harbor
and 911. In both, the US was directly attacked. For rebuttal purposes I offer Vietnam, Syria,
Iraq, Russia, Iran, WWI, treatment of Japanese-American citizens in WWII, and McCarthyism.
Greenwald accurately assesses the situation as "really irrational and really quite dangerous."
Indeed. And if indictments and accusations were crimes, we wouldn't need a jury.
If the DNC servers were hacked, they are evidence, where is the fucking evidence now? At the bottom of the Hudson River with
concrete shoes that's where! Where are the Anwan servers, Podesta's, Wieners....where are Hillary's emails?
Fuck this is getting out of hand. All of the top spooks in the alphabet agencies are complicit, DOJ too, right up to the skinny
faggot in the rainbow house!
Getting close to the time for some real fucking justice in America!
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Here is an update to the map I posted yesterday about where not to be, not sure I agree one way or the other, you decide:
Even if it were found to be true that Russia (and not Seth Rich) was the source of the info that revealed to the American people
(and the world) that the DNC conspired to rig its own primary election, my response would be one of gratitude for shining a light
on the cockroaches.
the zeal with which MSN and especially CNN Wolf Blitzer now defend the 'Intelligence Community' as a singular infallible flawless
entity is incredible ...
... in the context of the war they waged on that very same 'Intelligence Community' in light of it being wrong about WMD in
Iraq
... or the Snowden-gate about it spying on Americans.
most two-faced biased blindly-agended-based manipulative thing I've ever seen on CNN
Russian hack? hahaha, as if. Everybody knows it was an inside job. That sort of thing with all the emails is inside -> Seth
Rich is a good place to look.
BESIDES! LET'S NOT FORGET ABOUT THE CONTENT OF THOSE EMAILS!!!
This guy in the article above that says Hellary "must" be given the nomination because Russia 'hacked' the election. Great!
I'll be very happy to see that nasty bitch go down a second time, based on the substance of her twisted, hypocritical, and consummately
evil character.
" Deep State agent Bill Browder operated at the very nexus of the
U.S. and U.K. Intelligence Communities that conspired to produce
both the fake Russiagate and very real Spygate ."
***It is a tale, full of sound and fury, told by idiots, signifying nothing***
how can we be expected to take any of this shit seriously?
-- avowed globalist-communists opposed to any nation's sovereignty, repulsed at the faintest wiff of patriotism scolding us
for our lack of patriotism?
-- political parties, intelligence agencies, the media and much of the judiciary attempting to undermine the democratic process
for over a year and a half, delegitamize a Presidency, vilify half the nation, stoke the flames of enmity...now they kvetch about
our skepticism?
no, langley, we do not trust you. no, media, your agitprop has no currency.
of all the reasons for hillary's defeat, no one ever mentions the fact that she campaigned on a platform of war...WWIII, no
less. starting in May/June of 2016, cankles started pounding the war drums. in a scenario so stale and overused as to threadbare,
the left initiated the process of demonizing russia and russians.
Trump supporters are not only pro-American, they/we are anti-war. forever spinning in a manic and frenzied swirl of hysterics,
the left often loses sight of this...but as much is to be expected, in that the left doesn't think, they instead parrot the tropes
fed to them on a daily basis, forever unable to assemble the fragments of these disparate priorities into a cogent whole. but
if they were able to arrange this mess into coherence, the image would terrify them with its ghastliness. the left openly and
earnestly serves the forces of evil -- in fact, they are the forces of evil. they depend on the idiocy and credulity of their
minions to keep this reality obscured. fortunately for the left, their supporters are sufficiently dull and benighted to keep
the truth forever blighted.
maybe we should play the victoria nuland tapes again...as a refresher:
we not only interfered with Ukranian/Russian politics, we overtly overthrew a democratically elected government, attempted
to provoke Russia to respond militarily, started a civil war in the Ukraine, (downed a commercial airliner in a disgusting FF),
funded and trained Nazis and left the nation in shambles. these are the same people calling Trump a traitor. these are the same
forces who demand faith and fidelity.
it's gone...no one trusts (((you))) anymore...we know you're nothing but a bunch of bloodthristy satanists...your time is in
eclipse, the more you struggle, the tighter the constraints.
"fuck the EU (for balking at WWIII)" Victoria Nuland, Clinton apparatchik, globalists, communist, satanist, kike.
Zionists are a large part of the problem (and remember what Biden said) but not at all the whole problem. Don't hyperfocus
- the 'Deep State' is chock full of non-Jewish warmongers and traitors. In fact the top traitors are guys like Brennan, Comey,
McCabe, Clapper, Clinton, Obama, and Strozk.
" The US fabricated evidence to start the Vietnam war and the US fabricated WMD talk on the second war in Iraq. US intelligence
had no idea the Berlin Wall was about to fall. The US meddled in Russia supporting a drunk named Yeltsin because we erroneously
thought we could control him."
YUP! AMEN.
It's amusing to me that the Leftist's NOW have a blind-faith trust in government, whereas during the Vietnam war, and at the
start of the Iraq war the opposite was (justifiably) the case.
And remember, the [neoliberal] Left was all OVER how we manipulated Russia into an Oligarchy:
There is nothing in either the dictionary definition of "Marxism," nor the social facts, which justifies using that label for
the ruling classes, the pyramidion people of the globalized social pyramid systems.
The root of the runaway "mass hysteria" is the long history of the control over the public money supplies being captured by
the best organized gangsters, the banksters. There is an overwhelming amount of historical evidence regarding how that happened.
See Excellent Videos on Money Systems .
Some of that evidence indicates some of those banksters were behind the promotion of messianic Marxism through the Russian
Revolution which resulted in the Soviet Union. (Less compelling evidence indicates similar factors were at play in the later Chinese
Revolution.)
The original Marxism was relatively scientific, for its time and place in history. However, it was messianic Marxism which
became the ideologies of so-called "communist" movements, all of which necessarily ended up being dominated by their own kinds
of best available professional hypocrites, resulting in even steeper social pyramid systems than previously.
It is RIDICULOUS to label the banksters as "Marxists." The comment posted above by HopefulCynical only begins to make some
sense AFTER one substitutes some label which refers to the banksters , rather than to some ideologies which those banksters used
to covertly advance their overall agenda.
Ideologies which become publicly significant are always systems of organized lies, which operate robberies. There is actually
only one political system: organized crime. Therefore, contemporary geopolitical events make more sense after one recognizes who
are the best organized gangsters , which are dominating civilization, including dominating the mass media's public presentation
of those events.
While President Trump is correctly presenting the degree to which the mainstream media is based on "fake news," President Trump
deliberately does not engage in deeper analysis of that phrase "fake news," but rather, used his oratory skill to capture that
phrase, and thereby turn it against those who originally intended to use that phrase against President Trump.
The comment above by HopefulCynical was overwhelmingly up-voted by its readers. Tragically, the indicates the degree to which
so many people want to believe in bullshit.
"The Marxists who've run America (and the rest of the world) into the ground for so many decades ..."
It was NOT "Marxists," but rather the banksters, who've run America (and the rest of the world) ... for so many decades. In
particular, since 1971, when the American Dollar lost its last connection with the material world, after the last vestiges of
money backed by precious metals were cut, the banksters have been able to astronomically amplify their frauds, as enforced by
governments, to become about exponentially more fraudulent.
That about exponentially increasing fraudulence, as demonstrated by debt slavery systems generating numbers which have become
debt insanities, is at the root of the runaway manifestation of "mass hysteria" in America (and the rest of the world.)
The debt slavery systems were made and maintained by the international bankers, as the best organized gangsters, the banksters,
whose persistent and prolonged participation in the funding of all aspects of the political processes (including schooling and
mass media) has resulted in the public powers of government being primarily used to back up the privatized interests of big banks,
and the big corporations that grew up around those big banks being able to issue the public money supplies out of nothing as debts.
Those real social facts do NOT correspond to the dictionary definition of Marxism, nor to any other goofy ideologies which
were popularized to conceal the real social facts, and permit public discussion of those facts to be drowned under the bullshit
of false fundamental dichotomies and the related impossible ideals.
There continues to be a lot of awful nonsense presented in articles and comments published on Zero Hedge , because of the degree
to which the authors of those like to continue to believe in their favourite kinds of impossible ideals, by mislabeling what they
do not like in erroneous ways, which ignore both the actual facts and definitions of those labels.
BANKSTERS' "psychopathic dreams of total control" require that it will be possible for systems based on being able to enforce
frauds can continue to become about exponentially more fraudulent. However, endless exponential growth is absolutely impossible.
Rising popular awareness and resistance to the banksters is manifesting through various political movements. However, so far,
those movements continue to mostly be forms of controlled "opposition." Anyone who continues to misuse the labels such as "capitalism
versus communism," or abuses the label "Marxist," etc., is still actually a form of controlled "opposition," because of the degree
to which their thinking and communication is still based on taking for granted the biggest bullies' bullshit, which has become
the banksters' bullshit .
After the banksters kicked the shit out of Russia during the 20th Century, Russia has returned having learned something from
those experiences. The results are that Russia is slightly more able and willing to advance its national interests against the
international banksters. That is the main reason why Russia is being demonized by those who are still almost totally the banksters'
puppets.
President Trump appears to be a relative anomaly, whose social successfulness was based on the apparently increasing anomalies,
due to the systems based on enforced frauds becoming about exponentially more fraudulent. It was that diffuse awareness of mass
media propaganda being systematic lying, serving the interests of the owners of those mass media, that was one of the factors
which enabled President Trump to win the election.
Some of his most significant campaign promises were to diminish the demonization of Russia, and thereby diminish the threat
of war with weapons of mass destruction spinning out of control, which continues to potentially be the greatest of threats, which
are somewhat under human control, but which look like those are going more and more out of control.
However, in my opinion, President Trump tends to NOT go beyond superficially correct analysis of the accumulating apparent
anomalies, whose root causes are the systems of enforced frauds being amplified by about exponentially advancing technologies
to become about exponentially more fraudulent, which factors are at the root of the accumulating "mass hysteria."
The best overall ways to approach understanding current geopolitical events are that the excessively successful applications
of the methods of organized crime through the political processes are resulting in civilization manifesting runaway criminal insanities,
which situation is so serious that people who attempt to reduce that insanity are attacked by those who want to increase that
insanity.
The deeper reasons for the underlying issues are that there must be some death control systems, precisely because endless exponential
growth is absolutely impossible, and therefore, death control systems develop to stop that happening, which drives those death
control systems to become murder systems which maximize maliciousness.
The longer term consequences of the social successfulness of maximized maliciousness are that the biggest bullies' bullshit
almost totally dominates civilization, including the layers of controlled "opposition" that surround the central core of the best
organized gangsters, which have become the banksters . Hence, most of those who believe that they are "resisting" continue to
think and communicate in ways which still take for granted most of that bullshit .
Two points:
1. This indictment is nearly identical to the Jan. 6, 2017 ODNI Report, which came from a
handful of unnamed analysts from the CIA and FBI. There is very little new information in
well over a year. Right there, this raises red flags. Who were these analysts?
2. Did Mueller/Rosenstein consult with any foreign policy advisors? Does meddling in the
president's national security affairs put the country at ris?
It's a dangerous game and a slippery slope. For the sake of the country, they better be
right.
O Society July 14, 2018 at 6:20 am
Rosenstein makes the announcement. 8 minutes into this video he states:
There are no allegations in the indictment any American knew they were in contact with Russians
or with a Russian operation,
any American committed a crime in relation to this,
or that the operation changed or influenced the election.
Fist thoughts:
If there is no allegation (evidence) the operation influenced the election, then why do we care
about any of this?
Seems odd no Americans did anything worthy of investigating. Exonerating the DNC/ DCCC of all
wrong doing?
How does Rosenstein (or anyone in the FBI) know Russians did this "hack" without having access
to examine the DNC computers? Are we going by what CrowdStrike says they found? John
McCarthy , July 14, 2018 at 5:08 am
Mueller should be prosecuted for violating the Logan Act. The timing of this is an illegal
attempt to interfere with Foreign Policy.
Right on!
Apparently Mueller couldn't get a U-2 to fly over Russia and get shot down (which in 1960
scuttled a summit between President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Khrushchev).
How coincidental that just the day before the announcement of the indictments , The Daily
Beast published an extensive hit-piece on John Mark Dougan , who has admitted setting up the
DCLeaks website that was used to release some of the earlier leaks :
"Fugitive Cop Says He's Behind the DNC Leaks. It's His Latest Hoax.
A Florida cop turned hacker who fled to Russia to escape the FBI claims Seth Rich leaked him
DNC documents. But his story is full of holes."
George Webb is not a right-winger. He is a Bernie supporter. LOL. Still, the similarity of
the wording suggests that the indictment is meant not only as an attempt to bolster the
Russiagate fiction but also to defend Hillary and Podesta against charges of corruption,
rigging the Dem primary, and incompetence and perhaps allow Hillary to run in 2020 or at
lease to choose who the Dem candidate will be. It is also, of course, meant to sabotage
detente with Russia and damage both Trump and Bernie Sanders. Sanders is probably regarded as
even more dangerous than Trump by the deep state and by the corrupt, no-talent leaders of the
pathetic Dem party -- just look at Shumer's ridiculous and unpatriotic demand that Trump
cancel the summit. The current Dem leaders have absolutely nothing positive to offer the
American people in terms of foreign policy and do nothing but repeat neocon nonsense, but the
deep state supports the Dems at the moment because they want to see Trump impeached and
Bernie make a fool of himself by criticizing Russia with no evidence. Bernie lost a lot of
support with his recent uninformed Russophobic statement. The strong implied focus on
defending Podesta and by further implication Hillary, obvious from the similarities with the
Webb lawsuit, shows the real aim of the indictments. As Lauria points out, it's all for
internal consumption. But there are several apparent contradictions in the indictment, and
those contradictions will be no doubt be pointed out in the coming days by computer experts,
so this indictment may have no lasting effect outside of people who are already True
Believers in Russiagate. Even so, the failure to interview Assange and Craig Murray is truly
shocking and disappointing.
Alcuin , July 14, 2018 at 10:49 am
George Webb has talked with Bill Binney and despite being somewhat eccentric should not be
dismissed out of hand. He is rumored to be former Mossad. From his videos of the last three
days (days 15, 16, 17) it appears that he thinks Russian-born hackers living in the USA were
indeed involved, but that they were not working for the Russian government but rather for
various Americans (including well-known American politicians), concentrating on economic
espionage.
Remember that Assange when questioned repeatedly emphasized that that the emails did not come
from Russian "state" actors. Putin recently seems to have wanted to imply the same point.
According to Webb the hackers received their training from Russian military intelligence.
Webb also ties the hacking and espionage to the wider picture of pipeline politics in Europe
and the Middle East. Even if Webb is wrong, or if he represents Israeli interests, it's an
interesting view that is worth investigating.
Alcuin , July 16, 2018 at 2:18 am
Webb (for what it's worth): "They're really not Trump's Russians; they're really not
Putin's Russians -- they're really Rosenstein and Comey's Russians."
"... Crowdstrike's Danger Close report , which was supposed to be the nail in the coffin that proved the GRU was involved in the DNC hack, has been repudiated by the Ukrainian government, the IISS whose data they misused, and the builder of the military app that they claimed was compromised. ..."
"... The Reality Winner leak of a classified NSA document contained a graphic that used different colors of lines to qualify the data (confirmed, analyst judgment, contextual information). The line that connected the "actors" who sent out the spearphishing email to various electoral organizations with the GRU was yellow (analyst judgment) and included the words "probably within"; meaning that this was not a communications intercept. ..."
"... There are many other problems with the DNC investigation starting with the fact that no government agency actually did the forensics work. It was done by a company with strong ties to the Clinton campaign and an economic incentive to blame foreign governments for cyber attacks on evidence that was either flimsy or non-existent. ..."
"... Does any of this mean that the Russian government didn't do it? No. It only means that there is insufficient public evidence to say that it did. ..."
This gist of the article was, since we can't know what the classified evidence is that
supports the U.S. government's finding in favor of Russian government intereference, there is
plenty of public evidence which should convince us.
Bump is wrong about that. The public evidence isn't enough to identify Russian government
involvement, or even identify the nationality of the hackers involved. That doesn't mean that
the Russian government isn't responsible. It means that we don't know enough to say who is
responsible based solely on the publicly known evidence, including classified evidence that's
been leaked.
Here's a recap:
The X-Agent malware used against the DNC is not exclusive to Russia. The source code
has been acquired by at least one Ukrainian hacker group and one European cybersecurity
company, which means that others have it as well. "Exclusive use" is a myth that responsible
cybersecurity companies need to stop using as proof of attribution.
The various attacks attributed to the GRU were a comedy of errors ; not
the actions of a sophisticated adversary.
The FBI/DHS Grizzly Steppe report was a disaster ( here
,
here , here , and
here ).
Crowdstrike's
Danger Close report , which was supposed to be the nail in the coffin that proved the GRU
was involved in the DNC hack, has been repudiated by the Ukrainian government, the IISS whose
data they misused, and the builder of the military app that they claimed was
compromised.
The Arizona and Illinois attacks against electoral databases that were blamed on the Russian
government were actually conducted by
English-speaking hackers .
The Reality Winner leak of a classified NSA document contained a graphic that used
different colors of lines to qualify the data (confirmed, analyst judgment, contextual
information). The line that connected the "actors" who sent out the spearphishing email to
various electoral organizations with the GRU was yellow (analyst judgment) and included the
words "probably within"; meaning that this was not a communications intercept.
There are many other problems with the DNC investigation starting with the fact that no
government agency actually did the forensics work. It was done by a company with strong ties to
the Clinton campaign and an economic incentive to blame
foreign governments for cyber attacks on evidence that was either flimsy or
non-existent.
Does any of this mean that the Russian government didn't do it? No. It only means that
there is insufficient public evidence to say that it did.
ill-gotten goods are undeserving of protection of law. The DNC and Podesta had no legitimate
expectation of privacy in their combinations to defraud the public and steal elections.
It's been imputed that the Russians did this to damage the reputation of Hillary Clinton. To
take the alleged damage to reputation angle to its conclusion, truth is an entirely sufficient
defense to any charge of libel. What was revealed by an alleged hack was the truth, something
that is entirely lacking in the rest of this affair.
As for the alleged theft and public release of email, ill-gotten goods are undeserving of
protection of law. The DNC and Podesta had no legitimate expectation of privacy in their
combinations to defraud the public and steal elections.
The Russian GRU is accused of revealing that the people who run the DNC and Clinton campaign
committee colluded with each other to steal the nomination. The allegedly hacked emails show
what they really did and thought during the fraudulent nomination of Hillary Clinton. It might
be argued, that whomever revealed the truth actually did a public service for the American
people. An odd sort of "act of war," that.
Finally, individual officials and military officers have a limited immunity and are not
normally indicted by foreign states for intelligence activities such as electronic surveillance
and hacking across borders. That is where the element of harm comes in. The only real precedent
for this is the Rainbow Warrior case. In 1985, French intelligence officers blew up and sank a
Greenpeace ship by that name anchored in Auckland, NZ harbour, killing a passenger, a Dutch
photographer. A UN arbitrator held in that case the French agents were not immune under
customary international law to prosecution in a New Zealand court and could be individually
tried and jailed, but only because of the death of the victim as part of "a criminal act of
violence against property in New Zealand . . . done without regard for innocent civilians."
Greenpeace was additionally awarded damages in the UK under international Maritime Law because
the vessel was a British-flagged ship.
Also bear in mind, the US and UK both provide immunity to their own intelligence officers
and law enforcement officers for hacking and related computer crimes committed against foreign
powers. The UK takes that a step further and exempts police officers for domestic hacking:
This is a dangerous precedent, and the likely result is to ignite retaliation and further
exacerbate U.S.-Russian tensions. The entire staffs of the NSA, GCHQ and GRU could be similarly
"prosecuted," but what will that accomplish? Even if every word of the indictment is fact, the
indictment itself violates the norms of international law and this latest "Russiagate"
escalation by Mueller seems intended to ratchet up the New Cold War.
That is why "Russiagate" is a legal sham, in my opinion. Even if the alleged Russian hack of
the DNC email actually happened as claimed, and even if the hack was with bad intent, there was
no real crime or harm in the release of that information. That information was no more the
private property of the DNC and Clinton Campaign than a plan to rob a bank belongs to the
robbers. Isn't that so, Mr. Mueller?
Tomorrow, I am going to get in contact with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and tell him
that I have found the real people behind the hacking of the 2016 US election and they aren't
Russian – they are Chinese! I am prepared to give names and so to give everybody the
scoop, here they are-
Li Keqiang, Zhang Dejiang, Yu Zhengsheng, Zhou Qiang, Cao Jianming, Li Yuanchao, Han
Zheng, Sun Chunlan, Hu Chunhua and Liu He.
They are all real names of real Chinese government officials but unfortunately, as they
are Chinese, they cannot be extradited out of China in the same way that Russians can't be
extradited out of Russia. And like Special Counsel Robert Mueller, I have no real proof that
they did it and cannot bring them to a US court for trial so you will all have to take my
word for it so we're cool, right?
"... Rosenstein, Mueller and Strozk are clever, privileged boys who have always been able, to bamboozle their way out of a jam. So we have this scary, claptrap yarn about twelve ethereal "Russian Agents" ((1) Boris (2) Natashia (3) ..) who, being in Russia, can never be extradited or interrogated. Therefore, the narrative can be endlessly developed. The only constraint is the imagination of the second-rate story writers. An ongoing serial wow ..."
"... Credit to Isikoff for having the courage to face a skeptic, even if his attitude is indignant that Mate ain't buying what he's selling. ..."
Rosenstein, Mueller and Strozk are clever, privileged boys who have always been able,
to bamboozle their way out of a jam. So we have this scary, claptrap yarn about twelve
ethereal "Russian Agents" ((1) Boris (2) Natashia (3) ..) who, being in Russia, can never be
extradited or interrogated. Therefore, the narrative can be endlessly developed. The only
constraint is the imagination of the second-rate story writers. An ongoing serial
wow
I believe that Seth Rich was the leaker. What are the FBI/CIA/DOJ doing to investigate
Seth's murder? Not much.
However, the FBI/CIA/DOJ, ARE consumed with The Hunting of the Russian Snark ."It's a
Snark!" was the sound that first came to their ears,
And seemed almost too good to be true.
Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
Then the ominous words "It's a Boo -- "
Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air
A weary and wandering sigh
That sounded like "-jum!" but the others declare
It was only a breeze that went by.
They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.
In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away --
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
I have watched Rosenstein, Mueller and Strozk testifying over the last months. Creeps. I
wouldn't leave a pet Labradoodle in their care, much less entrust them with the defense of
"Our" Democracy
AARON MATE: I have no idea. Whoever it is, I think Guccifer is very sloppy. And given how
sophisticated we're told Russian military intelligence is supposed to be, they didn't do a
very good job of covering their tracks.
Maté makes an excellent observation here. Further, if you go to Guccifer's site,
his style is U.S. hipster English. It is possible that the Russians are that adept at U.S.
hipster English, or have suborned some hipster from Brooklyn, or, maybe, that Guccifer is an
American who has some other agenda.
Interestingly, in all of this hacking, we haven't heard what happened to Hillary Clinton's
30,000 yoga e-mails, which would be a masterpiece of contemplation of yoga, on the level of
Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. We read repeated allegations that the Clinton Family server was
hacked. How is it that the injured party here is only the Democratic National Committee?
And how many of these dangerous Russians will be extradited to the U S of A? You can't
have a finding of fact without a trial, and conveniently for aggrieved people like Isikoff,
there isn't going to be a trial.
Aaron Mate does a fine job in this interview of pushing back against unproven claims. No
hysteria, no yelling. But point by point he just takes Isikoff to task, calmly. He even
manages two separate digs without staking a high moral ground: Isikoff's own previous
reporting on (lack of) WMD, and a clip from a lying Robert Mueller in front of congress in
2003.
So I was very impressed with this interview. As someone who's taught myself the read the
lies in the MSM this was a clinic in how to get a major journalist (Isikoff) to make
concessions that essentially wipe out his argument without getting into a yelling match.
He's done some of the best reporting on this story that I can recall. Credit to Isikoff
for having the courage to face a skeptic, even if his attitude is indignant that Mate ain't
buying what he's selling.
It kills me that the only 'evidence' supporting Russia-gate is the public statements and
testimony of a bunch of high level government officials that are 1) proven liars and 2) have
reason to believe they'll never be held to account for these lies.
If you saw Strzok's testimony the other day, you'd have seen a number of Dems absolutely
willing to lay down in front of oncoming traffic to 'protect' the FBI. If my reps were that
dedicated to protecting me from the horror of facing a series of probing questions, I'd feel
pretty comfortable that I was untouchable, too!
Credit to Isikoff for having the courage to face a skeptic, even if his attitude is
indignant that Mate ain't buying what he's selling.
Good catch! I noticed this also, though I'm not as sure it's to Isikoff's credit. Mate has
positively ripped to shreds at least one other Isikoff like stooge (Luke Harding of The
Guardian ) in this interview: https://therealnews.com/stories/wheres-the-collusion-2
which really makes one wonder why Isikoff accepted such a challenge. (I include the link for
the benefit of others – it looks like you are already aware of it). After all, he has
basically nothing the other one didn't have other than perhaps a conviction he knows some
secret alchemy that: when lies reach a certain volume, or quantity, or momentum, they
miraculously transform to truth.
If anything, I suspect Isikoff is simply as full of himself as Luke Harding. Their basic
argument (it must be true because of the sheer volume and detail of all the allegations) is
exactly the same with Isikoff only having the advantage of yet another heaping helping of
allegation pudding that he knows full well will never see the light of verification.
As an aside, did you notice Isikoff's sour sign off? I think he was quite aware Mate had
served him some serious egg on the chin and was none too happy about it. Just my take on
it.
"... NOTE: There will likely be various amendments made to this article over the next 24 hours. ..."
"... So, in fairness, there is actually circumstantial evidence to suggest an overlap as Guccifer 2.0 clearly had Podesta's emails and it looks like the spearphishing attack used to snare Podesta's emails was identical to one that was attributed to the acquisition of emails published by DCLeaks. ..."
"... (NOTE: CrowdStrike decided to start investigating the NGP-VAN breach within a week of Podesta's emails being acquired, three months after the December 2015 incident) ..."
"... (using the publicly accessible default server in France) ..."
"... (in which he used ":)" at a far higher frequency) ..."
"... (in one of the documents, change tracking had been left on and recorded someone in a PST timezone saving one of Guccifer 2.0's documents after the documents had being manipulated in the Russian timezones!) ..."
"... (which was actually inconsistent with aspects of English language that Russians typically struggle with). ..."
This author is responding to the indictment because it features claims about Guccifer 2.0
that are inconsistent with what has been discovered about the persona, including the
following:
Virtually everything that has been claimed to indicate Guccifer 2.0 was Russian was based
on something he chose to do.
Considering that Guccifer 2.0 had access to Podesta's emails, yet never leaked anything
truly damaging to the Clinton campaign even though he would have had access to it, is highly
suspicious. In fact, Guccifer 2.0 never referenced any of the scandals that would later
explode when the DNC emails and Podesta email collections were published by WikiLeaks.
The first piece of malware at the DNC identified by Crowdstrike as relating to "Fancy Bear,"
was compiled on 25 April, 2016. This used a C2 (command and control) IP address that, for the
purposes of the APT group, had been inoperable for over a year. It was useful mostly as a
signature for attributing it to "Fancy Bear."
Two additional pieces of malware were discovered at the DNC attributed to the same APT
group. These were compiled on 5 May 2016 and 10 May 2016 while Robert Johnston was working with
the DNC on CrowdStrike's behalf to counter the intrusion reported at the end of April and
install Falcon.
This could be inferred from a number of things. DCLeaks was re-registered on 19 April 2016,
however, what they published included Republicans and individuals that were not connected to
the DNC. In fact, DCLeaks didn't start publishing anything relating to Clinton campaign staff
until June/July 2016. There was also the fact that the daily frequency of
emails in the DNC emails released by WikiLeaks increased dramatically from around 19 April
2016 , however, this wasn't indicative of the start of hacking activity but rather caused
by a 30 day email retention policy combined with the fact that the emails were acquired between
May 19th and May 25th.
There has been no technical evidence produced by those who had access to the DNC network
demonstrating files were being manipulated or that malware was engaging in activity prior to
this and by CrowdStrike's own admissions, many of the devices at the DNC were wiped in June. As
such, it's unclear where this may have come from.
There's an issue here with the conflation of Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. Why would Guccifer
2.0 have had an account at DCLeaks with which he had restricted access and could only manage a
subset of the leaks (and only those relating to the DNC) while DCLeaks featured leaks covering
those unconnected to and even opposing the DNC?
It makes no sense that the GRU would have even used Guccifer 2.0 in the manner we now know
he operated – it only caused any harm to Trump and served to undermine leaks due to the
deliberate placement of Russian metadata that would give a false perception of Russians
mishandling those documents (including the Trump research document found in Podesta's
emails).
So, in fairness, there is actually circumstantial evidence to suggest an overlap as
Guccifer 2.0 clearly had Podesta's emails and it looks like the spearphishing attack used to
snare Podesta's emails was identical to one that was attributed to the acquisition of emails
published by DCLeaks.
Is there a reason for ambiguity when referencing WikiLeaks?
While he clearly had access to the Podesta emails (NOTE: CrowdStrike decided to start
investigating the NGP-VAN breach within a week of Podesta's emails being acquired, three months
after the December 2015 incident) , Guccifer 2.0 used those materials to fabricate
evidence on 15 June 2016 implicating Russians and which, coincidentally appeared to support
(but ultimately helped refute) multiple assertions made by
CrowdStrike that the Trump Opposition report (actually sourced from Podesta's emails) was
targeted by Guccifer 2.0 at the DNC in April 2016 – and that the theft of this specific
file from the DNC – which, again, could not have been stolen from the DNC – had set
off the " first
alarm " indicating a security breach.
On 6 July 2016, Guccifer 2.0 released a batch of documents that were exclusively attachments
to DNC emails that would later be released by WikiLeaks.
Guccifer 2.0 certainly didn't make a genuine effort to "conceal a Russian identity," far
from it. The persona made decisions that would leave behind a demonstrable trail of
Russian-themed breadcrumbs, examples include:
Choosing the Russian VPN Service (using the publicly accessible default server in
France) in combination with a mail service provider that would forward the sender's IP
address .
Creating a blog and dropping a Russian emoticon in the second paragraph of the first
post, something he only ever did one other time over months of activity (in which he used
":)" at a far higher frequency) .
Tainting documents with Russian language metadata.
Going through considerable
effort to ensure Russian language errors were in the first documents provided to the
press.
Probable use of a VM set to Russian timezone while manipulating documents so that
datastore objects with timestamps implying a Russian timezone setting are saved (in one
of the documents, change tracking had been left on and recorded someone in a PST timezone
saving one of Guccifer 2.0's documents after the documents had being manipulated in the
Russian timezones!)
The deliberate and inconsistent mangling of English language (which was actually
inconsistent with aspects of English language that Russians typically struggle
with).
Guccifer 2.0 claimed credit for a hack that was already being attributed to Russians
without making any effort to counter that perception and only denied it when outright
questioned on it.
How have these identities been connected to the respective GRU officers? This query applies
to additional identities mentioned throughout the indictment.
Where have these pseudonyms been cited in any of the research or evidence published in the
past two years? Most seem to be new and were never referenced by the firms specifically
investigated the relevant phishing campaigns in the past.
Unfortunately, the indictment itself provides no reference for us to ascertain what the
individual attributions are based on.
How do we know for sure Morgachev was developing a version of it and that this is related to
the DNC?
Again, everything found on Google relating to "blablabla1234565" is in relation to the
indictment, where were these details during the past 2 years, where have they come from and how
has X-Agent development/monitoring been traced back to this individual?
It's unlikely technical evidence of his testing was left behind in deployed malware.
There is a "realblatr" profile at https://djangopackages.org/profiles/realblatr/
but this doesn't indicate anything relevant to this and other results for "realblatr" seem to
be about the indictment.
We know that whoever had the Podesta emails had far more damaging content on Hillary than
that produced by Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks and we know Guccifer 2.0 had access to Podesta's
emails. If it was the GRU and they wanted to harm Hillary, they had FAR better material do that
with than what they chose to release.
DCLeaks featured leaks from those that were not involved in the US presidential election.
Guccifer 2.0 only released content relating to the Democratic party and only content that was
of little harm to the DNC leadership and Clinton's campaign.
Yandex.com is the domain usually given to people outside of Russia that use the Yandex
service, in Russia it's yandex.ru by default.
"... I have read the entire indictment, more than once. As a lawyer, I suspect that little to none of what it asserts about supposed illegal activities could possibly be proven beyond a reasonable doubt according to the rules of evidence (unless some judge decides that actual evidence need not be presented, on "national-security" grounds, in which event the whole case would be exposed as nothing but a "show trial" or "kangaroo court"). The indictment appears to be little more than political theater, timed to embarrass Trump and Putin. Even Mueller cannot expect that there will ever be an actual trial of the defendants he has named. ..."
"... Even Stalin's show trials (to use a "Russian" analogy) were more credible than what Mueller has produced in the two indictments of Russians which he has obtained so far. ..."
"... More revealing is that the FBI supposedly is able to break through a maze of computer obfuscation and backtrack a highly convoluted e-conspiracy to named individuals in one of the (if not the) premier espionage outfits in the world -- the GRU -- but finds itself helpless in case after case in tracking down various perpetrators of "ransom ware" who have done significant economic damage to Americans over the last several years. How can one believe both of these observations to be true? ..."
"... Also, the indictment claims that the FBI has also broken through the maze of "anonymity" surrounding transactions in bitcoin (and apparently some other e-currencies). If this is true, that selling point for such currencies has now been exposed as hype. ..."
I have read the entire indictment, more than once. As a lawyer, I suspect that little
to none of what it asserts about supposed illegal activities could possibly be proven beyond
a reasonable doubt according to the rules of evidence (unless some judge decides that actual
evidence need not be presented, on "national-security" grounds, in which event the whole case
would be exposed as nothing but a "show trial" or "kangaroo court"). The indictment appears
to be little more than political theater, timed to embarrass Trump and Putin. Even Mueller
cannot expect that there will ever be an actual trial of the defendants he has
named.
If Putin's people have wanted to "undermine our democracy", they must be enjoying a good
laugh. Because Mueller and his team are doing a far better job of that than anything alleged
in the indictment could have done. Mueller is making "our democracy" the laughing stock of
the entire thinking world with this drivel. Even Stalin's show trials (to use a "Russian"
analogy) were more credible than what Mueller has produced in the two indictments of Russians
which he has obtained so far.
More revealing is that the FBI supposedly is able to break through a maze of computer
obfuscation and backtrack a highly convoluted e-conspiracy to named individuals in one of the
(if not the) premier espionage outfits in the world -- the GRU -- but finds itself helpless
in case after case in tracking down various perpetrators of "ransom ware" who have done
significant economic damage to Americans over the last several years. How can one believe
both of these observations to be true?
Also, the indictment claims that the FBI has also broken through the maze of
"anonymity" surrounding transactions in bitcoin (and apparently some other e-currencies). If
this is true, that selling point for such currencies has now been exposed as hype. Will
the bitcoin market now react (as it should) in a violently negative manner? If it does not,
would that not be a further indication that knowledgeable people consider the indictment
fatuous?
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) said at the time that their personal
analysis indicated the data transfer rate was far too high to have occurred over the internet
(22.7 Mbps). The organization concluded the 'hack' favoured an external device such as a
thumb drive, used by someone who had physical access to the DNC server. That does not
necessarily exclude the Russians, but it puts them near the back of a very large pack of
possibilities, and VIPS' explanation is far more compelling than the serving intelligence
agencies with their 'May haves' and 'Probablys'.
The story has always been that Russia slipped the information to Wikileaks, who are an arm
of Kremlin foreign policy. It could just as easily have been the Chinese, but it is more
likely whoever took the data passed it directly to Wikileaks without going through another
country. Regardless who took the information, it was all true, and if it made Mrs. Clinton
look bad, that is a natural consequence of her having done bad things. The sort of bad things
the electorate should know when making its decision. To suggest it should have been kept
under wraps until after the election is monstrous, and Clinton made her case much worse by
lying about the circumstances over and over in an attempt to keep the truth from the voters
until after their decision was registered. It almost worked - she won the popular vote.
"federal law states that gross negligence in handling the nation's intelligence can be
punished criminally with prison time or fines." ....
"Memos show that at least three top FBI officials were involved in helping Comey fashion
and edit the statement, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, General Counsel James Baker
and chief of staff Jim Rybicki."
I'd say there are plenty of people who need to be charged for their conscious conduct as
well as the cover up. The usual suspects seem to be happy to be talking abut Putin rather
than putt'n her and her associates in jail.
I have been expecting this under the theory of a scorned and frightened woman with a career
as a lawyer at risk (deals made?). Now there is concrete evidence of political bias by Strzok
and others. Inference and speculation based on text message content is over. Not so sure that
it derails Mueller though. He can claim that he dropped Strzok when the bias became obvious.
However, it certainly brings heavy suspicion onto his special investigation. Very interesting
situation.
Can we infer that you consider Mueller's latest indictment factually correct -
specifically wrt the GRU hacking the DNC & DCCC rather than it being a leak & false
flag to try and "taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish", as VIPS allege? Very
interested in your POV, as I am currently drawn towards Adam Carter's view that G2 is someone
deliberately leaving Russian breadcrumbs.
I enjoy reading your comments on this blog. First, for your experience and second you seem to
try to come to conclusions that are fair even if they are not the conclusions you desire.
If the Chinese Government stole Hillary Clinton's emails. That is proof that this whole
narrative of "yea she had a server but so what. Nobody penetrated it so it doesn't matter".
This is all I have heard for 2 plus years.
Now this. There really is no credibility left of the intelligence agency's if this can be
covered over. So why should I believe the Russians hacked the DNC and not a disgruntled
Bernie Sanders supporter named Seth Rich leaked them to Wikileaks. The former British
Ambassador Craig Murray says that is the case. And if anything he seems almost too
honest.
This is becoming a much bigger issue than Left versus Right. Right is right and wrong is
wrong. Donald Trump's thought process is to disorganized and ADD to have colluded with the
Russians.
If ideology is a cover for crime then this country is over.
Mr Podesta, how
long have you used
"PASSWORD" as a password
for your access to the
DNC?
Ons24-%&@yy zfo-%78 -
password the day before the
hack, changed daily
Password - password use
the day of the hack
I can't even buy
something from amazon with
an account password
"Password". Yet he can
control the entire DNC
without one security
question?
Trusting the gov since
Reagan is laughable.
Thinking Bush didn't create
9-11 is inexcusable.
Simply Believing anything
said by Strozck, FBI, CIA,
DOJ Clinton clapper, comer
Brennen et al is idiotic to
the level of drinking
koolaid at the church
retreat. It just isn't
being done (successfully).
Frogs gonna boil.
Say goodbye to your Dem
friends or help them see
the light of reason.
Stupid does not last long
in Darwin's evolutional
theory.
"... Sir, in my cynical old age, I have a hard time believing there will be any prosecution of the Deep State top echelons. The DOJ and FBI it seems are very focused on protecting their own. If Rosenstein is impeached then one could say the tide is turning. Otherwise it would appear to be more kabuki. ..."
"Former top FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified during two days of closed-door House hearings,
revealing shocking new Intel against her old bosses at the Bureau, according the well-placed
FBI sources.
Alarming new details on allegations of a bureau-wide cover up. Or should we say another
bureau-wide cover up.
The embattled Page tossed James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap among
others under the Congressional bus, alleging the upper echelon of the FBI concealed
intelligence confirming Chinese state-backed 'assets' had illegally acquired former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton's 30,000+ "missing" emails, federal sources said.
The Russians didn't do it. The Chinese did, according to well-placed FBI sources.
And while Democratic lawmakers and the mainstream media prop up Russia as America's
boogeyman, it was the ironically Chinese who acquired Hillary's treasure trove of classified
and top secret intelligence from her home-brewed private server.
And a public revelation of that magnitude -- publicizing that a communist world power
intercepted Hillary's sensitive and top secret emails -- would have derailed Hillary Clinton's
presidential hopes. Overnight. But it didn't simply because it was concealed." True Pundit
------------
A woman scorned? Maybe, but Page has done a real job on these malefactors. And, who knows
how many other penetrations of various kinds there were in Clinton's reign as SecState?
"You mean like with a towel?" Clinton mocked a reporter with that question when asked if her
servers had been wiped clean. It is difficult to believe that there won't be prosecutions.
pl
Putin offered to allow Mueller's team to go to Russia and interrogate the suspects in the
Mueller indictment provided 1) that Russian investigators could sit in on the
interrogations, and 2) that the US would allow Russian investigators to investigate
people like Bill Browder in the US.
This would be done until the existing treaty which allows the US and Russia to
cooperate in criminal investigation cases.
Now, let's get back to the issue of this 12 alleged intelligence officers of Russia. I
don't know the full extent of the situation. But President Trump mentioned this issue. I
will look into it.
So far, I can say the following. Things that are off the top of my head. We have an
existing agreement between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, an
existing treaty that dates back to 1999. The mutual assistance on criminal cases. This
treaty is in full effect. It works quite efficiently. On average, we initiate about 100,
150 criminal cases upon request from foreign states.
For instance, the last year, there was one extradition case upon the request sent by
the United States. This treaty has specific legal procedures we can offer. The
appropriate commission headed by Special Attorney Mueller, he can use this treaty as a
solid foundation and send a formal, official request to us so that we could interrogate,
hold questioning of these individuals who he believes are privy to some
crimes. Our enforcement are perfectly able to do this questioning and send the
appropriate materials to the United States. Moreover, we can meet you halfway. We can
make another step. We can actually permit representatives of the United States, including
the members of this very commission headed by Mr. Mueller, we can let them into the
country. They can be present at questioning.
In this case, there's another condition. This kind of effort should be mutual one.
Then we would expect that the Americans would reciprocate. They would question officials,
including the officers of law enforcement and intelligence services of the United States
whom we believe have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia. And
we have to request the presence of our law enforcement.
End Quote
Putin then proceeds to stick it to Hillary Clinton with the bombshell accusation that
Bill Browder - possibly with the assistance of US intelligence agencies - contributed a
whopping $400 million dollars to Clinton's election campaign!
Quote:
For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder in this particular case. Business associates
of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia. They never paid any taxes.
Neither in Russia nor in the United States. Yet, the money escapes the country. They were
transferred to the United States. They sent huge amount of money, $400 million as a
contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. [He presents no evidence to back up that
$400 million claim.] Well, that's their personal case. It might have been legal, the
contribution itself. But the way the money was earned was illegal. We have solid
reason to believe that some intelligence officers guided these transactions. [This
allegation, too, is merely an unsupported assertion here.] So we have an interest of
questioning them. That could be a first step. We can also extend it. There are many
options. They all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.
End Quote
This article mentions the above and provides background information on Browder and the
US Magnitsky Act which he finagled Congress into passing which were the original Russian
sanctions.
Despite Putin's claim that this was "off the top of his head", I'd say this was a
calculated response to the Mueller indictment as well as a calculated attack on Hillary
Clinton and the US intelligence agencies who were clearly in support of her election
campaign. Frankly, it's brilliant. It forces Mueller to "put up or shut up" just as much
as the company which challenged the previous indictment over Russian ads.
"US would allow Russian investigators to investigate people like Bill Browder in the US."
The example would be a good one, except, the US has no power to allow anybody to
investigate Bill Browder (grandson of the head of the American Communist Party, btw)
because Browder gave up his US citizenship, it is said, to avoid paying taxes
Skepticism is always prudent when it comes to any news source.
Regarding the issue of "trust"... Putin himself said that he and Trump shouldn't be
basing their discussions on trust of each other. While I trust Putin to be skillful and
strategic that doesn't mean I trust all of his words. After all, he is a politician and a
powerful leader. Respect is the key here, not trust.
From a transcript
http://time.com/5339848/don...
PUTIN (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): As to who is to be believed and to who's not to be believed,
you can trust no one if you take this.
Where did you get this idea that President Trump trusts me or I trust him? He defends
the interests of the United States of America, and I do defend the interests of the
Russian Federation.
We do have interests that are common. We are looking for points of contact. There are
issues where our postures diverge, and we are looking for ways to reconcile our
differences, how to make our effort more meaningful.
-----------------
Of course both countries spy on each other and engage in various forms of cyber
warfare, as do many other countries. It's business as usual. That's why the Mueller
investigation is bullshit. It doesn't acknowledge that most basic fact of geopolitics. It
posits Russia as the only bad actor in the relationship. I was very pleased that Trump
acknowledge that both sides created the issues the countries have with each other, though
of course the Borg and their media puppets went wild over that.
Trump and Putin both have excellent trolling skills. I very much enjoy this aspect of
the great Game!
Though perhaps Putin botched his trolling of Hillary by getting the number wrong. Or
may be he pulled a Trump maneuver and purposely gave the wrong number to force reporters
to research it and post the correction.
Let's see if "China hacked Clinton's server and got the 30,000 e-mails" goes mainstream.
This would nail the Borg dead. What has been peculiar about the last four years is that
there are concerted proxy operations to take down the Iranian and Russian governments to
get at their resources at the risk of crashing the world economy; let alone, a nuclear
war that would destroy the earth. But, nothing against China other than bleating about
freedom of passage in South China Sea. China is #2 and rising by all criteria. It is
restoring its ancient Imperial power to rule the civilized world. Europe has much more in
common with Russia. Over the centuries they keep battling the Kremlin over Crimea.
. It is difficult to believe that there won't be prosecutions.
Sir, in my cynical old age, I have a hard time believing there will be any
prosecution of the Deep State top echelons. The DOJ and FBI it seems are very focused on
protecting their own. If Rosenstein is impeached then one could say the tide is turning.
Otherwise it would appear to be more kabuki.
I don't get why President Trump does not declassify the documents that the DOJ are
withholding from Congress rather than tweet "witch hunt".
"... There was also the stunning Awan affair when a family of Pakistanis (with no security clearance) had been surfing congressional computers for years and perhaps selling the obtained classified information to the third parties. So much for the mighty mice CIA and FBI. ..."
It is hard to reconcile this, "Chinese state-backed 'assets' had illegally acquired former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 30,000+ "missing" emails" with that, "the US "defense"
budget is approximately 1.2 trillion dollars a year."
There was also the stunning Awan affair when a family of Pakistanis (with no security
clearance) had been surfing congressional computers for years and perhaps selling the obtained
classified information to the third parties. So much for the mighty mice CIA and FBI.
I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton
campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn't hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked. If you follow the money a
lot of what happened during the election and afterwards in regards to Russia and Trump start to make sense. Could it be that we
are finally witnessing the removal the last layers of the center of the onion?
I sure wish the mainstream media and all those critics of Donald Trump had had better civics
teachers in high school. If they had, they would understand that special counsel Robert
Mueller's indictment against those Russian officials for supposedly illegally meddling in
America's presidential election doesn't mean squat. Instead, the media and the Trump critics
have accepted the indictment as proof, even conclusive proof, that the Russians really did do
what Mueller is charging them with doing.
Of course, it's not really Mueller's indictment. It's a federal grand jury that has returned
the indictment. But, in reality, it's Mueller's indictment. He drafts it up and the grand jury
dutifully signs whatever he presents to them. As the old legal adage goes, prosecutors can get
a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
A prosecutor can say whatever he wants in an indictment. It's not sworn to. Neither the
prosecutor nor the grand jury can be prosecuted for perjury or false allegations in an
indictment.
In this particular case, the matter is even more problematic because Mueller knows that
those Russian officials who he has indicted will never be brought to trial. That's because
there is no reasonable possibility that the Russian government would ever turn them over to the
U.S. government. That means that Mueller knows that whatever he says in that indictment is
never going to be tested in a court of law. He can say whatever he wants in that indictment
knowing full well that he will never be required to prove it.
If only the mainstream media and the Trump critics would just attend one single criminal
case, they would learn that criminal indictments don't mean squat and are not evidence of
anything. Here is what judges always tell juries, in one way or another, in criminal cases:
An indictment is not evidence; it is simply the formal notice to the defendants of the
charges against each of them. The mere fact of an indictment raises no suspicion of guilty.
The government has the burden to prove the charges against the defendants beyond a reasonable
doubt, and that burden stays with the government from start to finish. The defendants have no
burden or obligation to prove anything at all. They are presumed innocent. The defendants
started this trial with a clean slate, with no evidence at all against them, and the law
presumes that they are each innocent. This presumption of innocence stays with each defendant
unless and until the government presents evidence here in court that overcomes the
presumption, and convinces you beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants are guilty.
Is that the standard that the mainstream media and Trump critics are applying in response to
the Mueller indictment? Are you kidding? They are applying the standard that is used in
communist and other totalitarian regimes. They are pointing to the accusation as proof that
those Russian officials really are guilty! After all, their argument goes, if they weren't
guilty, former FBI Director Mueller would never have secured an indictment against them.
Anyway, everybody knows that the Russians are guilty because America's deep state -- i.e.,
the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA -- say they are. What more proof does anyone need than that?
What even needs a trial? Case closed! Grab them, take them to Gitmo, torture them, and hang
them!
Pardon me, but I thought the special counsel was appointed to determine whether President
Trump somehow illegally "colluded" with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton for president.
What's Mueller doing wasting time and money indicting Russian officials who he knows will never
stand trial? Isn't it time for Mueller to put up or shut up with respect to President Trump and
let the Justice Department handle other criminal prosecutions?
Maybe it's just a coincidence that Mueller announced his indictment on the eve of Trump's
meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Or maybe not.
Ever since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. deep state has done everything it can to gin up
another Cold War with Russia. Recall that at the end of the Cold War in 1989, the U.S. deep
state was caught flat-footed. They had fully expected the Cold War to last forever, which would
guarantee ever-increasing budgets for the deep state and its army of bureaucrats, contractors,
and subcontractors.
In fact, people were talking about a "peace dividend," which would have entailed deep cuts
in expenditures for the military-industrial complex, which was President Eisenhower's term for
the deep state. That threw all elements of the deep state into a full-blown panic.
That's when they went into the Middle East and began poking hornet's nests, knowing full
well that their violent and destructive interventionism would produce terrorist blowback. It
did and the terrorist blowback was then used as the excuse for continuing out of control
deep-state expenditures in order to "keep us safe" from the enemies that their interventionism
was producing. In fact, it's probably worth mentioning that Russia's supposed hacking of some
email accounts pales to insignificance compared to massive U.S. interventionism, including the
destruction of democratic regimes, in the political affairs of other countries since the advent
of the U.S. deep state, including bribery, kidnappings, assassinations, coups, embargoes,
sanctions, and invasions.
At the same time they were intervening in the Middle East, they never gave up hope of
revitalizing the Cold War crisis environment with Russia. That is what NATO expansion into
Eastern Europe, including the hope of absorbing Ukraine into NATO, was all about. The U.S. deep
state knew that the closer NATO got to Russia's border, the more likely it would be that Russia
would have to respond. When Russia finally did respond by taking over Crimea, before the U.S.
deep state could, U.S. officials responded predictably: "We are shocked -- shocked! -- at this
act of aggression, which shows that Russia is preparing to attack and invade Eastern Europe,
the Baltics, Germany, France, and undoubtedly even the United States.
It's really just a repeat of the fears that the U.S. deep state inculcated into the American
people throughout the Cold War, as a way to get Americans to support the conversion of the
federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security or deep states.
The only thing missing is the communist part: Instead of the Reds coming to get us, it's now
just Putin and the Russkies.
What nonsense. Mueller should do the country a favor and shut down his ridiculous and
ridiculously expensive investigation. No matter how much one might dislike Donald Trump, the
fact is that he won the election, fair and square, and Hillary Clinton lost it. Accept it. Deal
with it. Wait until the 2020 election to try to oust Trump from office. Time to shut down all
the regime-change operations, including those of the U.S. deep state.
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This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger Jacob G. Hornberger is
founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo,
Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree
from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an
adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr.
Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for
Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across
the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as
a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show Freedom Watch . View these
interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full
Context . Send him email .
"... Did the Russian government seek to interfere in the 2016 US presidential elections? It's certainly possible, however we don't know. None of the Justice Department's assertions have been tested in a court of law, as is thankfully required by our legal system. It is not enough to make an allegation, as Mueller has done. You have to prove it. ..."
"... That is why we should be very suspicious of these new indictments. Mueller knows he will never have to defend his assertions in a court of law so he can make any allegation he wants. ..."
"... It is interesting that one of the Russian companies indicted by Mueller earlier this year surprised the world by actually entering a "not guilty" plea and demanding to see Mueller's evidence. The Special Counsel proceeded to file several motions to delay the hand-over of his evidence. What does Mueller have to hide? ..."
"... Meanwhile, why is no one talking about the estimated 100 elections the US government has meddled in since World War II? Maybe we need to get our own house in order? ..."
July 17, 2018 The term "deep state" has been so overused in the past few years that it may
seem meaningless. It has become standard practice to label one's political adversaries as
representing the "deep state" as a way of avoiding the defense of one's positions. President
Trump has often blamed the "deep state" for his political troubles. Trump supporters have
created big conspiracies involving the "deep state" to explain why the president places neocons
in key positions or fails to fulfill his campaign promises.
But the "deep state" is no vast and secret conspiracy theory. The deep state is real, it
operates out in the open, and it is far from monolithic. The deep state is simply the
permanent, unelected government that continues to expand its power regardless of how Americans
vote.
There are factions of the deep state that are pleased with President Trump's policies, and
in fact we might say that President Trump represents some factions of the deep state.
Other factions of the deep state are determined to undermine any of President Trump's
actions they perceive as threatening. Any move toward peace with Russia is surely something
they feel to be threatening. There are hundreds of billions of reasons – otherwise known
as dollars – why the Beltway military-industrial complex is terrified of peace breaking
out with Russia and will do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening.
That is why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's indictment on Friday of 12 Russian
military intelligence officers for allegedly interfering in the 2016 US presidential election
should immediately raise some very serious questions.
First the obvious: after more than a year of investigations which have publicly revealed
zero collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, why drop this bombshell of an allegation
at the end of the news cycle on the last business day before the historic Trump/Putin meeting
in Helsinki? The indictment could not have been announced a month ago or in two weeks? Is it
not suspicious that now no one is talking about reducing tensions with Russia but is all of a
sudden – thanks to Special Counsel Robert Mueller – talking about increasing
tensions?
Unfortunately most Americans don't seem to understand that indictments are not evidence. In
fact they are often evidence-free, as is this indictment.
Did the Russian government seek to interfere in the 2016 US presidential elections? It's
certainly possible, however we don't know. None of the Justice Department's assertions have
been tested in a court of law, as is thankfully required by our legal system. It is not enough
to make an allegation, as Mueller has done. You have to prove it.
That is why we should be very suspicious of these new indictments. Mueller knows he will
never have to defend his assertions in a court of law so he can make any allegation he
wants.
It is interesting that one of the Russian companies indicted by Mueller earlier this
year surprised the world by actually entering a "not guilty" plea and demanding to see
Mueller's evidence. The Special Counsel proceeded to file several motions to delay the
hand-over of his evidence. What does Mueller have to hide?
Meanwhile, why is no one talking about the estimated 100 elections the US government has
meddled in since World War II? Maybe we need to get our own house in order?
"... The embattled Page tossed James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap among others under the Congressional bus, alleging the upper echelon of the FBI concealed intelligence confirming Chinese state-backed 'assets' had illegally acquired former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 30,000+ "missing" emails, federal sources said. ..."
"Former top FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified during two days of closed-door House hearings,
revealing shocking new Intel against her old bosses at the Bureau, according the well-placed
FBI sources.
Alarming new details on allegations of a bureau-wide cover up. Or should we say another
bureau-wide cover up.
The embattled Page tossed James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap among
others under the Congressional bus, alleging the upper echelon of the FBI concealed
intelligence confirming Chinese state-backed 'assets' had illegally acquired former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton's 30,000+ "missing" emails, federal sources said.
The Russians didn't do it. The Chinese did, according to well-placed FBI sources." True
Pundit
"... The discussion made by William Binney (former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical and Military Analysis), Ed Loomis (computer scientist and former NSA Technical Director for the Office of Signals Processing), and some others, is about data taken from a computer of the DNC. They assert that it was not an intrusion from the outside over the Internet, but rather was a very high speed data transfer that could be done onto a storage device like a thumb drive (or, I think, onto another nearby device that permitted a very high transfer rate). Assuming the material they are analyzing is genuine, I agree with them. ..."
"... Note: Always remember that Google Gmail is "free" because you are not the customer, you are the product. ..."
There are at least 3 computers, computer servers, and/or computer systems involved in
the 2016 election campaign controversy: Hillary Clinton's e-mail server at her residence
that violated federal law about the handling of classified information, the Democratic
National Committee (DNC) computer system, and Google's Gmail computer system (used by
John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chairman).
TTG also mentioned a little earlier that multiple systems are involved.
The discussion made by William Binney (former NSA Technical Director for World
Geopolitical and Military Analysis), Ed Loomis (computer scientist and former NSA
Technical Director for the Office of Signals Processing), and some others, is about data
taken from a computer of the DNC. They assert that it was not an intrusion from the
outside over the Internet, but rather was a very high speed data transfer that could be
done onto a storage device like a thumb drive (or, I think, onto another nearby device
that permitted a very high transfer rate). Assuming the material they are analyzing is
genuine, I agree with them.
Numerous governments and private computer scientists, programmers, and "hackers" could
have gotten into Hillary Clinton's personal e-mail server from the outside through the
Interrnet and probably did. Furthermore, that does not end the problem. Data can be
intercepted as it goes from one location to another, whether going over a copper phone
line, a fiber optic cable, a computer network cable, the air, and so forth.
Note: Always remember that Google Gmail is "free" because you are not the customer,
you are the product.
Putin statement about $400 million 'donation' to Hillary Clinton by MI6-connected Bill Browder in his Helsinki presser is
obviously of great interest. This has given some new insights into the DNC false flag operation dynamics.
Notable quotes:
"... The FBI would get info about these hackers through the CrowdStrike team's disk images, memory dumps, network logs and other reports. CrowdStrike's Robert Johnston also said he worked with FBI investigators during his work at the DNC so the FBI also got some of their info directly. ..."
"... IMHO believing in the Crowdstrike analysis is like believing in Santa Claus. They did propagate unsubstantiated "security porno" like a hack of Ukrainians for a while. After this incident, Dmitry Alperovich looks like a sleazy used car salesman, not like a real specialist and, in any case, his qualification is limited to the SMTP protocol. ..."
"... What if it was Crowdstrike which compiled and planted the malware using Vault 7 tools and then conducted full-scale false flag operation against Russians to deflect allegations that Bernie was thrown under the bus deliberately and unlawfully. They have motivation and means to do this. ..."
PT, regarding your questions: "How did the FBI obtain information about activity on the DNC
and DCCC servers", "what is the source of the information?",
"how do they know what happened on specific dates as alleged in the complaint?", I believe
the answers are implicit in the first part of this news article:
It describes in considerable detail how, STARTING IN SEPTEMBER 2015, the FBI tried
strenuously to alert the DNC to the fact that it was being hacked by Russia, but the DNC,
remarkably, chose to ignore these warnings.
Here's how the article begins:
When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the
Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its
computer network, he was transferred, naturally [ sic! ], to the help desk.
His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C.
had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named "the Dukes," a
cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.
The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the
Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and
even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government's best-protected networks.
BTW, I sincerely thank TTG for providing this link in one of his previous comments.
The FBI warned the DNC of the Dukes (aka APT29, Cozy Bear) in September 2015. These are
the hackers that the Dutch AIVD penetrated and warned the NSA in real time when they attacked
Pentagon systems in 2015. Their goal seemed to be intelligence collection as one would expect
as the Dutch said they are affiliated with the SVR.
The Fancy Bear hackers (aka APT28) are the ones referred to in the recent indictment of
the GRU officers. They penetrated the DNC systems in April 2016 and weren't discovered until
CrowdStrike identified them. They're the ones who took data and released it through DCLeaks,
Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks as part of a coordinated information operation (IO). I'm not at
all surprised that the GRU would lead this IO as a military operation. The FBI would get
info about these hackers through the CrowdStrike team's disk images, memory dumps, network
logs and other reports. CrowdStrike's Robert Johnston also said he worked with FBI
investigators during his work at the DNC so the FBI also got some of their info
directly. There is absolutely no need to take physical possession of the servers.
The detail of some of the GRU officers' online activity indicates their computers were
penetrated by US or allied IC/LEA much like the Dutch AIVD penetrated the FSB computers. This
was probably a main source for much of the indictment's evidence. That the IC would release
information about this penetration for this indictment is extraordinary. Normally this stuff
never sees the light of day. It sets the precedent for the release of further such
intelligence information in future indictments.
IMHO believing in the Crowdstrike analysis is like believing in Santa Claus. They did
propagate unsubstantiated "security porno" like a hack of Ukrainians for a while. After this
incident, Dmitry Alperovich looks like a sleazy used car salesman, not like a real specialist
and, in any case, his qualification is limited to the SMTP protocol.
What if it was Crowdstrike which compiled and planted the malware using Vault 7 tools and
then conducted full-scale false flag operation against Russians to deflect allegations that
Bernie was thrown under the bus deliberately and unlawfully. They have motivation and means
to do this.
Now we also see a DNC motivation of keeping the content of affected servers from FBI eyes
-- Browder money.
"... Fucking bought and paid for by her, just like everything else in America! ..."
"... Trump just broke a tabu by failing to do homage to the sacred cow of our intelligence community. ..."
"... From Strzok testimony we saw (what we knew already) that Shillary's server was compromised by a 'foreign actor' and Strzok and Comey did nothing. What about that?!?!?!? ..."
Our intel agencies ARE corrupt...they walk into DNC HQ and leave without the
server...cause of Hillary you know that right. Fucking bought and paid for by her, just like
everything else in America!
Lookit, Trump is on the up and up, and all the little fags are crying foul? fuck 'em!
Trump just broke a tabu by failing to do homage to the sacred cow of our intelligence
community.
From Strzok testimony we saw (what we knew already) that Shillary's server was compromised
by a 'foreign actor' and Strzok and Comey did nothing. What about that?!?!?!?
I can't believe the drivel I'm reading about this Putin thing. The US is losing its mind, and rapidly becoming a major risk
to the world. A mad country of 320 million armed to the teeth is dangerous. Russia is a minnow by comparison. Putin's not our
problem, China's not our problem, they may not be 'nice'; we don't need them to be nice; WE'RE NOT NICE. But they're sane and
predictable. WE ARE OUR PROBLEM. The madness started in Congress and our appalling phony brainless opinionated media, where we
have passionate imbeciles foaming at the mouth about supposed foreign interference in our elections when it's clear that (1) we
don't know if it's true (2) the result was unaffected anyway, so (3) it doesn't matter a fuck whether they interfered or not and
(4) the major nations have been steaming open each others envelopes forever. Sense would be that even if we think Putin's lying,
we pretend to believe him and move on.
The US is arrogant and has zero insight, so doesn't understand that it's no longer a beacon to the word but loathed by the
world - and that long precedes Trump. The very politicians, like that fool McCain, who urged and organised regime change (not
just cyberfiddling and 'interference' but actually the sending of SOLDIERS to KILL PEOPLE WE DIDN'T LIKE) .. in Central America,
Asia, the Middle East over a long period .. are now ranting and indignant that Russia might be doing what we know we've been doing
for a century.
So the CIA would stop its cyberwarfare if Putin said "please don't"? For Christ's sake. We have to grow up and stop this nonsense,
or some lunatic will do something really stupid and we'll descend into anarchy, which is inevitably and rapidly followed by an
authoritarian 'solution'. This is a terrible time. Right now, in the military, some will be making plans in case the wheels fall
off and we'll need them to replace the 242yr of self-control that we're now incapable of, with external control.
yes. we have 3 eyewitnesses and verifiable proof that Seth Rich leaked the files. Russia had nothing to do with it. real question
is who ordered the murder of seth rich.
Another example of a common tool used by sociopaths and psychopaths . . . if information comes to light that can damage you
attack the messenger and ignore the message. That's high school level psychology. What's interesting is that there is a large
segment of the population that are too stupid to realize what's really going on . . . or maybe they just want to believe the bullshit
regardless.
Someone is at the center of the destruction of the Democratic Party, but who and why? Soros? Comey? Brennan? Muller? Rothchild?
Rockerfells?, Bezo, Fuckerbergs? Finesteein, McStain? Obamer? All, plus 1,000 more?
Think about all the unified media to make the Democrats look like out of control morons (yes, yes, I know what is new). But
this is a clean sweep of all of them with no voice countering this crazy aunt syndrome. Moderates and even what used to be called
liberal Democrats are leaving this extremely radicle party and the party does not seem to care one bit. Is two party time ending?
Nothing makes any sense. The Stock market doesn't either, but folks keep buying it.
Will Bezo or Fuckerberg be the new lords of the land with Schultz of Google? Are these the new kings of America? They are helping
to destroy the Republic from the ground up with their activities. Or Am I the moron?
The problem is, (to the American Deep State that is) is that Trump is not a member of the Puppet Political Cartel that has
been bought and paid for by the shadow rulers, Trump is his own man, and the shadow rulers don`t tolerate disobedience.
Looks like a hacking operation by China. They nailed Clinton's completely unprotected system and then inserted code that gave
them all her traffic over e-mail subsequent to that.
That included all her State Department classified traffic which she had her
staff illegally scan and insert in her private e-mail. We are talking about 30,000+ messages.
Strzok was told that by the Intelligence
Community Inspector General WHILE he was running the Clinton e-mail investigation and chose to ignore it. pl
Given the likely culprits, China made the most sense. Thanks for the confirmation!
Meanwhile, under the radar, another segment of the "Gordian knot" is getting ready to be cut.
White House Orders Direct Taliban Talks to Jump-Start Afghan Negotiations
https://www.nytimes.com/201...
The Trump administration has told its top diplomats to seek direct talks with the Taliban, a significant shift in American policy
in Afghanistan, done in the hope of jump-starting negotiations to end the 17-year war.
The Taliban have long said they will first discuss peace only with the Americans, who toppled their regime in Afghanistan in
2001. But the United States has mostly insisted that the Afghan government must take part.
The recent strategy shift, which was confirmed by several senior American and Afghan officials, is intended to bring those
two positions closer and lead to broader, formal negotiations to end the long war.
-----------------------
I am an independent. I voted for Obama twice because his opponents were so unappealing. I am starting to hate the left. I view
them and the neocon establishment behavior nothing short of treasonous.
Money quote: "This is just a softer "Saddam has WMDs [scam]" And people fell for it."
The cat fight between two factions of the US elite would be funny, if it was not so dangerous.
Notable quotes:
"... The greatest irony in all this is we have hard evidence that the Clinton machine swayed the MSM to promote T-rump in the primary and squash Bernie. Isn't that election tampering? ..."
"... We also witness the blatant privilege when Comey didn't indict the $hill when she obviously and without a doubt broke the law. So we have the Clinton's above the law laundering money through their foundation But it's Russia's fault....come on. ..."
"... You have totally taken the wind out of the sails of Russia Gate. As you stated, what was the crime? The information that came from the DNC computers and Podesta's emails showed that there was a plan to rig the primary against Bernie so that Hillary would win it. I've said numerous times that was the real election interference. ..."
"... Brennan who had admitted in Jan 2017 that there was no evidence that Russia affected the election in any way has since been prattling on about Russia Gate without every offering any evidence, but that is why this country has been peddling propaganda since Wilson decided it was a great way to get people on board with anything their government want to do. Here is the latest from Brennan. ..."
"... While standing next to the American president, Putin accuses Hillary Clinton of accepting illegal Russian campaign contributions. Trump doesn't push back. ..."
"... Propaganda baby. It works. Every person I have spoken with since Her Majesty lost the election really believes that this country is being run by Putin directly and with the full knowledge and help from the GOP. Because Putin has blackmailed them too or something ..."
"... @lizzyh7 ..."
"... What this episode really proves is that the US finally has joined the USSR as a broken, bankrupt empire that is run by shifting coalitions of international bankers and splinter groups of spooks. The facade of law and democratic norms in America has fallen and shattered on Washington steps. ..."
"... Personally, I accept that in modern times all major intelligence agencies and military general staffs routinely spy on each other and meddle in politics, including elections in their own countries. That's a given and should be obvious to everyone since Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev and Director George H.W Bush had three terms as President of the United States. ..."
"... What is most significant about the current spectacle is how it reveals the polarization and breakdown in discipline within US military and intelligence agencies. The internal policy dispute over Syria and Ukraine and botched election tampering has led to open infighting among the spooks. That's what "Russiagate" is really all about and it's why Flynn and Manafort were the first Mueller indicted. ..."
"... The Mueller investigation is an extension of politics by other means. ..."
"... Social media is completely insane. I've got a very large demographic of fairly open minded people given my trade, and it's unanimous: Drumpf is a Traitor and has committed Treason - both with capital Ts. ..."
The FBI never examined the DNC server. And even if they had, we learned from the vault 7 wikileaks that the CIA can leave evidence
of any country they choose when they hack into a system. I can't believe my normally rational friends can be so brainwashed as
to buy into the whole Russiagate narrative. T-rump has caused them to lose their ability to think.
The greatest irony in all this is we have hard evidence that the Clinton machine swayed the MSM to promote T-rump in the
primary and squash Bernie. Isn't that election tampering?
We also witness the blatant privilege when Comey didn't indict the $hill when she obviously and without a doubt broke the
law. So we have the Clinton's above the law laundering money through their
foundation But it's Russia's fault....come on.
Jimmy accuse people of thinking with their lizard brains...I fear he is right.
You have totally taken the wind out of the sails of Russia Gate. As you stated, what was the crime? The information that came
from the DNC computers and Podesta's emails showed that there was a plan to rig the primary against Bernie so that Hillary would
win it. I've said numerous times that was the real election interference. As to what Russia is accused of doing Obama, Brennan
and others have stated that no votes were changed from Hillary to Trump no were any voting machines hacked. Funny thing about
that though. 3 states have said that they did see signs of some entity trying to hack into their state's voting data bases but
it came from the DHS. Not a foreign country.
Could it be that Mueller is acknowledging something important here without stating it? There is no real victim in "Russiagate."
So, where is the crime? Was anyone harmed? No. Was a U.S. Navy battleship resting at anchor blown up? No, again. Not a scratch
to anything except the reputations of those who were shown to have rigged the Democratic primaries so that the DNC Chair's
favored candidate won.
Putin said that he would welcome the US investigation into those 12 military officers if the US would send someone to interview
them in Russia since the two countries have a treaty to do just that. Will anyone take him up on that offer? Anyone? Bueller?
After Trump's meeting with Putin neocons are doubling down and accusing Trump of doing all kinds of shady things.
Mueller indictments strengthen case that Trump's win was stolen. What's new? a) Strong possibility Russians monkeyed w/
voter rolls, affecting the 11/8/16 outcome and b) Trump's fall strategy may have been driven by stolen Democratic analytics.
My column: https://t.co/io2B8Nhjs7
Brennan who had admitted in Jan 2017 that there was no evidence that Russia affected the election in any way has since been
prattling on about Russia Gate without every offering any evidence, but that is why this country has been peddling propaganda
since Wilson decided it was a great way to get people on board with anything their government want to do. Here is the latest from
Brennan.
Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of "high crimes & misdemeanors."
It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican
Patriots: Where are you???
A few other tweets from the joint press conference.
I'm pretty sure that no one will ask Putin a follow up question about what he meant by this.
While standing next to the American president, Putin accuses Hillary Clinton of accepting illegal Russian campaign contributions.
Trump doesn't push back. pic.twitter.com/dDt2TTV24E
Debunked? I don't see that this was debunked. In fact I don't remember anyone ever talking about the content of the emails
that showed that the primary was rigged.
Asked if he believes US intel agencies or Putin about Russia's interference in the 2016 election, Trump immediately starts
pushing debunked DNC & Hillary conspiracy theories.
"I don't see any reason why it would be" Russia, Trump says, affirming he believes Putin's denials.
pic.twitter.com/uciAoRxbxA
PUTIN doesn't deny having blackmail material on Trump
"When Trump was in Moscow back then, I didn't even know that he was there. I treat him with utmost respect, but back then
when he was private person, a businessman, nobody informed me"
What we saw *today* was collusion. Trump's refusal to treat Russian sabotage of our democracy as the crime that it is encourages
Putin to keep it up. https://t.co/9OTDPQUmpWpic.twitter.com/efyNriYSwy
Propaganda baby. It works. Every person I have spoken with since Her Majesty lost the election really believes that this country is
being run by Putin directly and with the full knowledge and help from the GOP. Because Putin has blackmailed them too or something
....
I kept waiting for the day Russia Gate exploded and became known for the farce it is. I really wanted to see Rachel's reaction
and see how she would explain to her viewers that she had just made everything up. But now I'm don't think that is going to happen.
The PTB have invested to much into it and they won't let their agendas be derailed. This is just a softer "Saddam has WMDs." And
people fell for it.
What this episode really proves is that the US finally has joined the USSR as a broken, bankrupt empire that is run by shifting
coalitions of international bankers and splinter groups of spooks. The facade of law and democratic norms in America has fallen
and shattered on Washington steps.
Personally, I accept that in modern times all major intelligence agencies and military general staffs routinely spy on each
other and meddle in politics, including elections in their own countries. That's a given and should be obvious to everyone since
Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev and Director George H.W Bush had three terms as President of the United States.
What is most significant about the current spectacle is how it reveals the polarization and breakdown in discipline within
US military and intelligence agencies. The internal policy dispute over Syria and Ukraine and botched election tampering has led
to open infighting among the spooks. That's what "Russiagate" is really all about and it's why Flynn and Manafort were the first
Mueller indicted.
The Mueller investigation is an extension of politics by other means.
Social media is completely insane. I've got a very large demographic of fairly open minded people given my trade, and it's
unanimous: Drumpf is a Traitor and has committed Treason - both with capital Ts.
I could see Civil War in weeks. Completely terrifying.
@detroitmechworks He ostensibly went to seek advice on how to do his confirmation hearing for SOS. What actually happened
is the Medusa told him who to retain and what policies to pursue. Pompeo had no intention of adopting her policies (except Neocon
points) but he got valuable clues as to Clinton allies in the DOS. He then began purging them. Stupid HRC! But I hope she runs
in 2020.
The Dems. and journalists are jumping all over themselves to fawn over the intelligence
services as the defenders of democracy.
What is the journalism equivalent for 'regulatory capture'?
And even assuming that everything in the indictments are 100% true, then the DNC were
grossly negligent in handling their communications. And Clinton too, with her email
server. And the Obama administration for letting this happen.
I just finished reading Donna Brazile's book, Hacks .
According to Brazile, the DNC's IT department was alerted by the FBI. This was back in
2015 when a G-man called the DNC headquarters and was transferred to the DNC's help desk,
which had been outsourced to a Chicago-based company called The MIS Department. And, you
guessed it, this company had connections to Obama.
Well, it gets worse. The help desk guy who answered the phone thought it was a crank call.
And, after a cursory examination of the DNC computer network, he concluded that there was no
hack.
"... as Isikoff says, "everything the US government says is a lie, or is concocted, or is made up out of 'whole cloth'." Even the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee report blames the Russians for interference. ..."
This is obviously more horse poop, timed to mess up the Trump-Putin summit. Hardly worth
time to pay any attention to.
I could read about this, or I can read a nifty book I found in PDF format,
https://kalamkopi.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/utsa-patnaik-the-agrarian-question-in-the-neoliberal-era.pdf
The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo with Issa G. Shivji
What do you think I'll spend my time doing? (And also finding other material from Utsa
Patnaik.) No, the deep state does not want people reading about these neoliberal and
imperialist frauds, but wants to distract them from understanding what it is really up to.
Let them keep their fairy tales or tell them to the mystified -- I'm going to keep exploring
the reality.
Mueller the ultimate connoisseur of ham sandwiches. How's the indictment of three Russian
companies coming along?
Federal judge slaps Robert Mueller with humiliating fact check in courtroom over massive
'error' :
U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey asked one of Concord's attorneys, Eric Dubelier, if
he was also representing Concord Catering. They were not because the company did not exist
during the time period Mueller alleges, Dubelier said.
"What about Concord Catering? The government makes an allegation that there's some
association. I don't mean for you to -- do you represent them, or not, today? And are we
arraigning them as well?" the judge asked. Dubelier responded: "We're not. And the reason for
that, Your Honor, is I think we're dealing with a situation of the government having indicted
the proverbial ham sandwich."
"That company didn't exist as a legal entity during the time period alleged by the
government.
Yawn I'm waiting for Mueller to take the fifth prior to indicting foreign interference of
Christopher Steele- former British M16 spy, for the Steele dossier during a presidential
election. Oh lest not we forget who the players were and who funded that too .
Now that Mueller has solved the mystery of the Russians "hijacking" an election that the
Democrats wanted to hijack, maybe he could turn his attention to helping OJ find out who
killed Nicole and Ron. The National Enquirer is now our newspaper of record. Adios America.
200 years wasn't a bad run but it's over
Until there's a call for changing the vote tabulation system to something secure and
public, DOJ can indict every single person in Russia and its nothing but tilting at
windmills. It doesn't address the problem at all.
WMD in 2003 = Remember the Maine in 1898 = Russia Russia Russia.
Since we know that CIA has tools to make hacks look like it came from any suspect source,
and this technology has been leaked (after the DNC problem though) we will never know
anything true about this, not the public, not the prosecutors. They don't have the technical
ability, if anyone has, at this point, to distinguish a real from a fake hack.
I wouldn't be surprised now, if the Russians did the hacking, because they were paid by
the Clintons to do it. Certainly the NSA and GCHQ has it all too.
I certainly believe that many folks would like to use this Russian meddling to advance a
neocon agenda and start a new cold war, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that Russians
might have done this. The US certainly does it (and far worse). Israel certainly meddles in
our elections as do the Saudis, most likely. So does the Supreme Court, as do the Republicans
with their gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts. I believe that is what the Left
should be protesting, not joining in to the belief that this is all some giant frame-up of
Putin and Russia.
I've been a cautious skeptic about this whole collusion issue up to now, but after reading
the latest indictment it seems to me that Mueller is very close to closing the ring on Trump.
Perhaps I'm wrong but I find it hard to believe that Mueller, after a lifetime of mostly very
honorable public service, would join in to such a conspiracy. I find it easy to believe Trump
and Co. would.
I can't comment for others, but frankly I have two reasons for not believing "The Russians
Did It!" boondoggle.
1st: Of Course Russia was using the technology available to them to influence the
election. So was Israel, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, France, Great Britain, etc. Any major
nation whose intelligence services were not 'hacking' into our system, using Facebook, and
every other claim against Russia was not doing their job. The idea that this was limited to
Russia, and untenable to any other nation is BS on its face. Just like the idea that we
aren't doing it everywhere else is. It is the job of our intelligence community to either
shut down intelligence breeches. I'm amazed at the everyone who looks at the stories put out
about this who doesn't recognize the level of incompetence of the CIA, FBI, NIS, etc.
2nd: The more that has come out about the so-called hacks has made it clear that the DNC
was largely responsible for being an open sieve. And most of the most the items that were
most damaging to Clinton and the Democrats were, well true, and frankly items that our
so-called free press should have been hunting down if they weren't so captured.
3rd: This truly only became a problem when Clinton wasn't running away with the polls. The
breathless announcement with the Bull about the 17 different agencies when it was a
organization that speaks for the 17 agencies that reported it. Once again what was the Coast
Guard intelligence service doing investigating a hack of DNC servers? It was all PR again.
There still wasn't all that much concern on any one's part because no one was really worried
about the actual election. What were the agencies and the DNC doing to secure things?
4th: The hysteria involved in this hit high gear when Clinton lost because she and her
campaign was incompetent. They had to find an excuse besides Clinton being intensely disliked
by almost half the country, her campaign being stupid and the policies of the Democratic
Party being disliked. They didn't lose all those state houses and governorships and both
Houses of Congress because of the Russians, but the Presidency, nope that was because of
interference.
IOW, sure there was interference, interference that no one much cared about until the guy
willing to upset the apple cart got elected. And the interference that everyone recognizes
was the one that supports further Military action beloved by our NeoCon/NeoLiberal political
class and the MIC. Gosh. Recognizing the overwhelming finger of Israel on our political
system (including with Trump) isn't being addressed at all.
It is like not recognizing that Clinton was treated differently for actual illegal
activity regarding her security breeches at State, but pretending she was cleared. All show
and little actual concern for the problems at hand.
There was a preference by Putin and many others, Russians and other nationalities, for
Trump based on, as Putin said, Clinton wanting to start a war (she said she would do a 'no
fly zone' in Syria) and Trump wanting normal relations -- but that was not tampering or
hacking. Also, as Putin said, he would deal with whoever was elected, it could not be
predicted with confidence what either would do when in office, and it is Russian policy not
to interfere with the sovereignty of other countries. Some Russians preferred Trump and some
Clinton, like most everyone in the world. Most everyone would have preferred Sanders if the
primary hadn't been rigged against him.
Just having a preference is not the same as tampering, or everyone who voted could be
accused of tampering or hacking by casting his/her vote. I don't Russia had anything to do
with swaying the election, and it is only just now, going on two years after, that Putin even
let it be known he preferred Trump and normalization of relations over Clinton and war. Putin
is diplomatic but he plays it straight.
Isikoff's responses made me curious so I went and looked it up (PBS has it as well). It's
a bit under 30 pages long and relatively easy to read. I encourage anyone following the story
to do so.
Of all the Russia theories, the bit about the Russians being behind the DNC e-mail hack
has always seemed the most credible to me, if only because they were apparently able to
convince Trump of it when they presented the evidence to him. The indictment is very detailed
and implies the existence of considerable hard evidence that would have been used to create
it. There are names, dates and times, aliases, specific servers and tasks performed on them,
and so on. Either Mueller is going all in on a bluff or he actually has this stuff. The
former would be very risky because there is so much detail in the indictment that he would
rapidly need to put up or shut up in order to maintain any kind of credibility in court. If
he tried to handwave then it would all fall apart like a house of cards. I don't completely
rule it out (especially given that they did exactly that for the Iraq WMDs) but in this case
I think a legal challenge from one of the accused would expose things pretty quickly. It will
be interesting to see whether anyone does that.
So suppose it's true and Mueller has the evidence. That would mean that agents of the
Russian military were involved in the DNC server hacks. That's it. There have to date been no
claims from the intelligence community that the election itself was compromised, and the only
dirt on the Trump campaign was from the discredited Steele dossier. I think this falls within
the realm of things that big countries do all the time (the US probably did something similar
to obtain the evidence referenced in the indictment). It might have been a bit more serious
because it was politically sensitive material during an election campaign, which likely
merited some kind of response (Obama's "I told the Russians to cut it out" would seem
appropriate). "OMG the Russians stole our democracy!" is a hysterical overreaction.
The other thing is that the activities described in the indictment are nothing
particularly special or unusual. There are bad actors out there doing this kind of thing all
the time, and the DNC would be a high value target. Having a robust security policy and
ensuring it was followed would have been enough to thwart pretty much all of it. The real
story here is that DNC security practices were sloppy enough to allow this to happen. The
fact that it was the Russians that ended up doing it (if it was) is almost incidental.
The "real story" behind all the current brouhaha and kayfabe, is that the DNC is a vastly
corrupt, organized mob (sorry, the court said they are a "private club or association), their
candidate was and is an evil POS, and they played not hardball but dirty tricks all the way
through the 2016 campaign. They are the ones who make a mockery of 'democracy," however
loosely it might be defined, and the electoral process. And one little piece of the rot has
fortuitously been uncovered, all those emails and the existence of that "public-private
partnership" server and the rest.
(If it was) the Russians, and not some little person, maybe an unpaid intern, within the
DNC, with a residue of conscience, or just building some credit with the potential
prosecutorial futures Trying to lay it off as just a failure of the DNC to "have a robust
security policy, what do they call it, "gaslighting?"
i value this site and community but you guys have a real blind spot on this russia issue
and i hope you'll own up to it when the truth is known. i hate the current milquetoast dems
as much as anyone but if you can't smell the rot on this story or see that something big is
lurking under the surface, then you are willfully blind in my opinion.
Of course that's always possible (blind spots), but do you have any particular reasons or
evidence you can point to or link to that support your accusation? Is your opinion based on
the "overwhelming detail" in the current indictment? Doesn't it bother you that these
allegations (for they ARE only allegations) will likely never have to be proven since the
possibility of getting the 12 Russians extradited to the US is virtually nil (meaning no
trial where the facts must be presented)? Doesn't the timing of this indictment also strike
you as suspicious?
i don't want to start a scrum but i'll just say i find chait's recent piece, marcy wheeler
and tpm's coverage very convincing. too many "innocent explanations" don't add up when taken
as a whole and trump's behavior surrounding russia is simply troubling. also, too, he's
pretty clearly a money launderer and criminal with ties to russian money. pile on me if you
will but we'll have to agree to disagree until more facts come out
Help me out, please. What has Trump done that is so beneficial to Russia? I'm asking a
serious question and not trolling whatsoever. I can't follow all of the news, and maybe I
have a blind spot and missed where Trump sold us out to the Russians. All these people are
convinced that "Russia has something on Trump". How are they leveraging this something?
What is Trump doing to the benefit of Russia and the detriment of the USA? If it benefits
both, IMHO, then it doesn't necessarily require Russian leverage.
From the get-go there are two questions that I haven't seen anyone address. This is before
you get to any "substantive" bits of the indictment, or of the whole Evil Russian Hacker
scandal.
1. Why GRU. WHY GRU.
GRU is the Russian military intelligence agency reporting to the General Staff. While it
has many different units and functions, the common denominator is that these have something
to do with MILITARY intelligence or activities. Battlefield intelligence, counter-terrorism
units, special forces, saboteurs, et cetera.
Meanwhile, the Russians also have the SVR – "Service of Foreign Intelligence"
– which is what the foreign intelligence departments of the KGB were folded into in the
1990s (the domestic departments went into the FSB – hence creating a CIA-FBI type
duality). Although much of the structure is classified, the SVR does have an entire
department dedicated to "information systems".
In principle, an operation against a political target with the view of affecting a
political process should involve the SVR – not the GRU. It, in fact, makes absolutely
no sense for the GRU to get involved in this, as hacking Podesta's Gmail has no discernible
military intelligence objective. And yet, the only acronym various US publications (and
indictments) have been pushing since 2017 is the GRU while the SVR does not exist?
This continues to perplex me.
2. Technically speaking, the GRU operates under a very heavy classification regime.
Meaning the names of their operatives themselves are classified information. And yet, here we
have an indictment with not less than a dozen names.
Which means that either the US has infiltrated the GRU top to bottom and sideways, and
Mueller is somehow not gun shy to reveal this fact to the world – or someone is making
stuff up. Unless someone wants to point out to me some other explanation for a dozen
classified – top secret and all that – names showing up in a public US
document
-- -
But hey, I am not a professional journalist, so what do I know about asking questions.
My fear is that many on the Left are jumping into a rabbit hole where, as Isikoff
says, "everything the US government says is a lie, or is concocted, or is made up out of
'whole cloth'." Even the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee report blames the Russians
for interference. This from Charles Blow's column in today's NYT:
"In 2016, cyber actors affiliated with the Russian Government conducted an unprecedented,
coordinated cyber campaign against state election infrastructure. Russian actors scanned
databases for vulnerabilities, attempted intrusions, and in a small number of cases
successfully penetrated a voter registration database. This activity was part of a larger
campaign to prepare to undermine confidence in the voting process."
Rather than be distracted with whether Mueller and DOJ and the Intel Community is making
it all up let's wait and see what the special counsel ultimately finds and the evidence he
produces to support it. In the meantime, the Left should be shining the light on our own,
well documented, interference in other countries' elections, our illegal regime change
operations and calling out the neocons and their fellow travelers for trying to start a new
Cold War with Russia.
isikoff has been in on this from the git go. (Remember judy miller?)
He's the one who wrote a "yahoo" article, after talking to christopher steele of dossier
fame, that was cited as "confirmation" of the dossier "evidence" when it was used to get a
fisa warrant on Carter Paige to justify the Trump campaign "wiretapping" that "never
happened."
christopher steele got "fired from the fbi," and isikoff, claiming he didn't do nuthin'
"wrong," apparently got a book deal. He now seems to have decided that his mission in life is
advocating for nuclear war with Russia because john podesta got sucked in by a phishing email
and gave away his password which was, in perfect keeping with the stupidity of it all,
"password."
Scott Ritter is not buying this,: "this indictment would ever go to trial. It simply couldn't survive the discovery to which any
competent defense would subject the government's assertions." This clearly was a political act by neocons.
Rosenstein and Mueller claim that 12 Russians like 12 Spartan manage to keep Hillary from the coronation is questionable
political backstabbing at best, the act of sedition at worst.
Notable quotes:
"... Rosenstein, by the timing and content of the indictment he publicly released Friday, committed an act that undermined the president of the United States' ability to conduct critical affairs of state -- in this case, a summit with a foreign leader the outcome of which could impact global nuclear nonproliferation policy. The hue and cry among the president's political foes for him to cancel the summit with Putin -- or, failing that, to use the summit to confront the Russian leader with the indictment -- is a direct result of Rosenstein's decision to release the Mueller indictment when he did and how he did. Through its content, the indictment was designed to shape public opinion against Russia. ..."
While the impeachment of Rosenstein is highly unlikely and the likelihood
of the FBI being found guilty of its investigations being corrupted by individual bias is equally slim,
in the world of politics, perception creates its own reality and the Mueller investigation had been
taking a public beating for some time. By releasing an indictment predicated upon the operating assertion
that 12 named Russian military intelligence officers orchestrated a series of cyberattacks that resulted
in information being stolen from computer servers belonging to the Democratic Party, and then facilitated
the release of this information in a manner designed to do damage to the candidacy of Clinton, Rosenstein
sought to silence once and for all the voices that have attacked him, along with the Department of
Justice, the FBI and the Mueller investigation, as a participant in a partisan plot against the
president.
There is one major problem with the indictment, however: It doesn't
prove that which it asserts. True, it provides a compelling narrative that reads like a spy novel, and
there is no doubt in my mind that many of the technical details related to the timing and functioning of
the malware described within are accurate. But the leap of logic that takes the reader from the inner
workings of the servers of the Democratic Party to the offices of Russian intelligence officers in Moscow
is not backed up by anything that demonstrates how these connections were made.
That's the point of an indictment, however -- it doesn't exist to provide
evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather to provide only enough information to demonstrate probable
cause. No one would, or could, be convicted at trial from the information contained in the indictment
alone. For that to happen, the government would have to produce the specific evidence linking the hacks
to the named Russians, and provide details on how this evidence was collected, and by whom. In short, the
government would have to be willing to reveal some of the most sensitive sources and methods of
intelligence collection by the U.S. intelligence community and expose, and therefore ruin, the careers of
those who collected this information. This is something the government has never been willing to do, and
there is much doubt that if, for some odd reason, the Russians agreed to send one or more of these named
intelligence officers to the United States to answer the indictment, this indictment would ever go to
trial. It simply couldn't survive the discovery to which any competent defense would subject the
government's assertions.
Robert Mueller knew this when he drafted the indictment, and Rob
Rosenstein knew this when he presented it to the public. The assertions set forth in the indictment,
while cloaked in the trappings of American justice, have nothing to do with actual justice or the rule of
law; they cannot, and will never, be proved in a court of law. However, by releasing them in a manner
that suggests that the government is willing to proceed to trial, a perception is created that implies
that they can withstand the scrutiny necessary to prevail at trial.
And as we know, perception is its own reality.
Despite Rosenstein's assertions to the contrary, the decision to
release the indictment of the 12 named Russian military intelligence officers was an act of partisan
warfare designed to tip the scale of public opinion against the supporters of President Trump, and in
favor of those who oppose him politically, Democrat and Republican alike. Based upon the media coverage
since Rosenstein's press conference, it appears that in this he has been wildly successful.
But is the indictment factually correct? The biggest clue that Mueller
and Rosenstein have crafted a criminal espionage narrative from whole
cloth comes from none other than the very intelligence agency whose work
would preclude Rosenstein's indictment from ever going to trial: the National Security Agency. In June
2017 the online investigative journal The Intercept
referenced a highly classified document
from the NSA titled "Spear-Phishing Campaign TTPs Used Against U.S. And Foreign Government Political
Entities." It's a highly technical document, derived from collection sources and methods the NSA has
classified at the Top Secret/SI (i.e., Special Intelligence) level. This document was meant for internal
consumption, not public release. As such, the drafters could be honest about what they knew and what they
didn't know -- unlike those in the Mueller investigation who drafted the aforementioned indictment.
A cursory comparison of the leaked NSA document and the indictment
presented by Rosenstein suggests that the events described in Count 11 of the indictment pertaining to an
effort to penetrate state and county election offices responsible for administering the 2016 U.S.
presidential election are precisely the events captured in the NSA document. While the indictment links
the identity of a named Russian intelligence officer, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, to specific actions
detailed therein, the NSA document is much more circumspect. In a diagram supporting the text report, the
NSA document specifically states that the organizational ties between the unnamed operators involved in
the actions described and
an organizational entity, Unit 74455,
affiliated with Russian military intelligence is a product of the judgment of an analyst and not fact.
If we take this piece of information to its logical conclusion, then
the Mueller indictment has taken detailed data related to hacking operations directed against various
American political entities and shoehorned it into what amounts to little more than the organizational
chart of a military intelligence unit assessed -- but not known -- to have overseen the operations described.
This is a far cry from the kind of incontrovertible proof that Mueller's team suggests exists to support
its indictment of the 12 named Russian intelligence officers.
If this is indeed the case, then the indictment, as presented, is a
politically motivated fraud. Mueller doesn't know the identities of those involved in the hacking
operations he describes -- because the intelligence analysts who put the case together don't know those
names. If this case were to go to trial, the indictment would be dismissed in the preliminary hearing
phase for insufficient evidence, even if the government were willing to lay out the totality of its
case -- which, because of classification reasons, it would never do.
But the purpose of the indictment wasn't to bring to justice the
perpetrators of a crime against the American people; it was to manipulate public opinion.
And therein lies the rub.
The timing of the release of the Mueller indictment unleashed a storm
of political backlash directed at President Trump, and specifically at his scheduled July 16 summit with
Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. This summit was never popular with the president's
political opponents, given the current state of affairs between Russia and the U.S., dominated as they
are by events in Syria and Ukraine, perceived Russian threats against the northern flank of NATO,
allegations of election meddling in the U.S. and Europe, and Russia's nuclear arsenal. On that last
point, critics claim Russia's arsenal is irresponsibly expanding, operated in violation of existing arms
control agreements, and is being used to underpin foreign policy objectives through the use of nuclear
blackmail.
President Trump has publicly stated that it is his fervent desire that
relations with Russia can be improved and that he views the Helsinki summit as an appropriate venue for
initiating a process that could facilitate such an outcome. It is the president's sole prerogative to
formulate and implement foreign and national security policy on behalf of the American people. While his
political critics are free to criticize this policy, they cannot undermine it without running afoul of
sedition laws.
Rosenstein, by the timing and content of the indictment he publicly
released Friday, committed an act that undermined the president of the United States' ability to conduct
critical affairs of state -- in this case, a summit with a foreign leader the outcome of which could impact
global nuclear nonproliferation policy. The hue and cry among the president's political foes for him to
cancel the summit with Putin -- or, failing that, to use the summit to confront the Russian leader with the
indictment -- is a direct result of Rosenstein's decision to release the Mueller indictment when he did and
how he did. Through its content, the indictment was designed to shape public opinion against Russia.
This indictment, by any other name, is a political act, and should be
treated as such by the American people and the media.
"This isn't about Trump, his personality, or his other policies. It's about
whether a bunch of unelected bureaucrats are going to be granted a veto power over who sits in
that chair in the Oval Office" 7 hours ago | 2,546
75 MORE: Politics If there was ever any doubt
that the Russia-gate hoax is a scheme by the War Party to salvage their bankrupt foreign
policy, and depose a democratically-elected President, then Robert Mueller's
indictment of twelve alleged GRU agents for "interfering" in the 2016 election settles the
matter once and for all. Are we supposed to believe it was just a coincidence that the
indictment was made public just as Trump was about to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in
Helsinki?
An indictment of twelve individuals who will never contest the charges, and which will not
have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law – to whom is it addressed?
Not to any jury, but to the court of public opinion. It is, in short, pure propaganda, meant to
sabotage Trump's Helsinki peace initiative before it has even convened.
Yet the brazenness of this borderline treason is what makes it so ineffective. The American
people aren't stupid: to the extent that they're paying attention to this Beltway comic opera
they can figure out the motives and meaning of Mueller's accusations without too much
difficulty.
The indictment reads like a fourth-rate spy thriller: we are treated to alleged "real time"
transcripts of Boris and
Natasha in action, draining the DNC's email system as well as our precious bodily fluids.
This material, perhaps supplied by the National Security Agency, contains no evidence that
links either Russia or the named individuals to the actions depicted in the transcripts. We
just have to take Mueller's word for it.
What Mueller is counting on is that the defendants will never show up in court. If they did,
following the example of representatives of the indicted
Internet Research Agency – accused of running Facebook ads on Russia's behalf –
Mueller would have to provide real evidence of the defendant's guilt. In that case, the
indictment would have to be dropped, because the alleged evidence is classified.
Ominously, the indictment points to unnamed US individuals alleged to have collaborated with
supposed Russian agents: Roger Stone has been identified as one of them, and no doubt others
have been targeted by the special prosecutor's office. Anyone who thought the anti-Russian
inquisition would be content with mini-big fish Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort, and the little
tadpoles they'd managed to corral, is about to be proven dead wrong. This fishing expedition
has barely begun.
The whole shoddy affair is meant to distract attention away from the President's ambitious
foreign policy initiatives, the twin diplomatic outreach campaigns to two of our old cold war
enemies. These efforts demonstrate the overarching significance of the President's "America
First" foreign policy: Trump means to abandon the old cold war structures. In their place he
means to build a new so-called international order, one that is not overseen by any one
"superpower" but that is self-regulating, like the market order that has brought unparalleled
prosperity to this country and to the world.
That's the big picture. Focusing in on specifics, what is likely to come out of this summit
is:
· A settlement of the Syrian conflict as a prelude to US withdrawal.
· An agreement to renew and revitalize the INF treaty, which is in danger of being
nullified, and the initiation of new joint efforts to limit nuclear weapons.
· An acknowledgment of the need to normalize Russo-American relations in the interest
of world peace.
I might add that efforts to trace and capture "rogue" nukes, perhaps left over from the
immediate post-Soviet collapse, should also be on the agenda.
The disgusting – and depressing – response of the Democrats to the Helsinki
summit has been a concerted campaign to cancel it. Yes, that's how myopic and in thrall to the
Deep State these flunkies are: world peace, who cares ? Never mind that we're still on
hair-trigger alert, with our nukes aimed at their cities and their nukes targeting ours. The
slightest anomaly could spark a nuclear exchange – the end of the world, the extinction
of human life, and probably of most life, for quite some time to come.
And yet -- what does the survival of the human race matter next to the question of how and
why Hillary Clinton was denied her rightful place in history? I mean, really
!
The American people are not blaming Russia for their problems.
They don't want conflict with the Kremlin, they don't care about Ukraine, and the question of
sanctions never comes up at the dinner table of ordinary Americans. That's why Russia-gate and
the war propaganda coming out of the neocon and liberal thinktanks has had little effect on
public opinion, in marked contrast to its dominance of elite discourse inside the Beltway
bubble.
This latest effort to discredit the President's peace project and sabotage a summit with a
foreign leader underscores the battle lines in this country. On one side is the Deep State,
with its self-interested globalist leadership so invested in our interventionist foreign policy
that even Trump's limited (albeit surprisingly radical) critique poses a deadly threat to their
power. On the other side is Trump, the outsider, who often has to work against and around his
own government in order to pursue his preferred policies.
Yet this isn't about Trump, his personality, or his other policies. It's about whether a
bunch of unelected bureaucrats are going to be granted a veto power over who sits in that chair
in the Oval Office. It's as simple as that.
Debsisdead provides some consideration why the level of Mueller investigation is so low and finding are so pathetic...
Notable quotes:
"... I'm always gobsmacked at the cognitive dissonance of those who on the one hand shout that the American empire is on its last legs but as they do that they also claim that America's dumb as a rock alphabet intelligence agencies are successfully developing incredibly arcane and complicated strategies that would require having foresight to the point of omnipotence to successfully manage the plot/s. ..."
"... All that despite the fact that the known measurable outcomes that these agencies and their 'pointy end' the American military do deliver in conflicts mostly of their design and instigation reveal a miserable success rate of I would say, less than 1 in 10. ..."
"... That nonsense just does not compute. Yes they are violent crooks, but they are stupid violent crooks who cannot succeed at the simplest plan much less the intricate tactics outlined by so many here. ..."
this is all about freako psychopaths and their money, nothing more. lot's of blackmail to
keep the gravy train running
they cannot charge the Russians with what they have actually done due to a lot of these
little deep state sh%$ts would go to jail and possibly branches of government shut down if it
ever came out what the various "kompromats" were that the Russians targeted
the Russians are offensive and no innocents, however the US Gov is just disgusting
I'm always gobsmacked at the cognitive dissonance of those who on the one hand shout that the
American empire is on its last legs but as they do that they also claim that America's dumb
as a rock alphabet intelligence agencies are successfully developing incredibly arcane and
complicated strategies that would require having foresight to the point of omnipotence to
successfully manage the plot/s.
All that despite the fact that the known measurable outcomes that these agencies and their
'pointy end' the American military do deliver in conflicts mostly of their design and
instigation reveal a miserable success rate of I would say, less than 1 in 10.
That nonsense just does not compute. Yes they are violent crooks, but they are stupid
violent crooks who cannot succeed at the simplest plan much less the intricate tactics
outlined by so many here.
Once people begin believing the DC airheads' nonsense posturing , they may as well pack
their bags, throw in the towel and take off for parts unknown because falling for scumbag
tosh indicates an inability to accurately perceive the world - just the same as these DC
derps, but with less naked self interest on display.
"... How much proof would I need to lend my voice to the escalation of tensions between two nuclear superpowers? Mountains. I personally would settle for nothing less than hard proof which can be independently verified by trusted experts like the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. ..."
"... Is that a big ask? Yes. Yes it is. That's what happens when government institutions completely discredit themselves as they did with the false narratives advanced in the manufacturing of support for the Iraq invasion. You don't get to butcher a million Iraqis in a war based on lies, turn around a few years later and say "We need new cold war escalations with a nuclear superpower but we can't prove it because the evidence is secret." That's not a thing. Copious amounts of hard, verifiable proof or GTFO. So far we have no evidence besides the confident-sounding assertions of government insiders and their mass media mouthpieces, which is the same as no evidence. ..."
As
we just discussed , some major news stories have recently dropped about what a horrible horrifying menace the Russian Federation
is to the world , and as always I have nothing to offer the breathless pundits on CNN and MSNBC but my completely unsatisfied skepticism.
My skepticism of the official Russia narrative remains so completely unsatisfied that if mainstream media were my husband I would
already be cheating on it with my yoga instructor.
I do not believe the establishment Russia narrative. I do not believe that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to
rig the 2016 election. I do not believe the Russian government did any election rigging for Trump to collude with. This is not because
I believe Vladimir Putin is some kind of blueberry-picking girl scout, and it certainly isn't because I think the Russian government
is unwilling or incapable of meddling in the affairs of other nations to some extent when it suits them. It is simply because I am
aware that the US intelligence community lies constantly as a matter of policy, and because I understand how the burden of proof
works.
At this time, I see no reason to espouse any belief system which embraces as true the assertion that Russia meddled in the 2016
elections in any meaningful way, or that it presents a unique and urgent threat to the world which must be aggressively dealt with.
But all the establishment mouthpieces tell me that I must necessarily embrace these assertions as known, irrefutable fact. Here are
five things that would have to change in order for that to happen:
1. Proof of a hacking conspiracy to elect Trump.
The first step to getting a heretic like myself aboard the Russia hysteria train would be the existence of publicly available
evidence of the claims made about election meddling in 2016, which rises to the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world. So
far, that burden of proof for Russian hacking allegations has not come anywhere remotely close to being met.
How much proof would I need to lend my voice to the escalation of tensions between two nuclear superpowers? Mountains. I personally
would settle for nothing less than hard proof which can be independently verified by trusted experts like the Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity.
Is that a big ask? Yes. Yes it is. That's what happens when government institutions completely discredit themselves as they did
with the false narratives advanced
in the manufacturing of support for the Iraq invasion. You don't get to butcher a million Iraqis in a war based on lies, turn around
a few years later and say "We need new cold war escalations with a nuclear superpower but we can't prove it because the evidence
is secret." That's not a thing. Copious amounts of hard, verifiable proof or GTFO. So far we have no evidence besides the confident-sounding
assertions of government insiders and their mass media mouthpieces, which is the same as no evidence.
2. Proof that election meddling actually influenced the election in a meaningful way.
Even if Russian hackers did exfiltrate Democratic party emails and give them to WikiLeaks, if it didn't affect the election, who
cares? That's a single-day, second-page story at best, meriting nothing beyond a "Hmm, interesting, turns out Russia tried and failed
to influence the US election," followed by a shrug and moving on to something that actually matters.
After it has been thoroughly proven that Russia meddled in the elections in a meaningful way, it must then be established that
that meddling had an actual impact on the election results.
3. Some reason to believe Russian election meddling was unwarranted and unacceptable.
The US government,
by a very wide margin , interferes in the elections of other countries far, far more than any other government on earth does.
The US government's
own
data shows that it has deliberately meddled in the elections of 81 foreign governments between 1946 and 2000,
including Russia in the nineties.
This is public knowledge. A former CIA Director
cracked jokes about it on Fox News earlier this year.
If I'm going to abandon my skepticism and accept the Gospel According to Maddow, after meaningful, concrete election interference
has been clearly established I'm going to need a very convincing reason to believe that it is somehow wrong or improper for a government
to attempt to respond in kind to the undisputed single worst offender of this exact offense. It makes no sense for the United States
to actively create an environment in which election interference is something that governments do to one another, and then cry like
a spanked child when its election is interfered with by one of the very governments whose elections the US recently meddled in.
This is nonsense. America being far and away the worst election meddler on the planet makes it a fair target for election meddling
by not just Russia, but every country in the world. It is very obviously moral and acceptable for any government on earth to interfere
in America's elections as long as it remains the world's worst offender in that area. In order for Russia to be in the wrong if it
interfered in America's elections, some very convincing argument I've not yet heard will have to be made to support that case.
4. Proof that the election meddling went beyond simply giving Americans access to information about their government.
If all the Russians did was simply show Americans
emails of Democratic Party officials talking
to one another and circulate some
MSM articles as claimed in the
ridiculous Russian troll farm allegations , that's nothing to get upset about. If anything, Americans should be upset that they
had to hear about Democratic Party corruption through the grapevine instead of having light shed on it by the American officials
whose job it is to do so. Complaints about election meddling is only valid if that election meddling isn't comprised of truth and
facts.
5. A valid reason to believe escalated tensions between two nuclear superpowers are worthwhile.
After it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia did indeed meddle in the US elections in a meaningful way, and
after it has then been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia actually influenced election results in a significant way, and
after the case has been clearly made that it was bad and wrong for Russia to do this instead of fair and reasonable, and after it
has been clearly proven that the election meddling went beyond simply telling Americans the truth about their government, the question
then becomes what, if anything, should be done about it?
If you look at the actions that this administration has taken over the last year and a half, the answer to that question appears
to be harsh sanctions, NATO expansionism, selling arms to Ukraine, throwing out diplomats, increasing military presence along Russia's
border, a Nuclear Posture Review which is much more aggressive toward Russia, repeatedly bombing Syria, and just generally creating
more and more opportunities for something to go catastrophically wrong with one of the two nations' aging, outdated nuclear arsenals,
setting off a chain of events from which there is no turning back and no surviving.
And the pundits and politicians keep pushing for more and more escalations, at this very moment braying with one voice that Trump
must aggressively confront Putin about Mueller's indictments or withdraw from the peace talks. But is it worth it? Is it worth risking
the life of every terrestrial organism to, what? What specifically would be gained that makes increasing the risk of nuclear catastrophe
worthwhile? Making sure nobody interferes in America's fake elections? I'd need to see a very clear and specific case made, with
a 'pros' and 'cons' list and "THE POTENTIAL DEATH OF LITERALLY EVERYTHING" written in big red letters at the top of the 'cons' column.
Rallying the world to cut off Russia from the world stage and cripple its economy has been been a goal of the US power establishment
since the collapse of the Soviet Union, so there's no reason to believe that even the people who are making the claims against Russia
actually believe them. The goal is
crippling Russia to handicap China , and ultimately to shore up global hegemony for the US-centralized empire by preventing the
rise of any rival superpowers. The sociopathic alliance of plutocrats and intelligence/defense agencies who control that empire are
willing to threaten nuclear confrontation in order to ensure their continued dominance. All of their actions against Russia since
2016 have had everything to do with establishing long-term planetary dominance and nothing whatsoever to do with election meddling.
Those five things would need to happen before I'd be willing to jump aboard the "Russia! Russia! Russia!" train. Until then I'll
just keep pointing to the total lack of evidence and how very, very far the CIA/CNN Russia narrative is from credibility.
* * *
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"... "In my mind, this is a level of panic and desperation unseen in the annals of Washington D.C. coverups...this is a desperate move by Mueller...this does nothing at all to strengthen Mueller's investigation of Trump himself. It actually weakens his mandate as Special Counsel" ..."
"... Tom is a regular contributor not only here at Russia Insider but also at Seeking Alpha and Newsmax . Check out his blog, Gold Goats 'n Guns and please support his work through his Patreon where he also publishes his monthly investment newsletter. ..."
"... isolationist, conspiracy theorist, nativist and racist ..."
"... Please support my work by joining my Patreon. ..."
"In my mind, this is a level of panic and desperation unseen in the annals of Washington
D.C. coverups...this is a desperate move by Mueller...this does nothing at all to strengthen
Mueller's investigation of Trump himself. It actually weakens his mandate as Special Counsel"
Tom is a regular
contributor not only here at Russia Insider but also at Seeking Alpha and Newsmax . Check out his blog, Gold Goats 'n Guns and please support his work through his
Patreon where he also
publishes his monthly investment newsletter.
So, imagine my shock, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted twelve Russian intelligence
officers on the eve of a summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir
Putin.
Despite his oh-so-earnest protestations to the contrary, Rod Rosenstein, of all people,
knows there are no coincidences in politics.
Trump is on a search and destroy mission all across Europe right now attacking the pillars
of the post-WWII institutional order.
While in Washington, Congress devolved into an episode of Jerry Springer during the Peter
Strzok hearings yesterday. Both Strzok and Rosenstein have literally destroyed their
credibility by stonewalling Congress over the investigations into Hillary Clinton's email
server, which, conveniently Mueller now has enough information to take to the Grand Jury.
In my mind, this is a level of panic and desperation unseen in the annals of Washington D.C.
coverups. Both Strzok and Rosenstein know that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is completely
compromised and can do nothing to stop them from obstructing investigations and turning our
justice system into something worse than farce.
And why do I think this is a desperate move by Mueller? Because the indictments go out of
their way to preclude any Americans having any involvement in these 'hacking events' at
all.
So, this does nothing at all to strengthen Mueller's investigation of Trump himself. It
actually weakens his mandate as Special Counsel.
On the other hand, it does a bang-up job of shifting the news cycle away from Trump's
heavy-handed but effective steam-rolling Germany and the UK over NATO spending, energy policy
and Brexit.
Trump continues, in his circuitous way, to stick a fork in the eye of the globalists whose
water politicians like Angela Merkel and Theresa May have carried for years.
Now with Trump prepared to sit down with Putin and potentially hammer out a major agreement
on many outstanding issues like Syria, arms control, NATO's purpose, energy policy and
terrorism the Deep State/Globalist/Davos Crowd needed something to saddle him with to prevent
this from happening.
The reasoning will be (if not already out there as I write this) that Trump would be a
traitor for sitting down with Putin after these indictments.
These indictments are not of some Russian private citizens Internet trolls like the last
batch. These are Russian military intelligence officers. And the irony of this, of course, is
that the intelligence officers involved in collating and disseminating demonstrably false
information about Trump which led to all this in the first place hail from the country that
Trump is currently visiting, the U.K.
So, the trap is set for the Democrats, Never Trumpers and media to hang Trump next week with
whatever agreement he signs with Putin. In fact, at this point Trump could shoot Putin in the
face with a concealed Derringer and they'd say he killed Putin to shut him
up.
There is no rationality left to this circus. And that's what
these indictments represent.
This is not about right and wrong, it never was. It is, was and always will be about
maintaining power. If this week shows people anything it should show just how far these
powerful people will go to maintain that power, pelf and privilege.
Because winning isn't everything, it's the only thing in politics. Unfortunately, for them,
people all over the West are getting tired of it. And the more they smirk, shuck, jive and cry
"Point of Order!" the angrier the people will get.
As one of my savvy subscribers said to me this morning, the Strzok hearings are brilliant.
They are shifting the Overton Window so far away from the status quo that it will never shift
back to where it was.
I'm sure Mueller, et.al. are thinking they are so smart in doing this today. Just like
Angela Merkel continues to think she's survived the challenge to her power and Theresa May
hers.
They think they've managed these crises.
They haven't. All they are doing is ensuring the next opportunity the people get to rise up
against them at the ballot box the worse it will be for them. And if the ballot box doesn't
work, then pitchforks and torches come out.
It is the way of things. It has happened before and it will happen again.
Those in power and their quislings in the media and the legislatures continue to decry this
growing sense of unfairness as dangerous. Terms like isolationist, conspiracy theorist,
nativist and racist are all used as bludgeons to shame people for feeling outraged at the
corruption they see with their own eyes.
The problem for people like Strzok, Rosenstein and Mueller is that they are simply
expendable pawns. And when the time is right they will be sacrificed to ensure the real
perpetrators walk without a scratch.
"... They also pointed out that it was likely leak not as hack as their copying/transmission speeds of alleged email file transfers were high above those possible to achieve via internet file transfer and hence hinting of local transfer via USB 3.0 or better. ..."
"... That was confirmed by former British diplomat who stated that he received from unidentified person FD copy of those Podesta emails while visiting D.C. in 2016. Assange himself stated that the source of those emails were not Russian at all. ..."
"... So what we got cooked by Mueller here. Allegedly stolen/fake identities, possibly some Bitcoin transactions, maybe some rented laptops, perhaps some rented servers, and probably some phishing,and suspicion of some hacking emails, websites that cannot be ruled out, with absolutely no hint of any connection to Russian government. ..."
"... In fact indictment describes nothing that any computer savvy teenager would not be able to do ..... to do what? RIG US ELECTIONS, not at all as it is clearly stated in this nonsensical indictment, there was no impact of anything listed above on US elections outcome nor any collusion. ..."
"... In other words, completely internet illiterate US grand jury after hearing extremely entangled tech jargon ridden fantastic tale of supposed crime with no hard evidences at all, indicted blindly some shadowy likely made up figures of straight from Russophobia instigated obsession Dream, in last ditch effort to revive long dead corpse of Russia Gate like a drug dealer giving last credit to hurting client out of money. ..."
"... CIA stooges who believe that Russia Gate nonsense mudguards prepare for horrible withdraw symptoms coming soon. ..."
"... n fact Mueller himself deepen the absurd by FBI own admission that alleged crime had no material impact on electoral campaign and election results beyond informing public about never repudiated truth of Dems machinations, which truth if fact was irrelevant to voting outcome as most of those who were exposed to Podesta emails were in states Hillary won while in those critical for Trump voters were largely unaware of them or their content. ..."
"... Mueller who already defrauded US government of $200 millions desperately looking for cover of his own futility and waste of FBI resources as he is ready to make grand jury indict a ham sandwich as long as pig from which the ham came from watch Putin on TV once. ..."
Another conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact. I remember when MSM in EU dismissed as
conspiracy theory Assange and Wikileaks claims the secret indictment is being prepared for
Assange and that warrant for Julian would be issued immediately upon arriving in Sweden for
pre trial interview as accused ? No, as a person of interest.
Now, after this recent indictment we know for a fact that Assange was or will be indicted
for treason regardless of fact that statute does not apply to him as non US citizen.
Returning to this phony indictment and baseless accusation contained in it.
The same wild accusation as in 2017 CIA report and the same utter lack of any shred of
evidence whatsoever as pointed out by former CIA, NSA directors and agents whistleblowers who
back then demanded hard evidences of hacking (trace routing log) as these would not in anyway
have disclosed any classified information or methods of collection by doing so.
They also pointed out that it was likely leak not as hack as their
copying/transmission speeds of alleged email file transfers were high above those possible to
achieve via internet file transfer and hence hinting of local transfer via USB 3.0 or
better.
That was confirmed by former British diplomat who stated that he received from
unidentified person FD copy of those Podesta emails while visiting D.C. in 2016. Assange
himself stated that the source of those emails were not Russian at all.
So what we got cooked by Mueller here. Allegedly stolen/fake identities, possibly some
Bitcoin transactions, maybe some rented laptops, perhaps some rented servers, and probably
some phishing,and suspicion of some hacking emails, websites that cannot be ruled out, with
absolutely no hint of any connection to Russian government.
In fact indictment describes nothing that any computer savvy teenager would not be
able to do ..... to do what? RIG US ELECTIONS, not at all as it is clearly stated in this
nonsensical indictment, there was no impact of anything listed above on US elections outcome
nor any collusion.
In other words, completely internet illiterate US grand jury after hearing extremely
entangled tech jargon ridden fantastic tale of supposed crime with no hard evidences at all,
indicted blindly some shadowy likely made up figures of straight from Russophobia instigated
obsession Dream, in last ditch effort to revive long dead corpse of Russia Gate like a drug
dealer giving last credit to hurting client out of money.
CIA stooges who believe that Russia Gate nonsense mudguards prepare for horrible
withdraw symptoms coming soon.
I n fact Mueller himself deepen the absurd by FBI own admission that alleged crime had
no material impact on electoral campaign and election results beyond informing public about
never repudiated truth of Dems machinations, which truth if fact was irrelevant to voting
outcome as most of those who were exposed to Podesta emails were in states Hillary won while
in those critical for Trump voters were largely unaware of them or their content.
Mueller who already defrauded US government of $200 millions desperately looking for
cover of his own futility and waste of FBI resources as he is ready to make grand jury indict
a ham sandwich as long as pig from which the ham came from watch Putin on TV once.
What is going on with the Mueller indictments is open public demonstration of how US court
system is submissive to political control and expediences and serves solely as a political
tool in class war and in this case psychological class warfare aimed exactly in sowing
divisions among population along phony partisan or Identity politics lines exactly what they
accused Putin of doing.
Like Hitler shouting murder while he was murdering Jews , as Israel shouting murder while
IDF is murdering Palestinians, not Mueller shouting treason, collusion, attack on democracy
while while doing the same or worse.
HILLARY CLINTON'S COMPROMISED EMAILS WERE GOING TO A FOREIGN ENTITY – NOT RUSSIA! FBI Agent Ignored Evidence Report from
Decameron
FBI Peter Strzok – the philandering FBI chief investigator who facilitated the FISA surveillance of Trump campaign officials in
2016 – has been exposed for ignoring evidence of major Clinton-related breaches of national security and has been accused of lying
about it.
Hillary Clinton's emails, "every single one except for four, over 30,000 of them, were going to an address that was not on the
distribution l ist," Texas Congressman Louis Gohmert said on Friday. And they went to "an unauthorized source that was a foreign
entity unrelated to Russia." The information came from Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough, who sent his
investigator Frank Rucker, along with an ICIG attorney Janette McMillan, to brief Strzok.
Gohmert nailed Strozk at the open Congressional hearing on Friday the 13 th in Washington, but Strzok claimed no recollection.
Gohmert accused him of lying. Maybe Strzok's amnesia about the briefing on Hillary Clinton's email server is nothing but standard
FBI training: i.e., when in doubt, don't recall. It's far more likely that there is a campaign of deliberate obstructing justice,
selective prosecution, and political targeting by top officials embedded in the permanent bureaucracy of the Justice Department,
FBI, and broader IC. Strzok is not alone.
And what "foreign entity" got Hillary's classified emails? Trump haters in British Intelligence and those in Israel who want to
manipulate the US presidency – whatever party prevails – come to mind. Listen closely and you may hear rumors around Washington that
it was Israel, not Russia, that was the foreign power involved in approaching Trump advisers. Time to follow that thread.
Both Representatives Gohmert (TX) and Trey Gowdy (SC) did a great job trying to pierce the veil of denials. But, right after Strzok's
amnesia in Congress, the Justice Department announced the indictment of GRU members. Change of subject. The same foul stench noted
by Publius Tacitus about the GRU indictment filled Congress as Agent Strzok testified.
So, a foreign power (not Russia but "hostile" according to Gohmert) modified internal instructions in HC's server so that a blind
copy went to this other country, all 30,000 e-mails. I wonder what was different about the four that were not so copied. What
are likely countries? The UK, China and Israel would be at the top of my list
So the emails were being bcc-ed or the server was set up to copy all emails passing through it to some foreign server? I am curious
about the mechanics.
It seems that the server was the mechanism. Whether that was by physical access to the server or electronically at a distance.
Her entire system was not secure and could be easily penetrated.
FBI did not have the evidence, as they were pushed aside and not allowed to look into it.
Crowdstrike was hired by DNC (read Clinton family) and handles (or more correctly botched)the investigation. No evidence from
Crowdstrike is probably admissible in court as they are clearly played the role Clinton family pawns. NSA can't have such a detailed
evidence because of encryption. So where did it came from? CIA?
The accusations are worded different this time around. No more of "we assess" like the last time. Direct Le Carre style of fiction
;-)
It is amazing to see the detail with which the US supposedly knows of the names and actions of cyber spy organizations personnel
in Russia. If not the NSA, why not the Mossad cyber units? They have a lot of skill and connections with telecom eqpt and companies.
Are these the only spearfishers to be indicted? And did any go into team Trump?
But don't look at other things like how stupid
team Clinton is with cyber security whether HRC's handling of classified emails with her private server or her campaign's handling
of important matters. And what of the comment of those emails.
Our MSM told us not to look. These things only lead to more uncomfortable
questions and tend to drag us into the morass ... while they do ... what?
"... The rising power of China and Russia has been a threat to US power for some time, no matter if its the US globalists trying their useless hegemon crap to stop them or the US nationalists that have scrapped the old hegemonic empire. The nationalists are more dangerous as their thinking is not confined to the box of the last era. ..."
"... They also pointed out that it was likely leak not as hack as their copying/transmission speeds of alleged email file transfers were high above those possible to achieve via internet file transfer and hence hinting of local transfer via USB 3.0 or better. ..."
"... That was confirmed by former British diplomat who stated that he received from unidentified person FD copy of those Podesta emails while visiting D.C. in 2016. Assange himself stated that the source of those emails were not Russian at all. ..."
"... So what we got cooked by Mueller here. Allegedly stolen/fake identities, possibly some Bitcoin transactions, maybe some rented laptops, perhaps some rented servers, and probably some phishing,and suspicion of some hacking emails, websites that cannot be ruled out, with absolutely no hint of any connection to Russian government. ..."
"... In fact indictment describes nothing that any computer savvy teenager would not be able to do ..... to do what? RIG US ELECTIONS, not at all as it is clearly stated in this nonsensical indictment, there was no impact of anything listed above on US elections outcome nor any collusion. ..."
"... In other words, completely internet illiterate US grand jury after hearing extremely entangled tech jargon ridden fantastic tale of supposed crime with no hard evidences at all, indicted blindly some shadowy likely made up figures of straight from Russophobia instigated obsession Dream, in last ditch effort to revive long dead corpse of Russia Gate like a drug dealer giving last credit to hurting client out of money. ..."
"... CIA stooges who believe that Russia Gate nonsense mudguards prepare for horrible withdraw symptoms coming soon. ..."
"... n fact Mueller himself deepen the absurd by FBI own admission that alleged crime had no material impact on electoral campaign and election results beyond informing public about never repudiated truth of Dems machinations, which truth if fact was irrelevant to voting outcome as most of those who were exposed to Podesta emails were in states Hillary won while in those critical for Trump voters were largely unaware of them or their content. ..."
"... Mueller who already defrauded US government of $200 millions desperately looking for cover of his own futility and waste of FBI resources as he is ready to make grand jury indict a ham sandwich as long as pig from which the ham came from watch Putin on TV once. ..."
The Mueller investigation started with a script allegedly authored by Sergei Skripal;
two tall blonde moscow hotel-room prostitutes peeing on obama's bed; this is genius.
However the hoax unravelled; (the tale was too thin and needed filling out because
Trump
had not even been impeached according to Peter Strozk's dungeon master's original plan.)
The love story of Dawn and Charlie is not Skripal's best work, yet we sense that the
hand
of the master is there somewhere, and look forward to the next episode of his new novela.
In part, this indictment is preparation to drop charges in the Concord Management case, which
will make discovery in the Concord case moot. If they issued these indictments after
dropping the charges in Concord Management, it would be too obvious that this is just a
replacementfor those charges. Won't it be fun if one of the Russians indicted patriotically
volunteers to travel to the use and likewise demands discovery?
Of course, we're all aware that William Binney has analyzed the metadata of the files and
concluded that their transfer was too rapid to have occurred over the internet and must have
been downloaded to a USB drive.
The rising power of China and Russia has been a threat to US power for some time, no matter
if its the US globalists trying their useless hegemon crap to stop them or the US
nationalists that have scrapped the old hegemonic empire. The nationalists are more dangerous
as their thinking is not confined to the box of the last era.
Another conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact.
I remember when MSM in EU dismissed as conspiracy theory Assange and Wikileaks claims the
secret indictment is being prepared for Assange and that warrant for Julian would be issued
immediately upon arriving in Sweden for pre trial interview as accused ? No, as a person of
interest.
Now, after this recent indictment we know for a fact that Assange was or will be indicted
for treason regardless of fact that statute does not apply to him as non US citizen.
Returning to this phony indictment and baseless accusation contained in it.
The same wild accusation as in 2017 CIA report and the same utter lack of any shred of
evidence whatsoever as pointed out by former CIA, NSA directors and agents whistleblowers who
back then demanded hard evidences of hacking (trace routing log) as these would not in anyway
have disclosed any classified information or methods of collection by doing so.
They also pointed out that it was likely leak not as hack as their copying/transmission
speeds of alleged email file transfers were high above those possible to achieve via
internet file transfer and hence hinting of local transfer via USB 3.0 or better.
That was confirmed by former British diplomat who stated that he received from
unidentified person FD copy of those Podesta emails while visiting D.C. in 2016. Assange
himself stated that the source of those emails were not Russian at all.
So what we got cooked by Mueller here. Allegedly stolen/fake identities, possibly some
Bitcoin transactions, maybe some rented laptops, perhaps some rented servers, and probably
some phishing,and suspicion of some hacking emails, websites that cannot be ruled out, with
absolutely no hint of any connection to Russian government.
In fact indictment describes nothing that any computer savvy teenager would not be
able to do ..... to do what? RIG US ELECTIONS, not at all as it is clearly stated in this
nonsensical indictment, there was no impact of anything listed above on US elections outcome
nor any collusion.
In other words, completely internet illiterate US grand jury after hearing extremely
entangled tech jargon ridden fantastic tale of supposed crime with no hard evidences at all,
indicted blindly some shadowy likely made up figures of straight from Russophobia instigated
obsession Dream, in last ditch effort to revive long dead corpse of Russia Gate like a drug
dealer giving last credit to hurting client out of money.
CIA stooges who believe that Russia Gate nonsense mudguards prepare for horrible withdraw
symptoms coming soon.
I n fact Mueller himself deepen the absurd by FBI own admission that alleged crime had
no material impact on electoral campaign and election results beyond informing public about
never repudiated truth of Dems machinations, which truth if fact was irrelevant to voting
outcome as most of those who were exposed to Podesta emails were in states Hillary won while
in those critical for Trump voters were largely unaware of them or their content.
Mueller who already defrauded US government of $200 millions desperately looking for
cover of his own futility and waste of FBI resources as he is ready to make grand jury indict
a ham sandwich as long as pig from which the ham came from watch Putin on TV once.
What is going on with the Mueller indictments is open public demonstration of how US court
system is submissive to political control and expediences and serves solely as a political
tool in class war and in this case psychological class warfare aimed exactly in sowing
divisions among population along phony partisan or Identity politics lines exactly what they
accused Putin of doing.
Like Hitler shouting murder while he was murdering Jews , as Israel shouting murder while
IDF is murdering Palestinians, not Mueller shouting treason, collusion, attack on democracy
while while doing the same or worse.
Let's get real here. I don't know if it was part of the original indictment, but there are
now claims that the government, using secret and likely illegal NSA surveillance, _has_ been
able to show a 'trail' from the Russian officers to Guccifer 2.0 and then on to Wikileaks. Is
this true or just more claims without evidence?
U.S. indictments show technical evidence for Russian hacking accusations
Regarding @146, I think I get it now. Mueller can claim anything he wants in this indictment,
including pseudofacts generated through illegal international data collection, because he
knows he will never be asked to present such evidence in a court of law.
Mueller's indictments are not just fraudulent, but easily discoverable as such (as they
are plagiarized). I'm frankly baffled as to why, even if Mueller felt compelled to fabricate
something to blow up Trump's meeting with Putin, he'd go this route.
"... In December, a letter from Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) revealed that Strzok and other FBI officials effectively "decriminalized" Clinton's behavior through a series of edits to James Comey's original statement. ..."
"... The letter described how outgoing Deputy Director Andrew McCabe exchanged drafts of Comey's statement with senior FBI officials , including Strzok, Strzok's direct supervisor , E.W. "Bill" Priestap, Jonathan Moffa, and an unnamed employee from the Office of General Counsel (identified by Newsweek as DOJ Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson) - in a coordinated conspiracy among top FBI brass. ..."
"... In summary; the FBI launched an investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server, ignored evidence it may have been hacked, downgraded the language in Comey's draft to decriminalize her behavior, and then exonerated her by recommending the DOJ not prosecute. ..."
"... Meanwhile, a tip submitted by an Australian diplomat tied to a major Clinton Foundation deal launched the FBI's counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign - initially spearheaded by the same Peter Strzok who worked so hard to get Hillary off the hook. ..."
FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok reportedly ignored "an irregularity in the
metadata" indicating that Hillary Clinton's server may had been breached, while FBI top brass
made significant edits to former Director James Comey's statement specifically minimizing how
likely it was that hostile actors had gained access.
Sources told
Fox News that Strzok, who sent anti-Trump text messages that got him removed from the
ongoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, was told about the metadata anomaly in
2016, but Strzok did not support a formal damage assessment. One source said: " Nothing
happened. "
In December, a letter
from Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) revealed that Strzok and other
FBI officials effectively "decriminalized" Clinton's behavior through a series of edits to
James Comey's original statement.
The letter described how outgoing Deputy Director Andrew McCabe exchanged drafts of Comey's
statement with senior FBI officials , including Strzok, Strzok's direct supervisor , E.W. "Bill" Priestap, Jonathan
Moffa, and an unnamed employee from the Office of General Counsel (identified by Newsweek as DOJ Deputy General Counsel Trisha
Anderson) - in a coordinated conspiracy among top FBI brass.
It was already known that Strzok - who was demoted to the FBI's HR department for sending
anti-Trump text messages to his mistress -
downgraded the language describing Clinton's conduct from the criminal charge of "gross
negligence" to "extremely careless."
Notably, "Gross negligence" is a legal term of art in criminal law often associated with
recklessness. According to Black's Law Dictionary, it is defined as " A severe degree of
negligence taken as reckless disregard ," and " Blatant indifference to one's legal duty,
other's safety, or their rights ." "Extremely careless," on the other hand, is not a legal term
of art.
18 U.S. Code §
793 "Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information" specifically uses the phrase
"gross negligence." Had Comey used the phrase, he would have essentially declared that Hillary
had broken the law.
In order to justify downgrading Clinton's behavior to "extremely careless," however, FBI
officials also needed to minimize the impact of her crimes. As revealed in the letter from Rep.
Johnson, the FBI downgraded the probability that Clinton's server was hacked by hostile actors
from " reasonably likely " to " possible ."
"Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained
access to Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail account," Comey said in his statement.
By doing so, the FBI downgraded Clinton's negligence - thus supporting the "extremely
careless" language.
The FBI also edited Clinton's exoneration letter to remove a reference to the "sheer volume"
of classified material on the private server, which - according to the original draft "supports
an inference that the participants were grossly negligent in their handling of that
information." Furthermore, all references to the Intelligence Community's involvement in
investigating Clinton's private email server were removed as well.
Director Comey's original statement acknowledged the FBI had worked with its partners in the
Intelligence Community to assess potential damage from Secretary Clinton's use of a private
email server. The original statement read:
W]e have done extensive work with the assistance of our colleagues elsewhere in the
Intelligence Community to understand what indications there might be of compromise by hostile
actors in connection with the private email operation.
In summary; the FBI launched an investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server, ignored
evidence it may have been hacked, downgraded the language in Comey's draft to decriminalize her
behavior, and then exonerated her by recommending the DOJ not prosecute.
Meanwhile, a tip submitted by an Australian diplomat tied to a major Clinton Foundation deal
launched the FBI's counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign - initially
spearheaded by the same Peter Strzok who worked so hard to get Hillary off the hook.
And Strzok still collects a taxpayer-funded paycheck.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's foreign ministry said there was no evidence the 12 people indicted by
the United States on Friday were linked to military intelligence or hacking into the computer
networks of the U.S. Democratic party.
The U.S. indictment named 12 Russian officers and indicted them on charges of hacking the
computer networks of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her party.
The Russian ministry said the indictment was meant to damage the atmosphere before the summit
between the Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump in Helsinki on Monday.
Lee Stranahan, a host on a Radio SPUTNIK Show, and a former reporter for BREITBART, has said
on air that people have told him that the FBI has been questioning them about him. He says he
thinks that it is possible that he may be indicted.
"... Exactly what I was thinking, he can create multiple indictments and nothing will get to court, he's knows that. What this really is, is a giant PSYOP, crazy propaganda going on in front of us. And how many people protest? Nothing but a witch hunt as Trump have pointed out. ..."
"... I am sure Mueller could create a collusion indictment too, there is no stop against these lying neocons. After all, this is the same guy that was part of the Iraq WMD lies, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEqTZF6nyCY ..."
Exactly what I was thinking, he can create multiple indictments and nothing will get
to court, he's knows that. What this really is, is a giant PSYOP, crazy propaganda going on
in front of us. And how many people protest? Nothing but a witch hunt as Trump have pointed
out.
I am sure Mueller could create a collusion indictment too, there is no stop against
these lying neocons. After all, this is the same guy that was part of the Iraq WMD lies,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEqTZF6nyCY
Assistant Attorney General Rosenstein announced a bizarre indictment against Russian military intelligence operatives today that,
rather than confirming the case of "Russian meddling" in the U.S. 2016 Presidential election raises more questions. Here are the
major oddities:
How did the FBI obtain information about activity on the DNC and DCCC servers when the DNC/DCCC refused to give the Feds access
to the servers/computers?
Why does Crowdstrike get credit as being a competent computer security firm when, according to the indictment, they completely
and utterly failed to stop the "hacks?"
Why does the indictment refuse to name Wikileaks by name as the Russian collaborator?
Please go read the indictment ( here ) for yourself.
I have taken the time to put together a timeline based on the indictment and other information already on the public record. Here
is the bottomline--if US officials knew as early as April that Russia was hacking the DNC, why did it take US officials more than
six months to stop the activity? The statement of "facts" contained in the indictment also raise another troubling issue--what is
the source of the information? For example, if the FBI was not given access to the DNC/DCCC servers and computers then how do they
know what happened on specific dates as alleged in the complaint?
Here is the timeline:
18 April 2016--The Russians hacked into the DNC using DCCC computers and installed malware on the network. (p. 10, para 26)
22 April 2016--The GRU (Russian military intelligence) compressed gigabytes of data using X-tunnel and moved it to a GRU computer
located in ILLINOIS. (p. 11, para 26a)
28 April 2016--The Russians stole documents from the DCCC and moved them on to the computer in Illinois. (p. 11, para 26b).
Late April - 5 May 2016--DNC leaders were tipped to the hack in late April. Chief executive Amy Dacey got a call from her operations
chief saying that their information technology team had noticed some unusual network activity. That evening, she spoke with Michael
Sussmann, a DNC lawyer who is a partner with Perkins Coie in Washington. Soon after, Sussmann, a formerfederal prosecutor who handled
computer crime cases, called Henry, whom he has known for many years. (
Ellen Nakashima's 14 June Washington Post article ) (see p. 12, para 32 of th
13 May 2016--The Russians deleted logs and files from a DNC computer. (p. 11, para 31)
25 May - 1 June 2016--the Russians hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server and stole thousands of emails from DNC employees.
(p. 11, para 29).
8 June 2016--DCLeaks.com set up, allegedly by the GRU (no proof offered).
Also created Facebook and Twitter accounts (pp. 13-14, paras. 35, 38, 39)
10 June 2016--Ultimately, the [Crowdstrike] teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC.
Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10 , all DNC employees were instructed to leave
their laptops in the office. (
Esquire
Magazine offers a different timeline )
22 June 2016--Wikileaks contacts Guccier 2.0 stating, "send any new material here for us to review and it will have a much higher
impact than what you are doing."
14 July 2016--The GRU, under the guise of Guccifer 2.0, sent Wikileaks an attachment with an encrypted file that explained how
to access an online archive of "stolen" documents.
15 August 2016--Guccifer, alleged to be the GRU, has email exchange with Roger Stone.
22 July 2016--Wikileaks publishes 40,000 plus emails (note, the Indictment INCORRECTLY states that the number was 20,000).
September 2016--The GRU obtained access to a DNC server hosted by a third party and took "data analytics" info. (p. 13, para 34)
October 2016--A functioning Linux-based version of X-agent remained on the DNC server until October. (p. 12, para 32)
Another great curiosity is the timing of the announcement of the indictments. Why today? There was no urgency. No one was on the
verge of fleeing the United States. All of the defendants are in Russia and beyond our reach.
A careful read of the indictment reveals a level of detail that could only have been obtained from intelligence sources (which
means that information would be invalidated if the defendants ever decide to challenge the indictment) or it was provided by an unreliable
third party.
I was shocked to discover, thanks to the indictment, how inept Crowdstrike was in this entire process. Not only did more than
30 days lapse before they attempted to shutdown the Russian hacking by installing new software and issuing new email passwords, but
their so-called security fix left the Russians running an operation until October 2016. How can you be considered a credible cyber
security company yet fail to shutdown the alleged Russian intrusion? It does not make sense.
The most glaring deficit in the indictment is the lack of supporting evidence to back up the charges levied in the indictment.
How do we know that computer files were erased if the FBI did not have access to the computers and the servers? How do we know the
names of the 12 Russian GRU officers? The Russians do not publish directories of secret organizations. Where did this information
come from?
It would appear that the release of the indictment today was a deliberate political act designed to detract and distract from
the Trump visit to the UK and to put pressure on him to confront Vladimir Putin. I have heard from many of my former colleagues who
are hoping that Putin calls the Rosenstein bluff. If forced to reveal the "evidence" behind this indictment because of a challenge
from a defendant, the results will be a disaster for the prosecution.
A report appeared yesterday on the 'True Pundit' site entitled 'Mueller Plagiarizes Right-Wing YouTube Journalist's Lawsuit
Against Podesta in New Russian Indictments; DOJ's Big Splash Appears Fabricated.'
''George Webb sued John Podesta in 2017, along with other elected and public officials including Justice Department personnel
but today, exact language, accusations and content from Webb's suit appeared in the Justice Department's indictment. Beyond
strange.
'Mueller swiped Webb's hacking allegations against Imran Awan and simply flipped them -- almost word for word – and made
the exact allegations against Russian operatives.'
The reference is to a class action brought last November against John Podesta and others by one George Webb Sweigert and
so far anonymous others against John Podesta and others.
It has long seemed to me that it is likely that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in relation to the activities of
the Awans. However, I do not feel able to take an informed view on whether the 'True Pundit' report and the material presented
by Sweigert reflect accurate information fed by discontented insiders, genuine 'fake news', or some combination of both.
I would be most interested in what others make of this.
Steven Wasserman, Brother of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to Oversee Awan Family Investigation Jul 27, 2017
https://squawker.org/all/st...
Louie Gohmert, June 5, 2018
"'We need someone assigned to the Awan case that will protect congress from further breaches and from the Awan crime family...
for heavens sake, we need someone in the FBI to step up and do their job'"
In his opening remarks, Gohmert, a former prosecutor, argued that Rosenstein was "disqualified from being able to select
or name" a special counsel because he had counseled Trump on the matter; therefore, Rosenstein would be a material witness.
The truepundit article is fake news IMO. The only 'plagiarism' cited in it is the use of a domain name similar to the Dems
fundraiser site;
actblue.com
. The class action against Podesta alleges the domain was set up by Awan and the DOJ indictment alleges it was set up by the
GRU. Having now read them both, aside from references to 'spearphishing' - a well know hacking technique - I cannot see another
example of significant repeat language.
Thanks for researching! My eyes glaze over whenever I try to read thru generally boring legal docs. Since I had not encountered
Truepundit before, I read some of the other articles on their front page and realized it's a conservative news site. There
are more and more of those lately. Much needed as a balance to the mostly liberal MSM. I put on my "skeptical spectacles" for
both.
My educated guess as to the answer to your three questions is the same as you imply: 1. everything they have they have through
hearsay from Crowdstrike. 2. See #1. 3. Wikileaks is the only party who would actually respond to the indictment and seek discovery,
so leaving them out means they're not in danger of actually having to produce any evidence.
The timing of this announcement illustrates how badly the deep state desires to sabotage Trump's plan to improve US-Russia
relations. Since they have been playing the Russia card for so long with no real results and to the detriment of their credibility,
the urge to try to obstruct Trump at the 11th hour must have been overwhelming.
Between Trumps experience dealing with shady characters in his prior career (esp the casino industry) and what he has no
doubt learned about his enemies in the borg since getting elected, I'm guessing he has contingency plans. And if not, he has
great Road Runner-like instincts :)
I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Mueller, Rosenstein and others are a stalking horse for a complete reorganization of the
DOJ and FBI. By that I mean it appears to now be beyond reasonable doubt that the above have demonstrated that they are highly
political organizations, dripping with partisan agendas.
The question then becomes "how can justice be blind in the USA in the face of incontrovertible evidence it ain't?". To me
that sounds like a call to action for President Trump.
I suspect it is more a case of ineptitude than political bias. They were charged with finding meddling, so they are finding
meddling by using imagination rather than evidence. Can you imagine the uproar if they were to conclude a two-year investigation
by saying, "Sorry, we found nothing" at the end? We don't have to imagine, since that's what happened after the Clinton email
investigation.
I think you could be right. If any agreements are made at the Helsinki summit, Trump will have to reign in the deep state to
implement them. I've been wondering why there hasn't been a complete house cleaning at DOJ and FBI yet. Perhaps Trump is waiting
for them to "jump the shark" so blatantly that when it finally comes it will be seen as the end of their long farce by everyone
but the true believers, who by that point will be seen as delusional by the general public. Trump is the master of the game
of perception. If he pulls it off the Democrats get crushed this fall. If not, we get president Pence next spring. Game on.
I think Rosenstein is bucking to be fired by Trump. This will then allow the Democrats, to claim obstruction of justice, justifying
impeachment. ( Assumption being the Democrats win control of Congress and Senate ) He's been deeply provocative giving ample
reason for said dismissal, Trump has resisted up until now. As long as he resists the temptation Congress will eventually impeach
Rosenstein. As this article went to print documents for his impeachment are being drawn up for release on Monday possibly,
of course subject to politics. ( Please edit the link if you feel it's inappropriate )
https://www.zerohedge.com/n...
PT,
Please excuse me if this is a far out idiotic thought re the timing of the indictment, but doesn't this at least possibly give
Putin some power over Trump? Putin could threaten Trump with having one of the accused "confess" to the hacking per a "collusion"
agreement between Russia and the Trump campaign. If that happened, Trump would be promptly impeached. It would be a whirlwind
circus.
Thx for the confirmation. Sometimes I "war game" these things over a couple of Scotches. I come up with all sorts of notions,
but this one seemed reasonable.
1. How did Mueller arrive at his conclusions? There is no exposition of that in the indictment.
2. Has Mueller established a precedent? Wouldn't other countries use this indictment as an example to indict NSA and other
US intelligence personnel for conducting "normal" intelligence activities.
3. Rosenstein in his press conference reiterated what is written in the indictment that no US person was involved, and that
it did not change the outcome of the election. Does that imply that Mueller & the DOJ are stating that there was no collusion
between the Russian government & the Trump campaign? If that is the case what is the remit of the Mueller special counsel?
4. Why is this indictment handed over to DOJ NSD for prosecution rather than Mueller taking it to the court? Isn't the DOJ
NSD implicated in the FISA abuse being investigated by IG Horowitz?
5. The Russian intelligence agents are innocent until convicted by a court. An indictment is only the prosecution's story.
In this case the prosecution has yet to provide the level of evidence required for a conviction.
6. As is the case with the Russian trolls indicted by Mueller, these agents could ostensibly hire counsel and cause Mueller
much embarrassment by requesting evidentiary discovery. Mueller is now backtracking on the Russian troll case as he either
has no evidence to back the indictment or is unwilling to provide defense counsel with the same which means the prosecution
goes no where.
7. Was this indictment primarily a political document for the TDS afflicted media and people at large? Are Mueller and the
Deep Staters assuming that this indictment goes no where as the Russians will not contest the indictment, so it is a cost free,
politically beneficial indictment?
My personal favourite part is this one :"All twelve defendants are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation
intelligence agency within the Main Intelligence Directorate of the
Russian military." Mueller & Co haven't a clue.
For example, if the FBI was not given access to the DNC/DCCC servers and computers then how do they know what happened on
specific dates as alleged in the complaint?
I believe the NSA records and stores metadata for all Internet traffic, so the FBI asked the NSA for whatever the NSA has
for the DNC/DCCC computers then excluded legitimate sources/destinations for the data before analyzing the rest. Once you have
loaded all the data into a database, it's not difficult.
I have heard from many of my former colleagues who are hoping that Putin calls the Rosenstein bluff. If forced to reveal
the "evidence" behind this indictment because of a challenge from a defendant, the results will be a disaster for the prosecution.
The GRU is part of the military so Putin should order one or two "over the top" to "attack" the Mueller organization. Russia
should be able to afford the best defense lawyers in the United States and should be able to circumvent all and any Treasury
Dept. attempts to block any funding.
I thought immediately that Rosentstein's announcement of this indictment was strangely timed. Your analysis indicates it
was put together hurriedly. Therefore, my first thought was that perhaps Rosenstein was attempting to prevent Trump from meeting
with Putin, as many of the opposition media have suggested Trump should not meet with Putin because of the announcement of
the indictment. After all, they say a POTUS should not hang around with the likes of Putin.
However, most anyone who has followed Trump lately would guess that Trump would not change his planned schedule and would
surely keep his schedule and would indeed confront Putin about the indictment.
Then, if that is what they were hoping, it puts Trump in a spot. If Putin denies the entire story and provides Trump with
a plausible denial and Trump then wants to investigate further, Trump could be accused of doing what the opposition has claimed
all along--"colluding." with the baddest Russian of all.
I think Trump would not be stupid enough to accept either Rosensteein's story or Putin's denial without investigating.
It's Rosentstein's word against the Russians' word in that case, and Trump is caught in the middle and in the same place
he's been all along.
I do hope one or all of the accused do ask for a trial. No way, however, would I look forward to that media circus for weeks
and weeks.
I personally felt the story was made up when Grucifer was mentioned and purported to be Russian. I thought it convenient
that the Russians in America who had been first reported as harmlessly trying to meddle while in the U.S. would be back in
Russia and accused just now. Our FBI is truly inept if that is the case. They let the Boston bombers get away with their attack.
They let the Pulse night club jihadist get away with his, and they let the "professional school shooter" fulfill his destiny.
There are so many tangled webs from those who have practiced to deceive that we are faced with never finding the truth in
our lifetimes.
My only hope for relief from this now, strangely,Lisa Page. I do hope she has been burned badly enough by being stupid enough
to become involved with a married co-worker, who is obviously in love with only himself, that she somehow provides us some
answers.
I know that I will surely be happier when this horror story is over.
If the 12 indicted are actually Russian military intelligence officers then wouldn't it be a simple matter for their superior
to order them to front up and demand their day in court?
Sure, there is a risk that they will be convicted, but spooks willingly undertake far more hazardous missions than this.
A promise could be made that if they are found guilty the Russian government will move heaven and earth to arrange a spy-swap
to get them back and a fabulous recompense for their trouble, so the reward is worth the risk.
Honestly, the prosecutor showed terrible judgement when he included Concord Management in a previous indictment, only to
see that company's lawyer calling his bluff. He appears to be under the impression that naming only Russian persons and not
Russian companies will prevent that from happening again.
Thank you PT for your analysis and commentary on this subject.
It seems this indictment is similar to the indictment filed earlier this year against the Russian astroturfers. And in that
instance, one of the companies charged is defending itself in US court. Not only that, it opted to exercise its right to a
speedy trial!!!
From what I've read, the Mueller team was totally caught off guard since it didn't expect any of the Russians to mount a
defense. According to Andrew McCarthy at National Review who's been diligently commenting on the Mueller probe and related
matters, the special counsel's team made the mistake of filing the indictment when it was evidently unprepared to go to trial.
Mueller's team has consequently asked for delays because it can't produce the DISCOVERY that the defendant has a right to review.
I don't know what the latest news is about the case but at one point the Mueller team provided a HUGE cache of internet postings
allegedly made by the defendant BUT THEY WERE IN RUSSIAN. How on earth did that influence American voters?
Overcome by events. They already are, and the event in question hasn't even happened yet. They are also claiming the this indictment
"proves" treason by Trump, even though it does not even suggest that Trump was involved.
They waited TWO YEARS to produce this "evidence" - which is without evidence, merely assertions.? That in itself condemns
it to complete hogwash.
As for the NSA, they could have produced this stuff at any time in the last two years without compromising any "methods
and sources" since we all know since Snowden and Binney how much they capture and retain. Instead, they had only "moderate
confidence" of Russian "meddling" in the January, 2017, "assessment."
They allegedly had to rely on the Dutch to penetrate the hackers? And that story was hogwash from the get-go.
As for how they "know" that certain files were erased, that could have come from the "certified true images" provided by
CrowdStrike to the FBI - but since CrowdStrike is utterly compromised due to the anti-Russian status of its CEO, that's worthless
"evidence."
If Wikileaks was in contact with Guccifer 2.0, then why did James Clapper expend effort trying to shut down the DoJ negotiations
with Assange who offered "technical evidence" that would prove the Russians had nothing to do with the Wikileaks DNC emails?
Sincerely hope Sy Hersh gets his hands on an actual copy of that FBI Seth Rich report, because if he does, the FBI and the
DoJ are going down. Literally everyone in top management of those agencies (and likely at CIA as well, and possibly NSA) will
be up on charges and headed to jail for actual treason.
They have no choice now but to go all in on this stuff because otherwise everyone involved is going to jail.
You missed the obvious corollary: CrowdStrike is obviously a subsidiary of the GRU. Clever moves disguised as bumbling incompetence!
I second the motion to have one of the Russians "volunteer" to come to the US to clear his name, except that the poor guy will
probably end up in Gitmo.
The Witchfinder General has excelled himself this time. Would I be correct in concluding that more sources & methods have
been burnt here? "KOVALEV deleted his search history" for example is intel that has to have come from inside a GRU computer,
assuming it is true of course.
I'd also just like to highlight that a significant part of this indictment is dedicated to the involvement of both Wikileaks
and Bitcoin. It appears to me that a secondary aim here is to bolster Congressional support to outlaw both.
So, the DOJ is operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party in politicking against the President and Congress
controlled by the other party. Is this correct?
How else is one to read this indictment, its coordination with the Democratic leadership ("he must pull out of the Putin
meeting" squawk), and the "unrelated" matter of attacking Rep. Jordan about 25 year old "abuse" charges dating from his time
at OSU? Who was responsible for those "untraceable" attacks-the MSM, the DOJ, the Democratic Party? Is there any light between
these institutions at this point? The attack seems to have been successfully fought off, and Jordan is now parrying with a
direct attack at Rosenstein.
The pace of all this is dizzying. Is anyone else wondering where it leads to?
By indicting foreign intelligence agents has the USA crossed a line so that now USA intelligence agents are fair game in the
courts of foreign lands?
Looking at this deception over the past few years I have always believed its a game of tit-for-tat where the USA hands are
not clean either and that there was a mutual understanding amongst parties that there is a limit to retribution.
Just saw a would-be meme on my Facebook feed . . . to the general effect that the FBI
still hasn't even looked at the DNC's computer or server, but Mueller's indicted 12 Russians
for 'hacking' them.
Of course, there is that old quote from a New York state judge that a prosecutor could get
a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. (Which also reminds me of a riddle: Why is a ham
sandwich better than perfect happiness? Well, nothing is better than perfect happiness,
right? -- and a ham sandwich is certainly better than nothing. . . .)
The sheer arrogance of the yankee presumption to issue such an indictment is breathtaking.
As soon as the summit is over, why shouldn't Russia issue an indictment of the yankee agents
involved in subverting their country? Italy has already, in the past, under governments more
to the liking of the yankee regime, charged CIA agents for crimes committed in that country.
Since I am sure the yankees favoured those cinque stella and the Lega defeated in the past
election, why shouldn't Italy issue a similar indictment?
The yankees are relying on their hegemony to insulate themselves from the consequences of
their own much more unambiguous much more provable acts of subversion. After the imperium
declines, which is inevitable, this indictment provides an analogous precedent for any of the
former satellites to rise up and smite the yankee aggressors with similar indictments.
Perhaps they should also ignore diplomatic immunity to snag those agents acting within the
country.
The indictment, meanwhile, since it is obviously aimed at preventing the Trump
administration from achieving its foreign policy goals, is arguably an act of treason,
particularly since no real proof is offered and the allegations are trivial and/or absurd.
According to the concepts of the Nuremberg four power trial, since the indictment is intended
to provide support for elements within the yankee regime favouring aggressive war, it also
renders Mueller, Rosenstein and their operatives factually guilty of war crimes.
"... The obvious plan in a potentially so-called 'multipolar' World is to ally with the third power -- it is weaker than the second, and in any case it is more congenial, and ultimately most important! it is Energy-Land rich. ..."
"... IMHO personal interests don't weigh heavily here (as some have suggested) however the Tillerson - Oil axis was and remains a supreme consideration (minus Tillerson.) ..."
"... The blame Russia game is very much a sub-rosa contemp. war between corporate + mafia-like factions for control of parts of the NWO. BOA and power-sharing (in the W) is now very vulnerable, or is even being destroyed, (even NATO is at risk!), everyone is scrambling, therefore the over-the-top moves and fights. ..."
"... Any evidence blaming Russia is good to go - the aim is: a) to convince the public, who will absorb some headlines and 'hate' Russia even more, b) to re-assure the players on the anti-R side, we are doing it, and the public is on our side, etc. having the most powerful propaganda organ(S) is a guarantee of the ultimate 'win' it is said so they make up things out of whole cloth. ..."
IMO Trump isn't trying to achieve anything more than to negotiate an agreement that is
favorable to USA/NATO. The Deep State would be happy if an acceptable agreement could be
reached as it would split Russia from China. Jackrabbit at 13.
I suppose Jackr means achieving 'nothing specific' (e.g. Iran's future role in Syria,
etc.), .. OK. Second part IMHO, Trump was/is trying to organise the New World Order (as the
old order, set up at Bretton Woods, is dead or dying) and he means to ensure or create a
'favorable' position for the US. The obvious plan in a potentially so-called 'multipolar'
World is to ally with the third power -- it is weaker than the second, and in any case it is
more congenial, and ultimately most important! it is Energy-Land rich.
IMHO personal interests don't weigh heavily here (as some have suggested) however the
Tillerson - Oil axis was and remains a supreme consideration (minus Tillerson.)
One reason, not mentioned, for Trump's pro-Russia stance is that his base is pro-R and
détente or even strong cooperation with Russia was a heavily implied electoral
promise. Russians are White and they are Orthodox, Christians of a kind (in the popular US
imagination..) and Putin is seen as a strong, competent and 'savvy' leader. 90% of
evangelicals in the US voted for Trump for ex. (Catch the Boers (white) in S Africa wanting
to emigrate to Russia..see news.) Nothing slant-eyed about the Russkies! (apologies to
sensitive US souls on 'race' issue - i am not up to date re PC speech.)
DT's seeming 'ban' of Muslims (the entry / visa hoopla, hardly an attack that provoked
deaths) also satisfied the base and was a strong and direct jab at the support, payment for
and exploitation of islamists (Muslim brotherhood / mercenary forces / terrorists etc. Killed
off and still feared by Russia on their turf )
Russia always makes positive noises about the presumed / known winner of the US elections.
This worked fine with Bush (remember Georgie glommed Putin's soul), was difficult with Obama
(a secret muslim, not a US citizen, it was said, etc.), link, but a sure fire thing with
Trump, as Putin-Russia knew DT would win (imho.)
The blame Russia game is very much a sub-rosa contemp. war between corporate +
mafia-like factions for control of parts of the NWO. BOA and power-sharing (in the W) is now
very vulnerable, or is even being destroyed, (even NATO is at risk!), everyone is scrambling,
therefore the over-the-top moves and fights.
Any evidence blaming Russia is good to go - the aim is: a) to convince the public, who
will absorb some headlines and 'hate' Russia even more, b) to re-assure the players on the
anti-R side, we are doing it, and the public is on our side, etc. having the most powerful
propaganda organ(S) is a guarantee of the ultimate 'win' it is said so they make up things
out of whole cloth.
- Page 14 and 15: This is hilariously stupid! These Russian super spy agents on June
15, 2016, 4:19 MOSCOW TIME and they DID NOT HACK, BUT LOGGED INTO the DNC server and
spent 37 minutes to search for files or that included words (that is for the techo's out
there, they "grep") for the following words:
* some hundred sheets
* some hundreds of sheets
* dcleaks
* illuminati
* широко
известный
перевод (meaning: widely known translation)
* worldwide known
* think twice about
* company's competence
So what kind of super spies, and super hackers would use "some hundred sheets" and "some
hundreds of sheets" as two separate searches. Every computer geek knows that if you don't
waste time to do virtually two identical searches like those. Who ever did these searches
(after they logged in!) knows nothing about searching. The whole tech. world knows if you are
going to do hacking, you use things like Linux grep/sed tools and you wouldn't waste your
time doing pointless duplicitous searches. Why doesn't FBI state what tools were used, every
is logged, or it should be. Thus this person whom ever it was, was naive.
So here is the big one! Foreign hackers are looking for about people talking about the
Illuminati! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!...BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
Another stupid one! Russian hackers searching DNC files for RUSSIAN STRINGS This is
turning into a circus.
So you mean to tell me Russian hackers that logged into a computer (that is they didn't
hacked, the FBI stated as much), are looking about for files about nonsensical matter
including Russian Word Strings. You can't even make this stuff up. THE FBI ARE
CLOWNS!!!
So it goes on page 15 and 16, that these search words to comprise the breathtaking proof
that the culprit then was to admit these words:
Worldwide known cyber security company XXXX announced that the DNC servers have been hacked
by "sophisticated" hacker groups. I'm very please the company appreciated my skill highly .
Some hundred sheets! This's a serious case, isn't it?
I guess XXXX Customers should think twice about company's competence.
F*** the illuminati and their conspiracies
And when did this happen? Some 2 hours later, at 7:02pm.
So think about this! They wrote that paragraph AFTER the search! So how do you search for
something in 37 minutes that you don't know it exists, and with such meaningless words to
write a bragging paragraph, that was supposedly ON the DNC server itself! Meaning, the person
who logged in knew it existed and quickly went looking for where it was to extract it, and
then use later as to frame the Russians!
Look at the time line. The FBI only found that it was a DNC employee that logged in,
looking for something that shouldn't exist in anyway on his server, unless of course he wrote
it himself, and that was to use it frame the Russians. Remember that paragraph was ON THE DNC
Server!!!!
The FBI are morons! This indictment will be thrown out quick smart, and the FBI should be
brought up on charges of aiding and abetting a crime!
Dorian 9
Yeah. That part was funny, too. Why would they launch some oddball searches and then later
use those same words in a post at WordPress? It's like they were trying to get caught ...
unless something else is going on.
Rod Rosenstein had a press conference on July 13th, 2018 where he broke the news that 12
Russians were being indicted for hacking into the DNC server. This was all debunked by former
NSA and father of the surveillance state Bill Binney.
So. I just read the 'indictment charges' from Rosenstein. What I can say about it on
its face is that it is NOT concrete proof of any proven act by these people. It is based
on circumstantial anecdote AND an extensive discussion about where these people fit in
their overall Russian government agency operations.
1. It describes attempts to access (through phishing operations) email IDs and
passwords of selected accounts TWO of whom the government STILL refuses to name (Hillary
Clinton and John Podesta). It also alleges these same nefarious 'Rooskie Military
Meddlers" intended (yes, intended to ) release select emails so that it might upset "the
2016 election."
Clearly here, in order to judge whatever 'effect' this may or may not have had on the
election, the GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE FORCED to completely present the actual emails they
feel were problematic. RELEASE ALL THE FECKING EMAILS! Without concrete and complete
information no reasonable assessment can be made using a "bad men do bad things"
accusation coupled with unproven claims. To me, TRUTH if outed isn't "meddling." It is
immutable. SHOW US the damaging emails FIRST!
2. Regarding the abundant and complete description of the Russian Military agency
(right down to names and positions AND who 'hacked' what account, etc. It may not be
clear to a lot of people here but it is clear to me that Rosenstein and whomever is
behind him in this little news-cycle diversion action have almost certainly blown an
embedded source in that unit. I hope it was worth it. Particularly since it is unlikely
the government WILL EVER prove its claims.
This is just a diversion operation by a closet deep-state operative who is the
effective head of the Department of Justice since Sessions has inexplicably washed his
hands of anything that should rightly be his primary duties. Rosenstein was also greatly
assisted by some IC - which one? Could be the FBI, but the asset inside that military
unit is very likely CIA. My guess is FBI and CIA working jointly in a deep-state
diversion. NSA? Reports indicate at least parts of it disagree with the hacking source
assertions.
To me, this is pretty much it. President Trump has to fire sessions and appoint a new
head who will fire Rosenstein. This person should also deadline Mueller on a short leash
and have him put up or shut up - 2 weeks maximum and then he is disbanded. The new AG
also needs to fire Director Wray because he hasn't changed the FBI culture one stinking
bit. Lastly, the clearances of Mueller, Comey, Wray, Rosenstein and the whole cabal need
to be invalidated.
ROD ROSENSTEIN - so looks completely insane. Very similar to Adam Schiff.
Does anybody remember how easy it was for Podesta to hand over his security details,
when spoofed?
Crowd Strike - used old Ukrainian malware. Had the White House Commission, plus, the
DNC allowed Crowdstrike to look at their servers, but, not the FBI. Now why was that?
FISA Judges were also colluding with the FBI in an attempt to unseat Trump.
Lisa Page and Strzok texted about setting up a dinner/cocktail party as a cover to meet
with FISA Judge Rudy Contreras.
Lisa Page has refused to cooperate with the Congressional subpoena to testify.
FISA Judge Rudy Contreras not only signed off on a FISA spying warrant against Trump, he
also sat on the Mueller team to go after General Flynn (he was removed from the Mueller
team with no explanation provided).
---------------------------------
""Rudy is on the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court]!" Page excitedly texted Strzok
on July 25, 2016. "Did you know that? Just appointed two months ago."
"I did," Strzok responded. "I need to get together with him."
"[He] said he'd gotten on a month or two ago at a graduation party we were both
at."
Contreras was appointed to the top surveillance court on May 19, 2016, federal records
show.
The pair even schemed about how to set up a cocktail or dinner party just so
Contreras, Strzok, and Page could speak without arousing suspicion that they were
colluding. Strzok expressed concern that a one-on-one meeting between the two men might
require Contreras' recusal from matters in which Strzok was involved."
http://thefederalist.com/20...
Why is someone like Rod, anywhere near the steering wheel ??? Why are he and the rest
of these political-child-clowns, not in prison ??? Where the hell, are the adults ??? A
spanking is past due !!! These folk are ALL liars and thieves.
Peter Strzok was "out of scope" (lying) during his last Polygraph test in 2016.
Strzok, thus, lost his security clearance to allow his participation with FBI in the
Trump "investigation". So HOW did Strzok participate. Anyone involved in that breach of
security procedure should be immediately arrested.
and the non stop b.s. just flows from Rosendueches mouth.... and of course that
traitor disgrace scumbag McCain has to get his dying words in. Someone put a pillow over
that Rinos' pukehole already.
Seth Rich (DNC database employee) was the likely leaker of the DNC emails (see Assange
and Kim Dot Com).
Awan Bros (Pakistani) were given total access to dozens of Democrat Congressional
computers w/o ANY security clearance. None of the Dem Congressmen questioned that. Awan
Bros seemed to be laundering $$$ through their "car business" called CIA.
-------------------------
"Imran Awan and his family members were congressional IT aides who investigators said
made unauthorized access to the House Democratic Caucus server thousands of times. At the
same time as they worked for and could read all the emails of congressmen who sat on
committees like Intelligence, Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs, they also ran a car
dealership that took money from a Hezbollah-linked fugitive and whose financial books
were indecipherable and business patterns bizarre, according to testimony in court
records."
http://dailycaller.com/2017...
Rosenstein made a pathetic attempt to set the political table to block the scheduled
one-on-one meeting between Trump & Putin. These clowns are so predictable.
Both Chuck Schumer and McCain (Deep State operatives) came out saying that Trump should
not meet with Putin because it would be an insult to our "Democracy".
---------------------------------------------------------------
"Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called for President Trump to cancel his one-on-one meeting with
Russian President Vladimir Putin. "President Trump should cancel his meeting with
Vladimir Putin until Russia takes demonstrable and transparent steps to prove that they
won't interfere in future elections," he wrote in a statement. "Glad-handing with
Vladimir Putin on the heels of these indictments would be an insult to our democracy."
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) also came out against the meeting, writing in a statement that if
Trump "is not prepared to hold Putin accountable, the summit in Helsinki should not move
forward."
https://www.thedailybeast.c...
i like Binney; he's a straight shooter. Glad he's called bs on the MSM and intel
community narrative about the "hacking" of the DNC servers, and the
nonsense/impossibility of the DNC emails being hacked and transmitted from within, as the
data transfer rates were absolutely impossible to perform over the internet; it's why the
likelihood of a dl to a thumb drive or other portable data storage device, a handoff to
an intermediary, and surreptitious delivery to Assange is the MOST likely scenario.
The Liar simply keeps employing the Hitlerian "Big Lie" tactic of her pretending to be
an authority figure, and repeatedly reiterating "Wikileaks Russian hacking," which she
KNOWS is a lie before she opens her face hole and spews the green bile.
Rosensteins failed attempt to sabotage the Trump-Putin summit. Won't happen , I don't
know why this swampie is still in a position to try this. He should be fired, tried and
hung.
"in my remarks I have not identified the victims" (8:27) .....
"we need to work together to hold the perpetrators accountable"(9:21) ... certainly, he
is NOT talking about Peter Strozk, whom DOJ provided an attorney with advice not to
answer Congressional questions.
"what motivation they had, independent of what is required to prove this offense....is
not our responsibility"(10:55)
...apparently a policy change since Comey exhonorated Hillary.
"I only comment on the evidence...without regard to politics, is sufficient..."
(10:15)
The DOJ has selectively chosen what facts to gather and what to zealously avoid: Did not
get the DNC server; Did not get oath for Hillary et al interviews; did not prevent Awan
family computer consultants from fleeing; Did not accurately identify classified
documents marked "c" on Hillary server; FISA judge, Rudolph Contreras, was FORCIBLY
recused from the Michael Flynn Case, after he approved surveillance on Trump campaign
members.
Time to rewrite the rules for DOJ/FBI and/or reorg the entire agencies with better
accountability. Certainly remove auto access to NSA info. Congress needs the power to
indict any current of former federal employee and enforce it through the US Marshals.
Dems are so stupid.
John Podesta's office gave his password to hackers.
Podesta was Hillary's campaign chairman.
"The hack and eventual release of a decade's worth of Hillary Clinton campaign
chairman John Podesta's emails may have been caused by a typo, The New York Times
reported Tuesday in an in-depth piece on Russian cyberattacks.
Last March, Podesta received an email purportedly from Google saying hackers had tried
to infiltrate his Gmail account. When an aide emailed the campaign's IT staff to ask if
the notice was real, Clinton campaign aide Charles Delavan replied that it was "a
legitimate email" and that Podesta should "change his password immediately."
Instead of telling the aide that the email was a threat and that a good response would
be to change his password directly through Google's website, he had inadvertently told
the aide to click on the fraudulent email and give the attackers access to the
account.
http://thehill.com/policy/c...
Delavan told the Times he had intended to type "illegitimate," a typo he still has not
forgiven himself for making.
More importantly: the content of the hacked emails should have been the story not who
hacked or leaked them...........
Thank the Deepstate Project mockingbird media for that....
Rosenstein has the demeanor of a pedophile seducing a child. After listening to this,
I need to take a long, hot shower. Just listening to him makes me feel dirty.
Back to paper ballots. At least the cheating can be done locally!
Timing of this is unbelievable. Deep state really don't want Trump to meet with Putin.
Why?
Putin has some dark secrets Demoncrats don't want Trump to find out? Smells phishy to
me.
All I have to say is that a man that would break his wedding vows is capable of
anything. This man should have lost his FBI Security Clearance the day it was found out
that he was cheating on his wife. Adultery alone is more than enough to remove a security
clearance, and many employers would fire someone that committed adultery.
"Cheating on your spouse can even be grounds for losing your job. This is particularly
true in the military, where adultery has a maximum punishment of a dishonorable discharge
and confinement for one year, according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In the
past eight years, 30% of the commanders fired lost their jobs due to sexual misconduct,
including adultery, the Associated Press reports".
We are going full circle now. What this agent is telling us is precisely what we
learned from Alex and from Q. These two are not in contradiction, but they are
complementing each other. They just deal with different aspects of the swamp. It has been
an amazing journey to follow Alex-Q-Fox-Trump. Some uncomfortable details have been
exposed at Strzok's hearing. Some annonymous source exposed RR in connection of Seth
Rich. Trump is about to speak with Russia. All of a sudden RR is feeling the heat under
the pan.He realized he is the frog being cooked in low fire. RR has just raised the white
flag and wants to patch up a nice history that doesn't implicate anybody in America. All
he is praying for is a peaceful resolution of this whole Russia mess. But not so fast, he
still left a knife hanging over Trump's presidency, that is a illegitimate election. RR
still believes in the impeachment depending on the midterm elections.
Who could "plant hundreds of files, containing malicious computer code" on people's
computers. In addition to the Russians, anybody in the world could, after Wikileaks
published the contents of the CIA's "Vault 7" with the exact same code as is known to be
used by foreign governments.
For sure. Look how this psychopathic faced SOB spins as if the Ruskies stole the
entire Electoral College. Let's not also be naive - the US has significantly
(murderously) interfered w/foreign elections past 100 yrs. Then we go about killing those
we select and support - like Noriega, Saddam, Momar (the Shah) and the Assads. Don't buy
this crap. Binney is the most knowledgeable and honest on this matter that I've reviewed.
Look into him and consider trusting his reports.
Dont forget Mossadeq, a dually elected Iranian Prime minister who tried to nationalize
Irans Oil. Installed a minor Grunt by the Name of Reza Shah Pahlavi, whsmgiven Persia on
a Silver platter so long as he was chummy with the Western Oll Barrons. Then the
resulting domino effect with the Islamic Republic of Iran and our current troubles.
Everythiing the Global Deep State touches turns to garbage, they just rape the
resources in all its forms before the Rot goes terminal, oldest tricks are indeed the
best ones.
Another B.S Charge to distract from Strzok, Page Disaster for the Deep State. When the
FBI Lovers turn States Evidence Many of the Top FBI , DOJ Officials will be heading to
Prisons. Rogue FBI has No Credibility any longer after all the Deceit and Corruptions
They engaged in. The reason I Switched from Democrat Voter to Trump Voter is because
Putin called Me at the Last Minute before I sent out My Ballot. He does call me Once in a
While to see If I wanna Go get a Burger at IN N Out and stop and Have a Glass of KGB
Vodka. at a Local Bar in Commiefornia. Just don`t tell the FBI or the Corrupt DemoFreaks
about it. They are so desperate they may come and Bust Me. and Charge Me with Colluding
with the Ruskies.
[RR] has just told America how the DNC was rigging elections ,,,, thanks Rod,
First it was 12 Russians a few months ago with different backgrounds. One of the 12 come
to the USA and demand to see all the evidence against him. Mueller declines and nothing
more is heard about the Russian hacking.
Now its 12 military persons, its a different 12 people but DOJ deep state liars had to
cover for the first set of 12 bs indictments hoping Americans would not remember that
Mueller's indictments go away.
These RR Doj scum bags keep telling lys and they keep getting bigger.
They scumbags picked 12 military people this time because they now the military people
can not com to the USA to ask to see the evidence.
These DOJ traitors are about to have their ass's handed to them, they are so
stupid.
The only thing worse than fake news is, fake indictments.
Rosenstein is dying for credibility, all the while trying to avoid risking prison for
treason.
Rosenstein is J. Edger Hover the second, gathering investigation results to bribe
congressional and federal officials for power and extortion, while shielding criminals
from prosecution.
This creep needs to swing for treason. This isn't why the FBI or DOJ was created. FBI
rank and file and DOJ deserve better.
I'm realizing that in the deep state within the CIA, DOj, and FBI there are a range of
factions. There are RINO factions, progressive factions, and cowboy factions like I think
Rosenstein fits into. Rosenstein may actually be in it for himself, never the less, he is
selling out America, he commits treason.
I'll bet he's even a cross dresser like J Edger was.....
These creeps and clowns share one thing, they have massively abused their power, and
will band together to fight to survive. This is no joke, they may join forces and go to
war against America.
Rosenstein's wife, Lisa Barsoomian, is a protected CIA operative and FOIA shot
blocker....
Barsoomian represented :
Robert Muller three times
James Comey five times
Barack Obama 45 times
Kathleen Sebelius 56 times
Bill Clinton 40 times and
Hillary Clinton 17 times
between 1998 and 2017
She has specialized in opposing Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of the
intelligence community.
Just saw a would-be meme on my Facebook feed . . . to the general effect that the FBI
still hasn't even looked at the DNC's computer or server, but Mueller's indicted 12 Russians
for 'hacking' them.
Of course, there is that old quote from a New York state judge that a prosecutor could get
a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. (Which also reminds me of a riddle: Why is a ham
sandwich better than perfect happiness? Well, nothing is better than perfect happiness,
right? -- and a ham sandwich is certainly better than nothing. . . .)
"... Yes, this indictment is an obvious poison pill meant to ruin or postpone the summit. Chuck Shumer immediately called for cancelling the summit after Rod Rosenstein made his indictment announcement. ..."
"... Also consider that the House was just about to impeach Rod Rosenstein for obstruction. He has refused to release evidence to Congress regarding the FBI and it's motivations during the Hillary email investigation and also the Russiagate investigation. ..."
"... Item 38 of the Indictment claims that the "Alice Donovan" persona - which as a journalist submitted articles to CounterPunch and other sites - was used by the alleged Conspirators to set up a DCLeaks Facebook page in June 2016. ..."
"... While I anticipate the MSM Russophobes have already declared a slam dunk, the question, in my mind, is whether the "loyal opposition" (various DNC astrotuf) will actually even ATTEMPT to mobilize protests. (I think there may be ongoing Sunday family demonstrations to "attach" to). ..."
"... The DNC "resistance" has promised that if Mueller is fired, there will be thousands in the street ... Forcing Trump to cancel Helsinki would be an impressive wielding of "power" (numbers) they claim to have ... If they make no effort (my guess), well, that would be predictable ... ..."
"... So we're to believe that the Russian CIA does not have any access to English speaking translators and that when it wants to write a fake email in English as part of an elaborate plot against the United States, it uses Google? This sounds much more like the actions of a lone rogue hacker or small group of private hackers than the action of the secret intelligence agency of a major power. ..."
"... ""SERVERS The hackers used a server in AZ but then ran that through a server "overseas." The hackers leased a DCCC computer in Illinois. The use of infrastructure within the US suggests much of the hot air around transfer times -- one of the key attempts to debunk the hack -- is just that, hot air."" https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/07/13/the-russian-hack/ . ..."
"... it would have been impossible had the alleged victims not been idiotically, criminally negligent in handling their email accounts. What's more, it's incredible that US intelligence services and the Dem Party apparatus are willing to reveal how easily their systems were compromised and how helpless they were in reacting to it. ..."
"... Most of the information revealed from the DNC emails was either rather innocuous or confirmed what everyone already knew (that the entire Dem political and media establishment had pre-anointed HRC). Anyone who believes that the "Deep State" is some cabal of demonic masterminds is a giant fool. The best and brightest in DC are cack-handed sociopathic gangsters of middling intelligence and no imagination . ..."
"... It does appear that the whole Russian influence/DNC-Gluccifer/etc. stuff is bullshit. Just like the Trump dossier, White Helmets, Assange rape allegations, Skripal poisoning by Russia, and more. Sickening. ..."
"... It occurred to me that while HRC was Secretary of State, one reason to run her business on private servers was to avoid exposing her mix of private/public activities to open view. The same factor would apply at the DNC. Not that the DOS would have state-of-the-art tech security, but playing outside the field leads to depending on savvy conspirators or naive duds for your operations. So, in order to keep things quiet, Crowdstrike is the provider of cover. I would not want to be the provider of record for the Clinton gang or the DNC. Total fail. Although, Podesta was an idiot to be phished. ..."
"... One side of the current indictment scenario that could play into Trump's upcoming meeting with Putin, is that trashing the opposite party prior to negotiations is Trump's modus operandi. ..."
"... On the other hand, this entire kerfuffle has diverted attention away from those individuals, industries and countries that absolutely did collude with both Candidates, and absolutely did influence not just the election, but also US policies ever since. ..."
Cost $95,000 to pull off this 'conspiracy' to interfere in the 2016 presidential election?
Less than took in by Clinton at a single Wall Street Banker cocktail party. Seriously, you
Russian folks need to understand, it will take at least a billion to rig an election in
America ... we don't come cheap.
Correct, he obviously is fed up with this bs witch hunt, he wont give in to deepstate nor
MSM now even though he will say he raised this issue with Putin and so forth.
Yes, this indictment is an obvious poison pill meant to ruin or postpone the summit.
Chuck Shumer immediately called for cancelling the summit after Rod Rosenstein made his
indictment announcement.
Also consider that the House was just about to impeach Rod Rosenstein for obstruction.
He has refused to release evidence to Congress regarding the FBI and it's motivations during
the Hillary email investigation and also the Russiagate investigation.
Now if the House starts impeachment proceedings they will be seen as trying to impeach a
person that just indicted 12 Russians. In other words, they will be seen as protecting
Russians.
11 - I'd like to see VIPS respond to this line by line, it looks ridiculous from first glance
but I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to comment further. Is there any chance that
Assange could prove the source was an internal leak through a release without losing face? My
immediate reaction is that they really played them selves out on this one, its too flimsy of
a production; but than I said the same thing about every chemical attack in Syria, Skribals,
etc, etc.
Thank you Dorian @9 I loved your rant and can absolutely sympathise with your astonishment.
The FBI is clueless and ridiculous and so it should be. The more I follow this Mueller and
Rosenstein circus, the more I see them as Putin's senior agents in the USA. This latest leak
looks to me to be an attempt to do Putin's bidding to derail any meaningful meeting with the
President of the USA. (Not saying that there can ever be a "meaningful meeting with any USA
President") Who in their right mind wants to meet with a lying, thieving yankee? let alone
make a deal with one!
I say Mueller and Rosenstein are Putin's puppets and the whole damn circus is designed for
ridicule. But then I might be way too far down the rabbit hole to see clearly.
""We must speak with one voice in making clear to Vladimir Putin: 'We will not allow you
to interfere in our democratic processes or those of our allies,'" Sanders wrote in a tweet
on Friday."
Gee, I seem to recall the HRC Campaign and the DNC doing far more proven damage to
the electoral process than anything Russia's allegedly done. Where was Sanders denouncement
of HRC and the DNC then?! Clearly, even more than in 2016, Bernie Sanders is a gigantic
fraud every bit as disgusting as HRC, perhaps even more so given the number of people
deluded by his actions. People like him a big part of the problem and have no part in the
solution.
Item 38 of the Indictment claims that the "Alice Donovan" persona - which as a journalist
submitted articles to CounterPunch and other sites - was used by the alleged Conspirators to
set up a DCLeaks Facebook page in June 2016.
b exclaims: "Note: The indictment reinforces the author's hunch that bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies are creations and playgrounds of secret services just like Tor and other
'cool' internet 'privacy' stuff are. Its the very reason why one should avoid their use."
YES!
One of the things that rings my irony alarm is that the sort of "right wing" "Liberty
Movement" crowd has been warning for decades now of the One World Government plans for a
"cashless society." They feared that all transactions would be done via computer entries,
which the NWO could manipulate to either prevent a dissident from being able to buy
something, track every purchase, or simply to steal all of anyone's money.
And now, many of those same Liberty Movement voices are out there selling BitCoin, etc....
and selling it HARD.
This same Liberty Movement has been totally freaked out about the "Jack-Booted Thugs" of
the Police State for decades, too. Some USAmericans might even remember G. Gordon Liddy
telling his Radio Show followers to "go for headshots" when the coppers come (because the
police started wearing body armor).
And now, those same folks are cheering on the Pigs cracking skulls of Black Lives Matter
and anti-Trump hysterics. In fact, the LM is upset that more illegal surveillance,
unwarranted searches and extrajudicial killings aren't being done.
It still looks to me like the PTSB are tearing us apart.
While I anticipate the MSM Russophobes have already declared a slam dunk, the question,
in my mind, is whether the "loyal opposition" (various DNC astrotuf) will actually even
ATTEMPT to mobilize protests. (I think there may be ongoing Sunday family demonstrations to
"attach" to).
The DNC "resistance" has promised that if Mueller is fired, there will be thousands in
the street ... Forcing Trump to cancel Helsinki would be an impressive wielding of "power"
(numbers) they claim to have ... If they make no effort (my guess), well, that would be
predictable ...
Does anyone know if these latest charges are still based on that CrowdStrike "report?"
That is, DNC refused to let FBI have access to their servers so that FBI could run their
own forensics. All previous IC claims have been based on CrowdStrike claims.
Did FBI finally get ahold of those servers, and if so, could they possibly still have had
such evidence on them? Weren't they professionally scrubbed years ago?
See Item 41 in the indictment. "On or about June 15th 2016, the 'Conspirators ...' looked up
certain words and phrases on Google Translate, phrases which were later used by "Guccifer
2.0".
So we're to believe that the Russian CIA does not have any access to English speaking
translators and that when it wants to write a fake email in English as part of an elaborate
plot against the United States, it uses Google? This sounds much more like the actions of a
lone rogue hacker or small group of private hackers than the action of the secret
intelligence agency of a major power.
I have read that the indictment says that different offices/locations were targeted, so no.
""SERVERS The hackers used a server in AZ but then ran that through a server
"overseas." The hackers leased a DCCC computer in Illinois. The use of infrastructure
within the US suggests much of the hot air around transfer times -- one of the key attempts
to debunk the hack -- is just that, hot air."" https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/07/13/the-russian-hack/
.
about Crowdstrike:
CROWDSTRIKE
The indictment describes Crowdstrike's efforts to oust the hackers, but notes that a Linux
based version of X-Agent remained on DNC's network until October 2016.
Part of the "big reveal" (with apparent date discrepancies) is that "the hackers" had a
lot of targets over a long period of time.
I still think Trump was joking when he suggested "the Russians" could help him out by
finding the missing (HRC deleted) e-mails not recovered / found during the server
investigation .... poppycock ... but his "joke" was leapt on at the time and (embarassingly)
is claimed to be a "smoking gun" or "trigger" for the hacking.
Yeah, there seems to be very very little there there
I posted the following in response to Debsisdead wondering what was going on at
CounterPunch.
Then there was that whole thing where they were publishing articles written by an avatar
going by the name of Alice Donovan. I don't know what to make that whole thing. I will say
that some of her articles did discuss inconvenient truths that the MSM tries to play up as
"conspiracy theories" (eg. Obama Administration sent weapons to Syria that ISIL received).
But, she also wrote really bizarre stuff indicating she was not whom she claimed to be.
"...the question, in my mind, is whether the "loyal opposition" (various DNC astrotuf)
will actually even ATTEMPT to mobilize protests. (I think there may be ongoing Sunday family
demonstrations to "attach" to)."
I've been assigned to a 'Two Minutes Hate" for Saturday morning. ;-)
Honestly, I wouldn't put it past the ruthless and perfidious Russian intel services to have
actually done this, but it would have been impossible had the alleged victims not been
idiotically, criminally negligent in handling their email accounts. What's more, it's
incredible that US intelligence services and the Dem Party apparatus are willing to reveal
how easily their systems were compromised and how helpless they were in reacting to it.
Most of the information revealed from the DNC emails was either rather innocuous or
confirmed what everyone already knew (that the entire Dem political and media establishment
had pre-anointed HRC). Anyone who believes that the "Deep State" is some cabal of demonic
masterminds is a giant fool. The best and brightest in DC are cack-handed sociopathic
gangsters of middling intelligence and no imagination .
And even if this accusation is true, they have yet to find any actual collusion between
the Trump campaign and Russian government officials, which is the entire (official anyway)
point of the investigation. They have yet to prove that there was any effect on the outcome
of the election. If the Russians are guilty of hacking they will deny, if they are innocent
they will deny. This is Whitewater Redux, where flimsy allegation of criminal activity is
used to dig and dig and dig until they find something juicy that can be used to prosecute.
Ironic!
If Mueller is so sure the 12 intelligence officers are guilty and Putin is so sure they
are innocent, he ought to fly them to DC to stand trial. Professional courtesy from one
secret policeman to another.
The indictment flies in the face of the great research of the meta data carried out by the
Forensicator and Adam Carter. Which practically proves the leaks were a download from the
US.
The article above has many links referring to that research and the backdrop.
I - and everyone else here - agree that this pathetic "indictment" is an act of complete
desperation, designed to fool the foolables.
Re: "The indictment reinforces the author's hunch that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are
creations and playgrounds of secret services just like Tor and other 'cool' internet
'privacy' stuff are. Its the very reason why one should avoid their use."
It does appear that the whole Russian influence/DNC-Gluccifer/etc. stuff is bullshit.
Just like the Trump dossier, White Helmets, Assange rape allegations, Skripal poisoning by
Russia, and more. Sickening.
To clarify, the following is from Rosenstein's announcement, not the indictment.
"There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime.
There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election
result. The special counsel's investigation is ongoing and there will be no comments on the
special counsel at this time.""
What's more, it's incredible that US intelligence services and the Dem Party
apparatus are willing to reveal how easily their systems were compromised and how helpless
they were in reacting to it. Most of the information revealed from the DNC emails was
either rather innocuous or confirmed what everyone already knew (that the entire Dem
political and media establishment had pre-anointed HRC)
Exactly. It occurred to me that while HRC was Secretary of State, one reason to run
her business on private servers was to avoid exposing her mix of private/public activities to
open view. The same factor would apply at the DNC. Not that the DOS would have
state-of-the-art tech security, but playing outside the field leads to depending on savvy
conspirators or naive duds for your operations. So, in order to keep things quiet,
Crowdstrike is the provider of cover. I would not want to be the provider of record for the
Clinton gang or the DNC. Total fail. Although, Podesta was an idiot to be phished.
One side of the current indictment scenario that could play into Trump's upcoming
meeting with Putin, is that trashing the opposite party prior to negotiations is Trump's
modus operandi. See his comments re: Brexit a day ago, then the gushing with May over
the special nature of their most special of special relationships. What looks like a dagger
to the back by Rosenstein, while the boss was out of town, will likely get chuckles at the
summit.
Trump knows very well that this "Breaking News" is meant to disrupt the meeting with Putin.
Trump hates Mueller, so I guess he will briefly mentioned the 'crime' to Putin who will ask
for tangible proofs and Trump will throw the request to Mueller and pass to another more
important issue. Trump does care about been criticized for that, he know that he would be
criticized anyway.,
"And even if this accusation is true, they have yet to find any actual collusion between
the Trump campaign and Russian government officials, which is the entire (official anyway)
point of the investigation. They have yet to prove that there was any effect on the outcome
of the election. "
Yep. On the other hand, this entire kerfuffle has diverted attention away from those
individuals, industries and countries that absolutely did collude with both Candidates, and
absolutely did influence not just the election, but also US policies ever since.
Oh look! A squirrel! Gotta go chase that squirrel!
Trump will most likely just let the Russia dunnit garbage run. It doesn't bother him or slow
him down in any way, it is a thorn in the side for Russia, and gives Trump media cover while
setting up energy dominance.
To Trump, Russia is a competitor in the energy business.
So everyone got what they wanted. Trump can claim he has been proven free of collusion with
Russia. Dems and neocons can claim they were right that Russia did it, even though the
indictment lacks any proof of this.
Trump can use indictments to justify his backtracking on his campaign promises to improve
relations with Russia , and justify continued sanctions, increase military spending, push
NATO allies to buy more from American weapons dealers, and push EU members to block Russian
gas lines
Meanwhile the real elephant in the room continues to be ignored and control both parties,
influence elections, dictate foreign policy and economic decisions , disseminate fake news to
alter public perceptions, etc....
Well, heck, the list of defendants is itself proof that Mueller is desperate that this case
never comes before a court.
How do I know that?
Easy. His previous indictment named persons AND companies, which allowed Concord
Management to surprise everyone by demanding its day in court.
This time around he has only indicted individuals.
He pointedly does not indicted any companies.
This means that a Russian individual has to put their freedom at risk by taking up the
challenge, and Mueller obviously believes that nobody will be willing to do that.
I think he is going to be proved wrong yet again.
I predict that one or more of those defendants does, indeed, step foot on US soil and
demands to be put on trial, and this is going to shake the Mueller investigation to its
core.
The reason I am confident that this will happen is that
a) it is likely that at least one of those defendants does indeed work for Russian
intelligence, and
b) Russian intelligence knows full well that Mueller has nothing and is bluffing
So they will take that person aside and say: Boris/Dimitry/Ivan/baby, go over there and
call their bluff. If they fold then you come home and live like a king. If they convict you
then sit tight and we'll arrange a spy-swap, then you come home and live like a king. What do
you say?
Let's not take a look at the U$A's corrupt and horribly broken "election" systems,
suppression of voters, and outright bought and paid for "representatives". That, would be too
much trouble..
George Steele penned many a masterful dossier, some extraordinarily clever counterfeit
handwritten memoirs, and a pot-boiling John LaCarre spin-off cold-war spy-novel or two.
Steel's drinking has paralyzed his brain; he can't think of anything, he lauds
Skripal's
brilliant descriptions of the two russian prostitutes peeing on barak obama's hotel bed.
WHAT does Skripal do for a living? he writes. Sergei sees himself as a new dostoyevski
!
I agree with those who have argued that whole the Skripal meme is Hillary's gang
goofing
on the Brits. This pee-pee dossier is THE evidentiary source of the Mueller investigation
Yeah the Rowdy Lion has blocked and bearded Russia historically, that's why they make
great patsies for the Yankees whose criminal minds can not get over losing that election!
Put yourself in the place of a maniac primed to be a coddled goddess President of the
USA
¿Wouldn't YOU call reliable old insider George Steele (not knowing the man is
ossified)?
Once the gang realized that Steele's brain was fried, they could not let Sergei Skripal
die.
The always sober Prof. Stephen Cohen warned this would happen on the 11/07, and so it came to
pass. He picked these guys like a dirty nose. The Mueller investigation needs to be shut
down, the cloak of what it is pretending to be has fallen off.
***
Summitgate and the Campaign vs. 'Peace'
Not surprisingly, Trump's meetings with NATO and Putin are being portrayed as ominous events
by Russiagaters.
By Stephen F. Cohen
Excerpt
Also not surprisingly, and unlike in the past, mainstream media have found little place for
serious discussion of today's dangerous conflicts between Washington and Moscow: regarding
nuclear-weapons-imitation treaties, cyber-warfare, Syria, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the
Black Sea region, even Afghanistan. It's easy to imagine how Trump and Putin could agree on
conflict-reduction and cooperation in all of these realms. But considering the traducing by
the Post, Times, and Maddow of a group of senators who visited Moscow around July 4, it's
much harder to see how the defamed Trump could implement such "peace deals." (There is a
long history of sabotaging or attempting to sabotage summits and other détente-like
initiatives. Indeed, a few such attempts have been evident in recent months and more may
lie ahead.)
There is nothing illegal in and of itself about influencing an election in a foreign
country. Unless doing so is in violation of other laws, such as hacking or violating campaign
financing laws.
And it is most certainly illegal for people to collude with foreign nationals to interfere
in an election, and I suspect that Mueller's next step will be to connect these 12 indicted
Russians with members of the Trump campaign.
Mueller is proceeding very slowly and keeping his cards close to his chest, he knows that
any case he presents has to be fully free of flaws or contradictions as it will be attacked
from all sides.
the comments here range from delusional to outright psychotic
Trump has no ability to outsmart anyone let alone Putin.....take a look at north
Korea...where he declared the threat of nuclear war was over....he mouths a few slogans and
fools try to spin and interpret for the masses of fools what he is talking about.
his choice of staff and advisors were so comical they have all been removed and in their
place are the lowest slime of any swamp..reflecting the attitudes and racism of their leader
who seeks only to enrich himself which he has been doing through foreign affairs....now with
Russia where there is still enthusiasm for america....and where he gets a lot of cash...he
seeks to cozy up to Putin at the expense of NATO partners where he deflects his ignorance by
creating distraction.....again relying on others to explain.
if you all don't think Mueller is developing a real case because he doesn't expose it
while seeking indictments...that is your choice...but don't go on from there to assert it
someone makes the idiocy of Trump legitimate...it does not!
"They" really don't want Trump talking to Putin. Since they can't stop it; sabotage the
meeting. This harkens back to the Gary Powers shoot down... That one worked.
It's hilarious really! But also frightening. As Dorian pointed out, nobody doing "hacking"
are that amateurish, and certainly not the Russians or Chinese for that matter. It pobably
the clods in Cheltenham that are responsible, it bears all the marks of failure, so its
probably British.
I think the Russians got me last night! I woke up this morning, with tremors and shaking, not
feeling well at at all. I was not foaming at the mouth, but I did have a greenish tinge to
the skin and i looked bad in the mirror. I am sure it is Novichok.
How did the Russians know that i would buy that particular single malt! They probably
spied, and knew I would get an Oban and they poisoned me. If I do not comment again, know,
that I too have fallen victim to their devious games. In the meantime I will try to self
medicate with a stout or too. Pray for me. Donations accepted BTW.
Forensic evidence has already proven that the data on the DNC server was downloaded on a USB
thump drive. The bombshells in Robert Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence
officers, hackers of DNC server, put a damper on Trump's one on one visit with Putin.
Well, you start by blurting out a secret about DNC hack: there was no hack, there was a
leak, but the leaker Seth Rich was conveniently killed during "botched robbery". Guess who
ordered this murder? Obviously, it couldn't have been someone low in the food chain, as the
"investigation" of Seth Rich murder is going exactly nowhere in two years. The Dems via
Mueller just keep whipping the dead horse of "Russiagate" out of desperation.
But next you undermine your credibility claiming that Putin installed Trump. Unfortunately
for Putin, he does not have the resources to do that. Ludicrous sums allegedly spent by
mysterious Russians bandied about by Mueller's "investigation" show that Putin did not have
the money to affect the billion-dollar show that the US presidential elections have become.
Of course, corrupt mad witch, who outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost, would like to blame
someone other than herself, but her story is dead in the water. The Dems betrayed their own
electorate, white working-class people, and lost it forever. The fringe groups they gained
cannot offset that loss.
Trump won the elections not because he was so good, but because his opponent was utterly
repulsive. However, in contrast to Obama and the witch, Trump shows some street smarts: he
prefers to make deals with strong competitors, rather than fight them and sustain huge
losses.
BTW, you forgot that Trump's inclination to make deals includes China, which is certainly
not Christian. Basically, his is a common-sense approach that even an average Joe can
understand. Hence the hysterics of establishment-owned Dems and Republicans. So, I'd say God
bless common sense and the people possessing it.
"... Indictment fuels new calls to cancel Trump-Putin summit ..."
"... Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) demanded substantial changes to the summit saying that complaining to Putin about the indictments needs to be the focus of the entire summit, and that Putin and Trump should never be allowed to be alone in a room during the meeting. ..."
"... Warner was one of the few to not call for the talks to be cancelled outright, with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) saying the meeting needed to be cancelled "now," and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) saying that even shaking Putin's hand would be "a moment of historic cowardice." ..."
Indictment fuels new calls to cancel Trump-Putin summit
On Friday, special counsel Robert Mueller
has indicted 12 Russian GRU officers.
The 12 are
accused
of conspiring
to hack Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC computers to leak information ahead of the 2016 election.
This was the second substantial set of indictments coming out of the investigation.
In
February, the Justice Department
indicted 13 other "conspirators" claiming that they had stolen the identities
of US citizens to manipulate the campaigns. Russia has denied all the charges.
While indictments aren't surprising, as a chance to try to show that the investigation in progressing, the
timing is extremely unfortunate,
to the point that it must
raise suspicions
. The indictment, after all, comes just days before President Trump is to hold a summit with
Russia's President Vladimir Putin.
Trump was already facing bipartisan opposition to having a summit with Putin at all, based on the allegations
of election meddling. The indictments are adding fuel to the fire, sparking more calls from opponents of diplomacy
to pull out of the summit at the last minute.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)
demanded substantial changes to the summit
saying that complaining to Putin about the indictments needs to be
the focus of the entire summit, and that Putin and Trump should never be allowed to be alone in a room during the
meeting.
Warner was one of the few to not call for the talks to be cancelled outright, with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
saying the meeting needed to be cancelled "now," and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) saying that even shaking Putin's hand
would be "a moment of historic cowardice."
Of course, these lawmakers were all attacking the summit long before these indictments dropped, and this simply
is the new excuse for opposing the plan. With the growing sense that the Mueller investigation is
designed
to just keep going, there is also concern it's going to keep being used as a source of excuses to not
talk to Russia.
No Evidence In Mueller's Indictment Of 12 Russians - Release Now May Sabotage Upcoming
Summit
The Special counsel Robert Mueller issued an indictment (pdf, 29 pages) against 12
Russian people alleged to be officers or personal of the Russian Military Intelligence Service
GRU. The people, claims the indictment, work for an operational (26165) and a technical (74455)
subunit of the GRU.
A Grand Jury in Washington DC issued 11 charges which are described and annotated below. A
short assessment follows.
The first charge is for a "Conspiracy to Commit an Offense Against the United States" by
stealing emails and leaking them. The indictment claims that the GRU units sent spearfishing
emails to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party organizations DNC and DCCC.
They used these to get access to email boxes of John Podesta and other people. They are also
accused of installing spyware (X-agent) on DNC computers and of exfiltrating emails and other
data from them. The emails were distributed and published by the online personas DCLeaks,
Guccifer II and later through Wikileaks. The indictment claims that DCLeaks and Guccifer II
were impersonations by the GRU. Wikileaks, "organization 1" in the indictment, is implicated
but so far not accused.
Note: There is a different Grand Jury for the long brewing case against Julian
Assange and Wikileaks. Assange has denied that the emails he published came from a Russian
source. Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, said that he received the emails on a trip
to Washington DC and transported them to Wikileaks.
The indictment describes in some detail how various rented computers and several domain
names were used to access the DNC and DCCC computers. The description is broadly plausible but
there is little if any supporting evidence.
Charge 2 to 9 of the indictment are about "Aggravated Identity Theft" for using usernames
and passwords for the personal email accounts of others.
Charge 10 is about a "Conspiracy to Launder Money". This was allegedly done "through a web
of transaction structured to capitalize on the perceived anonymity of cryptocurrencies such as
bitcoin". It is alleged that the accused mined bitcoins, channeled these through dozens of
accounts and transactions and then used them to rent servers, virtual private network access
and domain names used in the operation.
Note : The indictment reinforces the author's hunch that bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies are creations and playgrounds of secret services just like Tor and other
'cool' internet 'privacy' stuff are. Its the very reason why one should avoid their use.
Such a convoluted tale in fact authored by the NSA?. Most of what the Russians are accused of
can be attributed to the NSA activities.
As Putin pointed out when the accusations were first made, no matter who is elected, US
policies remain the same. There is no motivation for RUssia to interfere.
Obviously a desperate move to torpedo the Helsinki meeting. Given that the indicted lot is in
Russia the judicial consequences will be nill.
By the way B, what do you say about the Novi-bottle found in a house surely searched over
and over? What took the searchers about ten days to found it?
One small point. Craig Murray has said he met with one of the individuals who were involved
with the DNC email release. Although he's been somewhat hazy on it, on the Scott Horton radio
show, Murray said the emails were already in the possession of Wikileaks before he met with
the individual involved. https://scotthorton.org/?powerpress_pinw=23500-podcast
Good job by Concord Management to challenge the previous bullshit. That makes it likely these
charges will also be challenged. The best thing you can do when someone living in a glass
house accuses you of doing something is to force them to expose themselves to the entire
world via evidentiary discovery; and as with the first case, it's too late to put the genie
back in the bottle. This ought to be seen as the equivalent of Novichok/Skripal debacle in
UK, which I trust people continue to follow Craig
Murray's reporting .
As we've seen, the number of Big Lies produced that end up driving policy has dramatically
increased since the USSR's disillusion, while trillions of dollars are stolen from taxpayers
and given to the global .01%--OWS clearly aimed at the heart of the beast. The indictment
will further roil domestic chaos within the Outlaw US Empire making solidarity more difficult
to obtain.
Meanwhile in other legal news, Assange has won a court order
demanding he be unmolested as he goes from Ecuadorian Embassy to airport for his flight into
Asylum. Bet the UK doesn't obey this ruling either further making it a Banana Republic.
Same ol' Deep State playbook, preaching to the converted while having little effect on
anything else. This will give Rachel Maddow many hours of profitable air time as she and her
ilk require no evidence.
However, ordinary people with lazy minds will see the headlines and think they're true and
there will be more pressure NOT to have any productive, mutually beneficial discussions with
Russia, so mission accomplished for Mueller, I guess. Anything to keep people from realizing
that Hillary was a horrible, corrupt, dangerous candidate who kept herself from winning the
election (which was easily winnable for the Democrats going in) all on her own.
How much hot and stinking air can an Empire blow before it blows itself out? Sadly, no doubt,
much more.
They have lost the narrative and don't even know it, they go on with Putin the Poisoner
and Russia did it and they keep it up because they have no choice and they live in fear
because we don't believe them any more.
- Page 14 and 15: This is hilariously stupid! These Russian super spy agents on June
15, 2016, 4:19 MOSCOW TIME and they DID NOT HACK, BUT LOGGED INTO the DNC server and
spent 37 minutes to search for files or that included words (that is for the techo's out
there, they "grep") for the following words:
* some hundred sheets
* some hundreds of sheets
* dcleaks
* illuminati
* широко
известный
перевод (meaning: widely known translation)
* worldwide known
* think twice about
* company's competence
So what kind of super spies, and super hackers would use "some hundred sheets" and "some
hundreds of sheets" as two separate searches. Every computer geek knows that if you don't
waste time to do virtually two identical searches like those. Who ever did these searches
(after they logged in!) knows nothing about searching. The whole tech. world knows if you are
going to do hacking, you use things like Linux grep/sed tools and you wouldn't waste your
time doing pointless duplicitous searches. Why doesn't FBI state what tools were used, every
is logged, or it should be. Thus this person whom ever it was, was naive.
So here is the big one! Foreign hackers are looking for about people talking about the
Illuminati! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!...BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
Another stupid one! Russian hackers searching DNC files for RUSSIAN STRINGS This is
turning into a circus.
So you mean to tell me Russian hackers that logged into a computer (that is they didn't
hacked, the FBI stated as much), are looking about for files about nonsensical matter
including Russian Word Strings. You can't even make this stuff up. THE FBI ARE
CLOWNS!!!
So it goes on page 15 and 16, that these search words to comprise the breathtaking proof
that the culprit then was to admit these words:
Worldwide known cyber security company XXXX announced that the DNC servers have been hacked
by "sophisticated" hacker groups. I'm very please the company appreciated my skill highly .
Some hundred sheets! This's a serious case, isn't it?
I guess XXXX Customers should think twice about company's competence.
F*** the illuminati and their conspiracies
And when did this happen? Some 2 hours later, at 7:02pm.
So think about this! They wrote that paragraph AFTER the search! So how do you search for
something in 37 minutes that you don't know it exists, and with such meaningless words to
write a bragging paragraph, that was supposedly ON the DNC server itself! Meaning, the person
who logged in knew it existed and quickly went looking for where it was to extract it, and
then use later as to frame the Russians!
Look at the time line. The FBI only found that it was a DNC employee that logged in,
looking for something that shouldn't exist in anyway on his server, unless of course he wrote
it himself, and that was to use it frame the Russians. Remember that paragraph was ON THE DNC
Server!!!!
The FBI are morons! This indictment will be thrown out quick smart, and the FBI should be
brought up on charges of aiding and abetting a crime!
So obviously timed to meddle with the Trump-Putin meeting. The United States and its 5 Eyes
partners intercept and store the emails of everyone on the planet, and throws a hissy fit
over the alleged same treatment. No doubt the politicians and media personalities will ascend
their soapboxes to play wounded victims. What a farce. Sad that the public, to a degree, has
now been trained to confuse mere allegations with established fact.
The evidence that the DNC hacks were a local download by someone with legitimate access is
persuasive as shown by the group of former intel professionals who analyzed the metadata.
John Podesta's email was hacked by a phishing email that convinced him to give up his
password. Any half-competent hacker could pull this off, so blaming the Russians is pure
speculation. But, it is consistent with the attempts to blame Russia for the incompetence and
corruption of the Clinton campaign.
The social media efforts by the Internet Research Agency, besides being mostly a
commercial effort as b has shown, are also a rather insignificant portion of the billions of
messages and posts that are posted daily. That these could have had any significant effect is
really stretching the point.
All that being said, I'm still not convinced that Russian intelligence did nothing at all
to attempt to influence the election. Certainly, the US has interfered with many elections
all over the world going back decades, one of the most egregious being our interference in
the Russian elections of 1991. So, there is no logical reason to believe that the Russians
are not doing the same thing.
In addition, I believe that Trump has commercial and financial reasons for being as
friendly as possible with Putin, i.e., Trump Tower Moscow. Trump is not particularly
interested in the politics or diplomacy of detente with Russia (which I would support, in
general), he is purely transactional in his approach and seems to have no interest other than
being the center of attention on media and making as much money as he can.
It is clear that the FBI in an act of desperation, tried to hoodwink the public and the
world, with a false flag operation to blame the Russians for DNC incompetence and criminal
behaviour by Hillary Clinton.
In this attempt of a cover up and foolish attempt of technical miss direction, they have
been caught red handed in gross malfeasance and high crimes.
President Putin should be made immediately aware of this attempt (if he hasn't been
already), and should take Trump to task on these grave crimes and attempts of sedition and
outright treason by US personnel in attempt to trigger a war with Russia.
Under US Code 2381, whomever owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against
them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or
elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death , or shall be imprisoned not
less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be
incapable of holding any office under the United States.
This treasonous behaviour by the FBI and DNC, should be investigated by Military Court.
And those responsible for attempt to start a war, with another super power, should be held to
the fullest account of US Code 2381. Attempting to precipitate a war, is a war crime and
those guilty should face a military court and held to highest punishment available, namely,
execution by firing squad.
High office demands high responsibility. If we do not hold government officials,
especially officials of the Executive Branch of the USA, then we are allowing a government,
like what is happening Washington DC today, to become a rouge nation. These evil merchants of
death, must face prosecution for their hatred, bigotry and lust for war. Warmongers must not
be tolerated in government. And the FBI and DNC have now shown absolutely they are prepared
to lie, however incompetently, to protect the warmongers and evil doers in government.
This act by the FBI is an act of treason: US Code 2381 must now be applied to all those
part of this treason.
b: The detente with Russia which U.S. president Donald Trump tries to achieve will
now be more difficult to implement and to sustain.
-
IMO Trump isn't trying to achieve anything more than to negotiate an agreement that
is favorable to USA/NATO. The Deep State would be happy if an acceptable agreement could be
reached as it would split Russia from China.
AFAICT, the depiction of Trump as pro-Russian is a fantasy concocted by Hillary-Obama and
their deep-state flunkies.
The entire anti-Russia campaign serves two purposes:
1) distraction
- from illegal wars, CIA color revolutions, Syrian occupation, etc.
what has been done is many times worse than temporarily separating families at the border
- from an undemocratic political system
Hillary's collusion with DNC against Sanders and the overall failure of the Democratic
Party to represent the people
2) negotiation
Trump is the 'good cop' to the anti-Russian deep-state 'bad cop'
Yes, this "indictment" is truly pathetic.
1) According to Mueller the "infrastructure" cost "over $95000" obtained by "money
laundering" using bitcoin etc.. Wow. It does not cost much to threaten "US democracy".
2) "Conspirators attempted to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the
computer program Ccleaner". I wonder if they used the free version of CCleaner or the premium
version available for $35. Another dubious if not laughable accusation.
As I understand it the GRU does not do these things -- it's pure military intelligence. The
Russian intelligence services are 1) very (very) good 2) born in real war. So they don't run
little independent operations like hacking US politics just for fun.
That struck me right from the get-go. The hacking would have been done by
Служба
специальной
связи и
информации (Special Service of
Communications and Information ie their NSA/CSE/GCHQ) which is now owned by
Федеральная
служба охраны
(Federal Protection Service). No way would military intelligence have run this.
In Russia int/security organs are not quasi-independent agencies that do what they want.
Exactly, he is going to test the Russian aims to overcome more bullying either in Syria
itself, even after offering to withdraw, or, better, and most probably, in Afghanistan
The whole thing is horrifying, that government agencies can be so inept while having so much
power. It's one thing when they try to apply it to individuals thousands of miles away but to
think they operate this way in regard to US citizens. And it just gets worse...
Sasha
Not much of an offer, the occupation is untenable with Pakistan in the SCO camp.
Trump has no chips to offer except Crimea.Putin/Xi may offer a face saving way out of
Afghanistan and Syria, but even the venue shows who the supplicant is.
You have to be exceptional not to see that is is far more than symbolic that the mountain
has to go to Mohamed.Trump wanted DC or Vienna.
Paragraph 47 of the indictment -- regarding "Organization 1," presumably Wikileaks --
cites intercepted messages showing that Guccifer 2.0 engaged in "failed attempts" to deliver
the docs to Organization 1 "starting in late June 2016." The problem is that Assange had
announced on June 12, 2016 that Wikileaks already had such documents. Given his history, it
is simply beyond belief that Assange would rely on a promise of unvetted docs.
Moreover, that June 12, 2016 announcement was just two days before the Crowstrike news
story of Russian hacking (June 14), followed by the debut of Guccifer 2.0 (June 15).
Independent analysts have long suggested that the latter events were a ploy by partisans
(Clintonites and their national security state supporters) trying to get ahead of the
Wikileaks release by tainting the source of any such documents as Russian.
The greatest threat to mankind is the ability of otherwise intelligent people
to believe unfounded absurd nonsense. Without critical thinking and diversity of opinion the
window to the truth becomes opaque.
The greatest threat to mankind is the ability of otherwise intelligent people to believe
unfounded absurd nonsense. Without critical thinking and diversity of opinion the window to
the truth becomes opaque.
Trump should just refuse to discuss this nonsense with Putin or anyone else. Don't take the
bait. Do your deals with Putin, and ignore the kibitzers. Of course Donald has trouble
keeping his mouth shut.
Mueller messed up the proven information on the illegal access to the DNC (and congressional)
computers by Awan family and the alleged trolling by the alleged Russian spies.
If Mueller has any worries about nationals security, he must investigate Wasserman and
Clinton.
By the way, the Awans were never cleared for having to access the classified information.
Almost 30 congressional computers had been compromised, and the classified information
obtained, by the fraudsters on the US government payroll.
Must laud Dorian for his enthusiasm @12, but any such trial would be conducted in a Federal
Court. Of course, since its inception, the FBI's played both sides of the legality street,
and it's quite obvious that Obama's Justice Department and its FBI agency obstructed justice
with the entire Clinton/Server fiasco in 2016 and has continued to do so.
As for Russia trying to sway a US presidential election, IMO they're telling the truth
that they don't since they can't hope to compete with all the corrupt interests actually
doing so, like AIPAC and the US Chamber of Commerce. Hell, US policy interferes in US
elections when monies sent to Zionistan get recycled into the election cycle through AIPAC or
other sources. What was HRC's Pay-to-Play Foundation if not a method to influence the
election? Dozens of good books are written about the influence of Big Money on US elections
at every level, yet an extremely "conservative" Supreme Court said all that Big Money's just
another form of speech, so say all you want.
Essentially, all levels of US government and elections have become more corrupt annually
since 1866 and the result is today's indictments, providing ever more proof that they're
under Oligarchical control. And unfortunately for the rest of the planet, it's up to the
USA's citizenry to resolve the problem--really, some of us actually do try. Sadly, we lack
the presence of a US Embassy to train and finance our Color Revolution as is done within
every other nation.
You said "Any half-competent hacker could pull this off. "
Don't you mean "any totally incompetent kiddie-scripter could cut/paste a phishing attack
from the dark net, and pull this off , provided the recipient was dumb enough to
respond"?
Imo Trump went into the Prez campaign with his eyes wide open. How else does one explain his
(seemingly premature) drain the Swamp declaration? I understand from the multitude of Trump
docos I've recorded since the campaign began that He had been contemplating the notion of
running for POTUS for at least a decade before he decided to dive in. So he's had at least 10
years to investigate The Swamp, find its flaws and weaknesses, and work out whether he would
be able to find and recruit powerful 'Patriots' willing to lend a hand when (not if) the
going (for a lone wolf) gets tough.
He'll turn this latest slice of Intellectual Pygmy-ism to his advantage. One really
obvious way to do so would be to "prove" that no time should be wasted in getting as close as
possible to 'dangerous' Putin, as soon as possible. And who better to do that than... Ta Da!
MAGA Trump!
Trump seems to have explored every possibility and evolved umpteen solutions to each. The
Swamp is going to regret trying to outsmart him.
"... Here's a more apt headline: "Petulant elites throwing tantrum at prospect of their votes not being 10,000x more powerful than regular peasant votes." ..."
In the face of fervent
opposition from Democratic elites who " think their vote is more
important " than the will of the party's base , the Democratic National
Committee's (DNC) Rules and Bylaws arm
cleared a major hurdle in the fight to curtail the power of superdelegates on Wednesday by
approving a plan that would end their ability to cast votes for the presidential candidate on
the first ballot at the party's convention.
"The activists that have been concerned that superdelegates will overturn the will of the
voters should feel good about this," DNC member Elaine Kamarck said in a statement
.
While the plan to gut the influence of superdelegates -- who have been free since 1984 to
put their weight behind any candidate no matter how the public voted -- has received broad
support from Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as an important first step toward making
the party's process more "
open and transparent ," establishment figures who stand to lose power if the plan is
implemented are staging a last-minute " revolt
" to block the rule change.
As investigative reporter Alex Kotch noted in a Twitter thread on
Wednesday, at least two of the Democratic insiders who are clinging desperately to their undue
influence as superdelegates happen to be corporate lobbyists -- a fact that Politico neglected
to mention in its reporting on the party elites' "longshot bid to block the measure."
"They don't realize it but they're proving the point of Sanders and everyone else who's
opposed to superdelegates," Kotch writes. "Many prioritize corporate interests over those of
everyday people and thus automatically support the less progressive candidate."
Two of the three superdelegates who are opposed to the Sanders plan:
One is a health care lobbyist
Another is a former lobbyist
The U.S. Rep quoted in the article who's opposed to the change, Gerry Connolly (Va.),
accepts a bunch of corporate PAC money from good corporate citizens like Northrup Grummon and
AT&T. https://t.co/s7KWJGWEGq
Responding to Politico's story on the superdelegates' last-ditch attempt to undermine the
push to curtail their power, The Humanist Report offered an alternative headline:
Here's a more apt headline: "Petulant elites throwing tantrum at prospect of their
votes not being 10,000x more powerful than regular peasant votes."https://t.co/oUlaXY9jLt
-- The Humanist Report (@HumanistReport) July 11,
2018
Wednesday's vote in favor of the plan to ensure superdelegates cannot overturn the will of
voters on the first ballot of the presidential nomination process was the final step before the
proposal heads to a vote before the full DNC next month. "Any attempt to derail the rules
changes at the summer convention is thought to be a long-shot," concluded Astead Herndon of the
New York Times.
Looks like another Steele dossier and it has Brennan fingertips all over. Looks like another
exercise in creation of a parallel reality. The content of the document implies that malware was
installed in GRU computers and those computers were monitored 24/7 by CIA. The documents
describes both GNU officers and DNC employees as unsophisticated idiots. DNC employees who who
should undergo some basic security training were easily deceived by fishing emails from a foreign
country. And a good practice is to disable hotlinks in emails.
I always suspected that Guccifer 2.0 was a false flag operation to hide the leak of DNC
documents. If this is true this was really sophisticated false flag.
BTW GRU is military intelligence unit, so to hack into civil computers is kind of out of
their main sphere of activities. They also should be aware about NSA capabilities of intercepting
the traffic.
I especially like the following tidbit: "On or about June 1,2016, the Conspirators attempted
to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program CCleaner." This
is how third rate hackers (wannabes) behave.
First of all the investigation of DNC was botched by hiring a private, connected to
Democratic Party security company (Crowdstrike), so no data from it are acceptable in court. FBI
did not have any access to the data.
Which means that Mueller is a patsy of more powerful forces
How about speed of download that proved to be excessive for Internet connection? Nothing is
said about Dmitri
Alperovitch role is all this investigation, which completely discredit all that results? See for example diuscusstion at
Why
Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear And, again, the question is: Was Guccifer 2.0 in itself a USA false flag operation ?
Looks like Mueller is acting as an operative of Democratic Party. Could not dig up enough
dirt on Trump, so he now saddled his beloved horse, trying to provoke Russia to respond.
And this John Le Carre style details about individuals supposedly involved. Probably were
provided by CIA ;-)
4. By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators also hacked into the computer networks of
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ("DCCC") and the Democratic National Committee
("DNC"). The Conspirators covertly monitored the computers of dozens of DCCC and DNC employees,
implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code ("malware"), and stole emails
and other documents from the DCCC and DNC.
5. By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators began to plan the release of materials
stolen from the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.
6. Beginning in or around June 2016, the Conspirators staged and released tens of thousands
of the stolen emails and documents. They did so using fictitious online personas, including
"DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0."
7. The Conspirators also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release additional stolen
documents through a website maintained by an organization ("Organization Iй), that had
previously posted documents stolen from U.S. persons, entities, and the U.S. government The
Conspirators continued their U.S. election-interference operations through in or around
November 2016.
8. To hide their connections to Russia and the Russian government, the Conspirators used
false identities and made false statements about their identities. To further avoid detection,
the Conspirators used a network of computers located across the world, including in the United
States, and paid for this infrastructure using cryptocurrency.
... ... ...
13. Defendant ALEKSEY VIKTOROVICH LUKASHEV
(Лукашсв
Алексей
Викторович) was a Senior Lieutenant
in the Russian military assigned to ANTONOV's department within Unit 26165. LUKASHEV used
various online personas, including "Den Katenberg" and "Yuliana Martynova." In on around 2016,
LUKASHEV sent spcarphisliing emails to members of the Clinton Campaign and affiliated
individuals, including the chairman of the Clinton Campaign.
14. Defendant SERGEY ALEKSANDROVICH MORGACHEV
(Моргачев
Сергей
Александрович)
was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Russian military assigned to Unit 26165. MORGACHEV oversaw a
department within Unit 26165 dedicated to developing and managing malware, including a hacking
tool used by the GRU known as "X-Agent." During the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks,
MORGACHEV supervised the co-conspirators who developed and monitored the X-Agent malware
implanted on those computers.
15. Defendant NIKOLAY YURYEVICH KOZACHEK (Козачек
Николай
Юрьевич) was a Lieutenant Captain in the Russian
military assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. KOZACHEK used a variety of
monikers, including "kazak" and "blablablal234565 " KOZACHEK developed, customized, and
monitored X-Agent malware used to hack the DCCC and DNC networks beginning in or around April
2016.
16. Defendant PAVEL VYACHESLAVOVICH YERSHOV (Ершов
Павел
Вячеславович) was a
Russian military officer assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. In or around
2016, YERSHOV assisted KOZACHEK and other co-conspirators in testing and customizing X-Agent
malware before actual deployment and use.
17. Defendant ARTEM ANDREYEVICH MALYSHEV (Малышев
Арт е м
Андреевич) was a Second Lieutenant in the
Russian military assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. MALYSIIEV used a variety
of monikers, including "djangomagicdev" and "realblatr." In or around 2016, MALYSHEV monitored
X-Agent malware implanted on the DCCC and DNC networks.
18. Defendant ALEKSANDR VLADIMIROVICH OSADCHUK
(Осадчук
Александр В
ладимирович) was a Colonel in
the Russian military and the commanding officer of Unit 74455. Unit 74455 was located at 22
Kirova Street, Khimki, Moscow, a building referred to within the GRU as the 'Tower." Unit 74455
assisted in the release of stolen documents through the DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas, the
promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media
accounts operated by the GRU.
19. Defendant ALEKSEY ALEKSANDROVICH POTEMKIN
(Потемкин
Алексей
Александрович)
was an officer in the Russian military assigned to Unit 74455. POTEMKIN was a supervisor in a
department within Unit 7445f responsible for the administration of computer infrastructure used
in cyber operations. Infrastructure and social media accounts administered by POTEMKIN'S
department were used, among other things, to assist in the release of stolen documents through
the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2 0 personas.
21, ANTONOV, BADIN, YKRMAKOV, LUKASHEV, and their co-conspiratore targeted victims using a
technique known as spearphishing to steal victims' passwords or otherwise gain access to their
computers. Beginning by at least March 2016, the Conspirators targeted over 300 individuals
affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.
a. For example, on or about March 19, 2016, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators created and
sent a spearphishing email to the chairman of the Clinton Campaign. LUKASHEV used the account
"John356gh" at an online service that abbreviated lengthy website addresses (referred to as a
"URL-shortcning service"). LIJKASHEV used the account to mask a link contained in the
spearphishing email, which directed the recipient to a GRU-created website. LUKASHEV altered
the a security notification from Google (a technique known as "spoofing"), instructing the user
to change his password by clicking the embedded link. Those instructions wore followed. On or
about March 21, 2016, LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and their co-conspirators stole the contents of the
chairman's email account, which consisted of over 50,000 emails.
Starting on or about March 19, 2016, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators sent spearphishing
emails to the personal accounts of other individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign,
including its campaign manager and a senior foreign policy advisor. On or about March 25, 2016,
LUKASHEV used the same john356gh account to mask additional links included in spearphishing
emails sent to numerous individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, including Victims 1
and 2. LUKASliEV sent these emails from the Russia-based email account [email protected] that he spoofed to appear to be from
Google. On or about March 28,2016, YERMAKOV researched the names of Victims 1 and 2 and their
association with Clinton on various social media sites. Through their spearphishing operations,
LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and their co-conspirators successfully stole email credentials and
thousands of emails from numerous individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign. Many of
these stolen emails. Including those from Victims 1 and 2, were later released by the
Conspirators through DCLeaks.
On or about April 6, 2016, the Conspirators created an email account in the name (with a
one-letter deviation from the actual spelling) of a known member of the Clinton Campaign. The
Conspirators then used that account to send spearphishing emails to the work accounts of more
than thirty different Clinton Campaign employees. In the spearphishipg emails, LUKASHEV and his
co-conspirators embedded a link purporting to direct the recipient to a document titled
"hillary-clinton-favorable-rating.xlsx " In fact, this link directed the recipients' computers
to a GRU-crcatcd website.
22. The Conspirators spearphished individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign
throughout the summer of 2016. For example, on or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators
attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a
third-
party provider and used by Clinton's personal office. At or around the same time, they also
targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.
Hacking into the DCCC Network
23. Beginning in or around March 2016, the Conspirators, in addition to their spearphishing
efforts, researched the DCCC and DNC computer networks to identify technical specifications and
vulnerabilities.
For example, beginning on or about March 15,2016, YERMAKOV ran a technical query for the
DNC's internet protocol configurations to identify connected devices.
On or about the same day, YERMAKOV searched for opcn-source information about the DNC
network, the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton.
On or about April 7. 2016. YKRMAKOV ran я technical query for the DNC's internet
protocol configurations to identify connected devices.
24. By in or around April 2016, within days of YERMAKOV's searches regarding the DCCC, the
Conspirators hacked into the DCCC computer network. Once they gained access, they installed and
managed different types of malware to explore the DCCC network and steal data.
a. On or about April 12,2016. the Conspirators used the stolen credentials of a I )CCC On or
about April 12,2016, the Conspirators used the stolen credentials of a DCCC Employee ('"DCCC
Employee 1") to access the DCCC network. DCCC Employee 1 had received a spearphishing email
from the Conspirators on or about April 6,2016, and entered her password after clicking on the
link.
b. Between in or around April 2016 and June 2016, the Conspirators installed multiple
versions of their X-Agent malware on at least ten DCCC computers, which allowed them to monitor
individual employees' computer activity, steal passwords, and maintain access to the DCCC
network.
c. X-Agent malware implanted on the DCCC network transmitted information from the victims'
computers to a GRU-leased server located in Arizona. The Conspirators referred to this server
as their "AMS" panel. KOZACHEK, MALYSHEV, and their со-conspirators logged into the
AMS panel to use X-Agent's keylog and screenshot functions in the course of monitoring and
surveilling activity on the DCCC computers. 'Ibe keylog function allowed the Conspirators to
capture keystrokes entered by DCCC employees. The screenshot function allowed the Conspirators
to take pictures of the DCCC employees' computer screens.
d. For example, on or about April 14, 2016, the Conspirators repeatedly activated X-Agent's
keylog and screensiot functions to surveil DCCC Employee 1's computer activity over the course
of eight hours. During that time, the Conspirators captured DCCC Employee 1 's communications
with co-workers and the passwords she entered while working on fundraising and voter outreach
projects. Similarly, on or about April 22, 2016, the Conspirators activated X-Agcnt's keylog
and screenshot functions to capture the discussions of another DCCC Employee ("DCCC Employee
2") about the DCCC's finances, as well as her individual banking information and other personal
topics.
25. On or about April 19, 2016, KOZAC1IEK, YERSIIOV, and their co-conspirators remotely
configured an overseas computer to relay communications between X-Agent malware and the AMS
panel and then tested X-Agent's ability to connect to this computer. The Conspirators referred
to this computer as a "middle server." The middle server acted as a proxy to obscure the
connection between malware at the DCCC and the Conspirators' AMS panel. On or about April 20,
2016, the Conspirators directed X-Agent malware on the DCCC computers to connect to this middle
server and receive directions from the Conspirators.
Hacking into the DNC Network
26. On or about April 18, 2016, the Conspirators hacked into the DNC's computers through
their access to the DCCC network. The Conspirators then installed and managed different types
of malware (as they did in the DCCC network) to explore the DNC network and steal documents, a.
On or about April 18, 2016, the Conspirators activated X-Agent's keylog and screenshot
functions to steal credentials of a DCCC employee who was authorized
to access the DNC network. The Conspirators hacked into the DNC network from the DCCC network
using stolen credentials. By in or around June 2016, they gained access to approximately
thirty-three DNC computers.
In or around April 2016, the Conspirators installed X Agent malware on tho DNC network,
including the same versions installed on the DCCC network.
MALYSHEV and his co-conspifators monitored the X-Agent malware from the AMS panel and captured
data from the victim computers. The AMS panel collected thousands of keylog and screenshot
results from the DCCC and DNC computers, such as a screenshot and keystroke capture of DCCC
Employee 2 viewing the DCCC's online banking information.
Theft of DCCC and DNC Documents
27. The Conspirators searched for and identified computers within the DCCC and DNC networks
that stored information related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for example, on or
about April 15, 2016, the Conspirators searched one hacked DCCC computer for terms that
included "hillary," "cruz," and "trump." The Conspirators also copied select DCCC folders,
including "Benghazi Investigations." The Conspirators targeted computers containing information
such as opposition research and field operation plans for the 2016 elections.
28. To enable them to steal a large number of documents at once without detection, the
Conspirators used a publicly available tool to gather and compress multiple documents on the
DCCC and DNC networks. The Conspirators then used other GRU malware, known as "X-Tunncl," to
move the stolen documents cutside the DCCC and DNC networks through encrypted channels.
a. For example, on or about April 22, 2016, the Conspirators compressed gigabytes of data
from DNC computers, including opposition research. The Conspirators later moved the compressed
DNC data using X-Tunnel to a GRU-leased computer located in Illinois.
b. On or about April 28, 2016, the Conspirators connected to and tested the same computer
located in Illinois. Later that day, the Conspirators used X-Tunnel to connect to that computer
to steal additional documents from the DCCC network.
29. Between on or about May 25, 2016 and June 1, 2016, the Conspirators hacked the DNC
Microsoft Exchange Server and stole thousands of emails from the work accounts of DNC
employees. During that time, YERMAKOV researched PowerShell commands related to accessing and
managing the Microsoft Exchange Server.
30. On or about May 30, 2016, MALYSHEV accessed the AMS panel in order to upgrade custom AMS
software on die server. That day, the AMS panel received updates from approximately thirteen
different X-Agent malware implants on DCCC and DNC computers.
31. During the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks, the Conspirators covered their tracks
by Intentionally deleting logs and computer flies. For example, on or about May 13, 2016, the
Conspirators cleared the event logs from a DNC computer. On or about June 20, 2016, the
Conspirators deleted logs from the AMS panel that documented their activities on the panel,
including the login history. Efforts to Remain on the X'CC and PNC Networks
32. Despite the Conspirators' efforts to hide their activity, beginning in or around May
2016, both the DCCC and DNC became aware that they had been hacked and hired a security company
("Company 1") to identify the extent of the intrusions. By in or around June 2016, Company 1
took steps to exclude intruders from the networks. Despite these efforts, a Linux-based version
of X-Agent, programmed to communicate with the GRU-registercd domain linuxkml.net, remained on
the DNC network until in or around October 2016.
33. In response to Company Ts efforts, the Conspirators took countermeasures to maintain
access to the DCCC and DNC networks.
a. Oil 01 about May 31, 2016, YERMAKOV searched for opcn-sourcc information about Company 1
and its reporting on X-Agent and X-Tunnel. On or about June 1,2016, the Conspirators attempted
to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program CCleaner.
b. On or about June 14, 2016, the Conspirators registered the domain actblues.com,
which mimicked the domain of a political fundraising platform that included a
DCCC donations page. Shortly thereafter, the Conspirators used stolen DCCC
credentials to modify the DCCC website and redirect visitors to the actblucs.com
On or about June 14, 2016, the Conspirators registered the domain actblues.com,
which mimicked the domain of a political fundraising platform that included a
DCCC donations page. Shortly thereafter, the Conspirators used stolen DCCC
credentials to modify the DCCC website and redirect visitors to the actblucs.com
domain.
On or about June 20, 2016, after Company 1 had disabled X-Agent on the DCCC
network, the Conspirators spent ever seven hours unsuccessfully trying to connect
to X-Agent. The Conspirators also tried to access the DCCC network using
previously stolen credentials.
34. In or around September 2016, the Conspirators also successfully gained access to DNC
computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service. These computers contained test
applications related to the DNC's analytics. After conducting reconnaissance, the
Conspirators
gathered data by creating backups, or "snapshots," of the DNC's eloud-based systems using
the
cloud provider's own technology. The Conspirators then moved the snapshots to cloud-based
accounts they had registered with the same service, thereby stealing the data from the DNC.
Stolen Documents Released through DCLcaks
35. More than a month before the release of any documents, the Conspirators constructed the
online persona DCLeaks to release and publicize stolen election-related documents. On or about
April 19, 2016, after attempting to register the domain clcctionleaks.com, the Conspirators
registered the domain dcleaks.com through a service that anonymizcd the registrant. The funds
used to pay for the dcleaks.com domain originated from an online cryptocutrrecy service that
the Conspirators also used to fund the lease of a virtual private server registered with the
operational email account [email protected]. The dirbinsaabol email account was also used
to register the john356gh URL-shortening account used by LUKASHEV to spearphish the Clinton
Campaign chairman and other campaign-related individuals.
36. On or about June 8,2016, the Conspirators launched the public website dcleaks.com, which
they used to release stolen emails. Before it shut down in or around March 2017, the site
received over one million page views. The Conspirators falsely claimed on the site that DCLeaks
was started by a group of "American hacktivists," when in fact it was started by the
Conspirators.
37. Starting in or around June 2016 and continuing through the 2016 U.S. presidential
election, the Conspirators used DCLeaks to release emails stolen from individuals affiliated
with the Clinton Campaign. The Conspirators also released documents they had stolen in other
spearphishing operations, including those they had conducted in 2015 that collected emails from
individuals affiliated with the Republican Party.
38. On or about June 8,2016, and at approximately the same time that the dcleaks.com website
was launched, the Conspirators created a DCLeaks Facebook page using a preexisting social media
account under the fictitious name "Alice Donovan." In addition to the DCLeaks Facebook page,
the Conspirators used other social media accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. persons such
as "Jason Scott" and "Richard Gingrey" to promote the DCLeaks website. The Conspirators
accessed these accounts from computers managed by POTEMKFN and his co-conspirators.
39. On or about June 8, 2016, the Conspirators created the Twitter account @dcleaks_. The
Conspirators operated the @dclcaks_ Twitter account from the same computer used for other
efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. For example, the Conspirators
used the same computer to operate the Twitter account @BaltimorcIsWhr, through which they
encouraged U.S. audiences to "[j]oin our flash mob" opposing Clinton and to post images with
the hashtag #BlacksAgainstHillary.
Stolen Documents Released through Guccifer 2.0
40. On or about June 14, 2016, the DNC -- through Company 1 -- publicly announced that it
had been hacked by Russian government actors. In response, the Conspirators created the online
persona Guccifer 2.0 and falsely claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker to undermine the
allegations of Russian responsibility for the intrusion.
41. On or about June 15,2016, the Conspirators logged into a Moscow-based server used and
managed by Unit 74455 and, between 4:19 PM and 4:56 PM Moscow Standard Time, searched for
certain words and phrases, including:
Search terms
"some hundred sheets"
"some hundreds of sheets"
dcleaks
illuminati
широко
известный
перевод [widely known translation]
"worldwide known"
"think twice about"
"company's competence"
42. Later that day, at 7:02 PM Moscow Standard Time, the online persona Guccifer 2.0
published its first post on a blog site created through WordPress. Titled "DNC's servers hacked
by a lone hacker," the post used numerous English words and phrases that the Conspirators had
searched for earlier that day (bolded below):
Worldwide known cyber security company [Company 1] announced that the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by
"sophisticated" hacker groups.
I'm very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) [...]
Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking
into DNC's network. [...]
Some hundred sheets! This's a serious case, isn't it? [...]
I guess [Company 1] customers should think twice about company's competence.
F[***J the Illuminati and their conspiracies! МШШ F[***]
[Company 1] !!!!!!!!
43. Between in or around June 2016 and October 2016, the Conspirators used Guccifer 2.0 to
release documents through WordPrcss that they had stolen from the DCCC and DNC. The
Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also shared stolen documents with certain
individuals.
a. On or about August 15,2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request
for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using
the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate's
opponent. On or about August 22,2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, transferred
approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DCCC to a then-registered state lobbyist
and online source of political news. The stolen data included donor records and personal
identifying information for more than 2,000 Democratic donors.
On or about August 22, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent a reporter
stolen documents pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement. The reporter responded by
discussing when to release the documents and offering to write an article about their
release.
44. The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also communicated with U.S. persons about the
release of stolen documents. On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer
2.0, wrote to a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential
campaign of Donald J. TVump, "thank u for writing back... do u find anyt[h]ing interesting in
the docs i posted?" On or about August 17, 2016, the Conspirators added, "please tell me if i
can help u anyhow ... it would be a great pleasure to me." On or about September 9,2016, the
Conspirators, again posing as Guccifer 2.0, referred to a stolen DCCC document posted online
and asked the person, "what do u think of the info on the tunout model for the democrats entire
presidential campaign." The person responded, "[p]retty standard."
45. The Conspirators conducted operations as Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks using overlapping
computer infrastructure and financing.
a. For example, between on or about March 14, 2016 and April 28. 2016, the Conspirators used
the same pool of bitcoin funds to purchase a virtual private network ("VPN") account and to
lease a server in Malaysia. In or around June 2016, the Conspirators used the Malaysian server
to host the dcleaks.com website.
On or about July 6, 2016, the Conspirators used the VPN to log into the @Guccifcr_2 Twitter
account. The Conspirators opened that VPN account from
the same server that was also used to register malicious domains for the hacking of the DCCC
and DNC networks.
On or about June 27, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, contacted a U.S.
reporter with an offer to provide stolen emails from "Hillary Clinton's staff." The
Conspirators then sent the reporter the password to access a nonpublic, password-protected
portion of dc.eaks.com containing emails stolen from Victim 1 bу LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and
thier co-conspirators in or around March 2016.
46. On or about January 12,2017, the Conspirators published a statement on the Guccifer 2.0
WordPrcss blog, falsely claiming that the intrusions and release of stolen documents had
"totally no relation to the Russian government"
Use of Organization 1
47. In order to expand their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the
Conspirators transferred many of the documents they stole from the DNC and the chairman of the
Clinton Campaign to Organization 1. The Conspirators posing as Guccifer 2.0, discussed the
release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases with Organization 1 to
heighten their impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
a. On or about Juno 22, 2016, Organization 1 sent a private message to Guccifer 2.0 to
"[s]end any new material [stolen from the DNC] here for us to review and it will have a much
higher impact than what you are doing." On or about July 6, 2016, Organization 1 added, "if you
have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the
DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters
behind her after." The Conspirators responded, "ok... i see." Organization I explained, "we
think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary ... so conflict between bernie and
hillary is interesting "
b After failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents starting in late June 2016, on or
about July 14, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent Organization 1 an email
with an attachment titled "wk dnc linkl.txt.gpg." The Conspirators explained to Organization 1
that the encrypted file contained Instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC
documents. On or about July 18, 2016, Organization 1 confirmed it had "the 1Gb or so archive"
and would make a release of the stolen documents "this week."
48. On or about July 22, 2016, Organization 1 released over 20,000 emails and other
documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators. This release occurred approximately
three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention. Organization 1 did not
disclose Guccifer 2.0's role in providing them. The latest-in-time email released through
Organization 1 was dated on or about May 25,2016, approximately the same day the Conspirators
hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server.
49. On or about October 7, 2016, Organization 1 released the first set of emails from the
chairman of the Clinton Campaign that had been stolen by LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators.
Between on or about October 7, 2016 and November 7, 2016, Organization 1 released approximately
thirty-three tranches of documents mat had been stolen from the chairman of the Clinton
Campaign. In total, over 50,000 stolen documents were released.
The Department of Justice won't prosecute Imran Awan, a former IT administrator for Rep. Debbie
Wasserman Schultz and dozens of other Democrats, for allegations of cybersecurity breaches, theft
and potential espionage, as part of a plea agreement one one count of unrelated bank fraud.
After the entry of your client's plea of guilty to the offense identified in paragraph 1
above,
your client will not be charged with any non-violent criminal offense in
violation of Federal or District of Columbia law which was committed within the District of
Columbia by your client prior to the execution of this Agreement
-Awan Plea Agreement
Awan withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars after lying on a mortgage application and
pretending to have a medical emergency that allowed him to drain his wife's retirement account. He
then wired large sums of money to Pakistan in January, 2017.
Awan and several family members worked for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz along with 20% of House
Democrats as IT staffers who held - as the House Inspector General called it - the "
keys
to the kingdom
," when it came to accessing confidential information on Congressional
computer systems.
And while ample evidence of potential crimes were found by the House Inspector General, the DOJ
says they found no evidence of wrongdoing.
The Department of Justice said it "found
no evidence that [Imran] illegally removed
House data from the House network or from House Members' offices, stole the House Democratic
Caucus Server, stole or destroyed House information technology equipment, or improperly accessed
or transferred government information
."
That statement appears to take issue -- without explaining how -- with the findings of the
House's Nancy Pelosi-appointed inspector general, its top law enforcement official, the
sergeant-at-arms, and the statements of multiple Democratic aides.
In September 2016, the
House Office of Inspector General
gave House leaders
a presentation that alleged that Alvi, Imran, brothers Abid Awan and Jamal Awan, and a friend
were logging into the servers of members who had previously fired him and funneling data off the
network. It said
evidence "suggests steps are being taken to conceal their activity" and
that their behavior mirrored a "classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an
organization."
Server logs show, it said, that
Awan family members made "unauthorized access"
to congressional servers in violation of House rules by logging into the servers of members who
they didn't work for. -
Daily
Caller
Awan was arrested at Dulles airport while attempting to flee the country - one day after reports
emerged that the FBI had seized a number of "smashed hard drives" and other computer equipment from
his residence. While only charged with bank fraud,
there is ample evidence that the Awans
were spying on members of Congress
through their access to highly-sensitive information on
computers, servers and other electronic devices belonging to members of Congress.
Luke Rosiak of the
Daily Caller
has compiled the most comprehensive coverage of the
Awan situation from start to finish - and outlines exactly why the Awans' conduct warranted serious
inquiry.
On Feb. 3, 2017, Paul Irving, the House's top law enforcement officer,
wrote
in a letter
to the Committee on House Administration that soon after it became evidence, the
server went "missing."
The letter continued: "Based upon the evidence gathered to this point, we have concluded
the employees are an ongoing and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly
threatening the integrity of our information system
s."
Imran, Abid, Jamal, Alvi and a friend were banned from the House network the same day
Kiko sent the letter.
The alleged wrongdoing consisted of two separate issues.
The first was the cybersecurity issues. In an April 2018
hearing
spurred
by the Awan case, Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko
testified
: "The
bookend to the outside threat is the insider threat. Tremendous efforts are dedicated to
protecting the House against these outside threats, however these efforts are undermined when
these employees do not adhere to and thumb their nose at our information security policy, and
that's a risk in my opinion we cannot afford."
The second was a suspected theft scheme. Wendy Anderson, a former chief of staff for Rep.
Yvette Clarke,
told House investigators
she
believed Abid was working with ex-Clarke aide Shelley Davis
to steal equipment, and
described coming in on a Saturday to find so many pieces of equipment, including iPods and Apple
TVs, that it "looked like Christmas.
"
Meanwhile, as we
noted
i
n June, the judge in the Awan case, Tanya Chutkan, was appointed to the D.C. US District
Court by President Obama on June 5, 2014,
after Chutkan had contributed to him for years
.
Prior to her appointment to the District Court, she was a partner at law firm Boies Schiller &
Flexner (BSF) where
she represented scandal-plagued biotechnology company Theranos
-
which
hired Fusion GPS to threaten the news media
. Because of this,
Chutkan
had
to recuse herself from two cases
involving Fusion GPS
.
In short,
the Judge in the Awan case - appointed by Obama after years of contributing to
him, was a
partner
at a very Clinton-friendly law firm
. It should also be noted
that Obama appointed Chutkan's husband, Peter Krauthammer, to the D.C. Superior Court in 2011.
The left has, of course, seized upon the plea deal to suggest that there was no wrongdoing.
Then who goes down due to his deal? Was his deal just a freebie? Are there any
politicians or swampers (pardon my redundancy) who are not dirty?
Why can't
Trump supporters see how he goes along with these outrages? This ain't no
stinkin' 4D chess.
Just like Obama, who, even in his 2nd term, would read his teleprompter and
talk about a national issue and pretend that it was somebody else's fault.
Trump is no better than the rest of the puppets who have lived at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama = Trump = Clinton = The Shrubs... all alike.
The other thing to remember is that Trump and his puppetmasters knew that the
optics on this Awan deal would look bad. And they let it happen anyway. Folks,
the elites don't give a rat's hind end what we think. They think they've won.
They believe that we cannot resist. It's only going to get worse from here.
Therefore, prepare accordingly.
So, if the "deal" is to turn Awan against his former employers,
why would you pardon him of all previous "non-violent" crimes?
Seems to me, if the deal is not public and he refuses to
testify, they have nothing by which to motivate his testimony.
Is this not true? Else, it is exactly as it appears, the deep
state got their way and justice is again the victim.
Concerned about all
the news today about the
corruption of the FBI and
the Department of Justice?
This is the true legal
thriller that started the
firestorm. It tells the
inside story of the
corrupted prosecutions of
Arthur Andersen LLP, the
Merrill Lynch defendants in
the Enron Barge case, the
Ted Stevens case and many
others.
EDITORIAL
REVIEWS
"Licensed to Lie reads
like a cross between
investigative journalism
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takeaway is that both
Bushies and Obamaites
should be very afraid: over
the last few years, a
coterie of vicious and
unethical prosecutors who
are unfit to practice law
has been harbored within
and enabled by the now
ironically named Department
of Justice." –William Hodes,
Professor of Law Emeritus,
Indiana University, and
coauthor, The Law of
Lawyering
"When you've finished
reading this fast-paced
thriller, you will want to
stand up and applaud
Powell's courage in daring
to shine light into the
darkest recesses of
America's justice system.
The only ax Powell grinds
here is Truth." –Patricia
Falvey, author of The
Yellow House and The Linen
Queen, and former Managing
Director,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP
"Last year four
government officials
demonstrably lied under
oath, and nothing has been
done to them–two IRS
officials, the Attorney
General, and James
Clapper-which caused Ed
Snowden to release the fact
that the US is spying on
its citizens and in
violation of the 4th
amendment. That our
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the only conclusion. This
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understand the nature of
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"This book is a
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our own actions and our own
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powerful who cavalierly
threaten to take it away."
–Michael Adams, PhD,
University Distinguished
Teaching Associate
Professor of English
Associate Director, James
A. Michener Center for
Writers, University of
Texas–Austinor
"I have covered hundreds
of court cases over the
years and have witnessed
far too often the kind of
duplicity and governmental
heavy-handedness Ms. Powell
describes in her
well-written book, Licensed
to Lie." –Hugh Aynesworth,
journalist, historian,
four-time Pulitzer Prize
finalist, author, November
22, 1963: Witness to
History
just keep being
patient and
give this shit
more
time...they
have to take
down a whole
lot of powerful
monsters all
over the world
all at once and
it all has to
be air-tight.
All while
trying to keep
some kind of
peace without
these fuckers
creating a
world war.
Fake outrage over Russia hacking our
election as the Israhell & US
infiltrate and spur regime change
inside of Iran. It's the juice,
stupid...Always the lying parasitic
juice...
Was this one of Q Anus' unsealed unindictments?
Trust the plan?
Only the prosecution, i.e. the
DOJ, can sign off on a plea bargain. This POS
judge should have recused herself, but plea
bargains are essentially between a defendant and
the DOJ. Under the constitution, the president,
i.e. Trump, can hire and fire any level AG or
attorney (read prosecutor) in the DOJ. So
instead of tweeting in protest like one of us
useless eaters, why doesn't Trump kick some
ass. He could start by firing the prosecutor
who signed this POS plea bargain to set an
example.
Debbie is not going to say one word. Her brother Steve
Wasserman, Assistant U.S. Attorney, will keep her informed of
every step of the investigation, and if it looks like its getting
to hot, she'll be on the next flight to Tel-Aviv. This whole thing
will get buried, as it most likely involves the blackmail of, and
breach of US National Security by several dozen Idiotic democratic
members of Congress. No doubt these pakistani spies are somehow
tied to israeli intelligence.
###
*Attention - The Awans & Pakistani ISI are only "sub
contractors" for Hillary (CIA since young/operative/ratline field
commander) & Israeli Mossad (Debbie Wasserman, Weiner, Shumer &
any other affiliated Zionist Jews). Both the CIA
(Rockefeller>Kissinger down the line to CIA-op Hillary/all
presidents except Trump) + Israel (Rosthchild) & Mossad
(Rothschild private intel/military army) have compromised and
co-opted the White House/US Presidency, US Congress, US Senate and
much of state government.
Both CIA & Mossad farm out dirty work ops to other
international Intelligence agencies & military, as well as
criminal organizations in order to created a spider web of hard to
prove 3rd, 4th, 5th party connections to their illegal operations
in order limit their exposure to being outed by real journalists
like the dead Michael Hastings.
Pakistan ISI, the Muslim Brotherhood or any other seemingly bad
actors have 'not' infiltrated and taken over Congress nor anything
else. The Awans and the Pakistani ISI were 'invited' & brought
here by Mossad-Anthony Weiner & Mossad-Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
here to run operations for CIA-international-crime-boss-Hillary
Clinton.
Blackmail, compromise, threaten & Murder is the name of the
game with these Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Seditious
Psychopaths.
the deal is so he does not testify that all of the democrat members
committed felonies. Can't arrest half the govt and the law enforcement
personnel that are supposed to arrest them. There are not enough FBI to
arrest all the FBI.
Despite your unwavering adulation and constant fawning,
Trump cares only for Trump. He is a narcassist and most
likely a 'path of some flavor. He doesn't give a fuck
about you or me. All he has ever wanted was power. His
supporters are largely tired of the US gov BS and wanted
it to change for the better. If he betrays that, he
betrays them and suddenly you go from being counted as a
supporter to being a domestic terrorist. Do you have more
than 3 days of food, anti-gov beliefs, and a gun? Welcome
to being the enemy.
Get your head out of your ass and
grow a fucking spine. While I'm being hyperbolic, it can,
and has, happened that fast before.
Everyone is trying to blame Sessions, the Judge, the democrates etc.
TRUMP Is Playing those who support him. The Dept of Justice is Under
Trump. The judge did not do this deal, but the Dept of Justice. So,
TRUMP did this deal and is now playing he supporters for fools with
his tweets about being upset (and being unable to do anything about
it).
Trump could force a real investigation and prosecution. Trump is a
zionist swamp creature. During the election Trump said he would
investigate the Clinton's. After the election Trump said the
Clinton's were good people and that he would NOT pursue them.
It is Trump who will make a major move to remove gun rights. While
crying out in protest.
(The jew cries out as he strikes you, type thing.)
Everyone in Congress including Trump on the red side acts like
a slack jawed faggot. I'm just stunned there isn't one fucking
set of brass balls on any of them. There has been a nonstop
treason and sedition show since before Trump was even elected
being perpetrated by the Democrats. Trump is probably happy
with the leaks coming out of the White House. It's more press
and tv time for him.
One fucking person has gone to jail !
One ! That stupid NSA dyke skank Reality Loser. Nobody else has
even gotten a jaywalking ticket. This falls squarely on Trump
and his abortion of an crooked administration.
Just like Obama,
who, even in his 2nd term, would read his teleprompter and talk
about a national issue and pretend that it was somebody else's
fault.
Trump is no better than the rest of the puppets who have lived
at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama = Trump = Clinton = The Shrubs
The other thing to remember is that Trump and his puppetmasters
knew that the optics on this Awan deal would look bad. And they
let it happen anyway. Folks, the elites don't give a rat's hind
end what we think. They think they've won. They believe that we
cannot resist. It's only going to get worse from here. Therefore,
prepare accordingly.
1. Trump could have
sealed the US borders and put the military on them by Executive
Order.
2. Trump hasn't put up any resistance to 2nd Amendment rights
being eroded away in his year and a half in office.
3. His Attorney General Sessions is more useless than a set of
tits on a nun, and hasn't been fired for refusing to do his job of
prosecuting criminals and rooting out corruption.
4. Sessions has been increasingly vocal about increasing civil
asset forfeiture which is totally unconstitutional.
5. Trump hasn't pulled any troops out of Syria or Afghanistan.
6. Trump hasn't made Mexico pay for the wall when he could
easily do it by taxing wire transfers to Latin America.
7. Trump hasn't put any pressure on his own justice dept to
cooperate with Congress.
8. Trump still has done nothing to make NATO pay its fair share
of defense spending.
9. Cops are still being praised by Trump even though they
routinely stand down when Antifa are attacking his own supporters,
or showing total cowardice under fire when lives are at stake.
10. Only 1 person has been prosecuted for sedition, treason and
high crimes in the past year and half in spite of these crimes
being committed on a near daily basis.
The president is one man. One man's head can be blown apart in
front of a national audience with no repercussions.
What
might the Founders have meant when they said, "A well regulated
Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
infringed?"
If Trump isn't able to do what he was elected to do maybe
instead of attacking him we should thank him for leading us as
far as he has and consider doing our own Constitutional duty.
We have the 'lost' server...now we have first-person, factual
witnesses and the technical perps to prosecute top swamp criminal
links most conclusively, without a shred of doubt even
unto fanatics and trolls. It's happening, it's coming down
worldwide...there will be no civil war. Ignore the fake news. They
are supremely desperate.
And Rosenstein, Wray, and as far down the line as you need to go to
get rid of all the traitors. This is complete bullshit. Some
fucking Pakistani comes and spys on that whore Wasserman and passes
intelligence to who the fuck knows who, and he get's a pass? Might
was well open up the doors to all of the BOP prisons becuase if
Hillary, Comey, McCabe, Strozk, etc. are still wandering out free
then no one in federal prison should be there. These fuckers have
done more damage than any drug dealer, spy, or muderer in federal
custody.
This plea deal is given because they are out to protect the democrat
party and all of the bureaucrats who run the government.... It would
show their ineptitude..... and we can't have that, can we......?
And the big issue is that they expected everyone to buy the
bullshit excuse of" We were just talking about grand kids, blah,
blah" And perhaps even bigger is that there is no actual
representative of the people who calls bullshit and has the power
to demand evidence and demand processing through the justice
system. I know that is the supposed job of the DOJ but if the DOJ
is part of the scam, there needs to be something like a full time
independent prosecutor who is not under anyone.
Bill: "Now, Miss
Lowretta, I know you
are
as
smart
as a whip,
and being that smart, you would know the
consequences
of Mr. Trump being elected...think of your grandchillens; you
want those lil piccaninnies to have a good life...and they will
not be so fortunate under Mr. Trump's administration."
Lowretta: "Yessah Mr Clinton, I do unnerstan' what you
saying. I sho' will work hard to stop that"
Bill: "Miss Lowretta, it's a pleasure meeting with you
again. I figure if you
work real hard
you may even get
to be a Justice in the Supreme Court"
Case settled in the face of overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing,
check
obama appointed judge, check
judge worked with clinton law firm, fusion gps, check
Dws protects Awan till the bloody end, check
hard to imagine how it can get much worse in these United States.
The prior administration and its holdover lackeys are making a
mockery of the criminal justice system
Allowed to take plea so the details of all the compromising info he
had on half of Congress would not come out. THIS is how the DEEP
STATE protects itself, and the DOJ goes along, because that's, simply
the deal. There is no possible explanation for this guy getting a
deal unless he is going to hand over the entire Dem leadership now.
Of course, he won't.
Gumint at work. Do some bad stuff, get paid,
investigate, quash, move on.
Isz next, SVIMVEAR!! (10 points for the attribution)
Rule by the elite is one of the cornerstones of government. When
has the elite not ruled us, except perhaps in times immediately
following the collapse of the then current government?
You can't
leave steaks sitting on the kitchen counter and not expect these
dogs to take the biggest one and leave scraps for the general
population.
Given that Trump is the chief law enforcement officer in the
government, how is it that his underlings are able to get away
with such egregious corruption?
now who gets to make an appeal about this seditious corrupt legal proceeding
that is a cover for the direct transmission of the secret workings of
congressional committees and private communications of congress members
DIRECT TO HOSTILE FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS like iran, via pakistan.
Just another day in bizarro world. The good guys are treated like
shit, the bad guys are treated like heroes. There's no rule of
law. There are no borders. This duplicitous scumbag should
be sent to prison, for a long time.
So, commit one crime, go to jail.
Commit several crimes, plead and walk.
But who are they going after by letting him plead?
Who's the bigwig up above who's so valuable that the Awan minions (if
they are minions) can be let go?
I wonder what they'll get HRC to plead
to in order to unlawfully ignore the rest of her crimes.
Announced on the eve of the nation's biggest holiday.
This has to be
the biggest "f**k you" by the DOJ to the American people in the history
of this country.
Note that the prosecuting attorney in this case had someone pinch
hit for him at the actual hearing:
"Only one person sat at the prosecutors' table: J.P. Coomey,
who...was only added to the case Monday. There was no sign of Michael
Marando, who had previously led the prosecution."
Hard to overcome the violent
atk of nauseous rage at this
headline. The stench from the
DOJ is overwhelmingly strong
on this one.
One must step
back and ask, WTF is going
on. Do we have a justice
system or not-I tthink the
answer is clear that it is
prob a two tiered system or
more.
I would guess the clintons
and mossad are in this big
time. DWS seems to be a
poster child for mossad and
the clintons.
Not being one to say 'I told you, blah-blah', but...
I have maintained all along the journey here regarding
Queen
Madame DeFarge
, that this is simply 'Too Big' to prosecute
for the simple reason that there are too many key individuals in .gov
and the business community for the nation to absorb the
socio-political fallout. This in no way infers that prosecution
shouldn't happen, only that the corruption is so deep & wide that
it was never a realistic view to begin with. That said, things
have a way ironing themselves out, and we're seeing it nearly
every day with the implosion of politics-as-usual.
Not only was he a spy but he probably opened the door to every
other entity which wanted to spy on the USA - wide open. There is
no country if this is not treason.
Whatever it is that this plea bargain is covering up, it must be
pretty bad for that cohort of criminals to accept that it's NOT A
GOOD LOOK either way! They're choosing the lesser of evils, but it
will put another nail in their coffin anyway, and they know it. Be
prepared for yet another flash of violent distraction or somesuch
to drive it out of the press. Wait for the mid-terms to find out
if this dodgy strategy pays off...or NOT!
Sorry but no. This is not a deal in exchange for
cooperation. This deal requires nothing of Awan. When you
are giving a deal in exchange for cooperation that deal is
in writing in "the deal" and the Judge decides after you are
finished cooperating if you met your end of the deal. This
is a get out of jail free deal.
Awan has a deal from a Bank Fraud case in DC. Awan is not the
target and Bank Fraud certainly isn't our big complaint. Huber
is
outside
DC and has a prosecution witness. Another
pawn moved into position.
Wait for it...
Look at what Ramenhead looks like these days. The horror of
it is eating her from within:
A couple of notes. First, here's the plea agreement as quoted
by Luke Rosiak at the Daily Caller:
After the entry of your client's plea of guilty to the
offense identified in paragraph 1 above, your client will
not be charged with any non-violent criminal offense in
violation of Federal or District of Columbia law which was
committed within the District of Columbia by your client
prior to the execution of this Agreement and about which
this Office was made aware by your client prior to the
execution of this Agreement, all of which is contained in
the attached Statement of Offense.
Note 1: While the federal government and Washington DC
government are restricted from prosecuting Awan for any
previous non-violent crime, other state jurisdictions can
prosecute him for these crimes. He could be prosecuted in
Florida, Virginia, Maryland or any other state. Remember, Awan
ran most of his money laundering operations (disguised as used
car businesses) outside of the Washington DC jurisdiction. In
fact, most of the evidence that was discovered by independent
investigators has been found at locations in both Maryland and
Virginia (both of which would still be free to prosecute per
this plea agreement).
Note 2: This seems to be an illegitimate plea deal which is
really just an immunity agreement by any other name. We'll see
how this all shakes out, but the plea deal accepted by this
judge will probably not stand up to even the weakest legal
scrutiny. I don't even know if there's any precedent for such a
deal in American law.
There is a lot that smells very funny about this
agreement. It does not provide any leverage to get him to
be a states witness and it does not prevent him from
claiming the 5th in any Grand Jury testimony because the
issue of State Charges remains. I sure hope sometime in
the future we say that Justice knew what they were doing
and people start going to jail. At the moment I don't see
it, I don't smell it and I don't believe it. I have no
problem with this slimeball skating if the Politicians
are prosecuted and convicted. If he spills all Hillary's
crew will punish him better than a jail cell ever will.
Q1671: "Plea: Deal - No Charges for NON-Violent crime."
Awan still liable for VIOLENT Crimes, either committed by
himself, or by being witness to Crimes, or while serving as a
hub in a Criminal Enterprise, where VIOLENT Crimes are
monetized???
Awan's Case is based on 18 U.S. Code § 1344 Bank Fraud.
U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan is the judge
presiding over Imran Awan's case. She is an Obama
appointee! But, she allowed the case to get really
ridiculous.
She was a Crony of Obama, and kept postponing
the Imran Awan trial, which allowed him to flee to Pakistan,
where co-defendant and wife Hina Alvi has already fled, with
the blessing of the FBI. It's really unheard of, for a
federal criminal 'bank fraud' case to be granted 5 or
6 delays and continuances, as she has in this case. Its
apparent she is running cover for the Democrats.
Records confirm, she was appointed to the federal bench
by Obama after she kicked thousands in campaign donations to
his presidential campaign when he was a U.S. Senator in
Illinois. Obama also appointed Chutkan's husband, Peter
Krauthamer, a judge to the bench in the District of Columbia
Superior Court in 2011.
She a prime example of why judges should never be
politically appointed, voted into office, or have any
political affiliation with any political party.
Now, we have some of the trashiest people on the bench.
Her and her husband needs their asses tossed into jail.
BTW ... neither Imran nor his wife were ever charged with
the most obvious and verifiable crime. Imran intended to
carry and his wife did carry more than $10,000 in undeclared
moneys onboard an international flight. Strangely (which
seems to be the theme of this case), neither was ever
charged with this felony crime.
Why is the DOJ protecting members of Congress or staff
members of Congress?? It appears to be outrageous, yet
whoever made this decision has a calculus. What is the real
reason for the DOJ to protect the illegal actions of the
Awans and those that hired him?
There is a logic behind
it. What is it? If we can find that out we can understand
why this crime was committed by the DOJ.
No no no no, fake news. Plea deal does not cover Federal
crimes.
From Awan plea
Your client further understands that this
Agreement is binding only upon the Criminal and Superior
Court Divisions of the United States Attomey's Office for
the District of Columbia. This Agreement does not bind the
Civil Division of this Office or any other United States
Attomey's Office, nor does it bind any other state, local,
or federal prosecutor. It also does not bar or compromise
any civil, tax, or administrative claim pending or that may
be made against your client.
Deep state manipulated the 2016 'election'. They had
corporate mass media pump Trump 247 as their 'populist'
candidate since their identity politics candidate Clinton
couldn't attract even fleas to her rallies. They wanted to
kill any attention to the masses of Americans countrywide
who were packing arenas & auditoriums to see the old
socialist Sanders.
This plea deal is really a burying of how much corruption
actually occurs on Capitol Hill to keep the phony 2 party
system intact.
"... The fact of the matter is, if Russia wanted to do, cause lot of difficulty to the American election they could have. Instead, they went and talked privately to us. So when the government says Russia intercepted stuff that was very important to us, I'm being very fuzzy about it, it wasn't about the election. They told us that there were certain people in America doing things that were very deleterious to the War on Terrorism for personal and financial gain, and they could have blown it publicly but they went internally to us." ..."
"... I haven't listened to that particular interview yet, but can say the the HRC emails with Sid Blumenthal show the reason we got in bed with Sarkozy (and Britain) to destroy Libya was: ..."
"... To steal the nationalized oil ..."
"... To steal the hundreds of tons of gold and silver. ..."
"... To prevent Libya from developing a pan-African gold dinar and development bank to complete with the Federal Reserve petrodollar and the IMF. ..."
"... I can also say that Hersh documented that Ambassador Stevens was an arms dealer, smuggling Libyan military weapons into Syria to finish the "regime change" operation still ongoing there. Also, HRC knew her "rebels" were hunting down and murdering any black Libyans they could find even before Gaddafi was anally bayonet raped. ..."
Hello There! I'm curious to know if any readers have comments about a recent Sy Hersh
interview. In response to a question about Russian interference in the last US presidential
election Hersh replied:
"I have been reporting something, I've been watching something since 2011 in Libya, when we
had a secretary of state that later ran for president, and I will tell you: Some stories take
a long time. And I don't know quite how to package it. I don't know how much to say about it.
I assure you that there's no known intelligence that Russia impacted, cut into the DNC,
Podesta e-mails. That did not happen. I can say that.
I can also say Russia learned other things about what was going on in Libya with us and
instead of blowing -- [. . . lots cut out here before returning to the topic . . . ]
The fact of the matter is, if Russia wanted to do, cause lot of difficulty to the
American election they could have. Instead, they went and talked privately to us. So when the
government says Russia intercepted stuff that was very important to us, I'm being very fuzzy
about it, it wasn't about the election. They told us that there were certain people in
America doing things that were very deleterious to the War on Terrorism for personal and
financial gain, and they could have blown it publicly but they went internally to
us."
I haven't listened to that particular interview yet, but can say the the HRC emails with Sid
Blumenthal show the reason we got in bed with Sarkozy (and Britain) to destroy Libya was:
To steal the nationalized oil
To steal the hundreds of tons of gold and silver.
To prevent Libya from developing a pan-African gold dinar and development bank to complete
with the Federal Reserve petrodollar and the IMF.
I can also say that Hersh documented that Ambassador Stevens was an arms dealer, smuggling
Libyan military weapons into Syria to finish the "regime change" operation still ongoing there.
Also, HRC knew her "rebels" were hunting down and murdering any black Libyans they could find
even before Gaddafi was anally bayonet raped.
If I come up with more after listening, I'll post again.
Looks like Brennan abused his power as a head of CIA and should be held accountable for that.
Notable quotes:
"... Did the U.S. "Intelligence Community" judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election? ..."
"... it is not that ..."
"... even that is misleading ..."
"... the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express it ..."
"... The second thing to remember is that reports of the intelligence agencies reflect the views of the heads of the agencies and are not necessarily a consensus of their analysts' views. The heads of both the CIA and FBI are political appointments, while the NSA chief is a military officer; his agency is a collector of intelligence rather than an analyst of its import, except in the fields of cryptography and communications security. ..."
"... Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0" is an instrument of the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee's computer and conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published. ..."
"... Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the "Guccifer 2.0" data on the web and have concluded that "Guccifer 2.0's" data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion that "Guccifer 2.0" is a total fabrication. ..."
"... "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries." ..."
"... DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying ..."
"... Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically motivated, report as proof of "Russian interference" in the U.S. election without even the pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with common dangers is vital to both countries. ..."
Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence
Posted on by JackDid the U.S. "Intelligence Community" judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential
election?
Most commentators seem to think so. Every news report I have read of the planned meeting of
Presidents Trump and Putin in July refers to "Russian interference" as a fact and asks whether
the matter will be discussed. Reports that President Putin denied involvement in the election
are scoffed at, usually with a claim that the U.S. "intelligence community" proved Russian
interference. In fact, the U.S. "intelligence community" has not done so. The intelligence
community as a whole has not been tasked to make a judgment and some key members of that
community did not participate in the report that is routinely cited as "proof" of "Russian
interference."
I spent the 35 years of my government service with a "top secret" clearance. When I reached
the rank of ambassador and also worked as Special Assistant to the President for National
Security, I also had clearances for "codeword" material. At that time, intelligence reports to
the president relating to Soviet and European affairs were routed through me for comment. I
developed at that time a "feel" for the strengths and weaknesses of the various American
intelligence agencies. It is with that background that I read the January 6. 2017 report of three
intelligence agencies: the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
This report is labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment," but in fact it is not
that . A report of the intelligence community in my day would include the input of all the
relevant intelligence agencies and would reveal whether all agreed with the conclusions.
Individual agencies did not hesitate to "take a footnote" or explain their position if they
disagreed with a particular assessment. A report would not claim to be that of the
"intelligence community" if any relevant agency was omitted.
The report states that it represents the findings of three intelligence agencies: CIA, FBI,
and NSA, but even that is misleading in that it implies that there was a consensus of
relevant analysts in these three agencies. In fact, the report was prepared by a group of
analysts from the three agencies pre-selected by their directors, with the selection process
generally overseen by James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Clapper told
the Senate in testimony May 8, 2017, that it was prepared by "two dozen or so analysts --
hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies." If you can hand-pick the
analysts, you can hand-pick the conclusions. The analysts selected would have understood what
Director Clapper wanted since he made no secret of his views. Why would they endanger their
careers by not delivering?
What should have struck any congressperson or reporter was that the procedure Clapper
followed was the same as that used in 2003 to produce the report falsely claiming that Saddam
Hussein had retained stocks of weapons of mass destruction. That should be worrisome enough to
inspire questions, but that is not the only anomaly.
The DNI has under his aegis a National Intelligence Council whose officers can call any
intelligence agency with relevant expertise to draft community assessments. It was created by
Congress after 9/11 specifically to correct some of the flaws in intelligence collection
revealed by 9/11. Director Clapper chose not to call on the NIC, which is curious since its
duty is "to act as a bridge between the intelligence and policy communities."
During my time in government, a judgment regarding national security would include reports
from, as a minimum, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Bureau of
Intelligence and Research (INR) of the State Department. The FBI was rarely, if ever, included
unless the principal question concerned law enforcement within the United States. NSA might
have provided some of the intelligence used by the other agencies but normally did not express
an opinion regarding the substance of reports.
What did I notice when I read the January report? There was no mention of INR or DIA! The
exclusion of DIA might be understandable since its mandate deals primarily with military
forces, except that the report attributes some of the Russian activity to the GRU, Russian
military intelligence. DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, is the U.S. intelligence organ
most expert on the GRU. Did it concur with this attribution? The report doesn't say.
The omission of INR is more glaring since a report on foreign political activity could not
have been that of the U.S. intelligence community without its participation. After all, when it
comes to assessments of foreign intentions and foreign political activity, the State
Department's intelligence service is by far the most knowledgeable and competent. In my day, it
reported accurately on Gorbachev's reforms when the CIA leaders were advising that Gorbachev
had the same aims as his predecessors.
This is where due diligence comes in. The first question responsible journalists and
politicians should have asked is "Why is INR not represented? Does it have a different opinion?
If so, what is that opinion? Most likely the official answer would have been that this is
"classified information." But why should it be classified? If some agency heads come to a
conclusion and choose (or are directed) to announce it publicly, doesn't the public deserve to
know that one of the key agencies has a different opinion?
The second question should have been directed at the CIA, NSA, and FBI: did all their
analysts agree with these conclusions or were they divided in their conclusions? What was the
reason behind hand-picking analysts and departing from the customary practice of enlisting
analysts already in place and already responsible for following the issues involved?
As I was recently informed by a senior official, the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express
it . So the January report was not one of the "intelligence community," but rather of
three intelligence agencies, two of which have no responsibility or necessarily any competence
to judge foreign intentions. The job of the FBI is to enforce federal law. The job of NSA is to
intercept the communications of others and to protect ours. It is not staffed to assess the
content of what is intercepted; that task is assumed by others, particularly the CIA, the DIA
(if it is military) or the State Department's INR (if it is political).
The second thing to remember is that reports of the intelligence agencies reflect the views
of the heads of the agencies and are not necessarily a consensus of their analysts' views. The
heads of both the CIA and FBI are political appointments, while the NSA chief is a military
officer; his agency is a collector of intelligence rather than an analyst of its import, except
in the fields of cryptography and communications security.
One striking thing about the press coverage and Congressional discussion of the January
report, and of subsequent statements by CIA, FBI, and NSA heads is that questions were never
posed regarding the position of the State Department's INR, or whether the analysts in the
agencies cited were in total agreement with the conclusions.
Let's put these questions aside for the moment and look at the report itself. On the first
page of text, the following statement leapt to my attention:
We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of
the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the
intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political
processes or US public opinion.
Now, how can one judge whether activity "interfered" with an election without assessing its
impact? After all, if the activity had no impact on the outcome of the election, it could not
be properly termed interference. This disclaimer, however, has not prevented journalists and
politicians from citing the report as proof that "Russia interfered" in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election.
As for particulars, the report is full of assertion, innuendo, and description of
"capabilities" but largely devoid of any evidence to substantiate its assertions. This is
"explained" by claiming that much of the evidence is classified and cannot be disclosed without
revealing sources and methods. The assertions are made with "high confidence" or occasionally,
"moderate confidence." Having read many intelligence reports I can tell you that if there is
irrefutable evidence of something it will be stated as a fact. The use of the term "high
confidence" is what most normal people would call "our best guess." "Moderate confidence" means
"some of our analysts think this might be true."
Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0" is an instrument of
the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee's computer and
conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or
foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with
NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published.
Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the "Guccifer 2.0" data on the web and
have concluded that "Guccifer 2.0's" data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally
downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion
that "Guccifer 2.0" is a total fabrication.
The report's assertions regarding the supply of the DNC emails to Wikileaks are dubious, but
its final statement in this regard is important: "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not
contain any evident forgeries." In other words, what was disclosed was the truth! So,
Russians are accused of "degrading our democracy" by revealing that the DNC was trying to fix
the nomination of a particular candidate rather than allowing the primaries and state caucuses
to run their course. I had always thought that transparency is consistent with democratic
values. Apparently those who think that the truth can degrade democracy have a rather bizarre
-- to put it mildly–concept of democracy.
Most people, hearing that it is a "fact" that "Russia" interfered in our election must think
that Russian government agents hacked into vote counting machines and switched votes to favor a
particular candidate. This, indeed, would be scary, and would justify the most painful
sanctions. But this is the one thing that the "intelligence" report of January 6, 2017, states
did not happen. Here is what it said: " DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] assesses
that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote
tallying ."
This is an important statement by an agency that is empowered to assess the impact of
foreign activity on the United States. Why was it not consulted regarding other aspects of the
study? Or -- was it in fact consulted and refused to endorse the findings? Another obvious
question any responsible journalist or competent politician should have asked.
Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically
motivated, report as proof of "Russian interference" in the U.S. election without even the
pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block
any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with
common dangers is vital to both countries.
This is only part of the story of how, without good reason, U.S.-Russian relations have
become dangerously confrontational. God willin and the crick don't rise, I'll be musing about
other aspects soon.
Thanks to Ray McGovern and Bill Binney for their research assistance.
Jack F. Matlock, Jr.
Booneville, Tennessee
June 29, 2018
And it goes on today. Just over a year ago, Wikileaks source Seth Rich was assassinated. Fox
News and lefty Jimmy Dore reported this, until the Deep State put the screws on and they both
retracted with bogus stories to "correct" their errors. No one talks about this anymore.
After Peter Strzok
failed to address the concerns of Republicans by trying to explain away his anti-Trump texts as "just an intimate conversation"
with his mistress (former FBI lawyer Lisa Page) during yesterday's marathon closed-door session, President Trump chimed in this morning
with a tweet claiming that Strzok had been given "poor marks" on the hearing because he "refused to answer many questions."
The president also reaffirmed that there was "no Collusion and the Witch Hunt, headed by 14 Angry Democrats and others who are
totally conflicted, is Rigged!"
The president then turned his attention to the DNC Server, asking once again why the FBI wasn't allowed to closely examine it?
The DNC never furnished an explanation, despite Wikileaks emails revealing that former spy Christopher Steele had once filed a memo
claiming that "
Russian agents within the Democratic party structure itself" were involved with the theft.
This guy. This fucking guy. Still drawing a salary. That's what is incredible here.
The wheels of justice grind slowly and exceedingly fine. As a Marine I sometimes escorted Marines to courts martial hearings.
They were still drawing their pay, still eating in the mess hall, maybe they were sleeping on a bunk in a holding cell. But, they
were still Marines until the sentence was pronounced and any appeals exhausted. Some were still Marines afterwards just a little
poorer and missing some stripes. But, they got what were largely fair hearings for the military. Strzok is going to get his Justice
unless someone a little more impatient splatters his brains all over the sidewalk.
Gregg, yesterday you were raising hell saying the Marines will save the day. I need to tell you and I know it's hard to believe.
There are young Marine social justice warrior communist. I've met them. Not one or two many Marines and Army, vets in general.
So not all of the Marine Corps is right wing conservative. That was the impression you gave and I didn't have time to add the
data of the Marines that I've met who are in the activist movement of the social justice warrior communist. This is a generational
issue, our generation is in conflict with their generation.
I don't blame them because of the high level of corruption in this nation, perhaps the shock of 9/11 being a fraud, I don't
know, but I noticed this back in 2010.
The 9/11 event had a big impact on many young peoples mind, the trust of government issue is big.
And another anecdotal is a young 82nd Airborne soldier who kept asking me at work about what was behind the curtain, like one
world government etc. he wanted to know everything, so young people are not following the line of reasoning we followed and MSM
parrots.
Yes, prior service older vets like you are important to us, but I want to make sure you understand, just because someone is
a Marine or 82nd soldier doesn't mean they're politically reliable for our way of thinking. That's concerning when five police
officer were killed and many wounded in Dallas by a radicalized vet.
That's the danger, and we think the army of vets in this nation will automatically side with us in a race/civil war. The military
skills demonstrated in Dallas was a warning of things to come. The other component, the number of vets still killing themselves
each day is around 30-40 and suicide is increasing, not decreasing in the overall population.
So much for the idea that Strzok is co-operating with the investigation. It's pretty clear that he isn't and that this whole
meme that Priestap, Page, et al are co-operating witnesses is pretty much bullshit, unfortunately.
PS "Texts taken out of context"
PS "While emotional over the election, I conduct myself w/ upmost integrity w/o bias while undertaking any such investigation,
especially a high-profile case against the POTUS."
PS "In hindsight, it was a bad idea to openly discuss my feelings, but, in no way did those feelings impact my ability to conduct
a fair and proper investigation - we followed where the "facts" took us."
PS "I decline to answer that question on advice from counsel."
: When you state "where 'facts' led us" - what 'facts' are you referring to? To date, there has been zero evidence of any such
collusion or connections between the Trump campaign and Russia." In fact, the only facts discovered thus far have been between
the Clinton camp and Russia and other foreign groups ."
PS "On advice of counsel, I decline to answer that question"
PS "Because of the ongoing investigation, such answers may violate the security of such investigations ."
: "Mr S, I believe nobody here is buying what you are selling. I believe there was/is a serious effort on the part of people more
senior than you to remove Mr Trump from office out of fear of what this Administration may uncover. I believe you are being dishonest
in your answers and frankly shocked you agreed to come here today. I believe everyone on this panel (minus those from the other
side of the aisle) knew exactly what your answers would be and if you think we are going to sit here and accept these answers
you would be a foolish. We are also following the facts and once we uncover more (which we will) we will act accordingly. I'm
glad you retained counsel - you'll need one and hopefully they are very good."
.
"... The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove Russia was not involved in the DNC leak, as Ray McGovern explains. ..."
"... Special to Consortium News ..."
"... The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to "provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases," Solomon quotes WikiLeaks' intermediary with the government as saying. It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails. ..."
"... If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it would reveal a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak. ..."
"... On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that point from what it called "Vault 7" -- a treasure trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA files. This disclosure featured the tool "Marble Framework," which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs -- like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents also showed that the "Marble" tool had been employed in 2016. ..."
"... In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what former FBI Director Comey -- at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably -- failed to do when the so-called "Russian hack" of the DNC was first reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its key findings with supporting data. ..."
"... Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to the DNC computers in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover who intruded into the DNC computers? (Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain and others were calling the "Russian hack" no less than an "act of war.") A 7th grader can now figure that out. ..."
Did Sen. Warner and Comey 'Collude' on Russia-gate? June 27, 2018 •
68 Comments
The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director James Comey
ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove Russia was not involved in the
DNC leak, as Ray McGovern explains.
By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News
An explosive
report by investigative journalist John Solomon on the opinion page of Monday's edition of
The Hill sheds a bright light on how Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and then-FBI Director
James Comey collaborated to prevent WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from discussing "technical
evidence ruling out certain parties [read Russia]" in the controversial leak of Democratic
Party emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.
A deal that was being discussed last year between Assange and U.S. government officials
would have given Assange "limited immunity" to allow him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in
London, where he has been exiled for six years. In exchange, Assange would agree to limit
through redactions "some classified CIA information he might release in the future," according
to Solomon, who cited "interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate
investigators." Solomon even provided a
copy of the draft immunity deal with Assange.
But Comey's intervention to stop the negotiations with Assange ultimately ruined the deal,
Solomon says, quoting "multiple sources." With the prospective agreement thrown into serious
doubt, Assange "unleashed a series of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber warfare
capabilities for a long time to come." These were the Vault 7 releases, which led then CIA
Director Mike Pompeo to call WikiLeaks "a hostile intelligence service."
Solomon's report provides reasons why Official Washington has now put so much pressure on
Ecuador to keep Assange incommunicado in its embassy in London.
Assange: Came close to a deal with the U.S. (Photo credit: New Media Days / Peter
Erichsen)
The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with Assange. But it
came after Assange had offered to "provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did
not engage in the DNC releases," Solomon quotes WikiLeaks' intermediary with the government as
saying. It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not
WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails.
If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it would reveal a
cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly sophisticated cybertools at risk,
rather than allow Assange to at least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC
leak.
The greater risk to Warner and Comey apparently would have been if Assange provided evidence
that Russia played no role in the 2016 leaks of DNC documents.
Missteps and Stand Down
In mid-February 2017, in a remarkable display of naiveté, Adam Waldman, Assange's pro
bono attorney who acted as the intermediary in the talks, asked Warner if the Senate
Intelligence Committee staff would like any contact with Assange to ask about Russia or other
issues. Waldman was apparently oblivious to Sen. Warner's stoking of Russia-gate.
Warner contacted Comey and, invoking his name, instructed Waldman to "stand down and end the
discussions with Assange," Waldman told Solomon. The "stand down" instruction "did happen,"
according to another of Solomon's sources with good access to Warner. However, Waldman's
counterpart attorney David Laufman , an accomplished federal prosecutor picked by the
Justice Departent to work the government side of the CIA-Assange fledgling deal, told Waldman,
"That's B.S. You're not standing down, and neither am I."
But the damage had been done. When word of the original stand-down order reached WikiLeaks,
trust evaporated, putting an end to two months of what Waldman called "constructive, principled
discussions that included the Department of Justice."
The two sides had come within inches of sealing the deal. Writing to Laufman on March 28,
2017, Waldman gave him Assange's offer to discuss "risk mitigation approaches relating to CIA
documents in WikiLeaks' possession or control, such as the redaction of Agency personnel in
hostile jurisdictions," in return for "an acceptable immunity and safe passage agreement."
On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that
point from what it called "Vault 7" -- a treasure trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA
files. This disclosure featured the tool "Marble Framework," which enabled the CIA to hack into
computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving
so-called tell-tale signs -- like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents also showed that the
"Marble" tool had been employed in 2016.
Misfeasance or Malfeasance
Comey: Ordered an end to talks with Assange.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes among our members two former
Technical Directors of the National Security Agency, has repeatedly called
attention to its conclusion that the DNC emails were leaked -- not "hacked" by Russia or
anyone else (and, later, our suspicion that someone may have been playing Marbles, so to
speak).
In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what former FBI
Director Comey -- at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably -- failed to do when the
so-called "Russian hack" of the DNC was first reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its
key
findings with supporting data.
Two month later , VIPS published the results of
follow-up experiments conducted to test the conclusions reached in July.
Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to the DNC computers
in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover who intruded into the DNC computers?
(Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain and others were calling the "Russian hack" no less than
an "act of war.") A 7th grader can now figure that out.
Asked on January 10, 2017 by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr (R-NC) whether
direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation,
Comey replied
: "Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server
that's involved, so it's the best evidence."
At that point, Burr and Warner let Comey down easy. Hence, it should come as no surprise
that, according to one of John Solomon's sources, Sen. Warner (who is co-chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee) kept Sen. Burr apprised of his intervention into the negotiation with
Assange, leading to its collapse.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA
analyst for a total of 30 years and prepared and briefed, one-on-one, the President's Daily
Brief from 1981 to 1985.
If you enjoyed this original article please consider
making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
Looks like Fox and Free Beacon are part of the Deep state as they repeat the Deep State memo that DNC was hacked, not
that information was leaked by an insider and then false flag was performed by intelligence agencies to attribute it to Russia.
Former Obama administration National Security Council cybersecurity coordinator Michael
Daniel confirmed on Wednesday that a "stand down" order was given to counter Russian
cyberattacks during the 2016 election.
During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, asked Daniel
about a passage in the book Russian Roluette. The passage was about a staffer from Daniel's
team, Daniel Prieto, retelling the time that Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice told
Daniel and his team to halt their efforts and to "stand down" in countering Russia's
cyberattacks.
Daniel was quoted saying to his team that they had to stop working on options to counter the
Russian attack: "We've been told to stand down." Prieto is quoted as being "incredulous and in
disbelief" and asking, "Why the hell are we standing down?"
"That is an accurate rendering of the conversation at the staff meeting but the larger
context is something that we can discuss in the classified session," Daniel said. "But I can
say there were many concerns about how many people were involved in the development of the
options so the decision at that point was to neck down the number of people that were involved
in our ongoing response options. It's not accurate to say all activities ceased at that point.
"
Daniel and his team were tasked in developing options to Russia's cyberattacks on the United
States. Russian hacked the Democratic National Committee servers in 2015 and into voter
registration systems of several U.S. states in 2016.
Found an interesting article about some developments with Seth
Rich. Hard to make sense of. I noticed the DNC created a tiny
plaque above a crappy bike rack for him. They don't want anybody
to remember him. Probably Hillary's idea.
Seth uploaded the files into a DropBox (per Sy Hersh) and
also may have given others the password to it. He was trying
to make sure that the information got out. He very likely also
asked that he never be named as the leaker, for obvious
reasons.
His family could possibly confirm that he was the leaker if
they knew at the time, though I'm sure that they were heavily
pressured to do otherwise as soon as Seth Rich was murdered.
They would have simply been given a choice along with some
thinly veiled threats.
Bernie sold his mooing cow followers out last time. The DNC will make
him an offer he can't refuse. Biden is a tit grabbing corrupt
cartoon. I say Crusty the clown has a good chance. Do it for the
children!
"... the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block " Siberian candidate " Trump. ..."
"... The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The Washington Post , Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers" opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin." ..."
"... Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down. When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst). ..."
"... Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor . ..."
"... Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd. ..."
"... As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, argued that the Iraqi military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too. ..."
"... Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult" hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort. ..."
"... But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK. ..."
"... Stefan Halper then infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign. Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other. ..."
"... The rightwing Federalist website speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating it." Clovis believes that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue after inauguration. ..."
"... Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a "nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency with violating US election laws. ..."
"... As The Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2 article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election Day. ..."
"... Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not his government. ..."
"... Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker ..."
"... But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press." ..."
"... It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice. ..."
"... "Russiagate" continues to attract mounting blowback at Clinton, Obama and the Dems. Might well be they who end up charged with lawbreaking, though I'd be surprised if anyone in authority is ever really punished. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-02/fbi-spying-trump-started-london-earlier-thought-new-texts-implicate-obama-white ..."
"... I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb, Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged "puppet." ..."
"... The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what really happened. ..."
"... I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump did. ..."
"... Long-time CIA asset named as FBI's spy on Trump campaign By Bill Van Auken https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/21/poli-m21.html ..."
"... What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was "in the lead". ..."
"... Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House. Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal ideology for the most part. ..."
"... The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White House. ..."
"... It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its existence based on foreign enemies. ..."
"... So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab. ..."
As the role of a well-connected group of British and U.S. intelligence agents begins to
emerge, new suspicions are growing about what hand they may have had in weaving the Russia-gate
story, as Daniel Lazare explains.
Special to Consortium News
With the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy
named Stefan Halper infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in
shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus.
It's looking more and more massive. The intelligence agencies initiated reports that Donald
Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them and helped them grow, and then they spread
the word to the press and key government officials. Reportedly, they even tried to use these
reports to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration. Although the corporate press
accuses Trump of conspiring with Russia to stop Hillary Clinton, the reverse now seems to be
the case: the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block "
Siberian
candidate " Trump.
The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business
partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The
Washington Post , Dearlove
told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers"
opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years
earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US
authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in
communication with the Kremlin."
Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down.
When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make
him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable
scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for
his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director
Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top
Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese
academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA
Director (and now NBC News analyst).
In-Bred
A few things stand out about this august group. One is its in-bred quality. After helping to
run an annual confab known as the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove and Halper are now
partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are
connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also
connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke
and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another
MI6 vet. Alexander Downer
served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is
linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped
found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an
unpaid
advisor .
Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about
this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom
every Russian is a Boris
Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike
Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian
scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that
Lokhova convincingly
argues are absurd.
Halper: Infiltrated Trump campaign
In December 2016, Halper and Dearlove both resigned from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar
because they suspected that a company footing some of the costs was tied up with Russian
intelligence – suspicions that Christopher Andrew, former chairman of the Cambridge
history department and the seminar's founder, regards as " absurd " as well.
As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known,
Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of
Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass
destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency,
argued that the Iraqi
military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in
fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too.
Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence
against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend
the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses
fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult"
hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly
misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and
spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine.
The result is a diplo-espionage gang that is very bad at the facts but very good at public
manipulation – and which therefore decided to use its skill set out to create a public
furor over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
It Started Late 2015
The effort began in late 2015 when GCHQ, along with intelligence agencies in Poland,
Estonia, and Germany, began monitoring
what they said were " suspicious 'interactions' between figures connected to Trump and
known or suspected Russian agents."
Since Trump was surging ahead in the polls and scaring the pants off the foreign-policy
establishment by calling for a rapprochement with Moscow, the agencies figured that Russia was
somehow behind it. The pace accelerated in March 2016 when a 30-year-old policy consultant
named George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser. Traveling in
Italy a week later, he ran into Mifsud, the London-based Maltese academic, who reportedly set
about cultivating him after learning of his position with Trump. Mifsud claimed
to have "substantial connections with Russian government officials," according to prosecutors.
Over breakfast at a London hotel, he told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from Moscow
where he had learned that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands
of emails."
This was the remark that supposedly triggered an FBI investigation. The New York
Timesdescribes
Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at
meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr.
Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort.
But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later
tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking
British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security
agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in
such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK.
After Papadopoulos caused a minor political ruckus by
telling a reporter that Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for criticizing
Trump's anti-Muslim pronouncements, a friend in the Israeli embassy put him in touch with a
friend in the Australian embassy, who introduced him to Downer, her boss. Over drinks, Downer
advised him to be more diplomatic. After Papadopoulos then passed along Misfud's tip about
Clinton's emails, Downer informed his government, which, in late July, informed the FBI.
Was Papadopoulos Set Up?
Suspicions are unavoidable but evidence is lacking. Other pieces were meanwhile clicking
into place. In late May or early June 2016, Fusion GPS, a private Washington intelligence firm
employed by the Democratic National Committee, hired Steele to look into the Russian angle.
On June 20, he turned in the first of eighteen memos that would eventually comprise
the
Steele dossier , in this instance a three-page document asserting that Putin "has been
cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years" and that Russian intelligence
possessed "kompromat" in the form of a video of prostitutes performing a "golden showers" show
for his benefit at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. A week or two later, Steele
briefed the FBI on his findings. Around the same time, Robert Hannigan flew to Washington
to brief CIA Director John Brennan about additional material that had come GCHQ's way, material
so sensitive that it could only be handled at "director level."
One player was filling Papadopoulos's head with tales of Russian dirty tricks, another was
telling the FBI, while a third was collecting more information and passing it on to the bureau
as well.
Page: Took Russia's side.
On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on
U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in which he complained that " Washington and other western
capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such
as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed "
unease " that someone representing the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's
side in a growing neo-Cold War.
Stefan Halper then
infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks
before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter
re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign.
Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other.
On July 11, Page showed up at a Cambridge symposium at which Halper and Dearlove both spoke.
In early September, Halper sent Papadopoulos an email offering $3,000 and a paid trip to London
to write a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean, his specialty.
"George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?" Halper asked when he got there,
but Papadopoulos said he knew nothing. Halper also sought out Sam Clovis, Trump's national
campaign co-chairman, with whom he chatted about China for an hour or so over coffee in
Washington.
The rightwing Federalist website
speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that
"Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating
it." Clovis believes
that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in
the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue
warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought
a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue
after inauguration.
Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty
rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does
his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite
countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the
sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a
"nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said
it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others
on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for
corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency
with violating US election laws.
But the corruption charges have nothing to do with Russian collusion and nothing in the
indictment against IRA indicates that either the Kremlin or the Trump campaign were involved.
Indeed, the activities that got IRA in trouble in the first place are so unimpressive –
just $46,000 worth of Facebook
ads that it purchased prior to election day, some pro-Trump, some anti, and some with
no particular slant
at all – that Mueller probably wouldn't even have bothered if he hadn't been under
intense pressure to come up with anything at all.
The same goes for the army of bots that Russia supposedly deployed on Twitter. As The
Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2
article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a
six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one
billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election
Day.
The Steele dossier is also underwhelming. It declares on one page that the Kremlin sought to
cultivate Trump by throwing "various lucrative real estate development business deals" his way
but says on another that Trump's efforts to drum up business were unavailing and that he thus
"had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather
than business success."
Why would Trump turn down business offers when he couldn't generate any on his own? The idea
that Putin would spot a U.S. reality-TV star somewhere around 2011 and conclude that he was
destined for the Oval Office five years later is ludicrous. The fact that the Democratic
National Committee funded the dossier via its law firm Perkins Coie renders it less credible
still, as does the fact that the world has heard nothing more about the alleged video despite
the ongoing deterioration in US-Russian relations. What's the point of making a blackmail tape
if you don't use it?
Steele: Paid for political research, not intelligence.
Even Steele is backing off. In a legal paper filed in response to a libel suit last May, he
said the document "did not represent (and did not purport to represent) verified facts, but
were raw intelligence which had identified a range of allegations that warranted investigation
given their potential national security implications." The fact is that the "dossier" was
opposition research, not an intelligence report. It was neither vetted by Steele nor anyone in
an intelligence agency. Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig
up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at
taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not
his government.
Using it Anyway
Nonetheless, the spooks have made the most of such pseudo-evidence. Dearlove and Wood both
advised Steele to take his "findings" to the FBI, while, after the election, Wood pulled
Sen. John McCain aside at a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to let him know that
the Russians might be blackmailing the president-elect. McCain dispatched long-time aide David
J. Kramer to the UK to discuss the dossier with Steele directly.
Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker found a former national-security
official who
says he spoke with him at the time and that Kramer's goal was to have McCain confront Trump
with the dossier in the hope that he would resign on the spot. When that didn't happen, Clapper
and Brennan arranged for FBI Director James Comey to confront Trump instead. Comey later
testified that he didn't want Trump to think he was creating "a J. Edgar Hoover-type
situation – I didn't want him thinking I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over
him in some way."
But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry
observed a few
days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on
government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure
hate to see end up in the press."
Since then, the Democrats have touted the dossier at every opportunity, TheNew
Yorker
continues to defend it , while Times columnist Michelle Goldberg cites it as well,
saying it's a
"rather obvious possibility that Trump is being blackmailed." CNN, for its part, suggested not
long ago that the dossier may actually be Russian
disinformation designed to throw everyone off base, Republicans and Democrats alike.
It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the
intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the
public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that
they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this
out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice.
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing
Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a
wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique , and his articles about
the Middle East, terrorism, Eastern Europe, and other topics appear regularly on such websites
as Jacobin and The American Conservative.
Mueller is trying to omit the normal burden of legal liability, "wilful intent" in his
charges against the St Petersburg, social media operation. In a horrifically complex area
such as tax, campaign contributions or lobbying, a foreign entity can be found guilty of
breaking a law that they cannot reasonably have been expected to have knowledge of.
But the omission or inclusion of "wilful intent" is applied on a selective basis depending on
the advantage to the deep state.
From a practical standpoint, omission of "wilful intent" makes it easier for Mueller to get a
guilty verdict (in adsentia assuming this is legally valid in America). Once the "guilt" of
the St Petersburg staff is established, any communication between an American and them
becomes "collusion".
I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's
persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the
White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been
motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten
into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never
recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb,
Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would
have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged
"puppet."
The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his
candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were
always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of
jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to
beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat
themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and
other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what
really happened.
backwardsevolution , June 3, 2018 at 2:50 pm
Realist – good post. I think what you say is true. Trump got too caught up in the
birther crap, and Obama retaliated. But I think that Trump had been thinking about the
presidency long before Obama came along. He sees the country differently than Obama and
Clinton do. Trump would never have built up China to the point where all American technology
has been given away for free, with millions of jobs lost and a huge trade deficit, and he
would have probably left Russia alone, not ransacked it.
I saw Obama as a somewhat reluctant globalist and Hillary as an eager globalist. They are
both insiders. Trump is not. He's interested in what is best for the U.S., whereas the
Clinton's and the Bush's were interested in what their corporate masters wanted. The
multinationals have been selling the U.S. out, Trump is trying to put a stop to this, and it
is going to be a fight to the death. Trump is playing hardball with China (who ARE U.S.
multinationals), and it is working. Beginning July 1, 2018, China has agreed to reduce its
tariffs:
"Import tariffs for apparel, footwear and headgear, kitchen supplies and fitness products
will be more than halved to an average of 7.1 percent from 15.9 percent, with those on
washing machines and refrigerators slashed to just 8 percent, from 20.5 percent.
Tariffs will also be cut on processed foods such as aquaculture and fishing products and
mineral water, from 15.2 percent to 6.9 percent.
Cosmetics, such as skin and hair products, and some medical and health products, will also
benefit from a tariff cut to 2.9 percent from 8.4 percent.
In particular, tariffs on drugs ranging from penicillin, cephalosporin to insulin will be
slashed to zero from 6 percent before.
In the meantime, temporary tariff rates on 210 imported products from most favored nations
will be scrapped as they are no longer favorable compared with new rates."
Trade with China has been all one way. At least Trump is leveling the playing field. He at
least is trying to bring back jobs, something the "insiders" could care less about.
I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've
underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always
the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the
chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons
and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their
favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump
did.
Abe , June 2, 2018 at 2:20 am
"Pentagon documents indicate that the Department of Defense's shadowy intelligence arm,
the Office of Net Assessment, paid Halper $282,000 in 2016 and $129,000 in 2017. According to
reports, Halper sought to secure Papadopoulos's collaboration by offering him $3,000 and an
all-expenses-paid trip to London, ostensibly to produce a research paper on energy issues in
the eastern Mediterranean.
"The choice of Halper for this spying operation has ominous implications. His deep ties to
the US intelligence apparatus date back decades. His father-in-law was Ray Cline, who headed
the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence at the height of the Cold War. Halper served as an aide
to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Alexander Haig in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
"In 1980, as the director of policy coordination for Ronald Reagan's presidential
campaign, Halper oversaw an operation in which CIA officials gave the campaign confidential
information on the Carter administration and its foreign policy. This intelligence was in
turn utilized to further back-channel negotiations between Reagan's campaign manager and
subsequent CIA director William Casey and representatives of Iran to delay the release of the
American embassy hostages until after the election, in order to prevent Carter from scoring a
foreign policy victory on the eve of the November vote.
"Halper subsequently held posts as deputy assistant secretary of state for
political-military affairs and senior adviser to the Pentagon and Justice Department. More
recently, Halper has collaborated with Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, the British
intelligence service, in directing the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSi), a security think
tank that lists the US and UK governments as its principal clients.
"Before the 2016 election, Halper had expressed his view – shared by predominant
layers within the intelligence agencies – that Clinton's election would prove 'less
disruptive' than Trump's.
"The revelations of the role played by Halper point to an intervention in the 2016
elections by the US intelligence agencies that far eclipsed anything one could even imagine
the Kremlin attempting."
Sorry for not commenting on other posts as of yet. But I think I have a different
perspective. Russia Gate is not about Hillary Clinton or Putin but it is about Donald Trump.
Specifically an effort to get rid of him by the intelligence agencies and the MSM. The fact
is the MSM created Trump and were chiefly responsible for his election. Trump is their
brainchild starlet used to fleece all the republican campaigns like a huckster fleeces an
audience. It all ties to key Supreme Court rulings eliminating campaign finance regulations
which ushered in the age of dark money.
When billionaires can donate unlimited amounts of money anonymously to the candidate of
their choosing what ends up is a field of fourteen wannabes in a primary race each backed by
their own investor(s). The only way these candidates can win is to convince us to vote. The
only way they can do that is to spend on advertising.
What the MSM dreamed of in a purely capitalistic way was a way to drain the wallets of
every single one of the republican Super PACs. The mission was fraught with potential
checkmates. Foe example, there could be an early leader who snatched up the needed delegates
for the nomination early on which would have stopped the flow of advertising cash flowing to
the MSM. Such possibilities worried the MSM and caused great angst since this might just be
the biggest haul they ever took in during a primary season. How would they prevent a
premature end of the money river. Like financial vampire bats, ticks and leeches they needed
a way to keep the money flowing from the veins of the republican Super PACs until they were
sucked dry.
What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like
a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the
term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause
all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was
"in the lead".
It was a pure stroke of genius and it worked so well that Carl Rove is looking for a job
and Donald Trump is sitting in the White House.
Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one
little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House.
Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a
democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal
ideology for the most part.
What to do? Trump was now the Commander in Chief and was spouting nonsense that the
establishment recoiled at such as Trumps plans to form economic ties with Russia rather than
continue to wage a cold war spanning 65 years which the MIC used year after year to spook us
all and guarantee their billions annual increase in funding. Trump directly attacked defense
projects and called for de-funding major initiatives like F35 etc.
The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin
horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every
year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the
hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and
entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of
governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White
House.
What to do? There was clearly a need to eliminate this bad guy since his avowed policies
were in direct opposition to the game plan that had successfully compromised the former
administration. They felt powerless to dissuade the Administration to continue the course and
form strategies to eliminate Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya, Ukraine and other vulnerable
targets swaying toward China and Russia. They faced a new threat with the Trump
Administration which seemed hell bent to discontinue the wars in these regions robbing them
of many dollars.
It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very
threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the
hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its
existence based on foreign enemies.
So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and
the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It
had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in
the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they
committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the
White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab.
In the interim, they also forgot on purpose to tell anyone about the election campaign
finance fraud that they were the chief beneficiaries of. They also of course forgot to tell
anyone what the fight was about for the Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Twenty seven
million dollars in dark money was donated by dark money donors enabled by the Supreme Court's
decisions to eliminate campaign finance regulations which enabled these donors to buy out
Congress and elect and confirm a Supreme Court Justice who would uphold the laws which
eliminate all the election rules and campaign finance regulations dating back to the Tillman
Act of 1907 which was an attempt to eliminate corporate contributions in political campaigns
with associated meager fines as penalties. The law was weak then and has now been
eliminated.
In an era of dark money in politics protected by revisionist judges laying at the top of
our federal judicial branch posing as strict constructionists while being funded by the
corporatocracy that viciously fights over control of the highest court by a panicked
republican party that seeks to tie up their domination in our Congress by any means including
the abdication of the Constitutional authority granted to the citizens of the nation we now
face a new internal enemy.
That enemy is not some foreign nation but our own government which conspires to represent
the wealthy and the powerful and which exalts them and which enacts laws to defend their
control of our nation. Here is a quote:
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they
create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral
code that glorifies it.
Frederic Bastiat – (1801-1850) in Economic Sophisms
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:32 am
Different journalist covering much the same ground:
"Russiagate" is strictly a contrivance of the Deep State, American & British Spookery,
and the corporate media propagandists. It clearly needs to be genuinely investigated (unlike
the mockery being orchestrated by Herr Mueller from the Ministry of Truth), re-christened
"Intellgate" (after the real perpetrators of crime), pursued until all the guilty traitors
(including Mueller) who really tried to steal our democratic election are tried, convicted
and incarcerated (including probably hundreds complicit from the media) and given its own
lengthy chapter in all the history books about "The Election They Tried to Steal and Blame on
Russia: How America Nearly Lost its Constitution." If not done, America will lose its
constitution, or rather the incipient process will become totally irreversible.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 6:25 am
Your timing of events is confused.
The deep state didn't try and steal the election because they were overly complacent that
their woman would win. Remember, they didn't try to use the dodgy, Steele dossier before the
election.
What the deep state has done is reactively try to overcome the election outcome by launching
an investigation into Trump. The egregious element of the investigation is giving it the
title "investigation into collusion" when they in all probability knew that collusion was
unlikely to have taken place. To achieve their aim (removing Trump) they included the line
"and matters arising" in the brief to give them an open ended remit which allowed them to
investigate Trump's business dealings of a Russian / Ukrainian nature (which may venture
uncomfortably close to Semion Mogilevich).
If as you state (and I concur) there was no Russian collusion, then barring fabrication of
evidence by Mueller (and there is little evidence of that to date) you have nothing to worry
about on the collusion front. Remember, to date, Mueller has stuck (almost exclusively) to
meat and potatoes charges like tax evasion and money laundering. If however the investigation
leads to credible evidence that Trump broke substantive laws in the past for financial gain,
then it is not reasonable to cry foul.
Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:02 am
The Deep State assisted the DNC in knocking out Sanders. THAT was ground zero. Everything
since then has been to cover this up and to discredit Trump (using him as the distraction).
Consider that the Deep State never bothered to investigate the DNC servers/data; reason being
is that they'd (Deep State) be implicated.
Skip Scott , June 1, 2018 at 7:29 am
Very true Seer. That is the real genesis of RussiaGate. It was a diversion tactic to keep
people from looking at the DNC's behavior during the primaries. They are the reason Trump is
president, not the evil Ruskies.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:13 am
We all seem agreed that the Russia collusion is an exercise in distraction. I can't say I
know enough to comment with authority on whether the DNC would require assistance from the
deep state to trash Bernie. From an outsider perspective it looked more like an application
of massively disproportionate spending and standard, back room dirty tricks.
There is a saying; don't attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.
In this case, try replacing incompetence with MONEY.
dikcheney , June 2, 2018 at 5:09 pm
Totally agree with you Skip and the Mueller performance is there to keep up the
intimidation and distraction by regularly finding turds to throw at Trump. Mueller doesnt
need to find anything, he just needs to create vague intimations of 'guilty Trump' and
suspicious associates so that no one will look at the DNC or the Clinton corruption or the
smashing of the Sanders campaign.
Their actual agenda is to smother analysis and clear thinking. Thankfully there is the
forensicator piecing the jigsaw as well as consortium news.
robjira , June 1, 2018 at 11:55 am
Spot on, Seer.
michael , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm
Those servers probably had a lot more pay-to-play secrets from the Clinton Foundation and
ring-kissing from foreign big donors than what was released by Wikileaks, which mostly was
just screwing over Bernie, which the judge ruled was Hillary's prerogative. Some email chains
were probably construed as National Security and were discreetly not leaked.
The 30,000 emails Hillary had bit bleached from her private servers are likely in the hands
of Russians and every other major country, all biding their time for leverage. This was the
carrot the British (who undoubtedly have copies as well) dangled over idiot Popodopolous.
Uncle Bob , June 1, 2018 at 10:33 pm
Seth Rich
anon , June 1, 2018 at 7:42 am
Realist is likely referring to events before the election which involved people with
secret agency connections, such as the opposition research (Steele dossier and Skripal
affair).
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:32 am
Realist responded but is being "moderated" as per usual.
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:31 am
Hillary herself was a prime force in cooking up the smear against Trump for being "Putin's
puppet." This even before the Democratic convention. Then she used it big time during the
debates. It wasn't something merely reactive after she lost. Certainly she and her
collaborators inside the deep state and the intelligence agencies never imagined that she
would lose and have to distract from what she and her people did by projecting the blame onto
Trump. That part was reactive. The rest of the conspiracy was totally proactive on her part
and that of the DNC, even during the primaries.
Don't forget, the intel agencies led by Clapper, Brennan and Comey were all working for
Obama at the time and were totally acquiescent in spying on the Trump campaign and
"unmasking" the identities and actions of his would-be administration, including individuals
like General Flynn. The cooked up Steele dossier was paid for by money from the Clinton
campaign and used as a pretext for the intel agencies to spy on the Trump campaign. There is
no issue on timing. The establishment was fully behind Clinton by hook or crook from the
moment Trump had the delegates to win the GOP nomination. (OBTW, I am not a Trump supporter
or even a Republican, so I KNOW that I "have nothing to worry about on the collusion front."
I'm a registered Dem, though not a Hillary supporter.)
Moreover, if you think that Mueller (and the other intel chiefs) have been on the
impartial up-and-up, why did the FBI never seize and examine the DNC servers? Why simply
accept the interpretation of events given by the private cybersecurity firm (Crowdstrike)
that the Clinton campaign hired to very likely mastermind a cover-up? That is exceptional
(nay, unheard of!) "professional courtesy." Why has Mueller to this day not deposed Julian
Assange or former British Ambassador Craig Murray, both of whom admit to knowing precisely
who provided the leaked (not hacked) Podesta and DNC emails to Wikileaks? Why has Mueller not
pursued the potential role of the late Seth Rich in the leaking of said emails? Why has
Mueller not pursued the robust theory, based on actual evidence, proposed by VIPS, and
supported by computer experts like Bill Binney and John McAfee, that the emails were not, as
the Dems and the intel agencies would have you believe on NO EVIDENCE, hacked (by the
"Russians" or anyone else) but were downloaded to a flash drive directly from the DNC
servers? Why has Mueller not deposed Binney or Ray McGovern who claim to have evidence to
bear on this and have discussed it freely in the media (to the miniscule extent that the
corporate media will give them an audience)? Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a
kangaroo court he is running? Is the media really independent and impartial or are they part
of a cover-up, perpetrating numerous sins of both commission and omission in their highly
flawed reportage?
I don't see clarity in what has been thus far been propounded by Mueller or any of Trump's
other accusers, but I don't think I am the one who is confused here, Vivian. If you want to
meet a thoroughly confused individual on what transpired leading up to this moment in
American political history, just go read Hillary's book. Absolutely everyone under the sun
shares in the blame but her for the fact that she does not presently reside in the White
House.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 1:48 pm
You have presented your case with a great deal more detail and clarity than the original
post that prompted my reply. You are also a great deal more knowledgeable than I on the
details. I think we are 98% in agreement and I wouldn't like to say who's correct on the
remaining 2%.
For clarity, I didn't follow the debates and wouldn't do so now if they were repeated. Much
heat very little light.
The "pretext" that the intel agencies claim launched their actions against Trump was not the
Steele dossier, at least that is what the intel agencies say. Either way your assertion that
it was the dossier that set things off is just that, an assertion. I think this is a minor
point.
On the DNC servers and the FBI we are 100% singing from the same hymn book and it all sticks.
Mueller's apparent disinterest in the question of hack or USB drive does rather taint his
investigation and thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't thought of that angle. I still think
Mueller will stick to tax and money laundering and stay well clear of "collusion", so yes he
may be running a kangaroo court investigation but the charges will be real world.
The MSM as a whole are a sick joke which is why we collectively find ourselves at CN, Craig
Murray's blog, etc. I wouldn't like to attribute "collaboration" to any individual in the
media. It was the reference to hundreds of journalists being sent to jail in your original
post that set me off in the first place. When considering the "culpability" of any individual
journalist you can have any position on a spectrum from; fully cognisant collaborator with a
deep state conspiracy, to; a bit dim and running with the "sexy" story 'cause it's the
biggest thing ever, the bosses can't get enough of it and the overtime is great. If American
journalists are anything like their UK counterparts, 99% will fall into the latter
category.
Don't have any issue with your final point. Hillary on stage and on camera was phoney as
rocking horse s**te and everyone outside her extremely highly remunerated team could see
it.
Sorry for any inconvenience, but your second post makes your points a hell of a lot clearer
than the original.
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:26 pm
My purpose for the first post in this thread was to direct readers to the article in Unz
by Mike Whitney, not to compress a full-blown amateur expose' by myself into a three-sentence
paragraph. You would have found much more in the way of facts, analysis and opinion in his
article to which my terse comments did not even serve as an abstract.
Quoting his last paragraph may give you the flavor of this piece, which is definitely not
a one-off by him or other actual journalists who have delved into the issues:
"Let's see if I got this right: Brennan gets his buddies in the UK to feed fake
information on Russia to members of the Trump campaign, after which the FBI uses the
suspicious communications about Russia as a pretext to unmask, wiretap, issue FISA warrants,
and infiltrate the campaign, after which the incriminating evidence that was collected in the
process of entrapping Trump campaign assistants is compiled in a legal case that is used to
remove Trump from office. Is that how it's supposed to work?
It certainly looks like it. But don't expect to read about it in the Times."
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm
Vivian – 90% of all major media is owned by six corporations. There most definitely
was and IS collusion between some of them to bring down the outsider, Trump.
As far as individual journalists go, yeah, they're trying to pay their mortgage, I get it,
and they're going to spin what their boss bloody well tells them to spin. But there is
evidence coming out that "some" journalists did accept money from either Fusion GPS, Perkins
Coie (sp) or Christopher Steele to leak information, which they did.
Bill Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that enabled these six media
conglomerates to dominate the news. Of course they're political. They need to be split up,
like yesterday, into a thousand pieces (ditto for the banks). They have purposely and with
intent been feeding lies to the American people. Yes, some SHOULD go to jail.
As Peter Strzok of the FBI said re Trump colluding with Russia, "There was never any
there, there." The collusion has come from the intelligence agencies, in cahoots with Hillary
Clinton, perhaps even as high as Obama, to prevent Trump being elected. When that failed,
they set out to get him impeached on whatever they could find. Of course Mueller is going to
stick with tax and money laundering because he already KNOWS there was never any collusion
with Russia.
This is the Swamp versus the People.
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 1:52 pm
Realist – another excellent post. "Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a kangaroo
court he is running?" As you rightly point out, Mueller IS being very selective in what he
examines and doesn't examine. He's not after the whole truth, just a particular kind of
truth, one that gets him a very specific result – to take down or severely cripple the
President.
Evidence continues to trickle out. Former and active members of the FBI are now even
begging to testify as they are disgusted with what is being purposely omitted from this
so-called "impartial" investigation. This whole affair is "kangaroo" all the way.
I'm not so much a fan of Trump as I am a fan of the truth. I don't like to see him –
anyone – being railroaded. That bothers me more than anything. But he's right about
what he calls "the Swamp". If these people are not uncovered and brought to justice, then the
country is truly lost.
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:38 pm
Precisely. Destroy the man on false pretenses and you destroy our entire system, whether
you like him and his questionable policies or not.
Some people would say it's already gone, but we do what we can to get it back or hold onto
to what's left of it. Besides, all the transparent lies and skullduggery in the service of
politics rather than principles are just making our entire system look as corrupt as
hell.
michael , June 1, 2018 at 5:00 pm
When Mueller arrested slimy Manafort for crimes committed in the Ukraine and gave a pass
to the Podesta Brothers who worked closely with Manafort, it was clear that Russiagate was a
partisan operation.
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 6:17 pm
Michael – good point!
KiwiAntz , June 1, 2018 at 1:00 am
Its becoming abundantly clear now, that the whole Russiagate charade was had nothibg to do
with Russia & is about a elaborate smokescreen & shellgame coverup designed to divert
attention away from, firstly the Democratic Party's woeful defeat & its lousy Candidate
choice in the corrupt Hillary Clinton? & also the DNC's sabotaging of Bernie Saunders
campaign run! But the most henious & treacherous parts was Obama's, weaponising the
intelligence agencies to spy (Halper) on the imaginary Mancharian Candidate Trump & to
set him up as a Russia stooge? Obama & Hillary Clinton are complicent in this disgraceful
& illegal activity to get dirt on Trump withe goal of ensuring Clinton's election win?
This is bigger than Watergate & more scandalous? But despite the cheating & stacking
of the card deck, she still lost out to the Donald? And this isn't just illegal its
treasonous & willful actions deserving of a lengthy jail incarceration? HRC & her
crooked Clinton foundation's funding of the fraudulent & discredited "Steele Dosier" was
also used to implement Trump & Russia in a made up, pile of fictitious gargage that was
pure offal? Obama & HRC along with their FBI & CIA spys need to be rounded up,
convicted & thrown in jail? Perhaps if Trump could just shut his damn mouuth for once
& get off twitter long enough to be able too get some Justice Dept officials looking into
this, without being distracted by this Russiagate shellgame fakery, then perhaps the real
criminal's like Halpert, Obama,HRC & these corrupt spooks & spies can be rounded up
& held to account for this treasonous behaviour?
Sean Ahern , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 pm
Attention should be paid also to the role of so called progressive media outlets such as
Mother Jones which served as an outlets for the disinformation campaign described in Lazare's
article.
Here from David Corn's Mother Jones 2016 article:
"And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian
counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with
memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian
government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump -- and that the FBI requested more
information from him."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump/
Not only was Corn and Mother Jones selected by the spooks as an outlet, but these so
called progressives lauded their 'expose' as a great investigative coup on their part and it
paved the way for Corn's elevation on MSNBC for a while as a 'pundit.'
Paul G. , May 31, 2018 at 8:46 pm
In that vein did the spooks influence Rachel Maddow or is her $30,000. a day salary
adequate to totally compromise her microscopic journalistic integrity.
dikcheney , June 3, 2018 at 6:57 am
Passing around references to Mother Jones is like passing round used toilet paper for
another try. MJ is BS it is entirely controlled fake press.
Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:23 pm
Stefan Halper was being paid by the Clinton's foundation during the time he was spying on
the Trump campaign. This is further evidence that Hillary Clinton's hands are all over
getting Russia Gate started. Then there's the role that Obama's justice department played in
setting up the spying on people who were working with the Trump campaign. This is worse than
Watergate, IMO.
Rumors are that a few ex FBI agents are going to testify to congress in Comey's role in
covering up Hillary's crimes when she used her private email server to send classified
information to people who did not have clearance to read it. Sydney Bluementhol was working
for Hillary's foundation and sending her classified information that he stole from the
NSA.
Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills were concerned about Obama knowing that Hillary wasn't using
her government email account after he told the press that he only found out about it at the
same time they did. He had been sending and receiving emails from her Clintonone email
address during her whole tenure as SOS.
Obama was also aware of her using her foundation for pay to play which she was told by
both congress and Obama to keep far away from her duties. Why did she use her private email
server? So that Chelsea could know where Hillary was doing business so she could send Bill
there to give his speeches to the same organizations, foreign governments and people who had
just donated to their foundation.
Has any previous Secretary of State in history used their position to enrich their spouses
or their foundations? I think not.
The secrets of how the FBI covered for Hillary are coming out. Whether she is charged for
her crimes is a different matter.
F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 7:48 pm
If Hillary paid a political operative using Clinton Foundation funds – those are tax
exempt charitable contributions – she would be guilty of tax fraud, charity fraud and
campaign finance violations. Hillary may be evil, but she's not stupid. The U.S.Government
paid Halper, which might be "waste, fraud and abuse", but it doesn't implicate Hillary at
all. Not that she's innocent, mind you
Rob , June 1, 2018 at 2:14 am
I need some references to take any of your multitude of claims seriously. With all due
respect, this sound like something taken from info wars and stylized in smartened up a little
bit.
the idea that Stefan Halper was some sort a of mastermind spy behind the so called
"Russiagate" fiasco
seems very implausible considering what he seems to have spent doing for the past 40
years
going back to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980 and his efforts then.
i think he must have had a fairly peripheral role as to whatever or not was going on
behind the scenes from 2016 election campaign, and the campaign to first stop Trump getting
elected, and secondly, when that failed, to bring down his Presidency.
of course, the moment his name was revealed in recent days, would have shocked or
surprised those of in the general
public, but not certainly amongst those in Government aka FBI/CIA/Military-industrial
circles.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 4:36 pm
chris m – Halper is probably one of those people who hide behind their professor (or
other legitimate) jobs, but are there at the ready to serve the Deep State. "I understand.
You want me to set up some dupes in order to make it look like there was or could be actual
Russian meddling. Gotcha." All you've got to do is make it "look like" something nefarious
was going on. This facilitates a "reason" to have a phony investigation, and of course they
make it as open-ended an investigation as possible, hoping to get the target on something,
anything.
Well, they've no doubt looked long and hard for almost two years now, but zip. However, in
their zeal to get rid of their opponent, who they did not think would win the election, they
left themselves open, left a trail of crimes. Whoops!
This is the Swamp that Trump talked about during the election. He's probably not squeaky
clean either, but he pales in comparison to what these guys have done. They have tried to
take down a duly-elected President.
F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 5:09 pm
His role may have been peripheral, but I seem to recall that the Office of Net Assessments
paid him roughly a million bucks to play it. That office, run from the Pentagon, is about as
deep into the world of "black ops" spookdom as you can get. Hardly "peripheral", I'd say.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:13 pm
F. G. Sanford – yes, a million bucks implies something more than just a peripheral
involvement, more like something essential to the plot, like the actual setting up of the
plot. Risk of exposure costs money.
ranney , May 31, 2018 at 6:17 pm
Chris, I think the Halper inclusion in this complex tale is simply an example of how these
things work in the ultra paranoid style of spy agencies. As Lazare explains, every one knew
every one else – at least at the start of this, and it just kind of built from there,
and Halper may have been the spark – but the spark landed on a highly combustible pile
of paranoia that caught on fire right away. This is how our and the UK agencies function.
There is an interesting companion piece to this story today at Common Dreams by Robert Kohler
titled The American Way of War. It describes basically the same sort of mind set and action
as this story. I'd link it for you if I knew how, but I'm not very adept at the computer.
(Maybe another reader knows how?)
We (that is the American people who are paying the salaries of these brain blocked, stiff
necked idiots) need to start getting vocal and visible about the destructive path our
politicians, banks and generals have rigidly put us on. Does any average working stiff still
believe that all this hate, death and destruction is to "protect" us?
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:07 pm
ranney – when you are on the page that you want to link to, take your cursor (the
little arrow on your screen) to the top of the page to the address bar (for instance, the
address for this article is:
"https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/31/spooks-spooking ")
Once your cursor is over the address bar, right click on your mouse. A little menu will
come up. Then position your cursor down to the word "copy" and then left click on your mouse.
This will copy the link.
Then proceed back to the blog (like Consortium) where you want to provide the link in your
post. You might say, "Here is the link for the article I just described above." Then at this
point you would right click on your mouse again, position your cursor over the word "paste",
and then left click on your mouse. Voila, your link magically appears.
If you don't have a mouse and are using a laptop pad, then someone else will have to help
you. That's above my pay grade. Good luck, ranney.
irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:13 pm
If you are using a Mac, either laptop w/touch screen or with a mouse, the copy/paste
function
works similarly. Use either the mouse (no need to 'right click, left click') or the touch
screen
to highlight the address bar once you have the cursor flashing away on the left side of
it.
You may need to scroll right to highlight the whole address. Then go up to Edit (there's
also
a keyboard command you can use, but I don't) in your tool bar at the top of your screen.
Click on 'copy'. Now your address is in memory. Then do the same as described above to
get back to where you want to paste it. Put your cursor where you want it to be 'pasted'.
Go back to 'edit' and click 'paste'. Voila !
This is a very handy function and can be used to copy text, web addresses, whatever you
want.
Explore it a little bit. (Students definitely overuse the 'paste and match style' option,
which allows
a person to 'paste' text into for example an essay and 'match the style' so it looks
seamless, although
unless carefully edited it usually doesn't read seamlessly !)
Remember that whatever is in 'copy' will remain there until you 'copy' something else. (Or
your
computer crashes . . . )
ranney , June 1, 2018 at 3:39 pm
Irina and Backwards Evolution – Thanks guys for the computer advice! I'll try it,
but I think I need someone at my shoulder the first time I try it.
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 8:53 pm
ranney – you're welcome! Snag one of your kids or a friend, and then do it together.
Sometimes I see people posting things like: "Testing. I'm trying to provide a link, bear with
me." Throw caution to the wind, ranney. I don't worry about embarrassing myself anymore. I do
it every day and the world still goes on.
I heard a good bit of advice once, something I remind my kids: when you're young, you
think everybody is watching you and so you're afraid to step out of line. When you're
middle-aged, you think everybody is watching you, but you don't care. When you're older, you
realize nobody is really watching you because they're more concerned about themselves.
Good luck, ranney.
irina , June 2, 2018 at 10:00 pm
I find it helpful to write down the steps (on an old fashioned piece of paper, with old
fashioned ink)
when learning to use a new computer tool, because while I think I'll remember, it doesn't
usually
'stick' until after using it for quite a while. And yes, definitely recruit a member of the
younger set
or someone familiar with computers. My daughter showed me many years ago how to 'cut &
paste'
and to her credit she was very gracious about it. Remember that you need a place to 'paste'
what-
ever you copied -- either a comment board like this, or a document you are working on, or
(this is
handy) an email where you want to send someone a link to something. Lots of other
possibilities too!
mike , June 1, 2018 at 7:43 pm
No one is presenting Halper as a mastermind spy. He was a tool of the deep state nothing
more.
It seems a mistake to frame the "Russiagate" nonsense as a "Democrat vs Republican"
affair, except at the most surface level of understanding in terms of our political
realities. If one considers that the Bush family has been effectively the Republican Party's
face of the CIA/deep state nexus for decades, as the Clinton/Obama's have been the Democratic
Party's face for decades now, what comes into focus is Trump as a sort of unknown, unexpected
wild card not appropriately tethered to the control structure. Simply noting that the U.S.
and Russia need not be enemies is alone enough to require an operation to get Trump into
line.
This hardly means this is some sort of "partisan" issue as the involvement of McCain and
others demonstrates.
One of the true "you can't make this stuff up" ironies of the Bush/Clinton CIA/deep state
nexus history is worth remembering if one still maintains any illusions about how the CIA
vets potential presidents since they killed JFK. During Iran/Contra we had Bush, the former
CIA director now vice president, running a drugs for arms operation out the White House
through Ollie North, WHILE then unknown Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was busy squashing
Arkansas State Police investigations into said narcotics trafficking. Clinton obviously
proved his bona fides to the CIA/deep state with such service and was appropriately rewarded
as an asset who could function as a reliable president. Here in one operation we had two
future presidents in Bush and Clinton both engaged in THE SAME CIA drug running operation.
You truly can't make this stuff up.
Russiagate seems to be in the end all about keeping deep state policy moving in the "right
direction" and "hating Russia" is the only entree on the menu at this time for the whole
cadre of CIA/deep state, MIC, neocons, Zionists, and all their minions in the MSM. The Obama
White House would have gladly supported Vlad the Impaler as the Republican candidate that
beat Hillary if Vlad were to have the appropriate foaming at the mouth "hate-Russia" vibe
going on.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:18 pm
Gary – great post.
irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm
Roger that. I would really like to see an inquiry re-opened into the
teenage boys who died 'on the train tracks' in Arkansas during the
early years of the Clinton-Bush trafficking. Many questions are still
unanswered. Speculation is that they saw something they weren't
supposed to see.
Mark Thomason , May 31, 2018 at 1:12 pm
This all grows out of the failure to clean up the mess revealed by the Iraq fiasco.
Instead, those who did that remained, got away with it, and are doing more of the same.
Babyl-on , May 31, 2018 at 12:46 pm
So, here is my question – Who, ultimately does the
permanent/bureaucratic/deep/Imperial* state finally answer to? Who's interests are they
serving? How do they know what those interests are?
It could be, and increasingly it looks as if, the answer is – no one in particular
– but the Saud family, the Zionist cabal of billionaires, the German industrialist
dynasties, the Japanese oligarchy and never forget the arms dealers, all of them once part of
the Empire now fighting for themselves so we end up with the high level apparatchiks not
knowing what to do or who to follow so they lie outright to Congress and go on TV and babble
more lies for money.
It's a great contradiction that the greatest armed force ever assembled with cutting edge
robotics and AI yet at the same time so weak and pathetic it can not exercise hegemony over
the Middle East as it seems to desire more than anything. Being defeated by forces with less
than 20% of the US spend.
Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:36 pm
You're right. They answer to no one because they are not just working in this country, but
they think that the whole world is theirs.
To these people there are no borders. They meet at places like the G20, Davos and wherever
the Bilderberg group decides to meet every year. No leader of any country gets to be one
unless they are acceptable to the Deep State. The council of foreign relations is one of the
groups that run the world. How we take them down is a good question.
Abe , May 31, 2018 at 12:43 pm
Following the pattern of mainstream media, Daniel Lazare assiduously avoids mentioning
Israel and pro-Israel Lobby interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the
Israel-gate reality underlying all the Russia-gate fictions.
For example, George Papadopoulos is directly connected to the pro-Israel Lobby, right wing
Israeli political interests, and Israeli government efforts to control regional energy
resources.
Lazare mentions that Papadapoulos had "a friend in the Israeli embassy".
But Lazare conspicuously neglects to mention numerous Israeli and pro-Israel Lobby players
interested in "filling Papadopoulos's head" with "tales of Russian dirty tricks".
Papadopoulos' LinkedIn page lists his association with the right wing Hudson Institute.
The Washington, D.C.-based think tank part of pro-Israel Lobby web of militaristic security
policy institutes that promote Israel-centric U.S. foreign policy.
The Hudson Institute confirmed that Papadopoulos was an intern who left the pro-Israel
neoconservative think tank in 2014.
In 2014, Papadopoulos authored op-ed pieces in Israeli publications.
In an op-ed published in Arutz Sheva, media organ of the right wing Religionist Zionist
movement embraced by the Israeli "settler" movement, Papadopoulos argued that the U.S. should
focus on its "stalwart allies" Israel, Greece, and Cyprus to "contain the newly emergent
Russian fleet".
In another op-ed published in Ha'aretz, Papadopoulos contended that Israel should exploit
its natural gas resources in partnership with Cyprus and Greece rather than Turkey.
In November 2015, Papadapalous participated in a conference in Tel Aviv, discussing the
export of natural gas from Israel with a panel of current and past Israeli government
officials including Ron Adam, a representative of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
and Eran Lerman, a former Israeli Deputy National Security Adviser.
Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of
the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon
and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and
on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region.
Israeli plans to develop energy resources and expand territorial holdings in the Syrian
Golan are threatened by the Russian military presence in Syria. Russian diplomatic efforts,
and the Russian military intervention that began in September 2015 after an official request
by the Syrian government, have interfered with the Israeli-Saudi-U.S. Axis "dirty war" in
Syria.
Israeli activities and Israel-gate realities are predictably ignored by the mainstream
media, which continues to salivate at every moldy scrap of Russia-gate fiction.
Lazare need no be so circumspect, unless he has somehow been spooked.
"Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of
the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon
and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and
on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region."
And water. Rating energy and water, what's at the top for Israel. Israel would probably
say both but Israel shielded by the US will take what it wants. That is already true with the
Palestinians.. The last figure I heard is that the Palestinians are allocated one fifth per
capita what is allocated to Israel's
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:59 am
A large swamp is actually an ancient and highly organized ecosystem. Only humans could
create a lawless madness like Washington DC.
irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:24 pm
Yes that is a good description of a swamp. BUT, if it loses what sustains it --
water, in the case of a 'real' swamp and money in the case of this swamp --
it changes character very quickly and becomes first a bog, then a meadow.
I am definitely ready for more meadowland ! But the only way to create it
is to voluntarily redirect federal taxes into escrow accounts which stipulate
that the funds are to be used for (fill in the blank) Public Services at the
Local and Regional levels. Much more efficient than filtering them through
the federal bureaucracy !
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:21 pm
But how would one avoid prosecution for nonpayment of taxes?
That seems a very quiet way to be rendered ineffective as a resister.
irina , June 1, 2018 at 2:30 am
The thing is, you don't 'nonpay' them. The way it used to work, through the
Con$cience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account, was that you filed
your taxes as usual. (This does require having less withholding than you owe).
BUT instead of paying what is due to the IRS, you send it to the Escrow Account.
You attach a letter to your tax return, explaining where the money is and why it
is there. That is, you want it to be spent on _________________(fill in the blank)
worthy public social service. Then you send your return to the IRS.
When I used to do this, I stated that I wanted my tax dollars to be spent to develop
public health clinics at neighborhood schools. Said clinics would be staffed by nurse
practitioners, would be open 24-7 and nurses would be equipped with vans to make
House Calls. Security would be provided.
So you're not 'nonpaying' your taxes, you are (attempting) to redirect them.
Eventually,
after several rounds of letters back and forth, the IRS would seize the monies from the
escrow account, which would only release them to the IRS upon being told to by the
tax re-director. Unfortunately, not enough people participated to make it a going
concern.
But the potential is still there, and the template has been made and used. It's very
scale-
able, from local to international. And it would not take that many 're-directors' to shift
the
focus of tax liability from the collector to the payor. Because ultimately we are liable
for
how our funds are used !
Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:19 pm
this was done a lot during the Vietnam conflict, especially by Quakers. the first thing,
if you are a wage earner, is to re-file a W2 with maximum withholdings-that has two effects:
1) it means you owe all your taxes in April. 2) it means the feds are deprived of the hidden
tax in which they use or invest your withholding throughout the year before it's actually
due(and un-owed taxes if you over over-withhold). Pretty sure that if a large number of
people deprive the government of that hidden tax by under-withholding, they will begin to
take notice.
Abe , May 31, 2018 at 11:54 am
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence agency of the government
and armed forces of the United Kingdom.
In 2013, GCHQ received considerable media attention when the former National Security
Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency was in the process of collecting
all online and telephone data in the UK. Snowden's revelations began a spate of ongoing
disclosures of global surveillance and manipulation.
For example, NSA files from the Snowden archive published by Glenn Greenwald reveal
details about GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) unit, which uses "dirty
trick" tactics to covertly manipulate and control online communities.
In 2017, officials from the UK and Israel made an unprecedented confirmation of the close
relationship between the GCHQ and Israeli intelligence services.
Robert Hannigan, outgoing Director-General of the GCHQ, revealed for the first time that
his organization has a "strong partnership with our Israeli counterparts in signals
intelligence." He claimed the relationship "is protecting people from terrorism not only in
the UK and Israel but in many other countries."
Mark Regev, Israeli ambassador to the UK, commented on the close relationship between
British and Israeli intelligence agencies. During remarks at a Conservative Friends of Israel
reception, Regev opined: "I have no doubt the cooperation between our two democracies is
saving British lives."
Hannigan added that GCHQ was "building on an excellent cyber relationship with a range of
Israeli bodies and the remarkable cyber industry in Be'er Sheva."
The IDF's most important signal intelligence–gathering installation is the Urim
SIGINT Base, a part of Unit 8200, located in the Negev desert approximately 30 km from Be'er
Sheva.
Snowden revealed how Unit 8200 receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens, as part of
a secret agreement with the U.S. National Security Agency.
After his departure from GCHQ, Hannigan joined BlueteamGlobal, a cybersecurity services
firm, later re-named BlueVoyant.
BlueVoyant's board of directors includes Nadav Zafrir, former Commander of the Israel
Defense Forces' Unit 8200. The senior leadership team at BlueVoyant includes Ron Feler,
formerly Deputy Commander of the IDF's Unit 8200, and Gad Goldstein, who served as a division
head in the Israel Security Agency, Shin Bet, in the rank equivalent to Major General.
In addition to their purported cybersecurity activities, Israeli. American, and British
private companies have enormous access and potential to promote government and military
deception operations.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 12:23 pm
Thanks Abe. Sounds like a manual for slave owners and con men. What a tangled wed the rich
bastards weave. The simple truth is their sworn enemy.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:19 pm
Interesting that a foreign power would be given all US communications data, which implies
that the US has seized it all without a warrant and revealed it all in violation of the
Constitution. If extensive, this use of information power amounts to information warfare
against the US by its own secret agencies in collusion with a foreign power, an act of
treason.
Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:18 am
This has been going on for a LONG time, it's nothing new. I seem to recall 60 Minutes
covering it way back in the 70s(?). UK was allowed to do the snooping in the US (and, likely,
vice versa) and then providing info to the US. This way the US govt could claim that it
didn't spy/snoop on its citizens. Without a doubt Israel has been extensively intercepting
communications in the US..
Secrecy kills.
Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:23 am
Yes, but the act of allowing unregulated foreign agencies unwarranted access to US
telecoms is federal crime, and it is treason when it goes so far as to allow them full
access, and even direct US bulk traffic to their spy agencies. If this is so, these people
should be prosecuted for treason.
F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 11:36 am
To listen to the media coverage of these events, it is tempting to believe that two
entirely different planets are being discussed. Fox comes out and says Mueller was "owned" by
Trump. Then, CNN comes out and says Trump was "owned" by Clapper. Clapper claims the evidence
is "staggering", while video clips of his testimony reveal irrefutable perjury. Some of
President Trump's policies are understandably abhorrent to Democrats, while Clinton's email
server and charity frauds are indisputably violations of Federal statutes. Democrats are
attempting to claim that a "spy" in the Trump campaign was perfectly reasonable to protect
"national security", but evidence seems to indicate that the spy was placed BEFORE there was
a legitimate national security concern. Some analysts note that, while Mueller's team appears
to be Democratic partisan hacks, their native "skill set" is actually expertise in money
laundering investigations. They claim that although Mr. Trump may not be compromised by the
Russian government, he is involved with nefarious Russian organized crime figures. It
follows, according to them, that given time, Mueller will reveal these illicit connections,
and prosecution will become inevitable.
Let's assume, for argument, that both sides are right. That means that our entire
government is irretrievably corrupt. Republicans claim that it could " go all the way to
Obama". Democrats, of course, play the "moral high ground" card, insinuating that the current
administration is so base and immoral that somehow, the "ends justify the means". No matter
how you slice it, the Clinton campaign has a lot more liability on its hands. The problem is,
if prosecutions begin, people will "talk" to save their own skins. The puppet masters can't
really afford that.
"All the way to Obama", you say? I think it could go higher than that. Personally, I think
it could go all the way to Dick Cheney, and the 'powers that be' are in no mood to let that
happen.
Vivian O'Blivion , May 31, 2018 at 12:19 pm
The issue as I see it is that from the start everyone was calling the Mueller probe an
investigation into collusion and not really grasping the catch all nature of his brief.
It's the "any matters arising " that is the real kicker. So any dodgy dealing / possible
criminal activity in the past is fair game. And this is exactly what in happening with
Manafort.
Morally you can apply the Nucky Johnson defence and state that everyone knew Trump was a
crook when they voted for him, but legally this has no value.
There is an unpleasant whiff of deep state interference with the will of the people
(electoral college). Perhaps if most bodies hadn't written Trump's chances off in such an off
hand manner, proper due diligence of his background would have uncovered any liabilities
before the election.
If there is actionable dirt, can't say I am overly sympathetic to Trump. Big prizes sometimes
come with big risks.
David G , May 31, 2018 at 5:14 pm
My own feeling from the start has been that Mueller was never going to track down any
"collusion" or "meddling" (at least not to any significant degree) because the whole,
sprawling Russia-gate narrative – to the extent one can be discerned – is
obviously phony.
But at the same time, there's no way the completely lawless, unethical Trump, along with
his scummy associates, would be able to escape that kind of scrutiny without criminal conduct
being exposed.
So far, on both scores, that still seems to me to be a likely outcome, and for my part I'm
fine with it.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 5:29 am
My thoughts exactly. Collusion was never a viable proposition because the Russians aren't
that stupid. Regardless of any personal opinion regarding the intelligence and mental
stability of Donald Snr., the people he surrounds himself with are weapons grade stupid. I
don't see the Russians touching the Trump campaign with a proverbial barge pole.
Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:26 pm
it just happens that Trump appears to have been involved (wittingly or not), with the
laundering a whole lot of Russian money and so many of his friends seem to be connected with
wealthy Russian oligarchs as well plus they are so stupid, they keep appearing to (and
probably are) obstructing justice. The Cohen thing doesn't get much attention here, but it's
significant that they have all this stuff on a guy who is clearly Trump's bagman.
Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:15 pm
There is also quite an indication that the entire Mueller investigation is a complete
smoke screen to be used as cannon fodder in the mainstream media.
On the one hand, Mueller and his hacks have found nothing of import to link Trump to
anything close to collusion with members of the Russian government. And I am by no means a
Trump supporter by any stretch of the imagination, except as a foil to Clinton. However, even
my minimalist expectations for Trump have not worked out either.
In addition. the Mueller investigation has been spending what appears to be a majority of
its time on ancillary matters that were not within the supposed scope and mandate of this
investigation. Further, a number of indictments have come down against people involved with
such ancillary matters.
The result is that if Mueller is going beyond the scope of his investigatory mandate, this
may come in as a technicality that will allow indicted persons to escape prosecution on
appeal.
Such a mandate, I would think, is the same thing as a police warrant, which can find only
admissible evidence covered by the warrant. Anything else found to be criminally liable must
be found to be as a result of a completely different investigation that has nothing to do
with the original warrant.
In other words, it appears that the Mueller investigation was allowed to commence under a
Republican controlled Congress for the very reason that its intent is simply to go in circles
long enough for Republicans to get their agendas through, which does not appear to be working
all too well as a result of their high levels of internecine party conflicts.
This entire affair is coming to show just how dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent the
entirety of the US federal government has become. And to the chagrin of all sincere
activists, no amount of organized protesting and political action will ever rid the country
of this grotesque political quagmire that now engulfs the entirety of our political
infrastructure.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:48 pm
Very true that the US federal government is now "dysfunctional, corrupt, and
incompetent."
What are your thoughts on forms of action to rid us this political quagmire?
(other than ineffective "organized protesting and political action")
Have you considered new forms of public debate and public information?
Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:34 am
All of this is blackmail to hold Trump's feet to the fire of the Israel firsters (such
actions pull in all the dark swampy things). By creating the Russia blackmail story they've
effectively redirected away from themselves. The moment Trump balks the Deep State will reel
in some more, airing innuendos to overwhelm Trump. Better believe that Trump has been fully
"briefed" on all of this. John Bolton was able to push out a former OPCW head with threats
(knew where his, the OPCW head's children were). And now John Bolton is sitting right next to
Trump (whispering in his ear that he knows ways in which to oust Trump).
What actual "ideas" were in Trump's head going in to all of this (POTUS run) is hard to
say. But, anything that can be considered a threat to the Deep State has been effectively
nullified now.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:22 am
Possible, but Manafort already tried to get his charges thrown out as being the outcome of
investigations beyond the remit He failed.
Brendan , May 31, 2018 at 10:26 am
There's no doubt at all that Joseph Mifsud was closely connected with western
intelligence, and with MI6 in particular. His contacts with Russia are insignificant compared
with his long career working amongst the elite of western officials.
Lee Smith of RealClearInvestigations lists some of the places where Mifsud worked, including
two universities:
"he taught at Link Campus University in Rome, ( ) whose lecturers and professors include
senior Western diplomats and intelligence officials from a number of NATO countries,
especially Italy and the United Kingdom.
Mifsud also taught at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and the London Academy of
Diplomacy, which trained diplomats and government officials, some of them sponsored by the
UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council, or by their own governments."
Two former colleagues of Mifsud's, Roh and Pastor, recently interviewed him for a book
they have written. Those authors could very well be biased, but one of them makes a valid
point, similar to one that Daniel Lazare makes above:
"Given the affiliations of Link's faculty and staff, as well as Mifsud's pedigree, Roh thinks
it's impossible that the man he hired as a business development consultant is a Russian
agent."
Politically, Mifsud identifies with the Clintons more than anyone else, and claims to
belong to the Clinton Foundation, which has often been accused of being just a way of
funneling money into Hillary Clinton's campaign.
As Lee Smith says, if Mifsud really is a Russian spy, "Western intelligence services are
looking at one of the largest and most embarrassing breaches in a generation. But none of the
governments or intelligence agencies potentially compromised is acting like there's anything
wrong."
From all that we know about Joseph Mifsud, it's safe to say that he was never a Russian
spy. If not, then what was he doing when he was allegedly feeding stories to George
Papadopoulos about Russians having 'dirt' on Clinton?
I read somewhere that Mifsud had disappeared. Was that true? If so, is he back, or still
missing?
Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 6:21 pm
Here are some excerpts that will answer your question from an article by Lee Smith at
Realclearinvestigations, "The Maltese Phantom of Russiagate".
A new book by former colleagues of Mifsud's – Stephan Roh, a 50-year-old
Swiss-German lawyer, and Thierry Pastor, a 35-year-old French political analyst –
reports that he is alive and well. Their account includes a recent interview with him.
Their self-published book, "The Faking of Russia-gate: The Papadopoulos Case, an
Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with Mifsud in which he denies saying
anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they write, stated "vehemently that he
never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos." Mifsud asked rhetorically: "From where
should I have this [information]?"
Mifsud's account seems to be supported by Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat who
alerted authorities about Papadopoulos. As reported in the Daily Caller, Downer said
Papadopoulos never mentioned emails; he spoke, instead, about the Russians possessing
material that could be damaging to Clinton. This new detail raises the possibility that
Mifsud, Papadopoulos' alleged source for the information, never said anything about
Clinton-related emails either.
In interviews with RealClearInvestigations, Roh and Pastor said Mifsud is anything but a
Russian spy. Rather, he is more likely a Western intelligence asset.
According to the two authors, it was a former Italian intelligence official, Vincenzo
Scotti, a colleague of Mifsud's and onetime interior minister, who told the professor to go
into hiding. "I don't know who was hiding him," said Roh, "but I'm sure it was organized by
someone. And I am sure it will be difficult to get to the bottom of it."
Toby McCrossin , June 1, 2018 at 1:54 am
" The Papadopoulos Case, an Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with
Mifsud in which he denies saying anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they
write, stated "vehemently that he never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos.""
Thank you for providing that explosive piece of information. If true, and I suspect it is,
that's one more nail in the Russiagate narrative. Who, then, is making the claim that Misfud
mentioned emails? The only source for the statement I can find is "court documents".
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:20 am
The election scams serve only to distract from the Israel-gate scandal and the oligarchy
destruction of our former democracy. Mr. Lazare neglects to tell us about that. All of
Hillary's top ten campaign bribers were zionists, and Trump let Goldman-Sachs take over the
economy. KSA and big business also bribed heavily.
We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for
democracy is lost.
We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and
foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious preference.
Otherwise the United States is lost, and our lives have no historical meaning beyond
slavery to oligarchy.
Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 9:51 am
You are right Sam. Israel does work the fence under the guise of the Breaking News.
Joe
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm
My response was that Israel massacres at the fence, ignored by the zionist US mass
media.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:48 am
The extreme wealth and privileges of oligarchy depend on the poverty and slavery of
others. Inequality of income is the root cause of most of our ills. Try to imagine what a
world of economic equals would be like. No striving for more and more wealth at the expense
of others. No wars. What would there be to fight over – everyone would be content with
what they already had.
If you automatically think such a world would be impossible, try to state why. You might
discover that the only obstacle to such a world is the greedy bastards who are sitting on top
of everybody, and will do anything to maintain their advantages.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:52 am
How do the oligarchs ensure your slavery? With the little green tickets they have hoarded
that the rest of us need just to eat and have a roof over our heads. The people sleeping in
the streets tell us the penalty for not being good slaves.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 12:50 pm
Very true, Mike. Those who say that equality or fairness of income implies breaking the
productivity incentive system are wrong. No matter how much or how little wage incentive we
offer for making an effort in work, we need not have great disparities of income. Those who
can work should have work, and we should all make an effort to do well in our work, but none
of us need the fanciest cars or grand monuments to live in, just to do our best.
Getting rid of oligarchy, and getting money out of mass media and elections, would be the
greatest achievement of our times.
Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 5:30 pm
An old socialist friend of my dad's generation who claimed to have read the biography of
Andrew Carnegie had told me over a few beers that Carnegie said, "that at a time when he was
paying his workers $5 a week he 'could' have been paying them $50 a day, but then he could
not figure out what kind of life they would lead with all that money". Think about it mike,
if his workers would have had that kind of money it would not be long before Carnegie's
workers became his competition and opened up next door to him the worst case scenario would
be his former workers would sell their steel at a cheaper price, kind of, well no exactly
like what Rockefeller did with oil, or as Carnegie did with steel innovation. How's that
saying go, keep them down on the farm . well. Remember Carnegie was a low level stooge for
the railroads at one time, and rose to the top .mike. Great point to make mike, because there
could be more to go around. Joe
Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:16 pm
"We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for
democracy is lost.
We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and
foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious
preference."
Good luck with that!!!
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:19 pm
Well, you are welcome to make suggestions on how to save the republic.
john wilson , May 31, 2018 at 9:10 am
The depths of the deep state has no limits, but as a UK citizen, I fail to see why the
American "spooks" need any help from we Brits when it comes state criminal activity. Sure, we
are masters at underhand dirty tricks, but the US has a basket full of tricks that 'Trump'
(lol) anything we've got. It was the Russians wot done mantra has been going on for many
decades and is ever good for another turn around the political mulberry tree of corruption
and underhand dealings. Whether the Democrats or the Republicans win its all the same to the
deep state as they are in control whoever is in the White House. Trump was an outsider and
there for election colour and the "ho ho ho" look what a great democracy we are, anyone can
be president. He is in fact the very essence of the 'wild card' and when he actually won
there was total confusion, panic, disbelief and probably terror in the caves and dungeons of
the deep state.
Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:33 am
I'm sure the result was so unexpected that the shadowy fixers, the IT mavens who could
have "adjusted" the numbers, were totally caught off guard and unable to do "cleanly." Not
that they didn't try to re-jigger the results in the four state recounts that were ordered,
but it was simply too late to effectively cheat at that point, as there were already massive
overvotes detected in key urban precincts. Such a thing will never happen again, I am
sure.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:36 am
It appears that UK has long had a supply of anti-Russia fearmongers, presumably backed by
its anti-socialist oligarchy as in the US. Perhaps the US oligarchy is the dumbest salesman,
who believes that all customers are even dumber, so that UK can sell Russophobia here thirty
years after the USSR.
Bob Van Noy , May 31, 2018 at 8:49 am
"But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry
observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information
about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press."
Perfect.
Recently, while trying to justify my arguement that a new investigation into the RFK Killing
was necessary, I was asked why I thought that, and my response was "Modus operandi," exactly
what Robert Parry learned by experience, and that is the fundamental similarity to all of the
institutionalized crime that takes place by the IC. Once one realizes the literary approach
to disinformation that was fundamental to Alan Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, even Ian
Fleming, one can easily see the Themes being applied. I suppose that the very feature of
believability offered by propaganda, once recognized, becomes its undoing. That could be our
current reality; the old Lines simply are beginning to appear to be ridiculous
Thank you Daniel Lazar.
Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:39 am
The recognition of themes of propaganda as literary themes and modus operandi is helping
to discredit propaganda. The similarities of the CW false-flag operations (Iraq, Syria, and
UK), and the fake assassinations (Skripal and Babchenko) by the anti-Russia crowd help reveal
and persuade on the falsehood of the Iraq WMD, Syria CW, and MH-17 propaganda ops. Just as
the similarities of the JFK/MLK/RFK assassinations persuade us that commonalities exist long
before we see evidence.
Bob Van Noy , June 1, 2018 at 1:11 pm
Many thanks Sam F for recognizing that. As we begin to achieve a resolution of the 60's
Kllings, we can begin to see the general and specific themes utilized to direct the programs
of Assassination. The other aspect is that real investigation Never followed; and that took
Real Power.
In a truly insightful book by author Sally Denton entitled "The Profiteers" she puts
together a very cogent theory that it isn't the Mafia, it's the Syndicate, which means (for
me at least) real, criminal power with somewhat divergent interests ok with one another, to
the extent that they can maintain their Own Turf. I think that's a profound insight
Too, in a similar vain, the Grand Deceptions of American Foreign Policy, "scenarios" are
simply and only that, not a Real possible solution. Always resulting in failure
Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 9:23 pm
Yes, it is difficult to determine the structure of a subculture of gangsterism in power,
which can have many specialized factions in loose cooperation, agreeing on some general
policy points, like benefits for the rich, hatred of socialism, institutionalized bribery of
politicians and judges, militarized policing, destruction of welfare and social security,
deregulation of everything, essentially the neocon/neolib line of the DemReps. The party line
of oligarchy in any form.
Indeed the foreign policy of such gangsters is designed to "fail" because destruction of
cultures, waste, and fragmentation most efficiently exploits the bribery structure available,
and serves the anti-socialist oligarchy. Failure of the declared foreign policy is success,
because that is only propaganda to cover the corruption.
You know, not only Gay Trowdy but even Dracula Napolitano think people like Lazare ,
McGovern, etc. are overblown on this issue.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 1:47 pm
SocraticGadfly – Trey Gowdy hasn't even seen the documents yet, so he's hardly in a
position to say anything. The House Intelligence Committee, under Chairman Nunes, are being
stymied by the FBI and the Department of Justice who are refusing to hand over documents.
Refusing! Refusing to disclose documents to the very people who, by law, have oversight.
Nunes is threatening to hit them with Contempt of Congress.
Let's see the documents. Then Trey Gowdy can open his mouth.
What I take from this head spinning article is the paragraph about Carter Page.
"On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in
which he complained that "Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential
progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality,
corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed "unease" that someone representing
the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's side in a growing neo-Cold War
Mr. Page hit the nail on the head. There is no greater sin to entrenched power than to
spell out what is going on with Russia. It helps us understand why terms like dupe and
naïve were stuck on Carter Page's back.. Truth to power is not always good for your
health.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:07 am
The tyrant accuses of disloyalty, all who question the reality of his foreign
monsters.
And so do his monster-fighting agencies, whose budgets depend upon the fiction.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 am
Daniel Lazare – good report. "It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth
degree." This wasn't a case of paranoia. This was a blatant attempt to bring down a rival
opponent and, failing that, the President of the United States. This was intentional and
required collusion between top officials of the government. They fabricated the phony Steele
dossier (paid for by the Clinton campaign), exonerated Hillary Clinton, and then went to town
on bringing down Trump.
"Was George Popodopolous set up?" Of course he was. Set up a patsy in order to give you
reason to carry out a phony investigation.
"If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged
themselves to notice." They're not befogged; they're following orders (the major television
and newspaper outfits). Without their 24/7 spin and lies, Russiagate would never have been
kept alive.
These guys got the biggest surprise of their life when Hillary Clinton lost the election.
None of this would have come out had she won. During the campaign, as Trump gained in the
polls, she was heard to say, "If they ever find out what we've done, we'll all hang."
I hope they see jail time for what they've done.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:38 am
Apparently what has come out so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Some are saying this
could lead all the way up to Obama. I hope not, but they have certainly done all they can to
ruin the Trump Presidency.
JohnM , May 31, 2018 at 9:58 am
I'm adjusting my tinfoil hat right now. I'm wondering if Skripal had something to do with
the Steel dossier. The iceberg may be even bigger than thought.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:18 am
It is known that Skripal's close friend living nearby was an employee of Steele's firm
Orbis.
Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 2:58 pm
Exactly, his name is Pablo Miller and he is the MI6 agent who initially recruited Sergei
Skripal. Miller worked for Orbis, Steele's company and listed that in his resume on LinkedIn
but later deleted it. But once it's on the internet it can always be found and it was and it
was published.
robjira , May 31, 2018 at 2:13 pm
John, both Moon Of Alabama and OffGuardian have had excellent coverage of the Skripal
affair. Informed opinions wonder if Sergei Skripal was one of Steele's "Russian sources," and
that he may have been poisoned for the purpose of either a) bolstering the whole "Russia =
evil" narrative, or b) a warning not to ask for more than what he may have conceivably
received for any contribution he may or may not have made to the "dossiere."
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:20 am
Interesting details in this article, but we have known this whole Russiagate affair was a
scam from the get go. It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over
Hillary. The chagrined dems came together and concocted their sore loser alibi – the
Russians did it. They scooped up a lot of pre-election dirt, rolled it into a ball and
directed it at Trump. It is a testament to the media's determination to stick with their
story, that in spite of not a single scrap of real evidence after over a year of digging by a
huge team of democratic hit men and women, this ridiculous story still has supporters.
David G , May 31, 2018 at 10:31 am
"It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over Hillary."
Not so.
Daniel Lazare's first link in the above piece is to Paul Krugman's July 22, 2016 NY Times
op-ed, "Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate". (Note how that headline doesn't even bother to
employ a question mark.)
I appreciate that that Krugman column gets pride of place here since I distinctly remember
reading it in my copy of the Times that day, months before the election, and my immediate
reaction to it: nonplussed that such a risible thesis was being aired so prominently, along
with a deep realization that this was only the first shot in what would be a co-ordinated
media disinformation campaign, à la Saddam's WMDs.
Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 3:37 pm
Actually, I think the intelligence agencies' (CIA/FBI/DNI) plan started shortly after
Trump gave the names of Page and Papadopoulos to the Washington Post (CIA annex) in a meeting
on March 21, 2016 outlining his foreign policy team.
Carter Page (Naval Academy distinguished graduate and Naval intelligence officer) in 2013
worked as an "under-cover employee" of the FBI in a case that convicted Evgeny Buryakov and
it was reported that he was still an UCE in March of 2016. The FBI never charged or even
hinted that Page was anything but innocent and patriotic. However, in October 2016 the FBI
told the FISA Court that he was a spy to support spying on him. Remember the FISA Court
allows spying on him AND the persons he is in contact, which means almost everyone on the
Trump transition team/administration.
Here is an excerpt from an article by WSJ's Kimberley Strassel:
In "late spring" of 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed White House "National
Security Council Principals" that the FBI had counterintelligence concerns about the Trump
campaign. Carter Page was announced as a campaign adviser on March 21, and Paul Manafort
joined the campaign March 29. The briefing likely referenced both men, since both had
previously been on the radar of law enforcement. But here's what matters: With this briefing,
Mr. Comey officially notified senior political operators on Team Obama that the bureau had
eyes on Donald Trump and Russia. Imagine what might be done in these partisan times with such
explosive information.
And what do you know? Sometime in April, the law firm Perkins Coie (on behalf the Clinton
campaign) hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion turned its attention to Trump-Russia connections.
David G , May 31, 2018 at 4:56 pm
Most interesting, Chet Roman. Thanks.
My understanding is that Trump more or less pulled Page's name out of a hat to show the
WashPost that he had a "foreign policy team", and thus that his campaign wasn't just a hollow
sham, but that at that point he really had had no significant contact at all with Page
– maybe hadn't even met him. It was just a name from his new political world that
sprang to "mind" (or the Trumpian equivalent).
Of course, the Trump campaign *was* just a sham, by conventional Beltway standards: a
ramshackle road show with no actual "foreign policy team", or any other policy team.
So maybe that random piece of B.S. from Trump has caused him a heap of trouble. This is
part of why – no matter how bogus "Russia-gate" is – I just can't bring myself to
feel sorry for old Cheeto Dust.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 6:56 am
Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal had some good advice:
"Mr. Trump has an even quicker way to bring the hostility to an end.
He can – and should – declassify everything possible, letting Congress and the
public see the truth.
That would put an end to the daily spin and conspiracy theories. It would puncture
Democratic arguments that the administration is seeking to gain this information only for
itself, to "undermine" an investigation.
And it would end the Justice Department's campaign of secrecy, which has done such harm to
its reputation with the public and with Congress."
What do you bet he does?
RickD , May 31, 2018 at 6:44 am
I have serious doubts about the article's veracity. There seems to be a thread running
through it indicating an attempt to whitewash any Russian efforts to get Trump elected. To
dismiss all the evidence of such efforts, and , despite this author's words, there is enough
such evidence, seems more than a bit partisan.
What evidence? I've seen none so far. A lot of claims that there is such evidence but no
one seems to ever say what it is.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:06 am
RickD – thanks for the good laugh before bedtime. I'm with Mr. Merrell and I
actually want to see some evidence. Maybe it was Professor Halper in the kitchen with the
paring knife.
Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:21 am
Unfortunately, what this guy says is what most Americans still seem to believe. When I ask
people what is the actual hard evidence for "Russiagate" (because I don't know of any that
has been corroborated), I get a response that there have been massive examples of Russian
hacks, Russian posts, tweets and internet adverts–all meant to sabotage Hillary's
candidacy, and very effective, mind you. Putin has been an evil genius worthy of a comic book
villain (to date myself, a regular Lex Luthor). Sez who, ask I? Sez the trustworthy American
media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know, professional paragons of virtue
like Rachel Maddow and her merry band.
Nobody seems aware of the recent findings about Halpern, none seem to have a realistic
handle on the miniscule scope of the Russian "offenses" against American democracy. Rachel,
the NY Times and WaPo have seen to that with their sins of both commission and omission. Even
the Republican party is doing a half-hearted job of defending its own power base with
rigorous and openly disseminated fact checking. It's like even many of the committee chairs
with long seniority are reluctant to buck the conventional narrative peddled by the media.
Many have chosen to retire rather than fight the media and the Deep State. What's a better
interpretation of events? Or is one to believe that the silent voices, curious retirements
and political heat generated by the Dems, the prosecutors and the media are all independent
variables with no connections? These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it,
especially when directed at them.
Personally, I think that not only the GOPers should be fighting like the devil to expose
the truth (which should benefit them in this circumstance) but so should the media and all
the watchdog agencies (ngo's) out there because our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT by
the Russians. Worse than that, it was done by internal domestic enemies of the people who
must be outed and punished to save the constitution and the republic, if it is not too late.
All the misinformation by influential insiders and the purported purveyors of truth
accompanied by the deliberate silence by those who should be chirping like birds suggests it
may well be far too late.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:53 pm
Realist – a most excellent post! Some poll result I read about the other day
mentioned that well over half of the American public do NOT believe what they are being told
by the media. That was good to hear. But you are right, there are still way too many who
never question anything. If I ever get in trouble, I wouldn't want those types on my jury.
They'd be wide awake during the prosecution's case and fast asleep during my defense.
This is the Swamp at work on both sides of the aisle. Most of the Republicans are hanging
Trump out to dry. They've probably got too much dirt they want to keep hidden themselves, so
retirement looks like a good idea. Get out of Dodge while the going is good, before the real
fighting begins! The Democrats are battling for all they're worth, and I've got to hand it to
them – they're dirty little fighters.
Yes, democracy has been hijacked. Hard to say how long this has been going on –
maybe forever. If there is anything good about Trump's presidency, it's that the Deep State
is being laid out and delivered up on a silver platter for all to see.
There has never been a better chance to take back the country than this. If this
opportunity passes, it will never come again. They will make sure of it.
The greatest thing that Trump could do for the country would be to declassify all
documents. Jeff Sessions is either part of the Deep State or he's been scared off. He's not
going to act. Rosenstein is up to his eyeballs in this mess and he's not going to act. In
fact, he's preventing Nunes from getting documents. It is up to Trump to act. I just hope
he's not being surrounded by a bunch of bad apple lawyers who are giving him bad advice. He
needs to go above the Department of Justice and declassify ALL documents. If he did that, a
lot of these people would probably die of a heart attack within a minute.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:11 am
You sure came out of the woodwork quickly to express your "serious doubts" RickD.
Skip Scott , May 31, 2018 at 8:07 am
Please provide "such evidence". I've yet to see any. The entire prosecution of RussiaGate
has been one big Gish Gallop.
strgr-tgther , May 31, 2018 at 9:39 pm
RickD – Thank you for pointing that out! You were the only one!!! It is a very
strange article leaving Putin and the Russians evidence out and also not a single word about
Stromy Daniels witch is also very strange. I know Hillary would never have approved of any of
this and they don't say that either.
John , June 1, 2018 at 2:26 am
What does Stormy Daniels have to do with RussiaGate?
You know that someone who committed the ultimate war crime by lying us into war to destroy
Libya and re-institute slavery there, and who laughed after watching video of a man that
Nelson Mandela called "The Greatest Living Champion of Human Rights on the Planet" be
sodomized to death with a knife, is somehow too "moral" to do such a thing? Really?
It amazes me how utterly cultish those who support the Red Queen have shown themselves to
be – without apparently realizing that they are obviously on par with the followers of
Jim Jones!
strgr-tgther , June 1, 2018 at 12:17 pm
That is like saying what does income tax have to do with Al Capone. Who went to Alctraz
because he did not pay income tax not for being a gangster. So we know Trump has sexual
relations with Stormy Daniels, then afterward PAID her not to talk about it. So he paid Story
Daniels for sex! That is Prostitution! Same thing. And that is inpeachable, using womens
bodies as objects. If we don't prosecute Trump here then from now on all a John needs to say
to the police is that he was not paying for sex but paying to keep quiet about it. And
Cogress can get Trump for prostitution and disgracing the office of President. Without Russia
investigations we would never have found out about this important fact, so that is what it
has to do with Russia Gate.
"... That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say. ..."
"... The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack. ..."
"... "No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.] ..."
"... "Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since . ..."
"... "More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi." ..."
"... The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "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."Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ] ..."
"... Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies. MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers. ..."
"... The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. ..."
"... I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed out" propaganda. One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not. No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply." ..."
"... There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths. ..."
"... Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked" to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another ..."
"... (FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and printed. ..."
"... Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden. ..."
"... Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their "investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again. ..."
"... Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's activities are a complete sham. ..."
"... Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely cause of the Russiagate scams. ..."
"... Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." ..."
"... For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic conspiracy. ..."
"... Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB drive, it is not a known. ..."
"... There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings. ..."
"... Don't forget this Twitter post by Wikileaks on October 30, 2016: Podesta: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082#efmAGSAH- ..."
"... Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face? ..."
"... If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars. ..."
"... My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody? ..."
If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked
into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand
close scrutiny . It
could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to
investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with
WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity -- including two "alumni" who were former
National Security Agency technical directors -- have long since concluded that Julian Assange
did not acquire what he called the "emails related to Hillary Clinton" via a "hack" by the
Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access
to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage
device -- probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained
this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.
On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted
that the "conclusions" of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to
WikiLeaks were "inconclusive." Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA "Intelligence Community Assessment of
Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections" of January 6, 2017, which tried to
blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained
no direct evidence of Russian involvement. That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of
that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian
intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to
WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.
Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA "assessment" became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff
(D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the
blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump. It simply could not have been that
Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself. No, it had
to have been the Russians.
Five days into the Trump presidency, I had a chance to
challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks.
Schiff still "can't share the evidence" with me or with anyone else, because it does not
exist.
WikiLeaks
It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that
Assange announced the pending publication of "emails related to Hillary Clinton," throwing the
Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of
Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders. When the emails
were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to
create what I call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the
emails by blaming Russia for their release.
Clinton's PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various
media outlets at the convention with instructions "to get the press to focus on something even
we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails
from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton." The
diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept shouting "The Russians did it," and gave
little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer'
Fox, Bernie didn't say nothin'.
Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating "forensic
facts" to "prove" the Russians did it. Here's how it played out:
June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish "emails related to
Hillary Clinton."
June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple
conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there
is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15, 2016: "Guccifer 2.0" affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the
"hack;" claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was
synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."
The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a
pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish
and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack.
Enter Independent Investigators
A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for
reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the "handpicked analysts"
who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do. The independent investigators found
verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5,
2016 showing that the "hack" that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or
anyone else.
Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for
example) by an insider -- the same process used by the DNC insider/leaker before June 12, 2016
for an altogether different purpose. (Once the metadata was found and the "fluid dynamics"
principle of physics applied, this was not difficult to
disprove the validity of the claim that Russia was responsible.)
One of these independent investigators publishing under the name of The Forensicator on May
31
published new evidence that
the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West Coast of the United States, and not
from Russia.
In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum to President Donald Trump we stated ,
"We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI."
Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be
related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this
general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA
documents that WikiLeaks labeled 'Vault 7.' WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or
former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the
information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.
"No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which
disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's
Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital
Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned
President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.]
Marbled
"Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it
race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described
and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part
3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too
delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has
never been mentioned since .
"The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, it seems, 'did not get the memo' in time. Her March
31
article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: 'WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA
cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations.'
"The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use
'obfuscation,' and that Marble source code includes a "de-obfuscator" to reverse CIA text
obfuscation.
"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post
report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by
WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution
double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian,
Korean, Arabic and Farsi."
A few weeks later William Binney, a former NSA technical, and I commented on
Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed version
published in The Baltimore Sun
The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was
neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his
associates "demons," and insisting; "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."Our July 24
Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like
it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we
know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and
with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [
President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017
VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together
at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary
straightforwardness. ]
We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin.
In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager
– to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7
disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's
technology enables hacking to be 'masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can
understand the origin' [of the hack] And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or
any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack.
"'Hackers may be anywhere,' he said. 'There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States
who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a
scenario? I can.'
New attention has been drawn to these issues after I discussed them in a widely published
16-minute
interview last Friday.
In view of the highly politicized environment surrounding these issues, I believe I must
append here the same notice that VIPS felt compelled to add to our key Memorandum of July 24,
2017:
"Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in
the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we
add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political
agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our
former intelligence colleagues.
"We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say
and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." The fact we find it
is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Savior in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer before serving as
a CIA analyst for 27 years. His duties included preparing, and briefing one-on-one, the
President's Daily Brief.
ThomasGilroy , June 9, 2018 at 9:44 am
"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post
report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by
WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic
attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in
Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi."
Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of
choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies.
MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to
blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the
supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US
allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not
capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of
the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during
the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis
could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth
Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted
by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers.
The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the
CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. It must be the Gulf of Tonkin all
over again. While Crowdstrike might have a "dubious professional record and multiple
conflicts of interest", their results were also confirmed by several other cyber-security
firms (Wikipedia):
cybersecurity experts and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant,
SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and the editor for Ars Technica, have rejected the claims of
"Guccifer 2.0" and have determined, on the basis of substantial evidence, that the
cyberattacks were committed by two Russian state-sponsored groups (Cozy Bear and Fancy
Bear).
Then there was Papadopoulas who coincidentally was given the information that Russia had
"dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Obviously, they were illegally
obtained (unless this was another CIA false flag operation). This was before the release of
the emails by WikiLeaks. This was followed by the Trump Tower meeting with Russians with
connections to the Russian government and the release of the emails by WikiLeaks shortly
thereafter. Additionally, Russia had the motive to defeat HRC and elect Trump. Yesterday,
Trump pushed for the reinstatement of Russia at the G-7 summit. What a shock! All known
evidence and motive points the finger directly at Russia.
Calling everything a false flag operation is really the easy way out, but ultimately, it
lets the responsible culprits off of the hook.
anon , June 9, 2018 at 11:28 am
I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed
out" propaganda.
One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not.
No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin
supply."
CitizenOne , June 8, 2018 at 11:40 pm
There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence
agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false
flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false
flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible
to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths.
In pre computer technology days there were also many false flags which were set up to
create real world scenarios which suited the geopolitical agenda. Even today, there are many
examples of tactical false flag operations either organized and orchestrated or utilized by
the intelligence agencies to create the narrative which supports geopolitical objectives.
Examples:
The US loaded munitions in broad daylight visible to German spies onto the passenger ship
Lusitania despite German warnings that they would torpedo any vessels suspected of carrying
munitions. The Lusitania then proceeded to loiter unaccompanied by escorts in an area off the
Ireland coast treading over the same waters until it was spotted by a German U-Boat and was
torpedoed. This was not exactly a false flag since the German U-Boat pulled the trigger but
it was required to gain public support for the entrance of the US into WWI. It worked.
There is evidence that the US was deliberately caught "off guard" in the Pearl Harbor
Attack. Numerous coded communication intercepts were made but somehow the advanced warning
radar on the island of Hawaii was mysteriously turned off in the hours before and during the
Japanese attack which guaranteed that the attack would be successful and also guaranteed that
our population would instantly sign on to the war against Japan. It worked.
There is evidence that the US deliberately ignored the intelligence reports that UBL was
planning to conduct an attack on the US using planes as bombs. The terrorists who carried out
the attacks on the twin towers were "allowed" to conduct them. The result was the war in Iraq
which was sold based on a pack of lies about WMDs and which we used to go to war with
Iraq.
The Tonkin Gulf incident which historians doubt actually happened or believe if it did was
greatly exaggerated by intelligence and military sources was used to justify the war in
Vietnam.
The Spanish American War was ginned up by William Randolph Hearst and his yellow
journalism empire to justify attacking Cuba, Panama and the Philippines. The facts revealed
by forensic analysis of the exploded USS Maine have shown that the cataclysm was caused by a
boiler explosion not an enemy mine. At the time this was also widely believed to not be
caused by a Spanish mine in the harbor but the news sold the story of Spanish treachery and
war was waged.
In each case of physical false flags created on purpose, or allowed to happen or just made
up by fictions based on useful information that could be manipulated and distorted the US was
led to war. Some of these wars were just wars and others were wars of choice but in every
case a false flag was needed to bring the nation into a state where we believed we were under
attack and under the circumstances flocked to war. I will not be the judge of history or
justice here since each of these events had both negative and positive consequences for our
nation. What I will state is that it is obvious that the willingness to allow or create or
just capitalize on the events which have led to war are an essential ingredient. Without a
publicly perceived and publicly supported cause for war there can be no widespread support
for war. I can also say our leaders have always known this.
Enter the age of technology and the computer age with the electronic contraptions which
enable global communication and commerce.
Is it such a stretch to imagine that the governments desire to shape world events based on
military actions would result in a plan to use these modern technologies to once again create
in our minds a cyber scenario in which we are once again as a result of the "cyber" false
flag prepared for us to go to war? Would it be too much of a stretch to imagine that the
government would use the new electronic frontier just as it used the old physical world
events to justify military action?
Again, I will not go on to condemn any action by our military but will focus on how did we
get there and how did we arrive at a place where a majority favored war.
Whether created by physical or cyberspace methods we can conclude that such false flags
will happen for better or worse in any medium available.
susan sunflower , June 8, 2018 at 7:52 pm
I'd like "evidence" and I'd also like "context" since apparently international electoral
"highjinks" and monkey-wrenching and rat-f*cking have a long tradition and history (before
anyone draws a weapon, kills a candidate or sicc's death squads on the citizenry.
The DNC e-mail publication "theft" I suspect represents very small small potatoes for so
many reasons As Dixon at Black Agenda Report put it . Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism
writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked"
to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another
(FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund
marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy
targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is
able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and
printed.
Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as
source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal
State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden.
Skip Scott , June 8, 2018 at 1:07 pm
I can't think of any single piece of evidence that our MSM is under the very strict
control of our so-called intelligence agencies than how fast and completely the Vault 7
releases got flushed down the memory hole. "Nothing to see here folks, move along."
I don't think anyone can predict whether or not Sanders would have won as a 3rd party
candidate. He ran a remarkable campaign, but when he caved to the Clinton machine he lost a
lot of supporters, including me. If he had stood up at the convention and talked of the DNC
skullduggery exposed by Wikileaks, and said "either I run as a democrat, or I run as a Green,
but I'm running", he would have at least gotten 15 pct to make the TV debates, and who knows
what could have happened after that. 40 pct of registered voters didn't vote. That alone
tells you it is possible he might have won.
Instead he expected us to follow him like he was the f'ing Pied Piper to elect another
Wall St. loving warmonger. That's why he gets no "pass" from me. He (and the Queen of Chaos)
gave us Trump. BTW, Obama doesn't get a "pass" either.
willow , June 8, 2018 at 9:24 pm
It's all about the money. A big motive for the DNC to conjure up Russia-gate was to keep
donors from abandoning any future
Good Ship Hillary or other Blue Dog Democrat campaigns: "Our brand/platform wasn't flawed. It
was the Rooskies."
Vivian O'Blivion , June 8, 2018 at 8:22 am
An earlier time line.
March 14th. Popadopoulos has first encounter with Mifsud.
April 26th. Mifsud tells Popadopoulos that Russians have "dirt" on Clinton, including "thousands of e-mails".
May 4th. Trump last man standing in Republican primary.
May 10th. Popadopoulos gets drunk with London based Australian diplomat and talks about "dirt" but not specifically
e-mails.
June 9th. Don. Jr meets in Trump tower with Russians promising "dirt" but not specifically in form of e-mails.
It all comes down to who Mifsud is, who he is working for and why he has been "off grid" to journalists (but not presumably
Intelligence services) for > 6 months.
Specific points.
On March 14th Popadopoulos knew he was transferring from team Carson to team Trump but this was not announced to the
(presumably underwhelmed) world 'till March 21st. Whoever put Mifsud onto Popadopoulos was very quick on their feet.
The Australian diplomat broke chain of command by reporting the drunken conversation to the State Department as opposed to his
domestic Intelligence service. If Mifsud was a western asset, Australian Intelligence would likely be aware of his status.
If Mifsud was a Russian asset why would demonstrably genuine Russians be trying to dish up the dirt on Clinton in June?
There are missing pieces to this jigsaw puzzle but it's starting to look like a deep state operation to dirty Trump in the
unlikely event that he went on to win.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:28 pm
Ms. Clinton was personally trying to tar Trump with allusions to "Russia" and being
"Putin's puppet" long before he won the presidency, in fact, quite conspicuously during the
two conventions and most pointedly during the debates. She was willing to use that ruse long
before her defeat at the ballot box. It was the straw that she clung to and was willing to
use as a pretext for overturning the election after the unthinkable happened. But, you are
right, smearing Trump through association with Russia was part of her long game going back to
the early primaries, especially since her forces (both in politics and in the media) were
trying mightily to get him the nomination under the assumption that he would be the easiest
(more like the only) Republican candidate that she could defeat come November.
Wcb , June 8, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Steven Halper?
Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:33 am
I might add to this informative article that the reason why Julian Assange has been
ostracized and isolated from any public appearance, denied a cell phone, internet and
visitors is that he tells the truth, and TPTB don't want him to say yet again that the emails
were leaked from the DNC. I've heard him say it several times. H. Clinton was so shocked and
angry that she didn't become president as she so confidently expected that her, almost
knee-jerk, reaction was to find a reason that was outside of herself on which to blame her
defeat. It's always surprised me that no one talks about what was in those emails which
covered her plans for Iran and Russia (disgusting).
Trump is a sociopath, but the Russians had nothing to do with him becoming elected. I was
please to read here that he or perhaps just Pompeo? met with Binney. That's a good thing,
though Pompeo, too, is unstable and war hungry to follow Israel into bombing yet another
innocent sovereign country. Thank, Mr. McGovern for another excellent coverage of this
story.
MLS , June 7, 2018 at 9:59 pm
"no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team"
Do tell, Ray: How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's investigation –
with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks – has and has not
done?
strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:14 am
MLS: Thank you! No one stands up for what is right any more. We have 17 Intelligency
agencies that say are election was stolen. And just last week the Republicans Paul Ryan,
Mitch McConnel and Trey Gowdy (who I detest) said the FBI and CIA and NSA were just doing
there jobs the way ALL AMERICANS woudl want them to. And even Adam Schiff, do you think he
will tell any reporter what evidence he does have? #1 It is probably classified and #2 he is
probably saving it for the inpeachment. We did not find out about the Nixon missing 18
minutes until the end anyways. All of these articles sound like the writer just copied Sean
Hannity and wrote everything down he said, and yesterday he told all suspects in the Mueller
investigation to Smash and Bleach there mobile devices, witch is OBSTRUCTION of justice and
witness TAMPERING. A great American there!
Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:48 am
strgr-tgther:
Sean Hannity??? Ha, ha, ha.
As Mr. McGoven wrote .."any resemblance between what we say and what presidents,
politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental."
John , June 8, 2018 at 5:48 am
Sorry I had to come back and point out the ultimate irony of ANYONE who supports the
Butcher of Libya complaining about having an election stolen from them (after the blatant
rigging of the primary that caused her to take the nomination away from the ONE PERSON who
was polling ahead of Trump beyond the margin of error of the polls.)
It is people like you who gave us Trump. The Pied Piper Candidate promoted by the DNC
machine (as the emails that were LEAKED, not "hacked", as the metadata proves conclusively,
show.)
incontinent reader , June 8, 2018 at 7:14 am
What is this baloney? Seventeen Intelligence agencies DID NOT conclude what you are
alleging, And in fact, Brennan and his cabal avoided using a National intelligence Estimate,
which would have shot down his cherry-picked 'assessment' before it got off the ground
– and it would have been published for all to read.
The NSA has everything on everybody, yet has never released anything remotely indicating
Russian collusion. Do you think the NSA Director, who, as you may recall, did not give a
strong endorsement to the Brennan-Comey assessment, would have held back from the Congress
such information, if it had existed, when he was questioned? Furthermore, former technical
directors of the NSA, Binney, Wiebe and Loomis- the very best of the best- have proven
through forensics that the Wikileaks disclosures were not obtained by hacking the DNC
computers, but by a leak, most likely to a thumb drive on the East Coast of the U.S. How many
times does it have to be laid out for you before you are willing and able to absorb the
facts?
As for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, (and Trey Gowdy, who was quite skilled on the
Benghazi and the Clinton private email server investigations- investigations during which
Schiff ran interference for Clinton- but has seemed unwilling to digest the Strozk, Page,
McCabe, et al emails and demand a Bureau housecleaning), who cares what they think or say,
what matters is the evidence.
I suggest you familiarize yourself with the facts- and start by rereading Ray's articles,
and the piece by Joe diGenova posted on Ray's website.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:12 pm
The guy's got Schiff for brains. Everyone who cares about the truth has known since before
Mueller started his charade that the "17 intelligence agency" claim was entirely a ruse,
bald-faced confected propaganda to anger the public to support the coup attempted by Ms.
Clinton and her zombie followers. People are NOT going to support the Democratic party now or
in the future when its tactics include subverting our public institutions, including the
electoral process under the constitution–whether you like the results or not! If the
Democratic party is to be saved, those honest people still in it should endeavor to drain the
septic tank that has become their party before we can all drain the swamp that is the federal
government and its ex-officio manipulators (otherwise known as the "deep state") in
Washington.
Farmer Pete , June 8, 2018 at 7:30 am
"We have 17 Intelligency agencies that say are election was stolen."
You opened up with a talking point that is factually incorrect. The team of hand-picked
spooks that slapped the "high confidence" report together came from 3 agencies. I know, 17
sounds like a lot and very convincing to us peasants. Regardless, it's important to practice
a few ounces of skepticism when it comes to institutions with a long rap sheet of crime and
deception. Taking their word for it as a substitute for actual observable evidence is naive
to say the least. The rest of your hollow argument is filled with "probably(s)". If I were
you, I'd turn off my TV and stop looking for scapegoats for an epically horrible presidential
campaign and candidate.
strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:50 pm
/horrible presidential campaign and candidate/ Say you. But we all went to sleep
comfortable the night before the election where 97% of all poles said Clinton was going to be
are next President. And that did not happen! So Robert Mueller is going to find out EXACTLY
why. Stay tuned!!!
irina , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm
Not 'all'. I knew she was toast after reading that she had cancelled her election night
fireworks
celebration, early on the morning of Election Day. She must have known it also, too.
And she was toast in my mind after seeing the ridiculous scene of her virtual image
'breaking the glass ceiling' during the Democratic Convention. So expensively stupid.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:50 pm
Mueller is simply orchestrating a dramatic charade to distract you from the obvious reason
why she lost: Trump garnered more electoral votes, even after the popular votes were counted
and recounted. Any evidence of ballot box stuffing in the key states pointed to the
Democrats, so they gave that up. She and her supporters like you have never stopped trying to
hoodwink the public either before or after the election. Too many voters were on to you,
that's why she lost.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:57 pm
Indeed, stop the nonsense which can't be changed short of a coup d'etat, and start
focusing on opposing the bad policy which this administration has been pursuing. I don't see
the Dems doing that even in their incipient campaigns leading up to the November elections.
Fact is, they are not inclined to change the policies, which are the same ones that got them
"shellacked" at the ballot box in 2016. (I think Obama must own lots of stock in the shellack
trade.)
Curious , June 8, 2018 at 6:27 pm
Ignorance of th facts keep showing up in your posts for some unknown reason. Sentence two:
"we have 17 intelligency (sic) agencies that say ". this statement was debunked a long time
ago.
Have you learned nothing yet regarding the hand-picked people out of three agencies after all
this time? Given that set of lies it makes your post impossible to read.
I would suggest a review of what really happened before you perpetuate more myths and this
will benefit all.
Also, a good reading of the Snowden Docs and vault 7 should scare you out of your shell since
our "intelligeny" community can pretend to be Chinese, Russian, Iranian just for starters,
and the blame game can start after hours instead of the needed weeks and/or months to
determine the veracity of a hack and/or leak.
It's past trying to win you over with the actual 'time lines' and truths. Mr McGovern has
re-emphasized in this article the very things you should be reading.
Start with Mr Binney and his technical evaluation of the forensics in the DNC docs and build
out from there This is just a suggestion.
What never ceases to amaze me in your posts is the 'issue' that many of the docs were
bought and paid for by the Clinton team, and yet amnesia has taken over those aspects as
well. Shouldn't you start with the Clintons paying for this dirt before it was ever
attributed to Trump?
Daniel , June 8, 2018 at 6:38 pm
Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on
their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their
"investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry
picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again.
More than 1/2 of their report was about RT, and even though that was all easily viewable
public record, they got huge claims wrong. Basically, the best they had was that RT covered
Occupy Wall Street and the NO DAPL and BLM protests, and horror of horrors, aired third party
debates! In a democracy! How dare they?
Why didn't FBI subpoena DNC's servers so they could run their own forensics on them? Why
did they just accept the claims of a private company founded by an Atlantic Council board
member? Did you know that CrowdStrike had to backpedal on the exact same claim they made
about the DNC server when Ukraine showed they were completely wrong regarding Ukie
artillery?
Joe Lauria , June 8, 2018 at 2:12 am
Until he went incommunicado Assange stated on several occasions that he was never
questioned by Muellers team. Craig Murray has said the same. And Kim Dotcom has written to
Mueller offering evidence about the source and he says they have never replied to him.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm
Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to
divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the
truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's
activities are a complete sham.
MLS wrote, "How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's
investigation – with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks
– has and has not done?"
Robert Mueller is NOT a Special Prosecutor appointed by the Congress. He is a special
counsel appointed by the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, and is part of the
Department of Justice.
I know no one who dislikes Trumps wants to hear it. But all Mueller's authority and power
to act is derived from Donald J. Trump's executive authority because he won the 2016
presidential election. Mueller is down the chain of command in the Executive Department.
That's why this is all nonsense. What we basically have is Trump investigating himself.
The framers of the Constitution never intended this. They intended Congress to investigate
the Executive and that's why they gave Congress the power to remove him or her via
impeachment.
As long as we continue with this folly of expecting the Justice Department to somehow
investigate and prosecute a president we end up with two terrible possibilities. Either a
corrupt president will exercise his legitimate authority to end the investigation like Nixon
did -or- we have a Deep State beyond the reach of the elected president that can effectively
investigate and prosecute a corrupt president, but also then has other powers with no
democratic control.
The solution to this dilemma? An empowered Congress elected by the People operating as the
Constitution intended.
As to the rest of your post? It is an example of the "will to believe." Me? I'll not act
as if there is evidence of Russian interference until I'm shown evidence, not act as if it
must be true, because I want to believe that, until it's fully proven that it didn't
happen.
F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 8:22 pm
There must be some Trump-Russia ties.
Or so claim those CIA spies-
McCabe wants a deal, or else he won't squeal,
He'll dissemble when he testifies!
No one knows what's on Huma's computer.
There's no jury and no prosecutor.
Poor Adam Schiff hopes McCabe takes the fifth,
Special council might someday recruit her!
Assange is still embassy bound.
Mueller's case hasn't quite come unwound.
Wayne Madsen implies that there might be some ties,
To Israelis they haven't yet found!
Halper and Mifsud are players.
John Brennan used cutouts in layers.
If the scheme falls apart and the bureau is smart,
They'll go after them all as betrayers!
They needed historical fiction.
A dossier with salacious depiction!
Some urinous whores could get down on all fours,
They'd accomplish some bed sheet emiction!
Pablo Miller and Skripal were cited.
Sidney Blumenthal might have been slighted.
Christopher Steele offered Sidney a deal,
But the dossier's not copyrighted!
That story about Novichok,
Smells a lot like a very large crock.
But they can't be deposed or the story disclosed,
The Skripals have toxic brain block!
Papadopolis shot off his yap.
He told Downer, that affable chap-
There was dirt to report on the Clinton cohort,
Mifsud hooked him with that honey trap!
She was blond and a bombshell to boot.
Papadopolis thought she was cute.
She worked for Mifsud, a mysterious dude,
Now poor Paps is in grave disrepute!
But the trick was to tie it to Russians.
The Clinton team had some discussions.
Their big email scandal was easy to handle,
They'd blame Vlad for the bad repercussions!
There must have been Russian collusion.
That explained all the vote count confusion.
Guccifer Two made the Trump team come through,
If he won, it was just an illusion!
Lisa Page and Pete Strzok were disgusted
They schemed and they plotted and lusted.
If bald-headed Clapper appealed to Jake Tapper,
Brennan's Tweets might get Donald Trump busted!
There had to be cyber subversion.
It would serve as the perfect perversion.
They would claim it was missed if it didn't exist,
It's a logically perfect diversion!
F.G., you've done it again, and I might add, topped even yourself! Thanks.
KiwiAntz , June 7, 2018 at 7:30 pm
What a joke, America, the most dishonest Country on Earth, has meddled, murdered &
committed coups to overturn other Govts & interfered & continues to do so in just
about every Country on Earth by using Trade sanctions, arming Terrorists & illegal
invasions, has the barefaced cheek to puff out its chest & hypocritcally blame Russia for
something that it does on a daily basis?? And the point with Mueller's investigation is not
to find any Russian collusion evidence, who needs evidence when you can just make it up? The
point is provide the US with a list of unfounded lies & excuses, FIRSTLY to slander &
demonise RUSSIA for something they clearly didn't do! SECONDLY, was to provide a excuse for
the Democrats dismal election loss result to the DONALD & his Trump Party which just
happens to contain some Republicans? THIRDLY, to conduct a soft Coup by trying to get Trump
impeached on "TRUMPED UP CHARGES OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION"? And FOURTLY to divert attention away
from scrutiny & cover up Obama & Hillary Clinton's illegal, money grubbing activities
& her treasonous behaviour with her private email server?? After two years of Russiagate
nonsense with NOTHING to show for it, I think it's about time America owes Russia a public
apology & compensation for its blatant lying & slander of a innocent Country for a
crime they never committed?
Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 7:11 pm
Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely
cause of the Russiagate scams.
I am sure that they manipulate the digital voting machines directly and indirectly. True
elections are now impossible.
Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any
resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely
coincidental."
Antiwar7 , June 7, 2018 at 6:23 pm
Expecting the evil people running the show to respond to reason is futile, of course. All
of these reports are really addressed to the peanut gallery, where true power lies, if only
they could realize it.
Thanks, Ray and VIPS, for keeping up the good fight.
mike k , June 7, 2018 at 5:55 pm
For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which
pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering
a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic
conspiracy.
And BTW people have become shy about using the word conspiracy, for fear it will
automatically brand one as a hoaxer. On the contrary, conspiracies are extremely common, the
higher one climbs in the power hierarchy. Like monopolies, conspiracies are central to the
way the oligarchs do business.
John , June 8, 2018 at 5:42 am
Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in
knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is
involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB
drive, it is not a known.
There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that
the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth
Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being
done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated
reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings.
" whether or not"?!! Wow. That's an imperialistic statement.
Drew Hunkins , June 7, 2018 at 5:50 pm
Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic
charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and
Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the
mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by
Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was
the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable
DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his
crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they
even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?
So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to
their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was arguably in bed with the Winter Hill
Gang!
jose , June 7, 2018 at 5:13 pm
If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They
know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The
Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars.
Jeff , June 7, 2018 at 4:35 pm
Thanx, Ray. The sad news is that everybody now believes that Russia tried to "meddle" in
our election and, since it's a belief, neither facts nor reality will dislodge it. Your
disclaimer should also probably carry the warning – never believe a word a government
official says especially if they are in the CIA, NSA, or FBI unless they provide proof. If
they tell you that it's classified, that they can't divulge it, or anything of that sort, you
know they are lying.
john wilson , June 7, 2018 at 4:09 pm
I suspect the real reason no evidence has been produced is because there isn't any. I know
this is stating the obvious, but if you think about it, as long as the non extent evidence is
supposedly being "investigated" the story remains alive. They know they aren't going to find
anything even remotely plausible that would stand up to any kind of scrutiny, but as long as
they are looking, it has the appearance that there might be something.
Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 4:08 pm
I first want to thank Ray and the VIPS for their continuing to follow through on this
Russia-Gate story. And it is a story.
My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After
all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart
Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not
be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for
justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved
in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody?
Now we have Sean Hannity making a strong case against the Clinton's and the FBI's careful
handling of their crimes. What seems out of place, since this should be big news, is that CNN
nor MSNBC seems to be covering this story in the same way Hannity is. I mean isn't this news,
meant to be reported as news? Why avoid reporting on Hillary in such a manner? This must be
that 'fake news' they all talk about boy am I smart.
In the end I have decided to be merely an observer, because there are no good guys or gals
in our nation's capital worth believing. In the end even Hannity's version of what took place
leads back to a guilty Russia. So, the way I see it, the swamp is being drained only to make
more room for more, and new swamp creatures to emerge. Talk about spinning our wheels. When
will good people arrive to finally once and for all drain this freaking swamp, once and for
all?
Realist , June 7, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Ha, ha! Don't you enjoy the magic show being put on by the insiders desperately trying to
hang onto their power even after being voted out of office? Their attempt to distract your
attention from reality whilst feeding you their false illusions is worthy of Penn &
Teller, or David Copperfield (the magician). Who ya gonna believe? Them or your lying
eyes?
Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 10:00 pm
Realist, You can bet they will investigate everything but what needs investigated, as our
Politico class devolves into survivalist in fighting, the mechanism of war goes
uninterrupted. Joe
F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 5:34 pm
Joe, speaking of draining the swamp, check out my comment under Ray's June 1 article about
Freddy Fleitz!
Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 6:59 pm
That is just what I was reminded of; here is an antiseptic but less emphatic last
line:
"Swamp draining progresses apace.
It's being accomplished with grace:
They're taking great pains to clean out the drains,"
New swamp creatures will need all that space!
Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 11:00 am
We must realize that to them, "the Swamp" refers to those in office who still abide by New
Deal policy. Despite the thoroughly discredited neoliberal economic policy, the radical right
are driving the world in the libertarian direction of privatization, austerity, private bank
control of money creation, dismantling the nation-state, contempt for the Constitution,
etc.
In his final report in a three-part series, Guccifer 2's West
Coast Fingerprint , the Forensicator discovers evidence that at least one operator behind
the Guccifer 2.0 persona worked from the West Coast of the United States.
The Forensicator's earlier findings stated that Guccifer 2.0's NGP-VAN files were
accessed locally on the East Coast, and in another analysis they suggested
that a file published by Guccifer 2.0 was created in the Central time zone of the United
States. Most recently, a former DNC official refuted the DNC's initial allegations that Trump opposition files
had been ex-filtrated from the DNC by Russian state-sponsored operatives.
So, if Guccifer 2.0's role was negated by the statements of the DNC's own former "official"
in a 2017 report by the Associated Press
, why do we now return our attention to the Guccifer 2.0 persona, as we reflect on the last
section of new findings from the Forensicator?
The answer: Despite almost two years having passed since the appearance of the Guccifer 2.0
persona, legacy media is still trotting
out the shambling corpse of Guccifer 2.0 to revive the legitimacy of the Russian hacking
narrative. In other words, it is necessary to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the
Guccifer 2.0 persona.
As previously noted, In his final report in
a three-part series, the Forensicator
discusses concrete evidence that at least one operator behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona worked
from the West Coast of the United States. He writes:
"Finally, we look at one particular Word document that Guccifer 2 uploaded, which had
"track changes" enabled. From the tracking metadata we deduce the timezone offset in effect
when Guccifer 2 made that change -- we reach a surprising conclusion: The document was likely
saved by Guccifer 2 on the West Coast, US ."
The Forensicator spends the first part of his report evaluating indications that Guccifer
2.0 may have operated out of Russia. Ultimately, the Forensicator discards those tentative
results. He emphatically notes:
"The PDT finding draws into question the premise that Guccifer 2 was operating out of
Russia, or any other region that would have had GMT+3 timezone offsets in force. Essentially,
the Pacific Timezone finding invalidates the GMT+3 timezone findings previously
described."
The Forensicator's new West Coast finding is not the first evidence to indicate that
operators behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona were based in the US. Nine months ago,
Disobedient Media , reported on the Forensicator's analysis ,
which showed (among other things) that Guccifer 2.0's "ngpvan" archive was created on the East
Coast. While that report received the vast majority of attention from the public and legacy
media,
Disobedient Media later reported on another analysis done by the Forensicator, which
found that a file published by Guccifer 2.0 (on a different occasion) was probably created in
the Central Timezone of the US.
Adding to all of this, UK based analyst and independent journalist Adam Carter presented his own analysis which also showed
that the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter persona interacted on a schedule which was best explained by
having been based within the United States.
The chart above shows a box which spans regular working hours. It indicates that unless
Guccifer 2.0 worked the night shift, they were likely working out of the US. Though this last
data point is circumstantial, it is corroborated by the previously discussed pieces of
independently verifiable hard evidence described by the Forensicator.
When taking all of these separate pieces into account, one observes a convergence of
evidence that multiple US-based operators were behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona and its
publications. This is incredibly significant because it is based on multiple pieces of concrete
data; it does not rely on "anonymous sources within the government," nor contractors hired by
the DNC. As a result, much of the prior legacy press coverage of Guccifer 2.0 as a Russia-based
agent can be readily debunked.
Such tangible evidence stands in contrast to the claims made in a recently published
Daily Beast article, which reads more
like a gossip column than serious journalism. In the Daily Beast's recital, the outlet cites an
anonymous source who claims that a Moscow-based GRU agent was behind the Guccifer 2.0
operation, writing :
"Guccifer 2.0, the "lone hacker" who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen
emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia's military
intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It's an attribution that
resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.
But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN
client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address
in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with
the government's Guccifer investigation.
Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU
officer working out of the agency's headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow."
[The Daily Beast , March 22, 2018]
Clearly, the claim made in the Daily Beast's report is in direct contradiction with the
growing mound of evidence suggesting that Guccifer 2.0 operated out of the United States. A
detailed technical breakdown of the evidence confirming a West-Coast "last saved" time and how
this counters the claims of the Daily Beast can be found in the Forensicator's
work.
The Forensicator explained to Disobedient Media that their discovery process was initiated
by the following Tweet by Matt Tait ( @pwnallthings ), a security blogger and journalist.
Tait noticed a change revision entry in one of the Word documents published in Guccifer 2.0's
second
batch of documents, (uploaded 3 days after Guccifer 2.0 first appeared on the scene).
The Forensicator corrects Tait, stating that the timestamp is in "wall time," (local time)
not UTC. The Forensicator explains that Tait's mistake is understandable because the "Z" suffix
usually implies "Zulu" (GMT) time, but that isn't the case for "track changes" timestamps. The
Forensicator writes that the document Tait refers to in his Tweet is named
Hillary-for-America-fundraising-guidelines-from-agent-letter.docx ; it has Word's "track
changes" feature enabled. Guccifer 2.0 made a trivial change to the document, using the
pseudonym, "Ernesto Che," portrayed below:
The Forensicator correlated that timestamp ("12:56:00 AM") with the document's "last saved"
timestamp expressed in GMT, as shown below courtesy of the Forensicator's
study :
Based on the evidence discussed above, the Forensicator concludes that Guccifer 2.0 saved
this file on a system that had a timezone offset of -7 hours (the difference between 0:56 AM
and 7:56 AM GMT). Thus, the system where this document was last changed used Pacific Timezone
settings.
The logical conclusion drawn from the preceding analysis is that Guccifer 2.0 was operating
somewhere on the West Coast of the United States when they made their change to that document .
This single finding throws into shambles any other conclusions that might indicate that
Guccifer 2.0 was operating out of Russia. This latest finding also adds to the previously cited
evidence that the persona was probably operated by multiple individuals located in the United
States.
Taken all together, the factual basis of the Russian hacking story totally collapses. We are
left instead with multiple traces of a US-based operation that created the appearance of
evidence that Kremlin-allied hackers had breached the DNC network. Publicly available data
suggests that Guccifer 2.0 is a US-based operation. To this, we add:
The Forensicator's
recent findings that Guccifer 2.0 deliberately planted "Russian fingerprints" into his first
document, as reported by
Disobedient Media.
A former DNC official's statement that a document with so-called "Russian fingerprints"
was not in fact taken from the DNC, as reported by Disobedient
Media .
In the course of the last nine months this outlet has documented the work of the
Forensicator, which has indicated that not only were Guccifer 2.0's "ngp-van" files accessed
locally on the East Coast of the US, but also that several files published by the Guccifer 2.0
persona were altered and saved within the United States. The "Russian fingerprints" left on
Guccifer 2.0's first document have been debunked, as has the claim that the file itself was
extracted from the DNC network in the first place. On top of all this, a former DNC official
withdrew the DNC's initial allegations that supported the "Russian hack" claim in the first
place.
One hopes that with all of this information in mind, the long-suffering Guccifer 2.0 saga
can be laid to rest once and for all, at least for unbiased and critically thinking
observers.
Snowden talked about the NSA or is it CIA, had the ability to leave Russian
fingerprints.
All of this was the "insurance" to frame Trump who they knew would win when they saw that
Hillary rallies had 20 people only showing up few old lesbians and nobody else.
Meanwhile, Snowden risked his life and liberty to show us evidence that the NSA developed
technology to make it appear even with expert analysis that NSA hacking originated from a
foreign power.
Several of the parties being sued by the DNC have expressed their excitement over the
discovery process , by which they may get their hands on even more evidence which might
incriminate or exonerate various actors. President Trump, Roger Stone, and Wikileaks (which is
countersuing the DNC) have all noted that they're looking forward to checking out the
controversial "DNC Servers" which were allegedly hacked by Russia .
In response to the DNC
lawsuit, Trump tweeted that it could be good news that " we will now counter for the DNC Server
that they refused to give to the FBI," along with the "Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and
Documents ."
Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in
that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Debbie
Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton
Emails.
The Trump campaign also says the lawsuit will provide an opportunity to " explore the DNC's
now-secret records ."
And as we reported on Monday, WikiLeaks is
counter-suing the DNC - setting up a donation fund and noting "We've never lost a
publishing case and discovery is going to be amazing fun."
The Democrats are suing @WikiLeaks and @JulianAssange for revealing
how the DNC rigged the Democratic primaries. Help us counter-sue. We've never lost a
publishing case and discovery is going to be amazing fun: https://t.co/E1QbYJL4bB
DNC chair Tom Perez defended the lawsuit as "necessary," telling Meet the Press that they
had to file before the statue of limitations ran out, and that "it's hard to put a price tag on
preserving democracy."
David Pepper, chair of the Ohio Democratic Party is totally cool with the DNC lawsuit. "I
don't think it hurts," said Pepper. "If you have credible claims, you have a responsibility to
pursue legal action. I think you have a day or two where [the suit] is the story, but that's
different from your overall message."
" I wouldn't have our candidates spending the fall talking about Russia or the suit or
anything like that ," Pepper said.
"They should be focused on health care, education, student debt. We shouldn't divert the
message from those topics to talk about Russia. "
And yet, that's exactly what's going to happen as the DNC lawsuit plays out in the six
months and change before midterms.
"... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies. ..."
"... the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies. ..."
"... The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule. ..."
"... But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils. ..."
In a three-part series published last week,
the World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic
Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican
incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.
... ... ...
The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA,
NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus.
This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts"
for the television networks .
In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while essentially ignoring Trump's attacks
on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs
like Medicaid and food stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the
military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice.
This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the
intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen
candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation
with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.
The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its
operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that
score. A chorus of media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire editorial board
of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip
up support on alleged "human rights" grounds for an expansion of the US war in Syria.
The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers
to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic
Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining
the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.
The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence
operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience
invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given
preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.
The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration
has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened
its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.
The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of
American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose
interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class
is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.
Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry
out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx
of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that
the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the
corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.
The gloves are off in the multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) against the Trump campaign, Wikileaks and several other parties including the
Russian government, alleging an illegal conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 election in a "brazen
attack on American Democracy."
Many have suggested the lawsuit is a tactical error by the DNC, as it may expose or confirm
claims against the organization - such as whether they rigged the primary against Bernie
Sanders , the level of coordination between the DNC and the Clinton Campaign, and the details
surrounding the funding of the "Steele dossier," paid for in part by both the Clinton campaign
and the DNC .
The defendants - from President Trump, to Wikileaks - and now Roger Stone - are excited at
the prospect of examining the DNC servers which cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike determined were
victims of Russian hacking in advance of the 2016 elections. Notably, the DNC would not allow
the FBI or anyone else to inspect said servers .
To that end, Stone's attorneys have slapped the DNC with a notification to preserve evidence
related to the case with a "standard pre-discovery notice." Discovery is a pre-trial process by
which one party can obtain evidence from the opposing party relevant to the case.
My lawyers and I will demand to examine the DNC's servers and expose them to real forensic
analysis, not merely accepting the claims of the DNC's paid contractor , to finally
extinguish this bogus Russian hacking claim, once and for all . My lawyers have served the
DNC with standard pre-discovery notice directing the DNC of their obligation under law to
preserve all possible evidence, including their servers, for ultimate inspection and exposure
to critical review . As Julian Assange wrote on Twitter, via the WikiLeaks feed, " Discovery
is going to be fun ." - Roger Stone
Stone notes that "Former CIA experts like Bill Binney and Ray McGovern examined the basic
data available about the copying of DNC data and concluded that there is more forensic evidence
that the material was downloaded to a portable drive , meaning it had to be someone with
physical access to DNC computers ."
"Having made their computer systems the subject matter of multi-million dollar demands for
judicial relief, the DNC has now exposed them to the discovery process ," writes Stone.
In February, New Zealand entrepreneur Kim Dotcom responded to a tweet by President Trump,
claiming that "the DNC hack wasn't even a hack. It was an insider with a memory stick." Dotcom
says he knows "who did it and why," adding "Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my
evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied."
"... By now, everybody knows that this idea that Trump was colluding with the Russians in order to get them to do things like steal the DNC emails and then release them through WikiLeaks, the public knows that's just total baloney," ..."
"... "I knew the one man who could prove that it was all baloney was Assange. So I went to see him in London, and he confirmed for me that the Russians did not give him the DNC emails. He had physical proof of that, and he was going to let me see that and have that, but only once, I found an agreement so he wouldn't get arrested when he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy in London." ..."
In a recent
interview with Breitbart Radio, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who reportedly visited the
Ecuadorian embassy in London in August 2017 and met with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, said that
Assange has physical evidence to prove that Russia did not provide WikiLeaks with Democratic
National Committee (DNC) emails during the 2016 US presidential campaign.
"
By now, everybody knows that this idea that Trump was colluding with the Russians
in order to get them to do things like steal the DNC emails and then release them through
WikiLeaks, the public knows that's just total baloney," Rohrabacher said. "I knew the
one man who could prove that it was all baloney was Assange. So I went to see him in London,
and he confirmed for me that the Russians did not give him the DNC emails. He had physical
proof of that, and he was going to let me see that and have that, but only once, I found an
agreement so he wouldn't get arrested when he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy in London."
Rohrabacher added:
"Unfortunately, this was in the middle of having a special prosecutor, [and] any
discussion with Trump and myself that mentions Russia will be used as an excuse by that
special prosecutor to just quadruple all the areas of investigation into me and into Trump.
So it is standing there. I've been waiting because I know that we're not going to give this
special prosecutor any more ammunition than he needs to try to destroy this president."
Rohrabacher claimed that Assange had evidence and was willing to provide it in exchange for
US/UK authorities agreeing not to arrest him upon leaving the Ecuadorian embassy in London,
where the WikiLeaks co-founder has been "arbitrarily detained" under threat of arrest since
2012.
Assange first sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy after the UK sought to
arrest him on a Swedish warrant that has since been lifted. British authorities, thought to
operating covertly at the behest of the US -- due to a purported secret federal grand jury
indictment in the US for Assange -- insist they will arrest him if he attempts to leave the
embassy for violating the terms of his bail. It is believed that once arrested for the bail
violation in the UK, Assange would likely be extradited to the US under the sealed
indictment.
Following his meeting with Assange, Rohrabacher was denied
access to President Trump by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly due to Special Counsel
Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump-Russia collusion during the 2016 US presidential
election. In February, Rohrabacher "said he was told by Kelly that meeting with Trump could put
the president in unnecessary legal jeopardy," according to a report from The Intercept.
Rohrabacher also claimed that Assange "did not want to release the evidence publicly" because
he wanted to avoid exposing "his sources and methods."
The DNC and Hillary Clinton have continually accused WikiLeaks as acting as a "Russian
cutout" during the 2016 election, after the transparency organization published private emails
from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta as well as internal DNC emails. Assange says WikiLeaks
never releases sources, but has emphatically denied that the organization was supplied the
emails by Russia.
Craig Murray -- former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan and "close associate" of WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange -- publicly stated in a December 2016
interview with The Daily Mail that the Democratic National Committee's emails were obtained
by WikiLeaks from a "disgusted" DNC operative who had legal access to them, not Russia.
"Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians," Murray said. "The source had legal access
to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks."
Murray said the leakers were motivated by "disgust at the corruption of the Clinton
Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders."
The Daily Mail reported that Murray said he "retrieved the package from a source during a
clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the
individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an
intermediary."
An investigation into the alleged hack performed last year by Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) claimed that the "data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with
physical access to DNC computers." VIPS findings were
presented to CIA Director Mike Pompeo last November, reportedly at the direction of
President Trump.
Assange has been unable to publicly comment on Rohrabacher's statements, as the Ecuadorian
government has barred him from receiving visitor and suspended his
internet access for the past month.
This article was chosen for republication based on the interest of our readers.
Anti-Media republishes stories from a number of other independent news sources. The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect Anti-Media editorial
policy.
The father of Imran Awan - a longtime IT aide from Pakistan who made "unauthorized access" to the
House computer network -
reportedly transferred a USB drive to the former head of a
Pakistani intelligence agency
, alleges the father's ex-business partner, Rashid Minhas.
Imran Awan and wife Hina Alvi
Minhas told the
Daily Caller News Foundation
(DCNF) - which traveled to Pakistan to
interview those involved - that Haji Ashraf Awan, Imran Awan's father, had been giving information
to Rehman Malik - former head of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and current senator.
Malik was appointed to Interior Minister in early 2008, only to step down in 2013 after he lost a
Supreme Court hearing over holding dual UK citizenship.
Minhas told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Imran Awan's father, Haji Ashraf Awan, was
giving data to Pakistani official Rehman Malik, and that Imran bragged he had the power to "
change
the U.S. president.
"
Asked for how he knew this, he said that on one occasion in 2008 when a
"USB [was]
given to Rehman Malik by Imran's father, my brother Abdul Razzaq was with his father
."
-
DCNF
"After Imran's father deliver (sic) USB to Rehman Malik, four Pakistani [government
intelligence] agents were with his father 24-hour on duty to protect him," he said - however Minhas
did not say what was on the USB.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague (left), Rehman Malik
The House watchdog, Inspector General Michael Ptasienski, charged in September 30, 2016 that
data was being
siphoned off
of the House Network by the Awans as recently as two months before the US
presidential election.
The Awan family had virtually unlimited access to Democratic House members' computers, including
classified information.
Nearly Imran's entire immediate family was on the House payroll working as IT aides
to one-fifth of House Democrats
, and he began working for the House in 2004. The
inspector general, Michael Ptasienski, testified this month that "
system administrators
hold the 'keys to the kingdom' meaning they can create accounts, grant access, view, download,
update, or delete almost any electronic information within an office. Because of this high-level
access, a rogue system administrator could inflict considerable damage
." -
DCNF
According to Minhas - "Imran Awan said to me directly these words: '
See how I control
White House on my fingertip
' He say he can fire the prime minister or change the U.S.
president," Minhas said. "
Why the claiming big stuff, I [didn't] understand 'till now
."
"
I was Imran father's partner in Pakistan,
" Minhas said, in two land deals
in Pakistan so big that they are often referred to as "towns."
In 2009, both men were
accused of fraud
, and
Haji was arrested but then released after Imran flew to
Pakistan
, "allegedly exerting pressure on the local police through the ministry as
well as the department concerned," according to local news. Minhas and multiple alleged victims
in Pakistan also told TheDCNF
Imran exerted political influence in Pakistan to extricate
his father from the case
. -
DCNF
Minhas is currently sitting in US federal prison for fraud, and the
Daily Caller
says
they can not confirm whether Minhas' claims about the USB is true. That said,
Minhas says
that neither the DOJ nor the FBI ever interviewed him about the Awans
, which is odd
considering that he's available and connected to Imran Awan.
He is also one of many people with past relationships with the Awans who have said
they believe they are aggressive opportunists who will do
anything for money
.
And parts of Minhas's story correlate with observations
elsewhere. Haji's wife, Samina Gilani -- Imran's stepmother -- said in
court documents
that Imran used his IT skills to wiretap her as a means of exerting pressure
on her.
Haji would frequently boast that Imran's position gave him political leverage, numerous
Pakistani residents told TheDCNF. "
My son own White House in D.C.
," he would
say, according to Minhas. "
I am kingmaker
."
Senator Malik has denied any relationship with the parties reportedly involved, saying "I am
hearing their names for the first time. I am in public and people always do name-dropping."
Imran Awan's attorney Chris Gowen says Minhas's claims are
"completely and totally
false."
The Awans were banned from the congressional network on Feb 2, 2017 by House Seargant-At-Arms,
Paul Irving - after the IG report concluded that the Awans had been making "unauthorized access" to
House servers. The Awans
were logging in using Congressional members' personal usernames
,
as well as breaching servers for members they did not work for.
After several members fired
them, the Awans continued to access their data
, says the IG.
The behavior mirrored a "classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an
organization,"
and "steps are being taken [by the Awans] to conceal their activity," reads
the report.
Shortly before the 2016 election, the House Democratic Caucus server was breached by Awan - who
authorities believe secretly moved
all the data
of over 12 House members' offices onto the caucus server.
The server may have been "
used for nefarious purposes and elevated the risk that
individuals could be reading and/or removing information,
" an IG presentation said.
The Awans logged into it 27 times a day, far more than any other computer they
administered
.
Imran's most forceful advocate and longtime employer is Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie
Wasserman Schultz, who led the DNC until she resigned following a hack that exposed committee
emails. Wikileaks published those emails, and they show that
DNC staff summoned Imran
when they needed her password
. -
DCNF
Shortly after the IG report came out,
the House Democratic Caucus server - which the
Awans were funneling data onto,
was physically stolen
according to three
government officials. During the same period of time, the Awans were shedding assets at a rapid
pace.
In January 2017 they took out a loan intended for home improvement, falsely claimed a medical
emergency in order to cash out their House retirement account, and
wired $300,000
overseas
, according to an FBI affidavit. -
DCNF
The FBI arrested Imran Awan at Dulles Airport in July 2017 while trying to flee to Pakistan with
a wiped cell phone and a resume that listed a Queens, NY address. Imran and his wife, Hina Alvi,
were indicted last August on charges of bank fraud - which prosecutors contend was hastened
after the Awans had likely learned that authorities were closing in on them for various other
activities
.
That said, neither Imran nor Hina have been charged over the unauthorized access
concluded
by the House's own Inspector General,
after reviewing server logs. Three other suspects,
Jamal and Abid Awan, and Rao Abbas, have faced no charges whatsoever.
As
reported by The Gateway Pundit 's Jim Hoft, 27 year-old Democratic staffer Seth
Conrad Rich was murdered in Washington DC on July 10, 2016, roughly one block from his
apartment. The suspects
took nothing from Rich, leaving behind his wallet, watch and phone. The murder has gone
unsolved to this day.
Burkman
sued the Democratic National Committee for the release of the hacked DNC server he
claimed will reveal key information in solving the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
Lobbyist Jack Burkman, who began a private investigation into the murder of Democratic
National Committee staffer Seth Rich last year, says he was nearly killed after a man who
joined the investigation attempted to murder him last week, according to a report.
"It's a horror story," Burkman told the Washington Post Monday.
Kevin Doherty, 46, shot Burkman multiple times and ran him over with an SUV, according
to the Post
Tension reportedly developed between the two as Doherty began to think the profiling
project was his and began speaking to reporters without Burkman's consent, Burkman told the
Post.
Burkman fired Doherty and sent him a cease-and-desist letter in July, according to the
news outlet. "I just figured the matter was closed," Burkman told the Post. "But what
happened is, I guess, he was simmering and simmering and simmering."
A source who identified as a senior FBI official contacted Burkman and claimed to have
internal documents relative to another case he was working on.
The anonymous source planted envelopes of information under a traffic cone in the
parking garage at the Key Bridge Marriott in Rosslyn, according to Burkman.
As the lobbyist arrived to retrieve the documents, with his pet Dachshund in hand, he
reached under the cone and was shot in the buttocks and thigh and run over by an SUV.
Burkman spent three days in the hospital, and his dog was not harmed.
Doherty was charged with use of a firearm in the commission of a felony and two counts
of malicious wounding. He is currently jailed in the Arlington County Detention
Facility.
We have reached out to Mr. Burkman and will post any updates as we receive
them
Hacking is an ideal space for false flag operation where shadow, intelligence connected
companies like Crowdstype can plan evidence with impunity and traced can be constructed according
to the needs of the day or particular operation. Only British-style poisonings can compete as
they provide the same mantle of secrecy in which real evidence can be buried and fake propagated
;-)
Somebody on UNZ forum said that it is stupid to believe anything that comes from national
intelligence services, especially when they are engaged in color revolution against the current
administration.
The Daily Beast reports that U.S. investigators identified the hacker as a Moscow-based
Russian intelligence operative after the hacker failed to activate a virtual private networking
(VPN) service meant to obscure the operative's location before logging on.
The result was the operative's Moscow IP address being caught in the logs of a U.S. social
media company, allowing U.S. investigators to track the individual. Special counsel Robert Mueller , who is leading
the investigation into Russian election meddling, has taken over the probe into Guccifer,
according to The Daily Beast, which reported that he added FBI agents to his team who
previously worked to track the hacker.
U.S. intelligence agencies previously stated in January 2017 that they had "high confidence"
that "Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used
the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data."
Aside from the obvious legalized bribery (Citizens United), the absolute control of the
corrupt 2-party system, the oligarchic and utterly undemocratic mass media, etc., we also had
the case in 2000 that a bunch of unelected dictators-for-life "decided" the US election,
clearly unlawfully. Bush vs. Gore.
Yes, US is in no position to be lecturing anybody about "democracy". But US is not short
on chutzpah in any political realm.
If elections resulted in real change, Yankees wouldn't have them. All theater for the
zombies, aka the voting class. Only zombies would argue over the merits of the candidates.
The US needs very little from its citizens. These includes obedience, widespread ignorance
and the unquestioned belief they live in a Democracy because voting happens.
The best slaves are the ones that lack the intelligence to recognize their own slavery.
The happiest slaves know that voting is a rigged sham but don't care because the right master
leads them.
Anon from TN
Now, that I believe. Due to dismal school system (purely parochial, no national standards,
local boards full of ignoramuses decide what kids are taught in school) too many Americans
sincerely believe that the world consists of three roughly equal parts: Main street,
out-of-town, and overseas. I guess the election results in the last few decades show this
clearly.
Alas, I stayed with USA friends, well educated middle class, where CNN was the only 'news'
source.
Three other USA acquaintances I visited in their homes, cannot remember having seen a
newspaper other than a local one about marriages and funerals.
The USA reminded me of the Peking court, that, when British warships were reported on the
coast, responded with 'there had been so many pirates already'.
In the Badlands, in a very small café, I identified myself as Dutch, from Holland,
Netherlands.
When all this did not ring bell I mentioned Europe, the first time in my life.
This was understood.
Anon from TN
Maybe I overestimate American citizens (I work at a top-rate University and communicate
mostly with faculty and grad students), but I'd like to come to their defense. CNN (as well
as FOX news, NYT, and other MSM) represent the views of the lower half of US citizens by IQ.
As far as I can tell, blatant lies of Western propaganda achieved among the people with
brains the same result as the Soviet propaganda: even if they state something truthful for a
change, people would doubt that.
You're truly delusional if you think CNN does NOT represent average American thinking, at
least a large paart of it. Last week I suffered through a luncheon of 5 mature adults
extolling Rachel Maddow. Sickening.
"... If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. ..."
"... Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation, assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice. ..."
"... The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD; ..."
"... Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century. ..."
"... The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated." ..."
"... The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies glorifying American spies and assassins ..."
"... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks . ..."
"... This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine. ..."
"... The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. ..."
"... The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments. ..."
In a three-part series published last week, the
World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and
military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence
candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant
seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant
swing to the Democrats.
If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control
of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department
officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. The
presence of so many representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus in the legislature
is a situation without precedent in the history of the United States.
Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry
Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the
activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation,
assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice.
In the wake of the Watergate crisis and the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon,
reporter Seymour Hersh published the first devastating exposure of the CIA domestic spying, in
an investigative report for the New York Times on December 22, 1974. This report
triggered the establishment of the Rockefeller Commission, a White House effort at damage
control, and Senate and House select committees, named after their chairmen, Senator Frank
Church and Representative Otis Pike, which conducted hearings and made serious attempts to
investigate and expose the crimes of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.
The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against
foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in
Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly
subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD;
Operation Mockingbird, in
which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an
effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the
telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century.
The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating
political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA
became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was
widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated."
In that period, it would have been unthinkable either for dozens of "former"
military-intelligence operatives to participate openly in electoral politics, or for them to be
welcomed and even recruited by the two corporate-controlled parties. The Democrats and
Republicans sought to distance themselves, at least for public relations purposes, from the spy
apparatus, while the CIA publicly declared that it would no longer recruit or pay American
journalists to publish material originating in Langley, Virginia. Even in the 1980s, the
Iran-Contra scandal involved the exposure of the illegal operations of the Reagan
administration's CIA director, William Casey.
How times have changed. One of the main functions of the "war on terror," launched in the
wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been to
rehabilitate the US spy apparatus and give it a public relations makeover as the supposed
protector of the American people against terrorism.
This meant disregarding the well-known connections between Osama bin Laden and other Al
Qaeda leaders and the CIA, which recruited them for the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in
Afghanistan, waged from 1979 to 1989, as well as the still unexplained role of the US
intelligence agencies in facilitating the 9/11 attacks themselves.
The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies,
backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies
glorifying American spies and assassins ( 24 , Homeland , Zero Dark
Thirty , etc.)
The American media has been directly recruited to this effort. Judith Miller of the New
York Times , with her reports on "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, is only the most
notorious of the stable of "plugged-in" intelligence-connected journalists at the
Times , the Washington Post , and the major television networks. More
recently, the Times has installed as its editorial page editor James Bennet, brother
of a Democratic senator and son of the former administrator of the Agency for International
Development, which has been accused of working as a front for the operations of the Central
Intelligence Agency.
The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based
entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either
unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been
accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly
paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks .
In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while
essentially ignoring Trump's attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with
ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs like Medicaid and food
stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the
agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political
voice.
This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and
expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United
States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the
Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate
the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.
The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of
resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the
campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. A chorus of
media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire
editorial board of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part
of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip up support on alleged "human rights" grounds
for an expansion of the US war in Syria.
The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence
operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in
Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are
"former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however,
purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the
Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.
The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not
covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic
primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat
experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on
their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party
officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.
The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand,
the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other
previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a
"friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.
The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an
expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the
extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state
apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working
class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.
Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right
policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects
the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of
military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade
unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary,
working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled
two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.
Intereseting that a former staffer from Senator Feinstein is implicated in the mess. How many
others are there who have been doing the same thing? I wonder if Congresswoman Debbie
Wasserman-Schultt's IT staffer Mr. Arwan was accessing any relavent iformation while he was
on her payroll and for whom?
You wanna hear another hot tip? Debbie's brother, Steven Wasserman, is the Assistant United
States Attorney for the District of Columbia -- the very jurisdiction where Seth Rich was
murdered. Not much progress being made in that investigation ... can't imagine why!
" FBI Special Agent David Raynor was suicided yesterday while he was investigating
why former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met this past June (2017) with Baltimore
Police Department Detective Sean Suiter -- who was a member of the wildly corrupt Baltimore
police unit called the Gun Trace Task Force linked to the "Operation Fast and Furious" gun
scandal covered up the Obama regime -- but with Detective Suiter being murdered with his
own gun on 15 November (2017) the day before he was due to testify before a US Federal Grand
Jury..."
"... What has however become clear in recent days is that the 'Gerasimov Doctrine' was not invented by its supposed author, but by a British academic, Mark Galeotti, who has now confessed – although in a way clearly designed to maintain as much of the 'narrative' as possible. ..."
"... Three days ago, an article by Galleoti appeared in 'Foreign Policy' entitled 'I'm Sorry for Creating the "Gerasimov Doctrine": I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.' ..."
"... The translation of the original article by Gerasimov with annotations by Galeotti which provoked the whole hysteria turns out to be a classic example of what I am inclined to term 'bad Straussianism.' ..."
"... What Strauss would have called the 'exoteric' meaning of the article quite clearly has to do with defensive strategies aimed at combatting the kind of Western 'régime change' projects about which people like those who write for 'Lawfare' are so enthusiastic. But Galeotti tells us that this is, at least partially, a cover for an 'esoteric' meaning, which has to do with offensive actions in Ukraine and similar places. ..."
More material on the British end of the conspiracy.
Commenting on an earlier piece by PT, I suggested that a key piece of evidence pointing to
'Guccifer 2.0' being a fake personality created by the conspirators in their attempt to
disguise the fact that the materials from the DNC published by 'WikiLeaks' were obtained by a
leak rather than a hack had to do with the involvement of the former GCHQ person Matt
Tait.
To recapitulate: Back in June 2016, hard on the heels of the claim by Dmitri Alperovitch
of 'CrowdStrike' to have identified clinching evidence making the GRU prime suspects, Tait
announced that, although initially unconvinced, he had found a 'smoking gun' in the
'metadata' of the documents released by 'Guccifer 2.0.'
A key part of this was the use by someone modifying a document of 'Felix Edmundovich'
– the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky, the Lithuanian-Polish noble who created the
Soviet secret police.
As I noted, Tait was generally identified as a former GCHQ employee who now ran a
consultancy called 'Capital Alpha Security.' However, checking Companies House records
revealed that he had filed 'dormant accounts' for the company. So it looks as though the
company was simply a 'front', designed to fool 'useful idiots' into believing he was an
objective analyst.
As I also noted in those comments, Tait writes the 'Lawfare' blog, one of whose founders,
Benjamin Wittes, looks as though he may himself have been involved in the conspiracy up to
the hilt. Furthermore, a secure income now appears to have been provided to replace that from
the non-existent consultancy, in the shape of a position at the 'Robert S. Strauss Center for
International Security and Law', run by Robert Chesney, a co-founder with Wittes of
'Lawfare.'
A crucial part of the story, however, is that the notion of GRU responsibility for the
supposed 'hacks' appears to be part of a wider 'narrative' about the supposed 'Gerasimov
Doctrine.' From the 'View from Langley' provided to Bret Stephens by CIA Director Mike Pompeo
at the 'Aspen Security Forum' last July:
'I hearken back to something called the Gerasimov doctrine from the early 70s, he's now
the head of the – I'm a Cold War guy, forgive me if I mention Soviet Union. He's now
the head of the Russian army and his idea was that you can win wars without firing a single
shot or with firing very few shots in ways that are decidedly not militaristic, and that's
what's happened. What changes is the costs; to effectuate change through cyber and through RT
and Sputnik, their news outlets, and through other soft means; has just really been lowered,
right. It used to be it was expensive to run an ad on a television station now you simply go
online and propagate your message. And so they have they have found an effective tool, an
easy way to go reach into our systems, and into our culture to achieve the outcomes they are
looking for.'
What has however become clear in recent days is that the 'Gerasimov Doctrine' was not
invented by its supposed author, but by a British academic, Mark Galeotti, who has now
confessed – although in a way clearly designed to maintain as much of the 'narrative'
as possible.
Three days ago, an article by Galleoti appeared in 'Foreign Policy' entitled 'I'm
Sorry for Creating the "Gerasimov Doctrine": I was the first to write about Russia's infamous
high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.'
'Gerasimov was actually talking about how the Kremlin understands what happened in the
"Arab Spring" uprisings, the "color revolutions" against pro-Moscow regimes in Russia's
neighborhood, and in due course Ukraine's "Maidan" revolt. The Russians honestly –
however wrongly – believe that these were not genuine protests against brutal and
corrupt governments, but regime changes orchestrated in Washington, or rather, Langley. This
wasn't a "doctrine" as the Russians understand it, for future adventures abroad: Gerasimov
was trying to work out how to fight, not promote, such uprisings at home.'
The translation of the original article by Gerasimov with annotations by Galeotti
which provoked the whole hysteria turns out to be a classic example of what I am inclined to
term 'bad Straussianism.'
What Strauss would have called the 'exoteric' meaning of the article quite clearly has
to do with defensive strategies aimed at combatting the kind of Western 'régime
change' projects about which people like those who write for 'Lawfare' are so enthusiastic.
But Galeotti tells us that this is, at least partially, a cover for an 'esoteric' meaning,
which has to do with offensive actions in Ukraine and similar places.
Having now read the text of the article, I can see a peculiar irony in it. In a section
entitled 'You Can't Generate Ideas On Command', Gerasimov suggests that 'The state of Russian
military science today cannot be compared with the flowering of military-theoretical thought
in our country on the eve of World War II.'
According to the 'exoteric' meaning of the article, it is not possible to blame anyone in
particular for this situation. But Gerasimov goes on on to remark that, while at the time of
that flowering there were 'no people with higher degrees' or 'academic schools or
departments', there were 'extraordinary personalities with brilliant ideas', who he terms
'fanatics in the best sense of the word.'
Again, Galeotti discounts the suggestion that nobody is to blame, assuming an 'esoteric
meaning', and remarking: 'Ouch. Who is he slapping here?'
Actually, Gerasimov refers by name to two, utterly different figures, who certainly were
'extraordinarily personalities with brilliant ideas.'
If Pompeo had even the highly amateurish grasp of the history of debates among Soviet
military theorists that I have managed to acquire he would be aware that one of the things
which was actually happening in the 'Seventies was the rediscovery of the ideas of Alexander
Svechin.
Confirming my sense that this has continued on, Gerasimov ends by using Svechin to point
up an intractable problem: it can be extraordinarily difficult to anticipate the conditions
of a war, and crucial not to impose a standardised template likely to be inappropriate, but
one has to make some kinds of prediction in order to plan.
Immediately after the passage which Galeotti interprets as a dig at some colleague,
Gerasimov elaborates his reference to 'extraordinary people with brilliant ideas' by
referring to an anticipation of a future war, which proved prescient, from a very different
figure to Svechin:
'People like, for instance, Georgy Isserson, who, despite the views he formed in the
prewar years, published the book "New Forms Of Combat." In it, this Soviet military
theoretician predicted: "War in general is not declared. It simply begins with already
developed military forces. Mobilization and concentration is not part of the period after the
onset of the state of war as was the case in 1914 but rather, unnoticed, proceeds long before
that." The fate of this "prophet of the Fatherland" unfolded tragically. Our country paid in
great quantities of blood for not listening to the conclusions of this professor of the
General Staff Academy.'
Unlike Svechin, whom I have read, I was unfamiliar with Isserson. A quick Google search,
however, unearthed a mass of material in American sources – including, by good fortune,
an online text of a 2010 study by Dr Richard Harrison entitled 'Architect of Soviet Victory
in World War II: The Life and Theories of G.S. Isserson', and a presentation summarising the
volume.
Ironically, Svechin and Isserson were on opposite sides of fundamental divides. So the
former, an ethnic Russian from Odessa, was one of the 'genstabisty', the former Tsarist
General Staff officers who sided with the Bolsheviks and played a critical role in teaching
the Red Army how to fight. Meanwhile Isserson was a very different product of the
'borderlands' – the son of a Jewish doctor, brought up in Kaunas, with a German Jewish
mother from what was then Königsberg, giving him an easy facility with German-language
sources.
The originator of the crucial concept of 'operational' art – the notion that in
modern industrial war, the ability to handle a level intermediate between strategy and
tactics was critical to success – was actually Svechin.
Developing the ambivalence of Clausewitz, however, he stressed that both the offensive and
the defensive had their places, and that the key to success was to know which was appropriate
when and also to be able rapidly to change from one to the other. His genuflections to
Marxist-Leninist dogma, moreover, were not such as to take in any of Dzerzhinsky's
people.
By contrast, Isserson was unambiguously committed to the offensive strand in the
Clausewitzian tradition, and a Bolshevik 'true believer' (although he married the daughter of
a dispossessed ethnically Russian merchant, who had their daughter baptised without his
knowledge.)
As Harrison brings out, Isserson's working through of the problems of offensive
'operational art' would be critical to the eventual success of the Red Army against Hitler.
However, the specific text to which he refers was, ironically, a warning of precisely one of
the problems implicit in the single-minded reliance on the offensive: the possibility that
one could be left with no good options confronting an antagonist similarly oriented –
as turned out to be the case.
As Gerasimov intimates, while unlike Svechin, executed in 1938, Isserson survived the
Stalin years, he was another of the victims of Dzerzhinsky's heirs. Arrested shortly before
his warnings were vindicated by the German attack on 22 June 1941, he would spend the war in
the Gulag and only return to normal life after Stalin's death.
So I think that the actual text of Gerasimov's article reinforces a point I have made
previously. The 'evidence' identified by Tait is indeed a 'smoking gun.' But it emphatically
does not point towards the GRU.
Meanwhile, another moral of the tale is that Americans really should stop being taken in
by charlatan Brits like Galeotti, Tait, and Steele.
"... The deep state (the oligarchs, MIC, and intelligence community, which controls the media and most politicians) whether or not it actually helped Trump by harming Hillary is immaterial. The election is over and there was never any real resolve in the deep state to impeach Trump or to jail Hillary and their never will be. The reason should be obvious. ..."
"... The only thing consistent in the Russian collusion and election rigging nonsense is the groundless and unrelenting vilification of Russia, blaming Putin for everything. Just as we see grandiose deep state theatrics for the US to obtain access to strategic rare-earth resources in North Korea, we see the similar deep state orchestrated theatrics falsely alleging that Russians rigged or interfered in the US Presidential election. Russia's Putin is the main obstacle to the Western bankster-corporate cabal obtaining resource and geopolitical hegemony over the entire planet. That is the main fact. It is the main reason to subject that nation to constant vilification, sanctions, and military aggression and provocation. ..."
"... The deep state cabal will likely spend tens, if not hundreds, of billions of US dollars interfering in the Russian election. Presently they are most likely bribing, blackmailing, and intimidating thousands of people to swing and rig the election to ensure Putin does not win. "You did it to us." Will be their justification when Putin complains. ..."
Well of course there are. We've been told repeatedly that the Obama administration was on the job and focused like a laser
on Russia collusion and meddling.
Unfortunately, the hard drive all that was stored on crashed and it was all lost.
If we really want the truth then we have to stop relying on what people say just because we like them, or we think they are
on our side, and instead we have to examine the interests of the various sources. Only then we can make better decisions. At this
stage of the game the deep state can no longer blame with any credibility Russian hacking as the source of the alleged leak. The
know it came directly from the DNC. However, the deep state has a priority (a very strong interest) to keep the heat on Russia.
The deep state (the oligarchs, MIC, and intelligence community, which controls the media and most politicians) whether
or not it actually helped Trump by harming Hillary is immaterial. The election is over and there was never any real resolve in
the deep state to impeach Trump or to jail Hillary and their never will be. The reason should be obvious.
The only thing consistent in the Russian collusion and election rigging nonsense is the groundless and unrelenting vilification
of Russia, blaming Putin for everything. Just as we see grandiose deep state theatrics for the US to obtain access to strategic
rare-earth resources in North Korea, we see the similar deep state orchestrated theatrics falsely alleging that Russians rigged
or interfered in the US Presidential election. Russia's Putin is the main obstacle to the Western bankster-corporate cabal obtaining
resource and geopolitical hegemony over the entire planet. That is the main fact. It is the main reason to subject that nation
to constant vilification, sanctions, and military aggression and provocation.
The disproportionate ongoing emphasis on the fake story that Russia meddled in the US election, not only serves to stir up
suspicions and fears regarding Russia in the generally brain-numbed population, but mainly at this stage, and by the sheer fact
that the deep state has carried this rouse so far down the field, the only rational conclusion one can make is that the deep state
is going to interfere in the Russian elections in a very major way to ensure that Putin and his cronies - those wicked oil and
gas nationalizers, those heinous enemies of the Rothschild banksters and their plans for an expanded US Fed to the auspices of
their proposed One World Bank; those upstart renegades who support nations which choose to trade oil without US petrodollars;
those evil monsters who oppose globalism and defend their own nation's sovereignty and other nations like Syria which call for
help.
The deep state cabal will likely spend tens, if not hundreds, of billions of US dollars interfering in the Russian election.
Presently they are most likely bribing, blackmailing, and intimidating thousands of people to swing and rig the election to ensure
Putin does not win. "You did it to us." Will be their justification when Putin complains.
"... For someone who is such an outsider, Trump has a knack for stroking the establishment. Droning and occupying Syria, sword dancing, moving US embassy to Jerusalem, more tax cuts, upping military spending, drill baby drill, etc. ..."
"... Also consider these made-for-tv moments: ..."
"... Bloomberg's hysterical reaction in Jan 2016 at the prospect of a Sanders or Trump win; ..."
"... Schumer's snide remark about the intel agencies: "they have a way of getting back at you"; ..."
We might well ask why DNC was funding "opposition research" that they could not use.
Hillary's own embarrassing connections to Russia via Uranium One made it difficult, if not
impossible, for her campaign to question Trump's connection to Russia (if any such connection
was found).
it is reasonable to conclude that the "opposition research" was actually an 'insurance
policy' to ensure that Trump did as he was told after he was elected President.
Problem with "opposition research" thing is that Russian influence was not made an issue
in the election.
Why?
Some might say that Hillary didn't need to raise the issue because she was in the lead.
Yeah, what politician pulls punches like that? The race had already turned ugly with both
Democrats bringing forth women that claimed to have been sexually abused by Trump and Trump
accusing Bill Clinton of sexual malfeasance.
Some might say that making such accusations would be irresponsible because they weren't
proven. Since when does a US politician shy away from innuendo?
Interestingly, Obama also faced questions about his loyalty to the country. In fact, Trump
was one of leaders of the "birthers" that questioned Obama's qualification to be President
and, by extension, his loyalty to America. Criticism of Obama as a "socialist Muslim" by
parts of the right nearly reached "meme" status.
As Trump pointed out during the campaign, it was Hillary that first questioned (obliquely)
if Obama was qualified to be President. And it was her loyal friend Trump that ran with that
ball on her behalf.
For someone who is such an outsider, Trump has a knack for stroking the establishment. Droning and occupying Syria, sword dancing, moving US embassy to Jerusalem, more tax cuts,
upping military spending, drill baby drill, etc.
Trump once boasted that he could kill some one in Times Square and get away with it. Why
would he say such a thing? It's the kind of think that a "made man" might say.
Also consider these made-for-tv moments:
>> Bloomberg's hysterical reaction in Jan 2016 at the prospect of a Sanders or Trump
win;
>> Schumer's snide remark about the intel agencies: "they have a way of getting
back at you";
>> Hillary wins 6 out of 6 coin tosses in Iowa primaries;
>> Bill Clinton's meeting on the tarmac just happen to be caught by a
journalist?
>> Hillary's being dragged into a van among rumors of ill health just happen to be
caught by an amateur photographer;
>> the father of a the guy that shot up a Florida night club shows up at one of
her campaign events - sitting in a highly visible spot behind the podium;
>> and who could forget: "Wiped? like with a cloth?"
Innocent mistakes? Or best government (entertainment) money can buy?
"... It wasn't a "Hack." It was a LEAK. And, his name was #SethRich. Control the Language, Control the Narratives. ..."
"... Seth Rich was a Russian agent? Does that mean we can investigate his murder now? Somebody call that British Boris to throw a hissyfit, and maybe JUST MAYBE we can take a second look... ..."
"... DID they find SETH's Russian Passport Yet ? ? ? ..."
"... Hmm.....Friend of Panda....Fancy Bear....it's all starting to MAKE SENSE .....not..... The Obama and Clinton (and McCain) dorks botched a coup attempt, have the world's sloppiest coverup underway, and they will pay. ..."
"... Mueller would indict a bowl of borscht soup. Nevermind that British MI6 spy, Christopher Steele, hacked the US Election. Nevermind that DNC email leaker Seth Rich was asassinated by British MI6 spies. Nevermind that Assange is held captive by British MI6 spies. ..."
"... And why is ANYONE listening to this lying SOB Steele? Man the media disgusts me in this country. I wish I could find a way to consume less of their product, but I already have no TV, turn off the radio news in a heartbeat when I hear it come on, and visit none of their websites. ..."
Shortly after WikiLeaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on July 26, 2016, former UK spy Christopher
Steele filed a memo with his employer, Fusion GPS, claiming that the DNC "hack" during the 2016 election involved Russian agents
"within the Democratic Party structure itself ," The New Yorker reports.
On July 26, 2016, after WikiLeaks disseminated the D.N.C. e-mails, Steele filed yet another memo, this time claiming that the
Kremlin was "behind" the hacking, which was part of a Russian cyber war against Hillary Clinton's campaign. Many of the details
seemed far-fetched: Steele's sources claimed that the digital attack involved agents "within the Democratic Party structure itself,"
as well as Russian émigrés in the U.S. and "associated offensive cyber operators."
The unverified claim was contained within a multitude of memos compiled by Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, which was conducting
opposition research on then-candidate Donald Trump for Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
Of note, the 35-page "Trump-Russia" dossier used in part by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant on one-time Trump campaign advisor
Carter Page was comprised of seventeen of Steele's memos - including one which alleged that Trump had paid "a number of prostitutes
to perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show in front of him," which would defile a bed that Barack and Michelle Obama had slept
in during a state visit - an allegation attributed to four individuals' second-hand reporting.
The shocking claim comes amid recent reports that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is preparing criminal charges against Russian
hackers allegedly behind the breaches of both the DNC and John Podesta's email.
Much like the indictment
Mueller filed last month charging a different group of Russians in a social media trolling and illegal-ad-buying scheme, the
possible new charges are expected to rely heavily on secret intelligence gathered by the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency
(NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), several of the officials say. [ ] Mueller's consideration of charges accusing
Russians in the hacking case has not been reported previously . Sources say he has long had sufficient evidence to make a case,
but strategic issues could dictate the timing. Potential charges include violations of statutes on conspiracy, election law as
well as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The sources say the possible new indictment -- or more than one, if that's how Mueller's office decides to proceed -- would
delve into the details of, and the people behind, the Russian intelligence operation that used hackers to penetrate computer networks
and steal emails of both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Meanwhile, as we have been reporting, Mueller has yet to even reach out to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, or New Zealand entrepreneur
Kim Dotcom - who clearly knew of the upcoming email leaks before they were dropped. While Assange has heavily insinuated it was DNC
staffer Seth Rich, Dotcom has gone "all in" over the last few months - tweeting that he knows Seth Rich was Wikileaks' source, Rich
used a memory stick, and that Dotcom himself was involved.
As Josh Caplan of TGP notes, In Donna Brazile's book, "Hacks: The
Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House," the Democrat operative admits the DNC allowed
alleged Russian hackers to steal data from the party's servers. From the
Daily Caller :
Donna Brazile says in her new book the Democratic National Committee (DNC) went against professional advice and sat idly for
a month while Russians stole data because primaries were still underway in a number of states.
In May, when CrowdStrike recommended that we take down our system and rebuild it, the DNC told them to wait a month, because
the state primaries for the presidential election were still underway , and the party and the staff needed to be at their computers
to manage these efforts," Brazile wrote in her new
book , "
Hacks
."
"For a whole month, CrowdStrike watched Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear operating. Cozy Bear was the hacking force that had been in
the DNC system for nearly a year."
Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear are cybersecurity firms that have
reported ties with Russian hackers. Both groups are blamed for the hacks on the DNC in 2016. CrowdStrike is a private U.S.
cybersecurity firm that oversaw the protection of the DNC's servers.
Nothing to see here folks - just Trump's enemies using Steele's unverified memos with info from high level Kremlin officials when
it benefits them, while ignoring the ones which suggest "insiders" was involved in the DNC hack. Tags
Politics Entertainment Production - NEC Application Software
Seth Rich was a Russian agent? Does that mean we can investigate his murder now? Somebody call that British
Boris to throw a hissyfit, and maybe JUST MAYBE we can take a second look...
Hmm.....Friend of Panda....Fancy Bear....it's all starting to MAKE SENSE .....not..... The Obama and Clinton (and
McCain) dorks botched a coup attempt, have the world's sloppiest coverup underway, and they will pay.
Mueller would indict a bowl of borscht soup. Nevermind that British MI6 spy, Christopher Steele, hacked the US Election.
Nevermind that DNC email leaker Seth Rich was asassinated by British MI6 spies. Nevermind that Assange is held captive by British
MI6 spies.
I am sooooo tired of this Russian hacking, collusion, meddling bullshit. They are just not going to stop until we are
trading missiles with Russia. Then they will say that they were right all along, when in fact they started the damn thing.
And why is ANYONE listening to this lying SOB Steele? Man the media disgusts me in this country. I wish I could find a
way to consume less of their product, but I already have no TV, turn off the radio news in a heartbeat when I hear it come on,
and visit none of their websites.
As Hofkin mourned the loss of 27-year-old Rich, he saw a powerful meaning in the illicit
cookouts: Even though Rich was not particularly observant, he wanted to make sure that his more
observant friends could enjoy the salami, steak and kebabs with him.
That respect for others' beliefs combined with the can-do spirit made Rich a natural leader
-- and a serious politics geek.
"He was a totally unassuming intellectual who knew very early on that he wanted go into
politics," said Jacob Cytryn, the director of Camp Ramah. "He wanted to get stuff done."
Rich's life was cut short early that Sunday morning, when an unknown assailant shot him four
times, including at least once in the back.
The idealistic young man from Omaha, Nebraska, was on his way home in the Bloomingdale
neighborhood of Washington, a small community near Howard University
that has seen a rise in crime this year . Police heard the gunshots and arrived on the
scene to find Rich conscious and breathing, but he died of his injuries after being taken to a
local hospital.
The motive for the shooting is still unclear. Rich's father, Joel Rich, thought that it
might have been a botched robbery attempt. The shooter remains at large, and the investigation
into the shooting is ongoing. The police are offering a $25,000 reward for information on the
case.
For friends and family it was a shocking end to a short life of extraordinary promise.
Rich grew up in a tight-knit and relatively modest Jewish community in Omaha. Rabbi Paul
Drazen, who knew Rich when he was a young boy still preparing for his bar mitzvah, said he
always knew Rich would go far.
"He was a young man who had dreams, and, frankly, he pursued them," Drazen said "He really,
really pushed hard to be all he could be."
Drazen credited Rich's parents with teaching him the importance of caring for others -- in
words and deeds. When they would visit their son at summer camp, Drazen said, they wouldn't
just bring treats for Rich's cabin -- they would bring food enough for his whole eidah
, or age group.
"That was the kind of lesson they taught through the way they lived," Drazen said. "And they
still live that way."
Rabbi Steven Abraham, the current spiritual leader of Rich's hometown synagogue, Beth El
Synagogue, said that Rich was always actively engaged in a wide range of Jewish
organizations.
"Seth was involved in USY [United Synagogue Youth], he was involved in Ramah, he went to the
community Jewish day school," he said. "The kid was a mensch."
Joel Rich is the immediate past president of their synagogue. His grandparents were founding
members.
"This is a family that is entrenched in our Jewish community," Abraham said.
Rich brought creativity and initiative to his experience at camp, especially during his
summer as the director of boating education in 2011, a year after graduating from Creighton
University in Omaha.
"He was exceptionally thoughtful, very engaged, in his own way, in his Jewish identity,"
Cytryn said. "And he loved roofball."
He had always been drawn to the world of politics: In high school he was a member of the
student democrats club, and at Creighton, where he majored in political science, he served two
terms as a representative on the student government.
After his summer as the director of boating at Camp Ramah, Rich moved to Washington, where
he held jobs in the office of the Nebraska senator Ben Nelson and at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner,
a major polling and consulting firm, before going to work for the Democratic National
Committee.
Seth Rich was only two years into his job as the voter expansion data director working for
the DNC, where he helped boost turnout by connecting voters with resources like polling place
locations.
But it was clear that he had even bigger goals.
"In this business, people cycle in and out, but not him,"
said James Green , a campaign director who gave Rich one of his first jobs in politics. "He
was going to be a rising star."
Since the news of Rich's killing broke, many of his friends and co-workers have taken to
social media to mourn his loss.
Seth Rich was a great guy. Warm, funny, happy, extremely talented and creative. May his
memory be a blessing. https://t.co/z8EdxOhZu6 -- Henry J. Bernstein (@gonzo3249)
July 11,
2016
"Add him to the roll of justice," wrote Democratic stalwart Donna Brazile.
Remember his name and add him to the rolls of justice. #SethConradRich . He lived to make
a difference. He believed in voting rights. -- Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) July 11,
2016
At a speech on gun reform on Tuesday in Portsmouth, N.H., Hillary Clinton, the presumptive
Democratic presidential nominee,
spoke of Rich's death . Tragedies like these, she said, "tear at our soul."
"Seth Rich was a dedicated, selfless public servant who worked tirelessly to protect the
most sacred right we share as Americans -- the right to vote," said Debbie Wasserman-Schultz,
chair of the DNC, in a statement released after Rich's death.
"He was a joy to have as a member of our team, and his talents, intelligence and enthusiasm
will be deeply missed by many friends, colleagues and coworkers who worked by his side in
service to the highest ideals of our democracy."
Around the office Rich was known for combining a strong work ethic with ample
lightheartedness. He often pulled out his famous panda sweatshirt and wore it around the
office, just to make his coworkers smile, his mother, Mary Ann Rich, told
WOWT News .
"Will I forever miss him, yes. But I have to remember the happy times too to get through the
tears," she said.
"He worked hard and he wanted to make a difference and unfortunately now there is someone
who could have made a difference who isn't going to be there," his father, Joel, said.
Seth Rich's last Facebook post is a final symbol of his dedication to the ideals his parents
instilled in him.
As accounts of the shootings of Dallas police officers spread, Rich made an emotional plea
on Facebook for people to end the violence.
"I have family and friends on both sides of the law," he wrote. "Please, stop killing each
other."
twitter
Seth Rich's last Facebook post, in response to the series of shootings last week.
if anyone has any doubts about how deep and wide the swamp is, they only need to read
about seth's brother aaron.
a northrup grumman employee?
Wheeler also claimed in recently leaked audio that Seth Rich's brother, Aaron
– a Northrup Grumman employee, blocked him from looking at Seth's computer and
stonewalled his investigation.
Wheeler said that brother Aaron Rich tried to block Wheeler from looking at Seth's
computer, even though there could be evidence on it. "He said no, he said I have his
computer, meaning him," Wheeler said. "I said, well can I look at it? He said, what are you
looking for? I said anything that could indicate if Seth was having problems with someone.
He said no, I already checked it. Don't worry about it."
Aaron also blocked Wheeler from finding out about who was at a party Seth attended the
night of the murder.
"All I want you to do is work on the botched robbery theory and that's it," Aaron told
Wheeler -
Big League Politics
One of the Awan brothers was at the same party, stalked Seth on his walk home and botched
the hit. Seth was alive in Howard Univ. Hospital and was murdered in his bed after being
moved to the private hospital
Loretta Lynch - some of you know her as Elizabeth Carlisle - told WJC on the tarmac that
it was Seth Rich. A procedure known as Arkancide then ensued.
Wikileaks offered a reward for information leading to the killers of Seth Rich. Did the
DNC do anything? No.
Rich was killed by two members of MS-13, who were subsequently liquidated for their
efforts.
Remember when President Trump referred to MS-13 in the SOTU? And then some undereducated
water buffalo on CNN complained to the effect that "No one outside of Fox News knows about
this obscure gang?" Well, Trump wasn't making some random verbal gesture. That was a signal
that he knows, and serious investigators know, about Rich's murder and the DNC.
Muller was the guy who buried 911 investigation. That's probably why he was hired for Russiagate investigation too.
Notable quotes:
"... retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks a simple, yet monumentally significant question: Why haven't Congressional
Investigators or Special Counsel Robert Mueller addressed the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich - who multiple people have claimed was
Wikileaks' source of emails leaked during the 2016 U.S. presidential election? ..."
"... Mueller has been incredibly thorough in his ongoing investigations -- however he won't even respond to Kim Dotcom, the New
Zealand entrepreneur who clearly knew about the hacked emails long before they were released, claims that Seth Rich obtained them with
a memory stick , and has offered to provide proof to the Special Counsel investigation. ..."
"... In addition to several odd facts surrounding Rich's still unsolved murder - which officials have deemed a "botched robbery,"
forensic technical evidence has emerged which contradicts the Crowdstrike report. The Irvine, CA company partially funded by Google
, was the only entity allowed to analyze the DNC servers in relation to claims of election hacking: ..."
"... Notably, Crowdstrike has been considered by many to be discredited over their revision and retraction of a report over Russian
hacking of Ukrainian military equipment - a report which the government of Ukraine said was fake news. ..."
"... Also notable is that Crowdstrike founder and anti-Putin Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch sits on the Atlantic Council - which
is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Who else is on the Atlantic Council?
Evelyn Farkas - who slipped up during an MSNBC interview with Mika Brzezinski and disclosed that the Obama administration had been spying
on the Trump campaign: ..."
"... "The facts that we know of in the murder of the DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was that he was gunned down blocks from his home on
July 10, 2016. Washington Metro police detectives claim that Mr. Rich was a robbery victim, which is strange since after being shot
twice in the back, he was still wearing a $2,000 gold necklace and watch. He still had his wallet, key and phone. Clearly, he was not
a victim of robbery, " writes Lyons. ..."
"... Another unexplained fact muddying the Rich case is that of a stolen 40 caliber Glock 22 handguns stolen from an FBI agent's
car the same day Rich was murdered. D.C. Metro police said that the theft occurred between 5 and 7 a.m., while the FBI said two weeks
later that the theft had occurred between Midnight and 2 a.m. - fueling speculation that the FBI gun was used in Rich's murder ..."
"... Perhaps the most stunning audio evidence, however, comes from leaked audio of a recorded conversation between Ed Butowsky and
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who told him of a " purported FBI report establishing that Seth Rich
sent emails to WikiLeaks ." ..."
"... Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign – directly pointing a
finger at former CIA director (and now MSNBC/NBC contributor ) John Brennan as the architect. ..."
As rumors swirl that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is
preparing a case against Russians who are alleged to have hacked Democrats during the 2016 election -- a conclusion based solely
on the analysis of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, a Friday op-ed in the
Washington Times by retired
U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks a simple, yet monumentally significant question: Why haven't Congressional Investigators
or Special Counsel Robert Mueller addressed the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich - who multiple people have claimed was Wikileaks'
source of emails leaked during the 2016 U.S. presidential election?
Mueller has been incredibly thorough in his ongoing investigations -- however he won't even respond to Kim Dotcom, the New
Zealand entrepreneur who
clearly knew about the hacked emails long before they were released, claims that Seth Rich obtained them with a
memory
stick , and has offered to provide proof to the Special Counsel investigation.
On May 18, 2017, Dotcom proposed that if Congress includes the Seth Rich investigation in their Russia probe, he would provide
written testimony with evidence that Seth Rich was WikiLeaks' source.
In addition to several odd facts surrounding Rich's still unsolved murder - which officials have deemed a "botched robbery,"
forensic technical evidence has emerged which contradicts the Crowdstrike report. The Irvine, CA company
partially
funded by Google , was the
only
entity allowed to analyze the DNC servers in relation to claims of election hacking:
Notably, Crowdstrike has been considered by many to be discredited over their revision and retraction of a report over Russian
hacking of Ukrainian military equipment - a report which the government of Ukraine said was fake news.
In connection with the emergence in some media reports which stated that the alleged "80% howitzer D-30 Armed Forces of Ukraine
removed through scrapping Russian Ukrainian hackers software gunners," Land Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine informs
that the said information is incorrect .
Ministry of Defence of Ukraine asks journalists to publish only verified information received from the competent official sources.
Spreading false information leads to increased social tension in society and undermines public confidence in the Armed Forces
of Ukraine. –mil.gov.ua (translated) (1.6.2017)
In fact, several respected journalists have cast serious doubt on CrowdStrike's report on the DNC servers:
Pay attention, because Mueller is likely to use the Crowdstrike report to support the rumored upcoming charges against Russian
hackers.
Also notable is that Crowdstrike founder and anti-Putin Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch sits on the Atlantic Council - which
is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and
Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
Who else is on the Atlantic Council?
Evelyn Farkas - who slipped up during an MSNBC interview with Mika Brzezinski and disclosed that the Obama administration had
been spying on the Trump campaign:
The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try
to compromise those sources and methods , meaning we would not longer have access to that intelligence. - Evelyn Farkas
Odd facts surrounding the murder of Seth Rich
"The facts that we know of in the murder of the DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was that he was gunned down blocks from his home on
July 10, 2016. Washington Metro police detectives claim that Mr. Rich was a robbery victim, which is strange since after being shot
twice in the back, he was still wearing a $2,000 gold necklace and watch. He still had his wallet, key and phone. Clearly, he was
not a victim of robbery, " writes Lyons.
Another unexplained fact muddying the Rich case is that of a stolen 40 caliber Glock 22 handguns stolen from an FBI agent's
car the same day Rich was murdered. D.C. Metro police said that the theft occurred between 5 and 7 a.m., while the FBI said two weeks
later that the theft had occurred between Midnight and 2 a.m. - fueling speculation that the FBI gun was used in Rich's murder.
Furthermore, two men working with the Rich family - private investigator and former D.C. Police detective Rod Wheeler and family
acquaintance Ed Butowsky, have previously stated that Rich had contacts with WikiLeaks before his death.
"According to Ed Butowsky, an acquaintance of the family, in his discussions with Joel and Mary Rich, they confirmed that their
son transmitted the DNC emails to Wikileaks ," writes Lyons.
While Wheeler initially told TV station Fox5 that proof of Rich's contact with WikiLeaks lies on the murdered IT staffer's laptop,
he later walked
the claim back - though he maintained that there was "some communication between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks."
Wheeler also claimed in recently leaked audio that Seth Rich's
brother, Aaron – a Northrup Grumman employee, blocked him from looking at Seth's computer and stonewalled his investigation.
Wheeler said that brother Aaron Rich tried to block Wheeler from looking at Seth's computer, even though there could be evidence
on it. "He said no, he said I have his computer, meaning him," Wheeler said. "I said, well can I look at it? He said, what are
you looking for? I said anything that could indicate if Seth was having problems with someone. He said no, I already checked it.
Don't worry about it."
Aaron also blocked Wheeler from finding out about who was at a party Seth attended the night of the murder.
"All I want you to do is work on the botched robbery theory and that's it," Aaron told Wheeler -
Big League Politics
Perhaps the most stunning audio evidence, however, comes from leaked audio of a recorded conversation between Ed Butowsky
and Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who told him of a " purported FBI report establishing that Seth
Rich sent emails to WikiLeaks ."
As transcribed and exclusively reported on by journalist Cassandra Fairbanks last year:
What the report says is that some time in late Spring he makes contact with WikiLeaks, that's in his computer," he says. "
Anyway, they found what he had done is that he had submitted a series of documents -- of emails, of juicy emails, from the DNC."
Hersh explains that it was unclear how the negotiations went, but that WikiLeaks did obtain access to a password protected
DropBox where Rich had put the files.
" All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive sample, I'm sure dozens of emails, and said 'I want money.' Later, WikiLeaks
did get the password, he had a DropBox, a protected DropBox," he said. They got access to the DropBox."
Hersh also states that Rich had concerns about something happening to him, and had
"The word was passed, according to the NSA report, he also shared this DropBox with a couple of friends, so that 'if anything
happens to me it's not going to solve your problems,'" he added. "WikiLeaks got access before he was killed."
Brennan and Russian disinformation
Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign – directly pointing a
finger at former CIA director (and now
MSNBC/NBC contributor
) John Brennan as the architect.
I have a narrative of how that whole f*cking thing began. It's a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation , and
the fu*kin' President, at one point, they even started telling the press – they were backfeeding the Press, the head of the NSA
was going and telling the press, fu*king c*cksucker Rogers, was telling the press that we even know who in the Russian military
intelligence service leaked it.
(full transcription here and extended audio of the Hersh conversation
here )
Hersh denied that he told Butowsky anything before the leaked audio emerged , telling NPR " I hear gossip [Butowsky] took two
and two and made 45 out of it. "
Technical Evidence
As we mentioned last week, Dotcom's assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name
Forensicator , who determined that the DNC files were copied at
22.6 MB/s - a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network - yet a speed
typical of file transfers to a memory stick.
The big hint
Last but not least, let's not forget that Julian Assange heavily implied Seth Rich was a source:
Given that a) the Russian hacking narrative hinges on Crowdstrikes's questionable reporting , and b) a mountain of evidence pointing
to Seth Rich as the source of the leaked emails - it stands to reason that Congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert
Mueller should at minimum explore these leads.
As retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks: why aren't they?
Something all of us here already know, if Mueller gets away from the delusion of Trump-Russia collusion then it will be his
ass in the frying pan. So he won't go after the Clintons, Obama, Comey or anyone else. Hitlery could show up with a gun in her
hand and tell Mueller she shot Seth and he would ignore it.
And, sadly, there ain't nobody gonna do anything about it unless and until a Special Prosecutor from outside DC is hired. Right
now a snowball in hell has a better chance.
Why don't the Democrats scream about the exploitation of his murder against them like they do with every minor accusation? It's as if they want his death to disappear from the public view...wonder why?
I think it is mostly because they know so much of their world hangs in the secrecy. If they let the Seth Rich story get out,
the Uranium One story gets out. If the Uranium One story gets out, the Awans' stolen cars with diplomatic cover for guns to Syria
in return for heroin to America comes out. If that story comes out, then the ISI Pakistani doctors with fake medical degrees pushing
pharma opiods in America comes out. And finally, Pizzagate, Pedogate, call it what you want, it comes out too. And then all of
these dirty sons of bitches go to jail.
And that's why you aren't hearing any of it. Especially from Mueller. I think he got hoodwinked too. They sold him this job
as a slam dunk to get Trump out of the White House. It really is the shits when the best laid plans of mice go south.
One of Trumps big problems is that as an outsider he did not have people both qualified and loyal to appoint to critical offices
in the deep state. That is why he wound up with a cipher like Sessions, a guy naive and gullible enough to believe the justice
department was filled with honorable and trustworthy people or at least men who played by some set of rules. Having found out
the hard way that he screwed up Trump is groping for a way out, trying to use a knife in a gun fight. The other side is too ruthless
and i suspect they will take him down in the end.
"All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive sample, I'm sure dozens of emails, and said 'I want money.'
Later, WikiLeaks did get the password, he had a DropBox, a protected DropBox," he said. They got access to the
DropBox."
Why has no one followed the money on this yet? This introduces an interesting angle - did Seth Rich get paid by WikiLeaks?
And if so, can we find evidence of the payoff? How did he afford his expensive watch and necklace?
Report a crime, yet don't allow law enforcement access to evidence to help them solve the case.
Sounds like a case in Illinois. A 1 1/2 year old went missing, yet the parent wouldn't let the authorities search the house.
I don't remember if there was a warrant or what finally happened that the police were allowed to search the home, but they did,
and found the baby, dead, under the sofa.
The other key is Rod Rosenstein's post-indictment presser. At the very end, he gave away the game by admitting there was no
collusion, no Americans were involved, and nothing allegedly done by the Russians affected the election's outcome. BOOM. Stick
a fork in Mueller's ham sandwich indictment.
The one bit of evidence that pushes me over from the possible to probably is the gun, what are the odds of this gun being stolen
from the FBI, not just some random joe, but the FBI themselves. If that was the same gun used in the murder than the odds of it
happening to turn up immediately in a robbery where nothing was stolen in an area where no one commits crimes is so small as to
be near zero. It is vague above, what do ballistics say?
If Trump really wants to drain his swamp then this would be the way in, however if they did murder Seth then they'll murder
Trump's family too so he is neutralized unless they can go in and get everyone involved in one go. Otherwise I'd expect the job
to be handed over to someone ready to die, thinking here a retired general/admiral with no family might be the one to do it.
Perry, a member of the Homeland Security subcommittee on cyber security, said Tuesday that the House Office of Inspector General
tracked the network usage of Awan and his associates on House servers and found that a "massive" amount of data was flowing from the
networks.
Notable quotes:
"... Attorneys for the Plaintiffs in the case, Jared and Elizabeth Beck, and appears to argue that if the Democratic Party did cheat Sanders in the 2016 Presidential primary race, then that action was protected under the first amendment. Twitter users were quick to respond to the brief, expressing outrage and disgust at the claims made by representatives of the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. ..."
"... This author was shocked to find that despite the characterization of the Becks as peddlers of conspiracy theory, the defense counsel failed to mention the motion for protection filed by the Becks earlier in the litigation process. They also failed to note the voice-modulated phone calls received by the law offices of the Becks which contained a caller-ID corresponding to the law offices of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a defendant in the case. In light of this context, the Becks hardly appear to be peddlers of conspiracy theory. ..."
"... It appears that the defendants in the DNC Fraud Lawsuit are attempting to argue that cheating a candidate in the primary process is protected under the first amendment. ..."
"... If all that weren't enough, DNC representatives argued that the Democratic National Committee had no established fiduciary duty "to the Plaintiffs or the classes of donors and registered voters they seek to represent." ..."
"... It seems here that the DNC is arguing for its right to appoint candidates at its own discretion while simultaneously denying any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the belief that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved. ..."
"... If Wikileaks' publication of DNC emails are found to be similarly admissible in a United States court of law, then the contents of the leaked emails could be used to argue that, contrary to the defendant's latest brief, the DNC did favor the campaign of Hillary Clinton over Senator Sanders and that they acted to sabotage Sanders' campaign. ..."
"... Seth Rich murder and DHS investigation into 2016 election tampering soon to expose this party's contempt for the law, and all other forms of ethical conduct. ..."
"... Bernie is more than happy to yammer on about Russian bots swarming Facebook and other social media platforms in some insidious plot to rig the election -- and yet he fails to say a word about the actual attempts to rig the election by the DNA and Hillary. ..."
"... Don't forget in their twisted minds that the lies they tell to support their corrupt agenda are "protected free speech". There are no further examples one needs to show that these fuckers are nothing but malignant sociopaths. The death of the Rule of Law is why sociopaths flourish. ..."
"... They are without shame, without remorse, without ethics or morals, feeling or caring. Yet they still try to defend their indefensible actions where contrition and humbleness would be much better long term..."politically". The rank & file snowflakes would eat up a simple apology because they have been brought up to think thats all it takes to right wrongs. ..."
The ongoing litigation of the DNC Fraud Lawsuit and the appeal regarding its dismissal took a stunning turn yesterday. The defendants
in the case, including the DNC and former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, filed a response brief that left many observers
of the case at a loss for words. The
document , provided by the
law offices of the Attorneys for the Plaintiffs in the case, Jared and Elizabeth Beck, and appears to argue that if the Democratic
Party did cheat Sanders in the 2016 Presidential primary race, then that action was protected under the first amendment.
Twitter users were quick to respond to the brief, expressing outrage and disgust
at the claims made by representatives of the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The Defense counsel also argued that because of Jared Beck's outspoken twitter posts, the plaintiffs were using the litigation
process for political purposes: "For example, Plaintiffs' counsel Jared Beck repeatedly refers to the DNC as "shi*bags" on Twitter
and uses other degrading language in reference to Defendants." Fascinatingly, no mention is made regarding the importance of First
Amendment at this point in the document.
The defense counsel also took issue with Jared Beck for what they termed as: " Repeatedly promoted patently false and deeply offensive
conspiracy theories about the deaths of a former DNC staffer and Plaintiffs' process server in an attempt to bolster attention for
this lawsuit."
This author was shocked to find that despite the characterization of the Becks as peddlers of conspiracy theory, the defense
counsel failed to mention the motion for protection filed by the Becks earlier in the litigation process. They also failed to note
the voice-modulated phone calls received by the law offices of the Becks which contained a caller-ID corresponding to the law offices
of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a defendant in the case. In light of this context, the Becks hardly appear to be peddlers of conspiracy
theory.
The DNC defense lawyers then argued that: " There is no legitimate basis for this litigation, which is, at its most basic, an
improper attempt to forge the federal courts into a political weapon to be used by individuals who are unhappy with how a political
party selected its candidate in a presidential campaign ."
The brief continued: " To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege based on their animating theory would run
directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by
political parties, especially when it comes to selecting the party's nominee for public office. "
It appears that the defendants in the DNC Fraud Lawsuit are attempting to argue that cheating a candidate in the primary process
is protected under the first amendment.
If all that weren't enough, DNC representatives argued that the Democratic National Committee had no established fiduciary duty
"to the Plaintiffs or the classes of donors and registered voters they seek to represent."
It seems here that the DNC is arguing for its right to appoint candidates at its own discretion while simultaneously denying
any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the belief that the DNC would act impartially
towards the candidates involved.
Adding to the latest news regarding the DNC Fraud Lawsuit was the recent
finding by the UK Supreme Court, which stated
that Wikileaks Cables were admissible as evidence in legal proceedings.
If Wikileaks' publication of DNC emails are found to be similarly admissible in a United States court of law, then the contents
of the leaked emails could be used to argue that, contrary to the defendant's latest brief, the DNC did favor the campaign of Hillary
Clinton over Senator Sanders and that they acted to sabotage Sanders' campaign.
The outcome of the appeal of the DNC Fraud Lawsuit remains to be seen. Disobedient Media will continue to report on this important
story as it unfolds.
Even on a practical level, beyond the "fraud is free speech" argument, they don't seem to have considered that this argument
is a lose/lose proposition. Even if they (DNC) win legally, they are going to lose as people turn away from the finger they're
giving them.
Notice this is a civil suit brought by a citizen. The Bern is silent and not suing anybody although he was the target
of the scam, or maybe a party to it. The DOJ is silent and not looking to put anybody in jail for what appears to be an
obvious violation of criminal law.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
- - Jeff Sessions
Not so for murder, and rigging the general election. Seth Rich murder and DHS investigation into 2016 election tampering
soon to expose this party's contempt for the law, and all other forms of ethical conduct.
What is the difference? There is no any justice in America. It is all gone.
The US people are polarized and, thanks to Hollywood and mainstream media, with the culture of lawless, violence, and hatred
of everybody. America is a very sick country with a fake President and the utterly corrupt US Congress. It will not end good or
bloodless.
The US military reliance on super-technology is poorly thought of since these high-tech military systems require very highly-educated
and intelligent people to operate these systems while the US educational system being a total failure cannot produce.
Bernie is more than happy to yammer on about Russian bots swarming Facebook and other social media platforms in some insidious
plot to rig the election -- and yet he fails to say a word about the actual attempts to rig the election by the DNA and Hillary.
But, hey, if he can shave a few hundred dollars off of my monthly health insurance premiums he can call for a first-strike nuclear
attack on Russia!
Clearly we have laws for little people while the owners do whatever the fuck they want.
... the State Department completed its review and determined that 2,115 of the 30,490 emails contain information that is presently
classified Out of these 2,115 emails, the State Department determined that 2,028 emails contain information classified at the
Confidential level; 65 contain information classified at the Secret level; and 22 contain information classified at the Top Secret
level....
I think this is the exact reason election boards exists. They should be suing the DNC over this as well, but are full of party
officials. If there was any sane form of democracy, the DNC would be bared from campaigning in most states.
It's a sewer, the whole fucking system is just a cesspool filled with the most reprehensible, self-serving people in the country
outside of Wall Street. But everybody just keeps playing along.
Don't forget in their twisted minds that the lies they tell to support their corrupt agenda are "protected free speech". There
are no further examples one needs to show that these fuckers are nothing but malignant sociopaths. The death of the Rule of Law
is why sociopaths flourish.
They don't live in the same reality as us and never have.
They are without shame, without remorse, without ethics or morals, feeling or caring. Yet they still try to defend their indefensible
actions where contrition and humbleness would be much better long term..."politically". The rank & file snowflakes would eat up
a simple apology because they have been brought up to think thats all it takes to right wrongs.
My take was Bernie was supposed to cat herd the millennials to the Hillary camp but that blew up in their face when the millennials
decided to put down their cell phones and proceeded to give Hillary the bird.
Wouldn't doubt a large majority still ended up voting for but they probably won't admit it.
Doesn't this make the whole candidate selection process, and all the rules and regulations governing a party's whole nomination
process meaningless? If what DEMS did within their own party to Bernie is moot, then what Trump may have done via his "Russian
collusion" is mooted also. Can't have it both ways.
They used the same argument before the appeal... and the corrupt judge agreed with "The Crooks" and closed the case. NOT ONE media outlet covered the fact they actually said in open court that the DNC had no legal obligation to be fair.
Interesting information Guccifer II. He falsified the evidence.
Follow the money. Along with a smoke screen for Hillary political fiasco, Russiagate is a swindle to get more money for intelligence
agencies and MIC. For about 15 companies who run the US foreign policy.
Notable quotes:
"... The CIA and NSA, and other intelligence agencies all work on behalf of these corporate entities. There main objective is to keep us all uninformed and dumber than a bag of hammers, so they can extort all the wealth from our great nation ..."
"... If this video won't stop the brainless McCarthyist regressives from knowing the truth about Russiagate, nothing will. And I mean absolutely nothing. Except maybe if they come here to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NYC. We got lots of Russian immigrants here and they are just normal people ..."
"... Russiagate is an excuse to spend more on the military. Wow- surprising, yet somehow not surprising. American Empire is the biggest destabilizing force in the world ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0 is the United States government. Either the CIA, FBI, NSA or DHS. I'd say it was the CIA with the NSA being a close second ..."
Also, when did Russian hackers become so stupid? Since when has the GRU being unable to get even the basics like the up to
date email list for the Clinton campaign, started using two-year-old obsolete malware instead of 0-day exploits, completely forgetting
that VPN's exist and how to spoof an IP address, and on and on and on. These aren't the guys who cloned Nasdaq!
Thank you jimmy so much for doing this interview and thank you Bill Binney for so clearly explaining the technical and structural
reasons why Russiagate is both false and ceaselessly pushed. Amazing interview!
My experience working on the Mississippi democratic party executive committee, the Hinds county Executive committee, and working
for the state employees union here in Mississippi has educated me on the fact that democratic reps and republican reps work together
to pass legislation to benefit the corporate class i.e. business. All you who have replied to my comment make sense, but we must
remember that there is no difference between the Democratic and Republician parties, they all work for their corporate masters.
The CIA and NSA, and other intelligence agencies all work on behalf of these corporate entities. There main objective is
to keep us all uninformed and dumber than a bag of hammers, so they can extort all the wealth from our great nation. In other
words they our commiting treason upon the American people and our constitution and all should be through in prison for the rest
of their lives and all ill-gotten wealth given back to the people of these great nation by rebuilding the infrastructure of America,
investing in the education of our people to secure a prosperous future, and provide healthcare for all Americans. We can ensure
this happens in two ways, pass the 28th amendment and pass FDR's 2nd bill of rights(worker's bill of rights). This will ensure
that corporations will never take control of our country again.
Can we please now move onto whom the person was that stole the data from the DNC? Can I take a stab in the dark (or maybe two
shots to the back of the head?) and guess his name was Seth Rich?
I know I commented this already in the last segment, but this guy is absolutely awesome. Everything he says is substantial,
non-speculative and supported by facts. You're becoming a proper journalist Jimmy. More of people like this please. I got my credit
card again. I will donate shortly. Keep up.
As long as they keep lying about Russia they can continue the sanctions against Russia. Russia is holding it's own even with
the sanctions but originally under Putin Russia had paid off all it's debt to the IMF (World Bank). Now their debt is increasing,
partly because of the sanctions and partly because of helping Syria and preparing for the US to cause a great war. Russia is a
threat to the IMF (World Bank). Russia and China want trade outside of the Petrol Dollar. When Russia was debt free from the IMF
(World Bank) it was completely independent of them. Russia did not have to take orders from the international bankers. That is
why they lie about Russia.
If this video won't stop the brainless McCarthyist regressives from knowing the truth about Russiagate, nothing will. And
I mean absolutely nothing. Except maybe if they come here to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NYC. We got lots of Russian immigrants
here and they are just normal people.
Russiagate is an excuse to spend more on the military. Wow- surprising, yet somehow not surprising. American Empire is
the biggest destabilizing force in the world
As I tried to tell you the previous time you had referenced the "conclusions" of the CIA groups, this data nonsense he is handwaving
about is all quite feasible, by using a nearby national server, and much skepticism is deserved! Also he doesn't seem to know
what he is talking about, from all of the paraphrasing.
I am also quite reminded of the psychological incorporation into personal behaviors by habit of the standards and policies
of the industry or professional standards, which for the US Intelligence community includes an explicit policy of disinformation
and dishonesty.
How the hell would the NSA's "man in the middle" logging servers see that the transfer occurs to a local USB2 drive (he assumes
this is the case because 40 megabytes per second is approximately the rate of the USB2 protocol of 400 megabits per second...
Very few USB flash drives were manufactured with solid state storage chips fast enough to reach that full transfer rate before
the widespread adoption of USB3, or the modern USB3.1. Essentially, your chosen headline title is a false clickbait, because as
of today there is insufficient evidence to draw ANY conclusion
Just as they smeared Joe Wilson & his wife, and other great Courageous Americans that came out AGAINST the invasion of Iraq!
Until we start DEMANDING those LIARS leave their seats in Washington, put on the Military Gear, and GO to the Countries they want
to invade! I am past FED UP with them sacrificing our Troops, they return home to be MISTREATED, and kicked to the curb! Americans,
wake up and DEMAND that they GO!
A very interesting interview. It is almost one year old.
When intelligence agencies use the phase "with high confidence" means that they do not have evidence. This is one of
the biggest lie intelligence agencies resort to. They are all professional liars and should be treated as such.
If DNC email offloading was done over Internet (which means it was a hack not an internal leak) NSA should have the direct evidence.
They do not. So this is a progpaganda move by Brennan and Clapper to unleash MSM witch hunt, which is a key part of the color revolution
against Trump.
Another question is who downloaded this information to Wikileaks. Here NSA also should have evidence. And again they do not.
They have already to direct attention from the main issues. Oversight of intelligence agencies is joke. They can lie with impunity.
BTW NSA has all Hillary emails, including deleted.
He also exposes the NSA penchant for "swindles", such as preventing the plugging of holes in software around the world, to preserve
their spying access.
It's almost comical to hear that they lie to each other. No wonder why these retards in the mid-east and every other third
world country gets the better of us.
The Clinton campaign to divert attention to Russia instead of her myriad of crimes that were revealed during the election must
be stopped and the alt media needs to start talking about her and Obama's crimes again and demand justice...control the dialogue
Thank you Paul E. Merrell, J.D. I have been convinced from the beginning of all of this
that this was the line to Wikileaks. Now if we could only get a real investigation into
Seth's murder.
Stop Bush and Clinton , February 19, 2018 at 7:34 pm
"We found that they broke a vast number of laws, did surveillance of a competitor with a
warrant based on fake evidence, all adding up to treason worse than Watergate. But we think
that no reasonable prosecutor would file charges .." -- The FBI
"... The Deep State (Oligarchs and the MIC) is totally fucking loving this: they have Trump and the GOP giving them everything they ever wanted and they have the optics and distraction of an "embattled" president that claims to be against or a victim of the "deep state" and a base that rally's, circles the wagons around him, and falls for the narrative. ..."
"... They know exactly who it was with the memory stick, there is always video of one form or another either in the data center or near the premises that can indicate who it was. They either have a video of Seth Rich putting the stick into the server directly, or they at least have a video of his car entering and leaving the vicinity of the ex-filtration. ..."
"... This would have been an open and shut case if shillary was not involved. Since it was involved, you can all chalk it up to the Clinton body count. I pray that it gets justice. It and the country, the world - needs justice. ..."
Kim Dotcom has once again chimed in on the DNC hack, following a Sunday morning tweet from President Trump clarifying his previous
comments on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
In response, Dotcom tweeted " Let me assure you, the DNC hack wasn't even a hack. It was an insider with a memory stick. I know
this because I know who did it and why," adding "Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him
twice. He never replied. 360 pounds! " alluding of course to Trump's "400 pound genius" comment.
Dotcom's assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name Forensicator , who determined
that the DNC files were copied at
22.6 MB/s - a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network - yet a speed
typical of file transfers to a memory stick.
The local transfer theory of course blows the Russian hacking narrative out of the water, lending credibility to the theory that
the DNC "hack" was in fact an inside job, potentially implicating late DNC IT staffer, Seth Rich.
John Podesta's email was allegely successfully "hacked" (he fell victim to a
phishing scam
) in March 2016, while the DNC reported suspicious activity (the suspected Seth Rich file transfer) in late April, 2016 according
to the
Washington Post.
On May 18, 2017, Dotcom proposed that if Congress includes the Seth Rich investigation in their Russia probe, he would provide
written testimony with evidence that Seth Rich was WikiLeaks' source.
On May 19 2017 Dotcom tweeted "I knew Seth Rich. I was involved"
Three days later, Dotcom again released a guarded statement saying "I KNOW THAT SETH RICH WAS INVOLVED IN THE DNC LEAK," adding:
"I have consulted with my lawyers. I accept that my full statement should be provided to the authorities and I am prepared
to do that so that there can be a full investigation. My lawyers will speak with the authorities regarding the proper process.
If my evidence is required to be given in the United States I would be prepared to do so if appropriate arrangements are made.
I would need a guarantee from Special Counsel Mueller, on behalf of the United States, of safe passage from New Zealand to the
United States and back. In the coming days we will be communicating with the appropriate authorities to make the necessary arrangements.
In the meantime, I will make no further comment."
Dotcom knew.
While one could simply write off Dotcom's claims as an attention seeking stunt, he made several comments and a series of tweets
hinting at the upcoming email releases prior to both the WikiLeaks dumps as well as the publication of the hacked DNC emails to a
website known as "DCLeaks."
In a May 14, 2015
Bloomberg article entitled "Kim Dotcom: Julian Assange Will Be Hillary Clinton's Worst Nightmare In 2016 ": "I have to say it's
probably more Julian," who threatens Hillary, Dotcom said. " But I'm aware of some of the things that are going to be roadblocks
for her ."
Two days later, Dotcom tweeted this:
Around two months later, Kim asks a provocative question
Two weeks after that, Dotcom then tweeted "Mishandling classified info is a crime. When Hillary's emails eventually pop up on
the internet who's going to jail?"
It should thus be fairly obvious to anyone that Dotcom was somehow involved, and therefore any evidence he claims to have, should
be taken seriously as part of Mueller's investigation. Instead, as Dotcom tweeted, "Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in
my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied. "
The Deep State (Oligarchs and the MIC) is totally fucking loving this: they have Trump and the GOP giving them everything
they ever wanted and they have the optics and distraction of an "embattled" president that claims to be against or a victim of
the "deep state" and a base that rally's, circles the wagons around him, and falls for the narrative.
Meanwhile they keep enacting the most Pro Deep State/MIC/Police State/Zionist/Wall Street agenda possible. And they call it
#winning
"Had to be a Russian mole with a computer stick. MSM, DNC and Muller say so."
They know exactly who it was with the memory stick, there is always video of one form or another either in the data center
or near the premises that can indicate who it was. They either have a video of Seth Rich putting the stick into the server directly,
or they at least have a video of his car entering and leaving the vicinity of the ex-filtration.
This would have been an open and shut case if shillary was not involved. Since it was involved, you can all chalk it up
to the Clinton body count. I pray that it gets justice. It and the country, the world - needs justice.
Kim is great, Assange is great. Kim is playing a double game. He wants immunity from the US GUmmint overreach that destroyed
his company and made him a prisoner in NZ.
Good on ya Kim.
His name was Seth Rich...and he will reach out from the grave and bury Killary who murdered him.
There are so many nuances to this and all are getting mentioned but the one that also stands out is that in an age of demands
for gun control by the Dems, Seth Rich is never, ever mentioned. He should be the poster child for gun control. Young man, draped
in a American flag, helping democracy, gunned down...it writes itself.
They either are afraid of the possible racial issues should it turn out to be a black man killing a white man (but why should
that matter in a gun control debate?) or they just don't want people looking at this case. I go for #2.
Funny that George Webb can figure it out, but Trump, Leader of the Free World, is sitting there with his dick in his hand waiting
for someone to save him.
Whatever he might turn out to be, this much is clear: Trump is a spineless weakling. He might be able to fuck starlets, but
he hasn't got the balls to defend either himself or the Republic.
Webb's research is also...managed. But a lot of it was/is really good (don't follow it anymore) and I agree re: SR piece of
it.
I think SR is such an interesting case. It's not really an anomaly because SO many Bush-CFR-related hits end the same way and
his had typical signatures. But his also squeels of a job done w/out much prior planning because I think SR surprised everyone.
If, in fact, that was when he was killed. Everything regarding the family's demeanor suggests no.
MANY patterns in shootings: failure in law enforcement/intelligence who were notified of problem individuals ahead of time,
ARs, mental health and SSRIs, and ongoing resistance to gun control in DC ----these are NOT coincidences. Nor are distractions
in MSM's version of events w/ controlled propaganda.
Children will stop being killed when America wakes the
fuck up and starts asking the right questions, making the right demands. It's time.
I don't think you know how these hackers have nearly ALL been intercepted by CIA--for decades now. DS has had backdoor access
to just about all of them. I agree that Kim is great, brilliant and was sabotaged but he's also cooperating. Otherwise he'd be
dead.
Bes is either "disinfo plant" or energy draining pessimist. Result is the same - to deflate your power to create a new future.
Trump saw the goal of the Fed Reserve banksters decades ago and spoke often about it. Like Prez Kennedy he wants to return
USA economy to silver or gold backed dollar then transition to new system away from the Black Magic fed reserve/ tax natl debt
machine.
The Globalist Cabal has been working to destroy the US economy ever since they income tax April 15th Lincoln at the Ford theater.
125 years. But Bes claims because Trump cannot reverse 125 years of history in one year that it is kabuki.
"... We need a separate, really non-partisan investigation for the rest of the list. I think it would be possible to find competent investigators outside of the more politicized agencies who could be vetted for any political bias before being assigned. Investigation is investigation - you just need a place to start and a list of people to talk to. Facts then shake out. ..."
"... If Mueller does not look sufficiently into the "rolling Soft-Coup" aspects of all this, let us hope that the Congress and the Administration together can force into existence a Special Counsel with all of the powers and staff and funding that Mueller currently has/ will have. . . . to look into the "rolling Soft-Coup" aspects of all this. ..."
"... If such a counsel would look into the "letting Clinton off the e-mail hook" aspects of all this and esPECially into the "who shot Seth Rich" and "e-mails . . . hacked or leaked?" aspects of all this, so much the better. ..."
I agree that the list should be investigated - especially the DNC "hack" hoax as that
involves screwing with the investigation of a Federal crime and has counterintelligence
implications and could lead to lots of indictments.
However, as someone else pointed out in the last thread, Mueller's only remit was to find
evidence of Russian government "meddling" in the election and/or "collusion" with Trump and
the Trump campaign - which he has not found yet and is highly unlikely to find. The 13
indictments are a joke in that regard.
We need a separate, really non-partisan investigation for the rest of the list. I think it
would be possible to find competent investigators outside of the more politicized agencies
who could be vetted for any political bias before being assigned. Investigation is
investigation - you just need a place to start and a list of people to talk to. Facts then
shake out.
If Mueller does not look sufficiently into the "rolling Soft-Coup" aspects of all this,
let us hope that the Congress and the Administration together can force into existence a
Special Counsel with all of the powers and staff and funding that Mueller currently has/ will
have. . . . to look into the "rolling Soft-Coup" aspects of all this.
If such a counsel would look into the "letting Clinton off the e-mail hook" aspects of
all this and esPECially into the "who shot Seth Rich" and "e-mails . . . hacked or leaked?"
aspects of all this, so much the better.
New evidence shows DNC server files were downloaded directly to USB drive, not hacked by
Russians
Now that the liberal left mainstream media is fixated on their latest Trump-Russia collusion
smoking gun, with the revelation that Donald Trump Jr., **GASP**, spoke with a lawyer from
Russia about adoption stuff, it is important to take a step back and realize that this entire
Hillary Clinton concocted Russia collusion narrative started with a DNC server hack that the
FBI never investigated, and now (according to an independent researcher known as The
Forensicator) was not even a hack, but a document download onto a USB drive.
New meta-analysis has emerged from a document published today by an independent
researcher known as The Forensicator, which suggests that files eventually published by the
Guccifer 2.0 persona were likely initially downloaded by a person with physical access to a
computer possibly connected to the internal DNC network. The individual most likely used a
USB drive to copy the information. The groundbreaking new analysis irrevocably destroys the
Russian hacking narrative, and calls the actions of Crowdstrike and the DNC into
question.
The document supplied
to Disobedient Media via Adam Carter was authored by an individual known as The Forensicator.
The full document referenced here has been published on their blog . Their analysis indicates the data was
almost certainly not accessed initially by a remote hacker, much less one in Russia. If true,
this analysis obliterates the Russian hacking narrative completely.
The Forensicator specifically discusses the data that was eventually published by Guccifer
2.0 under the title "NGP-VAN." This should not be confused with the separate publication of
the DNC emails by Wikileaks. This article focuses solely on evidence stemming from the files
published by Guccifer 2.0, which were previously discussed in depth by Adam Carter .
Disobedient Media previously reported that Crowdstrike is the only group that has
directly analyzed the DNC servers. Other groups including Threat Connect have used the information provided by
Crowdstrike to claim that Russians hacked the DNC. However, their evaluation was based solely
on information ultimately provided by Crowdstrike; this places the company in the unique
position of being the only direct source of evidence that a hack occurred.
The group's President Shawn Henry
is a retired executive assistant director of the FBI while their co-founder and CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at
the Atlantic Council, which as we have
reported , is linked to George Soros. Carter has stated on his website that "At present, it looks a LOT like Shawn Henry &
Dmitri Alperovitch (CrowdStrike executives), working for either the HRC campaign or DNC
leadership were very likely to have been behind the Guccifer 2.0 operation." Carter's
website was described by Wikileaks as a useful source of primary information
specifically regarding Guccifer 2.0.
Carter recently spoke to Disobedient Media, explaining that he had been contacted by
The Forensicator, who
had published a document which contained a detailed analysis of the data published by
Guccifer 2.0 as "NGP-VAN."
The document states
that the files that eventually published as "NGP-VAN" by Guccifer 2.0 were first copied to a
system located in the Eastern Time Zone, with this conclusion supported by the observation
that "the .7z file times, after adjustment to East Coast time fall into the range of the file
times in the .rar files." This constitutes the first of a number of points of analysis which
suggests that the information eventually published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona was not
obtained by a Russian hacker.
Disobedient
Media , The
Forensicator stated in their analysis that a USB drive was most likely used to boot Linux
OS onto a computer that either contained the alleged DNC files or had direct access to them.
They also explained to
Disobedient Media that in this situation one would simply plug a USB drive with the LinuxOS
into a computer and reboot it; after restarting, the computer would boot from the USB drive and
load Linux instead of its normal OS. A large amount of data would then be copied to this same
USB drive.
In this case, additional files would have been copied en masse, to be "pruned" heavily at
a later time when the 7zip archive now known as NGP-VAN was built. The Forensicator wrote
that if 1.98 GB of data had been copied at a rate of 22.6 MB/s and time gaps t were noticed
at the top level of the NGP-VAN 7zip file were attributed to additional file copying, then
approximately 19.3 GB in total would have been copied. In this scenario, the 7zip archive
(NGP-VAN) would represent only about 10% of the total amount of data that was collected.
The very small proportion of files eventually selected for use in the creation of the
"NGP-VAN" files were later published by the creators of the Guccifer 2.0 persona. This point
is especially significant, as it suggests the possibility that up to 90% of the information
initially copied was never published.
The use of a USB drive would suggest that the person first accessing the data could not
have been a Russian hacker. In this case, the person who copied the files must have
physically interacted with a computer that had access to what Guccifer 2.0 called the DNC
files. A less likely explanation for this data pattern where large time gaps were observed
between top level files and directories in the 7zip file, can be explained by the use of
'think time' to select and copy 1.9 GB of individual files, copied in small batches with
think time interspersed. In either scenario, Linux would have been booted from a USB drive,
which fundamentally necessitates physical access to a computer with the alleged DNC
files.
The Forensicator believed that using the possible 'think-time' explanation to explain the
time-gaps was a less likely explanation for the data pattern available, with a large amount
of data most likely copied instantaneously, later "pruned" in the production of the Guccifer
2.0's publication of the NGP-VAN files.
Both the most likely explanation and the less likely scenario provided by The
Forensicator's analysis virtually exclude the possibility of a Russian or remote hacker
gaining external access to the files later published as "NGP-VAN." In both cases, the
physical presence of a person accessing a containing DNC information would be
required.
Importantly, The Forensicator concluded that the chance that the files had been
accessed and downloaded remotely over the internet were too small to give this idea any
serious consideration. He explained that the calculated transfer speeds for the initial copy
were much faster than can be supported by an internet connection. This is extremely
significant and completely discredits allegations of Russian hacking made by both Guccifer
2.0 and Crowdstrike.
This conclusion is further supported by analysis of the overall transfer rate of 23 MB/s.
The Forensicator
described this as "possible when copying over a LAN, but too fast to support the hypothetical
scenario that the alleged DNC data was initially copied over the Internet (esp. to Romania)."
Guccifer 2.0 had claimed to originate in Romania. So in other words, this rate indicates that
the data was downloaded locally, possibly using the local DNC network. The importance of this
finding in regards to destroying the Russian hacking narrative cannot be overstated.
If the data is correct, then the files could not have been copied over a remote connection
and so therefore cannot have been "hacked by Russia."
The use of a USB drive would also strongly suggest that the person copying the files had
physical access to a computer most likely connected to the local DNC network. Indications
that the individual used a USB drive to access the information over an internal connection,
with time stamps placing the creation of the copies in the East Coast Time Zone, suggest that
the individual responsible for initially copying what was eventually published by the
Guccifer 2.0 persona under the title "NGP-VAN" was located in the Eastern United States, not
Russia.
The implications of The
Forensicator 's analysis in combination with Adam Carter 's work, suggest that at the very least, the Russian
hacking narrative is patently false. Adam Carter has a strong grasp on the NGP-VAN files and
Guccifer 2.0, with his website on the subject called a "good source" by Wikileaks via
twitter. Carter told Disobedient Media that in his opinion the analysis provided by The
Forensicator was accurate, but added that if changes are made to the work in future, any new
conclusions would require further vetting.
On the heels of recent retractions by legacy media outlets like CNN and The New York
Times, this could have serious consequences, if months of investigation into the matter by
authorities are proven to have been based on gross misinformation based solely on the false
word of Crowdstrike.
Assange recently lamented widespread ignorance about the DNC Leak via Twitter, specifically naming Hillary Clinton, the DNC, the
Whitehouse and mainstream media as having "reason" to suppress the truth of the matter. As
one of the only individuals who would have been aware of the source of the DNC Leaks,
Assange's statement corroborates a scenario where the DNC and parties described in Adam
Carter's work likely to have included Crowdstrike, may have participated in "suppressing
knowledge" of the true origins and evidence surrounding the leak of the DNC emails by
confusing them with the publication of the Guccifer 2.0 persona.
Despite Guccifer 2.0's conflicting reports of having both been a Russian hacker and having
contact with Seth Rich, the work of The Forensicator indicates that neither of these
scenarios is likely true. What is suggested is that the files now known as "NGP-VAN" were
copied by someone with access to a system connected to the DNC internal network, and that
this action had no bearing on the files submitted to Wikileaks and were most likely
unassociated with Seth Rich, and definitively not remotely "hacked" from Russia.
This whole thing hangs on the murder of Seth Rich. The
Dossier and the Intelligence Assessment are fundamentally
rooted to Trump and Russians hacking the DNC and using
WikiLeaks to ruin Hillary Clinton. Without the DNC "hack"
there is nothing to Russia's interference in the election or
any Trump collusion. Seth Rich is the Redline.
Hannity and
CTH can go on and on about all of this but, not Seth Rich.
Mention Seth Rich and get your chain yanked. Everything now
reflects a Limited Hangout. They've been caught, and they're
cutting their losses. What will "they" do to keep Seth
Rich's real killers hidden forever from public view?
You folks are missing the point. Mueller has been at this
for 9 months. He has come up with basically nothing, nada,
zip, zilch. To make himself and Rosie look better they
indict the evil Rooskies and say "aha I told you there was
something there". It is a punt and a fairly transparent one.
The cases against Manafort and Flynn will be dropped for
prosecutorial malfeasance, withholding of evidence, flawed
FISA warrants etc.
It tells me there is no case against not
only Trump but also no case against any higher ups in either
the campaign or the administration. It is a way of saving
face for Mueller and Rosenstein but they may have their own
worries soon enough or perhaps a deal has already been made.
"... As part of their defense, BuzzFeed issued a subpoena to the DNC for information which might help them defend against Gubarev's lawsuit by verifying claims in the dossier - including "digital remnants left by the Russian state operatives," as well as a full version of the hacking report prepared by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. ..."
"... Since the DNC wouldn't let the FBI look at the server and instead relied on the report prepared by CrowdStrike (founded by Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch - who sits on the very Anti-Russian Atlantic Council along with Evelyn " oops! " Farkas. The AC is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk, who apparently owns the Ukrainian gas company Joe Biden's son is on the board of). ..."
"... If the DNC is compelled to turn over the full CrowdStrike report and "digital remnants," perhaps Gubarev would then present a counter-analysis by researcher Forensicator which CrowdStrike apparently "missed" - revealing that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - all but confirming that the files had to have been copied locally by an inside source. Many have speculated that DNC IT staffer Seth Rich, whose murder is still unsolved, was the source of the emails provided to WikiLeaks. ..."
"... Word of BuzzFeed's suit against the DNC comes on the heels of a Monday revelation that the news outlet hired a former top FBI and White House cybersecurity official to fly around the globe on a secret mission to corroborate various claims in the dossier. ..."
"... The probe is being conducted by Anthony Ferrante - formerly the FBI's top official in charge of "cyber incident response" at the U.S. National Security Council under the Obama administration. Ferrante is leading the investigation from his new employer, D.C.-based business advisory firm, Forensic Technologies International (FTI) consulting reports Foreign Policy ..."
"... Wouldn't it be funny if BuzzFeed proves the DNC wasn't hacked? ..."
BuzzFeed is suing the
cash-strapped Democratic National Committee (DNC) to force them to hand over information
related to the "Steele Dossier" that might help the news outlet defend itself against a lawsuit
lodged by a Russian businessman who was named in the document. Three separate lawsuits have
been launched against BuzzFeed in connection to the January 11, 2017 publication of the
dossier, which states that Russian tech executive Aleksej Gubarev used his web hosting
companies to hack into the DNC's computer systems.
The dossier, without substantiation, said Gubarev's U.S.-based global web-hosting
companies, XBT and Webzilla, planted digital bugs, transmitted viruses and conducted altering
operations against the Democratic Party leadership.
While one key name in the dossier was blackened out by BuzzFeed, Gubarev's was not. He
alleges that he was never contacted for comment, suffering reputational harm in the process.
-
Foreign Policy
As part of their defense, BuzzFeed issued a subpoena to the DNC for information which might
help them defend against Gubarev's lawsuit by verifying claims in the dossier - including
"digital remnants left by the Russian state operatives," as well as a full version of the
hacking report prepared by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Since the DNC wouldn't let the FBI look at the server and instead relied on the report
prepared by CrowdStrike (founded by Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch - who sits on the very
Anti-Russian Atlantic Council along with Evelyn "
oops! " Farkas. The AC is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and
Ukranian
Oligarch Victor Pinchuk, who apparently owns the Ukrainian gas
company Joe Biden's son is on the board of).
"As part of the discovery process, BuzzFeed is attempting to verify claims in the dossier
that relate to the hacking of the DNC," said BuzzFeed spokesman Matt Mittenhal in a statement.
"We're asking a federal court to force the DNC to follow the law and allow BuzzFeed to fully
defend its First Amendment rights."
Last month, the DNC claimed that providing the requested information would expose the DNC's
internal operations and harm the party politically (it's always someone else's fault, no?).
"If these documents were disclosed, the DNC's internal operations, as well as its ability to
effectively achieve its political goals, would be harmed ," said DNC lawyers.
If the DNC is compelled to turn over the full CrowdStrike report and "digital remnants,"
perhaps Gubarev would then present a counter-analysis by researcher Forensicator which
CrowdStrike apparently "missed" - revealing that the DNC files were copied at
22.6 MB/s - all but confirming that the files had to have been copied locally by an inside
source. Many have speculated that DNC IT staffer Seth Rich, whose murder is still unsolved, was
the source of the emails provided to WikiLeaks.
Word of BuzzFeed's suit against the DNC comes on the heels of a Monday revelation that the
news outlet hired a former top FBI and White House cybersecurity official to fly around the
globe on a secret mission to corroborate various claims in the dossier.
The probe is being conducted by Anthony Ferrante - formerly the FBI's top official in charge
of "cyber incident response" at the U.S. National Security Council under the Obama
administration. Ferrante is leading the investigation from his new employer, D.C.-based
business advisory firm, Forensic Technologies International (FTI) consulting reports
Foreign Policy.
At FTI, Ferrante launched what's now been a months-long stealth effort chasing down
documents and conducting interviews on the ground in various countries around the world. His
team directed BuzzFeed lawyers to subpoena specific data and testimony from dozens of
agencies or companies across the country and assembled a cyber ops war room to analyze that
dat a, according to sources familiar with the work.
Considering that much of the Steele dossier came from a collaboration with high level
Kremlin officials (a collusion if you will), one has to wonder exactly what channels
Ferrante and FTI have tapped in order to access such information.
Wouldn't it be funny if BuzzFeed proves the DNC wasn't hacked?
I'm wondering where Seth
Rich fits into the whole
scenario.
Did he
discover the Hillary/DNC
plot? Was he going to
leak that information?
I'm not sure if the
timeline surrounding his
death fits, but I'm
curious about it.
Can someone here add
some clarification on
this hypothesis?
long winded, but you could start here for some lite bg reading on the
events of the summer of 2016:
July 10, 2016
: DNC
staffer Seth Rich, whose title is reported as "voter expansion data
director," is murdered in the street near his home in Washington, DC.
The police will attribute his murder to robbery, although nothing was
stolen from Rich. His murder remains unsolved.
Here, thanks to William Craddick of
Disobedient Media
, is the crime report, which tells us that three of
the officers at the scene were wearing body cams.
"
I
mran Awan, the former DNC staffer who was arrested
this week while trying to flee the United States, was with Seth Rich the
night of his murder, according to new photographic evidence.
Police who originally investigated the murder suggested that Seth
Rich might have been killed by someone he knew, due to the lack of
struggle. The killer also took nothing from the victim, leaving behind
his wallet containing $2000, watch and phone.
The photo, which directly links Imran Awan to Seth Rich, also links
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Awan's former employer, to the former Seth
Rich's death.
there's bunches more available via your favorite search engine, but
that might pique your curiosity.
"... When the entire episode about the creation of the Trump dossier (by former Brit spy, Christopher Steele) and its dissemination (by Steele and the Democrat hired contractor, FUSION GPS,) to the FBI and the press, is fully exposed, the American people will be confronted with the stark dilemma of how to deal with the fact that there was a failed domestic coup attempted by members of the U.S. intel and law enforcement community. The facts will show that the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the CIA and the FBI conspired and meddled in the 2016 Presidential election. They lied to a Federal judge about the origins of the dossier and used those lies to get permission to spy on Trump and members of his campaign staff. ..."
"... But U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian's leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News. ..."
"... The response to the information from the FBI, he recalled, was "shock and horror." After a few weeks, the bureau asked him for information on his sources and their reliability and on how he had obtained his reports. He was also asked to continue to send copies of his subsequent reports to the bureau. These reports were not written, he noted, as finished work products; they were updates on what he was learning from his various sources. ..."
"... "I have recently become concerned that the threat of the Russian government tampering in our presidential election is more extensive than widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results. The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign continues to mount. . ." ..."
"... Michael Isikoff referenced those briefings : "The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election, the sources said. After one of those briefings, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote FBI Director James Comey, citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and "high ranking sanctioned individuals" in Moscow over the summer as evidence of "significant and disturbing ties" between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that needed to be investigated by the bureau." ..."
"... September 2016. FBI used the Steele memos as part of the basis for requesting a FISA warrant according to reports by the NY Times and the Washington Post : ..."
"... We do not know exactly when the FISA warrant was granted, but the New York Times and the Washington Post have reported, citing U.S. government sources, that this occurred in September 2016 (see here , here , and here ). ..."
"... After Mr. Page, 45 -- a Navy veteran and businessman who had lived in Moscow for three years -- stepped down (26 September 2016) from the Trump campaign in September, the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing the authorities to monitor his communications on the suspicion that he was a Russian agent. ..."
"... The Justice Department obtained a secret court-approved wiretap last summer on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald J. Trump 's presidential campaign, based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent, a government official said Wednesday. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the warrant, the official said, after investigators determined that Mr. Page was no longer part of the Trump campaign, which began distancing itself from him in early August. ..."
"... The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page's communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials. ..."
"... Loretta Lynch, Attorney General under President Obama, approved the FISA application. (Note--federal law requires that the attorney general approve every application to the FISA court.) ..."
"... End of September--Steele revealed in a London court filing earlier this year that he was directed by Fusion GPS to brief reporters at outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Yahoo! News and Mother Jones about his Trump findings. ..."
"... End of September--Steele informs Simpson (i.e. Fusion GPS) that the FBI wants to meet him in Rome. ( Senate Judiciary Committee 0n 22 August 2017, p. 171 ) ..."
"... 6 January 2017--FBI Director Comey briefs Trump on the Steele dossier, which Comey describes as "salacious and UNVERIFIED." : ..."
"... The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing. (Comey's statement before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 8 June 2017) ..."
"... Describing his reports in the Mother Jones interview, Steele asserted, "This was something of huge significance, way above party politics." Things changed, though, when Steele was sued for libel after the dossier was published in early 2017. Suddenly, when he was in a forum where it was clear to him that making exaggerated or false claims could cost him dearly, he decided his allegations were not of such "huge significance" after all . . . .According to Steele's courtroom version, the dossier is merely a compilation of bits of "raw intelligence" that were "unverified" and that he passed along because they "warranted further investigation" -- i.e., not because he could vouch for their truthfulness. (kudos to Rowan Scarborough who initially broke the story). ..."
"... I think one has to start with the assumption that everyone at the highest levels of the federal government, especially the national security apparatus, is a swamp creature. They just don't get there unless they are one. Weasels like Clapper, Brennan, Hayden. Of course that does not mean a person with honor & integrity doesn't get up there. Just far and few between. ..."
"... It is extremely difficult to uncover malfeasance in government in the best of circumstances and it is practically impossible within the national security apparatus as they have the ever present shield of "state secrets". In this context we have to be thankful for small gifts of transparency coming from inside like these disclosures by IG Horowitz as well as by whistleblowers like Snowden. ..."
"... Are you sure the"insurance policy" referred to a way to destroy Trump if he were to be elected? What if FBI counterintelligence agents were involved in illegal surveillance activities that could possibly come to light if Trump were president? The dossier in fact was the insurance policy that they retroactively used to launder previous illegal searches that would have been covered up if Hillary had won. ..."
"... The primary purpose of the "insurance policy" was to protect FBI agents against accusations of malfeasance, which at present, appears to be an accurate description of their behavior. ..."
"... The ENTIRE SYSTEM of FISA-702 surveillance and data collection was weaponized against a political campaign. The DOJ and FBI used the FISA Court to gain access to Trump data, and simultaneously justify earlier FISA "queries" by their contractor, Fusion GPS. FISA-702 queries were used to gather information on the Trump campaign which later became FBI counterintelligence surveillance on the officials therein. ..."
"... So, the snooping began much before Steele was hired by Fusion GPS. Sundance for example believes that the FBI provided this "unauthorized" access to its subcontractor Fusion GPS. This is how Fusion GPS was paid by the FBI. ..."
"... When the time line and interactions are put together it seems that it all begins at the FBI during March 2016, pretty early in the primary season, possibly with Fusion GPS as the subcontractor. Steele only comes on the scene, after the meeting of Mary Jacoby, Glen Simpson's wife at the White House and Fusion is hired by the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... This post and PT's previous ones on the same topic, concern what many here suspect to be an orchestrated attempt to remove the Constitutionally-elected head of state via extra Constitutional means. In other words a soft coup. Rather than "Trump_vs_deep_state", I think the motivations for exploring this possibility here, by and large, come from feelings of patriotism. Particularly from those who swore to defend the Constitution (not the President) from enemies, both foreign and domestic. ..."
"... The question of whether the Rule of Law, or the observance of contitutional propriety, is being upheld is what is being examined here. That second issue is independent of the first. That is as it should be. If it were so that the FBI had played politics against Mrs Clinton that would be as disturbing as if they had played politics against Mr Trump. ..."
"... It will be most interesting to see Trump's most devoted congressional supporters and 'swamp beast fighters' utilize the timeline and verified facts and (unknown-to-indy investigators) details in the 'private' source, to bring justice to bear on this extremely serious matter. Why hasn't the DOJ appointed a special prosecutor; considering what PT and many others here and elsewhere are "piecing together?" ..."
"... I didn't vote Trump but I was shocked by the obvious coup d'etat to overthrow Trump after the election. You see some of us support the rule of law, our constitution, and established process for political change. Just because someone is elected that is unpopular with the losing side doesn't mean you throw away everything and become a willing banana Republic. While this was going on I predicted that if they had succeeded they would have over a million angry people in Washington and I would have been one of them ..."
"... To amplify your point, Terry: once you give the unelected and unaccountable "intelligence community" (or any other part of the Deep State) a de facto veto over election results, you will never get that power back. ..."
"... You as a country have crossed the Rubicon, and when you get to the other side, you are no longer in a constitutional republic, but in something else. ..."
"... In my view, the deep state......... CIA, FBI, NSA....... had the opportunity to prove their commitment to the welfare of the nation...... given they had the means and opportunity to sway the election. ..."
"... Given that the FBI made no serious effort to analyze the DNC servers after the alleged "hack" and, according to Seymour Hersh, are sitting on an FBI report that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the supplier of the DNC emails to Wikileaks, these two facts also support the conclusion that the FBI at the highest levels are in a criminal conspiracy to overthrow Trump ..."
"... The FBI IS a criminal enterprise ..."
"... The FBI never investigated the DNC servers because they decided to accept CrowdStrike's analysis despite CrowdStrike being run by a Russian ex-pat who hates Russia and sees Russians under every bed. Now they want to try to accuse Trump associates of "hacking"? Seriously? ..."
"... Second, according to Seymour Hersh, the FBI is sitting on a report that explicitly fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the source for the DNC emails received by Wikileaks. ..."
The Trump Dossier Timeline, A Democrat Disaster Looming by Publius Tacitus
When the entire episode about the creation of
the Trump dossier (by former Brit spy, Christopher Steele) and its dissemination (by Steele and the Democrat hired contractor, FUSION
GPS,) to the FBI and the press, is fully exposed, the American people will be confronted with the stark dilemma of how to deal with
the fact that there was a failed domestic coup attempted by members of the U.S. intel and law enforcement community. The facts will
show that the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the CIA and the FBI conspired and meddled in the 2016 Presidential
election. They lied to a Federal judge about the origins of the dossier and used those lies to get permission to spy on Trump and
members of his campaign staff.
Here are the facts as we know them now. (Please note, these facts are sourced and are not my opinion).
Fusion
GPS approached Perkins Coie (a Seattle based law firm) and sought an engagement to continue research it had started on Donald
Trump. (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4116755-PerkinsCoie-Fusion-PrivelegeLetter-102417.html)
The
Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing
allegations about President Trump's connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin. (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4116755-PerkinsCoie-Fusion-PrivelegeLetter-102417.html,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.14d16b270afd).
Russian regime had been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years.
TRUMP declined various business deals offered him in Russia but accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin,
including on his Democratic and other political rivals.
Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has material to blackmail TRUMP.
The Russians had a dossier on Clinton but "nothing embarrassing."
July 2016, Christopher Steele meets with FBI (name of contact unknown) and passes on content from the 20 June memo.
Third report, dated 19 July 2016 , claims that TRUMP advisor Carter PAGE held secret meetings in Moscow with SECHIN and senior
Kremlin Internal Affairs official, DIVYEKIN. (
See dossier ).
But U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin,
a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian's
leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News.
15 August 2016 FBI Agent Strzok's text about the meeting in McCabe's office is dated August 15, 2016. . . According to Agent
Strzok, with Election Day less than three months away, Page, the bureau lawyer, weighed in on Trump's bid: "There's no way he
gets elected."
The response to the information from the FBI, he recalled, was "shock and horror." After a few weeks, the bureau asked
him for information on his sources and their reliability and on how he had obtained his reports. He was also asked to continue
to send copies of his subsequent reports to the bureau. These reports were not written, he noted, as finished work products;
they were updates on what he was learning from his various sources.
"I have recently become concerned that the threat of the Russian government tampering in our presidential election
is more extensive than widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results. The evidence of a direct
connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign continues to mount. . ."
Michael Isikoff referenced those briefings : "The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests
in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to
influence the presidential election, the sources said. After one of those briefings, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote
FBI Director James Comey, citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and "high ranking sanctioned
individuals" in Moscow over the summer as evidence of "significant and disturbing ties" between the Trump campaign and the
Kremlin that needed to be investigated by the bureau."
We do not know exactly when the FISA warrant was granted, but the New York Times and the Washington Post have reported,
citing U.S. government sources, that this occurred in September 2016 (see
here ,
here
, and
here ).
After Mr. Page, 45 -- a Navy veteran and businessman who had lived in Moscow for three years -- stepped down (26
September 2016) from the Trump campaign in September,
the
F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing the authorities to monitor his communications
on the suspicion that he was a Russian agent.
The Justice Department obtained a secret court-approved wiretap last summer on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser
to Donald J. Trump 's presidential
campaign, based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent, a government official said Wednesday. The Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the warrant, the official said, after investigators determined that Mr. Page was
no longer part of the Trump campaign, which began distancing itself from him in early August.
The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page's communications after convincing
a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of
a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials.
End of September--Steele revealed in a London court filing earlier this year that he was directed by Fusion GPS to brief
reporters at outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Yahoo! News and Mother Jones about his Trump findings.
8 November 2016 , Senator John McCain, accompanied by David Kramer (a Senior Director at Senator McCain's Institute for International
Leadership), met in London with an Associate of Orbis, former British Ambassador Sir Andrew Wood, to arrange a subsequent meeting
with Christopher Steele in order to read the now infamous Steele Dossier.
Once Senator McCain and David Kramer returned to the United States, arrangements were made for Fusion GPS to provide Senator
McCain hard copies of the memoranda.
13 December 2016 , Christopher Steele prepares, on his own, the 17th report in the dossier and sends it to Senator McCain
via David Kramer.
6 January 2017--FBI Director Comey briefs Trump on the Steele dossier, which Comey describes as
"salacious and UNVERIFIED." :
The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence
of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to
publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from
the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such
effort with a defensive briefing. (Comey's statement before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 8 June 2017)
One of the more interesting developments in the dossier case came as a result of depositions and testimony in the defamation case
that Aleksej Gubarev filed against Christoper Steele in the United Kingdom last year. When pressed to defend the authenticity and
accuracy of the dossier and the allegations against President Trump, Christopher Steele became a British version of Michael Jackson
and moon-walked backwards.
Andy McCarthy describes the situation beautifully :
Describing his reports in the Mother Jones interview, Steele asserted, "This was something of huge significance, way above
party politics." Things changed, though, when Steele was sued for libel after the dossier was published in early 2017. Suddenly,
when he was in a forum where it was clear to him that making exaggerated or false claims could cost him dearly, he decided his allegations
were not of such "huge significance" after all . . . .According to Steele's courtroom version, the dossier is merely a compilation
of bits of "raw intelligence" that were "unverified" and that he passed along because they "warranted further investigation" -- i.e.,
not because he could vouch for their truthfulness. (kudos to
Rowan
Scarborough who initially broke the story).
There are some very interesting unanswered questions. Here are some that I believe are most relevant:
Why does a former MI-6 officer reach out on his own to the FBI when the normal point of contact would be the CIA?
Who did Steele contact at the FBI?
Who at the FBI asked Steele to travel to Rome in October 2016? [Note--this request is quite odd given the fact that the FBI
has a very large presence in London and, if the purpose was simply to inform the FBI about possible nefarious Russian activity,
could have easily walked over to the US Embassy at Grosvenor Square rather than travel to Rome.]
The failure of the FBI and the CIA to disclose to members of Congress and the President that the information they briefed from
the dossier had been paid for by the Clinton campaign is much more than gross negligence and incompetence. It is prima facie evidence
of collusion and meddling in a U.S. domestic election. Only the culprits weren't the Russians.
As Pogo once said , "we have
met the enemy and he is us."
Thanks for spurring my interest on this monumental deceit with your many posts.
I knew nothing about FISA & mass surveillance other than our government was collecting all communications of every American,
before you began posting on this topic. I've learned more since and it is revolting if one is a staunch believer in the Bill of
Rights as what makes America different.
IG Mike Horowitz was barred from investigating the DOJ National Security Division by the Obama administration. It required
an act of Congress and Obama signed it after the election, to allow the IG the ability to investigate all of DOJ. The DOJ NSD
and FBI CounterIntelligence had a big role to play in all this as all the FISA applications originated there. What we know about
Peter Strzok & Lisa Page, Bruce & Nellie Ohr and the Clinton exoneration all came from the IG. In testimony to Congress, Rosenstein
used the IG investigation to stall the production of documents and witness interviews. It seems the IG report will become available
in a few weeks. That will hopefully shed more light.
Considering that in our country the rule of law does not apply to high officials in government, I am not holding my breath
that any of these miscreants will be held accountable or there will be any changes to the surveillance laws.
So, is IG Michael Horowitz one of the honorable guys in this whole thing? You'd never guess judging by his bio. And his ties to
the Democrats and Comey. I've lost all respect for the FBI. And the IC.
I think one has to start with the assumption that everyone at the highest levels of the federal government, especially
the national security apparatus, is a swamp creature. They just don't get there unless they are one. Weasels like Clapper, Brennan,
Hayden. Of course that does not mean a person with honor & integrity doesn't get up there. Just far and few between.
I don't have any basis to judge Michael Horowitz since I didn't even know about him until a few weeks ago. What we know in
this case is he has allowed us to learn about some of the activities of Peter Strozk & Lisa Page as well as Bruce & Nellie Ohr
which has helped further understand Russiagate.
It is extremely difficult to uncover malfeasance in government in the best of circumstances and it is practically impossible
within the national security apparatus as they have the ever present shield of "state secrets". In this context we have to be
thankful for small gifts of transparency coming from inside like these disclosures by IG Horowitz as well as by whistleblowers
like Snowden.
Both Christopher Wray and Rosenstein in separate testimony were unable to confirm that any of the contents in the Steele dossier
was verified, with the exception of Carter Page's visit to Russia.
It's becoming quite clear that Trump, as President, appeared to be such an appalling concept amongst some highly placed functionaries
that "insurance" was needed to deal with the possibility. And these people had contacts with the media, which, by and large, were
as appalled. Thus the current situation.
Quite unfortunately, Trump's unbounded hubris has played into this mess. Trump is very fortunate that his party is in control
of the legislative branches. One thinks of Hercules and the Aegean stables.
Great compilation and analysis of the available facts. No need to publish the following, but I would suggest that your work
is important enough to correct a couple of typos and provide a clarification which I will identify by paragraph number.
1. Perkins Coie (a Seattle Law Firm)--you get the name right in #2.
9. Put "Lisa" in front of "Page" in order to let the reader know you are referring to Lisa Page.
19. Rowan Farrow, I think, not Rowan Scarborough.
Keep posting and keep up the good work. Bob Randolph
Are you sure the"insurance policy" referred to a way to destroy Trump if he were to be elected? What if FBI counterintelligence
agents were involved in illegal surveillance activities that could possibly come to light if Trump were president? The dossier
in fact was the insurance policy that they retroactively used to launder previous illegal searches that would have been covered
up if Hillary had won.
The primary purpose of the "insurance policy" was to protect FBI agents against accusations
of malfeasance, which at present, appears to be an accurate description of their behavior.
The ENTIRE SYSTEM of FISA-702 surveillance and data collection was weaponized against a political campaign. The DOJ and
FBI used the FISA Court to gain access to Trump data, and simultaneously justify earlier FISA "queries" by their contractor, Fusion
GPS. FISA-702 queries were used to gather information on the Trump campaign which later became FBI counterintelligence surveillance
on the officials therein.
Here's something that's puzzling. The FBI directly or indirectly through Fusion GPS or another a subcontractor, began querying
the NSA database around March 2016 as per the FISC ruling. That's pretty early in the primary. I don't think anyone at that point
was thinking Trump was going to clinch the GOP nomination.
Do you think they were doing this on other candidates too? Bernie? Were they already an arm of the Clinton campaign? Or just
snooping on all or some of the candidates communications?
Here's a stab at your relevant unanswered questions.
"Why does a former MI-6 officer reach out on his own to the FBI when the normal point of contact would be the CIA?"
"Who did Steele contact at the FBI?"
"Who at the FBI asked Steele to travel to Rome in October 2016?"
Steele's CIA contacts were probably more of the bureaucratic liaison variety. Hardly memorable. However, he worked closely
with the FBI Eurasian Joint Organized Crime Squad on several operations. He formed strong friendships doing these "heady things"
as Steele describes . When he decided to bring his concerns to the FBI, he found one of these old FBI friends stationed in Rome.
This FBI friend is who he reached out to. This FBI Special Agent seems to be identified in Steele's Judicial Committee testimony,
but the name and position is redacted. Someone in Comey's Russian investigation team probably decided to continue this established
relationship and venue for the October 2016 meeting. Perhaps it was Comey himself.
DC you are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts. Both the FBI and Steele in his court case
have stated that there is no confirmation of anything in the reports. They are purely hearsay at absolute best and more likely
a deliberate fabrication for political purposes in the opinion of far more knowledgeable people than you.
To put that another way, the chances of your opinion being valid are judged as zero.
Keep your eyes tightly closed. Your hatred of Trump blinds you to what is really going on. Deal with these two indisputable facts:
1) Comey, under oath, almost one year after the info became available, still said it was UNVERIFIABLE; 2) Steele, himself, also
under oath, now disavows the importance of what he originally claimed was so essential. You should write a novel. You're very
good at spinning a tale without having a shred of evidence to go on.
If you look at the FISC ruling that has been declassified but heavily redacted, you will notice the FBI provided a sub-contractor
"unauthorized" access to the NSA database in March 2016. This access to the raw FISA data was discontinued on April 18, 2016.
So, the snooping began much before Steele was hired by Fusion GPS. Sundance for example believes that the FBI provided
this "unauthorized" access to its subcontractor Fusion GPS. This is how Fusion GPS was paid by the FBI.
When the time line and interactions are put together it seems that it all begins at the FBI during March 2016, pretty early
in the primary season, possibly with Fusion GPS as the subcontractor. Steele only comes on the scene, after the meeting of Mary
Jacoby, Glen Simpson's wife at the White House and Fusion is hired by the Clinton campaign.
Not being an academic, mathematician, nor pollster, I simply run an image search on both Clinton and Trump election rallies. These
showed that Trump would win. Early in the campaign, there were several pics of large crowds at Clinton rallies, but from about
six months out, the images all showed her speaking to fifty to hundred people, whereas Trump images always showed packed stadiums.
The Dossier. A person as portrayed in the Steele would be corrupt/dishonest in most everyday business dealings. With the attacks
against Trump, by intelligence and investigative agencies, any dishonesty, breaking the law in business dealings, would have been
brought up. This tells me he has always operated within the letter of the law. Perhaps sharp and ruthless, but within the letter
of the law.
Trump's ideology/culture is USA through and through. Russia has no ideology, and its own culture.
There is no ideology nor religion involved, so why would a man like Trump that has always operated within the letter of the
law be nefariously colluding with a foreign state?
Needs to be a lot more digging like you are doing PT, as the saying goes "Without fear or favor".
Here's a timeline based on Sundance's work to supplement PT's timeline. I did this for my benefit so likely contain errors. Others
here at SST can correct.
- Before March 2016: a)Fusion GPS hired by Washington Free Beacon to do oppo research on Trump. I have read elsewhere that
it was billionaire fund manager Paul Singer who paid for this, presume to provide GOP candidate he supported in the primary
oppo research. b) FBI provides unauthorized FISA 702 access to a subcontractor who conducts numerous FISA 702(16)(17) searches
on NSA database, which lead to FISA 702 violations. Speculation subcontractor is Fusion GPS. The subcontractor's name is redacted
in declassified FISC ruling.
- March 9, 2016: DOJ oversight personnel learn that FBI has disclosed raw FISA information to a subcontractor that went
well beyond what was necessary to respond to FBI's request.
- Early April 2016: Admiral Rogers learns of FISA 702 violations and orders compliance review at NSA.
- April 18, 2016: Access to raw FISA information by subcontractor ended presume after FBI learns that Admiral Rogers is
on to the FISA violations.
- April 19, 2016: White House log shows Mary Jacoby, wife of Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS visits White House.
- Later in April 2016: Clinton campaign hires Fusion GPS to do oppo research on Trump. See PT's timeline.
- March/April 2016: Fusion GPS hires Nellie Ohr, who also works with CIA and is the the wife of DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr.
- May 2016: Fusion GPS hires Christopher Steele. See PT's timeline. Presume that Steele receives whatever prior oppo research
the Fusion GPS did which may include info obtained from FISA 702 searches (if Fusion GPS is the FBI subcontractor) and whatever
stuff Nellie Ohr has written up until then.
- May 23, 2016: Mary Jacoby applies for ham radio license. Presume to communicate with Steele without getting "collected"
in NSA hoover.
- June 2016 on: Steele dossier dissemination. See PT's timeline for more detail.
- August 2016: Peter Strzok's "insurance policy" text message. See PT's timeline.
- October 2016: a) NSA compliance review completed and Admiral Rogers goes to FISC to report FISA 702 violations and ends
FISA 702(17) searches. b) DOJ NSD prepares FISA application that in part includes content from Steele dossier. c) FISC grants
warrant.
- A week after election: a) Admiral Rogers goes to Trump Tower and spills the beans b) Next day Trump transition moves
out of Trump Tower to Trump Golf Club in Bedminster.
Publius Tacitus: "When James Comey testified in June of 2017 that the dossier was "SALACIOUS AND UNVERIFIED," he made it very
clear that Steele's so-called "raw intelligence" had no value nor corroboration. If Comey had said, "WE HAVE VERIFIED KEY ELEMENTS
OF THE DOSSIER BUT WILL HAVE TO DISCUSS THAT IN CLOSED SESSION," then Trump would have been a dead man walking."
Then Trump is in big trouble. In the June 2017 transcript, Senator Burr questions first. After about a dozen questions:
"BURR: In the public domain is this question of the "Steele dossier," a document that has been around out in for over a year.
I'm not sure when the FBI first took possession of it, but the media had it before you had it and we had it. At the time of your
departure from the FBI, was the FBI able to confirm any criminal allegations contained in the Steele document?
COMEY: Mr. Chairman, I don't think that's a question I can answer in an open setting because it goes into the details of the
investigation."
This post and PT's previous ones on the same topic, concern what many here suspect to be an orchestrated attempt to remove
the Constitutionally-elected head of state via extra Constitutional means. In other words a soft coup. Rather than "Trump_vs_deep_state",
I think the motivations for exploring this possibility here, by and large, come from feelings of patriotism. Particularly from
those who swore to defend the Constitution (not the President) from enemies, both foreign and domestic.
This said, if Trump actually does go to war with Iran (rather than just threaten it) I will agree with your comparison re Bush
and the neocons of his era.
Nice try Lee, but he still does not contradict his sworn testimony, i.e. UNVERIFIED. Not being able to discuss "details of the
investigation" could have opened up questions about when the FBI first learned of the reports in the dossier. That would have
raised even more uncomfortable questions about the FBIs conduct.
"I check in with this site from time to time because I find coverage of the Middle East that I will not find elsewhere. It has
always been informative. But it is curious to find this remarkable devotion to Trump_vs_deep_state."
Right on the first point. Wrong on the second. To my occasional regret the dream of 2016 had and has few all-in adherents here.
The merits of what you term "Trump_vs_deep_state" are examined from time to time on the Colonel's site. The question of whether the
Rule of Law, or the observance of contitutional propriety, is being upheld is what is being examined here. That second issue is
independent of the first. That is as it should be. If it were so that the FBI had played politics against Mrs Clinton that would
be as disturbing as if they had played politics against Mr Trump.
From my point of view - I'm English, as you might notice - the question of whether the UK Security Services helped
play politics in a US presidential election is relevant whoever the target was. I like to think that our Security Services work
as part of our defence forces, not as political hit men.
The Kremlin targeted "educated youth"? Which ones, the Bernie supporters who were going to be screwed by the rigged democratic
primary? How did they do the targeting, by that $100K ad spend with Zuckerberg? Isn't he then also guilty by association or is
he still the good billionaire? Which other US citizens maintain ties to rich businessmen from Axerbaijan? Which law does that
violate?
When the MSM was all a-flutter with coverage of Simpson's testimony in the Capitol, I heard none of the TV hosts mention that
it was the Clinton folks who hired Fusion. If that is not the case, please let me know.
In his testimony, Simpson supposedly said that Russia was just one country that research into Trump's business contacts were
conducted, the others being the likes of South East Asia and Latin America. We have heard nothing about the outcome of that research.
It will be most interesting to see Trump's most devoted congressional supporters and 'swamp beast fighters' utilize the timeline
and verified facts and (unknown-to-indy investigators) details in the 'private' source, to bring justice to bear on this extremely
serious matter. Why hasn't the DOJ appointed a special prosecutor; considering what PT and many others here and elsewhere
are "piecing together?"
If Trump wanted to do so, he could have all this factual stuff published on the WH web site; yes?
If he did so the counter-narrative would be instantly annihilated, right?
I didn't vote Trump but I was shocked by the obvious coup d'etat to overthrow Trump after the election. You see some of us
support the rule of law, our constitution, and established process for political change. Just because someone is elected that
is unpopular with the losing side doesn't mean you throw away everything and become a willing banana Republic. While this was
going on I predicted that if they had succeeded they would have over a million angry people in Washington and I would have been
one of them
What I find remarkable isn't Trump_vs_deep_state - but rather the blind emotional partisanship that drives far too many people and how
willing so many people are to commit treason and tear apart constitutional law just to "win".
- November 2016: Clapper recommended that Rogers be fired. This was soon after Rogers' meeting with Trump.
- March 2017: Trump tweeted that Trump Tower had it's "wires tapped."
Sundance's theory is very interesting. Given the circumstances and the timeline of events, it seems plausible to say the least
that Rogers tipped off Trump.
I have believed that the FISA courts and procedures are a flat violation of the Sixth Amendment (which guarantees public trials,
the right to confront witnesses and the right of the accused to be made aware of the charges against them) ever since the day
I became aware of them.
To amplify your point, Terry: once you give the unelected and unaccountable "intelligence community" (or any other part of
the Deep State) a de facto veto over election results, you will never get that power back.
You as a country have crossed the Rubicon, and when you get to the other side, you are no longer in a constitutional republic,
but in something else.
Americans should be able to put their personal beliefs about Trump aside and realize that our country has a serious problem when
one-sided opposition research containing little more than rumors is used as the basis for starting a FBI investigation on a presidential
candidate during an election. This is especially true when, as we all know, the "news" of such an investigation would soon be
leaked to the press.
Personally, I have a very low opinion of Trump and his policies. However, this whole "Russiagate" thing, from what evidence
I've seen, is complete bullshit. To see that such obvious bullshit was used to start an FBI spying operation and witch hunts by
both the press and a special prosecutor against Trump is outrageous. It is also a crime under our laws. If it can happen to Trump,
it can happen to anyone.
One would think the great harm caused by allowing our government intelligence agencies to spy on political candidates and then
leak both true and false information about those candidates to the press would be obvious. I hope the people who caused this outrage
are prosecuted for the many crimes they committed.
Very, very well done. Andy McCarthy's and Publius Tacitus's combined work in clearing the political and MSM smoke from around
this Beltway debacle alone is more than is needed to predicate a full criminal investigation.
In my opinion, another Special
Counsel is neither needed nor desirable: a competent apolitical United States Attorney with a special Grand Jury and a couple
of squads of FBI Agents brought in from some place like Chicago should be adequate to the job; or the American taxpayer has not
been getting its money's worth. A not inconsiderable side benefit would be that our system of justice and the FBI might start
to reclaim some of their reputation that is lying in tatters.
The only thing I would add is that I would integrate into the design of the case the multiple unmaskings and unfettered leaks.
This case points directly towards the Obama White House and it is reasonable to suspect that it may include Obama himself.
In my view, the deep state......... CIA, FBI, NSA....... had the opportunity to prove their commitment to the welfare of
the nation...... given they had the means and opportunity to sway the election.
I'm speaking of Sanders... There was enough dirt on HRC to blackmail her into giving the nomination to Sanders. There
was enough dirt on DT to show him as the plaything of the Zionists/ Russians. They had both the Post and Times in their pockets,
not to mention Fox and CNN. Only Sanders had a domestic program which could put money into households and thus grow demand and
the economy, and Sanders was/is a hawk. They didn't. Their loyalty to HRC trumped the nation.... The question left un asked.........
WHY??? What did they have to gain from HRC that no one else offered?
Given that the FBI made no serious effort to analyze the DNC servers after the alleged "hack" and, according to Seymour Hersh,
are sitting on an FBI report that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the supplier of the DNC emails to Wikileaks, these
two facts also support the conclusion that the FBI at the highest levels are in a criminal conspiracy to overthrow Trump.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the FBI's history of conducting illegal, criminal activities
against various dissident groups in the US and covering up evidence of criminal activity by their own informants - including murder
- and also covering up evidence of criminal activity by other law enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Prisons.
If any of Trump's associates knew about and encouraged the hacking of Democrats' emails and computer servers, they could
be charged under the statute.
In November, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mueller's team was letting the original DOJ prosecutors retain the investigation
of the actual cyber intrusions into the DNC and other targets.
This is beyond ridiculous.
The FBI never investigated the DNC servers because they decided to accept CrowdStrike's analysis despite CrowdStrike being
run by a Russian ex-pat who hates Russia and sees Russians under every bed. Now they want to try to accuse Trump associates of
"hacking"? Seriously?
Second, according to Seymour Hersh, the FBI is sitting on a report that explicitly fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich
as the source for the DNC emails received by Wikileaks.
These two facts - along with the compromised FBI personnel involved in the Fusion GPS scandal - demonstrate that the FBI at
the highest levels were involved in a criminal conspiracy to prevent Trump from winning the election.
This establishes that the entire "Russiagate" investigation is nothing but more of the same. The real scandal is that the FBI,
the CIA, and other intelligence agencies are involved in a "soft coup" against an elected President.
I can keep smacking you around all day. Here's what Corn reported in January 2017 about his first conversations with Steele: The
former spy said he soon decided the information he was receiving was "sufficiently serious" for him to forward it to contacts
he had at the FBI. He did this, he said, without permission from the American firm that had hired him. "This was an extraordinary
situation," he remarked.
The response to the information from the FBI, he recalled, was "shock and horror." After a few weeks, the bureau asked him
for information on his sources and their reliability and on how he had obtained his reports. He was also asked to continue to
send copies of his subsequent reports to the bureau. These reports were not written, he noted, as finished work products; they
were updates on what he was learning from his various sources. But he said, "My track record as a professional is second to no
one."
When I spoke with the former spy, he appeared confident about his material -- acknowledging these memos were works in progress
-- and genuinely concerned about the implications of the allegations. He came across as a serious and somber professional who
was not eager to talk to a journalist or cause a public splash. He realized he was taking a risk, but he seemed duty bound to
share information he deemed crucial. He noted that these allegations deserved a "substantial inquiry" within the FBI.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/spy-who-wrote-trump-russia-memos-it-was-hair-raising-stuff/
Of course, if you had actually read carefully what I wrote you would have known this.
"... The FBI never investigated the DNC servers because they decided to accept CrowdStrike's analysis despite CrowdStrike being run by a Russian ex-pat who hates Russia and sees Russians under every bed. Now they want to try to accuse Trump associates of "hacking"? Seriously? ..."
"... Second, according to Seymour Hersh, the FBI is sitting on a report that explicitly fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the source for the DNC emails received by Wikileaks. ..."
If any of Trump's associates knew about and encouraged the hacking of Democrats' emails and computer servers, they could
be charged under the statute.
In November, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mueller's team was letting the original DOJ prosecutors retain the investigation
of the actual cyber intrusions into the DNC and other targets.
End Quote
This is beyond ridiculous.
The FBI never investigated the DNC servers because they decided to accept CrowdStrike's analysis despite CrowdStrike being
run by a Russian ex-pat who hates Russia and sees Russians under every bed. Now they want to try to accuse Trump associates of
"hacking"? Seriously?
Second, according to Seymour Hersh, the FBI is sitting on a report that explicitly fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich
as the source for the DNC emails received by Wikileaks.
These two facts - along with the compromised FBI personnel involved in the Fusion GPS scandal - demonstrate that the FBI at
the highest levels were involved in a criminal conspiracy to prevent Trump from winning the election.
This establishes that the entire "Russiagate" investigation is nothing but more of the same. The real scandal is that the FBI,
the CIA, and other intelligence agencies are involved in a "soft coup" against an elected President.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the DNC Fraud Lawsuit received good news from the 11th
Circuit Court of Federal Appeals earlier today. The Becks stated via social media that "After
posing two separate jurisdictional questions, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has found
jurisdiction sufficient for the case to proceed on appeal.
The DNC Fraud lawsuit was initially filed on behalf of donors to the Democratic party in the
wake of the revelations stemming from the publication of DNC emails that clearly demonstrated
the party's partisan efforts to support Hillary Clinton and to undermine Bernie Sander's
campaign. After the suit was dismissed late last year, Disobedient
Media reported that the Becks filed an appeal to that ruling.
The suit has proven extremely significant in terms of calling the Democratic Party
establishment to account, with DNC defense counsel forced to argue in open court that the Party
should legally be able to support one candidate over another, in an apparently overt
contradiction of the DNC's charter.
Disobedient Media reported on the numerous issues stemming from the suit, including safety
concerns of the plaintiff's Attorneys and their co-counsel. Among other disturbing events
surrounding the case, including the death of
Shawn Lucas ,
Disobedient Media reported that the Becks had received unusual phone calls from a caller-ID
which matched the Aventura office of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a defendant in the case.
"I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any
real basis for it," John Podesta said not long before the young DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was
mysteriously killed. Some unsubstantiated claims indicate Rich may have been Julian Assange's
source for the leaked DNC emails
But talk he did. He was alive and talking when the police arrived. And what do the police
ask gunshot victims when that are talking? They ask "Who shot you?". And where is that
testimony? Where are the police reports about when the police found him alive and talking?
And why did the emergency room personnel leave the room and allow .GOV officials enter the
room where Rich was? And then he was dead. His wounds were NOT life threatening.
I wonder who ordered the murder of Seth Rich. Was it John Podesta?
Was it Hillary Clinton?
Was it Debra Wasserman-Scholtz?
As I side note, I wonder who double crossed and informed on Seth Rich?
Was it Julian Assange or was Seth Rich careless and confided his intentions to someone
that he thought he could trust?
I'd bet my balls to a barn dance the whoever those two gunmen were that were on the
surveillance tape were also in the bar that night.
Bet that bar has video too.
You know the kid said something to paramedics and the ER Docs, too.
Seth Rich was talkative when police arrived. Was not even aware he'd been shot. In fact,
the cops were surprised to learn that he didn't make it. So what did Rich have to say before
he passed? And why did Rich wander so long that early morning, far longer than the walk home
should have taken - was he trying to shake someone?
What did he tell his GF?
The frat bro he also spoke with that morning?
The machinations surrounding the Election 2016 and its aftermath could hardy have been
scripted more intriguingly. So many vile characters.
It would seem that if the facts don't get reported by all news agencies then I guess the
truth is not the truth after all.
Bill Binney proved that this was a leak not a hack, because metadata proves that the
transfer rate was much too fast to have been a hacker and was a drive that was plugged
directly into the computer.
The Lucas murder right after serving DNC papers on the law suit, then Seth Rich murder,
nothing stolen but according to police it was a robbery. Then the Haitian minister is
suicided the day before he was to testify on the Clinton Foundation.
Too many dead bodies showing up around democrats, considering Wasserman Shultz looks
inbred, sounds and acts inbred, is extremely racist against those who are not Jews, then
maybe Wasserman Shultz must be investigated, we can't because she is a Jew, just like Harvey
Wienstein can't be indicted and convicted, because he is a Jew.
Then we have Wasserman Shultz running a Pakistani espionage ring connected to Hezbollah
and we don't know if this is the same Hezbollah cocaine ring Obama covered for.
I've been saying for over 2 years now, the collective "we" probably deserves what's coming
for sticking their fingers in the ears, closing their eyes and adamantly refusing to to
consider any evidence except that which supported their previously held beliefs.
It does remove all doubt about the FBIs true role in our society, hopefully opening a few
eyes and minds.
The secret police guarding the one party, the Pure Evil Criminal Psychopath and its
minions.
Its policing work is merely practice and cover for that true purpose.
Don't nominate a new head, send it to the trash can of history NOW..
A federal investigator who reviewed an FBI forensic report detailing the contents of DNC
staffer Seth Rich's computer generated within 96 hours after his murder, said Rich made
contact with WikiLeaks through Gavin MacFadyen, a now-deceased American investigative
reporter, documentary filmmaker, and director of WikiLeaks who was living in London at the
time.
This explosive information was being suppressed by James Comey...FUCK the FBI!
And Andrew the Weiner and Huma have called off the divorce......Hmmmm cannot testifies
against your husband!!! or wife.....
You just know they are all dirty of what we suspect, and I'm sure much more. They would
not do these things if they were not guilty...
Private meetings on air port runways, smashing hard drives and blackberry's, bleach
bit...erasing emails after subpoena... and the list goes on and on.....
Actually there will be a lot of super delegates. At least it's no more than 15% of the
total delegates. It's partly how the Democrats choose their candidate, and ensures the
"establishment" has a say. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey obtained the Democrat nomination for
president, without entering a single primary by sewing up the super delegate vote, which led
to some reform.
Washer-woman making thinly disguised "anonymous" calls (and forgetting about caller-ID) is
a sign of serious desperation. Discovery on this one could be life changing for many people.
"OK, I'll talk: I did X, Y and Z so I wouldn't end up blackmailed to disgrace or dead."
The best part of this whole shitstorm is that if nothing happens to the guilty parties
here, then it is very clear that the Rule of Law is dead in America and revolution a
necessity.
It you need to read a singe article analyzing current anti-Russian hysteria in the USA this in the one you should read. This is
an excellent article Simply great !!! And as of December 2017 it represents the perfect summary of Russiagate, Hillary defeat and, Neo-McCarthyism
campaign launched as a method of hiding the crisis of neoliberalism revealed by Presidential elections. It also suggest that growing
jingoism of both Parties (return to Madeleine Albright's 'indispensable nation' bulling. Both Trump and Albright assume that the
United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena) and loss of the confidence and paranoia of the US
neoliberal elite.
It contain many important observation which in my view perfectly catch the complexity of the current Us political landscape.
Bravo to Jackson Lears !!!
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress ..."
"... Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton's defeat. Then everything changed. ..."
"... A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton's chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s. ..."
"... The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. ..."
"... Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free 'assessment' produced last January by a small number of 'hand-picked' analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. ..."
"... It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's putative weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of disinformation (a.k.a. 'fake news') as a tactic for advancing one administration or another's political agenda. Once again, the established press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had 'wittingly' spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. ..."
"... In May 2017, he told NBC's Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump's campaign because they are 'almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique'. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians – above all Putin – as uniquely, 'almost genetically' diabolical. ..."
"... It's hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump's election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It's true that Trump's menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. ..."
"... Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors' lavish funding of the already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albright's 'indispensable nation'. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it's the greatest country in the world, Albright because it's an exceptional force for global good. ..."
"... Besides Trump's supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies. ..."
"... So far, after months of 'bombshells' that turn out to be duds, there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking Colin Powell's claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN. ..."
"... The crucial issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of people with professional credentials and a solid track record. ..."
"... Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. ..."
"... The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. ..."
"... More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders's supporters. ..."
"... Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin's interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. ..."
"... Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration, James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After Comey's briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington establishment. ..."
"... The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence, disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the intelligence community: the 'tree of smoke' that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. ..."
"... Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party's base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about 'treason' like a reconstituted John Birch Society. ..."
"... The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. ..."
"... For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless. ..."
"... The prospect of impeaching Trump and removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats, allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of many politicians far more skilful in Washington's ways than their president will ever be. ..."
"... They are posing an overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic arrogance that led to Clinton's defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are seeking funding from outside the DNC. ..."
"... Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar formulas. ..."
"... Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire. ..."
"... This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. 'The Democratic Party's claims of fighting for "working families" have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,' Autopsy announces. ..."
"... Clinton's record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. ..."
"... If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It's a long shot, but there is something happening out there. ..."
American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are
troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership's failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign.
Bernie Sanders's challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump's triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as
usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington.
Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means
of fighting evil in order to secure global progress . Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered
their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a
widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more
capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton's defeat. Then everything changed.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a really interesting player as for DNC leak... This Anan brothers story is simply incredible
and probably hides some really nasty staff related to DNC espionage over congress members.
Notable quotes:
"... To briefly recap, our report from last week , the Awan family - which was employed by quite a number of House Democrats, had full access to highly sensitive Congressional computer systems , both on-site and remotely from Pakistan , with which they are suspected of committing a variety of crimes - including brokering classified information to hostile foreign governments. ..."
"... would frequently simply go across the street to longstanding dealership called AAA Motors and get one. ..."
"... While Imran and Abid Awan ran their car dealership in Falls Church, Va. in the early part of the decade, Drug Enforcement Agency officials a few miles away in Chantilly were learning that the Iranian-linked terrorist group frequently deployed used car dealerships in the US to launder money and fund terrorism , according to an explosive new Politico expose. - Daily Caller ..."
"... "Based on the modest way Awan was living, it is my opinion that he was sending most of his money to a group or criminal organization that could very well be connected with the Pakistani government ," said Wayne Black - a private investigator who worked in Janet Reno's Miami public corruption unit, adding " My instincts tell me Awan was probably operating a foreign intelligence gathering operation on US soil." ..."
"... In February, the Daily Caller dropped two bombshells: that the Awans were under criminal investigation after being caught accessing congressional computers without permission, and they had borrowed, laundered, and never repaid $100,000 from a shady Iraqi expat physician – Dr. Ali al-Attar , a Hezbollah-linked fugitive who led a group of other expats which regularly advised the Bush administration on their plans to invade Iraq in 2002-2003 ( source ). ..."
"... Al-Attar's license to practice medicine was revoked by the Maryland State Board of Physicians and he had to pay a $50,000 fine for unprofessional conduct, healthcare fraud, and failure to cooperate with an investigation. ..."
"... It's not clear where the dealership's money was going, because it was sued by at least five different people on all ends of a typical car business who said they were stiffed. ..."
"... CIA didn't pay the security deposit, rent or taxes for its building, it didn't pay wholesalers who provided cars, and it sold broken cars to people and then refused to honor the warranties, the lawsuits say . ..."
"... Moreover, when the Awans' shady car dealership ran into money troubles, Florida Congressman Theo Deutch began paying a monthly salary to a man who had threatened to sue the Awans . ..."
"... The brothers had numerous additional sources of income, all of which seemed to disappear. While they were supposedly working for the House, the brothers were running a car dealership full-time that didn't pay its vendors, and after one -- Rao Abbas -- threatened to sue them, he began receiving a paycheck from Rep. Theodore Deutch (D-FL), who like Wasserman Schultz represents Florida. - Daily Caller ..."
"... " It was in the garage. They recycled cabinets and lined them along the walls. They left in a huge hurry," the Marine said. " It looks like government-issued equipment. We turned that stuff over ." ..."
"... If the Awans cut a deal , one might speculate that a liberal prosecutor and a DNC-friendly court might be conducting a dog-and-pony show. For months, rumors swirled that brother of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Wasserman was handling the prosecution - however court filings reveal that assistant U.S. Attorney Michael J. Marando is handling the case. Marando is married to JoAnna Wasserman - an employee of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in D.C. ..."
"... While the notion that Imran Awan cut a deal based on his name vanishing from the court calendar, Federal prosecutors certainly have enough evidence against the Awan clan to put them away for a long time. Perhaps they've decided they like the outside of a prison cell better than the alternative. ..."
Luke Rosiak of The Daily Caller pointed out a mysterious twist in the case of Pakistani national and long-time DNC IT contractor,
Imran Awan - who was arrested in July at Dulles Airport while trying to flee the country after having wired nearly $300,000 to Pakistan
.
Awan's court date on four counts related to bank fraud, which had already been reschedule twice, has disappeared from the docket
altogether:
Which begs the question - did Imran Awan cut a deal with Federal prosecutors?
Of note - Imran's wife, Hina Alvi - who had fled to Pakistan in March with the Awan children,
struck a deal with federal prosecutors in September to return to the U.S. and face charges. One wonders why Alvi would willingly
leave the relative security of her family in Pakistan to face arraignment in the United States?
To briefly recap, our
report from last week , the Awan family - which was employed by quite a number of House Democrats, had full access to highly
sensitive Congressional computer systems , both on-site and remotely from Pakistan , with which they are suspected of committing
a variety of crimes - including brokering classified information to hostile foreign governments.
Of note, the Awans had access to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence - whose members have top secret clearance
and are looking into Russian election interference.
The Pakistani nationals also operated a shady used car dealership in Falls Church, VA operating under the title "CIA" which Luke
Rosiak of The Daily Caller reported has all the signs of a money laundering operation .
On its Facebook page, CIA's "staff" were fake personalities such as "James Falls O'Brien," whose photo was taken from a
hairstyle mode l catalog, and "Jade Julia," whose image came from a web page called "Beautiful Girls Wallpaper."
If a customer showed up looking to buy a car from Cars International A, often referred to as CIA, Abid Awan -- who was managing
partner of the dealership while also earning $160,000 handling IT for House Democrats -- would frequently simply go across the
street to longstanding dealership called AAA Motors and get one.
While Imran and Abid Awan ran their car dealership in Falls Church, Va. in the early part of the decade, Drug Enforcement Agency
officials a few miles away in Chantilly were learning that the Iranian-linked terrorist group frequently deployed used car dealerships
in the US to launder money and fund terrorism , according to an explosive new
Politico
expose. -
Daily Caller
"Based on the modest way Awan was living, it is my opinion that he was sending most of his money to a group or criminal organization
that could very well be connected with the Pakistani government ," said Wayne Black - a private investigator who worked in Janet
Reno's Miami public corruption unit, adding " My instincts tell me Awan was probably operating a foreign intelligence gathering operation
on US soil."
The money which the Awans borrowed was moved from Ali Al-Attar through accounts intended for Fairfax County real estate. Both
Imran Awan and Khattak -- who also put up $200,000 in cash as an investor in CIA -- had realtors licenses.
Dr. Ali al-Attar
Al-Attar's license to practice medicine was revoked by the Maryland State Board of Physicians and he had to pay a $50,000 fine
for unprofessional conduct, healthcare fraud, and failure to cooperate with an investigation.
It's not clear where the dealership's money was going, because it was sued by at least five different people on all ends of
a typical car business who said they were stiffed.
CIA didn't pay the security deposit, rent or taxes for its building, it didn't pay wholesalers who provided cars, and it sold
broken cars to people and then refused to honor the warranties,
the lawsuits say .
Moreover, when the Awans' shady car dealership ran into money troubles, Florida Congressman Theo Deutch began paying a monthly
salary to a man who had threatened to sue the Awans .
Rep Theo Deutch (D-FL), Awan Benefactor
The brothers had numerous additional sources of income, all of which seemed to disappear. While they were supposedly working
for the House, the brothers were running a car dealership full-time that didn't pay its vendors, and after one -- Rao Abbas --
threatened to sue them, he began receiving a paycheck from Rep. Theodore Deutch (D-FL), who like Wasserman Schultz represents
Florida. - Daily Caller
The Awans were also turned into the Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) by two renters occupying a home they owned , after
they found "wireless routers, hard drives that look like they tried to destro y, laptops, [and] a lot of brand new expensive toner"
in the garage.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity over concerns for his wife's naval career, the former Marine told the Daily Caller:
" It was in the garage. They recycled cabinets and lined them along the walls. They left in a huge hurry," the Marine said.
" It looks like government-issued equipment. We turned that stuff over ."
If the Awans cut a deal , one might speculate that a liberal prosecutor and a DNC-friendly court might be conducting a dog-and-pony
show. For months, rumors swirled that brother of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Wasserman was
handling the prosecution - however court filings reveal that assistant U.S. Attorney Michael J. Marando is handling the case. Marando
is married to JoAnna Wasserman - an employee of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in
D.C.
While JoAnna Wasserman shares a maiden name with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, her parents are named Mark and Donna, while Debbie
Wasserman Shultz's parents are Larry and Ann Wasserman. Plus, if there's any relation, JoAnna Wasserman got all of the family's good
genetics.
US Attorney Michael J. Marando and wife JoAnna Wasserman (top). Steve Schultz and wife Debbie Wasserman Schultz (bottom)
While the notion that Imran Awan cut a deal based on his name vanishing from the court calendar, Federal prosecutors certainly
have enough evidence against the Awan clan to put them away for a long time. Perhaps they've decided they like the outside of a prison
cell better than the alternative.
It's pretty interesting fact: "Even today more than half of the
US Senators do not possess passports, meaning they have never been abroad, barring possible
trips to Canada using their driver's licenses as ID."
While you can't exclude that Russia favored Trump over Clinton and might be provided some token of support, you can't compare
Russia and Israel as for influence on the US domestic and foreign policy. And GB also have a say and connections (GB supported
Hillary and MI6 probably used dirty methods). KSA provided money to Hillary. Still there is multiple investigations of Russia
influence and none for those two players. That makes the current Russiagate current witch hunt is really scary.
The main theme of American political life right now is McCarthyism and anti-Russian hysteria
Notable quotes:
"... The American public is now experiencing mass paranoia that is called Russia-gate. Obnoxious and dangerous as this officially encouraged madness may be, it is, alas, nothing new. As from 9/11, the same kind of group hypnosis was administered from the Nation's Capital on the body politic to serve the then agenda of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, turning back civil liberties that had accrued over generations without so much as a whimper from Congress, our political elites and the country at large. ..."
"... Foreign policy issues are instrumentalized for domestic political objectives. In 2001 it was the threat of Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world attacking the American homeland. Today it is the alleged manipulation of our open political system by our enemies in the Kremlin. ..."
"... There is in the United States a significant minority of journalists and experts who have been setting out the facts on why the Russia-gate story is deeply flawed if not a fabrication from the get-go. In this small but authoritative and responsible field, Consortium News stands out for its courage and dogged fact-checking and logic-checks. Others on the side of the angels include TruthDig.com and Antiwar.com . ..."
"... Perhaps the most significant challenge to the official US intelligence story of Russian hacking released on January 6, 2017 was the forensic evidence assembled by a group of former intelligence officers with relevant technical expertise known as VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity). Their work, arguing that the attack on the DNC computers was an inside job by someone with access to the hardware rather than a remote operation by persons outside the Democratic Party hierarchy and possibly outside the United States, was published in Consortium News ("Intel Vets Challenge 'Russia Hack' Evidence") on July 24, 2017. ..."
"... The final word on Russia's electoral preferences during the October 20 show was given by the moderator, Vladimir Soloviev: "There can be no illusions. Both Trump and Clinton have a very bad attitude to Russia. What Trump said about us and Syria was no compliment at all. The main theme of American political life right now is McCarthyism and anti-Russian hysteria." ..."
"... "America is a very complex country. It does not pay to demonize it. We have to understand precisely what we like and do not like. On this planet there is no way to avoid them. Whoever becomes president of the USA, the nuclear parity forces us to negotiate and reach agreement." ..."
"... "The US has opened its doors to the most intelligent people of the world, made it attractive for them. Of course, this builds their exceptionalism. All directors, engineers, composers head there. Our problem is that we got rid of our tsar, our commissars but people are still hired hands. The top people go to the States because the pay is higher." ..."
"... How are we to understand the discrepancy between the very low marks the panelists gave the US presidential race and their favorable marks for the US as an economic and military powerhouse. It appears to result from their understanding that there is a disconnect between Washington, the presidency and what makes the economy turn over. The panelists concluded that the USA has a political leadership at the national level that is unworthy and inappropriate to its position in the world. On this point, I expect that many American readers of this essay will concur. ..."
"... Even today more than half of the US Senators do not possess passports, meaning they have never been abroad, barring possible trips to Canada using their driver's licenses as ID. ..."
"... And for those Americans who do travel abroad, the world outside US borders is all too often just an object of prestige tourism, a divertissement, where the lives of local people, their concerns and their interests do not exist on the same high plateau as American lives, concerns and interests. It is not that we are all Ugly Americans, but we are too well insulated from the travails of others and too puffed up with our own exceptionalism. ..."
"... It is not surprising that in the US foreign policy is not a self-standing intellectual pursuit on a chessboard of its own but is strictly a subset of domestic policy calculations, and in particular of partisan electoral considerations. ..."
"... As regards the Russian Federation, the ongoing hysteria over Russia-gate in particular, and over the perceived threat Russia poses to US national interests in general, risks tilting the world into nuclear war. ..."
"... JFK murder was about replacing the president elected by the people. Russia-gate has the same goal. ..."
"... As shown in this article, the American media has a long track record of misreporting key news items: ..."
"... The current cycle of fake news about Russia is definitely not a new phenomenon in the United States. ..."
"... Can someone tell the big fat cowards exercising around North Korea to please shut the hell up? Cowards make a lot of noise. When Libya was invaded there were no exercises, when Iraq was invaded there were no exercises...... when Vietnam was invaded there were no exercises.... ..."
"... It is obvious to the world that the fat cowards cannot attack a nuclear armed country. They are too yellow bellied to do anything but beat their chest like some stupid gorilla in an African jungle ..."
"... All the while the real diplomacy is going on between South Korea and China with North Korea paying close attention, I am sure. The Russian / Chinese proposal of a rail system from South Korea through North Korea and into China connecting to the connection grid of all of Asia is a far greater prospect for the peace initiative than the saber rattling presently outwardly being displayed. ..."
"... They keep raising the ante, and the North Koreans keep calling their bluff. They are made to look ridiculous as they don't have a winnable hand and the North Koreans know it. ..."
"... "American media simply were not interested in knowing what Russians were thinking since that might get in the way of their construction of what Russians should be thinking". ..."
"... Reminds me of the classic American boss's remark: "Any time I want your opinion, I'll tell you it". ..."
"... This is actually quite a neat and elegant example of the kind of deceptive language routinely used by politicians and the media. It is, of course, entirely true that no conclusive proof has surfaced. Indeed, that must follow from the equally true and indisputable fact that no proof of any kind has surfaced. Actually, nothing even vaguely resembling proof has surfaced. There is no evidence at all - not the slightest scrap. ..."
"... But by slipping in that little adjective "conclusive" the journalist manages to convey quite a strong impression that there is proof - only not quite conclusive proof. ..."
"... It is just as dishonest and cynical as Ronald Reagan's 1984 campaign remark, "I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience". ..."
"... Russiangate is concocted BS, to keep the ignorant American sheep , from understanding Israel picked the "president of the USA". ..."
"... I think at times the CIA is actually assisting the Russian security services with terror operations. I realize it doesn't make sense with Langley assisting ISIS in Syria, but that's the world we appear to have: selective cooperation. ..."
"... After Uranium One, it would make sense to assume Russia would have preferred Hitlery in the White House ..."
"... Of course they also know Hitlery is a massive warmongering Nazi terrorist, but then again, looks like Trump doesn't differ very much from her on that. ..."
"... Funny how the CIA has better intel on terrorism in Russia than the Russians do, even stranger than the RF leadership doesn't seem to question the situation what so ever. ..."
"... Got to hand it to the Americans, a couple of months ago Putin joked about RF "cells" in the USA and now the CIA hands the RF a real cell all ready to go murder some Russians. ..."
"... "German media reported on Saturday that BND covertly provided a number of journalists with information containing criticism of Russia before the data were disclosed by the agency." ..."
"The two (Trump and Clinton) cannot greet one another on stage, cannot say goodbye to one
another at the end. They barely can get out the texts that have been prepared for them by their
respective staffs. Repeating on stage what one may have said in the locker room."
"Billions of people around the world conclude with one word: Disgrace!"
- Vladimir Zhirinovsky - prominent Russian politician, leader of a major party in
parliament.
The American public is now experiencing mass paranoia that is called Russia-gate. Obnoxious
and dangerous as this officially encouraged madness may be, it is, alas, nothing new. As from
9/11, the same kind of group hypnosis was administered from the Nation's Capital on the body
politic to serve the then agenda of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, turning back civil
liberties that had accrued over generations without so much as a whimper from Congress, our
political elites and the country at large.
This time the generalized paranoia started under the nominally left of center administration
of Barack Obama in the closing months of his presidency. It has been fanned ever since by the
centrists in both Democratic and Republican parties who want to either remove from office or
politically cripple Donald Trump and his administration, that is to say, to overturn the
results at the ballot box on November 8, 2016.
Foreign policy issues are instrumentalized for domestic political objectives. In 2001 it was
the threat of Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world attacking
the American homeland. Today it is the alleged manipulation of our open political system by our
enemies in the Kremlin.
Americans are wont to forget that there is a world outside the borders of the USA and that
others follow closely what is said and written in our media, especially by our political
leadership and policy elites. They forget or do not care how the accusations and threats we
direct at other countries in our domestic political squabbling, and still more the sanctions we
impose on our ever changing list of authoritarians and other real or imagined enemies abroad
might be interpreted there and what preparations or actions might be taken by those same
enemies in self-defense, threatening not merely American interests but America's physical
survival.
In no case is this more relevant than with respect to Russia, which, I remind readers, is
the only country on earth capable of turning the entire Continental United States into ashes
within a day. In point of fact, if Russia has prepared itself for war, as the latest issue of
Newsweek magazine tells us, we have no one but our political leadership to blame for
that state of affairs. They are tone deaf to what is said in Russia. We have no concern for
Russian national interests and "red lines" as the Russians themselves define them. Our Senators
and Congressmen listen only to what our home grown pundits and academics think the Russian
interests should be if they are to fit in a world run by us. That is why the Senate can vote
98-2 in favor of making the sanctions against Russia laid down by executive order of Barack
Obama into sanctions under federal legislation as happened this past summer.
There is in the United States a significant minority of journalists and experts who have
been setting out the facts on why the Russia-gate story is deeply flawed if not a fabrication
from the get-go. In this small but authoritative and responsible field, Consortium
News stands out for its courage and dogged fact-checking and logic-checks. Others on the
side of the angels include TruthDig.com and
Antiwar.com .
The Russia-gate story has permutated over time as one or another element of the
investigation into Donald Trump's alleged collusion with the Kremlin has become more or less
promising. But the core issue has always been the allegation of Russian hacking of DNC
computers on July 5, 2016 and the hand-over of thousands of compromising documents to Wikileaks
for the purpose of discrediting putative Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and throwing the
election to Donald Trump, who had at that time nearly clinched the Republican nomination.
Perhaps the most significant challenge to the official US intelligence story of Russian
hacking released on January 6, 2017 was the forensic evidence assembled by a group of former
intelligence officers with relevant technical expertise known as VIPS (Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity). Their work, arguing that the attack on the DNC computers was an
inside job by someone with access to the hardware rather than a remote operation by persons
outside the Democratic Party hierarchy and possibly outside the United States, was published in
Consortium News ("Intel Vets Challenge 'Russia Hack' Evidence") on July 24, 2017.
The VIPS material was largely ignored by mainstream media, as might be expected. An
editorial entitled "The unchecked threat from Russia" published by The Washington Post
yesterday is a prime example of how our media bosses continue to whip up public fury against
collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin even when, by their own admission, "no
conclusive proof has surfaced."
The VIPS piece last July was based on the laws of physics, demonstrating that speed
limitations on transfer of data over the internet at the time when the crime is alleged to have
taken place rendered impossible the CIA, NSA and FBI scenario of Russian hacking In what
follows, I will introduce a very different type of evidence challenging the official US
intelligence story of Russian hacking and meddling in general, what I would call
circumstantial evidence that goes to the core issue of what the Kremlin really wanted.
Let us consider whether Mr. Putin had a motive to put his thumb on the scales in the American
presidential election.
In the U.S., that is a slam-dunk question. But that comes from our talking to ourselves in
the mirror. My evidence comes precisely from the other side of the issue: what the Kremlin
elites were saying about the US elections and their preferred candidate to win while the
campaign was still going on. I present it on a privileged basis because it is what I gathered
on my several visits to Moscow and talks with a variety of insiders close to Vladimir Putin
from September through the start of November, 2016. Moreover, there is no tampering with this
evidence on my part, because the key elements were published at the time I gathered them, well
before the US election. They appeared as incidental observations in lengthy essays dealing with
a number of subjects and would not have attracted the attention they merit today.
* * * *
Political talk shows are a very popular component of Russian television programming on all
channels, both state-run and commercial channels. They are mostly carried on prime time in the
evening but also are showing in mid-afternoon, where they have displaced soap operas and
cooking lessons as entertainment for housewives and pensioners. They are broadcast live either
to the Moscow time zone or to the Far East time zone. Given the fact that Russia extends over 9
time zones, they are also video recorded and reshown locally at prime time. In the case of the
highest quality and most watched programs produced by Vesti 24 for the Rossiya One channel,
they also are posted in their entirety and in the original Russian on youtube, and they are
accessible worldwide by anyone with a computer or tablet phone using a downloadable free
app.
I underline the importance of accessibility of these programs globally via live streaming or
podcasts on simple handheld gadgets. Russian speaking professionals in the States had every
opportunity to observe much of what I report below, except, of course, for my private
conversations with producers and panelists. But the gist of the mood in Moscow with respect to
the US elections was accessible to anyone with an interest. As you know, no one reported on it
at the time. American media simply were not interested in knowing what Russians were thinking
since that might get in the way of their construction of what Russians should be
thinking.
The panelists appearing on these different channels come from a rather small pool of Russian
legislators, including chairmen of the relevant committees of the Duma (lower house) and
Federation Council (upper house), leading journalists, think tank professors, retired military
brass. The politicians are drawn from among the most visible and colorful personalities in the
Duma parties, but also extend to Liberal parties such as Yabloko, which failed to cross the
threshold of 5% in legislative elections and received no seats in parliament.
Then there are very often a number of foreigners among panelists. In the past and at the
present, they are typically known for anti-Kremlin positions and so give the predominantly
patriotic Russian panelists an opportunity to cross swords, send off sparks and keep the
audience awake. These hostile foreigners coming from Ukraine or Poland are Russian speakers
from their childhood. The Americans or Israelis who appear are generally former Soviet citizens
who emigrated, whether before or after the fall of Communism, and speak native Russian.
"Freshness" is an especially valued commodity in this case, because there is a considerable
overlap in the names and faces appearing on these talks whatever the channel. For this there is
an objective reason: nearly all the Russian and even foreign guests live in Moscow and are
available to be invited or disinvited on short notice given that these talk programs can change
their programming if there is breaking news about which their audiences will want to hear
commentary. In my own case, I was flown in especially by the various channels who paid airfare
and hotel accommodation in Moscow as necessary on the condition that I appear only on their
shows during my stay in the city. That is to say, my expenses were covered but there was no
honorarium. I make this explicit to rebut in advance any notion that I/we outside panelists
were in any way "paid by the Kremlin" or restricted in our freedom of speech on air.
During the period under review, I appeared on both state channels, Rossiya-1 and Pervy
Kanal, as well as on the major commercial television channel, NTV. The dates and venues of my
participation in these talk shows are as follows:
September 11 – Sunday Evening with Vladimir Soloviev, Rossiya 1
September 26 - Sixty Minutes with Yevgeni Popov and Olga Skabeyeva, Rossiya 1
November 8-9 Time Will Tell.
For purposes of this essay, the pertinent appearances were on September 11 and 26. To this I
add the Sixty Minutes show of October 20 which I watched on television but which aired content
that I believe is important to this discussion.
My debut on the number one talk show in Russia, Sunday Evening with Vladimir Soloviev, on
September 11 was invaluable not so much for what was said on air but for the exchange I had
with the program's host, Vladimir Soloviev, in a five minute tête-à-tête in
the guests' lounge before the program went on air.
Soloviev obviously had not yet read his guest list, did not know who I am and stood ready to
respond to me when I walked up to him and unceremoniously put to him the question that
interested me the most: whom did he want to see win the US presidential election. He did not
hesitate, told me in no uncertain terms that he did not want to see Trump win because the man
is volatile, unpredictable and weak. Soloviev added that he and others do not expect anything
good in relations with the United States in general whoever won. He rejected the notion that
Trump's turning the Neocons out of government would be a great thing in and of itself.
As I now understand, Soloviev's resistance to the idea that Trump could be a good thing was
not just an example of Russians' prioritizing stability, the principle "better the devil you
know," meaning Hillary. During a recent chat with a Russian ambassador, someone also close to
power, I heard the conviction that the United States is like a big steamship which has its own
inertia and cannot be turned around, that presidents come and go but American foreign policy
remains the same. This view may be called cynical or realistic, depending on your taste, but it
is reflective of the thinking that comes out from many of the panelists in the talk shows as
you will find below in my quotations from the to-and-fro on air. It may also explain Soloviev's
negativism.
To appreciate what weight the opinions of Vladimir Soloviev carry, you have to consider just
who he is. That his talk show is the most professional from among numerous rival shows, that it
attracts the most important politicians and expert guests is only part of the story. What is
more to the point is that he is as close to Vladimir Putin as journalists can get.
In April, 2015 Vladimir Soloviev conducted a two hour interview with Putin that was aired on
Rossiya 1 under the title "The President." In early January 2016, the television documentary
"World Order," co-written and directed by Soloviev, set out in forceful terms Vladimir Putin's
views on American and Western attempts to stamp out Russian sovereignty that first were spoken
at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 and have evolved and become ever more frank
since.
Soloviev has a Ph.D. in economics from the Institute of World Economics and International
Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was an active entrepreneur in the 1990s and spent
some time back then in the USA, where his activities included teaching economics at the
University of Alabama. He is fluent in English and has been an unofficial emissary of the
Kremlin to the USA at various times.
For all of these reasons, I believe it is safe to say that Vladimir Soloviev represents the
thinking of Russian elites close to their president, if not the views of Putin himself.
On September 27 , I took part in the Sixty Minutes talk show that was presented as a post
mortem of the first Trump-Clinton debate the day before. I direct attention to this show
because it demonstrates the sophistication and discernment of commentary about the United
States and its electoral process. All of this runs against the "slam-dunk" scenario based on a
cartoon-like representation of Russia and its decision makers.
The show's hosts tried hard to convey the essence of American political culture to their
audience and they did some effective research to this end. Whereas French and other Western
media devoted coverage on the day after the debates to the appearance of the American
presidential candidates and especially to Hillary (what else attracts comment from the male
world of journalism if not a lady's hair styling and sartorial choices), 'Sixty Minutes'
tweaked this aspect of the debates to find politically relevant commentary.
To make their point, presenter Yevgeny Popov came on stage in a blue suit and blue tie very
similar in coloring to Trump's, while his wife and co-presenter Olga Skabeyeva was wearing a
garment in the same red hue as Hillary. They proceeded to note that these color choices of the
candidates represented an inversion of the traditional colors of the Democratic and Republican
parties in American political tradition. And they took this a step further by declaring it to
be in line with the inversion of policies in the electoral platforms of the candidates. Hillary
had taken over the hawkish foreign policy positions of the Republicans and their
Neoconservative wing. Donald had taken over the dovish foreign policy positions normally
associated with Democrats. Moreover, Donald also had gone up against the free trade policies
that were an engrained part of Republican ideology up until now and were often rejected by
Democrats with their traditional financial backers from among labor unions. All of these
observations were essentially correct and astute as far as the campaigns went. It is curious to
hear them coming from precisely Russian journalists, when they were largely missed by West
European and American commentators.
As mentioned above, foreigners are often important to the Russian talk shows to add pepper
and salt. In this case, we were largely decorative. The lion's share of the program was shared
between the Russian politicians and journalists on the panel who very ably demonstrated in
their own persona that Russian elites were split down the middle on whether Donald Trump or
Hillary Clinton was their preferred next occupant of the Oval Office
The reasons given were not what you heard within the USA: that Trump is vulgar, that Trump
is a bigot and misogynist. Instead the Russian Trump-skeptics were saying that he is impulsive
and cannot be trusted to act with prudence if there is some mishap, some accidental event
occurring between US and Russian forces in the field, for example. They gave expression to the
cynical view that the positions occupied by Trump in the pre-election period are purely
tactical, to differentiate himself from all competitors first in his own party during the
primaries and now from Hillary. Thus, Trump could turn out to be no friend of Russia on the day
after the elections.
A direct answer to these changes came from the pro-Trump members of the panel. It was best
enunciated by the senior politician in the room, Vyacheslav Nikonov. Nikonov is a Duma member
from Putin's United Russia party, the chair of the Education Committee in the 6th Duma. He is
also chair of a government sponsored organization of Russian civil society, Russian World,
which looks after the interests of Russians and Russian culture in the diaspora abroad.
Nikonov pointed to Trump's courage and determination which scarcely suggest merely tactical
considerations driving his campaign. Said Nikonov, Trump had gone up against the entire US
political establishment, against the whole of corporate mainstream media and was winning.
Nikonov pointed to the surge in Trump poll statistics in the couple of weeks preceding the
debate. And he ticked off the 4 swing states which Trump needed to win and where his fortunes
were rising fast. Clearly his presentation was carefully prepared, not something casual and
off-the-cuff.
During the exchange of doubters and backers of Trump among the Russians, one doubter spoke
of Trump as a "non-systemic" politician. This may be loosely interpreted a meaning he is
anti-establishment. But in the Russian context it had an odious connotation, being applied to
Alexei Navalny and certain members of the American- and EU-backed Parnas political movement,
and suggesting seditious intent.
In this connection, Nikonov put an entirely different spin on who Trump is and what he
represents as an anti-establishment figure. But then again, maybe such partiality runs in the
family. Nikonov is the grandson of Molotov, one of the leading figures who staged the Russian
Revolution and governed the young Soviet state.
Who won the first Trump-Clinton debate? Here the producers of Sixty Minutes gave the final
verdict to a Vesti news analyst from a remote location whose image was projected on a
wall-sized screen. We were told that the debate was a draw: Trump had to demonstrate that he is
presidential, which he did. Clinton had to demonstrate she had the stamina to resist the
onslaught of 90 minutes with Trump and she also succeeded.
The October 20 program Evening with Vladimir Soloviev, which I watched on television from
abroad, was devoted to the third Clinton-Trump debate. My single most important conclusion from
the show was that, notwithstanding the very diverse panel, there was a bemused unanimity among
them regarding the US presidential electoral campaign: that it was deplorable. They found both
candidates to be disgraceful due to their flagrant weaknesses of character and/or records in
office, but they were also disturbed by the whole political culture. Particular attention was
devoted to the very one-sided position of the American mass media and the centrist
establishments of both parties in favor of one candidate, Hillary Clinton. When Russians and
former Russians use the terms "McCarthyism" and "managed democracy" to describe the American
political process as they did on the show, they know acutely well whereof they speak.
Though flamboyant in his language the nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of
the LDPR Party, touched on a number of core concerns that bear repeating extensively, if not in
full:
"The debates were weak. The two cannot greet one another on stage, cannot say goodbye to
one another at the end. They barely can get out the texts that have been prepared for them by
their respective staffs. Repeating on stage what one may have said in the locker room.
Billions of people around the world conclude with one word: disgrace! This is the worst
electoral campaign ever. And mostly what we see is the style of the campaign. However much
people criticize the USSR – the old fogies who ran it, one and the same, supposedly the
conscience of the world.
Now we see the same thing in the USA: the exceptional country – the country that has
bases everywhere, soldiers everywhere, is bombing everywhere in some city or other. They are
making their 'experiments.' The next experiment is to have a woman in the White House. It
will end badly.
Hillary has some kind of dependency. A passion for power – and that is dangerous for
the person who will have her finger on the nuclear button. If she wins, on November 9th the
world will be at the brink of a big war "
Zhirinovsky made no secret of his partiality for Trump, calling him "clean" and "a good man"
whereas Hillary has "blood on her hands" for the deaths of hundreds of thousands due to her
policies as Secretary of State. But then again, Zhirinovsky has made his political career over
more than 30 years precisely by making outrageous statements that run up against what the
Russian political establishment says aloud. Before Trump came along, Zhirinovsky had been the
loudest voice in Russian politics in favor of Turkey and its president Erdogan, a position
which he came to regret when the Turks shot down a Russian jet at the Syrian border, causing a
great rupture in bilateral relations.
The final word on Russia's electoral preferences during the October 20 show was given by the
moderator, Vladimir Soloviev: "There can be no illusions. Both Trump and Clinton have a very
bad attitude to Russia. What Trump said about us and Syria was no compliment at all. The main
theme of American political life right now is McCarthyism and anti-Russian hysteria."
This being Russia, one might assume that the deeply negative views of the ongoing
presidential election reflected a general hostility to the USA on the part of the presenter and
panelists. But nothing of the sort came out from their discussion. To be sure, there was the
odd outburst from Zhirinovsky, who repeated a catchy line that he has delivered at other talk
shows: essentially that the USA is eating Russia and the world's lunch given that it consumes
the best 40% of what the world produces while it itself accounts for just 20% of world GDP. But
otherwise the panelists, including Zhirinovsky, displayed informed respect and even admiration
for what the United States has achieved and represents.
The following snippets of their conversation convey this very well and do not require
attribution to one or another participant:
"America has the strongest economy, which is why people want to go there and there is a
lot for us to borrow from it. We have to learn from them, and not be shy about it."
"Yes, they created the conditions for business. In the morning you file your application.
After lunch you can open your business."
"America is a very complex country. It does not pay to demonize it. We have to understand
precisely what we like and do not like. On this planet there is no way to avoid them. Whoever
becomes president of the USA, the nuclear parity forces us to negotiate and reach
agreement."
"The US has opened its doors to the most intelligent people of the world, made it
attractive for them. Of course, this builds their exceptionalism. All directors, engineers,
composers head there. Our problem is that we got rid of our tsar, our commissars but people
are still hired hands. The top people go to the States because the pay is higher."
How are we to understand the discrepancy between the very low marks the panelists gave the
US presidential race and their favorable marks for the US as an economic and military
powerhouse. It appears to result from their understanding that there is a disconnect between
Washington, the presidency and what makes the economy turn over. The panelists concluded that
the USA has a political leadership at the national level that is unworthy and inappropriate to
its position in the world. On this point, I expect that many American readers of this essay
will concur.
* * * *
Ever since his candidacy took off in the spring of 2016, both Liberal Interventionists and
Neoconservatives have been warning that a Donald Trump presidency would mean abandonment of US
global leadership. They equated Donald's "America First" with isolationism. After all, it was
in the openly "isolationist period" of American political history just before the outbreak of
WWII that the original America First slogan first appeared.
However, isolationism never left us, even as the United States became engaged in and
eventually dominated the world after the end of the Cold War. Even today more than half of the
US Senators do not possess passports, meaning they have never been abroad, barring possible
trips to Canada using their driver's licenses as ID.
And for those Americans who do travel abroad, the world outside US borders is all too often
just an object of prestige tourism, a divertissement, where the lives of local people, their
concerns and their interests do not exist on the same high plateau as American lives,
concerns and interests. It is not that we are all Ugly Americans, but we are too well insulated
from the travails of others and too puffed up with our own exceptionalism.
It is not surprising that in the US foreign policy is not a self-standing intellectual
pursuit on a chessboard of its own but is strictly a subset of domestic policy calculations,
and in particular of partisan electoral considerations. Indeed, that is very often the case in
other countries, as well. The distinction is that the US footprint in the world is vastly
greater than that of other countries and policy decisions taken in Washington, especially in
the past 20 years of militarized foreign-policy making, spell war or peace, order or chaos in
the territories under consideration.
As regards the Russian Federation, the ongoing hysteria over Russia-gate in particular, and
over the perceived threat Russia poses to US national interests in general, risks tilting the
world into nuclear war.
It is a luxury we manifestly cannot afford to indulge ourselves.
But we all have to agree that the USA is the more infantile of all The Nations, and since
the end of the last war they have made no effort to grow up. They have created RussiaGate
where no other nation would dream up such Trivia.
JFK murder was about replacing the president elected by the people. Russia-gate has the same goal. When the
American president is enemy, you are not American
Can someone tell the big fat cowards exercising around North Korea to please shut the hell
up? Cowards make a lot of noise. When Libya was invaded there were no exercises, when Iraq
was invaded there were no exercises...... when Vietnam was invaded there were no
exercises....
It is obvious to the world that the fat cowards cannot attack a nuclear armed country.
They are too yellow bellied to do anything but beat their chest like some stupid gorilla in
an African jungle.
Please cut out the announcements of exercises after exercises, it is clogging the
airwaves. We are all tired of your stupid exercises... if you want to attack go ahead and get
your fat asses whipped like a slave running away from its masters.
Shameless cowards are now becoming highly annoying... it can be called Propaganda
terrorism. Cut that nonsense out. You cannot beat North Korea, you know it, the rest of the
world knows it. You cannot fight China or Russia, the rest of the world knows it ... so
please shut up once and for all.
You are terrorizing the airwaves with your exercise after exercise after exercise.
Practice control of the ships that are becoming a maritime hazzard to commercial ships. That
is what you need to practice.
Nobody is impressed with your over-bloated expensive war equipment which fail under war
conditions. Cut out the exercises before we start turning off our ears for your
propaganda.
YELLOW BELIED COWARDS!!!!! Go poison an innocent person or kill a child....it may make you
feel better... Big fat cowards.!
I am also very tired of the bluster . They flap their gums and taunt. Enough already . You
have made fools of yourselves in the eyes of the world .
All the while the real diplomacy is going on between South Korea and China with North Korea
paying close attention, I am sure. The Russian / Chinese proposal of a rail system from South
Korea through North Korea and into China connecting to the connection grid of all of Asia is
a far greater prospect for the peace initiative than the saber rattling presently outwardly
being displayed.
They keep raising the ante, and the North Koreans keep calling their bluff. They are made
to look ridiculous as they don't have a winnable hand and the North Koreans know it.
"American media simply were not interested in knowing what Russians were thinking since
that might get in the way of their construction of what Russians should be thinking".
Reminds me of the classic American boss's remark: "Any time I want your opinion, I'll tell you it".
The whole thing is orchestrated by the Zionist state within a state which controls not only America but most of the West -
and own the entire mainstream media. They cannot forgive Trump for wanting to make peace with Russia. Their hatred of
Christian Russia is visceral and unhinged.
'...by their own admission, "no conclusive proof has surfaced."'
This is actually quite a neat and elegant example of the kind of deceptive language
routinely used by politicians and the media. It is, of course, entirely true that no conclusive proof has surfaced. Indeed, that must
follow from the equally true and indisputable fact that no proof of any kind has surfaced.
Actually, nothing even vaguely resembling proof has surfaced. There is no evidence at all -
not the slightest scrap.
But by slipping in that little adjective "conclusive" the journalist manages to convey
quite a strong impression that there is proof - only not quite conclusive proof.
It is just as dishonest and cynical as Ronald Reagan's 1984 campaign remark, "I am not
going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience".
Russiangate is concocted BS, to keep the ignorant American sheep , from understanding
Israel picked the "president of the USA".
That American children are murdering innocent children in foreign lands, for the benefit of,
not Israel, it is just a figment of the imagination, as the USSR was, and the USA is, but the
owners of Israel, City of London, Usury bankers.
Pedophile scum!
- understanding Israel picked the "president of the USA".
The fraud is in every election district. Israel cannot afford the bussing of Liberals.
This is too large for some poor nation like Israel. You are making up "Israel", just like
Gordon Duff. It tells me you are the same as Gordon Duff.
What an excellent article. If only people who have a very small knowledge of Russia/USA
relations would bother to read this and reflect upon it, a lot of misconceptions could be
cleared up if goodwill is part of the picture.
I think at times the CIA is actually assisting the Russian security services with terror
operations. I realize it doesn't make sense with Langley assisting ISIS in Syria, but that's
the world we appear to have: selective cooperation.
I don't know if the FSB has the levels of electronics signals intelligence the US has, I
do know the US and Russia may have cooperated in raids resulting in deaths of two Caucaus
Emirates leaders in 2014-2015. I believe that group has since disbanded and members probably
blended into other terror groups.
The thing that is absolutely ridiculous is that the American media and Deep State are what
is causing this trouble. I don't know why they want to have a World War so badly, but the
only thing keeping our two countries from destruction is Vladimir Putin's hard work and good
nature, and Trump's defiance of his "staff."
These Deep State actors in the US have
hidey-holes they can run to in case of the unthinkable, but they couldn't care less about the
people of the US -- let alone Russia. Their day is coming, and they'll be praying for their
mountains to fall on them when it does.
Anyone in the US that's paying any attention at all
knows the real story on this, and none of those who do are blaming anyone in Russia. If the
day ever comes that the US Deep State takes to their bunkers, they better be prepared to stay
in there--Balrogs or no Balrogs--because those of us who manage to survive above will be
looking for their sorry azzes when they come out!!!
Just to take your comment a little further ;- get to know every plumber and builder in
your area as I am, get on a friendly basis and ask about these "Deep State actors in the US
have hidey-holes" over a pint or two.
Then I am starting a crowdfunding fund to bring in "hundreds of thousands" to pay them to
screw up their sewage facilities in their hidey-holes SO THEY CAN down in their own BS.
After Uranium One, it would make sense to assume Russia would have preferred Hitlery in
the White House - Uranium One gives Russia something they know all the details of and
something they know the US public won't take lightly, so they could easily have blackmailed Hitlery with leaking those details.
Of course they also know Hitlery is a massive warmongering Nazi terrorist, but then again,
looks like Trump doesn't differ very much from her on that.
No need for paranoia, it is a veritable American love fest at the Kremlin, RIA, etc., ever
since the CIA informed Moscow that they had "information" on an imminent attack in
Russia.
Funny how the CIA has better intel on terrorism in Russia than the Russians do, even
stranger than the RF leadership doesn't seem to question the situation what so ever.
Got to hand it to the Americans, a couple of months ago Putin joked about RF "cells" in
the USA and now the CIA hands the RF a real cell all ready to go murder some Russians.
Some people talk a good game while some people actually take action.
For those of you that have some video viewing time available , you will probably enjoy the
lecture at the National Press Club , not nearly well attended I might add for this quality
venue, of Gilbert Doctoro.
New legatum prosperity index is up: Europeans enjoy the greatest quality of life
worldwide, Russians fall into more impoverishment and low quality of life. Its no secret that, for the past 150 years, Russian's wealth, quality of life and life
expectancy is unacceptably low for European standards).
Norway, Finland,
Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands and Denmark occupying the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th 7th and 8th
places respectively.
- low for European standards ... ) .... Norway, Finland, Switzerland,
Sweden Netherlands and Denmark
When you do copyworks, include your source. RI is not for illiterate globalist bots who
cannot read an answer. The quality of trolls is now too low. The globalists are now hiring
junk?
"German media reported on Saturday that BND covertly provided a number of journalists with
information containing criticism of Russia before the data were disclosed by the agency."
rumors
, denials, whistleblowers
,
backlash , demands, threats,
lies , bias, and
anti-bias surrounding Robert Mueller and his investigation, President Trump said Sunday
that he is not considering firing the Special Counsel.
"No, I'm not," Trump told reporters, when asked if he intended to fire Mueller, according to
Politico .
The president was returning to the White House from a weekend at the Camp David presidential
retreat.
Trump's allies complained
this weekend about the way Mueller's team went about obtaining from the presidential
transition. Mueller's spokesman Peter Carr said Sunday that the office had followed appropriate
steps to obtain the transition emails. Pro-Trump lawmakers and pundits also have accused the
special counsel's office of bias after it was revealed that two FBI officials who previously
served on Mueller's team had exchanged anti-Trump text messages.
And while Trump said "I'm not,"
Axios notes that he did criticize the fact that Mueller accessed
"many tens of thousands" of emails from the presidential transition, saying it was "not
looking good."
seth? he was the guy that stole the dnc and podesta emails (well at least the dnc emails)
and got them to julian assange. after he was murdered (well at least shot twice) on the
streets of d.c. (he actually died in a hospital; probably bears some looking into), julian
offered a reward for info on it, making many believe he was wiki's source.
seymour hersh, who followed the case closely, thinks the same, but agrees with the d.c.
police that he was just mugged, not shot by say hillary and podesta using imran awan or
something. http://archive.is/lD4BV if
so, for a lucky lady that hillary clinton has some real bad luck. but it is poetically
fitting that someone who actually killed dozens of people as a private citizen (and maybe a
million as a public servant), would be convicted in the public's eye of the one she didn't
really do.
Mueller has painted himself into a cesspool that is exploding. If he had an ounce of sense
or honor he would get the eff out before he has to start covering his own tracks. But don't
bet on Mueller doing the right thing. His pals in politics and the press have made him out to
be some kind of saint when he really is all t'aint, no saint (don't ask me what t'aint is,
ask someone else.)
Don't fire Mueller now- the cesspool is bursting at the seems and Mueller is standing
right under it.
It makes little sense to me that if Seth Rich was an idealistic young man, standing on
principle and conviction, who along with his brother contacted WikiLeaks and arranged to give
it evidence of Hillary's and Debbie's treachery against Sanders, why he would then have been
reported to be looking forward to joining the Hillary campaign staff in the Brooklyn
headquarters.
CrowdStrike (run by Shawn Henry, who is a former FBI official, promoted by Mueller), which
provided the narrative to the DNC that the "Russians did it," has never been independently
verified in their conclusions by the FBI. Or Mueller. Pull that thread and the sweater starts
to unravel.
Mueller doesn't have it in him to step aside. Therefore he needs to be indicted for
prosecutorial abuse. Slap his ass down hard. Handcuffs would be a nice touch.
Mueller didn't oppose the raid of Paul Manafort at 5 a.m. in the morning with guns drawn.
Sounds like a good law enforcement technique for the buzzard.
Last month Seth Rich, a data analyst who worked for the DNC, was shot near his home in Washington DC. He was on the phone to his
girlfriend when it happened. Police were called to the scene and discovered the young man's body at roughly 4.20am. It was reported
that Rich was "covered in bruises", shot "several times" and "at least once in the back".
The New York Daily News reported:
" police have found little information to explain his death. At this time, there are no suspects, no motive and no witnesses
in Rich's murder.
While initial theories were that the killing was robbery or mugging gone wrong, the Washington Post said:
" There is no immediate indication that robbery was a motive in the attack but it has not been ruled out as a possibility."
Rich's family have also reported that nothing was taken:
" [Rich's] hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they
never took anything."
On August 9th Julian Assange gave an interview on Dutch television in which he seemed to imply that Rich's death was politically
motivated, and perhaps suggest he had been a source for the DNC e-mail leak:
That same day wikileaks tweeted that they were offering a $20,000 dollar reward for information on the killing of Mr Rich.
These are the facts of the case, so far. And they are undisputed.
I'm not going to take a position on the motive for Mr Rich's killing, or possible suspects. But I do want to point out the general
level of media silence. Take these facts and change the names – imagine Trump's email had been hacked, and then a staffer with possible
ties to wikileaks was inexplicably shot dead. Imagine this poor young man had been a Kremlin whistleblower, or a Chinese hacker,
or an Iranian blogger.
If this, as yet unsolved, murder had ties to anyone other than Hillary Clinton, would it be being so ritually and rigourously
ignored by the MSM?
"... How is your Debbie Wasserman doing -- did not she threatened the DC police investigator for doing his job of investigating the Awan affair? Debbie has been a major protector of the Awan family that accomplished the greatest breach of the US cybersecurity. And how is your Nobel Peace Laureate doing -- collecting nice fees from banksters for his betrayal of democracy in the US? ..."
Are you shocked about Seth Rich murder? Wikileaks has offered a reward to speed up a
search for the murderers, whereas DNC did nothing. Nothing! But the DNC was very active when
certain Mr. Awan needed legal protection.
How is your Debbie Wasserman doing -- did not she threatened the DC police investigator for
doing his job of investigating the Awan affair? Debbie has been a major protector of the Awan
family that accomplished the greatest breach of the US cybersecurity. And how is your Nobel
Peace Laureate doing -- collecting nice fees from banksters for his betrayal of democracy in
the US?
"... If there were secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence such as might give rise to genuine concern that the national security of the United States might be compromised – for example because they were intended to swing the US election from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump – then the FBI would have a legitimate reason to investigate those contacts even if no actual crimes were committed during them. ..."
"... The point is however is that eighteen months after the start of the Russiagate investigation no evidence either of criminal acts or of secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence which might have placed the national security of the United States in jeopardy has come to light. ..."
"... There is no evidence of a criminal conspiracy by anyone in the Trump campaign involving the Russians. or the hacking of John Podesta's and the DNC's computers in order to steal emails from those computers and to have them published by Wikileaks; ..."
"... There is also no evidence of any secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the election which might have placed the national security of the United States in jeopardy. ..."
"... If no evidence either of a criminal conspiracy or of inappropriate secret contacts by the Trump campaign and the Russians has been found after eighteen months of intense investigation by the biggest and mightiest national security and intelligence community on the planet, then any reasonable person would conclude that that must be because no such evidence exists. ..."
"... Some months I expressed doubts that Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would countenance fishing expeditions . It turns out I was wrong. On any objective assessment it is exactly such fishing expeditions that the Mueller investigation is now engaging in. ..."
"... Deutsche Bank is a German bank not a Russian bank. To insinuate that the Russians control Deutsche Bank – one of the world's leading international banks – because Deutsche Bank has had some previous financial dealings with various Russian banks and businesses is quite simply preposterous. I doubt that there is a single important bank in Germany or Austria of which that could not also be said. ..."
"... Which again begs the question why? Why are Mueller and the Justice Department resorting to these increasingly desperate actions in order to prove something which it ought to be obvious by now cannot be proved? ..."
"... My colleague Alex Christoforou has recently pointed out that the recent indictment of Michael Flynn seems to have been partly intended to shield Mueller from dismissal and to keep his Russiagate investigation alive. Some time ago I made exactly the same point about the indictments against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and about the indictment against George Papadopoulos. ..."
"... Those indictments were issued directly after the Wall Street Journal published an editorial saying that Mueller should resign. ..."
"... It is the Wall Street Journal editorial which in fact provides the answer to Mueller's and Rosenstein's otherwise strange behaviour and to the way that Mueller has conducted the investigation up to now. The Wall Street Journal's editorial says that Mueller's past as the FBI's Director means that he is too close to the FBI to take an objective view of its actions. ..."
"... It is universally agreed that the FBI's then Director – Mueller's friend James Comey – broke protocols by the way he announced that Hillary Clinton had been cleared. ..."
"... By failing to bring charges against Hillary Clinton the FBI ensured that she would win the Democratic Party's nomination, and that she not Bernie Sanders would face off against Donald Trump in the election in the autumn. That is important because though the eventual – completely unexpected – election outcome was that Donald Trump won the election, which Hillary Clinton lost, every opinion poll which I have seen suggests that if the election had been between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump then Bernie Sanders would have won by a landslide. ..."
"... They played Sessions like a violin. Sessions recluses himself for a bullcrap Kisnyak speech, where he did not even meet him. Rosenstein then recommends Trump fire Comey -- who wanted to be fired so they would appoint a special prosecutor -- which Rosenstein does -- Mueller, to the acclamation of ALL of Con and the Senate-including Republicans. ..."
"... Trump was pissed because they removed his only defender from Mueller -- the head of the DOJ. He knew it was a setup, so went ballistic when he found out about Sessions recusing. ..."
"... Strzok was obviously at a VERY senior pay grade. It would be very surprising if HR had any jobs at Strzok's pay grade. ..."
"... once this special prosecutor is done, congress needs to rewrite the special prosecutor law to narrow their mandate to just the item allowed to be investigated - no fishing expeditions - enough of this stupidity - and maybe put a renewal clause in there so that it has to be renewed every 12 months... ..."
"... This is, and always has been a sideshow for the "true believers" in the Democrap party and all Hitlary supporters to accuse Trump of EXACTLY what Hitlary did ..."
Almost eighteen months after Obama's Justice Department and the FBI launched the Russiagate investigation, and seven months after
Special Counsel Robert Mueller took the investigation over, the sum total of what it has achieved is as follows
(1) an indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates which concerns entirely their prior financial dealings, and which makes no
reference to the Russiagate collusion allegations;
(2) an indictment for lying to the FBI of George Papadopoulos, the junior volunteer staffer of the Trump campaign, who during
the 2016 Presidential election had certain contacts with members of a Moscow based Russian NGO, which he sought to pass off –
falsely and unsuccessfully – as more important than they really were, and which also does not touch on the Russiagate collusion
allegations; and
(3) an indictment for lying to the FBI of Michael Flynn arising from his perfectly legitimate and entirely legal contacts with
the Russian ambassador after the 2016 Presidential election, which also does not touch on the Russiagate collusion allegations,
and which looks as if it was brought about by an
act of entrapment
.
Of actual evidence to substantiate the claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the election Mueller has
so far come up with nothing.
Here I wish to say something briefly about the nature of "collusion".
There is no criminal offence of "collusion" known to US law, which has led some to make the point that Mueller is investigating
a crime which does not exist.
There is some force to this point, but it is one which must be heavily qualified:
(1) Though there is no crime of "collusion" in US law, there most certainly is the crime of conspiracy to perform a criminal act.
Should it ever be established that members of the Trump campaign arranged with the Russians for the Russians to hack the DNC's
and John Podesta's computers and to steal the emails from those computers so that they could be published by Wikileaks, then since
hacking and theft are serious criminal acts a criminal conspiracy would be established, and it would be the entirely proper to do
to bring criminal charges against those who were involved in it.
This is the central allegation which lies behind the whole Russiagate case, and is the crime which Mueller is supposed to be investigating.
(2) The FBI is not merely a police and law enforcement agency. It is also the US's counter-espionage agency.
If there were secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence such as might give rise to genuine concern that
the national security of the United States might be compromised – for example because they were intended to swing the US election
from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump – then the FBI would have a legitimate reason to investigate those contacts even if no actual
crimes were committed during them.
Since impeachment is a purely political process and not a legal process, should it ever be established that there were such secret
contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence which might have placed the national security of the United States in
jeopardy, then I have no doubt that Congress would say that there were grounds for impeachment even if no criminal offences had been
committed during them.
The point is however is that eighteen months after the start of the Russiagate investigation no evidence either of criminal acts
or of secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence which might have placed the national security of the United
States in jeopardy has come to light.
Specifically:
(1) There is no evidence of a criminal conspiracy by anyone in the Trump campaign involving the Russians. or the hacking of
John Podesta's and the DNC's computers in order to steal emails from those computers and to have them published by Wikileaks;
and
(2) There is also no evidence of any secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the election
which might have placed the national security of the United States in jeopardy.
Such contacts as did take place between the Trump campaign and the Russians were limited and innocuous and had no effect on the
outcome of the election. Specifically there is no evidence of any concerted action between the Trump campaign and the Russians to
swing the election from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump.
As I have previously discussed, the meeting between Donald Trump Junior and the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya is
not such evidence .
If no evidence either of a criminal conspiracy or of inappropriate secret contacts by the Trump campaign and the Russians has
been found after eighteen months of intense investigation by the biggest and mightiest national security and intelligence community
on the planet, then any reasonable person would conclude that that must be because no such evidence exists.
Why then is the investigation still continuing?
Some months I expressed doubts that Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would
countenance fishing expeditions. It turns out I was wrong. On any objective assessment it is exactly such fishing expeditions that the Mueller investigation is
now engaging in.
How else to explain the strange decision to subpoena Deutsche Bank for information about loans granted by Deutsche Bank to Donald
Trump and his businesses?
Deutsche Bank is a German bank not a Russian bank. To insinuate that the Russians control Deutsche Bank – one of the world's leading
international banks – because Deutsche Bank has had some previous financial dealings with various Russian banks and businesses is
quite simply preposterous. I doubt that there is a single important bank in Germany or Austria of which that could not also be said.
Yet in the desperation to find some connection between Donald Trump and Russia it is to these absurdities that Mueller is reduced
to.
Which again begs the question why? Why are Mueller and the Justice Department resorting to these increasingly desperate actions
in order to prove something which it ought to be obvious by now cannot be proved?
My colleague Alex Christoforou has recently pointed out that the recent indictment of Michael Flynn seems to have been
partly intended to shield Mueller from dismissal and to keep his Russiagate investigation alive. Some time ago I made exactly the same point about
the indictments against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and about the indictment against George Papadopoulos.
Those indictments were issued directly after the Wall Street Journal published an
editorial saying that Mueller
should resign.
The indictment against Manafort and Gates looks sloppy and rushed. Perhaps I am wrong but there has to be at least a suspicion
that the indictments were issued in a hurry to still criticism of Mueller of the kind that was now appearing in the Wall Street Journal.
Presumably the reason the indictment against Flynn was delayed was because his lawyers had just signaled Flynn's interest in
a plea bargain, and it took a few more weeks of negotiating to work that out.
It is the Wall Street Journal editorial which in fact provides the answer to Mueller's and Rosenstein's otherwise strange behaviour
and to the way that Mueller has conducted the investigation up to now. The Wall Street Journal's editorial says that Mueller's past as the FBI's Director means that he is too close to the FBI to take
an objective view of its actions.
In fact the Wall Street Journal was more right than it perhaps realised. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the FBI's
actions are open to very serious criticism to say the least, and that Mueller is simply not the person who can be trusted to take
an objective view of those actions.
Over the course of the 2016 election the FBI cleared Hillary Clinton over her illegal use of a private server to route classified
emails whilst she was Secretary of State though it is universally agreed that she broke the law by doing so.
The FBI does not seem to have even considered investigating Hillary Clinton for possible obstruction of justice after it also
became known that she had actually destroyed thousands of her emails which passed through her private server, though that was an
obvious thing to do.
It is universally agreed that the FBI's then Director – Mueller's friend James Comey – broke protocols by the way he announced
that Hillary Clinton had been cleared.
By failing to bring charges against Hillary Clinton the FBI ensured that she would win the Democratic Party's nomination, and
that she not Bernie Sanders would face off against Donald Trump in the election in the autumn. That is important because though the eventual – completely unexpected – election outcome was that Donald Trump won the election,
which Hillary Clinton lost, every opinion poll which I have seen suggests that if the election had been between Bernie Sanders and
Donald Trump then Bernie Sanders would have won by a landslide.
In other words it was because of the FBI's actions in the first half of 2016 that Bernie Sanders is not now the President of the
United States.
In addition instead of independently investigating the DNC's claims that the Russians had hacked the DNC's and John Podesta's
computers, the FBI simply accepted the opinion of an expert – Crowdstrike – paid for by the DNC, which it is now known was partly
funded and was entirely controlled by the Hillary Clinton campaign, that hacks of those computers had actually taken place and that
the Russians were the perpetrators.
As a result Hillary Clinton was able to say during the election that the reason emails which had passed through those computers
and which showed her and her campaign in a bad light were being published by Wikileaks was because the Russians had stolen the emails
by hacking the computers in order to help Donald Trump.
It is now known that the FBI also met with Christopher Steele, the compiler of the Trump Dossier, who is now known to have been
in the pay of the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign. The first meeting apparently took place in early July 2016, shortly before
the Russiagate investigation was launched.
Whilst there is some confusion about whether the FBI actually paid Steele for his information, it is now known that Steele was
in contact with the FBI throughout the election and continued to be so after, and that the FBI gave credence to his work.
Recently it has also come to light that Steele was also directly in touch with Obama's Justice Department, a fact which was only
disclosed recently.
The best
account of this has been provided by Byron York writing for The Washington Examiner
The department's Bruce Ohr, a career official, served as associate deputy attorney general at the time of the campaign. That
placed him just below the deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, who ran the day-to-day operations of the department. In 2016,
Ohr's office was just steps away from Yates, who was later fired for defying President Trump's initial travel ban executive order
and still later became a prominent anti-Trump voice upon leaving the Justice Department.
Unbeknownst to investigators until recently, Ohr knew Steele and had repeated contacts with Steele when Steele was working
on the dossier. Ohr also met after the election with Glenn Simpson, head of Fusion GPS, the opposition research company that was
paid by the Clinton campaign to compile the dossier.
Word that Ohr met with Steele and Simpson, first reported by Fox News' James Rosen and Jake Gibson, was news to some current
officials in the Justice Department. Shortly after learning it, they demoted Ohr, taking away his associate deputy attorney general
title and moving him full time to another position running the department's organized crime drug enforcement task forces.
It is also now known that over the course of the election the FBI – on the basis of information in the Trump Dossier – obtained
at least one warrant from the FISA court which made it possible for it to undertake surveillance during and after the election of
persons belonging to involved the campaign team of Hillary Clinton's opponent Donald Trump.
In response to subpoenas issued at the instigation of the Congressman Devin Nunes the FBI has recently admitted that
the Trump Dossier cannot be verified
.
However the FBI and the Justice Department have so far failed to provide in response to these subpoenas information about the
precise role of the Trump Dossier in triggering the Russiagate investigation.
The FBI's and the Justice Department's failure to provide this information recently provoked an angry exchange between FBI Director
Christopher Wray and Congressman Jim Jordan during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.
During that hearing Jordan said to Wray the following
Let's remember a couple of things about the dossier. The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, which we now
know were one and the same, paid the law firm who paid Fusion GPS who paid Christopher Steele who then paid Russians to put together
a report that we call a dossier full of all kinds of fake news, National Enquirer garbage and it's been reported that this dossier
was all dressed up by the FBI, taken to the FISA court and presented as a legitimate intelligence document -- that it became the
basis for a warrant to spy on Americans.
In response Wray refused to say officially whether or not the Trump Dossier played any role in the FBI obtaining the FISA warrants.
This was so even though officials of the FBI – including former FBI Director James Comey – have slipped out in earlier Congressional
testimony that it did.
This is also despite the fact that this information is not classified and ought already to have been provided by the Justice Department
and the FBI in response to Congressman Nunes's subpoenas.
There is now talk of FBI Director Christopher Wray and of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein being held in contempt of Congress
because of the failure of the Justice Department and the FBI to comply with Congressman Nunes's subpoenas.
During the exchanges between Wray and Jordan at the hearing in the House Judiciary Committee Jordan also had this to say
Here's what I think -- I think Peter Strozk (sic) Mr. Super Agent at the FBI, I think he's the guy who took the application
to the FISA court and if that happened, if this happened , if you have the FBI working with a campaign, the Democrats' campaign,
taking opposition research, dressing it all up and turning it into an intelligence document so they can take it to the FISA court
so they can spy on the other campaign, if that happened, that is as wrong as it gets
Peter Strzok is the senior FBI official who is now known to have had a leading role in both the FBI's investigation of Hillary
Clinton's misuse of her private server and in the Russiagate investigation.
Strzok is now also known to have been the person who changed the wording in Comey's statement clearing Hillary Clinton for her
misuse of her private email server to say that Hillary Clinton had been "extremely careless'" as opposed to "grossly negligent".
Strzok – who was the FBI's deputy director for counter-intelligence – is now also known to have been the person who signed the
document which launched the Russiagate investigation in July 2016.
Fox News has
reported that Strzok was also the person who supervised the FBI's questioning of Michael Flynn. It is not clear whether this
covers the FBI's interview with Flynn on 24th January 2017 during which Flynn lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian
ambassador. However it is likely that it does.
If so then this is potentially important given that it was Flynn's lying to the FBI during this interview which made up the case
against him and to which he has now pleaded guilty. It is potentially even more important given the strong indications that Flynn's
interview with the FBI on 24th January 2017 was
a set-up intended
to entrap him by tricking him into lying to the FBI.
As the FBI's deputy director of counter-intelligence it is also highly likely that it was Strozk who was the official within the
FBI who supervised the FBI's contacts with Christopher Steele, and who would have been the official within the FBI who was provided
by Steele with the Trump Dossier and who would have made the first assessment of the Trump Dossier.
Recently it has been disclosed that Special Counsel Mueller sacked Strzok from the Russiagate investigation supposedly after it
was discovered that Strzok had been sending anti-Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton messages to Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer with whom he
was having an affair.
These messages were sent by Strzok to his lover during the election, but apparently only came to light in July this year, when
Mueller supposedly sacked Strzok because of them.
It seems that since then Strzok has been working in the FBI's human resources department, an astonishing demotion for the FBI's
former deputy director for counter-intelligence who was apparently previously considered the FBI's top expert on Russia.
Some people have questioned whether the sending of the messages could possibly be the true reason why Strzok was sacked. My colleague
Alex Christoforou has
reported on some
of the bafflement that this extraordinary sacking and demotion has caused.
Business Insider reports the anguished comments of former FBI officials incredulous that Strzok could have been sacked for such
a trivial reason. Here is what Business Insider
reports
one ex FBI official Mark Rossini as having said
It would be literally impossible for one human being to have the power to change or manipulate evidence or intelligence according
to their own political preferences. FBI agents, like anyone else, are human beings. We are allowed to have our political beliefs.
If anything, the overwhelming majority of agents are conservative Republicans.
This is obviously right. Though the ex-FBI officials questioned by Business Insider are clearly supporters of Strzok and critics
of Donald Trump,
the same point has been made from the other side of the political divide by Congressman Jim Jordan
If you get kicked off the Mueller team for being anti-Trump, there wouldn't be anybody left on the Mueller team. There has
to be more
Adding to the mystery about Strzok's sacking is why the FBI took five months to confirm it.
Mueller apparently sacked Strzok from the Russiagate investigation in July and it was apparently then that Strzok was simultaneously
sacked from his previous post of deputy director for counter-espionage and transferred to human resources. The FBI has however only
disclosed his sacking now, five months later and only in response to demands for information from Congressional investigators.
There is in fact an obvious explanation for Strzok's sacking and the strange circumstances surrounding it, and I am sure that
it is the one which Congressman Jordan had in mind during his angry exchanges with FBI Director Christopher Wray.
I suspect that Congressman Jordan believes that the true reason why Strzok was sacked is that Strzok's credibility had become
so tied to the Trump Dossier that when its credibility collapsed over the course of the summer when the FBI finally realised that
it could not be verified his credibility collapsed with it.
If so then I am sure that Congressman Jordan is right.
We now know from a variety of sources but first and foremost from the
testimony to Congress of Carter Page
that the Trump Dossier provided the frame narrative for the Russiagate investigation until just a few months ago.
We also know that the Trump Dossier was included in an appendix to the January ODNI report about supposed Russian meddling in
the 2016 election which was shown by the US intelligence chiefs to President elect Trump during their stormy meeting with him on
8th January 2017.
The fact that the Trump Dossier was included in an appendix to the January ODNI report shows that at the start of this year the
top officials of the FBI and of the US intelligence community – Comey, Clapper, Brennan and the rest – believed in its truth.
The June 2017 article in the Washington Post (discussed by me
here ) also all but confirms that it was
the Trump Dossier that provided the information which the CIA sent to President Obama in August 2016 which supposedly 'proved' that
the Russians were interfering in the election.
As the BBC has pointed out , it was also the
Trump Dossier which Congressman Adam Schiff – the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Community, who appears to be very close
to some of the FBI investigators involved in the Russiagate case – as well as the FBI's Russiagate investigators were using as the
narrative frame when questioning witnesses about their supposed role in Russiagate.
These facts make it highly likely that it was indeed the Trump Dossier which provided the information which the FBI used to obtain
all the surveillance warrants the FBI obtained from the FISA court during the 2016 election and afterwards.
Strzok's position as the FBI's deputy director for counter-intelligence makes it highly likely that he was the key official within
the FBI who decided that the Trump Dossier should be given credence, whilst his known actions during the Hillary Clinton private
server investigation and during the Russiagate investigation make it highly likely that it was he who was the official within the
FBI who sought and obtained the FISA warrants.
Given Strzok's central role in the Russiagate investigation going back all the way to its start in July 2016, there also has to
be a possibility that it was Strzok who was behind many of the leaks coming from the investigation which so destabilised the Trump
administration at the start of the year.
This once again points to the true scandal of the 2016 election.
On the strength of a fake Dossier paid for by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign the Justice Department, the FBI and the
US intelligence community carried out surveillance during the election of US citizens who were members of the campaign team of Hillary
Clinton's opponent Donald Trump.
Given the hugely embarrassing implications of this for the FBI, it is completely understandable why Strzok, if he was the person
who was ultimately responsible for this debacle – as he very likely was – and if he was responsible for some of the leaks – as he
very likely also was – was sacked and exiled to human resources when it was finally concluded that the Trump Dossier upon which all
the FBI's actions were based could not be verified.
It would also explain why the FBI sought to keep Strzok's sacking secret, so that it was only disclosed five months after it happened
and then only in response to questions from Congressional investigators, with a cover story about inappropriate anti-Trump messages
being spread about in order to explain it.
This surely is also the reason why in defiance both of evidence and logic the Russiagate investigation continues.
Given the debacle the Justice Department, the FBI and the US intelligence community are facing, it is completely understandable
why they should want to keep the Russiagate investigation alive in order to draw attention away from their own activities.
Put in this way it is Robert Mueller's investigation which is the cover-up, and the surveillance which is the wrongdoing that
the cover up is trying to excuse or conceal, which is what
I said nine months ago in March .
When the suggestion of appointing a second Special Counsel was first floated last month the suggestion was that the focus of the
second Special Counsel's investigation would be the Uranium One affair.
That always struck me as misconceived not because there may not be things to investigate in the Uranium One case but because the
focus of any new investigation should be what happened during the 2016 election, not what happened during the Uranium one case.
Congressman Jordan has now correctly identified the surveillance of US citizens by the US national security bureaucracy during
the election as the primary focus of the proposed investigation to be conducted by the second Special Counsel.
In truth there should be no second Special Counsel. Since there is no Russiagate collusion to investigate the Russiagate investigation
– ie. the investigation headed by Mueller – should be wound up.
There should be only one Special Counsel tasked with looking into what is the real scandal of the 2016 election: the surveillance
of US citizens carried out during the election by the US national security bureaucracy on the basis of the Trump Dossier.
I remain intensely skeptical that this will happen. However the fact that some members of Congress such as Congressman Nunes (recently
cleared of charges that he acted inappropriately by disclosing details of the surveillance back in March) and Congressman Jordan
are starting to demand it is a hopeful sign.
Top Clinton Aides Face No Charges After Making False Statements To FBI
Neither of the Clinton associates, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, faced legal consequences for their misleading statements,
which they made in interviews last year with former FBI section chief Peter Strzok.
These are acts to overthrow the legitimate government of the USA and therefore constitute treason. Treason is still punishable
by death. It is time for some public hangings. Trump should declare martial law. Put Patraeus and Flint in charge and drain the
swamp like he promised...
Absolutely. This is not political, about justice or corruption or election coercion, this is about keeping the fires lit under
Trump, no matter how lame or lying, in the hopes that something, anything, will arise that could be used to unseat Trump. Something
that by itself would be controversial but ultimately a nothing-burger, but piled upon the months and years of lies used to build
a false consensus of corruption, criminality and impropriety of Trump. Their goal has always been to undermine Trump by convincing
the world that Trump is evil and unfit using nothing but lies, that without Trump's endless twitter counters would have buried
him by now. While they know that can't convince a significant majority that these lies are true, what they can do is convince
the majority that everyone else thinks it true, thereby in theory enabling them to unseat Trump with minimal resistance, assuming
many will simply stand down in the face of a PERCEIVED overwhelming majority.
This is about constructing a false premise that they can use minimal FACTS to confirm. They are trying and testing every day
this notion with continuing probes and jabs in hopes that something....anything, sticks.
Mueller is a lot of things, but he is a politician, and skilled at that, as he has survived years in Washington.
So why choose KNOWN partisans for your investigation? He may not have known about Strzok, but he surely knew about Weitsmann's
ties to HRC, about Rhee being Rhodes personal attorney,..so why put them on, knowing that the investigations credibility would
be damaged? No way most of this would not come out, just due to the constant leaks from the FBI/DOJ.
What is the real goal, other than taking Trump down and covering up FBI/DOJ/Obama Admin malfeasance? These goons are all highly
experienced swamp dwellers, so I think there is something that is being missed here..
" The fact that the Trump Dossier was included in an appendix to the January ODNI report shows that at the start of this year
the top officials of the FBI and of the US intelligence community – Comey, Clapper, Brennan and the rest – believed in its truth.
"
Oh, bull crap. None of them believed a word of it, and at least some of them were in on the dossier's creation.
They just wanted to put over their impeach/resist/remove scam on us deplorables so they could hang on to power and maintain
secrecy over all their years of criminal activity.
The FBI is a fraud on the sheeple. Indoctrinated sheeple believe FBI testimony. The M.O. of the FBI is entrapment of victims
and entrapped witnesses against victims using their Form 302 interrogations. The FBI uses forensic evidence from which gullible
juries trust the FBI financed reports. Power corrupts. The power to be believed because of indoctrination corrupts absolutely.
Keep your powder dry. Hold your fire until you see the whites of their eyes.
All this crap comes down to ONE THING: Sessions ... why he refuses to fire a mega-conflicted and corrupt POS Mueller...
Investigative reporter Sarah Carter hinted (last Friday?) that something big would be happening "probably within the next forty-eight
hours". She related this specifically to a comment that Sessions had been virtually invisible.
I will make a prediction:
THE COMING WEEK WILL BE A TUMULTUOUS WEEK FOR THOSE OBSESSED BY THE "RUSSIA COLLUSION CONSPIRACY" .
First, Sessions will announce significant findings and actions which will directly attack the Trump-Russia-Collusion narrative.
And then, the Democrats/Media/Hillary Campaign will launch a hystierical, viscious, demented political counter attack in a
final onslaught to take down Trump.
They played Sessions like a violin. Sessions recluses himself for a bullcrap Kisnyak speech, where he did not even meet him.
Rosenstein then recommends Trump fire Comey -- who wanted to be fired so they would appoint a special prosecutor -- which Rosenstein
does -- Mueller, to the acclamation of ALL of Con and the Senate-including Republicans.
When Trump tries to get out of the trap by leaking he is thinking about firing Sessions, Lispin Lindsey goes on television
to say that will not be allowed too happen. If he fires Sessions, Congress would not approve ANY of Trump's picks for DOJ-leaving
Rosenstein in charge anyway.
Trump was pissed because they removed his only defender from Mueller -- the head of the DOJ. He knew
it was a setup, so went ballistic when he found out about Sessions recusing.
There is good reason for optimism: Trumpus Maximus is on the case.
I remain intensely skeptical that this will happen. However the fact that some members of Congress such as Congressman Nunes
(recently cleared of charges that he acted inappropriately by disclosing details of the surveillance back in March) and Congressman
Jordan are starting to demand it is a hopeful sign.
The design has been exposed. It is now fairly clear WHAT the conspirators did.
We now enter the neutralization and mop-up phase.
And, very likely, people who know things will be EAGER to talk:
FBI agents, like anyone else, are human beings. We are allowed to have our political beliefs. If anything, the overwhelming
majority of agents are conservative Republicans.
Bloomberg fed a fake leak that Mueller had subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank. Democrats (Schiff) on the House Intelligence Committee fed fake information about Don Jr. that was leaked to CNN. Leading to
an embarrassing retraction. ABC's Brian Ross fed a fake leak about the Flynn indictment. Leading to an embarrassing retraction.
Maybe the operation that Sessions set up some time ago to catch leakers is bearing fruit after all. And Mueller should realize
that the ice is breaking up all around him.
once this special prosecutor is done, congress needs to rewrite the special prosecutor law to narrow their mandate to just
the item allowed to be investigated - no fishing expeditions - enough of this stupidity - and maybe put a renewal clause in there
so that it has to be renewed every 12 months...
This is, and always has been a sideshow for the "true believers" in the Democrap party and all Hitlary supporters to accuse
Trump of EXACTLY what Hitlary did, in the classic method of diversion. Sideshow magicians have been doing it for millenia--"Look
over there" while the real work is done elsewhere. The true believers don't want to believe that Hitlary and the Democrap party
are complicit in the selling of Uranium One to the Ruskies for $145 million. No, no, that was something completely different and
Hitlary is not guilty of selling out the interests of the US for money. Nope, Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election.
Yep, that's it.
Mueller is now the official head of a shit show that's coming apart at the seams. He was too stupid to even bring on ANY non-Hitlary
supporting leftists which could have given him a smidgen of equibility, instead he stacked the deck with sycophant libtard leftists
who by their very nature take away ANY concept of impartiality, and any jury on the planet would see through the connivance like
glass. My guess is he's far too stupid to stop, and I happily await the carnage of his actions as they decimate the Democrap party.
Currently in the USA only nationalist politicians display some level of courage and
authenticity. That's why they attract people.
The problem with superdelegates in Democratic Party is just the tip of the iceberg of the "Clinton transformation" of the
party. The Part is
now neoliberal party that have nothing to do with the democracy. At best it would qualify as a
moderate Republican wing.
Notable quotes:
"... This endless compromise won't work. The odds of the Dems intentionally trading their Big Money Corporate Supporters like Monsanto for the Working Class is somewhere between slim and none, at least in my lifetime. ..."
"... If the superdelegates were limited to currently serving Democratic members of Congress, currently serving Democratic state governors, and current or former Democratic Presidents and Vice-Presidents, it would be a huge improvement. ..."
"... No lobbyists, no big city mayors, and no state party bosses (unless they are also in one of the other permitted categories). ..."
"... I suppose it doesn't help that I watched the Truman & Wallace episodes of Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States" last night. But even before that I've been haunted by the image of shadow on the steps of Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, Japan. Recalling that image, the DNC's betrayals of the American people, and the short-sighted and self-serving actions of those who rule us -- detailed in trivialities by Norman Solomon -- combined these give fuller meaning to the comment Bernie Sanders made about those who rule us and their greatest concern about their place on the Titanic. ..."
"... Team D cares not a whit for its voters, but it cares very much for the concerns of big donors. ..."
"... under the new rules, those superdelegates would have to tie their votes on the convention's first ballot to the outcome of primaries and caucuses. In 2016, all superdelegates were allowed to support either candidate. ..."
"... In other words, will the practice of Clinton or the Clintonites locking the superdelegate vote up early just be merely reshaped by this process, with a new sheen of faux democracy, rather than inhibited? ..."
"... This is why the comment above by Quanka is astute: You have to tell the Democrats (and Republicans) that you won't owe your vote to them. And that you are going to burn down the party if it doesn't serve the commonwealth. ..."
"... See my post below when it comes out of moderation; Our country does have a progressive/populist tradition, but everything possible is done to erase it from contemporary memory. Now buried to memory is the history of the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, and even the Reform Republicanism of the early 1900's (Wisconsin's Robert M. La Follette for instance). ..."
"... I hate to tell you, but the New York City subway actually costs $2.75. Another testament to the neoliberal con game, as practiced by the Metropolitan Transit Authority. ..."
"... What is ironic about this issue of superdelegates is that the so called "Democratic" party has them and the party of the elite, the Republicans, do not (well, they do, but at a much smaller % and they are required to vote for whoever won their respective state primary). What is also ironic is that the reason the Dems came up with this system was to prevent blowouts in the election. Carter and McGovern had gotten trounced. The feeling was that "wiser" heads, i.e. experienced politicians could steer the party toward a more electable candidate. And how did that work out for them? First time superdelegates voted in 1984, Mondale lost 49 out of 50 states to Reagan. ..."
"... The Democrat Party is run by a bunch of careerist hacks. This is why the GOP is actually more "democratic" (and got hijacked by Trump): because it's not run by careerist hacks who are more concerned about protecting their rice bowls than they are about being responsive to the electorate. These hacks got paid a billion dollars to run the losing 2016 campaign -- they "won" the election by their self-serving metric, and now get to pay themselves to "resist" the administration that they caused to be elected through their self-serving careerism. ..."
"... And now with current 'RussiaGate' nonsense and the rest of it, and all the wars, including the genocidal destruction of Libya, and some other things, I can never again vote for a Democrat, and I won't vote for a Republican either. I voted for a Socialist once but those votes were not counted because he could not satisfy the requirements to get on the ballot -- petitions and registering in over 200 districts in the state. No one decent gets through the machine. ..."
"... The DNC's Unity Commission's behavior confirms that the real goal of the leadership of the DNC is exactly the opposite of the name of the commission. So what is their real goal? To prevent the emergence of a progressive majority. In fact, this has been their goal for decades; and in fairness, they have been very successful in realizing it to the detriment of the majority of We the People. ..."
"... While I was at the post office, I had a conversation with a longtime friend who is now in the Arizona House of Representatives. She just got elected last year. Even though she is officially a Democratic Party member, she ran as a progressive and that's how she rolls in the House. Get this, she spent this morning addressing a conservative youth group and they loved it. Compared to what they usually hear from politicians, they found her speech refreshing. It was all about balanced policy, and if she posts a video, I will share it. Perhaps the DNC will pay attention. ..."
"... I approve of bringing up this suppressed history of our country's leftist, progressive, socialist, even communist strands, not to mention the multi racial and class political alliance, social organizations, and very frequently personal connections including marriages. Don't forget that the power structure used propaganda, legislation, the law, and armed mobs that often especially, but not only, in the South with rope necklaces, lead poisoning, or if you were "lucky" multi-decade prison terms, or just merely having your home/church/business burnt. This has never really stopped. Like when Jim Crow continues by other means, so did the anti-organization. Chicago, Detroit, the South,etc. Sadly, the black misleadership also help, albeit without the violence, after MLK and others, were no longer a problem. ..."
"... So centuries of poor whites, blacks, native Americans, religious leaders, even some business leaders and some upper class people, struggling together, usually dealing with violence and murder have been dropped into the memory hole. ..."
"... Some days I just want to start screaming and not stop. ..."
The Report is fair, but supporting things like reduction of Super Delegates from the
mid-700s to mid-200s is wrong! Complaining about lack of democracy within the Party means
getting rid of them altogether! That's just one small example.
This endless compromise won't work. The odds of the Dems intentionally trading their
Big Money Corporate Supporters like Monsanto for the Working Class is somewhere between slim
and none, at least in my lifetime.
It is a good start. If the superdelegates were limited to currently serving Democratic
members of Congress, currently serving Democratic state governors, and current or former
Democratic Presidents and Vice-Presidents, it would be a huge improvement.
No lobbyists, no
big city mayors, and no state party bosses (unless they are also in one of the other
permitted categories).
I can't point to any particulars -- but I felt something disingenuous about Norman Solomon
-- something 'off'. An even meaner thought came to mind as I listened to his complaints and
details of the DNC machinations -- Norman Solomon would be perfect to work for unity in the
Green Party. He could make theater of herding the Green cats and accomplish nothing in
particular.
I suppose it doesn't help that I watched the Truman & Wallace episodes of Oliver
Stone's "Untold History of the United States" last night. But even before that I've been
haunted by the image of shadow on the steps of Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, Japan. Recalling
that image, the DNC's betrayals of the American people, and the short-sighted and
self-serving actions of those who rule us -- detailed in trivialities by Norman Solomon --
combined these give fuller meaning to the comment Bernie Sanders made about those who rule us
and their greatest concern about their place on the Titanic.
But this time the DNC has no dying Roosevelt to tack a Truman onto.
Aye! and you can't burn a thing down by continuing to send it money, or lend it undying
support, or by continuing to vote for their horrible lesser evil moderate republican
candidates.
I quit the damned party as loudly as i could in november 2016 emails to all and sundry,
chewing them all new ones, as it were.
i never heard a word back, of course and the AI that runs the damned thing keeps sending
me emails begging for cash; and surveys,lol which i send back to them with my chicken scratch
all in the margins with my outrage and my considered opinions. i assume all that goes unread,
as well. perhaps if i incorporated and obtained a po box in the caymans or pulau or
somewhere
Short-term (2018)–Norman Solomon is right. Only the Democratic party is in a
position to defeat the rightists. In the longer term, Howie Hawkins's recent argument for a
new, genuinely working-class party is more convincing to me. It's a lot more work,
though.
The DNC may be becoming irrelevant, but individual Democratic politicians can monetize
their current positions as they stock their personal lifeboats before the Bernie Sanders
mentioned Titanic goes down..
Instead of thinking short term and trying stay in the Dim party real left wing people need
to take the long term view and start a new party which will be the only way forward.
In the draft proposal, a special national party commission calls for keeping some 400
members of the Democratic National Committee as automatic delegates to the convention.
But under the new rules, those superdelegates would have to tie their votes on the
convention's first ballot to the outcome of primaries and caucuses. In 2016, all
superdelegates were allowed to support either candidate.
And yet
Cohen and other Democrats stressed, however, that commission members have been busy
circulating amendments ahead of the commission's weekend gathering in metro Washington.
So, which superdelegates will remain and with what actual
constraints, and how far does this move the system away from the status quo? In light of
Solomon's interview, I do wonder about actuarial sleigh-of-hand here. Is there a way of
affecting a likely purge of 2020 Sanders/"grass-roots" aligned superdelegates now? Is there a
way of suggesting that the superdelegates must vote as the states' primaries/caucuses (thus
defanging them) but then not actually imposing any real penalty of these "party elders" and
such? (Will 2020 be about "unfaithful superdelegates voting their conscience against the
party rules for the greater good"?)
In other words, will the practice of Clinton or the Clintonites locking the
superdelegate vote up early just be merely reshaped by this process, with a new sheen of faux
democracy, rather than inhibited?
The report itself is worth reading. I downloaded it a while back when Lambert and Yves
first posted it.
Solomon gets Moore wrong. Moore is not a neo-fascist or fascist. Moore represents some
very deep-seated religious ideas that are prevalent in the South and in the border states.
When Naked Capitalism and other sources report a bishop of an African-American church making
rather ambiguous comments about the rock with the Ten Commandments, we see an ancient
religious attitude emerging:
Yet as many Southerners point out, the South has a progressive / populist tradition. And
where are the Democrats? To me, this is part of the thorough corruption of the party and its
deterioration into a fan club. Too many Democrats are looking for fascists and Rooskies.
People are fleeing the party, and various Democrats living the "Don't know much about
history" aspect of U.S. culture are desperately trying to pin the fascist label on people.
And what is the solution being offered? Fly in Jon Ossoff? He didn't live in the
congressional district where he ran anyway, going counter to another deeply held U.S.
tradition, that you live in your district.
This isn't about "smart" or not smart thinking. This is about people being so thoroughly
corrupt in their thinking that they can only frame questions corruptly and give corrupt
answers. Maybe I'm being hard on Solomon, but looking for Benito Mussolini in Alabama is
wrong history, wrong metaphor, wrong diagnosis, wrong meme.
Next up? The question and and answer of "gentle" "entitlement" "reform." Corrupt from its
very inception.
This is why the comment above by Quanka is astute: You have to tell the Democrats (and
Republicans) that you won't owe your vote to them. And that you are going to burn down the
party if it doesn't serve the commonwealth.
See my post below when it comes out of moderation; Our country does have a
progressive/populist tradition, but everything possible is done to erase it from contemporary
memory. Now buried to memory is the history of the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, the
Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, and even the Reform Republicanism of the early 1900's
(Wisconsin's Robert M. La Follette for instance).
Watt4Bob: You refer here and below to the states along the inland sea, in a sense, the
rather eccentric Great Lakes States. I'd add:
–Chicago agitators and the Haymarket "Riot" (which the police caused)
–The United Auto Workers (Flint strike among others).
–Unions and Youngstown.
–Jane Addams and her own ideas about building community and building peace.
–The Milwaukee Socialists and the mayoralty there.
–The whole rambunctious structure (if it's a structure) of neighborhood associations in
Chicago, where many of those involved in the Harold Washington campaign got their start.
–Henry Gerber, the Society for Human Rights, and the first agitation for acceptance of
gay people, 1924, Chicago. Who even knew that midwesterners thought about politico-sexual
themes?
Yes, there is very talented group of people here who simply have to cut down on the
distractions and get back to work.
Socialism was actually a powerful movement -- with elected officials -- all throughout the
Upper Midwest during the so-called Progressive Era and the 1920s. Part of this was a result
of German settlements; any Midwestern town with a significant population of Germans
(especially from Hamburg) had a strong socialist impulse. Often this was manifest in the
elected officials, but even where the Socialists didn't win elections, they were able to
influence policy.
I have little patience for the so-called "Democrats" who, as you said above "don't know
much about history".
Thank you for bringing those points up. I'd say that buzzwords like fascist and Nazi are
bull horned (as opposed to Republican dog whistles) only as a means to distract from actual
policy issues (vis-a-vis Bernie), but I wonder if it is the case that even the most cynical
Clintonites believe their own BS at this point. These narratives have taken on a life of
their own.
I don't think Norman Solomon has bad intentions. If anything he is appealing to pragmatism
and reason too strongly in a political environment that is unreasonable. Bernie does a much
better job at blowing the emotional horn just enough to fit the political zeitgeist while
maintaining an engine of actual policy issues to move his political machine. Historically,
this has always been a successful strategy for socialists, Americans love fire-brands.
As far as Norman's claims of fascism I just don't see how tossing around those terms adds
any strategic value to the political struggle against the right. It just comes across as
preaching to the choir. We (the left) all know Moore is an ass, calling him fascist doesn't
make that any more evident. The trick is trying to understand why he is still viable
politically to a significant number of people despite being an ass. This was the mistake made
with Trump. To loosely paraphrase Adolph Reed, calling something fascist or Nazi and $2.25
will get me a ride on the subway but it does nothing to develop action to counter right wing
agendas. The normalization of the right (Republicans) does not occur because they have
"better ideas" (their current tax bill shows they aren't even trying to appeal to 99% of
society) it is because the current left option in the USA (Democrats) are offering
no ideas , or certain members are not allowed to express ideas because of corporate power and
corporate-supported political power. Assuming I am directing this at the DNC, then who is
actually supporting the so-called fascists?
As goes fascism in the United States, I don't really think anyone has a good
definition. Some see it as a politics that are largely aesthetic as opposed to based on
discourse or debate. Some see it as a marriage of corporate power with state power with
police and military supremacy. By those two measures I think the USA is already deeply
fascist. Though it seems by the current measures, the only thing that make someone
unequivocally fascist (or Nazi) is their being a bigot. This simplistic view of fascism is an
insult to history, and all the people that either died fighting fascism or were sacrificed at
its political altar.
I hate to tell you, but the New York City subway actually costs $2.75. Another
testament to the neoliberal con game, as practiced by the Metropolitan Transit
Authority.
What is ironic about this issue of superdelegates is that the so called "Democratic"
party has them and the party of the elite, the Republicans, do not (well, they do, but at a
much smaller % and they are required to vote for whoever won their respective state primary).
What is also ironic is that the reason the Dems came up with this system was to prevent
blowouts in the election. Carter and McGovern had gotten trounced. The feeling was that
"wiser" heads, i.e. experienced politicians could steer the party toward a more electable
candidate. And how did that work out for them? First time superdelegates voted in 1984,
Mondale lost 49 out of 50 states to Reagan.
I think a little history would be useful at this point to help us understand that we've
been this way before.
As concerns the Minnesota Farmer-Labor party which later merged with the Minnesota
Democratic Party to form the DFL, which has lately devolved, IMO, Wellstone and Franken not
withstanding, to much more closely resemble the party of Clintonism than the party of the
young Hubert Humphrey.
The Minnesota Farmer–Labor Party emerged from the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota
and the Union Labor
Party in Duluth, Minnesota, on a platform of farmer and labor union protection,
government ownership of certain industries, and social security laws.[2] One of the primary
obstacles of the party, besides constant vilification on the pages of local and state
newspapers, was the difficulty of uniting the party's divergent base and maintaining
political union between rural farmers and urban laborers who often had little in common
other than the populist perception that they were an oppressed class of hardworking
producers exploited by a small elite.
That 'divergent base' thing ring a bell anyone?
"The farmer approached problems as a proprietor or petty capitalist. Relief to him meant
a mitigation of conditions that interfered with successful farming. It involved such things
as tax reduction, easier access to credit, and a floor under farm prices. His individualist
psychology did not create scruples against government aid, but he welcomed it only as long
as it improved agricultural conditions. When official paternalism took the form of public
works or the dole, he openly opposed it because assistance on such terms forced him to
abandon his chosen profession, to submerge his individuality in the labor crew, and to
suffer the humiliation of the bread line. Besides, a public works program required
increased revenue, and since the state relied heavily on the property tax, the cost of the
program seemed likely to fall primarily on him.
At the opposite end of the seesaw sat the city worker, who sought relief from the
hunger, exposure, and disease that followed the wake of unemployment. Dependent on an
impersonal industrial machine, he had sloughed off the frontier tradition of individualism
for the more serviceable doctrine of cooperation through trade unionism. Unlike the
depressed farmer, the unemployed worker often had no property or economic stake to protect.
He was largely immune to taxation and had nothing to lose by backing proposals to dilute
property rights or redistribute the wealth. Driven by the primitive instinct to survive,
the worker demanded financial relief measures from the state."
The upper-midwest was fly-over land long before the Wright brothers, and it makes perfect
sense that the the Minnesota Farmer-Labor, and its predecessor, the Non-Partisan League of
North Dakota should sprout here, where the effects of elite neglect/abuse and the related
Great Depression had left We the People feeling mis/unrepresented by the two
national parties.
Of course it's good to remember that Hubert Humphrey, and the Minnesota Democratic party
did not embrace the populist revolt until it had been successful on its own, in electing
multiple Minnesota Governors, Senators, and Representatives in the 1920-30's, but embrace it
they did, and from 1944 until the 1970's, the DFL stood for something a bit more than the
local franchise of the National Party.
I strongly encourage you to follow the links in the quotes above, you'll find the history
of, among other things, the Bank of North Dakota, still the only state-owned bank in the
country, founded in 1919 to allow ND farmers to break the strangle-hold that banks in
Minneapolis and Chicago held over the farmers of the northern plains, and demand of working
people for free, universal health-care.
So far, the Democratic party, sadly, including the DFL, seems dedicated to putting down
the populist revolt by its neglected base, but with some hard work maybe this time around we
can figure out how to shorten the time between being resisted and being embraced.
The enemies are perennial, so are the solutions, but populism did have a season of
successes in the first half of the 20th century, and there is no reason to think it couldn't
happen again.
Remember too, the Non Partisan League of
Alberta Canada, and was one of the principal champions of universal healthcare that Canadians
now enjoy.
I think incumbent Governors and Congress members have earned the right to be a super
delegate by virtue of having won their own election. Their re-election will be affected by
the top of the ticket.
If Repubs had been blessed with super delegates, would Trump have still won?
July 2016, after the primaries were over, the WaPo, that bastion of Dem estab groupthink,
suggested the GOP adopt super delegates to avoid another surprise primary outcome. And we see
how well not having super delegates turned out for the GOP.
"There are probably a few missteps I am forgetting. Priebus's spinelessness may well
result in an irretrievably divided party, not to mention a humiliating loss in a critical,
entirely winnable election. Priebus's successor had better learn some lessons from 2016. He
or she might also consider using super delegates. It turns out party grownups are needed.
This cycle they've been AWOL."
The Democrat Party is run by a bunch of careerist hacks. This is why the GOP is
actually more "democratic" (and got hijacked by Trump): because it's not run by careerist
hacks who are more concerned about protecting their rice bowls than they are about being
responsive to the electorate. These hacks got paid a billion dollars to run the losing 2016
campaign -- they "won" the election by their self-serving metric, and now get to pay
themselves to "resist" the administration that they caused to be elected through their
self-serving careerism.
They're not going to let go of the self-licking ice cream cone that the Democrat Party has
become until their comprehensive election losses make it obvious to the Wall Street Wing that
they're wasting their money. That day may be coming soon; however, the current coup d'etat in
Washington may render a party of $27 donors irrelevant
This: "until their comprehensive election losses make it obvious to the Wall Street Wing
that they're wasting their money. "^^^
A similar sentiment was included in all of the flurry of angry emails i sent hither and
yon when I quit the demparty right after the election. ie: the current course of pleasing the
donors is unsustainable if they continue to chase off their own base. what are the donors
paying for?
one would presume a voice in gooberment .meaning won seats,lol.
without voters, why would any self respecting conglomerate continue to shell out dough to the
demparty?
of course, all the hippie-punching and other abuse of their base makes perfect sense if the
demparty is, in truth, a ringer party for the oligarchs a pressure relief valve, like on the
side of a water heater
if, in other words, they pretend to be the "opposition" and "for the people"(tm) so all
us'n's don't go rabid and Wobbly.
This seems a more and more likely explanation every week.
Perhaps old age and failing memory is to blame, but I can't remember not hearing the
nonsense arguments of 'vote for the lesser of two evils and reform from within', and the fear
mongering about the right or Republicans winning. (Republicans used to have sort-of 'liberal'
members, like Lowell Weicker, who would make current Democrats look like fascists -- well, a
lot of them are really ). It never worked and everything just gets worse.
And now with current 'RussiaGate' nonsense and the rest of it, and all the wars,
including the genocidal destruction of Libya, and some other things, I can never again vote
for a Democrat, and I won't vote for a Republican either. I voted for a Socialist once but
those votes were not counted because he could not satisfy the requirements to get on the
ballot -- petitions and registering in over 200 districts in the state. No one decent gets
through the machine.
I've given up on both parties, and their phony elections -- there are no solutions there.
What is needed is to see through the games and destroy the machine. Not easy but there is no
other way. Solomon is part of the machine, and the so-called 'progressives' are not
progressive. We are at the point where the only possible solutions are radical -- striking at
the root. The collapse of the empire and capitalism (corporatism -- just a larval stage of
fascism) is coming one way or another because it is not sustainable -- and that which cannot
be sustained will not be. It's like how slavery and feudalism reached a point where they
could no longer survive as dominant systems, nor returned to as such (similar to how the gold
standard, or non-tech agricultural society can not be universally restored). The writing
finger moves on.
We can either see how the global wind of history and culture is blowing and intelligently
move ahead with it, or we can destroy ourselves. The action must be on the streets, in the
workplace, from the masses, in collective consciousness, and world wide. Democrat shills like
Solomon and clowns like Trump should be ignored as symptomatic noise.
The DNC's Unity Commission's behavior confirms that the real goal of the leadership of
the DNC is exactly the opposite of the name of the commission. So what is their real goal? To
prevent the emergence of a progressive majority. In fact, this has been their goal for
decades; and in fairness, they have been very successful in realizing it to the detriment of
the majority of We the People.
Thank you for shining the light on this latest episode of their actions for their
financial benefactors.
Just got back from running errands. While I was at the post office, I had a
conversation with a longtime friend who is now in the Arizona House of Representatives. She
just got elected last year. Even though she is officially a Democratic Party member, she ran
as a progressive and that's how she rolls in the House. Get this, she spent this morning
addressing a conservative youth group and they loved it. Compared to what they usually hear
from politicians, they found her speech refreshing. It was all about balanced policy, and if
she posts a video, I will share it. Perhaps the DNC will pay attention.
it's really not possible for the leaders at the national level of the Democratic Party
to have a close working relationship with the base when it's afraid of the base.
And strangely, this is a big reason for why after three plus decades, I am no longer an
active member of the party. If you treat the majority of American nation as dangerous,
deplorable, or at best just dumb, please don't be shocked when people start either start
ignoring you, or just try to get rid of.
I approve of bringing up this suppressed history of our country's leftist,
progressive, socialist, even communist strands, not to mention the multi racial and class
political alliance, social organizations, and very frequently personal connections including
marriages. Don't forget that the power structure used propaganda, legislation, the law, and
armed mobs that often especially, but not only, in the South with rope necklaces, lead
poisoning, or if you were "lucky" multi-decade prison terms, or just merely having your
home/church/business burnt. This has never really stopped. Like when Jim Crow continues by
other means, so did the anti-organization. Chicago, Detroit, the South,etc. Sadly, the black
misleadership also help, albeit without the violence, after MLK and others, were no longer a
problem.
So centuries of poor whites, blacks, native Americans, religious leaders, even some
business leaders and some upper class people, struggling together, usually dealing with
violence and murder have been dropped into the memory hole.
Some days I just want to start screaming and not stop.
"... Pentagon "weaponised information" years ago: " Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media ".) ..."
"... The collapse of the Fusion GPS operation will unravel the whole construction. And it's coming . ( And don't forget Awan .) All this because the Dems fixed their nomination and then lost anyway. ..."
Possibly all of the Russia-gate allegations, which have been taken on faith by Democratic partisans
and members of the anti-Trump Resistance, trace back to claims paid for or generated by Democrats. If
for a moment one could remove the often justified hatred many people feel toward Trump, it would be
impossible to avoid the impression that the scandal may have been devised by the DNC and the Clinton
camp in league with Obama's intelligence chiefs to serve political and geopolitical aims. In other
words this is a sophisticated false flag operation.
Even more alarmingly (what really smells like a part on intelligence agencies coup d'état against
Trump ) is the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence "assessment" by those "hand-picked" analysts
from three U.S. intelligence agencies - the CIA, the FBI and the NSA - not all 17 agencies that Hillary
Clinton continues to insist were involved. (Obama's intelligence chiefs, DNI Clapper and CIA Director
John Brennan, publicly admitted that only three agencies took part and The New York Times printed a
correction saving so.)
Notable quotes:
"... Well its three . And one is Brennan . And one is whatever. I mean, give me a break. They're political hacks . So you look at it, and then you have Brennan, you have Clapper and you have Comey . Comey's proven now to be a liar and he's proven to be a leaker. So you look at that. ..."
"... Trump gets it. He knows the weak points of the propaganda claims of "Russian hacking": Podesta and the fake Steele dossier, the DNC server, the lack of any FBI investigation of the alleged hack, the NYT's long false insistence on the '17 agencies' assessment, the "political hacks" who fitted their claims to the Obama/Clinton narrative. ..."
"... But neither the Washington Post nor the NY Times or others mention the crucial points Trump spelled out in their write-ups of the gaggle. There is no word on the DNC servers in them. Instead they create a claim of "Putin says and Trump just believes him". The do not name the facts and questions Trump listed to support his position. Taking up the valid questions Trump asked would of course require the news outlets to finally delve into them. We can't have that. ..."
"... Trump is not the brightest bulb and he is not well informed. I dislike nearly all of his policies. But he understands that the "Russian hacking" narrative is false and is carried by lunatic political hacks who want to push the U.S. back into a cold, or maybe even hot war with Russia, China, Iran and probably everyone else. ..."
"... I guess it could be that the DNC really was hacked, but maybe they faked the hack story, fed the story to Crowdstrike, then paid Crowdstrike a lot of money to fabricate a fairytale about Russian hacking... ..."
"... This Russian fairytale would be the bedrock of Hillary's campaign, and it gave her a reason to badmouth trump who intended to get along with Putin, which deeply offended the neocon Bolsheviks who've been running things since 9/11 ..."
"... If the hacking really happened, it's maybe more likely to have been the US NSA that did the hacking... that might explain why the DNC and Hillary were not alarmed by the hacking --if it happened-- and did nothing about it, and continued to write incriminating emails... ..."
"... Russia gate is Really Hillary Gate... And that's just the beginning as we consider the DNC lid coming off via Donna Brazile and the Uranium scandal. Mueller has been gatekeeper for the Deep State for OKC bombing, 911,...other False Flag...and now today's Intrigues. ..."
"... Back when Trump looked like he was in the running in the US presidential election, I wondered how one man, even if he was genuine, could without the backing of US intelligence, take down the deepstate/borg/whatever. Putin pulled Russia out of the nineties with key backing from patriotic intelligence and military leadership, but Trump even if genuine would be on his own. Just ordered 'Art of the deal' to try and understand Trump a bit more. Looks like he has just destroyed a big chunk of deep state financing so will be interesting to see how long he can stay alive. ..."
"... well, Mueller declined to find 9/11 evidence against bin laden... or maybe we should say, "he declined to manufacture evidence"... for some unkown reason... ..."
"... Can we just face the facts here that there is a coordinated effort by these elite to get Trump dethroned? What reason for this? Simple...he's a threat. ..."
"... Mike Whitney posted a great piece this week suggesting Brennan, Obama's political 'hack', is behind this mess - "Brennan spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign from the get-go. As early as August 2016, Brennan was providing classified briefings to ranking members of Congress expressing his conviction that Moscow was helping Trump to win the election. The former Director offered no proof to back up his claims nor has he since then. It was also Brennan who gradually persuaded Clapper, Comey and Morrell to join his anti-Russia jihad, although all were reluctant participants at first. Were they won over by compelling secret evidence that has been been withheld from the public?" - http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48172.htm ..."
"... These are but a few sources digging and reporting on these bogus charges against Putin. I'd like to believe the majority of the U.S. electorate isn't being fooled by the nonsense. I can't speak for those who choose to remain inside the brainwashing corporate media bubble, but for those of us who divorced ourselves from their propaganda long ago ain't buying nor ever did buy into the muh Russia crap. ..."
"... Meanwhile, USG declares RT and Sputnik to be foreign agents and must register as such -- and Trump had nothing to do with that?!? ..."
"... The media is now now in permanent psy op mode, colonizing the public's mind and jamming people's ability to reason, think critically and even tell fact from fiction. It is only a matter of time before overt repression becomes widespread (to protect our freedoms of course) and the last remnants of democracy give way to an Orwellian/Huxleyite dystopia. ..."
"... CNN covers the Binney/Pompeo meeting, and describes Binney in the headline as a "conspiracy theorist": http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/07/politics/mike-pompeo-william-binney-meeting/index.html ..."
Trump Points To Falsehoods In "Russian Hacking" Claims - Media Still Ignore Them
During the flight of his recent Asia tour U.S. President Donal Trump held a press gaggle on board
of the plane. Part of it were questions and answers about the alleged "Russian hacking" of the U.S.
election.
There is no public transcript available yet but the Washington Post's Mark Berman
provided a screenshot
of some relevant parts:
Mark Berman @markberman - 6:20 AM - 11 Nov 2017
Full comment from @realDonaldTrump again questioning the US intel community conclusion that
Russia meddled last year
In the attached transcript Trump talks about his very short encounter with the Russian President
Putin in Hanoi:
Q: When did you bring up the issue of election meddling? Did you ask him a question?
A: Every time he sees me he says he didn't do that and I really believe that when he tells
me that, he means it. But he says, I didn't do that. I think he is very insulted by it, ...
...
He says that very strongly and he really seems to be insulted by it he says he didn't do it.
Q: Even if he didn't bring it up one-on-one, do you believe him?
A: I think that he is very, very strong on the fact that didn't do it. And then you look and
you look what's going on with Podesta , and you look at what's going on with the server from the
DNC and why didn't the FBI take it ? Why did they leave it? Why did a third party look at the
server and not the FBI ? You look at all of this stuff, and you say, what's going on here? And
you hear it's 17 agencies. Well its three . And one is Brennan . And one is whatever. I mean,
give me a break. They're political hacks . So you look at it, and then you have Brennan, you have
Clapper and you have Comey . Comey's proven now to be a liar and he's proven to be a leaker. So
you look at that. And you have President Putin very strongly, vehemently say he has nothing
to do with that. Now, you are not going to get into an argument, you are going to start talking
about Syria and the Ukraine.
Trump gets it. He knows the weak points of the propaganda claims of "Russian hacking": Podesta
and the fake Steele dossier, the DNC server, the lack of any FBI investigation of the alleged hack,
the NYT's long false insistence on the '17 agencies' assessment, the "political hacks" who fitted
their claims to the Obama/Clinton narrative.
But
neither the Washington Post
nor the NY Times or
others mention the crucial points Trump spelled out in their write-ups of the gaggle. There is
no word on the DNC servers in them. Instead they create a claim of "Putin says and Trump just believes
him". The do not name the facts and questions Trump listed to support his position. Taking up the
valid questions Trump asked would of course require the news outlets to finally delve into them.
We can't have that.
Instead we get more "Russian influence" claptrap. Like this from the once honorable Wired
which headlines:
Russian interference in Brexit through targeted social media propaganda can be revealed for the
first time. A cache of posts from 2016, seen by WIRED, shows how a coordinated network of Russian-based
Twitter accounts spread racial hatred in an attempt to disrupt politics in the UK and Europe.
Interesting, enthralling, complicate and sensational ...
... until you get down to paragraph 14(!):
Surprisingly, all the posts around Brexit in this small snapshot were posted after the June vote
"Russian agents" influenced the U.S. election by buying mostly
irrelevant Facebook ads - 25% of which were never seen by anyone and 56% of which were posted
AFTER the election
"Russian-based Twitter accounts" influenced the Brexit vote in the UK by tweeting affirmative
AFTER the vote happened
Trump is not the brightest bulb and he is not well informed. I dislike nearly all of his policies.
But he understands that the "Russian hacking" narrative is false and is carried by
lunatic political hacks who want to push the U.S. back into a cold, or maybe even hot war with
Russia, China, Iran and probably everyone else.
"Trump is not the brightest bulb and he is not well informed. I dislike nearly all of his policies.
But he understands that the "Russian hacking" narrative is false and is carried by lunatic political
hacks who want to push the U.S. back into a cold, or maybe even hot war with Russia, China, Iran
and probably everyone else."
I couldn't agree more B. The distraction to cover up the DNC crimes and the 'pay to play' antics
during HRC's tenure at SECState are part of this nonsense as well.
the term "hacked" implies that someone came in on the internet, right?
I guess it could be that the DNC really was hacked, but maybe they faked the hack story,
fed the story to Crowdstrike, then paid Crowdstrike a lot of money to fabricate a fairytale about
Russian hacking...
This Russian fairytale would be the bedrock of Hillary's campaign, and it gave her a reason
to badmouth trump who intended to get along with Putin, which deeply offended the neocon Bolsheviks
who've been running things since 9/11
If the hacking really happened, it's maybe more likely to have been the US NSA that did
the hacking... that might explain why the DNC and Hillary were not alarmed by the hacking --if
it happened-- and did nothing about it, and continued to write incriminating emails...
...they assumed the hackers were on their side
OK, then, if the hacking was a fairytale, made up by Debbie and Hillary, and reinforced by
Crowdstrike, then what? Maybe it doesn't make any difference in the long run, if the DNC was hacked
or not
Whatever happened, the emails got out, Assange strongly hints that Seth Rich was the leak,
Seth Rich was murdered, and his murder was intended to be a warning to people like Donna Brazile,
who, after Seth was murdered, started drawing her office blinds because she didn't want to be
sniped... presumably by the people who murdered Seth Rich
Russia gate is Really Hillary Gate... And that's just the beginning as we consider the DNC
lid coming off via Donna Brazile and the Uranium scandal. Mueller has been gatekeeper for
the Deep State for OKC bombing, 911,...other False Flag...and now today's Intrigues.
Will
Podesta and Hillary escape?...or get Prison? John McCain with ISIS and photo opp,.. Evil in your
face 24. If certain people are not in Prison....Mueller could wear the label Satan's guardian.
..and it wouldn't be exaggeration
Back when Trump looked like he was in the running in the US presidential election, I wondered
how one man, even if he was genuine, could without the backing of US intelligence, take down the
deepstate/borg/whatever. Putin pulled Russia out of the nineties with key backing from patriotic
intelligence and military leadership, but Trump even if genuine would be on his own. Just ordered
'Art of the deal' to try and understand Trump a bit more. Looks like he has just destroyed a big
chunk of deep state financing so will be interesting to see how long he can stay alive.
well, Mueller declined to find 9/11 evidence against bin laden... or maybe we should say,
"he declined to manufacture evidence"... for some unkown reason...
whatever, if seth rich's murder was an attempt to terrorize politicians and the media into
parroting the party line --like the anthrax letters did after 9/11-- it worked
b, it is so funny that everytime you allude to Trump being in the right against the teeming hordes
or globalist, anti-Russia elites, you always offer the caveat: "but...he's a bastard and I hate
him."
Can we just face the facts here that there is a coordinated effort by these elite to get
Trump dethroned? What reason for this? Simple...he's a threat.
Enemy of my enemy anyone?
P.s. I view him as an opportunist. a chameleon. At the very least, perhaps he realizes the
absolute absurdity of trying to keep the house of cards aloft in the ME. So far, no wars, and
a de-escalation in Syria. Pundits are talking about 3+% growth in US for first time in decade.
I dont't know...perhaps Donald can cut and run in time to salvage some of the US prosperity.
I'm almost inclined to think Trump is letting this Russian hack thing play out on purpose despite
his Tweets to the contrary. Preventing the feds from 'investigating' it wouldn't make it go away,
it would just cement the notion of guilt and a cover-up into the anti-Trump, anti-Russian segment
of the public. More importantly, the similarly-inclined political/government leaders (pro-Hillary,
DNC, politicized FBI and intel, neocons, deep state, whatever...) and MSM slowly expose themselves
for what they are. They get too confident in the big lie actually working and go into a feeding
frenzy. Trump trolls them on Twitter and they go insane.
When you want to catch sharks, you don't chase them around the ocean to hunt them. You
chum the waters and wait
for them to come to you. Trump isn't the one chumming the waters here - he's letting the sharks
do that themselves.
I scratched my head like everyone else trying to figure out Trump's earlier incomprehensible
hiring/firing volley his first few months. Maybe that was just a bit of theatre. Trump might not
understand the 'little people' too much, but he does understand his opponent psychopaths (corporate,
banking or government/intel) and how to use their basic flaws against them. 'Draining the swamp'
sells well, but letting his opponents stick their necks out far enough before Trump's own Night
of the Long Knives would (to me) be a far more effective strategy towards his ends. And probably
much safer for him than Kennedy's approach.
Kind of worrying that one has to rely on outsider psychopaths to cull other psychopath's well-entrenched
herds within the US government. Does that ever turn out well?
Only the most strident partisans hold tightly to the Russian interference nonsense.
Those who simply want to deal in facts bother ourselves to self inform using multiple sources
who have been trying to make sense of the dastardly twists and turns in this muh Russia whodunit
scandal. The DNC emails, dossier, collusion the whole escapade, from the beginning, could be seen
as being built on nothing more than quicksand.
Mike Whitney posted a great piece this week suggesting Brennan, Obama's political 'hack',
is behind this mess - "Brennan spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign from the get-go. As early
as August 2016, Brennan was providing classified briefings to ranking members of Congress expressing
his conviction that Moscow was helping Trump to win the election. The former Director offered
no proof to back up his claims nor has he since then. It was also Brennan who gradually persuaded
Clapper, Comey and Morrell to join his anti-Russia jihad, although all were reluctant participants
at first. Were they won over by compelling secret evidence that has been been withheld from the
public?" - http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48172.htm
And then you have the Intercept's piece on Binney's meeting with CIA's Pompeo with Ray McGovern
providing a lot more detail and an interview with his favorite news outlet RT -
http://raymcgovern.com/
Oh, and about Binney's meeting with Pompeo? Trump requested Pompeo meet with him. He did. But
Pompeo, as of today, remains steadfast in supporting the ICA crap report Obama's political intel
hacks put out.
These are but a few sources digging and reporting on these bogus charges against Putin.
I'd like to believe the majority of the U.S. electorate isn't being fooled by the nonsense. I
can't speak for those who choose to remain inside the brainwashing corporate media bubble, but
for those of us who divorced ourselves from their propaganda long ago ain't buying nor ever did
buy into the muh Russia crap.
we got to wonder why donna brazile made such a fuss about Seth Rich. She's being way too cagey
for comfort but even if we leave seth rich out of it, none of it make any sense
Also from a Youtube video I saw earlier there are claims this is what is happening.
1. Obama regime was chronically corrupt including sell of Uranium to Russia for bribes. Elements
of the US military and intelligence were disgusted by this and approached Trump BEFORE the elections
as a figure who could help them.
2. Trump decided to work with them and during his election campaign he deliberately made constant
exaggerated claims of his supposed friendship with Putin, this was bait for the Democrats to smear
him as a Putin-lover, Putin puppet.
3. Once elected, the whole "Trump is a Putin puppet" was allowed to run so that a huge demand
for some sort of investigation in to Trump and his Russia links could be built. Only this investigation
would in fact be used to target the Democrats and Clinton including for their corruption over
the Uranium sales with the Russians.
4. This was apparently (according to these claims) the game plan from the beginning and Mueller
is apparently going to work to convict Hillary Clinton and other senior Democrats.
I don't know how true this is, but it does answer a lot of questions and anomalies and also
ties in with B's thesis that we are essentially seeing a quasi-military government in D.C. under
Trump.
@ PavewayIV who ended his comment with: "Kind of worrying that one has to rely on outsider psychopaths
to cull other psychopath's well-entrenched herds within the US government. Does that ever turn
out well? "
Yep! And we add our textual white noise to the rearranging of the deck chairs on
the top deck of the good ship Humanity as it careens over the falls/into the shoals/pick-your-metaphor
psychohistorian@14 - Captain to crew: "I will not have this ship go down looking
like a garbage scow. Deck chairs will be arranged in a neat and orderly manner at all times!"
The same media you're decrying here is also ignoring this week's paradise papers revelations
about Wilbur Ross, Trump's commerce secretary and business links with Russian Israeli mobsters
and oligarchs like Mogilevich.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMhzkvWuXEM
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what is not true. The other is to refuse
to believe what is true. Can't fix stupid sociopathy. I pity deplorable goyims, They deserve their
plight...
Please someone end this idiot circus! Russia hacked THE ELECTION ...hacked THE ELECTION ??? For
the love of gawd..the ELECTION, meaning the voting was hacked.....it was NOT. Nothing has focused
on Russian 'hacking' of VOTES. Russia 'if' they hacked, at best hacked some emails and info used
to expose Hillary. And posted negative info on the net. So, so what? How many leakers weren't
doing that?
I have had it with the Dems, they have IQs somewhere below that of cabbages. But
I guess there are a certain number of citizens that will believe anything if it is repeated enough
by their herd leaders.
All this pathetic, lousy street theater resembling staging can only serve one important reason:
Distraction. What is it that people need to be distracted from? That the US has turned openly
into a military dictatorship? That the extermination proceedings are speeding up?
Hitler used
gas chambers, as did the US after the war. While the first was a psychopathic dictator, the latter
is a psychopathic society. It has spend trillions in research and design of lethal weapons and
systems to exterminate any 'enemy'.
With all the technological progress, people do no longer need to be dragged to a gas chamber.
The gas chamber will come to them. Sprayed into the atmosphere and making its way into earth's
life systems.
Trump, Dump, Busch, Koch, Clinton, Reagan, Nixon - plutocratic hand puppets. It is not the
people who decide where and when the ship sinks. It will be sunken for them - with all the useless
eaters on board.
Trump is too stupid to realize that the very reason the election was rigged in his favour was
- the derailment of ANY ZIO/US/Russia relations !! Their top priority ( as always) has been to
keep Russia and Germany apart ! Russia's 'resources' and German 'innovation' is a match made in
heaven - would spell the end of the US economy !
Not only did the Propaganda System refuse to correctly report as b details, but nowhere has it
mentioned the defeat of Daesh, as Pepe Escobar discloses: "This is History in the making.
"And right on cue, VIRTUALLY NOTHING about this REAL ON THE GROUND VICTORY OF
A REAL WAR ON TERROR is being covered by Western corporate media.
"No wonder. Because this was the work of Damascus, Russia, Hezbollah, Iran advisers, Baghdad
and the PMUs – actually the "4+1" - and not the US-led "coalition" that includes Wahhabi mongrels
House of Saud and UAE - that totally smashes to bits the monochord Washington narrative.
The war on Syria and the Russian "hacking" debacle has corrupted the entire western media. Not
that it was ever squeaky clean - far from it - but it was at least somewhat independent from the
dominant establishment. There were pauses between the outrageous lies and blatant fact twisting
and it did not overtly shill for neoliberal political parties and work overtime pushing massive
amounts of propaganda on the public 24/7/365 and relentlessly demonize, in the most crude fashion
imaginable, the leaders of some of the the world's most powerful countries and any sovereign nation
that values its independence and freedom from Western exploitation.
The media is now now in permanent psy op mode, colonizing the public's mind and jamming
people's ability to reason, think critically and even tell fact from fiction. It is only a matter
of time before overt repression becomes widespread (to protect our freedoms of course) and the
last remnants of democracy give way to an Orwellian/Huxleyite dystopia.
If by chance Trump or anyone is genuine about taking down the deep state, they cannot do it
by running around in a pathetic attempt trying to fix small issues. They would have to leave the
machine to carry on as normal and go for its foundations. I thought about this months ago, and
now looking at the latest events, this could be what is happening.
Meanwhile a revolution threatening the federation of Australia is taking place in Canberra utilizing
a formless and compliant press corps and a fake issue of dual citizenship. Chaos is a disease
agent which has jumped out of the Middle Eastern laboratory into all western nations.
"... As Russia-gate continues to buffet the Trump administration, we now know that the "scandal" started with Democrats funding
the original dubious allegations of Russian interference, notes Joe Lauria. ..."
As Russia-gate continues to buffet the Trump administration, we now know that the "scandal" started with Democrats funding
the original dubious allegations of Russian interference, notes Joe Lauria.
By Joe Lauria
The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia meddled in the 2016 election -- without providing convincing
evidence -- were both paid for by the Democratic National Committee, and in one instance also by the Clinton campaign: the
Steele dossier and the CrowdStrike analysis of the DNC servers. Think about that for a minute.
We have long known that the DNC did not allow the FBI to examine its computer server for clues about who may have hacked it –
or even if it was hacked – and instead turned to CrowdStrike, a private company co-founded by a virulently anti-Putin Russian. Within
a day, CrowdStrike blamed Russia on dubious evidence.
And, it has now been disclosed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC
paid for opposition research memos written by former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele using hearsay accusations
from anonymous Russian sources to claim that the Russian government was blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump in a scheme that presupposed
that Russian President Vladimir Putin foresaw Trump's presidency years ago when no one else did.
Since then, the U.S. intelligence community has struggled to corroborate Steele's allegations, but those suspicions still colored
the thinking of President Obama's intelligence chiefs who, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, "hand-picked"
the analysts who produced the Jan. 6 "assessment" claiming that Russia interfered in the U.S. election.
In other words, possibly all of the Russia-gate allegations, which have been taken on faith by Democratic partisans and members
of the anti-Trump Resistance, trace back to claims paid for or generated by Democrats.
If for a moment one could remove the sometimes justified hatred that many people feel toward Trump, it would be impossible to
avoid the impression that the scandal may have been cooked up by the DNC and the Clinton camp in league with Obama's intelligence
chiefs to serve political and geopolitical aims.
Absent new evidence based on forensic or documentary proof, we could be looking at a partisan concoction devised in the midst
of a bitter general election campaign, a manufactured "scandal" that also has fueled a dangerous New Cold War against Russia; a case
of a dirty political "oppo" serving American ruling interests in reestablishing the dominance over Russia that they enjoyed in the
1990s, as well as feeding the voracious budgetary appetite of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Based on what is now known, Wall Street buccaneer Paul Singer paid for GPS Fusion, a Washington-based research firm, to do opposition
research on Trump during the Republican primaries, but dropped the effort in May 2016 when it became clear Trump would be the GOP
nominee. GPS Fusion has strongly
denied that it hired
Steele for this work or that the research had anything to do with Russia.
Then, in April 2016 the DNC and the Clinton campaign
paid its Washington lawyer Marc Elias to hire Fusion GPS to unearth dirt connecting Trump to Russia. This was three months before
the DNC blamed Russia for hacking its computers and supposedly giving its stolen emails to WikiLeaks to help Trump win the election.
"The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee
retained Fusion GPS
to research any possible connections between Mr. Trump, his businesses, his campaign team and Russia, court filings revealed this
week," The New York Times
reported on Friday
night.
So, linking Trump to Moscow as a way to bring Russia into the election story was the Democrats' aim from the start.
Fusion GPS then hired ex-MI6 intelligence agent Steele, it says for the first time, to dig up that dirt in Russia for the Democrats.
Steele produced classic opposition research, not an intelligence assessment or conclusion, although it was written in a style and
formatted to
look like one.
It's important to realize that Steele was no longer working for an official intelligence agency, which would have imposed strict
standards on his work and possibly disciplined him for injecting false information into the government's decision-making. Instead,
he was working for a political party and a presidential candidate looking for dirt that would hurt their opponent, what the Clintons
used to call "cash for trash" when they were the targets.
Had Steele been doing legitimate intelligence work for his government, he would have taken a far different approach. Intelligence
professionals are not supposed to just give their bosses what their bosses want to hear. So, Steele would have verified his information.
And it would have gone through a process of further verification by other intelligence analysts in his and perhaps other intelligence
agencies. For instance, in the U.S., a National Intelligence Estimate requires vetting by all 17 intelligence agencies and incorporates
dissenting opinions.
Instead Steele was producing a piece of purely political research and had different motivations. The first might well have been
money, as he was being paid specifically for this project, not as part of his work on a government salary presumably serving all
of society. Secondly, to continue being paid for each subsequent memo that he produced he would have been incentivized to please
his clients or at least give them enough so they would come back for more.
Dubious Stuff
Opposition research is about getting dirt to be used in a mud-slinging political campaign, in which wild charges against candidates
are the norm. This "oppo" is full of unvetted rumor and innuendo with enough facts mixed in to make it seem credible. There was
so much dubious stuff in Steele's
memos that the FBI was unable to confirm its most salacious allegations and apparently refuted several key points.
Perhaps more significantly, the corporate news media, which was largely partial to Clinton, did not report the fantastic allegations
after people close to the Clinton campaign began circulating the lurid stories before the election with the hope that the material
would pop up in the news. To their credit, established media outlets recognized this as ammunition against a political opponent,
not a serious document.
Despite this circumspection, the Steele dossier was shared with the FBI at some point in the summer of 2016 and apparently
became the basis for
the FBI to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against members of Trump's campaign. More alarmingly, it may have
formed the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence
"assessment" by those "hand-picked" analysts from
three U.S. intelligence agencies – the CIA, the FBI and the NSA – not all 17 agencies that Hillary Clinton continues to insist were
involved. (Obama's intelligence chiefs, DNI Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, publicly admitted that only three agencies took
part and The New York Times
printed a correction
saying so.)
If in fact the Steele memos were a primary basis for the Russia collusion allegations against Trump, then there may be no credible
evidence at all. It could be that because the three agencies knew the dossier was dodgy that there was no substantive proof in the
Jan. 6 "assessment." Even so, a summary of the Steele allegations were included in a secret appendix that then-FBI Director James
Comey described to then-President-elect Trump just two weeks before his inauguration.
Five days later, after the fact of Comey's briefing was leaked to the press, the Steele dossier was published
in full by the sensationalist website BuzzFeed behind the excuse that the allegations' inclusion in the classified annex of a
U.S. intelligence report justified the dossier's publication regardless of doubts about its accuracy.
Russian Fingerprints
The other source of blame about Russian meddling came from the private company CrowdStrike because the DNC blocked the FBI from
examining its server after a suspected hack. Within a day, CrowdStrike claimed to find Russian "fingerprints" in the metadata of
a DNC opposition research document, which had been revealed by an Internet site called DCLeaks, showing Cyrillic letters and the
name of the first Soviet intelligence chief. That supposedly implicated Russia.
CrowdStrike also claimed that the alleged Russian intelligence operation was extremely sophisticated and skilled in concealing
its external penetration of the server. But CrowdStrike's conclusion about Russian "fingerprints" resulted from clues that would
have been left behind by extremely sloppy hackers or inserted intentionally to implicate the Russians.
CrowdStrike's credibility was further undermined when Voice of America
reported
on March 23, 2017, that the same software the company says it used to blame Russia for the hack wrongly concluded that Moscow also
had hacked Ukrainian government howitzers on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
"An influential British think tank and Ukraine's military are disputing a report that the U.S. cyber-security firm CrowdStrike
has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election," VOA reported. Dimitri Alperovitch, a CrowdStrike
co-founder, is also a senior fellow at the anti-Russian Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
More speculation about the alleged election hack was raised with WikiLeaks' Vault 7 release, which revealed that the CIA is not
beyond covering up its own hacks by leaving clues implicating others. Plus, there's the fact that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
has declared again and again that WikiLeaks did not get the Democratic emails from the Russians. Buttressing Assange's denials of
a Russian role, WikiLeaks associate Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he met a person connected to the
leak during a trip to Washington last year.
And, William Binney, maybe the best mathematician to ever work at the National Security Agency, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern
have published a technical analysis
of one set of Democratic email metadata showing that a transatlantic "hack" would have been impossible and that the evidence points
to a likely leak by a disgruntled Democratic insider. Binney has further stated that if it were a "hack," the NSA would have been
able to detect it and make the evidence known.
Fueling Neo-McCarthyism
Despite these doubts, which the U.S. mainstream media has largely ignored, Russia-gate has grown into something much more than
an election story. It has unleashed a neo-McCarthyite attack on Americans who are accused of being dupes of Russia if they dare question
the evidence of the Kremlin's guilt.
Just weeks after last November's election, The Washington Post
published a front-page story
touting a blacklist from an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, that alleged that 200 news sites, including Consortiumnews.com and
other leading independent news sources, were either willful Russian propagandists or "useful idiots."
Last week, a new list emerged with the names of over 2,000 people,
mostly Westerners, who have appeared on RT, the Russian government-financed English-language news channel. The list was part of a
report entitled, "The Kremlin's Platform for 'Useful Idiots' in the West," put out by an outfit called European Values, with a
long list of European funders.
Included on the list of "useful idiots" absurdly are CIA-friendly Washington Post columnist David Ignatius; David Brock, Hillary
Clinton's opposition research chief; and U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
The report stated: "Many people in Europe and the US, including politicians and other persons of influence, continue to exhibit
troubling naïveté about RT's political agenda, buying into the network's marketing ploy that it is simply an outlet for independent
voices marginalised by the mainstream Western press. These 'useful idiots' remain oblivious to RT's intentions and boost its legitimacy
by granting interviews on its shows and newscasts."
The intent of these lists is clear: to shut down dissenting voices who question Western foreign policy and who are usually excluded
from Western corporate media. RT is often willing to provide a platform for a wider range of viewpoints, both from the left and right.
American ruling interests fend off critical viewpoints by first suppressing them in corporate media and now condemning them as propaganda
when they emerge on RT.
Geopolitical Risks
More ominously, the anti-Russia mania has increased chances of direct conflict between the two nuclear superpowers. The Russia-bashing
rhetoric not only served the Clinton campaign, though ultimately to ill effect, but it has pushed a longstanding U.S.-led geopolitical
agenda to regain control
over Russia, an advantage that the U.S. enjoyed during the Yeltsin years in the 1990s.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Wall Street rushed in behind Boris Yeltsin and Russian oligarchs to asset strip
virtually the entire country, impoverishing the population. Amid widespread accounts of this grotesque corruption, Washington
intervened in Russian politics to help get Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The political rise of Vladimir Putin after Yeltsin resigned
on New Year's Eve 1999 reversed this course, restoring Russian sovereignty over its economy and politics.
That inflamed Hillary Clinton and other American hawks whose desire was to install another Yeltsin-like figure and resume U.S.
exploitation of Russia's vast natural and financial resources. To advance that cause, U.S. presidents have supported the eastward
expansion of NATO and have deployed 30,000 troops on Russia's border.
In 2014, the Obama administration helped
orchestrate a coup that toppled the
elected government of Ukraine and installed a fiercely anti-Russian regime. The U.S. also undertook the risky policy of aiding jihadists
to overthrow a secular Russian ally in Syria. The consequences have brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at
any time since the Cuban
missile crisis in 1962.
In this context, the Democratic Party-led Russia-gate offensive was intended not only to explain away Clinton's defeat but to
stop Trump -- possibly via impeachment or by inflicting severe political damage -- because he had talked, insincerely it is turning
out, about detente with Russia. That did not fit in well with the plan at all.
Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist. He has written for the Boston Globe, the Sunday Times of London and the Wall
Street Journal among other newspapers. He is the author of How I Lost By Hillary Clinton published by OR Books in June 2017. He can be reached at
[email protected] and followed on Twitter at
@unjoe .
The question arise: "Was hacking DNC another CIA false flag operation with the specific goal
to poison US-Russian relations and using Hillary Clinton as a patsy?"
According fo church committee report: "Approximately 50 of the [Agency] assets are individual
American journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations. Of these, fewer than half are
"accredited" by U.S. media organizations ... The remaining individuals are non-accredited
freelance contributors and media representatives abroad ... More than a dozen United States news
organizations and commercial publishing houses formerly provided cover for CIA agents abroad. A
few of these organizations were unaware that they provided this cover.
[7] "
"Journalist Carl
Bernstein , writing in an October 1977 article in the magazine Rolling Stone , claims that the Church
Committee report "covered up" CIA relations with news media, and names a number of journalists
whom he says worked with the CIA [10] Like the Church
Committee report, however, Bernstein does not refer to any Operation Mockingbird."
Notable quotes:
"... "Russian meddling" became the perfect rallying cry for the CIA's broader information operation (IO) that was designed to poison public opinion against "Russian aggression" and to reign in Trump's plans to normalize relations with Moscow. ..."
"... Clinton became the "fall guy" in a darker, deep-state propaganda campaign for which she is only partially responsible. ..."
"... the Steele dossier was shared with the FBI at some point in the summer of 2016 and apparently became the basis for the FBI to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against members of Trump's campaign. ..."
"... More alarmingly, it may have formed the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence "assessment" by those "hand-picked" analysts from three U.S. intelligence agencies -- the CIA, the FBI and the NSA -- not all 17 agencies that Hillary Clinton continues to insist were involved ..."
"... The article proves that the nation's premier law enforcement agency was using parts of a discredited "raw intelligence" report that was paid for by the DNC and was clearly commissioned as a part of a smear campaign -- to spy on members of the opposition party. Clearly, one could easily make the case that the FBI was abusing its extraordinary police-state powers to subvert the democratic process. ..."
"... The FBI, under James Comey, also attempted to use agent Steele for future research but abandoned the idea after parts of the dossier began to surface in the media making it politically impossible to maintain the relationship. ..."
"... The fact that the FBI was willing to build its investigation on the sensational and unverified claims in the DNC-bought-and-paid-for dossier, suggests that the real motive was not to reveal collusion between Trump and Moscow or even to uncover evidence related to the hacking claims. The real goal was to vilify Russia and derail Trump's efforts at détente. ..."
"... Steele's July report helped to prop up the threadbare "hacking" storyline that was further reinforced by the dubious cyber-forensic analysis of DNC servers performed by CrowdStrike, "a private company co-founded by a virulently anti-Putin Russian." ..."
"... Russia-gate is entirely a Democratic Party invention. Both sources of information (Crowdstrike and Steele) were chosen by members of the Democratic hierarchy (through their intermediaries) to create stories that coincided with their political objectives. Due to the obvious bias of the people who funded the operations, neither the methods nor the information can be trusted. But that's just part of the story. The bigger story relates to the role played by the nation's premier intelligence and law enforcement agencies. And that's where we see signs of institutional corruption on a truly colossal scale. ..."
"... Nov. 18: Arizona Sen. John McCain and a former assistant, David Kramer, are told about the existence of the dossier by an associate of Steele's, former British diplomat Sir Andrew Wood. Kramer travels to London later that month to meet with Steele and find out more about the dossier. Steele forwards a copy of the dossier to Fusion, Kramer and McCain. ..."
"... This is a damning admission that the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that was released on January 6, and was supposed to provide rock-solid proof of Russia hacking and collusion, was built (at least, in part) on the thin gruel and specious allegations found in the sketchy "Trump dossier". Former CIA Director John Brennan has refuted this claim, but there's significant circumstantial evidence to suggest that it is true. ..."
"... On December 9, 2016, The Washington Post reported that the CIA determined that Russian hacking was conducted to boost Trump and hurt Clinton during the presidential campaign. This same theory that was propounded in the ICA report just a month later. It appears that Brennan and his "hand-picked" intelligence analysts decided to carefully comb the dossier cherry-picking the most credible allegations to weave into their dubious intelligence Assessment. So even though large sections of the dossier were scrapped, the report itself was used as the foundation for the ICA. ..."
"... It's clear that Brennan had no "information or intelligence" that would lead a reasonable man to think that anyone in Trump's entourage was colluding with Russian officials or agents. The whole story is spun from whole cloth. The disturbing implication however is that Brennan, who was an outspoken supporter of Hillary and equally harsh critic of Trump, was using the CIA's intrusive surveillance powers to spy on a rival political party in the heat of a presidential campaign. If that is not a flagrant example of subverting democracy, then what is? ..."
"... It all started with Brennan, he's the ringleader in this dodgy caper. But Brennan was not operating as a free agent pursuing his own malign political agenda, but as a strong-arm facilitator for the powerful foreign policy establishment which includes leaders from Big Oil, Wall Street, and the giant weapons manufacturers. These are the corporate mandarins who pull Brennan's chain and give Brennan his marching orders. This is how power trickles down in America. ..."
"... So while the moneytrail may lead back to the DNC and Hillary's Campaign, the roots of Russia-gate extend far beyond the politicians to the highest-ranking members of the permanent state. ..."
For nearly a year, Hillary Clinton failed to admit that her campaign and the
Democratic National Committee had provided funding for the notorious dossier that alleged Trump
colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. Then, two weeks ago, the Washington
Post published a blockbuster article that proved that Clinton had been misleading the public
about her Campaign's role in producing the report.
Following the article's publication, Clinton went into hiding for more than a week
during which time she huddled with her political advisors to settle on a strategy for dealing
with the crisis.
"Russian meddling" became the perfect rallying cry for the CIA's broader information
operation (IO) that was designed to poison public opinion against "Russian aggression" and to
reign in Trump's plans to normalize relations with Moscow.
The fact that the CIA had essentially extracted a credible narrative from sections of the
notorious dossier, left Hillary with no other option except to play-along even after the votes
had been counted. As a result, Clinton became the "fall guy" in a darker, deep-state
propaganda campaign for which she is only partially responsible. Here's a little
background from Joe Lauria's "must read" article "The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate":
" the Steele dossier was shared with the FBI at some point in the summer of 2016 and
apparently became the basis for the FBI to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
warrants against members of Trump's campaign.
More alarmingly, it may have formed the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence
"assessment" by those "hand-picked" analysts from three U.S. intelligence agencies -- the
CIA, the FBI and the NSA -- not all 17 agencies that Hillary Clinton continues to insist were
involved .
If in fact the Steele memos were a primary basis for the Russia collusion allegations
against Trump, then there may be no credible evidence at all." (Consortium News)
So, were "the Steele memos the primary basis for the Russia collusion allegations against
Trump"? This is the pivotal question that still remains largely unanswered. As Lauria notes,
the FBI did in fact use the "salacious and unverified" dossier to obtain at least one FISA
warrant. This is from The Hill:
"The FBI used the dossier alleging Russian ties to President Trump's campaign associates
to help convince a judge to grant a warrant to secretly monitor former campaign aide Carter
Page, CNN reports.
FBI Director James Comey has cited the dossier in some of his briefings with lawmakers in
recent weeks as one of the information sources used by his bureau to bolster its probe, U.S.
officials briefed on the investigation told CNN." ("FBI used Trump dossier to help get warrant
to monitor ex-aide: report", The Hill)
The article proves that the nation's premier law enforcement agency was using parts of a
discredited "raw intelligence" report that was paid for by the DNC and was clearly commissioned
as a part of a smear campaign -- to spy on members of the opposition party. Clearly, one could
easily make the case that the FBI was abusing its extraordinary police-state powers to subvert
the democratic process.
The FBI, under James Comey, also attempted to use agent Steele for future research but
abandoned the idea after parts of the dossier began to surface in the media making it
politically impossible to maintain the relationship. This is from a February article in
the Washington Post:
"The former British spy who authored a controversial dossier on behalf of Donald Trump's
political opponents alleging ties between Trump and Russia reached an agreement with the FBI
a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work, according to
several people familiar with the arrangement. The agreement to compensate former MI6 agent
Christopher Steele came as U.S. intelligence agencies reached a consensus that the Russians
had interfered in the presidential election by orchestrating hacks of Democratic Party email
accounts ..
Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy
were interrupted as Steele's now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories,
congressional inquiries and presidential denials, according to the people familiar with the
arrangement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to
discuss the matter." ("FBI once planned to pay former British spy who authored controversial
Trump dossier", Washington Post)
The fact that the FBI was willing to build its investigation on the sensational and
unverified claims in the DNC-bought-and-paid-for dossier, suggests that the real motive was not
to reveal collusion between Trump and Moscow or even to uncover evidence related to the hacking
claims. The real goal was to vilify Russia and derail Trump's efforts at
détente.
It's also worth noting , that Steele's earliest report implausibly alleges that the "Russian
authorities had been cultivating and supporting US presidential candidate Trump for at least 5
years." (No one had any idea that Trump would run for president 5 years ago.) The report also
details perverted sexual acts involving Trump and urinating prostitutes in a hotel in Moscow.
(All fake, of course) The point we are trying to make, is that Steele's first report focused on
corruption, perversion and blackmail, whereas, his second installment completely changed
direction to cyber-espionage operations on foreign targets.
Why?
It was because, on July 22, 2016, just days before the Democratic National Convention,
WikiLeaks published 20,000 emails hacked from DNC computers revealing the corrupt
inner-workings of the Democratic establishment. In response, Steele decided to craft a story
that would support the Dems plan to blame the Russians for the moral cesspit they-alone had
created. In other words, his report was a way of "passing the buck".
Steele's July report helped to prop up the threadbare "hacking" storyline that was
further reinforced by the dubious cyber-forensic analysis of DNC servers performed by
CrowdStrike, "a private company co-founded by a virulently anti-Putin Russian."
The hacking theme was also aided by the deluge of unsourced, evidence-lite articles cropping
up in the media, like this gem in the Washington Post:
"Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National
Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential
candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded
to the breach.
The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC's system that they also were able to read
all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations.
The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted
by Russian spies " ("Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on
Trump", Washington Post)
What's remarkable about the above excerpt is that it follows the same basic approach to
propaganda as nearly all the other pieces on the topic. Unlike the lead-up to the Iraq War,
where journalists at the New York Times made every effort to create a believable storyline that
included references to aluminum tubes, Niger uranium, mobile weapons labs, etc. The media no
longer tries to support their narrative with evidence or eyewitnesses. The major media now
simply tells people what they want them to think and leave it at that. Even so, it doesn't
require much critical thinking to see the holes in the Russia hacking story. One merely needs
to suspend judgment long enough to see that main claims all emerge from (Democratic) sources
who have every reason to mislead the public. Here's an excerpt from Joe Lauria's article that
sums it up perfectly:
"The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia meddled in the 2016
election were both paid for by the Democratic National Committee, and in one instance also by
the Clinton campaign: the Steele dossier and the CrowdStrike analysis of the DNC servers.
Think about that for a minute .
In other words, possibly all of the Russia-gate allegations, which have been taken on faith
by Democratic partisans and members of the anti-Trump Resistance, trace back to claims paid for
or generated by Democrats.
If for a moment one could remove the sometimes justified hatred that many people feel toward
Trump, it would be impossible to avoid the impression that the scandal may have been cooked up
by the DNC and the Clinton camp in league with Obama's intelligence chiefs to serve political
and geopolitical aims." ("The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate", Consortium News)
Russia-gate is entirely a Democratic Party invention. Both sources of information
(Crowdstrike and Steele) were chosen by members of the Democratic hierarchy (through their
intermediaries) to create stories that coincided with their political objectives. Due to the
obvious bias of the people who funded the operations, neither the methods nor the information
can be trusted. But that's just part of the story. The bigger story relates to the role played
by the nation's premier intelligence and law enforcement agencies. And that's where we see
signs of institutional corruption on a truly colossal scale.
As we noted earlier, the Clinton smear campaign would probably have ended after the votes
were counted had not the intel agencies, particularly the CIA, decided the hacking story could
be used to inflict more damage on Russia. It wasn't Clinton's decision to gather more
information for the dossier, but others whose motives have remained largely concealed. Who are
they?
According to a timeline in the Daily Caller:
November: The contract between the Democrats, Fusion and Steele ends along with the
presidential campaign.
Nov. 18: Arizona Sen. John McCain and a former assistant, David Kramer, are told about
the existence of the dossier by an associate of Steele's, former British diplomat Sir Andrew
Wood. Kramer travels to London later that month to meet with Steele and find out more about the
dossier. Steele forwards a copy of the dossier to Fusion, Kramer and McCain.
Dec. 9: McCain provides a copy of the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey during a
meeting at the latter's office.
Dec. 13: Steele writes the final memo of the dossier. It alleges that a Russian tech
executive used his companies to hack into the DNC's email systems. The executive, Aleksej
Gubarev, denied the allegations after the dossier was published by BuzzFeed on Jan. 10, 2017.
He is suing both BuzzFeed and Steele.
Jan. 6: Comey and other intelligence community officials brief then-President-elect Trump on
some of the allegations made in the dossier.
Jan. 10: CNN reports that the briefing of Trump took place four days earlier. Citing that
reporting as justification, BuzzFeed publishes the dossier. (The Daily Mail)
John McCain? Is that who we're talking about? Was it McCain who paid former M16 agent
Christopher Steele to add another report to the dossier? Why?
Is it that hard to imagine that a Russophobic foreign policy wonk like McCain -- who has
expressed his vehement hatred for Vladimir Putin on the floor of the senate -- would hire a
mud-slinging free agent like Steele to craft a story that would further demonize Russia,
discourage Trump from normalizing relations with Moscow, and reinforce the theory that the
Kremlin meddled in the 2016 elections?
Does that mean that McCain may have told Steele (or his intermediaries) precisely what he
wanted the final draft to say? It certainly seems probable. And here's something else to mull
over. This is from the Business Insider:
Steele gave the dossier to Republican Sen. John McCain. McCain then gave it to the FBI
director at the time, James Comey. Comey, along with the former Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, briefed both President Barack
Obama and then-President elect Trump on the dossier's allegations in January.
Intelligence officials purposefully omitted the dossier from the public intelligence report
they released in January about Russia's election interference because they didn't want to
reveal which details they had corroborated, according to CNN." ("Mueller reportedly interviewed
the author of the Trump-Russia dossier -- here's what it alleges, and how it aligned with
reality", Business Insider)
This is a damning admission that the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that was
released on January 6, and was supposed to provide rock-solid proof of Russia hacking and
collusion, was built (at least, in part) on the thin gruel and specious allegations found in
the sketchy "Trump dossier". Former CIA Director John Brennan has refuted this claim, but
there's significant circumstantial evidence to suggest that it is true.
On December 9, 2016, The Washington Post reported that the CIA determined that Russian
hacking was conducted to boost Trump and hurt Clinton during the presidential campaign. This
same theory that was propounded in the ICA report just a month later. It appears that Brennan
and his "hand-picked" intelligence analysts decided to carefully comb the dossier
cherry-picking the most credible allegations to weave into their dubious intelligence
Assessment. So even though large sections of the dossier were scrapped, the report itself was
used as the foundation for the ICA.
Brennan spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign from the get-go. As early as August 2016,
Brennan was providing classified briefings to ranking members of Congress expressing his
conviction that Moscow was helping Trump to win the election. The former Director offered no
proof to back up his claims nor has he since then. It was also Brennan who gradually persuaded
Clapper, Comey and Morrell to join his anti-Russia jihad, although all were reluctant
participants at first. Were they won over by compelling secret evidence that has been been
withheld from the public?
Not likely. It's more probable that Brennan was merely able to convince them that the
powerful foreign policy establishment required their cooperation on an issue that would have
grave impact on Washington's imperial plan for Syria, Ukraine, Central Asia and beyond?
Some readers might remember when Brennan testified before Congress way-back on May 23 and
boldly stated:
BRENNAN: "I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed
contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump
campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such
individuals and it raised questions in my mind, again, whether or not the Russians were able
to gain the cooperation of those individuals."
It's clear that Brennan had no "information or intelligence" that would lead a
reasonable man to think that anyone in Trump's entourage was colluding with Russian officials
or agents. The whole story is spun from whole cloth. The disturbing implication however is that
Brennan, who was an outspoken supporter of Hillary and equally harsh critic of Trump, was using
the CIA's intrusive surveillance powers to spy on a rival political party in the heat of a
presidential campaign. If that is not a flagrant example of subverting democracy, then what
is? Here's a clip from the Washington Times:
"It was then-CIA Director John O. Brennan, a close confidant of Mr. Obama's, who provided
the information -- what he termed the "basis" -- for the FBI to start the counterintelligence
investigation last summer .Mr. Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee on May 23 that
the intelligence community was picking up tidbits on Trump associates making contacts with
Russians
But he said he believed the contacts were numerous enough to alert the FBI, which began its
probe into Trump associates that same July, according to previous congressional testimony from
then-FBI director James B. Comey." (The Washington Times)
It all started with Brennan, he's the ringleader in this dodgy caper. But Brennan was
not operating as a free agent pursuing his own malign political agenda, but as a strong-arm
facilitator for the powerful foreign policy establishment which includes leaders from Big Oil,
Wall Street, and the giant weapons manufacturers. These are the corporate mandarins who pull
Brennan's chain and give Brennan his marching orders. This is how power trickles down in
America.
So while the moneytrail may lead back to the DNC and Hillary's Campaign, the roots of
Russia-gate extend far beyond the politicians to the highest-ranking members of the permanent
state.
"... Their argument, if you can call it that, rests on the claim that a document which unquestionably shows inappropriate bias and collusion does not show inappropriate bias and collusion because it contains a paragraph which says the document should not be construed as containing inappropriate bias and collusion. This is really boring and stupid, but since the Clinton cult is circulating this nonsense all over social media I figure I should probably write something for people to refute it with. ..."
Dem Pundits Spent Yesterday Lying About DNC Primary Rigging Document
The establishment liberal spin machine has been working overtime the last 24 hours to make
it seem as though former acting DNC chair Donna Brazile had not admitted what she'd admitted in
an excerpt from her book published by Politico on Thursday.
Their argument, if you can call it that, rests on the claim that a document which unquestionably
shows inappropriate bias and collusion does not show inappropriate bias and collusion because
it contains a paragraph which says the document should not be construed as containing inappropriate
bias and collusion. This is really boring and stupid, but since the Clinton cult is circulating
this nonsense all over social media I figure I should probably write something for people to refute
it with.
"... The agreement -- signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to [DNC lawyer] Marc Elias -- specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party's finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings. ..."
"... A second difference in substance: Let's remember that for Clinton, the JFA enabled her campaign to circumvent contribution limits for large donors (Brazile: "Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400"). The Sanders campaign , by contrast, had no issue with maxed out donors: "During fall '15, 99.8% of Bernie donors could give again" (because it's awful hard to max out $27 at a time). ..."
"... That's pretty amazing, isn't it? Personnel is policy, as they say, and the Clinton campaign has made sure that the DNC's Communications Director and new hires in the senior staff in the communications, technology, and research departments will be acceptable to it. The Clinton campaign will also review all mass email and communcations (which explains why Brazile, as interim DNC chair, couldn't send out a press release without checking with Brooklyn. Since the notorious debate schedule was already controlled by Wasserman Schultz, there was no point messing about with it, I assume.) There is one place in this passage where the general election is mentioned, so let's look at it: ..."
"... Second, the DNC itself does not ..."
"... But I'd like to know how far up the editorial totem poles the fix went and how it was achieved. ..."
"... It has been a while since I handled a criminal defense case, but I am not sure that the agreement is not in fact, criminal. When the Sanders for President campaign signed an agreement and paid money in consideration of getting access to the voter file and when the state parties agreed to merge their fundraising efforts with the DNC and HFA, the commercial fraud laws applied to that relationship. Since the fundraising was done using interstate phone calls, letters, and emails and the voter file access was provided by electronic transmissions from servers in DC to end users in Burlington, Vermont that includes 18 USC 1341, 1343 and 1346 (mail, wire and honest services fraud). These laws do not just ban outright lying, but also the concealment of material facts that one has a duty to disclose. ..."
"... The DNC got into the position of selling themselves to the Clintons as they were $20 million in debt, right? I have read that the major reason for these debts was that the DNC had not shrunk itself since the last campaign and was paying out a ton of money for consultants doing Christ knows what. In fact, Obama also used the DNC to support a stack of his consultants as well as grifters gotta grift, right? ..."
"... My question is whether this was a deliberate ploy on Obama and the Clinton factions to put the DNC into such a vulnerable position before 2016 came along that when the time came, they had to take up an offer that they could not refuse. I have not heard if Obama has made any comments on this fiasco that took place on his watch and it seems nobody wants to call him out on it. In the Brazile case, it is not a matter of following the money but following the lack of money. ..."
"... "Both sides in the Democratic Party's current faction fight, as I see it, are in denial about the true nature and scope of the problem "Both responses are essentially utopian: They rest on the premise that the Democratic Party is still a functioning political organization and that the United States is still a functioning democracy." ..."
Long-time Democratic[1] operative Donna Brazile, interim chair of the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) after Debbie Wasserman Schultz was defenestrated[2], has, like two otherparticipants in
the 2016 Presidential election and at least one set of
observers , written a book, Hacked , and published a long excerpt from it four
days ago, in Politico
. Here is the key passage, in which Brazile paraphrases and quotes a conversation with Gary
Gensler, former of Goldman Sachs and the CFTC, and then the chief financial officer of the
Clinton campaign:
[Gensler] described the party as fully under the control of Hillary's campaign
, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life
support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using
the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a
maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for
contributions to state parties and a party's national committee.
Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write
an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund -- that figure
represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states' parties who were part of the Victory Fund
agreement -- $320,000 -- and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states
first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states
usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the
DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.
Yes, you read that right. Although the Hillary Victory Fund was billed as aiding the states,
in fact the states were simply pass-throughs, and the money went to the Clinton campaign. (This
is not news;
Politico covered the Victory Fun in 2016 : "The Democratic front-runner says she's raising
big checks to help state committees, but they've gotten to keep only 1 percent of the $60
million raised.")
"Wait," I said. "That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the
state party races. You're telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she
got the nomination?"
Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.
"That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie," he explained, referring to campaign
manager Robby Mook. "It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from
September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election."
After some research, Brazile finds a document ("the agreement") that spells out what "fully
under the control of Hillary's campaign" meant operationally:
The agreement -- signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a
copy to [DNC lawyer] Marc Elias -- specified that in exchange for raising money and investing
in the DNC, Hillary would control the party's finances, strategy, and all the money raised.
Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and
it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult
with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.
I had been wondering why it was that I couldn't write a press release without passing it
by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.
(Importantly, Gensler has not disputed this account, of which, assuming he's not vacationing
Antarctica, he must have been aware of, given the media uproar. We can therefore assume its
accurate). Note two aspects of this passage, which I'm quoting at such length to ensure we know
what Brazile actually charged. I've helpfully underlined them: (1) Brazile leads with the
money; that is, the Clinton Victory Fund, and (2) Brazile describes the DNC as "fully under the
control" of the Clinton campaign.
Predictably, an enormous controversy erupted, much of it over the weekend just passed, but
I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow of the talking points. (Glenn Greenwald provides an
excellent media critique in
"Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That Are False
"; all four have to do with this controversy[3].) I think the following three quotes are key,
the first two being oft-repeated talking points by Clinton loyalists:
"The joint fundraising agreements were the same for each campaign except for
the treasurer, and our understanding was that the DNC offered all of the presidential
campaigns the opportunity to set up a JFA and work with the DNC to coordinate on how those
funds were used to best prepare for the general election."
Question: Were the agreements "the same" for each campaign? (Perez focuses only on the JFA,
but that omits a separate Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the DNC and the Clinton
campaign, as we shall see below.)
Second, from 2005-9 DNC chair Howard Dean:
Question: Did the agreement apply only to the general election, and not the primary? (Dean
says "this memo," but he also omits the distinction between the MOU and the JFA.)
"We learned today from the former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile
that the Clinton campaign, in her view, did rig the presidential nominating process by
entering into an agreement to control day-to-day operations at the DNC," Tapper said,
continuing on to describe specific arms of the DNC the Clinton camp had a say over, including
strategy and staffing, noting that the agreement was "entered into in August of 2015," months
before Clinton won the nomination .
Tapper then asked, "Do you agree with the notion that it was rigged?" And
Warren responded simply: "Yes."
Question: Can we say that the 2016 Democratic primary was rigged? (Tapper uses the word
"rigged," and Warren adopts it, but a careful reading of Brazile's article shows that although
she uses the word, she does not actually make the claim.[4])
In this post, I'm going to answer each of these three questions by looking at the documents,
plural, in question (Spoiler: My answers are "No," "No," and "Yes," respectively.) Here is a
timeline of the documents:
8/27/2015 (
reported ): The Clinton-DNC Joint Fundraising Agreement (JFA).
Available for download at
WikiLeaks, hilariously enough.
8/26/2015 (signed): The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU, or "memo").
Available for
download at MSNBC. The MOU
characterized by NBC as a "side deal," specifies how the JFA is to be implemented. Hence,
"the agreement" comprises both documents; the JFA cannot be understood without the MOU, and
vice versa.
11/5/2105 (
reported
): The Sanders-DNC Joint Fundraising Agreement. I can't find a copy online, but it's
described by ABC here . If there is an MOU that accompanies the Sanders JFA, it has not
come to light, and presumably, by this point, it would have.
In summary, the Clinton JFA set up the Hillary Victory Fund scam , the MOU gave
Clinton control of (much of) the DNC apparatus, and (
according to Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver ) the Sanders JFA bought their campaign
access to the DNC voter list, and was never used for fundraising because the DNC never asked
the campaign to do any. So to answer the our first question, we'll look at the JFA. To answer
the second, we'll look at the MOU. And to answer the third, we'll see how all the evidence
balances out.
Were the Agreements "the Same" for Each Campaign?
Perez is wrong. The agreements were not at all the same, either formally or
substantively.
Formally, the agreements were not the same because the Clinton JFA had an MOU (the "side
deal") and the Sanders JFA did not.
ABC :
[T]he Clinton campaign Friday afternoon confirmed the existence of a memo between the DNC
and their campaign, which specifically outlines an expanded scope and interpretation of their
funding agreement . [R]epresentatives from Sanders' former campaign say they only signed a
basic, formulaic fundraising agreement that did not include any additional language about
joint messaging or staffing decision-making [as does the MOU].
Substantively, the agreements weren't the same either. The substance of the JFA was a scheme
enable the Hillary Victory Fund to collect "big checks" (as Politico puts it), supposedly
behalf of the state parties, but in reality treating them as conduits to the coffers of the
Clinton campaign. Page 3:
From time to time and in compliance with FECA, after expenses have been deducted from the
gross proceeds, the Victory Fund will transfer the net proceeds to the Committees according
to the Allocation Formula, as modified by any reallocation required.
"[T]he Committees" being the state party political committees, into whose accounts the
contributions were deposited, only to be immediately removed and transferred to the Clinton
campaign (at least for the states that signed entered into the agreement; a few did not).
However, the Sanders campaign wasn't in the business of collecting "big checks," being
small-donor driven. Hence the substance of the agreement could not have been the same.
ABC once more :
Former Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told ABC News Friday night that the campaign
entered the agreement with the party in November 2015 to facilitate the campaign's access to
the party's voter rolls. Weaver claims the DNC offered to credit any fundraising the senator
did for the party against the costs of access to the party's data costs, priced at $250,000.
But, Weaver continued, the party did not follow up about fundraising appearances for the
independent senator.
Instead, the Sanders campaign raised the $250,000 from small donors.
WaPo :
Weaver said the Sanders campaign decided early on to ignore the joint fundraising program
and raise small dollars on its own to pay for access to the voter file. "Who are the wealthy
people Bernie was going to bring to a fundraiser?" Weaver asked. "We had to buy the voter
file right before the primaries."
A second difference in substance: Let's remember that for Clinton, the JFA enabled her
campaign to circumvent contribution limits for large donors (Brazile: "Individuals who had
maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for
$353,400"). The Sanders campaign , by
contrast, had no issue with maxed out donors: "During fall '15, 99.8% of Bernie donors could
give again" (because it's awful hard to max out $27 at a time).
Suppose you were comparing two mortgages on different houses: One mortgage has a side deal
attached, the other does not. One is for a lavish facility and demands a complex financing
arrangement involving a third party. The other is for a fixer-upper and a lump sum is paid in
cash. Would you say those two mortgages are "the same," or not? Even if they both had the word
"Mortage" at the top of page one?
Did the Agreement Apply Only to the General Election, and not the Primary?
We now turn our attention to the MOU. Howard Dean,
sadly , is wrong. The MOU contains two key passages; the first describes the relationship
between Hillary for America (HFA; the Clinton campaign) and the DNC (Brazile: "fully under the
control of Hillary's campaign"), and the second is language on the general election. Let's take
each in turn. On control, pages 1 and 2:
With respect to the hiring of a DNC Communications Director , the DNC agrees
that no later than September 11, 2015 it will hire one of two candidates previously
identified as acceptable to HFA.
2. With respect to the hiring of future DNC senior staff in the communications,
technology, and research departments , in the case of vacancy, the DNC will maintain
the authority to make the final decision as between candidates acceptable to HFA. 3.
Agreement by the DNC that HFA personnel will be consulted and have joint authority over
strategic decisions over the staffing, budget, expenditures, and general election
related communications, data, technology, analytics, and research. The DNC will provide HFA
advance opportunity to review on-line or mass email, communications that features a
particular Democratic primary candidate . This does not include any communications
related to primary debates – which will be exclusively controlled by the DNC. The DNC
will alert HFA in advance of mailing any direct mail communications that features a
particular Democratic primary candidate or his or her signature .
That's pretty amazing, isn't it? Personnel is policy, as they say, and the Clinton campaign
has made sure that the DNC's Communications Director and new hires in the senior staff in the
communications, technology, and research departments will be acceptable to it. The Clinton
campaign will also review all mass email and communcations (which explains why Brazile, as
interim DNC chair, couldn't send out a press release without checking with Brooklyn. Since the
notorious debate schedule was already controlled by Wasserman Schultz, there was no point
messing about with it, I assume.) There is one place in this passage where the general election
is mentioned, so let's look at it:
Agreement by the DNC that HFA personnel will be consulted and have joint authority over
strategic decisions over the staffing, budget, expenditures, and general
election[-]related communications, data, technology, analytics, and research.
At the most generous reading, the Clinton campaign has "joint authority" with the DNC over
"strategic decisions over the staffing, budget, expenditures." At the narrowest reading, given
that the "general-election[-]related qualifier applies only to "communications," the joint
authority applies to "strategic decisions over the staffing, budget, expenditures, and data,
technology, analytics, and research." And given that the Clinton campaign is writing the checks
that keep the DNC afloat, who do you think will have the whip hand in that "joint authority"
relationship?
Now to the clause that supposedly says the agreement (JFA + MOU) applies only to the general
election. Here it is, from page 3:
Nothing in this agreement shall be construed to violate the DNC's obligation of
impartiality and neutrality through the Nominating process. All activities performed
under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and
not the Democratic Primary. Further we understand you may enter into similar agreements with
other candidates
(Pause for hollow laughter, given Wasserman Schultz's defenestration, Brazile passing debate
questions to the Clinton campaign, etc.). First, even though Hoho seems to think it's
exculpatory, the clause is an obvious fig leaf.
Glenn Greenwald explains :
DNC and Clinton allies pointed to the fact that the agreement contained self-justifying
lawyer language claiming that it is "focused exclusively on preparations for the General,"
but
as Fischer noted that passage "is contradicted by the rest of the agreement." This would
be like creating a contract to explicitly bribe an elected official ("A will pay Politician B
to vote YES on Bill X"), then adding a throwaway paragraph with a legalistic disclaimer that
"nothing in this agreement is intended to constitute a bribe," and then have journalists cite
that paragraph to proclaim that no bribe happened even though the agreement on its face
explicitly says the opposite.
Second, the DNC itself does not believe that it has any "obligation of impartiality
and neutrality" whatever. From Wilding et al. v. DNC Services Corporation, D/B/A Democratic
National Committee and Deborah "Debbie" Wasserman Schultz (as cited
in Naked Capitalism here ), the DNC's lawyer, Mr. Spiva:
MR. SPIVA: [W}here you have a party that's saying, We're gonna, you know, choose our
standard bearer, and we're gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are
voluntarily deciding, we could have -- and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look,
we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that
way . That's not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also
been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party
politics to answer those questions.
Third, look at the institutional realities from point one on control. The Clinton campaign
had control over the Communications Director slot and major strategic decisions from
the moment the agreement was signed. Are we really to believe that they were behaving as
neutral parties? (One obvious way to have shown that would have been to release the MOU either
when it was signed.)
Can We Say that the 2016 Democratic Primary Was Rigged?
I found no evidence, none whatsoever. 'The only thing I found, which I said, I've found
the cancer but I'm not killing the patient,' was this memorandum that prevented the DNC from
running its own operation," Brazile added
I think Brazile is either overly charitable, or overly legalistic (perhaps confusing
"rigged" with "fixed," where only in the latter case is the outcome absolutely determined). I
also think she's wrong. The
dictionary definition of rigged is:
to manipulate fraudulently
There's ample evidence of rigging in both the JFA and the MOU. The JFA enabled the Hillary
Victory Fund, which was a fraudulent scheme to allow big donors to contribute to the Clinton
campaign by using the states as passthroughs. And the MOU enabled to Clinton campaign to
fraudulently manipulate the public and the press into the belief that the DNC was an
independent entity, when in fact it was a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Clinton
campaign.
Conclusion
I know
we're not supposed to "relitigate" the 2016 campaign ; we're supposed to look forward and
not back. However, the demand not to "relitigate" assumes that the case is closed; as Brazile
shows, we're hardly through with the depositions, let alone prepared to render judgment. So,
when you hear "relitigate," think "silencing tactic," and ask yourself who and what silence
serves. And perhaps this post will provide a basis for further discussion. 119
comments
Likewise, confirms my decision to wash my hands of the party. If, by some miracle, a
candidate acceptable to my priorities is nominated, I will still vote for him/her, but the
party isn't getting any default support or any $.
People need to stop conflating the DNC with the Democratic Party. I realized I was doing
so and stopped.
The DNC is an organization for raising money to support Democratic Party candidates for US
President; its subsidiaries are, of course, the DCCC and the DSCC. The only reason they have
power to dictate to the actual party is because they hold the purse strings. That
Bernie and others have run successful campaigns, to one degree or another, without their
"help" is one of the reasons they're fighting so hard to maintain the status quo. If they're
shown to be redundant, the power of those who currently run it evaporates.
Saying "I'll never vote Democrat again" is, as my sainted mother used to say, cutting off
your nose to spite your face. Right now, if we're going to at least slow down the rocketing
juggernaut that is GOP/plutocratic ownership of our governments, we need to elect progressive
candidates. There's no time to create a third party that can compete, so we need to vote for
the candidates who are advancing a non-neoliberal/neocon agenda whatever party they run
under. It's mostly Democrats, at the moment, but a social media acquaintance spoke of a
clearly progressive candidate running for a local office as a Republican because that's how
she's registered.
One of the ways the GOP was so successful in conning the working people and small business
owners and others into buying their hogwash was by demonizing "the Democrats." Now, their
message that "Democrats" are nothing but crazy-headed hippies who want to take their money
and give it to other people is so deeply ingrained it's a hard row to how convincing them
just how big a lie it is. Indeed, I suspect I shocked a raging right-winger the other day
when I told him we agreed about Obama and Clinton, because his Fox-muddled mind firmly
believes a Democrat thinks Obama rules the heavens.
If we don't "vote Democrat" in the upcoming primaries, then the establishment local and
state parties are going to throw more New Democrats against the GOP and lose. That can't
happen.
Yes, thank you! People need to vote for the progressive candidates in the Democratic
primaries. If they don't, then the establishment candidates will easily win, and the national
government will continue to be dominated by both Republican and Democratic lap dogs of the
billionaires. And if there are a few progressive Republicans out there, sure, vote for them,
too.
I often wonder whether some of the people who admonish us to stop voting for Democrats are
really employed by one of the many Koch brothers organizations. Not all of them, of course,
and I'm not making an accusation against anyone who is commenting here. But if people don't
vote for progressive Democrats, the billionaires and the corporate advocates of
financialization will win.
Of course, appearances can be deceptive: Obama ran as a progressive candidate .
As a quick ready-reckoner -- the more a candidate bloviates on Identity issues, the less
likely they are (should they be elected) to be "progressive" on issues of substance: the
economy, tax, war/imperialism
Right! Where are these progressive democrats? I would love to support one other than
Bernie Sanders (yes I know he is not perfect and he is too old). But they don't seem to exist
at the national level. There seem to be mayoral and other municipal candidates on the right
track – just have no idea how to move those ideas onto the state or national level.
Maybe I am just cranky and pessimistic right now.
TYT did several interviews of "Justice Democrats", newbies running on a progressive
platform. Some of the interviews you could see Cenk Uynger almost cringing, and the usually
voluble Jimmy Dore very quiet as the candidates lacked public speaking skills, and
demonstrating a probable lack of political smarts necessary to maneuver any bureaucracy.
Without trial by fire at lower levels, learning how to run a government and get results,
then there is no way to judge the candidates.
Unless candidates like Roza Calderon a faster learn that is
apparent at this point, they the Justice Democrats can only win when "anyone but him/her"
applies ,
So it was our apathy that did it. It was our moral failure. "Really," says Algernon, in The Importance of Being Earnest, "if the lower orders don't
set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have
absolutely no sense of moral responsibility."
There's an important difference between being and voting Democrat. Actually, we already
have a defacto 3rd party, Independents/Unaffiliated, a larger block of voters than either
Republicans or Democrats.
With even greater numbers of Independents/Unaffiliated, we could be a force to be reckoned
with. Actually, we should recognize and own our power right now because we could decimate the
ranks of the Duopoly and make room for an actual third party. We can still vote for Democrats
of course, but they'll realize that they can't continue to take our votes for granted.
There's actually no good reason to remain a registered Democrat. You can still vote for
Democrats as an Independent/Unaffiliated voter. It's only for some presidential primaries and
caucuses that party registration is a limitation. If you live in one of those states, you can
temporarily register as a Democrat to vote, then revert to independent/unaffiliated
afterwards. Other than that, all other elections are open without regard to affiliation.
The Democrats and Republicans are two wings of the same bird of prey, and we're the prey
only because we haven't yet learned to fly to escape their talons. If we start owning our
power as free agents/Independent voters, that can change. While deep pocketed donors may have
the power to make the wheels turn for the Duopoly, those wheels can't go anywhere without our
votes. Since we don't have the power of money, we can at least exercise our political power
to stay out of their talons.
Independence is the way to fly. It's not just leverage, it's also the only way to clear
more space and demand for official third parties. Since the Duopoly refuses to change their
ways and repair the rigged system they created to keep only themselves in power, we can and
should abandon them in droves.
In order to vote in the New York State Democrat party primary you must be a registered
Democrat. In NY the primary is where most seats are won and lost. Being registered as a
Democrat is a necessary evil in some cases.
It has never been clear to me why a hostile takeover of the Democrats, followed by a
management purge and seizure of its assets, should be framed as "saving" the Democrat Party.
I think that's what a lot of Sanders people would like to do. It's also not clear to me why
people think the Democrats can simply be by-passed , and don't need to be assaulted,
and if from the inside, all the better.
As readers know, my experience with the Greens was poor (as it has been with others I have
talked to). This is especially sad since the GP in Maine had seemed to be viable. So, my fear
of the Greens is not fear of the un known, but fear of the known ; I worked
at dysfunctional non-profits before, and I don't need to do it again. Others, especially CP
activists, may differ in their experience, but that's mine. (Note that I was reinforced in my
priors by Stein's lawyer adopting the "Russian hacking" meme in Stein's post-election
lawsuits.)
if Bernie's primary campaign and support had been transferred to the Green Party, he
would have been a very serious contender,
I agree. But Sanders couldn't join the Green ticket, because he made a promise to support
the Democratic candidate, and unlike some politicians, he tries to keep his promises. So what did the Greens do? Instead of actively trying to gain the support of Sanders
primary voters, they nominated ideological purist Ajamu Baraka as their Vice Presidential
candidate, and he would not back down from unrealistic insulting criticism of Sanders. In
effect, the Greens chose to fail.
I am not interested in keeping the two party system. Either the country breaks apart, or we will have regional parties that can compete with
the Democrats and the Republicans.
How many clowns can dance on the head of a pin? Debating whether it feels better to have a
donkey or an elephant standing on your neck is a fools errand. Neither the Democrat or
Republican party is democratic or representative of any more than a handful of families from
the Billionaires Club. While they may favor different individuals in the ruling class,
neither faux-party has the slightest interest in the rabble who don't line their pockets and
provide protection against electoral defeat.
Elections are a stage managed charade in our kleptocracy. Expecting them to change
anything that matters, or alter the course of the Warfare State is pure delusion. First we
must have Collapse, then Chaos before we can have Change that we can believe in.
"First we must have Collapse, then Chaos before we can have Change that we can believe
in."
You are right -- although hopefully mere "crisis" will be sufficient for radical change
rather than complete collapse & chaos . Collapse & chaos may void any chance of
organised positive change. Having said that the signs are not good: see https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/06/the-ecosystem-is-breaking-down/
for the less than cheery news on ecosystem breakdown.
Both parties must be revealed unambiguously to the whole public as the completely morally
bankrupt, treasonous & vicious entities that socialists & progressives have known
them to be for decades.
The big problem with the Democrats is that they just kicked all the Progressives out and
actively oppose them. Voting for blue dogs doesn't get us anywhere.
You are correct about Carter. Zbigniew Brzezinski was a creature of the Rockefellers, and
he was Carter's Special Assistant for National Security. Prior to becoming President, Carter
was a member of the Trilateral Commission.
The rigging was obvious from the start. When nearly all the super delegates declared for
Clinton before a single primary was held, I read numerous reports that said the reason was
quid pro quo. The super delegates were to be given campaign money in exchange for their
support. The agreement proves it.
That, and what the DNC did to Bernie supporters during the convention, made me swear I'd
never give them a penny. I have only donated to specific candidates directly. Meanwhile, the
Dem establishment stubbornly remains clueless as to why it cannot regain the House and
Senate.
I have seen portions of the agreement (not sure if JFA or MOU) characterized as a "slush
fund" for consultants. Naturally, of course, but one might also wonder if that slush fund was
used to purchase any superdelegate votes. Pure speculation I didn't have time to run down, so
I left it on the cutting room floor.
G, a lot happened to Sanders supporters at the convention, too much to recap but you can
probably find stories about it. Many walked out but their seats were filled by paid
seat-fillers so the hall didn't look empty, also from what I understand paid seat-fillers
sometimes didn't let them take their seats. Signs were blocked, white noise was used to
muffle boos, etc.
Before the convention, many of the primaries had a lot of funny business (not all, I know
of no problems here in Texas). But California, Arizona, New York, Puerto Rico, Nevada and
others all had SERIOUS problems with things such as efforts to prevent Sanders supporters
from voting, questionable vote counting (such as at Nevada caucuses), efforts to make voting
difficult by having few poll places, etc., etc.
I think there were irregularities in Illinois, too. I recall that 6 counties did not have
enough Democratic ballots, and the Democratic Attorney General, a Clinton supporter, sued to
prevent voters in those counties from voting after election day. In Massachusetts, Bill Clinton illegally electioneered near or in a polling place. But the
authorities let him get away with it.
Great article Lambert. TheGreenwald article was helpful but yours is the icing on the
cake. Hopefully many will read this so that they do not get confused with all of the
Clintonista response to Brazile. Howard Dean must be suffering from early Alzheimer's to
write such a lie. But he has done it before.
It's hard for me to believe anyone can, with a straight face, suggest the 2 agreements are
equal.How can you have more than one agreement giving "the authority to make the final decision
" ??!!
Final means last, no? #corruptlosers
I know we're not supposed to "relitigate" the 2016 campaign; we're supposed to look
forward and not back. However, the demand not to "relitigate" assumes that the case is
closed; as Brazile shows, we're hardly through with the depositions, let alone prepared to
render judgment. So, when you hear "relitigate," think "silencing tactic," and ask yourself
who and what silence serves.
Well said. Regular contact with the centrist MSM recently is like being subjected to
hypnotism routines from 50s movies. "You are thinking forward, forward, forward. When I snap
my fingers you will feel fresh, eager to believe in the promises of the party of Franklin
Roosevelt and Barack Obama."
and yet FDR stood by while his own "Senator Sanders" – Henry Wallace was sidetracked
from his vice-presidency and legacy as FDR's successor (to the chagrin of Eleanor, among
many) by corporate dems James Byrnes, stooge for big oil and U.S. steel, who replaced Wallace
with Truman at 1944 dem convention
However, there certainly is no comparison, as you note, between obama's complete lack of
"transparency, oversight, accountability" regarding bush-cheney war crimes, Wall Street
frauds, destabilization of entire Middle-East, leading to republican trump administration,
and FDR
Most authors-historicans I have encountered believe FDR had no real idea how ill he
was
A while ago, I read a story about the DNC's misuse of unpaid interns. The story itself was
barfy enough, but what really shocked me was an aside asserting that even official elected
DNC members were barred from viewing the DNC's budget. ( http://paydayreport.com/unpaidinternsatdnc/
)
"Surely that can't be true," I said to myself. But it is! I looked up the DNC's charter
and bylaws and the standing budget committee is specifically exempted from article 9 section
12, which says that all official meetings of the DNC and its committees must be open to the
public and cannot involve voting by secret ballot. http://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.democrats.org/Downloads/DNC_Charter__Bylaws_9.17.15.pdf
"WTF kind of an organization is this?!" I thought. How on earth is that even legal?
Well, after the Brazile disclosure of the Clinton MOU, I went back to look at the DNC
charter/bylaws. You'll note on the first page the date the current version was
adopted–2 days after the MOU was signed!
Anyone wanna take a bet that the budget committee carveout was one of things that was
changed?
jsba, suggest you use the Wayback machine or another internet archive and look at prior
historical copies of DNC charter/bylaws, to identify the changes. Could be very illuminating
as to (possible) criminal intent?
I was wrong about the budget committee carveout–it's in this version as well (still
completely insane!).
The fact that it was amended 2 days after the MOU is, obviously, still extremely
suspicious. I don't have time to, but the 2009 version would be useful to identify possible
changes.
As much as I'd like to switch parties (hah) so as to add to the greater numbers of fleeing
formerly party faithful, I'm in one of those 'closed primary' states. My vote is already
nearly worthless (though I exercise my right every chance I get); to switch to a third party
would make sure I'm both excluded from the more interesting local party contests AND drowned
out in national contests. Lose/lose. Maybe if something like Maine's (currently under attack)
Ranked Choice Voting existed all over, I'd be less sour about the whole thing.
Yeah, you need people like Lambert willing to do the work. It is exhausting keeping up
with the truths, half truths and lies promulgated in the press and trying to figure out what
is true and what isn't.
I find it interesting that the agreement involved control of the IT/data infrastructure of
the DNC. Doesn't the DNC administer the democratic party registry? And with that observation,
wasn't there a lot of illegal party switching that caused a problem for some Democrats voting
in party restricted primaries that had their registration switched, so that they couldn't
take part in the primaries. Wouldn't it be interesting if the switched parties were on the
DNC record as donating to Bernie's campaign? Fixed, indeed.
Manipulations of the deplorable superdelegate system, with its covert quid pro quo payoffs
after the Clintons take power, was part of a seamless fix. Premature coronation by media and
party wigs after primary victories in red states no Democrat would win in the general
election helped ice it.
Perhaps revelations will turn up on mainstream media, from the Sabbath Gasbags to NPR,
knifing Bernie with Hillary talking points at every opportunity, when he wasn't being
ignored. Thomas Frank wrote persuasively on WaPo's bias in Swat Team in Harper's, and there
have been tidbits on off-record Clinton media cocktail parties and such. But I'd like to know
how far up the editorial totem poles the fix went and how it was achieved. Certainly Jeff
Bezos has a Washington wish list. I marveled at how many journalists suddenly sounded like
breathless valley girl propagandists. And still do. What faster way to tank journalism's
credibility than that perception?
I guess that's why after catching headlines more of my reading time shifts to alternative
offerings such as those presented here.
But I'd like to know how far up the editorial totem poles the fix went and how it was
achieved.
I worked as a journalist in America for over a decade. I cannot stress enough how
unnecessary such a literal fix would be. (Though doubtless words were and are exchanged
between concerned parties when needed.)
The hive-mind position of most U.S. journalists -- and especially of editors, who tend to
be the most compliant with the power-structure and often the stupidest people in the room --
was (and is) an automatical default to unquestioning support -- even worship -- of the
Democratic Party, its elite, and Clintonite neoliberalism.
I once wrote a long feature that got a crush-letter from Joe Lieberman's office. The
editors at the magazine in question were ecstatic and printed that letter as its own separate
feature in the next issue. Personally, I thought Leiberman was scum, but kept my qualms to
myself and was glad I used a byline.
It seems to me that the HRC campaign's JFA was expressly designed to -- and succeeded in
its design -- circumvent the statutory $2700 limit on direct campaign contributions. Yet I
have not seen commentary that suggests any laws were violated. What am I missing?
To me, it seemed that the Democratic Party had already decided for clinton before the
primaries, as at my local caucus the party had planted each neighborhood group with a party
faithful, not from the neighborhood, who would argue for clinton and fear monger about Trump.
I know this because I talked to the plant in my group, asked her where she lived, and
discovered it was not in my neighborhood; it was a different town. Others reported the
same.
Also, a Dem party leader came up to me and said "Sanders is not going to be the nominee"
and "When this is over (meaning the primary), then you'll be supporting Hillary, right?" I
told her to never assume anything.
So, thanks to Brazile, no matter her motivation, for providing proof of what we already
knew.
I think you don't see that skill set very much in party leaders because they so rarely
need for the party to win elections. They do need to be able to maintain control
over their parties, so they're great at being cutthroat and cheating. But apart from certain
important individual elections, the success of the party as a whole isn't a big priority for
them. There are spoils to divide either way.
I worked on the Sanders primary campaign in my city. I watched as the state/regional
leadership consistently tanked the gotv and other Sanders ground outreach while a few local
leaders working in smaller areas worked their hearts out on the ground. Surprisingly (or not)
the state/ regional leadership bailed to work on the HRC campaign within hours of closing the
primary office.
I swear, in one of her interviews on the past weekend, Brazile made a quick, underbreath,
reference to 'poor Seth Rich' in recounting the death threats aimed at her. Glad someone has
not forgotten that connection.
It has been a while since I handled a criminal defense case, but I am not sure that the
agreement is not in fact, criminal. When the Sanders for President campaign signed an
agreement and paid money in consideration of getting access to the voter file and when the
state parties agreed to merge their fundraising efforts with the DNC and HFA, the commercial
fraud laws applied to that relationship. Since the fundraising was done using interstate
phone calls, letters, and emails and the voter file access was provided by electronic
transmissions from servers in DC to end users in Burlington, Vermont that includes 18 USC
1341, 1343 and 1346 (mail, wire and honest services fraud). These laws do not just ban
outright lying, but also the concealment of material facts that one has a duty to
disclose.
Considering the importance of voter file access, it is impossible to imagine that your
chief competitor having joint authority over hiring the people who handle all your customer
service and monitor your compliance with voter file contract is not a material fact. If,
under DC contract law or FTC commerical regulations, these kinds of conflicts of interest are
mandatorily disclosable (I do not practice in DC but I doubt DC applies caveat emptor to that
degree), then 18 USC 1343 was broken and Jeff Sessions could indict everyone involved.
It is even worse for the state parties agreement. The DNC arguably has a duty of loyalty
to its state affiliates which makes agreeing to encourage them all to sign up even though it
is concealing its knowledge that the money will be allocated in a way that will be bad for at
least some of them seem utterly inconsistent with the honest services provisions of 1346. All
in all, it is probably a good thing for the DNC that the Sessions aides I went to law school
with paid less attention in criminal law that I did.
It seemed to me that the nondisclosure of material facts and of conflicts of interest
might, arguably, constitute some type of criminal activity and that Donna Brazile's
characterization of the agreement as "not a criminal act" was, perhaps, a bit too facile but
I did not know the specific statutes or claims that might be involved. I really appreciate
your detailed observations here.
"Not a dime's worth of difference."
When it comes to politics, it isn't Russians we need to worry about, it's Americans. That's
where the collusion is – between the parties.
It was the Republicans' turn, period. Jeff Sessions doubtless knows that.
Just want to point out that the state-party=>DNC pass-through is not at all new. Has
been active in some form and proportion in every presidential campaign since 1992 (mainly, or
at least nominally due to changes in FEC regulation), but really ramped up in and after
2008.
Pushback by states has decreased over time, as state party executive directors are now
almost always (even in off-cycle years) routed in from DC, instead of staffing from the local
pool of operatives.
One of the important impacts is on state legislatures. Gutted of necessary funding, and
discouraged (and sometimes contractually inhibited) from soliciting further funds on the
national level, state parties have little left in their coffers to support their legislative
candidates and committees (and forget about the bottom of the ticket).
So this kind of money hoovering is a significant factor in the national net loss of Dem
seats in state houses in non-"battleground" states.
During oral arguments in McCutcheon v. FEC three years ago, Justice Samuel Alito
dismissed the Campaign Legal Center's
analysis showing how, absent limits on the total amount that donors could give to
multiple political committees, candidates could use joint fundraising schemes to raise
huge, potentially corrupting contributions.
These scenarios, Justice Alito claimed, are "wild hypotheticals that are not obviously
plausible." Hillary Clinton, though, is proving that the Campaign Legal Center was right all
along.
I'm not at all a campaign finance expert. Perhaps readers will weigh in?
Yes, the amounts are new. Just saying this was the direction things were going for a while
already. Good will between DNC and state parties already at a low ebb, DWS a big part of
that.
As we know, the Citizens United Supreme Court decision allows corporations, individuals
and labor unions to make unlimited contributions to independent organizations that use the
money to support or defeat a candidate. Rules prohibit coordination between a candidate committee and an individual or
organization making "independent expenditures."
Clearly this was not the arrangement between the HVF, State Democratic Central Committees
participating in the PAC and the DNC. Hillary was pulling the strings at the DNC. But I'm just now appreciating that the Hillary Victory Fund is not a Super PAC.
Joint fundraising is fundraising conducted jointly by a political committee and one or
more other political committees or unregistered organizations. Joint fundraising rules
apply to:
Party committees;
Party organizations not registered as political committees;
Federal and/or nonfederal candidate committees;
Nonparty, unauthorized political committees (nonconnected PACs); and
Unregistered nonparty organizations. 11 CFR 102.17(a)(1)(i) and (2).
The HVF was the first joint fundraising committee between a presidential candidate and the
Democratic party since the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision McCutcheon v FEC. A horrible
precedent at that!
McCutcheon declared a total limit on how much an individual can give federal candidates
and parties in a two-year cycle unconstitutional. Chief Justice Roberts opined, "The existing
aggregate limits may in fact encourage the movement of money away from entities subject to
disclosure."
Right!
The HVF demonstrates how rechanneling dark money from super PACs toward candidates and
parties doesn't stop unethical and undemocratic processes.
That the HVF was needed to balance the Obama debt is one thing. That the HVF can pass
through money from State committees to the DNC and then coordinate activities there while
passing off as a joint fundraising committee is another thing.
The rechanneling of hundreds of millions of dollars donated by rich D elites to bypass
individual contribution limits was a brilliant financial engineering feat–one that the
Rs will surely emulate.
Before conducting a joint fundraiser, all participants must enter into a written
agreement that identifies the JFR and states the allocation formula -- the amount or
percentage that the participants agree to use for allocating proceeds and expenses. 11 CFR
102.17(c)(1).
What was the allocation formula of the joint fundraising committee?
As the HVF fairy tale plays out, Clinton is the witch who lures Hansel and Gretel to the
forest with a castle of confections, with the intention to eat them.
Are Democrats capable of outsmarting the witches that want to cannibalize the party?
Thanks Lambert for this. As usual, you have seen around corners and cleared the mud from
the water. Thank God you like crawling through this sh*t, so that I at least don't have
to.
Our local radio host Warren Olney, on KCRW who started his show "To The Point" (which is
syndicated nationally on Public Radio International) during the 2000 Bush v Gore Supreme
Court crowning of Bush fiasco is doing a week long retrospective of the disintegration of
Americans' faith in "our" institutions (ha!) before he goes to a once a week podcast.
I have listened to him for 17 years and I don't know how he could stomach covering U.S.
society, politics, and culture during those years of non-ending sh*t show. He was fair to all
guests including some right wing loonies, but you never got the feeling he was going for
"balance." He always seemed to get the truth. Gonna sorely miss him.
So glad you are still on the case, and loving it. You have my gratitude, and soon, a
contribution.
How much of the $250,000 the Sanders campaign paid for the DNC voter list went to the
Clinton campaign? I am still wondering if this kind of thing has occurred in other elections?
As far as relitigating the primary goes, we should've had that fight back, if not in 2000,
then definitely in 2004. After Team Clinton, people who justified their sellouts and perfidy
with 'we must never have another McGovern or Carter', gave the GOP a gift of a unified
government that should have been the permanent end of their credibility. Because while
McGovern, Carter, and Mondale went down in flames they didn't so thoroughly destroy the
anti-reactionary institutions as badly as the Third Way did.
The endless 2016 primary is our punishment for giving these centrist vipers a second
chance.
I appreciate Lambert going through these documents and laying out the timeline. One of the
things that this read sparked for me was the realization the Joe Biden was elbowed out just
as much as Bernie Sanders. I didn't follow the Biden decision-making process at the time but
checking back on the timeline it seems like Clinton pre-empted any attempt by dear old Joe to
actually decide to run. Correct me if I'm wrong (as I may well be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden#2016_presidential_race
It doesn't take much elbowing to oust someone who was polling in single digits in his home
state. I donated to O'Malley's campaign before Bernie got in, and, regrettably, am still on
his mailing list.
The bottom line is that the political system is owned by the ruling oligarchy and that the
Democratic Establishment is in bed with them. If a serious candidate from the left poses a
challenge, they will rig the Primary against that candidate.
The Democratic Establishment is pretty much paid to lose and to make the consultant class
rich. Equally as importantly, they exist to co-opt the left.
Sure there are a few voices talking that make sense like Tulsi Gabbard. They are the
exception to a very corrupt party.
A big part of why the middle class has declined is because of the total betrayal of the
Democratic Party from the ideas behind the New Deal.
The DNC got into the position of selling themselves to the Clintons as they were $20
million in debt, right? I have read that the major reason for these debts was that the DNC
had not shrunk itself since the last campaign and was paying out a ton of money for
consultants doing Christ knows what. In fact, Obama also used the DNC to support a stack of
his consultants as well as grifters gotta grift, right?
My question is whether this was a deliberate ploy on Obama and the Clinton factions to put
the DNC into such a vulnerable position before 2016 came along that when the time came, they
had to take up an offer that they could not refuse. I have not heard if Obama has made any
comments on this fiasco that took place on his watch and it seems nobody wants to call him
out on it. In the Brazile case, it is not a matter of following the money but following the
lack of money.
"Both sides in the Democratic Party's current faction fight, as I see it, are in denial
about the true nature and scope of the problem
"Both responses are essentially utopian: They rest on the premise that the Democratic Party
is still a functioning political organization and that the United States is still a
functioning democracy."
Thanks. This was plain and simple money laundering to get around the Federal Election
Commission rules and regulations. That no one has been brought to justice shows how corrupt
the American political process is. It would great if you could post how you would reform it.
I would start with paper ballots counted in public and halt corporations from buying
elections.
If I understand the law correctly, this really wasn't money laundering, since laundered
money becomes dirty by virtue of its being the result of a crime (like drug dealers
depositing cash at HSBC (IIRC)). Handling money in a complex and obfuscated way is not, in itself, money laundering. I'm
not sure what the word is, though.
Violating campaign laws is a crime. Circumventing can often be shown to be violating. Need
a prosecutor willing to prosecute white collar crime, a rare breed for at least the last
decade.
But trump has been attacked by Clintons, and he has DOJ but nothing is happening.
Some very good points are made here. Carping about the inequities of the Democrat Party
establishment isn't going to change their behaviour. Too much lucre. One needs to change the
people running the party. From the ground up and with concrete regulatory features. Full
stop.
However, one might look to the UK Labour party to see how it reacted when J. Corbyn, a
lifelong member and activist, became leader of the party through grandee miscalculation. The
Thatcherist Blairites went ballastic and basically decided to destroy the party rather than
let a fairly mild democratic socialist offer an alternative to their beloved neoliberal
economic policies. Too much lucre. They almost destroyed Labour in Scotland and were intent
on defenestrating Labour in England, whilst retaining some feeble structure as a mock
substitute, so that the Tories would, in fact, become the one and only alternative.
The forces aligned against the democratic tendencies of ordinary citizens are formidable
and reach into every nook and cranny of our lives. They have the money, technological reach
and hence the power of capital and its persuasive abilities.
i dont think a campaign had owned the dnc like that before. i think it had nothing to do
with hilary being a good team player, and everything to do with money and juicy
consulting/lobbying jobs. and pointing this out is not "sulking". know your enemy, and don't
excuse their crimes and predations by an argument that "that's just the way things are".
I am a Bernie supporter. He was pushed to the side by the Dem's – a party to which I
belonged for forty years – in a total panic when it was shown to the Dem's that Bernie
was able to reach disaffected party members as myself by raising a large amount of money
through individual small donors.
That Bernie accomplished this feat was a huge factor, IMO, in why and how my former party
felt it necessary to malign and derail Bernie and his supporters before, during and after the
Democratic -meh – Nominating Convention.
The Dem's should have just named the Hillary for America Fund the Hillary for Hillary
Fund.
Hillary cares only for and about Hillary. She's the reason Trump is POTUS today.
My family has been Democrat for many generations. Most of my family members have,
unfortunately, BTFD on this one. I used to find them to be reasonable folk. Trump derangement
syndrome has infected them all. This is a common complaint these days.
Forgot to thank Lambert for all of his great care and hard work in putting this together
for us. Thank you, Lambert.
In Brazile's account I do believe I remember reading that my home state, CA, did not sign off
on the agreement with regard to the HFV fund. But I seem to remember that Naked Capitalism,
or perhaps in the commentariat here, did state that the Dem's here in CA were in an uproar
over Hillary Victory Fund taking all of the state party monies. Am I having a flashback or
did I actually remember this wrong? Anyone know?
I thought the most interesting thing about Brazile's comments to date was that Obama left
the DNC indebted and therefore more vulnerable to the highest bidder. Not easy to bail that
out on $27 donations. So typical of these Goldmanite administrations, this use of finance as
a political weapon.
Presstitutes from guardian have no shame. Look, for example, at the following statement "The former
Clinton staffers – among them high-profile figures such as Huma Abedin, Jennifer Palmieri and campaign
manager Robby Mook, the target of stringent criticism from Brazile – wrote: "It is particularly troubling
and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians
and
our opponent , about our candidate's health."
It is widely suspected that Hillary Clinton has second stage
of Parkinson or some other serious neurological diseases?
It is telling that Guardian is afraid to open comments on this article.
Notable quotes:
"... Regarding the primary, in which Sanders – a Vermont independent – mounted a surprisingly strong challenge, Brazile writes in her book that a joint fundraising agreement between Clinton and the DNC "looked unethical" and she felt Clinton had too much influence on the party. ..."
She also said she "got sick and tired of people trying to tell me how to spend money" as DNC chair,
when she "wasn't getting a salary. I was basically volunteering my time".
"I'm not Patsey the slave," Brazile said, referring to a character in the Oscar-winning film 12
Years a Slave.
In her book, Brazile writes that she did not ultimately try to make the change of candidate because:
"I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her.
I could not do this to them."
On ABC, she admitted she had not had the power to make the change but said: "I had to put in on
the the table because I was under tremendous pressure after Secretary Clinton fainted to have a quote-unquote
plan B. I didn't want a plan B. Plan A was great for me. I supported Hillary and I wanted her to
win. But we were under pressure."
Brazile writes that on 12 September 2016, Biden's chief of staff called saying the vice-president
wanted to speak with her. Her thought, she writes, was: "Gee, I wonder what he wanted to talk to
me about?"
On ABC, she said she did not mention the possible switch. "I mean, look, everybody was called
in to see, do you know anything? How is she doing? And of course my job at the time was to reassure
people, not just the vice-president but also reassure the Democratic party, the members of the party,
that Hillary was doing fine and that she would resume her campaign the following week."
It is unclear if Biden was ever willing to step into the race. The former vice-president, who
many believe could a run for the presidency in 2020, made no immediate comment.
Asked if she still thinks a Biden-Booker ticket could have won, Brazile equivocated, saying: "Well,
you know, I had a lot of other combinations. This was something you play out in your mind."
Regarding the primary, in which Sanders – a Vermont independent – mounted a surprisingly strong
challenge, Brazile writes in her book that a joint fundraising agreement between Clinton and the
DNC "looked unethical" and she felt Clinton had too much influence on the party.
"... the DNC agreed to let the Clinton campaign control the party's finances, strategy, donations, and staffing decisions in exchange for the Clinton campaign's financial help. ..."
"... At a time when many people and many voices are calling for unity within the Democratic party, it was really disturbing to see that there was kind of a purge of party officials from both the at large committee, as well as the executive committee within the DNC. That really had one common thread of the people who were booted out of those seats that they had held. Some for decades. The commonality was that these were people who had either supported Bernie Sanders for president or supported Keith Ellison for DNC chair, or both. ..."
"... Getting rid of the non democratic superdelegates who make up one third of all of the votes cast that a nominee needs to secure the nomination, and to secure open or same day registration primaries so that again, open the doors. Let's let everybody in and get involved in the process. ..."
"... In Roger Stone's book, The Making of the President 2016 ..."
"... Every piece of what we've learned so far, unfolding over months, is as bad as or worse than we had thought: The DNC works to engineer a Clinton/Trump match-up, the combination most likely to assure a Democratic loss . It vehemently denies that it is tilted favorably toward Clinton -- which turns out to be true, in a technical sense, because it is controlled by Clinton. ..."
"... Debbie will be the sacrificial lamb. Still waiting for anyone in the mainstream to publish the name "Awan". ..."
"... she's put her money where her mouth is numerous times now, beginning with leaving the DNC in protest over its unethical practices ..."
In
this Real
News Network interview , Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) responds to former interim chair
Donna Brazile's revelation that the Clinton campaign had effective control of the DNC. Gabbard
was a vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee until February 28, 2016, when she
resigned to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Primary.
AARON MATÉ: It's The Real News. I'm Aaron Maté. During the 2016 Democratic
primary, supporters of Bernie Sanders complained that the Democratic National Committee was
plagued by internal corruption, and rigging the nomination for Hillary Clinton. Well today, the
former interim chair of the DNC has come out to say exactly that. Writing for Politico, Donna
Brazile details a scheme wherein the Clinton campaign effectively took over the DNC. Facing a
major funding shortfall, the DNC agreed to let the Clinton campaign control the party's
finances, strategy, donations, and staffing decisions in exchange for the Clinton campaign's
financial help.
But, this did not happen after Clinton became the nominee. In fact, this agreement was made
in August 2015, months before a single primary vote was cast. Among many things, this meant
that the DNC was able to act as a money laundering operation for the Clinton campaign. Tens of
millions of dollars in donations to state democrats across the country ultimately was kicked
back to Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn, well, earlier I spoke to someone who has been a
prominent vocal critic of the DNC process from the start. Congressmember Tulsi Gabbard
represents Hawaii's second congressional district. She was vice chair of the DNC until February
2016 when she resigned to endorse senator Bernie Sanders. I spoke to her about Donna Brazil's
revelations. Congressmember Gabbard, welcome. Your response, what we've heard from Donna
Brazile today.
TULSI GABBARD: I was not surprised to read what she was detailing in what was printed today.
This was something that when I was vice chair of the DNC I didn't have knowledge of the
details, but it was something that some folks were actually talking about and were concerned
about at that time
AARON MATÉ: I want to quote more from Donna Brazile. She writes "If the fight had
been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which
one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the
party's integrity." She's referring especially to this financial arrangement in which the
Clinton camp gives the DNC money but in exchange, the DNC hands over control of basically every
single decision. Your thoughts on that? Were you surprised by her revelation?
TULSI GABBARD: Again, this is not something I wasn't privy to the inner workings of how
these decisions were made, because at that time the decisions were really ultimately coming
from the chair of the DNC. But I had heard some concerns from folks from different state
parties actually. Executive directors and chairs and people who were involved in the grassroots
organizing and trying to again increase involvement in the process. Their concerns around this
joint fundraising agreement that Donna Brazile talked about in her article and her book was
that the funds that were being raised through this agreement were not actually benefiting the
party, but they were kind of being used as a pass through for lack of a better word. Their
concerns again were about getting more support for the work that parties do on the ground and
grassroots organizing. Turning out the vote, going and knocking on doors. Doing all the things
that happened on the ground in states all across the country. Again, this was not something
that I was terribly surprised by in reading that Donna detailed, but it's something that hasn't
been laid out in the way that she has in this way.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah. She provides a figure when it comes to the money element. She says
that of $82 million that was raised in state fundraisers, less than half of 1%, half of 1% got
to go to the state parties, and said the rest went back to Brooklyn for the Clinton campaign.
What kind of difference do you think that made on the election outcome when it comes to
democratic efforts at the state level?
TULSI GABBARD: It's hard to say. I can't exactly quantify that. But I do know that some of
the state party officials who I had spoken to at different times during the campaign had
actually expressed these concerns and decided not to sign onto this joint fundraising agreement
for that specific reason. They saw at that point, look we're not going to be used by anyone's
campaign. If you want to talk about how to help strengthen local parties, let's have that
conversation, but this was clearly not an effort in that direction.
AARON MATÉ: You recently spoke out about some more decisions by the DNC at the
national level, in terms of their staffing of key committees. Can you comment there on what you
were most upset by, and your thoughts on what should be done?
TULSI GABBARD: At a time when many people and many voices are calling for unity within the
Democratic party, it was really disturbing to see that there was kind of a purge of party
officials from both the at large committee, as well as the executive committee within the DNC.
That really had one common thread of the people who were booted out of those seats that they
had held. Some for decades. The commonality was that these were people who had either supported
Bernie Sanders for president or supported Keith Ellison for DNC chair, or both. If the message
is that we're going to get rid of people who may have dissenting opinions, or may be calling
for different kinds of reform or retaliating for positions that they've taken this is not the
direction that the democratic party should be going in. The democratic party should be going in
the direction of openness, inclusiveness, transparency, accountability, which is why I've been
calling for two major but very basic kinds of reform. Getting rid of the non democratic superdelegates who make up one third of all of the votes cast that a nominee needs to secure
the nomination, and to secure open or same day registration primaries so that again, open the
doors. Let's let everybody in and get involved in the process.
She says that of $82 million that was raised in state fundraisers, less than half of 1%,
half of 1% got to go to the state parties, and said the rest went back to Brooklyn for the
Clinton campaign.
Great dot-connecting. Incredible irony that HRC's diversion of funds from swing states to
her high-spending campaign was one of the proximate causes of her losing the electoral
college.
Yep. Here in Maine, where the state party was part of the Victory Fund kick-back scheme,
Trump ended up winning one of the state's electoral votes (Maine allows splitting by
congressional district) -- the first time a Republican took a Maine electoral vote since
1988.
The link at the FEC was dated 9/16/15 and shows only 32 states and the Democratic Party of
the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
Open Secrets shows 38 states eventually signed on to the Hillary Victory Fund shows 38
states (Iowa, NJ, Del, KS, NM and SD added), with each participating state a "beneficiary" of
around $3M. Nada to the Democratic Party of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. https://www.opensecrets.org/jfc/summary.php?id=C00586537
These $3M expenditures pale to Hillary for America ($120,822,326), DNC Services Corp
($55,639,930), Bully Pulpit Interactive ($40,881,995), and Chapman, Cubine et al
($25,432,057).
Incidentally, I was not able to track these funds at the Oregon Secretary of State with
Orestar, the online tool to search campaign finances. As I looked closely at the filings, it
appears the FEC requires expenditures by (not contributions to) the Democratic Party of
Oregon to federal political committees be recorded. I only see ~$275K contributed back
(aggregated expenditures) to "Democratic Party of Oregon Federal Account" and "Democratic
Party of Oregon Forward Oregon Transfer Down Acct." in the 2015 and 2016 calendar years
(though an additional $123,404.48 has gone to Democratic Party of Oregon Federal Account in
2017).
"Open Secrets shows 38 states eventually signed on to the Hillary Victory Fund shows 38
states (Iowa, NJ, Del, KS, NM and SD added) "
Oh, so that's why the KS Dem party officials claimed they couldn't afford $20k for
a mailer for Thompson in the KS-04 special election race this spring . A race he almost won,
without that help!
So for Wisconsin at least, it is not true that the state party made anything (even half of
1 percent) from the "joint" fundraising. Clinton took all but $4700 of the proceeds AND took
another $282,000 from the state party.
She says that of $82 million that was raised in state fundraisers, less than half of 1%,
half of 1% got to go to the state parties, and said the rest went back to Brooklyn for the
Clinton campaign.
Just like Charles Koch, she just wanted her fair share; all of it.
Tell me please, how is this different from republican efforts to exterminate Obama Care by
de-funding every bit of its supporting infrastructure?
Whether it was Hilary's intent to exterminate the Democratic party or not, the effect
seems quite similar.
At first, I didn't think that he was anything more than your classic identity politician.
Then I needed constituent service. Matter of fact, I needed it a couple of times. Let me tell
you, his staff aced it. They were that good.
As far as I am concerned, Raul has my vote for as long as he wants to stay in office.
Finally one shoe has dropped. The second one about to drop is that the DNC emails were not
hacked by Russia in any capacity, directly or indirectly by the Kremlin, whatever. They were
most probably leaked. HRC started the Russia hysteria when she called President Trump a
pupped of Putin in one of the debates. This is only one small example of her manipulative
arrogance.
Every piece of what we've learned so far, unfolding over months, is as bad as or
worse than we had thought: The DNC works to engineer a Clinton/Trump match-up, the
combination most likely to assure a Democratic loss . It vehemently denies
that it is tilted favorably toward Clinton -- which turns out to be true, in a technical
sense, because it is controlled by Clinton.
The establishment Democrats accuse
Sanders of not working for down-ballot Democrats while the DNC is siphoning money from the
states to help Clinton's campaign. "Maintaining ties to Wall Street makes economic
sense for Democrats and keeps their coffers full," one "pollster and senior political adviser
to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000" helpfully assures us two weeks ago in the NYT , except when it
doesn't, such as when Donna Brazile discovers, to her horror, that the party is, fact, broke,
probably due, in no small part, to paying consultants -- like the one writing in the
Times -- whose expertise has led the
decimation of the party. (And, on top of all that, the DNC, professing "unity," purges
long-time members who supported Bernie Sander or Keith Ellison and appoints anti-minimum wage
lobbyist Dan Halpern to the Finance Committee.)
Every part of the story turns out to be a colossal train wreck -- and all this
from establishment/élite types who spent the entire campaign season reminding everyone
else that they knew what was realistic, pragmatic, achievable, so on and so forth.
It's unreal, really.
" but it was something that some folks were actually talking about and were concerned
about at that time"
===================================
Why does this remind me of Harvey Weinstein?
its like deja vu or something
I think we have to go back and find out who 'endorsed' Harvey. How many? And we go back, research and publish the names of those who knew, and yet still endorsed
Hillary.
To be fair to Rep. Gabbard, the excerpt published by Ms. Brazile clearly indicates that
Rep. Wasserman-Shulz (DWS) was not keeping the rest of the DNC leadership fully informed of
relevant business and financial arrangements.
If Brazile's account is accurate, the question arises, why did the DNC board tolerate that
situation for so long, given their legal responsibilities? Given the anomalous behavior by
DWS, you have to wonder how the DNC board could have been comfortable in their roles, and why
action wasn't taken against DWS earlier. That leads one to a suspicion is that there was an
outside force supporting (controlling?) DWS and intimidating the others.
Ah yes, but Brazile's account is a self-serving CYA attempt to get ahead of a story that
was obvious as it was happening to anyone paying attention 18 months ago. Notice no mention
of passing debate questions from CNN to Clinton ahead of time. It undercuts your "bombshell"
if you have to say "it was rigged and I helped"
Debbie will be the sacrificial lamb. Still waiting for anyone in the mainstream to publish
the name "Awan".
Nearly a year after the Nov 2016 general election, this issue is finally beginning to be
elevated. Senator Elizabeth Warren also responded affirmatively to a question about whether
some primary elections were rigged against Sanders on PBS Newshour yesterday evening.
Somewhat related in terms of the scramble to get ahead of the Den estab breakdown: In an interesting coincidence the recent meeting of the AFL-CIO saw labor leaders say it's
time to stop automatically giving Dems support.
"The time has passed when we can passively settle for the lesser of two evils," reads
the main political resolution passed Tuesday by delegates. Lee Saunders, chair of the
AFL-CIO's political committee and president of AFSCME (link is external), and Randi
Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (link is external), introduced
the resolution. They lead the labor federation's two largest unions. Convention managers
yoked the resolution to another measure it also approved discussing a labor party, though not
by name. "
Many AFT members were very unhappy (understatement) when Weingarten announced support for
Hillary without first polling members. AFT lost a lot of members over that. I'm not sure this
isn't a PR scramble by labor leaders to keep their jobs, instead of any real change in
outlook. But it's an interesting data point about the current state-of-play.
AFT member here. I was livid about the sham endorsement "process" that happened; it was
rushed through, months before the first contest, with absolutely no consultation from the
rank and file. Weingarten's infamous text messages about the National Nurses Union basically solidified
for me that she's nothing but pond scum. She's not a teacher, she's an attorney. And clearly,
not a very clever one, at that. I am obligated to be an AFT member, and if I were only to
become a "partial" member I'd still be paying about 88% of the dues anyway. I still support
my AFT local.
The national AFT and its pathetic misleadership can go to hell.
If it's any consolation, your situation appears to be the norm with the long-established
unions. Their clearly-stated bias aside, the World Socialist Web Site covers labor disputes
and has shown over and over that the mainstream unions have sold their rank-and-file out.
Ironically, just this week I read where an activist group has done some major housecleaning
at the Teamsters -- and it only took them 41 years.
During the primary, the outrage among SEIU members when their Fearless Leader not only
announced for HRC but tried to pretend it was "what our people want" by posting to Facebook
photos of a half-dozen blue-shirted members heading out to knock on doors. It didn't go over
well.
Did Senator Warren admit that her refusal to endorse Bernie was bought by the Hillary
Victory Fund? In other words, does this indicate that the great fighter against Wall Street
corruption was bought off by Wall Street?
Was Massachusetts one of the participating states? She wouldn't have made any friends
there exposing the money-laundering, if so. And had Clinton beaten the odds and won, she
would have been toast, especially given she has a huge target on her back painted by the GOP.
The Clintons notoriously hold grudges, and have long memories.
The Margot Kidder piece in Counterpunch linked to in Montanamaven's
comment lists 31 of the 33 participating states. Massachusetts is one of them. (It's not
clear which are the other two states or why they aren't listed.)
I remember reading these things back then, and trying to forward them to HillBots I knew.
Without exception I was poo-poo'ed as a
tinfoil-hat-wearing-conspiracy-theorist-berniebro-whiner-misogynist-right-wing-conspiracy-member.
I'd love to say 'I told you so' to those peeps, but most of them are now fully occupied
looking under their beds for Russkis. :/
Not that I know Joseph Cannon, but check out his Cannonfire site .hysteric hysteria, deny,
RUSSKIS!, Brazile is a liar!!!, deny again, MORE RUUUUSSSKKKIIIIS!!!
to me it seems to be the 'I'm With Her' version of a Trumpsters pizzagate rantings .I
dunno, maybe I am missing something and my brain has already been washed and taken over by
Cyrillic Control Mechanisms
I read about this on Politico yesterday. Donna Brazile? This is the lady who leaked debate
topics to Clinton and was fired from CNN, right? It makes you wonder why she is writing about
this now. Opportunism in order to sell books? Revenge on Clinton? Or does she sense the wind
changing direction in the Democratic party?
Personally I think Donna Brazile, via her story and book, is trying get her version out as
she probably knows the Clinton Mafia will throw her under the bus as this story is finally
getting legs..with or without Donna Brazile's revelations.
As I've noted before her name is Mud with CNN, noone wants her to be a talking head. And
Clinton can no longer shelter her. What does she have left but airing the dirty laundry and
hoping for a payout?
Donna Brazile is wrong that this was not illegal, but only unethical. The Hillary Victory
Fund was set up to evade the campaign financing laws. There is a legal limit on how much an
individual can give to a candidate. Hillary's big donors had reached those limits. She
directed her donors who had exceeded the legal limits on direct contributions to her to give
to the DNC and state parties with the agreement that those entities would funnel the money
back to her.
That would seem to me to be evidence of intent to violate the law.
RICO? Would seem the big donors had to know what they were doing as well. But then I
recall the recent lawsuit where the party claimed it could do anything and the judge
agreed.
There is just no good reason for a party to operate in such a manner. Complete financial
transparency in real time whilst functioning in a democratic process among binding terms with
real membership seems to be the least people should expect.
All of which is why I am a member/participant of no party and find the process
illegitimate across the board. It really does come back to it's not just if you win or lose,
but how it's played.
" If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before
the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act
." -- Donna Brazile
I, too, beg to differ. Naturally a perp doesn't see their own twisted actions as
criminal.
But the basic principle behind campaign finance laws is transparency. Both the D and R
parties receive extensive direct and in-kind government financing, such as the free primary
elections which states run on their behalf. Consequently they are obliged to provide an
accurate accounting of funds received and paid.
Does anyone think Robert "Torquemada" Mueller couldn't indict both Hillary and Donna
Brazile on a whole laundry list of federal offenses, if he were actually looking for gross
electoral wrongdoing?
Re "Naturally a perp doesn't see their own twisted actions as criminal."
Remember Brazile is famous for complaining that people were trying to "criminalize
behavior that is normal", when they complained about the blatant pay-to-play behavior
revealed during the election.
Slightly off topic: The neolib Dem estab has just discovered – much to their
surprise, no doubt – that's it's one thing to run the neoliberal economic playbook on
the deplorables, but quite another thing to run the neoliberal playbook on their own
establishment's finances and organization, each for their own personal benefit.
The judge dismissed the lawsuit because federal court wasn't, in his opinion, the proper
channel for seeking redress, not because he agreed with the DNC's assertion it wasn't
required to abide by its charter.
"But not one of them alleges that they ever read the DNC's charter or heard the statements
they now claim are false before making their donations. And not one of them alleges that they
took action in reliance on the DNC's charter or the statements identified in the First
Amended Complaint (DE 8). Absent such allegations, these Plaintiffs lack standing."
People who knew and did not speak, would they be accessories?
From Wikipedia:
Knowledge of the crime[edit]
To be convicted of an accessory charge, the accused must generally be proved to have had
actual knowledge that a crime was going to be, or had been, committed. Furthermore, there
must be proof that the accessory knew that his or her action, or inaction, was helping the
criminals commit the crime, or evade detection, or escape. A person who unknowingly houses
a person who has just committed a crime, for instance, may not be charged with an accessory
offense because they did not have knowledge of the crime.
I believe you are most correct & thanks for altering the direction of the
comments.
The support for Sanders was a resonate echo of
support many of us felt for President Jimmy Carter.
How far we have traveled is well acknowledged when you see that Sanders lost.
For the purposes of the Naked Capitalism readers, who are studying how real money is
captured & used by the Jet Setter Classes, here we have a Politico so entrenched
her Unit used coercion & tricks to take for themselves all of the main tool, money,
required to make the Democratic Party a real Party.
(I refuse to see Hillary Clinton as the First Woman Nominated for the Presidency, &
consider her & her husband Bill, the Clinton Unit.)
I do chalk it up to the Clinton Unit's long & destructive influence as law makers &
breakers. What the Unit is about is clear when you look at their history in Haiti. We are to
get the leadership & economy same as the Haitians get.
The leak that in many cases there was no sincere link at all between what Clinton Unit II
said, and what she really believed & intended, meant we were to get another cipher.
"Look out kid/They keep it all hid. -Bob Dylan, comes to mind.
After Obama it is clear that the Democratic Party is and will be in the pocket of the
pirate parasites of the US Financial System.
The revolution has to take place below the jet setter classes stranglehold on who writes
the checks for what. (I'd be interested in knowing how much of whose money paid for the
Clinton Unit's Boeing.)
In the end we as a bunch of honest people who like justice in that form it takes in the
day to day demonstration of good ethical moorings, liked how Sanders got the money for his
campaign.
The Clinton Unit by taking money from down ballot candidates crippled the necessary
revolution being attempted by those actually fighting to strengthen the nation.
Is there a large and notable set of organized people who vote, lining up behind Tulsi
Gabbard as the next Great Hope of the Mope (GHOTM)? Able and willing to go to the mat for
her? Trusting that she is not just another screen on which people can project their
images?
Got to have leaders, don't we? Because most of us just go along, go along, go along But
leaders are just other flawed humans, so easy to corrupt and failing that, to remove from the
game board by other means Too bad the Occupy model, whatever that actually was/is, seems not
to work effectively, especially against the organized on the other side of the crowd-control
technologies
I don't think people learned/practiced an occupy model for the most part. Folk were
expected to bite off more than they could chew in due haste. Remember the media immediately
asking what are your demands before people could figure out wtf was going on beyond we are
the 99 percent? Establishing a new practice was of course difficult to do while wondering if
you would be busted for just being there. Like the problems with parties people just keep
rolling with what they know (top-down), hammering their familiar square peg in a round hole
– rather than attempt/establish new process.
We really have no idea what a democratic process looks like.
Trusting that she is not just another screen on which people can project their
images?
Always a valid concern, but she's put her money where her mouth is numerous times now,
beginning with leaving the DNC in protest over its unethical practices.
And also, it's not up to her, is it? That screen thing is not about what she is, it's
about what people do. On a practical level, that move that Gabbard decries -- killing off
local party organizations -- is truly a step the wrong way. Real citizens have more to do
than just project their images.
she's put her money where her mouth is numerous times now, beginning with leaving
the DNC in protest over its unethical practices
That isn't why Tulsi Gabbard resigned as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.
She resigned because the person in that position is supposed to remain neutral in
presidential primaries, and she decided she wanted to publicly endorse Sanders.
In other words, she was following the party rules. This separates her from all those DNC
officers who stayed on board while putting their thumbs on the scale for Clinton.
In order to survive, you have to trust SOMEBODY! Whom do you trust JT? I get what you are
saying and agree 100%, but what next? I think that is the meaning of accountability. You have
to trust someone and make that trust the basis for your life. Screw me over and you are out.
Mopes are mopes because they keep placing their trust in the wrong place or for whatever
social reason, don't have an option.
The twisted logic of Margaret Thatchers now famous line-" there is no society", is a case
in point. The entire quote is,"I think we've been through a period where too many people have
been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with
it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.'
They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society.
There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything
except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after
ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too
much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone
has first met an obligation."
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the champions of Neoliberalism and the recasting of
the Divine right of Kings as a means of ordering society. The Market is Supreme, the Noble
Families (Corporations and Insiders, the 10%, are in direct communion with the divine, and
the rest of us need to worship and obey. We have no power because we have not earned it. It
is a recasting of the Feudal order. But what she fails to articulate is the obligation of the
system to the people? In her ideology, there is no reciprocal obligation. The systems owes
nothing. It is a system where the powerful hold control and the subjects are held in check by
blind faith.
Thatcher is right for the wrong reasons. Trust starts with the family and successful,
healthy families have a better chance of surviving over time due to the natural support they
provide. But she takes for granted, or is totally blinded by her own history. The Feudal
order failed for a reason. It breeds war and corruption. It thrived on ignorance and
violence. Offer a different vision, and the power center shifts.
Leadership is important as everyone knows. With proper leadership, much is possible.
Leadership is achieved when guided by some vision or goal. Is it any wonder why individuals
that can communicate a vision of brotherhood and solidarity are killed or marginalized by
Authoritarians? Where collectivism is shunned at every turn. How the meaning of family values
is cynically turned on its head.
Obligation is right. What is screwed up is how obligations have been distorted, and
continue to be distorted in a capitalist system. If you believe in social evolution, then the
strength of the family unit can serve as the fundamental immortal unit that provides the
basis for continued human existence. It is a buffer against the excesses of the capitalist
system. It is the source from which positive change will come. Support the family unit by
guaranteeing affordable housing, healthcare, and work. A basic income firmly grounded in
social contribution. What institutions are left that have not been corrupted by the
Neoliberal disease?
The problem making inroads is that the current political power still thinks this is a
game. It is not. The first duty for people who desire a better world for themselves, their
families, and their future generations need to see the obligation to protect the commons,
their families being the basic unit connected to a larger whole.
By destroying the middle class, capitalists have sown the seeds of their own destruction.
How many people are willingly going to walk into bondage? The promise of Neoliberalism is
failing and the mopes/masses know it- they live it. They just don't know where to turn. It is
a slow motion grinding into dust.
Communities are begging for relief. The organizations that need to be constructed are ones
that allow people to extend themselves out into the world and take risks, at the same time,
providing them with the assurance and concrete reality that if they fail, there is a place or
institution that will not let them perish. Capitalists buy loyalty. Individuals in their club
always fail upwards. No one is EVER left behind.
There is nothing to prevent other groups from achieving that same sense of solidarity
except fear.
The same is true of the Republican party -- nationally it's owned by the Koch brothers and
other billionaires, and locally, pretty much the same. Neither organization is going away in
the near future.
The most powerful aspect of the last election cycle is the eye opening role that money
plays in politics. Everyone knows the fundamental influence money has, but the false
narrative that has been acting for decades was finally turned on its head. Namely, that large
sums of money are needed to compete in the political process and only by funneling that
capital flow into the pockets of corporate entities can anything get done. Sanders campaign
proved without a doubt that self financing is possible and money alone is not enough to carry
victory. Its who controls that money, and what can be done with it, are the important
factors. Money didn't win the election for Trump, corruption did.
The lies and crookedness of the existing power structure has been laid bare and only the
completely uninformed still believe it or are directly paid off by the process. No wonder
silence and an outside forces- RUSSIA- must be deployed. There is nothing left to mask the
class warfare. This process reminds me of rats fleeing a sinking ship, and good riddance-
they all need to drown or just scatter away into obscurity.
But until those money flows can be directed towards the commons, the corruption will not
be driven out of our society. Democracy will die.
The silence and obfuscation on these important developments just highlight the crisis
capitalism, as a system, is facing and how the existing political structure is incapable of
dealing with the problem. The level of corruption is the problem, along with the extent lies
and misinformation are needed to maintain control. It is dysfunctional.
Once again, the rallying cry is for a social guarantee. A guarantee for work, healthcare,
housing, and a basic standard of living. Neoliberalism says no to all the above. Their
worldview is that there are no guarantees. Only competition where the strong prevail and the
weak perish. Boiled down once again to the fight between socialism and capitalism. Third way
politics is no longer functional. Hard choices must be made.
But what is the source of that power? Physical strength? Intellect? Mind control- the
ability to convince others? All of the above? The mind returns to social evolution. Forces
trying to maintain the status quo and counter forces seeking to alter the system. The
constant tension of forces exerting pressure until something gives. The faults and cracks are
everywhere. What holds it together is the peoples willingness to exert pressure where they
are directed to by their leadership. There is a crisis of leadership.
Finally, people are waking up to the notion that following crooks and thieves does not
make their lives better or secure. The nation needs leaders who are not cynical opportunists,
here in America and around the world. As the Trump administration makes painfully obvious,
America's standing in the world diminishes in proportion to its level of naked corruption. We
have become that which we professed we were against. The next true Revolution must be that
Scoundrels cannot run the world. Yea, I know Utopia. But if you can't dream about Utopia what
do humans have? All that comes to mind is a capitalist nightmare. ( As seen from the
Bottom)
Just as the Soviet Union collapsed in a breathtaking short time, the Rube Goldberg
construction that is todays capitalist system might meet the same speedy end. Just as the old
guard soviet apparatchiks held on for dear life, supporting a known failed experiment due to
their privileged position, if feels like the capitalist system is headed for a similar fate.
A quick, catastrophic failure instead of a slow, incremental adjustment. A failure brought
about form outside forces and the system not being able to deal or cope.
Donna Brazile can now make money revealing how she and the Democratic party screwed over
working people in this country and lied to the constituency she was supposed to serve. If
this helps people understand how they are fundamentally mislead, if only indirectly and
unintended, all the better. Its NOT about the money alone, it shows what the cynical
manipulation of money makes you become.
Re "Once again, the rallying cry is for a social guarantee. A guarantee for work,
healthcare, housing, and a basic standard of living. Neoliberalism says no to all the above.
Their worldview is that there are no guarantees. Only competition where the strong prevail
and the weak perish."
One cannot get a government controlled by special interests and large corporations to
provide social guarantees that are worth a damn and won't be corrupted. Indeed, the heart of
the problem is that the New Deal guarantees and post-Depression regulations (e.g.
Glass-Steagall), or even the earlier antitrust laws, have all been eroded.
There is a historical American worldview, not neoliberal, but also not "Third Way", in
which there are no Big Brother guarantees, yet there is strong social protection of those in
need. It contains a greater level of self-reliance, in the sense that one does not place
one's hope in corruptible governments as the solution. And yet not self-reliance, because it
trusted in neighbors to help neighbors. And it also renounces personal greed as a prime
motivator. The pioneers had this worldview – self reliance with a recognition of a
common interest, and thus a moral duty, leading to a willingness to help others, building an
entire nation, one barn raising party at a time, so that their children would have a better
life.
I am no historian, but gut experience informs me that what you are talking about is a true
American sentiment. The desire for individual freedom struggling simultaneously to forge a
lasting social bond with your fellow countrymen. At its heart, our nation was formed in the
embrace of a contradiction. The promise of freedom connected to the chains of bondage. The
age old dilemma of the rights of the rulers over the ruled. Freedom was sought above all else
and the historical opportunity presented itself for a great experiment. Open land available
for occupation, far from a ruling power, devoid of a powerful local social force.
The delusion, and betrayal, is the fact that reconciling this contradiction is no longer
the driving force of American politics. Neoliberal ideology has short circuited the political
system- on should we say, perfected it in that the ruling elite in America never intended to
share power with the unwashed masses. With the destruction of a functioning two party system,
even the pretense cannot be upheld any longer. Without a viable opposition party, the power
of private property can do as it pleases- and is doing it.
In America, we just had lots of space to spread out into and put off the day of reckoning.
Well, that day has arrived.
You mention barn raising, but that is an Amish tradition, to my limited understanding, the
Amish rejected American culture and wished to separate themselves from the broader culture to
ensure that their values could be preserved. It is an honest attempt to live christian
values. They are a-political and want to be left alone. I can't say much for other christian
denominations other than they are connected at the hip to capitalist values. That is not
working out so well on a cognitive dissonance level.
The cooperation that you speak of is more along socialist lines. And once again on an
intuitive level, most sane and healthy human beings, this is their normal state. The default
desire is to aid a person in need or to take satisfaction from assisting your neighbor
instead of abusing them. This natural human desire is prevented from becoming embodied in a
political force because that would spell the end to individual opulence, and we can't have
that. Charity is acceptable, a natural state of care and social equality is unacceptable.
The question is can you have a secular society that is dedicated to human care? Or a
theocratic society that does not become bogged down in religious dogma. American Democracy
seemed to point in that direction but appears to have stalled out due to resistance and lack
of trying.
Big Brother guarantees is code language for destroying the social responsibilities
embodied in New Deal legislation. Functioning Democracy is supposed to protect from
corruption by being able to vote the crooks out. This becomes impossible when the crooks take
control of the government and citizens are convinced that their government itself is the
problem. You have the revolving door policy that we see today. National government captured
by special interests.
Until a two-pronged attack can be instituted on a large scale- communities taking care of
one another along with demand for honest representation by the government, only small scale
resistance will be possible. Evil and hardship will prevail.
As far as a greater level of self-reliance and not placing all one's hopes in corruptible
governments I definitely think that's what the radical labor movement aimed at, a lot of
bottom up left movements do, just have limited power these days. This is fighting back to
reclaim the wealth the 1% (or 1% of the 1%) have captured.
Charity likely doesn't even work with such inequality for several reasons: Although you
can always give a dollar to a homeless person, charity fails to do that much good when almost
all of the wealth in a society is controlled by fewer and fewer people to a greater and
greater degree. A bunch of paupers can only do so much in helping each other (except in
trying to fight to reclaim the wealth from the 1% of the 1%). They can't do much else when
the very few control the businesses, the agriculture, own most of the property and use their
charity (Bill Gate's charity as it were) as a means of control (whatever little good it may
or may not also do).
Has this happened in other elections? Is this a first? The counterpart of this story is
the nuts and bolts of how the U.S. press is controlled by various interests.
This is a story which should not disappear down the memory hole.
" This was something that when I was vice chair of the DNC I didn't have knowledge of the
details, but it was something that some folks were actually talking about and were concerned
about at that time"
Boy, is there a big question mark hanging over THAT. Apparently she didn't respond to the
rumors by asking impertinent questions. And if the vice-chair didn't know who really owned
the joint, it was a purely ornamental office. Rather like Ellison's now.
Brazile said in her Politico article that even she had a hard time finding out what was
going on. She said she couldn't even issue a press release without an okay from Brooklyn.
I knew the cat was in the bag the moment nearly all of the super delegates publicly
supported Hillary Clinton before a single primary was held. (Are you listening, Sen. Shumer?)
I also knew it had to be a quid pro quo because it was obvious they were doing it for
campaign money for their re-elections. A lot of this appeared in print long before Donna
Brazile "discovered" the affirming document. This, and the way Bernie supporters were treated
at the convention, is why I will never give the DNC a penny.
Tulsi seemed a bit tongue tied on some questions in her position and not knowing what was
going on? Not credible to me.
She gets credit for quitting and endorsing Bernie, and big credit for anti war, but she does
not have history as a progressive, though moving in that direction.
Similarly Liz is no progressive irrespective of anti bank position, though similarly inching
in that direction.
Both want to move up, seem to be sensing changing winds.
If Bernie runs, who would he pick? Both usefully female, but neither brings any ev's he won't
get anyway. Tulsi brings looks and youth and she endorsed Liz better at treasury, and she
might be happy there.
I think Liz would be a great Treasury Secretary. As for Bernie's VP pick, I think that
Tulsi would, ahem, appeal to a certain portion of our male electorate.
I also think that he could also do well by choosing Nina Turner as his VP. Unlike Tulsi,
whose oratorical style puts me to sleep, Nina knows how to sign, seal, and DELIVER a
speech.
Gabbard is a co-sponsor of all 4, and Jayapal is a co-sponsor of all but HR1587. I believe
you that Gabbard isn't always progressive, but she does pretty well most of the time, and
(for now) she's better than Jayapal on the very dangerous issue of antibiotic overuse.
I don't know people taking positions on things that aren't likely to pass isn't all that.
Ok if enough Dems were on board and they controlled congress or some Reps were AND they had a
president who wouldn't veto then maybe Medicare for All etc. Even getting enough Dems on
board to pass it even if they had the majority is a long way from where we are now.
However a constitutional amendment is in a whole other category of unlikely than that as
the requirement to get one passed are super majorities we are never going to see. So some of
the former may be difficult and mostly grandstanding at this point, but I really regard the
last as impossible.
Another way to take a public position is to refuse to co-sponsor high profile bills such
as these. People in the PACs notice if a member of Congress co-sponsors something that they
don't like, or if the member chooses to avoid co-sponsoring it.
Of course none of these bills will pass in the current Congress. However, it is important
to get some momentum for them so that they will have a greater chance in future Congresses,
and co-sponsorship is a way to generate some of that momentum.
HR676 has been introduced in every Congress since 2003, and this is the first Congress in
which it has gained more than 100 co-sponsors. HR1587 has also been introduced since 2003,
although it has always had a different bill number. Its number of co-sponsors has gone up and
down.
Perhaps too many people are paying too much attention to Trump's twitter account, and not
enough attention to the wonkish reality of how bills can become laws. People need to push
their Representatives to support these bills.
DNC has long stood for Democratic National CLUB not Committee. Under Perez, I see little
evidence of movement toward a "democratic" "committee." This is not about Anti-Sanders it is
apparently about maintaining Clintonism when the electorate wants more progressivism. DNC is
pushing many of us to vote for a qualified Republican over a Clintonite Democrat. That is
very stupid – very sad.
Good laws make a good society, bad laws make a bad society. Good people make better laws
than bad people.
All people are good, but some do more bad, sure, go ahead and think of it that way.
I only get to vote for people.
"The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to
talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with
economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats." Steve Bannon
It's not often your opponent does you the favor of telling you why you are losing. I
pissed away some money on the Democrats last election (not because I liked Hillary; I just
despise Trump). What I got for my money was four or five emails a day asking for more money.
That and the ignominious, gut-wrenching loss. Many of the emails were from Donna Brazile and
almost all of them were about identity politics issues, usually tsk-tsk'ing some nasty thing
Trump said about one group or another. I remember thinking how dumb this was. They already
had the identity politics voters and getting them to turn out was going to be a ground game
play. While they sang to their choir, Trump and Bannon were out energizing an aggrieved white
middle and working class, which could have been Hillary's. Non-stop ads with Trump's ugly
face on the screens of Pennsylvania and Ohio saying "you're fired" would have been good.
Every time the Democrats waxed indignant about an identity issue, they lost some more
aggrieved white voters, who took the message as further confirmation that the Dems really
didn't care about them and their problems. Trump walked right in. Comey's timing, the
Russians, etc all mattered, but net net the Democrats gave Trump the win. The top of their
organization is full of people who seem to be better at identity politics than anything else,
except maybe backstabbing. They're crap at strategy.
I strongly encourage those who have Democratic friends and relatives to be sure that those
friends and relatives have seen the article by Donna Brazile. Don't be afraid to be a pest
(although I do recommend politeness). Many of those friends and relatives will be voting in
primaries next year, and they need to know what is happening in the Democratic party.
It doesn't just indict Hillary, although that is what gets the focus, it is a condemnation
of Obama as well for leaving the Dem party in so much debt. So Obama as well sacrificed the
Dem party for his own campaign. By slightly different means (running up debt rather than
funneling money) but to the same end. What a self-seeking bunch, to the destruction of even
their own party, the Dem top ticket has been (yea cheeto is no better, but that's it's own
thing).
DNC Bylaws state that the Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national
officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and
evenhandedness during the Democratic Party
Presidential nominating process.
Since that obviously didn't happen, I would assert that Hillary being the Democrat nominee
is null and void.
When they rig an election, everyone participates in the election (voting or running) is a
victim.
Even people watching it become victimized (like the quiz shows in the 1950s, TV viewers
were victims).
(So, you, me and all the other guys had the primary election stolen.)
And if Donna Brazile tells you it's rigged, it's not up to you, but up to all of us, to
absorb the insider information (you can't withhold all those secret details) and to decide on
the verdict.
"The victory fund agreement was signed in August 2015 and widely reported during the
course of the campaign, amplifying the friction between Sanders and the DNC that had already
been fueled by disagreements over the primary debate schedule and access to the party's voter
database."
oh well then nothing to see here, let's just go back to bashing russia.
Wasn't Brazile the one who said that while the DNC is supposed to be neutral, she was
working on behalf of Clinton over Bernie? So as we all knew, then and now, grifters gotta
grift and Brazile is no better than anyone else at the DNC who keeps failing upwards and
being rewarded for her part in the grift.
The real question is so much Russian influence as the US intelligence agencies influence on 2016 presidential elections. Brennan
in particular. He bet of Hillary Clinton and lost. After that he was instrumental in launching "color revolution" against Trump. In
which the the critical step was to appoint "special prosecutor".
Notable quotes:
"... But even more is emerging that could take the Russia story in a totally new direction -- namely that the infamous dossier compiled
by former British Secret Intelligence Service officer Christopher Steele was bought and paid for by a law firm , Perkins Coie, working
on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). ..."
"... The extent to which the Steele Dossier influenced the intelligence underpinning Mueller's probe has yet to be determined with
any certainty. In January, the U.S. intelligence community published the unclassified ICA, which was derived from a compilation of intelligence
reports and assessments conducted by the FBI, CIA, and NSA. Many of the allegations made in the ICA mirror reporting contained in the
Steele Dossier. So striking are the similarities that there are real concerns among some senior Republican lawmakers that the ICA merely
reflects "echoes" of the Steele Dossier reported back via liaison with foreign intelligence services who had access to it (namely the
British Secret Intelligence Service) or whose own sources were also utilized by Steele. ..."
"... An examination of the nexus between the dossier and the publication of the Russian ICA, however, shows that Litt was less than
truthful in his denials. Material from the Steele Dossier was, in fact, shared with the FBI and U.S. intelligence community in July
of 2016, and seems to have been the driving force behind the intelligence briefings provided to the so-called Gang of Eight who served
as the initial impetus for an investigation into Russian meddling that eventually morphed into the 2017 Russian ICA. ..."
"... Moreover, while Perkins Coie had its hands all over the dossier, it was also massaging the Russian hack narrative for mainstream
media primetime. ..."
"... The political law practice of Perkins Coie was started in 1981 under the leadership of Bob Bauer , who went on to become the
White House Counsel to President Barack Obama. Today, the practice is headed by Marc Elias , who has been described as "the Democrats'
go-to attorney an indispensable figure in the party." Elias oversees the work of 18 attorneys representing nearly every Democratic senator,
as well as the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and Hillary for America, which oversaw the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... Sussman, after coordinating with Wasserman-Schultz, approached the FBI and tried to get them to publicly attribute the intrusion
to Russia. ..."
"... When the FBI refused, citing a need to gain access to the DNC servers before it could make that call, Sussman balked and, again
with the full support of the DNC, instead coordinated a massive publicity effort intended to link Russia to the DNC breach through an
exclusive to the Washington Pos t ..."
"... According to the Washington Post , in early August 2016, the CIA director John Brennan came into possession of "sourcing deep
inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin's direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and
discredit the U.S. presidential race." This intelligence was briefed to the Gang of Eight. Almost immediately, information derived from
this briefing began to leak to the media. "Russia's hacking appeared aimed at helping Mr. Trump win the November election," officials
with knowledge of Brennan's intelligence told the New York Times . The intelligence, referred to as "bombshell," allegedly "captured
Putin's specific instructions on the operation's audacious objectives -- defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton,
and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump." ..."
"... The question is was the investigation supposed to uncover whatever it uncovere, or was it supposed to fabricate the discovery?
If it was fabrication, yes, they should be condemned. ..."
"... My best guess is that some part of the US intelligence community is involved in the election manipulation. Overthrowing foreign
governments or undermining the EU is one thing, colluding with a foreign power to manipulate the US election is quite another. Note,
by the way, the absence of any reference to George Papadopulous or Viktor Yanukovych. ..."
"... But it is obvious that most of the Beltway including the spook world badly wants a proxy war with Russia, Iran, and Syria.
As usual we are killing people overseas under Presidents of both parties and as usual the United States of narcissism can only complain
about what dastardly foreigners allegedly did to us. ..."
"... Someone help me out here. If Clinton (or her very close associates) pay huge bucks to Russians to get dirt (even if it is made
up dirt) on Trump, that is good, because it hurts Trump. But if Trump associates simply have conversations with Russians, full stop
(cf. Michael Flynn, or anyone else who spoke with the Russian ambassador), that is criminal. Is this not sort of a double standard?
..."
"... We're expected to believe Crowdstrike's report on Russian hacking but we can't examine the evidence. We're expected to believe
that Perkins Coie went rogue and decided to spend $12 million without informing any of its clients. ..."
"... What a bunch of hogwash. There's a cover up here, but it's not what the complicit media is portraying. The cover up is of the
past 8 years of misdeeds by the Deep State, the Clintons and the Obama Administration. ..."
"... I think the story is even more obvious than this. They wanted to spy on aspects of the Trump campaign but they legally couldn't.
The FBI told them they needed a reason to tap the phones and read the mail. They paid a guy to put together a dossier that would allow
them to get FISA warrants to do the spying they wanted to do illegally. They just needed the dossier to say certain things to get it
past a FISA judge. They did this and tapped his phones and read his emails and texts for the purpose of beating him in the election.
It is really that simple of a story. ..."
"... Given Hillary's past pay to play lobbying and her disregard for national security, it would seem appropriate to have investigate
if members of the Clinton campaign had contacts with the Russian Ambassador or Russian "operatives. We now know that the dossier relied
on collaboration with Russian officials. ..."
"... In my opinion, Mueller has disgraced his former and present positions by collaborating in this conjured affair that obfuscates
the real crimes occurring during the Obama administration. ..."
"... Crooked Hillary and her klan never thought for a second they wouldn't be able to cover up democrat crimes. The Clinton Crime
Family is in full panic mode. No one seems to remember why Mueller quit as director of the FBI. He was disgusted by the Obama administration
covering up lawlessness. ..."
"... Why didn't the FBI insist on examining the DNC servers? Something's not right. ..."
"... I voted for Clinton, but as the lesser evil on various issues, chiefly domestic and environmental. Clinton is not in Putin's
pocket. She is in the pocket of Netanyahu, and the Saudis. Trump doesn't really seem to be in Putin's pocket -- he has neocons and others
working hard to ensure that he gets into a confrontation with Iran. Basically he too is in the pocket of the Israelis and the Saudis.
..."
"... The mainstream ignores this. The countries with real influence on our policies don't have to favor one party over the other.
They have them both in their pocket. ..."
"... As time goes on, I don't think Russia "meddled" in US elections as much as US politicians of both parties corruptly attempted
to rig the elections. Seems to me that the demonization of Russia is bi-partisan because the US military industrial complex needs a
"bogey man" to justify its billions$$$$ and just about ALL politicians need that money to stay in power. ..."
The Democratic Law Firm Behind the Russian Collusion Narrative How a high-powered practice contracted oppo-research
on Trump -- and then pushed a hack story.
Credit: Shutterstock/ Mark Van Scyoc The ongoing investigation
headed by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller into alleged collusion between the campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump and the Russian
government has moved into a new phase, with a focus on
purported money laundering. On Monday,
indictments were filed against
former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates.
But even more is emerging that could take the Russia story in a totally new direction -- namely that the infamous dossier
compiled by former British Secret Intelligence Service officer Christopher Steele was
bought and paid for by a law firm , Perkins Coie, working on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National
Committee (DNC).
The current controversy isn't so much over the contents of the dossier -- despite some of the reporting, none of the relevant
claims contained within have been verified. Rather, the issue in question is how opposition research derived from foreign intelligence
sources and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC ended up influencing the decision to prepare the January 2017
Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) into alleged
Russian interference in the 2016 election, the contents of that assessment, and the subsequent investigations by the U.S. Congress
and a special prosecutor.
The extent to which the Steele Dossier influenced the intelligence underpinning Mueller's probe has yet to be determined with
any certainty. In January, the U.S. intelligence community published the unclassified ICA, which was derived from a compilation of
intelligence reports and assessments conducted by the FBI, CIA, and NSA. Many of the allegations made in the ICA mirror reporting
contained in the Steele Dossier. So striking are the similarities that there are
real
concerns among some senior Republican lawmakers that the ICA merely reflects "echoes" of the Steele Dossier reported back via
liaison with foreign intelligence services who had access to it (namely the British Secret Intelligence Service) or whose own sources
were also utilized by Steele.
According to Robert Litt , who served as general counsel
to former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, this mirroring was nothing more than coincidence. "The dossier itself,"
Litt wrote in a recent Lawfare blog , "played
absolutely no role in the coordinated intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in our election. That assessment, which was
released in unclassified form in January but which contained much more detail in the classified version that has been briefed to
Congress, was based entirely on other sources and analysis."
Moreover, Litt noted, the decision in December 2016 to brief President-elect Trump on the existence of the Steele Dossier and
provide him with a two-page summary of that document, was not a reflection that "the Intelligence Community had relied on it in any
way, or even made any determination that the information it contained was reliable and accurate." It was rather, Litt said, a need
to share with Trump the fact that the document existed and was being passed around Congress and the media.
An examination of the nexus between the dossier and the publication of the Russian ICA, however, shows that Litt was less
than truthful in his denials. Material from the Steele Dossier was, in fact, shared with the FBI and U.S. intelligence community
in July of 2016, and seems to have been the driving force behind the intelligence briefings provided to the so-called
Gang of Eight who served as the initial impetus for an investigation into Russian meddling that eventually morphed into the 2017
Russian ICA.
Moreover, while Perkins Coie had its hands all over the dossier, it was also massaging the Russian hack narrative for mainstream
media primetime.
It was in the latter two roles that Elias, acting on behalf of his clients, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington, D.C.-based company
that, according to its website , "provides premium research, strategic intelligence,
and due diligence services." Fusion GPS had previously been contracted by the
Washington Free Beacon "to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary." However, when it became clear that Trump
was going to secure the Republican Party nomination, the contract with Fusion GPS was terminated. According to
a letter sent by Perkins Coie to Fusion
GPS sometime in March 2016, Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of Fusion GPS, met with Elias and lobbied for the job of conducting
opposition research on behalf of the Clinton campaign. In April 2016, Simpson's company was retained by the firm through the end
of the election cycle.
Perkins Coie is also home to Michael
Sussman , a partner in the firm's Privacy and Data Security Practice, who was retained by the DNC to respond to the cyber-penetration
of their server in the spring of 2016. When, in late April 2016, the DNC discovered that its servers had been breached, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz,
then chairwoman of the DNC, turned to Perkins Coie and Sussman for help. Sussman chaired the meetings at the DNC regarding the breach,
and, on May 4, 2016,
he reached out to Shawn Henry , a former FBI agent who headed the incident response unit for the private cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike,
for assistance in mitigating the fallout from the breach. According to CrowdStrike, it was immediately able to detect the presence
of hostile malware that it identified as Russian in origin. Sussman, after coordinating with Wasserman-Schultz, approached the
FBI and tried to get them to publicly attribute the intrusion to Russia.
When the FBI refused, citing a need to gain access to the DNC servers before it could make that call, Sussman balked and,
again with the full support of the DNC, instead coordinated a massive publicity effort intended to link Russia to the DNC breach
through
an exclusive to the Washington Pos t , which was published in concert with a dramatic CrowdStrike technical report
detailing the intrusion, ominously named
"Bears in the Midst."
This public relations campaign started the media frenzy over the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC server, enabling every facet
of the story that followed to be painted with a Russian brush -- normally with
a spokesperson from either
the DNC or Hillary for America taking the lead in promulgating the story.
It was about this same time that Elias decided to expand the scope of Fusion GPS's opposition research against Trump, going beyond
the simple mining of open-source information that had been the hallmark of the firm's work up until that time, and instead delving
into the active collection of information using methodologies more akin to the work of spy agencies. The person
Fusion GPS turned to for this task was Steele
Key persons within the Clinton campaign and the DNC denied any knowledge of either the decision by Perkins Coie to hire Fusion
GPS for the purpose of gathering opposition research, or to tap Steele to conduct this task. Elias reportedly made use of money already
paid to the firm by the Clinton campaign and the DNC to fund the work of Fusion GPS, creating the conditions for deniability on the
part of his clients. This decision meant that Perkins Coie, as a firm, had ownership of the Steele Dossier; expenditures of firm
assets require the approval of either the
management or executive committee
of the firm (Elias sits on the executive committee).
But as far as intelligence products go, the Steele Dossier is as sketchy as it gets. It's an amalgam of poorly written "reports"
cobbled together from what
Vanity Fair called "angry émigrés," "wheeling and dealing oligarchs," and "political dissidents with well-honed axes
to grind." These are precisely the kind of sources intelligence professionals operating in Russia in the early 1990s -- Steele was
assigned to Moscow from 1990 to 1993 -- would have had access to. Such sources also produce information that professional analysts
normally treat with more than a modicum of skepticism when preparing national-level intelligence products.
The very first report produced by Steele, dated June 20, 2016, was chock full of the kind of salacious details justifying its
explosive title, "Republican Candidate Donald Trump's Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin." The substantive
charges leveled in the report centered on three unnamed sources -- a senior Foreign Ministry official, a former top-level Russian
intelligence officer, and a senior Russian financial official -- whom Steele accessed through a "trusted compatriot." The report
alleged that Russia had been feeding the Trump campaign "valuable intelligence" on Clinton, and that this effort was supported and
directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. A second report, dated June 26, 2016, focused exclusively on "Russian State Sponsored
and Other Cyber Offensive (Criminal) Operations."
These reports were delivered to Elias at a critical time -- on July 22,
when Wikileaks released thousands of emails believed to have been sources from the DNC hack . These emails detailed the internal
deliberations of the DNC that proved to be embarrassing to both Clinton and the DNC leadership -- Wasserman-Schultz was compelled
to resign due to the revelations set forth in these emails. This leak took place on the eve of the Democratic National Convention
when Clinton was to be selected as the Democrats' candidate for president. The Clinton campaign blamed Russia. "Russian state actors,"
Robby Mook, the Clinton campaign manager told the press , "were feeding the email to hackers for the purpose of helping Donald
Trump."
If Elias thought the publication of the DNC emails would spur the U.S. intelligence community to join both the DNC and the Clinton
campaign in pointing an accusatory finger at Russia, he would be disappointed. When questioned by CNN's Jim Sciutto at the
2016 Aspen
Security Forum as to whether or not the DNI shared the White House's view that there was no doubt Russia was behind the hack
of the DNC emails, Clapper responded, "I don't think we are quite ready to make a call on attribution I don't think we are ready
to make a public call on that yet." Noting that there was still some uncertainty about exactly who was behind the DNC cyber-penetration,
Clapper stated that he was taken aback by the media's "hyperventilation" over the DNC email issue, pointing out that the intelligence
community did not "know enough to ascribe motivation" at that time.
According to the
Washington Post , in early August 2016, the CIA director John Brennan came into possession of "sourcing deep inside the
Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin's direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit
the U.S. presidential race." This intelligence was briefed to the Gang of Eight. Almost immediately, information derived from this
briefing began to leak to the media. "Russia's hacking appeared aimed at helping Mr. Trump win the November election," officials
with knowledge of Brennan's intelligence told
the New York Times
. The intelligence, referred to as "bombshell," allegedly "captured Putin's specific instructions on the operation's audacious objectives
-- defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump."
This intelligence, allegedly from a "human source" linked to a foreign intelligence service, is at the center of the current spate
of Russian meddling investigations. Was this source a product of the CIA's own efforts, as DNI General Counsel Litt contends, or
was this an "echo" of the work done by Steele? The answer may lie in the actions of both Elias and Steele, who in the aftermath of
the Democratic National Convention, and on the heels of the statement by DNI Clapper that he wasn't ready to commit to Russian attribution,
shared the first two reports with both the FBI and members of the intelligence community.
Steele also sat down with U.S. officials to discuss the details of these reports , which presumably included the sourcing that
was used.
The parallels between the information contained in the initial report filed by Steele and the "bombshell" intelligence that prompted
Brennan's decision to brief the Gang of Eight are too close to be casually dismissed. Of particular note is Steele's "Source C,"
a senior Russian "financial official" who had "overheard Putin talking" on at least two occasions. Was this the source that Brennan
cited when it came to Putin's "specific instructions"? The cause and effect relationship between the decision by Marc Elias to brief
U.S. intelligence officials on the aspects of the Steele Dossier, and Brennan's coming into possession of intelligence that virtually
mirrors the reporting by Steele, cannot be dismissed out of hand.
The future of the Trump presidency will be determined by the various investigations currently underway. Those efforts have been
influenced, in one way or another, by reporting sourced to Perkins Coie, including the designation of Russia as the responsible party
behind the DNC cyber-breach and the Steele Dossier. These investigations are linked in their unquestioning embrace of the conclusions
set forth in the 2017 Russia Intelligence Community Assessment that Russia was, in fact, meddling in the election. However, the genesis
of that finding, both in terms of Russian involvement in the DNC hack and the "bombshell" intelligence introduced by Brennan in August
2016, has gone largely unquestioned by the investigators.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control
treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Deal
of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road to War (Clarity Press, 2017). MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR
The question is was the investigation supposed to uncover whatever it uncovere, or was it supposed to fabricate the discovery?
If it was fabrication, yes, they should be condemned. But if it was a question of "tell us what you find, good, bad, or indifferent"
then uncovering what might be treasonable activity would be called a patriotic act.
All of this and not one mention of how much of the controversy Donald Trump could defuse by simply releasing his tax returns and
allowing more transparency into his financial relationships with the Russian oligarchy.
Ritter's underlying 'logic' here extended would have us believe Alan Turin's breaking of the Enigma Machine was done in collusion
with Nazi U-boat commanders.
The spooks are still scared silly of Russiagate. "Hillary paid" doesn't mean "Hillary fabricated". That Mr Ritter is reduced to
such a manifestly silly argument shows just how spooked the spooks are. My best guess is that some part of the US intelligence
community is involved in the election manipulation. Overthrowing foreign governments or undermining the EU is one thing, colluding
with a foreign power to manipulate the US election is quite another. Note, by the way, the absence of any reference to George
Papadopulous or Viktor Yanukovych.
Given that Russia's insiders (not to mention former-officials) are no more lined up with Putin than US counterparts and political
actors are behind any current US administration or opponent, within and without the party in power, there are presumably Russian
actors who would like to undermine Putin.
To the extent "the Russians" may be behind particular efforts – including information/disinformation – related to the 2016
US election, might they not have sought to undermine foreign and (Russian) domestic proponents of US-Russian detente?
" Overthrowing foreign governments or undermining the EU is one thing, colluding with a foreign power to manipulate the
US election is quite another. "
This is a joke. I have no concern one way or the other about whether Trump colluded with Russia – if laws were broken, prosecute
the lot of them. But it is obvious that most of the Beltway including the spook world badly wants a proxy war with Russia,
Iran, and Syria. As usual we are killing people overseas under Presidents of both parties and as usual the United States of narcissism
can only complain about what dastardly foreigners allegedly did to us.
In DC we have a vicious fight between the McCain-Clinton forces and the Trump forces. It's a choice between warmongers.
Donald (the left leaning one), I agree with your concluding comment that we are left with a choice between two warmongers, no
question about that. However if you look at the corruption in the deep state in the Uranium One deal, how it was approved and
now nobody, I mean nobody knows anything about FBI informant and gag order on him for the last 8 years it is just mind boggling.
Oh well after all these years I think the African dictators have more integrity than our elected officials.
Someone help me out here. If Clinton (or her very close associates) pay huge bucks to Russians to get dirt (even if it is
made up dirt) on Trump, that is good, because it hurts Trump. But if Trump associates simply have conversations with Russians,
full stop (cf. Michael Flynn, or anyone else who spoke with the Russian ambassador), that is criminal. Is this not sort of a double
standard?
I've worked at large law firms, been a partner at several and litigated against Perkins Coie, so I know a bit about them. Knowing
the industry and this firm in particular, I can say without reservation that this statement is ridiculous: "Elias reportedly made
use of money already paid to the firm by the Clinton campaign and the DNC to fund the work of Fusion GPS, creating the conditions
for deniability on the part of his clients." That does not and would not happen with a $12 million expense.
Mr. Ritter does not come out and say it, but there's a plausible explanation for all of this Russia nonsense we've been hearing
about for the past year. Until the day after the election, 99.9% of Democrats were convinced that Hillary Clinton would win. Once
enshrined in office, all of the misdeeds that they'd been getting away with for the past decade -- the Clinton Foundation, Uranium
One, the Pay-to-Play politics, etc. -- would be swept under the rug.
November came, and that didn't happen. Democrats were both floored and caught with their pants down. Now, all of their dirty
laundry was going to come out into the open. It was only a matter of time.
So, what did they do? The same thing Democrats always do. The best defense is an offense. 'Always accuse your opponents of
doing whatever wrong you've committed.' All of the sudden, it wasn't just that 'Russians hacked the election.' It became, 'the
Trump campaign secretly colluded with the Russians.' The Steele dossier was leaked, the FBI was briefed which in turn briefed
Obama, the Gang of Eight and Trump. Next, a Special Prosecutor had to be appointed to investigate.
But, where does it all lead? Back to Hillary, through Perkins Coie, and through many of the same Deep State players who were
complicit in the misdeeds.
We now learn that Comey, Mueller and Rosenstein all knew about Russians attempting to buy influence through donations to the
Clinton "charity," but they turned a blind eye when Uranium One was up for approval.
We now learn that Clinton and the DNC paid for the Steele dossier then fed it to Comey, who leaked it.
We're expected to believe Crowdstrike's report on Russian hacking but we can't examine the evidence. We're expected to
believe that Perkins Coie went rogue and decided to spend $12 million without informing any of its clients.
What a bunch of hogwash. There's a cover up here, but it's not what the complicit media is portraying. The cover up is
of the past 8 years of misdeeds by the Deep State, the Clintons and the Obama Administration.
I find it curious that Crooked Mueller charged two republicans just as Crooked Hillary and the DNC were identified for paying
Russians for smear documents! America First!
How is it not true? Reports indicate that Mr. Steele did indeed use paid sources within Russia to compile the "dossier" on Trump.
Steele used money paid by the Clinton campaign labeled as "legal fees". There is a reason Hillary, DWS, Podesta and the others
have all lied.
I think the story is even more obvious than this. They wanted to spy on aspects of the Trump campaign but they legally couldn't.
The FBI told them they needed a reason to tap the phones and read the mail. They paid a guy to put together a dossier that would
allow them to get FISA warrants to do the spying they wanted to do illegally. They just needed the dossier to say certain things
to get it past a FISA judge. They did this and tapped his phones and read his emails and texts for the purpose of beating him
in the election. It is really that simple of a story.
Did Obama's White House Counsel Bauer and Perkins Coie's Elias engage in a conspiracy to smear Trump and benefit the Clinton campaign?
Did they orchestrate a campaign trick, using the Fusion GPS dossier and an insider leaking DNC emails to Wikileaks,that falsely
smeared the Trump team?
Hillary and Fusion GPS both lobbied against business restrictions proposed and imposed by the Magnitsky legislation and both
received bonuses and payments from Russian entities with ties to the Putin gang.
Given Hillary's past pay to play lobbying and her disregard for national security, it would seem appropriate to have investigate
if members of the Clinton campaign had contacts with the Russian Ambassador or Russian "operatives. We now know that the dossier
relied on collaboration with Russian officials.
Given that several levels under the 17 intelligence heads of the Obama administration, including former FBI Director Mueller,
participated in suppressing known Russian bribery, obfuscated and obstructed the investigation into Hillary's national security
violations & pay to play schemes, and apparently conspired using a dossier, containing Russian supplied information, to throw
the last Presidential election, it is time to bring the Obama political appointees and Clinton campaign officials to justice and
stop the interference affecting the Trump administration.
In my opinion, Mueller has disgraced his former and present positions by collaborating in this conjured affair that obfuscates
the real crimes occurring during the Obama administration.
The Russian SVR RF was no doubt inside the DNC's server, just as it was no doubt inside of Hillary Clinton's private unsecured
email server on which she did all of her State Department business.
But that does not necessarily mean that the SVR RF released the damning evidence about the corruption of the DNC & its machinations
to influence the outcome of the Election to Wikileaks. I believe Seth Rich was the source of that damning evidence.
Since there was allegedly some evidence of the Russian hacking, the DNC conveniently blamed the Wikileaks story on them.
But the fact the Democrats refused to turn over the supposedly hacked DNC server to the FBI suggests there is something seriously
wrong with the Democ"rats" story.
Crooked Hillary and her klan never thought for a second they wouldn't be able to cover up democrat crimes. The Clinton Crime
Family is in full panic mode. No one seems to remember why Mueller quit as director of the FBI. He was disgusted by the Obama
administration covering up lawlessness.
All of this and not one mention of how much of the controversy Hillary Clinton could defuse by simply releasing all of the government
emails she kept on a private server in order to keep them away from FOIA requests and allowing more transparency into her financial
relationships with the Russian oligarchy.
Nice try at deflection, but it is not likely to stop Muller because he has an actual brain. On the other hand, the comments indicate
that the conspiracy types are on board. Now I have it on good authority that there are ties between Steele and Benghazi as well
so it is time to wrap this all up together into a unified story.
Since most of the posters here seem to be partisan I'm sure that no one will like my preference: Lock both Trump and HRC up and
put them in the same cell to save us money. They are both crooked and any attempt to accuse one and defend the other is futile.
Karen Finney, formerly of the Clinton 2016 campaign, on October 29th:
"I think what's important, though, is less who funded it than what was in the dossier."
In the same interview:
"We also learned this week that Cambridge Analytica, the company that was basically the data company for the [Trump] campaign,
reached out to Julian Assange of Wikileaks."
Did everybody catch that?
In today's Democratic Party, it is perfectly acceptable to pay foreign sources for dirt, fabricated or not, on your domestic
political opponent.
But it is totally unacceptable to reach out to Wikileaks, with no money involved, for dirt on your domestic political opponent.
I'll note that Wikileaks has relied on whistle-blower sources and has not been shown to have published any false information in
its entire 10-year existence.
The Russian SVR RF was likely inside the DNC's server, just as it was likely inside of Hillary Clinton's private unsecured email
server on which she did all of her State Department business.
But that does not necessarily mean that the SVR RF released the evidence about the rotten corruption of the DNC & its machinations
to influence the outcome of the Election to Wikileaks. I believe Seth Rich was the source of that evidence.
Since there was allegedly some evidence of the Russian hacking, the DNC conveniently blamed the Wikileaks story on them.
But the fact the Democrats refused to turn over the supposedly hacked DNC server to the FBI suggests that there is something
seriously wrong with the Democ"rats" story.
To all of those who think that paying a foreign informant money to give you info is the same thing as accepting help from a foreign
government, you have some screws lose.
Furthermore, the help that Trump received was in the form of emails that have been stolen from an American citizen, a federal
offence.
The whole Uranium one non story is based on a book that his own author admitted he has no evidence of malfeasance by HRC ,
and who was paid for his effort by the Mercers.
Also, the Uranium cannot be exported outside the USA anyway, because the law prevents it, no matter who owns the company
To all those who think what Hillary campaign did is the same thing as what Trump campaign did: Can you with a straight face think
that Hillary is in Putin's pocket? I don't think so. The issue, if you're being honest, is that a lot of people on the other side
can easily see Trump being in Putin's pocket. And so far he (Trump) has done nothing to disprove that. Remember the Glee that
the neocons had when Trump ordered a few missiles at Syria..guess what nothing came off it and Assad is still very much in power
and no one cares anymore (an outcome that I am fine with). You think things would have been the same if Hillary was in power?
But at the end of the day, we're left to wonder whether Trump is doing Putin's bidding Just because so far he has done nothing
that has been antagonistic towards Russian interests (Iran notwithstanding because nothing is going to come off it, all it is
going to do is make US look impotent, which will be fine by Putin).
If only Sanders had ever exclaimed something like "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn Russians!"
If there is any kind of actual evidence of state actors in the various efforts to force transparency on the Clinton campaign
and the DNC, it is now tainted by the association with Steele, Simpson, Elias, which appear to have repeatedly acted against client
privileges and privacy – peddling results paid for by one client to another, leaking information paid for by clients to the press,
Congress, the FBI – or have acted with client permission, while a former "spy" is accessing and potentially endangering networks
maintained by his former employer, a foreign intelligence service known for its ability to find yellowcake.
Only the Democrats can show such staggering ineptitude.
The plot needs some new, exciting turn at this point. Let us speculate that the Steele Dossier was in fact a false flag operation,
allowing "Russians" to discredit not one, but two presidential campaigns, not one, but two presidential candidates, a twofer that
makes whomever becomes President look like an idiot. One of the most ridiculous propositions of this whole affair has been the
claim that Putin would seriously care which incompetent and corrupt American gets to prosecute the self-inflicted ruin of this
blighted nation for the next four years.
@Virginia Farmer : "Lock both Trump and HRC up and put them in the same cell to save us money. They are both crooked and any attempt
to accuse one and defend the other is futile."
"To all those who think what Hillary campaign did is the same thing as what Trump campaign did: Can you with a straight face think
that Hillary is in Putin's pocket?"
I'm not very partisan. I voted for Clinton, but as the lesser evil on various issues, chiefly domestic and environmental.
Clinton is not in Putin's pocket. She is in the pocket of Netanyahu, and the Saudis. Trump doesn't really seem to be in Putin's
pocket -- he has neocons and others working hard to ensure that he gets into a confrontation with Iran. Basically he too is in
the pocket of the Israelis and the Saudis.
The mainstream ignores this. The countries with real influence on our policies don't have to favor one party over the other.
They have them both in their pocket.
Yeah, I can't keep up with all the twists and turns. I read just enough to see both sides ( the partisan ones) live in closed
cognitive universes. I suspect there is plenty of corruption and dishonesty to go around, even if we restricted ourselves to real
or alleged Russian ties. But I wonder what would turn up if we really looked into how our foreign policy sausage is made?
In my annoyance I overstated it a little, but this thread is a good example of what I was saying about a lot of the liberal
commenters on TAC. I don't read a lot of these comments and see people who are giving the article much thought.
BTW I was about to write the exact same thing to JR you did regarding the Saudis and the Israelis.
As time goes on, I don't think Russia "meddled" in US elections as much as US politicians of both parties corruptly attempted
to rig the elections. Seems to me that the demonization of Russia is bi-partisan because the US military industrial complex needs
a "bogey man" to justify its billions$$$$ and just about ALL politicians need that money to stay in power.
It was approximately one year ago, when angry tweeters alleged that Jack Dorsey et al., were
purposefully censoring and "suppressing" certain content on Twitter, namely anything to do with
the leaked DNC and John Podesta emails , as well as hashtags critical of Hillary Clinton
while
"shadow-banning" pro-Donald Trump content. We can now confirm that at least one part of the
above was true, because during today's Senate hearing, Twitter admitted it "buried", which is
another word for censored, significant portions of tweets related to hacked emails from the
Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in the months heading
into the 2016 presidential campaign.
As Daily Caller's Peter Hasson reports, Twitter's systems hid 48 percent of tweets using the
#DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using #PodestaEmails , Twitter general counsel Sean
Edgett said in his written
testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that
have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For
example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets
promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag , which originated with Wikileaks' publication of
thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's Gmail account.
The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118
original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily
installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the
election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations
of the #PodestaEmails hashtag.
Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation
detection systems that hid them from searches.
As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of
the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the
disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee
And yet, this glaring act of censorship was not aimed at the sources of the alleged
propaganda, but the content: Just 2% of the tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag came from
"potentially Russian-linked accounts," Edgett said.
He also explained that Twitter hid the tweets as " part of our general efforts at the time
to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas.
...And Hillary still lost?
Just over a year ago, on the same day that Donald Trump's "grab them by the pussy tape" was
released, WikiLeaks dumped over 30,000 hacked Podesta emails, which were damaging to Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton, throughout the election. A prior Wikileak of DNC emails, which
revealed party officials secretly aided Hillary Clinton during her primary battle against
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders , eventually cost then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Shultz her
job. The leaks also exposed supposedly "neutral" journalists as pro-Clinton partisans.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russian operatives were behind the original
hacking of both the DNC and Podesta emails, which were part of Russian influence operations
meant to disrupt the American electoral system.
* * * A question emerges: did Jack Dorsey, with his arbitrary decision to censor specific
content damaging to Democrats, interfere with the election, and a funnier question: if Hillary
lost with Twitter censoring anti-Hillary content, what would the outcome have been if Twitter
actually respected the First Amendment?
I mean, just how bad does a candidate have TO REALLY SUCK when, they have the
establishment media panting on their every word, they're outspending the opponent 2:1 and
they've got the intelligence apparatus of a world superpower spying on the opponent for them
...and she still loses?...lol.
Wow... Just plain ol' fuggin' wow... And this is EXACTLY the reason we can't allow these organizations, FB, Twitter, Google, to
control everything on the net. This is so fucking dangerous to our freedom and the new media, that these pricks are
creating and then censuring. And what the fuck do we do?
Google is getting a 1000 journanalists together to start 'creating' news. What do we do
when this monster starts to bury alternative, unwanted thought. The snowflakes will be in charge.
Fire up the ovens! 'Cause that's where people like you and me are gonna end up if we don't
stop this, somehow.
They already control everything on the Web. Fuckbook and Goolag filter everything,
preventing you from finding and seeing what you want. They only allow you to see what they
want you to see.
I have found from many observations that our liberals are incapable of allowing anyone to
have his own convictions and immediately answer their opponent with abuse or something worse.
FEYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, THE IDIOT (1868)
The government doesn't need to squash the 1st Amendment, their crony capitalist tech
monopolies will do it for them in exchange for not being regulated.
"... "It's difficult to imagine that a campaign chairman, that the head of the DNC would not know of an expenditure of this magnitude and significance. But perhaps there's something more going on here. But certainly it's worth additional questioning of those two witnesses," ..."
"... "more than anyone." ..."
"... On the same day, Elias' law firm, Perkins Coie, which represented the Clinton campaign and the DNC, confirmed it had hired Fusion GPS in April 2016. The funding arrangement brokered in the spring of 2016 lasted until right before the election, AP reported earlier this week, citing sources familiar with the matter. ..."
"... The document, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, alleged a compromising relationship between Trump and the Kremlin. It was finalized in December 2016, and published online by BuzzFeed in January. It contained unsubstantiated claims of links and allegations of deals between Moscow and the Trump campaign. ..."
"... It was funded initially by a Republican-funded journalism website, The Washington Free Beacon. However, the website insisted the enquiry had no Russian angle at that time. The alleged collusion between Trump and Russia became the focal point of the research after it was taken over by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). ..."
"... The Clinton campaign paid more than $5.6 million to Perkins Coie, recording the expenditures as "legal services," ..."
"... "legal and compliance consulting" ..."
"... "fake dossier," ..."
"... "Never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton made Fake Dossier," ..."
"... "so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out." ..."
Several top Democrats should be summoned to testify before the US Senate Intelligence
Committee on the infamous Trump-Russia dossier, US Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has said. Her
remarks were prompted by new revelations linking the file to the Democratic Party and the
Clinton campaign, Collins, who is a member of the Senate's Intelligence Committee, was emphatic
that Hillary Clinton's election campaign manager, John Podesta, and the former head of the
Democratic National Committee (DNC), Debbie Wasserman Schultz, "absolutely need to be
recalled."
She added that they were most likely aware of the Democrats role in the preparation of this
document.
"It's difficult to imagine that a campaign chairman, that the head of the DNC would not
know of an expenditure of this magnitude and significance. But perhaps there's something more
going on here. But certainly it's worth additional questioning of those two witnesses,"
she told CBS' Face the Nation.
She said further that Marc Elias, a lawyer representing Hillary for America and the DNC,
should be questioned "more than anyone." On Tuesday, the Washington Post alleged that
Elias retained research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to continue research into Trump's alleged
coordination with Russia; and which later became known as the Steele dossier.
On the same day, Elias' law firm, Perkins Coie, which represented the Clinton campaign
and the DNC, confirmed it had hired Fusion GPS in April 2016. The funding arrangement brokered
in the spring of 2016 lasted until right before the election, AP reported earlier this week,
citing sources familiar with the matter.
The document, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, alleged a compromising
relationship between Trump and the Kremlin. It was finalized in December 2016, and published
online by BuzzFeed in January. It contained unsubstantiated claims of links and allegations of
deals between Moscow and the Trump campaign.
It was funded initially by a Republican-funded journalism website, The Washington Free
Beacon. However, the website insisted the enquiry had no Russian angle at that time. The
alleged collusion between Trump and Russia became the focal point of the research after it was
taken over by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The Clinton campaign paid more than $5.6 million to Perkins Coie, recording the
expenditures as "legal services," according to the Federal Election Commission. The
DNC paid the law firm more than $2.9 million for "legal and compliance consulting" and
reported $66,500 for research consulting.
Taking note of the recent revelations concerning the dossier, the US House Intelligence
Committee has been granted access to Fusion GPS bank account records as part of its
investigation into the alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
On Sunday, Donald Trump lashed out in a series of tweets at the dossier and said something
should be done about Hillary Clinton's links to the "fake dossier," as the US
president put it.
"Never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of
investigation on Clinton made Fake Dossier," he wrote, later adding, that there is "so
much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out."
Never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of
investigation on Clinton made Fake Dossier (now $12,000,000?),....
Earlier this week, Trump said it is "commonly agreed" that there was no collusion
between his presidential bid and the Russian government, and accused Clinton of being the one
who really colluded with Russia.
"... For Donald Trump, all attempts to gain a foothold in the USSR and then in Russia in 30 years of travel and negotiations failed. Moscow did not have a Trump Tower of its own, although Trump boasted every time that he had met the most important people and was just about to invest hundreds of millions in a project that would undoubtedly be successful. ..."
"... Trumps' largest business success in Russia was the presentation of a Trump Vodka at the Millionaire Fair 2007 in Moscow. This project was also a cleansing; In 2009 the sale of Trump Vodka was discontinued. ..."
"... puts his name on stuff ..."
"... (2) Zhirinovsky Is The Very Last Person Putin Would Use For A Proxy ..."
"... Such a delicate plan – to reach the election of a President of the US by means of Zhirinovsky – ensures a skeptical smile for every Russian at best. He is already seventy and has been at the head of a party with a misleading name for nearly thirty years. The Liberal Democratic Party is neither liberal nor democratic. If their policies are somehow characterized, then as right-wing populism. Zhirinovsky is known for shrill statements; He threatened, for example, to destroy the US by means of "gravitational weapons". ..."
"... Why Would Russian Intelligence Agencies Sources Have Talked to Steele? ..."
"... But the report, published on the BuzzFeed Internet portal, is full of inconsistencies and contradictions. The problem is not even that there are a lot of false facts. Even the assumption that agents of the Russian secret services are discussing the details with a former secretary of a hostile secret service in the midst of a highly secret operation by which a future President of the US is to be discredited appears strange. ..."
"... Exactly. For the intelligence community and Democrat reliance on Steele's dossier to be plausible, you have to assume 10-foot tall Russkis (1) with incredibly sophisticated strategic, operational, and technical capabilities, who have (2) performed the greatest intelligence feat of the 21st and ..."
"... Donald Trump went on Howard Stern for, like, decades. The stuff that's right out there for whoever wants to roll those tapes is just as "compromising" as anything in the dodgy dossier, or the "grab her by the pussy" tape, for that matter. As Kowaljow points out, none of it was mortally wounding to Trump; after all, if you're a volatility voter who wants to kick over the table in a rigged game, you don't care about the niceties. ..."
"... transition ..."
"... And that's before we get to ObamaCare, financial regulation, gutting or owning the CIA (which Trump needs to do, and fast), trade policy, NATO, China, and a myriad of other stories, all rich with human interest, powerful narratives, and plenty of potential for scandal. Any one of them worthy of A1 coverage, just like the Inaugural crowd size dogpile that's been going on for days. ..."
"... Instead, the press seems to be reproducing the last gasps of the Clinton campaign, which were all about the evils of Trump, the man. That tactic failed the Clinton campaign, again because volatility voters weren't concerned with the niceties. And the same tactic is failing the press now. ..."
In any case, a link to the following story in Hamburg's ridiculously sober-sided Die Zeit came
over the transom:
So schockiert von Trump wie alle anderen ("So shocked by Trump like everyone else"). The reporter
is Alexej Kowaljow
, a Russian journalist based in Moscow. Before anyone goes "ZOMG! The dude is Russian
!", everything Kowaljow writes is based on open sources or common-sense information presumably available
to citizens of any nation. The bottom line for me is that if the world is coming to believe that
Americans are idiots, it's not necessarily because Americans elected Trump as President.
I'm going to lay out two claims and two questions from Kowaljow's piece. In each case, I'll quote
the conventional, Steele and intelligence community-derived wisdom in our famously free press, and
then I'll quote Kowaljow. I think Kowaljow wins each time. Easily. I don't think Google Translate
handles irony well, but I sense that Kowaljow is deploying it freely.
(1) Trump's Supposed Business Dealings in Russia Are Commercial Puffery
Here's
the
section on Russia in Time's article on Trump's business dealings; it's representative. I'm going
to quote it all so you can savor it. Read it carefully.
Donald Trump's Many, Many Business Dealings in 1 Map
Russia
"For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia," Trump
tweeted
in July, one day before he called on the country to "find" a batch of emails deleted from
Hillary Clinton's private server. Nonetheless, Russia's extraordinary meddling in the 2016 U.S.
election-a declassified report released by U.S. intelligence agencies in January disclosed that
intercepted conversations captured senior Russian officials celebrating Trump's win-as well as
Trump's complimentary remarks about Russian President have stirred widespread questions about
the President-elect's pursuit of closer ties with Moscow. Several members of Trump's inner circle
have business links to Russia, including former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who
consulted for pro-Russia politicians in the Ukraine. Former foreign policy adviser Carter
Page worked in Russia and
maintains ties there.
During the presidential transition, former Georgia Congressman and Trump campaign surrogate
Jack Kingston
told a gathering of businessmen in Moscow that the President-elect could lift U.S. sanctions.
According to his own son, Trump has long relied on Russian customers as a source of income.
"Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," Donald Trump
Jr.
told a Manhattan real estate conference in 2008 , according to an account posted on the website
of trade publication eTurboNews. "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."
Back to map .
Read that again, if you can stand it. Do you see the name of an actual business, owned by Trump?
Do you see the name of any businessperson who closed a deal with Trump? Do you, in fact, see any
reporting at all? At most, you see commercial puffery by Trump the Younger: "Russians [in Russia?]
make up a pretty [qualifier] disproportionate [whatever that means] cross-section [whatever that
means] of a lot of [qualifier] our assets."
Now Kowaljow (via Google Translate, so forgive any solecisms):
For Donald Trump, all attempts to gain a foothold in the USSR and then in Russia in 30
years of travel and negotiations failed. Moscow did not have a Trump Tower of its own, although
Trump boasted every time that he had met the most important people and was just about to invest
hundreds of millions in a project that would undoubtedly be successful.
Trumps' largest business success in Russia was the presentation of a Trump Vodka at the
Millionaire Fair 2007 in Moscow. This project was also a cleansing; In 2009 the sale of Trump
Vodka was discontinued.
Because think about it: Trump puts his name on stuff . Towers in Manhattan, hotels, casinos,
golf courses, steaks. Anything in Russia with Trump's name on it? Besides the failed vodka venture?
No? Case closed, then.
(2) Zhirinovsky Is The Very Last Person Putin Would Use For A Proxy
Five reasons intel community believes Russia interfered in election
The attacks dovetailed with other Russian disinformation campaigns
The report covers more than just the hacking effort. It also contains a detailed list account
of information warfare against the United States from Russia through other means.
Political party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who the report lists as a "pro-Kremlin proxy,"
said before the election that, if Trump won, Russia would 'drink champagne' to celebrate their
new ability to advance in Syria and Ukraine.
Now Kowaljow:
The report of the American intelligence services on the Russian interference in the US elections,
published at the beginning of January, was notoriously neglected by Russians, because the name
of Vladimir Zhirinovsky was mentioned among the "propaganda activities of Russia", which had announced
that in the event of an election victory of Trump champagne to want to drink.
Such a delicate plan – to reach the election of a President of the US by means of Zhirinovsky
– ensures a skeptical smile for every Russian at best. He is already seventy and has been at the
head of a party with a misleading name for nearly thirty years. The Liberal Democratic Party is
neither liberal nor democratic. If their policies are somehow characterized, then as right-wing
populism. Zhirinovsky is known for shrill statements; He threatened, for example, to destroy the
US by means of "gravitational weapons".
If, therefore, the Kremlin had indeed had the treacherous plan of helping Trump to power, it
would scarcely have been made known about Zhirinovsky.
The American equivalent would be. Give me a moment to think of an American politician who's both
so delusional and such a laughingstock that no American President could possibly
consider using them as a proxy in a devilishly complex informational warfare campaign Sara Palin?
Anthony Weiner? Debbie Wasserman Schultz? Na ga happen.
And now to the two questions.
(3) Why Would Russian Intelligence Agencies Sources Have Talked to Steele?
Kowaljow:
But the report, published on the BuzzFeed Internet portal, is full of inconsistencies and
contradictions. The problem is not even that there are a lot of false facts. Even the assumption
that agents of the Russian secret services are discussing the details with a former secretary
of a hostile secret service in the midst of a highly secret operation by which a future President
of the US is to be discredited appears strange.
Exactly. For the intelligence community and Democrat reliance on Steele's dossier to be plausible,
you have to assume 10-foot tall Russkis (1) with incredibly sophisticated strategic, operational,
and technical capabilities, who have (2) performed the greatest intelligence feat of the 21st
and 20th centuries, suborning the President of the United States, and whose intelligence agencies
are (3) leakly like a sieve. Does that make sense? (Of course, the devilish Russkis could have fed
Steele bad data, knowing he'd then feed it to the American intelligence agencies, who would lap it
up, but that's another narrative.)
(4) How Do You Compromise the Uncompromisable?
Funny how suddenly the word kompromat was everywhere, wasn't it? So sophisticated. Everybody
loves to learn a new word! Regarding the "Golden Showers" - more sophistication! - Kowaljow writes:
But even if such a compromise should exist, what sense should it have, since the most piquant
details have long been publicly discussed in public, and had no effect on the votes of the elected
president? Like all the other scandals trumps, which passed through the election campaign, they
also remained unresolved, including those who were concerned about sex.
This also includes what is known as a compromise, compromising material, that is, video shots
of the unsightly nature, which can destroy both the political career and the life of a person.
The word Kompromat shines today – as in the past Perestroika – in all headlines; It was not invented
in Russia, of course. But in Russia in the Yeltsin era, when the great clans in the power gave
bitter fights and intensively used the media, works of this kind have ended more than just a brilliant
career. General Prosecutor Jurij Skuratov was dismissed after a video had been shown in the country-wide
television channels: There, a person "who looks like the prosecutor's office" had sex with two
prostitutes.
Donald Trump went on Howard Stern for, like, decades. The stuff that's right out there for
whoever wants to roll those tapes is just as "compromising" as anything in the dodgy dossier, or
the "grab her by the pussy" tape, for that matter. As Kowaljow points out, none of it was mortally
wounding to Trump; after all, if you're a volatility voter who wants to kick over the table in a
rigged game, you don't care about the niceties.
Conclusion
It would be nice, wouldn't it, if our famously free press was actually covering the Trump
transition , instead of acting like their newsrooms are mountain redoubts for an irrendentist
Clinton campaign. It would be nice, for example, to know:
The content and impact of Trump's Executive Orders.
Ditto, regulations.
Personnel decisions below the Cabinet level. Who are the Flexians?
Obama policies that will remain in place, because both party establishments support them.
Charters, for example.
Republican inroads in Silicon Valley.
The future of the IRS, since Republicans have an axe to grind with it.
Mismatch between State expectations for infrastructure and Trump's implementation
And that's before we get to ObamaCare, financial regulation, gutting or owning the CIA (which
Trump needs to do, and fast), trade policy, NATO, China, and a myriad of other stories, all rich
with human interest, powerful narratives, and plenty of potential for scandal. Any one of them worthy
of A1 coverage, just like the Inaugural crowd size dogpile that's been going on for days.
Instead, the press seems to be reproducing the last gasps of the Clinton campaign, which were
all about the evils of Trump, the man. That tactic failed the Clinton campaign, again because volatility
voters weren't concerned with the niceties. And the same tactic is failing the press now. Failing
unless, of course, you're the sort of sleaze merchant who
downsizes the newsroom because, hey, it's all about the clicks.
"... BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said Mr Steele had previously been an intelligence officer - rather than agent - in MI6, who would have run a team of agents as an intelligence gatherer. ..."
"... Intelligence agencies considered the claims relevant enough to brief both Mr Trump and President Obama last week. ..."
"... But the allegations have not been independently substantiated or verified and some details have been challenged as incorrect by those who are mentioned. ..."
"... Mr Trump himself was briefed about the existence of the allegations by the US intelligence community last week but has since described them as fake news, accusing the US intelligence services of leaking the dossier. ..."
An ex-MI6 officer who is believed to have prepared memos claiming Russia has compromising material
on US President-elect Donald Trump is now in hiding, the BBC understands.
Christopher Steele, who runs a London-based intelligence firm, is believed to have left his home
this week.
The memos contain unsubstantiated claims that Russian security officials have compromising material
on Mr Trump.
The US president-elect said the claims were "fake news" and "phoney stuff".
Mr Steele has been widely named as the author of a series of memos - which have been published
as a dossier in some US media - containing extensive allegations about Mr Trump's personal life and
his campaign's relationship with the Russian state.
... ... ...
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said Mr Steele had previously been an intelligence officer
- rather than agent - in MI6, who would have run a team of agents as an intelligence gatherer.
However, as Mr Steele was now working in the private sector, our correspondent said, there was
"probably a fair bit of money involved" in the commissioning of the reports.
He said there was no evidence to substantiate the allegations and it was still possible the dossier
had been based on what "people had said" about Mr Trump "without any proof".
Donald J. Tump Twit
@realDonaldTrump
James Clapper called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally
circulated. Made up, phony facts. Too bad!
... ... ...
Obama briefing
The 35-page dossier on Mr Trump - which is believed to have been commissioned initially by Republicans
opposed to Mr Trump - has been circulating in Washington for some time.
Media organisations, uncertain of its credibility, initially held back from publication. However,
the entire series of reports has now been posted online, with Mr Steele named as the author.
Intelligence agencies considered the claims relevant enough to brief both Mr Trump and President
Obama last week.
But the allegations have not been independently substantiated or verified and some details have
been challenged as incorrect by those who are mentioned.
Mr Trump himself was briefed about the existence of the allegations by the US intelligence community
last week but has since described them as fake news, accusing the US intelligence services of leaking
the dossier.
So guardian clearly supports Steele dossier. Nice... So the guy clearly tried to influence
the US election and Guardian neoliberal honchos and their Russophobic presstitutes (like Luke
Harding) are OK with it. They just complain about Russian influence. British elite hypocrisy in action...
Notable quotes:
"... Published in January by BuzzFeed , the dossier suggested that Donald Trump's team had colluded with Russian intelligence before the US election to sabotage Hillary Clinton's campaign. Citing unidentified sources, it said Trump had been "compromised" by Russia's FSB spy agency during a trip to Moscow in 2013. ..."
"... Trump dismissed the dossier as fake news and said Steele was a "failed spy". Vladimir Putin also rejected the dossier. His spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed Russia did not collect kompromat – compromising material – on Trump or anyone else. ..."
"... As head of MI6's Russia desk, Steele led the inquiry into Litvinenko's polonium poisoning, quickly concluding that this was a Russian state plot. He did not meet Litvinenko and was not his case officer, friends said. ..."
Christopher Steele speaks publicly for first time since the file was revealed and thanks
supporters for 'kind messages'
The former MI6 agent behind the
controversial Trump dossier has returned to work, nearly two months after its publication caused
an international scandal and furious denials from Washington and Moscow.
Christopher Steele posed for a photograph outside the office of his business intelligence company
Orbis in Victoria, London on Tuesday. Speaking for the first time since his
dossier was revealed , Steele said he had received messages of support.
"I'm now going to be focusing my efforts on supporting the broader interests of our company here,"
he told the Press Association. "I'd like to say a warm thank you to everyone who sent me kind messages
and support over the last few weeks."
Steele, who left British intelligence in 2009 and co-founded Orbis with an MI6 colleague, said
he would not comment substantively on the contents of the dossier: "Just to add, I won't be making
any further statements or comments at this time."
Published in January by BuzzFeed , the dossier suggested that Donald Trump's team had colluded
with Russian intelligence before the US election to sabotage Hillary Clinton's campaign. Citing unidentified
sources, it said Trump had been "compromised" by Russia's FSB spy agency during a trip to Moscow
in 2013.
It alleged that Trump was secretly videoed with Russian prostitutes in a suite in the Ritz-Carlton
hotel in Moscow. The prostitutes allegedly urinated on the bed used by Barack Obama during a presidential
visit.
Trump dismissed the dossier as fake news and said Steele was a "failed spy". Vladimir Putin
also rejected the dossier. His spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed
Russia did not collect
kompromat – compromising material – on Trump or anyone else.
Steele's friends say he has been keen to go back to work for some weeks. They insist he has not
been in hiding but has been keeping a low profile to avoid paparazzi who have been camped outside
his family home in Surrey.
Several of the lurid stories about him that have appeared in the press have been wrong, said friends.
The stories include claims that Steele met Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian dissident who was murdered
in 2006 with a radioactive cup of tea,
probably on Putin's orders .
As head of MI6's Russia desk, Steele led the inquiry into Litvinenko's polonium poisoning,
quickly concluding that this was a Russian state plot. He did not meet Litvinenko and was not his
case officer, friends said.
"... Despite more than twelve months of non-stop charges against the Russians, and claims of Trump's collusion with Russia, not a shred of hard evidence has yet been presented to back these allegations, which are at the heart of the coup plot being run against the President. ..."
"... Brennan set up a task force to look into the Russian meddling charges after a former British Ambassador to Moscow, Sir Andrew Wood, delivered a fraudulent dossier, prepared by an "ex"-MI6 operative, to Brennan, through anti-Trump Senator John McCain. ..."
In a desperate attempt to defend its collapsing "Russiagate" narrative, the Washington Post launched
an attack on The Nation magazine for its August 9 article by Patrick Lawrence, "A New Report Raises
Big Questions About Last Year's DNC Hack." Lawrence's article, in the most prestigious left/progressive
magazine in the U.S., broke the attempted media blackout of the memo sent by the Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) on July 24 to President Trump, which effectively refutes the claims
of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, allegedly through "hacking" Democratic National Committee
(DNC) emails and releasing them to Wikileaks.
Despite more than twelve months of non-stop charges
against the Russians, and claims of Trump's collusion with Russia, not a shred of hard evidence has
yet been presented to back these allegations, which are at the heart of the coup plot being run against
the President.
The Nation article was followed by a prominent story in Bloomberg News and one in Salon magazine,
which both reported on the Nation article, and the VIPS memo, and how it challenges the narrative
that Trump owes his election victory to Putin and Russia. That story was concocted by leading figures
in British intelligence, and leaked to the U.S. media by corrupt elements of Obama's intelligence
team, led by the trio of Brennan, Clapper and Comey, as part of the "regime change" against Trump
they launched after his November 2016 election victory.
Brennan set up a task force to look into
the Russian meddling charges after a former British Ambassador to Moscow, Sir Andrew Wood, delivered
a fraudulent dossier, prepared by an "ex"-MI6 operative, to Brennan, through anti-Trump Senator John
McCain.
The attack on The Nation was posted on the Post's "Eric Wemple Blog" on August 15, and is a blatant
attempt to force The Nation's editors to not merely repudiate the Lawrence article, but to join the
campaign against Trump's desire for cooperation with Russia. Wemple's attempt to dismiss the authoritative
report of the VIPS has no substance, and is written to bludgeon the magazine's editors to adopt the
talking points of the coup plotters. As such, it presents the same weak, sophistical argument presented
by the DNC, which released a statement on the VIPS memo which simply reasserted the conclusion reached
by "U.S. intelligence agencies" of Russian interference, adding, "Any suggestion otherwise is false,
and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration."
Such dangerous silliness was countered by Salon's Danielle Ryan, who wrote on August 15,
"For
the media and mainstream liberals to dismiss information presented in The Nation as lacking in evidence
would be breathtakingly ironic, given how little evidence they required to build a narrative" against
Trump and Putin. She concluded that if the VIPS memo is right, "those who pushed the Russia hacking
narrative with little evidence have a lot to answer for."
Is this CIA against Hillary Clinton. Did she cross some red line ? Why this revelation
happened now? What changed in deep state to allow such a revelation to surface.
Notable quotes:
"... Though neither the DNC nor the Clinton campaign worked directly with former British spy Christopher Steele as he compiled the document, the fact that Democrats funded the dossier – which includes information primarily gleaned from sources in Russia – ironically suggests the Democrats indirectly leveraged Russian sources to try and spread information of dubious veracity about a political opponent to try and sway an election ..."
"... Even though the scandalous accusations contained within the dossier weren't made public until after the vote, presumably waiting to see what foot the shoe would end up on, this would've provided serious grist for the collusion narrative, which we imagine would've been stretched to include the entire Republican establishment as accomplices. ..."
"... While it's impossible to determine exactly how much money was spent on the dossier, the Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie – the law firm of Clinton superattorney Marc Elias - $5.6 million in legal fees from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in "legal and compliance consulting'' since Nov. 2015. Some of that money was presumably used to pay for the dossier. ..."
"... Steele previously worked in Russia for British intelligence. The dossier, which was primarily compiled in Moscow, is a compilation of reports Steele prepared for Fusion. Allegations contained in the dossier included claims the Russian government collected compromising information about Trump and the Kremlin was engaged in an active effort to assist his campaign for president. ..."
"... House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Dunes has tried to compel Fusion's founders to disclose who paid for the dossier, but all three of them pled the fifth during public testimony last week. Nunes has also tried subpoenaing the firm's bank records. ..."
"... The most salacious accusations contained in the dossier have not been verified, and may never be. Still, after the election, the FBI agreed to pay Steele to continue gathering intelligence about Trump and Russia, but the bureau pulled out of the arrangement after Steele was publicly identified in news reports ..."
Washington Post reported Tuesday that the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton
campaign jointly financed the creation of the infamous "Trump dossier," which helped inspire
the launch of the floundering investigations into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the
Russians.
Though neither the DNC nor the Clinton campaign worked directly with former British spy
Christopher Steele as he compiled the document, the fact that Democrats funded the dossier
– which includes information primarily gleaned from sources in Russia – ironically
suggests the Democrats indirectly leveraged Russian sources to try and spread information of
dubious veracity about a political opponent to try and sway an election.
Sound familiar?
Even though the scandalous accusations contained within the dossier weren't made public
until after the vote, presumably waiting to see what foot the shoe would end up on, this
would've provided serious grist for the collusion narrative, which we imagine would've been
stretched to include the entire Republican establishment as accomplices.
While it's impossible to determine exactly how much money was spent on the dossier, the
Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie – the law firm of Clinton superattorney Marc Elias -
$5.6 million in legal fees from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance
records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in "legal and compliance consulting'' since
Nov. 2015. Some of that money was presumably used to pay for the dossier.
Fusion GPS's work researching Trump began during the Republican presidential primaries when
an unidentified GOP donor reportedly hired the firm to dig into Trump's background. The
Republicans who were involved in the early stages of Fusion's efforts have not yet been
identified. Fusion GPS did not start off looking at Trump's Russia ties, but quickly realized
that those relationships would be a fruitful place to start,
WaPo reported.
Steele previously worked in Russia for British intelligence. The dossier, which was
primarily compiled in Moscow, is a compilation of reports Steele prepared for Fusion.
Allegations contained in the dossier included claims the Russian government collected
compromising information about Trump and the Kremlin was engaged in an active effort to assist
his campaign for president.
Fusion turned over Steele's reports and other research documents to Elias, and it's unclear
how much of it he shared with the campaign.
The revelation about who funded the dossier comes just days after Trump tweeted that the FBI
and DOJ should publicly reveal who hired Fusion GPS. And lo and behold, that information has
now been made public.
Officials behind the now discredited "Dossier" plead the Fifth. Justice Department and/or
FBI should immediately release who paid for it.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Dunes has tried to compel Fusion's founders to
disclose who paid for the dossier, but all three of them pled the fifth during public testimony
last week. Nunes has also tried subpoenaing the firm's bank records.
The most salacious accusations contained in the dossier have not been verified, and may
never be. Still, after the election, the FBI agreed to pay Steele to continue gathering
intelligence about Trump and Russia, but the bureau pulled out of the arrangement after Steele
was publicly identified in news reports. Officials also decided to withhold information from
the dossier in an intelligence community report published in January alleging that Russian
entities had tried to sway the US election on behalf of the Russian government.
Of course, we still don't know who leaked the dossier to Buzzfeed and CNN back in January.
John McCain – one of the primary suspects – has repeatedly denied it, and Fusion
GPS has said in court documents that it didn't share the document with Buzzfeed. However, we do
known that in early January, then-FBI Director James B. Comey presented a two-page summary of
Steele's dossier to President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump.
It therefore strongly suggests that it was the FBI that was instrumental in spreading the
dossier to the media, most of which was too embarrassed to publish it until Buzzfeed came along
and did it... for the clicks.
So to summarize:
Hillary Clinton and the DNC paid to uncover and package dirt, whether factual or not, on
Trump which eventually found its way in the Trump dossier
In doing so, the Clintons and the DNC were effectively collaborating with "deep" sources,
both among the UK spy apparatus and inside Russia
Once Trump won, the FBI was instrumental in "leaking" the dossier to the mainstream media
and select still unknown recipients (the same way Comey "leaked" his personal notebooks just
a few months later, following his termination, to launch a probe of Trump).
The former head of the FBI who was supposed to probe Clinton's State Department - and the
Clinton Foundation - for a bribery and kickback scheme involving Russia's U.S. nuclear
business, is now investigating Trump for Russia collusion instead
But wait, it gets better: as Ken Vogel, formerly the chief investigative reporter at
Politico and currently at the NY Times just reported, " When I tried to report this story,
Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying "You (or your sources)
are wrong."
When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back
vigorously, saying "You (or your sources) are wrong." https://t.co/B5BZwoaNhI
Another NYT reporter, Maggie Haberman, confirmed as much saying " Folks involved in
funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year ", and by folks she ultimately
means Hillary Clinton herself.
Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year https://t.co/vXKRV1wRJc
Which in light of the latest news suggests that Clinton was lying, which is not
surprising, especially when considering the recent "revelations" that the Clintons may
themselves have been involved in collusion with Russia over the infamous uranium deal.
Which brings us to the questionable role played by the FBI in all of this, and
ultimately, the role still being played by Robert Mueller. Here is the WSJ
,
Let's give plausible accounts of the known facts, then explain why demands that Robert
Mueller recuse himself from the Russia investigation may not be the fanciful partisan
grandstanding you imagine.
Here's a story consistent with what has been reported in the press -- how reliably
reported is uncertain. Democratic political opponents of Donald Trump financed a British
former spook who spread money among contacts in Russia, who in turn over drinks solicited
stories from their supposedly "connected" sources in Moscow. If these people were really
connected in any meaningful sense, then they made sure the stories they spun were
consistent with the interests of the regime, if not actually scripted by the regime. The
resulting Trump dossier then became a factor in Obama administration decisions to launch an
FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign , and after the election to
trumpet suspicions of Trump collusion with Russia.
We know of a second, possibly even more consequential way the FBI was effectively a
vehicle for Russian meddling in U.S. politics. Authoritative news reports say FBI chief
James Comey's intervention in the Hillary Clinton email matter was prompted by a Russian
intelligence document that his colleagues suspected was a Russian plant.
OK, Mr. Mueller was a former close colleague and leader but no longer part of the FBI
when these events occurred. This may or may not make him a questionable person to lead a
Russia-meddling investigation in which the FBI's own actions are necessarily a concern. But
now we come to the Rosatom disclosures last week in The Hill, a newspaper that covers
Congress.
Here's another story as plausible as we can make it based on credible reporting. After
the Cold War, in its own interest, the U.S. wanted to build bridges to the Russian nuclear
establishment. The Putin government, for national or commercial purposes, agreed and sought
to expand its nuclear business in the U.S.
Ah yes, the Clinton's own Russia collusion narrative which recently emerged to the
surface and which as of today is
being investigated by the House :
The purchase and consolidation of certain assets were facilitated by Canadian
entrepreneurs who gave large sums to the Clinton Foundation, and perhaps arranged a Bill
Clinton speech in Moscow for $500,000. A key transaction had to be approved by Hillary
Clinton's State Department.
Now we learn that, before and during these transactions, the FBI had uncovered a bribery
and kickback scheme involving Russia's U.S. nuclear business, and also received reports of
Russian officials seeking to curry favor through donations to the Clinton Foundation
This criminal activity was apparently not disclosed to agencies vetting the 2010
transfer of U.S. commercial nuclear assets to Russia . The FBI made no move to break up the
scheme until long after the transaction closed. Only five years later, the Justice
Department, in 2015, disclosed a plea deal with the Russian perpetrator so quietly that its
significance was missed until The Hill reported on the FBI investigation last week.
As the WSJ correctly notes, " for anyone who cares to look, the real problem here is
that the FBI itself is so thoroughly implicated in the Russia meddling story ."
Which then shifts the focus to the person who was, and again is, in charge of it all:
former FBI director, and current special prosecutor Robert Mueller:
The agency, when Mr. Mueller headed it, soft-pedaled an investigation highly
embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton as well as the Obama Russia reset policy . More recently, if
just one of two things is true -- Russia sponsored the Trump Dossier, or Russian fake
intelligence prompted Mr. Comey's email intervention -- then Russian operations, via their
impact on the FBI, influenced and continue to influence our politics in a way far more
consequential than any Facebook ad, the preoccupation of John McCain, who apparently cannot
behold a mountain if there's a molehill anywhere nearby.
Which means that Mr. Mueller has the means, motive and opportunity to obfuscate and
distract from matters embarrassing to the FBI, while pleasing a large part of the political
spectrum. He need only confine his focus to the flimsy, disingenuous but popular (with the
media) accusation that the shambolic Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.
Mr. Mueller's tenure may not have bridged the two investigations, but James Comey's, Rod
Rosenstein's , Andrew Weissmann's , and Andrew McCabe's did. Mr. Rosenstein appointed Mr.
Mueller as special counsel. Mr. Weissmann now serves on Mr. Mueller's team. Mr. McCabe
remains deputy FBI director. All were involved in the nuclear racketeering matter and the
Russia meddling matter.
The punchline: it's not the Clintons that should be looked at, at least not at first -
their time will come. It's the FBI:
By any normal evidentiary, probative or journalistic measure, the big story here is the
FBI -- its politicized handling of Russian matters, and not competently so. To put it
bluntly, whatever its hip-pocket rationales along the way, the FBI would not have so much
to cover up now if it had not helped give us Mrs. Clinton as Democratic nominee and then,
in all likelihood, inadvertently helped Mr. Trump to the presidency
We eagerly look forward to Trump's furious tweetstorm once he learns of all of this...
and how long before he fires Mueller, in this case with cause.
Another day, another scandal in Washington, DC. Simultaneous opening of inquires that are designed to hurt Hillary and Bill were
complete surprise.
Why now? There was some change on deep state level that is now reflected in this news. Suddenly Uranium 1 scandal comes into the
forfront. And along with Steele dossier it is damaging to Clinton. Were Clintons "Weinsteinalized"? Should be expect "50 women"
phenomena
to be replayed.
There is some storm hitting the US "deep state". The reasons for this storm remains hidden. But attempt of Clintons to preserve
their leadership in Democratic Party after Hillary fiasco in 2016 now are again became questionable.>
Notable quotes:
"... Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossier - The Washington Post The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump's connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said. ..."
"... After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ..."
"... Fusion GPS gave Steele's reports and other research documents to Elias, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear how or how much of that information was shared with the campaign and the DNC and who in those organizations was aware of the roles of Fusion GPS and Steele ..."
Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossier - The Washington Post The Hillary Clinton campaign and
the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President
Trump's connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.
Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the
research.
After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI
and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before
that agreement, Fusion GPS's research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS's research through the end of October 2016,
days before Election Day.
Former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele compiled the dossier on President Trump's alleged ties to Russia. (Victoria
Jones/AP)
Fusion GPS gave Steele's reports and other research documents to Elias, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear
how or how much of that information was shared with the campaign and the DNC and who in those organizations was aware of the roles
of Fusion GPS and Steele. One person close to the matter said the campaign and the DNC were not informed by the law firm of
Fusion GPS's role.
"... With the U.S. government offering tens of millions of dollars to combat Russian "propaganda and disinformation," it's perhaps not surprising that we see "researchers" such as Jonathan Albright of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University making the absurd accusation that the Russians have "basically turned [the Internet] into a sewer." ..."
"... I've been operating on the Internet since 1995 and I can assure you that the Internet has always been "a sewer" -- in that it has been home to crazy conspiracy theories, ugly personal insults, click-bait tabloid "news," and pretty much every vile prejudice you can think of. Whatever some Russians may or may not have done in buying $100,000 in ads on Facebook (compared to its $27 billion in annual revenue) or opening 201 Twitter accounts (out of Twitter's 328 million monthly users), the Russians are not responsible for the sewage coursing through the Internet. ..."
"... Even former Clinton political strategist Mark Penn has acknowledged the absurdity of thinking that such piddling amounts could have any impact on a $2.4 billion presidential campaign, plus all the billions of dollars worth of free-media attention to the conventions, debates, etc. Based on what's known about the Facebook ads, Penn calculated that "the actual electioneering [in battleground states] amounts to about $6,500." ..."
"... In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday, Penn added, "I have 40 years of experience in politics, and this Russian ad buy mostly after the election anyway, simply does not add up to a carefully targeted campaign to move voters. It takes tens of millions of dollars to deliver meaningful messages to the contested portion of the electorate." ..."
"... Occasionally, the U.S. mainstream media even acknowledges that fact. For instance, last November, The New York Times, which was then flogging the Russia-linked "fake news" theme , ran a relatively responsible article about a leading "fake news" Web site that the Times tracked down. It turned out to be an entrepreneurial effort by an unemployed Georgian student using a Web site in Tbilisi to make some money by promoting pro-Trump stories, whether true or not. ..."
"... The owner of the Web site, 22-year-old Beqa Latsabidse, said he had initially tried to push stories favorable to Hillary Clinton but that proved unprofitable so he switched to publishing anti-Clinton and pro-Trump articles, including made-up stories. In other words, the Times found no Russian connection. ..."
"... But the even larger Internet problem is that many "reputable" news sites, such as AOL, lure readers into clicking on some sensationalistic or misleading headline, which takes readers to a story that is often tabloid trash or an extreme exaggeration of what the headline promised. ..."
"... This reality about the Internet should be the larger context in which the Russia-gate story plays out, the miniscule nature of this Russian "meddling" even if these "suspected links to Russia" – as the Times initially described the 470 Facebook pages – turn out to be true. ..."
"... And, there is the issue of who decides what's true. PolitiFact continues to defend its false claim that Hillary Clinton was speaking the truth when – in referencing leaked Democratic emails last October – she claimed that the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies "have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election." ..."
"... That claim was always untrue because a reference to a consensus of the 17 intelligence agencies suggests a National Intelligence Estimate or similar product that seeks the judgments of the entire intelligence community. No NIE or community-wide study was ever done on this topic. ..."
"... Only later – in January 2017 – did a small subset of the intelligence community, what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described as "hand-picked" analysts from three agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation – issue an "assessment" blaming the Russians while acknowledging a lack of actual evidence . ..."
"... In other words, the Jan. 6 "assessment" was comparable to the "stovepiped" intelligence that influenced many of the mistaken judgments of President George W. Bush's administration. In "stovepiped" intelligence, a selected group of analysts is closeted away and develops judgments without the benefit of other experts who might offer contradictory evidence or question the groupthink. ..."
Exclusive: As the Russia-gate hysteria spirals down from the implausible to the absurd,
almost every bad thing is blamed on the Russians, even how they turned the previously pristine
Internet into a "sewer," reports Robert Parry.
With the U.S. government offering tens of
millions of dollars to combat Russian "propaganda and disinformation," it's perhaps not
surprising that we see "researchers" such as Jonathan Albright of the Tow Center for Digital
Journalism at Columbia University making the absurd accusation that the Russians have
"basically turned [the Internet] into a sewer."
I've been operating on the Internet since 1995 and I can assure you that the Internet
has always been "a sewer" -- in that it has been home to crazy conspiracy theories, ugly
personal insults, click-bait tabloid "news," and pretty much every vile prejudice you can think
of. Whatever some Russians may or may not have done in buying $100,000 in ads on Facebook
(compared to its $27 billion in annual revenue) or opening 201 Twitter accounts (out of
Twitter's 328 million monthly users), the Russians are not responsible for the sewage coursing
through the Internet.
Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans and pretty much every other segment of the world's
population didn't need Russian help to turn the Internet into an informational "sewer." But, of
course, fairness and proportionality have no place in today's Russia-gate frenzy.
After all, your "non-governmental organization" or your scholarly "think tank" is not likely
to get a piece of
the $160 million that the U.S. government authorized last December to counter primarily
Russian "propaganda and disinformation" if you explain that the Russians are at most
responsible for a tiny trickle of "sewage" compared to the vast rivers of "sewage" coming from
many other sources.
If you put the Russia-gate controversy in context, you also are not likely to have your
"research"
cited by The Washington Post as Albright did on Thursday because he supposedly found some
links at the home-décor/fashion site Pinterest to a few articles that derived from a few
of the 470 Facebook accounts and pages that Facebook suspects of having a link to Russia and
shut them down. (To put that 470 number into perspective, Facebook has about two billion
monthly users.)
Albright's full quote about the Russians allegedly exploiting various social media platforms
on the Internet was: "They've gone to every possible medium and basically turned it into a
sewer."
But let's look at the facts. According to Facebook, the suspected "Russian-linked" accounts
purchased $100,000 in ads from 2015 to 2017 (compared to Facebook's annual revenue of about $27
billion), with only 44 percent of those ads appearing before the 2016 election and many having
little or nothing to do with politics, which is curious if the Kremlin's goal was to help elect
Donald Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.
Even former Clinton political strategist Mark Penn has acknowledged the absurdity of
thinking that such piddling amounts could have any impact on a $2.4 billion presidential
campaign, plus all the billions of dollars worth of free-media attention to the conventions,
debates, etc. Based on what's known about the Facebook ads, Penn calculated that "the actual
electioneering [in battleground states] amounts to about $6,500."
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday, Penn added, "I have 40 years of experience in
politics, and this Russian ad buy mostly after the election anyway, simply does not add up to a
carefully targeted campaign to move voters. It takes tens of millions of dollars to deliver
meaningful messages to the contested portion of the electorate."
Puppies and Pokemon
And, then there is the curious content. According to The New York Times, one of these
"Russian-linked" Facebook groups was dedicated to
photos of "adorable puppies." Of course, the Times tried hard to detect some sinister
motive behind the "puppies" page.
Similarly, CNN went wild over its own
"discovery" that one of the "Russian-linked" pages offered Amazon gift cards to people who
found "Pokémon Go" sites near scenes where police shot unarmed black men -- if you would
name the Pokémon after the victims.
"It's unclear what the people behind the contest hoped to accomplish, though it may have
been to remind people living near places where these incidents had taken place of what had
happened and to upset or anger them," CNN mused, adding:
"CNN has not found any evidence that any Pokémon Go users attempted to enter the
contest, or whether any of the Amazon Gift Cards that were promised were ever awarded -- or,
indeed, whether the people who designed the contest ever had any intention of awarding the
prizes."
So, these dastardly Russians are exploiting "adorable puppies" and want to "remind people"
about unarmed victims of police violence, clearly a masterful strategy to undermine American
democracy or – according to the original Russia-gate narrative – to elect Donald
Trump.
A New York Times article
on Wednesday acknowledged another inconvenient truth that unintentionally added more
perspective to the Russia-gate hysteria.
It turns out that some of the mainstream media's favorite "fact-checking" organizations are
home to Google ads that look like news items and lead readers to phony sites dressed up to
resemble People, Vogue or other legitimate content providers.
"None of the stories were true," the Times reported. "Yet as recently as late last week,
they were being promoted with prominent ads served by Google on PolitiFact and Snopes,
fact-checking sites created precisely to dispel such falsehoods."
There is obvious irony in PolitiFact and Snopes profiting off "fake news" by taking money
for these Google ads. But this reality also underscores the larger reality that fabricated news
articles – whether peddling lies about Melania Trump or a hot new celebrity or outlandish
Russian plots – are driven principally by the profit motive.
The Truth About Fake News
Occasionally, the U.S. mainstream media even acknowledges that fact. For instance, last
November, The New York Times, which was then flogging the
Russia-linked "fake news" theme , ran
a relatively responsible article about a leading "fake news" Web site that the Times
tracked down. It turned out to be an entrepreneurial effort by an unemployed Georgian student
using a Web site in Tbilisi to make some money by promoting pro-Trump stories, whether true or
not.
The owner of the Web site, 22-year-old Beqa Latsabidse, said he had initially tried to push
stories favorable to Hillary Clinton but that proved unprofitable so he switched to publishing
anti-Clinton and pro-Trump articles, including made-up stories. In other words, the Times found
no Russian connection.
The Times article on Wednesday revealed the additional problem of Google ads placed on
mainstream Internet sites leading readers to bogus news sites to get clicks and thus
advertising dollars. And, it turns out that PolitiFact and Snopes were at least unwittingly
profiting off these entrepreneurial ventures by running their ads. Again, there was no claim
here of Russian "links." It was all about good ole American greed.
But the even larger Internet problem is that many "reputable" news sites, such as AOL, lure
readers into clicking on some sensationalistic or misleading headline, which takes readers to a
story that is often tabloid trash or an extreme exaggeration of what the headline promised.
This reality about the Internet should be the larger context in which the Russia-gate story
plays out, the miniscule nature of this Russian "meddling" even if these "suspected links to
Russia" – as the Times initially described the 470 Facebook pages – turn out to be
true.
But there are no lucrative grants going to "researchers" who would put the trickle of
alleged Russian "sewage" into the context of the vast flow of Internet "sewage" that is even
flowing through the esteemed "fact-checking" sites of PolitiFact and Snopes.
There are also higher newspaper sales and better TV ratings if the mainstream media keeps
turning up new angles on Russia-gate, even as some of the old ones fall away as inconsequential
or meaningless (such as the Senate Intelligence Committee dismissing earlier controversies over
Sen. Jeff Sessions's brief meeting with the Russian ambassador at the Mayflower Hotel and minor
changes in the Republican platform).
Saying 'False' Is 'True'
And, there is the issue of who decides what's true. PolitiFact continues to
defend its false claim that Hillary Clinton was speaking the truth when – in
referencing leaked Democratic emails last October – she claimed that the 17 U.S.
intelligence agencies "have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks,
come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our
election."
That claim was always untrue because a reference to a consensus of the 17 intelligence
agencies suggests a National Intelligence Estimate or similar product that seeks the judgments
of the entire intelligence community. No NIE or community-wide study was ever done on this
topic.
Only later – in January 2017 – did a small subset of the intelligence
community, what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described as
"hand-picked" analysts from three agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency,
National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation – issue an "assessment"
blaming the Russians while acknowledging
a lack of actual evidence .
In other words, the Jan. 6 "assessment" was comparable to the "stovepiped" intelligence
that influenced many of the mistaken judgments of President George W. Bush's administration. In
"stovepiped" intelligence, a selected group of analysts is closeted away and develops judgments
without the benefit of other experts who might offer contradictory evidence or question the
groupthink.
So, in many ways, Clinton's statement was the opposite of true both when she said it in 2016
and later in 2017 when she repeated
it in direct reference to the Jan. 6 assessment. If PolitiFact really cared about facts, it
would have corrected its earlier claim that Clinton was telling the truth, but the
fact-checking organization wouldn't budge -- even after The New York Times and The Associated
Press ran corrections.
In this context, PolitiFact showed its contempt even for conclusive evidence –
testimony from former DNI Clapper (corroborated by former CIA Director John Brennan) that the
17-agency claim was false. Instead, PolitiFact was determined to protect Clinton's false
statement from being described for what it was: false.
Of course, maybe PolitiFact is suffering from the arrogance of its elite status as an
arbiter of truth with its position on Google's First Draft coalition, a collection of
mainstream news outlets and fact-checkers which gets to decide what information is true and
what is not true -- for algorithms that then will exclude or downplay what's deemed
"false."
So, if PolitiFact says something is true – even if it's false – it becomes
"true." Thus, it's perhaps not entirely ironic that PolitiFact would collect money from Google
ads placed on its site by advertisers of fake news.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen
Narrative, either in print here or
as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
David G , October 18, 2017 at 5:57 pm
I bet the Russians are responsible for all the naked lady internet pictures as well. Damn
you, Vladimir Vladimirovich, for polluting our purity.
TS , October 19, 2017 at 5:43 am
Two-thirds of a century ago, Arthur C. Clarke, who besides being a famous SF author,
conceived the concept of the communications satellite, published a short story in which the
Chinese use satellite broadcasting to flood the USA with porn in order spread moral
degeneracy. Wadya think?
Mr. Mueller! Mr. Mueller! Investigate who the owners of YouPorn are!
It's all a Chinese plot, not a Russian one!
Broompilot , October 19, 2017 at 1:55 pm
I second the motion!
Antiwar7 , October 19, 2017 at 7:48 pm
"Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rainwater, and
only pure-grain alcohol?"
richard vajs , October 20, 2017 at 7:50 am
And Vladimir keeps tempting me with offers of money that he found abandoned in Nigerian
banks and mysteriously bequeathed to me.
This sounds eerily similar to newspeak described by George Orwell "1984" in
Sam F , October 18, 2017 at 7:20 pm
The failure of Russia bashers to rank all nations on FB ads and accounts, proves that they
know they are lying. Random Russians (about 2% of the world population) may have spent 100K
on mostly apolitical ads on FB (about 0.0004%) and may have 470 accounts on FB (about
0.000025%). So Russians have far fewer FB ads and accounts per capita than the average
nation. Probably most developed nations have a higher per capita usage of FB, and many
individuals and companies may have a higher total usage of FB.
The fact that 160 million is spent to dig up phony evidence of Russian influence (totaling
about 0.13% of the investigation cost), proves that such "researchers" are paid liars; they
are the ones who should be prosecuted for subversion of democracy for personal gain.
The fact that all views may be found on internet does not make it a "sewer" because one
can view only what is useful. The Dems and Repubs regard the People as a sewer, because they
believe that power=virtue=money no matter how unethically they get it, to rationalize
oligarchy. They keep the most abusive and implausible ads out of mass media only because no
advertiser wants them, but of course they don't want the truth either.
JWalters , October 18, 2017 at 9:03 pm
Add MSNBC to the sources of sewage on the internet. I checked out MSNBC today, and they
are full-throttle on any kind of Russia-phobia. For those who read somewhat widely, it is
obvious they are not even trying to present a balanced picture of the actual evidence. It is
completely one-sided, and includes the trashiest trash of that one side. Their absolute lack
of integrity matches Fox on its worst days.
As someone who formerly watched MSNBC regularly, I am sickened at the obvious capituation
to the criminal Zionists who own the network. Have these people no decency? Apparently not.
Historians will judge them harshly.
Dave P. , October 19, 2017 at 11:28 am
JWalters –
Yes. I completely agree with you. I am beginning to wonder if these people who are
spitting out this trashiest trash at MSNBC from their mouths every day for over a year now
are really sane people. I believe that along with politicians like Adam Schiff, these talk
show hosts have slid into complete madness. The way it is going now, I am afraid that If
these people are not removed, there is a danger of the whole country sliding into some form
of madness.
anonymous , October 20, 2017 at 2:12 pm
"Historians will judge them harshly."
The western civilisation galloped to worldly success on the twin horses of Greed and
Psychopathy. This also provided them the opportunity to write history as they wished.
Are historians judging them harshly now? They are themselves whores to whichever society
they belong to.
Anna , October 19, 2017 at 5:32 pm
Jonathan Albright, the Research Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism,
[email protected] . https://towcenter.org/about/who-we-are/
Mr. Albright is preparing for himself a feathered nest among other presstitutes swarming the
many ziocons' "think tanks," like the viciously russophobic (and unprofessional) Atlantic
Council that employs the ignoramus Eliot Higgins (a former salesman of ladies' underwear and
college dropout) and Dmitry Alperovitch of CrowdStrike fame, a Russophobe and threat to the
US national security
One can be sure that Jonathan Albright knows already all the answers (similar to Judy Miller)
and he is not interested in any proven expertise like the one provided by the Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/
.
Can anyone out there please supply me with a couple of Russian hit pieces that crippled
Hillary´s campaigne. Just askin, because I have never seen one.
Michael K Rohde , October 18, 2017 at 8:29 pm
You obviously haven't looked hard enough. I just finished the book "Shattered" and she had
no problem blaming the Russians when the emails of Podesta came out in the summer. It took
her a day or 2 to figure out that she couldn't blame the Arabs so the Russians were next up.
How could you have missed it?
Sam F , October 18, 2017 at 9:38 pm
He is likely asking for ads from Russia that actually could have served as "hit pieces"
against Clinton, versus her accusations.
I fear we must set aside our sarcasm and understand that this entire Russian narrative has
the ultimate goal of silencing any oppositional news sources to the corporate media. When we
hear that Facebook is seeking to hire people with national security clearances, which is made
to sound as if it's a good, responsible reaction to the "Russian ads" and is cheered on by
people who should know better, we need to get our tongues out of our cheeks and stay
alert.
A good friend, who is an activist battling the fracking industry in Colorado and blogging
about it, was urging people this week to sign petitions demanding more censorship on Facebook
to "prevent Russian propaganda." When I pointed out that, based on the Jan. 6 "report," which
condemned RT America for "criticizing the fracking industry" as proof it was a propaganda
organ, her blog is Russian propaganda. Did that change her mind? Nope. Her response was in
the category of "Better safe."
So, it appears Russia is not replacing "Muslim terrorists" as the "great danger" our
beloved and benevolent government must ask us to hand over our rights to combat. And people
who can't seem to get it through their heads the government is NOT their friend are marching
in lock-step to agree because it never occurs to them they, too, are a target.
Sam F , October 18, 2017 at 7:39 pm
Yes, the purpose of Russia bashing is to distract from the revelations of DNC corruption
by oligarchy (top ten Clinton donors all zionists), attack leakers as opponents of oligarchy,
and attack Russia in hope of benefits to the zionists in the Mideast.
Perhaps you meant to say that "Russia is [not] replacing "Muslim terrorists" as the 'great
danger' our beloved and benevolent government must ask us to hand over our rights to combat."
Or perhaps you meant that the Russia-gate gambit is not working.
Abe , October 18, 2017 at 8:32 pm
American psychologist Gustave Gilbert interviewed high-ranking Nazi leaders during the
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In 1947, Gilbert published part of his diary,
consisting of observations taken during interviews, interrogations, "eavesdropping" and
conversations with German prisoners, under the title Nuremberg Diary.
Hermann Goering, one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, was founder of the
Gestapo and Head of the Luftwaffe.
From an 18 April 1946 interview with Gilbert in Goering's jail cell:
Hermann Goering: "Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a
farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back
to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor
in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after
all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple
matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a
Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
Gilbert: "There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter
through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare
wars."
Hermann Goering: "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell
them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Dave P. , October 19, 2017 at 12:44 am
Abe –
Good post. Yes, from all the wars initiated during the last half century what Hermann
Goring said is very true of U.S. The opposition to the Vietnam War later on was largely
because of the draft.
Bertrand Russell in his autobiography describes in length how they prepared the U.K.
public with outrageously false propaganda for War – World War I – against Germany
in 1914. Bertrand Russell was vehemently against the War with Germany and spent some time in
Jail for his activities to oppose the war.
Brad Owen , October 19, 2017 at 3:58 am
Based on what I have read about him, in his own words,on EIR, he was probably opposed to
war with Germany because he was already looking ahead to a revival of the "Imperial Rome"
situation we have in the Trans-Atlantic Community today, with its near-global Empire
(enforced by America), working on breaking up the last holdout:the Eurasian Quarter with
Russia, China, India, Iran, etc.
Dave P. , October 20, 2017 at 2:21 am
Yes Brad, Bertrand Russell did love England and was very proud of English Civilization and
it's contributions to the World. Considering his very aristocratic background, his
contributions to mathematics and Philosophy are laudable. And he was very much involved in
World peace and nuclear disarmament movements.
(Goering quote) ahh yes, sometimes it takes a cynical scoundrel to tell the truth!
T.Walsh , October 20, 2017 at 11:09 am
the major war criminals' trial ended in 1946, with the execution of the 10 major war
criminals taking place on October 16, 1946.
Joe Tedesky , October 18, 2017 at 8:48 pm
Elizabeth for the mere fact you are on this site may possibly be your reason for your
escape from the MSM as it is a propaganda tool, to be used by the Shadow Government to guide
your thought processes. (See YouTube Kevin Shipp for explanation for Shadow Government and
Deep State) other than that I think it safe to say we are living in an Orwellian predicted
state of mass communications, and for sure we are now living in a police state to accompany
our censored news. Joe
Joe Tedesky , October 18, 2017 at 10:02 pm
Here is something I feel may ring your bell when it comes to our maintaining a free press.
Read this .
"From the PR perspective, releasing one anti-Russia story after another helps cement a
narrative far better than an all-at-once approach to controlling the news cycle. The public
is now getting maximum effect from what I believe is a singular and cohesive effort to lay
the groundwork for global legislation to eradicate any dissent and particular dissent that is
pro-Russia or pro-Putin. The way the news cycle works, a campaign is best leveled across two
weeks, a month, or more, so that the desired audience is thoroughly indoctrinated with an
idea or a product. In this case, the product is an Orwellian eradication of freedom of speech
across the swath of the world's most used social media platforms. This is a direct result of
traditional media and the deep state having failed to defeat independents across these
platforms. People unwilling to bow to the CNN, BBC and the controlled media message, more or
less beat the globalist scheme online. So, the only choice and chance for the anti-Russia
message to succeed is with the complete takeover of ALL channels. As further proof of a
collective effort, listen to this Bloomberg interview the other day with Microsoft CEO Brad
Smith on the same "legislation" issues. Smith's rhetoric, syntax, and the flow of his
narrative mirror almost precisely the other social CEOs, the US legislators, and especially
the UK Government dialogue. All these technocrats feign concern over privacy protection and
free speech/free press issues, but their real agenda is the main story."
Here is the link for the rest of the essay to Phil Butler's important news story ..
When you read this keep in mind that the Russians weren't doing any backroom illegal
deals, because the Russians thought that they were dealing on the upside with the Obama White
House State Department. Where you may question this, is where our Obama State Department side
stepped the law to make money for those couple of Americans who fronted this deal. This is
the epitome of hypocrisy of the worst kind.
Disclaimer; please Clinton and Trump supporters try and attempt to see this scandal for
what it is. This fudging of the law to make a path for questionable donations is not a party
platform issue. It is an issue of integrity and honesty. Yes Trump is the worst, but after
you dig into the above link I provided, please don't come back at me screaming partisan
politics. This scandal doesn't deserve a two sided political debate, as much as it deserves
our attention, and what we do all should do about it.
Dave P. , October 19, 2017 at 2:56 pm
Joe Tedesky –
Reading about this Russian Bribery case in buying interest in "Uranium One" reminds me
that Russians came a century or two late into this Capitalist Game. And they must be novices
and rather crude in this business of bribing. This Russia bribery case is just a puddle in
this vast Sea of Corruption to sell weapons, fighter jets, commercial airplanes, and other
things by U.S., U.K., French, Swedes or other Western Nations to the Third World countries
like India, Egypt, Philippines, Indonesia, Nigeria etc. To make a sale of three or four
billion dollars they would bribe the ministers and other officials in those countries
probably with a 100 million dollars easily. Those of us who belong to the two worlds know it
much better. The Indian Newspapers used to be always full of it, whenever I visited.
And the bribe money stays in the Western banks with which those ministers and officials
sons and daughters buy extensive properties in these countries. In fact, these kind of issues
are the topic of conversation at these Ethnic parties of rather prosperous people to which we
do get invited once in a year or so – which minister or official bought what property
and where with this kind or other type of corruption money. There used to be stories about
Egyptian Presidents Sadat and Mubarak's sons playing around in U.S. having bought extensive
properties with the bribe money. For Indian Ministers and Officials U.S., Canada, Australia,
U.K., and New Zealand are the preferred destinations to buy the properties.
And as we know with the corruption money, rich Russians are buying all these homes and
other properties in Spain, U.S., U.K. and other Western Countries. It seems like Putin and
his team have stopped most of big time corruption but it is very hard to stop the other
corruption in this globalized free market economy, especially in countries where corruption
is the norm.
Same is true of these IMF loans to those Third World Countries. Most of the money ends up
in these Western Countries. The working class of those countries end up in paying back the
high interest loans.
This is the World we are trying to defend with these endless wars and Russia-Gate.
Joe Tedesky , October 19, 2017 at 11:20 pm
Dave I concur that even the Russians are not beyond corruption, but we are not talking
about the bad habits of the Russians, no we are talking about U.S. officials possibly
breaking the law. I'll bet Dave if I had taken you on a vandalizing spree when we were young
bad ass little hoodlums, and we got caught, that your father wouldn't have come after me, as
much as he would come after you, as he would have given you a well deserved good spanking for
your bad actions. So with that frame of mind I am keeping my focus with this Clinton escapade
right here at home.
I like that you did point out to how the Russians maybe new to this capitalistic new world
they suddenly find themselves in, but I would not doubt that even an old Soviet Commissar
would have reached under the table for a kickback of somekind to enrich himself, if the
occasion had arisen to do so. You know this Dave, that bribery has no political philosophy,
nor does it have a democratic or communist ideology to prevent the corrupted from being
corrupt.
I am not getting my hopes up that justice will be served with this FBI investigation into
Hillary and Bill's uranium finagling. Although I'm surmising this whole thing will get turned
around as a Sessions Trump attack upon the Clintons, and with that this episode of selling
off American assets for personal wealth benefits, will instead fade away from our news cycles
altogether. Just like the torture stuff went missing, and where did that go?
Dave I always look forward to hearing from you, because I think that you and I often have
many a good conversation. Joe
Dave P. , October 20, 2017 at 2:07 am
Yes Joe. I agree with you. The reason I wrote my comments was to make a point that Russian
businessmen are not the only one who are in the bribery business, the businessmen of other
Western Nations are doing the same thing. Yesterday on the Fox News the "Uranium One" bribery
case was the main News. Shawn Hannity was twisting his words to make it look like that it is
Putin who did it, and that it is Putin who gave all this 140 million as bribery to Clinton
Foundation. Actually , I think the 140 millions was given to the Clinton Foundation by the
trustees of the Company in Canada. And Russian officials probably greased the hands of a few
of them too.
Of course Clintons are directly involved in this case. Considering how Hillary Clinton has
been perpetuating this Russia-Gate hysteria, I hope some truth comes out to show that she may
be the real center of this Russia-Gate affair. But way the things in Washington are now,
probably they are going to whitewash the Hillary Clinton's role in this bribery scandal.
Joe Tedesky , October 18, 2017 at 10:55 pm
While my one comment i wanted for you to read is being moderated, and it is an important
comment, read how the Israeli's handle unwanted news broadcasting. When you read this think
of the Kristallnacht episode, and then wonder why the Israeli's would do such a terrible
thing similar to what they had encountered under Hitler's reign.
Be sure to see my comment I left above, which is being moderated. In the meantime go to
NEO New Eastern Outlook and read Phil Butler's shocking story, 'Globalist Counterpunch: Going
for the Media Knockout'.
backwardsevolution , October 19, 2017 at 3:41 am
Joe Tedesky – the Zionists had been working (long before Hitler) on getting the Jews
into Palestine. Read up on the Balfour Declaration. Hitler was helping them get out to
Palestine. During World War II, one of the top German officials (can't remember which one
right now) went to Palestine to have discussions with the Zionists. The Zionists basically
said to him: "Look, you're sending us lazy Jews. These guys aren't interested in
construction. Can't you raise more hell so that the harder-working Jews will want to leave
Germany and come to Palestine?"
I think if we ever find out the truth about what happened, we will be shocked.
Joe Tedesky , October 19, 2017 at 9:11 am
Edmund de Rothschild who was a big financier of Zionism in 1934 on the subject of
Palestine had said, "the struggle to put an end to the Wandering Jew, could not have as its
result, the creation of the Wandering Arab."
I personally can't see the legality of the 'Balfour Declaration', but before Zionist
trolls attack me, I must admit I'm no legal scholar.
I'll need to research that episode you speak of about the Germans meeting the Zionist.
It's not an easy part of the Zionist history to study. Unless, you backwardsevolution can
provide some references that would help to learn more about this fuzzy history.
Good to see you posting, for awhile your absence gave me concern that you are doing okay.
Joe
Skip Scott , October 19, 2017 at 8:38 am
Thanks for the links Joe. Both great articles.
Joe Tedesky , October 19, 2017 at 9:14 am
Your welcome Skip I'll apologize for my posting all these links, but I kind of went nuts
getting into the subject we are all talking about here, and more. Joe
Joe Tedesky , October 18, 2017 at 11:21 pm
Although this article by the Saker talks about the U.S. being prepared for war against
Iran it speaks to the bigger problem of who is America's puppet master.
Joe start with a book called The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black
Joe Tedesky , October 19, 2017 at 11:25 pm
I put it on my next book to read. Thanks Tannerhouser appreciate your recommendation.
Joe
dfc , October 18, 2017 at 8:55 pm
Elizabeth: Tell your good friend that once they get rid of the Russian propaganda
on Facebook they will coming after those that oppose the Fracking Industry next:
How Hillary Clinton's State Department Sold Fracking to the World
Sorry, but how naive or deeply in the bubble can one be? lol :(
Beverly Voelkelt , October 19, 2017 at 2:50 am
I agree Elizabeth. The ultimate objective is censorship and control, using the pretext of
keeping America safe from external meddling just like they enacted the Patroit Act to protect
us from the terrists they created.
Daniel , October 19, 2017 at 5:04 am
Thank you Elizabeth. Shutting down alternative voices is clearly the end game here.
David G , October 18, 2017 at 6:25 pm
I'm not crazy about Robert Parry's phrase, "the mistaken judgments of President George W.
Bush's administration".
The lying, murdering bastards were lying. It's their parents that made the mistake.
But I'll let it slide.
Tayo , October 18, 2017 at 6:29 pm
I've said this before and I'll say it again: I suggest Mueller focuses on Tinder too. I'm
betting there's something on there. Russians have been known to use honey pot plots.
D.H. Fabian , October 18, 2017 at 6:40 pm
Ah, but who is better at it -- Russia or the US? (And dare we even consider the power of
China to infiltrate political powers and the media?)
anon , October 18, 2017 at 7:46 pm
So do Martians and every other national, religious, and ethnic group on the planet, with
the US out in front. You will not trick more careful thinkers by attacking the target du
jour.
D.H. Fabian , October 18, 2017 at 6:38 pm
Yes, and over the past week or two, it appears that work is being redirected into holding
the vast military behemoth (?), Israel, accountable for our own political/policy choices.
Either way, the US is clearly in its post-reality era.
anon , October 18, 2017 at 7:49 pm
zio-alert
Abe , October 18, 2017 at 10:06 pm
The naked gun of post-reality Hasbara propaganda:
When Israeli influence on US foreign policy choices may be discussed, Hasbara troll "D.H.
Fabian" pops up to insist:
And what do you want to discuss Abe? That there is undue influence from Israel on the US
government? Maybe, but you could say the same thing about the pharmaceuticals, the MIC, big
oil and the bankers, just to begin the list.
If you and others wish to focus in on a single culprit (defined as anyone fighting for
their own self interests), fine. But there are opposing views that believe the picture is
bigger than the one you would like to paint.
Curious , October 19, 2017 at 1:26 am
WC, I don't want to speak for Abe, but I am wondering about your use of the word "maybe".
Since the last count of US politicians was 13 Senators, and 27 House Reps who are dual
citizens of Israel, does that not imply a conflict of interest just in those stats alone?
Israel doesn't allow dual citizenship in their political system as it is a security risk, so
why do we? I will wait for your reply.
WC , October 19, 2017 at 4:23 am
Curious.
I can't speak for the legalities that led to allowing dual citizenship in the House and
Senate, nor why Israel doesn't allow dual citizenship in their political system. Like a lot
of laws it is probably serving someone's best interests. ;)
As for the word "maybe" and how it relates to your overall question. Just because there
are dual citizen reps in government, does that automatically say they all vote in the
interests of Israel exclusively? And even if that were the case what makes them any different
from the rep sold out to the MIC, big oil, pharmaceuticals, bankers, etc., or combination of?
We'd then need to do a study of all of the sold-out politicians and chart the percentage of
each to the various interests they sold out to. At what percentage does Israel come into the
big picture?
No one is denying Israel has a certain influence on the US government, but given all of
the vested interests involved, the US also has a big stake in what happens in the region. I
also don't know what the overall game plan is, not just for the middle east but all of the
sordid shit going on everywhere. If old George is right about "The Big Club", I'm assuming
some group or combination of groups have some master plan for us all, so I am not ready to
label any group, country or entity good or bad at this stage of the game. If this somehow
leaves out the moral question, I am not idealistic enough to believe morality and
Geo-politics often work hand in hand. :)
Brad Owen , October 19, 2017 at 4:41 am
WCs point is valid and correct. The picture is MUCH bigger than a tiny desert country of a
few million Semites ruling the World. The actual picture is the outgrowth of the several,
world-wide, European Empires having united into one, gigantic "Roman Empire" (under
Synarchist directorship) and CAPTURED America, post WWII, to be its enforcer, working to
break the last holdout: the Eurasian Quarter including Iran, into a truly global Empire.
Israel was a strategy of the British Empire to preclude any revival of a Muslim Empire,
threatening its MENA holdings. The enemy is still the British Empire of the 1%er oligarchs in
City-of-London and Wall Street. The fact that NOBODY pays attention to this situation, and
obsesses over Israel, guarantees the success of the Plan.
anon , October 19, 2017 at 7:29 am
No, the problem of Mideast policy and oligarchy control of mass media is entirely due to
zionist influence, including all top ten donors to Clinton 2016. Ukraine and the entire
problem of surrounding and opposing Russia is due primarily to zionist influence, due to
their intervention in the Mideast, although the MIC is happy to join the corruption for war
anywhere. The others on your list "pharmaceuticals, big oil and the bankers" are involved in
other problems.
WC seeks to divert discussion from zionist influence by changing the subject.
anon , October 19, 2017 at 7:33 am
Brad, you will have a hard time explaining why US wars in the Mideast and surrounding
Russia are always for the benefit of Israel, if you think that ancient Venetians and British
aristocracy are running the show. Looks like a diversionary attack to me.
Abe , October 20, 2017 at 2:05 am
The naked solo of "D.H. Fabian" has surged into a Hasbara chorus. Where to begin.
Let's start with "Curious", who definitely does not speak for me.
The "dual citizens" canard is a stellar example of Inverted Hasbara (false flag
"anti-Israel", "anti-Zionist", frequently "anti-Jewish" or "anti-Semitic") propaganda that
gets ramped up whenever needed, but particularly Israel rains bombs on the neighborhood.
Like Conventional Hasbara (overtly pro-Israel or pro-Zionist) propaganda, the primary
purpose of Inverted Hasbara false flag propaganda is to divert attention from Israeli
military and government actions, and to provide cover for Israel Lobby activities
The Inverted Hasbara canard inserted by "Curious" came into prominence after the
Israel-initiated war Lebanon in 2006. Israel's shaky military performance, flooding of south
Lebanon cluster munitions, use of white phosphorus in civilian areas brought censure. Further
Israeli attacks on Gaza brought increasing pressure on the neocon-infested Bush
administration for its backing of Israel.
A Facebook post titled, "List of Politicians with Israeli Dual Citizenship," started
circulating. The post mentioned "U.S. government appointees who hold powerful positions and
who are dual American-Israeli citizens."
With the change of US administration in 2008, new versions of the post appeared with
headlines such as "Israeli Dual Citizens in the U.S. Congress and the Obama Administration."
Common versions included 22 officials currently or previously with the Obama administration,
27 House members and 13 senators.
The posts were false for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the
misrepresentation of Israeli nationality law. Israel does allow its citizens to hold dual (or
multiple) citizenship. A dual national is considered an Israeli citizen for all purposes, and
is entitled to enter Israel without a visa, stay in Israel according to his own desire,
engage in any profession and work with any employer according to Israeli law. An exception is
that under an additional law added to the Basic Law: the Knesset (Article 16A) according to
which Knesset members cannot pledge allegiance unless their foreign citizenship has been
revoked, if possible, under the laws of that country.
The Law of Return grants all Jews the right to immigrate to Israel and almost automatic
Israeli citizenship upon arrival in Israel. In the 1970s the Law of Return was expanded to
grant the same rights to the spouse of a Jew, the children of a Jew and their spouses, and
the grandchildren of a Jew and their spouses, provided that the Jew did not practice a
religion other than Judaism willingly. In 1999, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that Jews
or the descendants of Jews that actively practice a religion other than Judaism are not
entitled to immigrate to Israel as they would no longer be considered Jews under the Law of
Return, irrespective of their status under halacha (Jewish religious law).
Israeli law distinguishes between the Law of Return, which allows for Jews and their
descendants to immigrate to Israel, and Israel's nationality law, which formally grants
Israeli citizenship. In other words, the Law of Return does not itself determine Israeli
citizenship; it merely allows for Jews and their eligible descendants to permanently live in
Israel. Israel does, however, grant citizenship to those who immigrated under the Law of
Return if the applicant so desires.
A non-Israeli Jew or an eligible descendant of a non-Israeli Jew needs to request approval
to immigrate to Israel, a request which can be denied for a variety of reasons including (but
not limited to) possession of a criminal record, currently infected with a contagious
disease, or otherwise viewed as a threat to Israeli society. Within three months of arriving
in Israel under the Law of Return, immigrants automatically receive Israeli citizenship
unless they explicitly request not to.
In short, knowingly or not, "Curious" is spouting Inverted Hasbara propaganda.
Conventional Hasbara (pro-Israel, pro-Zionist) propagandists constantly attempt to portray
Israeli military threats against its neighbors, Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian
territory, Zionist claims of an "unconditional land grant covenant" for Israel, or the
manipulations of the Israel Lobby, as somehow all based on "the way the world really
works".
"WC" has repeatedly promoted a loony "realism" in the CN comments, claiming for example
that "The Jews aren't doing anything different than the rest have done since the beginning of
time."
The Conventional Hasbara troll refrain is that whatever Israel does "ain't no big
thing".
"D.H. Fabian", "WC" and others are not Hasbara trolls because we somehow "disagree". They
are Hasbara trolls because they promote propaganda for Israel.
Fellow travellers round out the Hasbara chorus.
Commenter anon discourses in absolutes such as "entirely due to zionist influence" and
"always for the benefit of Israel".
Commenter Brad Owen just can't understand why everyone "obsesses" over that "tiny desert
country" when "the Plan" outlined by LaRouche is sooo much more interesting.
Dave P. , October 20, 2017 at 11:55 am
Abe – An excellent analysis – very penetrating. Yes, I understand it very
clearly.
I am one of those who does not have the background in this area. However, reading the
largely British view oriented newspapers since I was fourteen , in a different land where at
that time during 1950's and early 60's, all viewpoints were discussed including the communist
Russian/Soviet side, and the Communist Chinese side too, one develops a balanced outlook on
the World events.
Reading your comments on Israel's citizenship laws, is very eye opening for me. Israel is
a very Racist State, which is kind of the opposite of what Jewish Writers write books in this
country about America being the melting pot. Some of us have already melted here. I sometimes
wonder, Jewish writers are writing all these books, but why don't they melt! Are they special
chosen people?
WC , October 20, 2017 at 4:59 pm
Let me first dispel the notion that I am trying to change the subject, as "anon" would
like to imply. What I am after is a proper perspective as opposed to something blown out of
proportion.
When it comes to the subject of Israel, Jews and Zionism, Abe would appear to be well
versed on the subject. He certainly cleared up "Curious"s question on dual citizenship!
With Abe and others on this site, Zionism is the big daddy culprit in the world today. I,
on the other hand, see it as simply one part of a bigger picture, which I am still trying to
get my head around, but I am quite certain it goes far beyond just a regional issue. In
reading what Abe has to say on this subject over the past few months, he may very well be
right about Zionist influence and a take no prisoners-type of resolve in pursuing their aims
(whatever that may be). But none of this has yet to convince me they are entirely wrong
either.
Which brings us to the subject of morality. Take a second look at what Abe has chosen to
cherry pick from what he sees as the "Hasbara chorus" – all pointing to "trolls" who
(he thinks) are in support of an all powerful and heartless sect. This is what is known as
being overly dramatic and speaks volumes about what Abe (and others on this site) view as the
most objectionable of all – the moral wrongs being committed. For the sake of
clarification "morality" is defined as "principles concerning the distinction between right
and wrong or good and bad behavior". Most of us who are not suffering from a mental disorder
can agree on what constitutes right and wrong at its purist level, but thrown into a world
filled with crime, corruption, greed, graft, hate, lust, sociopaths and psychopaths vying for
power, sectarian violence, a collapsing economy, inner city decay, and all of the vested
special interests jockeying to save their piece of the pie, what is right and wrong becomes
far more convoluted and mired in mud. Simply throwing perfect world idealism at the problem
will not fix it. In fact, it will get you as far as the miles of crucified Christians that
lined the road to Rome. Which is a hell of a way to prove you are so right in a world filled
with so much wrong.
Since the day I "slithered in" here, I have asked the same question over and over –
what are your REAL world solutions to REAL world problems? So far, the chorus of the Church
Of The Perfect World has offered up nothing. :)
Abe , October 20, 2017 at 6:07 pm
Making the same statements over and over again, "WC" is clearly "after" a Hasbara "proper
perspective" on Israel.
For example, in the CN comments on How Syria's Victory Reshapes Mideast (September 30,
2017), "WC" advanced three key Hasbara propaganda talking points concerning the illegal
50-year military occupation of Palestinian territory seized by Israel during the 1967
War:
– Spurious claims about "what realistically (not idealistically) can be done"
– Insistence that "Israel is not going to go back to the 1948 borders"
– Claims that the US "depends on a strong Israeli presence"
A leading canard of Hasbara propaganda and the Israeli right wing Neo-Zionist settlement
movement is the notion of an "unconditional land grant covenant" entitlement for Israel.
Land ownership was far more widespread than depicted in the fictions of Israeli
propaganda. In reality, the Israeli government knowingly confiscated privately owned
Palestinian land and construct a network of outposts and settlements.
Israel's many illegal activities in occupied Palestinian territory encompass Neo-Zionist
settlements, so-called "outposts" and declared "state land".
The United Nations has repeatedly upheld the view that Israel's construction of
settlements constitutes a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention (which provides
humanitarian protections for civilians in a war zone).
The 1967 "border" of Israel refers to the Green Line or 1949 Armistice demarcation line set
out in the Armistice Agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria after the
1948 Arab–Israeli War.
The Green Line was intended as a demarcation line rather than a permanent border. The 1949
Armistice Agreements were clear (at Arab insistence) that they were not creating permanent
borders. The Egyptian–Israeli agreement, for example, stated that "the Armistice
Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary,
and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either Party to the
Armistice as regards ultimate settlement of the Palestine question."
Similar provisions are contained in the Armistice Agreements with Jordan and Syria. The
Agreement with Lebanon contained no such provisions, and was treated as the international
border between Israel and Lebanon, stipulating only that forces would be withdrawn to the
Israel–Lebanon border.
United Nations General Assembly Resolutions and statements by many international bodies
refer to the "pre-1967 borders" or the "1967 borders" of Israel and neighboring
countries.
According to international humanitarian law, the establishment of Israeli communities
inside the occupied Palestinian territories – settlements and outposts alike – is
forbidden. Despite this prohibition, Israel began building settlements in the West Bank
almost immediately following its occupation of the area in 1967.
Defenders of Israel's settlement policies, like David Friedman, the current United States
Ambassador to Israel, argue that the controversy over Israeli settlements in occupied
Palestinian territory is overblown.
The Israeli government and Israel Lobby advocates like Ambassador Friedman claim the
built-up area of settlements comprises only around 2% of the West Bank.
This Hasbara "2%" argument is at best ignorant, and at worst deliberately
disingenuous.
The "2%" figure is misleading because it refers restrictively to the amount of land
Israeli settlers have built on, but does not account for the multiple ways these settlements
create a massive, paralytic footprint in the illegally occupied Palestinian territory of the
West Bank.
Since 1967, Israel has taken control of around 50% of the land of the West Bank. And
almost all of that land has been given to the settlers or used for their benefit. Israel has
given almost 10% of the West Bank to settlers – by including it in the "municipal area"
of settlements. And it has given almost 34% of the West Bank to settlers – by placing
it under the jurisdiction of the Settlement "Regional Councils."
In addition, Israel has taken hundreds of kilometers of the West Bank to build
infrastructure to serve the settlements, including a network of roads that crisscross the
entire West Bank, dividing Palestinian cities and towns from each other, and imposing various
barriers to Palestinian movement and access, all for the benefit of the settlements.
Israel has used various means to do this, included by declaring much of the West Bank to
be "state land," taking over additional land for security purposes, and making it nearly
impossible for Palestinians to register claims of ownership to their own land.
The Israeli Supreme Court has repeatedly used the term "belligerent occupation" to
describe Israel's rule over the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that
the question of a previous sovereign claim to the West Bank and Gaza is irrelevant to whether
international laws relating to occupied territories should apply there.
Rather, the proper question – according to Israel's highest court – is one of
effective military control. In the words of the Supreme Court decision, "as long as the
military force exercises control over the territory, the laws of war will apply to it." (see:
HCJ 785/87, Afo v. Commander of IDF Forces in the West Bank).
The Palestinian territories were conquered by Israeli armed forces in the 1967 war.
Whether Israel claims that the war was forced upon it is irrelevant. The Palestinian
territory has been controlled and governed by the Israeli military ever since.
Who claimed the territories before they were occupied is immaterial. What is material is
that before 1967, Israel did not claim the territories.
Ariel Sharon, one of the principal architects of Israel's settlement building policy in
the West Bank and Gaza, recognized this reality. On May 26, 2003, then Israeli Prime Minister
Sharon told fellow Likud Party members: "You may not like the word, but what's happening is
occupation [using the Hebrew word "kibush," which is only used to mean "occupation"]. Holding
3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is a bad thing for Israel, for the Palestinians and
for the Israeli economy."
Whether one believes that these territories are legally occupied or not does not change
the basic facts: Israel is ruling over a population of millions of Palestinians who are not
Israeli citizens. Demographic projections indicate that Jews will soon be a minority in the
land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
Real world solutions:
An end to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
An end to apartheid government and the beginning of real democracy in Israel.
What can be done now?
United States government sanctions against Israel for its 50-year military occupation of
Palestine, its apartheid social regime, and its arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The United States can require Israel to withdraw its forces to the 1967 line, and honor
the right of return to Palestinians who fled their homeland as a result of Israel's multiple
ethnic cleansing operations.
In addition, the United States can demand that immediately surrender its destabilizing
nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons arsenal or face severe U.S. action.
Hasbara trolls will keep trying to change the subject, continue muttering about "opposing
views" and some "bigger picture" picture", and repeatedly insist that an Israel armed with
weapons of mass destruction routinely attacking its neighbors "ain't no big thing".
Tannenhouser , October 20, 2017 at 10:30 am
Most of the ones in control of "pharmaceuticals, the MIC, big oil and the bankers" are
Israel firsters as well. Round and round we go eh?
This is probably as good a place as any to point out that it isn't just Russophobia at
work; Congress is hard at work to protect Israel's abominable human rights record from public
criticism as well. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act is squarely aimed at criminalizing advocates
of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement and has 50 co-sponsors in the
Senate. See
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/720?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22israel+anti-boycott+act%22%5D%7D&r=2
wapo says Hamas disarm because us and israel want them to.israel won't disarm
though.Boy.
Curious , October 18, 2017 at 6:44 pm
Thank you Mr Parry for actually taking the time to read the NYT or WaPo for your readers,
so we don't have to. There is only so much disinformation one can cram into our 'cranium soft
drives' regarding journalists with no ethics nor moral rudders.
It reminds me of watching Jon Stewarts Daily Show to check out the perverse drivel on Fox
News since to watch Fox myself would have damaged me beyond repair. Many of my friends are
already Humpty-Dumptied by the volume of fragmented info leeching into their bloodstreams by
140 character news.
Thank you for your fortitude in trying to debunk the news and 'outing' those editors who feel
they are insulated from critical analysis.
dahoit , October 19, 2017 at 12:36 pm
jon stewart?WTF?
Curious , October 19, 2017 at 8:56 pm
Well dahoit,
Just chalk it up to a historical reference as that is around the time I stopped watching TV,
having worked in the biz for some 30 years. I don't miss it either. Jon gave us a lot of
humor and a lot of clever, surreptitious info, and the way they captured the talking points
of the politicians by the use of their fast cuts was remarkable. There was a lot of political
content in a show meant to just be humorous. Sorry you feel otherwise.
fudmier , October 18, 2017 at 6:59 pm
EITHER OR, INC. (EOI) a secret subsidiary of Deep Sewer Election Manipulators, Inc
(DSEMI), a fraudulent make believe Russia company, that changes election outcomes, in foreign
countries, to conform the leadership of the foreign country with Russia foreign policy,
studied the most recent USA candidates and concluded Russia could not have found persons more
suited to Russian foreign policy than the candidates the USA had selected for its American
governed, to vote on. The case is not yet closed, EOI is still trying to decide if there is
or was a difference between the candidates..
Charles Misfeldt , October 18, 2017 at 7:44 pm
Our election process is so completely corrupted I doubt that a few thousand dollars of
Facebook ads that no one pays any attention to could sway the vote, I am much more concerned
about bribery, Israel, American Zionists, racists, corporations, evangelicals, dominionists,
white nationalists, anarchist's, conservatives, war profiteers, gerrymanders, vote purges,
vote repressors, voting machine hackers, seems like Russian's are pretty far down the
list.
Joe Tedesky , October 18, 2017 at 8:52 pm
Now you talking, let's get to the real stuff. Good one Charles. Joe
Peter Loeb , October 19, 2017 at 6:08 am
I don't have "FACEBOOK". Or any other "social media (whatever that may be.)
I don't "tweet" and the technology which we were once told would save
the world, has left me behind. I don't text. I have no smart phone
or cell.
I no longer have a TV of any description. Or cable with millions of things
you don't want to see anyway.
Only my mind is left. For some more years.
(J.M. Keynes: " in the long run we will all be dead."
Perhaps one has to have "social media" to be born in
this generation. Do you need it to exit?
Please accept my thoughts with my "asocial" [media]
appologies.
-- -Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
My "tweet"/message is only my fear that the NY Yankees
will be in the World Series where I can hate them with complete
impunity. (I was created a fan of the Washington Senators,
morphed into a Brooklyn Dodgers fan so the usually failing
Boston Red Sox fits me well. Being for that so-called "dodgers"
team on the west coast is a forced marriage at best.
Joe Tedesky , October 19, 2017 at 9:27 am
Peter screw Facebook and all the rest of that High Tech Big Brother Inc industry, and the
garbage they are promoting.
Also Peter do you have a little Walter Francis O'Malley voodoo doll to stick pins in it? I
also haven't followed baseball since Roberto Clemente died.
We kids use to skip school to go watch Clemente play. In fact in 1957 a young ball player
who the Pirates had acquired in somekind of trade with the Brooklyn Dodgers chased my seven
year old little butt out of right field when I wandered all confused onto the field. That
young rookie who chased my loss little being off the field, was none other than the great
number 21 Roberto Clemente.
Actually the only thing you left out Peter was the Braves moving to Atlanta. Take care
Peter, and let's play more ball in the daylight, and let's make it more affordable game to
watch again. Play ball & BDS. Joe
Thomas Phillips , October 19, 2017 at 12:30 pm
I'm envious now Joe. Roberto Clemente was one of my favorite baseball players. My no. 1
favorite, though, was Willie Mays. And speaking of the Braves moving to Atlanta, my father
took my brother and I there the first year the team was in Atlanta. The Giants were there for
a series with the Braves, and I got to see Mays play (my first and only time). I would have
loved to have been able to skip school and watch Clemente play.
On the subject of concern here, The Hill has a couple of stories on the zerohedge.com
story you referenced above. From what I read, it appears to me that if this is still an open
case with the FBI, Ms. Clinton (and Obama?) could possibly face criminal charges in this
matter. We can only hope. To Peter – I do have an old 1992 console TV, but no cable; so
I have no television to speak of. I have a VHS and DVD player though and watch old movies and
such on the old TV.
Joe Tedesky , October 19, 2017 at 2:42 pm
Thomas how cool. My buddies and I would purchase the left field bleacher seats for I think
fifty cents or maybe it was a dollar. Then around the third inning we would boogie on over
into the right field stands overlooking the great Roberto, and yell 'hey Roberto'. From right
field we kids would eye up the empty box seats off of third base. Somewhere about the sixth
or seventh inning we would sneakily slide into those empty box seats along third base side,
where you could see into the Pirate dugout along first. Now the Pirate dugout is along third.
The box seat ushers would back then justbsimply tell us kids to be good, and that they got a
pat on the back from management for filling up those empty box seats, because the television
cameras would pick that up. The best part was, we little hooky players did all of this on our
school lunch money.
About that FBI thing with Hillary I'm hoping this doesn't get written off as just another
Trump attack, and that this doesn't turn into another entertaining Benghazi hearing for
Hillary to elevate her status among her identity groupies. Joe
mark , October 18, 2017 at 7:46 pm
All this nonsense will soon die an evidence-free natural death, but rather than admit to
the lies the MSM will divert the Deplorables with some convenient scandal like the Weinstein
affair.
The effect of all this will be to hammer the final nails in the coffin of the political
establishment and its servile MSM. This process began with the Iraqi WMD lies, and now 6% of
the population believes what it sees in the MSM.
Skip Scott , October 19, 2017 at 8:47 am
mark-
I wish you were right, but with all the money being thrown around, and scumbag Mueller in
the mix, how this will end is anybody's guess. I'm also curious where you got the 6% figure.
Sounds like wishful thinking to me.
Great take Mr Parry
Smoke and mirrors to distract we the sheeple of this dying paradigm. Fascism alive and well
in the land of the free. The sheeple r now entering the critical stage, they have hit 20
percent. Dangerous times for the western masters of the universe. Get ready for more false
flags to keep the sheeple blinded from reality. The recent events globally with regards to
Iran, Syria and the DPRK are all their for distractions add the Russians ate my homework and
viola distraction heaven. But like I said more and more people in the US and the west are
turning off 1/5 to be exact and that spells trouble for the masters. They want war at all
costs 600 percent debt is not a sustainable economic system . IMF warning just the other day
that all it will take is one major European bank to crash and viola. So dangerous and
interesting times we r living. Is it by design in order to get their way.?I would say yes to
that.
Sam F , October 18, 2017 at 9:44 pm
Good notes. Incidentally you may intend the French "voila" rather than the musical
instrument "viola."
Skip Scott , October 20, 2017 at 3:37 pm
Voila, viola. Didn't Curly of the three stooges do a bit on that?
Michael K Rohde , October 18, 2017 at 8:27 pm
Should I say it? Shocker. NYT and HIllary are a potent team. Add on Google and CNN and you
have a formidable propaganda organization that is going to influence millions of American.
Plus Face Book and you have most of America covered without a dissenting voice. I used to be
one of their customers, reading and believing everything they put out until Judith Miller was
exposed with W and Scooter. I confess to a jaundiced eye since then. Unfortunately there
isn't a whole lot out there if you like to read good writers of relevant material. We have a
problem, Houston.
Joe Tedesky , October 18, 2017 at 9:07 pm
If it is possible to consider Russia helped throw the 2016 presidential election with 100k
spent over a three year period, then why not suspect and investigate the American MSM, who
gave Donald Trump 4.9 billion dollars worth of free media coverage? Surely you all may recall
the wall to wall commercial free cable network coverage Trump used to receive during the way
too long of a presidential campaign? Now we are being led to believe that a few haphazard
placed Russian adbuys on FB stool the election from 'it's my turn now boys' Hillary. Here I
must admit that as much as I would love to have a woman President, I would choose almost any
qualified women other than Hillary. But yeah, this Russia-gate nonsense is a creation of the
Shadow Government, who wants so badly to see Putin get thrown out of office, that they would
risk starting WWIII doing it.
Larry Gates , October 18, 2017 at 9:44 pm
A single person started all this nonsense: Hillary Clinton.
No need for America to be influenced to turn the internet into a sewer, America is doing
just fine on that with no help at all. The Russians are just mocking us over there, which is
perfectly understandable. In fact, from what I read, Russians are actually more religious and
concerned about immorality than Americans.
This whole thing is a joke, we know it, it's an attempt to control people, and I for one
am pretty sick of it and don't mind telling anyone just that. Let them sputter, stomp their
feet, or whatever. Keep it up, United States, and you'll be playing in the schoolyard all by
yourself!
Was the article below in corporate media? Link below:
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
-- -- -
Thousands of govt docs found on laptop of sex offender married to top Clinton adviser
Published time: 18 Oct, 2017 16:45Edited time: 18 Oct, 2017 18:37 https://www.rt.com/usa/407120-fbi-found-3k-docs-weiner/
It's amazing how the "mainstream media" has pushed this Russian collusion nonsense. What's
more amazing is how every time an article is published my these outlets claiming some new
evidence of Russian collusion, within 24 hours there's evidence to the contrary. I think the
whole Pokemon and Facebook claims are the lowest point in this Russian collusion nonsense.
The worst part is we won't see it end anytime soon
Sam F , October 19, 2017 at 7:38 am
Good points, Sam. There are many named "Sam" so please distinguish your pen name from
mine, perhaps with an initial. Thanks!
Drew Hunkins , October 19, 2017 at 12:46 am
Absolutely crucial and outstanding piece by Mr. Parry. His well thought out dissection of
Politifact is invigorating.
backwardsevolution , October 19, 2017 at 12:52 am
Peter Schweizer, author of "Clinton Cash", has been talking about the biggest Russian
bribe of all, the one no one wants to talk about – Uranium One. This deal may have been
the reason why $145 million ended up in Clinton Foundation coffers, all while Hillary Clinton
was Secretary of State.
Here is Peter Schweizer today on Tucker Carlson's program talking about it:
Her emails showed that HRC's internal polling proved her greatest vulnerability with her
supporters was when they were told the details of her uranium deal.
Skip Scott , October 19, 2017 at 9:03 am
Thanks for the link. Great interview. The real Russia-gate!
Your site has a lot of useful information for myself. I visit regularly. Hope to have more
quality items.
Dave P. , October 19, 2017 at 1:33 am
Joe – I never had interest in conspiracy type stories and narratives like that.
However, after reading the zerohedge article in the link in your post, I am beginning to
seriously doubt the Seth Rich murder investigation findings by the Washington DC police
– I had some misgivings before about it too. I think there was not any significant
involvement by FBI in the case. And the Justice department under Loretta Lynch did not pursue
the investigation.
Knowing all kind of stories in the news about Clintons friend Vince Foster's death during
1990's , and many other episodes in Bill and Hillary Clinton's political life, I wonder about
the power and reach of this couple. And now this article and no investigation of this bribery
and corruption scandal during Obama's presidency. It all smells fishy.
Joe Tedesky , October 19, 2017 at 1:58 am
Dave not only as what you had mentioned, but the Seth Rich story seems to have become
taboo in our news. I realize what the Rich family requested, but when did ever a request from
the family ever get honored by the big media ever before? I'm not suggesting anything more,
than why is the Seth Rich murder appearing to be off limits, and further more with Seth's
death being in question and implicated to the Wikileaks 'Hillary Exposures' being Seth one of
those 'leakers', then take responsibility DNC and ask the same questions, or at least answer
the questions asked. I hope that made sense, because somehow it made sense to me.
The suggestion of any alternative to the establish narrative gets tossed to the wind. I
think this drip, drip, flood, of Russia collusion into the gears of American Government is a
way of America's Establishment, who is now in charge, way of going out with a bang. The world
is starting to realize it doesn't need the U.S., and the U.S. is doing everything in it's
power to help further that multi-polar world's growing realization that it doesn't.
Okay Dave. Joe
Dave P. , October 19, 2017 at 2:57 am
Joe, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has the power to initiate investigations into these
cases. However, it seems to me that the Ruling Elite/Deep State does not want to wash the
dirty linen in front of the whole World. It would be very embarrassing; it will show the true
picture of this whole sewage/swamp it is. Jeff Sessions or others in high places, have no
independence at all, even if they want to pursue their own course – which they rarely
do.
It seems like that all these investigations are a kind of smoke screen to hide the real
issues. During 1950's or 60's , people in this country mostly trusted the leaders and elected
officials. And majority of the leaders, whatever their policies or sides they took on issues,
had some integrity, depth, solidity and dignity about them. But it seems to me that these
days politicians do not have any of it. The same is true of the Media. This constant mindless
Russia-Gate hysteria being perpetuated by the elected leaders, Media, and pundits without any
thought or decorum is not worthy of a civilized country. Also, it is not good for the Country
or the World.
Joe Tedesky , October 19, 2017 at 9:34 am
Yes Dave the quality of accountability and responsibility in DC is sorely lacking of
concern to be honest, and do the right thing by its citizens. This is another reason why it's
good to talk these things over with you, and many of the others who post comments here.
Joe
Joe,Dave, glad you bring it up Russiagate seems to be providing a full eclipse of any
investigation into the Seth Rich murder and just whatever happened to his laptop?
Joe Tedesky , October 19, 2017 at 10:45 am
I think Bob the Rich investigation got filed under 'conspiracy theory do not touch' file.
Joe
backwardsevolution , October 19, 2017 at 1:39 am
Hours ago:
"Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley asked the attorney of a former FBI informant
Wednesday to allow her client to testify before his committee regarding the FBI's
investigation regarding kickbacks and bribery by the Russian state controlled nuclear company
that was approved to purchase twenty percent of United States uranium supply in 2010, Circa
has learned.
In a formal letter, Grassley, an Iowa Republican, asked Victoria Toensing, the lawyer
representing the former FBI informant, to allow her client, who says he worked as a voluntary
informant for the FBI, to be allowed to testify about the "crucial" eyewitness testimony he
provided to the FBI regarding members of the Russian subsidiary and other connected players
from 2009 until the FBI's prosecution of the defendants in 2014. [ ]
FBI officials told Circa the investigation could have prevented the sale of Uranium One,
which controlled 20 percent of U.S. uranium supply under U.S. law. The deal which required
approval by CFIUS, an inter-agency committee who reviews transactions that leads to a change
of control of a U.S. business to a foreign person or entity that may have an impact on the
national security of the United States. At the time of the Uranium One deal the panel was
chaired by then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and included then-Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton and then-Attorney General Eric Holder."
This FBI informant was apparently gagged from speaking to Congress by either Loretta Lynch
or Eric Holder (I've heard both names). Why would they have done this?
Sven , October 19, 2017 at 1:44 am
Very well written article
Lee Francis , October 19, 2017 at 2:41 am
The whole Russia-Gate brouhaha has become a monumental bore. How anyone with a modicum of
intelligence and moral integrity can believe this garbage is beyond me. I salute Mr Parry for
his fortitude in clearing the Augean stables of this filth; it reminds of the old Bonnie
Raitt song, to wit – 'It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it." personally I can't
be bothered reading it anymore.
backwardsevolution , October 19, 2017 at 2:51 am
Stefan Molyneux does a great job in this 25-minute video where he outlines the absolute
corruption going on in the Banana Republic of Americastan on both the left and right.
He ends up by saying that all of the same actors (Rosenstein, McCabe, Mueller, Comey,
Lynch, Clinton) who were part of covering up Hillary's unsecured servers and Uranium One are
the very same people who are involved with going after Trump and his supposed collusion with
Russia. Same people. And the media seem to find no end of things to say about the latter,
while virtually ignoring the former.
Yes, Media ignores the other scandal while beating up 24/7 on Russian inference/collusion
in the Presidential Election. It is the same with the Foreign News. There was this more than
10,000 strong torchlit Neo-Nazi March in Kiev last Saturday. The pictures in the Sputnik News
of these neo-Nazis in the march were very threatening. I think that most of the Russians have
probably left West Ukraine. There was not even a mention of this March in the Los Angeles
Times.
However, a week before Alexander Navalny had this protest – 500 figure as given the
Western media – in Moscow. The picture was splashed across the entire page of Los
Angeles Times with a half page article, mostly beating up on Putin.
I rarely watch TV shows. However, this Tuesday, because of the some work going on our
house, I was home most of the day. My wife was watching TV starting in the afternoon well
into the evening – MSNBC, CNN, PBS newshour; Wolg Blitzer, Lawrence O'Donnell, Don
Lemon, Rachel Maddow, and others with all these so called experts invited to the shows. Just
about most of it was about beating up on Trump and Russia as if it is the only news in the
Country and in the World to report. It was really pathetic to hear all these nonsensical lies
and garbage coming out the mouths of these talk show hosts and experts. It is becoming Banana
Republic of Americanistan as you wrote.
backwardsevolution , October 19, 2017 at 4:04 am
Hi, Dave P. Yeah, I swear they have things on the shelf that are ready-to-go stories
whenever there's a lull in the Trump/Russia collusion nonsense. This last week they pulled
Harvey Weinstein off the shelf and crucified the guy (not that he shouldn't have been). If
this Uranium One deal gets legs, watch for some huge false flag to coincidentally appear to
take our minds off of it.
The biggest thing separating a "first world" country from a "third world" country is the
rule of law. Without it, you might as well hoist up a flag with a big yellow banana on it and
call it a day. Bananastan has a nice ring to it.
Cheers, Dave.
Lee Francis , October 19, 2017 at 8:10 am
"There was this more than 10,000 strong torchlit Neo-Nazi March in Kiev last Saturday." It
never happened, well according to the Washington Post (aka Pravda on the Potomac) or New York
Times (aka The Manhattan Beobachter) who, like the rest of the establishment media lie by
omission. Other things that didn't happen – the Odessa fire where 42 anti-Maidan
demonstrators were incinerated by the Banderist mob who actually applauded as the Union
Building went up like a torch with those unfortunate people not only trapped inside with the
entrances barricaded, but those who jumped out of windows to escape the flames (a bit like
9/11 in New York) were clubbed to death as they lie injured on the ground. The film is on
youtube if you can bear to watch it, I could only bear to watch it once. According to the
website of Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh, it was "another bright day in our national
history." A Svoboda parliamentary deputy added, "Bravo, Odessa . Let the Devils burn in
hell." These people are our allies, along of course with Jihadis in the middle east.
In his the British playwright Harold Pinter's last valediction nailed the propaganda
methodology of the western media with the phrase, 'even while it was happening it wasn't
happening.'
Dave P. , October 20, 2017 at 2:31 am
Lee Francis –
yes. The words : 'even while it was happening it wasn't happening.' It is from his Nobel
lecture. I read the text of Nobel Lecture by Harold Pinter at that time – very
passionate lecture. Pinter had terminal throat cancer, he could not go to Sweden. I think he
sent his video of the Nobel lecture to be played.
It will be interesting to see how the so-called left leaning media like MSNBC and CNN spin
the Uranium One/Obama-Clinton State Department story. The right, especially Hannity on Fox,
are on it, also Tucker Carlson who is moderate mostly. When these pundits say "Russia", they
seem to imply "Putin" but that may not be the case. And they always want to imply the US is
beyond corrupt business deals, which is a joke. It's about time the Clinton case is cracked,
but with corruption rampant, who knows?
JeffS , October 19, 2017 at 9:34 am
The targeting of Pokemon Go users was especially nefarious because aren't about half of
those people below voting age? But when they finally are old enough to vote we can say that
they were influenced by Russia! And this is always reported in a serious tone and with a
straight face. I find the aftermath of the 2016 election to be 'Hillary'ous. The obviously
phony from the get-go Russia story was invented out of whole cloth to allow stunned Democrat
voters to engage in some sort extended online group therapy session. After a year many are
still working through the various stages of the grieving process, and some may actually reach
the final stage -- Acceptance (of the 2016 Election results)
mike k , October 19, 2017 at 1:07 pm
Good one!
Jamila Malluf , October 19, 2017 at 12:36 pm
Excellent Report! Consortium needs a video outlet somebody to give these reports. There
are many places other than YouTube you could use and I could become one of your Amateur video
editor :)
mike k , October 19, 2017 at 1:10 pm
The Rulers fear the internet.
Liam , October 19, 2017 at 3:01 pm
#MeToo – A Course In Deductive Reasoning: Separating Fact From Fiction Through The
Child Exploitation Of 8 Year Old Bana Alabed
I was glad to see that when H Clinton was in England, the RT ads all around were making
fun of the blame game. Someone needs to lighten up and stop the ludicrous nonsensical
year-long concentration on blaming Russia for the deep defects in almost all aspects of US
presence in our world. Observe Pres. Putin and nearly every other real leader getting on with
negotiations, agreements, constructive trade deals, ignoring the sinking ship led by the
Trumpet and the Republican Party, while the Dems slide down with them.
Realist , October 19, 2017 at 7:20 pm
I think the "Powers that be" in America actually believed it when Karl Rove announced to
the world that the U.S. government had the godlike power to create any reality of its own
choosing, the facts be damned, and the entire world would come to accept it and live by it,
like it or not. They've been incessantly trying to pound this square peg of a governing
philosophy into holes of a wide spectrum of geometric shapes ever since, believing that mere
proclamation made it so. Russia, China, Iran and any other country that does business with
this troika are evil. Moreover, any country that does not kowtow to Israel, or objects to its
extermination campaign against the Palestinian people, is evil. Even simply pursuing an
independent foreign policy not approved by Washington, as Iraq, Libya and Syria felt entitled
to do, is evil. Why? Because we say so. That should suffice for a reason. Disagree with us at
your peril. We have slaughtered millions of "evil-doers" in Middle Eastern Islamic states who
dared to disagree, and we have economically strapped our own "allies" in Europe to put the
screws to Russia. The key to escape from this predicament is how much more blowback, in terms
of displaced peoples, violated human rights, abridged sovereignty and shattered economies, is
Europe willing to tolerate in the wake of Washington's megalomaniacal dictates before it
stands up to the bully and stops supporting the madness. When does Macron, Merkel and May
(assuming they are the leaders whom others will follow in Europe) say "enough" and start
making demands on Washington, and not just on Washington's declared "enemies?"
And, if the internet has indeed become the world's "cloaca maxima," I'd say first look to
its inventors, founders, chief administrators and major users of the service, all of which
reside in the United States. In terms of volume, Russia is but a small-time user of the
service. If the object is to re-create a society such as described in the novel "1984," it is
certainly possible to censor the damned thing to the point where its just a tool of tyranny.
The "distinguished" men and corporations basically running the internet planetwide have
already conferred such authority to the Chinese government. Anything they don't want their
people to see is filtered out, compliments of Microsoft, Google, Facebook and the other heavy
hitters. Just looking at trends, rhetoric and the fact that the infrastructure is mostly
privately-owned, I can see the same thing coming to the West, unless the users demand
otherwise, vociferously and en masse.
Tannenhouser , October 20, 2017 at 4:19 pm
Trump is running point on the distraction op currently being run, to distract from the
actual crimes committed by the Blue section of the ruling political party. So far he played
his part brilliantly, knowingly or unknowingly, matters not.
Readers of Consortium News come from around the world, from very small towns with
populations in the few 1,000's to major cities with populations in the millions, and
everything size category in between. In each of those categories of population size, the
power is controlled by those possessing the greatest wealth inside that particular
population, whether small town, medium, semi-large or major city. One can describe each
category of population center as pyramidal in power structure, with those at the top of the
pyramid the wealthiest few who "pull the strings" of societies, and, as relates to war and
peace, the people who literally fire the first shots.
Identify those at the top of the world category pyramid, call them out for their war
crimes, and then humanity has a fighting chance for peace.
Curious , October 19, 2017 at 7:56 pm
For WC,
Thank you for your answer to my question. The 'reply' tab is gone on the thread so I will
reply here.
I believe I was trying to figure out the difference between "lawmakers" and the corporate
entities you mentioned. Obviously the lawmakers are heavily influenced by the money and the
lobbyists from the large corps which muddies the waters and makes it even more difficult to
find clarity between politicians and the big money players. When the US sends our military
into sovereign countries against international law, it's fair to ask whether it is at the
behest of corporate interests, or even Israels' geopolitical agenda, especially in the Middle
East.
The large corps you mentioned don't have the legal authority to send our military to foreign
lands and perform duties that have nothing to do with US defense (or do they?) and that is
why I try to understand the distinction between 40 dual citizens of Israel within the
'lawmakers' of our country and large corporations. When Israels 'allowance' from US tax
payers goes remarkably up in value, one has to wonder how and why that occurs when our own
country is suffering. That's all I wonder about. I won't distract any more from Mr. Parrys'
article.
GM , October 19, 2017 at 9:31 pm
If I recall correctly, Politifact is owned by the majority owners of the St Petersburg
times, which family is a major big Clinton donor.
Kevin Beck , October 20, 2017 at 9:01 am
I am curious whether Russia is really able to employ all these "marketing geniuses" to
affect elections throughout the world. If so, then America's greatest ad agencies need to
look to Moscow for new recruits, instead of within our business schools.
Maybe Politifact declares it? stance is based on an alternative fact?
But greetings from Finland. In here is in full swing a MSM war against so called fake
media, never mind the fact that many are the stories in fake media that have turned out to be
the truth -- or that we are supposed to be a civilized country with free speech.
Our government with the support of the MSM is using a term hatespeech to silence all
tongues telling a different tale; some convictions have been given even though our law does
not recognise hatespeech as a crime. The police nor the courts can not define exactly what
hatespeech is -- so it is what they want it to be.
"... "We know Russian agents used Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and even Pinterest to place targeted attack ads and negative stories intended not to hurt just me but to fan the flames of division in our society. Russians posed as Americans pretending to be LGBT and gun rights activists, even Muslims, saying things they knew would cause distress." ..."
"... She said some of the basics of the Russian interference in the 2016 election had been known, but "we were in the dark about the weaponisation of social media". She cited new research from Columbia University showing that attack ads on Facebook paid for in roubles were seen by 10 million people in crucial swing states and had been shared up to 340m times. ..."
"... Clinton said the matter of whether Trump's campaign cooperated with Russian interference was a subject for congressional investigation. But she called for anyone found guilty of such cooperation with Moscow to be subject to civil and criminal law. "The Russians are still playing on anything and everything they can to turn Americans against each other," she said. ..."
"... "In addition to hacking our elections, they are hacking our discourse and our unity. We are in the middle of a global struggle between liberal democracy and a rising tide of illiberalism and authoritarianism. This is a kind of new cold war and it is just getting starting." ..."
This power hungry woman are just plain vanilla incompetent: "The Russian campaign was
leading to nationalism in Europe, democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland, and a loss of
faith in democracy, she said."
Democrats had urged her to be silent after
her defeat to Trump but she was not going to go away, said Clinton. She vowed to play her part
in an attempt to win back Democratic seats in the forthcoming midterm elections. She admitted
she "just collapsed with real grief and disappointment" after her election defeat.
Clinton, who is touring the country to promote What Happened – her memoir reflecting
on the election defeat, told the BBC's Andrew Marr: "Looking at the Brexit vote now, it was a
precursor to some extent of what happened to us in the United States."
She decried the amount of fabricated information voters were given: "You know, the big lie
is a very potent tool and we've somewhat kept it at bay in western democracies, partly because
of the freedom of the press. There has to be some basic level of fact and evidence in all parts
of our society."
She urged Britain to be cautious about striking a trade deal with Trump, saying he did not
believe in free trade.
In other comments during the Cheltenham literary festival, she accused the Kremlin of waging
an information war throughout the 2016 US election process. The tactics "were a clear and
present danger to western democracy and it is right out of the Putin playbook", she said.
"We know Russian agents used Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and even Pinterest to place targeted
attack ads and negative stories intended not to hurt just me but to fan the flames of division
in our society. Russians posed as Americans pretending to be LGBT and gun rights activists,
even Muslims, saying things they knew would cause distress."
She said some of the basics of the Russian interference in the 2016 election had been known,
but "we were in the dark about the weaponisation of social media". She cited new research from
Columbia University showing that attack ads on Facebook paid for in roubles were seen by 10
million people in crucial swing states and had been shared up to 340m times.
Clinton said the matter of whether Trump's campaign cooperated with Russian interference was
a subject for congressional investigation. But she called for anyone found guilty of such
cooperation with Moscow to be subject to civil and criminal law. "The Russians are still
playing on anything and everything they can to turn Americans against each other," she
said.
"In addition to hacking our elections, they are hacking our discourse and our unity. We are
in the middle of a global struggle between liberal democracy and a rising tide of illiberalism
and authoritarianism. This is a kind of new cold war and it is just getting starting."
The Russian campaign was leading to nationalism in Europe, democratic backsliding in Hungary
and Poland, and a loss of faith in democracy, she said.
In an interview with the ABC's Four Corners program, to air on
Monday night, Clinton alleges that Assange cooperated with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin , to
disrupt the US election and damage her campaign for president.
"WikiLeaks is unfortunately now practically a fully owned subsidiary of Russian
intelligence," Clinton
told the ABC's Sarah Ferguson .
Describing Putin as a "dictator", Clinton said the damaging email leaks that crippled her
2016 candidacy were part of a coordinated operation against her, directed by the Russian
government.
Our intelligence community and other observers of Russia and Putin have said he held a grudge
against me because as secretary of state, I stood up against some of his actions, his
authoritarianism," Clinton told the ABC.
"But it's much bigger than that. He wants to destabilise democracy, he wants to undermine
America, he wants to go after the Atlantic alliance, and we consider Australia an extension of
that."
WikiLeaks received
thousands of hacked emails from accounts connected to the Democratic campaign allegedly stolen
by Russian operatives. The emails were released during a four-month period in the lead-up to
the US election.
Emails from the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, were leaked on the same day –
7 October 2016 – the director of national intelligence and the secretary of homeland
security released a statement concluding the Russian government had been attempting to
interfere in the election.
Clinton told the ABC she believed the email leak was coordinated to disrupt the influence of
the Access Hollywood tape.
"WikiLeaks, which in the world in which we find ourselves promised hidden information,
promised some kind of secret that might be of influence, was a very clever, diabolical response
to the Hollywood Access tape," she said. "And I've no doubt in my mind that there was some
communication if not coordination to drop those the first time in response to the Hollywood
Access tape."
"I think he is part nihilist, part anarchist, part exhibitionist, part opportunist, who is
either actually on the payroll of the Kremlin or in some way supporting their propaganda
objectives, because of his resentment toward the United States, toward Europe," she said.
"He's like a lot of the voices that we're hearing now, which are expressing appreciation for
the macho authoritarianism of a Putin. And they claim to be acting in furtherance of
transparency, except they never go after the Kremlin or people on that side of the political
ledger."
Assange has denied the emails came from the Russian government or any other "state
parties".
In response to Clinton's comments, Assange said on Twitter there was "something wrong with
Hillary Clinton".
"It is not just her constant lying," he wrote. "It is not just that she throws off menacing
glares and seethes thwarted entitlement.
"Something much darker rides along with it. A cold creepiness rarely seen."
Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange)
There's something wrong with Hillary Clinton. It is not just her constant lying. It is not
just that she throws off menacing glares and seethes thwarted entitlement. Watch closely.
Something much darker rides along with it. A cold creepiness rarely seen. https://t.co/JNw2dkXgdu
Those two "propaganda solders" from Yale release outright lies about "stealing information
from 90,000 voting
records in the state of Illinois alone. " as it this is a fact. Looks like those
students learned quickly from their Yale "color revolution" teachers ;-)
The USA perfected election interference technique in dozen of color revolution
in xUSSR republics and other areas of the globe. Actually the first color revolution was organized
in 1974.
Now DemoRats (neoliberal Democrats of Clinton wing of the party) and elements of intelligence agencies and MS who support them simply can not
quit... Now quitting involved potential significant PR damage... McCarthyism has its own internal
dynamics. The danger for DemoRats (neoliberal Democrats of Clinton wing of the party) now is that
if Russian were investigated why Israelis and Saudies (along with other Gulf monarchies) were
not.
In the past few weeks, we have learned that the Russian government
reached more than 10 million Americans with a misinformation campaign on Facebook, and that
hackers
targeted 21 state election systems , stealing information from 90,000 voting
records in the state of Illinois alone. These are just the latest of many revelations about
Russia's unprecedented interference in the election.
It is cold comfort that we have no evidence so far that Moscow actually manipulated vote
tallies to change the election's outcome.
But what if it emerges that Russian operatives were successful on that front as well?
Setting Trump aside, what if a foreign government succeeds in the future in electing an
American president through active vote manipulation?
The Constitution offers no clear way to remedy such a disaster.
Any evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia raises its own set of important
issues -- now being assiduously investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller. But the
disturbing scenario in which hackers manipulate election results, conceivably rendering the
true vote tally unrecoverable, would pose a unique threat to a foundational principle of our
democracy: rule by the consent of the governed. We would in no sense have a government "by the
people."
Although such a constitutional crisis now seems all too plausible, we have yet to seriously
consider provisions that might protect our democracy -- measures that could allow us to reverse
such a result.
... ... ...
Vinay Nayak and Samuel Breidbart are students at Yale Law School.
When people stop to trust MSM, rumor mill emerges as a substitute. Neoliberal MSM lost people
trust. Now what ?
Notable quotes:
"... But social media manipulation did not begin or end with the election. As early as 2011, the US government hired a public relations firm to develop a " persona management tool " that would develop and control fake profiles on social media for political purposes. ..."
"... The British parent company of Cambridge Analytica, Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), has been a client of the government for years, working with the Department of Defense, and The Washington Post ..."
"... There is also growing awareness of hundreds of thousands of so-called "sleeper" bots: Accounts that have tweeted only once or twice for Trump, and which now sit silently, waiting for a trigger -- a key political moment -- to spread disinformation and drown out opposing views. ..."
Now the focus is less on Trump's extensive personal social media following and more on the roles
that Facebook and Twitter may have played in alleged Russian interference in the election. Congress
is calling on Facebook and Twitter to
disclose details about how they may have been used by Russia-linked entities to try to influence
the election in favor of Trump.
But despite the much-publicized case in the U.S., the pervasiveness of these political strategies
on social media, from the distribution of disinformation to organized attacks on opponents, the tactics
remain largely unknown to the public, as invisible as they are invasive. Citizens are exposed to
them the world over, often without ever realizing it.
Drawing on two recent reports by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and independent research,
Newsweek has outlined the covert ways in which states and other political actors use social
media to manipulate public opinion around the world, focusing on six illustrative examples: the U.S.,
Azerbaijan, Israel, China, Russia and the U.K.
It reveals how "Cyber-troops" -- the name given to this new political force by the OII -- are
enlisted by states, militaries and parties to secure power and undermine opponents, through a combination
of public funding, private contracts and volunteers, and how bots -- fake accounts that purport to
be real people -- can produce as many as 1,000 social media posts a day.
By generating an illusion of support for an idea or candidate in this way, bots drive up actual
support by sparking a bandwagon effect -- making something or someone seem normal and like a palatable,
common-sense option. As the director of the OII, Philip Howard,
argues : "If you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you
are what's legitimate. You are creating truth."
On social media, the consensus goes to whoever has the strongest set of resources to make it.
The U.S.: Rise of the bots
America sees a wider range of actors attempting to shape and manipulate public opinion online
than any country -- with governments, political parties, and individual organizations all involved.
In its report, the OII describes 2016's Trump vs. Hillary Clinton presidential contest as a "
watershed moment " when social media manipulation was "at an all-time high."
Many of the forces at play have been well-reported: whether the hundreds of thousands of bots
or the right-wing sites like Breitbart distributing divisive stories. In Michigan, in the days before
the election, fake news was shared
as widely as professional journalism . Meanwhile firms like Cambridge Analytica, self-described
specialists in "election management," worked for Trump to target swing voters, mainly on Facebook.
While Hillary Clinton's campaign also engaged in such tactics, with big-data and pro-Clinton bots
multiplying in number as her campaign progressed, Trump's team proved the most effective. Overall,
pro-Trump bots generated five times as much activity at
key moments of the campaign as pro-Clinton ones. These Twitter bots -- which often had zero followers
-- copied each other's messages and sent out advertisements alongside political content. They regularly
retweeted Dan Scavino, Trump's social media director.
One high-ranking Republican Party figure told OII that campaigning on social media was like "the
Wild West." "Anything goes as long as your candidate is getting the most attention," he said. And
it worked: A Harvard study concluded that overall Trump
received 15 percent more media coverage than Clinton.
Targeted advertising to specific demographics was also central to Trump's strategy. Clinton
spent two and a half times more than Trump on television adverts and had a 73% share of nationally
focused digital ads.
But Trump's team, led by Cambridge Analytica for the final months, focused on sub-groups. In one
famous example, an anti-Clinton ad that repeated her notorious speech from 1996 describing so-called
"super-predators" was shown exclusively to African-American voters on Facebook in areas where the
Republicans hoped to suppress the Democrat vote -- and again, it worked.
"It's well known that President Obama's campaign pioneered the use of microtargeting in 2012,"
a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica tells Newsweek . "But big data and new ad tech are
now revolutionizing communications and marketing, and Cambridge Analytica is at the forefront of
this paradigm shift."
"Communication enhances democracy, not endangers it. We enable voters to have their concerns
heard, and we help political candidates communicate their policy positions."
The firm argues that its partnership with American right-wing candidates -- first Ted Cruz and
then Trump -- is purely circumstantial. "We work in politics, but we're not political," the spokesperson
said.
The company is part-owned by the family of Robert Mercer, which was one of Trump's major donors,
while Stephen K. Bannon sat on the company's board until he was appointed White House chief strategist
(he was dismissed from his post seven months later). According to Bannon's March federal financial
disclosure, he held shares worth as much as
$5 million in the company . On October 11, it was also revealed that the House Intelligence Committee
has asked the company to provide information for its ongoing probe into Russian interference.
But social media manipulation did not begin or end with the election. As early as 2011, the
US government hired a public relations firm to develop a "
persona management tool " that would develop and control fake profiles on social media for political
purposes.
The British parent company of Cambridge Analytica, Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL),
has been a client of the government for years, working with the Department of Defense, and The
Washington Post
reports that it recently secured work with the State Department.
There is also growing awareness of hundreds of thousands of so-called "sleeper" bots: Accounts
that have tweeted only once or twice for Trump, and which now sit silently, waiting for a trigger
-- a key political moment -- to spread disinformation and drown out opposing views.
Emilio Ferrara, an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Southern California
Computer Science department, even
suggests
the possibility of "a black-market for reusable political disinformation bots," ready to be utilitized
wherever they are needed, the world over. These fears appeared to be confirmed by
reports that the same bots used to back Trump were then deployed against eventual winner Emmanuel
Macron in this year's French presidential election.
Anybody who subscript of NYT, or WaPo after this fiasco is simply paying money for state
propaganda.
Notable quotes:
"... Committee Chairman Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.) admitted as much in a press conference last Wednesday when he said: "We feel very confident that the ICA's accuracy is going to be supported by our committee. " ..."
"... Burr's statement is an example of "confirmation bias" which is the tendency to interpret information in a way that confirms one's own preexisting beliefs. In this case, Burr and his co-chair, Senator Mark Warner have already accepted the findings of a hastily slapped-together Intelligence report that was the work of "hand-picked" analysts who were likely chosen to produce conclusions that jibed with a particular political agenda. ..."
"... This is the basic claim of Russia meddling that has yet to be proved. As you can see, the charge is mixed with liberal doses of mind-reading mumbo-jumbo that reveal the authors' lack of objectivity. There's a considerable amount of speculation about Putin's motives and preferences which are based on pure conjecture. It's a bit shocking that professional analysts -- who are charged with providing our leaders with rock-solid intelligence related to matters of national security -- would indulge in this type of opinionated blather and psycho-babble. ..."
"... The ICA reads more like the text from a morning talk show than an Intelligence report. And what is it about this report that Burr finds so persuasive? It's beyond me. The report's greatest strength seems to be that no one has ever read it. If they had, they'd realize that it's nonsense. ..."
"... How can the committee conduct "100 interviews, comprising 250 hours of testimony and resulting in 4,000 pages of transcripts" without producing a shred of evidence that Russia meddled in the elections? How is that possible? The Committee's job is to prove its case not to merely pour over the minutia related to the investigation. No one really cares how many people testified or how much paperwork was involved. What people want is proof that Russia interfered with the elections or that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow. That's the whole point of this exercise. And, on the collusion matter, at least we have something new to report. In a rare moment of candor, Burr blurted out this gem: "There are concerns that we continue to pursue. Collusion? The committee continues to look into all evidence to see if there was any hint of collusion. Now, I'm not going to even discuss any initial findings because we haven't any." ..."
"... Let's cut to the chase: The committee is not getting to the bottom of the Russia hacking matter, because they don't want to get to the bottom of it. It's that simple. ..."
"... Brennan not only helped select the hand-picked analysts who authored the ICA, he also clearly has an animus towards Russia due to his frustrated attempt to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad which was thwarted by Putin. In other words, Brennan has a motive to mislead the Committee. He's biased. He has an ax to grind. In contrast, Assange has firsthand knowledge of what actually transpired with the DNC emails because he was the recipient of those emails. Has Assange been contacted by the Committee or asked to testify via Skype? ..."
"... It should be obvious by now that the real intention of the briefing was not to provide the public with more information, facts or evidence of Russian hacking, but to use the prestigious setting as a platform for disseminating more disinformation aimed at vilifying an emerging rival (Russia) that has blocked Washington's aggression in Ukraine and Syria, and threatens to unite the most populous and prosperous region in the world (Eurasia) into one massive free trade zone spanning from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Reasonable people must now consider the possibility that the Russia hacking narrative is an Information Operation (IO) devoid of any real substance which is designed to poison the publics perception of Russia. It is a domestic propaganda campaign that fits perfectly with the "Full Spectrum Dominance" theory of weaponizing media in a way that best achieves one's geopolitical objectives. The American people are again being manipulated so that powerful elites can lead the country to war. ..."
"... If the Senate can 'assess,' so can I! I assess that Hollywood hottie Jenifer Lawrence is secretly in love with me! Although I can't prove this, all of my assessments point to this as being fact. ..."
"... This report is as bogus as the "9/11 Commission Report". Both commissions members were hand-picked by those guys that have a vested interest in the right outcome. ..."
"... In the end, Robert Mueller, an Obama/Clinton/Comey/Brennan stooge, will produce some "evidence" about so-called Russian meddling as far-fetched this may be. And the fawning media will go for it. The American public will get the report, which it deserves. ..."
"... But what is missing is that this "Russian Hacking" story was not nonsense, it worked. After Trump was elected, the establishment panicked and went into full attack mode. The headlines were screaming, thought went out the window, it looked like Trump was going to be hounded out of office by force majeure. Then Trump buckled, and shot those missiles at the Syrian air base, and we are back on track throwing away trillions of dollars on endless pointless winless foreign wars in places of zero strategic interest to us. ..."
"... Having served its purpose, the Russian 'hacking' stories are tapering off, being continued more out of momentum and habit than true focused intent. Oh sure, the corporate press still publicly despises Trump, but the intensity is gone. They are just going through the motions, it is no longer important, just political theater. ..."
"... The people who came up with the Russian hacking story were not stupid. The logical weakness of the claim was never relevant. Unlike Dubya in Iraq, they got what they wanted. Mission accomplished. ..."
"... The inaptly named Intelligence Community just never busts out. However much it has gotten flat out wrong and however much it has flat out missed over the years, however much its blunders and mistakes have cost us and our victims in treasure and blood, it just never busts out. There is always an excuse. The closest the Borg ever came to any gesture towards accountability was the Church committee post Watergate, ancient history, lessons purposefully buried and lost to the legions of bureaucrats blundering their way through the last 40 years. ..."
"... Good article on something everyone who is well researched and truth seeking already knows; the Russian Collusion story is a hatchet job by incompetent political hacks. The only power they USED to have is an obsessive never give up faith in the power of lying. ..."
"... So what ? Truth is no longer an issue in USA politics: Christopher Lasch, 'The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations', 1979, 1980, London ..."
"... Even today there was another AP hit piece about those 201 Russian Twitter handles, and zero perspective about the kind of math that renders 201 out of 24 billion a speck of dust. You really have to depend on a dumbed down population to get them to buy this stuff. ..."
"... If all we hear are endless allusions to what are just opinions, meetings, plans, criticism, etc what is being investigated? This is literally suggesting that some in Washington and US media are not mature enough, smart enough, or sane enough to be taken seriously. How are they planning to recover the basic level of rationality after this fiasco? ..."
The Senate Intelligence Committee has made it clear that it is not conducting an open and
independent investigation of alleged Russian hacking, but making a determined effort to support
a theory that was presented in the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.
Committee Chairman Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.) admitted as much in a press conference
last Wednesday when he said: "We feel very confident that the ICA's accuracy is going to be
supported by our committee. "
Burr's statement is an example of "confirmation bias" which is the tendency to interpret
information in a way that confirms one's own preexisting beliefs. In this case, Burr and his
co-chair, Senator Mark Warner have already accepted the findings of a hastily slapped-together
Intelligence report that was the work of "hand-picked" analysts who were likely chosen to
produce conclusions that jibed with a particular political agenda. In other words, the
intelligence was fixed to fit the policy. Burr of course has tried to conceal his prejudice by
pointing to the number of witnesses the Committee has interviewed and the volume of work that's
been produced. This is from an article at The Nation:
Since January 23, the committee and its staff have conducted more than 100 interviews,
comprising 250 hours of testimony and resulting in 4,000 pages of transcripts, and reviewed
more than 100,000 documents relevant to Russiagate. The staff, said Warner, has collectively
spent a total of 57 hours per day, seven days a week, since the committee opened its inquiry,
going through documents and transcripts, interviewing witnesses, and analyzing both
classified and unclassified material.
It all sounds very impressive, but if the goal is merely to lend credibility to unverified
assumptions, then what's the point? Let's take a look at a few excerpts from the report and see
whether Burr and Warner are justified in "feeling confident" in the ICA's accuracy. From the
Intelligence Community Assessment:
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at
the US presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US
democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential
presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference
for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.
This is the basic claim of Russia meddling that has yet to be proved. As you can see,
the charge is mixed with liberal doses of mind-reading mumbo-jumbo that reveal the authors'
lack of objectivity. There's a considerable amount of speculation about Putin's motives and
preferences which are based on pure conjecture. It's a bit shocking that professional analysts
-- who are charged with providing our leaders with rock-solid intelligence related to matters
of national security -- would indulge in this type of opinionated blather and
psycho-babble. It's also shocking that Burr and Warner think this gibberish should be
taken seriously.
Here's more from the ICA:
Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her
since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and
because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.
More mind-reading, more groundless speculation, more guessing what Putin thinks or doesn't
think. The ICA reads more like the text from a morning talk show than an Intelligence
report. And what is it about this report that Burr finds so persuasive? It's beyond me. The
report's greatest strength seems to be that no one has ever read it. If they had, they'd
realize that it's nonsense. Also, it would have been better if the ICA's authors had
avoided the amateur psychoanalysis and stuck to the point, Russia hacking. Dabbling in the
former seriously impacts the report's credibility.
To their credit, however, Burr and Warner have questioned all of the analysts who
contributed to the report. Check out this excerpt from The Nation:
"We have interviewed everybody who had a hand or a voice in the creation of the ICA," said
Burr. "We've spent nine times the amount of time that the IC [intelligence community] spent
putting the ICA together. We have reviewed all the supporting evidence that went into it and,
in addition to that, the things that went on the cutting-room floor that they may not have
found appropriate for the ICA, but we may have found relevant to our investigation." Burr
added that the committee's review included "highly classified intelligence reporting," and
they've interviewed every official in the Obama administration who had anything to do with
putting it together. ("Democrats and Republicans in Congress Agree: Russia Did It", The
Nation)
That's great, but where' the beef? How can the committee conduct "100 interviews,
comprising 250 hours of testimony and resulting in 4,000 pages of transcripts" without
producing a shred of evidence that Russia meddled in the elections? How is that possible? The
Committee's job is to prove its case not to merely pour over the minutia related to the
investigation. No one really cares how many people testified or how much paperwork was
involved. What people want is proof that Russia interfered with the elections or that members
of the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow. That's the whole point of this exercise. And, on
the collusion matter, at least we have something new to report. In a rare moment of candor,
Burr blurted out this gem: "There are concerns that we continue to pursue. Collusion? The
committee continues to look into all evidence to see if there was any hint of collusion. Now,
I'm not going to even discuss any initial findings because we haven't any."
Think about that. After "100 interviews, 250 hours of testimony, and 4000 transcript pages"
there's not the slightest hint of collusion. It's mindboggling. Why isn't this front page news?
Why haven't the New York Times or Washington Post run this in their headlines, after all,
they've hyped every other part of this story?
Could it be that Burr's admission doesn't mesh with the media's "Russia did it" narrative so
they decided to scrub the story altogether?
But it's not just collusion we're talking about here, there's also the broader issue of
Russia meddling. And what was striking about the press conference is that –after all the
interviews, all the testimony, and all the stacks of transcripts– the Committee has come
up with nothing; no eyewitness testimony supporting the original claims, no smoking gun, no
proof of domestic espionage, no evidence of Russian complicity, nothing. One big goose egg.
So here's a question for critical minded readers:
If the Senate Intelligence Committee has not found any proof that Russia hacked the 2016
elections, then why do senators' Burr and Warner still believe the ICA is reliable? It doesn't
really make sense, does it? Don't they require evidence to draw their conclusions? And doesn't
the burden of truth fall on the prosecution (or the investigators in this case)? Isn't a man
innocent until proven guilty or doesn't that rule apply to Russia?
Let's cut to the chase: The committee is not getting to the bottom of the Russia hacking
matter, because they don't want to get to the bottom of it. It's that simple. That's why
they have excluded any witnesses that may upset their preconceived theory of what happened.
Why, for example, would the committee chose to interview former CIA Director John Brennan
rather than WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange? Brennan not only helped select the
hand-picked analysts who authored the ICA, he also clearly has an animus towards Russia due to
his frustrated attempt to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad which was thwarted by
Putin. In other words, Brennan has a motive to mislead the Committee. He's biased. He has an ax
to grind. In contrast, Assange has firsthand knowledge of what actually transpired with the DNC
emails because he was the recipient of those emails. Has Assange been contacted by the
Committee or asked to testify via Skype?
Don't bet on it.
What about former UK ambassador Craig Murray, a WikiLeaks colleague, who has repeatedly
admitted that he knows the source of the DNC emails. Murray hasn't been asked to testify nor
has he even been contacted by the FBI on the matter. Apparently, the FBI has no interest in a
credible witness who can disprove the politically-motivated theory expounded in the ICA.
Then there's 30-year CIA analyst Ray McGovern and his group of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). McGovern has done extensive research on the topic and has
produced solid evidence that the DNC emails were "leaked" by an insider, not "hacked" by a
foreign government. McGovern's work squares with Assange and Murray's claim that Russia did not
hack the 2016 elections. Has McGovern been invited to testify?
How about Skip Folden, retired IBM Program Manager and Information Technology expert, whose
excellent report titled "Non-Existent Foundation for Russian Hacking Charge" also disproves the
hacking theory, as does The Nation's Patrick Lawrence whose riveting article at The Nation
titled "A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year's DNC Hack" which thoroughly
obliterates the central claims of the ICA.
Finally, there's California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher who met with Assange in August at
the Ecuadorian embassy in London and who was assured that Assange would provide hard evidence
(in the form of "a computer drive or other data-storage device") that the Russians were not
involved in the DNC email scandal.
Wouldn't you think that senate investigators would want to talk to a trusted colleague and
credible witness like Rohrabacher who said he could produce solid proof that the scandal, that
has dominated the headlines and roiled Washington for the better part of a year, was bogus?
Apparently not. Apparently Burr and his colleagues would rather avoid any witness or
evidence that conflicts with their increasingly-threadbare thesis.
So what conclusions can we draw from the Committee's behavior? Are Burr and Warner really
conducting an open and independent investigation of alleged Russia hacking or is this just a
witch hunt?
It should be obvious by now that the real intention of the briefing was not to provide
the public with more information, facts or evidence of Russian hacking, but to use the
prestigious setting as a platform for disseminating more disinformation aimed at vilifying an
emerging rival (Russia) that has blocked Washington's aggression in Ukraine and Syria, and
threatens to unite the most populous and prosperous region in the world (Eurasia) into one
massive free trade zone spanning from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Reasonable people must now
consider the possibility that the Russia hacking narrative is an Information Operation (IO)
devoid of any real substance which is designed to poison the publics perception of Russia. It
is a domestic propaganda campaign that fits perfectly with the "Full Spectrum Dominance" theory
of weaponizing media in a way that best achieves one's geopolitical objectives. The American
people are again being manipulated so that powerful elites can lead the country to war.
Where is this going? At some point in the next few years there will be a 'damning' report
that will regurgitate what has already been endlessly publicised: VIP's meet each other (the
horror!), somehow DNC emails got published, Facebook sold ads to 'Russia-linked' users, and
Pokemon Go, whatever. That will be described in sinister terms and RT will be thrown in. How
dare RT not to have the same views as CNN?
But what then? Let's even say that Trump is removed – he is at this point so
emasculated that keeping him in the White House is the most stabilising thing the
establishment could do. Is Congress going to declare a war on Russia? Or more sanctions? Are
they going to ban RT? Break diplomatic relations? None of that makes sense because any of
those moves would be more costly than beneficial, some dramatically so. Therefore nothing
will happen.
All that will remain is permanent bitterness towards Russia, and vice-versa. And much
reduced ability to do what the West has done for 75 years: heavy interference and media
campaigns inside foreign countries to influence elections. If 'meddling' is so bad, the
biggest meddlers – by far – will be less able to meddle. So how is this hysteria
helping?
Sanity in public life is a precious thing. Once abandoned, all kinds of strange things
start happening. Yeah, Pokemon GO – Putin was personally naming the characters to 'sow
division'. It sounds like something Stalin would accuse his 'cosmopolitan' enemies of doing.
This is really embarrassing.
Incorrect parsing of reality. It was not about getting Trump but it was about making Trump
administration to severe relations with Russia. It began with having Gen. Flynn fired. This
mission was accomplished. We have now worse relations with Russia than at the end of Obama
administration.
If the Senate can 'assess,' so can I! I assess that Hollywood hottie Jenifer Lawrence is secretly in love with me! Although I
can't prove this, all of my assessments point to this as being fact.
I have been convinced of the ridiculousness of the Russian-hacking/collusion
narrative/scandal since it was created in 2016.
I, too, smelled a rat and figured that it was all BS right from the get go. So much so
that I haven't followed it a bit. In fact it's so ridiculous on its face, that I have not and
probably will not, waste time reading the article even though MW is a good guy, an
unimpeachable source, a true journalist, and a fine writer.
Bless you, Mr Whitney, for having the energy to document what is no doubt a pack of lies
from the usual suspects.
I stumbled on this yesterday, and it suggests, to no one's surprise, that it's always
deja vu all over again. You'd think our "high IQ" masters would show a little
originality once in a while, and that we, "Low IQ" as we are, would finally learn that it's
all BS from the get-go.
Note the date.:
THESE books all belong to that literature of Katzenjammer which now flourishes so
amazingly in the United States t hey all embody attempts to find out what is the matter
with the Republic. I wish I could add that one or another of them solves the problem, or at
least contributes something to its illumination , but that would be going somewhat
beyond the facts.
-H.L. Mencken, Autopsy (4 Reviews), , September 1927 , pp. 123-125 –
PDF
This makes me suspect that Mike Whitney is a censorious coward on the model of Razib
Khan (thankfully expelled from unz.com) or even worse Paul Craig Roberts (who prohibits
comments entirely).
While I agree with you about the latter two, and have written them off accordingly, along
with Mercer, who I suspect "edits" (really, "purges" ) her comments too, I highly doubt that
MW falls into the same categories as those mentioned. At least MW doesn't use the word,
"insouciant" 3 or 4 times in every article!
If I am wrong and this article is simply strangely unpopular please let me know and I
will apologize.
The article isn't so much unpopular as the subject is wearying. It's the same crud all
over again,obviously false, and I suspect virtually everyone knows it. It's utterly boring
and I give MW a lot of credit for having the persistence to even face the mindless mess, let
alone think and write about it. He really is to be admired for that.
I've always thought it was a distraction as usual from other much more more important
things but utu has a better take on it.
it was about making Trump administration to severe relations with Russia. It began with
having Gen. Flynn fired. This mission was accomplished. We have now worse relations with
Russia than at the end of Obama administration. [ed note:And Flynn is gone too.]
I think that's a "Bingo!" and I also think you better formulate an apology and plan on
getting on yer knees to deliver it!
PS: I'm curious as to why you think this is of much interest at all. (Aside from utu's
take.)
We don't know who this author really is but, once again, what's interesting is that so
many people are still so scared of an investigation which is supposedly producing "no
evidence" (leaving aside Trump Junior's evidence, of course). If all this was a load of
nonsense, why make such a fuss about it? If there's nothing to this, an "effort to support a
theory", however "determined" will come up with nothing. The frantic attempts to kill off
Russiagate suggest that those who are making such attempts know, or believe, that there
actually is something to it which has not yet come to light. Probably something pretty dirty
by the sound of it. What if some part of the US intelligence services took part in the
manipulation of the election, either in collusion with the Russians or posing as Russians,
and Putin can prove it? That would certainly explain the plethora of retired intelligence
agents who are so assiduously defending a foreign government. If Putin really is innocent,
the common sense way to prove it is to let Russiagate take its natural course.
Reasonable people must now consider the possibility that the Russia hacking narrative is
an Information Operation (IO) devoid of any real substance which is designed to poison the
publics perception of Russia.
Really? Only "now"?! I thought it was pretty much clear from the beginning.
This report is as bogus as the "9/11 Commission Report". Both commissions members were
hand-picked by those guys that have a vested interest in the right outcome.
In the end,
Robert Mueller, an Obama/Clinton/Comey/Brennan stooge, will produce some "evidence" about
so-called Russian meddling as far-fetched this may be. And the fawning media will go for it.
The American public will get the report, which it deserves.
Indeed, well said. But what is missing is that this "Russian Hacking" story was not nonsense, it worked. After Trump was elected, the establishment panicked and went into full attack mode. The
headlines were screaming, thought went out the window, it looked like Trump was going to be
hounded out of office by force majeure. Then Trump buckled, and shot those missiles at the
Syrian air base, and we are back on track throwing away trillions of dollars on endless
pointless winless foreign wars in places of zero strategic interest to us.
Having served its purpose, the Russian 'hacking' stories are tapering off, being continued
more out of momentum and habit than true focused intent. Oh sure, the corporate press still
publicly despises Trump, but the intensity is gone. They are just going through the motions,
it is no longer important, just political theater.
The people who came up with the Russian hacking story were not stupid. The logical
weakness of the claim was never relevant. Unlike Dubya in Iraq, they got what they
wanted. Mission accomplished.
Mike – good article. The inaptly named Intelligence Community just never busts out. However much it has gotten
flat out wrong and however much it has flat out missed over the years, however much its
blunders and mistakes have cost us and our victims in treasure and blood, it just never busts
out. There is always an excuse. The closest the Borg ever came to any gesture towards
accountability was the Church committee post Watergate, ancient history, lessons purposefully
buried and lost to the legions of bureaucrats blundering their way through the last 40
years.
If it can be gotten wrong, the Borg will get it wrong; it will be gotten wrong at the worst
possible time; it will move on to get it wrong again. These are three things that you can
absolutely count on.
Good article on something everyone who is well researched and truth seeking already knows;
the Russian Collusion story is a hatchet job by incompetent political hacks. The only power
they USED to have is an obsessive never give up faith in the power of lying.
So what ?
Truth is no longer an issue in USA politics:
Christopher Lasch, 'The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing
Expectations', 1979, 1980, London
@Mike Whitney Russia collusion does lack credibility, but you're still doing us a great
service by following the twists and turns of this beheaded snake. The details are worth
reading about, even if there isn't much to argue about regarding the conclusion. So thanks
for that.
Even today there was another AP hit piece about those 201 Russian Twitter handles, and
zero perspective about the kind of math that renders 201 out of 24 billion a speck of
dust. You really have to depend on a dumbed down population to get them to buy this stuff.
"If Putin really is innocent, the common sense way to prove it is to let Russiagate take
its natural course."
Innocent of what? What is it exactly that Russia supposedly did? Let me list a few
things that are still perfectly legal in our world (that would include US, I hope):
having an opinion, even if that opinion is not the same as NY Times/CNN/US State
Dept
expressing this opinion publicly, even spending money to spread that opinion
supporting the side in an election that you prefer – even in other countries
(everybody does this all the time, Obama flew to UK to campaign against Brexit)
publishing negative stuff about those you dislike (or who dislike you), e.g. their emails,
accounts, etc
spending money to spread your views – even on 'US-owned' platforms that are otherwise
operating all over the world, e.g. Facebook has 700 million active users, they cannot all be
in US
laughing or celebrating if what you preferred won (champagne for Trump)
meeting with foreigners from a country not in a state of war with you, or – God
forbid! – meeting with their ambassador.
None of the above is either unusual or illegal. It might not look good to some people, but
it is what international life has consisted for at least 200 years. If you call that
'meddling', you just might be too naive for the world as it is.
What is the 'natural course' for the investigation? If all we hear are endless allusions
to what are just opinions, meetings, plans, criticism, etc what is being investigated? This
is literally suggesting that some in Washington and US media are not mature enough, smart
enough, or sane enough to be taken seriously. How are they planning to recover the basic
level of rationality after this fiasco?
Putin named Pokemon GO characters after BLM victims to stir up racial hatreds in US. How
does one answer that? Where would you even start dealing with people who are capable of this
level of nonsense?
"... Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people's frustration with neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by corporate-concocted "free trade" agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything, or the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and replaced with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which is merely a simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because exchange value is its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their eviscerated cultural values back to them so they can wear their "identities" like designer brands as they hunch together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on Facebook. ..."
"... No, this discontent with the political establishment, corporate elites, and the mainstream media has nothing to do with any of that. It's not like global Capitalism, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. (its last external ideological adversary), has been restructuring the entire planet in accordance with its geopolitical interests, or doing away with national sovereignty, and other nationalistic concepts that no longer serve a useful purpose in a world where a single ideological system (one backed by the most fearsome military in history) reigns completely unopposed. If that were the case, well, it might behoove us to question whether this outbreak of Nazism, racism, and other forms of "hate," was somehow connected to that historical development and maybe even try to articulate some sort of leftist analysis of that. ..."
"... a world where a single ideology rules the planet unopposed from without ..."
"... Brexit is about Britons who want their country back, a movement indeed getting stronger and stronger in EU member states, but ignored by the ruling 'elites'. ..."
"... A lot of these so called "revolutions" are fomented by the elite only to be subverted and perverted by them in the end. They've had a lot of practice co-opting revolutions and independence movements. ..."
"... "Independence" is now so fashionable (as was Communism among the "elite" back in the '30s), that they are even teaching and fostering independence to kids in kindergarten here in the US. That strikes me as most amusing. Imagine "learning" independence in state run brainwashing factories. ..."
Well all right, let's review what happened, or at least the official version of what
happened. Not Hillary Clinton's version of what happened, which Jeffrey St. Clair so
incisively skewered , but the Corporatocracy's version of what happened, which overlaps
with but is even more ridiculous than Clinton's ridiculous version. To do that, we need to
harken back to the peaceful Summer of 2016, (a/k/a the
"Summer of Fear" ), when the United States of America was still a shiny city upon a hill
whose beacon light guided freedom-loving people, the Nazis were still just a bunch of ass
clowns meeting in each other's mother's garages, and Russia was, well Russia was Russia.
Back then, as I'm sure you'll recall, Western democracy, was still primarily being menaced
by the lone
wolf terrorists, for absolutely no conceivable reason, apart from the terrorists' fanatical
desire to brutally murder all non-believers. The global Russo-Nazi Axis had not yet reared its
ugly head. President Obama, who, during his tenure, had single-handedly restored America to the
peaceful, prosperous, progressive paradise it had been before George W. Bush screwed it up, was
on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon slow
jamming home the TPP . The Wall Street banks had risen from the ashes of the 2008 financial
crisis, and were buying back all the foreclosed homes of the people they had fleeced with
subprime mortgages. American workers were enjoying the freedom and flexibility of the new gig
economy. Electioneering in the United States was underway, but it was early days. It was
already clear that Donald Trump was literally
the Second Coming of Hitler , but no one was terribly worried about him yet. The Republican
Party was in a shambles. Neither Trump nor any of the other contenders had any chance of
winning in November. Nor did Sanders, who had been defeated, fair and square, in the Democratic
primaries, mostly because of
his racist statements and crazy, quasi-Communist ideas. Basically, everything was hunky
dory. Yes, it was going to be terribly sad to have to bid farewell to Obama, who had bailed out
all those bankrupt Americans the Wall Street banks had taken to the cleaners, ended all of Bush
and Cheney's wars, closed down Guantanamo, and just generally served as a multicultural messiah
figure to affluent consumers throughout the free world, but Hope-and-Change was going to
continue. The talking heads were all in agreement Hillary Clinton was going to be President,
and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Little did we know at the time that an epidemic of Russo-Nazism had been festering just
beneath the surface of freedom-loving Western societies like some neo-fascist sebaceous cyst.
Apparently, millions of theretofore more or less normal citizens throughout the West had been
infected with a virulent strain of Russo-Nazi-engineered virus, because they simultaneously
began exhibiting the hallmark symptoms of what we now know as White Supremacist Behavioral
Disorder, or Fascist Oppositional Disorder (the folks who update the DSM are still arguing over
the official name). It started with the Brexit referendum, spread to America with the election
of Trump, and there have been a rash of outbreaks in Europe, like
the one we're currently experiencing in Germany . These fascistic symptoms have mostly
manifest as people refusing to vote as instructed, and expressing oppressive views on the
Internet, but there have also been more serious crimes, including several assaults and murders
perpetrated by white supremacists (which, of course, never happened when Obama was President,
because the Nazis hadn't been "emboldened" yet).
Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of
fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people's frustration with
neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire
with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with
supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by
corporate-concocted "free trade" agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything, or
the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and replaced
with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which is merely a
simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because exchange value is
its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their eviscerated cultural
values back to them so they can wear their "identities" like designer brands as they hunch
together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on Facebook.
No, this discontent with the political establishment, corporate elites, and the
mainstream media has nothing to do with any of that. It's not like global Capitalism, following
the collapse of the U.S.S.R. (its last external ideological adversary), has been restructuring
the entire planet in accordance with its geopolitical interests, or doing away with national
sovereignty, and other nationalistic concepts that no longer serve a useful purpose in a world
where a single ideological system (one backed by the most fearsome military in history) reigns
completely unopposed. If that were the case, well, it might behoove us to question whether this
outbreak of Nazism, racism, and other forms of "hate," was somehow connected to that historical
development and maybe even try to articulate some sort of leftist analysis of that.
This hypothetical leftist analysis might want to focus on how Capitalism is fundamentally
opposed to Despotism, and is essentially a value-decoding machine which renders everything and
everyone it touches essentially valueless interchangeable commodities whose worth is determined
by market forces, rather than by societies and cultures, or religions, or other despotic
systems (wherein values are established and enforced arbitrarily, by the despot, the church, or
the ruling party, or by a group of people who share an affinity and decide they want to live a
certain way). This is where it would get sort of tricky, because it (i.e., this hypothetical
analysis) would have to delve into the history of Capitalism, and how it evolved out of
medieval Despotism, and how it has been decoding despotic values for something like five
hundred years. This historical delving (which would probably be too long for people to read on
their phones) would demonstrate how Capitalism has been an essentially progressive force in
terms of getting us out of Despotism (which, for most folks, wasn't very much fun) by fomenting
bourgeois revolutions and imposing some semblance of democracy on societies. It would follow
Capitalism's inexorable advance all the way up to the Twentieth Century, in which its final
external ideological adversary, fake Communism, suddenly imploded, delivering us to the world
we now live in a world where a single ideology rules the planet unopposed from without
, and where any opposition to that global ideology can only be internal, or insurgent, in
nature (e.g, terrorism, extremism, and so on). Being a hypothetical leftist analysis,
it would, at this point, need to stress that, despite the fact that Capitalism helped deliver
us from Despotism, and improved the state of society generally (compared to most societies that
preceded it), we nonetheless would like to transcend it, or evolve out of it toward some type
of society where people, and everything else, including the biosphere we live in, are not
interchangeable, valueless commodities exchanged by members of a global corporatocracy who have
no essential values, or beliefs, or principles, other than the worship of money. After having
covered all that, we might want to offer more a nuanced view of the current neo-nationalist
reaction to the Corporatocracy's ongoing efforts to restructure and privatize the rest of the
planet. Not that we would support this reaction, or in any way refrain from calling
neo-nationalism what it is (i.e., reactionary, despotic, and doomed), but this nuanced view
we'd hypothetically offer, by analyzing the larger sociopolitical and historical forces at
play, might help us to see the way forward more clearly, and who knows, maybe eventually
propose some kind of credible leftist alternative to the "global neoliberalism vs.
neo-nationalism" double bind we appear to be hopelessly stuck in at the moment.
Luckily, we don't have to do that (i.e., articulate such a leftist analysis of any such
larger historical forces). Because there is no corporatocracy not really. That's just a fake
word the Russians made up and are spreading around on the Internet to distract us while the
Nazis take over. No, the logical explanation for Trump, Brexit, and anything else that
threatens the expansion of global Capitalism, and the freedom, democracy, and prosperity it
offers, is that millions of people across the world, all at once, for no apparent reason, woke
up one day full-blown fascists and started looking around for repulsive demagogues to swear
fanatical allegiance to. Yes, that makes a lot more sense than all that complicated stuff about
history and hegemonic ideological systems, which is probably just Russian propaganda anyway, in
which case there is absolutely no reason to read any boring year-old pieces, like this one in TheEuropeanFinancialReview , or this report by
Corporate Watch , from way back in the year 2000, about the rise of global corporate
power.
So, apologies for wasting your time with all that pseudo-Marxian gobbledygook. Let's just
pretend this never happened, and get back to more important matters, like statistically proving
that Donald Trump got elected President because of racism, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia,
or some other type of behavioral disorder, and pulling down Confederate statues, or kneeling
during the National Anthem, or whatever happens to be trending this week. Oh, yeah, and
debating punching Nazis, or people wearing MAGA hats. We definitely need to sort all that out
before we can move ahead with helping the Corporatocracy remove Trump from office, or at least
ensure he remains surrounded by their loyal generals, CEOs, and Goldman Sachs guys until the
next election. Whatever we do, let's not get distracted by that stuff I just distracted you
with. I know, it's tempting, but, given what's at stake, we need to maintain our laser focus on
issues related to identity politics, or else well, you know, the Nazis win.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Yesterday evening on RT a USA lady, as usual forgot the name, spoke about the USA. In a
matter of fact tone she said things like 'they (Deep State) have got him (Trump) in the
box'.
They, Deep State again, are now wondering if they will continue to try to control the
world, or if they should stop the attempt, and retreat into the USA.
Also as matter of fact she said 'the CIA has always been the instrument of Deep State, from
Kenndy to Nine Eleven'.
Another statement was 'no president ever was in control'.
How USA citizens continue to believe they live in a democracy, I cannot understand.
Yesterday the intentions of the new Dutch government were made public, alas most Dutch
also dot not see that the Netherlands since 2005 no longer is a democracy, just a province of
Brussels.
Brexit is about Britons who want their country back, a movement indeed getting
stronger and stronger in EU member states, but ignored by the ruling 'elites'.
No doubt many do want their country back, but what concerns me is that all of a sudden we
have the concept of "independence" plastered all over the place. Such concepts don't get
promoted unless the ruling elites see ways to turn those sentiments to their favor.
A lot of these so called "revolutions" are fomented by the elite only to be subverted
and perverted by them in the end. They've had a lot of practice co-opting revolutions and
independence movements. (And everything else.)
"Independence" is now so fashionable (as was Communism among the "elite" back in the '30s),
that they are even teaching and fostering independence to kids in kindergarten here in the
US. That strikes me as most amusing. Imagine "learning" independence in state run
brainwashing factories.
"Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of
fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people's frustration with
neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire
with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with
supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by
corporate-concocted "free trade" agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything,
or the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and
replaced with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which
is merely a simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because
exchange value is its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their
eviscerated cultural values back to them so they can wear their "identities" like designer
brands as they hunch together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on
Facebook."
Very impressed with this article, never really paid attention to CJ's articles but that is
now changing!
"... Russia is for and against Trump, and is thus destroying American democracy! We have always been at war with Eurasia! Freedom is slavery! ..."
"... The dangerous projection from the US elites where anyone and anything can be turned into something "evil" through the mere suggestion of any connection to Russia is no longer shocking--but that makes it no less disturbing and insidious. ..."
"... the whole thing is quite laughable, if it wasn't taken so seriously by so many doorknobs... ..."
"... b you are right to continue to focus on this issue. The Russia hysteria is beginning to burn itself out. However the msn and the Democrats are now beginning to focus on Google, Twitter and Facebook instead. Hillary last week gave a talk at Stanford calling for those companies to censure false news reports. If her plan was put into effect one of its targets would obviously be MoA along with hundreds of other outlets on both the left and the right that challenge the usual deep state "news" promoted by the mainstream news monopolies. ..."
"... Identifying all of the ways in which it was rigged is still open to debate, but we know for sure that during the primary the DNC manipulated the schedule for "Super Tuesday" so as to pad Clinton's lead with meaningless red states which would never turn out for her in the general, that numerous states also executed suspect purges of their voter roles in precincts leaning heavily toward Bernie Sanders, and that Clinton fraudulently secured the electoral votes of some 400 so-called "super delegates" in order to create the illusion she had popular support. ..."
"... Furthermore, we know that the DNC itself promoted Trump because they wrongly believed that he would be easier to beat in the general election. If anyone really adulterated our democracy during this election, it was the DNC and, as usual, the corporate media apparatus. But as with any large-scale CYA operation, the first order of business is to distract attention away from the domestic perpetrators by hyping up an external threat and projecting all manner of crimes to this shadowy enemy. ..."
"... If one looks at the recent history of which bills pass in congress, and how close the votes lie, it is very easy to see the BIG LIE that these people represent anything other than the corporate interests that pay them the most money. ..."
"... Trump is a symptom, not the disease. Hillary was the same, and I fully expect the next bunch of politicians to show even more stark symptoms. To expect the MSM to do other than purvey the lies and obfuscate and distract is simply an illogical and fallacious expectation - an expectation that money will never allow to be met. ..."
"... This entire Russiagate thing is a distraction, canard, red herring - pick your noun for falsity. It's purpose is to obfuscate other things the corporations and governments are doing elsewhere. Caveat emptor ..."
After the ludicrous "Russian hacking" claims have died down for lack of evidence, the
attention was moved to even more ludicrous claims of "Russian ads influenced the elections".
Some readers are upset that continue to debunk the nonsense the media spreads around this. But
lies should not stand without response. If only to blame the reporters and media who push this
dreck.
As evidence is also lacking for any "Russian interference" claims the media outlets have
started to push deceiving headlines. These make claims that are not covered at all by the
content of the related pieces. The headlines are effective because less than 20% of the viewers
ever read beyond them.
Google has found no ads that "Russia", the state or nation, has bought. There is also no
evidence that the ads in question interfered in any way with the election. There is evidence
that any of the ads in questions aimed to achieve that. The opener of the piece repeats the
false headline claims. But now we have "Russian agents", not "Russia", which allegedly did
something.
Google has found evidence that Russian agents bought ads on its wide-ranging networks in an
effort to interfere with the 2016 presidential campaign.
The term "Russian agents" is not defined at all. Where these "secret agents" or Public
Relation professionals in Washington DC hired by some Russian entity?
Using accounts believed to be connected to the Russian government, the agents purchased
$4,700 worth of search ads and more traditional display ads, according to a person familiar
with the company's inquiry ...
"Accounts believed to be connected to the Russian government." Believed by
whom? And how is "connected" defined? Isn't any citizen "connected" to his or her
government?
Those believed , connected accounts bought a whopping $4,700 of ads?
Googles 2016 revenue was $89,000,000,000. The total campaign expenditures in 2016 were some
$6,000,000,000. The Clinton campaign spent some $480,000 on social network ads alone. But
something "Russian" spending $4,700 was "interference"?
But wait. There is more:
Google found a separate $53,000 worth of ads with political material that were purchased from
Russian internet addresses, building addresses or with Russian currency. It is not clear
whether any of those were connected to the Russian government, and they may have been
purchased by Russian citizens, the person said.
So now we are on to something. A full $53,000 worth of ads. But ....
The messages of those ads spanned the political spectrum. One account spent $7,000 on ads to
promote a documentary called "You've Been Trumped," a film about Donald J. Trump's efforts to
build a golf course in Scotland along an environmentally sensitive coastline. Another spent
$36,000 on ads questioning whether President Barack Obama needed to resign. Yet another
bought ads to promote political merchandise for Mr. Obama.
The film is anti-Trump. Obama not resigning would have been anti-Trump. Selling Obama
merchandise may have been good business, but is certainly not pro-Trump. So at least $43,000 of
a total of $53,000 mentioned above was spent by believed , connected
"Russians" on ads that promoted anti-Trump material. How does that fit with the claims that
"Russia" wished to get Trump elected? Putin pushed the wrong button?
The allegedly "Russian" Facebook ads were just
a click-bait scheme by some people trying to make money. The allegedly "Russian" Goggle ads
were of a volume that is unlikely to have made any difference in anything. They were also
anti-Trump.
Clinton lost because people on all sides had learned to dislike her policies throughout the
years. She was unelectable. Her party was and is acting against the interest of the common
people. No claim of anything "Russian" can change those facts.
But, But, But
It is OK when the US of A ( via NED, USAID aka CIA covert ops) does it in Iran, some African
countries, South American and even in Western Europe circa the '60's, to elect puppets
Clinton won the election. Trump winning the Electoral College doesn't change that. If anybody
has been repudiated by popular vote, it is Trump. It wasn't a huge win because the Democratic
Party platform of how great the economy is is not going to win big for the good and simply
reason it's BS. And black voters weren't going to turn out for a white candidate. If winning
the election is a moral endorsement and losing is conviction of sin, then it is Clinton who
was the angel and Trump who was the devil in the judgment of the American people. Seeing
Clinton supporters as demons serving evil just means you hate the American people.
Either the Trumpists are getting exactly what they wanted, which exposes them as shameful.
Or they got blindly picked the biggest liar because, stupid. It's a lose/lose situation.
Since the Electoral College has made the election moot, what is the point of savaging Clinton
except a desperate effort to apologize for Trump?
Russia is for and against Trump, and is thus destroying American democracy! We have
always been at war with Eurasia! Freedom is slavery!
The dangerous projection from the US elites where anyone and anything can be turned
into something "evil" through the mere suggestion of any connection to Russia is no longer
shocking--but that makes it no less disturbing and insidious.
if the Dems wanted to campaign for the NEXT election rather than the LAST one, they could try
opposing Trump on an actual issue... but I don't see Clinton doing squat for Puerto Rico, EPA
standards, Black Lives, health care, Yemen, education, etc. The truth is, she and her party
don't oppose Trump on anything except who won the last election and which country to threaten
next.
I stopped listening to Amy Goodman over a year ago when I got sick of hearing nothing but
this partisan BS, though once in a while I turn it on for a few minutes, and Goodman is STILL
going on and on about Trump v Clinton! but today I got to hear Julian Assange tell her off,
so it was worth it.
b you are right to continue to focus on this issue. The Russia hysteria is beginning to
burn itself out. However the msn and the Democrats are now beginning to focus on Google,
Twitter and Facebook instead. Hillary last week gave a talk at Stanford calling for those
companies to censure false news reports. If her plan was put into effect one of its targets
would obviously be MoA along with hundreds of other outlets on both the left and the right
that challenge the usual deep state "news" promoted by the mainstream news monopolies.
Johnson #2. You obviously do not understand the US constitution. It was crafted to
distribute political power to all of the States, not to just those with the largest
populations. That was done deliberately and carefully in order to get the 13 former colonies
to agree to joining a united states. That is why we have the electoral college and why each
of the states have exactly two US senators irrespective of their population. So you want to
abolish the electoral college? Well then change the US constitution. Of course keep in mind
that the constitution has a rule for that process too -- it requires that 2/3 of the states
agree. Good luck with trying that! Well you loyal Hillary sycophants should just go back and
continue to cry in your beers like the pathetic losers that you all are.
The 2016 election, as with every federal election since at least 2000, was rigged.
Identifying all of the ways in which it was rigged is still open to debate, but we
know for sure that during the primary the DNC manipulated the schedule for "Super Tuesday" so
as to pad Clinton's lead with meaningless red states which would never turn out for her in
the general, that numerous states also executed suspect purges of their voter roles in
precincts leaning heavily toward Bernie Sanders, and that Clinton fraudulently secured the
electoral votes of some 400 so-called "super delegates" in order to create the illusion she
had popular support.
Furthermore, we know that the DNC itself promoted Trump because they wrongly believed
that he would be easier to beat in the general election. If anyone really adulterated our
democracy during this election, it was the DNC and, as usual, the corporate media apparatus.
But as with any large-scale CYA operation, the first order of business is to distract
attention away from the domestic perpetrators by hyping up an external threat and projecting
all manner of crimes to this shadowy enemy.
It's been the same tired song and dance in this country since forever, and I don't think
it'll ever change, especially not with almost universal control of the government, media,
finance, and industry by the money-printing fifth column.
If one looks at the recent history of which bills pass in congress, and how close the
votes lie, it is very easy to see the BIG LIE that these people represent anything other than
the corporate interests that pay them the most money.
The 'differences' they postulate and promulgate across media are of things
inconsequential, or of things that can never be wholly resolved with laws and regulations.
When important things arise, they are locked away in committee or alleged 'deadlock'. What
bills do pass are always, not sometimes, but always those that enrich their own pockets in
some way.
Those that believe in either cause, Democrat or Republican, are avoiding the truth staring
them in the face. They prefer the old reality we lived in where news could be controlled via
5 or 6 media outlets. They prefer The Matrix to the reality of where we exist today.
The truth is slowly oozing out, even as these parasitic creatures shovel and shove it back
under rocks and into overflowing waste bins. The result of this is apathy in extremis. This
will continue until a disaster or collapse of some part of the existing system forces people
to act for change.
Trump is a symptom, not the disease. Hillary was the same, and I fully expect the next
bunch of politicians to show even more stark symptoms. To expect the MSM to do other than
purvey the lies and obfuscate and distract is simply an illogical and fallacious expectation
- an expectation that money will never allow to be met.
This entire Russiagate thing is a distraction, canard, red herring - pick your noun
for falsity. It's purpose is to obfuscate other things the corporations and governments are
doing elsewhere. Caveat emptor
The official US doctrine is and has been containment of Russia. that excludes any
friendship. The best that can be done is to avoid WWIII. And due to Putin patience that might be
possible. After Putin is gone, who knows. If nationalist come to power, the neocon might
really feel the depth of Russian anger at the US imperial policies.
Bunch of neocons travel to Moscow to test waters for rapprochement. After then pissed Russia
and launched neo-McCarthyism campaign for the last two years... such a great diplomats.
Those neocons completely poisoned the well and now want to drink clean water. No way.
Notable quotes:
"... President Vladimir Putin's recent hint that the Kremlin could cut another 155 people from the number permitted to work at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. ..."
"... because Mr. Putin does not seem to feel real pressure from U.S. sanctions, he is unlikely to be disposed to offer major concessions to the United States simply to reach agreement, especially in the runup to Russia's 2018 presidential elections ..."
"... Keep pretending that Russia has hacked your elections. There is zero interest from the US side in improving relations and we know this quite well here. There is no question that the fat defense and intelligence budgets and all the extra power that the spooks now got is a direct outcome of destroyed Russia-US relations. The democrats sour grapes and election rigging cover up with Russiagate is also undeniable. Keep living the lie ..."
"... It is sad that the media, the Democratic party, and the "deep state" are all working together to try to keep the phony Trump-Russia collusion story alive - but it has almost run its course and less and less people believe it. ..."
"... The US doctrine is and has been containment of Russia. That is a very foolish and self defeating way in the 21st century. The West would have been better off when the bankers did not have such controls and the American congress grew real courage and paid down the national debt. ..."
"... I don't know to what degree the author of this article and those he went with have real influence on either side, but we, the American public, have yet to be presented with any real proof that Russia (and specifically its government, directly) actually did anything significant with regard to the election. To the degree that we've been shown any evidence, it appears completely inconsequential, extremely minor dabbling at most. The latest is that "Russia" (nebulously defined) spent $100,000 on Facebook ads... Meanwhile the Clinton campaign spent $1 BILLION. This is a joke. ..."
"... The situation in Ukraine is a million times more of a significant obstacle to improved relations. ..."
"... Russia and US have all the reasons to be adversaries. Because US seeks global domination but will never be able to achieve it as long as Russia exists as subject of global politics. US invests huge resources into making harm to Russia in every possible way. And it been this way at least since Truman administration. ..."
"... NATO cannot save a non-existent failed state. There are at least three different and geographically separate Ukraines. Catholic Galicia has nothing to do with the rest of the country. And the East wants to separate. It is another case of former Yugoslavia. ..."
"... trump was given a choice by the deep state of you either work with us or else... so he has become a puppet of the swamp ..."
Russian officials were largely dismissive of U.S. and European economic sanctions, which some
indirectly credit with significantly strengthening Russia's agricultural sector -- to such an
extent that they claimed Russian products may fiercely compete in Europe if and when the
European Union eases it sanctions and Russia lifts its protectionist counter-sanctions. Indeed,
the U.S. Department of State itself asserted in 2016 that a loss of
"at most 1 percent of GDP can be potentially explained by sanctions" as opposed to declining
global energy prices. The combination of "at most" and "potentially" in this sentence suggests
that there is little empirical evidence that sanctions have caused real damage to Russia's
economy. Moreover, since U.S. sanctions could account for only a small part of this -- because
Europe's economic
relationship with Russia is far larger than America's -- there is no reason to think that
new U.S. sanctions, which have yet to be fully implemented, will make a material difference at
the macroeconomic level. (The State Department did find that sanctioned companies appeared to
lose significant revenue and assets.) Still, some officials did privately admit that the
sanctions undermine Russia's investment climate, especially among foreign investors.
At the same time, however, some officials reacted quite strongly to the Trump
administration's decision to close Russia's consulate in San Francisco, the latest move in an
escalating diplomatic spat that began with the Obama administration's expulsion of thirty-five
Russian diplomats and seizure of two diplomatic properties in December, following a widely
publicized intelligence community report on Russia's election interference.
Even in this area, however, our interlocutors seemed to prefer curtailing the dispute over
extending it -- notwithstanding President Vladimir Putin's recent hint that
the Kremlin could cut another 155 people from the number permitted to work at the U.S. Embassy
in Moscow.
Yet containing this battle between the State Department and Russian Foreign Ministry
bureaucracies may well be the easiest step in working toward a functional U.S.-Russia
relationship. Far more important and more challenging will be addressing Russia's election
interference, which has poisoned the relationship to an extent that Russian officials -- who
describe the matter strictly as a U.S. partisan slugfest brought on by sour-grapes Democrats --
did not seem to appreciate....
... Russia's
diplomatic, economic, military and security officials will each seek to pursue their own
objectives, sometimes contradicting one another. Also, because Mr. Putin does not seem to
feel real pressure from U.S. sanctions, he is unlikely to be disposed to offer major
concessions to the United States simply to reach agreement, especially in the runup to Russia's
2018 presidential elections .
Thus "getting to yes" on these or other issues will take
persistence and creativity.
Paul J. Saunders, associate publisher of the National Interest, is executive director of
the Center for the National Interest.
Keep pretending that Russia has hacked your elections. There is zero interest from the
US side in improving relations and we know this quite well here. There is no question that
the fat defense and intelligence budgets and all the extra power that the spooks now got is a
direct outcome of destroyed Russia-US relations. The democrats sour grapes and election
rigging cover up with Russiagate is also undeniable. Keep living the lie
I agree with you that Russia probably did not hack the US elections. Julian Assange, head
of WikiLeaks, has made it quite clear that he received the Clinton campaign emails from
elsewhere. (and he has a 100% history of being truthful with regard to what he releases) But
I would say to Russia to not give up on better relations with America. It is true that the
"deep state" and the Military Industrial Complex make a lot of money from "bad relations"
with Russia, but I think Trump understands that improving relations will be good for both
sides and potentially save a lot of money for America's citizens. Give it some time.....
Wow, good to hear a sober voice! I have felt some backlash personally in the commercial
world, and it really feels nasty (basically just like racism), especially since I feel like
1/2 American, having lived in the US for 11 years. So this has gone very deep even in private
sector.
Not too sure about good prospects coming up soon. I'm following both the foreign and domestic
policies of the current government in Washington and its a bit scary - Cuba, Nicaragua,
Venezuela, NK, China, Iran - all are becoming enemies, sanctions reintroduced, and all the
ultra-right wing stuff home like getting rid of health insurance, removing all regulations,
now 20% poverty rate in CA, I don't recognize the country I used to live a couple decades
ago!
It is sad that the media, the Democratic party, and the "deep state" are all working
together to try to keep the phony Trump-Russia collusion story alive - but it has almost run
its course and less and less people believe it. It is now looking like it was the Obama Admin's justice department that actually paid for the phony "Trump Dossier" that was used as
an excuse to wiretap the Trump campaign. Once that story blows up (Senator Grassley has
subpoenaed the background docs) I think you will see a rapid improvement in relations.
pavel , Russia made
its choices. The onus is not on the US to pacify Russia with any standard of proof that it
may find convincing. Its up to the US authorities to interpret the Russian actions as being
either confrontational or friendly. Russia has no say over it.
The US doctrine is and has been containment of Russia. That is a very foolish and self
defeating way in the 21st century. The West would have been better off when the bankers did
not have such controls and the American congress grew real courage and paid down the national
debt.
It is testimony to the gross malfeasance of American media and pols (both sides but
especially Ds like both idiotic Clintons) that America has no working relationship with
Russia. The good news, once again in time Trump will be proved right.
I don't know to what degree the author of this article and those he went with have real
influence on either side, but we, the American public, have yet to be presented with any real
proof that Russia (and specifically its government, directly) actually did anything
significant with regard to the election. To the degree that we've been shown any evidence, it
appears completely inconsequential, extremely minor dabbling at most. The latest is that
"Russia" (nebulously defined) spent $100,000 on Facebook ads... Meanwhile the Clinton
campaign spent $1 BILLION. This is a joke.
But apparently this group went over there and acted as if the American people are
outraged. No, dishonest Democrat hacks and never-Trump Republicans inside the Beltway are
obsessed with it, because they hate the outcome of the election and want to discredit Trump.
But they've been fishing for a year and a half and can't find anything, despite furiously
leaking every innuendo they can, that turns out to be a false smear against Trump and
completely falls apart on inspection.
The situation in Ukraine is a million times more of a significant obstacle to improved
relations.
"If Russia can't be trusted to respect the borders of its neighbors, we can't have good
relations."
Says who? Citizen of a country which invaded 100+ countries since 1890, including Russia
twice? Learn how to respect borders and sovereignity or others yourself. Otherwise it is not
going to end well for you.
Given your namesake, I'm not sure what point you think you're making. My point is that
now, today, the US and Russia have no reason to be adversaries. The past is the past. This is
just practical reality. We have allies in Europe who are worried about Russian expansionism.
Again, because of your namesake. If Russia makes moves to its west, relations cannot
improve.
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I will be shocked if the judge does anything about it beyond a slap on the wrist an an admonition not to get caught again.
Explain, would you? Maybe I didn't read carefully enough.
thanks larry.. what are the chances seth rich was an intel asset?
Very unlikely that he was an intel asset.
Sid Finster,
In fairness to the FBI, they didn't say there were no emails, they said they used a search of CRS and that didn't identify any emails. It isn't clear to me from what was provided in this post whether the search would have included records from the WFO.
The sorry fact is this: Out here in places like my town in flyover country, I could mention Seth Rich and no one would have the slightest idea who he was and why he should get justice--or at least that the truth about his life and death should be told.
Diana Croissant
David H et al
Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This image shows Crowdstrike in their network. Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network. In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The network communication goes through a secondary source.
Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence. The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could be on the list.
<img src="https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/PARKHOMENKO-twitter.com-2018.08.14-04-34-11.png" alt="Adam Parkhomenko" width="355" height="454" srcset="https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/PARKHOMENKO-twitter.com-2018.08.14-04-34-11.png 355w, https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/PARKHOMENKO-twitter.com-2018.08.14-04-34-11-235x300.png 235w" sizes="(max-width: 355px) 100vw, 355px" /> Before Clinton declared her candidacy, Parkhomenko started a PAC for Hillary Clinton with the goal of getting millions of people email lists so the support was ready for a Clinton run. After she declared her candidacy, Robby Mook, Hillary's campaign manager decided to sideline Parkhomenko and didn't take on his full staff as promised. He reduced Parkomenko to a quiet menial position when he was brought onboard.
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US politics (domestic)
Canova Contests The Results Of Congressional Race Against Wasserman-Schultz, Calls For Revote December 1, 2018 December 1, 2018 Elizabeth Vos Earlier today, former Congressional candidate Tim Canova announced that his legal team filed a complaint officially contesting the results of last month's congressional race, in which Canova faced off against former DNC Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
July 15, 2018 July 15, 2018 Adam Carter
Senate to examine financial records of firm behind notorious Trump-Russia dossier
