President Obama's Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper and his
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan oversaw a secret supercomputer
system known as "THE HAMMER," according to former NSA/CIA contractor-turned whistleblower
Dennis Montgomery.
Clapper and Brennan were using the supercomputer system to conduct illegal and
unconstitutional government data harvesting and wiretapping. THE HAMMER was installed on
federal property in Fort Washington, Maryland at a complex which some speculate is a secret CIA
and NSA operation operating at a US Naval facility.
President Trump's allegation that the Obama Administration was wiretapping him is not only
supported by Montgomery's whistleblower revelations about Brennan's and Clapper's computer
system THE HAMMER, but also by statements made this week by William Binney, a former NSA
Technical Director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, by former
CIA and State Department official Larry Johnson, and by Montgomery's attorney Larry
Klayman.
Computer expert Dennis Montgomery developed software programs that could breach secure
computer systems and collect massive amounts of data.
That system, THE HAMMER, according to the audio tapes, accessed the phone calls, emails and
bank accounts of millions of ordinary Americans.
The tapes also reveal that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court (FISA), Supreme Court
Chief Justice John Roberts, 156 other judges, members of Congress, and Donald J. Trump were
targeted by the HAMMER.
One of the audio tapes made public by Federal Judge G. Murray Snow revealed that Brennan
and Clapper particularly targeted and wiretapped Donald Trump a " zillion
times."
Montgomery also contends that the government can plant files such as child *********** or
state secrets on a target's computer, setting up the owner of that device for blackmail or
framed prosecution.
Former CBS Reporter Sharyl Attkisson Alleged In 2013 She Was Under Electronic Surveillance
For At Least Two Years And That Three Classified Documents Were Planted On Her "Compromised"
Computer.
The audio tapes were released by Federal Judge G. Murray Snow in Maricopa County, Arizona in
the Justice Department's civil contempt case against Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio.
Attorney Klayman, founder of Freedom Watch, represented Montgomery before federal Judge
Royce C. Lamberth. Klayman, who characterizes his client Montgomery as a "whistleblower," told
Fox News that Montgomery "turned over 600 million plus pages of information to the FBI." Judge
Lamberth was formerly the presiding judge over the FISA court.
After Montgomery produced his documentation, the FBI gave him two immunity agreements: one
in the area of "production" and the other regarding "testimony."
The FBI then took possession of Montgomery's documentation.
Attorney Klayman asserts that this information precipitated James Clapper's resignation.
Clapper had gone before Congress to testify under oath that the NSA, and other intelligence
agencies including the CIA," were not collecting massive amounts of telephonic and Internet
metadata on hundreds of millions of innocent American citizens" according to Klayman.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations proved otherwise.
Clapper was subsequently found to be untruthful and resigned on November 17, 2016, effective
January 20, 2017, the day Donald Trump was sworn in.
Clapper has not been prosecuted for perjury and we wonder why.
7 minutes ago Thanks Q! I bring up Montgomery all of the time here. The Eff Bee Eye and Dee oh
Jay have all of the documents and are sitting on them. This is how the IC controls everything
in the Swamp.
BOMBSHELL: CIA Whistleblower Leaked Proof Trump Under "Systematic Illegal" Surveillance
Over Two Years Ago: FBI Sat On It by ZeroPointNow Wed, 03/22/2017 - 22:37 0
SHARES
The same day House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes gave a press conference
disclosing that President Trump had been under "
incidental surveillance ," Attorney and FreedomWatch Chairman, Larry Klayman, sent a letter
to the House Committee on Intelligence imploring them to pursue the claims and evidence
presented under oath at a Washington DC FBI Field Office by his client - CIA / NSA
Whistleblower Dennis Montgomery - who Klayman claims "holds the keys to disproving the false
claims... ...that there is no evidence that the president and his men were wiretapped"
When Montgomery attempted to deliver this information through the appropriate channels two
years ago , the former CIA and NSA contractor wasn't given the time of day:
[W]hen Montgomery came forward as a whistleblower to congressional intelligence committees
and various other congressmen and senators, including Senator Charles Grassley , Chairman of
the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, like Comey, once had a reputation for integrity, he was
"blown off;" no one wanted to even hear what he had to say.
As a result, Montgomery went to attorney and FreedomWatch founder Larry Klayman - who then
approached the FBI:
Under grants of immunity, which I obtained through Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Curtis,
Montgomery produced the hard drives and later was interviewed under oath in a secure room at
the FBI Field Office in the District of Columbia . There he laid out how persons like
then-businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy
agencies of the Obama administration.
Montgomery left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of
information , much of which is classified, and sought to come forward legally as a
whistleblower to appropriate government entities, including congressional intelligence
committees, to expose that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal
surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other
justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump , and even yours truly.
Working side by side with Obama's former Director of National Intelligence (DIA), James
Clapper, and Obama's former Director of the CIA, John Brennan, Montgomery witnessed "up close
and personal" this "Orwellian Big Brother" intrusion on privacy , likely for potential
coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.
He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008
presidential election , which illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White
House.
Given the fact that the FBI had Montgomery's testimony and evidence for over two years,
Klayman traveled to Washington DC last Thursday to meet with Committee Chairman Devin Nunes in
the hopes that he would ask FBI Director Comey why the FBI hadn't pursued Montgomery's
evidence. When Klayman arrived to speak with Nunes, he was "blown off" and instead shared his
information with committee attorney Allen R. Souza - who Klayman requested in turn brief Nunes
on the situation.
During my meeting with House Intelligence Committee counsel Allen R. Sousa I politely
warned him that if Chairman Nunes, who himself had that same day undercut President Trump by
also claiming that there is no evidence of surveillance by the Obama administration, I would
go public with what would appear to be the House Intelligence Committee's complicity in
keeping the truth from the American people and allowing the FBI to continue its apparent
cover-up of the Montgomery "investigation."
And, that is where it stands today. The big question: will House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Nunes do his job and hold FBI Director Comey's feet to the fire about the Montgomery
investigation?
Klayman has detailed all of this in a
NewsMax article , followed up with an official
letter to Chairman Nunes today, requesting that he question Comey on Montgomery's evidence.
Perhaps this explains Nunes' impromptu press conference today admitting that Trump's team was
under "
Incidental Surveillance " before making his way to the White House to discuss with the
President.
So - we know that evidence exists from a CIA / NSA contractor turned whistleblower,
detailing a massive spy operation on 156 judges, the Supreme Court, and high profile Americans
including Donald Trump. See the letter below:
A remarkably disingenuous article I would say. Russia sanctioned and sanctioned again with
threats of being kicked out of SWIFT and isolated in every way takes minimal precautions
against an internet collapse and is criticized. For example, DNS resolution function which I
believe resides in various western countries could be denied rendering much of the Russian
internet useless.
If the British were the ones to organise an independence referendum in Crimea, they would
probably push as many people as possible into postal voting and reduce the number of polling
stations as part of this strategy.
"80% sure that Mifsud is dead". What has become of the Russiagate professor? InsideOver
(Furzy Mouse).
When is a CIA asset not an asset?
When the asset is made up out of thin air.
Somebody should make a movie out of this. Yes, Ghost Writer comes close and I highly
recommend it if you've not seen it. But this takes it a big set forward.
Of course, the director will have to be especially attentive to character development.
That could be difficult unless it's thought thru.
Top recommendation, Polar Socialist. Alec Guinness by way of Graham Greene makes for an
excellent combination to poke fun at the whole world of state-sponsored spycraft.
timbers: The story posted today is bizarre indeed. So the university consortium (Agrigento
doesn't have its own university and the plan is to continue to sponsor a branch of the
University of Palermo) wants a leader and ends up with Mifsud?
From Italian Wikipedia, entry Agrigento:
Agrigento, oltre ad essere sede di varie scuole medie superiori (alle quali sono iscritti
anche studenti provenienti dalla provincia), ospita una sede distaccata
dell'Università degli Studi di Palermo. Il polo universitario della provincia di
Agrigento nell'anno accademico 2008/2009 contava 3.613 studenti iscritti, così
suddivisi nelle 6 facoltà attivate nella sede decentrata
Mifsud, head of a small branch of a major university? Odd. And then he starts
grifting.
Yet Agrigento is the home turf of Andrea Camilleri and, supposedly, one of the models for
his city of Vigàta. This story is definitely something for Inspector Montalbano.
Background: Il Giornale was founded by Indro Montanelli, who was a "classic" Italian
conservative. He was notoriously stubborn. Kneecapping didn't stop him. One of the products
of Il Giornale is Marco Travaglio, who founded Il Fatto Quotidiano. So the source is
legitimate. I can't find an Italian version of the article, which is strange.
But the oddities of the obviously dodgy Mifsud and the hapless Papadopoulos are just part
of the whole saga of the current palace coup.
No wonder Nancy Pelosi can't figure out to send the charges to the Senate.
In March 2016, Papadopoulos first met Mr. Mifsud impromptu at Link Campus University, a
for-profit college in Rome that instructs NATO intelligence personnel.
Link Campus instructs NATO intelligence personnel[2] and the US intelligence and law
enforcement officials are also involved with Link.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have
sent their officers to lecture at Link.
Regarding "the mysterious audio file sent to the editors of Adnkronos and Il Corriere
della Sera", that was found to be fake by the "expert in forensic sciences, one of the most
important in Italy working in the field", it is interesting to note that NATO-aligned
propaganda outlet Bellingcat
claims the voice in the recording is authentic (i.e. Mifsud).
Bellingcat deciding to "investigate" something is always a giant red flag.
Adam Schiff Has 'No Sympathy' For FBI Victim Carter Page; Page Responds by Tyler Durden Sun, 12/22/2019 -
13:00 0 SHARES
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) says it's hard to feel sympathetic for former Trump campaign aide
Carter Page, despite the fact that he was spied on by the FBI after the agency fabricated
evidence to obtain a surveillance warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
court.
After the FISA court denied their request, FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith fabricated evidence
to exclude the fact that Page was a CIA source, with "positive assessment," despite the fact
that the CIA informed Clinesmith of Page's prior work for the agency.
Schiff, however, has no love for Page despite DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz finding
16 significant 'errors' in the FBI's FISA applications used to surveil Page.
"I have to say, you know, Carter Page came before our Committee and for hours of his
testimony, denied things that we knew were true, later had to admit them during his testimony
," Schiff told PBS News ' Margaret Hoover. " It's hard to be sympathetic to someone
who isn't honest with you when he comes and testifies under oath . It's also hard to be
sympathetic when you have someone who has admitted to being an adviser to the Kremlin ."
Hoover countered, noting "But then was also informing the CIA," to which Schiff replies
"Yes, yes."
"Which we didn't know about," replied Hoover.
" Who was both targeted by the KGB but also talking to the United States and its agencies
and that should have been included , made clear, and it wasn't, according to the inspector
general," Schiff responded.
. @RepAdamSchiff is unsympathetic
to Carter Page, telling @FiringLineShow that Page
"denied things that we knew were true" in testimony, admitted to being an advisor to the
Kremlin & "was apparently both targeted by the KGB, but also talking to the United States
and its agencies." pic.twitter.com/GkjdGQZWLV
-- Firing Line with Margaret
Hoover (@FiringLineShow) December
20, 2019
After Schiff's comments were published, Page responded on Twitter: "There have been various
allegations of dishonesty regarding FBI lawyer Clinesmith. On information, belief and firsthand
experience since 2017, I have actually found @RepAdamSchiff to be even more untrustworthy and
dangerous with his misuse of @DNC lies. "
There have been various allegations of dishonesty regarding FBI lawyer Clinesmith. On
information, belief and firsthand experience since 2017, I have actually found @RepAdamSchiff to
be even more untrustworthy and dangerous with his misuse of @DNC lies: https://t.co/kMkRYFceGs
If you don't feel sympathy for someone who was wrongly smeared for years as being a
traitor, and who was spied on by his own government due to FBI lying & subterfuge, then
you're not only unqualified to wield power but probably also a sociopath.
The big question: Has Durham convened a grand jury or is he just planing another report?
On the conspiracy front: Apparently Mifsud is dead, so say some Italian journalists. Has
he been epsteined too?
Then there is the Intercept story that Adm. Rogers has been voluntarily cooperating with
Durham.
In any case, I'm really curious if Durham's playing Sherlock Holmes and uncovering the
various threads of this fascinating story of alleged meddling by law enforcement &
intelligence agencies in several countries in a presidential election and the framing of an
opposition presidential campaign and then president as a Manchurian Candidate.
No doubt Hollywood material if Durham lays it all out. Could beat All the Presidents
Men!
Sara Carter has the current story about Jospeh Mifsud alleged second reported demise, after
his allleged first demise reported a few years ago, as the Russiagate story was just
breaking. Second demise now that Russiagate story is concluding.
Papadopolus reports of Mifsud's death are greatly exaggerated. And the curtain will soon
be going up on his third act. Could this be the CIA disinformation coup crew working
overtime?
I guess we wait to get the real story from CNN.
(Sarcasm)
Have any of you read Bill Browder's book Red Notice?
It's a great read.
The grandson of the General Secretary of the United States Communist Party, whose great
auntie worked for the NKVD. His brother, Lev, is a great mathematician.
Browder worked with Robert Maxwell as an intern. That's the father of Ghislaine Maxwell,
Jeffrey Epstein's facilitator.
Browder went on to Salomen Brothers and ended up being one of the largest capitalists in
Eastern Europe.
For some reason the Russians believed that Browder was using front companies to aquire
stakes in Russian strategic assets, then remove billions without paying taxes, apparently
worth in excess of 4 billion. If Russian 'propaganda' is to be believed.
They must have wrong because Browder was able to achieve the Magnitsky Act in
response.
It seemed the Russians unfairly seized shares from Browder he acquired in Gazprom,
Surgutneftegaz, Unified Energy Systems, and Sidanco.
In July 2017, Browder testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Russia's alleged
interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
As everyone knows, this claim about Russian collusion by Trump is 100% true, and supports
the veracity of all his other claims. As the number one capitalist in Russia following the
fall of the Soviet Union.
And he was a hero too. Speaking out about how Jewish Oligarchs defenestrated Russia with
Yeltsin in the early 2000s and late 90s. He spoke out against his fellow Jews in what most
regard as conspiracy theories. Putin even praised him for assisting in liberation from the
Oligarchs.
What the Russians did was terrifying. They established a precedent where Jewish
international assets and capital could be seized for interference with affairs of state.
Of course what they apparently did was steal $230m off of Browder's fund shareholders.
Russia is of course very corrupt. And Browder's testimony against Trump for alleged Russia
collusion given what everyone knows speaks for his utmost veracity.
I came out of that book with the utmost admiration for Bill Browder. He did his best in
Poland with depressed assets, and he had a grand adventure. He's clearly amazingly good at
finance.
I came out of that book with the utmost admiration for Bill Browder.
You don't seem to be serious, if I understood what you want to say. Even Der Spiegel has
published a critical article in English about Browder, Browder is the one who pushed for
sanctions against Russia because of the case Magnitsky:
Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions
The story of Sergei Magnitsky has come to symbolize the brutal persecution of
whistleblowers in Russia. Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story
suggest he may not have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him
to be.
@Anon
After reading the book of this MI6 asset (and potential killer) who tried to fleece Russia,
you probably can benefit from watching a movie by Nekrasov about him. See references in:
It looks like it was Browder who killed Magnitsky, so that he can't spill the beans. And
then in an act of ultimate chutzpah played the victim and promoted Magnitsky act.
If anyone was watching The Horowitz hearing in the senate today it would be hard to conclude
that RussiaGate and Ukrainegate will not have serious consequences going forward.
The whole sordid, nasty conspiracy seems on the verge of being exposed, maybe as high as
Obama himself, although he is just a puppet himself, and indictments are sure to follow. I
don't see how anyone could think that this will not be catastrophic for the democratic
party.
Investor Bill Browder's allegations –Why Spiegel
is sticking to Magnitsky research
By Lucy Komisar
Dec 15, 2019
This is German news magazine Der Spiegel's response to a complaint by William Browder to its
editor
and to the
German Press Commission
about its exposé that proved he was a fraudster and his Magnitsky story a fabrication.
Key parts are marked in bold. The text and documents show the Spiegel story to be correct and Browder to be a conman.
Former major investor Bill Browder accuses SPIEGEL of misrepresenting the circumstances surrounding the
death of Russian Sergei Magnitsky. SPIEGEL rejects this – and lists the arguments and facts.
Bill Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital Management, photo Luke MacGregor / Bloomberg / Getty Images
Friday,
13.12.2019
8:21 p.m.
SPIEGEL reported on the background of the so-called Magnitsky sanctions on November 23. These punitive measures,
which were imposed on Russian officials by the United States, are mainly based on the account of the former major
investor Bill Browder and relate to the fate of his colleague Sergei Magnitsky.
Magnitsky died in a prison in Moscow in 2009 in circumstances that were not fully understood. Browder claims
Magnitsky was murdered for uncovering a tax scandal.
The SPIEGEL report describes the contradictions in
Browder's statements and states that he cannot provide sufficient evidence for his thesis.
Browder has now made a complaint against the text public, in the form of a letter to the editor-in-chief and a
complaint to the German Press Council. In his letter, he accuses SPIEGEL of distorting the facts.
We consider the complaint to be unfounded and therefore want to make it clear once again where our considerable
doubts about Brudder's story come from and why we consider it necessary to discuss it publicly. We have also made
the
text
freely available to all SPIEGEL readers (
you
can find the text here
). In this statement, we also link some of the sources to which we referred in our
research.
We have corrected an error in the English version of the SPIEGEL report. There we had the information that a rubber
truncheon was used, wrongly assigned to a report from 2009. In fact, it only appears in another report from 2011. The
German version was correct from the start.
NOTE FROM LK: That is Der Spiegel's only mistake. The claim that a rubber truncheon was used is a Browder
forgery. See this by reporter Michael Thau with whom I collaborated on exposing this very complex Browder
fakery
, which included inventing a form that doesn't exist and tracing a signature.
No doubt Magnitsky died a terrible death. As it was said in the SPIEGEL report, "horrible injustice" happened to
him. In our view, it is also appropriate to speak of a "mercilessly omitted assistance". The "use of a rubber stick"
is also
indisputable
. At no point in the SPIEGEL report is the issue of exonerating the Russian state from guilt for
Magnitsky's death. It is about showing
the inconsistencies, contradictions, and unsubstantiated claims in the
story that Browder has been coming and going to Western governments for years – and which have become the basis for
Western sanctions against Russian officials.
Browder's account of what happened to Sergei Magnitsky's death consists of several key elements:
How it all started:
According to Browder, tax inquiries were launched in Moscow in 2007, which he
described as clearly "criminal and politically motivated". The proceedings were fictitious, initiated only for the
purpose of confiscating important documents from some of his letterbox companies during a search. On June 4, 2007,
searches were conducted in Moscow. Numerous company documents were confiscated.
Magnitsky becomes a whistleblower:
Browder claims that he entrusted Magnitsky with the
investigation in 2007: three mailbox companies were hijacked after the search. According to Browder, Magnitsky
reported these events to the State Investigation Committee on June 5 and October 7, 2008, and explicitly accused two
police officers of the crime, Artyom Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov. According to Browder, this advertisement gives a
clear motive for the later arrest and murder of Magnitsky.
Arrest and death
: A trial against Magnitsky will open in autumn 2008. The allegation is tax
evasion. Magnitsky was arrested in November 2008. He died in Russian custody on November 16, 2009. Browder repeatedly
describes the death as a targeted murder plot.
Browder's presentation of the exact events varied
. The campaign videos that he published on
Youtube are exemplary.
Among other things, it states:
"?? After Sergei Magnitsky testified against the same criminal group for an even larger crime, the same
officers arrested, tortured and eventually killed Sergei to hide their crime."
"Instead of supporting Sergei Magnitsky and recognizing him as a hero, the government allowed interior
ministry officers, Kuznetsov, Karpov to arrest, torture and kill him."
At every stage of this presentation, numerous points do not stand up to scrutiny. A London court came to
the conclusion that Browder did not even begin to substantiate his allegations against Karpov (the
full
court order can be viewed here
)
Again and again it becomes clear that Browder's story contains errors and inconsistencies that distort the
overall picture of the events surrounding Magnitsky's death.
1. The tax investigation
The investigation started much earlier than Browder claims. While he has repeatedly stressed that he first
heard the name of the investigator Artyom Kuznetsov in 2007, the opposite is well documented. Kusnezov's name is
already on a letter from the tax investigator from June 2006, which went to Browder's companies.
That Browder's team was aware of the process also results from Magnitsky's statement of June 5, 2008.
There he describes that Kusnetzov requested company and bank documents at the end of May 2006. This mid-2006
investigation is also mentioned in complaints that Browder's people sent to the authorities in December 2007.
In addition, Magnitsky himself was questioned by the authorities in 2006 about tax inquiries.
Investigations into tax evasion by mailbox companies in the vicinity of Browder, including the company "Saturn
Investment", which Magnitsky was concerned with, also date from before 2004.
Several court rulings were brought against Browder's companies, then the proceedings were closed, but reopened in
2008.
SPIEGEL does not adopt the views of the Russian judiciary. A final clarification on whether the allegations of tax
evasion were valid would be up to an independent court, in a fair trial. It becomes clear, however, that
the
investigation did not suddenly start in 2007 as Browder claims, apparently recognizable without any basis. The
investigation has a well-documented history. The European Court of Human Rights concluded in its judgment on the case
that Magnitsky was not "arbitrarily" detained:
"
The Court observes that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal proceedings
against Mr Magnitskyy, started in 2004, long before he complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in
fraudulent acts."
(
Find
the verdict here
)
2. Magnitsky's role as a crucial whistleblower:
In Browder's account, Magnitsky's statement to investigators is the motive for his imprisonment and later targeted
murder: a corrupt clique team silenced the man who was dangerous to it. This is the core of the story spread by
Browder.
Browder describes Magnitsky as a decisive whistleblower. But this is a retrospective construction. Several
people from Browder's team have made the same or very similar allegations against the Russian authorities, some of
them earlier than Magnitsky:
Browder's lawyer Eduard Khairetdinov in complaints to the authorities in early December 2007 (PDF on
Browders
website
)
According to Browder, Magnitsky's first statement on the matter dates back to June 5, 2008.
He speaks about the search and confiscation of documents that, in his opinion, have been carefully used to hijack
the companies. He does not speak of the great tax fraud.
Magnitsky had "not yet discovered the scam",
writes Browder on his website.
A week earlier, however, on May 28, 2008, another Browder man named Grant Felgenhauer wrote in a
letter to the anti-corruption council of the Russian president about the suspicion that the attackers' real goal
was to refund hundreds of taxes Millions of dollars
(PDF
on
Browders website
– the corresponding passage is on top three, Felgenhauer speculates over $ 300 million).
The media had already reported the events. The business service
Bloomberg
,
the "Financial Times" and the "Wall Street Journal" reported in early April 2008.
The New York Times also made public the $ 230 million fraud on July 24, 2008 (link to
article
). Magnitsky,
in turn, did not speak to the authorities until his statement on October 7, 2008.
This chronological sequence is one reason why observers have doubts as to whether Magnitsky was actually
murdered so that the charges against the police officers are no longer raised. The allegations against the Russian
police were worldwide, regardless of Magnitsky's testimony.
Human rights activist Soya Svetova, who dealt with the case from the beginning, put it this way in conversation
with SPIEGEL last summer.
SPIEGEL
:
What about the version that was specifically targeted for being killed? Is
there evidence of this?
Svetova
:
No. There is no evidence of this. What was the point of killing him? No sense.
SPIEGEL
:
Because he knew about a $ 230 million fraud.
Svetova
:
Yes, but not only did he know about this fraud, the entire management and
colleagues also knew about it. It was written about in newspapers. He didn't reveal a secret.
SPIEGEL
: But your report mentions that pressure may have been put on him while in custody.
Svetova
: When he was in custody, people wanted statements from him against Bill Browder. But he
didn't do any. And probably he would never have made such a statement. But killing him would have been completely
pointless for them.
Svetova agreed to the interview and its recording in July 2019. In previous years, she had taken the position that
there was no evidence of a targeted murder. In 2014, for example, she wrote that she could not imagine that someone
had caused Magnitsky's death in a targeted manner ("Well, after five years have passed, I think this killing was not
intentional" –
original in
Russian
).
Shortly before the publication of the SPIEGEL report in November, she said that although that was her words, she
had meanwhile changed her mind and believed that targeted murder was possible. Svetova's change of heart is
transparently documented in the SPIEGEL.
3. The motive for Magnitsky's arrest
Browder claims that Magnitsky was arrested to force him to withdraw his statements against the police. He was
therefore tortured and murdered. Magnitsky's attorney at the time presented the situation differently right from the
start.
Dmitrij Kharitonov told SPIEGEL in autumn 2009 that his client was only a hostage, and that the
authorities actually wanted to put pressure on Bill Browder
(click here for the
article
).
Kharitonov has used the phrase "hostage" more often. In an interview with the Russian edition of Forbes magazine,
he reported that Magnitsky said about himself in court: "Your honor, I was actually taken hostage. My person hardly
interests anyone, everyone is interested in the person of the Hermitage chiefs."(
Russian
text
).
Human rights activist Soya Svetova also argued in a similar fashion in an interview with SPIEGEL this summer.
Svetova
: The figure Magnitsky combines the two greatest grievances in the Russian judiciary and
the Russian investigative system. If a lawsuit is opened against a company and it is not possible to arrest its boss,
then they take his assistant or his deputy or simply a colleague hostage. We see that in many cases: It was the same
with Mikhail Khodorkovsky's group Yukos (??). First, they take hostages. Magnitsky was also a hostage. He was of no
interest to anyone, they wanted Browder.
SPIEGEL
: Although the Russian authorities had just thrown Browder out of the country.
Svetova
: You wanted Magnitsky to tell you what terrible things Browder did. They wanted him to
discredit him, that he was a fraud and tax evader. Even though they stole his companies from him.
Svetova has represented this position several times, in 2014, for example, "
Radio
Liberty
".
In the 2009 text report co-authored by Svetova, evidence is given that investigators, together with the prison
authorities, put pressure on Magnitsky. The report also contains a corresponding quote from Magnitsky. His conditions
of detention had deteriorated in coordination with the investigator of the case against him, Oleg Siltschenko.
Their
goal is "that I accept false accusations, burden myself and others". There is no mention of Browder's claim that
Magnitsky should have revoked his statements.
The Russian original of the report is available on Browder's website (
PDF
). While
the Russian text does not contain the name of the investigator Kuznetsov, the English translation also published on
Browder's website expressly refers to him
(
PDF
).
[LK: Browder posted the version with his forged paragraph at the top of page 3 to his
website
and distributed it to media, including to the
Wall Street Journal
,
which has it on its website. The
translation
filed in U.S. federal court in the Prevezon case does not have that paragraph.]
4. The alleged evidence of a targeted murder plot
As alleged evidence of his thesis of targeted murder, Browder cites photos of hematomas on the dead man's
hands. Some may have been handcuffed, others may have been from Magnitsky's desperate punches on a door. A fatal
injury cannot be seen in the pictures
.
This does not preclude Magnitsky from being killed by external violence, but
there is no evidence of a
targeted murder by beating eight prison guards over an hour and 18 minutes, as Browder has variously claimed.
The contradicting information about the cause of death of the Russian authorities is disturbing, it is not
sufficient evidence for a targeted murder. The use of a rubber stick was also mentioned in the SPIEGEL text.
[LK:
Again, that is incorrect, there is no evidence of use of a truncheon. And consider, do American police who beat up
prisoners write that in reports?]
5. Magnitsky's alleged statements against police officers Karpov and Kusnezov
Browder accuses SPIEGEL of embezzling the true content of Sergei Magnitsky's statements. That in fact, Magnitsky
clearly named police officers Kuznetsov and Karpov as guilty in the statements before his arrest.
Nowhere in the two documents does Magnitsky raise a direct personal accusation against Karpov and
Kusnezov.
6. The role of the police officer Karpov in the Magnitsky case
Browder accuses SPIEGEL of spreading Pavel Karpov's claim that it has nothing to do with Magnitsky's death and tax
fraud. However, it is part of the journalistic due diligence to give people who have been charged with serious crimes
the opportunity to comment. This also applies to Karpov.
Magnitsky's lawyer Dmitry Kharitonov has emphasized several times (for example
here
in
conversation with the Russian radio station Echo Moscow) that Pavel Karpov played no role in the prosecution of his
client.
Kharitonov repeated this statement to SPIEGEL twice. Human rights activist Soja Svetova also said in
the summer of 2019 with a view to Karpov: "But there is no evidence that Karpov put pressure on him (Magnitsky)."
In addition,
the London High Court has also
found
that
Browder's allegations against Karpov are insufficiently substantiated.
7. The question of money
The SPIEGEL report does not go any further into the course of
the $230 million fraud, of which Browder
complains.
He refers to the findings of US investigators in the New York trial (
PDF
).
LK: The Justice Department acted as Browder's proxy lawyer. Its chief investigator
admitted
under oath that he got all his information from Browder and "the internet." The complaint filed by
U.S. attorney Preet Bharara is full of fabrications and should not be believed.
However, this case is less clear than Browder claims. The responsible US investigator had to admit in a
survey that his findings are based solely on statements and documents from Browder and his team.
The process
ended with a compromise. The Russian Kazyv clan – accused by Browder of profiting from tax fraud – has enforced the
express written note that it has nothing to do with the Magnitsky case.
Browder has been interviewed in the case. Under oath, he is unable to explain how he and his people
followed the cash flows.
Video recordings of the statement have landed on Youtube, the transcript is
available on Pacer.gov, an electronic database for documents from US proceedings.
Browder was able to take a comprehensive position on SPIEGEL on all of the points covered in the report, including
two talks each lasting two hours in summer.
SPIEGEL also sent questions to Browder on November 21 that go beyond the text previously
published. Browder didn't respond.
"... an inquiry by cabinet secretary Lord Hunt in 1996 concluded that "a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5" had "spread damaging malicious stories". ..."
"... Well, if a cabinet secretary says that it must be true. MI5, not MI6 - I think MI5's the heavy mob - but I just wondered if our spooks had passed these tricks on to the lads who put the Steele dossier about. ..."
Massive win, Colonel, that as far as I know nobody predicted. Not the polls, not the political blogs. But I didn't follow it that
closely so that's just a general impression.
My man, Nigel Farage, got squeezed mercilessly. I was looking around the BBC site to find out how mercilessly when I came across
a picture of the bete noir of my father's time, Harold Wilson. Wilson was convinced that MI something was out to get him - bugged
his office, spread smear stories about him around the press, even a possible coup.
The odd rumour of all this had spread to my corner of the English provinces and I'd always wondered if there was anything in it.
So I clicked on the BBC article -
" .. A 1987 inquiry concluded the allegations of a security service plot against Wilson were untrue. However, an inquiry
by cabinet secretary Lord Hunt in 1996 concluded that "a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5" had "spread damaging malicious stories".
Well, if a cabinet secretary says that it must be true. MI5, not MI6 - I think MI5's the heavy mob - but I just wondered if
our spooks had passed these tricks on to the lads who put the Steele dossier about.
On another security matter I note with concern above - "Those are Jacobite tribesmen at the top. Some of my ancestors were
such as they." I thought so. '15 and '45 caused us a lot of trouble and just in case the tradition remained in your family I'm
opening a file. We're very happy with our present Queen, thank you, and we don't want you replacing her with some Stuart relic you
might happen to have dug up.
Though I suppose it would only be poetic justice. We've just had a go at toppling your President so why shouldn't you return the
compliment and topple Her Majesty.
We will see... I am skeptical about idea that Brennan will be indicted.
But this article supports the idea that impeachment was a counterattack of Brannan faction of CIA and Clinton mafia against
Barr and Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... Former CIA officer and counter-intelligence expert Kevin Shipp says that former Obama Administration Attorney General (AG) Eric Holder gave a big Deep State panic signal when he wrote in an Op-Ed last week in the Washington Post trashing current AG William Barr and his top prosecutor John Durham ..."
"... We have to understand it was Eric Holder that Barack Obama used to target the heads of corporations that spoke out publicly about Barack Obama. We know Holder was held in 'Contempt of Congress.' He spied on AP reporters, ran guns to drug cartels and blacked out the information. He spied on over a hundred journalists, and on and on we go... ..."
"... when Holder comes out and puts out this bombshell in the Washington Post, which is another indication that indictments are coming. John Brennan, former Obama Administration CIA Director, is going to be at the top of the list. " ..."
"... during the entire Trump Presidency, the mainstream media (MSM) has operated as a propaganda arm of the Deep State and the Democrats ..."
"... Shipp says the hoax of Russia collusion and the impeachment sham of President Trump is distracting us from other very big problems such as the extreme debt the country and the world is facing . Shipp says, ..."
Former CIA officer and counter-intelligence expert Kevin Shipp says that former Obama
Administration Attorney General (AG) Eric Holder gave a big Deep State panic signal when he
wrote in an Op-Ed last week in the Washington Post trashing current AG William Barr and his top
prosecutor John Durham. Shipp explains,
"This is very significant. We all remember that Holder was Obama's right hand man. Eric
Holder was Barack Obama's enforcer. The fact that Holder comes out this quickly after the
Inspector General (IG) Horowitz Report comes out... and makes this veiled threat against
Durham's reputation. The fact that Eric Holder came out and made this statement is a clear
indication to me they are running scared.
We have to understand it was Eric Holder that Barack Obama used to target the heads of
corporations that spoke out publicly about Barack Obama. We know Holder was held in 'Contempt
of Congress.' He spied on AP reporters, ran guns to drug cartels and blacked out the
information. He spied on over a hundred journalists, and on and on we go...
They (Deep State) are convinced there are going to be indictments. Secondly, there is AG
Barr's outrage over (IG) Horowitz's report and what it did not do. He made statements that
there was spying and actions by government officials that need to be criminally looked into.
Barr's outrage over this shows me that there are going to be indictments, and that he is
taking this seriously. Again, when Holder comes out and puts out this bombshell in the
Washington Post, which is another indication that indictments are coming. John Brennan,
former Obama Administration CIA Director, is going to be at the top of the list. "
Shipp says during the entire Trump Presidency, the mainstream media (MSM) has operated as a
propaganda arm of the Deep State and the Democrats . Shipp contends,
"They put these stories out intentionally because they are creating their own story, and
that is what the propaganda mainstream media does. It creates its own story...
They want to frame their latest story that there really wasn't any spying on Trump. That's
what FISA warrants and applications are all about. They are all about spying ."
Shipp thinks this will be a big nail in the coffin of the MSM. Shipp says, "The mainstream
media will never come back from this..."
"...because finally, through shows like this and others, the real information is coming
out as to what the mainstream media has done . At the top of that list is the New York Times,
the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC...
What they did is they created the Russia collusion story as if it was reality, as if it
was real. That is part of the procedure in doing this. Then, they invented the evidence, and
that was the Steele Dossier. They portrayed this as evidence to create this false narrative.
Then they sent this story out to each outlet, and all repeat the same story over and over and
over again knowing the more they repeat it, the more people were going to believe it. Then,
the FBI leaked information to the mainstream media. The FBI took that information leaked to
the media and used their stories as evidence. Brennan leaked the dossier to the mainstream
media as part of this whole machine."
Shipp says the hoax of Russia collusion and the impeachment sham of President Trump is
distracting us from other very big problems such as the extreme debt the country and the world
is facing . Shipp says,
"Trump inherited a financial monster that was not his doing. When he was sworn into
office, it already existed. It is very serious, and I think now or very soon the U.S.
government will not be able to afford the interest on the national debt, much less paying off
the debt itself."
It is reported that central banks are buying record amounts of gold, and even Goldman Sachs
is telling its clients to buy the yellow metal. Shipp says,
" This is a solid indicator that we are headed for the financial rapids with Goldman Sachs
especially. Goldman Sachs is a global bank, and it's one of the main banks in the United
States. The fact that Sachs and others are building up gold reserves is a clear indication
that they expect a financial downturn, to put it mildly, that is coming. "
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with former CIA Officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp.
I kinda think that everyone is holding off to see if Trump gets re-elected.
If he does then there will be indictments, jail time, and a real cleaning of the
house.
The guys in the middle of this investigation depose the "liberal" old guard and offer
sacrifices to their own "conservative" god of filth. Same Mammon, just a different order of
worship.
If he doesn't get re-elected then the guys that are investigating this can just slink back
into the current slime and survive in some basic way.
I have seen this dynamic when companies merge as equals. Everybody is afraid to act
because the stakes are so high. It's a chess game played by ruthless cowards.
NYT fails to state that the most plausible scenario was that CIA send Page to join Trump
campaign, then to establish contacts with Russians and after that obtain FICA warrants in a
typical false flag operation manner. Essentially Trump campaign was entrapped.
First, when agents initially sought permission for the wiretap, F.B.I. officials scoured
information from confidential informants and selectively presented portions that supported
their suspicions that Mr. Page might be a conduit between Russia and the Trump campaign's
onetime chairman, Paul Manafort.
But officials did not disclose information that undercut that allegation -- such as the fact
that Mr. Page had told an informant in August 2016 that he "never met" or "said one word" to
Mr. Manafort, who had never returned Mr. Page's emails. Even if the investigators did not
necessarily believe Mr. Page, the court should have been told what he had said.
Second, as the initial court order was nearing its expiration and law-enforcement officials
prepared to ask the surveillance court to renew it, the F.B.I. had uncovered information that
cast doubt on some of its original assertions. But law enforcement officials never reported
that new information to the court.
Specifically, the application included allegations about Mr. Page contained in a dossier
compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research was funded
by Democrats. In January 2017, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Steele's own primary source, and he
contradicted what Mr. Steele had written in the dossier.
The source for Mr. Steele may, of course, have been lying. But either way, officials should
have flagged the disconnect for the court. Instead, the F.B.I. reported that its agents had met
with the source to "further corroborate" the dossier and found him to be "truthful and
cooperative," leaving a misleading impression in renewal applications.
Finally, the report stressed Mr. Page's long history of meeting with Russian intelligence
officials. But he had also said that he had a relationship with the C.I.A., and it turns out
that he had for years told the agency about those meetings -- including one that was cited in
the wiretap application as a reason to be suspicious of him.
That relationship could have mitigated some suspicions about his history. But the F.B.I.
never got to the bottom of it, and the court filings said nothing about Mr. Page's dealings
with the C.I.A.
The inspector general's report contains many more examples of errors and omissions. Mr.
Horowitz largely blamed lower-level F.B.I. agents charged with preparing the evidence, but he
also faulted high-level supervisors for permitting a culture in which the inaccuracies took
place.
Clapper and Brennan will be shaking in their boots after watching Barr's interview: done in
"bad faith" = SEDITION !!!! Deep State operatives...ie, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Stork, Lisa,
McCabe, should be held accountable. Obama should probably be impeached.
The hard fact is, that the top of the FBI knew, in advance, that the "dossier" was just bs
invented by Russian liars, for money, to be used as political lies for kilary's campaign. It
Wasn't evidence and Comey knew far in advance of crossfire hurricane. I can't see less than 20
years in comey's future. That same includes barak, brennan and clapper, who were all informed,
willing accomplices in this crime.
10:30
Whoever in FBI that intentionally misled the court using the Steele dossier knowing that the
dossier was "total rubbish" as Barr states, needs to be inditing immediately. Why we are
continuing to investigate instead of inditimg while continuing to investigate. Until these people
are held accountable I don't think our country will begin to heal and media and others apologize
to the country for the damage they have done.
7:49 -
"Comey refused to sign back up for his security clearance, and therefore couldn't be questioned
about classified matters." Well now, isn't that interesting. Haven't heard that one before.
In an exclusive interview, Attorney General William Barr spoke to NBC News' Pete Williams
about the findings on the Justice Department Inspector General's report on the Russia
investigation and his criticisms of the FBI.
I'm So glade we have a competent attorney General pushing back on the massive
disinformation narrative that comes from Giant News outlets of which are used to being
unchallenged, unchecked by today's "journalistic standards"
so this guy really asked Bahr"why not open an investigation even with little evidence?"
because is a violation of civil liberties to invade the privacy of law abiding citizens. You
need compelling evidence for something so huge
Horowitz should be instructed to edit or update his Report to discuss The Question of Bias
and Evidence of Bias. He has clearly misguided Americans with his choice of words and has
omitted important facts underpinning bias.
AG Barr is an outstanding role model, a man of integrity and wisdom, calm in a raging
political storm. I have full confidence he will make those who fabricated evidence and hid
exculpatory evidence finally face justice. AG Barr for President 2024!
Barr is a straight shooter and I love it. It sounds like we will get to the real truth
eventually through Durhams investigation I just hope it doesnt take another year to get to
the prosecutions.
So, I watched the interview... The video is called, "Full Interview: Barr Criticizes
Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation." Not once did I hear him criticize the
I.G.'s report. In fact, A.G. Barr clarified that the I.G.'s report was limited in scope
because of the limitations put on the I.G. He said that the report was appropriate.
It's scary to see how powerful the corruption of the Democratic Party has grown. It
represents a serious threat to all our personal freedom. The Democratic Party has to be
stopped.
Ok after watching this interview its quite clear that Barr and Durham is going after these
criminals and people are going to jail. Maybe there is hope for US yet becuase this dane
consider US atm a banana republic. Spying on political candidates? Forging documents? You FBI
behaving like Stalins secret police. Lets see what happen.
Amazing for the AG to go in deep into enemy territory at the heart of the opposition media
to lay out a case for the criminal activities that undermined our country prior to and after
the 2016 election. The deep state is trembling at the prospect of being held accountable
after all the facts are laid out to the american people that these activities cannot be
brushed aside or swept under the carpet if we are to continue as a country.
The corrupt media is trying to act like they have not been involved in this treasonous
scam since the beginning working directly with the treasonous cabal. The media has been lying
and pushing fake news for 3 years calling Trump a Russia agent and called him treasonous. I
knew the whole time that they were lying there was evidence from day one that this was all
lies and if I can see that from the public then they can definitely see that from the inside
they are purposefully lying.
I dare anyone on here to research Barr's History back to his involvement in the
assignation of JFK, the cover up, defending Nixon, Epstein, and many other illegal and
immoral activities. After reviewing the evidence, I walked away believing that Barr is trying
to cover up his tracks so he does do jail time. No need to reply. Either take my dare or not.
God Bless America and ALL her people, Stephan
The public are sick of waiting . I find myself skipping through a half hour news show in 5
minutes flat looking for arrests ,whereas before I was rivited to every minute of the half
hour show but it goes on and on and at the there is Nothiing .The Democrats are the masters ,
it's obvious . If they break the law they get off scott free . If you are republican wave bye
bye , you will be in jail for years . America is not the free and fair country it is all
cracked up to be . It is corrupted by the democrats who have peoiple in high places that
thwart real justice.
Mifsud approached George! Who was Mifsud working for (western asset) and why did he
approach George? He’s the one who offered George dirt on Hill. Then invited him to meet
the fake “niece”, of Putin, in England! What about this information? Someone set
George up to make this happen outside the US, because of EO 12333. It had to happen outside
the US so they could go to the fisa court!
I dont trust Christopher Wrey. He keeps slow-walking all the FBI documents and
declassifications. He also fights judicial watch and judges that rule in their favor and
continue not giving over what is ordered! This last judge was ready to hold him in contempt
for refusing to cooperate with court ordered documents.
Why did the FBI continue to investigate Trump after January when the case collapsed? To
try and find a way to impeach Trump. Remember the Washington Post headlined article right
after the inauguration "The effort to impeach President Donald John Trump is already
underway." The FBI "insurance" policy was essential!
"... And in the case of Carter Page, the FISA judges initially denied a warrant to surveil the former Trump aide until the agency padded the application with the wildly unverified Steele Report , lying about Steele's credibility, and then fabricating evidence to specifically say Page was not an "operational contact" for the CIA , when in fact he was - and had a "positive assessment." ..."
"... Let's not forget that FISA court judge Rudolph Contreras recused himself from overseeing the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn due to his personal friendship with former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok. ..."
"... And the only reason Contreras did so was because his friendship with Strzok was revealed in their anti-Trump text messages found by the Inspector General. ..."
The shadowy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) and the processes behind
obtaining a warrant from it has fallen under harsh scrutiny by lawmakers following the release
of the DOJ Inspector General's report which found that the FBI was able to easily mislead the
judges to surveil Trump adviser Carter Page.
"The goal is to make sure this doesn't happen again, so you tighten up the system right,"
said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC), adding: "Quite frankly, I'm looking at
the FISA court itself. ... I'm looking for the court to tell the public, 'Hey, we're upset
about this too,' and, you know, take some corrective steps."
Graham said his committee will look into legislation to introduce more "checks and balances"
to the FISA process, according to
The Hill .
When asked if he thought there would be bipartisan support for FISA reform, Sen. Dick Durban
(D-IL) said "I hope so," adding "This was a real wake-up call that three different teams can
screw this up at the FBI."
The renewed interest comes after five hours of partisan barb trading during a Judiciary
hearing Wednesday with Horowitz that resulted in one clear bipartisan interest: overhauling
the FISA court.
"One of the only points I've heard with bipartisan agreement today is a renewed interest
in reforming the FISA process," said Sen. Christopher Coons (D-Del.). -
The Hill
Created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the FISA court is made up
of 11 judges who are chosen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court to serve seven-year
terms. They are responsible for approving warrant applications for intelligence gathering
purposes and national security operations, which - as The Hill notes, "more often than not,
they sign off."
And in the case of Carter Page, the FISA judges initially denied a warrant to surveil the
former Trump aide until the agency padded the application with the wildly unverified Steele
Report , lying about Steele's credibility, and then fabricating evidence to specifically say
Page was not
an "operational contact" for the CIA , when in fact he was - and had a "positive
assessment."
Last year the government filed 1,117 FISA warrant applications, including 1,081 for
electronic monitoring. The court signed off on 1,079 according to a DOJ report.
That said, reform may come slowly.
But the timeline for any legislative reforms is unclear. Congress already faces a
mid-March deadline to extend expiring surveillance authorities under the USA Freedom Act.
Durbin suggested the discussions could merge, while Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime privacy advocate,
appeared skeptical that Republicans would ultimately get on board with broader changes to
surveillance powers.
"Why after YEARS of blocking bipartisan FISA reforms are senior Republicans suddenly
interested in it? There is no question that we need to improve transparency, accountability
and oversight of the FISA process," Wyden tweeted. -
The Hill
Still, the IG report appears to have 'enlightened' some GOP lawmakers who previously
resisted the notion of reining in FISA courts . Several GOP senators gave credit to their
libertarian-minded colleagues on the hill, who have pushed for surveillance reform after
accurately predicting the potential for abuse.
Those who have long-advocated for reform include GOP Sens. Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Ben Sasse
(Neb.), according to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).
"I wish Mike Lee weren't sitting here two people from me right now, because as a national
security hawk I've argued with Mike Lee in the 4 1/2 or five years that I've been in the Senate
that stuff just like this couldn't possibly happen at the FBI and at the Department of
Justice," said Sasse during the Horowitz testimony, who added that the IG's findings marked a
"massive crisis of public trust" since we should know about FISA applications that aren ' t as
high-profile as Page's.
Horowitz reported a total of 17 "significant inaccuracies and omissions" in the
applications to monitor Page , taking particular issue with applications to renew the FISA
warrant and chastising the FBI for a lack of satisfactory explanations for those
mistakes.
Horowitz stressed that he would not have submitted the follow-up applications as they were
drafted by the FBI . Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer, altered an email related to the warrant
renewal application, according to Horowitz's report.
" [The] applications made it appear as though the evidence supporting probable cause was
stronger than was actually the case ," Horowitz said. " We also found basic, fundamental and
serious errors during the completion of the FBl's factual accuracy reviews. "
Horowitz also found that there were errors that "represent serious performance failures by
the supervisory and non-supervisory agents with responsibility over the FISA applications." -
The Hill
Let's not forget that FISA court judge Rudolph Contreras recused himself from overseeing the
case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn due to his personal friendship with
former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok.
Just as was true when the Mueller investigation closed
without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia
over the 2016 election, Wednesday's issuance of the long-waited report from the
Department of Justice's Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives
from the U.S. media were utter
frauds .
Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI's gross abuse of its power
– its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to
demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in
order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page
during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence,
and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.
If you don't consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in
order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal,
what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building
named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers
and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that's what
these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state
factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and
civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.
In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide
this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It's brimming with proof of
FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not
true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the
Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.
Now that we know Carter Page was working for the CIA as an informant in 2016, is it
reasonable to speculate that Page was planted in the Trump campaign by the CIA?
And behind Brennan we can can see the Nobel Peace Price winner.
Notable quotes:
"... A major role in directing the plot has fallen to Obama's consigliere John Brennan, the current director of the CIA. ..."
"... One part of the still ongoing deligitimization campaign was the FBI investigation of alleged Russian connections of four members of the Trump election campaign. ..."
"... The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with. ..."
"... The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors. ..."
"... That the dossier was mere dreck was quite obvious to any sober person who read it when it was first published ..."
"... That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level", face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. ..."
"... (This is a Moon of Alabama fundraiser week. Please consider to support our work .) ..."
"... Occam's razor: CIA-MI6, with approval of US Deep State (Clintons, Bush, McCain, Brennan, Mueller, etc.), meddled to elect Trump and pointed fingers at Russia to initiate a new McCarthyism. ..."
"... "Sergey Lavrov: In my opinion, Congress sounds rather obsessed with destroying our relations. It continues pursuing the policy started by the Obama administration. As I mentioned, we are used to this kind of attack. We know how to respond to them. I assure you that neither Nord Stream-2 nor Turkish Stream will be halted." ..."
"... ... the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by Obama's team and was designed for Clinton to escalate ... ..."
"... It's Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 that provides the answer. In this Op-Ed, Kissinger calls for a restored US Empire that is essentially Trump's MAGA. Kissinger is writing immediately after the Donbas rebels have won. The Russians refused to heed Kissinger's advice (to back down) and it has become apparent that Russia's joining the West is no longer an inevitability as the US elite had assumed. ..."
"... Good chance Steele had little to do with writing the Dossier. "Simpson-Ohr Dossier", anyone? Steele was needed as a credible looking intelligence officer with Russia ties and a past working relationship with US Intel, as cover to sell to FBI, FISA Court, and the public (meeting with Isikoff, Yahoo News story). ..."
"... Glenn Simpson and wife Mary Jacoby had written articles for the WSJ in 2007 and 2008 with a script and language similar to the Dossier. Devin Nunes seems to believe this scenario, and it is discussed in detail in books by Dan Bongino and Lee Smith, among others. ..."
"... physchoh @ 60; The difference, at least in my mind, is that, the "Russia did it" meme, is the weakest of all cases against DJT. Corbyn, on the other hand, may actually be hurt by the bogus charges. IMO, what this shows is coordination between the elites to bring down a progressive in the UK, who fancies public control over major finances instead of private concerns. ..."
"... So Horowitz was technically correct when he did not find bias. What he might have been reluctant to spell out is that he did find malice. ..."
When Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S. presidential election the relevant powers
launched a campaign to delegitimize the President elect Donald Trump.
The ultimate aim of the cabal is to kick him out of office and have a reliable
replacement, like the Vice-President elect Pence, take over. Should that not be possible
it is hoped that the delegitimization will make it impossible for Trump to change major
policy trajectories especially in foreign policy. A main issue here is the reorientation of
the U.S. military complex and its NATO proxies from the war of terror towards a direct
confrontation with main powers like Russia and China.
...
A major role in directing the plot has fallen to Obama's consigliere John Brennan, the
current director of the CIA.
One part of the still ongoing deligitimization campaign was the FBI investigation of alleged
Russian connections of four members of the Trump election campaign.
Horowitz finds that the FBI was within the law when it opened the investigation but that the
FBI's applications to the FISA court, which decides if the FBI can spy on someone's
communications, were based on lies and utterly flawed.
Your host unfortunately lacked the time so far to read more than the executive summary. But
others have pointed out some essential findings.
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz
constitutes a "clearing" of the FBI, never clear me of anything. ...
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz's conclusion that there was no evidence of
"political bias or improper motivation" in the FBI's probe of Donald Trump's Russia contacts,
an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had "authorized purpose" to conduct.
...
However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose "serious" procedural problems and
omissions of "significant information" in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the
direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a
president).
...
There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless
headlines were wrong. Some key points:
The so-called "Steele dossier" was, actually, crucial to the FBI's decision to seek secret
surveillance of Page. ...
...
The "Steele dossier" was "Internet rumor," and corroboration for the pee tape story was
"zero." ...
Appendix 1 identifies the total violations by the FBI of the so-called Woods Procedures, the
process by which the bureau verifies information and assures the FISA court its evidence is
true.
The Appendix identifies a total of 51 Woods procedure violations from the FISA application
the FBI submitted to the court authorizing surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter
Page starting in October 2016.
A whopping nine of those violations fell into the category called: "Supporting document
shows that the factual assertion is inaccurate."
For those who don't speak IG parlance, it means the FBI made nine false assertions to the
FISA court. In short, what the bureau said was contradicted by the evidence in its official
file.
The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not
mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and
on everyone they communicated with.
The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had
talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later
'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were
no more than unconfirmed rumors.
The anonymous former British operator hears from an anonymous compatriot that two anonymous
sources, asserted to have access to inner Russian circles, claimed to have heard somewhere
that something happened in the Kremlin.
They assert that Trump was supported and directed by Putin himself five years ago while
even a year ago no one would have bet a penny on Trump gaining any political significant
position or even the presidency.
It is now claimed that the FBI is exculpated because the Horowitz report did not find
"political bias or improper motivation". But that omits the fact that at least four high
ranking people in the FBI and Justice Department who were involved in the case were found to be
politically
biased and were removed from their positions.
It also omits that the scope of Horowitz's investigation was limited to the Justice
Department. He was not able to investigate the CIA and its former director John Brennan who was
alleging Russia-Trump connections months before the FBI investigation started:
Contrary to a general impression that the FBI launched the Trump-Russia conspiracy probe,
Brennan pushed it to the bureau – breaking with CIA tradition by intruding into
domestic politics: the 2016 presidential election. He also supplied suggestive but ultimately
false information to counterintelligence investigators and other U.S. officials.
The current CIA director Gina Haspel was CIA station chief in London during that time and
while several of the entrapment attempts of Trump campaign staff by the FBI investigation
happened. Horowitz spoke with neither of them.
The current Horowitz Report, read alongside his previous report on how the FBI played inside
the 2016 election vis-a-vis Clinton, should leave no doubt that the Bureau tried to influence
the election of a president and then delegitimize him when he won. It wasn't the Russians; it
was us.
That is correct, but the whole conspiracy was even deeper. It was not the FBI which
initiated the case.
My hunch is still that the FBI investigation was a case of parallel construction which is often
used to build a legitimate case after a suspicion was found by illegitimate means. In this case
it was John Brennan who in early 2016 contacted the head of the British GCHQ electronic
interception service and asked him to spy on the Trump campaign. GHCQ then claimed that
something was found that was deemed
suspicious :
That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief
John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level",
face-to-face between the two agency chiefs.
The FBI was tipped off on the issue and on July 31 2016 started an investigation to
construct a parallel legal case. It send out British and U.S. agents to entrap Trump campaign
members. It used the obviously fake Steele dossier to gain FISA court judgments that allowed it
to spy on the campaign. Downing Street
was informed throughout the whole affair. A day after Trump's inauguration the UK's then
Prime Minister Theresa May
fired GHCQ chief Robert Hannigan.
One still open question is to what extend then President Barack Obama was involved in the
affair.
There is another ongoing investigation by U.S. Prosecutor John Durham. That investigation is
not limited to the Justice Department but will involve all agencies and domestic as well as
foreign sources. Durham has the legal rights to declassify whatever is needed and he can indict
persons should he find that they committed a crime. His report will hopefully go much deeper
than the already horrendous stuff Horowitz delivered.
(This is a Moon of Alabama fundraiser week. Please consider to support our
work .)
Posted by b on December 11, 2019 at 16:16 UTC |
Permalink
Anyone taking bets on Durham/Barr making indictments in this mess? My guess is a whole lot of
horse trading is going on behind the scenes now, as in, "I'll trade you a censure for all
potential indictments going down the memory hole."
Typical dog and pony show which will change nothing relating to interventionist foreign
policy and the new cold war with Russia. Too many saw benefits from the corruption in Ukraine
to dig deep there; the Bidens were just the most blatant, Lindsey Graham and others from both
parties were involved so don't expect much from the Senate hearings. The bipartisan major
goals are a fait accompli; universal acceptance that Russia worked to undermine our elections
(and to destroy our "Democracy") and are thus an enemy we must fight, and it's universally
accepted by all that we MUST provide Ukraine with Javelin missiles and other lethal aid to
fight "Russian Aggression" (with little mention that even Obama balked at that reckless
option). All of these proceedings are great distractions, but the weapons of war will not be
diminished.
Unfortuneately, few will question the findings of these investigations or consider the
possibility that the investigations themselves are misdirection/cover-up.
IMO the Lavrov-Pompeo
presser is notable mostly for Lavrov's discussion of Russiagate (about 6 minutes in).
Lavrov tells us that the Russian's repeatedly sought to clarify their noninterference by
publishing correspondence - which the Trump Administration didn't respond to. And he actual
mentions McCarthyism!
Wait, wot?
Yeah, during the worst of the Russiagate accusations, Trump wouldn't do things that
would've helped to prove that Russiagate was a farce!!
So, during the election, Trump called on Putin to publish Hillary's emails (the very act
of making such a request is likely illegal because at the time it was known that her emails
contained highly classified info) but he wouldn't accept Russia's publication of
exculpatory info about Russiagate?!?!
This would cause cognitive dissonance galore in an Americans that hear it - so one can
be sure that it will not be reported.
Occam's razor: CIA-MI6, with approval of US Deep State (Clintons, Bush, McCain, Brennan,
Mueller, etc.), meddled to elect Trump and pointed fingers at Russia to initiate a new
McCarthyism.
Meanwhile in bizarroland (aka USA), Barr says Russiagate is a fantasy based on FBI "bad
faith" - yet Pompeo still presses on with the "Russia meddled" bullshit.
thanks b... i like your example in the comment - ''those who thought otherwise should
question their judgment''.. good example!
i am a bit concerned like @ 2 casey, that most of this is going to go down the memory hole
and there will be that made in america stamp on it - ''no accountability''... i wish i was
wrong, but getting worked up at the idea anyone is going to be held accountable for any
actions of the usa, or the insiders playing the usa, is clearly a fools game at this point..
all i mostly see is the needed collapse and waiting for that to happen..
Thanks for that, there are definitely cracks in the armor and we should promote that
narrative as you do in your link. Tulsi Gabbard has also expanded the awareness, hopefully
she will make the upcoming debates despite strong efforts to silence her. I'll try more to
focus on the positive!
@ 6 jr.. there is a press release on all what was said
here for anyone interested..
lavrov quote and etc. etc.. "We suggested to our colleagues that in order to dispel all
suspicions that are baseless, let us publish this closed-channel correspondence starting from
October 2016 till November 2017 so it would all become very clear to many people. However,
regrettably, this administration refused to do so. But I'd like to repeat once again we are
prepared to do that, and to publish the correspondence that took place through that channel
would clear many matters up, I believe. Nevertheless, we hope that the turbulence that
appeared out of thin air will die down, just like in 1950s McCarthyism came to naught, and
there'll be an opportunity to go back to a more constructive cooperation."
I continue to believe that the FBI and Horowitz perjured themselves
in the FISA report. To correct a mistake in a previous post I made, I
believe they lied when the claimed the Steele Dossier was not a
predicate for opening crossfire hurricane. How can the Steele dossier
not be instrumental in the opening of the investigation when bruce ohr's
wife nellie ohr was working at fusion gps when bruce ohr met with
steele
to discuss the dirty dossier.
In other words, the FBI
was concocting Operation Crossfire Hurricane prior to the time they had
any knowledge of the phony Papadopoulus predicate that the russians were proferring
the clinton emails to the trump campaign.
The FISA report claim that Operation Crossfire
Hurricane was predicated solely on the Papadopolous allegations is therefore a lie. There
was, in fact, no real predicate for Operation Crossfire Hurricane. The predications
cited were all fictions and inventions fabricated in a conspiracy between MI6(the FFC or
friendly foreign country cited in the Horowitz report), the
DOJ and the FBI. Operation Crossfire Hurricane was a massive Psyop from its inception.
What major publications have picked up this info from the State Dept PR? Which of them are
questioning why Trump didn't agree to let the Russians publish the exonerating information?
And how many of those are linking this strange fact to other strange facts and thus raising
troubling questions about the 2016 election?
<> <> <> <> <> <>
It's not just that Trump refused to publish exculpatory material. Anyone that's been
reading my comments (and/or my blog) knows that Trump also:
- hired Manafort - whose work for pro-Russian candidates in Ukraine had drawn the ire of
CIA - despite Manafort's having no recent experience with US elections;
- helped Pelosi to be elected Speaker of the House by inviting her to attend a White
House meeting about his border wall (along with Chuck Schumer) prior to the House vote to
elect a Speaker.
- initiated Ukrainegate by talking with Ukraine's President about investigating an
announced candidate - he didn't have to do this(!) he could've let subordinates work
behind the scenes .
And then there's a set of suspicious activity that is difficult to explain, such as: ...
- Kissinger's having called for MAGA in August 2014 (Trump announced his campaign 10
months later and he was the ONLY MAGA candidate and the ONLY populist in the Republican
primary) ;
- London as a nexus for the US 2016 campaign (Cambridge Analytica; GPS Fusion;
Halper, etc.) ;
- Hillary's making mistakes in the 2016 campaign that no seasoned politician would
make;
- the settling of scores via entrapments of Flynn, Manafort, and Wikileaks/Assange
(painted as a hostile intelligence agency and Russian agent).
All of these and more support the conclusion that CIA-MI6 elected MAGA Trump and initiated
Russiagate.
The anonymous former British operator hears from an anonymous asserted compatriot what two
anonymous sources, asserted to have access to inner Russian circles, claim to have heard
somewhere that something happened in the Kremlin. <-- Perhaps it is too much to add that
the entire conversation happen in a pub, like an eyewitness account of a trout caught by an
angler that was larger than a tiger shark [the trout was so large, not the angler].
I am a great fan of Dmitri Orlov and have just read a large portion of his linked
post.
What I do not see Orlov doing is taking into account--in his takedown of "scientific"
models---evidence of global warming/change such as *actual* observations of *actual, current*
phenomena that are being measured today, such as the condition of the world's coral reefs;
the rate of melting of permafrost and release of methane gas; the melting of Greenland (and
other) glaciers and release of fresh water into the oceans; acidification of oceans; and
quite a lot of evidence for sea level rise, such as saltwater intrusion into freshwater
swamps, aquifers, etc.
More can be gleaned by the manner in which BigLie Media spin the investigation's results. At
The Hill , Jonathon Turley makes that clear in the first paragraph:
"The analysis of the report by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz
greatly depends, as is often the case, on which cable news channel you watch. Indeed, many
people might be excused for concluding that Horowitz spent 476 pages to primarily conclude
one thing, which is that the Justice Department acted within its guidelines in starting its
investigation into the 2016 campaign of President Trump."
The further he goes the worse it gets for the Ds. And he's 100% correct about the biases
present in reporting about the Report.
Remarks made by Lavrov at the presser were likely done prior to anyone from Russia's
delegation having digested any of the Report. What I found important was the following
revelation by Lavrov:
"Let me remind you that at the time of the first statements on this topic, which was on
the eve of the 2016 US presidential election, we used the communications channel that linked
back then Moscow and the Obama administration in Washington to ask our US partners on
numerous occasions whether these allegations that emerged in October 2016 and persisted until
Donald Trump's inauguration could be addressed. The reply never came. There was no
response whatsoever to all our proposals when we said: look, if you suspect us, let's sit
down and talk, just put your facts on the table. All this continued after President Trump's
inauguration and the appointment of a new administration. We proposed releasing the
correspondence through this closed communications channel for the period from October 2016
until January 2017 in order to dispel all this groundless suspicion. This would have
clarified the situation for many. Unfortunately, this time it was the current administration
that refused to do so. Let me reiterate that we are ready to disclose to the public the
exchanges we had through this channel . I think that this would set many things straight.
Nevertheless we expect the turbulence that appeared out of thin air to calm down little by
little, just as McCarthyism waned in the 1950s, so that we can place our cooperation on a
more constructive footing." [My Emphasis]
Lavrov on Mueller Report: "It contains no confirmation of any collusion." End of story.
But we do have all this compiled evidence within our communications we're ready to publish is
the USA
agrees.
The Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) organization has yet to publish anything
about the report. However, Matt Taibbi often writes for that outlet, so his reporting at
Rolling Stone ought to be seen as a proxy FAIR report.
Now that we know Carter Page was working for the CIA as an informant in 2016, is it
reasonable to speculate that Page was planted in the Trump campaign by the CIA?
The Inspector General of the Department of Justice, Micheal Horowitz's report on the move to
delegitimize the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is clear proof of the massive rot
that lies at the heart of the US' political system. If this matter is whitewashed over by the
MSM, then one more step will have been taken to a violent and bloody revolution in the US of
A.
By now Steele's credibility is zero. Time to revisit Steele's involvement with the debunked
"Russia bought the soccer World Champion games", the Litvinenko polonium poisening and the
Skripal novichok poisening. The timing of the Skripal matter deserves some scrutiny in
relation to Skripal possibly being Steele's source for the infamous Trump dossier. There
might be a motive hidden there.
Thank you for posting Lavrov's words. Between those words and the IG report the kabuki
farce is revealed. Why was Trump ignoring the Russian offer you might ask. Because it suited
him to have this nonsense dominate the news cycle, you might conclude. Trump and Comey and
Brennan deserve each other.
just like 9-11... this is an inside job... does anyone really think the truth is going to
come to light in any of it?? i'm still with @ 2 caseys view...
Thanks for your reply! Yes, agreed, and I'd add Obama and Clinton.
Lavrov also held another presser at the conclusion of his visit that provides additional
info not covered in the first. The following is one I thought important:
"Question: The day before, US Congress agreed on a draft military budget, which includes
possible sanctions against Nord Stream-2 and Turkish Stream. Have you covered this topic? The
Congress sounds very determined. How seriously will the new restrictions affect the
completion of our projects?
"Sergey Lavrov: In my opinion, Congress sounds rather obsessed with destroying our
relations. It continues pursuing the policy started by the Obama administration. As I
mentioned, we are used to this kind of attack. We know how to respond to them. I assure you
that neither Nord Stream-2 nor Turkish Stream will be halted."
I must emphatically agree with Lavrov's opinion and was very pleased he answered
forthrightly. What seems quite clear is the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by
Obama's team and was designed for Clinton to escalate, with bipartisan Congressional backing.
That she lost didn't stop the anti-Russian wheel from being turned. So, logic tells us to
discover the reason for Obama to alter policy. Over the years I've written here why I think
that was done--to continue the #1 policy goal of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance over the
planet and its people regardless of its impossibility given the Sino-Russo Alliance made
reality by that policy goal. That a supermajority in Congress remain deluded is clearly a
huge problem, and those continuing to vote for the War Budget need to be removed.
b posted, in part;"When Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S. presidential election the
relevant powers launched a campaign to delegitimize the President elect Donald Trump."
It doesn't take HRC and her resident scum-bag sycophants to deligitimize DJT, his sorry
life-style, and his past record do that quite nicely, IMO.
Are you aware of any means by which a member of congress or of a congressional committee can
be impeached or otherwise censured for the misconduct of official duties? That would at least
be Schiff...
Posted by: Paul Damascene | Dec 11 2019 21:24 utc |
32
@ 31 john.. i didn't know i had to read the orlov article to say what i did to you!! your
post @11 never make any internet link to orlov... what am i missing? does this mean i can
only speak with you after i have read another orlov article? lol...
"It doesn't take HRC and her resident scum-bag sycophants to deligitimize DJT, his sorry
life-style, and his past record do that quite nicely, IMO."--ben @28
Ah, but that would be legitimate deligitimization, like attacking his actual policies.
Those are rocks that would break the Democrats' own windows as well as Trump's.
1. Senate Foreign Relations Comm passed Turkey sanctions bill
2. Pentagon Chief warned Turkey moving away NATO
3. U.S. lawmakers introduce legislation to curb Turkey's nuclear weapon obtainment"
Finally, the pretense of being nice to Turkey has come to an end. It will now intensify
its looking East, and pursue its national interests. IMO, the Eastern Med's energy issues
will now become a major headache.
karlof @ 29: The head Dems know their pushing the " Russia did it"meme is weak, but the
PTB
insist on it, to keep the MIC funds flowing.
The "no-brainer" charges should be; "Obstruction" and "Emoluments" violations. Charges the
public can grasp.
What happens if you, or any average person, ignores a summons to appear? They are
arrested.
Funneling govt. funds for personal gain is a violation of law, if you are POTUS.
These are violations average Americans can grasp, not the current circus of he said, she
said, going on in D.C. lately.
Guess my point is, this hearings are built to fail, because most of our so-called
leaders
like things the way they are. The rape of the workings classes will continue.
Yes. The impeachment process is the same as for Trump. Censuring is much easier but doubt
it will occur as too many are deserving. We're seeing the reason Congressional elections are
held every two years--vote 'em out if they're no good!
... the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by Obama's team and was designed for
Clinton to escalate ...
I don't agree that the baton would be passed to Clinton. The Deep State uses the two-party
system as a device. It's not tied to partisan concerns. If the Deep State and the
establishment really wanted Clinton elected, they would've made that happen. Few expected
Trump to win and few would've been outraged if he had lost. Yet he won. Against all odds. Furthermore, Clinton wasn't the MAGA candidate as called for by Kissinger - Trump was. And
he was from the beginning of his candidacy.
Russiagate was based on suspicions of a populist that was compromised by Russia.
Hillary has too much baggage to play populist or nationalist - including Bill's involvement
with Epstein.
Also, you're forgetting the set ups of Manafort, Flynn, and Wikileaks/Assange - which were
important parts of Russiagate and also a convenient way of settling scores. These set-ups
required the Russiagate-tainted candidate (Trump) to win.
And Trump's beating Hillary makes him the classic come-from-behind hero - giving Trump a
certain legitimacy that an establishment candidate wouldn't have. That's important when
contemplating taking the country to war in the near future.
It's strange to me that people can think that Hillary was the 'chosen candidate', and be
OK with that but find a possible selection of a different candidate (Trump, as it turns out)
to be outrageous and inconceivable.
=
... with bipartisan Congressional backing . That she lost didn't stop the
anti-Russian wheel from being turned.
Since the Deep State and the Establishment desired an effort to restore the Empire, they
would turn to whomever could most effectively accomplish that task.
Once again: It didn't have to be Hillary that was selected. In fact, for many reasons
(that I've previously expressed) Hillary would have been a poor choice.
=
So, logic tells us to discover the reason for Obama to alter policy. Over the years I've
written here why I think that was done--to continue the #1 policy goal of attaining Full
Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people ...
FSD is US Mil policy, not a political goal. It states that US Mil will strive to have
superiority in weapons and capability in every sphere of combat.
Politically, FSD is just one of several means to an end. IMO that end is the maintenance
and expansion of the Anglo-Zionist Empire (aka New World Order).
Also, your dominance theory doesn't answer the question of WHY NOW? (more on that
below)
... regardless of its impossibility given the Sino-Russo Alliance ...
Firstly, US Deep State believes that it is possible. And I personally don't buy the notion
that Russia and China are fated to prevail. If that were obvious, then the moa bar would have
no patrons.
Secondly (and again), WHY NOW? The Sino-Russo Alliance was long in the making. Why did USA
suddenly take note?
It's
Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 that provides the answer. In this Op-Ed, Kissinger
calls for a restored US Empire that is essentially Trump's MAGA. Kissinger is writing
immediately after the Donbas rebels have won. The Russians refused to heed Kissinger's advice
(to back down) and it has become apparent that Russia's joining the West is no longer an
inevitability as the US elite had assumed.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
I've written many times of Kissinger's Op-Ed and of indications that the Deep State
selected MAGA Trump to be President while also initiating a new McCarthyism. Why is it STILL
so difficult to believe a theory that makes so much sense?
Yes, the status quo is very generous to the Current Oligarchy and its tools, but not so
for the vast public majority which is clamoring for change. IMO, much can be learned from the
UK election tomorrow, of which there's been very little discussion here despite its
importance. I suggest following the very important developments from the past few days at
Criag Murray's Twitter and
at
his website , the linked article being a scoop of sorts.
Also harder to follow but important as well are ballot initiatives within the states.
This site
has current listing . I just looked over those for California where there are a few good
ones, but the threshold for signatures is getting higher, close to one million are now needed
in CA.
Lavrov's comments about the offers to open up normally closed communications really only
highlight two obvious issues:
The previous US Administration had no interest in shutting off the oxygen to the "Trump =
Moscow's Man" campaign; and
The current US Administration cannot afford to be perceived as receiving help in this matter
from the country he is alleged to be beholden to for his election.
With only 9% approval, it ought to be easy to toss out most Congresscritters, excepting
that part of the Senate not up for reelection.
You'd think so, but somehow the numbers pretty much reverse when these same people
consider their own rep, and the incumbency reelection rate is shockingly high (haven't
looked recently but IIRC it has hovered around 90% for decades). Apparently it is amazingly
easy to convince the masses that their guy is the one good apple in the bunch.
Jon Schwartz
reminds me why I don't stop and peruse magazine stands anymore. Seeing the words and this
picture would've sparked lots of unpleasant language:
"The best part of Michelle Obama explaining she shares the same values as George W. Bush
is she was being interviewed on network TV by Bush's daughter. There's nothing more American
than our ruling class making us watch them discuss how great they all are."
And the escalation wasn't rigged for Clinton to initiate--yeah, sure, whatever the rabbit
says.
Until there is some comparison of how the FISA court usually works, none of this chatter
means a thing. Violations of Woods procedures and assertions not supported by documents are
SOP. The FISA court is always a joke.
Delgeitimizing Trump, reversing the election, all simple-minded drviel, as only nitwits
see Trump as anything but the loser.
Skripal knows something that US-UK either 1) don't want the Russians to know OR 2) don't
want ANYONE to know.
What could that be? 1) That Steele dossier is bullshit? We know that. 2) That Steele
dossier was meant to be bullshit ? Well, that raises a whole host of questions,
doesn't it?
Good chance Steele had little to do with writing the Dossier. "Simpson-Ohr Dossier", anyone?
Steele was needed as a credible looking intelligence officer with Russia ties and a past
working relationship with US Intel, as cover to sell to FBI, FISA Court, and the public
(meeting with Isikoff, Yahoo News story).
Glenn Simpson and wife Mary Jacoby had written
articles for the WSJ in 2007 and 2008 with a script and language similar to the Dossier.
Devin Nunes seems to believe this scenario, and it is discussed in detail in books by Dan Bongino and Lee Smith, among others.
The Afghanistan report outlines a *massive fraud*. $14 billion/month, 90% of the world's
opium, no "progress", oh, and lying to Congress for two decades.
physchoh @ 60; The difference, at least in my mind, is that, the "Russia did it" meme, is the
weakest of all cases against DJT. Corbyn, on the other hand, may actually be hurt by the
bogus charges. IMO, what this shows is coordination between the elites to bring down a progressive in the
UK, who fancies public control over major finances instead of private concerns.
Fox News, now: Biden blames staff, says nobody 'warned' him son's Ukraine job could raise
conflict. In a TV comedy Seinfeld, one of the main characters, George, is a compulsive liar with a
knack of getting in trouble. Sometimes he has a job. Final scene of one of those jobs:
Boss: "You have been seen after hours making sex with the cleaning lady on the top of your
desk."
George (after a measured look at his boss): "If I was only told that this kind of things
is being frown upon..." [and she had cleaned the desk both before AND after!]
I have theory about why Horowitz did not bias in the FBI. The
definition of bias is to harbor a deeply negative feeling that
clouds one's judgement about a person or subject. However, the
conspirators' judgement was not clouded in this case. Their
negative feelings focused their intent to destroy the object of
their feeling. The precise term for this is malice.
So Horowitz
was technically correct when he did not find bias. What he might
have been reluctant to spell out is that he did find malice.
Re Really?? | Dec 11 2019 18:31 utc | 14 and AshenLight | Dec 11 2019 19:36 utc | 19
I agree with you. Orlov is a brilliant, insightful analyst, who is also very funny. But he
is off the mark with his dismissal of global warming and also with his endorsement of nuclear
power. The immense amounts of waste from uranium mining all the way to hundreds of thousands
of tons of high-level waste in spent fuel pools pose a huge threat to current and future
generations . . . like the next 3000 generations of humans (and all other forms of life) that
will have to deal with this. Mankind has never built anything that has lasted a fraction of
the 100,000 years required for the isolation of high-level wastes from the biosphere. Take a
look at Into
Eternity which is a great documentary on the disposal of nuclear waste in Finland.
Orlov's analysis is superficial, unfortunately, in these areas.
This is selective quotes from anti-Trump of neocon author. The general tone of the article is
completely different from presented quotes.
Notable quotes:
"... ..."This was an overthrow of government, this was an attempted overthrow -- and a lot of people were in on it," Trump declared , while Barr insisted , in a more lawyerly fashion, "The Inspector General's report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken." ..."
The report confirmed that the Russia investigation originated, as has been previously
reported, with the Trump campaign adviser
George Papadopoulos bragging to an Australian diplomat about Russia possessing "dirt" on
Hillary Clinton, which the IG determined "was sufficient to predicate the investigation." The
widespread conservative belief that the investigation began because of the dubious claims in
the Steele dossier was false. "Steele's reports played no role" in the opening of the Russia
investigation, the report found, because FBI officials were not "aware of Steele's election
reporting until weeks later."
...The IG also "did not find any records" that Joseph Mifsud, the professor who told
Papadopoulos the Russians had obtained "dirt" on Clinton, was an FBI informant sent to entrap
him.
...Page "did not play a role in the decision to open" the Russia investigation, and that
Strzok was "was not the sole, or even the highest-level, decision maker as to any of those
matters."
...the IG did determine that the Page FISA application was "inaccurate, incomplete, or
unsupported by appropriate documentation," which misled the court as to the credibility of the
FBI's evidence when seeking authority to surveil Page.
..."This was an overthrow of government, this was an attempted overthrow -- and a lot of
people were in on it,"
Trump declared , while Barr insisted , in a more lawyerly fashion, "The Inspector General's
report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential
campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps
taken."
Adam
Serwer is a staff writer atThe Atlantic, where he covers
politics.
FBI Didn't Tell Surveillance Court That Carter Page Was "Operational Contact" For CIA
With "Positive Assessment" by Tyler Durden Tue, 12/10/2019 - 07:55 0
SHARES
The FBI failed to inform surveillance court judges that Carter Page was an "operational
contact" for the CIA for years , and that an employee at the spy agency gave the former Trump
aide a "positive assessment," according to a Justice Department report released Monday.
The finding is included in a list of seven of the FBI's "significant inaccuracies and
omissions" in applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against
Page, a longtime energy consultant who joined the Trump campaign in March 2016.
(emphasis ours)
The report said the FBI "omitted" information it obtained from another U.S. government
agency about its prior relationship with Page.
The agency approved Page as an "operational contact" from 2008 to 2013, according to the
report.
"Page had provided information to the other agency concerning his prior contacts with
certain Russian intelligence officers, one of which overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA
application," the report stated.
Page told the Daily Caller News Foundation he believes the agency in question is the CIA.
Page has previously said he provided information to the CIA and FBI before becoming ensnared in
the bureau's investigation of the Trump campaign.
The report stated an employee with the CIA assessed Page "candidly" described contact he had
with a Russian intelligence officer in 2014. But the FBI cited Page's contact with the officer
to assert in its FISA applications that there was probable cause to believe that Page was
working as a Russian agent.
The IG faulted the FBI for failing to disclose to FISA judges that Page was an operational
contact for the CIA for five years, and that "Page had disclosed to the other agency contacts
that he had with Intelligence Officer 1 and certain other individuals."
The report also stated that the FBI omitted that "the other agency's employee had given a
positive assessment of Page's candor."
The IG said the FBI's failure to disclose Page's relationship with the CIA "was particularly
concerning" because an FBI attorney had specifically asked an FBI case agent whether Page had a
current or prior relationship with the other federal agency.
***
[editor's note: Not only that, an FBI employee - undoubtedly 'resistance' lawyer
Kevin Clinesmith , altered an email to specifically state that Page was "not a source" for
the CIA . ]
The FBI agent falsely asserted Page's relationship was "outside scope" of the investigation
because it dated back to when Page lived in Moscow from 2004 to 2007.
"This representation, however, was contrary to information that the other agency had
provided to the FBI in August 2016, which stated that Page was approved as an 'operational
contact' of the other agency from 2008 to 2013 (after Page had left Moscow)," the IG report
stated.
The report also said Page's CIA contacts considered him to have been candid about his
interactions with a suspected Russian intelligence officer who was later indicted for acting as
an unregistered agent of Russia.
Occams_Razor_Trader_Part_Deux , 8 minutes ago
link
I sometimes think Page was a plant- he's vigorously defended Trump and slammed the CIA and
the hoax of the spying- but that could all be a ruse.
In my mind the jury is still out.
Papadopolous on the other hand- was clearly used, honey pot and all.
The entire "Russian collusion" investigation is another example of the Feds manufacturing
false evidence. Mitsud, supposedly a Russian agent, was actually an asset of US intelligence.
Ever since the foisting of the 17th Amendment, which destroyed the veto of the several states
of Washington excesses and corruptions, Washington D.C. has been the only REAL enemy that the
people have ever had.
Rudy is going to take a huge Trump Dump, right on the heads of the Libtards this
week....... Open wide Retards..........
=============
Breaking: Ukrainian Official Reveals Six Criminal Cases Opened in Ukraine Involving the
Bidens
Trump told the waiting reporters that his personal attorney former New York City Mayor
Rudy Giuliani "found plenty" of "good information" during his recent trip to Ukraine and
Europe.
Trump then added that he believes Giuliani wants to present a report to the Attorney
General William Barr and to Congress. Trump added Giuliani has not told him what he
found.
Giuliani reportedly traveled to Budapest and Ukraine this past week to meet with several
Ukrainian officials about corruption.
OAN reporter Chanel Rion has been traveling with Rudy Giuliani and reporting on his
investigations in Hungary and Kiev, Ukraine.
In her report released on Sunday night Chanel Rion mentioned that Ukrainian officials
showed her six criminal cases involving the Bidens, Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
A more powerful force is at work here, the agencies are their tools, operators. We need to
get our heads out of the weeds if we are to identify the source. Whatever it is, it is likely
internal, thought a higher cause and convincing as CIA, FBI have bought in?
I read the linked article. Quite fascinating that Hillary and her minions were treated
with kid gloves (and nothing at all about Obama, Lynch, Holder, Jarrett, et al) and extended
every courtesy and soft-pedal, yet Roger Stone and Paul Manafort were greeted with platoons
of FBI ninjas and armored vehicles in early morning raids akin to those in Stalinist
Russia.
The FBI didn't tell the FISA court a lot of things. The FBI failed to tell the FISA court
the interview with Papadopoulos revealed there to be absolutely NO Russian collusion. The FBI
deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence that would have freed General Flynn and ended the
investigations.
Instead, the FBI covered up the truth with omissions and lies. That what I call bias.
Call it willful blindness by omission, but I prefer to call it a criminal act and sedition
against a President.
This guy is an Annapolis grad and CIA contact and they destroyed him. Hes gonna get very
rich with lawsuits now. The thing that amazes me no one is talking about.........motivation.
All of these major and minor infractions add up to one thing.....an orchestrated attempt to
frame and over throw the President.\ of the United States
"... If Russia spending $100,000 on Facebook ads constitutes election interference, and Donald Trump asking Ukraine to investigate the Bidens is too - then Hillary Clinton takes the cake when it comes to influence campaigns designed to harm a political opponent. ..."
"... The article suggests that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page "has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials - including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president." ..."
"... Steele told us that in September [of 2016] her and Simpson gave an "off-the-record" briefing to a small number of journalists about his reporting, " reads page 165 of the FISA report, which says that Steele "acknowledged that Yahoo News was identified in one of the court filings in the foreign litigation as being present. " ..."
"... Put another way, Hillary Clinton paid Christopher Steele to feed information to the MSM in order to harm Donald Trump right before the 2016 election . Granted, there were intermediaries; the Clinton campaign paid law firm Perkins Coie, which paid Fusion GPS, which paid Steele. And if asked, we're guessing Clinton would claim she had no idea this happened - which simply isn't plausible given the stakes. Whatever the case - the act of Simpson paying Steele to peddle fiction to the media for the purpose of harming Trump, by itself , constitutes blatant election meddling by every standard set by the left over the past three years. ..."
If Russia spending $100,000 on Facebook ads constitutes election interference, and Donald
Trump asking Ukraine to investigate the Bidens is too - then Hillary Clinton takes the cake
when it comes to influence campaigns designed to harm a political opponent.
Contained within Monday's FISA report by the DOJ
Inspector General is the revelation that Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Clinton campaign to
produce the Steele dossier, " was paying Steele to discuss his reporting with the media. " (
P.
369 and elsewhere)
And when did Steele talk with the media - which got him
fired as an FBI source ? Perhaps most notably was Yahoo News journalist Michael Isikoff ,
who says he was invited by Fusion GPS to meet a
"secret source" at a Washington restaurant . That secret source was none other than
Christopher Steele , who fed Isikoff information from his now-discredited dossier - and which
appeared in a
September 23, 2016 article roughly six weeks before the election - which likely had orders
of magnitude greater visibility and impact coming from a widely-read, MSM source vs. $100,000
in Russian Facebook ads.
The article suggests that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page "has opened up private
communications with senior Russian officials - including talks about the possible lifting of
economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president."
Steele told us that in September [of 2016] her and Simpson gave an "off-the-record" briefing
to a small number of journalists about his reporting, " reads page
165 of the FISA report, which says that Steele "acknowledged that Yahoo News was identified
in one of the court filings in the foreign litigation as being present. "
Put another way, Hillary Clinton paid Christopher Steele to feed information to the MSM in
order to harm Donald Trump right before the 2016 election . Granted, there were intermediaries;
the Clinton campaign paid law firm Perkins Coie, which paid Fusion GPS, which paid Steele. And
if asked, we're guessing Clinton would claim she had no idea this happened - which simply isn't
plausible given the stakes. Whatever the case - the act of Simpson paying Steele to peddle
fiction to the media for the purpose of harming Trump, by itself , constitutes blatant election
meddling by every standard set by the left over the past three years.
We're sure Hillary can explain that if and when she jumps into the 2020 race.
Carter Page is a very shady individual. He was in Navy intelligence, did work at the
Council on Foreign Relations, conveniently did lots of business in Russia and likes wearing
goofy ass hats.
Several days ago, I wrote a piece asking if Carter Page was an asset of the
Central Intelligence Agency. Page as many of you know has been a central figure in this
conspiracy to frame Donald Trump as a Russian intelligence asset. Page was a former adviser to
the Trump campaign who had an extensive business history in Russia. The FBI used the fake
#pissgate dossier financed by Hillary Clinton and manufactured by Christopher Steele as the
primary piece of evidence to request a warrant from the secret FISA court. This was effectively
used to spy on Page and by proxy the Trump campaign.
What's interesting is that just a few days after writing my piece, Page appeared on Sean
Hannity's show for an interview. Hannity specifically pressed him on if he had ever worked for
American intelligence. Page's answers were cryptic. He admitted to having some type of
communications with American intelligence and would not flat out deny being an asset. As in
previous interviews, he came off as an untrustworthy individual who appears to be hiding many
secrets.
One of the more interesting things he talked about was how in 2016, he was invited to speak
in Russia by Shlomo
Weber . He delivered his speech while he was still advising the Trump campaign. This was
already public information but it seems to be a lesser known fact that not many people have
zeroed in on.
... This event allowed Christopher Steele to manufacture some of the garbage that ended
up in the #pissgate dossier.
Weber is an academic who works at the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia. He
previously spent a great deal of time in Israel and earned his PhD at Hebrew University. He
also somehow has both American and Canadian citizenship. These facts alone raise a number of
alarm bells. It would not be a surprise if he was connected to the Israeli Mossad.
And check out how Page's speech was described when it took place.
Page's visit itself was perhaps more notable than the content of his speech. It was
unclear why Page, a relatively little-known analyst, had been invited suddenly to speak at
the same event offered to the serving U.S. president. Interest in Page's trip was high among
Russian media, which was in large attendance at the event.
Shlomo Weber, the director of the New Economic School, said he could not remember if he
had invited Page before or after he was appointed adviser to Trump. Weber said he hoped Page
would "broaden his students' horizons."
There was also speculation that Page might meet with officials from the Russian government
during his visit. Asked at the event directly whether he would meet with officials from
Putin's presidential administration and the foreign ministry, Page laughed and refused to
answer.
... The speech allowed Steele to claim that Page had met with various Russian government
officials while he was in Moscow. And this was a big part of what the FBI used to request the
warrant to spy on Page and by proxy the Trump campaign as a whole.
I would say that all of this makes the theories about Page being a CIA asset planted inside
the Trump campaign even more credible. It certainly helps explain why he hasn't been arrested
and why he keeps talking to the media.
... Hannity pressed Page on being a CIA asset is reason enough for us to continue covering
it.
Carter Page: "I worked for the CIA" Posted on 12/9/19 at 8:40 pm 9 1
I believe this is
the first time he has admitted he worked for the CIA. He said it's all going to come out.
So, if you go look at his emails, he knew there was a FISA against him. He was emailing
Comey and the FBI.
I really think someone told him he was being spied on. He is one of the ones that gave a
heads up to Trump.
?Austere Scholar Monsieur ?
@MonsieurAmerica
THE APEX ASSET:
Targeted asset
@carterwpage
force-fed the FBI via FISA intercepted emails EXCULPATORY evidence in his case and INCULPATORY
evidence in the James Wolfe trial.
Page doesn't just have HISTORY with "other Agency", he's OPERATIONAL.
"... In other words, Carter Page just admitted that he's supplied information about his Russian interactions to the FBI and CIA. That means that at one point, at least, he was a de facto informant. When did that begin? Was it in 2013, after the U.S. busted the Russian spy ring that had sucked him in? Was that why he wasn't prosecuted? How long did he remain an FBI informant? Was he one during the Trump campaign? Is he still one? Is that why he acts in interviews as if he has no fear of getting in trouble, even as he willingly incriminates himself with his answers? ..."
"... This casts new light one another already-documented piece of information about Carter Page: the FBI obtained a FISA warrant on him back in the summer of 2016 ( Washington Post ), not long after he went to work for the Donald Trump campaign. Usually a FISA warrant is aimed at spying on that person. But if Page was already a willing FBI informant, it's possible the warrant was obtained so the FBI could surveil the conversations Page was having with the rest of the Trump campaign. ..."
CNN is confirming today what a wide barrage of evidence has long pointed to: that Russia
tried to use Donald Trump's campaign adviser Carter Page to infiltrate the campaign from within
( link
). But while that's not really news in and of itself, the real story here may be what Page just
told CNN in response – because he may have just given away everything
.
It's already been established that a Russian spy ring tried to turn Carter Page into an
asset back in 2013. Page went as far as giving the Russians some unspecified documents (
NY Times
). When the spy ring was busted, authorities in the U.S. notably took no known legal action
against Page. It's led some to speculate that perhaps they turned Page into an informant right
then and there. The response Page gave to CNN for its story today sounds a lot like he's
confirming as much:
"My assumption throughout the last 26 years I've been going [to Russia] has always been that
any Russian person might share information with the Russian government as I have similarly done
with the CIA, the FBI and other government agencies in the past."
In other words, Carter Page just admitted that he's supplied information about his
Russian interactions to the FBI and CIA. That means that at one point, at least, he was a de
facto informant. When did that begin? Was it in 2013, after the U.S. busted the Russian
spy ring that had sucked him in? Was that why he wasn't prosecuted? How long did he remain an
FBI informant? Was he one during the Trump campaign? Is he still one? Is that why he acts in
interviews as if he has no fear of getting in trouble, even as he willingly incriminates
himself with his answers?
This casts new light one another already-documented piece of information about Carter
Page: the FBI obtained a FISA warrant on him back in the summer of 2016 (
Washington Post ), not long after he went to work for the Donald Trump campaign.
Usually a FISA warrant is aimed at spying on that person. But if Page was already a willing FBI
informant, it's possible the warrant was obtained so the FBI could surveil the conversations
Page was having with the rest of the Trump campaign.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report
So CIA agent Carter Page joins Trump campaign and then do several "improper" moves like
travel to Moscow and contracts with Russian officials things in order to create a pretext for FBI
investigation. Which of course was promptly started. This is called false flag operation.
From comments: "He wasn’t a victim, he was an asset. When actors portray a victim, they
are ACTING!!!"
Notable quotes:
"... "The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses". - the esteemed Malcolm X. ..."
"... Seth Rich downloaded the emails on a potable drive. Was he Russian? ..."
"... DNC/ FBI/ CIA/ CNN/ NBC have merged into the 5 headed serpent. ..."
"... Roger Stone got some minor facts wrong and is facing jail time, Brennan and Comey outright lied to Congress, when are they going to jail? ..."
"... "June 2017, CIA told FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith that Carter Page was working for them (the CIA)." Clinesmith then changed that notification so he could submit the last (FISA) renewal. ..."
"... "Lets hope Carter Page spends the rest of his life sueing everyone..." lol Thats the meanest thing ive ever heard you say! O:) ..."
There are so many crooked actors and actresses hired by the MSM it is just pathetic. They
are not reporters, they are there only to put on a show for the masses.
"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the
innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the
minds of the masses". - the esteemed Malcolm X.
"June 2017, CIA told FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith that Carter Page was working for them
(the CIA)." Clinesmith then changed that notification so he could submit the last (FISA)
renewal.
1:52
- This is what a paid shill looks like. If the money is good, they'll read whatever is on the
prompter. Years from now when they're demonized by the corrupt media they'll scratch their
head and ask... What happened to integrity in our country???
If you asked me 20 years ago wether I would be watching Fox News to get the most rational
point of view in politics, I would have said you were crazy. Another great job Tucker! In my
opinion, you’re one of the best news men of our current time; questioning needless
wars, and calling out politicians, gvmnt officials and your counterparts at other news desks
with rational arguments. Well done sir!
Personally seen these types of things/cases in lower levels, police chiefs and officials,
judges, prosecutors, mayor, FBI, and so on. Not surprisingly it happens elsewhere. ...But
very disappointed of it all.
If I were an American citizen, I'd be very concerned about the utter incompetence of the
FBI that the IG report exposed. The dems don't seem to be bothered by this at all. Go
figure.
The Establishment has played this game many times before .. remember PM Harold Wilson was
put up as a Russian Agent .. sure they won that game but NOT this time .. they fear President
Trump because the have nothing over him .
The Democ-rats and the media (I repeat myself) are shamelessly LYING through their teeth
to the American People. There was NO Russian collision—it's a HOAX made by LOSERS who
can't accept their loss in 2016 so they were up to smear the winner, President Trump, by all
means, possible including Illegal surveillance, fraud and manipulation—ABUSE of
government power for political prosecution.
Steele dossier......fake evidence bought and payed for by the democrats and presented to
the FISA court by James Comey...........FELONY FELONY FELONY!......this one can’t be
talked away!
Tucker, thank you for being a constant drumbeat for the criminal activity undertaken by
the FBI and CIA to ultimately unseat a duly elected President. No rest until they are held
accountable.
How could the FBI be innocent? We saw the emails. We saw them cover up for Bill Gates,
Clinton, Epstein, Brunel, and all the others. We saw how they protected these abusers of
children. We saw how they worked to overthrow a sitting president. We saw how they protected
the Awan’s and Huma.
THE FIX WAS IN - People are saying that Nellie Orr the Russian Expert is best friends with
the IG's Horowitz wife - So nice - Bruce your husband is a lap dog and works for the FBI .
People should be outraged as the cover up continues . Just like OJ - they have 10 times the
evidence that would convict anyone else - have them charged , arrested , tried and jailed .
Different rules for corrupt politicians and their friends in law enforcement .
Michael Cohen In prison, Papadopulos went to prison, Flynn is going to prison, Roger Stone
is going to prison, Manafort is in prison and Devin Nunes and Rudy Giuliani are under
investigation.....Lock them up, lock them up!!!!
CIA tells FBI who in turn uses their corrupt media to spread the lies as truth. The less
intelligent among us believe them as gospel and thus we get "Russian Collusion, or Quid Pro
Quo, or Iraq has weapons of mass destruction " and on and on.....
Ukraine and Barisma may be corrupt, but after reading the summary of this report, this
country better not be calling any country corrupt. The USA is following Rome. Soon it will
die.
FBI is totally corrupted by it's unchecked power, these deep states have the guts to
repeatedly use FALSE Information again & again to spy on the opposition political party
presidential candidate campaign. The Fake News medias continue to cover for them, it is
sickening!
The FBI based on the IG report are either criminally liable for deceiving FISA courts, or
the most inept, bumbling criminal investigation agency ever. Looks like both to me. Any FBI
agent or employee who knew the FBI was breaking the law, and remained silent needs to be
fired immediately and prosecuted along with the principals, for aiding and abetting criminal
activity. This sounds like RICO violations.
if Carter Page didn't run the 2016 "Trump Election Campaign Committee of Moscow" from the
ROSNEFT bureau offices inside the Kremlin, where did Carter Page run the "Trump Election
Campaign Committee of Moscow" ?
Horowitz needs to stop being a wuss and tell the whole truth. His report is a big lie. The
whole thing was a political attack. It started with John McCain and he handed it off to Obama
and Crooked Hillary. There was no reason at all to investigate Trump. Is the IG part of the
deep state? Democrats are acting like this report is good news for them.
Steele was not the author of the fake dossier, DNC FusionGPS Glen Simpson was, and Steele
used as cover. Coming in the Durham findings. 17 FBI "mistakes" in a row all against Trump?
No bias? B S.
How Trump has "conned" the American tax payer: This is just a few of his fraud actions!He
set up a foundation to benefit the military, then him and his family pocketed our money.He
started a Fake University, then stole the money from the American people.He cheated on his
wives, then paid them to keep quiet so it wouldn't damage his chances in the election.He
stiffed 100's of worker's he hired and then made up an excuse y they didn't get paid
If Donald Trump was a Russian spy it would’ve been the deepest cover of any secret
agent ever....he came here after his lgb training as a young man and became a celebrity for
30 years before finally putting his dastardly plan to go from pageant owner to president into
action! If that were anywhere close to true the Russians did so much work I think they earned
the 4-8 years in the White House! I know that at this point I’d rather have Vladimir
Putin as President than any of the top democrats!
Folks..All this soap opera is just a smoke screen to hide what is really important and is
happening right now at this very minute. The Federal Reserve Banking cartel is pumping 100s
of billions of dollars into insolvent banks again like they did in 2008. This time it is more
and we taxpayers will again foot the bill. The banks are getting this money called REPO
loans. Watch your cash everyone as the Federal Reserve has only 1 product and that is
printing money( debt) that they will use to steal your assets and future.
There are many opinions about the Horowitz report. As with a prior report Horowitz lays
out damning evidence and then draws exactly the wrong conclusion. Why does he have to draw
ANY CONCLUSIONS? His job is to present the facts and the evidence and to let "We the People'
draw conclusions. Reminds me of Comey declaring that Hillary's actions were irresponsible but
not criminal. Why? She didn't act with intent. She was just incompetent! Tucker is absolutely
right! What does it matter what their motive was? Like Clinton, they behaved in a criminal
fashion.
The Washington Post and others just adhered to the Justice Department's own policy of
protecting their own while wrecking the lives of those who have the guts to stand up to
them.
T he Washington Post and other media outlets last week reported that a former FBI
attorney allegedly altered a document related to the FBI's 2016 surveillance of Carter Page, a
Trump campaign adviser. FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz apparently concluded that the
conduct "did not affect the overall validity of the surveillance application," which was made
with the secret FISA court.
Carter Page, target of the surveillance. (MSNBC, Wikimedia Commons)
The Post article, as well as articles in The New York Times , at CNN ,
and in other outlets, downplayed the behavior as having had "no effect" on the FBI's
surveillance of Page, ignoring the fact that tampering with a federal document is a felony.
That's consistent with the Justice Department's own policy of protecting their own while
wrecking the lives of those who have the guts to stand up to them.
Publishing Excuses
Look at The Washington Post's original account of the inspector general's findings.
The FBI attorney was just a "low-level employee" who has already "been forced out of the
Bureau." The altered document "did not affect the overall validity of the surveillance
application." The employee "erroneously indicated he had documentation to back up a claim he
had made in discussions with the Justice Department about the factual basis for the
application. He then altered an email to back up that erroneous claim."
Let's straighten a few things outs.
First, the employee was not "low-level." Attorneys enter the FBI at the GS-11 level. That's
a starting salary of $69,581. On Day One of his career, the attorney would actually be a
mid-level employee. Furthermore, "low-level employees" are not assigned to sensitive operations
involving counterintelligence against a major-party presidential campaign. Hand-picked senior
employees get that honor.
Second, even if the altered document didn't affect the FISA warrant application, the
statement is irrelevant. The attorney committed a felony, plain and simple.
Third, the media says that the attorney "erroneously indicated" that he could back up the
document. But that, too, was a felony. It's called "making a false statement" and it's
punishable by up to five years in prison.
To make matters worse, there is no indication from the Justice Department that this attorney
will be prosecuted. "He's already resigned," The Washington Post tells us, as if that's
supposed to make everything OK. Why is the mainstream media shielding FBI malfeasance? For FBI
crimes? Because the victim is the Trump campaign, and we're not supposed to like the Trump
campaign. It's all about Russia, Russia, Russia, remember? If the evidence doesn't show that,
you just change the evidence.
... ... ...
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the
Obama administration under the Espionage Act -- a law designed to punish spies. He served 23
months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture
program.
Brian James , December 1, 2019 at 21:08
March 2015 Trevor Aaronson: How this FBI strategy is actually creating US-based
terrorists
There's an organization responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than
al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The FBI. How? Why? In an eye-opening talk,
investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson reveals a disturbing FBI practice that breeds
terrorist plots by exploiting Muslim-Americans with mental health problems.
Our justice system and corporate news system are corrupt, i.e. criminal, as Mr. Kiriakou
courageously reports. Further, this corruption is clearly coordinated. So who is directing
it? The crimes of Israel are routinely ignored by the entire corporate media, acting as a
functional monopoly. That is a clear clue. And as CN articles routinely document, the
corporate news also acts in unison to promote more war in the Middle East. Watergate taught
us to follow the money. Today the bank that financed the establishment of Israel is profiting
from the Golan Heights oil fields stolen by Israel. Also, led by Sheldon Adelson and Haim
Saban, Israeli money dominates both political parties in America, dwarfing whatever minuscule
efforts Russia may have made. The situation is, as Mr. Kiriakou notes, serious indeed.
Tim Jones , November 30, 2019 at 22:09
I've been thinking how much power William Barr could wield? Will he have an alligator
mouth and a humming bird ass? Or is he going to deliver justice and clean house? Little hand
slaps- and admonishments, or the fair application of the law. A good man or woman would risk
all to right the ship of state and others will just retire with a book deal and a consulting
job. Which is it Bill?
Tyler , November 30, 2019 at 03:57
Once again, a complete lack of accountability has allowed those entrusted with power over
We the People run amok, destroying lives and with them the very foundations of what it means
to participate in a democracy where the rule of law spikes to everyone. They have committed
violence not only to their victims but also to their very credibility. Those who refuse to
accede to their will are no longer violating the will of We the People but instead committing
an act of courage. This is what the rot of empire looks like up close.
Nathan Mulcahy , November 29, 2019 at 13:58
Thank you John Kiriakou, for your ourage and sacrifice.
There is one misnomer in the article. Mainstream papers are neither"press" of organs of
journalism. They are stenographers, or "presstitutes", if you so prefer.
This article focuses on one agent who altered a document involved in the FISA application
targeting Carter Page. But the entire application was corrupt. The signatories attested under
oath that the evidence presented – most prominently, sections of the Steele dossier
mentioning Carter Page – had been verified. Yet they had not verified it, and the
allegations were lies. The applicants indicated their belief that Page was acting as a
Russian agent – yet Page had cooperated with the FBI in recent years to enable
conviction of true Russian spies – a fact which the application left out. Also left out
was the fact that the dossier was funded by the DNC and Clinton campaign as oppo research.
The evident intent of the warrant was to spy not just on Page, but on other members of the
Trump campaign who had contact with him – the "2 hop" rule. So, on the basis of
"evidence" that anyone with half an ounce of sense could see was highly dubious and, in any
case, wholly unverified – and concocted by political opponents – the FBI gained
the right to spy on the Trump campaign.
If the people responsible for this are not indicted, then ANY political campaign in future
can be spied on by the Deep State once some defamatory lies have been concocted by the
campaign's opponents. This must not stand. Horowitz may look the other way on this, but I
doubt Durham will.
The principle of 'follow the money' in government institutions like this usually leads to
the conclusion that you are being screwed with your own tax dollars
Interesting that Albury tells us that "Of the variables at their disposal, I was deemed to
be a 'Greater Security Threat'" and that this was "misguided and inappropriate" – in
other words, completely false.
What is interesting is that when Max Blumenthal was arrested he was described as "armed
and dangerous" even though this was clearly untrue.
They have a way of getting at people who say things they don't like – presumably
based on a particular hatred of them.
Robyn , November 29, 2019 at 02:09
I can add nothing to this article but I am pleased to be able to record my boundless
admiration for John Kiriakou, Terry Albury, and all the others CN readers are sadly familiar
with – heroes all. They stand head and shoulders above the cowards and hypocrites who
turn a blind eye or play a role in persecuting their honest colleagues.
Sam F , November 28, 2019 at 20:51
Thank you, Mr. Kiriakou, and Mr. Albury for your efforts; indeed the fight for "honesty in
government" is daunting. I do not expect to be happy while fighting corruption, but feel
strongly that it is necessary. The greatest difficulty is the realization that almost
everyone betrays the public-interest activist, in envy or hope of personal gain. Your stories
encourage those able to take action.
Hank , November 29, 2019 at 11:07
Money and power attract the type of people who should NOT be entrusted with it.
Sam F , November 29, 2019 at 16:56
Exactly, Hank; and those lowest characters float to the top in an unregulated market
economy. And of course the rich and economic power generally have seized control of our
government, because the founders could not have foreseen the need to protect the institutions
of democracy (all three federal branches and mass media) from economic power.
The federal government needs major repairs, but the tools of democracy are no longer
available to the People.
robert e williamson jr , November 28, 2019 at 19:35
What is witnessed here is what happens when the rule of law does not prevail. The classic
"double standard" appears. Things have been this way since at least since WWII.
In the past the slow pace of communications, that transfer of critical information of the
highest levels, dictated by the speeds and flexibility of the communication technology
available at the time enabled members of the intelligence community to more easily control
their data.
Things have changed with that technology and I believe we are witnessing what happens when
those who play fast and loose with the rules make mistakes now. Yep, they get found out and
it doesn't take long. The up side is we tend now not to forget the lies told just days ago
when "the forces of light" counters the "party line" and exposes the lies.
I also believe the chaos we are witnessing is the result of a lack of unity among the
media. A media that has lost the trappings of being a worthy agent providing the TRUTH to
American at large but has instead succumbed to the pressure to make big money.
We get truth more efficiently from independent media who worry more about content that the
bottom line, while the MSM has sunk to the low standards of the "oldest profession".
Thanks to all who care enough to pursue the truth and make it available for the rest of
us.
Sally , November 28, 2019 at 16:39
Walk a mile in Assange's shoes back and forth in a cell fit for no sentient being it makes
me want to throw up
GMCasey , November 28, 2019 at 12:24
Having both literary and American history studies in college, I am now finding that the
more I learn -- the less I know. It's almost as if the many governmental agencies are over
flowing with mini Humpty Dumpties, on increasingly higher walls -- -- -- and I am dreading
the fall of all those walls and the Humpty types. I am left with the bizarre words of the
1920s writer Gertrude Stein and what she said about the city of Oakland. It almost seems as
if America has become that city of Oakland, where Stein once wrote that," there is no there
-- there."
Maybe the many power seekers and takers are merely a throwback to the once upon a time king
-- –Gerorge. Although, we seem to be in a curious wormhole -- at least Consortium News
has made a readable path. Thank you.
Tomonthebeach , November 28, 2019 at 11:27
Life is unfair. We choose the people with whom we associate and the actions in which we
engage on their behalf. There is no question that this situation involved inappropriate, even
punitive, actions by government officials. However, the assumption that Page is an innocent
in all this is likewise dubious. He had his agenda and his objectives, while self-promoting,
remain cloudy.
The old adage about what happens when you lie down with dogs seem to apply in this
case.
incontinent reader , November 29, 2019 at 08:26
Tomonthebeach- I don't understand your comment. Are you suggesting that it is likely that
Page is guilty? Could you provide reasons and proof? And when you say this is what happens
when you lie down with dogs, do you mean that by joining the Trump campaign he called upon
himself all the illegal actions of the FBI, and should have expected to be set up?
And if you've read it, Mr. Kiriakou's article highlights systemic illegality and injustice
at the FBI, including attacking all those who question it and fight for their rights. Maybe
it is more appropriate to refer to the Bureau as the dogs in your adage.
Page's guilt or innocence is totally irrelevant. Falsifying evidence is a felony.
Falsifying evidence for a FISA warrant against a presidential candidate is a major crime
which, left unpunished, encourages further outrages against out legal system, bu the very
watchdogs set to protect it.
Jeff Harrison , November 29, 2019 at 11:20
It's not clear to me what you're thinking. Carter Page has never been charged with, much
less convicted of illegal behavior. He was illegally surveilled by the FBI based on false
testimony – the very epitome of the 9th commandment – Thou shalt not bear false
witness against thy neighbor. Yet you think he should get fleas. Last time I checked, in this
country you're supposed to be able to do anything you want as long as you don't break the
law.
So it is just fine with you that a lawyer working with the FBI altered documents to the
FISA Court in order to frame Carter Page. It is fine with you that he walks free. The fact
that the MSM in the USA agrees with you shows just how sad the state of the union actually is
. And Americans are so gung ho on fighting corruption in other countries, especially those
they are currently demonizing. Talk about sick countries.
michael , November 29, 2019 at 16:42
Am I to infer that the FBI are "fleas"? Possibly the type carrying the Black Plague?
A basic tenet of American Law used to be the presumption of innocence for the accused. These
cases John Kiriakou presents, and his own as well, provide evidence that the Intelligence
Agencies are now Judge, Jury and Executioner of those who cross them. A Police State
amok.
Tony , November 28, 2019 at 08:57
Is the FBI still doing the sort of things that it did when Hoover was in charge?
Hank , November 29, 2019 at 11:08
Can a bird fly?
Georgia , November 30, 2019 at 11:32
Worse. Now they have no problem trying to "fix" Presidential elections to install the
Candidate they are in bed with– in 2016 that was Hillary Clinton who committed numerous
Felonies that FBI Head James Comey et al both covered up and let the evidence be destroyed by
here and her lackeys & they also now have attempted to frame a duly elected President
that they did not support and who beat "their" candidate with a phony "Russia Collusion"
hoax/fraud–
So it is easy to argue that Hoover was actually a piker compared to the miscreants and
serious felons "running" the FBI (and their buddies at the CIA .) today the fact that if you
are "inside" with these criminals you don't get prosecuted is amazing to watch– the DOJ
and FBI are little more than criminal organizations now to anyone paying attention–
perjury, frame jobs, political hatchet work etc. -- people need to wake up that the KGB was
actually less of a problem for the people in the USSR because they were all aware of what was
up– most in the USA due to the complicit Mainslime Media have no clue that the country
has devolved into a banana Republic run by criminals -- the FBI "Lab" was actually just
fabricating evidence for many years framing people at the request of Field Agents–this
is now a PROVEN FACT there is no dispute the "Lab" did this for well over a decade, even in
Death Penalty cases they were doing this .– almost no one knows about it of course, the
country is a sad joke–
The fact Hillary Clinton can even be given consideration as a possible "Candidate" again
is amazing given what she has pulled and what she has done to the country thru her frauds and
machinations, Ma Barker was born at the wrong time she could be in the running for Federal
Office these days even with her final life "resume" .
AnneR , November 28, 2019 at 08:17
Thank you Mr Kiriakou for this further confirmation of the lies and obfuscations, the
intrinsically duplicitous and hypocritical nature of all aspects of our government (and I do
believe that it is all facets), their ever-ramifying, largely secret agencies (that
apparently answer to no one, certainly no one in the lower 90% of the population whose taxes
actually fund all of it) and the ruling elites who control it all to their sole benefit, of
course.
One is – again – confronted with the ongoing, starkly hypocritical difference
in "treatment" and publicity between the so-called White House "whistleblower" on Trump's
phone call with Zelensky and real whistleblowers such as Mr Allbury as presented in the MSM.
The former (really just a "leaker" of second-hand chit-chat) is lauded by the Dems who were
more than willing to denounce, charge and incarcerate genuine whistleblowers, like Mr
Allbury, Chelsea Manning and others. who made apparent the really existing war crimes,
law-breaking, racism, lies and other malfeasant actions of these agencies of the ruling
elites and *their* government stooges.
The rank hypocrisy of government, of their masters, of the secret agencies *and* the
judiciary at all levels is nauseating beyond belief. And its drenched Russo-phobic, Cold War,
Warmongering, "we're the planet's rulers" worldview underlies all of it.
[Inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz decided that] The altered document "did not affect
the overall validity of the surveillance application."
This is actually quite possible if FICA reads only the requests and ignores the
justification. Inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz presumably has enough experience to
make that judgement.
"A botched assassination attempt against Ukrainian politician and businessman Vyacheslav
Sobolev has resulted in the death of his three-year-old son, Alexander.
"While Sobolev and his wife were leaving his high-end restaurant "Mario" in Kiev this past
Sunday, right-wing thugs opened fire on Sobolev's Range Rover, missing him but hitting his
son who was seated in the back of the vehicle. The three-year-old died on the way to the
hospital.
"Police later apprehended two men who had fled the scene in a black Lexus sedan, Oleksiy
Semenov, 19, and Andrei Lavrega, 20. Both are veterans of the war in Donbass in eastern
Ukraine where they served as members of the fascist Right Sector's paramilitary formation
until June of this year.
"The Right Sector was instrumental in the US- and EU-backed, fascist-led coup in February
2014 that toppled the Yanukovitch government and replaced it with a pro-Western and
anti-Russian regime. Since then, the Right Sector has been among the far-right forces that
have been heavily involved in the war against Russian-backed separatists in East Ukraine.
"As is usual when members of neo-Nazi groups carry out political attacks, the Right Sector
and their former battalion commander fraudulently attempted to distance themselves from
Lavrega and Semenov, claiming they had lost contact with them since they left Ukraine's armed
forces in June. These claims are not credible.
"Lavrega, who has been identified as the principal shooter in the killing, has been a
member of the Right Sector for at least half a decade. He had participated in the Maidan
movement of 2014 as a member of the Right Sector and perfected his shooting skills as a
sniper killing separatist soldiers in eastern Ukraine. According to his Right Sector
battalion commander, Andrei Herhert, Lavrega -- also known as "Quiet" -- was "one of the best
snipers in the war" and "very ideological."
"As a thanks for his service to the right-wing Kiev government, Lavrega received a
military decoration from former President Petro Poroshenko for "courage" just last year, in
October of 2018." ..........
"Whoever is ultimately responsible for ordering this political assassination and the
murder of the three-year-old boy, it is clear that the same far-right forces that were
instrumental in the coup in February 2014 and the civil war are now being employed to carry
out political assassinations by the Ukrainian oligarchy.
"Since the 2014 coup, the number of targeted political assassinations by right-wing
neo-Nazi groups like C14 and the Right Sector has skyrocketed. At least 15 people have been
murdered in such hit jobs by the far right since 2014. Among them was the well-known
Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet and the politician Kateryna Handziuk, who was killed in
a horrific acid attack by right-wing thugs last year.
"In virtually all these cases, the perpetrators have been protected from serious legal
prosecution. One of the murderers of Handziuk received a barely three-year prison sentence. A
critical role in shielding the neo-Nazis is played by Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs'
Arsen Avakov, who controls the country's police force and possesses well-known ties to
Ukraine's most notorious fascist militia, the Azov Battalion.
"Avakov is one of the few members of the previous Poroshenko government that have remained
in the current Cabinet of Ministers under President Volodmyr Zelensky. He was recently
praised by former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch while testifying before the
House of Representatives regarding the Trump impeachment investigation (see also: "The
impeachment crisis and American imperialism").
"President Zelensky, who was elected in April this year on the basis of promises that he
would bring an end to the widely despised civil war in eastern Ukraine that has claimed the
lives of over 13,000 people, has maintained a conspicuous silence on this latest political
assassination attempt by the far right. Instead, the day after the murder, he posted a
message on Facebook to honor two Ukrainian soldiers who were killed while fighting in eastern
Ukraine this past weekend."
The rest of the story can be found at the WSWS https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/07/ukra-d06.html
The Right Sector links with the former US Ambassador-Democratic heroine- are topical.
Thank you for that insight. I cannot see how Zelensky will manage the Nazi Ukrainians
short of a virtual civil war against one western district. The USA will foment a major
insurrection to destroy him if he does a deal with Gazprom. Your suggestion as to where those
issues are discussed would be welcome.
A User #72
Thank you and well said. The eurocentric kabuki does mesmerise the information providers.
I too seek escape from that dominance and spent a good time today researching the Power of
Siberia implications and issues of South America. The global assault on all things African is
a matter of deep despair for me and I feel totally powerless to reverse the relentless
assault on their world.
"... Thanks again for making explicit what I have long known: To America, Ukraine is nothing but a weapon against Russia. The whole point of support for Ukraine is to make Russia bleed—doesn’t matter how many people die or suffer in the process or how much of Ukraine is destroyed. https://twitter.com/BBuchman_CNS/status/1202267180219478024 … ..."
"... So fomenting on a war on Russia's border is, it appears, self-evidently aids our national security. What's next? A war scare? Ramping up MH17? ..."
"'Our Democracy Is at Stake.' Pelosi Orders Democrats to Draft Articles of Impeachment
Against Trump" [ Time ]. With autoplay video.
""The President abused his power for his own personal political benefit at the expense of
our national security by withholding military aid and a crucial Oval Office meeting in
exchange for an announcement of an investigation into his political rival." • So now when
a President doesn't allow The Blob to dictate Ukraine policy it's an impeachable offense?
Really? Yasha Levine quotes Democrat impeachment witness Karlan (see below) but the point is
the same:
Yasha Levine ✔ @yashalevine
Thanks again for making explicit what I have long known: To America, Ukraine is nothing but a weapon
against Russia. The whole point of support for Ukraine is to make Russia bleed—doesn’t matter how many people die or
suffer in the process or how much of Ukraine is destroyed.
https://twitter.com/BBuchman_CNS/status/1202267180219478024 …
So fomenting on a war on Russia's border is, it appears, self-evidently aids our
national security. What's next? A war scare? Ramping up MH17?
"Read opening statements from witnesses at the House Judiciary hearing" [
Politico ]. "Democrats' impeachment witnesses at Wednesday's judiciary committee hearing
plan to say in their prepared remarks that President Donald Trump's actions toward Ukraine were
the worst examples of misconduct in presidential history." • So again, it's all about
Ukraine. I feel like I've entered an alternate dimension. Aaron Maté comments:
My very subjective impression: I've skimmed three, and read Turley. Karlan, in particular,
is simply not a serious effort. Turley may be wrong -- a ton of tribal dunking on Twitter --
but at least he's making a serious effort. I'm gonna have to wait to see if somebody, say at
Lawfare, does a serious effort on Turley. Everything I've read hitherto is and posturing and
preaching to the choir. (Sad that Larry Tribe has so completely discredited himself, but that's
where we are.)
Lambert, while Trump was unable to complete his attempt to extort the President of
Ukraine, as someone who practiced the criminal law for 34 years, let me be the first to clue
you in to the concept in the criminal law of the inchoate offense . This is
criminal law, not contract law.
An inchoate offense includes an attempt, a conspiracy, and the solicitation of a crime.
All focus on the state of mind of the perpetrator, and none require that the offense be
completed -- only that a person or persons having the required criminal intent took material
steps toward completing the crime. Such a person becomes a principal in the contemplated
crime, and in the eyes of the law is just as guilty as if he or she had completed the
attempted offense.
(The details of Trump's offense differ from what David in Santa Cruz said they would be.)
"Inchoate" appears only in Turley's piece, indicating, to me, that his was the only serious
effort.
In its most detailed account yet, the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington says a Democratic
National Committee (DNC) insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump's
campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.
In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor
Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort dealings inside the country in
hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.
Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on
Manafort's Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.
Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as
a Ukrainian American activist and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the
embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S.
election.
"The Embassy got to know Ms. Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other
diasporas in Washington D.C., and not in her DNC capacity. We've learned about her DNC
involvement later," Chaly said in a statement issued by his embassy. "We were surprised to
see Alexandra's interest in Mr. Paul Manafort's case. It was her own cause. The Embassy
representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that
this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter."
"All ideas floated by Alexandra were related to approaching a Member of Congress with a
purpose to initiate hearings on Paul Manafort or letting an investigative journalist ask
President Poroshenko a question about Mr. Manafort during his public talk in Washington,
D.C.," the ambassador explained.
Reached by phone last week, Chalupa said she was too busy to talk. She did not respond to
email and phone messages seeking subsequent comment.
Chaly's written answers mark the most direct acknowledgement by Ukraine's government that an
American tied to the Democratic Party sought the country's help in the 2016 election, and they
confirm the main points of a January 2017
story by Politico on Chalupa's efforts.
... ... ...
In addition, I
wrote last month that the Obama White House invited Ukrainian law enforcement officials to
a meeting in January 2016 as Trump rose in the polls on his improbable path to the presidency.
The meeting led to U.S. requests to the Ukrainians to help investigate Manafort, setting in
motion a series of events that led to the Ukrainians leaking the documents about Manafort in
May 2016.
The DNC's embassy contacts add a new dimension, though. Chalupa discussed in the 2017
Politico article about her efforts to dig up dirt on Trump and Manafort, including at the
Ukrainian Embassy.
Exactly how the Ukrainian Embassy responded to Chalupa's inquiries remains in dispute.
Chaly's statement says the embassy rebuffed her requests for information: "No documents related
to Trump campaign or any individuals involved in the campaign have been passed to Ms. Chalupa
or the DNC neither from the Embassy nor via the Embassy. No documents exchange was even
discussed."
But Andrii Telizhenko, a former political officer who worked under Chaly from December 2015
through June 2016, told me he was instructed by the ambassador and his top deputy to meet with
Chalupa in March 2016 and to gather whatever dirt Ukraine had in its government files about
Trump and Manafort.
Telizhenko said that when he was told by the embassy to arrange the meeting, both Chaly and
the ambassador's top deputy identified Chalupa "as someone working for the DNC and trying to
get Clinton elected." Over lunch at a Washington restaurant, Chalupa told Telizhenko in
stark terms what she hoped the Ukrainians could provide the DNC and the Clinton campaign,
according to his account.
"She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort
were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with [Russian President Vladimir]
Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would
introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed
from the ballot, from the election," he recalled.
After the meeting, Telizhenko said he became concerned about the legality of using his
country's assets to help an American political party win a U.S. election. But he proceeded with
his assignment. Telizhenko said that as he began his research, he discovered that Fusion GPS
was nosing around Ukraine, seeking similar information, and he believed they, too, worked for
the Democrats. As a former aide inside the general prosecutor's office in Kiev, Telizhenko used
contacts with intelligence, police and prosecutors across the country to secure information
connecting Russian figures to assistance on some of the Trump organization's real estate deals
overseas, including a tower in Toronto.
Telizhenko said he did not want to provide the intelligence he collected directly to Chalupa
and instead handed the materials to Chaly: "I told him what we were doing was illegal, that it
was unethical doing this as diplomats." He said the ambassador told him he would handle the
matter and had opened a second channel back in Ukraine to continue finding dirt on Trump.
Telizhenko said he also was instructed by his bosses to meet with an American journalist
researching Manafort's ties to Ukraine.
About a month later, he said his relationship with the ambassador soured and, by June 2016,
he was ordered to return to Ukraine. There, he reported his concerns about the embassy's
contacts with the Democrats to the former prosecutor general's office and officials in the
Poroshenko administration: "Everybody already knew what was going on and told me it had been
approved at the highest levels."
Telizhenko said he never was able to confirm whether the information he collected for
Chalupa was delivered to her, the DNC or the Clinton campaign.
Chalupa, meanwhile, continued to build a case that Manafort and Trump were tied to
Russia.
In April 2016, she attended an international symposium where she reported back to the DNC
that she had met with 68 Ukrainian investigative journalists to talk about Manafort. She also
wrote that she invited American reporter Michael Isikoff to speak with her. Isikoff wrote some
of the
seminal stories tying Manafort to Ukraine and Trump to Russia; he later wrote a
book making a case for Russian collusion.
"A lot more coming down the pipe," Chalupa wrote a top DNC official on May 3, 2016 ,
recounting her effort to educate Ukrainian journalists and Isikoff about Manafort.
Then she added, "More offline tomorrow since there is a big Trump component you and Lauren
need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I'm working on you should be
aware of."
Less than a month later, the " black
ledger " identifying payments to Manafort was announced in Ukraine, forcing Manafort to
resign as Trump's campaign chairman and eventually to face criminal prosecution for improper
foreign lobbying.
DNC officials have suggested in the past that Chalupa's efforts were personal, not
officially on behalf of the DNC. But Chalupa's May 2016 email clearly informed a senior DNC
official that she was "digging into Manafort" and she suspected someone was trying to hack into
her email account.
Chaly over the years has tried to portray his role as Ukraine's ambassador in Washington as
one of neutrality during the 2016 election. But in August 2016 he raised eyebrows in some
diplomatic circles when he wrote an
op-ed for The Hill skewering Trump for some of his comments on Russia. "Trump's comments
send wrong message to world," Chaly's article blared in the headline.
... ... ...
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years
has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists'
misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political
corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at
The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports .
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:
"... Fact 10 : Shokin stated in interviews with me and ABC News that he was told he was fired because Joe Biden was unhappy the Burisma investigation wasn't shut down. He made that claim anew in this sworn deposition prepared for a court in Europe. You can read that here . ..."
"... Fact 11 : The day Shokin's firing was announced in March 2016, Burisma's legal representatives sought an immediate meeting with his temporary replacement to address the ongoing investigation. You can read the text of their emails here . ..."
"... Fact 13 : Burisma officials eventually settled the Ukraine investigations in late 2016 and early 2017, paying a multimillion dollar fine for tax issues. You can read their lawyer's February 2017 announcement of the end of the investigations here . ..."
"... Fact 15 : The Ukraine embassy in Washington issued a statement in April 2019 admitting that a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa solicited Ukrainian officials in spring 2016 for dirt on Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in hopes of staging a congressional hearing close to the 2016 election that would damage Trump's election chances. You can read the embassy's statement here and here . Your colleague, Dr. Fiona Hill, confirmed this episode, testifying "Ukraine bet on the wrong horse. They bet on Hillary Clinton winning." You can read her testimony here . ..."
"... Fact 18 : A Ukrainian district court ruled in December 2018 that the summer 2016 release of information by Ukrainian Parliamentary member Sergey Leschenko and NABU director Artem Sytnyk about an ongoing investigation of Manafort amounted to an improper interference by Ukraine's government in the 2016 U.S. election. You can read the court ruling here . Leschenko and Sytnyk deny the allegations, and have won an appeal to suspend that ruling on a jurisdictional technicality. ..."
"... Fact 21 : In April 2016, US embassy charge d'affaires George Kent sent a letter to the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office demanding that Ukrainian prosecutors stand down a series of investigations into how Ukrainian nonprofits spent U.S. aid dollars, including the Anti-Corruption Actions Centre. You can read that letter here . Kent testified he signed the letter here . ..."
"... Fact 22 : Then-Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said in a televised interview with me that Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch during a 2016 meeting provided the lists of names of Ukrainian nationals and groups she did want to see prosecuted. You can see I accurately quoted him by watching the video here . ..."
"... Fact 27 : In May 2016, one of George Soros' top aides secured a meeting with the top Eurasia policy official in the State Department to discuss Russian bond issues. You can read the State memos on that meeting here . ..."
"... Fact 28 : In June 2016, Soros himself secured a telephonic meeting with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to discuss Ukraine policy. You can read the State memos on that meeting here . ..."
honor and applaud Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman's service to his country. He's a hero. I also respect his decision to testify
at the impeachment proceedings. I suspect neither his service nor his testimony was easy.
But I also know the liberties that Lt. Col. Vindman fought on the battlefield to preserve permit for a free and honest debate
in America, one that can't be muted by the color of uniform or the crushing power of the state.
So I want to exercise my right to debate Lt. Col. Vindman about the testimony he gave about me. You see, under oath to Congress,
he asserted all the factual elements in my columns at The Hill about Ukraine were false, except maybe my grammar
"I think all the key elements were false," Vindman testified.
Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y, pressed him about what he meant. "Just so I understand what you mean when you say key elements, are you
referring to everything John Solomon stated or just some of it?"
"All the elements that I just laid out for you. The criticisms of corruption were false . Were there more items in there, frankly,
congressman? I don't recall. I haven't looked at the article in quite some time, but you know, his grammar might have been right."
Such testimony has been injurious to my reputation, one earned during 30 years of impactful reporting for news organizations that
included The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and The Daily Beast/Newsweek.
And so Lt. Col. Vindman, here are the 28 primary factual elements in my Ukraine columns, complete with attribution and links to
sourcing. Please tell me which, if any, was factually wrong.
Fact 1 : Hunter Biden was hired in May 2014 by Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company, at a time when his father
Joe Biden was Vice President and overseeing US-Ukraine Policy.
Here
is the announcement. Hunter Biden's hiring came just a few short weeks after Joe Biden urged Ukraine to expand natural gas production
and use Americans to help. You can read his comments to the Ukrainian prime minister
here . Hunter Biden's firm then began receiving monthly payments totaling $166,666. You can see those payments
here .
Fact 2 : Burisma was under investigation by
British authorities for corruption
and soon came under investigation by
Ukrainian authorities led by Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
Fact 3 : Vice President Joe Biden and his office were alerted by a
December 2015 New York Times article that Shokin's office was investigating Burisma and that Hunter Biden's role at the company
was undercutting his father's anticorruption efforts in Ukraine.
Fact 4 : The Biden-Burisma issue created the appearance of a conflict of interest, especially for State Department officials.
I especially refer you to State official George Kent's testimony
here . He testified he viewed
Burisma as corrupt and the Bidens as creating the perception of a conflict of interest. His concerns both caused him to contact the
vice president's office and to block a project that State's USAID agency was planning with Burisma in 2016. In addition, Ambassador
Yovanovitch testified she, too, saw the Bidens-Burisma connection as creating the appearance of a conflict of interest. You can read
her testimony
here .
Fact 5 : The Obama White House invited Shokin's prosecutorial team to Washington for meetings in January 2016 to discuss
their anticorruption investigations. You can read about that
here . Also, here is the official agenda for that meeting in
Ukraine and
English
. I call your attention to the NSC organizer of the meeting.
Fact 6 : The Ukraine investigation of Hunter Biden's employer, Burisma Holdings, escalated in February 2016 when Shokin's
office raided the home of company owner Mykola Zlochevsky and seized his property.
Here is the announcement of that court-approved
raid.
Fact 7 : Shokin was making plans in February 2016 to interview Hunter Biden as part of his investigation. You can read
his interview with me here, his sworn deposition to a court
here and his interview with
ABC News
here .
Fact 8 : Burisma's American representatives lobbied the State Department in late February 2016 to help end the corruption
allegations against the company, and specifically invoked Hunter Biden's name as a reason to intervene. You can read State officials'
account of that effort here
Fact 9 : Joe Biden boasted in a
2018 videotape
that he forced Ukraine's president to fire Shokin in March 2016 by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid. You can view his
videotape here
.
Fact 10 : Shokin stated in interviews with me and
ABC News that he was told he was fired because Joe Biden was unhappy the Burisma investigation wasn't shut down. He made that
claim anew in this sworn deposition prepared for a court in Europe. You can read that
here .
Fact 11 : The day Shokin's firing was announced in March 2016, Burisma's legal representatives sought an immediate meeting
with his temporary replacement to address the ongoing investigation. You can read the text of their emails
here .
Fact 12 : Burisma's legal representatives secured that meeting April 6, 2016 and told Ukrainian prosecutors that "false
information" had been spread to justify Shokin's firing, according to a Ukrainian government memo about the meeting. The representatives
also offered to arrange for the remaining Ukrainian prosecutors to meet with U.S State and Justice officials. You can read the Ukrainian
prosecutors' summary memo of the meeting here and here and the Burisma lawyers' invite to Washington
here .
Fact 13 : Burisma officials eventually settled the Ukraine investigations in late 2016 and early 2017, paying a multimillion
dollar fine for tax issues. You can read their lawyer's February 2017 announcement of the end of the investigations
here .
Fact 14 : In March 2019, Ukraine authorities reopened an investigation against Burisma and Zlochevsky based on new evidence
of money laundering. You can read NABU's February 2019 recommendation to re-open the case
here , the March 2019 notice of suspicion by Ukraine prosecutors
here and a
May 2019 interview
here
with a Ukrainian senior law enforcement official stating the investigation was ongoing. And
here is an announcement this week that the Zlochevsky/Burisma probe has been expanded to include allegations of theft of Ukrainian
state funds.
Fact 15 : The Ukraine embassy in Washington issued a statement in April 2019 admitting that a Democratic National Committee
contractor named Alexandra Chalupa solicited Ukrainian officials in spring 2016 for dirt on Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort
in hopes of staging a congressional hearing close to the 2016 election that would damage Trump's election chances. You can read the
embassy's statement
here and
here . Your colleague, Dr. Fiona Hill, confirmed this episode, testifying "Ukraine bet on the wrong horse. They bet on Hillary
Clinton winning." You can read her testimony
here .
Fact 16 : Chalupa sent an email to top DNC officials in May 2016 acknowledging she was working on the Manafort issue. You
can read the email here .
Fact 17 : Ukraine's ambassador to Washington, Valeriy Chaly, wrote an OpEd in The Hill in August 2016 slamming GOP nominee
Donald Trump for his policies on Russia despite a Geneva Convention requirement that ambassadors not become embroiled in the internal
affairs or elections of their host countries. You can read Ambassador Chaly's OpEd
here and the Geneva Convention rules of conduct for foreign diplomats
here . And your colleagues
Ambassador Yovanovitch and Dr. Hill both confirmed this, with Dr. Hill
testifying this
week that Chaly's OpEd was "probably not the most advisable thing to do."
Fact 18 : A Ukrainian district court ruled in December 2018 that the summer 2016 release of information by Ukrainian Parliamentary
member Sergey Leschenko and NABU director Artem Sytnyk about an ongoing investigation of Manafort amounted to an improper interference
by Ukraine's government in the 2016 U.S. election. You can read the court ruling
here . Leschenko and Sytnyk deny the allegations, and have won an appeal to suspend that ruling on a jurisdictional technicality.
Fact 19 : George Soros' Open Society Foundation issued a memo in February 2016 on its strategy for Ukraine, identifying
the nonprofit Anti-Corruption Action Centre as the lead for its efforts. You can read the memo
here .
Fact 20 : The State Department and Soros' foundation jointly funded the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. You can read about
that funding here from the Centre's own funding records and George
Kent's testimony about it here
.
Fact 21 : In April 2016, US embassy charge d'affaires George Kent sent a letter to the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office
demanding that Ukrainian prosecutors stand down a series of investigations into how Ukrainian nonprofits spent U.S. aid dollars,
including the Anti-Corruption Actions Centre. You can read that letter
here . Kent testified he signed the
letter here .
Fact 22 : Then-Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said in a televised interview with me that Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch
during a 2016 meeting provided the lists of names of Ukrainian nationals and groups she did want to see prosecuted. You can see I
accurately quoted him by watching the video
here .
Fact 23 : Ambassador Yovanovitch and her embassy denied Lutsenko's claim, calling it a "fabrication." I reported their
reaction
here .
Fact 24 : Despite the differing accounts of what happened at the Lutsenko-Yovanovitch meeting, a senior U.S. official in
an interview arranged by the State Department stated to me in spring 2019 that US officials did pressure Lutsenko's office on several
occasions not to "prosecute, investigate or harass" certain Ukrainian activists, including Parliamentary member Leschenko, journalist
Vitali Shabunin, the Anti-Corruption Action Centre and NABU director Sytnyk. You can read that official's comments
here . In addition, George Kent confirmed this same information in his deposition
here .
Fact 25 : In May 2018, then-House Rules Committee chairman Pete Sessions sent an official congressional letter to Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo asking that Yovanovitch be recalled as ambassador to Ukraine. Sessions and State confirmed the official letter,
which you can read here
.
Fact 26 : In fall 2018, Ukrainian prosecutors, using a third party, hired an American lawyer (a former U.S. attorney) to
proffer information to the U.S. government about certain activities at the U.S. embassy, involving Burisma and involving the 2016
election, that they believed might have violated U.S. law. You can read their account
here . You can also confirm it independently by talking to the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan or the American lawyer representing
the Ukrainian prosecutors' interests.
Fact 27 : In May 2016, one of George Soros' top aides secured a meeting with the top Eurasia policy official in the State
Department to discuss Russian bond issues. You can read the State memos on that meeting
here .
Fact 28 : In June 2016, Soros himself secured a telephonic meeting with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to
discuss Ukraine policy. You can read the State memos on that meeting
here .
Lt. Col. Vindman, if you have information that contradicts any of these 28 factual elements in my columns I ask that you make
it publicly available. Your testimony did not.
If you don't have evidence these 28 facts are wrong, I ask that you correct your testimony because any effort to call factually
accurate reporting false only misleads America and chills the free debate our Constitutional framers so cherished to protect.
"... 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.
The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a
laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014,
he founded Bellingcat, an open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen
staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special
knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing
video games , which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
...
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by
journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society
Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for
Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.
The Case of Sergei Magnitsky
Questions
Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions
The story of Sergei Magnitsky has come to symbolize the brutal persecution of
whistleblowers in Russia. Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story suggest he may not
have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him to be.
Jahrgang 1981. Studium der Volkswirtschaftslehre in Bonn, Mannheim und St. Petersburg.
Absolvent der studienbegleitenden Journalistenausbildung des Institutes zur Förderung
publizistischen Nachwuchses (ifp). Sieben Jahre Moskau-Korrespondent von SPIEGEL ONLINE. Autor
des Buchs "Generation Putin - Das neue Russland verstehen". Seit September 2016 Mitglied der
Wirtschaftsredaktion von SPIEGEL ONLINE.
There's a tombstone in northeastern Moscow that bears the portrait of a man with a friendly yet somewhat uneasy smile. His
name is Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky. He was born in April 1972 in Odessa, Ukraine, and died in November
2009 in Moscow. To this day, 10 years after the fact, the circumstances of his death in a Russian pretrial
detention facility remain unclear.
There are two versions of what happened to Magnitsky. The more well-known version has all the makings of
a conspiracy thriller. It's been repeated in thousands of articles, TV interviews and in parliamentary
hearings. In this version of the story, the man from the Moscow cemetery fought nobly against a corrupt
system and was murdered for it.
The other version is more complicated. In it, nobody is a hero.
The first version has had geopolitical implications. In 2012, the United States passed the Magnitsky Act,
which imposed sanctions against Russian officials who were believed to have played a role in his death. The
measure was signed into law by then-President Barack Obama after receiving a broad bipartisan majority. Back
then, if there was one thing that politicians on both sides of the aisle could agree on, it was their
opposition to a nefarious Russian state. In 2017, Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act, which enabled
the U.S. to impose sanctions against Russia for human rights violations worldwide.
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The facilitator behind these pieces of legislation is Bill Browder, Magnitsky's former boss in Moscow.
"When he was put to the ultimate test, he became the ultimate hero," Browder says of Magnitsky. Browder was
born in the U.S.. For years, his company, Hermitage Capital Management, was one of the largest foreign
investors in Russia. At the time, Browder was an advocate for Russian President Vladimir Putin in the West.
That is, until he was prohibited from entering Russia in 2005.
Public Enemy No. 1
Today, Browder refers to himself as "Putin's No. 1 Enemy." From his office in London's Finsbury district,
Browder coordinates a campaign he calls "Justice for Sergei Magnitsky." His goal is to get other countries
to impose sanctions against Russia for what happened to his former employee. So far, four other countries
have followed the U.S.' lead. For now, Browder is concentrating on Europe. He has spoken to politicians in
Norway, Sweden and France. He came to Berlin in May and spoke with the chairman of the Committee on Foreign
Affairs in Germany's federal parliament, the Bundestag. He also had an appointment at the Chancellery.
Browder tells a gripping story of how Magnitsky, the whistleblower, is believed to have died. This
narrative is his ticket into the political sphere. It's why he's received by members of parliament,
diplomats and human rights activists alike, often with open arms. They support his push for more legislation
because they see it as setting an important precedent: Corrupt regimes all over the world that are violating
their citizens' rights must be held accountable and made to suffer consequences in the form of entry bans
and frozen accounts as laid out by the Global Magnitsky Act. The law makes it more difficult, if only
slightly, for autocrats to sneer at and ignore human rights.
But there's another version of the Magnitsky saga, one that is more contradictory than Browder's telling
and more difficult to summarize. The legal documents that underpin it fill dozens of binders, not only in
Moscow, but also in London and New York. After sifting through thousands of pages, one might begin to
wonder: Did the perfidious conspiracy to murder Magnitsky ever really take place? Or is Browder a charlatan
whose story the West was too eager to believe? The certainty surrounding the Magnitsky affair becomes
muddled in the documents, particularly the clear division between good and evil. The Russian authorities'
take is questionable, but so is everyone else's -- including Bill Browder's.
The cases raises uncomfortable questions for the West. In Europe and the U.S., critics of Russia often
argue from a position of moral superiority. But with the Magnitsky sanctions, it could be that the activist
Browder used a noble cause to manipulate Western governments.
One thing that stays the same no matter which version is told, is this: Magnitsky is dead and he was the
victim of a terrible injustice.
Magnitsky's Demise
On the evening of Nov. 16, 2009, Sergei Magnitsky died in a cell at Moscow's "Matrosskaya Tishina"
pretrial detention center. A prison doctor had diagnosed him with an inflammation of the pancreas four and a
half months prior, but shortly before Magnitsky was scheduled to undergo surgery, he was moved to another
prison -- one without the necessary medical equipment for such an invasive procedure. The reason given for
the move was that Magnitsky's cell needed to be renovated. Could that possibly be true? Even after the
whistleblower's death, work still hadn't commenced, according to an investigative commission. It began
looking into the case shortly after Magnitsky's death because the outrage in Moscow was so huge. The
commission counted among its members respected human rights activists and opponents of the Kremlin. They
analyzed notes and complaints filed while Magnitsky was in prison. They also interviewed the prison staffers
who, instead of helping Magnitsky, let him die.
The commission's 20-page report offered detailed insights into the sadistic, cold-hearted nature of
Russia's prison system. In the months before his death, Magnitsky was constantly moved from one cell to
another. His mother brought him medications that took 18 days to reach him. In September, he was forced to
wear his jacket at night because his cell window lacked a pane of glass. His cell toilet often backed up.
One time Magnitsky's abdominal pains became so acute that his neighbor began desperately kicking against the
door of his cell and calling for help. It took prison staff five hours to get Magnitsky to a doctor.
Mischa Japaridze/ AP/ Picture Alliance/ DPA
Sergei Magnitsky's grave at a cemetery in Moscow.
Magnitsky's condition worsened on his last day. He was transferred back to the prison where he was
originally supposed to be operated on months prior. There, the dying man began to panic. He was sedated and
restrained with handcuffs. The files analyzed by the commission note the "use of a rubber baton." Magnitsky
was left alone in his cell, unobserved, without a doctor. "An ill person in severe condition was effectively
left without medical attention for 1 hour and 18 minutes to die," the commission wrote in its report, a
chronology of merciless negligence. Yet it contains no evidence of a targeted murder.
According to Browder's more dramatic telling of the story, Magnitsky's arrest and death were a targeted
act of revenge by Russian authorities against an anti-corruption activist. Browder says he tapped "my lawyer
Magnitsky," to investigate a case in 2007. Over the course of his research, Magnitsky supposedly stumbled
onto a crime of unprecedented proportions -- the biggest tax fraud in Russian history, perpetrated by a
corrupt band of police officers and government officials.
The fraud involved a sum of $230 million (208 million euros) and a complex master plan, which, according
to Browder, was run by two Moscow police officers, Artyom Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov. The duo had initiated
a fraudulent tax investigation against Browder's Hermitage Capital Management and then seized three
letterbox firms that had originally been founded by Browder's people. With confiscated company deeds, the
firms were transferred to middlemen who fabricated massive losses and requested the reimbursement of $230
million in taxes that Browder's company had previously paid. Karpov, the policeman, denies any involvement
in the fraud or Magnitsky's death. "Browder is a liar," he says. Kuznetsov could not be reached for a
statement.
Browder's Story
According to Browder, Magnitsky was onto Kuznetsov and Karpov. He also says the same officials had
arranged for Magnitsky to be imprisoned and killed. Browder has told this version of events countless times.
He testified in front of the U.S. Congress that Magnitsky had been "murdered." Browder told Canadian
parliamentarians: "Eight riot guards with rubber batons would beat him for one hour and 18 minutes. He was
subsequently found dead on the floor of that cell."
When asked, Browder cites the investigative committee's report as evidence. He does the same on his
website, where he also says the same officials incriminated by Magnitsky "intentionally tortured and
ultimately murdered him." The report, however, makes no such assertion of an intentional killing. The names
of the two police officers, Kuznetsov and Karpov, don't even appear in the original Russian version of the
commission's report. Kuznetsov is only mentioned in an English translation on Browder's website.
By now, Browder's campaign has created its own frame of reference and its own supposed evidence. Browder
has often cited reports by the Council of Europe in recent years, though these are largely based on his own
accounts. For instance, one Council rapporteur, former German Justice Minister Sabine
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, referred to Magnitsky as an "independent lawyer." But one look at documents
readily available online is enough to discover that Magnitsky was employed as a tax expert at an auditing
firm and had worked for Browder for years.
Browder claims to be fighting for justice. One of the reasons he's so successful may be because he's
adept at aligning his story with the devastating image that Russia has been projecting for years. And many
media outlets believe him. Browder has given countless TV interviews on the subject. In some of the shots,
viewers can see articles from prominent international media Browder has hung on his office walls -- the
Washington Post
, the
Financial Times
and Russia's
Novaya Gazeta
. The reports are all
framed and appear to lend credibility to Browder's story. DER SPIEGEL has also
written about Browder's campaign
and conducted interviews with him. The
New York Times
won the
Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Russia's legal system, including on the Magnitsky case. There are films
and plays too.
But the question remains: Just how solid are the facts upon which politicians and the media are basing
their judgements of this case? Various inconsistencies and contradictions are apparent in some documents
that Browder's own people have published online. These include two photographs of interrogation protocols
that allegedly prove how Sergei Magnitsky courageously reported the tax fraud of $230 million after
discovering it. In his book, Browder writes, "Sergei set up an appointment at the Investigative Committee
for 5 June 2008. (...) He sat in the chair, provided the evidence and gave his witness statement, explicitly
naming Kuznetsov and Karpov."
Contradictions
The protocol itself tells a different story. Magnitsky does indeed mention the names of the two police
officers nearly 30 times and describes their role during a search. But at no point does he make a concrete
accusation against them personally. In a second protocol of a statement made on Oct. 7, Kuznetsov and Karpov
are not mentioned at all. The first document also shows that Magnitsky did not make his statements entirely
of his own free will, but as a witness in an ongoing investigation. According to other documents, the trial
had been underway since February. This was confirmed to DER SPIEGEL by Magnitsky's lawyer at the time,
Dmitry Kharitonov, who said his client had been summoned to testify.
Browder has a well-documented talent for selling a set of facts so that it supports his own version of
events. In Moscow, this was part of his business model as an investor. According to its own calculations,
Hermitage Capital Management generated a 1,500 percent return on its investments within just a few years.
According to Russian investigators, a company in Browder's fund structure had wrongly paid only 5 percent in
taxes, when in fact 15 percent should have been due. A double taxation agreement with Cyprus should not have
been applied. Browder denies this.
One way or the other, Browder's business model was lucrative. Hermitage bought cheap shares in Russian
state-owned corporations, such as Gazprom or Sberbank, from the late 1990s onward. Then he took on the
conglomerates' leadership, denounced the widespread corruption and demanded reforms. If these came to
fruition, the value of Browder's shares rose. If they didn't, at least the publicity of his fund grew.
Browder had his eye on Gazprom especially. In 1998, the company was worth $3.5 billion. Within seven
years, that number had jumped to $160 billion. Hermitage held many shares through shell companies. Several
of them perfunctorily hired mentally disabled people who they described on paper as, "analysis division
experts." In fact, the people had no knowledge of this field, as several courts would later discover.
The companies took advantage of tax breaks that were intended for firms with workplace disability rates
of at least 50 percent -- and not as a tax-saving model for Western investment funds. Over the course of
their years-long investigations into Hermitage, Russian authorities stumbled upon a man who was helping
Browder come up with his tax-saving models: Sergei Magnitsky. Browder says the practice of skirting taxes
was common at the time.
When Browder talks about his fate in front of Western audiences, he makes it sound as if the
investigations into Hermitage were completely arbitrary. In his book and during interviews, Browder claims
that Kuznetsov, the investigator, appeared out of nowhere in 2007. This is significant because it appears to
underscore that the trial was "politically motivated, fabricated" and initiated for the sole purpose of
obtaining the necessary documentation for the long-planned $230-million fraud.
'A Measure of Vindication'
But the date Browder provided is incorrect. Kuznetsov's name appeared in letters to Browder's company in
June 2006. At the time, the police had demanded the firm surrender its bank data. There is also proof that
Browder's team knew about the letters. Indeed, they were in Browder's possession.
There is another interrogation protocol that Browder did not prominently publish online like the other
two. It is from October 2006, long before Magnitsky is said to have first exposed the big tax fraud that
Browder says caused him to fall out of the authorities' good graces.
According to the protocol, Magnitsky was questioned by investigators about one of the dubious letterbox
firms that gave employment contracts to people with disabilities. He claims that Browder's people asked him
to "to 'be' CEO for a period of reorganization." Other documents show that Magnitsky was involved in the
companies as early as 2002.
Some of the people accused by Browder have begun to fight back against the allegations. The Moscow
policeman Pavel Karpov, for one, who Browder claims worked with Kuznetsov to have Magnitsky arrested and
killed in retaliation for his testimony, filed a defamation lawsuit against Browder in London in 2012.
The presiding judge, Justice Simon, ruled the British courts had no jurisdiction over the matter. But in
his written verdict, he also wrote scathingly about Browder, calling him a "story-teller" who did "not come
close to pleading facts which, if proved, would justify the sting of the libel." Simon also wrote that his
assessment was to be explicitly understood as "a measure of vindication" of Karpov.
The only problem was the judge's words hardly made it into the public discourse at the time. The
Guardian
and other British media wrote about Karpov's humiliating defeat in the courts. Some of the
language they used can be found in press releases from Browder's campaign.
A second trial in New York concerned the frozen accounts of a wealthy Russian political clan, the Katsyv
family. The U.S. government imposed the sanctions because Browder had insisted that money from the
million-dollar fraud had wound up with the Katsyvs. In response, the Russians hired star New York-based
lawyers to defend themselves against the accusations.
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 48/2019 (November 23rd, 2019) of
DER SPIEGEL.
Browder, an otherwise talkative person, tried to avoid questioning. One video shows him running away when
someone tries to present him with a subpoena. In April 2015, he was required to appear in court. Under oath
and confronted with numerous documents, he answered meekly -- quite differently than during his public
appearances. Lawyer Mark Cymrot, a surly litigator with a moustache, spent six hours examining him. Cymrot
asked: Was Magnitsky a lawyer or a tax expert?
He was "acting in court representing me," Browder replied.
And he had a law degree in Russia?
"I'm not aware he did."
Did he go to law school?
"No."
How many times have you said Mr. Magnitsky is a lawyer? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?
"I don't know."
Have you ever told anybody that he didn't go to law school and didn't have a law degree?
"No."
DER SPIEGEL visited Browder in London and asked him to clarify some inconsistencies and contradictions in
his story. The result was a four hour-long interview and a grudging search for information, facts and
details. The meeting, which took place in a glass conference room in Browder's Finsbury office, provided
insights into his tactics: Together with his Russian partners Ivan Cherkasov and Vadim Kleiner, Browder laid
out dozens of documents that supposedly corroborated his version of events. Not all of them would stand up
to further scrutiny.
One of the documents was a previously unpublished email from Sergei Magnitsky. It supposedly confirmed
that he went to the authorities of his own volition as a whistleblower. Yet the document also makes clear
that Magnitsky was instructed to come forward by a higher-ranking lawyer working for Browder. This lawyer, a
Russian, admitted during the interview in London that Magnitsky had been sent as a stand-in for the CEO of a
letterbox company who investigators in Moscow had actually wanted to speak to.
To further back up their story, Browder and his team also presented an article by an American journalist
who had spoken to Magnitsky shortly before his arrest. The police officers Kuznetsov and Karpov had
Magnitsky arrested "immediately" after the publication of the article. But nothing in the article would
explain why Magnitsky was arrested. In it, he doesn't mention Karpov or Kuznetsov. The author of the
article, when contacted, said he couldn't imagine that it was his piece that triggered Magnitsky's
persecution.
Charles Dharapak/ AP/ Picture Alliance/ DPA
Former U.S. President Barack Obama signing the Magnitsky Act into law.
Browder's campaign has turned him into a global celebrity. His publisher advertises his book, "Red
Notice," as a
New York Times
bestseller. In interviews, he calls for Russia to be largely isolated.
He attacks politicians who disagree with him. He called John Kerry, the former U.S. secretary of state, a
"lapdog" and accused him of "appeasement." Browder has also called for Russia's banishment from the SWIFT
banking network, which would have devastating consequences for the Russian population. But is that really
necessary to ensure "Justice for Sergei Magnitsky?" Or has Browder's campaign turned into a personal
vendetta?
Too Good Not to Be True
Another strange thing about this case is that those involved sometimes change their stories completely
and begin saying the opposite of what they said before. Take Zoya Svetova, for instance: The Moscow-based
human rights activist co-wrote the investigative commission's report. She is a Kremlin opponent and writes
reports for MBKH News, the media project of the exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Svetova has
been intensively involved with the Magnitsky case and published regular articles about it. She is also
planning to write a book.
In July, Svetova said in an interview with DER SPIEGEL that even 10 years after Magnitsky's death, she
didn't think much of the theory that he was the victim of a murder plot. It was more likely that Magnitsky
got into an argument with the doctors and the staff because he wasn't being medically treated. "They were
beating him to pacify him," Svetova said, adding that the beatings in and of themselves did not indicate a
targeted murder. There was no evidence of this, she said. "What sense would it make to murder him?" So that
he wouldn't talk about the $230 million fraud anymore? By that point, news of the fraud was everywhere.
"Magnitsky did not reveal any secret," Svetova said in July.
The investigative commission report she helped co-write mentions that pressure had been placed on
Magnitsky while he was in prison. "They wanted testimonies against Browder. That was the motivation. He
should have accused Browder of not paying taxes. Magnitsky was a hostage. He himself was of no interest to
them. They wanted Browder," she said.
Svetova also said that while Magnitsky's fate was dreadful, it wasn't atypical. Failure to provide
assistance as well as abuse are common in Russian prisons, she said. She wrote an article on the subject in
2010. According to information from the Council of Europe, around 4,000 prisoners died in Russia in 2014. In
Germany, 150 died. "You have to know," Svetova said, "the Russian penitentiary system is very brutal."
Shortly before this article was published, however, Svetova suddenly changed her story. Now she had the
feeling "that he was moved deliberately to the 'Matrosskaya Tishina' prison to kill him." She said that
since July, she had gone back and re-examined all the old documents and that she now had a completely
different view of things.
In August, the European Court of Human Rights announced its ruling in the Magnitsky case: Russia must pay
the deceased's relatives 34,000 euros ($37,500) because the state should have protected the prisoner's life
and health. Nowhere in its verdict was there any mention of murder. The judges did, however, take apart the
claim that the whistleblower had been imprisoned out of revenge. Magnitsky's arrest was not without cause,
they wrote, nor were the authorities' actions malicious. The investigations into Magnitsky began in 2004,
long before he first approached the authorities, it says on page 39 of the court's written verdict. But that
didn't stop Browder from describing the ruling as a "resounding victory."
His campaign has created a kind of perpetual motion. Browder was recently received by diplomats in
Finland, which currently holds the presidency of the Council of the EU. They summoned him to discuss a
European version of the U.S.' Magnitsky sanctions. "This law will become a reality in the EU," Browder
tweeted in mid-October. His chances of success aren't bad: His story is simply too good not to be true.
British elite is capable to commit any crimes imaginable perusing its goals.
Notable quotes:
"... "The 'chemical incident' has likely been faked. It suspiciously happened just a few days after U.S. President Trump had announced the he wanted the U.S. military to leave Syria. A year earlier a similar incident was claimed to have happened after a similar announcement by Trump. The U.S. had responded to the 2017 incident by bombing an empty Syrian airfield." ..."
OT but very relevant to the Skripal/Douma incidents.
The Guardian has an
article today headlined
" The taboo on chemical weapons has lasted a century – it must be preserved " which is a bare-faced lie as the Guardian
should know because the British used chemical weapons against the Russian in August, 1919, less than a century ago, and the Japanese,
among America's closest allies used them against the Chinese in World War 2.
The strongest case for Churchill as a chemical warfare enthusiast involves Russia, and was made by Giles Milton in The Guardian
on 1 September 2013, which prompted this article. Milton wrote that in 1919, scientists at the governmental laboratories at
Porton in Wiltshire developed a far more devastating weapon: the top secret "M Device," an exploding shell containing
a highly toxic gas called diphenylaminechloroarsine [DM].
The man in charge of developing it, Major General Charles Foulkes, called it "the most effective chemical weapon ever devised."
Trials at Porton suggested that it was indeed a terrible new weapon. Uncontrollable vomiting, coughing up blood and
instant, crippling fatigue were the most common reactions. The overall head of chemical warfare production, Sir Keith Price,
was convinced its use would lead to the rapid collapse of the Bolshevik regime. "If you got home only once with the gas you
would find no more Bolshies this side of Vologda."
A staggering 50,000 M Devices were shipped to Russia: British aerial attacks using them began on 27 August 1919 .Bolshevik
soldiers were seen fleeing in panic as the green chemical gas drifted towards them. Those caught in the cloud vomited blood,
then collapsed unconscious. The attacks continued throughout September on many Bolshevik-held villages. But the weapons proved
less effective than Churchill had hoped, partly because of the damp autumn weather. By September, the attacks were halted then
stopped.
"The 'chemical incident' has likely been faked. It suspiciously happened just a few days after U.S. President Trump had
announced the he wanted the U.S. military to leave Syria. A year earlier a similar incident was claimed to have happened after
a similar announcement by Trump. The U.S. had responded to the 2017 incident by bombing an empty Syrian airfield."
Watching reports coming out of Syria in real time, I thought it was a genuine strike. Same as I thought the JK build up was
the real thing and also the 59 missiles a year ago. Once the dust, smoke, and the fog of war had cleared, it became apparent that
this, was yet again a choreographed move, same as the missiles on Shayrat airfield.
I may well be wrong, as I do not go along with group think here, but this strike seems a preemptive move by Trump to prevent
a push for for US military action in Syria that will take us to WWIII.
"... Ciaramella invited Chalupa to meetings and events at the Obama White House. She also visits the Obama White House with Ukrainian lobbyists seeking aid from Obama. Senator Charles Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in 2017, " ..."
"... According to Fox News, the complaint alleges that the DNC specifically "tasked Chalupa with obtaining incriminating or derogatory information about Donald Trump [and] Paul Manfort," ..."
"... Remarkably, despite his clear connections to Rice and Brennan, he was brought back into the inner circle of the Trump NSC by HR McMaster. McMaster appointed him to be his personal aide. ..."
"... He was fired in June of 2017 after being directly implicated in a series of serious national security leaks from the White House calculated to be damaging to President Trump. ..."
"... Vindman also leaked the classified information about the President's call with a foreign head of state to a number of other people. These unauthorized leaks are criminal. Both illegal, unethical and unconscionable. ..."
"... Ciaramella worked with both Grace and Misko in the NSC at the Obama White House. Misko and Grace joined Schiff's committee in early August of 2019, just in time to coordinate the "whistleblower" complaint. ..."
"... Both Vindman and Ciaramella do not qualify for "whistleblower" status. They were reporting on a diplomatic conversation, not an intelligence matter. They were not reporting on a member of the Intelligence committee. ..."
"... IC IG Michael Atkinson surreptitiously changed the rules for whistleblower complaints to allow second-hand testimony in September of 2019. He then backdated the changes to allow the Ciaramella complaint, initially filed in early August, to be included under the new "interpretive" guidelines. ..."
"... The playbook is the same as the Mueller Inquisition and the Russia Hoax, the same as the Kavanaugh smear campaign. With the same co-conspirators of the left-wing mainstream media. Not only carrying water for the coup plotters but being actual participants in the scheme. Paid mouthpieces for the Deep State. ..."
"... Sperry's devastating expose makes clear that Ciaramella is another cog in the Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Rice, Obama conspiracy to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States. As Chuck Schumer said in January of 2017, ..."
"... Ciaramella helped generate the "Putin fired Comey" narrative. Sperry reports, "In the days after Comey's firing, this presidential action was used to further political and media calls for the standup of the special counsel to investigate 'Russia collusion.'" ..."
WASHINGTON, DC : Adam Schiff "whistleblower" Eric Ciaramella has
been exposed as a John Brennan ally. An ally who actively worked to defame, target, and destroy
President Donald Trump during both the Obama and Trump administrations. He was fired from the
Trump White House for leaking confidential if not classified information detrimental to the
President. ( The Pajama Boy
Whistleblower Revealed – Rush Limbaugh )
The 33-year-old Ciaramella, a former Susan Rice protege, currently works for the CIA as an
analyst.
Eric Ciaramella: The Deep State non-whistleblower
During his time in the Obama White House, NSC Ciaramella worked under both Vice President
Joe Biden and CIA director John Brennan. He reported directly to NSC advisor Susan Rice through
his immediate boss, Charles Kupchan. Kupchan had extensive ties with Clinton crony Sydney
Blumenthal. Large portions of Blumenthal's disinformation from Ukrainian sources in 2016 was
used in the nefarious Steele Dossier.
Ciaramella also worked extensively with DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa. Chalupa led the
effort at the DNC to fabricate a link between the Trump Campaign to Vladimir Putin and Russia.
According to Politico, Chalupa "met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington
in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia."
The DNC paid Chalupa $412,000 between 2004 and 2016.
DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa: Ciaramella co-conspirator
"Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump's campaign, 'I felt there
was a Russia connection.'"
Apparently without any evidence. So she set out to concoct it.
Chalupa (left) also says that the Ukrainian embassy was working directly with reporters
digging for Trump-Russia ties. How convenient, and unethical.
Ciaramella invited Chalupa to meetings and events at the Obama White House. She also visits
the Obama White House with Ukrainian lobbyists seeking aid from Obama. Senator Charles
Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a letter to Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein in 2017, "
"Chalupa's actions appear to show that she was simultaneously working on behalf of a
foreign government, Ukraine, and on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign, in an effort to
influence not only the U.S voting population but U.S. government officials."
The FEC complaint against the DNC and Chalupa
In September 2019 a complaint was filed with the Federal Elections Commission against the
DNC naming Alexandra Chalupa. The complaint alleges that Chalupa acted "improperly to gather
information on Paul Manafort and Donald Trump in the 2016 election".
According to Fox News, the complaint alleges that the DNC specifically "tasked Chalupa
with obtaining incriminating or derogatory information about Donald Trump [and] Paul
Manfort,"
Fox News reporting, that Chalupa allegedly
"Pushed for Ukrainian officials to publicly mention Manafort's financial and political ties
to" Ukraine and "sought to have the Ukrainian government provide her information about
Manafort's work in the country."
John Solomon and Wikileaks both expose Chalupa as DNC operative
"Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information
from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort's dealings inside the country. Chalupa later
tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort's Russian ties
on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign."
Ciaramella's connection with John Brennan and Susan Rice
Eric Ciaramella had been working with John Brennan, Susan Rice, the Obama White House, and
Alexandra Chalupa to target and destroy Donald Trump well before he was elected. He was
initially brought into the NSC and the White House inner circle by John Brennan himself.
Remarkably, despite his clear connections to Rice and Brennan, he was brought back into the
inner circle of the Trump NSC by HR McMaster. McMaster appointed him to be his personal
aide.
He was fired in June of 2017 after being directly implicated in a series of serious national
security leaks from the White House calculated to be damaging to President Trump.
Ciaramella and Alexander Vindman: the second "whistleblower"
Ciaramella's title at the White House was NSC Director for Ukraine. That position is now
held by the newest Schiff star witness and Trump hater Lt. Col Alexander Vindman. Vindman is
apparently the "2nd whistleblower" to leak his concerns about the call between Trump and
President Zelensky to Ciaramella.
Vindman also leaked the classified information about the President's call with a foreign
head of state to a number of other people. These unauthorized leaks are criminal. Both illegal,
unethical and unconscionable.
Violating clear national security guidelines for classified information.
Republicans, on cross-examination of Vindman was asked by Republicans cross-examining him
during the closed-door secret police hearings conducted by Adam Schiff, asking who Vindman had
contact with. Schiff cut off the questioning, coaching the witness while refusing to let him
answer the questions.
Schiff coordinated with Ciaramella and Vindman
It is now clear that Ciaramella and Vindman coordinated the entire whistleblower affair with
Schiff and his staff in violation of the "whistleblower" statute. That Ciaramella has been
coordinating his complaint with Schiff committee staffers Abigail Grace and Sean Misko.
Ciaramella worked with both Grace and Misko in the NSC at the Obama White House. Misko and
Grace joined Schiff's committee in early August of 2019, just in time to coordinate the
"whistleblower" complaint.
Both Vindman and Ciaramella do not qualify for "whistleblower" status. They were reporting
on a diplomatic conversation, not an intelligence matter. They were not reporting on a member
of the Intelligence committee.
The suspicious case of IC IG Michael Atkinson
IC IG Michael Atkinson surreptitiously changed the rules for whistleblower complaints to
allow second-hand testimony in September of 2019. He then backdated the changes to allow the
Ciaramella complaint, initially filed in early August, to be included under the new
"interpretive" guidelines.
The level of subterfuge and coordination between Schiff, Ciaramella, Vindman, Abigail Grace,
Sean Misko, and IG Atkinson is more than suspicious. It reeks of yet another episode of a Deep
State coordinated coup attempt.
The whole impeachment affair is a brazen sequel to the Russia Hoax involving many of the
same key players. Susan Rice, John Brennan, Adam Schiff. Designed to target, destroy, and in
this case, fabricate grounds for the impeachment of the President.
The playbook is the same as the Mueller Inquisition and the Russia Hoax, the same as the
Kavanaugh smear campaign. With the same co-conspirators of the left-wing mainstream media. Not
only carrying water for the coup plotters but being actual participants in the scheme. Paid
mouthpieces for the Deep State.
Paul Sperry and Real Clear Investigations
The most comprehensive expose on Ciaramella, that has forced even the mainstream media to
take notice, was the Real Clear Investigations reporting of Paul Sperry. Only Sperry, the
Federalist, and CDN have exposed the whistleblowers' identity. But his name and transparent
partisan actions are the worst kept secret in Washington.
As CIA analyst Fred Fleitz has said:
"Everyone knows who he is. CNN knows. The Washington Post knows. The New York Times knows.
Congress knows. The White House knows. Even the president knows who he is."
Sperry's devastating expose makes clear that Ciaramella is another cog in the Brennan,
Clapper, Comey, Rice, Obama conspiracy to overthrow the duly elected President of the United
States. As Chuck Schumer said in January of 2017,
"If you take on the intelligence community, they have nines ways to Sunday of getting back
at you."
The never-ending coup attempt against Trump
The reality is that Trump was targeted by the Obama White House well before he was
President. The ongoing coup against him started as soon as he was elected. It morphed into the
Mueller Weissman inquisition and the Peter Strzok insurance policy.
When that fizzled into oblivion it was time for plan B, or in this case plan C or D. The
Deep State and their paid minions in the left-wing press have been unrelenting in their ongoing
anti-constitutional putsch against the President.
The impeachment farce, with its calculated rollout reminiscent of the Kavanaugh smear
campaign, is yet another extension of a never-ending East German Stassi coup (sic) attempt
against the constitution, the Republic, and the people of the United States.
Sperry lays out the trail of evidence against Ciaramella
Paul Sperry's excellent investigative reporting makes clear that Ciaramella "previously
worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan. (He) left his
National Security Council posting in the White House's West Wing in mid-2017 amid concerns
about negative leaks to the media." As Sperry reports, "He was accused of working against Trump
and leaking against Trump," said a former NSC official.
Sperry reports that "a handful of former colleagues have compiled a roughly 40-page research
dossier on him. A classified version of the document is circulating on Capitol Hill". The
dossier documents Ciaramella's bias against Trump. His relationships with Brennan, Rice, the
Obama White House, and DNC operative Chalupa. As well as his coordination with Vindman, Schiff
and his committee staff.
Chuck Schumer: "Eight ways to Sunday of getting back at you"
It questions both Ciaramella's and Vindman's veracity as a legitimate whistleblower. It
makes clear that Ciaramella and his co-conspirators are part of a Deep State coup attempt. A
calculated, coordinated, illegal, seditious, and illegitimate putsch.
As CIA analyst Fred Fleitz makes clear, " They're hiding him ." Fleitz was emphatic,
" They're hiding him because of his political bias."
Ciaramella helped generate the "Putin fired Comey" narrative. Sperry reports, "In the days
after Comey's firing, this presidential action was used to further political and media calls
for the standup of the special counsel to investigate 'Russia collusion.'"
How IC Inspector General Atkinson found the whistleblower complaint "credible" and "urgent"
at the same time he was backdating the change in regulations to allow the complaint to be filed
is more than highly suspicious. How the 'whistleblower" coordinated with Schiff, Grace, Misko,
and Atkinson to stager the start of impeachment farce is criminal.
Adam Schiff: Constantly lying while moving the goalposts
... ... ...
Schiff: Outstanding scoundrel in a cesspit filled to the brim with similar criminals.
Now Eric Ciaramella is apparently backing away from testifying. Schiff says he no longer
needs his testimony. But Ciaramella should be subpoenaed and called to testify before the
Senate Judiciary Committee. He should not be allowed to escape accountability for his role in
this calculated charade of a conspiracy.
He would then have to testify to his coordination with Schiff and the committee staff. He
would have to expose how Vindmann leaked national security information illegally. How the
entire 'whistleblower" farce was a calculated effort to again derail the Trump Presidency.
A lot has come out about Eric Ciaramella, the Adam Schiff 'Whistleblower", in recent days.
It is the tip of the iceberg. Any legitimate investigation of the circumstances surrounding the
entire Ukraine affair will reveal the extensive criminality of the Obama White House and the
coup plotters.
Exposing the dark underbelly of the Obama White House
It stretches back to the Steele Dossier and the clear efforts of the DNC and the Deep State
to use to a foreign power to interfere in the 2016 election. He exposes the corruption of Vice
President Biden to enrich his family at the expense of the American taxpayer. Details the $6
million dollar bribery scheme of Hunter and Joe Biden by Burisma Holdings.
Lays out the corrupt dealings of Ambassador Yovanovich.
It will lay open the devious underbelly of all the so-called hero witnesses of the Schiff
impeachment Star Chamber inquisition. Of the criminal actions of the coup plotters. Of
Ambassador Yovanovich, Ambassador Taylor, Alexandra Chalupa, and Alexander Vindman.
As well as the so-called whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella.
Calling the Fourth Estate back
It is the tip of the iceberg that only a truly free and independent press will have to
take the reins to fearlessly expose. Like brilliant investigative reporter Paul Sperry at
Real Clear Investigations. Like the Federalist, NOQ Report, and here at CommDigiNews, who
broke the Ciaramella story a full two days before Real Clear Investigations.
No one else in the corrupt media establishment seems willing to rise to the challenge.
The mainstream media has woken up just enough to "fact-check" all of the information coming
out lately about the Democrats long history of corruption in Ukraine. The only problem is that
their "fact-checks" are completely contradictory of the actual facts.
Alexandra Chalupa
We can start off with Alexandra Chalupa. I got into a lot of detail about her and her
involvement with the DNC a few weeks ago. (That article, detailing exactly how she was involved
with the DNC, is still available at mikulawire.com.) She has even admitted that she did in fact
work with the DNC. According to Chalupa herself, "During the 2016 U.S. election, I was a part
time consultant for the DNC running an ethnic engagement program." She of course denies that
she was an opposition researcher and claimed that she never went to the Ukrainian embassy to
collect information, but does admit to being a part time consultant.
We also have the FEC records that show that she did make $71,918 in 2016. Between her own
words and the FEC records there's absolutely no denying that she did work for the DNC at least
up until May of 2016. With that kind of payment I do suspect that her employment was a little
more then as a "part-time consultant".
Now, absolutely everything about this would have been investigated if it was someone with
ties to Donald Trump. We would have spent millions of dollars and a several year investigation
trying to figure out exactly what she did for the RNC. Every liberal in the media would talk
about it non-stop. When it comes to Chalupa? No investigation. No questioning. Nothing. Nothing
other then immediately jumping to her defense as soon as the "far-right" started to expose
her.
The Washington Post recently published an article titled "The GOP Theory That Ukraine 'Set
Up' Trump". According to the Washington Post, "Chalupa may have worked with some embassy
officials, but there's no evidence that the DNC used information gathered by Chalupa or that
the Ukrainians coordinated opposition research with the DNC." The problem with their
"fact-check"? It isn't exactly accurate.
In January 2016, Chalupa reported to the DNC that she just "had a feeling" that there was a
Russian connection between Manafort and Trump. We have her to thank for starting this whole
collusion claim. That same month the Obama administration held a meeting at the White House. At
the meeting, President Obama instructed the Ukrainian prosecutor to look into a case involving
Paul Manafort. Coincidence? Maybe but you would think it would be deserving of some questioning
at least.
Chalupa continued checking in with the DNC up until at least May 2016. Each time it was the
same topic: Paul Manafort. Somehow, the Washington Post is claiming that there is no evidence
that the DNC used any information gathered by Chalupa, despite leaked emails confirming that
Paul Manafort's name regularly came up between Chalupa and the DNC.
Prosecutor That Was Fired Because of Joe Biden
Next, we have the prosecutor that Vice President Joe Biden got fired. According to the
prosecutor, he was fired because he was investigating Burisma and refused to drop the probe
into Biden. He even gave a sworn testimony in front of an Ukrainian court.
The left is disputing this. They claim that there was no active investigation into Burisma
at that time. According to virtually everyone in the media, that investigation was "dormant" at
the time. CNN's Jake Tapper, in an interview with Congressman Jim Jordan, called the
investigation dormant. CNN, the Associated Press, Business Insider, have all called the
investigation "dormant". Forbes at least used a different word and called it "inactive", but
basically claimed the same thing. It's almost like absolutely everyone in the main stream media
is reading off of the exact same script.
This entire claimed originated with an article from Bloomberg on May 6th 2019. According to
Bloomberg, "what has received less attention is that at the time Biden made his ultimatum, the
probe into the company-Burisma holdings, owned by Mykola Zlochevsky-had been long dormant,
according to the former official, Vitaliy Kasko." That claim was all it took for everyone in
the mainstream media to run with it. There was no investigation. No fact checking. Everyone
just ran with it. It turns out, that maybe someone in the media should have fact-checked it
before running with the claim.
Kasko, the Ukrainian that told this to Bloomberg, worked for Shokin, the Ukrainian
prosecutor that Joe Biden got fired. Shokin claims that Kasko was working with Biden to
undermine him, so that Kasko could get the job as prosecutor. Is it true? I don't know. But
shouldn't that at least be enough to be questioned, before everyone in the media runs with the
exact same story?
According to Shokin, "I finally crossed the threshold on February 2nd 2016, when we went to
the courts with petitions for re-arresting the property of Burisma. I suppose that then the
President received another call from Biden, blackmail by non-provision of a loan then
Poroshenko (the then President of Ukraine) surrendered." Shokin also said that "we were going
to interrogate Biden Jr., Archer, and so on."
The date of February 2nd 2016 is really important. February 2nd was a full month before
Biden got Shokin fired. If true, Shokin's claim proves that there was an active investigation
into Burisma and that Joe Biden's son, was going to be called in for questioning next. That
sounds like something that should deserve at least some questioning. It doesn't look suspicious
that Biden gets the Prosecutor fired just before the prosecutor was about to bring his son in
for questioning?
According to Ukrainian news sources there was an active investigation into Burisma and that
the courts were seizing property. According to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, the court
"satisfied the petition to seize the property of Mykola Zlochevsky" on .February 2nd 2016, the
exact same date that Shokin claimed.
New Prosecutor Issues Retraction After Siding With Prosecutor Biden Got Fired
Then the Washington Post attempted to smear John Soloman, who is one of the very few guys
that actually does any reporting nowadays. According to the Washington Post, "John Soloman
foisted a bogus story on Fox News viewers. His punishment? A contact." In March, John Soloman
reported that a "top Ukrainian justice official says US ambassador gave him a do not prosecute
list." The claim is that the prosecutor was being told by the US ambassador who he could and
could not investigate.
After Biden got Shokin fired, Biden bragged that we finally have a good guy in there,
referring to Shokin's replacement, Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko (the good guy) claimed that Shokin
(the bad guy) was corrupt, even though a single specific claim was never brought up against
Shokin. The problem now is that the good guy was saying the same thing that the bad guy was
saying before he was fired. The good guy was now also being told not to investigate the head of
Burisma among other things, including Biden's son.
If we had real journalists, the fact that the new prosecutor was saying the exact same thing
that the old prosecutor was saying, should have been investigated. Instead of actually
investigating, the media started making things up like they always do. They started making the
claim that Lutsenko retracted his claim. The only problem is that there is no evidence of him
retracting his statement.
The source of this claim appears to have started in an article from UNIAN, which is a
Ukrainian site. The headline read "Ukraine Prosecutor General Lutsenko admits U.S. ambassador
didn't give him a do not prosecute list". They were referencing an interview that Lutsenko gave
to another Ukrainian news site where he gave this "retraction". Lutsenko claimed that he "took
a piece of paper, recorded the surnames and said: 'Dictate a list of inviolable persons; She
says: 'No you misunderstood me.' I say: such lists were written (in the presidential
administration) on Bankova, and you offer new lists from Tankova (the U.S. Embassy)'. The
meeting is over. I'm afraid the emotions were not very good." So his "retraction" was
clarifying that he wasn't "handed" a list, but that the list was spoken to him, and then he
wrote it down.
That's seems like something that should be important enough to report. Everyone who reads
articles from the Washington Post and other sites are left to think that Lutsenko gave a
retraction and that he isn't a credible witness when no retraction was actually given. I would
say this is unbelievable but sadly I expect these kinds of games coming from the main stream
media.
Finally we have Lev Leshchenko who told the Financial Times back in August 2016, three
months before the election, that he was attacking Trump because "a Trump presidency would
change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy He is a pro-Russian candidate who
can break the geopolitical balance in the world." This guy was working with the head of the
Anti-corruption bureau of Ukraine, that our government insisted they set up with NGO's. They
released the dirt on Paul Manafort and then started bragging about it to the press.
The Ukrainian court convicted Leshchenko for 1. Interfering in the 2016 election. 2.
Illegally interfering in Ukraine's foreign policy. What Leshchenko was convicted for in
Ukraine, the left is accusing Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani of the exact same thing. It seems
to be a common pattern among people who have something to hide. Usually if someone accuses you
of something, chances are they are themselves are guilty of the exact same thing.
Whenever "news" organizations such as the Washington Post mention this story, they usually
make a claim such as "In July, the ruling was overturned by an appeals court". So that means
that Leshchenko is not guilty? Not exactly.
According to an Ukrainian News headline: "Appeals Court: Sytnyk and MP Leshchenko Did Not
Act Illegally By Disclosing That Manafort's Name Is In Party of Regions' 'Black Ledger'." The
problem with that headline is that they were quoting what was said by the guy that was just
convicted. They never cared to report why the case was dismissed. The Washington Post then
allowed Leschchenko to write an article, debunking Rudy Giuliani's claims. That's what counts
as journalism now?
The comical thing is that Leschenko is on tape admitting that he was trying to influence the
election .and yet somehow he isn't guilty of interfering with the election?
It turns out that he is still guilty of both charges, but the media won't tell you that. The
case was thrown out, not because the charges were dismissed, but because of a technicality. The
defense cited 3 reasons why this case was thrown out. 1. The person that made the charges had
no right to file the lawsuit because his interests had not been affected. 2. The administrative
courts cannot consider lawsuits against Ukrainian members of parliament. 3. The statute of
limitations had expired. Innocent? No. Absolutely nothing was disputed.
A majority of those in the mainstream media aren't just clueless but are intentionally lying
and trying to manipulate us. They intentionally ignore key details so that they can twist every
story into something that fits their agenda. It's up to us to stop falling for their games. Its
up to us to stop taking everything they say as gospel and actually start to do the research for
ourselves. That is the only way that we can save our Republic. Democracy and Republics really
do die in darkness and ours is on the life support.
"... Preface by Washington's Blog: A leading cybersecurity expert has publicly said that Mr. Eliason's research as presented in this article does not violate the law. Washington's Blog does not express an opinion about whether or not the claims set forth in this article are accurate or not. Make up your own mind. ..."
"... StopFake- Irena Chalupa- Chalupa is the sister to the same Alexandra Chalupa that brought the term Russian hacking to worldwide attention. 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 Stopfake.org She is a Ukrainian Diaspora leader. The Chalupa's are the 1st family of Ukrainian propaganda. She works with and for Ukrainian Intelligence through the Atlantic Council, Stopfake, and her sisters Andrea (Euromaidanpr) and Alexandra. ..."
Originally By George Eliason, an American journalist living in Ukraine.
Preface by Washington's Blog: A leading cybersecurity expert has publicly said that Mr.
Eliason's research as presented in this article does not violate the law. Washington's Blog
does not express an opinion about whether or not the claims set forth in this article are
accurate or not. Make up your own mind.
Note: If any images are hard to see, you can look
here . (I'm not sure why, but these images are a tad fuzzier at ZH.)
A little over a year ago, the deep-state graced the world with Propornot . Thanks to them, 2017
became the year of fake news. Every news website and opinion column now had the potential to be
linked to the Steele dossier and Trump collusion with Russia. Every journalist was either with
us or against us. Every one that was against us became Russia's trolls.
Fortunately for the free world, the anonymous group known as Propornot that tried to "out"
every website as a potential Russian colluder, in the end only implicated themselves.
Turnabout is fair play and that's always the fun part, isn't it? With that in mind, I know
the dogs are going to howl this evening over this one.
The damage Propornot did to scores of news and opinions websites in late 2016-2017provides
the basis of a massive civil suit. I mean huge, as in the potential is there for a tobacco
company sized class-action sized lawsuit. I can say that because I know a lot about a number of
entities that are involved and the enormous amount of money behind them. How serious is
this?
In 2016, a $10,000 reward
was put out for the identities of Propornot players. No one has claimed it yet, and now, I
guess no one will. There are times in your life that taking a stand has a cost. To make sure
the story gets out and is taken seriously, this is one of those times.
If that's what it takes for you to understand the danger Propornot and the groups around
them pose to everyone you love, if you understand it, everything will have been well worth
it.
In this article, you'll meet some of the people staffing Propornot. You'll meet the people
and publications that provide their expenses and cover the logistics. You'll meet a few of the
deep state players. We'll deal with them very soon. They need to see this as the warning shot
over the bow and start playing nice with regular people. After that, you'll meet the NGO's that
are funding and orchestrating all of it. How am I doing so far?
The image that you see is the clincher or game winner that supplies the necessary proof up
front and the direct path to Propornot. This was a passive scan of propornot.com showing the
administrative dashboard belongs to the InterpreterMag.com as shown on the left of the image.
On the right, it shows that uploads to Propornot.com come from InterpreterMag.com and is a
product of that publication.
Now we have the first layer of Propornot, fake news, and our 1st four contestants. We havea
slew of new media organizations that are influenced by, or feeding Propornot. Remember, fake
news got off the ground and got its wings because of the attention this website received from
the Washington Post in Dec. 2016.
At the Interpreter Mag level, here are the people:
Michael Weiss is the Editor-in-Chief at the InterpreterMag.com. According to his Linkd profile , he
is also a National Security Analyst for CNN since Jul 2017 as well as an Investigative
Reporter for International Affairs for CNN since Apr 2017. He has been a contributor there
since 2015. He has been a Senior Editor at The Daily Beast since Jun 2015.
With the lengthy CNN cred's, how much involvement does CNN have in fake news? Yes, I know,
but we're talking about Propornot.
Catherine
A. Fitzpatrick is a Russian translator and analyst for the Interpreter. She has worked as
an editor for EurasiaNet.org and RFE/RL.
Pierre Vaux is an
analyst and translator for the Interpreter. He's also an intern. He is a contributor to
the Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, RFE/RL and Left Foot Forward and works at Dataminr Inc.
James Miller's bio at the InterpreterMag .com includes Managing Editor of The Interpreter
where he reports on Russia, Ukraine, and Syria. James runs the "Under The Black Flag" column
at RFE/RL which provides news, opinion, and analysis about the impact of the Islamic State
extremist group in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. He is a contributor at Reuters, The Daily Beast,
Foreign Policy, and other publications. He is an expert on verifying citizen journalism and
has been covering developments in the Middle East, specifically Syria and Iran, since 2009.
Follow him on Twitter: @MillerMENA- Miller even works for the US Embassy in Kiev "diplo-page"
the Kiev Post.
The Interpreter is a product of the Atlantic Council. The Digital Forensics Research Lab has been carrying
the weight in Ukrainian-Russian affairs for the Atlantic Council. Fellows working with the
Atlantic Council in this area include:
StopFake- Irena Chalupa- Chalupa is the sister to the same Alexandra
Chalupa that brought the term Russian hacking to worldwide attention. 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 Stopfake.org She is a Ukrainian
Diaspora leader. The Chalupa's are the 1st family of Ukrainian propaganda. She works with
and for Ukrainian Intelligence through the Atlantic Council, Stopfake, and her sisters Andrea
(Euromaidanpr) and Alexandra.
The strand that ties this crew together is they all work for Ukrainian Intelligence. If you
hit the links, the ties are documented very clearly. We'll get to that point again shortly, but
let's go further:
Propornot-> Atlantic Council -> Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG)
Who are the BBG? According to Wikipedia- "The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is an
independent agency of the United States government. According to its website, its mission is to
"inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy. The
BBG supervised Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Television
Marti, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcast Networks.
The board of the BBG was eliminated and replaced with a single appointed chief executive
officer as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, which was
passed in December 2016."
In 2015, just a few months after Donald Trump launched his campaign for President, the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) hired Alexandria Chalupa to do opposition research on
Donald Trump. So who is she? If you read my article from 2 weeks ago, she was the one that said
she just "had a feeling" that Trump was somehow connected to Russia.
Chalupa's work didn't just start in 2015. While in college, she interned at the Clinton
White House in 1998. Her career as a Democratic operative started in 2002. From 2003-2004. She
worked as the Online Constituency Outreach Director for John Kerry's Presidential Campaign.
This is kind of weird because John Kerry's son is involved with Joe Biden's son in Burisma
which is the energy company in Ukraine. It was John Kerry's son that was there before Joe
Biden's son.
In 2004-2005, she was Executive Director for Democrats Abroad, a DNC organization that
mobilizes Democrats living outside of the United States. From 2006-2011, she worked for the
DNC. From 2013 to 2016, she was working for the DNC's National Ethnic Council and as a side gig
to that, she was also trafficking Ukrainian dirt on Donald Trump.
According to FEC records, the DNC paid her $412,000 between 2004 and 2016. She was also paid
separate unknown amounts by Democrats Abroad.
The official story from the DNC is that she left in July 2016. Her claim is that she left in
July 2016, but she continued doing her own research on Manafort and that she occasionally
shared her findings with the DNC and the Clinton Campaign. The Clinton campaign claims that
they never received any information from Chalupa.
According to Chalupa, "I was a part time consultant for the DNC running an ethnic engagement
program. I was not an opposition researcher for the DNC and the DNC never asked me to go to the
Ukrainian embassy to collect information." Official records show that she was paid $71,918 just
in 2016 for what she claims was just a part time job. Even if she wasn't technically a
"opposition researcher" she was doing her own investigation into Donald Trump and sharing
information with both the Clinton campaign and the DNC, while on the DNC's payroll.
According to Politico, Alexandra Chalupa has "a network of people in Kiev and Washington --
including Ukrainian government officials -- who would pass her information that she would then
float as potential research to DNC staffers." Keep in mind that it's not "right-wing"
organizations such as Fox news who are making those claims. That claim came from Politico,
which is a site that does lean to the left. Chalupa called Politico's story was "nonsense".
According to another source, Chalupa "informally" told committee staffers last year that
"Ukrainian officials had become concerned about Trump's campaign and his ties to Russia and
suggested having the DNC work with the Ukrainian embassy to bring some damning information to
light." That claim was reported by CNN, another news network that isn't known to be
"far-right."
Alexandria Chalupa could try to act like she's innocent in all of this but it isn't going to
work. Not only is she involved in the Democrats corruption in Ukraine and spreading false
information about Donald Trump, but so are her two sisters. All three have a long pattern of
corruption and trying to cause chaos in Ukraine.
Chalupa's one sister, Andrea, funded something called "DigitalMaidan". Digital Maidan was
created to support the removal of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Maidan refers to the
name of Independence Square in Kiev. Digital Maidan organized tweet storms to flood twitter
with anti-Yanukovych messages. Maidan also did tweet storms aimed at Donald Trump such as
#TreasonousTrump, just a few weeks before the 2016 election.
Her other sister, Irene, is also very active in Ukrainian affairs. She has been a journalist
in Kiev, and was a long time editor at the "Atlantic Council". Irene was the contributor to a
bi-weekly report called "Ukraine Alerts". A senior fellow at the same think tank, Dmitri
Aperovitch, was coincidentally also the CEO of Crowdstrike. If that sounds familiar,
Crowdstrike was the security firm that the DNC hired to investigate the 2016 hacks, on the DNC.
Crowdstrike was also brought up by Donald Trump with his call with the Ukrainian President.
The Atlantic Council receives funding from a Russian Oligarch, named Victor Pinchuck.
Pinchuck was a former member of the Ukrainian parliament and sits on the International Advisory
Board of the Atlantic Council. Pinchuck is also one of the biggest donors to the Clinton
Foundation. Hmmm. In 2013, the Atlantic Council awarded Hillary Clinton with a "Distinguished
National Leadership" award.
Irena now works for an organization called "StopFake.org". This is a site that was going to
"verify and refute disinformation and propaganda about events in Ukraine." Now they expanded to
"fact check, de-bunk, edit, translate, research and disseminate information in 11
languages."
"StopFake.org" receives money from the International Renaissance Foundation which was an
organization being investigated by the Prosecutor General. This was the guy that Joe Biden
pressured the Ukrainian President to fire. Oh, and no Democratic corruption scandal is complete
without George Soros. Soros funds the International Renassiance Foundation, along with what
seems like absolutely everything else that the left is involved.
So Alexandra Chalupa and her two sisters were all involved in Ukraine and all three were on
a mission to stop Donald Trump.
Chalupa, who claims she did nothing wrong, hired Michael Avenatti to represent her. Avenatti
tweeted that he was "now representing Alexandra Chalupa in connection with investigating
pursing possible legal claims against Manafort, Trump and other affiliated individuals. She was
targeted with baseless, bogus, allegations, all designed to distract away from Trump's Russian
collusion." When Chalupa was challenged for hiring Michael Avenatti to represent her, she
responded with "He's a friend and someone I trust. He's also a fighter and on the right side of
history. He's already made a big impact, and now we're about to take it up a notch." Michael
Avenatti is the guy who was arrested for stealing $300,000 from Stormy Daniels after using
every opportunity to make sure he was seen in front of the camera attacking Donald Trump.
A few weeks after Donald Trump's shocking win, Chalupa wrote an article for the online blog
publishing platform, Medium, in which she described what she believed to be was Russia's
motivation for hacking the DNC during the 2016 election. "Russia's economy has also suffered
due to its reliance on oil and the drop in oil prices. Trump's appointment of an exxon-mobil
executive as Secretary of State shows an alignment of Russian and Trump administration
interests that is Kleptocratic."
Within a few days of posting this article, she met with 2 men. One of the men were now
working with Democrats Abroad, which was the same organization that Chalupa worked for just a
few years ago. He was put in touch with Chalupa because he had information that could help her
in her investigation into Donald Trump and his connections with Russia.
The other man was a guy who spent 17 years in federal prison for drug conspiracy,
impersonating a federal officer and setting off a series of homemade bombs in Indiana in
1978.
These two men met with Chalupa to discuss Russian hacking in the 2016 election. Chalpua paid
$9,000 for documents that supposedly linked Exxon mobil, Rex Tillerson and Donald Trump to
Russia's hacking on the DNC. Buzzfeed investigated the documents and ran a story titled "How
Donald Trump's Enemies Fell For A Billion-Dollar Hoax", in which they debunked the documents
and proved they were forged. One of the myths that were debunked was that Rex Tillerson paid
the Trump organization $1.4 billion in June 2016, so that he could secure the Secretary of
State position. I mean was that something that really needed to be investigated? A claim that
Tillerson paid $1.4 billion to Trump so that Trump would hire him for a position making
$200,000 per year?
We can thank Alexandra Chalupa for starting this whole collusion delusion nonsense. After
over 2 years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent of your money, and they still can't
prove that Donald Trump colluded with Russia. Maybe it's time now to investigate Chalupa and
those who were responsible for pushing the collusion delusion. There is far more evidence of
the corruption in the DNC, then there is today after spending hundreds of millions of dollars
looking into Russia. It's time that we hold the DNC accountable and actually investigate them.
Everything they accused Donald Trump of doing with Russia, they were doing with Ukraine and
it's time we investigate them.
Posted in The
Mikula Report Tagged # DNC #
Ukraine <img
src="https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/4c41be0c99f13e0b390701061c93f515?s=96&d=mm&r=g">
Levi Mikulahttp://mikulawire.com
Next Post
Questions
That Need to be Asked By Both Sides, Regarding Russia and Ukraine Mon Nov 4 , 2019
There are some questions that each one of us should ask ourselves, regardless of where we fall
on the political spectrum. There are times when we need to put aside our differences and put
the national interest of the country above what is in the best interest for our political
party. There are some questions that both sides should be able to come together on and answer
the same way, regardless of who you voted for in the last election and regardless of whether
you agree with Donald Trump on anything or not. Should we investigate whether Russia did try to
influence the election? Yes! We should! We have solid proof that Russia did try to influence
the 2016 election. That shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. We knew that Russia was interested
in trying to influence U.S. elections, going back to 2012. Remember when Mitt Romney warned
about Russia and was mocked for it? "The 1980's called and they want their foreign policy back"
we were told by Barack Obama. Now suddenly the left is concerned with Russia and the right
automatically dismisses any talk of Russia trying to influence U.S. elections. Sadly, both
sides seem more concerned with party politics then our national security. Not only did Russia
try to influence the 2016 election, but they will try it again in 2020 and beyond. This is an
issue where both sides should be able to come together, to discuss ways to prevent a foreign
power, any foreign power, from interfering with our elections again. Sadly, that doesn't look
like it will happen anytime soon, even though that is what we should be focusing on. 2. Should
we find out if Donald Trump colluded with Russia to hurt the Democrat candidate? Yes, we
should! If Trump did in fact knowingly collude with Russia, he should be impeached and then
removed from office. But we can't just remove a President based on accusations from the other
side. We need to find the solid evidence that Trump colluded with Russia, before we remove him
from office. We have yet to find that concrete evidence, even after an investigation that
lasted over two years, and tens of millions of dollars spent. If that concrete evidence were to
be discovered, every American should absolutely support removing Donald Trump. 3. Does the fact
that the DNC will benefit by a Russia investigation mean we shouldn't pursue the investigation?
No! We should absolutely still pursue the investigation, regardless of what it means for the
2020 election. National interest should come before party interests. There is no denying that
any talk of Russia will hurt Donald Trump. There is no denying that the media will try to spin
absolutely everything into their favor, regardless of what the facts show. But, this is a
serious issue involving national security that we need to get to the bottom of. Like I said
earlier, if we can prove that Donald Trump did in fact collude with Russia, he should be
removed from office. If Russia did in fact try to influence the U.S. election, which in fact
they did, they need to be dealt with. Both sides need to be willing to accept what ever the
investigations show. If Trump knowingly colluded with Russia, he should absolutely be removed.
If there is no evidence of him knowingly colluding with Russia, then the left needs to accept
that and move on. But we can't lose site the danger that Russia poses to our country. That is
an issue that neither side wants to pay any attention to. This is much bigger then anything
Donald Trump may or may not have done. 4. Would Trump benefit from investigations in Ukraine
and Burisma? Would he benefit any more then the DNC would benefit with Russia? Yes, Trump would
benefit from investigations into Ukraine and Burisma. Does that mean that it's not the right
thing for the country? No. The truth is important no matter which side it hurts in the next
election. The left should be just as interested in learning the facts about what had happened
in Ukraine as they are trying to make it seem like they are with the Russia investigations.
Would it benefit him more then it would benefit the DNC though, then it does with the Democrats
investigating Russia? No. Unlike the Democrats, Trump doesn't have a majority of the media on
his side. A media who tries to spin absolutely every little rumor into a major crisis, that
they are sure will take down the President this time. The left is quick to dismiss any talk of
Ukraine just like the right is quick to dismiss any talk of Russia. If either, or both, are
true, it is a very severe threat to our Republic and needs to be dealt with. 5. Which is more
in line with America's national interest? a) Withhold U.S. aid money ($400 billion) until
recipient investigates: What happened to $7 billion in U.S aid? Was there any collusion to
influence the U.S. election, government corruption involving the State Department, U.S.
intelligence, NGO's, U.S. candidates, etc. OR b) A President or Vice President withholding U.S.
aid ($1 billion) unless recipient STOPS investigations. The answer to this question is really
easy. We should absolutely investigate where the $7 billion went. We need to figure out if
there was any influence in the US election. We should investigate Vice President Joe Biden
calling for the ambassador to be fired. We know for a fact that there was collusion between the
DNC and the Ukraine embassy in D.C., so why is it that nobody cares about that collusion? Why
is it a big deal that Trump supposedly withheld aid from Ukraine until they investigated Joe
Biden, but no one seems to have a problem with Joe Biden withholding aid to force Ukraine to
fire the Ukranian prosecutor so that an investigation would be stopped? That wasn't an
impeachable offense, but Donald Trump's phone call with the Ukranian President was? What has
Trump done that is any worse then anything the Obama administration did? These 5 questions
should be questions that both sides should be able to come together on but sadly both sides are
more concerned with party politics, more then they are concerned about the security of our
republic. Claiming that Russia is a treat doesn't automatically mean that you believe Trump is
an illegitimate President and that he colluded with Russia. Claiming that Ukraine needs to be
investigated doesn't mean that you are excusing anything that Donald Trump has done. It simply
means that you are more concerned with the national security of our country then you are with
party politics. <img width="640" height="360"
src="https://mikulawire.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Trump-and-Biden-1024x576.jpg" alt=""
/> You May Like
"... Nuland's comment came in response to news that that there would be a second phase of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes' investigation into Russian interference – this time focusing on the State Department. Nunes sent a questionnaire to about two dozen current and former intelligence, law enforcement and State Department officials. My guess is Nuland was one of them. Former Secretary of State John Kerry may have been another. ..."
"... Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. 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. ..."
On February 4, 2018, Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of
State in the Obama Administration went on Face the Nation and made the
following comment :
During the Ukraine crisis in 2014-15, Chris Steele had a number of commercial clients who
were asking him for reports on what was going on in Russia, what was going on in Ukraine, what
was going on between them. Chris had a friend [Jonathan Winer] at the State Department and he
offered us that reporting free so that we could also benefit from it. It was one of, you know,
hundreds of sources that we were using to try to understand what was going on.
Then, in the middle of July, when he 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.
Nuland said the State Department received the Dossier directly from Steele in mid-July 2016,
whereupon the State Department turned it over to the FBI (segmented video
here ).
Which is right around the time Susan Rice began showing increased interest in National
Security Agency (NSA) intelligence material – including "unmasked" Americans' identities.
From a
Circa article :
Intelligence sources said the logs discovered by National Security Council staff suggested
Rice's interest in the NSA materials, some of which included unmasked Americans' identities,
appeared to begin last July around the time Trump secured the GOP nomination and accelerated
after Trump's election in November launched a transition that continued through January.
Nuland's comment came in response to news that that there would be a
second phase of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes' investigation into
Russian interference – this time focusing on the State Department. Nunes sent a questionnaire to about two dozen current and former intelligence, law
enforcement and State Department officials. My guess is Nuland was one of them. Former Secretary of State John Kerry may have been
another.
The New York Times
had earlier reported that the FBI received the Steele Dossier directly from Christopher Steele
on July 5, 2016 – the same day as Comey's infamous exoneration of Hillary Clinton during
a news conference:
The reports came from a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele, who was
working as a private investigator hired by a firm working for a Trump opponent. He provided the
documents to an F.B.I. contact in Europe on the same day as Mr. Comey's news conference about
Mrs. Clinton. It took weeks for this information to land with Mr. Strzok and his team.
This claim was recently repeated in a lengthy article in the
New Yorker . In this version, the Steele Dossier was given to the FBI on July 5, 2016. By ~July 20, 2016,
Comey had seen it and Strzok had the Dossier in his possession.
There is a third version of events, provided by Jonathan Winer in a
Washington Post Op-Ed :
In 2009, I met and became friends with Steele, after he retired from British government
service focusing on Russia. Steele was providing business intelligence on the same kinds of
issues I worked on at the time. Over the years, Steele and I had discussed many matters relating to Russia. He asked me
whether the State Department would like copies of new information as he developed it.
I contacted Victoria Nuland, a career diplomat who was then assistant secretary of state for
European and Eurasian affairs, and shared with her several of Steele's reports. She told me
they were useful and asked me to continue to send them. Over the next two years, I shared more
than 100 of Steele's reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to
find them useful.
In the summer of 2016, Steele told me that he had learned of disturbing information
regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign and senior Russian officials. He did
not provide details but made clear the information involved "active measures," a Soviet
intelligence term for propaganda and related activities to influence events in other
countries.
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.
I was allowed to review, but not to keep, a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the
State Department. I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Nuland, who indicated that,
like me, she felt that the secretary of state [John Kerry] needed to be made aware of this
material.
In this third version, Nuland and the State Department received the Dossier in September
2016.
Nuland made her comments on February 4, 2018. Winer wrote his Op-Ed on February 8, 2018.
Winer has known Steele since 2009. Nuland has known Steele since 2014 – during the
Ukraine crisis.
Victoria Nuland is famous for an interesting conversation with the U.S. Ambassador to
Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt on or before February 4, 2014 (transcript here ):
During the call, which was intercepted and leaked, the two appear to be discussing replacing
Ukrainian President Yanukovych with opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Some excerpts:
PYATT: I think we're in play. The Klitschko [Vitaly Klitschko, one of three main opposition
leaders] piece is obviously the complicated electron here.
NULAND: Good. I don't think Klitsch should go into the government. I don't think it's
necessary, I don't think it's a good idea.
PYATT: Yeah. I guess in terms of him not going into the government, just let him stay out
and do his political homework and stuff. I'm just thinking in terms of sort of the process
moving ahead we want to keep the moderate democrats together.
NULAND: I think Yats [opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk] is the guy who's got the economic
experience, the governing experience. He's the what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the
outside.
PYATT: The other issue is some kind of outreach to Yanukovych but we probably regroup on
that tomorrow as we see how things start to fall into place.
NULAND: Sullivan's come back to me VFR, saying you need [Vice President] Biden and I said
probably tomorrow. So Biden's willing.
Here's what actually happened:
On or before February 4 2014 – Call between Pyatt and Nuland.
February 22, 2014 – Yanukovych was
removed as President of Ukraine.
February 27 2014 – Yatsenyuk was installed as Prime Minister of Ukraine.
Klitschko was left out. Yatsenyuk would
resign
in April 2016 amidst corruption accusations.
April 18 2014 – Hunter Biden was
appointed to the Board of Directors for Burisma – one of the largest natural gas
companies in Ukraine.
April 22 2014 – VP Biden
travels to Ukraine and
offers support and $50 million in aid for Yatsenyuk's shaky new government.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly
questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump
aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after
the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his
advisers, a Politico investigation found.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met
with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between
Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of
the situation.
That Ukrainian-American was DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa.
Manafort's work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named
Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the
Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for
Democratic National Committee.
The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission
records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic
campaigns and the DNC's arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.
Some actions taken by Chalupa (sources from Politico
article unless otherwise linked):
January 3 2014 – Leaders representing more than a dozen Ukrainian-American
organizations, including the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, met at the
White House with President Obama's senior national security staff to discuss the crisis in
Ukraine.
The non-partisan meeting held on January 3 was initiated by the co-chairs of
Ukrainian-Americans for Obama, Julian Kulas, Andrew Fedynsky and Ulana Mazurkevich, as well
Alexandra Chalupa , co-convener of the National Democratic Ethnic Coordinating Committee.
This was approximately one month prior to Nuland's call with Pyatt regarding the
installation of Yatsenyuk as Prime Minister of Ukraine.
2014 (undetermined) -Chalupa begins to investigate Paul Manafort.
Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested
in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort's role in Yanukovych's rise, as well as
his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych's political party.
Late 2015 – Chalupa expands her opposition research into Manafort to include Trump's
ties to Russia.
Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington,
including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives.
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.
She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton's campaign
January 2016 – Chalupa informs a senior DNC official that she feels there is a Russia
connection with the Trump Campaign.
Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump's campaign, "I felt there was
a Russia connection," Chalupa recalled. "And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul
Manafort to be involved in this election," said Chalupa, who at the time also was warning
leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was "Putin's political brain for
manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections."
March 25 2016 – Chalupa shared her concerns with the Ukrainian Ambassador to the
U.S.
She said she shared her concern with Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and
one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy.
According to someone briefed on the meeting, Chaly said that Manafort was very much on his
radar, but that he wasn't particularly concerned about the operative's ties to Trump.
March 29 2016 – Chalupa briefs DNC Communication staff.
The day after Manafort's hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC's communications staff on
Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the
situation.
A former DNC staffer and the operative familiar with the situation agreed that with the
DNC's encouragement, Chalupa asked embassy staff to try to arrange an interview in which
Poroshenko might discuss Manafort's ties to Yanukovych.
While the embassy declined that request, officials there became "helpful" in Chalupa's
efforts, she said, explaining that she traded information and leads with them.
Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and
Russia to point them in the right directions.
April 4 – April 12 2016 – Ukrainian Parliamentarian Olga Bielkov has
four meetings – with Samuel Charap (International Institute for Strategic Studies),
Liz Zentos (National Security Council), Michael Kimmage (State Dept) and David Kramer (McCain
Institute).
Doug Schoen files FARA documents that
show he was paid $40,000 a month by Ukrainian Billionaire Victor Pinchuk (page 5) to arrange
these meetings.
Schoen attempts to arrange another 72 meetings with Congressmen and media (page 10). It is
unknown how many meetings took place.
April 6 2016 – Chalupa holds a meeting with an assistant of Representative Marcy
Kaptur.
Chalupa confirmed that, a week after Manafort's hiring was announced, she discussed the
possibility of a congressional investigation with a foreign policy legislative assistant in the
office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who co-chairs the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus.
April 26 2016 – Investigative reporter Michael Isikoff publishes
story on Yahoo News about Paul Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg
Deripaska.
April 28 2016 – Chalupa appears on a panel to discuss her research on Manafort with a
group of 68 Ukrainian investigative journalists gathered at the Library of Congress for a
program sponsored by a U.S. congressional agency called the Open World Leadership Center.
From a Wikileaks
email sent by Chalupa to Luis Miranda, Communications Director of the DNC:
I spoke to a delegation of 68 investigative journalists from Ukraine last Wednesday at the
Library of Congress – the Open World Society's forum – they put me on the program
to speak specifically about Paul Manafort and I invited Michael Isikoff whom I've been working
with for the past few weeks and connected him to the Ukrainians.
Two points.
Open World is a supposedly non-partisan Congressional agency.
Michael Isikoff is the same journalist Christopher Steele leaked
to in September 2016:
The Carter Page FISA application extensively cited a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focused on Page's July 2016 trip to
Moscow. This information was used to corroborate the Steele Dossier.
Steele leaked to Isikoff who wrote the article for Yahoo News. The Isikoff article was then
used to help obtain a Title I FISA grant to gather information on Page. This search was then
leaked by Steele to David Corn at Mother Jones.
Isikoff accompanied Chalupa to a reception at the Ukrainian Embassy immediately after the
Library of Congress event.
May 3 2016 – Chalupa emails Luis Miranda, Communications
Director of the DNC (same email referenced above).
A lot more coming down the pipe More offline tomorrow since there is a big Trump component
you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I'm working on
you should be aware of.
Late July 2016 – Chalupa leaves the DNC to work full-time on her research into
Manafort.
Chalupa left the DNC after the Democratic convention in late July to focus full-time on her
research into Manafort, Trump and Russia . She said she provided off-the-record
information and guidance to "a lot of journalists" working on stories related to Manafort and
Trump's Russia connections.
August 4 2016 – Ukrainian ambassador to U.S.
writes op-ed against Trump.
August 15 2016 – CNN
reports that Manafort is named in a Ukrainian probe over potentially illegal payments
received from Ukraine's pro-Russian ruling party.
August 19 2016 – CNN
reports the FBI is conducting an inquiry into Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort's payments
from pro-Russia interests in Ukraine in 2007 and 2009.
August 19 2016 – Ukrainian parliament member Sergii Leshchenko
holds news conference to draw attention to Paul Manafort and Trump's "pro-Russia" ties.
September 19 2016 – At UN General Assembly meeting in New York, Ukrainian President
Poroshenko
meets with Hillary Clinton.
November 28 2016 – McCain associate
David Kramer flies to London to meet Christopher Steele for a briefing on the Dossier. Upon
Kramer's return, Fusion GPS provided McCain with a copy of the Dossier.
July 24 2017 – Senator Charles Grassley
sends a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein regarding the actions taken by
Chalupa.
According to news reports, during the 2016 presidential election, "Ukrainian government
officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump" and did so by "disseminat[ing]
documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the
matter.
At the center of this plan was Alexandra Chalupa, described by reports as a
Ukrainian-American operative "who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee" and
reportedly met with Ukrainian officials during the presidential election for the express
purpose of exposing alleged ties between then-candidate Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, and
Russia.
Chalupa's actions appear to show that she was simultaneously working on behalf of a foreign
government, Ukraine, and on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign, in an effort to influence
not only the U.S voting population but U.S. government officials.
Aside from the apparent evidence of collusion between the DNC, Clinton campaign, and
Ukrainian government, Chalupa's actions implicate the Foreign Agents Registration Act
(FARA).
Chalupa reportedly worked directly with Ukrainian government officials to benefit Ukraine,
lobbying Congress on behalf of Ukraine, and worked to undermine the Trump campaign on behalf of
Ukraine and the Clinton campaign.
The January 4, 2018 Grassley Memo – made
public on February 6, 2018, made clear that both the State Department and the Clinton Campaign
directly contributed information used by Steele in the formation of his Dossier.
I'm curious if Chalupa met directly with Christopher Steele. It's clear her research was
funneled by the DNC to Steele's Dossier.
Former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland must have known about all of this.
People above her had to know as well.
On March 6, 2018, Sara Carter
reported that the House Intelligence Committee is now investigating former Secretary of
State John Kerry:
The House Select Committee on Intelligence is now investigating former Secretary of State
John F. Kerry's possible role into the unverified dossier paid for by the Democratic National
Committee and Hillary Clinton Campaign.
The climb up the Obama Administration hierarchy appears to have finally begun.
For the past three years, we have heard nonstop that Donald Trump colluded with Russia and
needs to be impeached. After nearly three years, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who was
against impeachment the whole time we were waiting for the Mueller Report, has suddenly,
instantly, changed her position and has now opened an impeachment inquiry. Why? Why the sudden
change? After millions of dollars and a two year investigation, she was still against
impeachment over Russia, but when it comes to Ukraine, without any of the facts coming out,
before the transcript of the phone call was even released, and before she even talked to the
whistle blower, she suddenly changed her mind on impeachment?
This sudden change over what amounts to an office rumor, actually makes a lot of sense now.
The Democrats desperately need to control the narrative. Everything they accused Trump of with
Russia, they were doing with Ukraine, and it could bring down the entire Democrat Party. What
Joe and Hunter Biden did really only scratches the surface of a much larger and more corrupt
party.
It's possible something else will come out that implicates Trump, but all of the facts right
now are pointing to the Democrats and a very long pattern of corruption when it comes to
Ukraine.
In Feburary 2014, protesters seized Kiev (the capitol of Ukraine) and President Viktor
Yanukovych was forced to flee. President Obama then appointed Vice President Joe Biden as the
new point man for Ukraine.
March 2014, Joe Biden's son, Secretary of State John Kerry's son, neither of who had any
experience, decide to start an investment firm. The two boys meet with Kerry's financial
advisor, Devon Archer, for advice.
April 2014, Joe Biden flies to Ukraine, but someone else also flies to Ukraine. Devon
Archer
May 2014, Devon Archer, is appointed board member of Burisma, which is a gas company,
whose main operations are in Ukraine. Guess who was also appointed as a board member. Hunter
Biden.
That should be enough to show you that something doesn't seem right. But that's just the
Biden story. That just scratches the surface of corruption between the Democrats and Ukraine
and no one in the media wants to talk about it. All everyone wants to talk about is what is
really like the front and back cover of a novel. The media seems obsessed with the back cover
(Trump's phone call with the President of Ukraine) and care a little about the front cover (Joe
and Hunter Biden) but that's about it. What I'm going to explain now is some of what's between
those two covers.
Now because of this poor, very corrupt country, Ukraine, President Obama decided to give a
massive aid package in May 2014. That aid package included:
A $1 billion sovereign loan guarantee
$118 million in equipment and training for their security forces.
$20 million for law enforcement reform.
A fleet of advisors in banking, politics, energy, media, and human rights.
After that aid package was given, because they are so corrupt, the United States demanded
that Ukraine start a National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. A man named Artem Sytnky is
tapped to be the first director of this bureau. Since he is now the director, he has a direct
line to President Obama. Back to them in a minute.
The director of Burisma, Ihor Kolomoyski, is so corrupt that he isn't even allowed into the
United States. Lucky for him, he owns a bank in Ukraine though. And because the United States
was giving $1.8 billion to Ukraine, we needed a bank to deposit the money. So where do we
deposit the money? Into PrivatBank, which is owned by Ihor, who just happens to run
Burisma.
Now I'm sure that it's just a coincidence that that $1.8 billion in PrivatBank goes missing.
I mean it's not like a corrupt oligarch would ever consider stealing $1.8 billion or anything.
It also must be a coincidence, that this guy who is so corrupt that he couldn't even come into
the United States, is just happened to be given a Visa at the same time that we deposited $1.8
billion into his bank.
By late 2015, we had become Ukraine's piggy bank. Not only are we giving them money but we
are also helping them with advisors. Advisors such as:
Greg Craig, Former Obama White House Counsel.
Tad Devine, Chieft Strategist for Bernie Sanders.
Tony Podesta, brother to John Podesta. If John Podesta sounds familiar, he was the White
House Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton and then Counselor to President Obama.
Mark Penn, Chief Strategist for Hillary Clinton.
John Anzalone, Obama campaign pollster.
Joel Benenson, Obama campaign lead pollster.
In June 2015, Donald Trump announces that he is running for President.
In late 2015, the DNC hires Alexandria Chalupa, who is a daughter of an Ukranian immigrant,
to do opposition research on Donald Trump. Opensecrets.org has confirmed that she did in fact
work for, and was paid $71,918 by the DNC. That was just for her work with the 2016 election,
although she's been working with the DNC since 2004.
In January 2016, Chalupa starts to investigate Donald Trump. She approaches an official in
the DNC because she "feels like there was a Russia connection." Oh really? She felt like Trump
was connected with Russia, before any evidence or allegations? Paul Manafort wasn't working for
the campaign at this time. There was no Steele Dossier at this time. George Papadopoulos wasn't
on the campaign yet. There was no fISA requests. But somehow she just "felt" that Trump was
connected to Russia?
She starts her investigation, focusing on Paul Manafort. Manafort, who I will admit is an
extremely corrupt guy, was trying to get the exited President back into power. Now her
investigation was only focused on trying to dig up dirt on Manafort. She didn't seem concerned
with Tad Devine and Tony Podesta also working on the same thing, with Paul Manafort.
That same month, that Chalupa just had "a feeling" that there was a connection with Trump
and Russia, the Obama White House summoned the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. The
Obama administration said that we need to begin cooperation with Ukraine. The meeting
immediately turned to two main issues: 1) The scandal involving Joe and Hunter Biden. 2) A case
tied to Paul Manafort. Obviously, they decided to investigate the case tied to Paul Manafort
and was pressured to ignore the scandal involving the Biden's and to not investigate where that
$1.8 billion went. You would think we should be more concerned about $1.8 billion in taxpayers
money just disappearing.
After the meeting, a prosecutor with the anti-corruption board, who was investigating the
Biden's involvement, was fired. This investigator who never had any problems with the Obama
administration before was now fired because, according to him, "I was leading a wide ranging
corruption probe into Burisma Holdings ("Burisma") a natural gas firm active in Ukraine, and
Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors. I assume Burisma, which
was connected with gas extraction, had the support of Vice-President Joe Biden because his son
was on the board of Directors."
Following this meeting, The Hill ran a story titled: "How the Obama White House engaged
Ukraine to give Russia Collusion narrative in an early boost." According to the article, the
deputy head of the anti-corruption organization claimed that "there was a clear message about
helping the Americans with the party of the regions case." Regarding the Manafort case, "there
was a lot of talking about needing help and then the ledger just appeared in public." What is
this ledger that was mentioned? Back to that in a minute.
In March 2016, out of nowhere, Paul Manafort joins the Trump team. This is definitely
exciting news for the Democrats considering they had been setting Manafort up for months.
Shortly after that, Chalupa starts working directly with the Ukranian embassy in the United
States and starts raising alarm bells on Manafort. According to Chalupa's own words, the
embassy "worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort, and Russia to point them
in the right directions."
So the Ukranian embassy in the United States worked directly with a DNC operative, to damage
the Republican candidate for President, to influence the election. Doesn't that sound exactly
like what they accused Trump of doing with Russia?
Remember that Anti-corruption bureau in Ukraine? In June 2016, the FBI decided that they
were doing such a good job that the two groups should partner together. Now they could share
any information that they couldn't have shared before. It's a lot like the wall that was
between the CIA and FBI before 9-11. The two groups couldn't share information with each other,
but when that wall was torn down, they were free to share anything they wanted.
So what was the ledger that was discussed in the meeting at the White House? This ledger was
released by Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau on Paul Manafort. The black ledger refers to
financial records that were kept by the former Ukranian President. Within days of this coming
out and Paul Manafort going to jail, Tony Podesta, who was doing the same thing as Manafort,
with the exact same people, just decides to suddenly close his political lobbying firm. This is
one of the biggest lobbying firms in the United States, and he just suddenly decides to close
up shop and retire without any warning. You would think that that would be something that
should be investigated, considering it was right after Paul Manafort was arrested.
In June 2017, White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, accused the DNC of
colluding with Ukraine and even quoted a New York Times article. If we had anyone in the media
who did their jobs, that claim would have been investigated immediately. That is a very serious
allegation that was completely ignored by the media. Had I been in the White House press pool,
that would be my very first question. I would be demanding an explanation.
I do have to give the New York Times some credit. Despite being a leftist paper, they do
occasionally get some things right and when they really want to, they know how to act like
journalists.
The media in the United States seems to have forgotten to talk about the two men in Ukraine
being arrested because they tried to influence the US election. Seems like kind of a big story
that I would have liked to read about. They were found guilty and very interesting evidence was
released. The Ukranian prosecutor gave an interview with the Ukranian media where he claims
that "I don't know how, but the Americans got an audio recording of Mr. Sytnik's (the head of
the corruption bureau in Ukraine) conversation: He is resting with his family and friends and
discussing how he would like to help Hillary."
This audio that was released has been reported by Ukranian papers for months, yet somehow
the media in the U.S. didn't find it to be a big deal? The audio proved that Ukrainians are in
fact guilty of trying to interfere with the 2016 election.
In April 2019, the Mueller Report is released and proves absolutely nothing of what the
Democrats have been accusing Trump off for over two years.
11 days after the Mueller Report is released, a new Ukranian President is sworn in. This is
a guy who did not do any interviews and didn't explain any of his policies and ended up winning
the election. The comedian in the race ended up winning and becoming the Ukranian
President.
This new President thinks that everything that is currently happening in Ukraine is insane
and that the whole country is corrupt, including his own ambassador. He decides to recall the
Ukranian ambassador, not long after Donald Trump also fired his ambassador. That means the
pipeline is now clear after corrupt ambassadors for both the Ukraine and the United States are
out of the way. That's what led to the phone call between the two Presidents.
Everything I have written here can easily be proven because of documents and audio
recordings that have been released. But let's forget all of that. No, the phone call between
the two Presidents is what the media thinks is the only important part of this story. They'll
throw the Biden's under the bus too since they don't really care about Biden. The solid
evidence that Ukranian officials tried to influence the 2016 election apparently isn't news
worthy enough.
Sadly, this still only scratches the surface. This is just some of what has been proven so
far. You would think that it would be important for someone to actually look into, but the
media is too busy focusing on a phone call to actually report any of the facts.
For the past three years, we have been hearing nonstop that Donald Trump colluded with
Russia, and yet have heard absolutely nothing about what the Democrats were doing in Ukraine.
The Ukranian embassy in the United States worked directly with the DNC to get dirt on a
candidate for President and influence the 2016 election, and no one is talking about it.
There is absolutely no reason to push impeachment a year before an election unless you need
to change the narrative, and that is exactly what they are trying to do, and what they
desperately need to do. The DNC is slowly being exposed and they are terrified that their dirty
secrets could take down the entire party. It's up to us to hold them accountable for their
corruption.
Posted in The
Mikula Report Tagged # Ukraine
Chalupa reportedly
acknowledged in her 2017 interview with Politico that she worked as a consultant for the
DNC during the 2016 campaign with the goal of publicly exposing Trump campaign aide
Paul Manafort 's
links to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. Chalupa admitted coordinating with the Ukrainian
Embassy, and with Ukrainian and U.S. news reporters.
I won't sit here and claim that what I've heard over the last 2 days with family in town,
is at all representative of all Americans but it was interesting. I have all kinds of
political affiliation in the family: Maga's, Dims and Independents. All are TIRED of both
sides antics. No one wanted to discuss it except to say that we are ALL fucked in one way or
another. What was lively political debate before was met with a lack of discussion and
instead a pervasive frustration and sadness about the system itself how corrupt it all is but
not knowing what to do about it.
I just wonder if that's how many Americans feel about all this. At least those sick of all
of it.
Most of us are aware of that. It doesn't mean that he isn't right about some things
though, and he's incredibly amusing at times. If there is ever a non zionist candidate, I'd
happily vote for them. At least he's not a west hating bolshevik golem.
As is everyone else in washington. Ron, Rand, and Tulsi, not given a chance. Obama was
probably the least zionist president we've had in decades, and he still went along with most
of their goals, along with being a fabian socialist.
Please wake up soon. Your savior is running $1 trillion annual deficits, has raised the
troop numbers in Afghanistan from 8500-14,000, will not leave Syria, bombed Syria twice with
zero evidence of gas attacks because there were none. Anybody who thinks there's a dime's
worth of difference between the parties comatose, please wake up soon.
As for Chalupa, she has served in several roles for the DNC while also working as an
pro-Ukraine activist. A former staffer in the Bill Clinton White House, Chalupa worked as
executive director for Democrats Abroad in the 2000s and as head of the DNC's national ethnic
outreach group during the 2016 campaign.
In her spare time, Chalupa organized social media campaigns against Trump. One of those
efforts encouraged activists to share the Twitter hashtag, #TreasonousTrump.
Chalupa, who founded the U.S. United With Ukraine Coalition in 2014, also led the DNC's
opposition research into any Trump ties to Russia, according to
an essay she recently published at Medium.
Politico reported in
January that Chalupa worked with the Ukrainian government to compile and disseminate research
on links between Trump, his campaign advisers, and the Russian government.
To help spread that information, Chalupa relied on "a network of sources in Kiev and
Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence
operatives," Politico reported.
One of the investigative journalists Chalupa worked with was Yahoo! News' Michael
Isikoff.
In a May 3, 2016
email released by WikiLeaks, Chalupa informed Luis Miranda, the DNC's communications
director at the time, that she had "been working with" Isikoff on stories involving Trump
campaign chairman Paul Manafort's work in Ukraine. She also said she had invited Isikoff to a
conference with dozens of Ukrainian journalists to discuss Manafort, a former consultant to
Viktor Yanukovych, a former Ukrainian president allied with Vladimir Putin.
Days before Chalupa's email, Isikoff published an
in-depth report on an ill-fated business partnership between Manafort and a Russian
oligarch allied with Putin named Oleg Deripaska.
In her email, Chalupa hinted to Miranda of "a big Trump component that will hit in next few
weeks." She also claimed that she was being targeted in state-sponsored computer hacking
attempts because of her research on Manafort.
According to Politico, Chalupa was paid $412,000 for consulting work from 2004 through June
2016. The last payment was made on June 20 for $25,000, records filed with the Federal Election
Commission show.
Ariel first got in touch with Chalupa and Kimberlin after Trump won the election, sometime
in mid-November. The Israeli noted that he had written articles asserting that Trump colluded
with the Russian government to influence the election.
At the time of his first contact with Chalupa and Kimberlin, Ariel had not seen the
documents that would later be debunked by BuzzFeed.
The documents soon ended up in the inboxes of several news outlets, but reporters quickly
determined that they were rife with errors. Names were misspelled; dates didn't make sense; the
gist of the underlying claim didn't pass the smell test.
Ariel, who says he once worked with the the anti-apartheid African National Congress,
disputed some of the BuzzFeed report. He said that the article portrayed him as the party most
responsible for pushing the documents. But he told TheDC that he always had at least some doubt
about the veracity of the papers. He also says that he did not send them to news outlets.
"... 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.
"... "The Blaze has released an audio recording that they recently obtained that appears to show Artem Sytnyk, Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, admitting that he tried to boost the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton by sabotaging then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign. ..."
"... The Ukrainian embassy political officer who worked at the embassy at the time, Andrii Telizhenko, stated that the Ukrainians "were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa" and that "the embassy worked very closely with" Chalupa. ..."
"The Blaze has released an audio recording that they recently obtained that appears
to show Artem Sytnyk, Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, admitting
that
he tried to boost the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton by sabotaging then-candidate
Donald Trump's campaign.
The connection between the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Ukrainian government
was veteran Democratic operative Alexandra Chalupa, "who had worked in the White House Office
of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration" and then "went on to work as a staffer,
then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee," Politico
reported.
Chalupa was working directly with the Ukrainian embassy in the United States to raise
concerns about Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and, according to Politico , she
indicated that the Embassy was working "directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and
Russia to point them in the right directions."
The
Ukrainian embassy political officer who worked at the embassy at the time, Andrii Telizhenko,
stated that the Ukrainians "were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul
Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa" and that "the embassy worked very closely with" Chalupa.
The Blaze highlighted an email from WikiLeaks from Chalupa to Louis Miranda at the
DNC:
"Hey, a lot coming down the pipe. I spoke to a delegation of 68 investigative
journalists from Ukraine last night at the Library of Congress, the Open World Society forum.
They put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort. I invited Michael
Isikoff, who I've been working with for the past few weeks, and connected him to the
Ukrainians. More offline tomorrow, since there was a big Trump component you and Lauren need
to be aware of that will hit in the next few weeks. Something I'm working on that you should
be aware of."
The Blaze then reported
that Sytnyk, who eventually "was tried and convicted in Ukraine for
interfering in the U.S. presidential election in 2016 ," released a "black ledger" on
Manafort during the 2016 presidential election that eventually led to Manafort's downfall.
Alexandra Chalupa was a key player in the Democrat's waste management business (i.e.
organizing street resistance against President Trump, keeping the collusion fake news narrative
alive, and spreading the evolving anti-Trump rumors).Chalupa also is very well
connected (and paid) and regularly hobnobs with Democrat elites.She also is aligned
with the early stages of fake Trump-Russia dossier and she hired creepy porn lawyer Michael
Avenatti to represent her in court.Avenatti is now indicted for numerous scams and
Chalupa is likely right behind him.
Three months ago creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti announced he was representing an
individual accused of being involved in the creation of the fake Russia-Trump dossier against
President Trump. His client, Alexandra Chalupa, also attended and no doubt put together a rally
for Avenatti outside the White House.
Now, the creepy porn lawyer is facing jail time and Chalupa is likely next!
As
we reported in December 2018, Andrii Telizhenko was approached by DNC operative Alexandra
Chalupa in early 2016. Chalupa wanted dirt on candidate Trump and his campaign manager Paul
Manafort. The Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC worked CLOSELY with the DNC
operative Chalupa.
Chalupa told Andrii she wanted Russian "dirt" on the Trump campaign.
The Gateway Pundit spoke with Telizhenko on the DNC Russia-gate Scandal –
Alexandra Chalupa was apparently hired by the DNC going as far back as 2013. According to
Politico:
A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American
diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing
pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching
Manafort's role in Yanukovych's rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who
funded Yanukovych's political party."
Politico also noted that Chalupa claimed that in October of 2015 she began investigating
Trump's ties to Russia. Why she began this investigation is completely unknown. Trump NEVER had
any ties with Russians. The only thing of significance that had happened at this point was that
Trump announced he was running for office. There was no apparent triggering event. Candidate
Trump had very limited contact with Russia or Russia businessmen.
Also, according to Politico, in January of 2016, Chalupa suddenly and out of the blue warned
the DNC about Paul Manafort. Manafort's name hadn't even been mentioned at this point in time.
Chalupa made a prediction that if Team Trump hired Paul Manafort that it would be clear and
convincing evidence that Trump had ties to Russia.
Manafort worked with Hillary's Campaign Manager John Podesta and his brother Tony in the
Ukraine. They worked to bring in US politicians to meet with Ukranian politicians.
It's unknown how much money these individuals received for their visit to the Ukraine or if
Chalupa was involved.
Politico
continued stating that the DNC had performed Trump – Russia research long before
Chalupa came along (i.e. January 2016) –
A DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party's
political department, not a researcher. She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort
and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its dossiers on the
subjects, the official said, stressing that the DNC had been building robust research books
on Trump and his ties to Russia long before Chalupa began sounding alarms."
Chalupa is also connected to Ukrainian by the name of Vasili Filipchuk, who ran the
organization labeled ICPS. Filipchuk too is expected of helping to write the phony Trump-Russia
dossier. The entity he works for ( ICPS ) stands for the International Center for Policy Studies
and it was founded by Open Society.
Open Society is a well
known George Soros funded organization that fronts as an entity that works "to build vibrant
and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all
people." In reality it is a far-left organization that works against freedoms embedded in the
US Constitution and across Europe.
Along with being connected to the fake Trump – Russia dossier and suspicious
individuals in the Ukraine, Chalupa also is involved in the creation of astro-turfed (i.e.
created by Democrat leadership) anti – Trump events in Washington D.C.
Chalupa also assisted in a fund raiser for fired and corrupt FBI leader Andrew McCabe
–
Chalupa
is another typical example of the corrupt leadership in the Democrat Party.She made up
fake stories against President Trump and then pushed them at Democrat funded rallies while
hiring a creepy porn lawyer to cover her misdeeds. What a nasty piece of work!
Alexandra Chalupa is as slimy as the day is long.
Let's hope the hammer is about to drop on this Soros-linked operative.
"... The Atlantic Council, along with the Brookings Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, were the subject of an unflattering portrayal in a New York Times article, Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks : ..."
"... Irena Chalupa's ideological interests in Ukraine are aligned directly with those of Alexandra Chalupa. ..."
I wrote on the
role of Alexandra Chalupa – a Ukrainian-American DNC operative – who appears at
the center of the DNC's construction of information used in the Steele Dossier.
The role of former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in disseminating the Dossier
– along with her involvement in shaping Ukraine – was also discussed.
The name Victor Pinchuk was mentioned.
Victor
Pinchuk is a Ukrainian billionaire. He is the founder of Interpipe, a steel pipe manufacturer. He also owns Credit Dnipro Bank,
some ferroalloy plants and a media empire. He is married to Elena Pinchuk, the daughter of former Ukrainian President Leonid
Kuchma. Pinchuk's been accused of profiting immensely from the purchase of state-owned assets at
severely below-market prices through political favoritism.
Pinchuk used his media empire to deflect blame from his father-in-law, Kuchma, for the
September 16, 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. Kuchma was never charged but is
widely believed to have ordered the murder. A series of recordings would seem to back up
this assertion.
On April 4 through April 12 2016, Ukrainian Parliamentarian Olga Bielkov had
four meetings – with Samuel Charap (International Institute for Strategic Studies),
Liz Zentos (National Security Council), Michael Kimmage (State Dept) and David Kramer (McCain
Institute).
Doug Schoen filed FARA documents
showing that he was paid $40,000 a month by Victor Pinchuk (page 5) – in part to arrange
these meetings.
Schoen attempted to arrange another 72 meetings with Congressmen and media (page 10). It is
unknown how many meetings took place.
Schoen has worked for both Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Schoen helped Pinchuk establish ties with the Clinton Foundation. The Wall Street Journal
reported
how Schoen connected Pinchuk with senior Clinton State Department staffers in order to pressure
former Ukrainian President Yanukovych to release Yulia Tymoshenko – a political rival of
Yanukovych – from jail.
The relationship between Pinchuk and the Clintons continued.
In 2013, Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk welcomed current U.S. Democratic Party
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton onto the stage at his Yalta European Strategy, an annual
conference he funds to promote Ukraine's European integration and strategy, calling her: "a
real megastar."
Clinton and her husband Bill, the 42nd U.S. president, have been paid speakers at the annual
YES and other Pinchuk events. They describe themselves as friends of Pinchuk, who is known
internationally as a businessman and philanthropist.
To date, Pinchuk's charitable foundation has given $125 million to various causes, according
to his spokespeople.
Although exact numbers are not clear,
reports filed by the Clinton Foundation indicate that as much as $25 million of Pinchuk's
"charitable donations" went to the Clinton organization.
Victor Pinchuk , a steel magnate whose father-in-law, Leonid Kuchma, was president of
Ukraine from 1994 to 2005, has directed between $10 million and $25 million to the foundation.
He has lent his private plane to the Clintons and traveled to Los Angeles in 2011 to attend Mr.
Clinton's star-studded 65th birthday celebration.
Later, the Clintons would try to distance themselves from Pinchuk.
Emails made public Tuesday show a Ukrainian businessman and major Clinton Foundation donor
was invited to Hillary Clinton's home during the final year of her diplomatic tenure, despite
her spokesman's insistence in 2014 that the donor never crossed paths with Clinton while she
served as secretary of state.
Amid scrutiny of Clinton's ties to Pinchuk in 2014, the Democratic nominee's spokesman, Nick
Merrill, said Pinchuk had never met with Clinton during that time. He
told the New York Times that, "from Jan. 21, 2009, to Feb. 1, 2013," the Ukrainian
businessman "was never on her schedule."
Pinchuk, who has given up to $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, appeared on the guest
list that was sent between Dennis Cheng, an executive at the foundation, and Huma Abedin, then
Clinton's deputy chief of staff at the State Department, ahead of a June 2012 dinner. Abedin
noted in a subsequent email that the gathering would be hosted in Clinton's home.
Pinchuk's dinner invitation was exposed in a
series of emails obtained by Citizens United.
Melanne Verveer, a senior Ukrainian-American official at the State Department, often acted
as a go-between for Clinton and Pinchuk. Verveer conveyed
Pinchuk's best wishes to the secretary of state in Feb. 2010 after meeting with him in
Ukraine.
After speaking with Pinchuk in Sept. 2011, Verveer
informed Clinton that the businessman had been asked by Viktor Yanukovych, then the
president of Ukraine, to relay to her some of his diplomatic interests in deepening ties to the
rest of Europe.
The intersection of Pinchuk's advocacy for Yanukovych with Clinton's State Department is
noteworthy because Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, was felled by his
connections to Yanukovych. Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign last week.
Hacked Podesta emails released via Wikileaks showed ongoing contact between Pinchuk and the
Clintons. From a March 30, 2015 email :
Victor Pinchuk is relentlessly following up (including this morning) about a meeting with
WJC in London or anywhere in Europe. Ideally he wants to bring together a few western leaders
to show support for Ukraine, with WJC probably their most important participant.
I sense this is so important because Pinchuk is under Putin's heel right now, feeling a
great degree of pressure and pain for his many years of nurturing stronger ties with the
West.
In addition to being a Clinton Foundation donor, Pinchuk is also on the International Advisory
Board of the Atlantic Counsel – an NATO-aligned American think tank specializing in
the field of international affairs.
Pinchuk's fellow Advisory Board members are industry leaders and former heads of state.
The Atlantic Counsel has been historically active in Ukraine through their Ukraine in Europe Initiative . More
recently, on January 19, 2017, the Atlantic Counsel
announced a partnership with Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Group.
Hunter Biden, former VP Joe Biden's son, sits on Burisma's board.
Biden was placed on Burisma's board after Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine
Geoffrey Pyatt held a phone conversation regarding installation of Arseniy Yatsenyuk in place
of then-President Yanukovych. Need of support from VP Biden was noted (more
here ):
On or before February 4 2014 – Call between Pyatt and Nuland discussing removal of
Yanukovych and installation of Yatsenyuk.
February 22, 2014 – Yanukovych was
removed as President of Ukraine.
February 27 2014 – Yatsenyuk was installed as Prime Minister of Ukraine.
Yatsenyuk would resign
in April 2016 amidst corruption accusations.
April 18 2014 – Hunter Biden was
appointed to the Board of Directors for Burisma – one of the largest natural gas
companies in Ukraine.
April 22 2014 – VP Biden travels to Ukraine and
offers support and $50 million in aid for Yatsenyuk's shaky new government.
The Atlantic Council, along with the Brookings Institute and the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, were the subject of an unflattering portrayal in a New York Times
article,
Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks :
More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of
dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government
officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors' priorities, an investigation by The
New York Times has found.
The think tanks do not disclose the terms of the agreements they have reached with foreign
governments. And they have not registered with the United States government as representatives
of the donor countries, an omission that appears, in some cases, to be a violation of federal
law.
As a result, policy makers who rely on think tanks are often unaware of the role of foreign
governments in funding the research.
Each is a major recipient of overseas funds, producing policy papers, hosting forums and
organizing private briefings for senior United States government officials that typically align
with the foreign governments' agendas.
Some interesting connections run through the Atlantic Council.
Dimitry Alperovich – the CEO of Crowdstrike that "investigated" the hacking of the
DNC's servers is a Non-Resident
Senior Fellow at Atlantic. The FBI was refused access to independently examine the DNC
servers. Interestingly, Alperovich's bio appears to have been disabled.
The Crowdstrike findings have been repeatedly called into questioned:
Intel Vets
Challenge 'Russia Hack' Evidence – DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a
speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Forensics show that the
copying was performed on the East coast of the U.S.
New Questions Over Claim Russia Hacked the Election – Cybersecurity experts who were
first to conclude that Putin hacked presidential election abandon some of their claims against
Russia – and refuse to co-operate with Congress.
I encourage you to read the report. I think you'll find it surprisingly lacking in detail
– highly generalized with very little in the way of substance.
The report was technically created by a joint effort between the CIA ( former
Director John Brennan), FBI ( former Director James Comey) and the NSA ( current
Director Mike Rogers) – and assembled by the DNI ( former Director James
Clapper).
The joint report contains one significant caveat:
CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has only moderate confidence
.
I wouldn't call it a discrepancy, I'd call it an honest difference of opinion between three
different organizations and in the end I made that call. It didn't have the same level of
sourcing and the same level of multiple sources .
In essence, the DNI's report was constructed by just three men – former DNI Director
Clapper, former CIA Director Brennan and former FBI Director Comey. This report was then used to push the entire Russian Narrative. It's appearing
increasingly likely that Clapper either used or affirmed some data from the Steele Dossier
in the IC Assessment Report.
Evelyn Farkas – who famously
disclosed the plan to disseminate information gathered on President Trump, is a
Non-Resident
Senior Fellow at Atlantic. Farkas served as Obama's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia.
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 no
longer have access to that intelligence.
Irena Chalupa – does not appear to be related to
Alexandra Chalupa (I've been unable to confirm and have seen conflicting reports) –
is a Non-Resident Fellow at
Atlantic. Irena Chalupa is also a senior correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. She
is a
former Director of the Ukrainian National Information Service (UNIS) – the Ukrainian
Congress Committee of America's Washington public affairs bureau. Irena Chalupa is also a member of
StopFake.org – Struggle Against Fake
Information About Events In Ukraine. Irena Chalupa's ideological interests in Ukraine are aligned directly with those of
Alexandra Chalupa.
Evelyn Farkas and Irena Chalupa worked together in 2014 on the Atlantic Council's
Coordinating on Ukraine .
Oleg Deripensky, a Russian oligarch once linked
to Paul Manafort, published an
Op-Ed in which he made the claim that George Soros was helping fund Fusion GPS.
He also highlighted a conversation between Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Victoria Nuland at
the Munich
Security Conference in February 2018.
I highlighted
Nuland's role in structuring the Ukrainian government in 2014.
I don't know about the Soros connection but I did find the Whitehouse-Nuland conversation
(Video is queued):
WHITEHOUSE: Even in an area [Climate Change] where the administration has carved out perhaps
the most irresponsible position it could, on an issue of global significance, nevertheless you
can't really resist the pressure of fact and science – and I guess what the Breitbart
crowd would call the Deep State – but what many of us would call knowledgeable
professionals who've given their lives to these things and actually know what they're talking
about
So even on that worst of all issues there's still a hope for continuity – at least in
the Deep State.
Note John Kerry smiling and applauding in the crowd.
NULAND: Well colleagues, you've now heard our bi-partisan, bicameral panel of Deep State
crowd loyalists give broad reassurance about continuity in U.S. leadership and in U.S. policy
overall.
For the record, Sheldon Whitehouse is a blithering idiot. Continue watching the video a moment longer to see Ex-Representative Jane Harman pay homage
to John McCain:
HARMAN: His voice, his presence, was instrumental in training generations of members of the
U.S. Congress on foreign policy issues.
NULAND: And the U.S. State Department
HARMAN: And the U.S. State Department too. He had his favorites, you being one Victoria.
I doubt John McCain has ever been right – in either policy or ideology. But he did
leave quite an unfortunate influence. These people all think the same. And they all think they know better than anyone else. Despite a tedious repetition of corruption and policy failures.
Now after her deposition Aaron should interview Fiona Hill. I would like to see how she would lose all the feathers of her cocky
"I am Specialist in Russia" stance. She a regular MIC prostitute (intelligence agencies are a part of MIC) just like Luke Harding. And
probably both have the same handlers.
Brilliant interview !
Harding is little more than an intelligence asset himself and his idea of speaking to "Russians" is London circle of Russian emigrants
which are not objective source by any means.
He's peddling a his Russophobic line with no substantiation. In fact, the interview constitutes an overdue exposure of this pressitute.
Notable quotes:
"... He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. ..."
"... This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral. ..."
"... Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia. ..."
"... Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil. ..."
"... Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs. ..."
"... Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News. ..."
"... GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked. ..."
"... Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking. ..."
"... NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!! ..."
"... Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here. ..."
"... His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected. ..."
That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence
(something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.
He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch
of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. That's not how you're going to
get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on
"oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season.
Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really,
its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations
of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding
for a shabby argument.
Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering
journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course
if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were
to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.
That is the video about fire arm legalization "cockroaches ", even if you are not Russian speaking it's pretty graphic to understand
the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ILxqIEEMg
And FYI - Central Asian workers do the low-wage jobs in Moscow, pretty like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in US. Yet, that "future
president" is trying to gain some popularity by labeling and demonizing them. Sounds familiar a bit?
"definitelly ddissagree with that assertation about Alexei he's had nationalist views but he's definitely not far right and
calling him a tool of US intelligence is pretty bs this is the exact same assertation that the Russian state media says about
him."
I disagree that there is any evidence of Navalny being tool of US intelligence, but you are wrong for not recognizing
that Navalny is ultranationalist. His public statements are indefensible. He is a Russian ultra nationalist, far right and a racist.
Statements about cockroaches, worse than rats, bullets being too good etc - there is no way to misunderstand that.
Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman
"all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always
cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil.
Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises
'' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling
the postal service company for transportation costs.
@trdi I am a Russian. And I remember the early Navalny who made me sick to my stomach with absolutely disgusting, RACIST, anti-immigration
commentaries. The guy is basically a NEO-NAZI who has toned down his nationalist diatribes in the past 10 or so years. Has he
really reformed? I doubt it.
MrChibiluffy, Navalny became relatively popular in Russia precisely at that time, especially during the White Ribbon protests
in 2011/2012. I remember it very well myself.
I am Russian and I lived in Moscow at that time and he was the darling of the Russian opposition. He publicly defined his views
and established himself back then and hasn't altered his position to this day.
What's more important is that around 2015 or so he made an alliance with the far-right and specifically Diomushkin who is a
neo-nazi activist. I understand that people change their views, it's just that he hasn't.
Nikita Gusarov it still feels like the best chance for some form of populist opposition atm. Even though they just rejected
him he has a movement. Would you rather vote for Sobchak?
Lets not forget that one reason many voted for Trump was his rhetoric about improving the peace-threatening antagonism towards
Russia, especially in order to help resolve the situation in Syria. It's not like it was secret he was trying to hide. He only
moderated his views somewhat when the Democrat-engineered anti-Russian smear campaign took off and there was a concerted effort
to tie him to Russia.
Is it crime surround yourself with people that will help you fullfill your pledges?
Yep, when he talked about murdering journalists, I paused the video and told my girlfriend about the murder of Michael Hastings.
Oh an PS the USA puts journalists in Guantanamo. We play real baseball.
Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths
or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate
to The Real News.
GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other
issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC
server was hacked.
Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know
if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever
you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase
that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking.
NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would
not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election.
Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller?
LIAR!!!!
Wow Aaron Matte NICE JOB. I'm only half through, I hope you don't make him cry. Do u make him cry? Did I hear this guy say
he's ultimately a storyteller? Lol.
It may seem like Trump has an alarming amount of associations with Russia, because he does.. that's how rich oligarchs work.
But it's all just SPECULATION still. Why publish a book on this without a smoking gun to prove anything? Collusion isn't even
a legal term, it's vague enough for people to make it mean whatever they want it to mean. People investigating and reporting on
this are operating under confirmation bias. Aaron, you're always appropriately critical and you're always asking the right questions.
You seem to be one of the few sane people left in media. Trump is a disgrace but there still is no smoking gun.
Omg a bunch of unproven conspiracy crap.. Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here..
How would anyone in the years before his candidacy have thought Trump would gain any political relevance. I mean even the pro
Hillary media thought until the end, their massive trump coverage would only help to get him NOT elected, but the opposite was
the case. This guy is a complete joke as are his theses. Actually reminding me of the guardian's so called report about Russian
Hacking in the Brexit referendum. Look here if you want to have a laugh
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/how-097-changed-the-fate-of-britain-not.html
Collusion Rejectionist! Ha Ha. Funniest interview ever. Well done Aaron. The Real News taking a stand for truth. So what's
in the book if there's no evidence? Guardian journalism? Stop questioning the official narrative, oh and have you heard of Estonia.
:)) ps that smiley face was not an admission of my working for the Kremlin.
Best interview ever. Aaron held him to his theories and asked what evidence or proof he had and he didn't come up with one
spec of evidence only hearsay and disputed theories. What a sad indictment this is on America. 1 year on a sensationalized story
and still nothing concrete. What a joke and proof of gullibility to anyone who believes this corporate media Narritive. I guess
at least they don't have to cover policies like the tax theft or net neutrality. This is why we need The Real news.
I'd rather have American business making business deals with Russia for things like hotels, rather than business deals with
the Pentagon to aim more weapons at the Russians. When haven't we been doing business with Russians? We might as well investigate
Cargill, Pepsi, McDonald's, John Deere, Ford, and most of our wheat farmers.
The Magnitsky Case
How true is the story on which US sanctions against Russia are based?
Exclusive for subscribers
Bill Browder turned the Americans against Putin with his statements about the death of a
whistleblower. However, his story is full of contradictions.
I'm almost tempted to open the month's trial Spiegel subscription on offer at the
walled-off article, but why read a "revelation" about something that all true Kremlin Stooges
the world over have known for years? -- and, I daresay, there are also more than a few who
are really in-the-know about the Magnitsky Case in the USA and in that state where
piece-of-shit Browder is now a citizen.
America eagerly embraced Browder's fabrications and rubbish because his tale fit the image
the United States is fond of cultivating of Russia, land of savagery and state repression
– but also for a more practical reason; it wanted legislation on the books which would
allow it to continue discriminating against Russia after the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was
relaxed, as it legally had to be with Russia's accession to the WTO. All members must be
granted Permanent Normal Trading Relations (PNTR) status by all other members, and America
wanted an instrument which would allow it to let Russia know things had not changed. So the
Magnitsky Act was safely in place before Jackson-Vanik restrictions were lifted.
Poking holes in Browder's story, gratifying as it is, will not make any practical
difference. As we are all aware, America will steamroller ahead as if nothing had happened,
and continue broadcasting its untruths as if it had never been contradicted, and its allies
will follow suit. The real glimmer of light is Germany's increasingly restless relationship
with the United States, and its implications for the completion of Nord Stream II. Once
that's done and dusted, either Russia or Germany can tell the USA to go fuck itself. It will
take years for the fact that Uncle Sam routinely lies in order to support manipulative
actions in its own interests to percolate through to the general public, because it mostly
listens to whoever yells the loudest. But once that pipeline is through and Russia's energy
connection to Europe exclusive of Ukraine is secure, it's just a matter of time before Uncle
Sam loses his grip on the whole region.
Browder and the Magnitsky Narrative: the end of a disinformation campaign?
24. November 2019
Der Spiegel has broken the anti-Russian story of the whistleblower's murder. The lie
construct has been known for some time: the scandal is that the media and politicians have
spread it unquestioned
Just over 10 years after the death of Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison, a large
news media organization has dared to write a critical article about this anti-Russian myth.
Browder, a shrewd businessman who made his money with tricks and tax evasion in the 1990s, is
another kind of Relotius [Claas-Hendrik Relotius: a former German journalist. He resigned
from Der Spiegel in 2018 after having admitted to numerous instances of journalistic fraud --
ME.] , who has also demonstrated his stance by moving from the USA to Britain for tax
avoidance. Persistent and eloquent, former hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who has allegedly
turned himself into a selfless human rights activist, has portrayed his employee Magnitsky as
a death-defying whistleblower and a fighter against the corrupt system of Vladimir Putin
.
The media and politicians believe in everything that fits in with their ideologies and
interests. But that's not Bidder's theme: if it were, he would have had to critically
question the role of Der Spiegel in this case as well
I any case, Bidder has not really been brave anyway. The European Court of Human Rights
(ECHR) had already made a decision about the Magnitsky Case: in September 2019, the court
granted damages to Magnitsky's family because of the conditions of his detention and his
sentencing after his death, but it did not call his death murder, nor did the court speak of
torture and it rejected key points in Browder's story .
Even then the media could have listened, but it didn't: it preferred to follow
Browder's misrepresentation, which stated, "The ECHR decision also completely destroys the
lies and propaganda about Sergei Magnitsky that the Russian government and its paid smear
campaigners in the West have been trying to spread for many years?
The article goes on to say that Bidder presents his article as a revelation of the truth,
and backs up this claim by publishing congratulatory Tweets from admiring subscribers to Der
Spiegel But the article criticising the great revelation in Der Spiegel says nothing new has
been published: what has been "revealed" by Bidder of Der Spiegel was already well known. The
article discusses Nekrasov's revelations and the blocking of the film he made exposing
Browder, stressing that Nekrasov is in no way a Putin fan.
The article critical of the Der Spiegel article says that Bidder's "revelations" also
reveal the ways of fake news story tellers, of how gullible audiences are manipulated, of how
anti-Russian prejudices are vigorously stoked by politicians, governments, Nato and NGOs. The
critical article also points out that the Council of Europe had looked at the case and
blindly accepted the Browder team interpretation of events in the Magnitsky Case, without
doing any independent research itself.
The above-linked article by Florian Rötzer ends thus:
Bill Browder, who otherwise reacts quickly, has not yet commented on the Der Spiegel
article. The strange thing is that Deutsche Welle [ German World Service -- not
Bundestag controlled, aber natürlich! ] has a report in Russian on the
Spiegel article by Bidder, but not in German or English. Bidder does not question this fact
either.
Have the German powers-that-be given the green-light, then, that Browder be exposed so as
to totally undermine the USA reason for imposing sanctions against the Evil Regime, including
its attempts to stop NS-2, whereby the Evil Orcs wish to control the EU energy market,
thereby enslaving the free and democratic satellite Western European satrap states of Uncle
Sam?
That's the same bottomfeeder and tax fraud Browder, who most probably killed Magnitsky. and who abruptly changed his
citizenship from the USA to British after his adventures in Russia. What a Chutzpah on the part of a person involved in
fleecing Russia after dissolution of the USSR, the activity supported by MI6 and CIA.
Businessman Bill Browder alleged Fusion GPS acted as an agent for Russian interests in 2016,
when the country was trying to combat the Magnitsky Act and its sanctions on Russian
officials.
"... Chalupa, founder of the political consulting firm Chalupa & Associates, LLC, and a co-chair of the Democratic National Committee's Ethnic Council, has been at the heart of efforts by allies of President Donald Trump to draw an equivalence between Russia's large-scale hacking and propaganda operation to interfere in the 2016 election with the actions of a small cadre of Ukrainian bureaucrats who allegedly worked with Chalupa to research former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's Russia ties. ..."
"... Her LinkedIn profile includes a work history: "Online Constituency Outreach Director" for John Kerry's presidential campaign; executive director for Democrats Abroad and five years as the director of the Office of Party Leaders for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). ..."
"... A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort's role in Yanukovych's rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych's political party. ..."
"... "The day after Manafort's hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC's communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation," Politico reported and that "officials [at the embassy] became 'helpful' in Chalupa's efforts explaining that she traded information and leads with them. ..."
"... Politico also reported the Ukraine Embassy worked "directly" with reporters researching Trump's alleged Russia ties -- a claim Shulyar denied. ..."
"... "But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia," Politico reported. ..."
"... "Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should contact Chalupa," Telizhenko said. "They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa." ..."
"... "In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet's ongoing investigation into Manafort," Politico reported. ..."
"... "For the record: I have never worked for a foreign government," Chalupa tweeted during the hearings. "I have never been to Ukraine. I was not an opposition researcher. In 2008, I knew Manafort worked for Putin's interests in Ukraine. I reported my concerns about him to the NSC in 2014 & sounded the alarm bells in 2016." ..."
"... In a profile of Chalupa in October 2018 in the Kyiv Post , she said her interest in Ukraine grew after the unrest and violence on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square in November 2013. ..."
"... "I have a diverse network of Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian friends on social media who were reporting real-time developments taking place in Kyiv that the western media was not covering," Chalupa said in the profile. "I wanted to do my part to be helpful to draw attention to the events on the Maidan, so I pulled together the heads of Ukrainian-American organizations and connected them with the White House." ..."
During the recent public impeachment hearings aimed at President Donald Trump, Republicans repeatedly mentioned
one woman's name: Alexandra Chalupa.
Chalupa may not be a household name, but if the impeachment effort against the president advances to the Senate
she might take center stage as an anti-Trump activist who could be credited with launching Russian collusion and
Ukraine bribery conspiracies.
If Democrats had not rejected almost all of the witnesses Republicans wanted to testify before the House Intelligence
Committee, Chalupa's role in the 2016 election may have been highlighted, including actions that led to the demise of
Paul Manafort, the man who was briefly Trump's presidential campaign manager and who is now serving a prison sentence
for financial fraud and conspiracy.
And despite the Democrats reluctance to have her at the witness table, Chalupa told
Politico
she wanted
to testify.
Eager Impeachment Witness
The
Politico
report
cited
Chalupa's willingness to be in the spotlight:
A longtime Democratic consultant and Ukrainian-American activist says she's itching to testify in the House's
public impeachment hearings to beat back Republican assertions that Ukrainian officials used her as a conduit for
information in 2016 to damage Donald Trump.
"I'm on a mission to testify," said Alexandra Chalupa, who Republicans identified as one of nine witnesses they
would like to testify publicly when the House begins public impeachment proceedings this week.
Chalupa, founder of the political consulting firm Chalupa & Associates, LLC, and a co-chair of the Democratic
National Committee's Ethnic Council, has been at the heart of efforts by allies of President Donald Trump to draw
an equivalence between Russia's large-scale hacking and propaganda operation to interfere in the 2016 election
with the actions of a small cadre of Ukrainian bureaucrats who allegedly worked with Chalupa to research former
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's Russia ties.
Chalupa'a Twitter account says she is a "human rights hobbyist, political strategist, connector, mom of 3 strong
girls. Lives in D.C., from California. On Putin & Trump's bad list," but her resume shows more about where her
loyalties lie.
Her LinkedIn profile
includes
a work history: "Online Constituency Outreach Director" for John Kerry's presidential campaign;
executive director for Democrats Abroad and five years as the director of the Office of Party Leaders for the
Democratic National Committee (DNC).
But it is in another
Politico
investigative piece in January 2017 that
reveals
-- despite media and Democrat denials -- Ukraine's efforts to influence the 2016 election and that Chalupa
lent them a hand.
In the report, entitled "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire, Kiev officials are scrambling to make
amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton" details of Chalupa's "mission" is outlined.
Longtime Activism Record
The story begins with Chalupa learning that lawyer and lobbyist Paul Manafort had been an adviser to Ukrainian
president Viktor Yanukovych before the latter fled the country under Putin's protection:
Manafort's work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa,
who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to
work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to
June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that
time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC's arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.
A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S.
Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested
in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort's role in Yanukovych's rise, as well as his ties to the
pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych's political party.
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
Politico
report also said Chalupa shared her research with the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign,
including the narrative about Russia/Trump collusion.
"I felt there was a Russia connection," Chalupa said. "And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to
be involved in this election."
Chalupa described Manafort as "Putin's political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections."
She also shared her research with then-Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and his aide, Oksana
Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy.
Those officials said that they knew about Manafort but were not worried because they believed Trump had little
chance of being the Republican nominee let alone winning the presidency.
And then Trump hired Manafort.
"The day after Manafort's hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC's communications staff on Manafort, Trump and
their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation,"
Politico
reported and that
"officials [at the embassy] became 'helpful' in Chalupa's efforts explaining that she traded information and leads
with them.
Politico
also reported the Ukraine Embassy worked "directly" with reporters researching Trump's alleged
Russia ties -- a claim Shulyar denied.
"But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she
instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia,"
Politico
reported.
"Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should contact Chalupa,"
Telizhenko said. "They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra
Chalupa."
"Oksana was keeping it all quiet," but "the embassy worked very closely with Chalupa," Telizhenko said.
"In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with
Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet's ongoing investigation into Manafort,"
Politico
reported.
Telizhenko also said in the
Politico
report: "If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or
Trump's involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September."
In a tweet she posted during the hearings, Chalupa defended notifying the Obama administration about Manafort.
She also defended her work with Ukrainian officials during the 2016 campaign by claiming she never visited the
country and was not employed by its government.
"For the record: I have never worked for a foreign government," Chalupa tweeted during the hearings. "I have never
been to Ukraine. I was not an opposition researcher. In 2008, I knew Manafort worked for Putin's interests in
Ukraine. I reported my concerns about him to the NSC in 2014 & sounded the alarm bells in 2016."
2016 Election Influencer
In a Yahoo News story investigative reporter Michael Isikoff named Chalupa as one of 16 "ordinary people" who
"shaped the 2016 election."
"Chalupa this month told
Politico
that, as her research and role in the election started becoming more
public, she began receiving death threats, along with continued alerts of state-sponsored hacking. But she said,
'None of this has scared me off.'"
In a profile of Chalupa in October 2018 in the
Kyiv Post
, she
said
her interest in Ukraine grew after the unrest and violence on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square
in November 2013.
"I have a diverse network of Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian friends on social media who were reporting real-time
developments taking place in Kyiv that the western media was not covering," Chalupa said in the profile. "I wanted to
do my part to be helpful to draw attention to the events on the Maidan, so I pulled together the heads of
Ukrainian-American organizations and connected them with the White House."
"This was the first of a handful of other meetings related to Ukraine she helped organize for Obama's National
Security Council," the
Post
reported.
The November 2019
Politico
piece explains why she is back in the spotlight:
Chalupa It's not only GOP House members who are interested in Chalupa, however. The right-wing activist group
Judicial Watch recently obtained visitor logs placing Chalupa at the White House several times in 2015, where she
attended meetings related to countering disinformation with other Ukrainian-Americans and sometimes worked with
the White House's Office of Public Liaison to organize ethnic engagement events, she said.
A photo of her at one of those meetings -- standing next to a man that conservative news outlets have identified
as the official who blew the whistle on Trump's interactions with Zelensky -- has again placed Chalupa at the center
of controversy.
She mused in an interview about how Republicans would be reacting now if she'd actually taken a job in Ukraine
that required her to shuttle back and forth from Kyiv to D.C. during the 2016 campaign. A position as an "embedded
consultant" in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was offered to her the day WikiLeaks began publishing stolen DNC
documents in July 2016, according to an email reviewed by Politico.
"I never responded to it," Chalupa said. "Felt it was a trap."
To date, it looks like Chalupa won't testify unless the impeachment effort advances to a Senate trial where
Republicans might have some tough questions for her.
Chalupa, for her part, thinks she can help the Democrats efforts to remove a duly elected president from office.
"As an expert on political hybrid warfare, including from first-hand experience being targeted by the Kremlin for
the past four years, I'm confident there's a lot I can contribute to the hearings," Chalupa said. "For now, it seems
the focus is exactly where it needs to be -- on Donald Trump and his accomplices trying to extort Ukraine, a U.S. ally
defending itself from Russia's ongoing military and hybrid warfare."
"... Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins. ..."
"... Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics ..."
"... "The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration. It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks. ..."
"... Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe" to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East -- and in D.C. -- certainly looked like a distant but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy agenda on questions that would require adult supervision." ..."
"... Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the crazy banner. ..."
"... To a great degree American foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions inherited from Old Europe. ..."
Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins.
Could it be my Russian paranoia. Nah, I am being unreasonable -- those people never had a bad feeling towards Trump's attempts to
boost Russian-American relations with Michael Flynn spearheading this effort.
Jokes aside, however, I can only imagine how SVR
and GRU are enjoying the spectacle. I can only imagine how many "free" promotions and awards can be attach to this thing as a
free ride.
Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't
remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics. I thought it
had been an American Admiral. I had no luck finding a reference so I googled it. Still no joy with the American admiral, but the
list thrown up had near the top of it this informative quote from Patrick Bahzad.
"The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration.
It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose
to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe"
to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth
called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East -- and in D.C. -- certainly looked like a distant
but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy
agenda on questions that would require adult supervision."
Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the
respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the
crazy banner. Or, to put it more soberly, form part of the neocon wing of those administrations. Though I, as an outside
observer, might be prejudiced here because I happen not to get on very well with Brzezinski and his copious output.
Allowing for that prejudice, which I confess runs very deep, I still think that to an extent American foreign policy has been
hijacked by Eastern European emigres who themselves retain some of the prejudices and mindset of another age and place.
Looking at it from afar, the influence of some Eastern European emigres on American foreign policy has been uniformly deleterious.
And that from a long way back and no matter whether those emigres are in Washington or Tel Aviv.
It cannot but help be distorting, that influence. It's not merely that unexamined Russophobia is embedded in the DNA of many
Eastern Europeans. There's a narrow minded focus on aggressive Machtpolitik, bred from centuries of violent territorial disputes
with neighbors.
That, transferred to the world stage as it must be when it infects the foreign policy of the United States - because that is
a country that cannot but help be at the centre of the world stage - distorts US foreign policy. To a great degree American
foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions
inherited from Old Europe.
In the most famous of his speeches Churchill spoke of the time when, as he hoped, "the New World, with all its power and might,
steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
Let the historians dispute as they will, that is what happened. And continued to happen for half a century and more. But there
was a price few noticed. The New World might have stepped forward to rescue the old, but it carried back from that old world a
most destructive freight.
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding
of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's
loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He
dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do
many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding
Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I
argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
I wrote what follows before reading Andrei's response to EO, but do not see much reason to change what I had written.
When in 1988 I ended up working at BBC Radio 'Analysis' programme because it was impossible to interest any of my old television
colleagues in the idea that one might go to Moscow and talk to some of the people involved in the Gorbachev 'new thinking', my
editor, Caroline Anstey, was an erstwhile aide to Jim Callaghan, the former Labour Prime Minister.
As a result of his involvement with the Trilateral Commission, she had a fascinating anecdote about what one of his fellow
members, the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, said about another, Zbigniew Brzezinski: that he could never work out which
of his country's two traditional enemies his Polish colleague hated most.
Almost a generation after hearing her say this, in December 2013, I read an article Brzezinski published in the 'Financial
Times, headlined 'Russia, like Ukraine, will become a real democracy.'
Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription wall, but it clearly expresses its author's fundamental belief that after all those
years of giving Russia the 'spinach' treatment -- to use Victoria Nuland's term -- it would finally 'knuckle under', and become
a quiescent satellite of the West.
An ironic sidelight on this is provided in a recent article by a lady called Anna Mahjar-Barducci on the 'MEMRI' site -- which
actually has some very useful material on matters to do with Russia for those of us with no knowledge of the language -- headlined
'Contemporary Russian Thinkers Series -- Part I -- Renowned Russian Academic Sergey Karaganov On Russia And Democracy.'
Its subject, who I remember well from the days when he was very much one of the 'new thinkers', linked to it on his own website,
clearly pleased at what he saw as an accurate and informed discussion of his ideas.
There is an obvious risk of succumbing to facetiousness, but sometimes what one thinks are essential features of an argument
can be best brought out at the risk of caricaturing it.
It seems to me that some of the central themes of Karaganov's writing over the past few years -- doubly interesting, because
his attacks on conventional Western orthodoxies are very far from silly, and because he is a kind of 'panjandrum' of a significant
section of the Russian foreign policy élite -- may be illuminated in this way.
So, attempting to link his Russian concerns to British and American ones, some central contentions of his writings might be
put as follows:
'"Government of the people, by the people, for the people' looked a lovely idea, back in 1989. But if in practice "by the people"
means a choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn, how can it be "for the people?"
'Moreover, it turned out that our "deplorables" were always right, against us 'intellectuals', in grasping that, with "Russophobes"
running Western policy, a "real democracy" would simply guarantee that we remained as impotent and humiliated as people like Brzezinski
clearly always wanted us to be.
'Our past, and our future, both in terms of alliances and appropriate social and political systems, are actually "Eurasian":
a 'hybrid' state, whose potential greatest advantage actually should be seen as successfully synthesising different inheritances.
'As the need for this kind of synthesis is a normal condition, with which most peoples have to reckon, this gives us a very
real potential advantage over people in the West, who, like the communists against whom I rebelled, believe that there is one
path along which all of humanity must -- and can -- go.'
At the risk of over-interpreting, I might add the following conclusion:
'Of course, precisely what this analysis does not mean is that we are anti-European -- simply that we cannot simply come to
Europe, Europe come some way to meet us.
'Given time, Helmut Schmidt's fellow countrymen, as also de Gaulle's, may very well realise that their future does not lie
in an alliance with a coalition of people like Brzezinski and traditional "Russophobes" from the "Anglosphere".
'And likewise, it does not lie with the kind of messianic universalist "liberalism" -- and, in relation to some of the SJC
and LGBT obsessions, one might say "liberalism gone bonkers" -- which Putin criticized in his interview with the "Financial Times"
back in June.
An obvious possibility implicit in the argument is that, if indeed the continental Europeans see sense, then the coalition
of traditional 'Anglophobes' and the 'insulted and injured' or the 'borderlands' may find itself marginalized, and indeed, on
the 'dustbin of history' to which Trotsky once referred.
Of course, I have no claims to be a Russianist, and my reading of Karaganov may be quite wrong.
But I do strongly believe that very superficial readings of what was happening when I was working in the 'Analysis' office,
back in 1988-9, have done an immense disservice alike to Britain and the United States.
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding
of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's
loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He
dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do
many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding
Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I
argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
David, Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. But the events of two days ago with Putin and Lavrov being personally
present at the unveiling of the monument to Evgenii Primakov in a front of Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs speaks, in fact
screams, volumes. You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as I type this and it means that the West "lost"
(quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose) Russia and it can be "thankful" for that to a so called Russia
Studies field in the West which was primarily shaped and then turned into the wasteland, in large part thanks to influx of East
European "scholars" and some "Russian" dissidents which achieved their objectives by drawing a caricature. They succeeded and
Russia had it with the West.
DH, appreciate your comment. Haven't read the MEMRI paper yet. Scanned the first page though.
Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. ... You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as
I type this and it means that the West "lost" (quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose)
Well, two things sticked out for me during Tumps reelection campain.
1) on the surface he stated, he wanted closer relations to Russia. Looked at more closely, as should be expected, maybe. They
were ambigous. If I may paraphrase it colloguially: I meet them and, believe me, if I don't get that beautiful deal, i'll be out
of the door the next second.
2) he promised to be enigmatic, compared to earlier American administrations. In other words, hard to read or to predict. Guess
one better is as dealmaker. But in the larger intelligence field? Enigmatic may well be a commonplace. No?
Otherwise, Andrei, I would appreciate your further elaboration on Karaganov as opportunist.
Andrei: Strzok and Pientka come from Galicia -- the westernmost portion of what is now Ukraine -- that was acquired by Empress
Maria Theresa in the mid - 18th century.
I have been curious about precisely where both Srzok and Pientka came from, but have not had time to do any serious searches.
What is the actual evidence that they have Galician origins?
And, if they do, what are these?
I would of course automatically tend to assume that Polish names mean that their origins are Polish.
But then, if this is so, why are they enthusiastically collaborating with 'Banderista' Ukrainians?
It has long been a belief of mine that one of Stalin's great mistakes was to attempt to incorporate Galicia into the empire
he was creating.
Had he returned it to Poland, the architects of the Volhynia massacres of Poles -- as also of the massacres of Jews in Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg
-- could have gone back to their old habits of assassinating Polish policemen.
I first picked up the Galician connection in an article by Scott Humor: " North America is a land run by Galician zombies "
-- published by The Saker on July 4, 2018. It seems that Galicians, especially those that arrived after WWII, migrate into security
positions such as ICE / FBI / NSA etc. It may have to do with a family history of work in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Regrettably, I am not from Eastern Europe and cannot help you further about the Bortnicks, the Gathkes, Buchtas, and so on.
Putin foe says Fusion GPS was agent for Russia while
helping Clinton in 2016 by Jerry Dunleavy | November 26,
2019 07:14 PM
Print
this article T he company that conducted anti-Trump research for Hillary Clinton's 2016
campaign also worked for the Russian government, producing material that was used by Moscow to
pressure the United States, according to a longtime foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Businessman Bill Browder alleged Fusion GPS acted as an agent for Russian interests in 2016,
when the country was trying to combat the Magnitsky Act and its sanctions on Russian
officials.
Browder, 55, championed the
Magnitsky Act, which was named for his tax lawyer, corruption
whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Magnitsky died in a Russian prison in 2009 after his
investigation for Browder's business uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian tax
fraud implicating Russian officials.
Putin, who despises the law, retaliated by banning American adoptions of Russian
children.
"The work that [Fusion GPS co-founder] Glenn Simpson did involved trying to change the
narrative of how Sergei Magnitsky was killed," said Browder. "He and the Russians paying him
wanted people in Washington to believe that Sergei Magnitsky died of natural causes instead of
being killed. Glenn Simpson claimed that Sergei Magnitsky wasn't a whistleblower and that he
was criminal. He also claimed that all of my testimonies to have Magnitsky sanctions imposed
were untrue."
Browder said he believes Fusion GPS's work violated the Foreign
Agents Registration Act . He sent a
complaint to the Department of Justice in 2016, and then-Senate Judiciary Committee
Chairman Chuck Grassley
urged the department to look into it in 2017.
"We did receive a response from the Justice Department, essentially stating that it can
neither confirm nor deny the existence of a specific FARA investigation," Grassley's office
told the Washington Examiner .
The DOJ declined the Washington Examiner 's request for comment, and a lawyer for
Fusion GPS didn't respond, though the company has previously said
"it was not required to register under FARA and it did not spread false information about
William Browder or Sergei Magnitsky."
Browder pointed out that Fusion GPS and Simpson began working for Russian lawyer Natalia
Veselnitskaya, who would later make headlines for
her meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower , in 2014 and provided her with
anti-Magnitsky research for years. Veselnitskaya, a former Russian prosecutor, maintained
Russian government ties, according to special counsel Robert Mueller, including lobbying
against 2016's expanded Magnitsky Act.
The DOJ alleged that Russia-owned real estate company Prevezon Holdings laundered fraudulent
money, and the
company later settled with the DOJ for $5.9 million in what the department
called "a $230 million Russian tax refund fraud scheme involving corrupt Russian
officials."
Veselnitskaya hired law firm BakerHostetler to help Prevezon in court, and the firm hired
Fusion GPS, which Simpson
confirmed in an interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 2017.
"Browder was always eager to testify before Congress or appear on TV, but he did not want to
answer questions from BakerHostetler lawyers about his role as a whistleblower in the Prevezon
case. So the lawyers asked Fusion to figure out how they could get Browder's testimony. What
ensued was a legal game of cat and mouse in which Fusion developed information that would help
BakerHostetler subpoena Browder multiple times, forcing him to testify about his business
activities in Russia and earning Fusion his everlasting enmity. The U.S. government had staked
its case against Prevezon on the credibility of Browder. Yet he was reluctant to explain under
oath where he had obtained his evidence. It was an odd position for a human rights crusader to
take," Simpson and Fusion GPS co-founder Peter Fritsch wrote in their new book, Crime in
Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump .
"I participated in two all-day depositions, but the case was settled before it went to
court," said Browder. "Otherwise, I would've been on the witness stand."
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act documents released in 2018 show the DOJ and the FBI
made extensive use of Steele's dossier in 2016. Fusion GPS was
hired by Clinton's campaign and the DNC through the Perkins Coie law firm. Fusion GPS then
hired Steele, who allegedly reached out to Russian sources to put together his dossier.
Clinton's campaign manager Robby Mook said they
received briefings from Perkins Coie about Fusion GPS's findings during the campaign.
Browder contended Fusion GPS created a dossier against him, too, by using "false
information."
"Since the Russians were working so closely with Simpson on the anti-Magnitsky, anti-Bill
Browder dossier, it would seem unlikely to me that the Russians wouldn't know that there was
another dossier being created," Browder said.
Mueller's report on Russian election
interference detailed the June 2016 meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., campaign chairman
Paul Manafort, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and various Russians, including Veselnitskaya.
The meeting was pitched to Trump's campaign as an opportunity to get damaging information on
Clinton, but Veselnitskaya pulled a bait-and-switch and turned it into a presentation on
Russia's desire to repeal the Magnitsky Act.
Veselnitskaya presented a
short dossier echoing nearly identical Kremlin talking points that were passed
to a Republican congressman by the Russia prosecutor general's office in April 2016,
criticizing the Magnitsky Act and criticizing Browder as a "fugitive criminal" who was engaged
in a massive fraudulent financial scheme in support of Democrats. In his Senate testimony,
Simpson admitted to researching many of the allegations that appeared in Veselnitskaya's
talking points. When Donald Trump Jr. asked Veselnitskaya for proof, she did not provide any,
according to Mueller's report. Russian American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer
Rinat Akhmetshin and the Russians then complained about U.S. sanctions and mentioned Russian
adoption, and the Trump associates considered it a waste of time.
Browder believes that presentation was from Fusion GPS research, though Simpson denies any
foreknowledge of the Trump Tower meeting despite seeing Veselnitskaya the day before, the day
of, and the day after.
Simpson "was a person who was coordinating an advocacy campaign for Natalia Veselnitskaya,
and the Trump Tower meeting seemed to be part of that advocacy campaign," said Browder. "It
seems a little odd that he would know about everything else but not that one meeting."
Veselnitskaya attended the meeting with fellow Russian anti-Magnitsky Act advocates,
including Akhmetshin. Simpson told the
Senate that BakerHostetler instructed Fusion GPS to pass anti-Browder research to
Akhmetshin, who lobbied Congress against the Magnitsky Act. Akhmetshin, who is in Browder's
FARA complaint, criticized Browder in congressional
testimony in 2017 and filed a lawsuit against him
in 2018.
In January, the DOJ unsealed an
indictment against Veselnitskaya, now out of reach in Russia, alleging she'd obstructed
justice during the Prevezon case through secret collaboration with Russia.
Fusion GPS's co-founders said in their book that Prevezon's court case was separate from its
anti-Magnitsky Act activities.
"In early 2016, Prevezon -- apart from the court case -- had launched a lobbying campaign
against the Global Magnitsky Act, working with Akhmetshin, in a backhanded effort to discredit
Browder in the halls of Congress," they wrote.
The firm never registered under FARA, they said, because it was not lobbying.
"Fusion had no say in the matter if Prevezon decided to take evidence from a court case and
repurpose it. But all this would come back to haunt Fusion," they wrote.
"... Fiona Hill committed perjury by deliberately lying under oath to Congress that there was no Ukraine interference in the 2016 election, when this is a documented fact with multiple sources and witnesses. ..."
"... DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa went to Ukraine's Embassy in Washington DC in early 2016 asking them to find dirt on Paul Manafort and Trump. ..."
"... Poroshenko's regime in Ukraine complied with the request and sent whatever information they could find. These included the payments made to Manafort by the previous President Yanukovych for Manafort's lobbying work to improve Ukraine's relations with the EU between circa 2006 and February 2014. (Both the Podesta's also worked on this same lobbying contract to improve EU relations, but for some reason this hasn't been widely reported!) ..."
"... Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire. Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton. ..."
Fiona Hill committed perjury by deliberately lying under oath to Congress that there was no
Ukraine interference in the 2016 election, when this is a documented fact with multiple sources
and witnesses.
She should be immediately prosecuted for perjury and sentenced to the maximum sentence of 5
years in jail.
She should also be prosecuted for failing to uphold her Oath of Office to protect the U.S.
from all enemies, both foreign and domestic, of which she is undoubtedly one along with all of
her close associates.
Bribery by Foreign Despots such as the Saudis would certainly come under "working for a Foreign
Power".
And so would working on behalf of international banking cartels.
Ideally she should be prosecuted for Treason and spend the rest of her life in jail, but
this would be harder to prove.
I am sure lots of other crimes could be found to keep her in jail for a VERY long time if a
suitable patriotic and honest investigator and prosecutor, working in the interests of ordinary
Americans were to be found to pursue the cases against her.
Ukraine Interference in the 2016 election for the benefit of Hillary Clinton
DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa went to Ukraine's Embassy in Washington DC in early 2016
asking them to find dirt on Paul Manafort and Trump.
Poroshenko's regime in Ukraine complied with the request and sent whatever information they
could find. These included the payments made to Manafort by the previous President Yanukovych
for Manafort's lobbying work to improve Ukraine's relations with the EU between circa 2006 and
February 2014. (Both the Podesta's also worked on this same lobbying contract to improve EU
relations, but for some reason this hasn't been widely reported!)
This information resulted in the firing of Paul Manafort soon after the Republican
Convention in 2016.
This has been confirmed by multiple members of Poroshenko's regime, Ukraine MPs and other
witnesses, and was fairly widely reported in the mainstream media in late 2016 and 2017.
"... So the Ukrainians traded their corrupt Ukrainian elected President, mostly accumulating stuff in Ukraine, for corrupt neocon/ neolib Democrat bureaucrats and Ukrainian/ Americans, who now cannot be denied their pound of flesh (which will quickly exit Ukraine, taking much of that country's value with it). ..."
"... Even the anti-corruption agencies are corrupt! So American policy now is set by such bureaucrats, who not only play military adventurism games (to justify all that money in loans, grants, and weapons), but even pass the corruption level of the Native Ukrainians in skimming that incoming money and getting rich, and of course steal whatever isn't nailed down (American policy as previewed in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman"). ..."
"to a one they are turf-conscious careerists who think they set U.S. foreign policy and
resent the president for intruding upon them. It is increasingly evident that Trump's true
offense is proposing to renovate a foreign policy framework that has been more or less
untouched for 75 years (and is in dire need of renovation)."
This may be even worse than Lawrence depicts. It is clear that Vindman in his opening
remarks made it clear that the consensus policy of experts (like John Bolton) had been
following an agenda from the Obama administration (or before, but implemented under Obama,
Biden and Nuland) and it is verboten to change anything, despite constitutionally these
people at best only having advisory roles to the President (and constitutionally the
President can ask for their opinions in writing; CYA even back then!) The Ukrainian Americans
involved in the coup (national security from Vindman's perspective) are deeply committed
since 2014, and they expect to reap the benefits with no interference from Trump. And the
Democrats/ Ukraine-Americans "running the show" are probably much more corrupt than
Ukrainians governing their country before 2014.
I have started Oliver Bullough's "Money Land" and was aghast at the luxury items
Yanukovich had stolen through corruption and accumulated at his many properties. Surely with
so much money going to corrupt Yanukovich and his henchmen, the coup would have been a
blessing for the Ukrainian people! Right? I was shocked to find that after the overthrow of
Yanukovich in 2014, the median per capita household income in Ukraine, which had risen
steadily from $2032 in 2010 to $2601 in 2013, had dropped over 50% to $1110 to $1135 in 2015
and 2016, and has only risen to $1694 in 2018 (ceicdata.com).
So the Ukrainians traded their
corrupt Ukrainian elected President, mostly accumulating stuff in Ukraine, for corrupt
neocon/ neolib Democrat bureaucrats and Ukrainian/ Americans, who now cannot be denied their
pound of flesh (which will quickly exit Ukraine, taking much of that country's value with
it).
Even the anti-corruption agencies are corrupt! So American policy now is set by such
bureaucrats, who not only play military adventurism games (to justify all that money in
loans, grants, and weapons), but even pass the corruption level of the Native Ukrainians in
skimming that incoming money and getting rich, and of course steal whatever isn't nailed down
(American policy as previewed in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman").
A controversial whistleblower who allegedly reported second-hand on President
Donald Trump's
private conversation with the Ukrainian President
Volodymyr
Zelensky visited the Obama White House on numerous occasions, according to Obama era visitor logs obtained by Judicial Watch.
Last week
Real Clear Investigation's first reported the whistleblower's name. It is allegedly CIA officer Eric Ciaramella. His name, however,
has been floating around Washington D.C. since the leak of Trump's phone call. It was considered an 'open secret' until reporter
Paul Sperry published his article. Ciaramella has never openly stated that he is the whistleblower and most news outlets are not
reporting his name publicly.
He was detailed to the National Security Counsel during the Obama Administration in 2015 and was allegedly sent back to the CIA
in 2017, after a number of people within the Trump White House suspected him of leaking information to the press, according to several
sources that spoke with SaraACarter.com .
Further, the detailed visitor logs reveal that a Ukrainian expert
Alexandra Chalupa , a contractor that was hired by the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election, visited the White
House 27 times.
Chalupa allegedly coordinated with the Ukrainians to investigate then candidate Trump and his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Manafort was forced out of his short tenure as campaign manager for Trump when stories circulated regarding business dealings with
Ukrainian officials. Manafort was later investigated and convicted by a jury on much lesser charges then originally set forth by
Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation. He was given 47 months in prison for basically failing to pay appropriate taxes and
committing bank fraud.
Both Ciaramella and Chalupa are of interest to Republican's investigating the what some conservatives have described as the second
Trump 'witch-hunt.' And many have called for the whistleblower to testify to Congress.
They are absolutely correct and within the law. There is so much information and evidence that reveals that this was no ordinary
whistleblower complaint but one that may have been based on highly partisan actions targeting Trump.
Here's just one example : Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes said its impossible to have a fair impeachment
inquiry without the testimony of the alleged whistleblower because he is a 'fact foundational witness' who had met with Intelligence
Committee Chairman
Adam
Schiff, D-CA, previously. Schiff had originally denied that he had any contact with his committee and then had to walk back his
statements when it was revealed that the whistleblower had met with the Democrats prior to filing his complaint to the Intelligence
Inspector General about the President.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, said the visitor logs reveal that there is much lawmakers or the American public don't know
about what happened during the 2016 presidential elections and moreover it raises very significant questions about the apparent partisan
nature of the whistleblower.
"Judicial Watch's analysis of Obama White House visitor logs raises additional questions about the Obama administration, Ukraine
and the related impeachment scheme targeting President Trump," said Fitton, in a press release Friday.
"Both Mr. Ciaramella and Ms. Chalupa should be questioned about the meetings documented in these visitor logs."
Read Below From Judicial Watch
The White House visitor logs revealed the following individuals met with Eric Ciaramella while he was detailed to the Obama White
House:
Daria Kaleniuk: Co-founder and executive director of the Soros-funded Anticorruption Action Center (AntAC) in Ukraine. She
visited on December 9, 2015
The Hill
reported that in April 2016, during the U.S. presidential race, the U.S. Embassy under Obama in Kiev, "took the rare step of
trying to press the Ukrainian government to back off its investigation of both the U.S. aid and (AntAC)."
Gina Lentine: Now a senior program officer at Freedom House, she was formerly the Eurasia program coordinator at Soros funded
Open Society Foundations. She visited on March 16, 2016.
Rachel Goldbrenner: Now an NYU law professor, she was at that time an advisor to then-Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha
Power. She visited on both January 15, 2016 and August 8, 2016.
Orly Keiner: A foreign affairs officer at the State Department who is a Russia specialist. She is also the wife of State Department
Legal Advisor James P. Bair. She visited on both March 4, 2016 and June 20, 2015.
Nazar Kholodnitzky: The lead anti-corruption prosecutor in Ukraine. He visited on January 19, 2016.
On March 7, 2019, The Associated Press reported
that the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch called for him to be fired.
Michael Kimmage: Professor of History at Catholic University of America, at the time was with the State Department's policy
planning staff where specialized in Russia and Ukraine issues. He is a fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He was also one of
the signatories to the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group Statement of Principles. He visited on October 26, 2015.
James Melville: Then-recently confirmed as Obama's Ambassador to Estonia, visited on September 9, 2015.
On June 29, 2018, Foreign Policy
reported that Melville resigned in protest of Trump.
Victoria Nuland: who at the time was assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs met with Ciaramella on
June 17, 2016.
(Judicial Watch has previously uncovered
documents revealing Nuland had an extensive involvement with Clinton-funded
dossier . Judicial Watch also released
documents revealing that Nuland was involved in the Obama State Department's "urgent" gathering of classified Russia investigation
information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Trump taking office.)
Artem Sytnyk: the Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Bureau director visited on January 19, 2016.
On October 7, 2019, the Daily Wire
reported leaked tapes show Sytnyk confirming that the Ukrainians helped the Clinton campaign.
The White House visitor logs revealed the following individuals met with Alexandra Chalupa, then a DNC contractor:
Charles Kupchan: From 2014 to 2017, Kupchan served as special assistant to the president and senior director for European
affairs on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) in the Barack Obama administration. That meeting was on November 9,
2015.
Alexandra Sopko: who at the time was a special assistant and policy advisor to the director of the Office of Intergovernmental
Affairs, which was run by Valerie Jarrett. Also listed for that meeting is Alexa Kissinger, a special assistant to Jarrett. That
meeting was on June 2, 2015.
Asher Mayerson: who at the time was a policy advisor to the Office of Public Engagement under Jarrett had five visits with
Chalupa including December 18, 2015, January 11, 2016, February 22, 2016, May 13, 2016, and June 14, 2016.
Mayerson was previously an intern at the Center for American Progress. After leaving the Obama administration, he went to work
for the City of Chicago Treasurer's office.
Mayerson met with Chalupa and Amanda Stone, who was the White House deputy director of technology, on January 11, 2016.
On May 4, 2016, Chalupa emailed DNC official Luis
Miranda to inform him that she had spoken to investigative journalists about Paul Manafort in Ukraine.
"... Browder is key in the U.S. demonization of Russia. Assange has exposed U.S. war crimes. For lawyers associated in the British legal system to take both sides on that conflict would appear to be an egregious conflict of interest. But it fits with the U.S.-UK support of the Browder-Magnitsky hoax and their cooperation in the attack on Assange. ..."
"... Bailin is a member of Matrix Chambers, which was founded by the wife of Tony Blair, the former neocon Labor British Prime Minister. He is solidly in the Browder camp. He represented Leonid Nevzlin, a major partner of Browder collaborator Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who according to filings with FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), paid $385,000 for Congress to adopt the Magnitsky Act which has been used by the U.S. as a weapon against the Russian government. ..."
"... In 2017 British legal actions surrounding an inquest into the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy, he represented Browder, who claimed that the Russian, who died of a heart attack, was somehow a victim of Russian President Putin. Perepilichnyy had lost money in investments he was handling for clients and had to get out of town. ..."
"... Needing support, he decamped to London and gave Browder documents relating to his client's questionable bank transfers. He died after a jog, Browder claimed he was poisoned by a rare botanical substance, obviously ordered by Putin, but forensic tests found that untrue. Robertson accused local police of a cover-up. ..."
"... Why did Assange or his advisors choose lawyers associated with the interests of the U.S. government and Browder? Or how could those lawyers be so ignorant about the facts of Browder's massive tax evasion and his Magnitsky story fabrications? ..."
"... What we are seeing now is no different from the Lula case in Brazil or any one of a thousand similar cases in authoritarian regimes. Upset the Deep State and you face selected targeted application of the law and the destruction of your life and future. ..."
"... because of the peculiar quirks of the legal system in Britain that may include a great deal of secrecy about how aspects of it operate, is how Julian Assange came to have such a dubious legal representation with its various connections to Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky ..."
"... who is going to foot these barristers' bills? ..."
Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises questions The network of lawyers in conflicting roles in Browder, Assange
and US government cases raises questions about Julian Assange's defense. Editor
A US government lawyer in the Assange extradition case just wrote a London Times oped
promoting the Browder Magnitsky hoax. Ben Brandon is one of five lawyers in a London network whose spokes link to convicted tax
fraudster William Browder, the U.S. government, and to both sides of the extradition case against whistleblower publisher Julian
Assange.
Here is how the British legal system works. Lawyers are either solicitors who work with clients or barristers who go to court
in cases assigned by the solicitors. To share costs, barristers operate in chambers , which provide office space, including
conference rooms and dining halls, clerks who receive and assign cases from solicitors, and other support staff. London has 210 chambers.
There are not "partners" sharing profits, but members operate fraternally with each other.
Browder is key in the U.S. demonization of Russia. Assange has exposed U.S. war crimes. For lawyers associated in the British
legal system to take both sides on that conflict would appear to be an egregious conflict of interest. But it fits with the U.S.-UK
support of the Browder-Magnitsky hoax and their cooperation in the attack on Assange.
The law firm and chambers involved in the Browder-Assange stories are Mishcon de Reya, Matrix Chambers and Doughty Street Chambers.
Ben Brandon of Mishcon de Reya and Alex
Bailin of Matrix Chambers co-authored an opinion
article
in The Times of London October 24, 2019 in which they repeated William Browder's fabrications about the death of his accountant
Sergei Magnitsky.
The article aimed to promote the Magnitsky Act which builds a political wall against Russia. It is based on the fake claim that
Magnitsky, the accountant who handled Browder's tax evasion in Russia, was really a lawyer who exposed a government scam.
Except that is not true, there is no evidence for it, and the lies are documented
here . But the Act has prevented the Russians from collecting about $100 million Browder owes in back taxes and illicit stock
buys.
Brandon's and Bailin's connections are notable. Law firms, at least in the U.S., tend to stake out their commitments. Lawyers
who represent unions do not represent companies fighting unions. It appears to be different in Britain, where legal chambers have
members on either side of some cases.
Bailin is a member of Matrix Chambers, which was founded by the wife of Tony Blair, the former neocon Labor British Prime
Minister. He is solidly in the Browder camp. He represented Leonid Nevzlin, a major partner of Browder collaborator Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
who according to filings with FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), paid $385,000 for Congress to adopt the Magnitsky Act which
has been used by the U.S. as a weapon against the Russian government.
Nevzlin's suit was for $50 billion against Russia for money allegedly lost by the nationalization of Yukos Oil. Yukos was obtained
by Khodorkovsky in the mid-90s in one of then Russian President Boris Yeltsin's rigged auctions. Khodorkovsky's bank Menatep ran
the auction.
He paid $309 million for a controlling 78 percent of the state company. Months later, Yukos traded on the Russian stock exchange
at a market capitalization of $6 billion. Not surprising, after Yeltsin departed, the state wanted the stolen assets back.
To add insult to injury, Khodorkovsky laundered profits from Yukos through
transfer-pricing
and other scams.
Transfer pricing is when you sell products to a shell company at a fake low price, and the shell sells them on the world market
at the real price, giving you the rake-off. It cheats tax authorities and minority shareholders.
See how
Khodorkovsky and Browder did this with Russian company Avisma, which Khodorkovsky also got through a rigged auction.
The Times oped co-author, Brandon of Mishcon de Reya, has a startling connection. The day after an extradition request
targeting Julian Assange was
signed by the UK home secretary , Brandon representing the U.S. government, formally opened the extradition case.
Now look at another Assange link. Mark Summers , who is
representing Julian Assange is, along with Bailin,
a member of Matrix Chambers.
But while he is Assange's lawyer, Summers is acting for Assange's persecutor, the U.S. government, in a major extradition
case involving executives of Credit
Suisse in 2013 making fake loans and getting kickbacks from Mozambique government officials.
Does Assange, or those who care about his interests, know he is part of chambers working for the U.S. government?
And where do you put this factoid? Alex Bailin is representing Andrew Pearse, one of the Credit Suisse bankers that the U.S. government,
represented by Summers, is seeking to extradite!
But there's chambers where two members are each supporting both Browder and Assange.
Geoffrey Robertson is founder of Doughty Street Chambers. He is also a longtime Browder / Magnitsky story promoter. He has pitched
implementation of a Magnitsky Act in Australia and has served Browder in UK court.
In 2017 British legal actions surrounding an inquest into the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy, he represented Browder, who
claimed that the Russian, who died of a heart attack, was somehow a victim of Russian President Putin. Perepilichnyy had lost money
in investments he was handling for clients and had to get out of town.
Needing support, he decamped to London and gave Browder documents relating to his client's questionable bank transfers. He
died after a jog, Browder claimed he was poisoned by a rare botanical substance, obviously ordered by Putin, but forensic tests found
that untrue. Robertson
accused local
police of a cover-up.
He is a legal advisor to Assange and is regularly
interviewed by international media about the case.
Jennifer Robinson of Doughty Street Chambers also has a Browder connection. She is acting for Paul Radu a journalist and official
of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) which is being
sued by an Azerbaijan MP. OCCRP is a Browder collaborator.
Browder admits in a deposition
that OCCRP prepared documents he would give to the U.S. Justice Department to accuse the son of a Russian railway official of
getting $1.9 million of $230 million defrauded from the Russian Treasury. The case was settled when the U.S. couldn't prove the charge,
and the target declined to spend more millions of dollars in his defense. OCCRP got the first Magnitsky Human Rights
award , set up for Browder's partners and acolytes.
Robinson is also the longest-serving member of Assange's legal team. She
acted for Assange in the Swedish extradition proceedings and in relation to Ecuador's request to the Inter-American Court of
Human Rights Advisory Opinion proceedings on the right to asylum.
Why did Assange or his advisors choose lawyers associated with the interests of the U.S. government and Browder? Or how could
those lawyers be so ignorant about the
facts of Browder's massive tax evasion and his Magnitsky story fabrications?
It raises questions about how they are handling the Assange defense.
The individuals cited were asked to respond to points made about them, but none did.
The Telegraph reports on a 2015 private dinner in the home of Doughty Street 's Geoffrey Robertson at which the
Magnitsky myth and sanctions against Russia are pitched to then-Labour-Party-leader Ed Miliband, and Doughty Street lawyer Amal
Clooney and co.:
Today we find aforementioned Browder/Magnitsky touts Alex Bailin, QC (Matrix lawyer and "legal writer for The Guardian, The
Times and The Lawyer – co-writer of the bogus FT Magnitsky column with Ben Brandon), and Geoffrey Robertson, QC (Doughty
Street's eminence grise), both on the Advisory Board of Amal Clooney's " TrialWatch " (part of the Clooney " Foundation
for Justice "): TrialWatch® Advisory Board
universal
The tentacles of the deep state (no longer secret now) are clamping on our life so tightly that one would honestly wish that one
of those extraterrestrial rocks would smash into this planet causing total annhilation –just in order to get rid of these psychopathic
mongrels ruling over us.
I am not sure, though, fantasy could solve problems!
mark
We have a corrupt and politicised "justice" system used for the purposes of intimidation and political persecution. Some people
still believe in fairy stories like the Rule of Law and an independent judiciary.
What we are seeing now is no different from the Lula case in Brazil or any one of a thousand similar cases in authoritarian
regimes. Upset the Deep State and you face selected targeted application of the law and the destruction of your life and future.
Jen
Unfortunately what we don't get in Lucy Komisar's article, perhaps because of the peculiar quirks of the legal system in Britain
that may include a great deal of secrecy about how aspects of it operate, is how Julian Assange came to have such a dubious legal
representation with its various connections to Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Who recommended Mishcon de Reya and
other barristers to Assange and Wikileaks, and who is going to foot these barristers' bills? Are there no other barristers
specialising in human rights cases in Britain who can take on Assange's case or was the case awarded to certain chambers in some
kind of bidding arrangement or some other competitive arrangement?
BTW it's not unusual for law firms in Britain and Australia to have clients whose interests may be opposed, ie a law firm can
represent both a company and a trade union whose members may be employed by that company. What usually happens is that different
teams of lawyers work for the two sides and the work of one team is separated from the other team by internal firewalls. The firewalls
include physical separations: the teams may even work on different floors so as not to share copiers or other office equipment
and lawyers in opposing teams may be discouraged from socialising with each other during lunch and coffee breaks. Sounds bizarre
but this does happen.
R Heybroek
With respect, you can't judge British law by US standards. Barristers are briefed by solicitors, not individual clients, and associate
primarily in areas of competence, e.g. criminal, corporate or tax law. In their specialization, they generally follow the 'cab
rank' principle and accept briefs from prosecution or defence as they arise. It's a strength of the system, not a problem.
Whatever I may think of some of the barristers in Matrix or Doughty, it would be foolish to assume that everyone in a chambers
shares the same political views or attitudes. They do not. They argue like cats and dogs, usually with considerable professional
respect.
I see nothing dubious about the range of experience of Assange's legal team. If his solicitor thinks a barrister has a conflict
of interest, he will withdraw the brief. I'd suggest you direct your enquiries to the instructing solicitor.
Julian Assange was a dead man walking from the time he was taken (totally illegally) from the Ecuadorian embassy. Just about all
the Wikileaks team are now totally corrupted; and as this article points out, most of Assange's legal team are also corrupted.
The alleged mental deterioration of Assange, combined with harsh (and totally unnecessary) prison conditions, might account for
some of this.
An important subsidiary question becomes, why aren't any of his high profile champions asking these questions? John Pilger? Craig
Murray? They all bang on about stuff like 'torture' but never point out that his lawyers totally fail to address this pretty darn
crucial issue. Craig Murray says 'Julian has great lawyers'. Really? If we step back and think for a minute, does it honestly
look that way?
They can't even get him out of solitary or into a lower security prison. Shit, they can't even get his mail delivered adequately
or uphold his right to get regular legal visitation! And yet no one, not even his parents, are complaining about these failures!
And who is running Wikileaks these days? Do we have any way of being sure they aren't just a co-opted shell?
Betrayed planet
To be fair Pilger is one of the few real supporters of Julian along with a handful of musicians. His lone voice is not enough.
I saw a clip of Pilger crying after the recent spectacle of a so called hearing. The presiding judge, The Honorary Upyourbottom
should have been in the dock for perjury, fraud, lying before a court and crimes against humanity.
LawStudent
I'm a 2nd year law student and I can confirm that questions about the conduct of Assange's defence are legion in my school. MNynpeople
talking about the inexplicable lapses. Just s fee usdyes often discussed: Why didn't the defense take up the judge's offer of
bail application? To say 'well they would lose' is counter to the basics of jurisprudence.
Why is there no complaint being lodged about his detention in a maximum security facility when he's on remand – not serving
a sentence – pending an extradition hearing? Why don't his lawyers lodge an appeal to the ECHR based on the testimony of the UN
observers? Why are his lawyers keeping such low media profiles?
It's generally agreed something is very 'off' about this.
L Took
I think his lawyers stated that they were never offered a bail application, even though the judge claimed they had refused one.
But I'm not sure; I had heard previous to this event that the lawyers would not ask because if they lost (the appeal?) Assange
could be further punished for the loss. Is this accurate?
MaryD
It may be relevant that one of Assange's barristers also represents the corporate psyop Extinction Rebellion!
nottheonly1
Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises questions. The network of lawyers in conflicting roles in Browder,
Assange and US government cases raises questions about Julian Assange's defense.
Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises only one question: What the?
I know it's not comedy, because people get seriously hurt and killed as a result of the transformation of a more or less democratic
government into a well organized criminal organization. Who better to run the courts, than the mob? Mob 'Law' enforcement included.
So, organized crime owns everything. The big club. The biggest profits are made with stuff that was bought to blow up something.
Or somebody. One could ask: 'With links like these, who needs enemies?' Anybody interfering into, or compromising the Mob execution
of the owners' plan, will be taken care of. Laws are written to owners' demands and are quickly as needed in show trials.
The eloquence in describing what is happening right now – and in all other show trials – is comforting.
As it is more like 'a gang of lawyers in revolving door roles in organized crime by Browder and US regime et al versus Julian
Assange, providing Defense for Julian Assange in his case against the same people and the same regime.
I forgot where, but I have heard of such things before.
The World will have to understand that, without the immediate release of Julian Assange, no more rule of law exists on Earth.
And to whomever has not connected the Assange affair with 'pre-emptive incarceration', might for a little longer enjoy playing
outdoor chess on the deck of a sinking cruise ship.
Oh, and yes, the qualifier "six ways to/from Sunday" should also be mentioned as an exemplary business practice by the Mob
regime. Actually, the Mob merged with the regime, with the regime belonging to the owners' club.
Northern
Good to see another article on this, seen several people raising concerns about these associations in independent media over the
last few months, though it's no doubt one of those things that will never be 'officially' addressed. Many people with more knowledge
than I have questioned the wisdom of certain decisions his legal team have made (or not, as the case may be) in recent proceedings.
Craig Murray's account of Julian's recent court appearance reads like something you'd expect from a country with 'the people's
democratic republic' in the name.
On a tangentially related note, anybody reading this who has the impetus to write to Julian in support;
The 'writetoJulian' website which appears at to the top of Google's search results for those who google how to go about such
a thing, is either accidentally or deliberately (one can probably guess which) mis-advising its readers of the requirements. The
website advises several times NOT to include Julian's prisoner number on any correspondence sent to him, but I know from direct
knowledge of communicating with the incarcerated that without the prisoner number your correspondence will be destroyed and neither
you nor the receiver will be notified. I hate to think how many well meaning messages of support for Julian have been 'legally'
destroyed without him seeing them as a result of this.
Northern
Ah, in a limited sliver of good news; The aforementioned website seem to have cottoned on to their mistake after several people
bringing it to their attention. They now advise you should include his number on all correspondence.
Mr Julian Assange
Prisoner #: A9379AY
HMP Belmarsh
Western Way
London SE28 0EB
UK
Betrayed planet
I have long suspected that Julian is not getting proper legal council. That his lawyers have not yet been able to get a proper
hearing whilst he is left to rot in a maximum security prison is suspect in the extreme. The obvious Nazi style behaviour of the
unlawful and fascist U.K. government and its lick spittle judiciary are apparent to all with absolutely no fight back from the
excuse of a media nor indeed 99.9 percent of its compliant increasingly dumbed down and wilfully ignorant population.
What is obvious now to anyone with half an eye open is that the U.K. is now a rogue state where law and justice are meaningless,
where bribery and corruption are common place. That Julian Assange is slowly dying in front of the whole world, will die without
some kind of major intervention is a stain on every single aware English resident. Mind you with a population seemingly set to
vote back in the same filthy vermin that have turned the country into the complete shithole it has become, it's hardly surprising.
Does anybody know if Gareth Pierce is still involved in his case?
nottheonly1
For quite some time now, an odd possibility offers itself – theoretically. Julian Assange is not the messenger. He is the message.
As a messenger, he is somewhat ineffective. He has not been able to convince people that the need for an uprising against lawlessness
exists. That any form of government cannot work when the judiciary is corrupt and that there is no justice in a society ruled
over by a regime.
As a message however, he is in the eyes of masses of people. Probably a majority of humans on Earth know who Julian Assange
is. How many know who he is, where he came from and what it was exactly he did, before he published videos showing how well the
'Support our Troops' deserve was used up in the way it was intended, can only be a guess. Or a dedicated team of statisticians
to hold polls in every country.
So, the published material, that was also leaked by a whistle blower, was proof of how deserving those soldiers were
of our support – showing them killing innocent human beings and 'our Troops' having the greatest times of their lives doing it.
The message is simply: Look, if we can do this to Assange, what do you think we will do to you from Monday to Sunday – if you
get any ideas?
No matter where you are. No matter who you are.
The only antidote to this insanity is the Truth and it be given its day(s) in court. 'Justice Mondays'.
I wonder if Alexander Perepilichnyy's death happened any which way – if indeed he was even a real person – there's only two photos
of him as far as I can tell and the feeling of reality about his is not strong – as the Japan Times says, "What we know of Perepilichnyy
is slight." Could he have just conveniently been invented and disappeared somehow? The story of him spending his last night with
his 22 year-old mistress (the good old 22) in Paris, complaining about his dinner, vomiting and then having his wife the next
day in London prepare his favourite food, sorrel soup, for lunch then going out jogging somehow doesn't ring true and we see a
typical anomaly of faked stories, different versions:
The Guardian: "was found outside his Surrey home"
The Atlantic: "He collapsed on Granville Road, within 100 meters of the house he was renting"
Japan Times: "Then, 50 meters from his home, he staggered into the road and died."
Wikipedia: "[he] was found dead on the road by a neighbour" with a reference to a BBC story makes no mention of neighbour
BBC story: "[he] has been found dead near his home in Weybridge. had collapsed on a road early on the evening"
Collapsed on a road? Wouldn't you give the name of the road in a suburban area?
Rhys Jaggar
Same story in UK sports reporting corrupt industries raking in cash for unprincipled wordsmithery
DiggerUK
The defence team around Julian seems to be unfathomable at many levels. My main concern has been over the unproved allegations
of chemical torture made during his incarceration in Bellmarsh Prison. Why has his defence team not asked for an independent medical
assessment? Why have concerns not been raised with prison visitors who are allowed to investigate independently?
https://www.imb.org.uk/independent-monitoring-boards/
Craig Murray who saw Julian on his last court appearance wrote of his condition .
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/10/assange-in-court/
is it as a result of drugs used during interrogations, or is it down to mental trauma after what he has been through.
Either way, his defense team and close friends need to up their game.
This article is not the first time that concerns have been raised in a worrying manner about the defence team around Julian
_
Rhys Jaggar
It is a standard Uk tactic to have someone try to beat you up then publicly say what a friend of yours they are. Happened to me
four times: I called the lot of them out on it, something which gets them on their faux high horses very quickly
Harry Stotle
Amazing isn't it, the way the legal system goes into hyperdrive pursuing those who expose war crimes while nonchantly turning
a blind eye to those who commit them (no matter how high the body count). Harder to find a more glaring example of the way hypocrisy
defines the elite's relationship with things like morality, fairness or decency, not least because no western politician has ever
been held to account for the havoc they have unleashed (in any court prosecuting war crimes).
Ellen DeGeneres hi-fiving with George Bush. British MPs pretending a courageous whistle blower is not being tortured to death
just a few miles from parliament.
Needless to say the MSM has fully sided with the criminals: first denigrating Julian Assange, then mocking his plight – this
gave way to lies, and now silence.
Put simply can anyone expect justice in Britain if their actions conflict with the ethos of the gangsters who control Britain's
economic, media and military interests?
Rhys Jaggar
We are actually approaching apartheid South Africa in that regard, namely contempt for legal due process. Not quite had the Met
coppers beating Assange over the head like SA cops did to Steve Biko, but we are slowly getting there
The Integrity Initiative, as paid for by the British Foreign Office, Ministry of
Defense, NATO and other such entities, will live on as a non-charitable entity with even less
transparency. Its website, as well as that of Institute of Statecraft, is down. That it
will now have to live in total secrecy will make it more difficult for it to recruit foreign
journalists to spread its propaganda.
On 3rd April, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) minister Alan Duncan revealed his
department's 'Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme' - which bankrolls the
Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative subsidiary - was funding a new
endeavour, Open Information
Partnership (OIP).
The announcement, buried in a response to a written parliamentary question, was supremely
light on detail - Duncan merely said the effort would "respond to manipulated information in
the news, social media and across the public space". Official fanfare was also unforthcoming
- there was no accompanying press release, briefing document, or even mention of the launch
by any government minister or department via social media channels.
The original proposal for
the Open Information Partnership , as
released by 'anonymous' , included the Institute of Statecraft , a Media
Diversity Institute , Bellingcat , DFR Lab (i.e. the Atlantic Council) and
some others in a so called ZINC Network . On the current OIP website the Institute of
Statecraft 'charity' is no longer named.
---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the issue:
At Kit Klarenberg's Twitter ,
there's a long tweet thread further detailing what b has written above. I can't help be
wonder how the Monty Python troop would have portrayed the Institute for Statecraft and its
parent the Integrity Initiative. It appears that the governments of the English speaking
nations became addicted to lying to their citizens @1900 and are unable to kick the habit and
instead have actually deepened their addiction. Elsewhere on the planet, it seems that people
are learning it's easier to talk straight and transparently with other people and to pool
resources and combine efforts to form a community of nations and humanity to better one and
all. Seems simple enough to determine which is functional and which isn't.
Bellingcat only serves one interest, a propaganda/info laundering shop for NATO, the military
industrial complex and some very rich people. The blatant lies about MH17, chemical weapons
in Syria, OPCW, Russia, the list goes on and on.
By the time the people in the Netherlands find out how they have been manipulated with the
MH17 narrative and the role of Bellingcat in this operation, hopefully they will torch the
office of Bellingcat in The Hague and club the survivors to death like the Uktainian Nazi
friends of Bellingcat did in Odessa.
The Ukrainian army shot down MH17. It was no accident. The Dutch were also involved with
the 2014 coup in the Ukraine. Putting the blame on Russia is a political decision, its not
based on facts. Dutch politicians are very dirty people. Burn in hell.
"... NBC s uggests that the Barr investigation is a ' mysterious ' review " amid concerns about whether the probe has any legal or factual basis " while the NY Times continues to cast doubt that the investigation has a legitimate basis implying that AG Barr is attempting to " deliver a political victory for President Trump." The Times misleads its readers with: ..."
"... There is, however, one small inconvenient glitch that challenges the Democratic version of reality that does not fit their partisan spin. The news that former FBI General Counsel James Baker is actively cooperating with the BD investigation ought to send ripples through the ranks. Baker has already stated that it was a 'small group' within the agency who led the counterintelligence inquiry into the Trump campaign; notably former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. ..."
"... Baker's cooperation was not totally unexpected since he also cooperated with the Inspector General's FISA abuse investigation which is awaiting public release. ..."
"... As FBI General Counsel, Baker had a role in reviewing the FISA applications before they were submitted to the FISA court and currently remains under criminal investigation for making unauthorized leaks to the media. ..."
"... As the agency's chief legal officer, Baker had to be a first-hand participant and privy to every strategy discussion and decision (real or contemplated). It was his job to identify potential legal implications that might negatively affect the agency or boomerang back on the FBI. In other words, Baker is in a unique position to know who knew what and when did they know it. ..."
"... Adds realist Dr.Assad: "I said before whatever the Americans say has no credibility, whether they say it to an enemy or a friend, the result is the same – it is unreliable. That is why we do not waste our time on things like this. " ..."
"... I don't think the Democratic leadership wanted a formal impeachment, they would prefer that Trump just faded away quietly before the 2020 election and were in the process of collecting information to reinforce this. They got cornered into formalizing the investigation by Trump's defense team baiting them as part of their overall strategy. It really doesn't change anything. ..."
"... Whichever way you slice and/or dice it Trump is fundamentally incompetent, he's unable to fulfill the duties of the office of the President. ..."
"... The DNC is playing this with a relatively weak field of potential candidates for 2020. Much as I personally like a Sanders or Warren they're just not going to fly in a Presidential contest -- as we found from the Obama presidency the ship of state just doesn't turn on a dime, you're not going to undo decades or generations of entrenched neoconservatism and a politically divided country overnight by some kind of Second Coming pronouncements. My concern is that if we don't get our collective acts together we're going to end up with a President Romney after 2020 -- a much more reasonable choice considering the last four years but also one that's guaranteed to change nothing. We need the journey but its only going to start with a few steps. ..."
"... Interesting updates, Joerg: however, it was obvious from the beginning that the interference in the US 2016 elections were Deep State gamers, from GCHQ-Ukro-Italian secret services, which was why they manufactured the Skripal Affair as Russians, Warning & Distraction, to cover their own backsides in the media: the same Skripal that worked on the Bum Steele Dossier, writing complete & utter fiction about Trump, that Comey then used as basis for his attempt with McCabe to enact Treason U$A, on wholly false trumped up charges, which were then transposed to the Russiagate-Hoax, Mueller &&& (yawn), . Still, it's good that Sid Powell has confirmed that they have Mifsud's phone . . . Get Mifsud, Now !? Strange how such USUK Agents become untraceable, when we simple folk would be harangued to hell, even with the odd ex-judicial killing, if we prove inconvenient to their narrative. ..."
"... "American Ukrainian nationalists don't like democracy. They don't understand the concept of it and don't care to learn. But they do understand nationalist fascism where only the top of society matters. They are behind the actors of the Intelligence coup going on in the US today .This is the mentality and politics the Diaspora is pushing into American politics today. Hillary Clinton and the DNC is surrounded with this infection which even includes political advisors. ..."
"... Rest assured they all the related Diasporas are in a fight for their political lives. If Donald Trump wins, their ability to infect American politics might be broken. Many of the leadership will be investigated for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States." ..."
As the Quantum field oversees the disintegration of institutions no longer in service to the public, the Democratic party continues
to lose their marbles, perpetuating their own simulated bubble as if they alone are the nation's most trusted purveyors of truth.
Since the Mueller Report failed to deliver on the dubious Russiagate accusations, the party of Thomas Jefferson continues to remain
in search of another ethical pretense to justify continued partisan turmoil. In an effort to discredit and/or distract attention
from the Barr-Durham and IG investigations, the Dems have come up with an implausible piece of political theatre known as Ukrainegate
which has morphed into an impeachment inquiry.
The Inspector General's Report, which may soon be ready for release, will address the presentation of fabricated FBI evidence
to the FISA Court for permission to initiate a surveillance campaign on Trump Administration personnel. In addition, the Department
of Justice has confirmed that Special Investigator John Durham's probe into the origin of the
FBI's counter intelligence investigation during the 2016
election has moved from an administrative review into the criminal prosecution realm. Durham will now be able to actively pursue
candidates for possible prosecution.
The defensive assault from the Democrat hierarchy and its corporate media cohorts can be expected to reach a fevered pitch of
manic proportions as both investigations threatened not only their political future in 2020 but perhaps their very existence.
NBC s uggests that the Barr investigation is a ' mysterious ' review " amid concerns about whether the probe has any legal
or factual basis " while the
NY Times continues
to cast doubt that the investigation has a legitimate basis implying that AG Barr is attempting to " deliver a political victory
for President Trump." The Times misleads its readers with:
Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel
closed it."
when in fact, it was the Russiagate collusion allegations that Trump referred to as a hoax, rather than the Mueller investigation
per se.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va), minority leader of the Senate Intel Committee suggested that Attorney General William Barr " owes the
Committee an explanation " since the committee is completing a " three-year bipartisan investigation " that has " found nothing to
justify " Barr's expanded effort.
The Senator's gauntlet will be ever so fascinating as the public reads exactly how the Intel Committee spent three years and came
up with " nothing " as compared to what Durham and the IG reports have to say.
On the House side, prime-time whiners Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) commented that news of the Durham
investigation moving towards criminal liability " raised profound concerns that Barr has lost his independence and become a vehicle
for political revenge " and that " the Rule of Law will suffer irreparable damage ."
Since Barr has issued no determination of blame other than to assure a full, fair and rigorous investigation, it is curious that
the Dems are in premature meltdown as if they expect indictments even though the investigations are not yet complete.
There is, however, one small inconvenient glitch that challenges the Democratic version of reality that does not fit their
partisan spin. The news that former FBI General Counsel James Baker is actively cooperating with the BD investigation ought to send
ripples through the ranks. Baker has already stated that it was a 'small group' within the agency who led the counterintelligence
inquiry into the Trump campaign; notably former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
Baker's cooperation was not totally unexpected since he also cooperated with the
Inspector General's FISA abuse investigation which is awaiting public release.
As FBI General Counsel, Baker had a role in reviewing the FISA applications before they were submitted to the FISA court and
currently remains under criminal investigation for making unauthorized leaks to the media.
As the agency's chief legal officer, Baker had to be a first-hand participant and privy to every strategy discussion and decision
(real or contemplated). It was his job to identify potential legal implications that might negatively affect the agency or boomerang
back on the FBI. In other words, Baker is in a unique position to know who knew what and when did they know it.
His 'cooperation' can be generally attributed to being more concerned with saving his own butt rather than the Constitution.
In any case, the information he is able to provide will be key for getting to the true origins of Russiagate and the FISA scandal.
Baker's collaboration may augur others facing possible prosecution to step up since 'cooperation' usually comes with the gift of
a lesser charge.
With a special focus on senior Obama era intel officials Durham has reportedly already interviewed up to two dozen former and
current FBI employees as well as officials in the office of the Director of National Intelligence.
From the number of interviews conducted to date it can be surmised that Durham has been accumulating all the necessary facts and
evidence as he works his way up the chain of command, prior to concentrating on top officials who may be central to the investigation.
It has also been reported that Durham expects to interview current and former intelligence officials including CIA analysts, former
CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper regarding Russian efforts to interfere in the
2016 election.
In a recent
CNN
interview , when asked if he was concerned about any wrongdoing on the part of intel officials, Clapper nervously responded:
I don't know. I don't think there was any wrongdoing. It is disconcerting to know that we are being investigated for having
done our duty and done what we were told to do by the President."
One wonders if Clapper might be a candidate for 'cooperating' along with Baker.
As CIA Director, Brennan made no secret of his efforts to nail the Trump Administration. In the summer of 2016, he formed an inter-agency
taskforce to investigate what was being reported as Russian collusion within the Trump campaign. He boasted to Rachel Maddow that
he brought NSA and FBI officials together with the CIA to ' connect the dots ."
With the addition of James Clapper's DNI, three reports were released: October, 2016, December, 2016 and January, 2017 all disseminating
the Russian-Trump collusion theory which the Mueller Report later found to be unproven.
Since 1947 when the CIA was first authorized by President Harry Truman who belatedly regretted his approval, the agency has been
operating as if they report to no one and that they never owe the public or Congress any explanation of their behaviour or activity
or how they spend the money.
Since those days it has been a weak-minded Congress, intimidated and/or compromised Members who have allowed intel to run their
own show as if they are immune to the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Since 1947, there has been no functioning Congress willing
to provide true accountability or meaningful oversight on the intel community.
Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU's Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast
Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member
of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31
vexarb
From a realist who deals with the real world, Syrian President Dr.Assad on why Trump is the best POTU$A:
"As for Trump, you might ask me a question and I give you an answer that might sound strange. I say that he is the best American
President, not because his policies are good, but because he is the most transparent president. All American presidents perpetrate
all kinds of political atrocities and all crimes and yet still win the Nobel Prize and project themselves as defenders of human
rights and noble and unique American values, or Western values in general. The reality is that they are a group of criminals who
represent the interests of American lobbies, i.e. the large oil and arms companies, and others. Trump talks transparently, saying
that what we want is oil. We want money. This is the reality of American policy. What more do we need than a transparent opponent?"
vexarb
Adds realist Dr.Assad: "I said before whatever the Americans say has no credibility, whether they say it to an enemy or a friend,
the result is the same – it is unreliable. That is why we do not waste our time on things like this. "
[Note: by "the Americans" Dr.Assad means the United $tates. A figure of speech, taking the whole to denote the part.]
Martin Usher
I don't think the Democratic leadership wanted a formal impeachment, they would prefer that Trump just faded away quietly before
the 2020 election and were in the process of collecting information to reinforce this. They got cornered into formalizing the
investigation by Trump's defense team baiting them as part of their overall strategy. It really doesn't change anything.
Whichever way you slice and/or dice it Trump is fundamentally incompetent, he's unable to fulfill the duties of the office
of the President. He also refuses to distinguish between private interests and public service. His cabinet, a rag tag body of
industry insiders and special interests, are busy trying to ride roughshod over opposition, established policy and even public
opinion to grab as much as possible before the whole house of cards collapses. Its a mess, and its a mess that's quite obviously
damaging US interests. Many constituency groups will have gone along with the program because they thought they could control
things or benefit from them but as its become increasingly obvious Trump's unable to deliver they've been systematically alienated.
The DNC is playing this with a relatively weak field of potential candidates for 2020. Much as I personally like a Sanders
or Warren they're just not going to fly in a Presidential contest -- as we found from the Obama presidency the ship of state just
doesn't turn on a dime, you're not going to undo decades or generations of entrenched neoconservatism and a politically divided
country overnight by some kind of Second Coming pronouncements. My concern is that if we don't get our collective acts together
we're going to end up with a President Romney after 2020 -- a much more reasonable choice considering the last four years but
also one that's guaranteed to change nothing. We need the journey but its only going to start with a few steps.
( and as for Trump/collusion we've spent the last three years confusing money with nation states. Trump's a businessman in
a business that's notorious for laundering money from dubious sources (this doesn't mean he's involved, of course)(legal disclaimer!).
I daresay that if Russia really wanted to sink Trump they could easily do so but why would they bother when he's doing such a
great job unaided?)
Interesting updates, Joerg: however, it was obvious from the beginning that the interference in the US 2016 elections were Deep
State gamers, from GCHQ-Ukro-Italian secret services, which was why they manufactured the Skripal Affair as Russians, Warning
& Distraction, to cover their own backsides in the media: the same Skripal that worked on the Bum Steele Dossier, writing complete
& utter fiction about Trump, that Comey then used as basis for his attempt with McCabe to enact Treason U$A, on wholly false trumped
up charges, which were then transposed to the Russiagate-Hoax, Mueller &&& (yawn), . Still, it's good that Sid Powell has confirmed
that they have Mifsud's phone . . . Get Mifsud, Now !? Strange how such USUK Agents become untraceable, when we simple folk would
be harangued to hell, even with the odd ex-judicial killing, if we prove inconvenient to their narrative.
More importantly for me was the "Putin sends a clear Message to Macron and the EU" TDC, (Top dead centre) in your link: it
was a (month old) pretty good longterm objective analysis of how the alliance between Russia & China was designed to be and has
become truly rock-solid, moving forwards: and it's well discussed & documented what a moron ManuMacroni has been on the world
stage >>> great translation of Putin's statement of intent and clear talk to Macron, who is exposed for the meaningless Deep State
puppet he is >>> even, Putin had no need to mention the Gilets Jaunes, representing a degree of vision, trust & commitment far
beyond that of the failing FUKUS empires: a vision that FUKUS cannot even financially entertain, in their present economic state
of financial & moral depravity & bankruptcy.
Austerity my ass, let's keep raising national debt and keep funding bum wars & terrorism, for the MIC & National Security State,
until society burns. How utterly shameful
It should be now very clear to all that the Russian-Chinese alliance is far more than just military, in every sense: together,
the world's largest economy will plough on regardless of what Macron or any other arrogant manipulative untrustworthy Westerner
has to say! And frankly, after NATZO's broken promises in Eastern Europe, (which I have personally observed here in Bulgaria since
2004, fully expected & awaited, I might add) and the events in the Ukraine and the self-destructive EU sanctions based on media
lies & manipulations & omissions, I really do believe Putin has handled this all extremely wisely & astutely playing the long
game, like the Chinese & avoiding incredible provocation, media wise. One day, however long it takes, the average ignorant Westerner
will come to understand that they have been deceived & lied to, from the beginning, especially by their secret services; & have
been lapdogs in the arms of US Deep State Corporate Fascist NATZO CIA & GCHQ morons, in "The History of the National Security
State" and, that Julian Assange needs to be set FREE asap : and given the Seth Rich murder, which kinda' benefited Trump and his
Fake News declarations, my guess is that Trump will not want Assange charged, in the end: but, we'll see ! ? Because first the
British have to sort out the arrogant bastards in GCHQ, also in the Media and their own new 'attorney general' who will investigate
secret services role in Deep State Corporate Deeds & prosecute people like Judge Arbuthnot, for not recusing herself >>> BoJo's
job, actually, but who cares ? >>> drain UK Swampland. ? Myopic Corbyn seems to have missed the bus & significance on the Affair
Assange, completely, which is somewhat inexplicable, given the Guardian Moderators infiltration by the British Military 77th Brigade,
and their bias against Corbyn. At least, that appears to be Trump's agenda and the longer Assange remains 'Censored', the worse
that societies throughout Europe will become, until we all address Communications & Media Law, with wholly wise, tech. savvy intelligent
and independent JUDGES, not compromised by the HillBilly Clinton/Epstein Clan of NATZO CIA/GCHQ operatives. (maybe I'm not clarifying
in the best way, but hopefully you get the drift?). Only a week or so ago, the Bulgarian President was complaining about appalling
standards of journalism, too, with an obvious agenda from abroad, also in terms of ownership. (Not widely reported!) And, I'm
sure you are aware of the incredible bias & censorship in the German MSM, just like Professor Dan Ganser & myself. 😉 R.i.P Udo
Ulfkotte >>> when Secret Services dictate the News, not much point in listening to a word they have to say >>> HANG 'EM HIGH
! out to dry, in Public Eye ! They are FASCISTS ! The worst kind !
I don't say this lightly . . . after over 40 years studying their collective behaviours, in relation to the reality on the ground.
Joerg
@Tim Jenkins
Yes, You are right.
But let's look at the bigger picture.
23 Trillions(!) of $$ are missing in the Pentagon.
To that see the great James Corbett's video "Fitt's Trillions" –
https://www.corbettreport.com/?s=fitts-trillions
.
So 23 trillion $ are missing – and the congress decided not to follow that up.
Before that on 911 already 3 trillion $ (if I remember this right) were missing in the Pentagon. And surprise, surprise: On 911
the Pentagon building exploded exactly there where those accountants were placed, who tried to find out where all that money (3
trillion $) went. All accountants died. After that no one started again to find out where the money went.
Where did the stolen gold from under the Twin Towers go to? Mueller (than state attorney of NY) obviously did want to research
that.
The US is already ruled by a mighty super-syndicate – or possibly by two or three of them. So mighty they could put the classical
Mafia directly into kindergarten.
And with that much money stolen they can buy in the USA but also in Europe (and, yes, Germany) all politicians, judges and journalists.
And those who don't comply, get fired by their (also bought) boss. Or they get murdered ("suicide"), or their career gets destroyed.
There are no classical politics anymore like, let's say, 50 years ago. Here in the west it is only the super-syndicates' power
that rules.
By the way: In the end-time of the Roman Empire there were also no more free judges. They had to follow the orders of the local
criminal gang – or they got killed. And I also believe that the fall of this impressive "Indus Valley Civilisation" (2000 B.C.)
was caused by overwhelming and destructive power of Mafia/Syndicates. In the end the citizens of the Indus Valley civilisation
simply fled the area – obviously to south India. So the Tamils may very well be the descendants of the old Indus people.
With you all the way, Joerg: ironic you should mention the Tamils. I spent time alone in Jaffna, in the aftermath of genocide.
I'd better not start here & now on Sin-dication and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Suffice to say, if one wishes to speculate
on the weather & commodities, with insider knowledge of what the D.o.D. did/do with electronics like HAARP, one would not be a
particularly intelligent or moral person, scientifically speaking. And said person, would never wish to discuss the contents of
WTC 7 and that Pentagon Wing. 😉
Ta, for the linkS :). Look forward to hearing more from you.
Viele Grüsse,
Tim
Latest in series of articles by the author re USA – Ukraine connections
"American Ukrainian nationalists don't like democracy. They don't understand the concept of it and don't care to learn. But
they do understand nationalist fascism where only the top of society matters. They are behind the actors of the Intelligence coup
going on in the US today .This is the mentality and politics the Diaspora is pushing into American politics today. Hillary Clinton
and the DNC is surrounded with this infection which even includes political advisors.
Rest assured they all the related Diasporas are in a fight for their political lives. If Donald Trump wins, their ability to
infect American politics might be broken. Many of the leadership will be investigated for attempting to overthrow the government
of the United States."
"My thoughts on all this are that many of us have become distracted and failed to examine the timeline of events since 9/11. We
look at news and conflict in isolation and move on to the next without seeing what is now a clear pattern."
In terms of the Middle East you need to go back further than the fortuitous event of 9/11 – at least to 1997 and the founding
of the Project for the New American Century which was essentially the first explicit formalisation of the agenda for an imperialist
Neoliberal and Neoconservative globalist new world order deployed through the media constructed conflicts of 'good' and 'evil'
around the world and with it the call for the 'democratisation' of the Middle East under the alibi of humanitarian interventionism
against broadly socialist governments, which since the fall of communism were constructed by Neoliberal fundamentalists as being
patently heretical and ideologically illegitimate forms of government. If it is economically illogical to elect a socialist failed
form of government then one can only assume that the election must have been rigged.
I started looking at this all a few years ago when I asked myself the question 14 years after the invasion of Iraq: where was
the liberal outrage at what had subsequently taken place in the ME? The answer was that from the Invasion of Iraq onward in addition
to fully embracing the economics of Neoliberalism as the end of economic history, the progressive 'left' quietly assimilated and
reduplicated the fundamentalist illiberal political philosophy of the Neocons. The progressive 'left' both in the UK and US have
subsequently become the far Neocon 'right' in all but name and their party hosts of Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the
US remain blissfully unaware of all of this. How else can we explain why they would welcome 'Woke' Bill Kristol into their ranks?
Once one accepts this hypothesis, then an awful lot falls into place in order to explain the 'Progressive' open support for regime
change and the almost total lack of any properly liberal objections to what has taken place ever since.
One key point here is that the Neocons have nothing to do with conservatism or the right. What is striking and most informative
about the history of Neo-conservatism is that it does not have its roots in conservatism at all, but grew out of disillusioned
US left wing intellectuals who were Marxist, anti-Stalinist Trotskyites. This is important because at the heart of Neo-conservatism
is something that appeals strongly to the die hard revolutionaries of the left who hold a strong proclivity for violence, conflict
and struggle. If one looks at the type of people in the Labour party who gravitated to the 'progressive' Neoliberal imperialist
camp they all exhibit similar personality traits of sociopathic control freaks with sanctimonious Messiah complexes such as Blair.
These extremist, illiberal fundamentalists love violence and revolution and the bloodier the better. In Libya or Syria is did
not matter that Gadaffi or Assad headed socialist governments, the Neo-colonised progressives would back any form of apparent
conflict and bloody revolution in any notional struggle between any identifiable form of 'authority' or 'oppression' with any
identifiable form of 'resistance' even if those leading the 'resistance' were head chopping, misogynist, jihadist terrorists.
It makes no difference to the fundamentalist revolutionary mindset.
The original left wing who gradually morphed in the Neoconservatives took 30-40 years to make the transition for the 1960s
to 1990s. The Labour party Blairites made the same journey from 1990 to 2003. Christopher Hitchens made the same journey in his
own personal microcosm.
When is this nausea inducing confected pile of crap going to end? Does anyone else think that Adam Schiff has a screw or three
loose, and should be residing in an institution? And imagine if somehow Mike Pence became Prez. Now that would be something to
scare the bejesus out of you.
Tim Jenkins
Adam Schiff should be shot for Treason, of the highest order, along with many others, including HRC, Brennan & Clapper ; and it
should be a public execution, like in Saudi Arabia. This is war on the minds of the masses, that Schiff for brains cares nothing
for.
As for Chuck Schumer, he can have a life sentence, as long as he manages to shut his utterly unfunny dumb vulgar cousin Amy up
& keep her out of the public eye, forever 🙂
Gezzah, life may seem bad right now: but imagine if,
you were Amy Schumer's Husband and father of her child 😉
Talk about obnoxious and utterly nauseating 🙂 , with you Gezzah, all the way.
"When is this nausea inducing confected pile of crap going to end?"
I'm almost seriously thinking of buying a one way ticket to the Marquesas Islands Right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, nowhere
near anywhere; such is the mad bad state of the World.
Need to start up a Go Fund Me page tho!
As I almost (94.6% of the time) boycott the presstitute filth masquerading as journalists (cough) so, I 99% of the time boycott
anything coming out of Hollywood, including alleged 'comedians'.
How are things in Bulgaria? What are the Fascist Stormtroopers up to, aka NATZO who all those you named have intimate connections
with.
Listening to a gorgeous Russian band called: iamthemorning. Check them out – food for the soul. Enjoy your arvo..
"The presidential election in Argentina was a game-changer and a graphic lesson. It pitted the people versus neoliberalism.
The people won – with new President Alberto Fernandez and former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) as his VP.
Neoliberalism was represented by a PR marketing product, Mauricio Macri [a Micron look-alike]: former millionaire playboy,
president of football legends Boca Juniors, obsessed with spending cuts, who was unanimously sold by Western MSM as a New Age
paradigm.
Well, the paradigm will soon be ejected, leaving behind the usual New Age wasteland: $250 billion in foreign debt, less than
$50 billion in reserves; inflation at 55 percent; 35.4 percent of Argentine homes can't make it); and (incredible as it may seem
in an agriculturally self-sufficient nation) a food emergency."
Meanwhile, in the real world, the Denmark's Ukronazi-friendly regime has been brought to heel by Germany's common sense:
Some big natural gas news very significant for Russia, Germany and the Ukraine. The Danish pipeline sector has been stalled
for a while now by anti-Russia, pro-Ukrainian forces within the Scandiwegian NATZO-friendly regimes. But it appears that Nordstream
2 _will_ get completed and that Ukraine's gas transit chokehold on the EU will come to an end when Russia's Nordstream 2 comes
online for Europe.
-- -- -- -
Permit for the Nord Stream 2 project is reluctantly granted by the Danish Energy Agency. Nord Stream 2 AG has been granted
a permit to construct natural gas pipelines on the Danish continental shelf.
The permit is granted pursuant to the Continental Shelf Act and in accordance with Denmark's obligations under the UN Convention
on the Law of the Sea. Denmark has been put under obligation to allow the construction of transit pipelines with respect to resources
and the environment.
In my humble opinion, the Trump stuff is all total nonsense.
Donald Trump was a property speculator in New York (amongst other places) and was heavily involved with the Mafia. Likewise,
Trump was heavily involved with Jeffery Epstein.
There's so much dirt on Trump that they could get him with the snap of fingers; but of course that's not what they really want.
Trump is pure theatre; a ploy to divert the masses. 'RussiaGate', 'UkraineGate' are all utter rollocks.
Trump and Obama, and all the rest going back to the assassination of Kennedy, are just puppets.
American/ deep state policy doesn't change a jot with any of them.
Wilmers31
America is always presentation over substance, wrapper over content, and shoot the messenger if you don't like the message.
In the meantime the adults in this world outside the US have to hold it all together.
Why was for instance Hillary Clinton not in the dock for saying 'Assad must go'?? It was meddling in the highest order.
Antonym
Pretty humble for an opinion 😀
phree
I guess this just goes to show you that a person can be a member of the ACLU, even a leader apparently, and still be highly biased
in favor of Trump.
Just because a witness is "cooperating" with an investigation does not entail that the witnesses testimony or evidence will
favor any particular side.
And implying that Clapper's comments somehow shows guilt when he clearly says he knows of no wrongdoing is pretty over the
top.
I've read a lot of what's out there about the start of the initial Russia investigation, and it does seem that some of the
FBI personnel leading it (McCabe particularly) were anti-Trump.
Isn't the bigger question whether the investigation was justified based on the reports from the Australians that Trump was
getting political dirt on Hillary from Russia? Is the FBI just supposed to ignore those reports? Really?
George Cornell
Love the Clapper claim (the same Clapper who lied to Congress) says he was just doing his duty in Russiagate. As GBS said, " when
a scoundrel is doing something of which he is ashamed, he always says he is doing his duty".
mark
The Spook Organisations and the Dirty Cops are a greater threat to our way of life than any foreign army or terrorist group (most
of which they created in the first place and which they directly control.)
They are a law unto themselves and completely free of any genuine oversight or control.
This applies equally to the US and UK.
"We lie, we cheat, we steal", as Pompeo helpfully explains.
They also murder people, at home and abroad. JFK, David Kelly, Diana, Epstein.
They plant bombs and blow people up.
Many of the "terrorist atrocities" from Northern Ireland to the present day, were false flag spook operations. The same applies
with Gladio on the continent and the plethora of recent false flags.
There is also a long and inglorious history of interference in domestic politics from the Zinoviev Letter onwards. Plots to stage
a military coup against the Wilson government of the 60s and 70s, with Mountbatten as its figurehead.
The more recent Skripal Hoax.
The contrived Syrian Gas Attack Hoaxes and the White Helmets.
They would not hesitate to do the same to Corbyn if they deemed it necessary.
The CIA and FBI conspired with the UK and Ukrainian governments to prevent the election of Trump, and then to sabotage and smear
his administration once he had been elected. The UK played a major part in this through MI6 and Steele.
This is highly dangerous for this country, irrespective of your view of Trump.
Trump has repaid the favour by meddling in Brexit and interfering in UK politics. It is not in his nature to turn the other cheek.
We have spook organisations claiming for themselves a right of veto over election results and foreign policy. These people are
poor servants and terrible masters.
We see Schumer warning against crossing the spook organisations, begging the obvious question – who runs this country, you or
the spooks?
The Democrats, the Deep State, the MSM, and the Deranged Left were willing to support these conspiracies and hoaxes, and even
suspend disbelief, for the greater good. The ends justify the means. All that matters is getting rid of Trump. Anything goes.
The corrosive erosion of trust, credibility and integrity in all the institutions of the state is probably irreparable. The legislature
and the political process in general. The judiciary. The spooks and police. About 9% of Americans now believe the MSM.
The irony in all this is that it very much serves Trump's interests.
He is extremely vulnerable, having failed to keep any of his promises.
Building The Wall, Draining The Swamp, Bringing The Troops Home. Sorting out health care. Building "incredible, fantastic" infrastructure.
All the Democrats had to do was highlight these failures, find a suitable candidate, and put forward some sensible policies, and
they were home and dry.
Instead, they provided an endless series of diversions and distractions from Trump's failures by charging down every rabbit hole
they could find, Russiagate, Ukrainegate, Impeachment. It couldn't work out better for Trump if he was paying them.
Expect to see the Orange Man in the White House for another 4 years.
And another even more virulent outbreak of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Tim Jenkins
Enigmatic and brilliant synopsis, m8, lol: & surely BigB could only agree 🙂
and you never even mentioned HQ.Intel.inside.Israel, today & their illegal trespass of WhatsApp, via corporate 'subsidiaries'
with 'plausible' denial of liability of spying on
everything-everything & any body, that could possibly threaten corporate fascist computerised dictatorship: distributing backdoors,
like Promis & Prism, liberally & worldwide, the Maxwells legacy . . . (yet) 🙂
No need to even discuss, until Western societies ALL get a grip on the depths of depravity that lie within the actions
and "The History of the National Security State" you have to admit, that Julian Assange could not have picked a better book to
firmly grip and signal with, than GORE Vidal's, when being manhandled out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, by Spooks who would
sell their own mother, let alone nation, in their utter technological ignorance and adherence to anachronistic doctrines & mentality
!
Glad you mentioned 'good ole' cousin ChuckS.' >>> Lol, just for a laugh and a sense of perspective: yes, he is related to Amy
Queen of Vulgarity & hideous societal distraction.
What a family of wimps & morons: the 'Schumers' being perfect fodder for ridicule & intelligent humour, naturally . . . on a positive
note, mark, think yourself lucky that you are not married to or the father of Amy Schumer's child 🙂
mark
I think I'd prefer the female rhinoceros in Moscow Zoo, even if Putin has been blackmailing me with the photos ever since.
Tim Jenkins
Well, (ahem), you certainly got me all thorny & horny, more than AmyS. ever could, in her wildest dreams, or Chucks, (shucks)
🙂 talk about suckers . . . now, do tell, what was the female Rhino's name ? ! 🙂
Who cares about some BlackRhinoMail, today ?
They'll be dead and extinct, in no time with a legacy 😉
for passionate lovers of Black holes & eternal energy 🙂
Antonym
Is that the best money can buy these days in the US? I guess most of the 1% reside in the Caribbean these days, while Washington
D.C. is stuffed with semi-stiffs.
The most important thing for us and deliciously so now the election is happening is the BLOWBACK. Our DS lying murdering arses
are going to get new ones drilled by Trump and BoBos bromance exploding in full technicolor.
Think May's dementia tax and Strong and Stable were bad?
Lol. This is going to be a FUN month of early xmases.
Dungroanin,
SST is essential reading for anyone concerned with US overseas policy and the corruption of the USA itself in the service of the
security state, so, many thanks for posting this link.
Dungroanin
By sharing we disrupt the msm messages.
Bernard at MoonofAlabama is also worth a daily visitation – priceless analysis on multiple subjects.
lundiel
Since those days it has been a weak-minded Congress, intimidated and/or compromised Members who have allowed intel to run
their own show as if they are immune to the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Since 1947, there has been no functioning Congress
willing to provide true accountability or meaningful oversight on the intel community.
Pretty much a carbon copy of our own oversight. We hear even less about our security services than Americans do of theirs.
I'd have thought that events like the spy in the holdall, the spies caught by farmers in Libya, the Skripal's, and the whole over-the-top
reaction to the domestic terrorism threat and consequent successful pleas for extra funding, the obvious danger of creating terrorists
by security services, the policy of giving asylum to foreign terrorists of countries we don't like and the whole concept of the
5 eyes and GCHQ needs more than ministerial oversight, a committee of yes men/women and an intelligence services commissioner.
Mr Johnson - an amateur's question but it's a question that was relevant as soon as Mr
Steele's work became public knowledge. Was MI6 aware of Steele's work investigating Trump's
Russian connections from the start of the time Steele was doing that work?
The Washington Post article contains these assertions -
"In 2009, after more than two decades in public service, Steele turned to the private
sector and founded a London-based consulting firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, drawing on
the reputation and network he developed doing intelligence work."
"Steele brought far more: He was able to tap a network of human sources cultivated over
decades of Russia work. He moved quickly, reaching out to Russian contacts and others he
referred to as "collectors" who had other sources -- some of whom had no idea their comments
would be passed along to Steele."
Earlier on SST the question was raised of whether Steele had used contacts made earlier
during his official work. The view was that he could not do that as a retired Intelligence
Officer - else any such retired Officer could launch into private business using MI6 networks
freely for their own profit and possibly putting those networks at risk.
The Washington Post article is carefully written. Possibly to lend credibility to Steele's
work it claims MI6 networks were used in assembling that work. That claim may not be true but
if it is not true it throws into doubt the veracity of other claims in the article. If it is
true it casts into doubt the veracity of the account of the meeting with Sir Richard
Dearlove.
In any case, whether it's true that Steele used official networks or not, Steele's former
employers must have kept a close eye on what Steele was doing collecting his information.
They would not want a former Intelligence Officer working in much the same field without
knowing what he was doing. There must therefore have been liaison with UK Intelligence from
the start of Steele's investigation. There was in any case a good deal of contact between
Steele and his former colleagues -
"In an interview, Dearlove said Steele became the "go-to person on Russia in the
commercial sector" following his retirement from the Secret Intelligence Service."
Steele was therefore not a private enquiry agent retiring into business on retirement and
seeing nothing of his former colleagues. He remained in close contact with them. Very close,
one would imagine, if he was still using official networks as the article claims. Close in
any case because he was a "go-to person."
So this section is bogus - "In the early fall, he and Burrows turned to Dearlove, their
former MI6 boss, for advice. Sitting in winged chairs at the Garrick Club, one of London's
most venerable private establishments, under oil paintings of famed British playwrights, the
two men shared their worries about what was happening in the United States. They asked for
his guidance about how to handle their obligations to their client and the public, Dearlove
recalled."
Nonsense. Steele had been liaising with, or at least being supervised by, his former
employers as soon as he started this assignment. Any problems or moral issues and those
former employers would have been aware of it. To suggest that the meeting with Dearlove was
the first time MI6 had heard of the affair is clearly misleading.
So this question - "Was MI6 aware of Steele's work investigating Trump's Russian
connections from the start of the time Steele was doing that work?" must be answered with a
"yes".
That work was extremely sensitive. It was nothing less than investigating an American
Presidential candidate. Therefore some official in MI6 authorised that work from the start.
Which leads to the question, at what level would that authorisation have been given?
"Which leads to the question, at what level would that authorisation have been given?"
EO
If the scheme in the US was run by Brennan, Clapper & Comey, possibly with the
knowledge and even at the instruction of Obama, then it would lead to a presumption that it
was authorized at the highest level. Of course to also keep it under wraps, Brennan would
have been in communication with his counterpart in the UK and maybe even enlisted him in his
Trump Task Force.
Did Mueller find "nothing" on Trump and Russia because Mueller and friends did not want
anyone else snooping into what had already been going on with the IC and Trump?
"... 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.
"... On February 2 Shokin confiscated four large houses Zlochevsky owned plus a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a "Knott 924-5014 trainer". (Anyone know what that is?) Ten days later Biden goes into overdrive to get him fired. Within one week he personally calls Poroshenko three times with only one major aim: to get Shokin fired. ..."
"... Zlochevsky had hired Joe Biden's son Hunter for at least $50,000 per month. In 2015 Shokin started to investigate him in two cases. During the fall of 2015 Joe Biden's team begins to lobby against him. On February 2 Shokin seizes Zlochevsky's houses. Shortly afterwards the Biden camp goes berserk with Biden himself making nearly daily phonecalls. Shokin goes on vacation while Poroshenko (falsely) claims that he resigned. When Shokin comes back into office Biden again takes to the phone. A week later Shokin is out. ..."
"... Biden got the new prosecutor general he wanted. The new guy made a bit of show and then closed the case against Zlochevsky. ..."
"... Is the "conspiracy theory" about Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election really "debunked"? It is, of course, not. The facts show that the interference happened. It was requested by the Democratic National Committee and was willingly provided by Ukrainian officials. ..."
"... Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found. ..."
"... A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia , according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. ..."
"... In March 2016 Chalupa went to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC and requested help from the Ukrainian ambassador to go after Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort. In August 2016 the Ukrainians delivered a secret "black ledger" that allegedly showed that Manafort had illegally received money for his previous work for the campaign of the former Ukrainian president Yanukovych. ..."
"... Serhin A. Leshchenko, the member of the Ukrainian parliament who published the dubious ledger, was rabidly anti-Trump. Shortly after providing the "secret ledger" he talked with the Financial Times and promised to continue to meddle in the U.S. election. The FT headline emphasized the fact: ..."
"... insisting on innocence of Biden will have a political cost. ..."
"... That term "conspiracy theory" has been so widely abused that, to me at least, it now means something that the author wishes were not true but almost certainly is. ..."
"... Joe Biden needs to STFU, and go away. He and his ilk are part of the problem, not the solution. The rulers of America insist on pushing this sycophant for the empire down our throats. And, he can take HRC and her crowd with him. It's high time for some new blood, IF, TPTB, will even allow that to happen, which I very much doubt.... ..."
"... If you were referring to Trump's convo with Zelensky specifically, reasonable people might disagree over whether that was an abuse of power or sleazy and dumb (in being unnecessary)--which of course shouldn't mean the Bidens get a pass here, which none of these young journalists are suggesting. ..."
"... Well, there you have it--proof that BigLie Media indeed specializes in publishing Big Lies that ought to reduce such outlets to the status of Tabloids. Of course, the media is free to lie all it wants within the limits of slander and libel, but most people don't like being lied to particularly over matters of importance. ..."
"... Larry Johnson has a piece at SST on a CIA task force set up to compromise Trump and prevent him becoming president. That Trump avoided all the traps set for him (even the Mueller investigation could pin nothing on Trump) and won the election says a bit for Trump ..."
"... Alexandra Chalupa's connection to the thinktank The Atlantic Council should be borne in mind in the developing discussion in the comments forum. Her sister Irena is or has been a non-resident Senior Fellow there. Irena Chalupa has also been a senior editor at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. ..."
"... Also the founder and CEO of the Crowdstrike company in charge of cybersecurity for the DNC during the 2016 presidential election campaign was Dmitri Alperovich who is a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council. It was Crowdstrike who came up with the idea that Trump had to be under the Kremlin's thumb and from there the hysterical witch-hunt and associated actions known as Russiagate began. ..."
"... I'm surprised that at this point in time, Bellingcat has not been included in digging up "dirt" on Trump ..."
"... Lee Stranahan of Radio Sputnik has been reporting on Alexandra Chalupa's role for a number of years now. I hope he gets proper credit as this story comes out. ..."
"... It seems some corners are coming unglued if the ZH link below is any indication: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-entrapped-flynn-manipulated-evidence-clapper-allegedly-issued-kill-shot-order ..."
"... The take away quote from a Matt Taibbi twit "LOL. Barack Obama is going to love this interview his former DIA James Clapper just gave to CNN about the Durham probe: "It's frankly disconcerting to be investigated for having done... what we were told to do by the president of the United States." ..."
"... Prescient observation by Aaron Mate : "When CNN & MSNBC now cover the criminal inquiry into conduct of intel officials in Russia probe, they are literally covering their employees -- John Brennan (MSNBC); James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, James Baker (CNN). I avoid the term, but it's appropriate here: Deep State TV." ..."
"... The take away quote: "Joe Biden intervened at least two times on matters his son Hunter's firms was being paid to lobby on, according to government records reviewed by the Washington Examiner." ..."
"... Indeed, the guilty are hiding in plain sight. It appears sinister, and is, but I think its a positive development of late, as it would suggest that big media are scrambling to preserve the status quo by legitimising these deep state actors. ..."
"... Obama orchestrated the regime change operation in Ukraine. As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe. To promote containment of the Russian menace, the US got in bed with Ukrainian fascists and successfully exploited political tensions in that country resulting in the removal of the duly elected Yanukovitch. A right wing billionaire then took the reigns and Putin orchestrated a referendum in Crimea in retaliation that resulted in its return to Russia. The Crimeans were and continue to be happy, happier than the rest of Ukrainians under Kiev neo-fascist free market exploitation. ..."
"... It is natural that neo-fascist Ukrainians would express their disapproval of Trump, who was making nice with Putin. No matter what his motives were, he was bucking US anti-Russian policy. I liked Trump at that time for this willingness to end a Cold War policy sponsored by the US military industrial complex. You can cal it "deep state" if you like. It's not deep and it's not a shadow government. It's the war party. It's the elite profiting from weapons manufacture. Trump has no principles except expedience and his pro-Russian stance is likely owing to the money laundering he's been doing for Russian criminals since he is such a lousy business man. ..."
"... The general charge against Trump is that he was "digging up dirt" on opponents. Well laddy-dah. So what. Welcome to Politics 101. ..."
"... Empires don't act on facts: they are all-powerful, so they sculpt reality as they see fit. What determines this is class struggle: the inner contradictions of a society that results in a given consensus, thus forming a hegemony. ..."
"... Again, not surprised at all. Pro-democratic/anti-Trump media write articles (obviously made-to-order) to whitewash already badly discredited Biden, and present all the arguments in favor of his dark connections with Ukraine as a kind of "conspiracy theory". This is a common practice. Not having sufficient competence to reasonably refute the arguments of opponents, MSM (as well as all sorts of "experts") immediately mark the position of opponents with "conspiracy theory" (there are also other options to choose from: "Putin's agent", "Putin's useful idiot", "Kremlin's agent", "pro-Russian propaganda", etc.). It is assumed that this makes unnecessary/optional (and even "toxic") all further conversations with the opponent (that is, there is no need to answer him, to prove something with facts, etc.), because his position is a "conspiracy theory". ..."
"... Western MSM are actively using this simplest propaganda technique of information warfare. For example, this was the case when reporting on events in Syria - those journalists, the media, experts who did not agree with the lie of MSM about Assad's use of the chemical weapons were declared "conspiracy theorists" (and also "Assad apologists"). This method was also used to cover "the Skripal case" - those who questioned the British authorities' version of the "Novichok poisoning" were declared "conspiracy theorists". ..."
"... This is the way the controlled media works. They provide half a story, half truths, straw-man facts, selective quotes and 'expert' comment, opinion and unwarranted assumption presented as fact that all together cover the spectrum from black to white, spread across the many titles. ..."
"... They also disseminate a fine dusting of lies and actual truth here and there. The result is the public have a dozen 'truths' to pick from, none of which are real, while the outright lies and actual truths get dismissed as not credible and the half-truths and straw-man truths appear to carry some validity. ..."
"... If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge. ..."
"... as Caitlin Johnstone lets to say - who gets to decide what the narrative is here? i don't have an answer for this, but those who appear to be taking a side in all of this - including you with the quote i make - seem to think that it has to be the issue of trumps extortion of Ukraine, verses what appears to me the CIA - Dem party extortion of the ordinary USA persons mind... ..."
"... Has mccarthyism version 2 come to life since the advent of what happened in the Ukraine from 2014 onward?? is the issue of a new cold war with Russia been on the burner for at least 5 or more years here and began before trump was even considered a potential candidate for the republican party? did Russia take back Crimea, which wasn't supposed to happen? is this good for military industrial complex sales? and etc. etc. ..."
"... i am sure biden is small potatoes in the bigger picture here, but if taking a closer examination of what took place in ukraine leading into 2014, with the victoria nulands and geoffrey pyatts and etc. etc. of usa diplomatic corps, usa dept of state and etc. could lead to a better understanding of how the usa has went down the road it has for the past 60 years of foreign policy on the world stage, it would be a good start... so, to me - it ain't about trump.. it is about usa foreign policy and how it has sucked the big one on the world stage for at least since the time of vietnam when i was a teenager.. ..."
Several mainstream media have made claims that Joe Biden's intervention in the Ukraine and
the Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election are "conspiracy theories" and "debunked". The
public record proves them wrong. By ignoring or even contradicting the facts the media create
an opening for Trump to rightfully accuse them of providing "fake news".
[In late 2018], Giuliani began speaking to current and former Ukrainian officials about the
Biden conspiracy theory, and meeting with them repeatedly in New York and Europe. Among those
officials was Viktor Shokin, a former top Ukrainian prosecutor who was sacked in March, 2016,
after European and U.S. officials, including Joe Biden, complained that he was lax in curbing
corruption. Shokin claimed that he had lost his powerful post not because of his poor
performance but rather because Biden wanted to stop his investigation of Burisma, in order to
protect his son. The facts didn't back this up. The Burisma investigation had been dormant
under Shokin.
Several other
media outlets also made the highlighted claim to debunk the "conspiracy theory". But is it
correct?
We have looked into the claim that Shorkin's investigation against Burisma owner Zlochevsky
was dormant, as the New Yorker says, and found it to be false :
The above accounts are incorrect. Shokin did go after Zlochevsky. He opened two cases against
him in 2015. After he did that Biden and his crew started to lobby for his firing. Shokin was
aggressively pursuing the case. He did so just before Biden's campaign against him went into
a frenzy.
... On February 2 Shokin confiscated four large houses Zlochevsky owned plus a Rolls-Royce
Phantom and a "Knott 924-5014 trainer". (Anyone know what that is?) Ten days later Biden goes
into overdrive to get him fired. Within one week he personally calls Poroshenko three times
with only one major aim: to get Shokin fired.
... Zlochevsky had hired Joe Biden's son Hunter for at least $50,000 per month. In 2015 Shokin
started to investigate him in two cases. During the fall of 2015 Joe Biden's team begins to
lobby against him. On February 2 Shokin seizes Zlochevsky's houses. Shortly afterwards the
Biden camp goes berserk with Biden himself making nearly daily phonecalls. Shokin goes on
vacation while Poroshenko (falsely) claims that he resigned. When Shokin comes back into
office Biden again takes to the phone. A week later Shokin is out.
Biden got the new prosecutor general he wanted. The new guy made a bit of
show and then closed the case against Zlochevsky.
It is quite astonishing that the false claims, that Shokin did not go after Burisma owner
Zlochevsky, is repeated again and again despite the fact that the public record , in form of a report
by Interfax-Ukraine , contradicts it.
On Thursday Buzzfeed Newswrote
about a different Ukrainian prosecutor who in early 2019 was approached to set up meetings
with President Donald Trump's private lawyer Rudy Giuliani:
[Gyunduz] Mamedov's role was key. He was an intermediary in Giuliani's efforts to press
Ukraine to open investigations into former vice president Joe Biden and the debunked
conspiracy theory about the country's interference in the 2016 presidential election , a
collaboration between BuzzFeed News, NBC News, and the Organized Crime and Corruption
Reporting Project (OCCRP) can reveal.
The OCCRP is funded by the
UK Foreign Office, the US State Dept, USAID, Omidyar Network, Soros' Open Society, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund and others. Most of these entities were involved in the 2014 coup
against the elected government of the Ukraine.
Is the "conspiracy theory" about Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election really
"debunked"? It is, of course, not. The facts show that the interference happened. It was requested by
the Democratic National Committee and was willingly provided by Ukrainian officials.
As Politico reported shortly after Trump had won the election, it was the Democratic
Party organization, the DNC, which had asked the
Ukrainians for dirt that could be used against the campaign on Donald Trump:
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly
questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump
aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after
the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his
advisers, a Politico investigation found.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee
met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties
between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia , according to people with direct
knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation
and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to
the east, Russia.
The Ukrainian-American who was the go between the DNC and the government of Ukraine had
earlier worked for the Clinton administration:
Manafort's work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named
Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the
Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for
Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to
Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that
time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC's arm for engaging expatriate Democrats
around the world.
In March 2016 Chalupa went to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC and requested help from
the Ukrainian ambassador to go after Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort. In August 2016 the
Ukrainians delivered
a secret "black ledger" that allegedly showed that Manafort had illegally received money
for his previous work for the campaign of the former Ukrainian president Yanukovych.
Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr.
Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych's pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to
Ukraine's newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the
disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included
election officials.
"Paul Manafort is among those names on the list of so-called 'black accounts of the Party
of Regions,' which the detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are
investigating," the statement said. "We emphasize that the presence of P. Manafort's name in
the list does not mean that he actually got the money, because the signatures that appear in
the column of recipients could belong to other people."
The provenance of the ledger is highly dubious. It was allegedly found in a burned out
office of Yanukovych's old party:
The papers, known in Ukraine as the "black ledger," are a chicken-scratch of Cyrillic
covering about 400 pages taken from books once kept in a third-floor room in the former Party
of Regions headquarters on Lipskaya Street in Kiev.
...
The accounting records surfaced this year, when Serhiy A. Leshchenko, a member of Parliament
who said he had received a partial copy from a source he did not identify, published line
items covering six months of outlays in 2012 totaling $66 million. In an interview, Mr.
Leshchenko said another source had provided the entire multiyear ledger to Viktor M. Trepak,
a former deputy director of the domestic intelligence agency of Ukraine, the S.B.U., who
passed it to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
Anti-corruption groups in Ukraine said the black ledger detailing payments was probably
seized when protesters ransacked the Party of Regions headquarters in February 2014.
The pages from the ledger, which had come from anonymous sources probably
supported by John Brennan's CIA , were never proven to be genuine. But the claims were
strong enough to get Manafort fired as campaign manager for Donald Trump. He was later
sentenced for unrelated cases of tax evasion.
Serhin A. Leshchenko, the member of the Ukrainian parliament who published the dubious
ledger, was rabidly anti-Trump. Shortly after providing the "secret ledger" he talked with the
Financial Times and promised to continue to meddle in the U.S. election. The FT
headline emphasized the fact:
The prospect of Mr Trump, who has praised Ukraine's arch-enemy Vladimir Putin, becoming
leader of the country's biggest ally has spurred not just Mr Leshchenko but Kiev's wider
political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene,
however indirectly, in a U.S. election.
...
Mr. Leshchenko and other political actors in Kiev say they will continue with their efforts
to prevent a candidate - who recently suggested Russia might keep Crimea, which it annexed
two years ago - from reaching the summit of American political power.
"A Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy," Mr
Leshchenko, an investigative journalist turned MP, told the Financial Times. "For me it was
important to show not only the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate
who can break the geopolitical balance in the world."
...
If the Republican candidate loses in November, some observers suggest Kiev's action may have
played at least a small role.
A Democratic Party operative asked the Ukrainian ambassador to find dirt on Trump's campaign
manger Paul Manafort. A few month later a secret "black ledger" emerges from nowhere into the
hands of dubious Ukrainian actors including a 'former' domestic intelligence director.
The ledger may or may not show that Manafort received money from Yanukovych's party. It was
never verified. But it left Trump no choice but to fire Manafort. Ukrainian figures who were
involved in the stunt openly admitted that they had meddled in the U.S. election, promised to
do more of it and probably did.
The Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election is well documented. How the Buzzfeed
News author can claim that it is a "debunked conspiracy theory" is beyond me.
1. The Contracting States shall provide mutual assistance, in accordance with the provisions
of this Treaty, in connection with the investigation, prosecution, and prevention of
offenses, and in proceedings related to criminal matters.
2. Assistance shall include: (a) taking the testimony or statements of persons; (b)
providing documents, records, and other items; (c) locating or identifying persons or items;
(d) serving documents; (e) transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes;
(f) executing searches and seizures; (g) assisting in proceedings related to immobilization
and forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and (h) any other form of
assistance not prohibited by the laws of the Requested State.
3. Assistance shall be provided without regard to whether the conduct that is the subject
of the investigation, prosecution, or proceeding in the Requesting State would constitute an
offense under the laws of the Requested State.
When Trump
asked the current Ukrainian President Zelensky to help with an investigation into the above
matters he acted well within the law and within the framework of the treaty. It was certainly
not illegitimate to do that.
But when mainstream media deny that Biden's interference in Ukraine's prosecutor office is
suspect, or claim that the Ukraine did not interfere in the U.S. elections, they make it look
as if Trump did something crazy or illegal. He does plenty of that but not in this case. To use
it a basis of an 'impeachment inquiry' is political bullshit.
Making these false claims will come back to haunt those media outlets. Sooner or later the
public will recognize that those claims are false. It will lessen the already low trust in the
media even more.
Posted by b on October 26, 2019 at 17:51 UTC |
Permalink
"Sooner or later the public will recognize that those claims are false. It will lessen the
already low trust in the media even more."
More precisely, there exit Trump-friendly media with millions of followers, so insisting
on innocence of Biden will have a political cost. Not to mention leftist media reminiscing
how Senator Biden championed the cause of MBNA (credit cart giant) when it was also a
generous employer of his dear son. Of course, given the size of Delaware, it could be just a
coincidence.
Thanks b for providing the nitty gritty details of this sorry saga. That term "conspiracy
theory" has been so widely abused that, to me at least, it now means something that the
author wishes were not true but almost certainly is.
What is certain is that if Biden is selected as the Dem candidate and ends up as President,
the GOP (if it retains influence in Congress) will open an investigation into his actions on
behalf of his son. Russia-gate is the gift that keeps on giving!
Thanks b, for the reality check.
Joe Biden needs to STFU, and go away. He and his ilk are part of the problem, not the
solution. The rulers of America insist on pushing this sycophant for the empire down our
throats. And, he can take HRC and her crowd with him. It's high time for some new blood, IF, TPTB, will even allow that to happen, which I very
much doubt....
Thanks for another informative and insightful commentary, B. It's like a drink of cool, clean
water after staggering through a volcanic landscape full of fumaroles belching sulfurous
plumes of superheated gas.
Sometimes my hobby horses merrily hop along under me without any effort on my part. I just
hang onto the reins and howl. So: it's bad enough that the US mass-media
consent-manufacturers, aka the CIA/Deep State's "Mighty Wurlitzer", gin up endless propaganda
to discredit the facts you mention; their mission is to fool enough of the public that
there's no "there" there, and prop up Biden's presidential campaign in the bargain.
But what increasingly bugs me is so-called "alternative" news outlets and independent
journalists buying into the spin that Trump and his associates are using the pretext of
investigating corruption as a means to illegally and illicitly "dig up dirt on political
rivals". Put the other way around, they concede that Biden and other Team Obama honchos are
indeed "dirty", and that their Ukraine adventure was reprehensibly illicit or illegal and
self-serving-- but they return to faulting Trump for impermissibly exploiting these
circumstances in order to gain political advantage.
It doesn't surprise me that talented but co-opted journalists like Matt Taibbi are careful
to affirm that Trump et al 's conduct is manifestly an abuse of power. But, sadly,
even journalists like Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Michael Tracey have
echoed this rote condemnation.
My guess is that this arises from two acronyms: incipient TDS, which compels even
"alternative" US journalists to regard Trump as the "heel" in the staged
"professional"-wrestling scam of US electoral politics. Also, CYA; I suspect that these
relatively young, professionally vulnerable journalists are terrified of coming off as
"defending" or "excusing" Trump, lest they trigger wrathful excoriation from their peers and
the hordes of social-media users whose custom they cultivate.
This is why I appreciate your clarity and forthrightness on this fraught topic.
Rereading your post, and agreeing with some it, I find I disagree less with its conclusions
than on first reading.
If you were referring to Trump's convo with Zelensky specifically, reasonable people might
disagree over whether that was an abuse of power or sleazy and dumb (in being
unnecessary)--which of course shouldn't mean the Bidens get a pass here, which none of these
young journalists are suggesting.
But where I would disagree is if you were suggesting that Taibbi, Mate and Blumenthal are
making obligatory objections to Trump more generally, in order to curry favour with their
peers. I think each of them would readily reel off lists of things (more substantive than
Ukrainegate -- and probably not including Russia collusion) that they think Trump should be
castigated, impeached and perhaps prosecuted for.
Well, there you have it--proof that BigLie Media indeed specializes in publishing Big Lies
that ought to reduce such outlets to the status of Tabloids. Of course, the media is free to
lie all it wants within the limits of slander and libel, but most people don't like being
lied to particularly over matters of importance.
Larry Johnson has a piece at SST on a CIA task force set up to compromise Trump and prevent
him becoming president.
That Trump avoided all the traps set for him (even the Mueller investigation could pin
nothing on Trump) and won the election says a bit for Trump. He definitely is more than the
twitter reality TV persona that he puts up as a public face.
With the Barr investigation, it looks like the non Trump section of the swamp will be drained
in the near future.
Possibly an irrelevant point, but Shokin's replacement Lutsenko was the prosecutor who
resurrected the "deceased", self declared journalist, Arkady Babchenko. The story was full of
plot twists, involving a Boris German/Herman, who was Russian. B kept Us regaled with events.
I'd post a link, but have witnessed too many thread expansions too risk it.
I think a lot of people give the MSM too much credit. Of course editorials etc. can influence
people's thinking but the media, and journalists in general, are loathed by the people who
voted for Trump. It's a big reason he was elected.
Ort @ 8 said;"It doesn't surprise me that talented but co-opted journalists like Matt Taibbi
are careful to affirm that Trump et al's conduct is manifestly an abuse of power."
Co-Opted, or truthful, depending on what you believe. You, have every right to your
opinion, but, when push comes to shove, think I'll give my opinion being swayed or not, by
giving more credibility to the five names you've decided to "shade".
DJT has a record of behavior, and so do the five you've mentioned. My choice is clear,
I'll believe the five..
Alexandra Chalupa's connection to the thinktank The Atlantic Council should be borne in mind
in the developing discussion in the comments forum. Her sister Irena is or has been a
non-resident Senior Fellow there. Irena Chalupa has also been a senior editor at Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty.
Also the founder and CEO of the Crowdstrike company in charge of cybersecurity for the DNC
during the 2016 presidential election campaign was Dmitri Alperovich who is a Senior Fellow
at The Atlantic Council. It was Crowdstrike who came up with the idea that Trump had to be
under the Kremlin's thumb and from there the hysterical witch-hunt and associated actions
known as Russiagate began.
I'm surprised that at this point in time, Bellingcat has not been included in digging up
"dirt" on Trump, Manafort or anyone Manafort supposedly had connections with who is also
mentioned in the "black ledger" but maybe that's because with the garbage that Bellingcat has
so delivered, Eliot Higgins and company can't be trusted any more. Their masters should have
known though, that when you give your subordinates base material to work with, they can only
come up with base results: garbage in, garbage out.
Thanks for your ongoing documentation of the political criminality in the US b. The recent events are playing out like a two-bit soap opera rerun in a nursing home for
America's brainwashed. Maybe Trump could start a new TV game show called Apprentice Corruption and instead of
saying "Your Fired!" it could be "Your Guilty!"
As an American it is difficult to watch the country that I was taught such good things
about in school be exposed as a criminal enterprise running cover for the elite cult that
owns global private finance and manipulates Western not-so-civilized culture.
I hope all this BS we are going through wakes up enough of the semi-literate public to
overthrow the criminal sect and restore the Founding Fathers motto and concept of E Pluribus
Unum.
Lee Stranahan of Radio Sputnik has been reporting on Alexandra Chalupa's role for a number of
years now. I hope he gets proper credit as this story comes out.
Given the fact that she got a first hand look at the Outlaw US Empire's injustice system and
its tie-in with BigLie Media, the comments by the now back in Russia Maria Butina carry some legitimate weight that're
worth reading: "'I believe that the Americans are wonderful people, but they have lost their legal
system,' Butina said. 'What is more, they are routinely losing their country. They will lose
it unless they do something'.... "'I am very proud of my country, of my origin,' Butina stressed. 'And I come to realize it
more and more.'"
Should I bold the following, maybe make the lettering red, and put it in all caps:
"They are routinely losing their country."
I know this is an international bar, but the general focus has long been on the Outlaw US
Empire. IMO, Maria Butina is 100% correct. The topic of this thread is just further proof of
that fact. As I tirelessly point out, the federal government has routinely violated its own
fundamental law daily since October 1945. The media goes along with it robotically. And aside
from myself, I know of no other US citizen that's raised the issue--not Chomsky, not Zinn,
not anyone with more credentials and public accessibility than I. I sorta feel like Winston
Smith: Am I the only one who sees and understands what's actually happening?! Well, I've
shared what I know, so I'm no longer alone. But that's not very satisfying, nor is it
satisfactory.
The take away quote from a Matt Taibbi twit
"LOL. Barack Obama is going to love this interview his former DIA James Clapper just gave to
CNN about the Durham probe: "It's frankly disconcerting to be investigated for having done...
what we were told to do by the president of the United States."
"
Prescient observation by Aaron Mate :
"When CNN & MSNBC now cover the criminal inquiry into conduct of intel officials in
Russia probe, they are literally covering their employees -- John Brennan (MSNBC); James
Clapper, Andrew McCabe, James Baker (CNN). I avoid the term, but it's appropriate here: Deep
State TV."
Sure, he sees it, many of us barflies see it, but it's the public within the Outlaw US
Empire that must see and understand this dynamic. If they don't or won't, then
Butina's words are even more correct--They are losing their country.
The take away quote:
"Joe Biden intervened at least two times on matters his son Hunter's firms was being paid to
lobby on, according to government records reviewed by the Washington Examiner."
The merry-go-round scenario you post would indicate a broken state. Biden's been in office
for 43 years, Trump 3 yrs... the potential for dirt is large, mix it with even larger GOP
vengeance should that scenario arise and this will drag on through the decades.
Part and parcel of democracy. Western style democracy at least. Perhaps others can set
theirs up better, though allways, the achilles heel of democracy is information, or media.
Who oversees ensuring voters recieve accurate information.
It took complaints from the public and investigated them. They did not have power to bring
charges, but for a time findings were made public. Once it got onto a money trail it would
keep following and that would lead to other money trails. It was a state agency and had to
stop at state borders but most money trails led to federal politics. It was defanged when
they came too close to federal politics.
Something like this in a countries constitution could work though it could be corrupted the
same as anything else.
Indeed, the guilty are hiding in plain sight. It appears sinister, and is, but I think its a
positive development of late, as it would suggest that big media are scrambling to preserve
the status quo by legitimising these deep state actors.
It wasn't so long ago these deep state types would rather steer clear of the media. Now
they are out there earning bread driving the narrative. Are these deep state media faces a
tactical last resort...?
Obama orchestrated the regime change operation in Ukraine. As we know from Wayne Madsen's
little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama has been a CIA asset since he was a
suckling babe. To promote containment of the Russian menace, the US got in bed with Ukrainian
fascists and successfully exploited political tensions in that country resulting in the
removal of the duly elected Yanukovitch. A right wing billionaire then took the reigns and
Putin orchestrated a referendum in Crimea in retaliation that resulted in its return to
Russia. The Crimeans were and continue to be happy, happier than the rest of Ukrainians under
Kiev neo-fascist free market exploitation.
It is natural that neo-fascist Ukrainians would express their disapproval of Trump, who was making nice with Putin. No
matter what his motives were, he was bucking US anti-Russian policy. I liked Trump at that time for this willingness to end a
Cold War policy sponsored by the US military industrial complex. You can cal it "deep state" if you like. It's not deep and
it's not a shadow government. It's the war party. It's the elite profiting from weapons manufacture. Trump has no principles
except expedience and his pro-Russian stance is likely owing to the money laundering he's been doing for Russian criminals
since he is such a lousy business man. Putin and other Russian kleptocrats saved Trump boy's bacon. So it's very
confusing when bed actors do good things.
Biden is no doubt quite corrupt. But that's got little to do with Trumps quid pro quo with
Ukraine. You say that Ukrainian interference in US elections is well documented. You don't
offer any documents, b. Anti-Putin Ukrainians were naturally anti-Trump. So what? Where's the
beef? Show me how that little piss ant country that can't even pay its fuel bills and gave
the world Chernobyl, interfered in US elections.
Your defense of Trump is getting tiresome. He's a criminal with no respect for the US
Constitution and he deserves to be impeached. This is not to say that Joe Biden or his drug
addict son are not also shit stains. I am just dismayed that you, an ostensibly intelligent
independent commentator would go to bat for an ignoramus like Trump.
The general charge against Trump is that he was "digging up dirt" on opponents. Well
laddy-dah. So what. Welcome to Politics 101.
President Harry Truman probably received as much flak as any politician ever did,
especially after he canned war-hero General MacArthur. But Truman wasn't a candy-ass current
politician complaining about dirt-digging. No, he gave back more than he got, in spades.
What was "give-em-hell" Harry Truman's attitude? Some Truman quotes:
--"I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell."
--"It's the fellows who go to West Point and are trained to think they're gods in uniform
that I plan to take apart"
--"I didn't fire him [General MacArthur] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he
was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three quarters of them
would be in jail."
-- "I'll stand by [you] but if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen ."
That's what Trump is doing and will probably continue to do with fake news. (And he coined
the phrase.)
I'll repeat what I posted here some days ago: this is not a battle between truth vs lies, but
between which is the truth that will guide the USA for the forseeable future.
Empires don't act on facts: they are all-powerful, so they sculpt reality as they see fit.
What determines this is class struggle: the inner contradictions of a society that results
in a given consensus, thus forming a hegemony.
It's not that the liberals deny Biden did what he did, but that they disagree with Trump's
interpretation over what he did. This is what the doctrine of the vital center is all about:
some facts are more facts than others, prevailing the one which maintains the cohesion of the
empire.
There's a battle for America's soul; the American elite is in flux: Russia or China?
In 1984 , the narrative was now 100% in your face and everything had to be
manipulated to match it, which apparently hadn't been needed previously. But we aren't told
if that was done as a "last resort." I would think not given continuing polls showing ongoing
distrust of media, thus the difficulty of manufacturing consent. Look at the great popularity
enjoyed by Sanders amongst 18-30 year-olds who get most of their information online or via
social media and the measures being taken to try and manipulate those realms. Then there're
efforts to counter the misinformation and manipulation by numerous activists, many of which
get cited here.
Another thought: They're out front now because the Establishment's deemed the fight to
control the narrative's being lost, and they've been drafted to rectify the situation. If
correct, they ought to keep failing.
The international nature of this bar and its many flies is that mostly (from what I read)
they have an immense respect for the rule of law. It is this singular concept that we trust
will transcend religion and the quasi religiosity of political allegiances.
The rule of law is a deity-like singularity that embraces all beings equally, or
should. Assaulting that legitimate expectation of the law applying equally is what confronts us
daily in so many ways and when it is observed being assaulted by the highest office bearers
in political and corporate life that we barflies get mighty annoyed. The gross vista of assumed immunity demonstrated by Nixon is equaled by the antics of the
Clinton foundation and its Directors. Each and every one of them.
But it is far worse than that as the assault on the rule of law is daily carried out by
the mafias that infest our societies, the corrupt and violent police that cant/wont protect
our citizens, the international warmongering criminal classes that propagandise us to accept
warring as a legitimate exercise of power even though we recognise it as a crime against
humanity.
So when we see the deplorable state of media and jurisprudence and fairness we can only
think as Maria Butina does "that we are routinely losing our countries" and I would add our
civil societies. The latter is vastly more concerning than the former IMO.
Again, not surprised at all. Pro-democratic/anti-Trump media write articles (obviously
made-to-order) to whitewash already badly discredited Biden, and present all the arguments in
favor of his dark connections with Ukraine as a kind of "conspiracy theory". This is a common
practice. Not having sufficient competence to reasonably refute the arguments of opponents,
MSM (as well as all sorts of "experts") immediately mark the position of opponents with
"conspiracy theory" (there are also other options to choose from: "Putin's agent", "Putin's
useful idiot", "Kremlin's agent", "pro-Russian propaganda", etc.). It is assumed that this
makes unnecessary/optional (and even "toxic") all further conversations with the opponent
(that is, there is no need to answer him, to prove something with facts, etc.), because his
position is a "conspiracy theory".
Western MSM are actively using this simplest propaganda technique of information warfare.
For example, this
was the case when reporting on events in Syria - those journalists, the media, experts
who did not agree with the lie of MSM about Assad's use of the chemical weapons
were declared "conspiracy theorists" (and also "Assad apologists"). This method was
also used to cover "the Skripal case" - those who questioned the British authorities'
version of the "Novichok poisoning" were declared "conspiracy
theorists".
When I see words like "conspiracy theory" in the headlines and see what media use them,
then, you know, it's all clear. No chance for such articles/media to be taken seriously.
@32 jadan quote "Show me how that little piss ant country that can't even pay its fuel
bills...." are you familiar with the name porkoshenko, or any other one of the numbers of
kleptomaniacs in positions of power in the ukraine? how do you think they got their, if
''that little piss ant country' can't even pay it's bills? i am sure you are capable of
adding 2 + 2...
b isn't defending trump here.. he's highlighting how corrupt the msm is! it looks like you
missed that.. check the headline..
This is the way the controlled media works. They provide half a story, half truths, straw-man
facts, selective quotes and 'expert' comment, opinion and unwarranted assumption presented as
fact that all together cover the spectrum from black to white, spread across the many titles.
They also disseminate a fine dusting of lies and actual truth here and there. The result is
the public have a dozen 'truths' to pick from, none of which are real, while the outright
lies and actual truths get dismissed as not credible and the half-truths and straw-man truths
appear to carry some validity. If you look for it you can find it applying in almost every
bit of 'news', if it is in any way controversial, whether it is partisan politics, Climate
Change or Brexit to give examples.
As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama
has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe.
If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas
drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about
Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge.
Ukraine was just one hell of a honey pot that too many couldn't resist visiting.
Kind of like Russia (Uranium One and HRC) or China (Biden for a start).
Giulani is going to be very busy - he still hasn't produced anything that wasn't already
published, but I bet he has much more.
... smart enough to understand and agree that they needed someone like Trump?
Yes, I do think they are smart enough and agreed to act in their collective best interest.
Kissinger first wrote of MAGA in a WSJ Op-Ed in August 2014. Trump entered the race in June
2015, IIRC.
Do you think that Trump - who failed at multiple businesses - just woke up one day and
became a political and geopolitical genius? As a candidate he said he'd "take the oil" and
now, more than 3 years later, he has! LOL.
And JUST AFTER the Mueller investigation formally ends, Trump ONCE AGAIN solicits a
foreign power to interfere in a US election. The biggest beneficiary? Deep State BIDEN! Who
now gets all the media attention.
FYI Wm Gruff makes your same point often: that Deep State mistakes demonstrate that they
couldn't possible pull of a Trump win (if that's what they wanted). I disagree.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
I very much doubt that anyone will go to jail - or serve any meaningful jail time if they
do - over the Deep State shenanigans. Nor will people 'wake up' and see how they've been
played anytime soon. Even the smarter, more savvy denizens of the moa bar have much
difficulty connecting dots. Dots that they don't want to see.
If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas
drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about
Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge
Trump at first threw down the gauntlet to the spies and proclaimed his autocratic
prerogative when God held off the rain for his inauguration (!) but now he would gladly get
on his knees between Gina Haspel's legs if the CIA would only help him stay in power.
What
distinguishes Obama from other presidents is the degree to which he was manufactured. He made
it to the WH without much of a political base. Control of the political context, media and
process, launched Obama to the top. It was fulfillment of the liberal American dream. It was
a great coup. Talk about the "deep state"! It's staring us all in the face.
Oh, but Deep State DID interfere.
FACT: Deep Stater Hillary colluded with DNC against Sanders. ( But she would NEVER
participate in collusion that caused her to lose an election./sarc LOL)
And now pro-Trump people say Clapper, Brennan, and Comey interfered in the 2016 election
OR committed treason by trying to unseat the President!
So we can talk about Deep State interference . . . as long as it follows the partisan
narrative that's been established for us.
I have news for you. USA Presidents use strong coercive persuasive arguments or means of
speech ALL THE TIME. And always have. Sometimes they can be subtle and allude to an action
that might make them happy and sometimes they can be blunt. Its a presidential thing. It is
what statespeople do when they 'negotiate' for their desired outcome.
It is not illegal or corrupt. It is power nakedly exercised. Just because Biden is a
candidate for the same presidential role does not confer immunity for Biden's graft in favor
of his son a few years back. You make a mockery of your position.
One USA President visited Australia once and when confronted with a roadblock of
demonstrators seeking peace in Vietnam demanded of the Australian Premier to "drive over the
bastards". That didn't happen but the President continued to drive all over the Vietnamese
innocents.
Trump may be a grifter and a scumbag but there are warmongers well ahead of him in the cue
for justice. Take Hillary Clinton for example. She is a ruthless killer and the greatest
breach of USA national Security ever with her Secretary of State emails held on an unsecured
server in her closet.
The same powers some call "deep state," are the same powers that have given us ALL modern day
presidents, probably from FDR on.
IMO, they are nothing more, nothing less than the "captains of commerce", who, through the
vast accumulation of wealth by monopoly, buy our "representatives" to legislate rules and
regulations to benefit themselves.
Our so-called "leaders" work for them, with very few exceptions, and transcends all
political parties, and now also the Supreme Court.
$ has been ruled speech, unlimited $ is allowed to be given to politicians for elections.
How could anything but massive corruption take place under this kind of system?
they make it look as if Trump did something crazy or illegal. He does plenty of that but not
in this case.
You suffer from TDS. What on Earth are you talking about here? Plenty of that? Say what?
Why do you undercut your entire point in your article with this little piece of utter
nonsense?
Name one thing that Trump that has done that is illegal. Name one thing that is crazy. Stop apologizing to the crazies by denigrating Trump. Your entire article was all about
how none of the bs is true. And then you put your own brand of bs in there at the end. Cut it
out.
@ 54 jadan... thanks for your comments... i am feeling more philosophical tonight, as i don't
have a gig and have some time to express myself a bit more here.. first off, i don't like any
of these characters - trump, biden, and etc. etc.. i have no horse in the game here, and it
sounds like you don't either.. your comment- "The issue is Trump's extortion of Ukraine, not
Biden's extortion of Ukraine." i can go along with that until i reflect back onto what
increasingly looks like an agenda to get trump even prior to when he was elected, at which
point i want to say why are we only examining trump in all of this? who gets to decide what
the issue is, or as Caitlin Johnstone lets to say - who gets to decide what the narrative is
here? i don't have an answer for this, but those who appear to be taking a side in all of
this - including you with the quote i make - seem to think that it has to be the issue of
trumps extortion of Ukraine, verses what appears to me the CIA - Dem party extortion of the
ordinary USA persons mind...
let me back up... Has mccarthyism version 2 come to life since the advent of what happened
in the Ukraine from 2014 onward?? is the issue of a new cold war with Russia been on the
burner for at least 5 or more years here and began before trump was even considered a
potential candidate for the republican party? did Russia take back Crimea, which wasn't
supposed to happen? is this good for military industrial complex sales? and etc. etc..
so, i don't think it is fair to only consider the latest boneheaded thing trump did when i
consider the bigger picture unfolding here.. now, maybe you think i am a trump apologist... i
am just saying what the backdrop looks like to me here.. i am sure biden is small potatoes in
the bigger picture here, but if taking a closer examination of what took place in ukraine
leading into 2014, with the victoria nulands and geoffrey pyatts and etc. etc. of usa
diplomatic corps, usa dept of state and etc. could lead to a better understanding of how the
usa has went down the road it has for the past 60 years of foreign policy on the world stage,
it would be a good start... so, to me - it ain't about trump.. it is about usa foreign policy
and how it has sucked the big one on the world stage for at least since the time of vietnam
when i was a teenager..
i suppose it depends on the time frame one wants to take.. my time frame will be
considered an evasion of the moment to some, but it is how i see it.. sure, trump is scum,
but the bigger issue to me is the usa's foreign policy agenda.. anything that can pull back
the covers on that would be an extremely good thing... now, perhaps this is the straw that
broke trumps back and the deep state will not tolerate being scrutinized.. that i could
understand, but i am not going to be putting it all on trump as the reason the covers have to
remain on all the shit the usa has been responsible for on the world stage to date and
especially the past 10 years.. i am not able to blame trump for all of that.. and as you can
see, i would prefer to get down to the nitty gritty of who is zooming who here... the msm for
all intensive purposes is complicit in duping the american public.. that to me is the gist of
b's comment here, not that he is cheer-leading for trump.. i just don't see it that way...i'm
definitely not!
"... "What they did was treasonous, OK? It was treasonous," he told author Doug Wead for his upcoming book, " Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency." ..."
President Trump has ratcheted up his claim that the Obama White House spied on his 2016 campaign, charging in a new book that
it was a "treasonous" act by the former Democratic president.
"The interesting thing out of all of this is that we caught them spying on the election. They were spying on my campaign. So you
know? What is that all about?" said Trump.
"I have never ever said this, but truth is, they got caught spying. They were spying," said Trump who then added, "Obama."
In 2017, Trump tweeted that he felt the Obama White House "had my wires tapped" in Trump Tower. He later said he didn't mean it
literally but that he felt his campaign was being spied on.
Attorney General William Barr earlier this year said he was looking into whether "improper surveillance" may have occurred in
2016.
He has tasked a prosecutor to look into Obama officials and other officials who sparked the Russia collusion investigation into
Trump after a report showed no collusion. New reports on that investigation described it as "criminal" in nature.
"It turned out I was right. By the way," Trump told Wead in excerpts provided to Secrets.
"In fact, what I said was peanuts compared to what they did. They were spying on my campaign. They got caught and they said,
'Oh we were not spying. It was actually an investigation.' Can you imagine an administration investigating its political opponents?"
said the president.
In the book, Trump said that the Russia investigation undercut his presidency.
" Anybody else would be unable to function under the kind of pressure and distraction I had. They couldn't get anything done.
No other president should ever have to go through this. But understand, there was no collusion. They would have had to make something
up," he said.
Technically, it was sedition, unless Trump can show that Obama was acting for a foreign power. There definitely were foreign
powers involved, the question is who was in charge?
The attempt to circumvent democracy and ensure Hillary's victory in the elections with falsified Russian collusion allegations
along with a constant communist media bombardment to discredit Trump, absolutely constitutes treason. What you need to understand
is that socialist progressives serve a different god - lucifer - and a different nation - Israel; that they do not have your best
interests at heart is a given.
Everything they do is to undermine traditional morality and the moral fabric that holds civilization together. Ordo Ab Cao.
More information on Hunter Biden. He served on the President's Advisory Council of the
National Democratic Institute (NDI), a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy,
which was set up after Congress banned the CIA from pursuing regime change. A lot of the
coordination and assistance for the Ukraine coup probably passed through that 'non-profit.'
Joe Biden was Obama's point person, and Hunter Biden was probably Joe's eyes, ears, and
gopher at NDI.
Immediately after the coup, Hunter was appointed to the board of the strategically
critical Burisma energy company, Ukraine's largest producer of natural gas. From what I have
seen, the US likes to have its assets sit on the Board of strategically critically energy
companies.
And is Ukraine ever strategically important!!! Apart from the fact the Russian pipelines
pass through the country, "Ukraine has an estimated 42 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of
technically recoverable shale gas reserves, according to the U.S. Energy Information
Administration (EIA), ranking its deposits as the fourth largest in Europe." https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ukraine_and_fracking
Again, Hunter Biden's appointment would not have been by chance. He would have been put
there to once again to be Joe Biden's eyes, ears, and gopher.
As a side benefit, Hunter Biden would have been in an excellent position, both from his
work at NDI and at Burisma, to meet the movers and shakers in post-coup Ukraine and
coordinate disinformation campaigns as needed. The Ukrainians would have been eager to help
as the solvency of the country depended on US loans.
So are we about to witness the first color revolution on US soil? Could be
"... "During the Ukraine cries in 2014-15, Chris Steele had a number of commercial clients who were asking him for reports on what was going on in Russia, what was going on in Ukraine, what was going on between them." --Victoria Nuland. ..."
"... More information on Hunter Biden. He served on the President's Advisory Council of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up after Congress banned the CIA from pursuing regime change. A lot of the coordination and assistance for the Ukraine coup probably passed through that 'non-profit.' Joe Biden was Obama's point person, and Hunter Biden was probably Joe's eyes, ears, and gopher at NDI. ..."
"... As a side benefit, Hunter Biden would have been in an excellent position, both from his work at NDI and at Burisma, to meet the movers and shakers in post-coup Ukraine and coordinate disinformation campaigns as needed. The Ukrainians would have been eager to help as the solvency of the country depended on US loans. ..."
"During the Ukraine cries in 2014-15, Chris Steele had a number of commercial clients who
were asking him for reports on what was going on in Russia, what was going on in Ukraine,
what was going on between them." --Victoria Nuland.
More information on Hunter Biden. He served on the President's Advisory Council of the
National Democratic Institute (NDI), a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy,
which was set up after Congress banned the CIA from pursuing regime change. A lot of the
coordination and assistance for the Ukraine coup probably passed through that 'non-profit.'
Joe Biden was Obama's point person, and Hunter Biden was probably Joe's eyes, ears, and
gopher at NDI.
Immediately after the coup, Hunter was appointed to the board of the strategically
critical Burisma energy company, Ukraine's largest producer of natural gas. From what I have
seen, the US likes to have its assets sit on the Board of strategically critically energy
companies.
And is Ukraine ever strategically important!!! Apart from the fact the Russian pipelines
pass through the country, "Ukraine has an estimated 42 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of
technically recoverable shale gas reserves, according to the U.S. Energy Information
Administration (EIA), ranking its deposits as the fourth largest in Europe." https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ukraine_and_fracking
Again, Hunter Biden's appointment would not have been by chance. He would have been put
there to once again to be Joe Biden's eyes, ears, and gopher.
As a side benefit, Hunter Biden would have been in an excellent position, both from his
work at NDI and at Burisma, to meet the movers and shakers in post-coup Ukraine and
coordinate disinformation campaigns as needed. The Ukrainians would have been eager to help
as the solvency of the country depended on US loans.
So are we about to witness the first color revolution on US soil? Could be
"... Two weeks later, the Financial Times did a story about Ukraine's takedown of Manafort, including quotes from Leshchenko and Western analysts. "The prospect of Mr Trump, who has praised Ukraine's arch-enemy Vladimir Putin, becoming leader of the country's biggest ally," it began, "has spurred not just Mr Leshchenko but Kiev's wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a US election." ..."
"... Reading the article in 2019, after three years of nonstop coverage about overseas meddling in US democracy, is stunning. Here is an established Western outlet calmly discussing successful foreign influence of an American presidential campaign as a neat little coup, a bit of gutsy international derring-do. ..."
"... "My desire to expose Manafort's doings was motivated by the desire for justice," wrote Leschenko in a recent Washington Post op-ed. "Neither Hillary Clinton nor Joe Biden, nor John Podesta, nor George Soros asked me to publish the information from the black ledger." ..."
Vulnerabilities in US election security need attention, and Ukraine's 2016 impact could
be instructive.
... ... ...
Ukraine's role in the 2016 race is undeniable: In the summer of 2016, Kiev's release of the
so-called "black ledger" resulted in Manafort's ouster from the Trump campaign. The actions of
foreign actors -- however well-intentioned -- directly impacted an American election.
One would imagine Washington media and lawmakers -- who spent three years combing through
every aspect of Moscow's interference in our election -- might direct similar attention to
Kiev's impact. Yet the Ukrainian angle barely made headlines.
If we want to get serious about safeguarding our electoral process from all foreign actors,
not just Moscow-based ones, it's time to examine Ukraine as well.
On August 14, 2016, The New York Times published a bombshell
about what would become known as the "black ledger" -- a handwritten document alleging millions
of off-the-books payments to Manafort by the Party of Regions, led by his former client Viktor
Yanukovych, the ousted pro-Russian president of Ukraine. The Times received the ledger
from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), an independent government
agency.
The story rocked the 2016 election, given Manafort's position as head of Trump's campaign.
The Hillary Clinton campaign immediately seized on it as proof that Manafort -- and therefore
Trump -- was tied to Yanukovych and the Kremlin.
Four days later, the Times ran a
follow-up story, based on more details released by NABU and publicity by Serhei Leshchenko,
a member of the Ukrainian parliament, who told the Times he'd studied the ledger. The
next day, Manafort resigned from Trump's campaign.
Two weeks later, the Financial Times did a story about Ukraine's
takedown of Manafort, including quotes from Leshchenko and Western analysts. "The prospect of
Mr Trump, who has praised Ukraine's arch-enemy Vladimir Putin, becoming leader of the country's
biggest ally," it began, "has spurred not just Mr Leshchenko but Kiev's wider political
leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however
indirectly, in a US election."
"Mr Leshchenko and other political actors in Kiev say they will continue their efforts to
prevent a candidate from reaching the summit of American political power," the story went
on.
Reading the article in 2019, after three years of nonstop coverage about overseas meddling
in US democracy, is stunning. Here is an established Western outlet calmly discussing
successful foreign influence of an American presidential campaign as a neat little coup, a bit
of gutsy international derring-do.
Calling the intervention "indirect" is a bit generous, as well. Manafort was ousted based on
handwritten pieces of paper -- the story would've never gone anywhere without NABU and
Leshchenko's vouching for the ledger's authenticity. That's as direct as it gets.
Of course, all this occurred in August of 2016, when the prospect of a Trump presidency was
seen as inconceivable. After Trump's election,
Leshchenko and
NABU frantically denied their intent to damage the Trump campaign, claiming the ledger was
publicized solely because of their concern to stamp out corruption and had nothing to do with
US politics.
"My desire to expose Manafort's doings was motivated by the desire for justice,"
wrote Leschenko in a recent Washington Post op-ed. "Neither Hillary Clinton nor Joe
Biden, nor John Podesta, nor George Soros asked me to publish the information from the black
ledger."
Ukrainians certainly had every reason to expose Manafort's corruption, and the man's
subsequent trial showed there was an enormous amount to expose. But Ukraine's efforts also
happened to coincide with -- and have an immediate impact on -- an American campaign. And yet,
despite this information's being available in English, and published by established Western
media, we've had almost no debate about its implications.
To understand just how astounding that is, simply imagine if the situation were reversed.
Imagine the Financial Times ran a story about a Russian government bureau and lawmaker
leaking documents that directly resulted in the ouster of the Clinton campaign manager. Even if
everything exposed by Russia were true, it'd still be a major scandal.
None of this is to say we should ignore the Kremlin's election meddling or Trump's current
attempt to coerce Ukraine into investigating Biden. These are extraordinarily serious issues --
but so is Ukraine's impact in 2016.
It seems many Americans are under the mistaken assumption that the moment Trump leaves
office, things will return to normal. They won't. If anything, the 2016 election let the devil
out of the box -- other actors in other nations surely took notice of the ease with which a
handful of individuals in Ukraine were able to influence an American campaign. There will be
more of this. Some may be in good faith; some will not.
It is impossible to say we're taking foreign interference seriously until the media,
lawmakers, and political activists have an honest conversation about the new norms. And that
involves looking not only at Trump and Russia, but at Ukraine as well.
Lev Golinkin is the
author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka , Amazon's Debut of the Month
and a Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program selection. Golinkin, a graduate
of Boston College, came to the United States as a child refugee from the eastern Ukrainian city
of Kharkov (now called Kharkiv) in 1990. His op-eds and essays on the Ukraine crisis have
appeared in The New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , The Boston Globe
, and Time.com , among others.
Looks like Cheney protégé Victoria Nuland played an important role in Steele dossier saga.
I wonder why female neocons are so nasty. Is this this suppressed "Inferiority
complex" or what ?
Notable quotes:
"... A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit was filed against the US Justice Department on Wednesday by legal watchdog group Judicial Watch , ..."
"... According to August 2018 testimony by the DOJ's former #4 official Bruce Ohr, dossier author Christopher Steele gave two memos from his salacious, Clinton-funded opposition research to Gaeta. ..."
"... According to the Epoch Times ..."
"... For this visit, the FBI sought permission from the office of Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Nuland, who had been the recipient of many of Steele's reports, gave permission for the more formal meeting. On July 5, 2016, Gaeta traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. ..."
"... Victoria Nuland???? Oh, waits, that Nuland. The qwm who orchestrated the Ukraine mess. Now I've got it, whew, thought I was losing my memory there for a bit. ..."
A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit was filed against the US Justice Department on
Wednesday by legal watchdog group
Judicial Watch , seeking records concerning FBI Special Agent Michael Gaeta - an
agency Legal Attaché in Rome who helped circulate the infamous Steele Dossier.
Expect the name Michael Gaeta to become a household name very soon regarding
spygate.
The JW lawsuit seeks:
All records of communications, including emails (using [his or her] own name or aliases),
text messages, instant chats and encrypted messages, sent to and from former FBI Legal
Attaché in Rome, Special Agent Michael Gaeta, mentioning the terms "Trump", "Clinton",
"Republican", "Democrat", and/or "conservatives."
All SF50s and SF52s of SA Michael Gaeta.
All expense reports and travel vouchers submitted for SA Michael Gaeta.
According to August 2018 testimony by the DOJ's former #4 official Bruce Ohr, dossier author
Christopher Steele gave two memos from his salacious, Clinton-funded opposition
research to Gaeta.
In the July 30 meeting, Chris Steele also mentioned something about the doping -- you
know, one of the doping scandals. And he also mentioned, I believe -- and, again, this is
based on my review of my notes -- that he had provided Mr. Gaeta with two reports "
The only thing I recall him mentioning is that he had provided two of his reports to
Special Agent Gaeta.
According to the Epoch Times , Gaeta was authorized by former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria
Nuland to meet with Steele at his London office in order to obtain dossier materials.
The purpose of the London visit was clear. Steele was personally handing the first memo in
his dossier to Gaeta for ultimate transmission back to the FBI and the State Department.
For this visit, the FBI sought permission from the office of Nuland, the assistant
secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Nuland, who had been the recipient of
many of Steele's reports, gave permission for the more formal meeting. On July 5, 2016, Gaeta
traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis.
The FBI's scramble to vet the dossier's claims are well known. According to an April, 2017
NYT
report , the FBI agreed to pay Steele $50,000 for "solid corroboration" of his claims .
Steele was apparently unable to produce satisfactory evidence - and was not paid for his
efforts :
Mr. Steele met his F.B.I. contact in Rome in early October, bringing a stack of new
intelligence reports. One, dated Sept. 14, said that Mr. Putin was facing "fallout" over his
apparent involvement in the D.N.C. hack and was receiving "conflicting advice" on what to
do.
The agent said that if Mr. Steele could get solid corroboration of his reports, the F.B.I.
would pay him $50,000 for his efforts, according to two people familiar with the offer.
Ultimately, he was not paid . - NYT
Still, the FBI used the dossier to obtain the FISA warrant on former Trump campaign aide
Carter Page - while the document itself was heavily shopped around to various media outlets .
The late Sen. John McCain provided a copy to Former FBI Director James Comey, who already had a
version, and briefed President Trump on the salacious document. Comey's briefing to Trump was
then used by CNN and BuzzFeed to justify reporting on and publishing the
dossier following the election.
" The FBI is covering up its role in the Russiagate hoax ," said Judicial Watch
President Tom Fitton. "Judicial Watch has had to fight the FBI 'tooth and nail' for every scrap
of information about the illicit targeting of President Trump."
Great news that Ted is finally (after 30+ years of discussion) introducing a term limits
amendment.
Along with term limits for legislature, we need to kill the deep state as well. The
government needs to be reduced significantly. I say we go back to spoils. If a federal role
is needed, then it must be hired/re-hired by the whitehouse. Every FBI agent, etc. Trump has
proven that most current direct appointments are waste of money and unnecessary.
Limits restricting ex-politicians and military from lobbying, but also partners and
nepotism need to be codified and restricted for politician families.
Whether it's MARK MEADOWS, DOUG COLLINS, JIM JORDAN, LINDSEY GRAHAM or any of the others,
I've come to the conclusion that the ONLY PERSON seriously taking on those who were involved
in THE ATTEMPTED COUP TO TAKE DOWN TRUMP is TOM FITTON of JUDICIAL WATCH.
Misfud was in Rome too. The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital St John - present
sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. Was he a bailiff or a knight, question...?
Talk talk talk, its cheap, and boring with the same criminals appearing over and over, but
no action ever taken and the Traitors don't look very nervous. Why doesn't Trump issue an
Executive Order to direct employees of the DOJ and the FBI etc., to fully cooperate with
investigators?
Agreed. This guy Wray has been slow-walking and standing in the way of anything happening
at every turn. I am convinced he is absolutely there to protect the FBI and nothing else. He
is definitely acting like a "company man".
And, I'm not gonna give Trump any more free passes for what seems to be a lot of BAD picks
in his appointments. In this respect I think it's where Trump has been the most
disappointing.
Victoria Nuland???? Oh, waits, that Nuland. The qwm who orchestrated the Ukraine mess.
Now I've got it, whew, thought I was losing my memory there for a bit.
but who is Evelyn Farkas? Gotta' think on that one.
The conscientious judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a
fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments
and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the
judgement in the mainstream media at all.
The myth is that Magnitskiy was an honest rights campaigner and accountant who discovered
corruption by Russian officials and threatened to expose it, and was consequently imprisoned
on false charges and then tortured and killed. A campaign over his death was led by his
former business partner, hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who wanted massive compensation for
Russian assets allegedly swindled from their venture. The campaign led to the passing of the
Magnitskiy Act in the United States, providing powers for sanctioning individuals responsible
for human rights abuses, and also led to matching sanctions being developed by the EU.
However the European Court of Human Rights has found, in judging a case brought against
Russia by the Magnitskiy family, that the very essence of this story is untrue. They find
that there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed engaged in tax fraud, in
conspiracy with Browder, and he was rightfully charged. The ECHR also found there was
credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed a flight risk so he was rightfully detained. And
most crucially of all, they find that there was credible evidence of tax fraud by Magnitskiy
and action by the authorities "years" before he started to make counter-accusations of
corruption against officials investigating his case.
This judgement utterly explodes the accepted narrative, and does it very succinctly:
Essentially neoliberal MSM were hijacked. Which was easy to do. The current anti-Russian campaign is conducted under
the direct guidance of MI6 and similar agencies
Notable quotes:
"... committee minutes note the secretary saying: "The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code." The minutes add: "This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it." ..."
"... These "considerable efforts" included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would "jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel". It was marked "private and confidential: not for publication, broadcast or use on social media". ..."
"... "The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] and the Telegraph published only a short". It continued by noting that only The Independent "followed up the substantive allegations". It added, "The BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story." ..."
"... The British security services had carried out more than a "symbolic act". It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies. ..."
"... The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair noted that after GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper's laptops "engagement with The Guardian had continued to strengthen". ..."
"... But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this, noting that "the process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice Committee] member". ..."
"... The Guardian's deputy editor went directly from the corporation's basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing. ..."
"... In November 2016, The Guardian published an unprecedented "exclusive" with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service. The article noted that this was the "first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service's 107-year history". It was co-written by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice Committee. This was not mentioned in the article. ..."
"... The MI5 chief was given copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an "increasingly aggressive" Russia. Johnson and his co-author noted, "Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the Snowden files." ..."
"... Just two weeks before the interview with MI6's chief was published, The Guardian itself reported on the high court stating that it would "hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service's decision not to charge MI6's former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004". ..."
"... The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these "exclusives" as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden's. They were possibly acting to prevent any revelations of this kind happening again. ..."
"... The Guardian's coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically. While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts. In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour concluded that the party "is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated every single United Kingdom race equality law." ..."
"... A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: "It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The Times rather than The Guardian." ..."
"... The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question: where does the next Snowden go? DM ..."
The Guardian, Britain's leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been
successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the 'security state', according to newly released
documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.
The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents
leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.
Snowden's bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and
its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of
mass surveillance
operated by both agencies.
According to minutes of meetings of the UK's Defence and Security Media Advisory
Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.
" This event was very concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the [committee] before publishing the
first tranche of information," state
minutes of a 7 November
2013 meeting at the MOD.
The DSMA Committee, more commonly known as the D-Notice Committee, is run by the MOD, where it meets every six months. A small
number of journalists are also invited to sit on the committee. Its
stated purpose is to "prevent inadvertent public disclosure
of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations". It can issue "notices" to the media to encourage them
not to publish certain information.
The committee is currently chaired by the MOD's director-general of security policy Dominic Wilson, who was
previously director of security and intelligence
in the British Cabinet Office. Its secretary is Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE, who
describes himself as an "accomplished, senior
ex-military commander with extensive experience of operational level leadership".
The D-Notice system describes itself as voluntary ,
placing no obligations on the media to comply with any notice issued. This means there should have been no need for the Guardian
to consult the MOD before publishing the Snowden documents.
Yet committee minutes note the secretary saying: "The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code." The minutes
add: "This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it."
' Considerable efforts'
These "considerable efforts" included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published
the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would "jeopardise
both national security and possibly UK personnel". It was
marked "private and confidential: not
for publication, broadcast or use on social media".
Clearly the committee did not want its issuing of the notice to be publicised, and it was nearly successful. Only the right-wing
blog Guido Fawkes made it public.
At the time, according to the committee
minutes , the "intelligence
agencies in particular had continued to ask for more advisories [i.e. D-Notices] to be sent out". Such D-Notices were clearly seen
by the intelligence services not so much as a tool to advise the media but rather a way to threaten it not to publish further Snowden
revelations.
One night, amidst the first Snowden stories being published, the D-Notice Committee's then-secretary Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance
personally called Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian. Vallance "made clear his concern that The Guardian had failed to
consult him in advance before telling the world",
according to a Guardian journalist who interviewed Rusbridger.
Later in the year, Prime Minister David Cameron again used the D-Notice system as a threat to the media.
" I don't want to have to use injunctions or D-Notices or the other tougher measures," he
said
in a statement to MPs. "I think it's much better to appeal to newspapers' sense of social responsibility. But if they don't
demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act."
The threats worked. The Press Gazette reported
at the time that "The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] and the Telegraph
published only a short". It continued by noting that only The Independent "followed up the substantive allegations". It added, "The
BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story."
The Guardian, however, remained uncowed.
According to the committee
minutes , the fact
The Guardian would not stop publishing "undoubtedly raised questions in some minds about the system's future usefulness". If the
D-Notice system could not prevent The Guardian publishing GCHQ's most sensitive secrets, what was it good for?
It was time to rein in The Guardian and make sure this never happened again.
GCHQ and laptops
The security services ratcheted up their "considerable efforts" to deal with the exposures. On 20 July 2013, GCHQ officials
entered The Guardian's offices at King's Cross in London, six weeks after the first Snowden-related article had been published. At the request of the government and security services, Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson, along with two others, spent
three hours destroying the laptops containing the Snowden documents.
The Guardian staffers, according to one of the newspaper's reporters,
brought "angle-grinders, dremels – drills with revolving bits – and masks". The reporter added, "The spy agency provided
one piece of hi-tech equipment, a 'degausser', which destroys magnetic fields and erases data."
Johnson
claims
that the destruction of the computers was "purely a symbolic act", adding that "the government and GCHQ knew, because we
had told them, that the material had been taken to the US to be shared with the New York Times. The reporting would go on. The episode
hadn't changed anything."
Yet the episode did change something. As the D-Notice Committee
minutes for November
2013 outlined: "Towards the end of July [as the computers were being destroyed], The Guardian had begun to seek and accept D-Notice
advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details and since then the dialogue [with the committee] had been reasonable and improving."
The British security services had carried out more than a "symbolic act". It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The
Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive
and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies.
The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair
noted that after
GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper's laptops "engagement with The Guardian had continued to strengthen".
Moreover, he added
, there were now "regular dialogues between the secretary and deputy secretaries and Guardian journalists". Rusbridger later
testified to the Home Affairs Committee that Air Vice-Marshal Vallance of the D-Notice committee and himself "collaborated"
in the aftermath of the Snowden affair and that Vallance had even "been at The Guardian offices to talk to all our reporters".
But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice
Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this,
noting that "the
process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice
Committee] member".
At some point in 2013 or early 2014, Johnson – the same deputy editor who had smashed up his newspaper's computers under the watchful
gaze of British intelligence agents – was approached to take up a seat on the committee. Johnson attended his first meeting in
May 2014 and was
to remain on it until
October 2018
.
The Guardian's deputy editor went directly from the corporation's basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee
alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing.
A new editor
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger withstood intense pressure not to publish some of the Snowden revelations but agreed to Johnson
taking a seat on the D-Notice Committee as a tactical sop to the security services. Throughout his tenure, The Guardian continued
to publish some stories critical of the security services.
But in March 2015, the situation changed when the Guardian
appointed a new editor, Katharine Viner, who had less experience than Rusbridger of dealing with the security services. Viner
had started out on fashion and entertainment magazine Cosmopolitan and had no history in national security reporting. According
to insiders, she showed much less leadership during the Snowden affair than Janine Gibson in the US (Gibson was another
candidate
to be Rusbridger's successor).
Viner was then editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, which was
launched just two weeks before the first Snowden
revelations were published. Australia and New Zealand comprise two-fifths of the so-called
"Five Eyes" surveillance alliance exposed by Snowden.
This was an opportunity for the security services. It appears that their seduction began the following year.
In November 2016, The Guardian
published an unprecedented "exclusive" with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service. The article
noted that this was the "first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service's 107-year history". It was co-written
by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice
Committee. This was not mentioned in the article.
The MI5 chief was given
copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an "increasingly aggressive" Russia. Johnson
and his co-author noted, "Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the
Snowden files."
Parker told the two reporters, "We recognise that in a changing world we have to change too. We have a responsibility to talk
about our work and explain it."
Four months after the MI5 interview, in March 2017, the Guardian
published another unprecedented "exclusive", this time with Alex Younger, the sitting chief of MI6, Britain's external
intelligence agency. This exclusive was awarded by the Secret Intelligence Service to The Guardian's investigations editor, Nick
Hopkins, who had been appointed 14 months previously.
The interview was the first Younger had given to a national newspaper and was again softball.
Titled "MI6 returns to 'tapping up' in an effort to recruit black and Asian officers", it focused almost entirely on the
intelligence service's stated desire to recruit from ethnic minority communities.
" Simply, we have to attract the best of modern Britain," Younger told Hopkins. "Every community from every part of Britain should
feel they have what it takes, no matter what their background or status."
Just two weeks before the interview with MI6's chief was published, The Guardian itself
reported on the high court stating that it would "hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service's
decision not to charge MI6's former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant
wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004".
None of this featured in The Guardian article, which did, however, cover discussions of whether the James Bond actor Daniel Craig
would qualify for the intelligence service. "He would not get into MI6," Younger told Hopkins.
More recently, in August 2019, The Guardian was
awarded yet another exclusive, this time with Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, Britain's most senior
counter-terrorism officer. This was Basu's " first major interview since taking up his post" the previous year and resulted in a
three-part series of articles, one of which was
entitled "Met police examine Vladimir Putin's role in Salisbury attack".
The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these "exclusives" as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising
the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden's. They were possibly acting to prevent
any revelations of this kind happening again.
What, if any, private conversations have taken place between Viner and the security services during her tenure as editor are not
known. But in 2018, when Paul Johnson eventually left the D-Notice Committee, its chair, the MOD's Dominic Wilson,
praised Johnson who, he said, had been "instrumental in re-establishing links with The Guardian".
Decline in critical reporting
Amidst these spoon-fed intelligence exclusives, Viner also oversaw the breakup of The Guardian's celebrated investigative team,
whose muck-racking journalists were told to apply for other jobs outside of investigations.
One well-placed source
told the Press Gazette at the time that journalists on the investigations team "have not felt backed by senior
editors over the last year", and that "some also feel the company has become more risk-averse in the same period".
In the period since Snowden, The Guardian has lost many of its top investigative reporters who had covered national security issues,
notably Shiv Malik, Nick Davies, David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Ewen MacAskill and Ian Cobain. The few journalists who were
replaced were succeeded by less experienced reporters with apparently less commitment to exposing the security state. The current
defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh,
started
at The Guardian as head of media and technology and has no history of covering national security.
" It seems they've got rid of everyone who seemed to cover the security services and military in an adversarial way," one current
Guardian journalist told us.
Indeed, during the last two years of Rusbridger's editorship, The Guardian published about 110 articles per year tagged as MI6
on its website. Since Viner took over, the average per year has halved and is decreasing year by year.
" Effective scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies -- epitomised by the Snowden scoops but also many other stories
-- appears to have been abandoned," a former Guardian journalist told us. The former reporter added that, in recent years, it "sometimes
seems The Guardian is worried about upsetting the spooks."
A second former Guardian journalist added: "The Guardian no longer seems to have such a challenging relationship with the intelligence
services, and is perhaps seeking to mend fences since Snowden. This is concerning, because spooks are always manipulative and not
always to be trusted."
While some articles critical of the security services still do appear in the paper, its "scoops" increasingly focus on issues
more acceptable to them. Since the Snowden affair, The Guardian does not appear to have published any articles based on an intelligence
or security services source that was not officially sanctioned to speak.
The Guardian has, by contrast,
published a steady stream of exclusives on the major official enemy of the security services, Russia, exposing Putin,
his friends and the work of its intelligence services and military.
In the Panama Papers leak in April 2016, which revealed how companies and individuals around the world were using an offshore
law firm to avoid paying tax, The Guardian's front-page launch scoop was authored by Luke Harding, who has received many security
service
tips focused on the "Russia threat", and was
titled "Revealed:
the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin".
Three sentences into the piece, however, Harding notes that "the president's name does not appear in any of the records" although
he insists that "the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured
without his patronage".
There was a much
bigger story
in the Panama Papers which The Guardian chose to downplay by leaving it to the following day. This concerned the father of
the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, who "ran an offshore fund that avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small
army of Bahamas residents – including a part-time bishop – to sign its paperwork".
We understand there was some argument between journalists about not leading with the Cameron story as the launch splash. Putin's
friends were eventually deemed more important than the Prime Minister of the country where the paper published.
Getting Julian Assange
The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator
during the early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.
One 2017 story came from investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who writes for The Guardian's sister paper The Observer,
titled "When Nigel Farage met Julian Assange". This concerned the visit of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage to the Ecuadorian embassy
in March 2017,
organised by the radio station LBC, for whom Farage worked as a presenter. Farage's producer at LBC accompanied Farage
at the meeting, but this was not mentioned by Cadwalladr.
Rather, she posited that this meeting was "potentially a channel of communication" between WikiLeaks, Farage and Donald Trump,
who were all said to be closely linked to Russia, adding that these actors were in a "political alignment" and that " WikiLeaks is,
in many ways, the swirling vortex at the centre of everything".
Yet Cadwalladr's one official on-the-record source for this speculation was a "highly placed contact with links to US intelligence",
who told her, "When the heat is turned up and all electronic communication, you have to assume, is being intensely monitored, then
those are the times when intelligence communication falls back on human couriers. Where you have individuals passing information
in ways and places that cannot be monitored."
It seems likely this was innuendo being fed to The Observer by an intelligence-linked individual to promote disinformation to
undermine Assange.
In 2018, however, The Guardian's attempted vilification of Assange was significantly stepped up. A new string of articles began
on 18 May 2018 with
one alleging Assange's "long-standing relationship with RT", the Russian state broadcaster. The series, which has been
closely
documented elsewhere, lasted for several months, consistently alleging with little or the most minimal circumstantial
evidence that Assange had ties to Russia or the Kremlin.
One story, co-authored again by Luke Harding,
claimed that "Russian diplomats held secret talks in London with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they
could help him flee the UK, The Guardian has learned". The former consul in the Ecuadorian embassy in London at this time, Fidel
Narvaez, vigorously denies the existence of any such "escape plot" involving Russia and is involved in a complaint process with The
Guardian for insinuating he coordinated such a plot.
This apparent mini-campaign ran until November 2018, culminating in a front-page
splash , based on anonymous sources, claiming that Assange had three secret meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy with Trump's
former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
This "scoop" failed all tests of journalistic credibility since it would have been impossible for anyone to have entered the highly
secured Ecuadorian embassy three times with no proof. WikiLeaks and others have strongly argued that the story was
manufactured
and it is telling that The Guardian has since failed to refer to it in its subsequent articles on the Assange case. The Guardian,
however, has still not retracted or apologised for the story which remains on its website.
The "exclusive" appeared just two weeks after Paul Johnson had been congratulated for "re-establishing links" between The Guardian
and the security services.
The string of Guardian articles, along with the vilification and smear stories about Assange elsewhere in the British media, helped
create the conditions for
a deal between Ecuador, the UK and the US to expel Assange from the embassy in April. Assange now sits in Belmarsh maximum-security
prison where he faces extradition to the US, and life in prison there, on charges under the Espionage Act.
Acting for the establishment
Another major focus of The Guardian's energies under Viner's editorship has been to attack the leader of the UK Labour Party,
Jeremy Corbyn.
The context is that Corbyn appears to have recently been a target of the security services. In 2015, soon after he was elected
Labour leader, the Sunday Times
reported a
serving general warning that "there would be a direct challenge from the army and mass resignations if Corbyn became prime minister".
The source told the newspaper: "The Army just wouldn't stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise
the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that."
On 20 May 2017, a little over two weeks before the 2017 General Election, the Daily Telegraph was
fed the story that "MI5 opened a file on Jeremy Corbyn amid concerns over his links to the IRA". It formed part of a Telegraph
investigation claiming to reveal "Mr Corbyn's full links to the IRA" and was sourced to an individual "close to" the MI5 investigation,
who said "a file had been opened on him by the early nineties".
The Metropolitan Police Special Branch was also said to be monitoring Corbyn in the same period.
Then, on the very eve of the General Election, the Telegraph gave space to an
article from Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of MI6, under a headline: "Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to this nation.
At MI6, which I once led, he wouldn't clear the security vetting."
Further, in September 2018, two anonymous senior government sources
told The Times that Corbyn had been "summoned" for a "'facts of life' talk on terror" by MI5 chief Andrew Parker.
Just two weeks after news of this private meeting was leaked by the government, the Daily Mail
reported another leak, this time revealing that "Jeremy Corbyn's most influential House of Commons adviser has been barred
from entering Ukraine on the grounds that he is a national security threat because of his alleged links to Vladimir Putin's 'global
propaganda network'."
The article concerned Andrew Murray, who had been working in Corbyn's office for a year but had still not received a security
pass to enter the UK parliament. The Mail reported, based on what it called "a senior parliamentary source", that Murray's application
had encountered "vetting problems".
Murray later heavily suggested that the security services had leaked the story to the Mail. "Call me sceptical if you must, but
I do not see journalistic enterprise behind the Mail's sudden capacity to tease obscure information out of the [Ukrainian security
service]," he wrote
in the New Statesman. He added, "Someone else is doing the hard work – possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt
if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows?"
Murray told us he was approached by the New Statesman after the story about him being banned from Ukraine was leaked. "However,"
he added, "I wouldn't dream of suggesting anything like that to The Guardian, since I do not know any journalists still working there
who I could trust."
The Guardian itself has run a remarkable number of news and comment articles criticising Corbyn since he was elected in 2015 and
the paper's clearly hostile stance has been widely
noted .
Given its appeal to traditional Labour supporters, the paper has probably done more to undermine Corbyn than any other. In particular,
its massive coverage of alleged widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has helped to disparage Corbyn more than other smears
carried in the media.
The Guardian's coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem
in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically. While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when
Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been
investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts. In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour
concluded
that the party "is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated
every single United Kingdom race equality law."
Analysis of two YouGov surveys, conducted in 2015 and 2017,
shows that anti-Semitic views held by Labour voters declined substantially in the first two years of Corbyn's tenure and
that such views were significantly more common among Conservative voters.
Despite this, since January 2016, The Guardian has published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-Semitism, an average of
around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. In the same period, The Guardian published
just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party's much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example,
found that nearly half of the Tory Party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister.
At the same time, some stories which paint Corbyn's critics in a negative light have been suppressed by The Guardian. According
to someone with knowledge of the matter, The Guardian declined to publish the results of a months-long critical investigation by
one of its reporters into a prominent anti-Corbyn Labour MP, citing only vague legal issues.
In July 2016, one of this article's authors emailed a Guardian editor asking if he could pitch an investigation about the first
attempt by the right-wing of the Labour Party to remove Corbyn, informing The Guardian of very good inside sources on those behind
the attempt and their real plans. The approach was rejected as being of no interest before a pitch was even sent.
A reliable publication?
On 20 May 2019, The Times newspaper
reported on a Freedom of Information request made by the Rendition Project, a group of academic experts working on torture
and rendition issues, which showed that the MOD had been "developing a secret policy on torture that allows ministers to sign off
intelligence-sharing that could lead to the abuse of detainees".
This might traditionally have been a Guardian story, not something for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times. According to one civil
society source, however, many groups working in this field no longer trust The Guardian.
A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: "It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in
torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The
Times rather than The Guardian."
The Times published its scoop under a strong
headline , "Torture: Britain breaks law in Ministry of Defence secret policy". However, before the article was published,
the MOD fed The Guardian the same documents The Times were about to splash with, believing it could soften the impact of the revelations
by telling its side of the story.
The Guardian
posted its own article just before The Times, with a headline that would have pleased the government: "MoD says revised
torture guidance does not lower standards".
Its lead paragraph was a simple summary of the MOD's position: "The Ministry of Defence has insisted that newly emerged departmental
guidance on the sharing of intelligence derived from torture with allies, remains in line with practices agreed in the aftermath
of a series of scandals following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." However, an inspection of the documents showed this was clearly
disinformation.
The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state
to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has
been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question: where does the next Snowden
go? DM
The Guardian did not respond to a request for comment.
Daily Maverick will formally launch Declassified – a new UK-focused investigation and analysis organisation run by the
authors of this article – in November 2019.
Matt Kennard is an investigative journalist and co-founder of Declassified . He was previously director of the
Centre for Investigative Journalism in London, and before that a reporter for the Financial Times in the US and UK. He is the author
of two books, Irregular Army and The Racket .
Mark Curtis is a leading UK foreign policy analyst, journalist and the author of six books including Web of
Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World and Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam .
Repeating lies over and over makes old-fashioned Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda.
Repeating lies, then contradicting them; moving them from one government-paid think-tank to
another; footnoting a new lie to an older version; quoting policemen and gangsters saying
fatuities; adding slang and the words of pop songs -- this is still Goebbels-type but
stretched out and product-diversified to make its author more money. This is Mark Galeotti's
method .
####
The rest at the link and a deep dive on Galeotti himself.
The fact that Smolenkov purchased house on his name excludes his "extraction" to the USA. He probably legally emigrated
amazing some serious money in Russia
Notable quotes:
"... [Smolenkov] follows Ushakov back to Moscow, where he is a mid-level paper pusher doing administrative support for Ushakov. The CIA gets copies of Putin's itineraries that Smolenkov photographs. He is a big hit, but ultimately produces nothing of vital importance because all truly sensitive information is hand carried by principles, and never seen by administrative staff. Moreover Ushakov advises on international relations, and would not be privy to anything dealing with intelligence. Ushakov, as a long-serving Ambassador to the US, would be asked by Putin to opine on US politics. Smolenkov has access to Ushakov's post-meeting verbal comments, which he turns over to the CIA. ..."
"... The initial reports of the Steele Dossier appeared in June 2016. This coincided with John Brennan ordering Moscow Station to turn up the heat on Smolenkov to gain access to what Putin is thinking. But Smolenkov has no real direct access. Instead, he starts fabricating and/or exaggerating his access to convince his CIA handler that he is on the job and worth every penny he is being paid by US taxpayers. ..."
"... The information Smolenkov creates is passed to his CIA handler via the secure communications channel set up when he was signed up as a spy. But these reports are not handled in the normal way that sensitive human intelligence is treated at CIA Headquarters. Instead, the material is accepted at face value and not vetted to confirm its accuracy. My intel friend, citing a knowledgeable source, indicates that Smolenkov was not polygraphed. ..."
"... This raised red flags in the CIA Counterintelligence staff, especially when Brennan starts briefing the President using the information provided by Smolenkov. Brennan responds by locking most of the CIA's Russian experts out of the loop. Later, Brennan does the same thing with the National Intelligence Council, locking out the National Intelligence Officers who would normally oversee the production of a National Intelligence Assessment. In short, Brennan cooked the books using Smolenkov's intelligence, which had it been subjected to normal checks and balances would never have passed muster. It's Brennan's leaks to the press that eventually prompt the CIA to pull the plug on Smolenkov. ..."
"... The dossier attributed to Steele, it has seemed to me, showed every sign of being the proverbial 'camel produced by a committee.' ..."
"... Although I know that fabricating evidence and corrupting judicial proceedings is part of its supposed author's 'stock in trade', I think it is unclear whether he contributed all that much to the dossier. ..."
"... His prime role, I think, was to contribute a veneer of intelligence respectability to a farrago the actual origins of which could not be acknowledged, so it could be used in support of FISA applications and in briefings to journalists. ..."
"... Although it had started much earlier, the moving into 'high gear' of the conspiracy behind 'Russiagate, of which the dossier was one manifestation, and the phone 'digital forensics' produced by 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait another, were I think essentially panicky 'firefighting' operations. ..."
"... Part of this involved turning the conspiracy to prevent Trump being elected into a conspiracy to destabilise his Presidency and ensure he did not carry through on any of his 'anti-Borgist' agenda. ..."
A flood of news in the last 24 hours regarding Russiagate. I am referring specifically to
reports that the CIA ex-filtrated Oleg Smolenkov, a mid-level Russian Foreign Ministry
bureaucrat who reportedly hooked himself on the coat-tails of Yuri Ushakov, who was Ambassador
to the US from 1999 through 2008. He was recruited by the CIA (i.e., asked to collect
information and pass it to the U.S. Government via his or her case officer) at sometime during
this period. Smolenkov is being portrayed as a supposedly "sensitive" source. But if you read
either the
Washington Post or
New York Times accounts of this event there is not a lot of meat on this hamburger.
Regardless of the quality of his reporting, Smolenkov is the kind of recruited source that
looks good on paper and helps a CIA case officer get promoted but adds little to actual U.S.
intelligence on Russia. If you understood the CIA culture you would immediately recognize that
a case officer (CIA terminology for the operations officer tasked with identifying and
recruiting human sources) gets rewarded by recruiting persons who ostensibly will have access
to information the CIA has identified as a priority target. In this case, we're talking about
possible access to Vladimir Putin.
If you take time to read both articles you will quickly see that the real purpose of this
"information operation" is to paint Donald Trump as a security threat that must be stopped.
This is conveniently timed to assist Jerry Nadler's mission impossible to secure Trump's
impeachment. But I think there is another dynamic at play--these competing explanations for
what prompted the exfiltration of this CIA asset say more about the incompetence of Barack
Obama and his intel chiefs. John Brennan and Jim Clapper in particular.
A former intelligence officer and friend summarized the various press accounts as the
follows and offered his own insights in a note I received this morning:
[Smolenkov] follows Ushakov back to Moscow, where he is a mid-level paper pusher doing
administrative support for Ushakov. The CIA gets copies of Putin's itineraries that Smolenkov
photographs. He is a big hit, but ultimately produces nothing of vital importance because all
truly sensitive information is hand carried by principles, and never seen by administrative
staff. Moreover Ushakov advises on international relations, and would not be privy to anything
dealing with intelligence. Ushakov, as a long-serving Ambassador to the US, would be asked by
Putin to opine on US politics. Smolenkov has access to Ushakov's post-meeting verbal comments,
which he turns over to the CIA.
The initial reports of the Steele Dossier appeared in June 2016. This coincided with John
Brennan ordering Moscow Station to turn up the heat on Smolenkov to gain access to what Putin
is thinking. But Smolenkov has no real direct access. Instead, he starts fabricating and/or
exaggerating his access to convince his CIA handler that he is on the job and worth every penny
he is being paid by US taxpayers.
The information Smolenkov creates is passed to his CIA handler via the secure communications
channel set up when he was signed up as a spy. But these reports are not handled in the normal
way that sensitive human intelligence is treated at CIA Headquarters. Instead, the material is
accepted at face value and not vetted to confirm its accuracy. My intel friend, citing a
knowledgeable source, indicates that Smolenkov was not polygraphed.
This raised red flags in the CIA Counterintelligence staff, especially when Brennan starts
briefing the President using the information provided by Smolenkov. Brennan responds by locking
most of the CIA's Russian experts out of the loop. Later, Brennan does the same thing with the
National Intelligence Council, locking out the National Intelligence Officers who would
normally oversee the production of a National Intelligence Assessment. In short, Brennan cooked
the books using Smolenkov's intelligence, which had it been subjected to normal checks and
balances would never have passed muster. It's Brennan's leaks to the press that eventually
prompt the CIA to pull the plug on Smolenkov.
There is public evidence that Brennan not only cooked the books but that the leaks of this
supposedly "sensitive" intelligence occurred when he was Director and lying Jim Clapper was
Director of National Intelligence. If Oleg Smolenkov was really such a terrific source of
intel, then where are the reports? It is one thing to keep such reports close hold when the
source is still in place. But he has been out of danger for more than two years. Those reports
should have been shared with the Senate and House Intelligence committees. If there was actual
solid intelligence in those reports that corroborated the Steele Dossier, then that information
would have been leaked and widely circulated. This is Sherlock Holmes dog that did not
bark.Then we have the odd fact that this guy's name is all over the press and he is buying real
estate in true name. What the hell!! If the CIA genuinely believed that Mr. Smolenkov was in
danger he would not be walking around doing real estate deals in true name. In fact, the
sources for both the Washington Post and NY Times pieces push the propaganda that Smolenkov is
a sure fire target for a Russian retaliatory hit. Really? Then why publish his name and confirm
his location.
That leaves me with the alternative explanation--Smolenkov is a propaganda prop and is being
trotted out by Brennan to try to provide public pressure to prevent the disclosure of
intelligence that will show that the CIA and the NSA were coordinating and operating with
British intelligence to entrap and smear Donald Trump and members of his campaign.
I want you to take a close look at the two pieces on this exfiltration (i.e., Washington
Post and NY Times) and note the significant differences
REASON FOR THE EXFILTRATION :
Let's start with the Washington Post:
The exfiltration took place sometime after an Oval Office meeting in May 2017, when
President Trump
revealed highly classified counterterrorism information to the Russian foreign minister and
ambassador, said the current and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to
discuss the sensitive operation.
What was the information that Trump revealed? He was discussing intel that Israel passed
regarding ISIS in Syria. (See the Washington Post story
here .) Why would he talk to the Russians about that? Because every day, at least once a
day, U.S. and Russian military authorities are sharing intelligence with one another in a phone
call that originates from the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center (aka CAOC) at the Al Udeid
Air Force Base in Qatar. Trump's conversation not only was appropriate but fully within his
right to do so as Commander-in-Chief.
What the hell does this have to do with a sensitive source in Moscow? NOTHING!! Red
Herring.
The NY Times account is more detailed and damning of Obama instead of Trump:
But when intelligence officials revealed the severity of Russia's election interference with
unusual detail later that year, the news media picked up on details about the C.I.A.'s Kremlin
sources.
C.I.A. officials worried about safety made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to
extract the source from Russia. The situation grew more tense when the informant at first
refused, citing family concerns -- prompting consternation at C.I.A. headquarters and sowing
doubts among some American counterintelligence officials about the informant's trustworthiness.
But the C.I.A. pressed again months later after more media inquiries. This time, the informant
agreed. . . .
The decision to extract the informant was driven "in part" because of concerns that Mr.
Trump and his administration had mishandled delicate intelligence, CNN reported. But former
intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the
source, and other current American officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency's
sources alone was the impetus for the extraction. . . .
But the government had indicated that the source existed long before Mr. Trump took office,
first in formally accusing Russia of interference in October 2016 and then when intelligence
officials declassified parts of their assessment about the interference campaign for public
release in January 2017. News agencies, including NBC, began reporting around that time about
Mr. Putin's involvement in the election sabotage and on the C.I.A.'s possible sources for the
assessment.
Trump played no role whatsoever in releasing information that allegedly compromised this
so-called "golden boy" of Russian intelligence. The NY Times account makes it very clear that
the release of information while Obama was President, not Trump, is what put the source in
danger. Who leaked that information?
WHAT DID THE SOURCE KNOW AND WHAT DID HE TELL US?
But how valuable was this source really? What did he provide that was so enlightening? On
this point the New York Times and Washington Post are more in sync.
First the NY Times:
The Moscow informant was instrumental to the C.I.A.'s most explosive conclusion about
Russia's interference campaign: that President Vladimir V. Putin ordered and orchestrated it
himself . As the American government's best insight into the thinking of and orders from Mr.
Putin, the source was also key to the C.I.A.'s assessment that he affirmatively favored Donald
J. Trump's election and personally ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee
.
The Washington Post provides a more fulsome account:
U.S. officials had been concerned that Russian sources could be at risk of exposure as early
as the fall of 2016, when the Obama administration first confirmed that Russia had stolen and
publicly disclosed emails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Hillary
Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta.
In October 2016, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence said in a joint statement that intelligence agencies were "confident that
the Russian Government directed" the hacking campaign. . . .
In January 2017, the Obama administration published a detailed assessment that unambiguously
laid the blame on the Kremlin, concluding that "Putin ordered an influence campaign" and that
Russia's goal was to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process and harm Clinton's chances
of winning.
"That's a pretty remarkable intelligence community product -- much more specific than what
you normally see," one U.S. official said. "It's very expected that potential U.S. intelligence
assets in Russia would be under a higher level of scrutiny by their own intelligence
services."
Sounds official. But there is no actual forensic or documentary evidence (by that I mean
actual corroborating intelligence reports) to back up these claims by our oxymoronically
christened intelligence community.
Vladimir Putin ordered the hack? Where is the report? It is either in a piece of intercepted
electronics communication and/or in a report derived from information provided by Mr.
Smolenkov. Where is it? Why has that not been shared in public? Don't have to worry about
exposing the source now. He is already in the open. What did he report? Answer--no direct
evidence.
Then there is the lie that the Russians hacked the DNC. They did not. Bill Binney, a former
Technical Director of the NSA, and I have written on this subject previously (
see here ) and there is no truth to this claim. Let me put it simply--if the DNC had been
hacked by the Russians using spearphising (this is claimed in the Robert Mueller report) then
the NSA would have collected those messages and would be able to show they were transferred to
the Russians. That did not happen.
This kind of chaotic leaking about an old intel op is symptomatic of panic. CIA is already
officially denying key parts of the story. My money is on John Brennan and Jim Clapper as the
likely impetus for these reports. They are hoping to paint Trump as a national security threat
and distract from the upcoming revelations from the DOJ Inspector General report on the FISA
warrants and, more threatening, the decisions that Prosecutor John Durham will take in deciding
to indict those who attempted to launch a coup against Donald Trump, a legitimately elected
President of the United States.
As I told LJ yesterday while he was writing this piece I have a slightly different theory
of this matter. It is true that CIA suffered for a long time from a dearth of talent in the
business of recruiting and running foreign clandestine HUMINT assets. This was caused by a
focus by several CIA Directors on technical collection means rather than espionage. This
policy drove many skilled case officers into retirement but the situation has much improved
in the last decade and it must be remembered that an agency only needs a few skilled case
officers with the right access to human targets to acquire some very fine and useful well
placed foreign agents (spies). IMO it is likely that CIA has/had several well placed Russian
assets in Moscow of whom Smolenkov was probably the least useful and the most expendable. It
may well be that Brennan was using the chicken feed provided by Smolenkov to fuel the
conspiracy run by him and Clapper against Trump's campaign and presidency, but Brennan left
office and then the CIA under other management was faced with the problem of a Russian
government which was told in the US press by implication that either the US had deep
penetrations of Russian diplomatic and intelligence communications or that there were deep
penetration moles in Moscow. that being the case it seems likely to me that the Russians
would have been beating the bushes looking for the moles. In that situation the CIA may have
decided to exfiltrate Smolenkov and his wife while leaving enough clues along the way that
would have indicated that he might have been THE MOLE. People do not need a lot of
encouragement to accept thoughts that they want to believe. A point in favor of this theory
is that once CIA had him in the States they quickly lost interest in him, terminated their
relationship with him and paid him his back pay and showed him the door. No new identity, no
resettlement, he was given none of that. Finding himself alone in a strange land, Smolenkov
then bought a house in the suburbs of Washington in HIS OWN NAME. Say what? That would not
have happened if CIA had maintained some sort of relationship with him. And then... someone
in CIA leaked the story of the exfiltration as movie plot to "a former senior intelligence
officer" who gives sit to Sciutto at CNN. Why would they do that? IMO they would have though
that having the story appear in the media would reinfocer Smolenkov's importance in Russian
minds. Well, pilgrims, Clapper fits the bill as the "former blah, blah". He is an employee of
CNN. CNN hates Trump and they quickly broadcast the story far and away. Unfortunately for CNN
the story immediately began to disintegrate even in the eyes of the NY Times. The
Smolenkov/Brennan affair will undoubtedly be part of the road that leads to doom for Brennan
and Clapper but the possible CIA story is equally interesting.
Sir;
The fact that Mr. Smolenkov is out and about in his new home in the West shows that he is a
small fish. As you say, if he was really in danger, he would be living somewhere in the West
now under a new name and maybe a new face. The fact that his 'handlers' allow this lax
security to happen is a sign of how unimportant he is. Unless, my inner cynic prompts, he is
destined to become one of the "honoured dead," perhaps by a false flag 'liquidation.'
How low will Clapper and Brennan et. al. go?
Thanks for keeping this matter front and centre.
So the son of Our Man in Havana went to Moscow. It would make a decent movies if it weren't
for the damage Brennan and company have done to us. Obama, of course, knew nothing......
I have lost hope that anyone--especially Brennan and Clapper--will be held accountable for
their attempt to "launch a coup" (as you put it).
Since their coup attempt ultimately failed, most people will be wanting just to move
on.
As an unimportant citizen liveing in a fly-over state, I feel very angry that my tax
dollars were wasted on these many government hearings and enormously expensive investigations
rather than on actually on governing and improving the governing of our country.
The least we should be able to expect is that people who live off our tax dollars should
be held accountable for all that wasted expense and for the lack of actual governing going on
in The House and The Senate. So many problems that need the attention of our elected
representative and Senators were ignored while elected representatives and representatives
got to capture the spotlight and try to become "media stars" while accomplishing nothing.
I also feel terrible that men have been sent to prison for seemingly nothing and have
their lives ruined for nothing but the chance of some to grand stand and claim they are
really doing the jobs they were sent to do. So many people with no real sense of honor or of
what is right and what is wrong.
Thanks, Larry. You have been consistently one of the good guys. (And I bet you are happy
now that Yosemite Sam Bolton is no longer advising the POTUS.)
"The fact that his 'handlers' allow this lax security to happen is a sign of how unimportant
he is."
It indicates to me that he and any handlers believe that the Russians are OK with it. That
could be for various reasons. But relying on Russian tolerance because he is a "small fish"
seems incredibly trusting. Neither fled agents nor their handlers are known for their
trusting natures. They have had some reasons stronger than that for their unconcern. Whether
those reasons will survive publicity remains to be seen.
Are those CIA agents as stupid, naive & incompetent as you paint them to be?
If that's the case our country is in real danger! You are. Pro Trump
and, you are basically defending him, but Putin do own Donald Trump,whether you like it or
not!
My question is: why did they push this report now? Any way you cut it, the Times and Post are
just providing some trivia and drivel. Without substance, they can accomplish nothing and
substance has been what's been missing all along.
I doubt that Democrats, having been burned once, are eager to explore Brennan's smoke and
mirrors again. It's never been a big concern to voters. And unless Brennan & Co. can do
better than this superficial stuff, voters are never going to be concerned.
Maybe the Times and Post just felt sorry for Brennan, who's been off barking at the moon
for years now.
...Smolenkov is a propaganda prop and is being trotted out by Brennan to try to provide
public pressure to prevent the disclosure of intelligence that will show that the CIA and the
NSA were coordinating and operating with British intelligence to entrap and smear Donald
Trump and members of his campaign...
Well said. Thank you for following this closely and shining the light! You are an amazing
American patriot, Mr. Larry C. Johnson. A glass in your honor!
IMO this scenario is the most plausible, Thanks for the sanity check. That said, given the
desperation by these Sorcerer's Apprentices, I would be on the lookout for Mr. Smolenkov lest
he be 'Skirpal-ed' in the coming weeks.
This whole story convinces now more than ever before that there is a high level spy/mole in
the us administration and intelligence community.The only question is it spying for russia or
china or both.Just a beautiful thing to watch.Those knickers,must surely be in a knot by
now.
Even rocketman had a giggle.
How many CIA Assets have been exposed..Tortured and Murdered During The Barrack Obama
Reign...In May..2014 HE Paid a Surprise Visit to Afghanastan..His White House Bureau Chief
Sent out an email to Reporters with a List of Who would meet With President Obama..It
Contained the NAME of the CIA...Chief of Station in Kabul...Now that is REAL MESSY..
Having been away from base, I have not been able to comment on some very fascinating
recent posts.
Both your recent pieces, and Robert Willman's most helpful update on the state of play
relating to the unraveling of the frame-up against Michael Flynn, have provided a lot to chew
over.
Among other things, they have made me think further about the 302s recording the
interviews with Bruce Ohr produced by Joseph Pientka – a character about whom I think
we need to know more.
On reflection, I think that the picture that emerges of Ohr as an incurious and gullible
nitwit, swallowing whole bucket loads of 'horse manure' fed him by Christopher Steele and
Glenn Simpson, may be a carefully – indeed maybe cunningly – crafted fiction.
The interpretation your former intelligence officer friend puts on the Smolenkov affair,
and also some of what Sidney Powell has to say in the ''Motion to Compel' on behalf of Flynn,
both 'mesh' with what I have long suspected.
The dossier attributed to Steele, it has seemed to me, showed every sign of being the
proverbial 'camel produced by a committee.'
Although I know that fabricating evidence and corrupting judicial proceedings is part of
its supposed author's 'stock in trade', I think it is unclear whether he contributed all that
much to the dossier.
His prime role, I think, was to contribute a veneer of intelligence respectability to a
farrago the actual origins of which could not be acknowledged, so it could be used in support
of FISA applications and in briefings to journalists.
Although it had started much earlier, the moving into 'high gear' of the conspiracy behind
'Russiagate, of which the dossier was one manifestation, and the phone 'digital forensics'
produced by 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait another, were I think
essentially panicky 'firefighting' operations.
They are likely to have been responses, first, to the realisation that material leaked
from the DNC was going to be published by WikiLeaks, and then the discovery, probably
significantly later, that the source was Seth Rich, and his subsequent murder.
Although the operation to divert responsibility to the Russians which then became
necessary was strikingly successful, it did not have the expected result of saving Hillary
Clinton from defeat.
What I then think may have emerged was a two-pronged strategy.
Part of this involved turning the conspiracy to prevent Trump being elected into a
conspiracy to destabilise his Presidency and ensure he did not carry through on any of his
'anti-Borgist' agenda.
In different ways, both the framing of Flynn, and the final memorandum in the dossier,
dated 13 December 2016, were part of this strategy.
Also required however was another 'insurance policy' – which was what the Bruce Ohr
302s were intended to provide.
The purpose of this was to have 'evidence' in place, should the first prong of the
strategy run into problems, to sustain the case that people in the FBI and DOJ, and Bruce and
Nellie Ohr in particular, were not co-conspirators with Steele and Simpson, but their
gullible dupes.
This brings me to an irony. Some people have tried to replace the 'narrative' in which
Steele was an heroic exposer of a Russian plot to destroy American democracy by an
alternative in which he was the gullible 'patsy' of just such a plot.
In fact there is one strand, and one strand only, in the dossier which smells strongly to
me of FSB-orchestrated disinformation.
Some of the material on Russian cyber operations, including critically the suggestions
about the involvement of Aleksej Gubarev and his company XBT which provoked legal action by
these against BuzzFeed and Steele, look to me as though they could come from sources in the
FSB.
But, if this is so, the likely conduit is not through Steele, but from FSB to FBI cyber
people.
How precisely this worked is unclear, but I cannot quite get rid of the suspicion that
Major Dmitri Dokuchaev just might be serving out his sentence for treason in a comfortable
flat somewhere above the Black Sea. Indeed, I can imagine a lecture to FSB trainees on how to
make 'patsies' of people like the Ohrs.
If this is so, however, it mat also be the case that these are attempting to make
'patsies' of Steele and Simpson.
"... So, this fully-spun story, apparently a mix of fact and fiction, arises at this moment to prop up the Russia-leaked-email hoax? ..."
"... If that's the case, does that mean this story's "authors" release it now to keep at least part of the Russia hoax alive as the Flynn case plods toward charges being dropped or because the Concord case is turning into a cluster f*k? Maybe someone is worried about the DNC-insider-leaked-email story breaking out? We need to talk about Rich? ..."
"... if I am wrong in supposing that a senior Chekist would never, as a question of policy, have been allowed a passport for foreign travel for him and his family. ..."
"... If Oleg Smolenkov reported allegedly "valuable" insider information about Russia's interference in US elections, as they say first hand, then why did Mueller's investigation fail? ..."
"... The New York Times story resurrects the Russia collusion hoax. This time the proof comes from Oleg Smolenkov. The story is identical to what the Steele dossier claimed: Putin personally directed a campaign to interfere in the US presidential elections. ..."
"... Every part of Steele narrative has already been shown to be a hoax and a fabrication. What proves that the Steele dossier is a work of fiction is that it is written from a fly-on-the-wall point of view. Only a person who was sitting in the same room with Putin when he had secret meetings could have written it. So how many moles did the West have sitting on Putin's desk? It seems like the CIA mole and Steele's secret source are one and the same source. But if Oleg Smolenkov was CIA's most tightly guarded secret, how did the information end up in Steele's dossier? ..."
"... Larry Johnson just posted about this on SST, and his take seems much more plausible: Desperation on the part of Clapper and his cabal as the chickens are coming home to roost. This story is chock full of holes, and the media hackery is disintegrating under its own weight. ..."
"... Perhaps someone should advise Smolenskov to stay away from park benches after eating seafood and to not touch doorknob's etc. ..."
"... "For those curious about what's going on with this bizarre Russia 'spy' story: Burr/Durham know Steele was fed obvious disinformation, they know who originated it, they know who peddled it, and it's just a matter of rounding up the whole network." ..."
"... In his third entry, he poses the following question: "So the only two unanswered questions about this particular pre-emptive leak campaign from the usual Russia hoax suspects are 1) why now, and 2) what specific event or official revelation are they trying to get ahead of?" ..."
"... Why the CIA would allow such a spy, once extradited, to live under his real name is beyond me. ..."
"... Because this man has nothing to do with "spies", "secrets" and "special services". He is an ordinary civilian, a former official from Russia. Many Russian ex- lives in abroad, including high-ranking persons. Smolenkov of course had no access to any "secrets", and had no access to entourage of the Russian president. ..."
"... That's the end of Smolenkov's anonymous quiet comfortable lifesyle. It doesn't send out a very reassuring message - that the CIA can publicly expose someone it considers a very useful asset. There must be a good reason why they threw Smolenkov under the bus in that way. ..."
"... It must be a very nice house. A 3-ish acre lot in that neighborhood has an assessment of $140k for the land. But the assessment for improvements for this house is over $900k while others in the neighborhood are more in the $600k range. I was looking at the aerial photos and trying to pick out what seem to be other nice houses, including ones with swimming pools which this one lacks, and which also have big garages (this one has 4 car garage apparently), but couldn't find a neighbor above an assessment in the $600k's. ..."
"... The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister. ..."
"... My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity. ..."
"... Sergei Skripal was not just an turncoat for UK he also worked for Estonian intelligence. It seems to me the poisoning fits better as an Estonian job, to keep relations in Europe with Russia in very bad shape. It's easy to say that the Russians wouldn't be so incompetent, also goes for the UK, which could have come up with something more compelling if they pre planned it as false flag. ..."
"... Joe Mifsud and Claire Smith of MI6, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, especially FBI special agent Joseph Pientka plus that BIG shot FBI agent (who's name I forget) are the names to remember. Why aren't Misud and Smith extradited to face inquiry? ..."
"... So what is emerging? is Mueller due in court to prosecute the Russian ad agency that has fully shirt fronted him? Is Flynn business about to upend a steaming pot of turds over Mueller and other heads. Is Seth Rich about to be posthumously knighted by some New York monarch for his role in smashing the HRC cart in public? Or is Julian Assange about to be put through more torture for being a journalist and publisher? ..."
And then there is the possibility that CIA extracted a minor source to divert attention
from someone or someones who remain(s) in place. The open purchase of a house in the outer
suburbs of Washington by the extracted would seem to support the possibility that this is
all a diversion. The narrative continues that "a former senior intelligence official" told
Sciutto, an Obama man, at CNN of all this. Clapper is "a former senior intelligence
official" and a CNN "contributor" (employee) is he not? He is dumb enough to have had this
story planted on him.
Double games, triple games ... Spies are so confusing ...
thanks b... i agree about your comment on pls comment - double / triple and etc games can be
played with spies... what seems clear to me is that some in the cia-msm want to frame trump..
this one feel apart fairly quickly... the frame up of russia over skripal has never been
addressed by the usa.. in fact, most folks - using ew as an example - are still drinking the
russia done it koolaid 24/7..
james , Sep 10 2019 18:14 utc |
3casey , Sep 10 2019 18:18 utc |
4
So, this fully-spun story, apparently a mix of fact and fiction, arises at this moment to
prop up the Russia-leaked-email hoax?
If that's the case, does that mean this story's "authors" release it now to keep at least
part of the Russia hoax alive as the Flynn case plods toward charges being dropped or because
the Concord case is turning into a cluster f*k? Maybe someone is worried about the
DNC-insider-leaked-email story breaking out? We need to talk about Rich?
Funny about Lang and his crew. So much practical experience and yet they would make an
interesting case study of extreme psychological compartmentalization as a means of
denial.
Lucky Oleg & Antonina. In Oz a 760 square metre house used be known as having an area of
81 squares (8,172 square feet. In well-maintained condition such a 3-storey house anywhere in
Oz would cost between A$2.5 million and A$3.5 million. Being in AmeriKKA Oleg's house
probably has a basement too. That's another $150,000 minimum if it's damp-proof and
ventilated.
Nice networking by 4 BigLie Media outlets to make certain Russia knows where this man and his
family reside. Maybe it's for an Outlaw US Empire sequel to MI-6's Novochock BigLie to be
sprung as the election heats up. If I were the Smolenskovs, I'd demand an immediate identity
change, sell ASAP and move to Idaho.
If Skripal could live safely under his own name I guess this guy could too. It just makes it
easier for the US to get him in their own time.
I don't really see this guy served any purpose until he was outed. Just a late effort to
pretend that Russiagate had any credibility.
I wish that there was a resident Russian on this site, as there is on Craig Murray's.
That person could then tell me if I am wrong in supposing that a senior Chekist would
never, as a question of policy, have been allowed a passport for foreign travel for him and
his family.
If Oleg Smolenkov reported allegedly "valuable" insider information about Russia's
interference in US elections, as they say first hand, then why did Mueller's investigation
fail?
The New York Times story resurrects the
Russia collusion hoax. This time the proof comes from Oleg Smolenkov. The story is identical
to what the Steele dossier claimed: Putin personally directed a campaign to interfere in the
US presidential elections.
Every part of Steele narrative has already been shown to be a hoax and a fabrication. What
proves that the Steele dossier is a work of fiction is that it is written from a
fly-on-the-wall point of view. Only a person who was sitting in the same room with Putin when
he had secret meetings could have written it. So how many moles did the West have sitting on
Putin's desk? It seems like the CIA mole and Steele's secret source are one and the same
source. But if Oleg Smolenkov was CIA's most tightly guarded secret, how did the information
end up in Steele's dossier?
Larry Johnson just posted about this on SST, and his take seems much more plausible:
Desperation on the part of Clapper and his cabal as the chickens are coming home to roost.
This story is chock full of holes, and the media hackery is disintegrating under its own
weight.
> Obama administration .... Russia had stolen .... Democratic National Committee and .....
John Podesta.
So we have to allege that Podesta's laptop between naked underage girls photos had list of
CIA secret agents in Russian government? What else rid it contain and where did Podesta stole
those lists?
Same question about Paki-managed DNC server. Was managing CIA agents in foreign
governments outsourced to DNC or what?
"Once in the lifetime of yer townfolk! F..en circus! Imbecile clowns! Degenerate tamers!
Deformed strongmen! Dysfunctional acrobats! Don't miss out!"
@2
Diversion is one of the three possibilities that I can think of:
1) clan wars within US special services, particularly in view of the 2020 elections.
2) diversion (as suggested by col. Pat Lang)
3) preparation of the ground to make this guy a "sacrificial lamb" like Scripal, to avoid
any new rapprochement between the US and Russia after the end of the Muller report.
@11 roy g.. this is what i said @3 "what seems clear to me is that some in the cia-msm want
to frame trump.. this one feel apart fairly quickly..." for others who want to read larry
johnsons latest at sst
here...
Interesting
Tweet thread by a Sean M Davis has 5 entries and almost 1000 retweets beginning with
this:
"For those curious about what's going on with this bizarre Russia 'spy' story: Burr/Durham
know Steele was fed obvious disinformation, they know who originated it, they know who
peddled it, and it's just a matter of rounding up the whole network."
In his third entry, he poses the following question: "So the only two unanswered questions about this particular pre-emptive leak campaign from
the usual Russia hoax suspects are 1) why now, and 2) what specific event or official
revelation are they trying to get ahead of?"
The easy answer is the story itself is enough of a distraction as the 1000 retweets
show.
I tend to agree with Larry Johnson (at Pat Lang's) that this guy wasn't that useful back
then. He might have become more useful, had he stayed at the Kremlin and rose further up the
ladder, granted; or Obama's top guys assumed he wouldn't and it wasn't an issue to risk to
burn him.
I tend to agree with Larry Johnson (at Pat Lang's) that this guy wasn't that useful back
then. He might have become more useful, had he stayed at the Kremlin and rose further up the
ladder, granted; or Obama's top guys assumed he wouldn't and it wasn't an issue to risk to
burn him.
This whole story is entirely in the spirit of Hollywood comics.
I had a good laugh when I saw the news about the "valuable spy successfully extracted from
Russia".
Here are some reasons why this is fake/disinformation:
1) The news was published by CNN. I think there's no need to explain whether it is worth taking seriously the "sensations"
published by news outlets with a reputation like CNN.
2) Sorry, but you must be a complete idiot (in the medical sense) to openly declare in the
media that you had a "very valuable spy" in the immediate circle of the president of the
Russian Federation (or any other country). Just because in this way you, by your own hands,
are giving your opponent the reason to "strengthen control", conduct checks and identify
those [other] people who might be able to work for you for a long time and be useful. When this really takes place in real life (the presence of a spy of the highest rank,
close to the head of state), then this becomes public only after many years/decades, when the
'Top Secret' stamp is removed from the documents, you know.
3) V.Putin is a former intelligence officer. To put it mildly, it is very naive to assume
that the presence of an "American spy" (close to Putin) would not be known to a person with
Putin's experience/knowledge/capacity.
4) To be a spy, a member of the inner circle of the President of Russia (or any other
country) and not to be exposed, one need to have extraordinary abilities and competencies.
This is the highest class. In recent years, it seems only the lazy one did not notice and did
not note the monstrous degradation of the American political class. These people do not know
how to behave in a civilized society, do not have the traditions and culture of diplomacy and
communication. The situation is similar in the American defense industry. With this level of decline in the competence of the American elite (political, military,
etc.), to assume that they have such a ultra-high-class spy is at least very strange.
5) The fact that the "valuable spy" in the inner circle of the Russian president is pure
CNN fiction is confirmed in practice. What I mean:
- If Smolenkov is really a "very valuable spy" and had access to "secrets," it's rather
strange that he didn't tell the CIA, for example, about the Crimean operation of the Russian
Federation in 2014. Russia's actions then began for the United States (and not only for the
United States, by the way) a complete surprise. This is some really strange "valuable spy"
who did not know anything about the intentions and actions of the Russian leadership in the
spring of 2014.
- If Smolenkov is really a "very valuable spy," and had access to "secrets," the fact that
he knew nothing and did not tell the CIA about Russia's plans to launch the Syrian campaign
in September 2015 looks unusually strange. Just to remind that the actions of Russia then
became a complete surprise for the United States. They did not know anything about this and
did not expect such a development of events. Within a month before the official start of the
Syrian campaign, Russia transferred equipment and weapons to Syria. This remained a secret
for all intelligence services in the world, no one noticed anything. Even Israel, located in
close proximity to Syria, made a "discovery" about the presence of the Russian military there
only 2 days before the start of Russia's actions in the SAR. A rather strange "valuable spy"
who was completely ignorant of Russia's plans/actions in the Syrian direction.
- If Smolenkov is really a "very valuable spy" and had access to "secrets", it is very
strange that he did not know anything and did not inform the CIA about the development by
Russia of the latest weapons presented by President Putin in the spring of 2018. The
presentation of the latest models of Russian weapons was a real shock for the United States,
and I remember that at first the Americans, smiling, called all this "cartoons." Now they no
longer laugh. The development of these weapons was carried out for many years. It's somehow
strange that a "very valuable spy" never found out about it.
6) Serious Russian experts unequivocally spoke out that all this was fake and that
Smolenkov certainly could not be a spy. In particular, Armen Gasparyan, one of the leading Russian political scientists,
historian, writer (incidentally, who wrote several books on intelligence), spoke quite fully
about this in his recent commentary .
Why the CIA would allow such a spy, once extradited, to live under his real name is
beyond me.
Because this man has nothing to do with "spies", "secrets" and "special services". He is
an ordinary civilian, a former official from Russia. Many Russian ex- lives in abroad,
including high-ranking persons. Smolenkov of course had no access to any "secrets", and had
no access to entourage of the Russian president.
An attempt to present Smolenkov as a "valuable spy" from exactly the same series as the
clumsy attempt by the British government to introduce two Russian civilians (Ruslan Boshirov
and Alexander Petrov) as "GRU agents".
It is hardly reasonable to take this seriously.
That's the end of Smolenkov's anonymous quiet comfortable lifesyle. It doesn't send out a
very reassuring message - that the CIA can publicly expose someone it considers a very useful
asset. There must be a good reason why they threw Smolenkov under the bus in that way.
This guy could not possibly be what the CIS and media are presenting to be. Living under his
own name in Virginia? Could it be any simpler to find him? The Russians do have search
engines, too.
B may be right that this is a double or triple play, but find it hard to see the benefits to
pretending to have had a deep mole in the Kremlin. I also find it implausible that any
Russsian diplomat who has been stationed in DC would not be viewed as potentially
compromised. It would be relatively simple to feed him bullshit and see what filters into DC.
Many thoughtful comments here. My take, as a fan of Le Carre and Mad Magazine's Spy vs Spy
cartoon, is that USA's spy was discovered and turned. He was dismissed, employed somewhere
close by, and fed chicken feed for his CIA masters. When they realized he was a failure, the
CIA got him and his family out with the possible object of turning him into a propaganda
subject. Of course he would have to die first, but CIA could make it look like the Russians
did it.
I'm generally interested in how spies are referred to in corporate media stories.
For instance, we were told constantly that Skirpal was a 'Russian Spy'. This ran contrary
to the normal usage, which would have referred to a British Spy within the Russian government
as a 'British Spy'. If that signaled a general change in language, then Solemenkov, would
also be referred to as a Russian Spy and not as an American Spy. He shares with Skirpal
having a Russian nationality, while he was spying for the Americans. Of course, when the
propagandists are going for an emotional reaction, they can be relied on to use whichever
helps tilt the story in their direction.
Historically, spy agencies aren't really known for their great humanity in pulling out a spy
who is in a useful position just because they fear for that spy's safety. The more common
course of action for Spy Bosses is to keep the spy in place, keep pushing for more, more,
more information from the spy, before perhaps holding a brief moment of silence over their
spy ending up in prison.
Maybe it's for an Outlaw US Empire sequel to MI-6's Novochock BigLie to be sprung as the
election heats up.
That's what I thought as well. Why would the MSM hype a spy other than establishing his
persona in the public eye, to be followed by some event later? Either he's a double agent and
they will kill him and blame it on Russia, or he is not a double agent and they will use him
to announce some "strong evidence" of Trump–Russia connection.
Part of the intention of this farce is to give the CIA and the CIA News Network (CNN) the
opportunity to pretend that they are not knotted together like mating dogs (I leave it up to
the reader to guess which one is the bitch).
1. Smolenkov was the source of the Steele Report, in other words he received a substantial
payment to come up with fictional "dirt" on Trump.
2. With all the publicity about the Steele report, Brennan/Obama/etc. were scared (and
with good reason) that the Russians would figure out that Smolenkov was the source and would
then make a grand show of his confessing to how he had made everything up at the request of
US/UK intelligence agencies.
3. Therefore he was extricated for a very good reason (if you are Obama/Brennan, that
is).
4. His extrication is now being used as an anti-Trump weapon, but also as a pre-emptive
measure to reduce the fallout if (or when) reports emerge that Smolenkov was the source for
Steele.
Be interesting to know what was occurring if Smolenkov was the source for the Steele
report.
Whatever information he was sending, that he just left on holidays makes me think Russian
intel were on the ball and had started feeding him a bit of disinformation.
I don't expect the US--and by US I mean the Current Oligarchy--to save anyone, while
Russia is very busy trying to save its current and future populace--the differences being
quite extreme. Since the US isn't intent on saving anyone, it wants to ensure its populace
thinks other governments act the same way toward their populaces so the US populace doesn't
get any ideas about saving itself from its own viscous government. Busting that narrative is
what keeps us busy--There IS an alternative.
From digging around on the property site (from the link).
It must be a very nice house. A 3-ish acre lot in that neighborhood has an assessment of
$140k for the land. But the assessment for improvements for this house is over $900k while
others in the neighborhood are more in the $600k range. I was looking at the aerial photos
and trying to pick out what seem to be other nice houses, including ones with swimming pools
which this one lacks, and which also have big garages (this one has 4 car garage apparently),
but couldn't find a neighbor above an assessment in the $600k's.
The neighborhood as a whole has had its valuations decline in the 2018 biannual
assessment. Not sure why, but maybe the neighborhood of 20 year old mansions isn't as hot as
some newer developments. The last previous lowering of assessment values occurred during the
Great-Not-A-Depression in the 2008 revaluations. Note, the land is not considered to have
lower values, but all of the homes on the street have had the assessments of the improvements
on the property lowered in the last reassessments.
Hard to tell much about the selling price from neighboring properties. Many of the
neighbors bought their homes direct from the construction company back in the early years of
the century. So not too many direct compares for homes bought in 2018.
A point that appears to have missed by several is that an aide to an aide to the foreign
minister is not likely to have access to Putin's super-top-secret plans to use a few thousand
dollars worth of utube and twit ads to change the course of multi-billion dollar American
election, nor would he have access to information that might be used to blackmail a potential
foreign leader. Both would be closely held secrets and apparently way above his pay grade.
Often the FM wouldn't know of either, and both operations would be compartmentalized into a
close team Putin can trust.
The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the
style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they
know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little
power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned
to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister.
My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means
he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's
anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because
he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his
own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in
the USG is setting him up with a fake identity.
House likely bought by CIA and annual upkeep--taxes etc.--also paid by them.
MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely
contributor to the Steele Dossier given the overall web of established connections--that was
most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA, although CIA was
involved in Russiagate Cover-up.
In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged
spy? Aside from the UNSC vote debacle on Libya, I see nothing but a string of successes,
although the Ukraine Coup wasn't debauched. IMO, Outlaw US Empire policy toward Russia has
failed spectacularly, and it is within the US government where I'd expect to find well placed
spies.
@35 turner.. no.. and no one here at moa believes anything out of the western msm either...
see @ 29 william gruff comment for more meaningful lingo on the set up..
Here's a tough problem for a counter-intelligence agent. Find the source of info for a
fictional report.
Normally, after a link, one avenue of investigation would be to check who had access to
the leaked information. But, if the report is completely fictional, then there is no list of
people who had access to information that didn't exist. Everyone or no one had equal access
to the non-existent information. The Tailor of Moscow had the same access to the non-existent
information as did Putin's closest personal aide. Who done it?
Ingérence russe :la CIA disposait d'une source haut-placée au Kremlin.
Russian collusion: CIA had high placed source at the Kremlin.
A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about
it. Really, when a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be
nigh.
Evidence-free accusations of Russian meddling. Now with extra sauce.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was
deliberately planned as part of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to
strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling.
The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that
Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used.
The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the
officials said.
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News.
What began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show
corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image
that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore,"
the official said.
Notice the source is spies working for US Allies. Remember that the NSA did not sign off on the Russian interference/hacking because they
were concerned that too much critical info rested on intelligence from a single foreign
country.
Sergei Skripal was not just an turncoat for UK he also worked for Estonian intelligence.
It seems to me the poisoning fits better as an Estonian job, to keep relations in Europe with
Russia in very bad shape. It's easy to say that the Russians wouldn't be so incompetent, also
goes for the UK, which could have come up with something more compelling if they pre planned
it as false flag.
Notice how we have some sources saying concern grew after the Trump Putin meeting, where
supposedly Trump gave Israeli intelligence to Putin on Syria, I think they were concerned
Trump would have no problem revealing a spy for another government, much like he was free
with foreign intelligence.
I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect
the real source, who is working for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is
possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016, Deputy Chief of Staff
of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the
foreign policy of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia.
Just out of curiousity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have
to exclude this from his report? The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check.The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have already noticed that he has done a runner. Check.
What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that starts with: "we know
the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being
relayed to us by an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and
now living in the USA".
I call it a red herring, and I bet this sucker has been fully set up. Publicly listed address
and all the indicators are that he is held in reserve to throw to the dogs whenever the
action gets too close to the mongrel perpetrators.
Joe Mifsud and Claire Smith of MI6, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, especially FBI special
agent Joseph Pientka plus that BIG shot FBI agent (who's name I forget) are the names to
remember. Why aren't Misud and Smith extradited to face inquiry?
So what is emerging? is Mueller due in court to prosecute the Russian ad agency that has
fully shirt fronted him? Is Flynn business about to upend a steaming pot of turds over
Mueller and other heads. Is Seth Rich about to be posthumously knighted by some New York
monarch for his role in smashing the HRC cart in public? Or is Julian Assange about to be put
through more torture for being a journalist and publisher?
This poor Russian sod is a patsy for the vicious deep state game that now needs to prey on
him and deliver his carcass to the howling mob and so distract them again. This Friday's
quiet press releases might hold a clue.
This guy will probably be making the rounds on CNN and cable news promoting the Steele
dossier and the Russian collusion hoax as its complete disintegration is now fully evident.
Offer up some turds on a plate, dress it up with a pinch a parsley and the truth will be
avoided.
The whole 2 year media storm of lies on Russian collusion will be avoided by offering up
another turd on a plate. This guy will pull down a few million and the media will never admit
their false reporting.
It would seem that a great deal has certainly changed at the CIA since 2003 when Valerie
Plame was revealed as a spy by a newspaper journalist who was given the information about her
during a phone conversation with someone close to the White House at the time, apparently to
punish her ambassador husband Joseph Wilson for going to Niger to verify if that country had
exported uranium to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Then there was shock and anger at the time that
the cover of a CIA operative had been blown.
Now the CIA doesn't even bother to give Smolenkov and his family new identities and
biographies to explain their living in Washington DC, and even co-operates with the outgoing
Obama administration in 2016 in risking the exposure of one of its own to try to stop Donald
Trump from ensconcing himself in the White House.
Something certainly has changed in the culture of the CIA: while it was always a political
animal, it is becoming an extremely ideological one as well.
The idea that this could be a fake spy is interesting.
Sabine wrote:
fuck are you guys not tired of this bullshit kabuki theatre that you get fed daily in order
to keep you amused and busy?
Only speaking for myself I ignore almost all of it (and actively treat it as propaganda,
deception, and manipulation) and take a lot of breaks. I test the waters (or sewage) from
time to time but I don't expect much and have no right to expect anything either.
However despite such sentiments the last decade seems like it has been an improvement
although too many people (and probably me as well) are searching for "replacements" to
failures when maybe there shouldn't be any: any false choice requires at least two wrong
answers but there could be any number .
In Bulgaria is a spy scandal too.
Reschetnikov is banned for ten years to visit Bulgaria. A reporter from NYT has tried to
interview him before steps are take in Bulgaria to investigate the case. The officials say
the Russians wanted to divert Bulgaria to the asia-project and that money-laundering was used
to finance subversive activities. The case started on 9.09 2019. Today the parliament heard
the statements of the agencies. Nothing new they sayed
Sounds fishy, the whole thing. Of course, when everyone is lying about everything while they
are pretending to fight with each other, it may well get a bit convoluted. CIA outing thrir
own dude on their own propaganda outlet is quite strange though. Also, their dude just
trotting about using his real name (in a publicly listed mansion no less),... ehh... Who
knows...
Of course, they could be trying to 'put him on the spot' to use him for yet another
propaganda push (whether he wants to play along, or not). But, again, the whole thing seems a
bit strange.
i would caution people here on patrick lang's views on this issue. remember he is an
existensialist american "patriot" who stop at nothing and will approve of any warcrime to
held up the mighty american empire. Look at patrick lang's history , he is ex intelligence
and thus never left the "services" even when he is "retired".
Pat lang's hate toward those who criticize american empire is legendary.. just look at his
own comments on SST.
another one to watch is patrick lang's friend called TTG which also US intelligence and it
is not unknown for this guy to post or inject nonsense narrative on SST especially on
intelligence matters concerning russia.
The posts that seems clean of US narrative lies seem to come from Publius Tacitus and
Walrus. But then again never take off your mandatory antipropaganda shield especially on SST
owned by ex spook who love the american empire and military trashing of the world
The following rumor (through sputniknews.com) is sort of educational even if it should
turn out to not be true (its Boolean value is essentially irrelevant which is interesting as
a separate matter as well):
Trump mistrusts spies etc .
It wasn't just shock. Scooter Libby, Cheney's (?) Chief of Staff, broke a federal law when
he exposed Valerie Palme as a CIA operative. He served part of a prison sentence for this.
Joseph Wilson verified that Saddam Hussein did not buy yellow cake. After his report was
ignored, he wrote an article about his findings. I remember reading it in the International
Herald Tribune. It put the WMD narrative in doubt.
OK, lets' assume that neoliberal MSM are not lying. Then why Mueller did not include him in his report? He was already in the USA
since June 2017. It is unclear when he was fired by russians.
Also as Smolenkov for a long time lived in the USA he knew very well what the USA wants and could lie with impunity trying to earn
more money. In a way similar personality as Skripal.
Is the idea to create the second Skripals-style false poisoning hysteria to help to sustain RussiaGate?
Notable quotes:
"... The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister. ..."
"... My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity. ..."
"... MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely contributor to the Steele Dossier given the overall web of established connections--that was most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA, although CIA was involved in Russiagate Cover-up. ..."
"... In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged spy? Aside from the UNSC vote debacle on Libya ..."
"... A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about it. Really,when a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be nigh. ..."
"... We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was deliberately planned as part of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling. ..."
"... The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016 ..."
"... I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect the real source, who is working for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016, Deputy Chief of Staff of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the foreign policy of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia. ..."
"... Just out of curiosity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have to exclude this from his report? The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check. The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have already noticed that he has done a runner. Check. ..."
"... What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that starts with: "we know the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being relayed to us by an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and now living in the USA". ..."
"... Well, I just think Putin had more important things to think about than the charade that is now the US electoral process. Probably he felt (I'm guessing of course) that the whole Russiagate scenario was a desperate move to throw a curtain over the demise of American democracy that served his, Putin's, purposes very well because it kept the idiots busy while he shored up the badly leaking ship of his own state. ..."
"... And I go with Smiley@34 - no spy of even mediocre caliber would agree to being placed in such an exposed position under his own name, for crying out loud! ..."
"... It doesn't make sense that he would leave himself exposed if either in Russia or in the US he had undercover connections of this sort. Just doesn't make sense. But that he was the best the US operatives could come up with right now simply speaks to further deterioration of US ability to field persuasive stories. ..."
"... Putin hasn't had to worry about vendettas or showing corruption in American politics. Take a reliable poll. Who in the US thinks our politics ISN'T corrupt? ..."
"... We didn't need Putin, mastermind though he is, to 'create an image' of American unreliability. Was it Putin who reneged on so many treaties? Was it Putin who antagonized the Koreas? Was it Putin who set up the trade war with China? Was it Putin who threatened and sanctioned Russia, Iran, Venezuela? ..."
"... What can the Russians do to get ahead of the narrative on the likely impending demise of Smolenkov by novichok or polonium poisoning? ..."
"... The concern is about the three hundred million other Americans who are at least partially captured by the false narratives pumped out non-stop from their Plato's Cave displays. Is there anything that the Russians can do now to inoculate some Americans against the hard sell they will be facing when the corporate mass media ( Mighty Wurlitzer ) cranks up the multi-channel marketing campaign for the United States' own Skripal farce? ..."
A point that appears to have missed by several is that an aide to an aide to the foreign minister is not likely to have access
to Putin's super-top-secret plans to use a few thousand dollars worth of utube and twit ads to change the course of multi-billion
dollar American election, nor would he have access to information that might be used to blackmail a potential foreign leader.
Both would be closely held secrets and apparently way above his pay grade. Often the FM wouldn't know of either, and both operations
would be compartmentalized into a close team Putin can trust.
The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor
of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because
it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that
scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister.
My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch.
He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch
money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's
not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity.
House likely bought by CIA and annual upkeep--taxes etc.--also paid by them.
MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely contributor to the Steele Dossier given
the overall web of established connections--that was most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA,
although CIA was involved in Russiagate Cover-up.
In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged spy? Aside from the UNSC vote
debacle on Libya, I see nothing but a string of successes, although the Ukraine Coup wasn't debauched. IMO, Outlaw US Empire
policy toward Russia has failed spectacularly, and it is within the US government where I'd expect to find well placed spies.
Here's a tough problem for a counter-intelligence agent. Find the source of info for a fictional report.
Normally, after a link, one avenue of investigation would be to check who had access to the leaked information. But, if the
report is completely fictional, then there is no list of people who had access to information that didn't exist. Everyone or no
one had equal access to the non-existent information.
The Tailor of Moscow had the same access to the non-existent information as did Putin's closest personal aide. Who done it?
Headline in le Figaro: Ingérence russe :la CIA disposait d'une source haut-placée au Kremlin (Russian collusion: CIA had high
placed source at the Kremlin.)
A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about it. Really,when
a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be nigh.
Evidence-free accusations of Russian meddling. Now with extra sauce.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was deliberately planned as part
of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling.
The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked
material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for
U.S. allies, the officials said.
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against
Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating
the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.
Notice the source is spies working for US Allies. Remember that the NSA did not sign off on the Russian interference/hacking
because they were concerned that too much critical info rested on intelligence from a single foreign country.
Sergei Skripal was not just an turncoat for UK he also worked for Estonian intelligence. It seems to me the poisoning fits
better as an Estonian job, to keep relations in Europe with Russia in very bad shape. It's easy to say that the Russians wouldn't
be so incompetent, also goes for the UK, which could have come up with something more compelling if they pre planned it as false
flag.
Notice how we have some sources saying concern grew after the Trump Putin meeting, where supposedly Trump gave Isreali intelligence
to Putin on Syria, I think they were concerned Trump would have no problem revealing a spy for another government, much like he
was free with foreign intelligence.
I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect the real source, who is working
for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016,
Deputy Chief of Staff of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the foreign policy
of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia.
Just out of curiosity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have to exclude this from his report?
The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check. The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have
already noticed that he has done a runner. Check.
What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that
starts with: "we know the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being relayed to us by
an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and now living in the USA".
Well, I just think Putin had more important things to think about than the charade that is now the US electoral process.
Probably he felt (I'm guessing of course) that the whole Russiagate scenario was a desperate move to throw a curtain over the
demise of American democracy that served his, Putin's, purposes very well because it kept the idiots busy while he shored up the
badly leaking ship of his own state.
And I go with Smiley@34 - no spy of even mediocre caliber would agree to being placed in such an exposed position under
his own name, for crying out loud!
This was a guy who had big money stashed away, wanted to be in a place where rich guys are held in high esteem, planned his
exit from a no-longer-friendly-to-rich-folk environment (if you had money in Russia these days, you should use it for the good
of the country).
It doesn't make sense that he would leave himself exposed if either in Russia or in the US he had undercover connections of
this sort. Just doesn't make sense. But that he was the best the US operatives could come up with right now simply speaks to further
deterioration of US ability to field persuasive stories.
And this gave me some amusement:
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against
Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating
the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said. [Quote
from Goldman Kropotkin@43]
Putin hasn't had to worry about vendettas or showing corruption in American politics. Take a reliable poll. Who in the
US thinks our politics ISN'T corrupt?
We didn't need Putin, mastermind though he is, to 'create an image' of American unreliability. Was it Putin who reneged on
so many treaties? Was it Putin who antagonized the Koreas? Was it Putin who set up the trade war with China? Was it Putin who
threatened and sanctioned Russia, Iran, Venezuela?
We, our leaders, masterminded it all. Sorry, Mr. Putin - you lose that enviable title. We own it.
What can the Russians do to get ahead of the narrative on the likely impending demise of Smolenkov by novichok or polonium
poisoning?
I know some here might say "Everyone would know it is a false flag if Smolenkov gets assassinated!" and that is certainly true
if by "everyone" one means the regular readers here and at a few other analysis sites that are not controlled by the empire.
The concern is about the three hundred million other Americans who are at least partially captured by the false narratives
pumped out non-stop from their Plato's Cave displays. Is there anything that the Russians can do now to inoculate some
Americans against the hard sell they will be facing when the corporate mass media ( Mighty Wurlitzer ) cranks up the multi-channel
marketing campaign for the United States' own Skripal farce?
"... Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will likely find that all four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page were obtained illegally , according to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee. ..."
"... " I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016, " said Barr. ..."
"... Jordan also noted that he wants Horowitz to testify about his reports on former FBI Director James Comey, and asked "When is somebody going to jail for wrongdoing that took place in the Trump-Russia investigation or even the Clinton investigation?" ..."
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will likely find that all four Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page were
obtained illegally , according to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), top Republican on the House Oversight
and Reform Committee.
" I think he will ," said Jordan during an discussion with Fox News 's Sean Hannity and
Gregg Jarrett Monday night.
In April , Attorney General William Barr assembled a team of DOJ investigators to review
controversial counterintelligence decisions made by DOJ and FBI officials made during the 2016
US election.
" I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the
aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016,
" said Barr.
"That's great news he's looking into how this whole thing started back in 2016," said Rep.
Jordan at the time. " That's something that has been really important to us. It's what we've
been calling for. "
The investigation into alleged FISA abuse against the Trump campaign by DOJ and FBI
officials has
reportedly been completed. After a declassification period, the report could be released
sometime in September. The contents of the report have not been confirmed.
Attorney General William Barr, who is overseeing U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation
into the origins of the Russia investigation, said he is working closely with Horowitz, and
they will take up any criminal referrals Horowitz might make.
Former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova said he has heard the initial FISA warrant against Page
and the three renewals at three-month intervals were illegally obtained . He
told the Washington Examiner 's Examining Politics
podcast late last month that he got his insider information because the report is "being
circulated inside and outside of the department for comment by interested parties." -
Washington Examiner
Jordan also noted that he wants Horowitz to testify about his reports on former FBI Director
James Comey, and asked "When is somebody going to jail for wrongdoing that took place in the
Trump-Russia investigation or even the Clinton investigation?"
The FISA Court is under the supervision of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Does
John Roberts have zero resources to figure out what happened internally? Is there no Judicial
oversight for this Star Chamber?
Or is his "judicial temperament" so calm that he can't see how his Branch has been
corrupted?
is there any doubt that the USA has a two tiered justice sytem...people in the Washinton
swamp are all covered if they capitulate to the Deep State! Comey is nothing but a Traitor
but the left wing party do not care cause he is just like them they hate... Trump! And the
Patriot all just stand down!
This is all a ****-show of theater. Nobody is going to be held accountable for anything
and, if by chance, some low level schlep gets thrown in the clink he'll hang himself with
one-ply toilet paper and nobody will have seen a thing....
The main achievement of neoliberal and imperial (warmongering) propaganda in the USA is that it achieved the complete,
undisputed dominance in MSM
Pot Calling the Kettle Black: "The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation machine is being unleashed via new platforms and continues to grow in Russia and
internationally. Russia seeks to destroy the very idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts as it attempts to influence opinions
about the United States and its allies. It is not an understatement to say that this new form of combat on the information battlefield
may be the fight of the 21st century."
Notable quotes:
"... Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to "court the compatible left." ..."
"... The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites. ..."
"... Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media (The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world. ..."
Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to "court the compatible left."
Right-wing and left-wing collaborators were needed to create a powerful propaganda apparatus that would be capable of hypnotizing
audiences into believing the myth of American exceptionalism and its divine right to rule the world.
The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites.
Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts
And Letters, and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers,
with particular emphasis on the complicity between the CIA and the famous literary journal, The Paris Review.
By the mid-1970s, as a result of the Church Committee hearings, it seemed as if the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. had been caught in flagrante
delicto and disgraced, confessed their sins, and resolved to go and sin no more.
Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media
(The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world.
It seemed as if all would be hunky-dory now with the bad boys purged from the American “free” press. Seemed to the most naïve,
that is, by which I mean the vast numbers of people who wanted to re-stick their heads in the sand and believe, as Ronald Reagan’s
team of truthtellers would announce, that it was “Morning in America” again with the free press reigning and the neo-conservatives,
many of whom had been “converted” from their leftist views, running things in Washington.
USAGM provides consistently accurate and compelling journalism that reflects the values of our society: freedom, openness,
democracy, and hope. Our guiding principles—enshrined in law—are to provide a reliable, authoritative, and independent source
of news that adheres to the strictest standards of journalism…
Russian Disinformation. And make no mistake, we are living through a global explosion of disinformation, state propaganda,
and lies generated by multiple authoritarian regimes around the world. The weaponization of information we are seeing today is
real. The Russian government and other authoritarian regimes engage in far-reaching malign influence campaigns across national
boundaries and language barriers.
The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation machine is being unleashed via new platforms and continues to grow in Russia and
internationally. Russia seeks to destroy the very idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts as it attempts to influence opinions
about the United States and its allies. It is not an understatement to say that this new form of combat on the information battlefield
may be the fight of the 21st century.
Then research the history of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, Radio and Television Marti, etc. You will
be reassured that Lansing’s July testimony was his job interview to head National Propaganda Radio.
Edward Curtin writes, and his writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He writes as a public
intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. He believes a non-committal sociology is an
impossibility and therefore sees all his work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding. His website is
edwardcurtin.com
"... Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I’m wondering why it’s that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. ..."
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The CIA Bull
in Glenn Simpson's Russia Shop Posted on January 22,
2018 by Jerri-Lynn ScofieldBy
John Helmer , the longest
continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct
his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a
professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United
States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy
Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with
Bears
In criminal trials the rule for prosecuting and defending lawyers is the same. Never ask a
witness a question unless you already know the answer. The corollary rule for defending lawyers
is – if the answer to your question will incriminate your client, don't ask it, and hope
the prosecutor fails to do his job.
Glenn Simpson, a former employee of the Wall Street Journal in New York, is currently on
trial in the US for having fabricated a dossier of allegations of Russian misconduct (bribes,
sex, blackmail, hacking) involving President Donald Trump and circulating them to the press;
the objective was to damage Trump's candidacy before the election of November 8, 2016. Simpson
was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on August 22, 2017; then the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on November 8 and again on November 14, 2017. So
far, Simpson's veracity and business conduct face nothing more than the court of public
opinion. He has not yet been charged with criminal or civil offences. That will happen if the
evidence materializes that Simpson has been lying.
Simpson's collaborator in the dossier and his business partner, Christopher Steele, is
facing trial in the London High Court, charged with libels he and Simpson published in their
dossier. Together, they are material witnesses in two federal US court trials for defamation,
one in Miami and one in New York. If they perjure themselves giving evidence in those cases,
they are likely to face criminal indictments. If they tell the truth, they are likely to face
fresh defamation proceedings; perhaps a civil racketeering suit for fraud; maybe a false
statement prosecution under the US criminal code.
One question for them is as obvious as its answer. Who do an American ex-journalist on US
national security and an ex-British intelligence agent go to for sources on Russian undercover
operations outside Russia in general, the US in particular? Answer -- first, their friends and
contacts from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); second, their friends and contacts from
the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, as the UK counterpart is known.
Why then did the twenty-two congressmen, the members of the House Intelligence Committee who
subpoenaed Simpson for interview, fail to pursue what information he and Steele received either
directly from the CIA or indirectly through British intelligence?
The answer noone in the US wants to say aloud is the possibility that it was the CIA which
provided Simpson and Steele with names and source materials for their dossier, creating the
evidence of a Russian plot against the US election, and generating evidence of Russian
operations. If that is what happened, then Simpson and Steele were participants in a false-flag
CIA operation in US politics.
This isn't idle speculation. It has been under investigation at the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) since Simpson and Steele decided in mid-2016 to go to the FBI to request an
investigation, and then told American press to get the FBI to confirm it was investigating. At
the fresh request this month from the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI is
still
investigating .
Simpson's appearance at the House Intelligence Committee was the sequel to his testimony
before the Senate Judiciary Committee; for that story, read this .
Simpson's three lawyers from the Washington, DC, firm of Cunningham Levy Muse, who appeared with him at the Senate and House committee hearings. From left to right, Robert Muse; Joshua Levy, and Rachel Clattenburg.
The firm's other name partner, Bryan Cunningham, was a CIA officer specializingin cyber operations.
The transcripts of the House Intelligence Committee were released last Thursday. Simpson's
first appearance was on November 8, and can be read in full here
.
Simpson's lawyers did all the talking; Simpson said nothing, pleading the US Constitution's
Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.
Although his lawyers repeatedly claimed during the earlier Senate Committee hearing that
Simpson was testifying voluntarily, the House Committee recorded that Simpson was compelled to
testify. "Our record today," the November 8 transcript begins, "will reflect that you have been
compelled to appear today pursuant to a subpoena issued on October 4th, 2017." Simpson then
told the Committee through his lawyers that he would plead the Fifth Amendment and not answer
any questions. The first transcript is a record of debate between Republican and Democratic
members of the Committee.
This resulted in an agreement for Simpson to testify under the subpoena but on terms his
lawyers said would limit the scope of the questions which he would agree to answer.
Steele, according to the November 8 transcript, was also summoned to testify. A British
citizen with home in Berkshire and office in London, he refused and the Committee recorded his
"noncooperation and nontestimony."
Republicans outnumber Democrats on the House Committee, 13 to 9. Just 5 Republican members
were at Simpson's November 14 appearance; 7 Democrats. The Republican committee chairman, Devin
Nunes, was absent. Release of Simpson's transcript was an initiative of the Democrats. In a
statement by their leader on the committee, Adam Schiff, the Democrats claimed
last week "thus far, Committee Republicans have refused to look into this key area and we hope
the release of this transcript will reinforce the importance of these critical questions to our
investigation."
Members of the House Intelligence Committee on the podium at an open hearing inNovember 2017. From left to right: Adam Schiff (D), Michael Conaway (R),and Thomas Rooney (R).
Search the 165 pages of the transcript for the CIA, and you will find many references to the
letters, C, I and A – spe cia lize, so cia l, commer cia l, espe cia lly, asso cia tion,
finan cia l and politi cia n. There were 44 mentions of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence
(FBI); 4 mentions of "British Intelligence" – the spy agency to which Steele belonged ten
years ago – one mention each of the Israeli Mossad, the Chinese and Indian intelligence
services.
According to Simpson, "foreign intelligence services hacking American political operations
is not that unusual, actually, and there's a lot of foreign intelligence services that play in
American elections." He mentioned the Chinese and the Indians, not the Israelis. The Mossad,
Simpson did tell the Committee, was his source for his belief that Russian intelligence has
been operating through the Jewish Orthodox Chabad movement, and the Russian Orthodox Church.
"The Orthodox church is also an arm of the Russian State now the Mossad guys used to tell me
about how the Russians were laundering money through the Orthodox church in Israel, and that it
was intelligence operations."
There are just two references in the Committee transcript to the CIA. One was a passing
remark to imply the Russians cannot "break[ing] into the CIA, [so instead] you are breaking
into, you know, places where, you know, an open society leaves open."
The second was a bombshell. It dropped during questioning by Congressman Thomas Rooney
(right), a 3-term Republican
representative from Florida with a career as an army lawyer. Rooney asked Simpson: "Do you or
anyone else independently verify or corroborate any information in the dossier?"
Simpson replied by saying, "Yes. Well, numerous things in the dossier have been verified.
You know, I don't have access to the intelligence or law enforcement information that I see
made reference to, but, you know, things like, you know, the Russian Government has been
investigating Hillary Clinton and has a lot of information about her."
Then Simpson contradicted himself, disclosing what he had just denied. "When the original
memos came in saying that the Kremlin was mounting a specific operation to get Donald Trump
elected President , that was not what the Intelligence Community was saying. The Intelligence
Community was saying they are just seeking to disrupt our election and our political process,
and that this is sort of kind of just a generally nihilistic, you know, trouble-making
operation. And, you know, Chris turned out to be right, it was specifically designed to elect
Donald Trump President."
How did Simpson know with such confidence what the "Intelligence Community" was "saying",
and who were Simpson's and Steele's sources in the "Intelligence Community"? Rooney failed to
inquire. Instead, he and Simpson exchanged question and answer regarding the approach Simpson
and Steele made to the FBI when they delivered their dossier. In the details of that, Simpson
repeated what he had already told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Rooney then asked what contact had been made with the CIA or "any other intelligence
officials". Simpson claimed he didn't understand the question at first, then he stumbled.
What Simpson was concealing in the two pauses, reported in the transcript as hyphens, Rooney
did not realize. Simpson was implying that noone from Fusion GPS, his consulting company, had
been in contact with the CIA, nor him personally. But Simpson left open that Steele had been in
contact with the CIA. Rooney followed with a question about "anyone", but that was so
imprecise, Simpson recovered his confidence to say "No". That was a cover-up – and the
House Intelligence Committee let it drop noiselessly.
Intelligence community sources and colleagues who know Simpson and Steele say Simpson was
notorious at the Wall Street Journal for coming up with conspiracy theories for which the
evidence was missing or unreliable. He told the Committee that disbelief on the part of his
editors and management had been one of his reasons for leaving the newspaper. "One of the
reasons why I left the Wall Street Journal was because I wanted to write more stories about
Russian influence in Washington, D.C., on both the Democrats and the Republicans eventually the
Journal lost interest in that subject. And I was frustrated that was where I left my journalism
career."
Left: Glenn Simpson reporter for the Wall Street Journal in 1996, promoting his book, Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics. Right: Simpson in Washington in August 2017.
When Simpson was asked "do you – did you find anything to -- that you verified as
false in the dossier, since or during?" Simpson replied: "I have not seen anything – ".
Note the hypthen, the stenographer's signal that Simpson was pausing.
"[Question]. So everything in that dossier, as far as you're concerned, is true or could be
true?"
"MR. SIMPSON: I didn't say that. What I said was it was credible at the time it came in. We
were able to corroborate various things that supported its credibility."
Sources in London are divided on the question of where Steele's sources came from –
CIA, MI6, or elsewhere. What has been clear for the year in which the dossier's contents have
been in public circulation is that the sources the dossier referred to as "Russian" were not.
For details of the
sourcing . The subsequent identification of the Maltese source Joseph Mifsud, and the
Greek-American George Papadopoulos, corroborates their lack of
direct Russian sources. Instead, the sources identified in the dossier were either
Americans, Americans of Russian ethnic origin, or Russians with no direct knowledge repeating
hearsay three or four times removed from source.
So were the allegations of the dossier manufactured by a CIA disinformation unit, and fed
back to the US through the British agent, Steele? Or were they a Simpson conspiracy theory of
the type that failed to pass veracity testing when Simpson was at the Wall Street Journal? The
House Intelligence Committee failed to inquire.
One independent clue is what financial and other links Simpson and Steele and their
consulting firms, Fusion GPS and Orbis Business Intelligence, have had with US Government
agencies other than the FBI, and what US Government contracts they were paid for, before the
Republican and Democratic Party organizations commissioned the anti-Trump job?
The House Committee has subpoenaed business records from Fusion, but Simpson's lawyers say
they will refuse to hand them over. The financial records of Steele's firm are openly
accessible through the UK government company registry, Companies House. Click to read
here .
Because the Trump dossier work ran from the second half of 2015 to November 2016, the
financial reports of Orbis for the financial years ending March 31, 2016, and March 31, 2017,
are the primary sources. For FY 2016 and FY 2017, open this link to read.
The papers reveal that Orbis was a small firm with no more than 7 employees. Steele's
business partner and co-shareholder, Christopher Burrows, is another former MI6 spy. They had
been hoping for MI6 support of their private business, but it failed to materialize, says an
London intelligence source. "Chris Burrows is another from the same background. They all hope
to be Hakluyt [a leading commercial intelligence operation in London] but didn't get the nod on
departure."
Left: Christopher Steele; right, Christopher Burrows.
They do not report the Orbis income. Instead, for 2016 the company filings indicate
£155,171 in cash at the bank, and income of £245,017 owed by clients and
contractors. Offsetting that figure, Orbis owed £317,848 – to whom and for what
purposes is not reported. The unaudited accounts show Orbis's profit jumped from £121,046
in 2015 to £199,223 in 2016, and £441,089 in 2017.
The financial data are complicated by the operation by Steele and Burrows of a second
company, Orbis Business Intelligence International, a subsidiary they created in 2010, a year
after the parent company was formed. Follow its affairs here .
According to British press reports ,
Orbis and Steele were paid £200,000 for the dossier. Simpson told the House Intelligence
Committee the sum was much less -- $160,000 (about £114,000). Simpson's firm, he also
testified, was being paid at a rate of about $50,000 per month for a total of about $320,000.
If the British sources are more accurate than Simpson's testimony, Steele's takings from the
dossier represented roughly half the profit on the Orbis balance-sheet.
British sources also report that a US Government agency paid for Orbis to work on evidence
and allegations of corruption at the world soccer federation, Fédération
Internationale de Football (FIFA). Indictments in this case were issued by the US Department of
Justice in
May 2015 , and the following
December . What role the two-partner British consultancy played in the complex
investigations by teams from the Justice Department, the FBI and also the Internal Revenue
Service is unclear. That Steele, Burrows and Orbis depended on US government sources for their
financial well-being appears to be certain.
Another reported version of the FIFA contract is that Steele, Burrows and Orbis were hired
by the British Football Association to collect materials on FIFA corruption, and provide them
to the FBI and other US investigators, and then to the press. The scheme's objective was
reportedly to advance the British bidding for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022 by discrediting the
rival bids from Russia and Qatar. Click to
read . Were MI6 and CIA sources mobilized by Orbis to feed the FBI with evidence the US
investigators were unable to turn up, or was Orbis the conduit through which disinformation
targeting Russia was fed to make it appear more credible to the FBI, and to the media?
US Congressional investigators have so far failed to notice the similarities between the
FIFA and the Trump dossier operations. Early this month two Republican members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee announced
that they have called for a Justice Department and FBI investigation of Steele for providing
false information to the FBI. The provision of the US code making lying a
federal crime requires the falsehoods occur "within the jurisdiction of the executive,
legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States." Simpson has testified
that when Steele briefed the FBI on the dossier, he did so at meetings in Rome, Italy.
Now then, Part I and this
sequel of the Simpson-Steele story having been read and thoroughly mulled over, what can the
meaning be?
In the short run, this case was a black job assigned by Republican Party candidates for
president, then the Democratic National Committee, for the purpose of discrediting Trump in
favour of Hillary Clinton. It failed on Election Day in 2016; the Democrats are still
trying.
In the long run, the case is a measurement of the life, or the half-life, of truth. Giuseppe
di Lampedusa wrote once that nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily. On his clock, that
was five minutes. He didn't know the United States, or shall we say the stretch from Washington
through New York to the North End of Boston. There, truth has an even shorter life. Scarcely a
second.
I pay pretty close attention to this topic and I must say I sometimes wonder if the
Russians haven’t sold the rope to the American political elite. I read all 311 pages of
Simpson’s testimony. I was struck that much of what he was “fed” by Steele
confirmed his “OMG Russia corruption” biases.
And I say “fed to him” when I’m in a generous mood, giving him the
benefit of the doubt, because usually I am of the opinion that he’s either a really
crappy CIA agent posing as a journalist or just a garden variety rat f*!@er. A black job
political operative, stitching together a few almost-believable “facts” and
out-and-out fabrications with squishy words like “collusion” and
“ties.”
London due diligence firms say the record of Simpson’s firm Fusion GPS and
Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence operations in the US has discredited them in the
due diligence market. The London experts believe the Senate Committee transcript shows
Simpson and Steele were hired for the black job of discrediting the target of their
research, Trump; did a poor job; failed in 2016; and now are engaged in bitter
recriminations against each other to avoid multi-million dollar court penalties.
A source at a London firm which is larger and better known than Steele’s Orbis
says “standard due diligence means getting to the truth. It’s confidential to
the client, and not leaked. There are also black jobs, white jobs, and red jobs. Black
means the client wants you to dig up dirt on the target, and make it look credible for
publishing in the press. White means the client wants you to clear him of the wrongdoing
which he’s being accused of in the media or the marketplace; it’s also leaked
to the press. A red job is where the client pays the due diligence firm to hire a
journalist to find out what he knows and what he’s likely to publish, in order to
bribe or stop him. The Steele dossier on Trump is an obvious black job. Too
obvious.”
I read all 311 pages of Simpson’s testimony. I was struck that much of what he was
“fed” by Steele confirmed his “OMG Russia corruption” biases.
Same here, but not just about what he was fed by Steele. Simpson claimed to have done some
of his own research and said it was consistent with what he got from Steele.
I’m about three-quarters of the way through the transcript of Simpson’s
interrogation by the House Intelligence Committee, and I’ve read all 312 pages of the
Senate Judiciary Committee transcript, which bears little resemblance to what was reported in
the major media – shocking, I know.
Among the “bombshells” the mainstream reported was “proof” that it
wasn’t the dossier that launched the FBI’s investigation of Trump, and therefore
the dossier couldn’t have been used as justification for a FISA warrant. A bigger
bombshell, which of course none of them mentioned, is that Simpson, with his client’s
consent, was secretly briefing Clinton-friendly reporters on information from Steele’s
memos, and they used it to write stories based on “unnamed sources.” He even
admitted that he didn’t verify the information before feeding it to the media, said he
didn’t feel he needed to, because it came from a trustworthy source. Where have we
heard that before?
Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the
DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I’m wondering why it’s that
much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. It’s
well-established that the State Department often acts as a cover for the CIA, and the agency
under Secretary Clinton had a strong anti-Russia faction that’s on the record as
meddling in Ukraine’s presidential election. And how much doubt could there be that
both Clintons kept the CIA connections they made while in office?
Then there was the whole “Grizzly Steppe” report just before Trump’s
inauguration, presented as a consensus among “17 intelligence agencies” that the
Russians “hacked the election” to help Trump win.
I’m not 100-percent convinced that U.S. intelligence was behind the dossier, but
it’s enough of a possibility that I’m not writing it off as some nutty
“conspiracy theory.”
Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that
the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I’m wondering why it’s
that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole
thing.
FWIW this NC commenter has never had any problem believing that this may be the case. In
fact I am fairly certain that it is the case, although from what I understand the FBI and MI6
were also involved.
Adding: Heh. I posted this before looking at Rev Kev’s link to the Raimondo article,
which comes to the same conclusions. Interesting times!
I believe that Seth Abramson or someone put photographs to the Steele dossier showing
people in the places & at the times delineated in the Steele dossier.
From the very first Steele said he would not & could not reveal his sources. It was from
the first indicated that it would be to the FBI & CIA to discover.
He said he believed that his sources were credible.
When I was studying Intelligence services the CIA was said to be the private army of the CIA.
These days I don’t know exactly who the CIA works for, or answers to.
I certainly don’t think well of the CIA believing they are wrapped up working for their
Front businesses more than focusing on the mission of spying in the interests of the American
people.
Of private intelligence companies I get what I can from IHS Jane’s.
That the CIA lost 20 assets, human beings, in China for incompetent secret communications
methods would lead professionals to withhold as much of identities as possible.
For awhile there I believe Steele was worried about his own health.
David Corn at Mother Jones was reticent to break the story.
So now what I see to look for is what Steele said needed to be done, & that being what
Mueller is doing at the behest of the DOJ.
The US has been at war, albeit Hybrid war since the imposition of sanctions for their
violations of international law as regarded the annexation of Crimea & the attack on the
Ukraine.
Sanctions are Economic Warfare.
That the US feels the right to engage in warfare of any kind Economic or Hot over violations
of International Law leads me to believe that the UN will fail to prevent the apocalyptic
riot.
But that as regards Trump becomes neither here nor there, correct?
William Binney, former NSA technical official and whistleblower, comments on the FISA
memo, that has apparently just been released. Obviously, a major development in
‘Russia-gate’.
"... It must again be emphasized: It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a more toxic allegation in American presidential history than the one leveled against candidate, and then president, Donald Trump that he "colluded" with the Kremlin in order to win the 2016 presidential election -- and, still more, that Vladimir Putin's regime, "America's No. 1 threat," had compromising material on Trump that made him its "puppet." Or a more fraudulent accusation. ..."
"... Was it plausible, for example, that Trump, a longtime owner and operator of international hotels, would commit an indiscreet act in a Moscow hotel that he did not own or control? Or that, as Steele also claimed, high-level Kremlin sources had fed him damning anti-Trump information even though their vigilant boss, Putin, wanted Trump to win the election? ..."
"... Nor was Russian "meddling" in the election anything akin to a "digital Pearl Harbor," as widely asserted, and it was certainly far less and less intrusive than President Bill Clinton's political and financial "interference" undertaken to assure the reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996. ..."
"... Nonetheless, Russiagate's core allegation persists, like a legend, in American political life -- in media commentary, in financial solicitations by some Democratic candidates for Congress, and, as is clear from my own discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed people. The only way to dispel, to excoriate, such a legend is to learn and expose how it began -- by whom, when, and why. ..."
"... Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump's presidential campaign? ..."
"... the repeatedly hapless Comey seems incapable of having initiated such an audacious operation against a presidential candidate, still less a president-elect. As I have long suggested, John Brennan and James Clapper, head of the CIA and Office of National Intelligence under Obama respectively, are the more likely culprits. ..."
"... First and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in Russiagate.) ..."
"... At every "debate" or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be asked about this grave threat to American democracy -- what they think about what happened and would do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy. ..."
It must again be emphasized: It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a more toxic
allegation in American presidential history than the one leveled against candidate, and then
president, Donald Trump that he "colluded" with the Kremlin in order to win the 2016
presidential election -- and, still more, that Vladimir Putin's regime, "America's No. 1
threat," had compromising material on Trump that made him its "puppet." Or a more fraudulent
accusation.
Even leaving aside the misperception
that Russia is the primary threat to America in world affairs, no aspect of this allegation has
turned out to be true, as should have been evident from the outset. Major aspects of the now
infamous Steele Dossier, on which much of the allegation was based, were themselves not merely
"unverified" but plainly implausible.
Was it plausible, for example, that Trump, a longtime owner and operator of
international hotels, would commit an indiscreet act in a Moscow hotel that he did not own or
control? Or that, as Steele also claimed, high-level Kremlin sources had fed him damning
anti-Trump information even though their vigilant boss, Putin, wanted Trump to win the
election? Nonetheless, the American mainstream media and other important elements of the
US political establishment relied on Steele's allegations for nearly three years, even
heroizing him -- and some still do, explicitly or implicitly.
Not surprisingly, former special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of "collusion"
between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. No credible evidence has been produced that
Russia's "interference" affected the result of the 2016 presidential election in any
significant way. Nor was Russian "meddling" in the election anything akin to a "digital
Pearl Harbor," as widely asserted, and it was certainly far less and less intrusive than
President Bill Clinton's political and financial "interference" undertaken to assure the
reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996.
Nonetheless, Russiagate's core allegation persists, like a legend, in American political
life -- in media commentary, in financial solicitations by some Democratic candidates for
Congress, and, as is clear from my own discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed
people. The only way to dispel, to excoriate, such a legend is to learn and expose how it began
-- by whom, when, and why.
Officially, at least in the FBI's version, its operation "Crossfire Hurricane," the
counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that began in mid-2016 was due to
suspicious remarks made to visitors by a young and lowly Trump aide, George Papadopoulos. This
too is not believable, as I pointed out previously .
Most of those visitors themselves had ties to Western intelligence agencies. That is, the young
Trump aide was being enticed, possibly entrapped, as part of a larger intelligence operation
against Trump. (Papadopoulos wasn't the only Trump associate targeted, Carter Page being
another.)
But the question remains: Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems
clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump's presidential campaign? A reflexive answer
might be because candidate Trump promised to "cooperate with Russia," to pursue a
pro-détente foreign policy, but this was hardly a startling, still less subversive,
advocacy by a would-be Republican president. All of the major pro-détente episodes in
the 20th century had been initiated by Republican presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, and
Reagan.
So, again, what was it about Trump that so spooked the spooks so far off their rightful
reservation and so intrusively into American presidential politics? Investigations being
overseen by Attorney General William Barr may provide answers -- or not. Barr has already
leveled procedural charges against James Comey, head of the FBI under President Obama and
briefly under President Trump, but the repeatedly hapless Comey seems incapable of having
initiated such an audacious operation against a presidential candidate, still less a
president-elect. As I have long suggested, John Brennan and James Clapper, head of the CIA and
Office of National Intelligence under Obama respectively, are the more likely
culprits.
The FBI is no longer the fearsome organization it once was and thus not hard to investigate,
as Barr has already shown. The others, particularly the CIA, are a different matter, and Barr
has suggested they are resisting. To investigate them, particularly the CIA, it seems, he has
brought in a veteran prosecutor-investigator, John Durham.
Which raises other questions. Are Barr and Durham, whose own careers include associations
with US intelligence agencies, determined to uncover the truth about the origins of Russiagate?
And can they really do so fully, given the resistance already apparent? Even if so, will Barr
make public their findings, however damning of the intelligence agencies they may be, or will
he classify them? And if the latter, will President Trump use his authority to declassify the
findings as the 2020 presidential election approaches in order to discredit the role of Obama's
presidency and its would-be heirs?
Equally important perhaps, how will mainstream media treat the Barr-Durham investigation and
its findings? Having driven the Russiagate narrative for so long and so misleadingly -- and
with liberals perhaps finding themselves in the incongruous position of defending rogue
intelligence agencies -- will they credit or seek to discredit the findings?
It is true, of course, that Barr and Durham, as Trump appointees, are not the ideal
investigators of Intel misdeeds in the Russiagate saga. Much better would be a truly
bipartisan, independent investigation based in the Senate, as was the Church Committee of the
mid-1970s, which exposed and reformed (it thought at the time) serious abuses by US
intelligence agencies. That would require, however, a sizable core of nonpartisan, honorable,
and courageous senators of both parties, who thus far seem to be lacking.
There are also, however, the ongoing and upcoming Democratic presidential debates. First
and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not
about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in
Russiagate.)
At every "debate" or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be asked
about this grave threat to American democracy -- what they think about what happened and would
do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the
host ofThe John Batchelor Show
. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are atTheNation.com .
Stephen
F. Cohen Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New
York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book
War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback
and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now
in their sixth year, are available at www.thenation.com .
I'm sure that had Michael Hudson accepted a position with the CIA, he would not have been
the first or the last person with Marxist, Trotskyist or even more extreme (for want of a
better description) socialist connections to have worked for the agency.
"... Let me cut to the chase--Felix Sater was an FBI informant since 1998. He was originally signed on as a "cooperator" in December 1998 by Robert Mueller's number two guy, Andrew Weissman. Robert Mueller and his team used Felix Sater as a "lure" or "bait" to tempt Trump and his team, Michael Cohen in particular, to work with Russia. Trump did not bite. ..."
"... Sater, as we now know, played a central role in the FBI plot to destroy Donald Trump by proposing a Trump Tower in Moscow. ..."
"... One of the very first reports provided by Christopher Steele insists that the Russians were working overtime to get Trump in bed with them on "lucrative real estate deals." The Steele report dated 20 June 2016 makes the following claims: ..."
"... Steele's claim that the "Kremlin," as part of a broader scheme to recruit Trump as a Russian asset, was "offering him various lucrative real development" deals in Russia, is refuted by the article by Newsweek's Bill Powell and by Robert Mueller's report ..."
"... Felix Sater was the ones telling Trump to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Sater, according to Newsweek's Powell, was not a close confidant of Trump: ..."
"... Powell's account is consistent with the information present by Robert Mueller in the Charging Indictment of Michael Cohen. While the Steele Dossier makes the claim that the Russian Government was offering up "lucrative projects" to the Trump organization, Michael Cohen never made such a claim. The details in the charging document show otherwise; i.e., that Felix Sater was pushing the projects : ..."
"... Notwithstanding these communications, the Moscow project was terminated in June 2016. And it was Felix Sater aka "Individual 2", not the Russians, pushing for going to Russia and making a deal. No evidence of Russians offering up "lucrative deals." ..."
"... If the Steele Dossier was true, Trump should have had multiple project going on in Russia, especially Moscow. Steele paints a picture of Putin's people feeding Trump information and opportunity. So where is the evidence of such activity? There is none. ..."
I am revisiting a story I did nine months ago about Felix Sater and the Steele Dossier (
you can read it here ). Let me cut to the chase--Felix Sater was an FBI informant since
1998. He was originally signed on as a "cooperator" in December 1998 by Robert Mueller's number
two guy, Andrew Weissman. Robert Mueller and his team used Felix Sater as a "lure" or "bait" to
tempt Trump and his team, Michael Cohen in particular, to work with Russia. Trump did not
bite.
Robert Mueller did not disclose that Sater was an FBI Informant. Mueller did not disclose
that Sater was deliberately used starting in September 2015 to entrap Donald Trump. I am
revisiting this issue because a Sater's work for the Feds was unsealed last Friday by Judge
Glasser in New York. According to the
Wall Street Journal:
Felix Sater, a former business associate of President Trump, began working with the Federal
Bureau of Investigation in 1998, after he was caught in a stock-fraud scheme. As he pleaded
guilty, Mr. Sater turned on his co-conspirators, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn wrote in an
Aug. 27,
2009, letter , unsealed Friday, to U.S. District Judge I. Leo Glasser, who was overseeing
the case. He had gone on to assist various agencies in different areas of law enforcement for
years, they wrote.
"Sater went above and beyond what is expected of most cooperators and placed himself in
great jeopardy in doing so," the prosecutors wrote in pushing for him to get a lighter
sentence. On the strength of his continuing cooperation, they had put off his sentencing for
more than a decade, an unusually long period for such arrangements.
As I tried to unpeel the
onion that is the layered life of Felix Sater, I came across an excellent article by Newsweek
reporter Bill Powell, Donald Trump Associate Felix Sater Is
Linked to the Mob and the CIA -- What's His Role in the Russia Investigation? . It is worth
your time. One of the surprising revelations from Powell is that Felix Sater was a childhood
friend of Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer. Let that sink in for a moment. The FBI informant,
Felix Sater, was a long time friend of Cohen. This now provides another explanation for how
Michael Cohen became part of the Trump orbit. Did Felix Sater, while an active FBI informant,
introduce Cohen to Trump? (Sater and his company, Bayrock, started working with Trump in 2003
while Cohen did not start working for Trump until 2006).
Sater, as we now know, played a central role in the FBI plot to destroy Donald Trump by
proposing a Trump Tower in Moscow. Trump did not take the bait. No Trump Tower in Moscow deal
was ever done. Sater also provides, unwittingly, direct evidence that part of the Christopher
Steele Dossier is a fraud and a fabrication.
One of the very first reports provided by Christopher Steele insists that the Russians were
working overtime to get Trump in bed with them on "lucrative real estate deals." The Steele
report dated 20 June 2016 makes the following claims:
Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign
Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the
Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican
presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for at least 5 years. . . .
In terms of specifics, Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his
team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate
Hillary CLINTON, for several years (see more below). . . .
The Kremlin's cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various
lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia , especially in relation to the
ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. How ever, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not
taken up any of these.
Steele's claim that the "Kremlin," as part of a broader scheme to recruit Trump as a Russian asset, was "offering him
various lucrative real development" deals in Russia, is refuted by the article by Newsweek's Bill Powell and by Robert Mueller's
report
Bill Powell reported the following in Newsweek:
[Felix Sater] and his childhood friend, Michael Cohen -- then a lawyer and dealmaker for the
Trump Organization -- had been working for more than a decade, on and off, to build a Trump
Tower in Moscow . The New York real estate mogul had long wanted to see his name on a glitzy
building in the Russian capital, but the project had never materialized.
Where are all of those "lucrative deals" the Kremlin was supposedly offering up? Nowhere. It
was a lie.
Felix Sater was the ones telling Trump to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Sater, according to
Newsweek's Powell, was not a close confidant of Trump:
In [2003], Sater says he met Trump, thanks to his work for Bayrock, the real estate company.
. . Sater raised money for Bayrock from, among others, a wealthy businessman from the former
Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, and he persuaded people in Trump's orbit -- including Cohen, his
old friend -- to bring his deals before the boss. Two of the ideas worked out. Sater and the
New York real estate mogul eventually worked on the Trump SoHo in Manhattan and a hotel and
condo project in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which failed after the 2008 economic crisis. He and
Trump, Sater claims, were friendly but not particularly close.
Powell does not report the Russians offering up any "lucrative" real estate deal.
Powell's account is consistent with the information present by Robert Mueller in the Charging
Indictment of Michael Cohen. While the Steele Dossier makes the claim that the Russian
Government was offering up "lucrative projects" to the Trump organization, Michael Cohen never
made such a claim. The details in the charging document show otherwise; i.e., that Felix
Sater was pushing the projects :
The Moscow Project was discussed multiple times within the Company and did not end in
January 2016. Instead, as late as approximately June 2016, COHEN and Individual 2 discussed
efforts to obtain Russian governmental approval for the Moscow Project.
Why does the Trump organization need to "obtain Russian governmental approval" if, per the
Steele Dossier, the Russians are offering up a slew of "lucrative" deals?
The charging document provides further detail on Cohen and Sater's interaction with Russian
officials. In early January 2016, Michael Cohen sent an email to Vladimir Putin's Press
Secretary. The Secretary responded:
On or about January 14, 2016, COHEN emailed Russian Official 1's office asking for
assistance in connection with the Moscow Project.
On or about January 20, 2016, COHEN received an email from the personal assistant to Russian
Official 1 ("Assistant 1"), stating that she had been trying to reach COHEN and requesting that
he call her using a Moscow-based phone number she provided.
Shortly after receiving the email, COHEN called Assistant 1 and spoke to her for
approximately 20 minutes. On that call, COHEN described his position at the Company and
outlined the proposed Moscow Project, including the Russian development company with which the
Company had partnered. COHEN requested assistance in moving the project forward, both in
securing land to build the proposed tower and financing the construction. Assistant 1 asked
detailed questions and took notes, stating that she would follow up with others in Russia.
Notwithstanding these communications, the Moscow project was terminated in June 2016. And it
was Felix Sater aka "Individual 2", not the Russians, pushing for going to Russia and making a
deal. No evidence of Russians offering up "lucrative deals."
From on or about June 9 to June 14, 2016, Individual 2 sent numerous messages to COHEN about
the travel, including forms for COHEN to complete. However, on or about June 14, 2016, COHEN
met Individual 2 in the lobby of the Company's headquarters to inform Individual 2 he would not
be traveling at that time.
If the Steele Dossier was true, Trump should have had multiple project going on in Russia,
especially Moscow. Steele paints a picture of Putin's people feeding Trump information and
opportunity. So where is the evidence of such activity? There is none.
The Mueller report reinforces the fact that Felix Sater was the one proposing doing the deal
in Moscow and talking to the Russians. THE PROPOSED TRUMP TOWER PROJECT IN MOSCOW,
according to Mueller's report, originated with an FBI Informant--Felix Sater. Here's what the
Mueller Report states:
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a
Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted
Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a
Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had
known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov
during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and
proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would
license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own.
Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the
Mueller Report).
Mueller,
as I have noted previously , is downright dishonest in failing to identify Sater as an FBI
informant. Sater was not just a private entrepreneur looking to make some coin. We now know
without a doubt that Sater was a fully signed up FBI informant. Sater's status as an FBI snitch
was first exposed in 2012 (you can read the letter confirming Sater's status as an FBI snitch
here ).
Another inconvenient fact excluded from the Mueller report is that one of Mueller's Chief
Prosecutors, Andrew
Weissman, signed the deal with Felix Sater in December 1998 that put Sater into the FBI
Informant business .
All suggestions for meeting with the Russian Government, including Putin, originated with
Felix Sater. The use of Sater on this particular project started in September 2015.
All of this raises very troubling issues about FBI misconduct. Under what authority did The
FBI initiate the "Moscow Tower" play in September 2015. We are supposed to believe that the FBI
counter intelligence investigation, aka Crossfire Hurricane, only began the end of July 2016
because of an alarming report from an Australian diplomat. We now know that is a lie.
The revelations about Sater add to the urgency to expose the FBI's criminality and
malevolence.
Mr.Johnson has done good work on these issues throughout the whole time this initiative has
gone on. It reveals the level of rot in the structure of the secret police operation carried
on by the US government and shows that it probably cannot be reformed from within but that
the only solution which might work is the dissolution of the existing institutions and some
form of starting over, something which is, of course, highly unlikely to be achieved.
Something just doesn't add up for me when Trump who was the target of these spying and
information operations doesn't use the power and authority of POTUS to expose all the
communications and actions of these people. Why? What is he hiding or what is he afraid of?
It is very simple. Trump is relying on the judicial process out of fear that if he did
unilaterally release this info he could be accused of "obstructing justice."
Trump announced his candidacy June 16, 2015. SO, by September the FBI had begun its operation
against him. It seems like a fairly quick mobilization.
Were Obama and Clinton so insecure that they felt they needed to resort to this, or are
they both so corrupt that this was business as usual?
Christopher Steele, Felix Sater, Josef Mifsud, Stephan Halper, Alexander Downer -- so far
there are at least 5 known to have connections to the IC who tried to entrap Trump. We need a
summary with an index since there's so much corruption to keep straight -- Hillary's Vast
Left-wing Conspiracy.
"... George Papadopoulos was nothing more than a naive, eager patsy. A young guy who wanted to be important to the Trump campaign got played. ..."
"... Here are salient sections of the Mueller Report. Read them for yourself and you will see that Mifsud was never fingered as a Russian intelligence asset. You were just asked to believe this nonsense. Sadly, many seemingly smart people have bought into this lie. ..."
"... According to Papadopoulos , Mifsud at first seemed uninterested in Papadopoulos when they met in Rome. After Papadopoulos informed Mifsud about his role in the Trump Campaign, however, Mifsud appeared to take greater interest in Papadopoulos. ..."
"... On March 24, 2016, Papadopoulos met with Mifsud in London. 422 Mifsud was accompanied by a Russian female named Olga Polonskaya. Mifsud introduced Polonskaya as a former student of his who had connections to Vladimir Putin. (p. 84) ..."
"... During the meeting, Polonskaya offered to help Papadopoulos establish contacts in Russia and stated that the Russian ambassador in London was a friend of hers .425 Based on this interaction, Papadopoulos expected Mifsud and Polonskaya to introduce him to the Russian ambassador in London, but that did not occur. (p. 84) ..."
"... Throughout April 2016, Papadopoulos continued to correspond with , meet with, and seek Russia contacts through Mifsud and , at times , Polonskaya. For example, within a week of her initial March 24 meeting with him, Polonskaya attempted to send Papadopoulos a text messagewhich email exchanges show to have been drafted or edited by Mifsud-addressing Papadopoulos 's "wish to engage with the Russian Federation." When Papadopoulos learned from Mifsud that Polonskaya had tried to message him , he sent her an email seeking another meeting. (p. 87) ..."
"... Following the meeting, Mifsud traveled as planned to Moscow.455 On April 18, 2016, while in Russia, Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos over email to Ivan Timofeev, a member of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC).456 Mifsud had described Timofeev as having connections with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA),457 the executive entity in Russia responsible for Russian foreign relations. (p. 88) ..."
"... After a stop in Rome, Mifsud returned to England on April 25, 2016.462 The next day, Papadopoulos met Mifsud for breakfast at the Andaz Hotel (the same location as their last meeting). 463 During that meeting, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had met with high-level Russian government officials during his recent trip to Moscow . Mifsud also said that, on the trip, he learned that the Russians had obtained "dirt" on candidate Hillary Clinton. As Papadopoulos later stated to the FBI, Mifsud said that the "dirt" was in the form of " emails of Clinton," and that they "have thousands of emails." (pp. 88-89) ..."
"... I believe that the term that you are looking for is "entrapment" or something very close. ..."
"... you're being far too kind to Papadop, who, while "naive" and "eager", was also a serial liar and fantasist, whose lies, amplified by unethical Mueller thugs, have caused a lot of trouble. He's made matters worse by spreading new fantasies, which have been uncritically believed by far too many. ..."
"... is CNN really a CIA run disinformation site? They have no viewers, credibility, revenues or business plan. Yet they persist in airports world wide. And now this odd CNN relationship to the very same Link Campus that included "visiting professor" Mifsud. ..."
Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese Diplomat who reportedly told George Papadopoulos that Russia had
Hillary's emails, was a British intelligence asset (known as a "Joe" among British spies). But
the Brits did not keep Mifsud for themselves. They offered him to the CIA and the FBI, and
those two US agencies, in a coordinated effort, relied on Mifsud to entrap Papadopoulos and to
manufacture a Russian collusion case against the Trump Campaign.
Mifsud's job was simple--dangle the possibility of getting Hillary's emails from the
Russians, offer up meetings with Russian Government officials and introduce Papadopoulos to
another Western intelligence operative who pretended to be the niece of Vladimir Putin (Putin
does not have a niece). These communications were recorded and then used against
Papadopoulos.
The FBI falsely claims that they learned of the Papadopoulos "meeting" with Mifsud two
months after it happened from an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, who also was tied
closely to British intelligence and the Clintons. But this story does not hold water. Take a
look at the criminal complaint filed against Papadopoulos (
see here ).
The complaint recounts meetings, emails and conversations that George Papadopoulos had with
Professor Mifsud and people Mifsud introduced to Papadopoulos.Where the hell did the FBI get
that information? Remember, they charged George with lying to the FBI because of discrepancies
between what he told Agents and what Agents claimed was actually said and written.
The meaning of this leaves only two possibilities--the FBI secured a FISA warrant against
Papadopoulos sometime in March or April of 2016 or the Brits and American intelligence
intercepted the communications between Papadopoulos and the Mifsud crew.
We already know that there is a recording--an exculpatory recording--of Papadopoulos
rebuffing the offer to collaborate with the Russians. There was no legal reason to get a FISA
warrant against Papadopoulos. And anything collected by British intelligence and passed to the
CIA or NSA could not be used as evidence. There is much more to this story to unravel.
What should shock all civil libertarians and Americans of good will is that the public has
been bamboozled into believing that Joseph Mifsud was a Russian intelligence operative. But
there is no evidence whatsoever for that claim. Please look at the Mueller Report (I have
copied key sections and inserted below, at the end of this article). Mueller only claims that,
"Joseph Mifsud, a London-based professor who had connections to Russia and traveled to Moscow
in April 2016." If that is the standard, then Bill Clinton is a Russian intelligence
asset--Clinton has connections to Russia (he got paid a lot of money by the Russians) and he
traveled to Moscow.
If you want to get the full picture of Mifsud's ties to British intelligence, the CIA and
the FBI, I encourage you to read,
The Death of Russiagate?, Mueller team tied to Mifsud network, a tangled web . This article
provides actual evidence about the intelligence pedigree of Joseph Mifsud. Robert Mueller, by
contrast, provides not one single piece of actual evidence. Mueller and his team of clown
lawyers relied on innuendo and guilt by association.
If this had been a genuine counter-intelligence investigation, then the FBI should have
asked one fundamental question--"Who is Joseph Mifsud working for?" They did not need to ask
The FBI knew the answer. Joseph Mifsud was working for the CIA and the FBI with the permission
of the British MI-6.
I hope the full dimensions of this hoax will be exposed. George Papadopoulos was nothing
more than a naive, eager patsy. A young guy who wanted to be important to the Trump campaign
got played.
Here are salient sections of the Mueller Report. Read them for yourself and you will see
that Mifsud was never fingered as a Russian intelligence asset. You were just asked to believe
this nonsense. Sadly, many seemingly smart people have bought into this lie.
Spring 2016. Campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos made early contact with
Joseph Mifsud, a London-based professor who had connections to Russia and traveled to Moscow in
April 2016. Immediately upon his return to London from that trip, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that
the Russian government had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. One
week later, in the first week of May 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a
foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government
that it could assist the Campaign? through the anonymous release of information damaging to
candidate Clinton. Throughout that period of time and for several months thereafter,
Papadopoulos worked with Mifsud and two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the
Campaign and the Russian government. No meeting took place. . . .
George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor during the campaign period , pleaded guilty to
lying to investigators about, inter alia, the nature and timing of his interactions with Joseph
Mifsud, the professor who told Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on candidate Clinton .in
the form of thousands of emails. . . .
In late April 2016, Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud,
immediately after Mifsud 's return from a trip to Moscow, that the Russian government had
obtained "dirt" on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. . . .Throughout the
relevant period of time and for several months thereafter, Papadopoulos worked with Mifsud and
two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government.
That meeting never came to pass. (p. 81)
The purpose of the trip was to meet officials affiliated with Link Campus University, a
for-profit institution headed by a former Italian government official.412 During the visit ,
Papadopoulos was introduced to Joseph Mifsud. (p. 83)
Mifsud is a Maltese national who worked as a professor at the London Academy of Diplomacy in
London, England. 413 Although Mifsud worked out of London and was also affiliated with LCILP,
the encounter in Rome was the first time that Papadopoulos met him.414 Mifsud maintained
various Russian contacts while living in London, as described further below. Among his contacts
was ,XXXX a one-time employee of the IRA,. . . In January and February 2016, Mifsud and -
discussed possibly meeting in Russia. (p. 83)
According to Papadopoulos , Mifsud at first seemed uninterested in Papadopoulos when they
met in Rome. After Papadopoulos informed Mifsud about his role in the Trump Campaign, however,
Mifsud appeared to take greater interest in Papadopoulos. The two discussed Mifsud 's European
and Russian contacts and had a general discussion about Russia; Mifsud also offered to
introduce Papadopoulos to European leaders and others with contacts to the Russian government.
Papadopoulos told the Office that Mifsud 's claim of substantial connections with Russian
government officials interested Papadopoulos, who thought that such connections could increase
his importance as a policy advisor to the Trump Campaign. (p. 83)
On March 24, 2016, Papadopoulos met with Mifsud in London. 422 Mifsud was accompanied by a
Russian female named Olga Polonskaya. Mifsud introduced Polonskaya as a former student of his
who had connections to Vladimir Putin. (p. 84)
During the meeting, Polonskaya offered to help Papadopoulos establish contacts in Russia and
stated that the Russian ambassador in London was a friend of hers .425 Based on this
interaction, Papadopoulos expected Mifsud and Polonskaya to introduce him to the Russian
ambassador in London, but that did not occur. (p. 84)
Throughout April 2016, Papadopoulos continued to correspond with , meet with, and seek
Russia contacts through Mifsud and , at times , Polonskaya. For example, within a week of her
initial March 24 meeting with him, Polonskaya attempted to send Papadopoulos a text
messagewhich email exchanges show to have been drafted or edited by Mifsud-addressing
Papadopoulos 's "wish to engage with the Russian Federation." When Papadopoulos learned from
Mifsud that Polonskaya had tried to message him , he sent her an email seeking another meeting.
(p. 87)
Mifsud , who had been copied on the email exchanges, replied on the morning of April 11,
2016. He wrote, "This is already been agreed. I am flying to Moscow on the 18th for a Valdai
meeting, plus other meetings at the Duma. We will talk tomorrow." 448 The two bodies referenced
by Mifsud are part of or associated with the Russian government: the Duma is a Russian
legislative assembly, 449 while "Valdai" refers to the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based
group that "is close to Russia's foreign-policy establishment." 450 Papadopoulos thanked Mifsud
and said that he would see him "tomorrow." 451 (p. 87)
Following the meeting, Mifsud traveled as planned to Moscow.455 On April 18, 2016, while in
Russia, Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos over email to Ivan Timofeev, a member of the Russian
International Affairs Council (RIAC).456 Mifsud had described Timofeev as having connections
with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA),457 the executive entity in Russia
responsible for Russian foreign relations. (p. 88)
After a stop in Rome, Mifsud returned to England on April 25, 2016.462 The next day,
Papadopoulos met Mifsud for breakfast at the Andaz Hotel (the same location as their last
meeting). 463 During that meeting, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had met with high-level
Russian government officials during his recent trip to Moscow . Mifsud also said that, on the
trip, he learned that the Russians had obtained "dirt" on candidate Hillary Clinton. As
Papadopoulos later stated to the FBI, Mifsud said that the "dirt" was in the form of " emails
of Clinton," and that they "have thousands of emails." (pp. 88-89)
Appreciate your efforts in peeling the onion on the shenanigans of our intel and law
enforcement agencies. This Russia Collusion/SpyGate story was a regular topic at our monthly
"guys night out" gathering at a local watering hole. However at our last gathering the
general consensus was "who cares" if Trump the butt of these machinations is unwilling to
Drain the Swamp by declassifying. Why do you think Trump is not aggressively going after
Brennan, Comey, Clapper, et al?
Larry..Fits The Timeline of for Operations that already been planned in Advance.while
watching the Election Result for Trump and Hillary..in 2016..By March 2016 the States were
making their choices... 2016..s clear..Long before May. ,,,.Using Its Profile Data n obtained
By Fusion GPS..since October 2015..AND..??????.What sources were they Using..Why...and were
they actually being Given MISINFORMATION.??.then through It. all these
Events.Happened..This,,.Operation you write of.....in May to June...The Steele Dossier
Operation was Conducted..The Muller Team..And Case Built..An Extra Ordinary SUPER PACK..and
Illegal..(THE REAL COLLUSION).. Operation..So Now...Its Time for the TRUTH..
also..to me...The..."Mystery Woman " in this Spy story...would be Nellie Ohr..especially the
European Operations...and That to Me..Has Brennen Finger Prints..on The
"Dossier"...So..Background..an d Fine Tuning...
Why Nellie Ohr..Because She her time line go's from The Steel Dossier and Fusion GPS meetings
With Obama..Clinton connected People like Attorney Edwin Lieberman..Husband of Hillary
Clintons Chief of Staff..To Ukrainetothe" Black Ledger.also a HOAX..To.."Joe.Bidens
Connections to the Ukraine..and back to herto work at CIA Open Source Operations..All done
Under the time Period when John Brennen was Director ..DCI..of the CIA...Appointed by
President OBAMA..To Replace General Petraeus..who looks like He may have been another.PAWN
..and Put into the DCI position on Purpose by Obama..Way back in September 2011..
Someone
advised DCI Petraeus..to use the same TRANSITIONAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS..
That Petraeus had
Used in the Field During Operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.Believing They were SECURE
Systems..
Apparently those Systems had already been Hacked By IRAN and China..Long before
Obama ...
Made his deals with Iran..Petraeus got into a Affair tht Compromised
Him..(Setup),,?? and The FBI..Under Director Muller to General Petraus Out..Shame
him..Brought Charges...and Petraeus was Replaced with John Brennen as DCI..in
On..Nov...2012...Then Bob Muller was replaced at the FBI,,was replaced By James Comey..In
September 2013...ALL Events Occurred during The time Barrack Obama was President..Jan
20...2009 to Jan 20th,,2017...and...Brennen and Nellie Ohr were in the Middle of everything
that happened..All Operations..ALL Information gathering..
And ALL Intended to Blame The
Russians..and Protect all other Poker Game High Rollers..Including The "Ukraine Train..' Thi
is just a Theory..Based on "Open Information...
you're being far too kind to Papadop, who, while "naive" and "eager", was also a serial liar
and fantasist, whose lies, amplified by unethical Mueller thugs, have caused a lot of
trouble. He's made matters worse by spreading new fantasies, which have been uncritically
believed by far too many.
George proved to be an easy mark. I don't beat up on "nobodies." Papadopoulos qualifies as
such in my book. He had done nothing to distinguish himself and suddenly had the world thrust
on him. I do feel sorry for hm. This is akin to raping a retarded girl.
AND YET the MSM largely remain AWOL on this and related subjects. They must figure if they
continue to hear, see and speak no evil the voting public will be deaf, dumb and blind to
such widespread corruption. It's not encouraging that the FBI and DOJ continue to be
intractable when it comes to attempts by Judicial Watch to gain transparency and clarity.
Unless something like optimal political timing is a big factor, it's also not encouraging
that AG Barr and even the POTUS are still keeping a lid on all of this.
It's going to be very interesting to see if the truth can break through the stonewalling
especially when it comes to the 2020 elections. Thanks to this site and a few others, there's
still hope. Thank you Larry and Col. Lang.
A BIASED FBI means ALL FBI sworn testimony is questionable and unreliable.
A BIASED FBI means every court case outcome in which the FBI has been involved is
untrustworthy.
A BIASED FBI means that everything from WACO to Oklahoma Bomb to 9/11 must be reexamined.
The Feds/FBI did a criminally irresponsible job of investigating the Oklahoma Bomb and
Sanilac county, with the Militia Culture permeating it. There were TWO militias up there. (1)
The CITIZENS Militia, with 85 year old Hattie Farley, which OPPOSED the Sheriff and the "Good
Old Boys" and (2) The violence prone, RACIST, PRO-sheriff "element".
Sanilac county Sheriff Virgil Strickler was BFF and business partner with David Rydel,
"commandant" of the "united States Theatre Command" militia which is named in the FBI
"Project Megiddo" report for Y2K. Strickler let the Rydel militia use the department's
shooting range. LOUD explosions on the Nichols farm were repeatedly reported to Strickler, So
what do you know! when the Feds raided the farm the evidence was cleaned up. James Nichols
stated in his speech at the Dearborn Centennial Library that the FIRST person he wanted to
talk to was Strickler, which he did BEFORE talking to the FEDS. James was welcomed home as a
HERO when he was released from Federal custody. All described in Nichols' book "Freedom's
End"
The "support network" for the bomb extended to the very top of Sanilac County. Worth Township
in Sanilac county, had a Supervisor, James Payne, who flew Confederate flags on his property
for decades. He drove around with a Confederate license plate, and had a Black Lawn Jockey
holding a Confederate flag standing right at his door. Sheriff Strickler and Judge Donald
Teeple redularly passed that lawn jockey and saw the flags as they entered Payne's home to
socialize. Payne bragged about "using" his Public Office to direct the State Police
Weighmaster to harrass Minority truckers coming through Worth township, and how he did not
want "dirty niggers" in His township. This got recorded and all came out in a township
meeting. Eric Levine, owner/editor of "The Sanilac County News" never once printed a negative
word about the Racism and Confederate flags, rendering support via his silence. Levine never
printed a word about Janice Putz, the Township Clerk, and Payne's successor in office,
publicly defending Payne's racism in a township meeting. Levine also "ignored" a letter that
was mailed to EVERY Worth township resident exposing Payne's racism . .... NOT ONE WORD. Eric
Levine supports racism by failing to expose it even when it is major news in his reporting
area. Nothing printed beyond the "obligatory" columns denouncing the bombers.
James Nichols gave a talk at the Dearborn Centennial Library promoting his book/conspiracy
theory blaming the Government for the Oklahoma bomb. I walked up to him afterward and offered
him documentation about judge Donald Teeple's campaign financing. Nichols did not want to
hear anything negative about THAT "Government Operative" ...... very ODD to say the least.
Why would he decline documentation on someone supposedly his enemy ..... unless .......
Teeple was a real "hero"when it came to looting elderly Citizen's property like ordering the
"cleanup" of a fortune in antiques from Hattie Farley, but Teeple was gentle as a lamb with
the Nichols boys.
The FBI lost all credibility with me back when they trotted out their parade of "domestic
terrorists" who they themselves were selling Play-Doh to, but who had only asked for combat
boots so that they could practice close order drill in Miami, or a guy who turned out to be
bootlegging cell phones in Michigan.
Now they're at it again, patting themselves on the back and making press conferences about
no fewer than five mass shooters apprehended this week, among them "saving dozens of lives"
by arresting a hotel cook who told a coworker he was planning on coming back to the hotel in
a few days to "shoot everyone he saw."
Sure, he was nuts, but even so if he was actually planning to do that would he announce it
to someone two days in advance? In any case, the FBI didn't find him, a coworker turned him
in when he was not on the FBI's radar.
Linked article raises the question again: is CNN really a CIA run disinformation site? They
have no viewers, credibility, revenues or business plan. Yet they persist in airports world
wide. And now this odd CNN relationship to the very same Link Campus that included "visiting
professor" Mifsud.
To wit: ......"tried to get him a cushy job working with CNN's Freedom Project at Link
Campus in Rome."
The more we learn, the more questions arise. No wonder no one is ready to go public with
the final Russia-gate analysis yet.
Images removed. See the original for full version.
Much more plausible explanation of Russiagate then Mueller report that cost probably 1000 times less. Mueller and his team should
commit hara-kiri in shame.
It contains more valuable information about Russiagate and color revolution against Trump initiatesd by Obama and Brennan. And
what is important it is much shorter and up to the point. In other words, Jeff Carlson beat the whole Mueller team to the
punch.
An excellent reporting by Jeff Carlson !!! Bravo!!!
Notable quotes:
"... Horowitz continued to push Congress for oversight access and encouraged passage of the Inspector General Empowerment Act . Horowitz would ultimately win his battle, but only as President Barack Obama was leaving office. On Dec. 16, 2016, Obama finally signed the Inspector General Empowerment Act into law. ..."
"... The IGs' memo included an assessment that Clinton's email account contained hundreds of classified emails, despite Clinton's claims that there was no classified information present on her server. ..."
"... On July 30, 2015, within weeks of the FBI's opening of the Clinton investigation, McCabe was suddenly promoted to the No. 3 position in the FBI. With his new title of associate deputy director, McCabe was transferred to FBI headquarters from the Washington Field Office, and his direct involvement in the Clinton investigation began. ..."
"... Strzok was one of the agents selected, and in late August 2015, he was assigned to the Mid-Year Exam team and transferred to FBI headquarters. Strzok, in his comments to lawmakers, acknowledged that the newly formed investigative team was largely made up of hand-picked personnel from the Washington Field Office and FBI headquarters. ..."
"... On Jan. 29, 2016, Comey appointed McCabe as FBI deputy director, replacing the retiring Giuliano, and McCabe assumed the No. 2 position in the FBI, after having held the No. 3 position for just six months. ..."
"... By early 2016, the three participants in the infamous "insurance policy" meeting -- McCabe, Strzok, and Page -- were now in place at the FBI. ..."
"... Priestap, who testified that he was unaware of the frequency of meetings between McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page, seems to have been kept in the dark regarding many of the actions taken by Strzok, who appeared to be exercising significant investigative control. ..."
"... It sounds like Peter Strzok was kind of driving the train here. Would you agree with that?" ..."
"... Peter and Jon, yeah." ..."
"... Do you know if Mr. McCabe was aware that some of his agent executives were concerned that they were being bypassed on information on what, by all accounts, was a sensitive, critical investigation?" ..."
"... My understanding was that he was aware." ..."
"... Notably, Comey had been convinced to remove the term "gross negligence" to describe Clinton's actions from his prepared statement by, among others, Page, Strzok, Anderson, and Moffa. ..."
"... While 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. Most of these meetings with Papadopoulos -- whose own background and reasons for joining the Trump campaign remain suspicious -- occurred in the first half of 2016. 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... The last major segment of Brennan's efforts involved a series of three reports. The first, titled the "Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security ," was released on Oct. 7, 2016. The second report, "GRIZZLY STEPPE -- Russian Malicious Cyber Activity ," was released on Dec. 29, 2016. The third report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections " -- also known as the intelligence community assessment (ICA) -- was released on Jan. 6, 2017. ..."
"... On July 5, 2016, Gaeta traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. At some point in early July, Steele passed his initial report to Nuland and the State Department. Nuland later said these documents were passed on at some point to both the FBI and then-Secretary of State John Kerry. ..."
"... Prior to joining Fusion GPS, Nellie had worked as an independent contractor for an internal open-source division of the CIA, Open Source Works, from 2008 to at least June 2010; it appears likely she remained in that role into 2014. ..."
"... Additionally, email communications between her and Bruce Ohr show that she routinely sent her husband at the DOJ articles on Russia -- most carrying a similar negative slant. The emails continued through the duration of Nellie's employment with Fusion GPS and usually contained a brief, often one-line comment from Nellie. ..."
"... In her testimony, Nellie described her work as online open-source efforts that utilized "Russian sources, media, social media, government, you know, business registers, legal databases, all kinds of things." Ohr said that she would "write occasional reports based on the open-source research that I described about Donald Trump's relationships with various people in Russia." ..."
"... Steele had produced eight reports from June 20, 2016, through the end of August 2016 (there also is one undated report included in the dossier). No further reports were generated by Steele until Sept. 14, when he suddenly wrote three separate memos in one day. One of the memos referenced a Russian bank named Alfa Bank, misspelled as "Alpha" in his memo. Steele's sudden burst of productivity was likely done in preparation for his Sept. 19 meeting in Rome with the FBI. ..."
"... The impact of Brennan's potential knowledge of the dossier in August 2016 should not be underestimated. As Brennan testified to Congress, his briefing to the Gang of Eight was done in consultation with the Obama administration: ..."
"... Halper, who has been outed as an FBI informant, stayed in contact with Carter Page for the next 14 months, severing ties exactly as the final FISA warrant on Page expired. ..."
"... Following the publication of the Isikoff article, the Hillary for America campaign released a statement on the same day that touted Isikoff's "bombshell report," with the full article attached. ..."
"... Winer had received a separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from longtime 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 gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele then shared this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it as a means to corroborate Steele's own dossier. ..."
"... Steele also met with U.S. media during his visit to Washington, doing so "at Fusion's instruction." According to UK Court documents , Steele testified that he "briefed" The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, and CNN at the end of September 2016. Steele would engage in a second round of media contact in mid-October 2016, meeting again with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yahoo News. Steele testified that all these meetings were "conducted verbally in person." ..."
"... Sometime in late 2016, his wife, Nellie Ohr, provided him with a memory stick containing all of her research that she had compiled while employed at Fusion GPS. Bruce Ohr testified he gave the memory stick to Pientka. Nellie Ohr had left Fusion in September 2016. Through Pientka, Strzok now had all of Nellie Ohr's Fusion research in his possession. ..."
"... Flynn's 2015 dinner in Moscow was initially used to implicate the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. It was then used as a means to cast doubts on Flynn's ability as Trump's national security adviser. Following Flynn's resignation, it was then used as a means to pursue the ongoing collusion narrative that gained full strength in the early days of the Trump administration. ..."
"... On April 18, 2016, Rogers moved aggressively in response to the disclosures. He abruptly shut down all FBI outside-contractor access. At this point, both the FBI and the DOJ's NSD became aware of Rogers's compliance review. They may have known earlier, but they were certainly aware after outside-contractor access was halted. ..."
"... Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of the compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the NSA 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. ..."
Efforts by high-ranking officials in the CIA ,
FBI , Department of Justice (
DOJ ), and State Department to portray President
Donald Trump as having colluded with Russia were the culmination
of years of bias and politicization under the Obama administration.
The weaponization of the intelligence community and other government agencies created an environment that allowed for obstruction
in the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the relentless pursuit of a manufactured collusion narrative against Trump.
A willing and complicit media spread unsubstantiated leaks as facts in an effort to promote the Russia-collusion narrative.
The Spygate scandal also raises a bigger question: Was the 2016 election a one-time aberration, or was it symptomatic of decades
of institutional political corruption?
This article builds on dozens of congressional testimonies, court documents, and other research to provide an inside look at the
actions of Obama administration officials in the scandal that's become known as Spygate.
To understand this abuse of power, it helps to go back to July 2011, when DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was appointed.
From the very start, Horowitz found his duties throttled by Attorney General Eric Holder, who placed limitations on the inspector
general's right to have unobstructed access to information. Holder
used
this tactic to delay Horowitz's investigation of the failed sting operation known as Operation Fast and Furious.
"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," Horowitz told
members of Congress in February 2015.
On Aug. 5, 2014, Horowitz and other inspectors general had 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, titled "
Memorandum
for Sally Quillian Yates Deputy Attorney General ," written by Karl R. Thompson, the principal deputy assistant attorney general
of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
The July 20, 2015, opinion was
widely criticized . But it accomplished what it was intended to do. The opinion limited IG Horowitz's oversight from extending
to any information collected under Title III -- including intercepted communications and national security letters. (Notably, The
New York Times
disclosed that national security letters were used in the surveillance of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.)
In response, on Aug. 3, 2015, IG Horowitz sent a
blistering letter to Congress. The letter was signed not only by Horowitz but by all other acting inspectors general as well:
"The OLC opinion's restrictive reading of the IG Act represents a potentially serious challenge to the authority of every Inspector
General and our collective ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner. Our concern is that, as
a result of the OLC opinion, agencies other than DOJ may likewise withhold crucial records from their Inspectors General, adversely
impacting their work.
Horowitz continued to push Congress for oversight access and encouraged passage of the
Inspector General Empowerment
Act . Horowitz would ultimately win his battle, but only as President
Barack Obama was leaving office. On Dec. 16, 2016,
Obama finally signed the Inspector General Empowerment Act into law.
It is against this backdrop of minimal oversight that Spygate took place.
Ironically, the Clinton email server investigation, known as the "Mid-Year Exam," originated from a disclosure contained in a
June 29, 2015, memo sent by the inspectors general for both the State Department and the Intelligence Community to Patrick F. Kennedy,
then-undersecretary of state for management.
The IGs' memo included an assessment that Clinton's email account contained hundreds of classified emails, despite Clinton's claims
that there was no classified information present on her server.
On July 6, 2015, the IG for the Intelligence Community made a
referral
to the FBI, which resulted in the official opening of an investigation into the Clinton email server by FBI officials Randall Coleman
and Charles Kable on July 10, 2015.
At this time, Peter Strzok was an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI's Washington Field Office. The assistant director
in charge at the Washington Field Office during this period was Andrew McCabe, a position he
assumed on Sept.
14, 2014.
On July 30, 2015, within weeks of the FBI's opening of the Clinton investigation, McCabe was suddenly
promoted to the No. 3 position in the FBI. With his new title of associate deputy director, McCabe was transferred to FBI headquarters
from the Washington Field Office, and his direct involvement in the Clinton investigation began.
Strzok would follow shortly. Less than a month after McCabe was transferred, FBI headquarters reached out to the Washington Field
Office, saying it needed greater staffing and resources "based on what they were looking at, based on some of the investigative steps
that were under consideration," Strzok told congressional investigators in a closed-door hearing on June 27, 2018.
Strzok was one of the agents selected, and in late August 2015, he was assigned to the Mid-Year Exam team and transferred to FBI
headquarters. Strzok, in his comments to lawmakers, acknowledged that the newly formed investigative team was largely made up of
hand-picked personnel from the Washington Field Office and FBI headquarters.
Starting in October 2015 and continuing into early 2016, FBI Director
James Comey made a series of high-profile reassignments
that resulted in the complete turnover of the upper-echelon of the FBI team working on the Clinton email investigation:
Oct. 12, 2015: Louis Bladel was moved to the New York Field Office.
Dec. 1, 2015: Randall Coleman, assistant director of Counterintelligence, was named as executive assistant director of the
Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, and was replaced by Bill Priestap.
Dec. 9, 2015: Charles "Sandy" Kable was moved to the Washington Field Office.
Feb. 1, 2016: Mark Giuliano retired as FBI deputy director and was replaced by Andrew McCabe.
Feb. 11, 2016: John Giacalone retired as executive assistant director and was replaced by Michael Steinbach.
March 2, 2016: Gerald Roberts, Jr. was moved to the Washington Field Office.
Comey is the only known senior FBI leadership official who remained involved throughout the entire Clinton email investigation.
McCabe had the second-longest tenure.
On Jan. 29, 2016, Comey
appointed
McCabe as FBI deputy director, replacing the retiring Giuliano, and McCabe assumed the No. 2 position in the FBI, after having
held the No. 3 position for just six months.
It was at this point that FBI lawyer Lisa Page was assigned to McCabe as his special counsel. This was not the first time that
Page worked directly for McCabe. James Baker, the FBI's former general counsel, told congressional investigators that Page had worked
for McCabe at various times during McCabe's career, going back as far as 2013.
By early 2016, the three participants in the infamous "insurance policy" meeting -- McCabe, Strzok, and Page -- were now in place
at the FBI.
In January 2016, Bill Priestap was named as head of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, replacing Coleman and inheriting the
Clinton email investigation in the process.
According to Priestap, Coleman had "set up a reporting mechanism that leaders of that team would report directly to him, not through
the customary other chain of command" in the Clinton email investigation. Priestap, who said he didn't know why Coleman had "set
it up," kept the chain of command in place when he assumed Coleman's position in January 2016.
This new structure resulted in some unusual reporting lines that went outside normal chains of command. Strzok, who would not
normally fall under Priestap's oversight, was now reporting directly to him.
As Priestap described it, the team involved in the Clinton investigation comprised three different but intertwined elements: the
primary team, the filter team, and the senior leadership team.
The primary team was small, consisting only of Strzok, FBI analyst Jonathan Moffa, and, to varying degrees, filter team leader
Rick Mains and FBI lawyer Sally Moyer. Mains reported to Strzok and Moffa, who in turn, along with Moyer, provided briefings to Priestap.
Below Strzok and Moffa was the day-to-day investigative "filter" team of approximately 15 FBI agents and analysts that was overseen
by Mains, a supervisory special agent.
The senior leadership team was more fluid, consisting of higher-level FBI officials who provided briefings and updates to Comey
and/or McCabe. In addition to Priestap, Strzok, and Moffa, frequent attendees included Moyer, Page, Deputy General Counsel Trisha
Anderson, chief of staff Jim Rybicki, and General Counsel James Baker.
While the elements of the day-to-day investigative team differed for the Clinton email investigation and the Trump–Russia investigation,
the primary team remained the same throughout both cases -- as did the lines of communication between the FBI and the DOJ. According
to testimony by Page, John Carlin, who ran the DOJ's National Security Division (NSD), was receiving briefings on both investigations
directly from McCabe.
Priestap Left in the Dark
Priestap, who testified that he was unaware of the frequency of meetings between McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page, seems to have
been kept in the dark regarding many of the actions taken by Strzok, who appeared to be exercising significant investigative control. Priestap was asked about this by congressional investigators during a June 5, 2018, testimony:
Rep. Meadows: " It sounds like Peter Strzok was kind of driving the train here. Would you agree with that?"
Additionally, Page often circumvented the established chain of command, not only with McCabe, for whom she reportedly served as
a conduit for Strzok, but also with Baker. Additionally, there were concerns that Page bypassed both the executive assistant director
for the National Security Branch -- first Giacalone, then Steinbach -- and Priestap, the head of counterintelligence. Anderson, the
No. 2 lawyer, admitted in her testimony to congressional investigators that she had been aware of these concerns, saying, "Neither
of them personally complained to me, but I was aware of their concerns."
A report published by IG Horowitz in June 2018, which reviewed the FBI's investigation of the Clinton email case, included the
notable statement that several witnesses had informed the IG that Page "circumvented the official chain of command, and that Strzok
communicated important Midyear case information to her, and thus to McCabe, without Priestap's or Steinbach's knowledge." Steinbach,
who was the executive assistant director and Priestap's direct supervisor,
left the FBI in early 2017.
According to Anderson, McCabe was aware of the ongoing concerns regarding Page's circumventions, but it appears that nothing was
done to address them:
Mr. Baker: " Do you know if Mr. McCabe was aware that some of his agent executives were concerned that they were being bypassed
on information on what, by all accounts, was a sensitive, critical investigation?"
Ms. Anderson: " My understanding was that he was aware."
DOJ Prevents 'Gross Negligence' Charges
By the spring of 2016, the Clinton email investigation was already winding down. This was due in large part to the fact that the
DOJ, under Attorney General Loretta Lynch , had decided
to set an unusually high threshold for the prosecution of Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that she would not be charged.
In order for Clinton to be prosecuted, the DOJ required the FBI to establish evidence of intent -- even though the gross negligence
statute explicitly does not require this.
This meant that the FBI would have needed to find a smoking gun, such as an email or an admission made during FBI questioning,
revealing that Clinton or her aides knowingly set up the private email server to send classified information.
According to Page, the DOJ played a far larger role in the Clinton investigation than previously had been known:
"Everybody talks about this as if this was the FBI investigation, and the truth of the matter is there was not a single step,
other than the July 5th statement, there was not a single investigative step that we did not do in consultation with or at the direction
of the Justice Department," Page told congressional investigators on July 13, 2018.
Comey also had hinted at the influence exerted by the DOJ over the Clinton investigation, at a July 5, 2016,
press conference , in which he
recommended that Clinton not be charged, stating that "there are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially
regarding intent."
Notably, Comey had been convinced to remove the term "gross negligence" to describe Clinton's actions from his prepared statement
by, among others, Page, Strzok, Anderson, and Moffa.
CIA Director Instigates Trump Investigation
As the Clinton investigation wound down, interest from the intelligence community in the Trump campaign was ramping up. Sometime
in 2015, it appears former CIA Director John Brennan established himself as the point man to push for an investigation into the Trump
campaign. Using a combination of unofficial foreign intelligence compiled by contacts, colleagues, and associates --
primarily from the UK , but also from other Five Eyes members, such as Australia -- Brennan then fed this information to the
FBI. Brennan stated this fact repeatedly 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 it was his intelligence that 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."
In late 2015, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was involved in collecting information regarding then-candidate
Trump and transmitting it to the United States. The GCHQ is the UK equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
While 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. Most of these meetings with Papadopoulos -- whose own background and reasons for joining the Trump campaign remain suspicious
-- occurred in the first half of 2016. 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.
Mifsud, who introduced Papadopoulos to a series of Russian contacts, appears to have more connections with Western intelligence
than with Russian intelligence.
Downer, then Australia's high commissioner to the UK, met with Papadopoulos in May 2016, in a meeting
established through a chain
of two intermediaries.
Information allegedly relayed by Papadopoulos during the Downer meeting -- that the Russians had damaging information on Clinton
-- appears nearly identical to claims later contained in the first memo from former MI6 spy and dossier author Christopher Steele
that the FBI obtained in early July 2016.
Downer's conversation with Papadopoulos was reportedly disclosed to the FBI on July 22, 2016, through Australian government channels,
although it may have come directly from Downer himself.
Details from the conversation between Downer and Papadopoulos were then used by the FBI to open its counterintelligence investigation
on July 31, 2016.
In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, the head of the UK's GCHQ, traveled to Washington to
meet with Brennan
regarding alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Around the same time, 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 NSA handled foreign and intelligence aspects.
During this time, Brennan appeared to have employed the use of
reverse targeting , which refers to the targeting of a foreign individual with the intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen.
Mr. Brennan:
" We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA's foreign intelligence collection authorities. Any time we
would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI because they have the legal authority
to do it. We would not pursue that type of investigative, you know, sort of leads. We would give it to the FBI. So, we were picking
things up that was of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there -- so they could piece it together
with whatever they were collecting domestically here."
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.
This final report was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of President Donald Trump.
Notably, Adm. Mike Rogers of the NSA publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning it only a moderate confidence level.
Fusion GPS and the Steele Dossier
Meanwhile, another less official effort began. Information paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton
campaign targeting Trump made its way to the highest levels of the FBI and the State Department, with a sophisticated strategy relying
on the personal connections of hired operatives.
At the center of the multi-pronged strategy to disseminate the information were Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and former
British spy Steele.
In early March 2016, Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie -- the law firm used by the Clinton campaign and the DNC -- expressing
interest in an "engagement," according to an Oct. 24, 2017,
response
letter by Perkins Coie. The firm hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to "perform a variety of research services during the 2016 election
cycle."
Steele's firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, was retained by Fusion GPS during the period between June and November 2016. During
this time, Steele produced 16 memos, with the last memo dated Oct. 20, 2016. There is one final memo that Steele wrote on Dec. 13
at the request of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Steele provided Fusion GPS with something that Simpson's firm was lacking: access to individuals within the FBI and the State
Department. These contacts could be traced back to at least 2010, when Steele had provided assistance in the FBI's investigation
into FIFA over concerns that Russia might have been engaging in bribery to host the 2018 World Cup.
Sometime in the latter half of 2014, Steele began to informally
provide reports
he had prepared for a private client to the State Department. One of the recipients of the reports was Victoria Nuland, the assistant
secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.
After Steele's company was hired by Fusion GPS in June 2016, he began to reach out to the FBI through Michael Gaeta, an FBI agent
and assistant legal attaché at the
U.S. Embassy in Rome who Steele had worked with on the FIFA case. Gaeta also headed up the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit, which
specializes in investigating criminal groups from Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine.
Gaeta was later identified as Steele's FBI handler, in a July 16, 2018, congressional testimony before the House Judiciary and
Oversight committees by Page.
On July 5, 2016, Gaeta traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. At some point in early July,
Steele passed his initial report to Nuland and the State Department. Nuland later said these documents were passed on at some point
to both the FBI and then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
Exactly what happened with the reports that Gaeta brought back from London, and precisely who he gave them to within the FBI,
remains unknown, although some media reports have indicated they might have been sent to the FBI's New York Field Office. During
the period following Steele's initial contact with the FBI, there appears to have been no further FBI interaction or contact with
Steele.
Former CIA Contractor Worked for Fusion GPS
Notably, eight months before Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, Simpson had hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of then-Associate Deputy
Attorney General Bruce Ohr, to work for his firm as a researcher in October 2015. It was at this time that Fusion GPS was retained
by the Washington Free Beacon to engage in research on the Trump campaign.
Prior to joining Fusion GPS, Nellie had worked as an independent contractor for an internal open-source division of the CIA, Open
Source Works, from 2008 to at least June 2010; it appears likely she remained in that role into 2014.
Nellie told congressional investigators, in her Oct. 19, 2018, closed-door testimony, that part of her work for Fusion GPS was
to research the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, including campaign associate Carter Page, early campaign supporter Lt. Gen. Michael
Flynn, and campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as Trump's family members, including some of his children.
Additionally, email communications between her and Bruce Ohr show that she routinely sent her husband at the DOJ articles on Russia
-- most carrying a similar negative slant. The emails continued through the duration of Nellie's employment with Fusion GPS and usually
contained a brief, often one-line comment from Nellie.
In her testimony, Nellie described her work as online open-source efforts that utilized "Russian sources, media, social media,
government, you know, business registers, legal databases, all kinds of things." Ohr said that she would "write occasional reports
based on the open-source research that I described about Donald Trump's relationships with various people in Russia."
The work Nellie conducted for Fusion GPS matches the same skill set used when she worked for Open Source Works, which is a division
within the CIA that uses open-source information to produce intelligence products.
When asked how she came to be hired by Fusion GPS and who had approached her, Nellie responded, "Nobody approached me," telling
investigators that it was she who had initiated contact and approached Fusion GPS after reading an article on Simpson.
Nellie would continue to work for Fusion GPS until September 2016. By this time, Simpson and Steele already had started working
on pushing the Steele dossier into the FBI.
Following the end of her employment with Fusion GPS, Nellie provided Bruce with a memory stick that contained all of the research
she had compiled during her time at the firm. Bruce then gave the memory stick to the FBI, through his handler, Joe Pientka.
Bruce Ohr Becomes a Conduit
Nearly a month after Gaeta brought back the reports that Steele provided in London, Simpson and Steele decided to pursue a new
channel into the FBI through Bruce Ohr. Bruce had known Steele since at least 2007, when they met during an "official meeting" while
Steele was still employed by the British government as an MI6 agent. Steele had already been in contact with Bruce via email in early
2016. Notably, most of these prior communications appeared to discuss Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and his ongoing efforts to
obtain a U.S. visa.
On July 29, 2016, Steele
wrote to Bruce, saying that he would "be in DC at short notice on business," and asked to meet with both Bruce and his wife.
On July 30, 2016, the Ohrs met Steele for breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel. Also present at the breakfast meeting was a fourth individual,
described by Bruce as "an associate of Mr. Steele's, another gentleman, younger fellow. I didn't catch his name." Nellie testified
that Steele's associate had a British accent.
The timing of the July 30 breakfast meeting is of particular note, as the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, "Crossfire
Hurricane," was formally opened the following day, on July 31, 2016, by FBI agent Peter Strzok.
According to a transcript of Bruce's testimony before Congress, Steele
relayed information from his dossier at this meeting and claimed that "a former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service,
the SVR, had stated to someone that they had Donald Trump over a barrel."
Steele also referenced Deripaska's business dealings with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter
Page's meetings in Moscow.
Lastly, Bruce noted that Steele told him he had been in contact with the FBI but now had additional reports. "Chris Steele had
provided some reports to the FBI, I think two, but that Glenn Simpson had more," he said.
Immediately following the Ohrs' breakfast meeting with Steele, Bruce Ohr reached out to FBI Deputy Director McCabe and the two
met in McCabe's office -- sometime between July 30 and the first days of August. Also present at this meeting was FBI lawyer Page,
who had previously worked for Bruce Ohr at the DOJ, where he was her direct supervisor for five to six years.
Bruce Ohr would later testify that during the July/August meeting, he told McCabe that his wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion, noting,
"I wanted the FBI to be aware of any possible bias." FBI General Counsel Baker, who reviewed a portion of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) application to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page -- which relied in part on the information from
Steele -- told congressional investigators that he was never told of Ohr's concerns regarding possible bias and conflicts of interest.
On Aug. 15, 2016, a week or two following Bruce Ohr's meeting with McCabe, Strzok would send the now-infamous "insurance policy"
text referencing McCabe to Lisa Page:
"I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office – that there's no way he 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."
On Aug. 22, Bruce Ohr had a meeting with Simpson. Ohr would later discuss that meeting during his testimony:
"I don't know exactly what Chris Steele was thinking, of course, but I knew that Chris Steele was working for Glenn Simpson, and
that Glenn might have additional information that Chris either didn't have or was not authorized to prevent [present], give me, or
whatever."
It was at this meeting that Simpson first mentioned Belarusan-American businessman Sergei Millian and former Trump attorney Michael
Cohen.
During this same period in late August 2016, Brennan began briefing members of the Gang of Eight on the FBI's counterintelligence
investigation, through a series of meetings in August and September 2016. Notably, each Gang of Eight member was briefed separately,
calling into question whether each of the members received the same information. Efforts by Democrats to
block the release of transcripts from each meeting are ongoing. Comey, however, did not notify Congress of the FBI investigation
until early March 2017, and it's entirely possible he was unaware of Brennan's private briefings during the summer of 2016.
During her testimony, FBI lawyer Lisa Page was questioned by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) in relation to an Aug. 25, 2016, text
message that read, "What are you doing after the CH brief?" CH almost certainly referred to Crossfire Hurricane.
Lisa Page then was asked about an event that took place on the same day as the "CH brief" -- a briefing provided by Brennan to
then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid:
"You give a brief on August the 25th. Director Brennan is giving a brief. It's not a Gang of Eight brief. It is a one-on-one,
from what we can tell, a one-on-one briefing with Harry Reid at that point."
According to Meadows, Brennan briefed Reid on the Steele dossier:
"We have documents that would suggest that in that briefing the dossier was mentioned to Harry Reid and then obviously we're going
to have to have conversations. Does that surprise you that Director Brennan would be aware [of the dossier]?"
Lisa Page appeared genuinely surprised that Brennan would have been aware of the dossier's existence at this early point, telling
Meadows: "The FBI got this information from our source. If the CIA had another source of that information, I am neither aware of
that nor did the CIA provide it to us if they did."
She elaborated further: "As of August of 2016, I don't know who Christopher Steele is. I don't know that he's an FBI source. I
don't know what he does. I have never heard of him in all of my life."
This claim by Page seems incongruous when viewed against Bruce Ohr's testimony that he met with Page and McCabe in the first days
of August following his July 30, 2016, breakfast with Steele:
"My initial meeting was with Mr. McCabe and with Lisa Page.
"I was telling them about what I was hearing from Chris Steele."
Meanwhile, Brennan's briefing prompted Reid to write not one but two letters to Comey. Both demanded that Comey commence an investigation,
with the details to be made public.
Reid's first letter
, which touched on Carter Page, was sent on Aug. 27, 2016. Reid's
second letter
, far angrier and declaring Comey to be in possession of material information, was sent on Oct. 30, 2016.
There had been
reports that Comey had been considering closing the FBI investigation of Trump, something Brennan strongly opposed. Now, with
Reid's letters sent, that avenue was effectively closed. The termination of the FBI's Trump–Russia investigation would be all but
impossible in the face of Reid's public demands.
Perhaps it was in response to Reid's Aug. 27 letter that the FBI suddenly reached out to Steele in September 2016, asking him
for all the information in his possession. The team working on Crossfire Hurricane received documents and a briefing from Steele
in mid-September, reportedly
at a meeting in Rome, where Gaeta also was present.
During Lisa Page's testimony, she appeared to corroborate this account, noting that the team received the "reports that are known
as the dossier from an FBI agent who is Christopher Steele's handler in September of 2016." She would later clarify the timing, noting
"we received the reporting from Steele in mid-September." A
text sent to her by FBI agent Peter
Strzok on Oct. 12, 2016, may provide us with the actual date:
"We got the reporting on Sept 19. Looks like [redacted] got it early August."
Steele had produced eight reports from June 20, 2016, through the end of August 2016 (there also is one undated report included
in the dossier). No further reports were generated by Steele until Sept. 14, when he suddenly wrote three separate memos in one day.
One of the memos referenced a Russian bank named Alfa Bank, misspelled as "Alpha" in his memo. Steele's sudden burst of productivity
was likely done in preparation for his Sept. 19 meeting in Rome with the FBI.
The impact of Brennan's potential knowledge of the dossier in August 2016 should not be underestimated. As Brennan
testified to Congress, his briefing to the Gang of Eight
was done in consultation with the Obama administration:
"Through the so-called Gang-of-Eight process we kept Congress apprised of these issues as we identified them. Again, in consultation
with the White House, I personally briefed the full details of our understanding of Russian attempts to interfere in the election
to congressional leadership.
"Given the highly sensitive nature of what was an active counter-intelligence case, involving an ongoing Russian effort, to interfere
in our presidential election, the full details of what we knew at the time were shared only with those members of Congress."
As the dossier was making its way into the FBI, the agency began its preparations to obtain a FISA warrant on Trump campaign adviser
Carter Page, who was surveilled under Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
According to Baker's testimony, it appears that the FBI began to set its sights on Carter Page in the summer of 2016. When asked
how he had first gained knowledge of the FBI's intention to pursue a FISA warrant on Carter Page, Baker testified that it came through
his familiarity with the FBI's investigation:
Mr. Baker: " I learned of -- so I was aware when the FBI first started to focus on Carter Page, I was aware of that because
it was part of the broader investigation that we were conducting. So I was aware that we were investigating him. And then at some
point in time –"
Rep. Meadows: "But that was many years ago. That was in 2014. Or are you talking about 2016?"
Mr. Baker: " I am talking about 2016 in the summer."
Rep. Meadows: "Okay."
Mr. Baker: " Yeah. And so I was aware of the investigation, and then at some point in time, as part of the regular briefings
on the case, the briefers mentioned that they were going to pursue a FISA."
It appears the FBI, and possibly the CIA, began to focus on Carter Page earlier than Baker was aware. Carter Page had been invited
some months prior to a July 2016 symposium held at Cambridge regarding the upcoming election. The speaker list was notable:
Madeleine Albright (former U.S. secretary of state)
Vin Weber (Republican Party strategist and former congressman)
Peter Ammon (German ambassador to the UK)
Sir Richard Dearlove (former head of MI6 and Steele's former boss)
Bridget Kendall (BBC diplomatic correspondent and the next master of Peterhouse College)
Sir Malcolm Rifkind (former defense and foreign secretary)
Carter Page attended the event just four days after his July 2016 Moscow trip, and it was during this time in the UK that he first
encountered Stefan Halper. Page's Moscow trip would later figure prominently in the Steele dossier.
Halper, who has been outed as an FBI informant, stayed in contact with Carter Page for the next 14 months, severing ties exactly
as the final FISA warrant on Page expired.
Trisha Anderson, the principal deputy general counsel for the FBI and head of the bureau's National Security and Cyber Law Branch,
approved the application for a warrant to spy on Carter Page before it went to FBI Director James Comey.
According to Anderson, pre-approvals for the Carter Page FISA warrant were provided by both McCabe and Deputy Attorney General
Sally Yates, before the FISA application was ever presented to Anderson for review.
"[M]y boss and my boss' boss had already reviewed and approved this application. And, in fact, the Deputy Attorney General, who
had the authority to sign the application, to be the substantive approver on the FISA application itself, had approved the application.
And that typically would not have been the case before I did that," said Anderson.
The unusual preliminary reviews and approvals from both McCabe and Yates appear to have had a substantial impact on the normal
review process, leading other individuals like Anderson to believe that the warrant application was more vetted than it really was.
Anderson also testified that she had not read the Carter Page FISA application prior to signing off on it and passing it along
to Comey for the final FBI signature. According to FBI lawyer Sally Moyer, the underlying Woods file (a document that provides facts
supporting the allegations made in a FISA application) was only read by the originating agent and the supervisory special agent in
the field. Moyer also noted that the Woods file relating to the Page FISA had not been reviewed or audited by anyone.
The Carter Page FISA application was largely reliant on the Steele dossier, which was unverified at the time of its submission
to the FISA court and remains unverified by the FBI to this day. Circular reporting, provided by Steele himself, was used as corroboration
of the dossier. Additionally, Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, whose conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer
was used to open the FBI's July 31, 2016, counterintelligence investigation, is referenced in the FISA, yet there "is no evidence
of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos," according to a House Intelligence Committee memo.
Moyer testified that without the Steele dossier, the Carter Page application would have had a "50/50" chance of achieving the
probable cause standard before the FISA court. Notably, the Steele dossier is generally considered to have been largely discredited.
On Sept. 19, shortly after Steele completed his latest three memos, FBI General Counsel James Baker met with Perkins Coie partner
Michael Sussmann, the lawyer the DNC turned to on April 28, 2016, after discovering the alleged hacking of their servers.
Sussman, who sought out the meeting, presented Baker with documents that Baker described as "a stack of material I don't know
maybe a quarter inch half inch thick something like that clipped together, and then I believe there was some type of electronic media,
as well, a disk or something."
The information that Sussmann gave to Baker was related to what Baker described as "a surreptitious channel of communications"
between the Trump Organization and "a Russian organization associated with the Russian Government."
Baker was describing alleged communications between Alfa Bank and a server in the Trump Tower. The allegations, which were investigated
by the FBI and proven to be false, were widely covered in the media.
Just four days earlier, on Sept. 14, Steele mentioned Alfa Bank (misspelled as Alpha bank) in one of his memos.
According to Baker's testimony, there appears to have been at least three meetings with Sussmann -- the first in person and at
least two subsequent meetings by phone. In either the second or third conversation, Baker came to understand The New York Times was
also in possession of Sussmann's information. As would become clear later, other members of the media also had this same information.
As Baker was meeting with Sussmann, Steele was back in Washington for a series of meetings that included his DOJ contact, Bruce
Ohr.
On Sept. 23, 2016, Bruce Ohr again met with Steele for breakfast, telling lawmakers during testimony, "Steele was in Washington,
D.C., again, and he reached out to me, and, again, we met for breakfast, and he provided some additional information." Ohr said this
meeting concerned similar topics that were discussed at the July 30, 2016, meeting but did not provide further details.
Bruce Ohr would also meet either that same month or in early October with FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and DOJ
career officials from the criminal division, Bruce Swartz, Zainab Ahmad, and Andrew Weissman (Ohr testified that he was unsure whether
Weismann was at this or a later meeting). Both Weissman and Ahmad would later become part of the team assembled by special counsel
Robert Mueller.
Steele's Meetings With the Media
On the same day that Bruce Ohr met with Christopher Steele for breakfast, on Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff
published an article about Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. The article, headlined "
U.S. Intel Officials Probe Ties Between Trump Adviser and Kremlin ," was based on an interview with Steele. Isikoff's article
would later be used by the FBI in the FISA spy warrant application on Carter Page as corroborating information.
Following the publication of the Isikoff article, the Hillary for America campaign released a
statement on the same day that touted
Isikoff's "bombshell report," with the full article attached.
A second lengthy article was published on Sept. 23, by Politico: "
Who Is Carter
Page? The Mystery of Trump's Man in Moscow ," by Julia Ioffe. This article was particularly interesting as it appeared to highlight
media efforts by Fusion GPS:
"As I started looking into Page, I began getting calls from two separate 'corporate investigators' digging into what they claim
are all kinds of shady connections Page has to all kinds of shady Russians. One is working on behalf of various unnamed Democratic
donors; the other won't say who turned him on to Page's scent. Both claimed to me that the FBI was investigating Page for allegedly
meeting with Igor Sechin and Sergei Ivanov, who was until recently Putin's chief of staff -- both of whom are on the sanctions list
-- when Page was in Moscow in July for that speech."
Ioffe noted that "seemingly everyone I talked to had also talked to the Washington Post, and then there were these corporate investigators
who drew a dark and complex web of Page's connections."
Her article also mentioned rumors regarding Alfa Bank:
"In the interest of due diligence, I also tried to run down the rumors being handed me by the corporate investigators: that Russia's
Alfa Bank paid for the trip as a favor to the Kremlin; that Page met with Sechin and Ivanov in Moscow; that he is now being investigated
by the FBI for those meetings because Sechin and Ivanov were both sanctioned for Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
It was probably during this same trip to Washington that Steele
met with Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement and former special envoy
for Libya, whom Steele had known since at least 2010.
Winer had received a
separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from longtime 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
gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele then
shared this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it as a means to corroborate Steele's own dossier.
Steele also met with U.S. media during his visit to Washington, doing so "at Fusion's instruction." According to
UK Court documents , Steele testified
that he "briefed" The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, and CNN at the end of September 2016. Steele
would engage in a second round of media contact in mid-October 2016, meeting again with The New York Times, The Washington Post,
and Yahoo News. Steele testified that all these meetings were "conducted verbally in person."
As Steele's media meetings were going on, FBI General Counsel James Baker learned that Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann was
also speaking with reporters from The New York Times regarding the Alfa Bank information that Sussmann had provided to the FBI. After
some internal discussion, the FBI approached both Sussmann and The New York Times, asking that any story be held until the FBI had
time to complete an investigation into the documents provided by Sussmann. It appears that an agreement was reached, and the FBI
began to look into the claims regarding Alfa Bank and the server at Trump Tower.
But Sussman wasn't the only one that Baker, currently the subject of an ongoing criminal leak investigation, was speaking with.
According to congressional investigators, beginning sometime in September 2016 -- before the presidential election -- Baker began
having conversations with his old friend and journalist, David Corn of Mother Jones.
According to Baker, these conversations were in relation to ongoing FBI matters:
Rep. Jordan: " Did you talk to Mr. Corn prior to the election about anything, anything related to FBI matters? Not -- so we're
not going to ask about the Steele dossier. Anything about FBI business, FBI matters?"
Mr. Baker: " Yes."
Rep. Jordan: " Yes. And do you know -- can you give me some dates or the number of times that you talked to Mr. Corn about
FBI matters leading up to the 2016 Presidential election?"
Mr. Baker: " I don't remember, Congressman."
By Oct. 31, 2016, the FBI had apparently wrapped up their investigation into the Alfa Bank allegations, finding no evidence of
anything untoward in the process. It was on this day that three separate articles on Alfa Bank would be published.
The first, " Investigating
Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia " by The New York Times, appeared to be an updated version of the article they
had intended to publish before the FBI asked them to delay their reporting. It stated the following:
"In classified sessions in August and September, intelligence officials also briefed congressional leaders on the possibility
of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump. They focused particular attention on what cyberexperts said
appeared to be a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia's biggest
banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin."
The reference to "classified sessions in August and September" is likely in relation to the series of Gang of Eight briefings
that former CIA Director John Brennan engaged in at that time -- including his briefing to then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
The article continued:
"F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa
Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 'look-up' messages --
a first step for one system's computers to talk to another -- to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I.
ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts."
The second article,
"Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?" by Slate Magazine, was solely focused on the allegations regarding a server in
the Trump Tower that had allegedly been communicating with a server at Alfa Bank in Russia.
Immediately following the publication of the Slate article, Clinton
posted a tweet that included a statement
from Jake Sullivan, a senior policy adviser:
"Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank."
Sullivan's statement referenced the Slate article and included the following:
"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."
The Alfa Bank story took off -- despite the same-day story from The New York Times that specifically noted the FBI had investigated
that matter and found nothing untoward.
"In recent weeks, reporters in Washington have pursued anonymous
online reports that a computer server related
to the Trump Organization engaged in a high level of activity with servers connected to Alfa Bank, the largest private bank in Russia.
On Monday, a Slate
investigation
detailed the pattern of unusual server activity but concluded, 'We don't yet know what this [Trump] server was
for, but it deserves further explanation.' In an email to Mother Jones, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, maintains, 'The
Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication
or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.'"
More notably, Corn's article also provided the first public reporting on the existence of the Steele dossier:
"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."
As it turns out, Corn had detailed, first-hand knowledge of the dossier. According to testimony from Baker, Corn had been provided
with parts of the dossier by Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson. Baker knew of this fact, because within a week of publishing his article,
Corn passed these dossier parts on to Baker personally:
Rep. Jordan: " Prior to the election Mr. Corn had a copy of the dossier and was talking to you about giving that to you so
the FBI would have it. Is that all right? I mean all accurate."
Mr. Baker: " My recollection is that he had part of the dossier, that we had other parts already, and that we got still other
parts from other people, and that -- and nevertheless some of the parts that David Corn gave us were parts that we did not have from
another source?"
Steele had written four memos after the FBI team received his information in mid-September. All of the memos were written in October
-- on the 12th, 18th, 19th, and the 20th. It is possible that these were the memos passed along to Baker by Corn.
Baker testified that he received elements of the dossier from Corn that were not in the FBI's possession at the time. He said
that he immediately turned this information over to leadership within the FBI, noting, "I think it was Bill Priestap," the head of
the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.
The use of personal relationships as a mechanism to transmit outside information to the FBI was actually noted by Baker, who said
of Corn: "Even though he was my friend, I was also an FBI official. He knew that. And so he wanted to somehow get that into the hands
of the FBI."
Bruce Ohr's FBI Handler
Christopher Steele was terminated as a source by the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016, for communicating with the media. Despite this, DOJ
official Bruce Ohr and Steele communicated regularly for another full year, until November 2017.
On Nov. 21, 2016, Ohr had a meeting with FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and was introduced to FBI agent Joe
Pientka, who became Ohr's FBI handler. Pientka was also present with Strzok during the Jan. 24, 2017, interview of
Trump's national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn .
The next day, Nov. 22, 2016, Ohr met alone with Pientka. Ohr would continue to relay his communications with Steele to the FBI
through Pientka, who then recorded them in FD-302 forms. What Ohr didn't know was that Pientka was transmitting all the information
directly to Strzok.
Ohr, in his testimony, detailed his interactions with Steele and Glenn Simpson, as well as his communications with officials at
the FBI and DOJ. Notably, Ohr repeatedly stated that he never vetted any of the information provided by either Steele or Simpson.
He simply turned it over or relayed it to the FBI -- usually to Pientka -- but Ohr also testified that "at least on two occasions
I was handed onto a new agent."
Sometime in late 2016, his wife, Nellie Ohr, provided him with a memory stick containing all of her research that she had compiled
while employed at Fusion GPS. Bruce Ohr testified he gave the memory stick to Pientka. Nellie Ohr had left Fusion in September 2016.
Through Pientka, Strzok now had all of Nellie Ohr's Fusion research in his possession.
On Dec. 10, 2016, Bruce Ohr met with Simpson, who gave him a memory stick that Ohr believed contained a copy of the Steele dossier.
Ohr also passed this second memory stick along to Pientka.
On Jan. 20, 2017, Ohr had one final communication with Simpson, a phone call that took place on the same day as Trump's inauguration.
Ohr testified that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson was concerned that one of Steele's sources was about to be exposed through
the pending publication of an article:
Mr. Ohr: " He says something along the lines of, I -- there's going to be some reporting in the next few days that's going
to -- could expose the source, and the source could be in personal danger."
Rep. Meadows: " And why was he concerned about that source being exposed?"
Mr. Ohr: " I think he was aware of some kind of article that was likely to come out in the next, you know, few days or something."
Apparently, Simpson's information was at least partly accurate. On Jan. 24, 2017, The Wall Street Journal
reported that Sergei Millian, a Belarusan-American businessman and onetime Russian government translator, was both "Source D"
and "Source E" in the dossier. It remains unknown exactly how Simpson knew in advance that Millian would be outed as a source.
But there are some questions as to the accuracy of the Journal's reporting. The dossier appears to conflict with the newspaper's
article in at least one aspect. According to the dossier, Source E was used as confirmation for Source D -- meaning they can't be
the same person.
McCain, the Dossier, and a UK Connection
Simpson and Steele were carefully thorough in their dissemination efforts. The 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 may have previously
worked on behalf of Steele's company, Orbis Business Intelligence; he was referenced in a
UK court filing as an associate of
Orbis. Wood was also referred to as an adviser to Orbis in a deposition by an associate of late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), David
Kramer.
Kramer knew Wood previously from their mutual expertise on Russia. Kramer said in his deposition, which was part of a defamation
lawsuit against BuzzFeed News, that Wood told him that "he was aware of information that he thought I should be aware of and that
Senator McCain might be interested in."
McCain, Wood, and Kramer would meet later that afternoon, on Nov. 19, 2016, in a private meeting room at the Halifax International
Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Wood told both Kramer and McCain that "he was aware of this information that had been gathered that raised the possibility of
collusion and compromising material on the president-elect. And he explained that he knew the person who gathered the information
and felt that the person was of the utmost credibility," Kramer said.
Kramer ascribed the word "collusion" three times to Wood in his deposition. He also said that Wood mentioned the possible existence
of a video "of a sexual nature" that might have "shown the president-elect in a compromising situation." According to Kramer, Wood
said that "if it existed, that it was from a hotel in Moscow when president-elect, before he was president-elect, had been in Moscow."
No such video was ever uncovered or given to Kramer.
Kramer testified that following the description of the video, "the senator turned to me and asked if I would go to London to meet
with what turned out to be Mr. Steele."
Kramer traveled to London to meet with Steele on Nov. 28, 2016. Kramer reviewed all the memos during his meeting with Steele but
wasn't provided with a physical copy of the dossier.
When Kramer returned to Washington, he was provided with a copy of the dossier -- which, at that point, consisted of 16 memos
-- during a meeting with Simpson on Nov. 29, 2016. Kramer also testified that there was another individual, "a male," present at
the meeting.
Interestingly, Kramer testified that Simpson gave him two copies of the dossier, noting that Simpson told him that "one had more
things blacked out than the other." Kramer said, "It wasn't entirely clear to me why there were two versions of this, so but I took
both versions."
Kramer noted that Simpson, who was aware the dossier was being given to McCain, said the dossier "was a very sensitive document
and needed to be handled very carefully."
Despite that warning, Kramer showed the dossier to a number of journalists and had discussions with at least 14 members of the
media, along with some individuals in the U.S. government.
Kramer testified that he gave a physical copy of the dossier to reporters Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy; to Fred Hiatt,
the editor of the Washington Post editorial page; Alan Cullison of The Wall Street Journal; Bob Little at NPR; Carl Bernstein at
CNN; and Ken Bensinger at BuzzFeed. It's possible that Kramer gave copies to other reporters as well.
Kramer said that Simpson and Steele were aware of most of these contacts, but that Kramer hadn't told either of them that he gave
the dossier to NPR. He also noted that Steele had been in contact with Bernstein at CNN and that the CNN and BuzzFeed meetings occurred
at Steele's request. Steele told Kramer that he and Bensinger "had been in touch during the FIFA investigation; they got to know
each other that way."
According to Kramer, he didn't believe that Fusion GPS and Simpson were aware of these two meetings with CNN and BuzzFeed.
Kramer testified that he, McCain, and McCain's chief of staff, Christopher Brose, met to review the dossier on Nov. 30, 2016.
Kramer suggested that McCain "provide a copy of [the dossier] to the director of the FBI and the director of the CIA." McCain later
passed a copy of the dossier to James Comey on Dec. 9, 2016. It isn't known whether McCain also provided a copy to then-CIA Director
John Brennan. Notably, Brennan did attach a two-page summary of the dossier to the intelligence community assessment that he delivered
to outgoing President Barack Obama on Jan. 5, 2017.
Kramer said that he wasn't aware of the content of McCain's Dec. 9 discussion with Comey, noting that he "did not get any readout
from the senator on the meeting, but just that it had happened."
Kramer did, however, provide updates to both Steele and Simpson regarding the status of McCain's meeting with Comey, in subsequent
discussions with Simpson and Steele:
"It was mostly just to inform him about whether or not the senator had transfer -- transmitted the document to the FBI. Both he
and Mr. Steele were -- I kept them apprised of whether the senator was -- where the senator was in terms of his contact with the
FBI."
The implications of this statement are significant. Kramer, a private citizen, was providing updates to a former British spy as
to what a sitting senator, and chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, was saying to the director of the FBI.
Other members of the media also had advance knowledge of McCain's intention to meet with Comey. Kramer testified that both Mother
Jones reporter David Corn and Guardian reporter Julian Borger came to meet with him. According to Kramer, "They were mostly interested
in Senator McCain and his, whether he had given it to Director Comey or not."
Several days after McCain, Brose, and Kramer met to discuss the dossier, Kramer said that McCain instructed him to meet with Victoria
Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, and Celeste Wallander, the senior director for Russia and
Central Asia on the National Security Council.
The purpose of the meeting was to verify whether the dossier "was being taken seriously." Both Nuland and Wallander were previously
aware of the dossier's existence, and both officials previously knew Steele, whom "they believed to be credible." Kramer said he
didn't physically share the dossier with them at this point, but met again with Wallander "around New Years" and "gave her a copy
of the document"
Nuland had actually
received a copy of the earlier Steele memos back in July 2016.
Steele produced a final memo dated Dec. 13, 2016. According to
UK court documents , Kramer, on behalf
of McCain, had asked Steele to provide any further intelligence that he had gathered relating to "alleged Russian interference in
the US presidential election." Notably, it appears it was this request from McCain that led Steele to produce his Dec. 13 memo.
Although Kramer didn't provide a date, he said he received the final Steele memo sometime after "Senator McCain had provided the
copy to Director Comey." We know that Kramer received the final memo prior to Dec. 29 -- when Kramer met with BuzzFeed's Bensinger.
Kramer testified that Bensinger "said he wanted to read them, he asked me if he could take photos of them on his -- I assume it
was an iPhone. I asked him not to. He said he was a slow reader, he wanted to read it. And so I said, you know, I got a phone call
to make, and I had to go to the bathroom " Kramer said that he "left him to read it for 20, 30 minutes."
Kramer also testified that besides the reporters, he gave a final copy of the dossier to two other people in early January 2017:
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Il.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan's chief of staff, Jonathan Burks.
James Clapper Leaks Details of Obama–Trump Briefings
The ICA on alleged Russian hacking was released
internally on Jan. 5, 2017. On this same day, outgoing president Obama held an undisclosed White House meeting to discuss the assessment
-- and the attached summation of the dossier -- with national security adviser Susan Rice, FBI Director James Comey, and Deputy Attorney
General Sally Yates. Rice would later send herself an
email documenting the meeting.
The following day, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James 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 ICA 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
that he had done so at the request of Clapper and Brennan, "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 :
"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."
The media had widely dismissed the dossier as unsubstantiated and, therefore, unreportable. It was only after learning that Comey
briefed Trump on it that
CNN reported
on the dossier. The House Intelligence Committee report on Russian election interference confirmed that Clapper personally leaked
confirmation of the dossier, along with Comey's meeting with Trump, to CNN:
"The Committee's investigation revealed that President-elect Trump was indeed briefed on the contents of the Steele dossier and
when questioned by the Committee, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted that he confirmed the existence
of the dossier to the media."
Additionally, the House intelligence report shows Clapper appears to have been the direct source for CNN's Jake Tapper and his
Jan. 10 story that disclosed the existence of the dossier:
"When initially asked about leaks related to the ICA in July 2017, former DNI Clapper flatly denied 'discuss[ing] the dossier
[compiled by Steele] or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists.' Clapper subsequently
acknowledged discussing the 'dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,' and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists
about the same topic.
"Clapper's discussion with Tapper took place in early January 2017, around the time IC leaders briefed President Obama and President-elect
Trump, on 'the Christopher Steele information,' a two-page summary of which was 'enclosed in' the highly-classified version of the
ICA."
The allegations within the dossier were made public, and with reporting of the briefings by intelligence community leaders, instant
credibility was given to the dossier's assertions.
Immediately following the CNN story,
BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, and the Trump–Russia conspiracy was pushed into the mainstream.
David Kramer was asked about his reaction when CNN broke the story on the dossier. According to his deposition, Kramer stated,
"I believe my words were 'Holy [expletive].'"
Kramer, who was actually meeting with The Guardian's Julian Borger when CNN reported on the dossier, said that he quickly spoke
with Steele, who "was shocked."
On the following day, Jan. 11, 2017, Clapper issued a statement condemning the leaks -- without revealing the fact that he was
the source of the leak.
On Nov. 17, 2016, Clapper submitted his resignation as director of national intelligence; his resignation became effective on
Jan. 20, 2017. Later that year, CNN hired Clapper as its national security analyst.
The Effort to Remove General Flynn
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then-national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was
interviewed on Jan. 24, 2017, by FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka about two December 2016 conversations that Flynn had
had with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
Details of the phone conversation had leaked to the media. Flynn ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI regarding
his conversations with Kislyak. It remains unknown to this day who leaked Flynn's classified call -- a far more serious felony violation.
The Washington Post reported in January 2017 that the FBI had found
no evidence of wrongdoing in Flynn's actual call with the Russian ambassador. The call, and the matters discussed in it, broke
no laws.
Flynn has been portrayed in the media as being suspiciously close to Russia; a dinner in Moscow that occurred in late 2015 is
frequently cited as evidence of this.
On Dec. 10, 2015, Flynn attended an event in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Russian television network RT. Flynn,
who was seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin for the culminating dinner, was also interviewed on national security matters
by an RT correspondent. Flynn's speaker's bureau, Leading Authorities Inc., was paid $45,000 for the event and Flynn received $33,000
of the total amount.
Seated at the same table with Flynn was Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate in the 2016 election. By all accounts, including
Stein's , Flynn and Putin didn't engage in any real conversation. At the time, Flynn's trip didn't garner significant attention.
But it would later be used by the media and the Clinton campaign to push the Russia-collusion narrative.
Notably, as stated
by lawyer Robert Kelner, Flynn disclosed his Moscow trip to the Defense Intelligence Agency before he traveled there and provided
a full briefing upon his return:
"As has previously been reported, General Flynn briefed the Defense Intelligence Agency, a component agency of the DoD, extensively
regarding the RT speaking event trip both before and after the trip, and he answered any questions that were posed by the DIA concerning
the trip during those briefings."
Flynn's trip to Russia was first brought to broader attention on July 18, 2016, during a
live interview at
the Republican National Convention with Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff.
The Isikoff interview took place on July 18, 2016. Unknown at the time, the matter had also captured the attention of Christopher
Steele, who had begun publishing his dossier memos on June 20, 2016.
Contained within an Aug. 10, 2016,
memo was this initial
reference to Flynn:
"Kremlin engaging with several high profile US players, including STEIN, PAGE and (former DIA Director Michael Flynn) and funding
their recent visits to Moscow."
In addition to the obvious questions raised by the timing of Flynn's name appearing in Steele's Aug. 10 memo, is the manner in
which Flynn is denoted. All other names are capitalized, in the manner of intelligence briefings. Flynn's name isn't capitalized
and, in one case, appears within parentheses.
Steele met with Yahoo News' Isikoff in September 2016 and gave him information from the dossier. The resulting Sept. 23, 2016,
article from Isikoff was then cited by the FBI as validating Steele's claims and was featured in the original
FISA application , and its three subsequent
renewals , for a warrant to spy on Trump campaign
foreign policy adviser Carter Page.
Steele wasn't the only person Isikoff was working with. On April 26, 2016, Isikoff
published a story
on Yahoo News about Paul Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It was later learned from a Democratic
National Committee (DNC) email leaked by Wikileaks that
Isikoff had been working with Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American operative who was doing consulting work for the DNC. Chalupa
met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose alleged ties between Trump, Manafort, and
Russia.
The obvious question remains: How did the information on Flynn make its way into the dossier at the time it did, and who provided
the information to Steele?
Flynn's 2015 dinner in Moscow was initially used to implicate the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. It was then
used as a means to cast doubts on Flynn's ability as Trump's national security adviser. Following Flynn's resignation, it was
then used as a means to pursue the ongoing collusion narrative that gained full strength in the early days of the Trump administration.
"In an extraordinary report released last week, the agencies
bluntly accused
the Russian government of having worked to undermine American democracy and promote the candidacy of Mr. Trump.
The report is likely to renew questions about Mr. Flynn's avowed eagerness to work with Russia, and his dismissal of concerns about
President Vladimir V. Putin."
Flynn would resign from his position as national security adviser in February 2017. The sequence of events leading to his resignation
were both coordinated and orchestrated, with acting Attorney General Sally Yates playing a leading role.
On Jan. 12, 2017, Flynn's Dec. 29, 2016, call with Kislyak was
leaked to The Washington Post. The article portrayed Flynn as undermining Obama's Russia sanctions that had been imposed on the
same day as Flynn's call with the Russian ambassador.
On Jan. 15, five days before Trump's inauguration, Vice President Mike Pence
appeared
on "Face the Nation" to defend Flynn's calls.
A few days later, on Jan. 19, Obama officials -- Yates, Clapper, Brennan and Comey -- met to discuss Flynn's situation. The concern
they
reportedly discussed was that Flynn might have misled Trump administration officials regarding the nature of his call with Kislyak.
Yates, Clapper, and Brennan supported informing the Trump administration of their concerns. Comey took a dissenting view. On Jan
23, Yates again pressured Comey, telling the FBI director that she believed Flynn could be vulnerable to blackmail. At this point,
according to media reports, Comey relented, despite the FBI finding nothing unlawful in the content of Flynn's calls.
Strzok and Pientka, at the instruction of McCabe, interviewed Flynn the following day. According to court documents, McCabe and
other FBI officials "decided the agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they wanted
Flynn to be relaxed." It was during this interview that Flynn reportedly lied to the FBI.
The DOJ was provided with a detailed briefing of the Flynn interview on the following day. On Jan. 26, Yates contacted White House
counsel Don McGahn, who agreed to meet to discuss the matter. Yates arrived at McGahn's office, bringing Mary McCord, John Carlin's
acting replacement as head of the DOJ's National Security Division.
Yates later testified before Congress that the meeting
surrounded Flynn's phone calls and his FBI interview. She also testified that Flynn's call and subsequent interview "was a topic
of a whole lot of discussion in DOJ and with other members of the intel community." McGahn reportedly asked Yates, "Why does it matter
to the DOJ if one White House official lies to another official?"
McGahn called Yates the following day and asked her to return for a second meeting. Yates returned to the White House without
McCord. McGahn asked to examine the FBI's evidence on Flynn. Yates said she would respond by the following Monday.
Yates failed to provide McGahn with the FBI's evidence on Flynn. From that point, the pressure on Flynn and the Trump administration
escalated -- with help from media reporting.
Flynn resigned on Feb. 13, after it was reported that he had misled Pence about phone conversations he'd had with Kislyak.
The following day, The
New York
Times reported that "phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and
other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according
to four current and former American officials."
With Flynn gone and the Russian narrative firmly established, the conspirators then turned their attention to Trump's newly confirmed
attorney general, Jeff Sessions . On March 1, 2017, The
Washington Post
reported that Sessions had twice had contact with the Russian ambassador, Kislyak. The following day, March 2, Sessions recused
himself from the Russia investigation.
On the same day that Sessions recused himself, Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, detailed efforts
at hampering the newly installed Trump administration, during a March 2, 2017,
interview with MSNBC , in which she described 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."
Note that Farkas said "how we knew," not just "what we knew."
Obama Officials Used Unmasking to Target the Trump Campaign
On Tuesday, March 21, 2017, the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), met
a classified source who showed him "dozens" of intelligence reports. Contained within these reports was evidence of surveillance
on the Trump campaign. Nunes held a
press conference on March 22 highlighting what he had found:
"I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens
involved in the Trump transition. Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent
foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting."
In a series of rapid-fire questions and answers, Nunes attempted to elaborate on what he had been shown:
"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 I think the NSA's going to comply. I am concerned – we don't know whether or not the FBI is going to comply.
I have placed a call, I'm waiting to talk to Director Comey, hopefully later today.
"I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show the President-elect and his team were at least monitored and disseminated
out in intelligence, in what appears to be raw -- well I shouldn't say raw -- but intelligence reporting channels.
"It looks to me like it was all legally collected, but it was essentially a lot of information on the President-elect and his
transition team and what they were doing."
The documents Nunes had been shown highlighted the unmasking activities of the FBI, the Obama administration, and CIA Director
Brennan in relation to the Trump campaign. Although March 2017 would prove chaotic, the Trump administration had survived the first
crucial months, and would now begin to slowly assert its administrative authority.
Comey Testifies No Obstruction by Trump Administration
On May 3, 2017, James Comey
testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Under oath, Comey stated that his agency -- and the FBI's investigation -- had
not been pressured by the Trump administration:
Sen. Hirono: " So if the attorney general or senior officials at the Department of Justice opposes a specific investigation,
can they halt that FBI investigation?"
Mr. Comey: " In theory, yes."
Sen. Hirono: " Has it happened?"
Mr. Comey: " Not in my experience. Because it would be a big deal to tell the FBI to stop doing something that – without an
appropriate purpose. I mean where oftentimes they give us opinions that we don't see a case there and so you ought to stop investing
resources in it. But I'm talking about a situation where we were told to stop something for a political reason. That would be a very
big deal. It's not happened in my experience."
Less than a week later, on May 9, Trump fired Comey based on a May 8 recommendation by Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein .
Rosenstein would later
tell members of Congress: "In one of my first meetings with then-Sen. Jeff Sessions last winter, we discussed the need for new
leadership at the FBI. Among the concerns that I recall were to restore the credibility of the FBI, respect the established authority
of the Department of Justice, limit public statements and eliminate leaks."
Regarding the recommendation, Rosenstein said: "I wrote it. I believe it. I stand by it."
McCabe's FBI Reaches Out Again to Steele
Within days of Trump's firing of Comey, the FBI, now under the leadership of acting-FBI Director Andrew McCabe, suddenly decided
to reestablish direct contact with Christopher Steele through DOJ official Bruce Ohr.
The re-engagement attempt came six months after Steele had been formally terminated by the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016.
The FBI's re-engagement of Ohr was highlighted during a congressional review of some text messages between Ohr and Steele:
Mr. Ohr: " The FBI had asked me a few days before, when I reported to them my latest conversation with Chris Steele,
they had had would he -- next time you talk with him, could you ask him if he would be willing to meet again."
Rep. Jordan: " So this is the re-engagement?"
Mr. Ohr: " Yes."
The texts being referenced were sent on May 15, 2017, and refer to a request that Ohr received from the FBI to ask Steele to re-engage
with the FBI in the days after Comey had been fired on May 9.
This was the only time the FBI used Ohr to reach out to Steele.
The Battle Between McCabe and Rosenstein
Two days after Comey was fired, on May 11, 2017, McCabe
testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. While the hearing's original intent had been to focus on national security
threats, Trump's firing of Comey completely altered the topic of the hearing.
McCabe, who
agreed that he would notify the committee "of any effort to interfere with the FBI's ongoing investigation into links between
Russia and the Trump campaign," told members of Congress that there had been "no effort to impede our investigation to date." In
other words, McCabe testified that he was unaware of any evidence of obstruction from Trump or his administration. Notably, Comey's
May 3 testimony may have left McCabe with little choice other than to confirm there had been no obstruction.
McCabe, however, failed to inform the committee that he was actively considering opening an obstruction-of-justice probe of Trump
-- a path he would initiate in a meeting with Rosenstein just five days later.
On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein allegedly
suggested
to McCabe that he could secretly record Trump. It was at this
meeting that McCabe was "pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation into the president," according to witness
accounts reported by The Washington Post.
In addition to McCabe, Rosenstein, and McCabe's special counsel, Lisa Page, there were one or two others present, including Rosenstein's
chief of staff , James Crowley, and possibly Scott Schools, the senior-most career attorney at the DOJ and a top aide to Rosenstein.
An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post,
framed the conversation between McCabe and Rosenstein in an entirely different light, noting that Rosenstein had responded with
angry sarcasm to McCabe, saying, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"
This was just five days after McCabe had publicly testified that there was no obstruction on the part of the Trump administration.
Sometime later that same day, both Rosenstein and Trump met with former FBI Director Robert Mueller in the Oval Office. The meeting
was reported as being for the FBI director position, but the idea that Mueller would be considered for the FBI director role seems
highly unlikely.
Mueller had previously served as the FBI director from 2001 to 2013 -- two years beyond the normal 10-year tenure for an FBI director.
In 2011, Obama requested that Mueller stay on as FBI director for an additional two years, which required
special congressional approval .
Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel the following day, on May 17, 2017, and in doing so, Rosenstein removed control
of the Trump–Russia investigation from McCabe and put it in the hands of Mueller.
This was confirmed in a recent statement by a DOJ spokesperson, who said, "The deputy attorney general in fact appointed special
counsel Robert Mueller, and directed that Mr. McCabe be removed from any participation in that investigation."
Following the appointment of Mueller as special counsel, it also appears the FBI's efforts to re-engage with Steele abruptly ended.
'There's No Big There There'
We know the FBI hadn't found any evidence of collusion in the May 2017 timeframe. While McCabe was attempting to open an obstruction
investigation, Peter Strzok -- who played a key role in the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign -- texted Lisa
Page about lacking evidence of collusion:
"You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I'd be there, no question. I hesitate, in part, because
of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there."
Page, who was asked about this text during her July 2018 testimony, said, "So I think this represents that even as far as May
of 2017, we still couldn't answer the question."
James Baker, who was questioned about the Strzok text, was then asked if he'd seen any evidence to the contrary. He stumbled a
bit in his reply:
Rep. Meadows: " Do you have any evidence to the contrary that you observed personally in your official capacity?"
Mr. Baker: " So the difficulty I'm having with your question is, what does 'collusion' mean, and what does 'prove' mean? And
so I don't know how to respond to that."
FBI Leadership Speculates on New Trump–Russia Collusion Narrative
In his testimony, Baker disclosed the actual substance of discussions taking place at the upper echelons of the FBI immediately
following Comey's firing -- that Vladimir Putin had ordered Trump to fire Comey:
Mr. Baker: " We discussed, so to the best of my recollection, with the same people I described earlier: Mr. McCabe, possibly
Mr. Gattis [Carl Ghattas, executive assistant director of the National Security Branch], Mr. Priestap, possibly Lisa Page, possibly
Pete Strzok. I don't remember that specifically."
Rep. Ratcliffe: " So there was -- there was a discussion between those folks, possibly all of the folks that you've identified,
about whether or not President Trump had been ordered to fire Jim Comey by the Russian Government?"
Mr. Baker: " I wouldn't say ordered. I guess I would say the words I sort of used earlier, acting at the behest of and somehow
following directions, somehow executing their will, whether -- and so literally an order or not, I don't know. But -- "
Rep. Ratcliffe: " And so -- "
Mr. Baker: " As a -- it was discussed as a theoretical possibility."
Rep. Ratcliffe: " When was it discussed?"
Mr. Baker: "After the firing, like in the aftermath of the firing."
The FBI, with no actual evidence of collusion after 10 months of investigating, began discussing a complete hypothetical at the
highest levels of leadership as a means to possibly open an obstruction-of-justice investigation of the president of the United States.
During his testimony, Baker told lawmakers: "I had a jaundiced eye about everything, yes. I had skepticism about all this stuff.
I was concerned about all of this. This whole situation was horrible, and it was novel and we were trying to figure out what to do,
and it was highly unusual."
McCabe was later fired for lying to the DOJ inspector general and is currently the subject of a criminal grand jury investigation.
The Fixer
Despite the ongoing assault from the intelligence community and holdovers from the Obama administration, Trump was not entirely
without allies.
Dana Boente, one of the nation's highest-profile federal prosecutors, served in a series of critical shifting roles within the
Trump administration. Boente, who remained the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia until early 2018, concurrently
became the acting attorney general following the firing of Sally Yates. Boente, who was specifically appointed by Trump, was not
directly in the line of succession that had been previously laid out under an unusual executive order from the Obama administration.
Upon the confirmation of Sessions as attorney general, Boente next served as acting deputy attorney general until the confirmation
of Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general on April 25, 2017. Boente then
became the acting head of the DOJ's National Security Division on April 28, 2017, following the sudden resignation of Mary McCord.
Boente was appointed as FBI general counsel on Jan. 23, 2018, replacing Baker, who was demoted and reassigned. Baker is currently
the subject of a criminal leak investigation. Boente remains in his position as FBI general counsel.
On March 31, 2017, the Trump administration asked for the resignations all 46 holdover U.S. attorneys from the Obama administration.
Trump refused to accept the resignations of just three of them -- Boente, Rosenstein, and John Huber.
As Sessions noted in a
March 29, 2018, letter
to congressional chairmen Chuck Grassley, Bob Goodlatte, and Trey Gowdy, Huber was assigned by Sessions to lead a prosecution
team and is currently working with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz:
"I already have directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues previously raised by the Committee. Specifically,
I asked United States Attorney John W. Huber to lead this effort."
The Carter Page FISA application has been the subject of significant media attention, but there's another element to the story
that, although largely ignored, is equally important. It involved what amounted to a surreptitious race between then-NSA Director
Adm. Mike Rogers and DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin.
Following a March 9, 2016, discovery that outside contractors for the FBI had been accessing raw FISA data since at least 2015,
Rogers directed the NSA's Office of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702" at some
point in early April 2016 (
Senate testimony &
pages
83–84 of court ruling).
On April 18, 2016, Rogers moved aggressively in response to the disclosures. He abruptly shut down all FBI outside-contractor
access. At this point, both the FBI and the DOJ's NSD became aware of Rogers's compliance review. They may have known earlier, but
they were certainly aware after outside-contractor access was halted.
The DOJ's NSD maintains oversight of the intelligence agencies' use of Section 702 authority. The NSD and the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence (ODNI) jointly conduct reviews of the intelligence agencies' Section 702 activities every 60 days. The NSD
-- with notice to the ODNI -- is required to report any incidents of agency noncompliance or misconduct to the FISA court.
Instead of issuing individual court orders, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence (DNI) are required
by Section
702 to provide the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) with annual certifications that specify categories of foreign
intelligence information the government is authorized to acquire, pursuant to Section 702.
The attorney general and the DNI also must certify that Intelligence Community agencies will follow targeting procedures and
minimization
procedures that are approved by the FISC as part of the certification.
Carlin filed the government's proposed
2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of the compliance review by Rogers. The NSD
was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016,
report by the NSA 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.
On Sept. 27, 2016, the day after he filed the annual certifications, Carlin announced his
resignation , which would become effective on Oct. 15, 2016.
On Oct. 4, 2016, a standard follow-up court hearing was held (
Page 19
), with Carlin present. Again, he made no disclosure of FISA abuse or other related issues. This lack of disclosure would be
noted by the court later in the April 2017 ruling:
"The government's failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing [was ascribed] to an institutional
'lack of candor.'"
On Oct. 15, 2016, Carlin formally left the NSD.
On Oct. 20, 2016, Rogers was briefed by the NSA compliance officer on findings from the 702 NSA compliance audit. The audit had
uncovered a large number of issues, including numerous "about query" violations (
Senate testimony ).
Rogers shut down all "about query" activity on Oct. 21, 2016. "About queries" are particularly worrisome, since they occur when
the target is neither the sender nor the recipient of the collected communication; rather, the target's "query," such as an email
address, is being passed between two other communicants.
On the same day, the DOJ and FBI sought and received a Title I FISA warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. At this point,
the FISA court still was unaware of the Section 702 violations.
On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally informed the FISA court of his findings:
"On October 24, 2016, the government orally apprised the Court of significant non-compliance with the NSA's minimization procedures
involving queries of data acquired under Section 702 using U.S. person identifiers. The full scope of non-compliant querying practices
had not been previously disclosed to the Court."
Rogers appeared formally before the FISA court on Oct. 26, 2016, and presented the written findings of his audit:
"Two days later, on the day the Court otherwise would have had to complete its review of the certifications and procedures, the government
made a written submission regarding those compliance problems and the Court held a hearing to address them.
"The government reported that the NSA IG and OCO were conducting other reviews covering different time periods, with preliminary
results suggesting that the problem was widespread during all periods under review."
The FISA court was unaware of the FISA "query" violations until they were presented to the court by then-NSA Director Rogers.
Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications, apparently in order to avoid raising
suspicions at the FISA court ahead of receiving the Carter 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. FISA
Abuse & the FISC
Rogers presented his findings directly to the FISA court's presiding judge, Rosemary Collyer. Collyer and Rogers would work together
for the next six months, addressing the issues that Rogers had uncovered.
It was Collyer who wrote the
April 26, 2017,
FISA court ruling on the entire episode. It also was Collyer who signed the original FISA warrant on Carter Page on Oct. 21,
2016, before being apprised of the many issues by Rogers.
The litany of abuses described in the April 26, 2017, ruling was shocking and detailed the use of private contractors by the FBI
in relation to Section 702 data. Collyer referred to it as "a very serious Fourth Amendment issue." The FBI was specifically singled
out by the court numerous times in the ruling:
"The improper access previously afforded the contractors has been discontinued. The Court is nonetheless 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."
Rogers informed Collyer of the ongoing FISA abuses by the FBI and NSD just three days after she personally signed the Carter Page
FISA warrant.
Virtually every FBI and NSD official with material involvement in the original Carter Page FISA application would later be removed
-- either through firing or resignation.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated the wrong month for Christopher Steele's 2016 meeting with the FBI in
Rome. The meeting took place in September 2016.
They are afraid to admin that a color revolution was launched to depose Trump after the
elections of 2016. Essentially a coup d'état by intelligence agencies and Clinton wing of
Democratic Party.
Notable quotes:
"... The 53 House Intel interviews. House Intelligence interviewed many key players in the Russia probe and asked the DNI to declassify those interviews nearly a year ago, after sending the transcripts for review last November. There are several big reveals, I'm told, including the first evidence that a lawyer tied to the Democratic National Committee had Russia-related contacts at the CIA. ..."
"... The Stefan Halper documents. It has been widely reported that European-based American academic Stefan Halper and a young assistant, Azra Turk, worked as FBI sources . ..."
"... Page/Papadopoulos exculpatory statements. Another of Nunes' five buckets, these documents purport to show what the two Trump aides were recorded telling undercover assets or captured in intercepts insisting on their innocence. Papadopoulos told me he told an FBI undercover source in September 2016 that the Trump campaign was not trying to obtain hacked Clinton documents from Russia and considered doing so to be treason. ..."
"... The 'Gang of Eight' briefing materials. These were a series of classified briefings and briefing books the FBI and DOJ provided key leaders in Congress in the summer of 2018 that identify shortcomings in the Russia collusion narrative. ..."
"... The Steele spreadsheet. I wrote recently that the FBI kept a spreadsheet on the accuracy and reliability of every claim in the Steele dossier. According to my sources, it showed as much as 90 percent of the claims could not be corroborated, were debunked or turned out to be open-source internet rumors. ..."
"... The Steele interview. It has been reported, and confirmed, that the DOJ's inspector general (IG) interviewed the former British intelligence operative for as long as 16 hours about his contacts with the FBI while working with Clinton's opposition research firm, Fusion GPS. It is clear from documents already forced into the public view by lawsuits that Steele admitted in the fall of 2016 that he was desperate to defeat Trump ..."
"... The redacted sections of the third FISA renewal application. This was the last of four FISA warrants targeting the Trump campaign; it was renewed in June 2017 after special counsel Robert Mueller 's probe had started, and signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein . It is the one FISA application that House Republicans have repeatedly asked to be released, and I'm told the big reveal in the currently redacted sections of the application is that it contained both misleading information and evidence of intrusive tactics used by the U.S. government to infiltrate Trump's orbit. ..."
"... Records of allies' assistance. Multiple sources have said a handful of U.S. allies overseas – possibly Great Britain, Australia and Italy – were asked to assist FBI efforts to check on Trump connections to Russia. ..."
"... Attorney General Bill Barr's recent comments that "the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign, to me, is unprecedented and it's a serious red line that's been crossed." ..."
As the Russiagate circus attempts to quietly disappear over the horizon, with Democrats
preferring to shift the anti-Trump narrative back to "racist", "white supremacist",
"xenophobe", and the mainstream media ready to squawk "recession"; the Trump administration may
have a few more cards up its sleeve before anyone claims the higher ground in this farce we
call an election campaign.
As
The Hill's John Solomon details, in September 2018 that President Trump told my Hill.TV
colleague Buck Sexton and me that he would order the release of all classified documents
showing what the FBI, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other U.S. intelligence agencies may
have done wrong in the Russia probe.
And while it's been almost a year since then, of feet-dragging and cajoling and
deep-state-fighting, we wonder, given Solomon's revelations below, if the president is getting
ready to play his 'Trump' card.
Here are the documents that
Solomon believes have the greatest chance of rocking Washington, if declassified:
1.) Christopher
Steele 's confidential human source reports at the FBI. These documents, known in bureau
parlance as 1023 reports, show exactly what transpired each time Steele and his FBI handlers
met in the summer and fall of 2016 to discuss his anti-Trump dossier. The big reveal, my
sources say, could be the first evidence that the FBI shared sensitive information with
Steele, such as the existence of the classified
Crossfire Hurricane operation targeting the Trump campaign. It would be a huge discovery
if the FBI fed Trump-Russia intel to Steele in the midst of an election, especially when his
ultimate opposition-research client was Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National
Committee (DNC). The FBI has released only one or two of these reports under FOIA lawsuits
and they were 100 percent redacted. The American public deserves better.
2.) The 53 House Intel interviews. House Intelligence interviewed many key players in
the Russia probe and asked the DNI to declassify those interviews nearly a year ago, after
sending the transcripts for review last November. There are several big reveals, I'm told,
including the first evidence that a lawyer tied to the Democratic National Committee had
Russia-related contacts at the CIA.
3.) The Stefan Halper documents. It has been widely reported that European-based
American academic Stefan Halper and a young assistant, Azra Turk,
worked as FBI sources . We know for sure that one or both had contact with targeted
Trump aides like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos at the end of the
election. My sources tell me there may be other documents showing Halper continued working
his way to the top of Trump's transition and administration, eventually reaching senior
advisers like Peter Navarro inside the White House in summer 2017. These documents would show
what intelligence agencies worked with Halper, who directed his activity, how much he was
paid and how long his contacts with Trump officials were directed by the U.S. government's
Russia probe.
4.) The October 2016 FBI email chain. This is a key document identified by Rep. Nunes and
his investigators. My sources say it will show exactly what concerns the FBI knew about and
discussed with DOJ about using Steele's dossier and other evidence to support a Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in October 2016. If
those concerns weren't shared with FISA judges who approved the warrant, there could be major
repercussions.
5.) Page/Papadopoulos exculpatory statements. Another of Nunes' five buckets, these
documents purport to show what the two Trump aides were recorded telling undercover assets or
captured in intercepts insisting on their innocence. Papadopoulos told me he told an FBI
undercover source in September 2016 that the Trump campaign was not trying to obtain hacked
Clinton documents from Russia and considered doing so to be treason. If he made that
statement with the FBI monitoring, and it was not disclosed to the FISA court, it could be
another case of FBI or DOJ misconduct.
6.) The 'Gang of Eight' briefing materials. These were a series of classified
briefings and briefing books the FBI and DOJ provided key leaders in Congress in the summer
of 2018 that identify shortcomings in the Russia collusion narrative. Of all the
documents congressional leaders were shown, this is most frequently cited to me in private as
having changed the minds of lawmakers who weren't initially convinced of FISA abuses or FBI
irregularities.
7.) The Steele spreadsheet. I
wrote recently that the FBI kept a spreadsheet on the accuracy and reliability of every
claim in the Steele dossier. According to my sources, it showed as much as 90 percent of the
claims could not be corroborated, were debunked or turned out to be open-source internet
rumors. Given Steele's own effort to leak intel in his dossier to the media before
Election Day, the public deserves to see the FBI's final analysis of his credibility. A
document
I reviewed recently showed the FBI described Steele's information as only "minimally
corroborated" and the bureau's confidence in him as "medium."
9.) The redacted sections of the third FISA renewal application. This was the last of
four FISA warrants targeting the Trump campaign; it was renewed in June 2017 after special
counsel Robert
Mueller 's probe had started, and signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein . It is the one
FISA application that House Republicans have repeatedly asked to be released, and I'm told
the big reveal in the currently redacted sections of the application is that it contained
both misleading information and evidence of intrusive tactics used by the U.S. government to
infiltrate Trump's orbit.
10.) Records of allies' assistance. Multiple sources have said a handful of U.S.
allies overseas – possibly Great Britain, Australia and Italy – were asked to
assist FBI efforts to check on Trump connections to Russia. Members of Congress have
searched recently for some key contact documents with British intelligence . My sources
say these documents might help explain Attorney General Bill Barr's
recent comments that "the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and
counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign, to me, is
unprecedented and it's a serious red line that's been crossed."
These documents, when declassified, would show more completely how a routine
counterintelligence probe was hijacked to turn the most awesome spy powers in America against a
presidential nominee in what was essentially a political dirty trick orchestrated by
Democrats.
I disagree with Solomon. Nothing will "doom" the swamp unless the righteous few are
willing to indict, prosecute and carry out sentencing for the guilty. Exposing the guilty
accomplishes nothing, because anyone paying attention already knows of their crimes. Those
who want to believe lies will still believe them after the truth comes out.
It's ALL A WASTE OF TIME unless we follow through.
Does anyone see a pattern here after the 2009 Tea Party movement began?
2009 - Republicans: "If we win back the House, we can accomplish our agenda."
2011 - Republicans: "If we win back the Senate, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE:
After winning back the House)
2012 - Republicans: "If we win back the Senate, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 2
YEARS After winning back the House)
2013 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE:
1 YEAR after winning back the House and the Senate)
2014 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE:
2 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)
2015 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE:
3 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)
2016 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE:
4 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)
2017 - Republicans: "Now that we've won back the Presidency, we can accomplish our
agenda." (NOTE: After winning back the House 6 YEARS AGO and the Senate 4 YEARS AGO)
2018 - Republicans: "Now that we've won back the Presidency, we can accomplish our
agenda." (NOTE: After winning back the House 7 YEARS AGO and the Senate 5 YEARS AGO)
2019 - John Solomon - "If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed"
I hate to say it, but I DON'T BELIEVE YOU, JOHN.
ALL WE HAVE HEARD OVER THE COURSE OF THIS DECADE IS "IF THIS HAPPENS...THEN THEY ARE
DOOMED / WE CAN ACCOMPLISH OUR AGENDA / YADDA YADDA YADDA.
WHEN THE FOLLOWING ARE FOUND GUILTY OF TREASON, THEN AND ONLY THEN WILL I BELIEVE YOU:
CLINTONS
OBAMA
BIDEN
KERRY
BRENNAN
CLAPPER
COMEY
MCCABE
MUELLER
WEISSMAN
STRZOK
RICE
POWERS
LYNCH
YATES
ET AL
WHY ARE THESE TREASONOUS, VILE, CORRUPT CRIMINALS NOT INDICTED FOR TREASON?
As if there's any major philosophical difference between the Librtads and Zionist
Cocksuckvatives.
Both sides use the .gov agencies to subvert and ignore the Constitution whenever possible.
Best example is WikiLeaks and how each party wished Assange would just go away when he
revealed damaging information about both sides on multiple occasions.
Because snoopydawg linked us to Craig Murray in an
essay yesterday, I happened
to see this important commentary.
Murray makes the point that much of the wealth controlling our obscenely corrupt system has come from the pillaging of Russian
resources during the Yeltsin period and that the motive for demonizing Putin is to keep that wealth out of the hands of the Russian
people.
(When shut out of the American system his sons so vaunt, Fred Koch went to the Soviet Union, which his sons so malign, to make
the Koch family fortune.)
This extended litigation effectively put Winkler-Koch out of business in the U.S. for several years. "Unable to succeed
at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union".[13] Between 1929 and 1932 Winkler-Koch "trained Bolshevik engineers[14] and
helped Stalin's regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries" in the Soviet Union. "Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged
several of Koch's Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration."[13] The
company also built installations in countries throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia.[1] Koch partnered with William Rhodes
Davis to build the third-largest oil refinery serving the Third Reich, a project which was personally approved by Adolf Hitler.[15]
Koch President and COO David L. Robertson acknowledged that Winkler-Koch provided the cracking unit for the 1934 Hamburg refinery,
but said that it was but one of many "iconic" American companies doing business in Germany at the time.[16]
(When shut out of the American system his sons so vaunt, Fred Koch went to the Soviet Union, which his sons so malign, to
make the Koch family fortune.)
I was trying to warn away from hijacking the thread to make it about the Kochs instead of about Russia. Or about RUSSIA!, which
is how I've been referring to the nation since Russiagate began.
You open up markets and provide a fence for the local oligarchs to offload vital public infrastructure and national resources.
Selling rubles for dollars was a no brainer. Rinse, repeat.
Up until the 21st Century, this was only done to the 3rd world and those of the 2nd world who didn't play ball.
I've seen the model looming over America too. The hollowing out and offshoring of America, IMO, is quite similar to the pillaging
of Russia. It's just lacking the hard coup and cannon fire at the capitol.
The same banksters are financing and laundering the money to boot.
I guess sheep are just meant to be fleeced, eh?
Good on Murray for calling it out. I like that guy.
I've just begun reading it, and already there is mention of HSBC, which connects to Mueller, when he was FBI Director, and
Comey, who was a board member of some part of HSBC.
I kept telling them that, unless they dealt with the City, separating from Europe wasn't going to help them at all. It's not
internationalism that's hurting them: it's the depredations of international capital. Leaving the European Union won't fix that.
While I understand that they feel like they're losing their culture and feel threatened by immigration on that account, the
deeper sufferings of their lives, both economic and political, go back, not to some person with dark skin and less money speaking
a foreign tongue who immigrates to Britain, but to good upstanding upper-class British financiers. And the good upstanding upper-class
foreign financiers with whom those Brits have made deals.
One just wonders (but I have read no-one raising this question) why Epstein stopped being useful, why was his "business" dismantled.
All further steps, "suicide" comprised, are standard operation.
The scandal is about the Mega Group [Bonfman and Wexner and the assorted group of other Israel-firsters with the ties to
Mossad], Maxwells [the old embezzler and his daughter the pimp, both tied to Mossad] and Mossad: "The Spy Story at the Heart
of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal."
The end: blackmail the "elite" clients on behalf of a foreign intelligence service.
Thanks for posting this most interesting and edifying story about Israeli decade-long, standard practice, of using sex trafficking
to blackmail and control politicians.
Although Shulamit Cohen's story is highly embellished by official historiography, she herself started working as a prostitute.
The Syrian military she trapped was Adib Al Shishkali, who went on to become Syria's president.
The young girl she used to bait her "clients" was a 14-year Armenian youngster called Lucy Kobelian.
One of Mossad' main modes of operation is prostitution. Not surprising. The Jewish tribe is
exceptional in having as its heroines a set of prostituting women -- Esther, Judith, Dalila.
No wonder that the orthodox Jews treat women like filth. All within the national tradition.
In 1967, Shulamit Cohen, Rachel Raffoul and two of the Jewish prostitutes were released
in a secret prisoner exchange after the Six Day War: they were exchanged against three
officers of the Syrian air force (the official version states that they were exchanged for
"over 500 prisoners").
Today Shula is a national hero of Israel and her story has been whitewashed and made
"apt for public consumption". She lives in the neighborhood of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish
fundamentalists, the Haredim, who are probably ignorant of her past.
And if a man and a woman are drowning in a river, first they'll save the man, "who is
obligated to perform more commandments," whereas a woman's "wisdom is only in the spindle."
In fact, "words of Torah should be burned rather than being given to women."
A man must say three blessings every day during morning prayers: He thanks God "that He
didn't make me a gentile, that He didn't make me a woman, that He didn't make me an
ignoramus."
Former Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko trace to Steele dossier is a real shocker.
Notable quotes:
"... On December 5, 2016, Bruce Ohr emailed himself an Excel spreadsheet, seemingly from his wife Nellie Ohr, titled " WhosWho19Sept2016 ." The spreadsheet purports to show relationship descriptions and "linkages" between Donald Trump, his family and criminal figures, many of whom were Russians. ..."
"... If you want to have more fun, search the pdf using the term "BAYROCK." You will discover that Nellie Ohr, like a female Don Quixote, is searching desperately to link Trump and Sater to dirty Russian money. What she does not suspect is that Sater was being used, via his company Bayrock, to try to gain access to Russians who were potential targets of the FBI. ..."
"... What is not emphasized in the piece, and it is something I want to direct you to, is that the idea or impetus to launch the investigation of Butina came courtesy of Christopher Steele, who was relaying rumor and conjecture to Bruce Ohr. ..."
"... FBI Director Christopher Wray reminds me of one of the workers in the bowels of the Titanic who was furiously shoveling coal into the doomed boilers of the sinking ship. The FBI, like the Titanic, is in trouble. ..."
"... It also gave immunity to all of the people on Hillary's team that participated in obstruction of justice. On that same day, Jim Comey signed off on a separate memo that decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Larry..Fusion GPS has always refused to Reveal who where its Financial support came from... ..."
"... So..the Timeline Indicates Fusion GPS was hired by The "Washington Free Beacon" around October 2015 to background checks and Profiles of The Republican Candidates for President.and that Fusion GPS continued to do so until May 2016..when it became clear that Donald Trump clinched the Nomination.. ..."
"... I wonder why AG Barr isn't forcing the FBI to comply sooner with Judge Boasberg's ruling to hand over unredacted Comey Memos and Archey Declarations? ..."
"... So what did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it? ..."
"... Nellie Ohr was working for a privately-owned firm that had employed her to make false accusations about Trump's alleged connections to Russians in order to sabotage his presidency and lay the groundwork for his impeachment. ..."
"... They also hired foreign agent, Chris Steele to concoct a thoroughly-debunked dossier for the same purpose. ..."
"... Can these people be charged with a crime or have we entered a new world of 'dirty tricks'??? ..."
"... Examination of the Nellie Ohr documents given to the FBI shows some of her source material also came from former Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko and a lawsuit she filed against Manafort. ..."
"... So, Bruce Ohr became a conduit of information not only for intelligence from Clinton's British opposition-researcher but also from his wife's curation of evidence from a Clinton foreign ally and Manafort enemy inside Ukraine. Talk about foreign influence in a U.S. election! ..."
"... The lines between government officials and informants, unverified political dirt and real intelligence, personal interest and law enforcement, became too blurred for the Justice Department's own good. ..."
There are many moving pieces in the drama surrounding the Deep State attempt to kill the Trump Presidency. God Bless Judicial
Watch. I think most of the key evidence that has surfaced came courtesy of Tom Fitton, Chris Farrell and their team of tireless workers.
I want to bring you back to
Mr. Felix Sater . He was part of Bayrock, which worked closely with Donald Trump's organization and, most importantly of all,
was an FBI Confidential Human Source since December of 1998.
Thanks to Judicial Watch we have a new dump of Bruce Ohr emails, which include several from his wife, Nellie. There are 330 pages
to wade thru (you can
see
them here ). There
is one item in particular I encourage you to look at:
On December 5, 2016, Bruce Ohr emailed himself an Excel spreadsheet, seemingly from his wife Nellie Ohr, titled "
WhosWho19Sept2016
." The spreadsheet purports to show relationship descriptions and "linkages" between Donald Trump, his family and criminal figures,
many of whom were Russians. This list of individuals allegedly "linked to Trump" include: a Russian involved in a "gangland
killing;" an Uzbek mafia don; a former KGB officer suspected in the murder of Paul Tatum; a Russian who reportedly "buys up banks
and pumps them dry"; a Russian money launderer for Sergei Magnitsky; a Turk accused of shipping oil for ISIS; a couple who lent their
name to the Trump Institute, promoting its "get-rich-quick schemes"; a man who poured him a drink; and others.
The spreadsheet starts on page 301. If you search the document for the name Felix Sater, he will pop up. Now here is the curious
and, I suppose, reassuring thing about this document--Nellie Ohr did not have a clue that Felix Sater was an active FBI informant.
We can at least give the FBI credit for protecting Sater's identity from Nellie Ohr and, more importantly, her husband, DOJ official
Bruce Ohr.
If you want to have more fun, search the pdf using the term "BAYROCK." You will discover that Nellie Ohr, like a female Don
Quixote, is searching desperately to link Trump and Sater to dirty Russian money. What she does not suspect is that Sater was being
used, via his company Bayrock, to try to gain access to Russians who were potential targets of the FBI.
One point is clear--she uncovered no evidence implicating Trump working with the Russians, either thru Felix Sater or one of the
other "suspects" she exhaustively listed.
Shifting gears, there are two very important pieces recently posted at The Conservative Tree House that I encourage you to read:
What is not emphasized in the piece, and it is something I want to direct you to, is that the idea or impetus to launch the
investigation of Butina came courtesy of Christopher Steele, who was relaying rumor and conjecture to Bruce Ohr.
You can find this information in the
Bruce
Ohr 302s that Judicial Watch also secured. Marina Butina was unfairly and unjustly portrayed and prosecuted as a Russian intelligence
agent. It was a damn lie.
I do not ever want to hear another American complaining about an American State Department or CIA employee who is entrapped and
unfairly prosecuted in Russia.
We have done the same damn thing that we have accused the Soviets of doing. The same thing. It is shameful.
The
second piece is the ultimate feel good piece. Kudos to its author, Sundance.
He details how a Federal Judge, infuriated by the FBIs stupidity and mendacity, tells the Bureau to go pound sand. The FBI is
frantically trying to prevent the Archey Declarations from being revealed thanks to a lawsuit brought by CNN (finally, CNN did something
right).
The Archey Declarations provide a detailed description of the memos written and illegally removed from FBI Headquarters by that
sanctimonious twit, Jim Comey. More shoes will be dropping in the coming days.
It appears that Inspector General Horowitz is going to present at least one report on Jim Comey and one report on the FISA abuse
by the FBI.
FBI Director Christopher Wray reminds me of one of the workers in the bowels of the Titanic who was furiously shoveling coal
into the doomed boilers of the sinking ship. The FBI, like the Titanic, is in trouble.
Finally, Gateway Pundit's Joe Hoft put up an important piece today (
see here ). Here is the bottomline, and keep this in mind as you read the piece, on June 20, 2016 the FBI signed off on a deal
with Hillary Clinton's attorney's that gave Hillary's team the right to destroy computers and emails.
It also gave immunity to all of the people on Hillary's team that participated in obstruction of justice. On that same day,
Jim Comey signed off on a separate memo that decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
The fix was in more than a month before Jim Comey appeared on camera to try to explain why he was not recommending prosecution
of Hillary for putting Top Secret information on her unclassified server.
Jim Comey lied when he declared that could not prove "intent."
I am sure that those of you who have never held a clearance and handled Top Secret material probably believed that lie.
But anyone who knows how the TS system is set up knows that the ONLY WAY, I repeat, the ONLY WAY to put TS material on an unclassified
server is to do so intentionally. There is no way to do this mistakenly.
Jim Ticehurst said in reply to Jim Ticehurst... ,
Larry..Fusion GPS has always refused to Reveal who where its Financial support came from...
So..the Timeline Indicates
Fusion GPS was hired by The "Washington Free Beacon" around October 2015 to background checks and Profiles of The Republican Candidates
for President.and that Fusion GPS continued to do so until May 2016..when it became clear that Donald Trump clinched the Nomination..
creating Phase 2..Operations..
"The Washington Free Beacon ".Has an Editor in Chief ..who is William Kristols Son In Law..And William Kristols ..Father....Irving
Kristol..is Called..."the God Father of Neo Conservatism". William Kristol..was a John McCain supporter..
Thus Fusion GPS..retained Nellie Ohr..(strangly..NO Wiki Profile) who apparently had to Use her husbnd Bruce Ohrs Clearances,,to
continue Her Collaberation with Fusion GPS..
By June 2016 the Strategy was to bring in Christopher Steele..who was know to Bruce Ohr back to 2006.. Strange.. NO early life
BIOS for Bruce or Nellie Ohr..
I wonder why AG Barr isn't forcing the FBI to comply sooner with Judge Boasberg's ruling to hand over unredacted Comey Memos
and Archey Declarations?
The Gateway Pundit item about the ridiculously unfair and unethical deals made in Hillary Clinton's email scandal investigation
is just further proof of how the Clinton taint infected the FBI. "Crooked" is a very apt epithet, that's for sure. I'd love to
know how much Bill and Hill raked in during her Sec'y. of State racketeering.
You say: "One point is clear--she uncovered no evidence implicating Trump working with the Russians, either thru Felix Sater or
one of the other "suspects" she exhaustively listed."
This is true, but it is also true that Nellie Ohr was working for a privately-owned firm that had employed her to make
false accusations about Trump's alleged connections to Russians in order to sabotage his presidency and lay the groundwork for
his impeachment.
They also hired foreign agent, Chris Steele to concoct a thoroughly-debunked dossier for the same purpose.
Can these people be charged with a crime or have we entered a new world of 'dirty tricks'???
... Examination of the Nellie Ohr documents given to the FBI shows some of her source material also came from former Ukrainian
presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko and a lawsuit she filed against Manafort.
Why is that significant? Tymoshenko and Hillary Clinton had a simpatico relationship after the former secretary of State
went out of her way in January 2013 to advocate for Tymoshenko's release from prison on corruption charges.
So, Bruce Ohr became a conduit of information not only for intelligence from Clinton's British opposition-researcher
but also from his wife's curation of evidence from a Clinton foreign ally and Manafort enemy inside Ukraine. Talk about foreign
influence in a U.S. election!
...
The tales of Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Christopher Steele, Yulia Tymoshenko, and those DEA and TSA agents raise a stark warning:
The lines between government officials and informants, unverified political dirt and real intelligence, personal interest
and law enforcement,
became too blurred for the Justice Department's own good.
The person responsible for securing the release of Yulia Tymoshenko was Chancellor Merkel. Further, that USA opposed Tymoshenko.
quote
As for one of the leaders of the war party in Kiev, Merkel has privately and publicly endorsed every claim of Yulia Tymoshenko,
promoting her release from prison and protecting her campaigns for war against Russia, even though – according to the high-level
German source – “they [Chancellery, Foreign Ministry] have known for years that [Tymoshenko] was a crook.”
endquote
There is a lot more detail Tymoshenko's corruption and Merkel's rescue here:
That suggest that FBI actions were influenced by Obama administration and CIA to much greater
expent thatn we assuned.
Notable quotes:
"... It may be that much of the dossier was created out of whole cloth by Nellie Ohr who was tasked to create a narrative that jibed with Simpson's political objectives. ..."
"... The ukraine is probably behind a great deal of the "info" the democrats and fib used.. ..."
In reviewing these 302s there are some salient points I want to bring to your attention.
First, Christopher Steele was terminated as an FBI Confidential Human Source at the end of
September 2016 for leaking to the press. That should have put an end to the relationship.
Instead, the FBI starts using Bruce Ohr, the number four guy at the Department of Justice, as a
cutout. Absolutely no justification for this kind of behavior by the FBI. It is, at a minimum,
unethical and creates a real problem if any of the info collected from Ohr was to be used in a
court proceeding. Something known as the "fruit of the poisonous tree" would kick in and the
so-called evidence proffered by Ohr would be inadmissible or unusable because of Steele's
previous lies to the FBI.
Second, Glenn Simpson played a huge role in helping spread anti-Trump propaganda generated
by Steele. In fact, it was Simpson's insistence on Steele speaking with the press that got
Steele terminated as an FBI source.
Third, the FBI knew by mid-December 2016 that Bruce Ohr's wife, Nellie, was working with
Simpson and Steele. This too should have set off alarm bells about the potential conflicts of
interest and unethical conduct.
Fourth, evidence used ultimately against Paul Manafort came from Nellie Ohr. If this was not
disclosed to Manafort's attorney's there is a likely Brady violation, which bolster's
Manafort's prospects for an appeal.
Fifth, Steele and Simpson made several claims of fact about Russia ties to the Trump
campaign that were later proven to be false. For example, stating that Michael Cohen was in
Prague meeting the Russians. Important to note that Christopher Steele produced the final
report of the so-called dossier bearing his name on 13 December 2016 yet this information was
"passed" to Ohr one day prior to the date on the report.
Sixth, the "debriefing" of Ohr on 12 December 2016 also provided the foundation for going
after Marina Butina. (See Sara Carter's excellent update on this case
here ). The false information from Steele/Simpson via Bruce Ohr became the pretext for
launching an investigation of Butina, who was working for a wealthy Russian banker, Alexander
Torshin. This too turns out to have been a fabrication. I believe this provides Butina's
attorneys more ammunition for arguing prosecutorial misconduct and failure to provide critical
Brady material.
Seventh, Ohr's report that Simpson and Steele were communicating with the State Department,
including Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland and Kathleen Kavalec makes it clear that State
Department was used as a front to pass on info from the questionable Steele Dossier. This
information was used in the FISA warrant and provided a seemingly reliable justification for
spying on Carter Page (see the Page FISA warrant here
.)
And finally, Fusion GPS, which was hired on behalf of the Clinton Campaign, was regularly
communicating and coordinating with Obama's Department of Justice and Department of State. This
was a complete abuse of power.
Now, here is the summary of the 302s:
11/22/2016 (entered on 12/19/2006)
Ohr met with Steele in 2007 (not sure of date) at a conference.
July 30, 2016 Steele met Ohr for breakfast. Steele claimed Carter Page had met with Russian
Sechin at a conference.
States that Glenn Simpson hired Steele and Ohr's wife to dig up dirt on Trump's connections
to Russia.
Noted that reporting was going to the Clinton Campaign, Jonathan Winer and the FBI.
Ohr met with Steele in late September and was told about Alfa Bank ties to Trump and the
Sergei Millian organization.
Noted that Steele was desperate to stop Trump and to thwart the Kremlin.
Ohr knew that Glenn Simpson and "others" were meeting with Victoria Nuland.
12/05/2016 (entered on 12/19/2016) (drafted on 12/12/2016)
Glenn Simpson directed Christopher Steele to speak to the press, including David Corn at
Mother Jones.
Ohr provided FBI info on Manafort Chronology prepared by his wife.
12/12/2016 (entered on 12/19/2016) (Drafted on 12/14/2016)
Ohr states, per Simpson, that Cohen replaced Manafort and Page as the contact with the
Russians.
Says that Cohen met with Russians in Prague.
Claims that Torshin is a Russian mobster and is trying to infiltrate the NRA and was pushing
money to Trump.
Simpson opined that Sergei Millian was an SVR officer and a link to Trump.
12/20/2016 (entered on 12/27/2016)
Thumb drive with Nelly Ohr's research passed to FBI.
1/23/2017 (entered on 1/31/2017) (drafted on 1/25/2017)
Simpson tells Ohr a source will be outed in the coming days.
Steele claims he met with a McCain staffer prior to October 2016
1/25/017 (entered on 1/27/2017)
Ohr spoke with Steele on 25 January 2017.
1/27/2017 (entered on 1/27/2017)
Steele told Ohr he wanted to keep lines of communication open.
02/06/2017 (entered on 02/08/2017)
Ohr contacted by Steele via What'sApp on 31 January 2017. Was reacting to firing of Sally
Yates. Worried that if Ohr got fired he would have no one to talk to.
"Interviewing agents asked Ohr to ask Steele if he would be comfortable getting the name of
an FBI agent."
Ohr reminded agents that Steele had spoken several times prior to 2016 Presidential election
with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec. Ohr identified one of the sources
for Steele's report as a Ukranian.
02/14/2017 (entered on 02/15/2017)
Ohr tells FBI about Steele's concerns about his business. Identifies other lawyer (name
blacked out) he is working with. Steele is preparing a proposal to re-establish his business
releationship with the FBI.
05/08/2017 (entered on 05/10/2017)
Steele tells Ohr that he is worried about Comey's upcoming testimony. Ohr tells Steele what
Comey will say and Steele is "happy."
Ohr said that Glenn Simpson would be visiting Steele soon.
As an aside, note the similarities between Steele and Downer. Both carried some imprimatur of
credibility based on prior government service, and popped up from no where and returned to
relative obscurity after producing a document that was able to be immediately misused by
others for the same purpose.
I'd wondered why anyone would want to involve Downer in these events, the man is a moron.
However, one of his greatest strengths is producing wonderful well written reports, and to
that extent would appear to have been chosen well.
It is, however despicable the whole story is, suggesting - and in its own way entertaining -
that apparently the experienced gutter lady "Eff the EU" Nuland was also involved, probably
bringing in her ... regime change experience aquired in the Ukraine.
I wonder, did she ever say "Eff the Orange Man too"? Alas. Either way, more interesting to
me is whether she also handed out cookies to Steel and/or Ohr?
As far as financial price of the Ohr & Steel operation goes, compared to the 5+
billion that were according to Nuland proudly poured into Ukraine to get Maidan and backstab
Janukowytsch, hiring Steel to backstab somebody else - Trump - was probably way cheaper -
i.e. 'however illegal, it was more economic'.
That said, I detested Nuland well before this story for her Maidan stuntery and the "Eff
the EU" arrogance, but then, she really made it easy even for an at time even more benevolent
observer.
But the big question that I would be interested to get opinions on is this:
when is all this stuff going to be revealed in a way that not even the readers of the WaPo
NYT et al can deny thet the entire Russia collusion/interference story is false from
beginning to end?
The longer the Russia-interfered-in-our-election-and-everybody-else's lie is perpetrated,
the closer we all get to nuclear annihilation. So it's a matter of some importance.
Any ideas?
One that occurs to me is that nothing will happen -- it will all dribble out over such a long
time that nothing will ever be ever dramatic and simple enough to make an effect.
My other thought is that Trump & Co wants the big explosive revelations to hit the
street next Mar/Apr so as to destroy the Dems in 2020.
But many of us have known the general outline of the conspiracy for a couple of years, but
nothing big ever hits the street and the lies get dug in a little deeper every day that
they're not exploded.
So, state department honchos--Victoria Nuland, Kavalec and Sally Yates (DOJ)--all had some
knowledge of what was going on, right? And so did national security advisor Susan Rice.
Doesn't that prove that Obama must have been in the loop?
I think it does.
Second, how much of Nellie Ohr's russia research actually ended up in the steele dossier?
I think that it is very unlikely that Chris Steele maintained his sketchy connections in
Russia after the seismic political changes in the early 2000s. It may be that much of the
dossier was created out of whole cloth by Nellie Ohr who was tasked to create a narrative
that jibed with Simpson's political objectives.
"... Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests of voters. ..."
Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which
varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms
spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a
loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor
interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests
of voters.
"... "I can report absolutely that the Durham investigators have now obtained an audiotape deposition of Joseph Mifsud, where he describes his work, why he targeted George Papadopoulos , who directed him to do that, what directions he was given, and why he set that entire process of introducing Papadopoulos to Russia in motion in March of 2016, which is really the flashpoint the starting point of this whole Russia collusion narrative," Solomon told Fox News' Sean Hannity. ..."
"... You can't save the Russian collusion narrative, if you can't find any real Russians anywhere in the story. The FBI under James Comey will then be seen as having engaged in an operation to entrap people, and "Russian agents" turn out to be fakes working for the FBI and who were making fake offers of Russian help to the Trump campaign. ..."
"... Mifsud turning out to be a fake Russian agent working for the FBI ..."
"... To have to admit that the story was actually right, while they themselves were still peddling the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, would be a most bitter pill for many of these 'legitimate' news outlets to swallow. ..."
"... And yet when it comes to recent developments about Mifsud, a key player in this Trump-Russia collusion narrative, many mainstream reporters appear indifferent at best, or outrightly hostile at worst to these latest developments. ..."
"... While many of these mainstream media reporters have been desperately trying to find some way to save the Trump/Russian collusion narrative, the last thing they want to have to report is that the supposed key Russian agent that started this whole Spygate thing wasn't really a Russian agent, but was instead an FBI asset pretending to be a Russian agent. ..."
While many mainstream media journalists have been
spinning fantasies for more than two years, based on Russian collusion stories being handed to
them by anonymous sources, crack reporter John Solomon of The Hill has been pursuing real leads
and uncovering actual evidence.
Now, Solomon is reporting that an audiotape
containing professor Joseph Mifsud's deposition has been given to both U.S. Attorney John
Durham's investigators and to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"I can report absolutely that the Durham investigators have now obtained an audiotape
deposition of Joseph Mifsud, where he describes his work, why he targeted George Papadopoulos , who
directed him to do that, what directions he was given, and why he set that entire process of
introducing Papadopoulos to Russia in motion in March of 2016, which is really the flashpoint
the starting point of this whole Russia collusion narrative," Solomon told
Fox News' Sean Hannity.
"I can also confirm that the Senate Judiciary Committee has also obtained the same
deposition," he said.
So I'm wondering why Solomon appears to be the only mainstream reporter pursuing this Mifsud
story.
I suspect it's because many DNC Media outlets, after having fallen deeply and passionately
in love with the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, are reluctant to call attention to something that
would be the final nail in its coffin.
The last thing the mainstream media wants right now would be for Mifsud to go on the record
with both Durham's investigative team and with Congress to say he was working for the FBI and
was only pretending to be a Russian agent.
If Mifsud was an FBI asset sent to entrap Papadopoulos, then there are no real Russian
agents anywhere in this entire Trump-Russia collusion story.
Foreign policy advisor to US President Donald Trump's election campaign, George
Papadopoulos goes through security at the US District Court for his sentencing in Washington,
DC on Sept. 7, 2018. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)
Ponder what that means for a minute.
You can't save the Russian collusion narrative, if you can't find any real Russians
anywhere in the story. The FBI under James Comey will then be seen as having engaged in an
operation to entrap people, and "Russian agents" turn out to be fakes working for the FBI and
who were making fake offers of Russian help to the Trump campaign.
Some of these news media outlets are still - at this late date - claiming there's some life
left in the Russian collusion narrative. Mifsud is literally the last dying hope for these
people that somewhere in all of this there is a real Russian asset and real collusion. They
literally need Mifsud to be a real asset of the Putin government. And if Mifsud goes on the
record to officially affirm he was working for the FBI, then the media's last dying hope is
gone forever.
To hear the mainstream media tell it, Mifsud turning out to be a fake Russian agent
working for the FBI is a "conspiracy theory" created by "right-wing zealots" such as Reps.
Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
To have to admit that the story was actually right, while they themselves were still
peddling the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, would be a most bitter pill for many of these
'legitimate' news outlets to swallow.
Which likely explains why Solomon appears to be just about the only mainstream reporter
pursuing the Mifsud story. If there are any other major news outlet reporters out there avidly
pursuing the facts about Mifsud and his reported contacts and testimony to Justice Department
investigators, they're being pretty quiet about it.
What are the mainstream news reporters who are ignoring the Mifsud story telling themselves,
anyway?
"I can't pursue this new information on Mifsud, because it's taking the story where I
don't want it to go!"?
That's a thought process that happens only to a political activist disguised as a reporter.
No real reporter would ever think that way.
And yet when it comes to recent developments about Mifsud, a key player in this
Trump-Russia collusion narrative, many mainstream reporters appear indifferent at best, or
outrightly hostile at worst to these latest developments.
While many of these mainstream media reporters have been desperately trying to find some
way to save the Trump/Russian collusion narrative, the last thing they want to have to report
is that the supposed key Russian agent that started this whole Spygate thing wasn't really a
Russian agent, but was instead an FBI asset pretending to be a Russian agent.
These selfsame media reporters have spent more than two years mocking the idea that Mifsud
is an FBI asset as something straight out of the right-wing fever swamp of convoluted nonsense
conspiracy theories. This is why so many political activists masquerading as journalists are
desperately hoping that somehow the Mifsud story will just go away and die on its own.
My instinct says they're going to be massively disappointed soon.
The only one's ever colluding with the Russians was Hillary the "******* Rotten" Clinton,
Obongo "the One" and the usual suspects (Comey,Clapper,Brennan,Lynch,) et.al .. FBI/DOJ/CIA Rats, British UN-intelligence,Australian &
Ukraine interference. The DNC server was never hacked by Russians but copied, the
Steele/Fusion GPS dossier was a work of worn out fiction that was originally put together in
2007 and used against McCain.
Russian agent Mifsud working with Papadopoulos to get Hillary emails claimed by
DNC/Crowdstrike/Perkins Coie hacked by Russians before destroyed by Hillary under subpoena,
just a FBI paid actor to keep the narrative going and covering up illegal spying on Trump,
NSA 702 "about" querries by private contractors ang gov. violating FISA which happened much
earlier.
Conservative treehouse does a better job than just about anywhere else I've seen of tying
that all together. But, if they are correct about this, as they've been correct about a lot
of things, it won't change anything or matter at all. None of these people will ever be
indicted, much less spend a single day in jail. Sad, but true. In a year and a half trump
will most likely be gone, and all of this will be memory holed.
Most Democrats still adhere to the Trump - Russia collusion narrative. And they wonder why
some Leftists like Roseanne Barr admit 'Democrats have gone insane.' An opinion shared by
most of the rest of the country. And yet public speeches by Trump are enthusiastically
attended by thousands - a story very much minimized by these same "news" outlets.
Those Democrats exist within a media bubble (95% of press outlets - online, too) working
for the Deep State (99% are Democrats) that misinforms them. Perhaps they are intentionally
self-duped. Though it remains shocking how deeply deluded they are.
They adhere to the hoax because they knew it was a hoax to begin with.
The dems have never been sincere calling people racist, sexist, Hitler, then Russian or
Assad stooges, etc.
Their Saul Alinsky tactic is to shriek incessantly, always accuse, never take the
defensive because your position is indefensible. You can't argue why offering open borders
and free health care to 7 billion people is rational.
That is why the violence is so important to them, and so important to keep concealing the
deep state/democratic crime syndicate.
The main stream media is the mouth piece of the intelligence community.
The main stream media is [ currently ] the mouth piece of the [ criminal Deep
State ] intelligence community.
There; fify. The "Intelligence Community" in its entirety is hardly any monolith of
pure evil. There are cadres and factions within every agency, including Old-School
Patriot.
MUST be said now and then lest others lose perspective. And that is all. 0{:-\o[
The progressives will happily embrace the worst criminal behavior by our government as
JUSTIFIED to depose the devil incarnate Trump.
There is only one principle...winning. The law is THEIR weapon devised to punish their
enemies and control their minions. All means are justifiable to the ends, and the vast
majority of those "serving" in government have no hesitancy in abusing their power to fulfill
the larger agenda.
They will have proof and undeniable facts...to no avail because those charged with the
prosecution of their own, will NOT.
More sensationalism... how many articles are you going to post saying the spygate
situation is about to blow up? I would love for it to happen but unlike the libtards hanging
on Rachel Maddow's every word... when I hear the walls are closing in for over 2 or 3 months
straight... I start to call ********... Give up the sensationalism Tyler... it's straight up
MSM flavor ********.
Look out for the bad reviews from The Fraudian's writers: Luke Harding can be relied on to
add his 2 cents' worth of conspiracy paranoid garbage, Shaun Walker will be parsing the book
for dill references and non-Russia experts like Marina Hyde and Natalie Nougat-head will want
a crack as well at reviewing the book.
Probably the only half-decent reviews will be from Mary Dejevski and Prof. Stephen Cohen
but theirs will be buried in a back page or inaccessible behind an Error 404 wall.
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it
6 (UK) Division is the new organisational home for the Army's "asymmetric edge",
comprising all things "Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, Information Operations, Electronic
Warfare, Cyber and Unconventional Warfare".
Launched this morning, 6 Div is a rebranding of the formation formerly known as Force
Troops Command, which covered a hotchpotch of Royal Signals, Intelligence Corps and other
units, including the infamous 77 Brigade
####
Don't forget to hit the comments for hilarity!
Also, the timing of the announcement says plenty, i.e. slipping it in to the news stream
when people have already gone on holiday and all the BREXIT and other bollocks. I've not seen
this reported on the tv in the UK – which is currently facing severe flooding etc.
Is it just me or is all the PPNN reporting that 'Putin's support has dropped to levels
not seen since 2011!'. Of course they don't actually give you any numbers and cherry pick
dodgy poll numbers but there really is this Pavlovian reaction anytime there is a
demonstration in Russia, like undertakers gathering at an allegedly dangerous road crossing
waiting for some cyclist to be dragged under a trash lorry so that they can tut tut and then
profit from the cyclist's misfortune. Nix that, the PPNN are just professional versions of
MacBeth's witches, something which they don't understand is a story .
Putin is in as much danger of being unceremoniously chucked out of office as he is of choking
to death on his grandmother's knitting. The west is ever hopeful, and dutifully rallies to
the glorification of every new dissident firebrand, but whether or not they know it, they are
just going through the motions. The only group, and I mean the only one, that would benefit
from Putin's overthrow would be the disaffected kreakliy and the poncy forgotten
semi-intellectuals. They would be feted by the west as political visionaries, and perhaps
given minor government positions to satisfy their vanity. But who else would make out like a
bandit? The military? Hardly – the west, after years of giggling about Russia's
decrepit military, lapsed into an uneasy silence on the subject just about the time that
long-distance Kalibr cruise-missile attack took place from the Caspian Sea into Syria, and a
west given meddling-room would want to disband the Russian military, if anything, down to a
token force of absolutely-trustworthy sycophants who would probably be issued with American
weapons. The oligarchs? Hardly – western business would be snapping up former state
assets while simultaneously carrying out an 'anti-corruption drive' under the new President's
imprimatur. Small businesses? Hardly – corporate interest would be in melding large
state interests into the Corporate Borg, and their method is to squeeze out small business in
order to expand market share. The people? Hardly – Russia would be a convenient place
to move all the refugee immigrants from that entire hemisphere, while the stubborn loyalty of
the population to Putin would not be forgotten.
It is no coincidence that it is always the same people who show up to bitch and carp about
how dreadful Putin is, and how Russia needs American-style freedom and democracy and non-stop
Pride parades and all the trappings of fresh admission to Club West. They are the only people
who would stand to benefit from driving Putin out. Nobody else is interested.
They're just trying to get some mileage out of Olga what's-her-name, and make it look like a
drop in Putin's poll numbers happened exactly at the moment this young political firebrand
emerged. Pretty sad, really, but you can't tell 'em, and it wouldn't make any difference.
They have to try, it's the same instinct that makes a dog lick its nose if you smear cheese
on it. The western media would rush to interview and endorse a talking Russian toad if it
said "I hate Putin".
Barr now has goods to jail major conspirators for life. It is unlikely happened but we can hope.
Notable quotes:
"... "Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign country interfering in American affairs," former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the 'Russiagate' investigation. ..."
"... The Guardian reported on texts between former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, who now heads GCHQ. The two men met in 2016 to discuss "our strange situation" – an apparent reference to Russia's alleged interference in US domestic politics. ..."
"... British intelligence "appears to have played a key role in the early stages," the report said. ..."
"... Galloway said the revelation was not surprising because people "already knew" that British intelligence had played a part in the Russia-related investigations in the US. He recalled that it was former British spy Christopher Steele who drew up the now-infamous Steele dossier, which made multiple unverifiable and salacious claims about Trump and has since been largely discredited. Britain is "up to its neck in the whole Russiagate affair," he said. ..."
"... Asked what the UK stood to gain by trying to implicate Russia in a US election scandal at a time when then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was dismissing baseless claims of Russian interference in the Brexit campaign, Galloway noted that Johnson's comments on Russia have appeared to strangely sway between friendly and antagonistic. ..."
"... In June 2016, the FBI opened a covert investigation codenamed 'Crossfire Hurricane' into Trump's now disproven collusion with Moscow, which was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller. ..."
While hysteria raged about possible Russian "interference" in the 2016 US election, British
intelligence officials were secretly playing a "key role" in helping instigate investigations
into Donald Trump, secret texts have shown. "Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign
country interfering in American affairs," former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about
the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the
'Russiagate' investigation.
The Guardian reported on texts between former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and Jeremy
Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, who now heads GCHQ. The two men met in 2016 to discuss
"our strange situation" – an apparent reference to Russia's alleged interference
in US domestic politics.
British intelligence "appears to have played a key role in the early stages," the
report said.
Galloway said the revelation was not surprising because people "already knew" that
British intelligence had played a part in the Russia-related investigations in the US. He
recalled that it was former British spy Christopher Steele who drew up the now-infamous Steele
dossier, which made multiple unverifiable and salacious claims about Trump and has since been
largely discredited. Britain is "up to its neck in the whole Russiagate affair," he
said.
The texts also reveal that the Brexit vote was viewed by some in the FBI as something that
had been influenced by Russia.
Asked what the UK stood to gain by trying to implicate Russia in a US election scandal at a
time when then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was dismissing baseless claims of Russian
interference in the Brexit campaign, Galloway noted that Johnson's comments on Russia have
appeared to strangely sway between friendly and antagonistic.
Johnson is like "a sofa that bears the impression of the last person to sit upon
him," the former MP quipped. What happens next will depend on who is leading the tango,
"the orange man in Washington or the blonde mop-head in London."
In June 2016, the FBI opened a covert investigation codenamed 'Crossfire Hurricane' into
Trump's now disproven collusion with Moscow, which was later taken over by special counsel
Robert Mueller.
Ultimately, the two-year-long probe that followed came up short, producing no evidence to prove a conspiracy or collusion
between Trump campaign officials and Russia
"... In 2017, The Guardian reported that Britain's spy agencies had played a key role in alerting their American counterparts of communications between members of the Trump campaign and "suspected Russian agents," which was passed along to the US in what was characterized as a "routine exchange of information." ..."
"... "For over a year, people have asked me to declassify. What I've done is declassified everything," said Trump, adding "He can look and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine ." ..."
"... "It's the greatest hoax probably in the history of our country and somebody has to get to the bottom of it. We'll see. For a long period of time, they wanted me to declassify and I did." ..."
"... in May, Fox News reported that the discredited "Steele Dossier" - assembled by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele - was referred to as "crown material" in an email exchange suggesting that former FBI Director James Comey insisted that CIA Director John Brennan pushed for the inclusion of the dossier in the intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference. ..."
"... Moreover, much of "Operation Crossfire Hurricane" - the FBI's official investigation into the Trump campaign - occurred on UK soil , which is perhaps why the New York Times reported last September that the UK begged Trump not to declassify 'Russiagate' documents 'without redaction.' ..."
"... Maltese professor and self-described Clinton foundation member Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had damaging information on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer. ..."
Newly surfaced text messages between Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his counterpart at MI-5, the UK's domestic security
service, have cast new light on Britain's role in the FBI's 2016 'Russiagate' investigation, according to
The Guardian .
Two of the most senior intelligence officials in the US and UK privately shared concerns about " our strange situation " as
the FBI launched its 2016 investigation into whether Donald Trump's campaign was colluding with
Russia , the Guardian has learned.
Text messages between Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI at the time, and Jeremy Fleming , his then counterpart
at MI5, now the head of GCHQ , also reveal their mutual surprise
at the result of the EU referendum, which some US officials regarded as a "wake-up call", according to a person familiar with
the matter. -
The Guardian
McCabe and Flemming's texts were "infrequent and cryptic," but "occurred with some regularity" after the June 2016 Brexit referendum.
In his text message about the August 2016 meeting, Fleming appeared to be making a reference to
Peter Strzok ,
a senior FBI official who travelled to London that month to meet the Australian diplomat
Alexander Downer . Downer had agreed to speak with the FBI about a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, who had told
him that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee in the race. -
The Guardian
In 2017, The Guardian reported that Britain's spy agencies had played a key role in alerting their American counterparts of communications
between members of the Trump campaign and "suspected Russian agents," which was passed along to the US in what was characterized
as a "routine exchange of information."
UK begged Trump not to declassify
In May, President Trump issued a sweeping declassification order on materials related to the DOJ/FBI Russia investigation - leaving
it in the hands of Attorney General William Barr to determine exactly what happened to Trump and his campaign before and after the
2016 US election.
"For over a year, people have asked me to declassify. What I've done is declassified everything," said Trump, adding "He can look
and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine ."
"It's the greatest hoax probably in the history of our country and somebody has to get to the bottom of it. We'll see. For a long
period of time, they wanted me to declassify and I did."
Meanwhile, also in May,
Fox News reported that the discredited "Steele Dossier" - assembled by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele - was referred to as
"crown material" in an email exchange suggesting that former FBI Director James Comey insisted that CIA Director John
Brennan pushed for the inclusion of the dossier in the intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference.
Moreover, much of "Operation Crossfire Hurricane" - the FBI's official investigation into the Trump campaign - occurred on UK
soil , which is perhaps why the
New York Times reported last September that the UK begged Trump not to declassify 'Russiagate' documents 'without redaction.'
Let's also not forget that shortly after Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos announced his intention to work for the campaign,
he was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor and self-described
Clinton foundation member Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had damaging information on Hillary Clinton. It was later
at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer.
We wonder what else McCabe's texts with his MI-5 counterpart will reveal?
"... Can anyone clarify the exact manner in which contractors for the State department become operatives for CIA or are handled by CIA? ..."
"... The entire Russia – Gate thing seems very CIA-ish . See CHALMERS JOHNSON'S "THE SORROWS OF EMPIRE", seems like since I read it ~ 2004 I have been watching Chalmers prediction come true in slow motion. ..."
"... Bill Browder shows up in D.C and gets special booking to go before congress. Why? Because he runs a hedge fund? B.S. there is much more to it than that. ..."
"... I have written plenty about Browder's actions and I have always thought him showing up when he did, the way he did was very strange. ..."
"... If Bill didn't pay his taxes where did all that money go? Why is it DOJ is hog tied so badly it cannot produce evidence? What is it that all the above want to keep secret? Why all the lies? ..."
"... Lets us suppose that the CIA who has been in the money laundering business for years and who likely wrote the book on the subject, had a plan. Maybe that plan was to have Browder do exactly what he did,. Except for the getting caught part. ..."
"... JFK lamented that for a government to keep secrets from it's people because it feared telling them the truth was not acceptable. Maybe he saw then what I see now, a public that increasingly threatened by it's government. ..."
"... In a recent newspaper column renowned Danish journalist and editor+ Flemming Rose examines in detail some core, false, claims made by such propagators of the myth as Browder, his connected supporters Jonathan Winer (USA), Irwin Cotler (Canada) and others. ..."
"... Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats. ..."
"... If Law Enforcement Officers come across evidence of a crime during an investigation, are they not obligated by Law to report it and to investigate it? Didn't the Mueller Team break the Law if they ignored this? ..."
"... Russia Gate was created out of smoke by Hillary and her campaign and people in the Obama administration and justice department. I'm hoping that Barr will release all the information that is being gathered ..."
"... The problem is that Goldstone invented most of the conversation, he told Veselnitskaya via Emin, that Don Jr could help her arrange a Senate hearing about Browder, and told Don Jr she would have "dirt"on Hillary. ..."
"... Even if Browder has a good reason for this, it is still obstruction of Justice, most likely can throw in Conspiracy to Interfere with the Election as a foreign agent by giving Steele a fake meeting. Browder desperately wanted to discredit Simpson, and it's likely Browder suggested Winer hire Simpson, so he can get embroiled with the Steele Dossier. ..."
"... Mueller is a deep state spy who's "investigation" was nothing but an effort to cover up the deep state's efforts to direct the outcome of the 2016 election. They get away with this, and they'll be at it again in 2020. Our democracy is toast. ..."
"... We keep coming back to Browder. Browder is Russiagate is my sense. ..."
"... Quantity or quality? Has the FBI tracked the number of contacts other campaigns have with foreigners, even Russians ? Obama, McCain, Bushes, Clinton's, Kerry, etc? ..."
"... We do know that one campaign actually hired a foreign agent to obtain information from Russia about an opponent and stated that highly placed Kremlin military and intelligence provided information on Trump which was pitched to numerous media outlets.Of course, controlling a few hundred million derived from a sale of control of uranium market is of no interest. These two events seem a bit weightier than Mr. Goldstone's tee-shirt. ..."
"... Mueller may have been a prisoner of his staff, we'll see how knowledgeable he is about what is in the report, if he actually answers questions ..."
"... The more of this is revealed, the more the holy Mueller comes forth as an old, tired cop, that has long lost the fine tricks of the trade, who was only still capable of the crude tricks of the trade. His pathology and tragedy is that he doesn't see it himself; it is likely to become his downfall when he testifies. ..."
"... Those who have seen the film, "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes.", by Andrei Nekrasov know that Nekrasov had a sea-change experience, shared by viewers of the film who get a front-seat, close-up look at what went on. That any who see the film could possibly retain a favorable impression of Browder is very hard to imagine. ..."
"... Mueller's apparent lack of curiosity and equally apparent willingness to accept so very many things at face value, based solely on what he was told, without, so it seems, any genuine effort on his part to look more deeply, to actually investigate beyond what really is hearsay, does not paint a picture of an intrepid, dogged pursuit of facts and actual evidence, but rather a slipshod pretense while unctously playing the make believe role of "Special Counsel". ..."
"... At least, this Second Coming, of Mueller will possibly provide a brief and hilarious respite from the Democratic Debate Circus floperation. And the media is sure to love it, Trump Tweets and all. ..."
"... He'll turn up every rock looking for dirt on Trump, but if someone says 'Your boy's dirt is under that rock,' he'll just pretend he didn't see it. There is no reason to ever trust him at all. Dude is an awful investigator, and should have been disbarred when it came to light that Agent John Connolly tipped off Whitey Bulger about a bug that State Police put in the Lancaster St. Garage, which served as Whitey's office. John Connolly is in prison, and his boss is lionized as a hero. ..."
"... Seems to be similar to the well choreographed story of The White Helmets. The deception is so widespread that it's nearly impossible to fully expose ..."
"... I've claimed that the CIA (and or FBI) was active in ensuring Sanders wouldn't rise above HRC in the 2016 campaign; the trail was leading here so the "players" unleashed the Russiagate circus (and we didn't even get any bread with it!). ..."
"... Many of the enablers of this hoax must know better, using the "ends justify the means" rationalization; as our self-appointed "protector" Colbert. ..."
She was also working with Fusion GPS and had nothing?
Trump Dossier Firm Also Supplied Info Used in Meeting of Russians, Trump Team
"The information that a Russian lawyer brought with her when she met Donald Trump Jr. in
June 2016 stemmed from research conducted by Fusion GPS, the same firm that compiled the
infamous Trump dossier, according to the lawyer and a source familiar with the matter."
Can anyone clarify the exact manner in which contractors for the State department become
operatives for CIA or are handled by CIA?
The entire Russia – Gate thing seems very CIA-ish . See CHALMERS JOHNSON'S "THE
SORROWS OF EMPIRE", seems like since I read it ~ 2004 I have been watching Chalmers
prediction come true in slow motion.
One thing about CIA being the most powerful entity in the U.S. when they screw up they
have no place to hide. except behind the skirt of Lady Justice!
Mr. Mueller are you back there also?
robert e williamson jr , July 5, 2019 at 13:53
I would wonder just how many files Mueller has gotten from ICIJ. Maybe we all need to call
bull shit on this entire affair.
Everyone says follow the money but no one seems to be able to do so here. Why not. ICIJ
sure as hell seems able to get info.
I'll state it again, I wonder just how much data Mueller got from ICIJ since CIA didn't
have it?
Bill Browder shows up in D.C and gets special booking to go before congress. Why? Because
he runs a hedge fund? B.S. there is much more to it than that.
I have written plenty about Browder's actions and I have always thought him showing up
when he did, the way he did was very strange. Whether what he claims to be true seems not to
have mattered to congress. Look at what the fools have done. Magnitski Act for what.
So did Bill, the DEEP STATE and CIA all get caught doing what they have always done in
third world countries for the last 70 years ?
If Bill didn't pay his taxes where did all that money go? Why is it DOJ is hog tied so
badly it cannot produce evidence? What is it that all the above want to keep secret? Why all
the lies?
It appears someone has gotten to DOJ. AGAIN!
I have some very bad news for many here. If what I witnessed here in the last couple of
years here is the only way for those who contribute and those who comment here to expose evil
doers we all are thoroughly screwed.
The county is running out of time. If Mueller has received data from ICIJ maybe we all
should be after someone to get the information about what files he got.
Lets us suppose that the CIA who has been in the money laundering business for years
and who likely wrote the book on the subject, had a plan. Maybe that plan was to have Browder
do exactly what he did,. Except for the getting caught part.
Just what do you suppose that carnage would look like.
Think about what the rest of the planet is thinking about the U.S. singing happy birthday
to it's self at such a chaotic time.
Isn't that something to be expected from 2 and 3 year old children?
JFK lamented that for a government to keep secrets from it's people because it feared
telling them the truth was not acceptable. Maybe he saw then what I see now, a public that increasingly threatened by it's
government.
We have the Trump mafia running the repugniklans and the Israeli mafia running the
dimocraps, and the DEEP STATE hoarding the proceeds.
"Off with their heads ", the Queen Shouted. She must have been familiar with the heads of
hedge funds!
In the 1990s I received an NNA – National Newspaper Award (Canada's top prize for
print journalism) for a series of newspaper articles first exposing the presence of Russian
mafia money laundering behind North American public and private co.s – and shut down
the YBM Magnex fraud – which led to Semion Mogilevitch being placed on the FBI's "Most
Wanted" list. The late Robert I. Friedman's "Red Mafiya" book (2000) included info from this
case – and he broke the word in the US via a 1998 feature in "The Village Voice".
I retired from active investigation of white collar / organized crime at the turn of the
century – and just last year became aware that the con-man Bill Browder, who, in the
1990s, was being mentored by another international scammer, Edmond Safra, is today falsely
portrayed as an "anti-corruption crusader". This geopolitical smoke-and-mirrors act is
maintained through the support of state actors and a western "legacy" media that is failed in
so many ways.
Fortunately, the inter-twined myths are all coming undone. To do my part, I've launched a
website "J'Accuse News" @ https://jaccuse.news
There is more than enough independent information – corporate, court, police+
records, employee interviews etc. – accessible on the public record for anyone that
chooses to know the truth of the "Magnitsky" campaign to do so.
In a recent newspaper column renowned Danish journalist and editor+ Flemming Rose examines
in detail some core, false, claims made by such propagators of the myth as Browder, his
connected supporters Jonathan Winer (USA), Irwin Cotler (Canada) and others.
"In his own words, Sergey Magnitsky was neither Bill Browder's lawyer nor a whistleblower.
It is in his witness statements." Rose concludes: "I salute the fight against human rights
abuses and personally was active in this fight in the former Soviet Union. But I fear that,
by relying on untruths, Browder's campaign could undermine this fight rather than support
it."
Fittingly, in Denmark, the land which gave the world Hans Christian Andersen, author of
"The Emperor's New Clothes", the Browder/Magnitsky con is unraveling and the naked truth is
revealed:
Editorial columns penned by Flemming Rose published by"Berlingske":
Danish investigative authors Birgitte Derykilde and Lars Abild have just announced their
book, which promises to reveal "The Emperor's New Clothes" of geopolitics, will be published
August12, 2019 (with a focus on the elements within that country eg. Danske Bank). The book's
title, "Troldmanden", translates fully into English as "The Wizard (master of trolls) –
the story about Danske Bank, money laundering and the man who deceived/fooled the world":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOl9S0_jMEk
###
Zhu , July 5, 2019 at 05:22
Remeber the Historians' Rule, folks: Stupidity always trumps conspiracy.
John McCarthy , July 5, 2019 at 00:09
From your article:
" Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that
Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes
and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats.
The Mueller investigators appear not to have looked into her charges. "
If Law Enforcement Officers come across evidence of a crime during an investigation, are
they not obligated by Law to report it and to investigate it? Didn't the Mueller Team break
the Law if they ignored this?
Abby , July 4, 2019 at 21:06
One thing about this Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr is that she originally couldn't
get into the country because she had problems with her passport. The Obama state department
had to fix it for her. And after the meeting she met with Simpson from Fusion GPS for
dinner.
Almost every person who ended up having contact with someone to make it look like they
were colluding with Russians was setup by the FBI or were members or connected to the
Clinton's foundation.
Russia Gate was created out of smoke by Hillary and her campaign and people in the Obama
administration and justice department. I'm hoping that Barr will release all the information
that is being gathered, but I doubt that he will let Obama be snared in it. Mueller took the
country on the biggest snipe hunt in history. Lots of people are thinking that they got lots
of snipes.
False. That is the disinformation spread by Fox News, John Solomon and Sara Carter, most
likely originating with Browder. Yes, she did meet Simpson on July 8, because he was hired by
US law firm Baker-Hostetler, who she hired to conduct the defence for her client Denis
Katsyv, in the Prevezon case.
In 2013, Browder had secretly passed US Attorney Preet Bharara a bundle of documents,
accusing Katsyv, wrongly as it turned out, of using proceeds of the alleged "Russian Tax
Fraud", central to his Magnitsky story. Browder was working with the State Dept's Jonathan
Winer, now his his personal lawyer, to have his Magnitsky story enshrined in US Case Law,
effectively giving the State the ability to confiscate any Russian property in the US by
linking it to the so called tax fraud.
The problems began for Browder, when his was discovered, and BH hired Simpson to check out
his story. Simpson recounts in his Senate Testimony, that they tracked Browder to Aspen,
Colorado, twice he evaded the subpoena, and again in New York, after he told the Judge Greisa
he would be overseas, he ran away from the server, after coming out of NBC studios plugging
his fictional book "Red Notice"
The Judge ordered Browder to appear on 15 April 2015, for a Deposition under oath. The
reason why he ran became clear, he couldn't substantiate any of the evidence he provided,
mostly complied by his staff, and he couldn't substantiate his Magnitsky Story either.
So what did he do? What he always does, attempt to shut down proceedings, on a thin
pretext, and his appeal was, guess what, in New York on morning of 9 June.
The meeting between NV and Simpson was about Browder's appeal, both have sworn to that
effect and there is zero evidence they setup the Trump Tower meeting. The also went to a full
defence team dinner a few days after, all above board.
However Browder always accuses others of his crimes, there is good evidence that Browder
was working with the State Dept's Robert Otto and Jonathan Winer, from Otto's leaked emails,
showing a menacing photograph of Veselnitskaya's Moscow home, the same day, she was granted a
work visa by the State Dept, 6 June 2016, three days before Browder's appeal. Same day,
Goldstone had Don Jr and Emin Agalarov agree on 9 June for Trump Tower. The problem is that
Goldstone invented most of the conversation, he told Veselnitskaya via Emin, that Don Jr
could help her arrange a Senate hearing about Browder, and told Don Jr she would have
"dirt"on Hillary.
Even if Browder has a good reason for this, it is still obstruction of Justice, most
likely can throw in Conspiracy to Interfere with the Election as a foreign agent by giving
Steele a fake meeting. Browder desperately wanted to discredit Simpson, and it's likely
Browder suggested Winer hire Simpson, so he can get embroiled with the Steele Dossier.
Haruspex , July 6, 2019 at 00:27
And the Phoenix tarmac meeting was about grandchildren and golf between two people who
never chatted socially. And you are trying to claim, the architect of the Steele dossier, had
nothing to do with Veselnitskaya meeting the Trump team? That it's coincidental? And it's
coincidental that Mike Isikoff runs into Jim Baker and warns him about the Steele dossier?
And it's coincidental that some unconnected oil industry specialist in London all of a
suddenly becomes the most courted man in Europe once it's determined he is associated with
Trump's campaign? And it's coincidental that Nellie Ohr gets a ham radio license the month
after Adm Rogers tossed her off all US intel data sites? And it's coincidental that Nellie is
married to the DoJ conduit between Steele and the FBI? Too many coincidences and in law
enforcement, they teach you there is no such thing as coincidences.
Garrett Connelly , July 4, 2019 at 20:03
Seemingly normal congressional representatives became obsessed with sanctions and passing
the Magnitsky Act.
Jeff Harrison , July 4, 2019 at 19:20
Mueller is a deep state spy who's "investigation" was nothing but an effort to cover up
the deep state's efforts to direct the outcome of the 2016 election. They get away with this,
and they'll be at it again in 2020. Our democracy is toast.
rosemerry , July 4, 2019 at 16:54
The excellent film by Andrei Nekrasov has been unavailable for at least a year. It shows
too clearly the falsity of the Browder charges, but somehow Browder is supported by those in
high places, since it is impossible to find the film anywhere. (I saw it twice online last
year before the complete blackout).
How many people here find the Skripal story in the UK to be as false? We have Theresa
May's word for all the relevant "facts" and that is all.
Experience tells us that US government/intel statements need to be backed up by perfect
evidence or they should be considered propaganda. With regards to Russia, the 5 Eyes have
told us nothing but lies for the last 5 years.
Stan W. , July 4, 2019 at 12:10
The Browder hoax would make a good sequel to the 1966 movie "The Russians Are Coming! The
Russians Are Coming!"
jsinton , July 4, 2019 at 10:15
We keep coming back to Browder. Browder is Russiagate is my sense.
Brian James , July 4, 2019 at 10:14
This will reveal their ultimate goal!
Jul 1, 2019 Democrat Calls On Tech Giants To Censor Conservatives Over Kamala Harris
Debate
Elizabeth Warren Calls On Big Tech To Censor Conservatives Over Kamala Harris Debate.
You are right that censorship was one of the goals of Russia Gate. Because of it we got
Hamilton 68 that said they were able to tell us what tweets came from Russian trolls or
bots.
The Integrity Initiative is another company created during this time and they have stuck
around and then there's NewsGuard who is putting its buttons on Microsoft web browsers.
Facebook, Twitter and Google all changed their algorithms and alternative websites were so
downgraded that some lost up to 90% of their readership. This all came into being after
someone leaked the DNC computers and podesta emails and gave them to Wikileaks. Hillary's
campaign said that if they blamed it on Russia then no one would focus on their content. It
worked. The DNC rigging the primary is considered CT on many leftists sites.
Skip Scott , July 4, 2019 at 07:44
Thanks for another great article that gives us a glimpse behind the curtain. It would be
great if the truth regarding Browder were to make it into the mainstream, but I have my
doubts about that being possible. People like Mueller and the MSM lackeys are protectors of
the powerful. What Robert Parry called the "mighty Wurlitzer" keeps the truth drowned out
except for our small "sound proof free speech zone" here at CN and similar sites.
For people who wish to take a look at the "evil Rooskies" from a more realistic angle, I
highly recommend Stephen Cohen's "War with Russia?" I am just finishing it and it is a good
read.
Amazing how long the fraud has been going on, hiding in plain sight, Mueller a clear
player for the corrupt Deep State! We who read Consortium News have been informed about
Browder's fraudulent claims for the entire 2+ years of this ongoing chicanery. The swamp muck
is deep and thick, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is embedded in it. The confluence of swamp
creatures is odd, many don't even interact but they do in strange ways, all by lying. Thanks
for this article, hope for an end to the lies although the US truth decay is pretty far
advanced, maybe a sign it is collapsing ?!
Michael Collins , July 4, 2019 at 00:48
I think the Magnitsky Act is profoundly arrogant and not in our national interest.
I believe that Russia's intervention in Syria was essential and positive.
I'm not convinced that the Dutch report on MH17 has any persuasive power. This site had
the first insider source info that the missile was launched by the Ukrainians.
Having said that, I must say that this article is pure propaganda.
"Collusion" is a pure Republican propaganda term straight from Trump and his acolyte Barr.
The term is the straw man that forms the basis of the author's argument. The Mueller Report
outlines numerous contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign. Were they just chatting
about the weather or were the Russians trying to apply influence.
Whether or not Mueller could prove a conspiracy to commit a crime doe not take away from
the clear meddling by the Russians. In terms of outcome, Trump's performance in Helsinki is
the best argument for Russians influence. He was Putin's bot.
T,J , July 4, 2019 at 02:48
Michael, you got it right in your first three sentences but then, alas, you allowed your
imagination to run wild. The truth is that the Russians had little or no effect on the result
of the 2016 elections. The Democrats, alone, were responsible through their own incompetence
for the election result and even with their poor choice of candidate they could still have
won. The Mueller thing is just a distraction. By not admitting this, to themselves, they have
probably forfeited the 2020 election.
Mark Kelly , July 4, 2019 at 09:48
Quantity or quality? Has the FBI tracked the number of contacts other campaigns have with
foreigners, even Russians ? Obama, McCain, Bushes, Clinton's, Kerry, etc?
It would be rather
difficult for a campaign not to have documented contacts with foreign nationals, and the
Trump contacts like Sessions running into Kislack at receptions seem innocuous. We do know
that one campaign actually hired a foreign agent to obtain information from Russia about an
opponent and stated that highly placed Kremlin military and intelligence provided information
on Trump which was pitched to numerous media outlets.Of course, controlling a few hundred
million derived from a sale of control of uranium market is of no interest. These two events
seem a bit weightier than Mr. Goldstone's tee-shirt.
Mueller may have been a prisoner of his staff, we'll see how knowledgeable he is about what
is in the report, if he actually answers questions . ( Huddles with counsel "Cannot answer,
its classified .") Then wait for IG and Barr investigations .
Mr.Parry immediately smelled a great big rat using historical Russiaphobia
Clark M Shanahan , July 4, 2019 at 10:11
"Trump's performance in Helsinki is the best argument for Russians influence. He was
Putin's bot."
So the dropping of the INF Treaty and the continued massive arms build-up in the ex-Soviet
satellites is simply cover for Evil Vlad's real plans of world domination?
Same with Bolton's failed coup in Venezuela and our arming and training of Ukraine's fascist
Azov Battalion?
Michael,
Did you know Putin provided us our primary Afghan supply line and introduced us to
Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, all-the-while warning us of the real dangers of creating a
quagmire?
rosemerry , July 4, 2019 at 17:00
Pathetic conclusion. Pres.Putin, with all the faults cast upon him from the West, cannot
be considered to be stupid. All the "interference", which he denies (and unlike Trump he is
NOT a liar) would be uncharacteristic and counterproductive, like the alleged
novichok/perfume poisoning in the UK of someone already punished and exchanged, by alleged
"GRU operatives" botching the job.
bjd , July 3, 2019 at 21:08
What an excellent article!
The author provides another view –from a whole other angle yet again– showing
how the Mueller Report is more a work of uninspired wordsmithery and linguistic trickery
(with one or two –sometimes not even that carefully– hidden objectives), than an
unambiguous work of judicious scrutiny.
The more of this is revealed, the more the holy Mueller comes forth as an old, tired cop,
that has long lost the fine tricks of the trade, who was only still capable of the crude
tricks of the trade. His pathology and tragedy is that he doesn't see it himself; it is
likely to become his downfall when he testifies.
Most readers of Consortium News from around the Earth understand the immensity of the
Browder-Magnitsky scandal, and so then they are certainly hugely appreciative of Lucy
Komisar's years-long reporting on the scandal, plus thankful to Consortium News for
exhibiting the moral courage to publish Ms. Komisar's truly bombshell, Earth-shaking article.
Those people around the world yet unaware of this profound and historically important
situation will now, undoubtedly, become fully aware – and soon.
Every candidate from every political party in America running for the office of President
of the United States in 2020 will find it impossible to avoid this just-revealed
800,000,000-pound elephant standing in/on the living room known as planet Earth, as well as
find it impossible to respond in any manner but in 100% alignment with the truth. There are
nothing but positive consequences coming from this truly historic development – most
especially, the forthcoming global paradigm shift featuring exponentially greater
effectiveness of international law in deterrence of major criminality. It is a moving and
humbling experience to witness. Thank you sincerely.
Jerry L.! that was a tremendous piece of editorial writing! . I have been on the trail of
this " MAGNITZKY Sting thing Josef Mifsud is the key man of not so much mystery any more ! I
have been on this William Browder Grifter of the Hoover Institute _Stanford John Perkins .
Book " Confessions of a Economic Hitman " is eye opening . look into Edmond Safra his bizarre
demise or death in 1999' in the middle of Monaco Principality Párkinson had ravaged
Mr. SAFRA a third generation manifestation of Lebanon and Jewish Global financial markets
Financiers Of renowned Edmond Safra was from family heritage of movers and shakers of Global
financial markets and currency manipulators from the Middle Ages! Rick – Él
Cuban cowboy ( 702.767.0072)) hope all is well
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 19:12
This article, which I thank Consortium News for publishing, and its author, Lucy Komisar
for researching and writing, is very important for a number of reasons.
Those who know the history of what happened to Russia and the Russian people when U$
"experts", vulture capitalists and B-School grads, descended on Russia for a sportive
slaughter of its economy, all the better to create an oligarchic class and impoverish the
many while providing many of those "experts" lucrative, even obscenely lucrative rewards,
among them William Browder.
Those who have seen the film, "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes.", by Andrei Nekrasov
know that Nekrasov had a sea-change experience, shared by viewers of the film who get a
front-seat, close-up look at what went on. That any who see the film could possibly retain a
favorable impression of Browder is very hard to imagine.
That so very much has been done to suppress any public or widespread showing of the film
speaks, eloquently and succinctly, to the motivations, if not expressly exposing the reasons,
for the suppression.
Clearly, when Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, in 2012, few of those who voted for that
law had seen the film or else they made no serious efforts to ascertain the actual facts.
Perhaps, they did not care to know the facts or, worse, do not care, at all, what the facts
actually were.
One hopes that among the questions posed to Robert Mueller will be several seeking clarity
about something he, rather obviously, got very wrong, about the infamous "meeting" at Trump
Tower.
Mueller's apparent lack of curiosity and equally apparent willingness to accept so very
many things at face value, based solely on what he was told, without, so it seems, any
genuine effort on his part to look more deeply, to actually investigate beyond what really is
hearsay, does not paint a picture of an intrepid, dogged pursuit of facts and actual
evidence, but rather a slipshod pretense while unctously playing the make believe role of
"Special Counsel".
His special guest appearance before Congress may well not be a reprise of a Cameo Role,
but an opportunity to win the Lifetime Oscar for Pusillanimous Leading Man.
The Democrats who have arranged this awards ceremony, thinking they are about to unearth
manifold riches, may well find that they have bitten off far more crow than they can possibly
chew.
Russiagate may yet become a dead albatross piece of neck ware for those banking on its
bonanza.
The "Ineffective Opposition" may soon confirm its utter uselessness, even as Robert
Mueller may find the very real need to embark on a costly "brand" restoration.
At least, this Second Coming, of Mueller will possibly provide a brief and hilarious
respite from the Democratic Debate Circus floperation. And the media is sure to love it,
Trump Tweets and all.
Seriously?
Once again, my appreciation for this timely and important article, which ties together a
plethora of peculiarities particularly perceptively well.
Nick , July 4, 2019 at 00:47
Mueller's lack of curiosity is something people in Boston are well aware of. He was the US
Attorney here when his FBI was covering up for Whitey Bulger, the murderous drug kingpin.
It's crazy, because now, to these same people in Boston, he's the saint who's gonna bring
down Trump. The fact that he got away in the late 90s when his FBI agents all came up filthy
with gifts from this gangster, and was subsequently able to work his way into an FBI
directorship, shows that this dude is a skillful liar, and more one of omission than
commission.
He'll turn up every rock looking for dirt on Trump, but if someone says 'Your
boy's dirt is under that rock,' he'll just pretend he didn't see it. There is no reason to
ever trust him at all. Dude is an awful investigator, and should have been disbarred when it
came to light that Agent John Connolly tipped off Whitey Bulger about a bug that State Police
put in the Lancaster St. Garage, which served as Whitey's office. John Connolly is in prison,
and his boss is lionized as a hero.
Seer , July 4, 2019 at 11:35
I too watched the film: subtle reminder- people ought to be sure to pay for it!
Seems to be similar to the well choreographed story of The White Helmets. The deception is
so widespread that it's nearly impossible to fully expose.
Seems that the Deep State HAS to
be involved in here somewhere: I've claimed that the CIA (and or FBI) was active in ensuring
Sanders wouldn't rise above HRC in the 2016 campaign; the trail was leading here so the
"players" unleashed the Russiagate circus (and we didn't even get any bread with it!).
Jerry Markatos , July 3, 2019 at 18:59
After watching the important film by Andrei Nekrasov, "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the
Scenes," I was embarrassed for the New Yorker and their running a puff piece with swindler
Browder anointing himself as a brave human rights hero standing up to the Russians. I hope
I'm not the only one who wrote the New Yorker editor urging a visit to Consortiumnews and an
evening with Nekrasov's docudrama. Robert Parry in a brief series of questions to people who
knew Sergei Magnitsky and an investigative reporter's nose for fraud, swiftly offered key
truths about the Magnitsky affair to readers of this site. If anyone else sees a possibility
of a mainstream magazine having an appetite either for detailing a fascinating and
consequential fraud or a willingness to eat crow, have at it!
Clark M Shanahan , July 4, 2019 at 10:48
The New Yorker and the lion's share of our MSM and late night talk shows (Colbert,
foremost) became collateral damage to Coronated-Hill's Clown-Car Fiasco.
Hill successfully projected her loss into the victimization of nearly half of the Nation.
Many of the enablers of this hoax must know better, using the "ends justify the means"
rationalization; as our self-appointed "protector" Colbert.
Robert Parry was clearly spot on about Browder and his fraud.
But the fraudster will not just go away, why should he, if he has been so successful in
his deception and fraud. Now we see that he is "leading" a charge against money laundering in
some of the European banks. If nothing else, the fraudster "continues:"
Where there are many who wish and hope that the Epstein scandal will roll up Trump and
everybody with him I must warn you to be careful of what you wish and hope for. It is
starting to appear that this de Rothschild purveyor of underage girls may have had way more
contact with certain Democrats than Epstein ever had with President I'm terrifically Red,
White, & Orange.
Here's a hint Democrats start talking up progressive political issues and quit with these
bogus attacks against Trump without sufficient evidence. Trump could be beat but he can't
lose to trivial or made up accusations which don't exist. It's long overdue to confront the
many hard issues we struggle with and time for the Democrats to let go of this corporate
conspired nonsense.
Gregory Herr , July 25, 2019 at 21:36
It is long overdue Joe. Thanks for the link.
"In the media the Epstein story died almost immediately, submerged in the tale of Donald
Trump telling several congresswomen to go back where they came from." Philip Giraldi
Gregory your link is an excellent article for my comment to jump off from. I too think
that collusion in US politics is far from just any curious Russians trying to flip an
election. Actually the culprits to watch out for interfering into our so called democracy are
the Saudi's and the Israeli's. In fact look no further than the Middle East if you don't
believe me. I mean who's wars are Americans fighting anyway certainly not any Russian wars
but, a ton of support is given to both Israel and Saudi Arabian this field of destruction.
The American public is being driven in car with hardly any brakes while the driver drives us
in the dark to creepy unknown destinations who needs headlights anyway?
Gregory Herr , July 26, 2019 at 21:29
Good to hear from you Joe. It's such a sad state of affairs that our nation's people are
bamboozled to such an extent that the demonization of Russia and the canard of Russian state
"interference" in our election gained widespread traction. But the government of Israel and
their agents of "influence" can mount all manner of coercion and bribery (obvious and well
documented) to the extent that nearly the entire representative structure of our "democracy"
is affected. Our people turn a blind eye to the horrific injustices cast upon Palestinians
while Congress, including Tulsi Gabbard, "condemns" non-violent First Amendment rights of
boycott.
I'll leave a link to a discussion. Be sure to catch Rashida Tlaib's stirring speech in
Congress embedded in the video.
"... Mueller is not currently mentally capable of programming his microwave, never mind author a report or conduct an investigation. ..."
"... I think if Barr digs deep enough he is going to see a foreign country was In control of Hillary during her state department days, and potentially Bubba during his presidency, remember how those secrets got leaked to China during Bill's Presidency? The preceding would also implicate that inner circle assisting Hill Dog, ie Comey, Clapper, MCabe, Brennan and the rest of those rat bastards BTW where is the computer guy that they were all using who got nabbed just before fleeing on a jet out of the country, What about Huma? ..."
"... Mueller was the token 'R'/Marine Vet/Never Trumper hired to give this corruption an air of 'fairness'. He was a tool, and has been for decades. Special place for him somewhere. ..."
"... Unfortunately the DNC clowns have discovered how to use Hillary's projection techniques and they are using them more and more. No matter what they do or what we discover they do they project it back on us. ..."
A DOJ internal review of the Russia investigation is now focusing on transcripts of (not-so)
covertly recorded conversations between former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos and 'at
least one government source' during an overseas conversation in 2016.
In particular, DOJ investigators are focusing on why certain exculpatory (or exonerating)
evidence from the transcripts was not included in subsequent FBI surveillance warrant
applications , according to
Fox News , citing two sources familiar with the review.
"A source told Fox News that the "exculpatory evidence" included in the transcripts is
Papadopoulos denying having any contact with the Russians to obtain the supposed "dirt" on
Clinton," according to the report.
And while Fox doesn't name the 'government source,' it's undoubtedly Australian diplomat and
Clinton ally Alexander Downer, who was "idiotic enough" to spy on Papadopoulos with his phone,
according to the former Trump aide.
But Papadopoulos did not only meet with Mifsud and Downer while overseas. He met with
Cambridge professor and longtime FBI informant Stefan Halper and his female associate, who
went under the alias Azra Turk. Papadopoulos told Fox News that he saw Turk three times in
London: once over drinks, once over dinner and once with Halper. He also told Fox News back
in May that he always suspected he was being recorded . Further, he tweeted during the
Mueller testimony about "recordings" of his meeting with Downer . -
Fox News
"These recordings have exculpatory evidence," one source told Fox , adding " It is
standard tradecraft to record conversations with someone like Papadopoulos -- especially when
they are overseas and there are no restrictions. "
The recordings in question pertain to conversations between government sources and
Papadopoulos, which were memorialized in transcripts. One source told Fox News that Barr and
Durham are reviewing why the material was left out of applications to surveil another former
Trump campaign aide, Carter Page.
" I think it's the smoking gun ," the source said. -
Fox News
Also under review by AG Barr and US Attorney John Durham of Connecticut is the actual start
date of the original FBI investigation into the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the
US election.
Former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) first revealed the existence of transcripts documenting the
secretly recorded conversations earlier this year.
"If the bureau's going to send in an informant, the informant's going to be wired, and if
the bureau is monitoring telephone calls, there's going to be a transcript of that," Gowdy said
on Fox News in May.
"Some of us have been fortunate enough to know whether or not those transcripts exist. But
they haven't been made public, and I think one, in particular ... has the potential to actually
persuade people," he continued, adding "Very little in this Russia probe I'm afraid is going to
persuade people who hate Trump or love Trump. But there is some information in these
transcripts that has the potential to be a game-changer if it's ever made public. "
According to the report, the transcripts are currently classified - however President
Trump's May order to approve declassification at AG Barr's discretion means they may see the
light of day. And even if not, the declassification allowed Barr to barge in on DNI Director
Dan Coats' office and demand the files .
A source told Fox News that without the declassification order signed by Trump, Director
of National Intelligence Dan Coats was not going to give anyone access to the files -- over
concerns for protecting sources and methods. But another source told Fox News in May that
Coats, along with CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Chris Wray, are all working
"collaboratively" with Barr and Durham on the review.
Barr and Durham are also trying to pinpoint the actual "start date" of the investigation,
according to a source. -
Fox News
As passionately laid out by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) during this week's Mueller testimony, the
FBI officially opened the Russia investigation after Papadopoulos told Downer about a rumor
(told to him by Clinton Foundation member Joseph Mifsud) that Russia had 'dirt' on Hillary
Clinton.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/QC529hakU6U
That said, some have suggested that the FBI probe began long before Downer's report to
intelligence agencies .
On Wednesday, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes, R-Calif.,
challenged former Special Counsel Mueller over when the investigation started.
"The FBI claims the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign began on July
31, 2016, but in fact, it began before that," Nunes said. "In June 2016, before the
investigation was officially opened, Trump campaign associates Carter Page and Stephen Miller
were invited to attend a symposium at Cambridge University in July 2016. Your office,
however, did not investigate who was responsible for inviting these Trump associates to the
symposium." -
Fox News
"Maybe a better course of action is to figure out how the false accusations started," said
Jordan on Wednesday, adding "Here's the good news -- that's exactly what Bill Barr is doing and
thank goodness for that."
For what it's worth, I think the whole thing started w/Her campaign, in particular:
Podesta (means, motive and opportunity). I think it began as a cheating strategy and
snowballed into a coup; many ppl involved... Trump won (Thank G--!) and they've been trying
to cover their tracks ever since
Mueller is not currently mentally capable of programming his microwave, never mind author
a report or conduct an investigation.
We are seeing a spectacular display of an ill advised poorly thought out conspiracy to
take Trump down...
No one is really looking at why the desperation to get Hillary in, remember Cuntlery
herself stated that if Trump were to be elected "we will all hang"
I think if Barr digs deep enough he is going to see a foreign country was In control of
Hillary during her state department days, and potentially Bubba during his presidency,
remember how those secrets got leaked to China during Bill's Presidency? The preceding would
also implicate that inner circle assisting Hill Dog, ie Comey, Clapper, MCabe, Brennan and
the rest of those rat bastards BTW where is the computer guy that they were all using who got
nabbed just before fleeing on a jet out of the country, What about Huma?
Why the desperation to obliterate the server with bleach bit, and hammer pound the
phones?
Suddenly "enhanced interrogation" makes a whole lot more sense... Lets see how the tough marine remembers his training. As for Mifsud, he will likely instantly remember his past life as a canary the moment he's
shown a fuckin phone book...
Mueller was the token 'R'/Marine Vet/Never Trumper hired to give this corruption an air of
'fairness'. He was a tool, and has been for decades. Special place for him somewhere.
Becoming pretty clear at this point that the ***** that perpetrated this treason have
pretty much already played out every option
Yes that's right Cuntlery...your time is coming Bitch. At what point do they just punt for the good of the country and accept guilt quietly. Nadler and Schiff keep pushing it, will go very badly after Horowitz report
Unfortunately the DNC clowns have discovered how to use Hillary's projection techniques and
they are using them more and more. No matter
what they do or what we discover they do they project it back on us. With unending driveby
complicity it always buys at least a few weeks or gets them to the next news cycle where they
feel safe again. Complex criminality wreaks of the company.
Alexander Downer is a the classic groomed fwit who was given a path to power so he could
be controlled. He was the national leader of the opposition but was such a *** he was unelectable and
dumped. Most cartoonists in Australia depict him in fishnet stockings. The usual *** of his generation who could never come out (like Mcron). Quite effeminate
and in *** terms would be the bottom.
"That said, some have suggested that the FBI probe began long before Downer's report to
intelligence agencies ."
The patriots already know that the entire Russia/Trump probe was just cover for illegal
spying that they were doing WITHOUT FISA approval. The Russia/Trump probe was going to be
their excuse.
it's fortuitous in any case as the great first cause of the last generation of government
malfeasance, 9-11, was investigated by mueller as head of the fbi for the bush
administration. it keeps that more in the public eye and mind. it let's people see that the
deep state is bipartisan: helps republican bush and democrat clinton. just as long as they
both help the likud mossad.
There's a LOT for which to blame Mueller. Whitey Bulger, Ruby Ridge, Pan Am flight 103
come immediately to mind. As for who wanted him so bad, I would hazard a guess it was all the
democrats on his "staff" who needed the cover of a "conservative republican". I know, hard to
say that with a straight face.
But lest anyone be tempted to think Steele's 2016 dossier is about to be mysteriously
revived as credible, consider this: Over months of work, FBI agents painstakingly researched
every claim Steele made about Trump's possible collusion with Russia, and assembled their
findings into a spreadsheet-like document.
The over-under isn't flattering to Steele.
Multiple sources familiar with the FBI spreadsheet tell me the vast majority of Steele's
claims were deemed to be wrong, or could not be corroborated even with the most awesome tools
available to the U.S. intelligence community. One source estimated the spreadsheet found upward
of 90 percent of the dossier's claims to be either wrong, nonverifiable or open-source
intelligence found with a Google search.
In other words, it was mostly useless.
"The spreadsheet was a sea of blanks, meaning most claims couldn't be corroborated, and
those things that were found in classified intelligence suggested Steele's intelligence was
partly or totally inaccurate on several claims," one source told me.
The FBI declined comment when asked about the spreadsheet.
The FBI's final assessment was driven by many findings contained in classified footnotes at
the bottom of the spreadsheet. But it was also informed by an agent's interview, in early 2017,
with a Russian that Steele claimed was one of his main providers of intelligence, according to
my sources.
The FBI came to suspect that the Russian misled Steele, either intentionally or through
exaggeration, the sources said.
The spreadsheet and a subsequent report by special prosecutor Robert Mueller show just how far off the
seminal claims in the Steele dossier turned out to be.
For example, U.S. intelligence found no evidence that Carter Page, during a trip to Moscow
in July 2016, secretly met with two associates of Vladimir Putin Igor Sechin and senior
government official Igor Divyekin -- as part of the effort to collude with the Trump campaign,
as Steele reported.
Page did meet with a lower-level Rosneft official, and shook hands with a Russian deputy
prime minister, the FBI found, but it was a far cry from the tale that Steele's dossier
spun.
Likewise, Steele
claimed that Sechin had offered Page a hefty finder's fee if he could get Trump to help
lift sanctions on Moscow: "a 19 percent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return."
That offer, worth billions of dollars, was never substantiated and was deemed by some in
U.S. intelligence to be preposterous.
The inaccuracy of Steele's intelligence on Page is at the heart of the inspector general
investigation specifically because the
FBI represented to the FISA court that the intelligence on Page was verified and strong
enough to support the FISA warrant. It was, in the end, not verified.
Another knockdown of the dossier occurred when U.S. intelligence determined former Trump
lawyer Michael Cohen was not in Prague
in the summer of 2016 when Steele claimed he was meeting with Russians to coordinate a
hijacking of the election, the sources said.
Steele's theory about who in the Trump campaign might be conspiring with Russia kept
evolving from Page to Cohen to former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. None of those theories
checked out in the end, as the Mueller report showed.
Again, Steele's intelligence was wrong or unverifiable.
The salacious, headline-grabbing claim that Russians had incriminating
sex tapes showing Trump engaged in depraved acts with prostitutes also met a factual dead
end when the FBI interviewed the Georgian-American businessman who claimed to know about them.
Giorgi Rtskhiladze told investigators "he was told the tapes were fake," according to a
footnote in the Mueller report. Rtskhiladze's lawyer subsequently
issued a letter taking issue with some of Mueller's characterizations.
Steele had some general things right, of course, including that the Russians were behind
the
hacking of the Democratic National Committee's emails. Of course, there were public reports
saying so when Steele reported this.
But even then, his dossier's theory of how the hackers worked, who paid them and how they
communicated with Trump was determined in the FBI spreadsheet and subsequent Mueller
investigation to be far from accurate.
Even State officials, who
listened to Steele's theories in October 2016 -- less than two weeks before his dossier was
used to support the FISA request -- instantly determined he was grossly wrong on some
points.
Any effort to use Steele's belated cooperation with the inspector general's investigation to
prop up the credibility of his 2016 anti-Trump dossier or the FBI's reliance on it for the FISA
warrant is deeply misguided.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a key defender of Trump, said he talked with DOJ officials after
the most recent stories surfaced about Steele and was told the reporting is wrong. "Based on my
conversations with DOJ officials, recent reports which suggest Christopher Steele's dossier and
allegations are somehow deemed credible by DOJ, are simply false and not based on any
confirmation from sources with direct knowledge of ongoing investigations," Meadows told
me.
The FBI's own spreadsheet was so conclusive that it prompted then-FBI Director James Comey (no fan of Trump, mind
you) to dismiss the document as " salacious and unverified " and
for lead FBI agent Peter Strzok to text, "
There's no big there there ." FBI lawyer Lisa Page
testified that nine months into reviewing Steele's dossier they had not found evidence of
the collusion that Steele alleged.
Two years later, Mueller came to the same conclusion: Steele's intelligence alleging a
conspiracy was never verified.
The next time you hear a pundit suggesting Steele's dossier is credible or that the FBI's
reliance on it as FISA evidence was justified, just picture all those blanks in that FBI
spreadsheet.
They speak volumes as to what went wrong in the Russia investigation.
John Solomon is an
award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI
intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster
children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He
serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow
him on Twitter @jsolomonReports .
"... A couple of weeks ago, The Times of London published an article about senior civil servants fearing U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was "too frail" to be prime minister. Reportedly they also thought he "lacks both a firm grasp of foreign affairs and the domestic agenda. ..."
"... This is the same civil service that is supposed to maintain complete neutrality and according to its code "must not act in a way that unjustifiably favours or discriminates against particular individuals or interests." ..."
"... Corbyn fought back, arguing that it was unacceptable that civil servants were briefing newspapers on an elected politician. He demanded an independent inquiry into who was spreading such fabrications in the press and "compromising the integrity of the civil service." ..."
"... Miller, who runs the Bristol-based Organisation for Propaganda Studies, said the scheme was found to be spreading its own disinformation and openly criticizing opposition leader Corbyn and his party. ..."
"... Miller said this was clear from the very beginning of the Integrity Initiative when it was regularly engaged in tweeting or retweeting attacks on Corbyn and his closest advisors. ..."
"... Miller calls the use of taxpayers' money to interfere in domestic politics an affront to democracy. ..."
"... Chris Williamson, a Labour MP and Corbyn supporter who was trying to investigate the Integrity Initiative, found himself suspended from the party after he was targeted with allegations of anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Corbyn's call for an independent investigation into the civil service leak to the press has also, as expected, been rejected by the government. ..."
"... If you enjoyed this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
"... Jews in Europe and the US have gone from being heavily discriminated against to having much more influence on government than their numbers warrant. I'm going to tell the Netanyahu joke to make my point. Don't know who to credit. Kudos anyway. "It is not anti-Semitic to disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu as he is as white as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan." ..."
"... If the Integrity Initiative really is shut down, the little Simon Bracey-Lane will be free to cross the pond and campaign for Bernie just like he did in 2015 / 2016. Nah, just kiddin', his cover is blown. But seriously, campaign managers for Tulsi Gabbard best be on guard against inflation from these snakes. ..."
"... This is a joke right. You say communist and you reference China, but in the last century it was ok to ship nearly the entire industrial base of Western Democracies to China so that a bunch of fat cat tycoons, investment bankers, hedge funders et al could become so rich they finally had enough money to purchase the U.S. Government, and it looks like the government of Britain too. ..."
"... This incessant accusation of antisemitism against anyone who supports justice for Palestinians does seem to be effective. A decade ago when I first noticed this smear tactic I assumed it would be self defeating on the part of the Zionists and their backers. It sort of seemed obvious that such a tactic would be self limiting with the broader world beginning to reject such slander. However, it seems the smear is more effective today than it was ten years ago. So depressing. Watching Corbyn's supporters ripping apart his own base in the Labour Party in an effort to appease the Israelis is appalling -- it seems the more that is conceded the more aggressive the Zionist become. Ten years ago it was proper to describe the West Bank as "occupied territory", soon it will be considered antisemitic to even go that far. ..."
"... in 2015, an unnamed, serving British general was quoted saying that if a Corbyn government implemented his well-established anti-imperial and anti-nuke agenda, "there would be mass resignations at all levels [of the military] and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-army-could-stage-mutiny-under-corbyn-says-senior-serving-general-10509742.html ..."
"... As Mayhew noted, 'the turning point' was the speech of George Marshall the US Secretary of State in June 1947. From 'the middle of 1947 onwards, decisions were taken towards uniting the free world, at the expense of widening the gap with the Communist world our immediate objective changed, from "one world" to "one free world"'. ..."
"... . That is what all of this is about: this is all a campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to keep expandable, pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt slavery. ..."
The 'Unconstitutional Animus' Against UK Labour Leader July 16, 2019 •
39 Comments
Johanna Ross spoke with David Miller, a propaganda researcher, after the recent publicity of
U.K. civil service murmurings about Jeremy Corbyn's "fitness."
By Johanna
Ross
in Edinburgh, Scotland Special to Consortium News
A couple of weeks ago, The Times of London published an
article about senior civil servants fearing U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was "too
frail" to be prime minister. Reportedly they also thought he "lacks both a firm grasp of
foreign affairs and the domestic agenda."
This is the same civil service that is supposed to maintain complete neutrality and
according to its code "must not act in a way that
unjustifiably favours or discriminates against particular individuals or interests."
Corbyn fought back, arguing that it was unacceptable that civil servants were briefing
newspapers on an elected politician. He demanded an independent inquiry into who was spreading
such fabrications in the press and "compromising the integrity of the civil service."
Controversial BBC graphic seeking to link Corbyn to Russia.
For David Miller, a professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, who
investigates concentrations
of power and ways to hold them accountable, the idea that the British civil service may not be
impartial in its operations is hardly surprising.
Far from ever being objective, he told Consortium News that the civil service now
clearly has "an unconstitutional animus against a potential Corbyn government and has been
briefing against it one way or another through various agencies for some time now."
Catalog of Smears
Indeed, the anti-Corbyn bias within the establishment has been obvious in the catalog of
smears on Corbyn and his team since he came to the Labour leadership; from allegations of being
a "Soviet sleeper" to being "anti-Semitic" and now to questions about his overall fitness.
David Miller: Faction fight against Corbyn. (University of Bristol)
Miller said most of the allegations were created by a number of organisations and
individuals who are "involved in a faction fight with the Corbyn leadership."
Noam Chomsky, a leading U.S. social critic, is among those who have spoken out against what
he termed a "witch hunt" against the Labour leader and his supporters.
Whether or not anti-Semitism exists in the party, Miller said the accusations are out of
hand. "Almost everyone who says anything which is either critical of Israel or critical of the
party's response to the anti-Semitism crisis is denounced as an anti-Semite," Miller said. "The
question is how long will it be before everyone sees that the people who are involved in this
have overreached themselves."
Attempts to undermine potential socialist governments are of course, not new.
Miller gives the example of the Zinoviev case – when a fake letter was published in
the Daily Mail in 1924 just prior to the general election, suggesting Communists in
Britain were taking orders from Moscow. The goal was clearly to undermine the British Labour
movement.
Miller also points to the case of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. "Despite what may now
be said by some elements of the security state," Miller said that British agencies were engaged
in an active plot to
undermine Wilson's elected government.
As another example, Miller offered the "Information Research Department," first proposed in
1947 and sold to the cabinet as a bipartisan, anti-Communist and anti-American propaganda
operation. In fact, Miller described it as a "secret, covert, anti-Communist propaganda
operation which in the 70s was engaged in undermining the Wilson government."
Today, Miller said, similar agencies in the U.K. government are doing the same thing.
Harold Wilson in 1986. (Allan Warren, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Integrity Initiative
As an example, Miller cites the Integrity Initiative; organized by the government's
Institute for Statecraft, which has a stated mission of countering "Russian disinformation and
malign influence by harnessing existing expertise and establishing a network of experts,
opinion formers and policy makers to educate national audiences in the threat and to help build
national capacities to counter it." Its website is incidentally now empty pending an
investigation into the "theft of its data" – after a hack exposed detail of the extent to
which the government-funded program was itself engaged in disinformation.
Miller, who runs the Bristol-based Organisation for Propaganda Studies, said the scheme was
found to be spreading its own disinformation and openly criticizing opposition leader Corbyn
and his party.
"Corbyn has recently said in relation to the most recent criticism from the civil service
that there are people in the establishment that are trying to undermine Corbyn, his office, his
advisors and supporters of him," Miller said. "And that's what the Integrity Initiative was
doing."
Cartoon published by Punch after the Zinoviev letter was released, depicting a Bolshevik
campaigning for Ramsay MacDonald, head of the short-lived Labour government of 1924. (Wikimedia
Commons)
Miller said this was clear from the very beginning of the Integrity Initiative when it was
regularly engaged in tweeting or retweeting attacks on Corbyn and his closest advisors.
Miller calls the use of taxpayers' money to interfere in domestic politics an affront to
democracy.
"A government-funded project was engaged in attacking the leader of the opposition," Miller
said, "which is unconstitutional and something the U.K. civil service should not be involved in
they crossed the line when they started attacking Corbyn. And when we look back on this period,
the Integrity Initiative, its funding by the Foreign Office and its base in British military
intelligence will be one of the strands of the activities which will be seen to have been a
secret state campaign against the elected leader of the Labour party."
Miller would like to see an investigation into the attacks on Corbyn and whether they had
been effectively funded by the Foreign Office, but doesn't hold out much hope of that
happening.
Six months ago, Shadow Home Secretary Emily Thornberry demanded answers to how this could
have happened, with no result.
And Chris Williamson, a Labour MP and Corbyn supporter who was trying to investigate the Integrity
Initiative, found himself suspended from the party after he was targeted with allegations of
anti-Semitism.
Corbyn's call for an independent investigation into the civil service leak to the press has
also, as expected, been rejected by the government.
Johanna Ross is a freelance journalist based in the United Kingdom.
If you enjoyed this original article, please consider
making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
Michael McNulty , July 18, 2019 at 05:52
After he won the second round to remain Labour Party leader Corbyn should have left the
party to form a new socialist party, taking his large following and their subscriptions with
him. He would have had three years behind him with a new movement, one which would not have
had the back-stabbers and poisoners he's having to deal with daily. It would have been quite
established now and a real political force. I think the Labour Party is so polluted that the
left must break away; it's the only way we can overturn the excesses and failures of
neo-liberalism which for most people is a truly dreadful system.
Maz Palmer , July 17, 2019 at 15:02
They are all much worse than bozos (or Bezos); they are all plutocrats, oligarchs,
neo-liberal neo-fascist capitalists. That is what all of this is about: this is all a
campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to keep expandable,
pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt
slavery.
Hopelb , July 17, 2019 at 21:52
Upvote!
Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 14:55
"lacks both a firm grasp of foreign affairs and the domestic agenda."
It makes me wonder how Teresa May and her Cabinet, including the next PM, fares in such
assessment. Nincompoops, loud mouths, poodles, and worshipers of woodoo economics.
I get it. Corbyn is Pro-Palestinian, anti-war and Pro-Worker so they are trying to get rid
of him.
All I see are articles attacking him. Are there people/forces behind him supporting him?
Is his support significant among other Labour MP's and the Public at large?
Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 16:11
The problem is that UK public opinion is quite chaotic at this point and "everything is
possible". At some point, four parties had roughly the same poll numbers: Tories, Brexit,
Labour and LibDems. However, in the last two weeks Labour and Tories gained with Labour
ahead. In a system with single seat districts, "anything can happen", and a recent
by-election suggested that Labour may have an advantage in "foot soldiers", volunteers who
walk around a district chatting up voters. The internal fights in Labour attracted many new
members, and from the point of view of "sensible folks in the Establishment", this is the
worst type of rubble. No respect for monarchy, the Trident, necessity of low taxes on
business and the rich and so on. And anti-Semitic to boot.
So the meaning of "Corbyn is frail" is that while he himself seems mild mannered, his
victory will unleashed the unwashed hordes wrecking everything which is good and he hold
dear, like the monarchy, the Trident and so on.
Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 16:45
The problem is that UK public opinion is quite chaotic lately and "everything is
possible". At some point, four parties had roughly the same poll numbers: Tories, Brexit,
Labour and LibDems. However, in the last two weeks Labour and Tories gained with Labour
ahead. In a system with single seat districts, "anything can happen", and a recent
by-election suggested that Labour may have an advantage in "foot soldiers", volunteers who
walk around a district chatting up voters. The internal fights in Labour attracted many new
members, and from the point of view of "sensible folks in the Establishment", this is the
worst type of rabble. No respect for the monarchy, the Trident, the necessity of low taxes on
business and the rich and so on. And anti-Semitic to boot.
So the meaning of "Corbyn is frail" is that while he himself seems mild mannered, his
victory would unleashed unwashed hordes wrecking everything which is good and that we hold
dear, like the monarchy, the Trident and so on.
Jeff Ewener , July 17, 2019 at 13:26
Gob-smacking. To call a man with the intelligence, experience, sensitivity & integrity
of Jeremy Corbyn "unfit" to be the British Prime Minister, while a monstrosity like Boris
Johnson is standing on the doorstep of Number 10 – just takes the breath away.
rosemerry , July 17, 2019 at 15:45
Not to mention the former "New Labour" leaders whose policies fell far away from the
traditional policies Corbyn has held to and which caused so many Britons to support him as
leader.
Hayman Fan , July 18, 2019 at 11:49
Integrity? Are you joking? Corbyn has been anti-EU for 40 years. In fact, he is the only
main party leader who voted leave in the last people's vote (aka the referendum). But he has
tried to hid that fact. He has been sitting on the fence and playing politics with the issue.
Many fools in Britain believe Corbyn is a remainer. A man of integrity would have explained
to the British people his long held position on the EU and Brexit. But he didn't do that
because he isn't a man of integrity. He wants to con his way into power and if he gets there
(looking unlikely right now), he and his Stalinist henchpeople will wield that power
ruthlessly.
Fascinating article. May we repost it on jvl.org.uk?
Eddie , July 17, 2019 at 12:36
Comment that I posted on the Malware article do not post.
Zenobia van Dongen , July 17, 2019 at 11:39
In English-speaking countries anti-Semitic is just a code word for pro-Islamic. Miller
himself is deeply involved in efforts to make extremist Islam respectable and justifying
terrorist indoctrination.
Okay, I'll take your comment as made in good faith but you will need to back it up with
good evidence. Where is it?
Qui? , July 18, 2019 at 03:22
Palestinians are semites, as the rest of the Arabs. So who is the real antisemite now?
Truth first , July 17, 2019 at 11:37
A "communist" who is against war, nukes and massive inequality is OK by me.
Hayman Fan , July 18, 2019 at 07:28
Is it indeed. Then your are a fool. Pol Pot was a communist who was against war and nukes
and massive inequality. But implementing totalitarism by force didn't turn out well for the
Cambodian people. And it wouldn't turn out well for the British people either. Except for
Corbyn and his henchpeople of course.
dean 1000 , July 17, 2019 at 10:42
Jews in Europe and the US have gone from being heavily discriminated against to having
much more influence on government than their numbers warrant. I'm going to tell the Netanyahu joke to make my point. Don't know who to credit. Kudos
anyway. "It is not anti-Semitic to disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu as he is as white as the Grand
Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan."
Given the influence of US and European Jews it is well past time for them to stop
screaming anti-semitism when someone has a divergent opinion. They should stop using Semitic
people as human shields.
The left also likes to hurl anti-Semitism at political opponents when they don't have a
relevant answer.
Unfounded criticism of Jews is anti-Jewish rather than anti-Semitic. Call it what it
is.
As Albert Einstein says Capitalism is an Evil supported by those who are terrified of
Jeremy Corbyn because like Jesus he is a true Socialist
Que Nelle , July 17, 2019 at 05:52
To be accused of antisemitism by zionists that champion the racist entity israel, is a
badge of honor.
Vivian O'Blivion , July 17, 2019 at 03:30
If the Integrity Initiative really is shut down, the little Simon Bracey-Lane will be free
to cross the pond and campaign for Bernie just like he did in 2015 / 2016. Nah, just kiddin',
his cover is blown. But seriously, campaign managers for Tulsi Gabbard best be on guard
against inflation from these snakes.
Hayman Fan , July 17, 2019 at 02:51
Guys be careful with this. Corbyn is a communist. He is surrounded by Stalinists. Their
modus operandi is entryism + free stuff + perpetual attacks on cultural norms. They used to
laud the USSR. Then Venezuala. Now China. If they ever manage to grab power, they will stamp
on individual liberty. Just like China does. The Muslim vote is very important to them and
whilst they despise conventional religions, they will happily 'buy' Muslim votes with anti
Israeli and anti Semitic rhetoric. The loudest voices speaking up against Corbyn and his
henchpeople are on the left. Be a little bit circumspect.
Truth first , July 17, 2019 at 11:36
A "communist" who is against war, nukes and massive inequality is OK by me.
Errr what ? Israel does enough on its own to show how anti-Arab and undemocratic it is
without the need for Jeremy Corbyn to add anything. I'm a socialist. I support what Mr Corbyn
is doing to promote socialism in the UK. There's not the slightest evidence he's an
anti-Semite, and the tiny amount of anti-Semitism in the Labour party is dwarfed by what's
emanating from the right against Jews and Muslims.
Just say no , July 17, 2019 at 13:58
This is a joke right. You say communist and you reference China, but in the last century
it was ok to ship nearly the entire industrial base of Western Democracies to China so that a
bunch of fat cat tycoons, investment bankers, hedge funders et al could become so rich they
finally had enough money to purchase the U.S. Government, and it looks like the government of
Britain too. That's where we are today.
There may be "communists" lurking somewhere mostly in
the imagination who are trotted out whenever a left person obtains a plurality. What has
happened to Jeremy Corbyn is horrifying and we have our own issues in the U.S. with the
endless smears and lies regarding the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. We live in a world of
fabrication, sanctions enough to go around for everyone. Even the little state of RI is
sanctioned by Moody's for having the effrontery to pass a bill which "gives too much away to
labor" but Moody's and the other ratings agencies gave triple AAA ratings to junk during the
"great recession" plain and simple, and no one cared. We need a Nuremburg trial for
Capitalism and all its practioners.
You are wrong is several ways. First, "There may be "communists" lurking somewhere mostly
in the imagination who are trotted out whenever a left person obtains a plurality." Corbyn
was observed to be a threat the moment he was elected Labour leader, something that stumped
large segments of "informed public". Due to the surprise element, the anti-Semitic angle was
not exploited properly, with possible exception of some Zionist whack jobs who harranged him.
Instead, two points were raised that really jolted my attention.
First, Corbyn was sooo
extreme that he advocated discontinuation of Trident program and even, horror!, the entirety
of British nuclear arms program. You could as well raise huge signs ?????? ?y???? ???????! on
English shores.
Second, his bicycling habits were compared to China during the orthodox
Communist year, when riding on non-descript bikes was heavily supported by pre-Capitalist
leadership.
Mind you, a person of note may ride a bike without shame, but not the cheap and
aged specimen favored by Corbyn. Finally, compromising photos were found showing Corbyn
relaxing and revealing his red socks.
Sounds like you just couldn't stand not posting a troll comment on an article about your
own activities, yes?
ToivoS , July 16, 2019 at 22:54
This incessant accusation of antisemitism against anyone who supports justice for
Palestinians does seem to be effective. A decade ago when I first noticed this smear tactic I
assumed it would be self defeating on the part of the Zionists and their backers. It sort of
seemed obvious that such a tactic would be self limiting with the broader world beginning to
reject such slander. However, it seems the smear is more effective today than it was ten
years ago. So depressing. Watching Corbyn's supporters ripping apart his own base in the
Labour Party in an effort to appease the Israelis is appalling -- it seems the more that is
conceded the more aggressive the Zionist become. Ten years ago it was proper to describe the
West Bank as "occupied territory", soon it will be considered antisemitic to even go that
far.
" the 'Information Research Department,' first proposed in 1947 and sold to the cabinet as
a bipartisan, anti-Communist and anti-American propaganda operation."
"Anti-American" is a slip, right? I assume it was pro-American (or pro-USAian).
My apologies, I was paraphrasing the work of Lyn Smith in her article on IRD in Millennium
in 1980. It should really be 'anti capitalist'. According Smith the founder of IRD (Christopher
Mayhew) put forward a plan to set up a cold war propaganda agency:
'Mayhew put forward his ideas: the campaign should be as positive as possible laying
stress on the merits of Social Democracy but, he pointed out "we shouldn't appear as
defenders of the status quo but should attack Capitalism and Imperialism along with Russian
Communism" In fact at this early stage, the idea was more of a "third force" propaganda
attacking Capitalism as well as communism (this, however, was not to last for, as later
documents reveal, anti Communism soon cam to the fore).'(Covert British Propaganda: The
Information Research Department: 1947-77, Millennium, 9(1), p68-9)
In fact the idea that it would be anti capitalist was a ruse used by Mayhew to deceive the
left members of the British cabinet. As my colleague and I Will Dinan summarised in our book
A Century of Spin (Pluto Press, 2008, p130-1):
IRD was not created with the knowing support of the Labour Cabinet. The author of the
paper which went to the cabinet –
Christoper Mayhew – was a Labour right winger and cold warrior. He dissembled to the
cabinet about the purpose and function of the IRD by claiming that it was to be a 'Third
Force' campaign, understood as policy intended by the left to be independent of both the US
and the USSR. According to Mayhew himself:
I thought it was necessary to present the whole campaign in a positive way, in a way which
Dick Crossman and Michael Foot would fi nd it hard to oppose. And they were calling for a
Third Force so I recommended in the original paper I put to Bevin that we call it a Third
Force propaganda campaign.
As Mayhew noted, 'the turning point' was the speech of George Marshall the US Secretary of
State in June 1947. From 'the middle of
1947 onwards, decisions were taken towards uniting the free world, at the expense of widening
the gap with the Communist world our immediate objective changed, from "one world" to "one
free world"'.
It is interesting, in this light, to reflect what might/will happen once a Corbyn
government is elected with – how should we put this – a minority of leftists in
the cabinet.
David G , July 17, 2019 at 15:27
Very interesting! I guess the propagandists back then had a little more finesse than the
idiotic bludgeoning the US/UK establishment is laying on us these days. Thanks for the clarification, David Miller!
Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2019 at 21:05
The British Political Class has the same problem as the American Political Class –
No integrity, No Honesty, No ethics. Just the sort of bozos we need running countries.
Maz Palmer , July 17, 2019 at 14:59
They are all much worse than bozos (or Bezos); they are all plutocrats, oligarchs, neo-liberal neo-fascist capitalists.
That is what all of this is about: this is all a campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to
keep expandable, pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt slavery.
Mr Johnson,
This would tie in to your (correct imo) observations of apparent untruths in the Mueller
Dossier, and with Mr Habakkuk's comment above.
Re: The Trump Tower meeting and Russian attorney Veselnitskaya - journalist Lucy Komisar
interviewed Veselnitskaya twice Nov 2018 iirc, and has found another apparent untruth.
Komisar does not believe William Browder of Magnitsky Act fame, and Komisar's article backs
up that claim, relating that to the Trump Tower meeting and the Mueller Dossier.
FTA - "the (Mueller) report on this topic is deceptive...the report itself lies about the
issue the meeting addressed."
"It wasn't to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton...That was a ploy by Robert
Goldstone...(Goldstone) got the lawyer (Veselnitskaya) the meeting for her to lobby a
potentially incoming administration against the Magnitsky Act..."
"Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that
Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes
and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats."
You and Mr Habakkuk should be aware Jeff Carlson (Epoch Times) is a "Q" follower (Trust The
Plan), fwiw.
Aaron Mate, although a flaming Socialist Progressive, is top notch. imo
Thank you for your continuing research on this.
Thanks again to the Colonel for allowing the intrusion.
Regards.
This is a blatant UK and US intelligence hit job aimed at influencing the 2020
election:
- "UK hijacks oil tanker": Message="UK is prepared to take action against Iran, why is
Trump so war shy"
- "Trump asks Iran before bombing": Message=ditto the above.
- "Diplomatic cables released "accidentally" by UK Foreign Office": Message="Even the UK
is getting tired of confused Trump"
Come on folks, stop analysing it with endless "what if"'s and see it for what it is.
Prepare for much more of this: The UK's Skripal affair lured Trump into expelling
diplomats, later making him look too trigger happy. Now they are trying to make him look
indecisive, stupid and reluctant to stand with his closest allies: notice how Bolton has
receded into the background to avoid the flak?
In addition, I am sure the UK's intelligence would never do any of this without the OK
from US intelligence.
You have probably seen the bumper sticker that says: "Shit Happens." Some people are just
lucky, I suppose, and odd coincidences mark their lives.
When he was just out of Columbia College and working for a reputed CIA front company,
Business International Corporation, Barack Obama had a chance encounter with a young woman,
Genevieve Cook, with whom he had a 1-2 year relationship.
Like Obama and at about the same
time, Cook just happened to have lived in Indonesia with her father, Michael Cook, who just
happened to become Australia's top spook, the director-general of the Office of National
Assessments, and also the Ambassador to Washington.
Of course, Obama's mother, as is well-known, just happened to be living in Indonesia with
Barack and Obama's step-father, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian military officer, who had been
called back to Indonesia by the CIA supported General Suharto three months before the CIA coup
against President Sukarno. Suharto subsequently slaughtered over a million Indonesian
Communists and Indonesian-Chinese.
As is also well-known, it just so happened that Obama's
mother, Ann Dunham, trained in the Russian language, after teaching English in the US Embassy
in Jakarta that housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia, did her "anthropological" work
in Indonesia and Southeast Asia financed by the well-known CIA conduits, USAID and the Ford
Foundation.
Then there is Cook's stepfather, Philip C. Jessup, who just happened to be in
Indonesia at the same time, doing nickel-mining deals with the genocidal Suharto
government.
Anyway, "shit happens." You never know whom you might meet along the way of life.
It is possible that Skripal was a source of some information in Steele dossier
Notable quotes:
"... Another corroboration was the Trump Tower meeting: ostensibly set up by Trump linked Araz Agalarov could verify the piss taking allegations. It's well worth revisiting the Elizabeth Vos Disobedient Media article for background on this meeting set up Mifsud et al: who are linked to London – not Moscow. ..."
"... "Genuine" in the sense that it was really written by a KGB insider (which Skripal was), NOT in the sense that what he alleged was true. The point is that the source of the Steele-Clinton dossier would have been revealed and, of course, the source would have been a proven consummate liar and traitor. This would blow Mueller's "investigation" out of the water. ..."
"... As someone who has worked for more than a decade with the microfilm collection of Soviet documents in the Hoover Institution Archives, I can say that the dossier itself was compiled by a Russian, whose command of English is far from perfect and who follows the KGB (now FSB) practice of writing intelligence reports, in particular the practice of capitalizing all names for easy reference. The report includes Putin's inner circle – Peskov, Ivanov, Sechin, Lavrov. The anonymous author claims to have "trusted compatriots" who knew the roles that each Kremlin insider, including Putin himself, played in the Trump election saga and were prepared to tell him. ..."
"... Sergei Skripal could fit the description of the "Russian" referred to in the third paragraph. ..."
The main corroboration for the Steele Dossier was Christopher Steele: briefing the press at the Tabard Inn, Washington – to set
up a collaboration loop. Julian Assange tweeted that one of the journalists was Paul Wood who looks like a spook or an asset himself.
Another journalists was Michael Isikoff. His planted story war used to collaborate the Dossier as the basis of the FBI's FISA
warrant to surveill Carter Page.
The Nunes Memo also states that Steele back-chanelled additional allegations into the DOJ via Bruce Ohr.
Another corroboration was the Trump Tower meeting: ostensibly set up by Trump linked Araz Agalarov could verify the piss
taking allegations. It's well worth revisiting the Elizabeth Vos Disobedient Media article for background on this meeting set
up Mifsud et al: who are linked to London – not Moscow.
Anyway, all these "experts" – and Wikipedia – seem to have got their information from one source – Steele: who both wrote and
then corroborated his own dossier. With a little help from his intel friends
"Genuine" in the sense that it was really written by a KGB insider (which Skripal was), NOT in the sense that what he alleged
was true. The point is that the source of the Steele-Clinton dossier would have been revealed and, of course, the source would
have been a proven consummate liar and traitor. This would blow Mueller's "investigation" out of the water.
But I'll not engage with you any further on this, since there's none so blind as those who will not see.
Thomas Peterson
why exactly does it seem likely Skripal was one of Steele's sources? did Steele even need any sources to write his ludicrous 'dossier'?
The Orbis report makes as if it knows all the ins-and-outs and comings-and-goings within Putin's impenetrable Kremlin. It
reports information from anonymous "trusted compatriots," "knowledgeable sources," "former intelligence officers," and "ministry
of foreign affairs officials." The report gives a fly-on-the-wall account of just about every conceivable event associated with
Donald Trump's Russian connections. It claims to know more than is knowable as it recounts sordid tales of prostitutes, "golden
showers," bribes, squabbles in Putin's inner circle, and who controls the dossiers of kompromat (compromising information).
There are two possible explanations for the fly-on-the-wall claims of the Orbis report: Either its author (who is not Mr. Steele)
decided to write fiction, or collected enough gossip to fill a 30-page report, or a combination of the two. The author of the
Orbis report has one more advantage: He knew that what he was writing was unverifiable. He advertises himself as the only Kremlin
outsider with enough "reliable" contacts to explain what is really going within Putin's office.
As someone who has worked for more than a decade with the microfilm collection of Soviet documents in the Hoover Institution
Archives, I can say that the dossier itself was compiled by a Russian, whose command of English is far from perfect and who follows
the KGB (now FSB) practice of writing intelligence reports, in particular the practice of capitalizing all names for easy reference.
The report includes Putin's inner circle – Peskov, Ivanov, Sechin, Lavrov. The anonymous author claims to have "trusted compatriots"
who knew the roles that each Kremlin insider, including Putin himself, played in the Trump election saga and were prepared to
tell him.
The Orbis report spins the tale of Putin insiders, spurred on by Putin himself, engaging in a five-year courtship of Donald
Trump in which they offer him lucrative real estate deals that he rejects but leaves himself open to blackmail as a result of
sexual escapades with prostitutes in St. Petersburg and Moscow (the famous "golden shower" incident). Despite his reluctance to
enter into lucrative business deals, Trump "and his inner circle have accepted regular intelligence from the Kremlin, including
on his Democratic and other political rivals," according to the Orbis report.
This story makes no sense. In 2011, when the courtship purportedly begins, Trump was a TV personality and beauty pageant
impresario. Neither in the U.S. or Russia would anyone of authority anticipate that Trump would one day become the presidential
candidate of a major U.S. political party, making him the target of Russian intelligence.
Sergei Skripal could fit the description of the "Russian" referred to in the third paragraph.
"... Harding's avowed contact with Steele may also have contributed to another high profile blunder in April this year. In the immediate wake of the apparent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, UK, the UK government issued a D(SMA) notice , blocking mention of Pablo Miller -- Skripal's MI6 recruiter -- in the media. ..."
On September 21, The Guardian ran an absolutely sensational exclusive, based on disclosures made by "multiple" anonymous sources
to Luke Harding, one of the paper's leading journalists - in 2017, Russian diplomats allegedly held secret talks in London with associates
of Assange, in an attempt to assist in the Wikileaks founder's escape from the UK.
The dastardly conspiracy would've entailed Assange being smuggled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge under cover
of Christmas Eve in a diplomatic vehicle and transported to Russia, where he'd be safe from extradition to the US, ending his eight-years
of effective arbitrary detention in the process.
In any event, the audacious plot was eventually aborted after being deemed "too
risky" -- even for the reckless daredevils of Moscow -- mere days before its planned execution date.
Rommy Vallejo, head of Ecuador's
intelligence agency, is said to have travelled to the UK around December 15 to supervise the operation, and left when it was called
off.
'Extraordinary, Deliberate Lies'
The Russian Embassy in London
was quick to condemn the
article on Twitter, calling the claims "another example of disinformation and fake news" in the UK mainstream media, and noting the
paper violated national media standards by failing to ask the Russian side for a comment prior to the report's release. "This publication
has nothing to do with the reality. The Embassy has never engaged with Ecuadorian colleagues, or with anyone else, in discussions
of any kind on Russia's participation in ending Assange's stay within the diplomatic mission of Ecuador.
We're puzzled by the sensational
attitude of the authors. As recently as September 18, Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright called for increased efforts to combat media
and online disinformation. [The] Guardian piece is a brilliant example of the kind of journalism British reader should be protected
from," a spokesperson added in an official statement.
In a subsequent statement
, the Russian Foreign Ministry slammed the article for containing a "whole series of similar anti-Russia innuendos, and once again
made clear Russian diplomats did not contact staff of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London or Assange's associates in order to assist
in his escape from the UK.
However,
a
far more damning indictment of the article's extraordinary, evidence-free claims was provided by Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador
to Uzbekistan, who denounced the "quite extraordinary set of deliberate lies" in a September 23 blog post. In doing so, he revealed
he and Fidel Narvaez -- a close confidant of Assange fingered as the key point of contact between the Ecuadorian embassy and Moscow
in the article -- had engaged in discussions with Assange in 2017 regarding a possible departure from the UK capital, and debated
possible future destinations for the embattled Wikileaks founder.
"It's not only the case Russia didn't figure in those plans, Julian directly ruled out the possibility of going to Russia. I know
100% for certain the entire story is a complete and utter fabrication. I cannot find words enough to express the depth of my contempt
for Harding and [Editor] Katherine Viner, who've betrayed completely the values of journalism. The aim of the piece is evidently
to add a further layer to the fake news of Wikileaks' non-existent relationship to Russia as part of the "Hillary didn't really lose"
narrative. I am, frankly, rather shocked," Murray
wrote
.
Friends in Spooky Places
The identities of Harding's alleged anonymous sources aren't even hinted at in the article, but Murray made a striking suggestion
-- he "strongly suspect[ed]" that "MI6 tool" Harding's informants were the UK security services. If true, this would make the article
"entirely black propaganda" produced by British spies. Whether MI6 agents are the source of the story or not, it's certainly true
Harding enjoys a very close relationship indeed with British intelligence services -- a bond he has frequently, openly and proudly
advertised in articles and books.
For instance, in his highly controversial 2017 book Collusion, Harding argued Donald Trump
had a relationship with the Russian 'deep state' dating back to the 1980s, and colluded with the Kremlin to subvert US democracy.
To support this conclusion, he frequently cited claims fed to him directly by Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 spy turned 'business
intelligence' professional, who authored the utterly discredited 'Trump-Russia' dossier for Fusion GPS.
When challenged to provide any evidence whatsoever for his book's assertions by Aaron Mate of The Real News, Harding was left mumbling
and stuttering -- he was also unable to defend
his claim that an individual's use of an emoji was proof they were working for Russian intelligence, and terminated the interview
prematurely.
Harding's avowed contact with Steele may also have contributed to another high profile blunder in April this year. In the immediate
wake of the apparent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, UK, the UK government
issued a D(SMA) notice , blocking mention of Pablo
Miller -- Skripal's MI6 recruiter -- in the media. Individuals who conducted internet searches for Miller afterwards quickly found
his LinkedIn profile, which identified him as a 'Senior Analyst' at Orbis Intelligence -- Steele's corporate espionage company.-
It is true, or was. As I say, this 2017 forum thread, which links to Pablo Miller's LinkedIn profile, states Orbis is listed on
Miller's CV -- https://t.co/Fx0vu1qorJ . Stop regurgitating anonymous claims
by your spook pals and do some research, Luke -- Kit Klarenberg (@KitKlarenberg)
March 12, 2018
Miller's page was quickly deleted though, and Harding took to Twitter to issue firm denials of a connection between Miller and the
firm, going so far as to suggest "someone" was using search engine optimization techniques to dishonestly associate Miller and Orbis.
However, enterprising Sputnik journalist Kit Klarenberg quickly and easily found an online forum thread dating from 2017 clearly
identifying Miller as an Orbis employee -- as of September, Harding is yet to respond, or retract his claims.
"... Rob Reiner (backed by David Frum, Max Boot, James Clapper and their absolutely-not-xenophobic-sounding "Committee to Investigate Russia") continues to use Hollywood celebrities to spread the Trump Derangement Syndrome. First it was Morgan Freeman. Didn't go over too well. Even the "liberals" hated it. Now it's Robert De Niro, Martin Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Stephen King, George Takei, and a few lesser known actors. ..."
"... Woah! Stop right there! The "Trump adviser" is George Papadopoulos -- that is clear from the video sequence. So the "Russian operative" they're talking about is none other than Joseph Mifsud. ..."
"... So how can it be that Joseph Mifsud is now a "Russian operative"? Well, look no further than his Wikipedia page. You see, he visited Valdai Discussion Club annual conference once or twice. Apparently, that's all it takes nowadays to become a Russian-linked Russian operative with close connections to Russia. ..."
Rob Reiner (backed by David Frum, Max Boot, James Clapper and their
absolutely-not-xenophobic-sounding "Committee to Investigate Russia") continues to use
Hollywood celebrities to spread the Trump Derangement Syndrome. First it was Morgan Freeman.
Didn't go over too well. Even the "liberals" hated it. Now it's Robert De Niro, Martin Sheen,
Laurence Fishburne, Stephen King, George Takei, and a few lesser known actors. Here's an
excerpt:
Stephen King: Here are some other specific examples from the Mueller report.
Sophia Bush: One: in the Spring of 2016, a Russian operative told a Trump adviser
that the Russian government had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of
emails.
Jonathan Van Ness: The adviser then worked to arrange a meeting between the
campaign and the Russian government.
Laurence Fishburne: That's collusion.
Woah! Stop right there! The "Trump adviser" is George Papadopoulos -- that is clear from
the video sequence. So the "Russian operative" they're talking about is none other than
Joseph Mifsud. Here's Papadopoulos himself talking about Mifsud in an April 16, 2019
interview with Michael Tracey:
George Papadopoulos: He remains an enigma to this day and no one could track him
down, but I've been told recently he's not dead, so there's some improvements.
Michael Tracey: Right, we should say I mean, he was rumored to have been deceased
at a certain point, right?
George Papadopoulos: That's right.
Michael Tracey: And now it appears he might be living under an assumed name [?]
but nobody's heard from him quite a while.
George Papadopoulos: Well, the only in-public statements that he's made were two.
One, he gave an interview -- a bizarre interview -- to the Italian media the day my name
was released and he said he's never heard of "Putin's niece" and "George is probably
talking about some girl that he was trying to have a romantic relationship with" (and we
could get into that aspect of my relationship with Joseph Mifsud). And also he his lawyer,
this man named Stephan Roh, who's a prominent Swiss attorney, has gone public numerous
times and stated that Joseph Mifsud was no Russian asset, but he was a Western intelligence
operative, and he was working under the guidance of the FBI when he was interacting with
Papadopoulos. He said this on CNN during a one-hour short documentary that CNN had about my
life, and he's given interviews subsequently to The Daily Caller , where he
suggested the same exact thing.
Now, anybody who's been following my case and who could just simply google Joseph Mifsud
can also see that: Joseph Mifsud, of course, was dealing with MI6 figures at the highest
level; three months after I notified the FBI that he could be potentially a Russian asset,
he was in Saudi Arabia on a panel with Ash Carter, who was the former defense secretary
under Obama; and around the time [?] my name was released in October of 2017, he was
photographed in The Guardian attending private parties with Boris Johnson, who just
happened to be the Secretary of State of the UK. So, unless the Russians, basically,
infiltrated the upper echelons of the U.S. and UK security establishment, then Mifsud was
no Russian agent, and he's, in my opinion, and what everybody now who is objective believes
is that he was actually an operative working on behalf of the West to, basically, entrap me
with this unsolicited information regarding Hillary Clinton and her emails, and that's why
he's gone underground, and he's living somewhere in Italy, I've been told, and he's
actually on the payroll of Italian intelligence -- that's what I've been told recently. So,
it's a very bizarre story, but I can try and go step-by-step and explain my entire
encounters with him, and what we know now about him.
And he does indeed go step-by-step and describe his encounters with Mifsud in the full
two-hour interview
(continue from 15:14). And of course after Mifsud told Papadopoulos during their last meeting
that "the Russians have Hillary Clinton's emails", no attempt was made by Papadopoulos to
"arrange a meeting between the Trump campaign and the Russian government". In fact,
Papadopoulos was scared and confused as it was right after that meeting that his life went
very bizarre.
So how can it be that Joseph Mifsud is now a "Russian operative"? Well,
look no further than his Wikipedia page. You see, he visited Valdai Discussion Club annual
conference once or twice. Apparently, that's all it takes nowadays to become a Russian-linked
Russian operative with close connections to Russia.
It would all be very funny if it weren't so depressing. I can understand Hollywood actors
doing this -- after all, these people excel at reading from a script for money. But Stephen
King? I thought he was somewhat of an intellectual. Apparently not. Or perhaps he's buddies
with CIA shill Reiner. Who knows.
Leda Cosmides at the University of California, Santa Barbara, points to her work with her colleague
John Tooby on the use of outrage to mobilize people: "The campaign was more about outrage than
about policies," she says. And when a politician can create a sense of moral outrage, truth
ceases to matter. People will go along with the emotion, support the cause and retrench into
their own core group identities. The actual substance stops being of any relevance.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University who studies false beliefs,
has found that
when false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it
becomes almost impossible to correct lies.
... ... ...
As the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain
put it, “The great master fallacy of the
human mind is believing too much.” False beliefs, once established, are incredibly tricky to correct. A leader who lies
constantly creates a new landscape, and a citizenry whose sense of reality may end up swaying far more than they think possible.
The Tax Justice Network, organized in 2003 to fight offshore tax evasion and corruption,
has censored a podcast its founding director recorded when I spoke at the Offshore Alert
Conference in November in London. I didn't write about this before now, because I though the
TJN leaders might change their minds. But it turns out they are either cowardly or
corrupt.
####
Browder's tentacles run far, but only as far as his backers allow him, which leads me to
ask 'what would it take for them to drop him'? Browder has a shelf-life and at some point he
will be surplus to requirement .
That's a very sad story. You can really only take on someone like Browder when you have
nothing to lose – it seems that as soon as you attract interest at an organizational
level, it turns out that organization is afraid of losing its funding, and bows to the power
which threatens to take it away. Note that he was not able to intimidate Nekrasov into not
making his film, but he was able to browbeat theatres into not showing it.
Sooner or later it will all come crashing down for Browder. But The USA will protect him
until they have something to replace the Magnitsky Act so they can continue to legally
discriminate against Russia. If Browder goes down, the act he worked so hard to get on the
books will be revealed as partisan bullshit, and nobody in the west wants that.
The security service is accused of breaking the law and documents state the "the task [of
complying with it] was too large".
"The documents show extraordinary and persistent illegality in MI5's operations,
apparently for many years," said civil liberties organisation Liberty, which is bringing the
case.
"The existence of what MI5 itself calls 'ungoverned spaces' in which it holds and uses
large volumes of private data is a serious failure of governance and oversight, especially
when mass collection of data of innocent citizens is concerned."
####
Incompetent? No. Don't give a shit? Yes.
It won't make a blind bit of difference as the security service have broad brush
surveillance powers and the 'National Security' exception behind them. At least they are not
handing over that data to their terrorist sponsoring Gulf brothers Oh, hang on, can't rule
anything out!
"... Steele had been Litvinenko's handler when he was poisoned in 2006 ..."
"... In the late Nineties, through no fault of his own, his cover in Moscow, along with that of scores of other spies, had been blown. When he was retained to pen the dossier reports, he hadn't been to Russia in nearly 20 years. ..."
"... Steele told Bruce Ohr he was desperate that Trump not get elected. ..."
"... Steele told State Department official Kathleen Kavalec that he hoped his dirt on Trump would become public before Election Day and that he was cultivating relationships with various major press outlets. Kavalec passed this information along to the bureau. ..."
"... The FBI has never accused Steele of lying about media contacts; there were so many such contacts that it would have been foolish of Steele to deny them; Steele freely discussed them with the State Department's Kavalec, and Justice's Bruce Ohr knew that Fusion GPS was trying to push anti-Trump information into the press. ..."
"... As mentioned earlier, Steele maintained that a "former top Russian intelligence officer" was one of his principal sources -- in particular, for the allegation that Russia had amassed enough kompromat on Trump to blackmail him at a time of Putin's choosing. ..."
"... We're supposed to believe that when Steele was not slumming with the wannabe likes of Sergei Millian, he was plugged in to the crème de la Kremlin? ..."
Its claims were absurd, its evidence unconvincing -- why did government
officials ignore so many red flags?
Could former Obama-administration intelligence chiefs run any faster from the Steele
dossier? "Pseudo-intelligence," scoffs former national intelligence director James Clapper in his new memoir --
after having arranged for the dossier to be included in a briefing of then-president-elect Trump, ensuring it
would be published by the media. John Brennan, the former CIA director, belittles the dossier as uncorroborated
reporting never refined into an authentic intelligence-agency product -- and hopes we don't notice his
behind-the-scenes stoking of the dossier's explosive allegations during the 2016 campaign. "Salacious and
unverified," sniffs former FBI director James Comey -- after his bureau repeatedly relied on the dossier to
obtain surveillance warrants from a federal court.
Even the principal author himself, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, no longer stands
behind his work. He touted it plenty ahead of the election he told colleagues he desperately wanted Trump to
lose. Later, though, when he was sued for libel in Britain and had to answer questions under oath, the dossier
disintegrated into "unverified" bits of "raw intelligence" that he had passed along because they "warranted
further investigation" -- not because they were, you know,
true.
By any objective measure, Steele's dossier is a shoddy piece of work. Its stories are preposterous -- the "pee
tape," the grandiose Trump–Russia espionage conspiracy, the closely coordinating Trump emissaries who turn out
not even to know each other, the trips and meetings that never happened, the hub of conspiratorial activity
that did not actually exist. Steele gets basic facts wrong. There are undated and misdated reports. The
putative Russia expert repeatedly misspells the name of Alfa Bank ("Alpha"), which is among the country's most
important financial institutions. In the antithesis of good spycraft, Steele tried (unsuccessfully) to
corroborate his sensational claims by using dodgy information pulled off the Internet, including posts by
"random individuals" who were as unknown to Steele as most of Steele's vaunted sources are unknown to everyone
else. No wonder Steele's former MI6 superior, Sir John Scarlett, scathingly assessed the dossier as falling
woefully short of professional intelligence standards: The reports were "visibly" part of a "commercial"
venture, unlikely ever to be corroborated, and patently suspect due to questions about who commissioned them
and why they were generated.
Yet the Obama administration made the dossier the centerpiece of its Russia investigation.
The FBI eventually tried to corroborate Steele's claims. The effort was ramped up only after the Obama
administration -- through the Justice Department and the bureau -- peddled the dossier to the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal established by Congress in the wake of the 1970s spy
scandals to give Americans a modicum of due-process protection against national-security monitoring. Months
after the FISA warrants were issued, enabling the bureau to monitor former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page,
then-director Comey sheepishly conceded to Judiciary Committee senators that investigators had not verified the
allegations; they had relied on them because they had believed Steele. This despite the fact that Steele had
not even pretended to be the actual source of the allegations. Essentially, he was an aggregator, a collector
of rank rumor.
Proceeding in this manner flouted an elementary principle. All warrants require the government to make a
probable-cause showing about the target. In criminal law, it must illustrate that a crime has been committed;
in counterintelligence law, that the proposed surveillance target is acting as an agent of a foreign power.
Regardless of what must be proved, though, the showing must be based on information from
the
sources who made the relevant observations
,
whom the judge is given reasons to credit. The credibility of the person who assembles the source information
(usually, the case agent) is largely beside the point.
Nevertheless, it's worth asking: Just how reliable was Christopher Steele?
Steele was a virulently anti-Trump partisan. The media-Democrat encomia therefore
hail him as a meticulous former British intelligence officer with a formidable record. So highly regarded was
he that MI6 put him in charge of the investigation of the Putin regime's brazen murder in London of Alexander
Litvinenko, a former Russian-intelligence operative who had defected to Britain. Less often mentioned is that
Steele had been Litvinenko's handler when he was poisoned in 2006. Steele, we're further told, was so well
connected that he was chosen to run MI6's all-important Russia desk. Well, yes . . . but he ran it from London.
In the late Nineties, through no fault of his own, his cover in Moscow, along with that of scores of other
spies, had been blown. When he was retained to pen the dossier reports, he hadn't been to Russia in nearly 20
years.
His recruiter and collaborator was the self-professed "journalist for rent" Glenn Simpson, a former
Wall
Street Journal
investigative
reporter. Simpson had co-founded a so-called intelligence firm, Fusion GPS, which had been contracted to do
anti-Trump research for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee by Perkins Coie, their law
firm.
By that point in the spring of 2016, Steele was a sleuth for hire who had done the bidding of such fine,
upstanding clients as Oleg Deripaska, known as "Putin's oligarch," who had cornered the Russian aluminum market
during the post-Soviet era of "gangster capitalism" and labors under U.S. sanctions imposed due to the regime's
malign policies. And why shouldn't Steele work for Deripaska?
... ... ...
In the media coverage of Russiagate, Steele's intelligence-officer background has been a deceptive distraction.
In drafting the dossier, he was not a detached intelligence agent whose training in the separation of fact from
fiction was critical to his country's security and prosperity. That was the Steele of years ago. Arguably it
was the Steele of 2010, fresh out of MI6, who had worked with the Obama Justice Department on the heralded FIFA
soccer-corruption investigation. The Steele of 2016, however, was a private eye, marshaling (or inflating)
information in the light most favorable to his clients. During the Trump–Clinton contest, he was a well-paid
and quite willing political hack.
Both the FBI and the Justice Department were well aware of that. Another Fusion GPS collaborator on the dossier
was Nellie Ohr, a former CIA open-source researcher married to Bruce Ohr, a high-ranking Justice Department
official. Nearly three months before the Obama administration used the dossier in court, Bruce Ohr told top
bureau officials -- including his longtime colleagues, deputy director Andrew McCabe and McCabe's counselor,
Lisa Page -- that Steele was working with Nellie Ohr on anti-Trump research that was connected to the Clinton
campaign. Steele told Bruce Ohr he was desperate that Trump not get elected. Ten days before the court issued
FISA warrants based on the dossier, Steele told State Department official Kathleen Kavalec that he hoped his
dirt on Trump would become public before Election Day and that he was cultivating relationships with various
major press outlets. Kavalec passed this information along to the bureau.
Yet the Justice Department and the FBI withheld from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court the dossier's
connection to the Clinton campaign, as well as Steele's avowed commitment to defeat Trump. The FISA-warrant
application not only concealed indications that Steele was leaking his unverified allegations to the media; the
FBI told the court that Steele was not the "direct" source for a press story (written by Michael Isikoff of
Yahoo
News
)
for which Steele appeared to be the obvious source, and for which he was, in fact, the source.
Again, this is
something the FBI could have figured out with minimal effort -- such as by pointedly interviewing Steele. For
reasons that are still unclear, he had become a paid FBI informant in February 2016, months before his
anti-Trump work started. He was obliged to answer the bureau's questions. There is no reason to believe Steele
would have held back: The FBI has never accused Steele of lying about media contacts; there were so many such
contacts that it would have been foolish of Steele to deny them; Steele freely discussed them with the State
Department's Kavalec, and Justice's Bruce Ohr knew that Fusion GPS was trying to push anti-Trump information
into the press.
Steele began generating his reports in mid June. There are 17 in all, cumulating to
35 pages, most crafted before the election. The dossier spells out the essential collusion narrative that has
been mass-marketed by Trump detractors since the 2016 election.
The first report, dated June 20, is what grabbed the attention of the FBI and the State Department. It is
entitled "U.S. Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump's Activities in Russia and Compromising
Relationship with the Kremlin." Steele claimed that Putin's regime had been "cultivating, supporting and
assisting Trump" for five years, providing the candidate "and his inner circle" with "a regular flow of
intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals." According to Steele's
star witness, described as a "former top Russian intelligence officer," the Kremlin was able to control the New
York real-estate tycoon because it possessed
kompromat
-- blackmail material involving "perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB" (successor
to the KGB). This was said to include the so-called pee tape, a 2013 video of Trump in a luxury suite at
Moscow's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, cavorting with prostitutes as they performed a "golden showers (urination) show"
on a bed in which President Obama and his wife, Michelle, were said to have slept.
Steele was confident in the lurid story because of his sources. Most important was a "close associate of Trump
who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow" and who had been heard to say "this Russian
intelligence had been 'very helpful.'" This source, with whom Steele was not in direct contact (i.e., it's
double-hearsay), was said to have been overheard claiming on-scene knowledge of Trump's lewd romp -- though
Steele's rambling, imprecise writing style makes it unclear whether the source had supposedly placed himself in
the room or merely at the hotel.
One is left to wonder: Did it not occur to the FBI that Trump had not made any "recent trips to Moscow"? There
is no record of his having been in Moscow after a brief weekend trip for a beauty pageant in 2013. Trump is a
very public person, so that should not have been difficult to figure out. In 2018, the
Washington
Post
's
Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger pulled together and published a comprehensive account of Trump's travel
to and business dealings in Russia, going back over 30 years. Why not the world's premier investigative agency,
which had, by mid 2016, been scrutinizing Trump–Russia contacts for months, in conjunction with the rest of the
government's $50 billion–per–annum "community" of intelligence agencies? What "recent trips to Moscow" and
"very helpful" Russian intelligence could Steele have been talking about?
Steele's work is slapdash: His source for the pee tape is referred to as "Source D" in the first report but
becomes "Source E" in later ones. Upon request, Steele would have been obliged to disclose his sources to the
bureau (and he is known to have identified at least some of them). Regardless, these were supposedly Trump
associates with Russian backgrounds; for the FBI, finding them should have been a layup. (Indeed, it is
publicly rumored, though unconfirmed, that Steele's sources included Russian-born Felix Sater, a fraudster and
longtime FBI informant who was a close friend and high-school classmate of Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen
and who partnered with Trump in real-estate ventures, including the mogul's failed efforts to build a Trump
Tower in Moscow.)
Both the
Wall
Street Journal
and
ABC News identified Steele's main pee-tape source as Sergei Millian. At the time, he was a 38-year-old native
of Belarus who had immigrated to America in his early twenties. To be blunt, you would not trust him as far as
you could throw him. Upon arriving, he worked as a translator and used the (apparently true) name "Siarhei
Kukuts." In 2006, to raise his profile, he started an outfit called "the Russian–American Chamber of Commerce."
Sounds impressive, but it was basically a Potemkin platform with little in the way of assets or activities --
just the sort of entity Russian intelligence would typically use as a front for recruitment operations, which
is how the FBI is said to have suspected that Millian's "chamber" was occasionally used.
Even Simpson confided to friends that he worried Millian was an unreliable "big talker." No wonder. Millian has
claimed in Russian and American media appearances to have a close relationship with Trump and to have marketed
Trump Organization properties as a real-estate broker. In reality, he barely knows Trump and cannot keep
straight the story of when they met. Originally, he said it was in 2007 in Moscow. When it was suggested to him
that Trump had not been in Russia that year, he revised the tale, claiming to have met the mogul in Florida at
a 2008 marketing meeting.
According to Cohen, Trump's former lawyer, there was just one meeting, a photo op of the kind Trump, a global
celebrity, had done thousands of times. Cohen denied Millian's claims of a personal and professional
relationship with Trump as well as a working relationship with him. (Cohen says he never met Millian but did
email him warnings to stop exaggerating his ties to the Trump Organization.) No, Cohen is not the world's most
reliable source, convicted as he is of fraud and false statements. But he was right to contend that no publicly
known evidence supports Millian's claims of close Trump ties. Further, Millian's representations have been
contradictory. When challenged on his purported work as a Trump real-estate agent, he admitted to never
actually having represented Trump. Significantly, Millian acknowledges that he was not with Trump during the
2013 Moscow trip. And upon being exposed as an indirect Steele source, Millian dismissed the dossier as "fake
news (created by sick minds)."
So Millian denies the pee-tape story, and it seems evident that he was not a "close
associate" of Trump's. No investigator who had interviewed Millian, or who had even questioned Steele in any
depth about him, would have dared to rely on information Steele had sourced to him. And the night-and-day
difference between Steele's description of Millian's connection to Trump and the reality of it would have
induced any qualified FBI agent to pause until all of Steele's allegations -- not just the ones about Millian --
could be carefully investigated. But it gets worse -- much worse. Millian was not just a key source on the pee
tape. He appears to be the source of Steele's core claim:
There was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between [Trump] and the Russian leadership. This was
managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate's manager, Paul Manafort, who was using foreign policy
advisor Carter Page and others as intermediaries.
Mind you, it's not just that Steele was not in direct contact with Millian, or that Millian lacked the kind of
relationship with Trump that would have enabled him to know of such a conspiratorial arrangement.
Both
Manafort and Page were available for interview by the FBI.
In
fact, they had both been interviewed on a number of occasions -- Manafort in connection with his work for a
Ukrainian political party; Page when he cooperated with the government's prosecution of Russian spies (and
while Manafort has now been convicted of fraud, the FBI has never accused Page of lying). Upon questioning
them, an agent could easily have learned that they say they do not know each other, and that there was no
evidence to the contrary. They were both on Trump's campaign, but their roles did not intersect: Manafort, the
chairman, focused on GOP convention delegates; Page was a tangential, low-level foreign-policy adviser.
But even that is not the half of it. The dossier attributes to the source identified as Millian the claim that
the "Trump campaign/Kremlin co-operation" against Hillary Clinton entailed the exchange of intelligence and
money at key hubs, including the Russian consulate in Miami.
Except
there is no Russian consulate in Miami
.
When Steele told this part of his story to the State Department's Kavalec, she was able in nothing flat to
confirm that it could not be true. And she immediately forwarded that information to the FBI, which was then
working on the first FISA surveillance application. Yet the Obama Justice Department and the bureau represented
to the court that they were aware of no derogatory information regarding Steele -- in addition to concealing the
dossier's connection to the Clinton campaign, as well as Steele's bias and media contacts.
The dossier allegation that catalyzed the surveillance of Page involved the claim that, in his purported role
as Trump-campaign intermediary to the Putin regime, Page had met with two operatives close to Putin during a
July 2016 trip to Moscow: Igor Sechin, head of the Kremlin-controlled energy conglomerate Rosneft; and Igor
Diveykin, an influential member of Putin's presidential administration. Sechin, under U.S. economic sanctions
due to Russia's aggression in Ukraine, is claimed to have said that, if Trump were elected president and lifted
the sanctions, Russia would pay Page and Trump the brokerage fee from the sale of a 19 percent stake in Rosneft
-- a bribe that would have amounted to tens of millions of dollars. Diveykin also supposedly told Page that
Russia had a
kompromat
file on Mrs. Clinton that it might be willing to share with the Trump campaign -- while warning that there was
also a file on Trump, which the tycoon should bear in mind when dealing with Russia. And the dossier had Trump
lawyer Cohen in a role similar to Page's -- dispatched by Trump on a secret trip to Prague to meet with Putin's
operatives for dark discussions about (a) damage control after public revelations of Manafort and Page ties to
Russia and (b) "deniable cash payments" for "hackers in Europe who had worked under Kremlin direction against
the Clinton campaign."
Two things are especially worth noting about these claims, which have been convincingly denied by Page and
Cohen. First, Steele's vaunted sources never predicted clandestine treachery. Rather, Steele and Simpson
fashioned a narrative framework of Trump–Russia collusion and then folded into the story each new publicly
reported development -- Page's well-publicized trip to Russia, the hacked DNC emails, and so on. Indeed,
Steele's reports (including one written just three days before WikiLeaks began publishing the DNC emails on
July 22) never said a word about the emails, even though WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had begun speaking
publicly about a coming release of Clinton-related material over a month earlier. When Steele finally wrote
about the emails, he echoed what the Clinton campaign was already saying publicly.
Second, there is the matter of the Kremlin sources to whom Steele attributed his information. As mentioned
earlier, Steele maintained that a "former top Russian intelligence officer" was one of his principal sources --
in particular, for the allegation that Russia had amassed enough
kompromat
on
Trump to blackmail him at a time of Putin's choosing.
Steele also purported to derive insider intelligence from
what were variously described as a "senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure," a "senior Kremlin official," an
official close to the head of Putin's presidential administration, and/or "two well-placed and established
Kremlin sources." Information was said to be forwarded to Steele through an unidentified person sometimes
described as the "trusted compatriot" of these sources. And for all we know, there may have been yet more
intermediaries in the telephone game between the sources, the "compatriot," and Steele.
When he was interviewed by the State Department's Kathleen Kavalec in October 2016, Steele claimed his sources
included Vyacheslav Trubnikov and Vladislov Surkov. A regime eminence, Trubnikov ran Russia's SVR (the external
intelligence service, analogous to our CIA) before Putin came to power. Thereafter, he served in other key
posts: first deputy for foreign affairs, ambassador to India, and omnipresent counselor. Surkov, who has been
Russia's deputy prime minister, may now be Putin's top adviser -- referred to as the "Kremlin demiurge" and
"Putin's Rasputin."
Really?
We're
supposed to believe that when Steele was not slumming with the wannabe likes of Sergei Millian, he was plugged
in to the crème de la Kremlin? Count me skeptical. As Daniel Hoffman, the CIA's former station chief in Moscow,
told the
Daily
Caller
's
Chuck
Ross, trusted figures in Russia's national-security bureaucracy "never stop" working for the Kremlin. In
Trubnikov's case, "there's no such thing as a
former
intelligence
officer." And Surkov might as well be Putin's right hand. If these characters were Steele's sources, they were
not spying on the Kremlin but getting the West believe what the Kremlin wanted to West to believe.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's final report found no conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
What remain to be investigated are the neon-flashing indications that we've been had.
I think it is oversimplification. It was the intelligence agencies that controlled Hillary,
not vise versa. The interests of intelligence agencies and Hillary campaign coincided, that's why
she got as much support form CIA and FBI: Trump represented a central danger to flow of funds to
"national security parasites" so their reaction was predictable reaction of any large bureaucracy
of the possibility of losing power -- they circle the wagons.
Notable quotes:
"... But Steele's first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI's imagination. So the Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr -- whose wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion -- to push his Trump dirt to the top of the FBI. ..."
"... Nellie Ohr likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele's dossier to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump dirt at the FBI, too. ..."
"... In short, the Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure -- and bad intel -- until an investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the time, James Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as then-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. ..."
"... The Clinton team's dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out its political hit job on Trump. ..."
"... After two years of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, it's time for the house to call in its IOU. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton owes us answers -- lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while doing many high-profile media interviews. ..."
"... Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said Friday night on Fox News that it's time for Clinton to answer what she knew and when she knew it. ..."
"... John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports . ..."
During the combined two decades she served as a U.S. senator and secretary of State,
Hillary Clinton 's
patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had official business pending before
America's most powerful political woman.
The pattern of political IOUs paid to the Clinton Foundation was so pernicious that the
State Department even tried to execute a special
agreement with the charity to avoid the overt appearance of "pay-to-play" policy.
Still, the money continued to flow by the millions of dollars, from foreigners and Americans
alike who were perceived to be indebted to the Clinton machine or in need of its help.
It's time for the American public to call in their own IOU on political transparency.
The reason? Never before -- until 2016 -- had the apparatus of a U.S. presidential candidate
managed to sic the weight of the FBI and U.S. intelligence community on a rival nominee during
an election, and by using a foreign-fed, uncorroborated political opposition research
document.
But Clinton's campaign, in concert with the Democratic Party and through their shared law
firm, funded Christopher Steele's unverified
dossier which, it turns out, falsely portrayed Republican Donald Trump as a treasonous asset colluding with
Russian President Vladimir Putin to hijack the U.S. election.
Steele went to the FBI to get an investigation started and then leaked the existence of the
investigation, with the hope of sinking Trump's presidential aspirations.
On its face, it is arguably the most devious political dirty trick in American history and
one of the most overt intrusions of a foreigner into a U.S. election.
It appears the Clinton machine knew that what it was doing was controversial. That's why it
did backflips to disguise the operation from Congress and the public, and in its Federal
Election Commission (FEC) spending reports.
Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
used the law firm of Perkins Coie to hire Glenn Simpson's research firm, Fusion GPS, which
then hired Steele -- several layers that obfuscated transparency, kept the operation off the
campaign's public FEC reports and gave the Clintons plausible deniability.
But Steele's first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI's imagination. So
the Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior Department of Justice
official Bruce Ohr -- whose wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion -- to push his Trump dirt to
the top of the FBI.
Nellie Ohr likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele's dossier
to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann
used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump dirt at the
FBI, too.
In short, the Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure -- and bad intel -- until an
investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the time, James
Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as then-FBI employees Peter
Strzok and Lisa Page.
To finish the mission, Simpson and Steele leaked the existence of the FBI investigation to
the news media to ensure it would hurt Trump politically. Simpson even
called the leaks a "hail Mary" that failed.
Trump won, however. And now, thanks to special counsel Robert Mueller, we know the
Russia-collusion allegations relentlessly peddled by Team Clinton were bogus. But not before
the FBI used the Clinton-funded, foreign-created research to get a total of four warrants to
spy on the Trump campaign , transition and presidency from October 2016 through the
following autumn.
The Clinton team's dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used
house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out its political hit
job on Trump.
After two years of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent,
it's time for the house to call in its IOU.
Hillary Clinton owes us answers -- lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while
doing many high-profile media interviews.
I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said
Friday night on Fox News that it's time for Clinton to answer what she knew and when she knew
it.
Here are 10 essential questions:
Please identify each person in your campaign, including Perkins Coie lawyers, who were
aware that Steele provided information to the FBI or State Department, and when they learned
it.
Describe any information you and your campaign staff received, or were briefed on, before
Election Day that was derived from the work of Simpson, Steele, Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr or
Perkins Coie and that tried to connect Trump, his campaign or his business empire with
Russia.
Did you or any senior members of your campaign, including lawyers such as Michael
Sussmann, have any contact with the CIA, its former Director John Brennan, current Director
Gina Haspel, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew
McCabe?
Describe all
contacts your campaign had with Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal concerning Trump,
Russia and Ukraine.
Describe all contacts you and your campaign had
with DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukraine government, the Ukraine Embassy in the
United States or the U.S. Embassy in Kiev concerning Trump, Russia or former Trump campaign
chairman Paul Manafort.
Why did your campaign and the Democratic Party make a concerted effort to portray Trump as
a Russian asset?
Given that investigations by a House committee, a Senate committee and a special
prosecutor all have concluded there isn't evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, do you regret
the actions by your campaign and by Steele, Simpson and Sussmann to inject these unfounded
allegations into the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and the news media?
Hillary Clinton owes us answers to each of these questions. She should skip the lawyer-speak
and answer them with the candor worthy of an elder American stateswoman.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has
exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists'
misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political
corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at
The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports .
Leaked documents reveal Russian effort to exert influence in Africa Exclusive: Kremlin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin leading push to turn continent into strategic
hub, documents show
by Luke Harding and Jason Burke
The only thing you really need to know about the exposé:
The leaked documents were obtained by the Dossier Center, an investigative unit based in
London. The centre is funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian businessman and exiled
Kremlin critic.
The Guardian obviously has no shame for publishing such an article but then it has never
explained the claims of Manafort meeting with Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. As for the
article, my reaction was "so fucking what?".
The British French and Americans have fucked up
large parts of Africa while the Soviet Union/Russia was indirectly responsible for
eradicating that cancerous growth, the apartheid state of South Africa, a single act that was
better than all the good things that the United Kingdom, France and the United States have
ever done in Africa
"NYT's Matthew Rosenberg: Christopher Steele Concerned He Will Be Thrown Under The Bus" [
RealClearPolitics ]. "'He is incredibly concerned and obsessed this investigation is going
to throw him under the bus. And his view, at least from the people close to him, is, 'Look, I
was working on this dossier that people were paying for. I saw things that the Democrats were
paying for. I saw things that seemed frightening to me and alarming. I went to old contacts of
the FBI to tell them. I wasn't a paid source in this case.' That's his view of it,' Rosenberg
reported on Tuesday's 'CNN Tonight' with host Don Lemon. ' He was simply helping them
out . And what they did with it, if they used -- misused it in a FISA, whatever they did,
he had nothing to do with that. Which is to a degree true. He's not part of that process. He
was simply a source of information. And I think he's acutely concerned he's going to be thrown
under the bus here,' Rosenberg said." • Simply helping them out. Because that's what
spooks do. It is known.
Re. Our current favorite ex-working working British spy .. I hope that Mr. 'no-holds' Barr
haz a chance to try out that newly acquired Steele Belted Radial the one with those 'Don't
Tread on Me' nobbies worn off. He better secure it fast, before it rolls away into a frigid IC
ditch somewhere.
Former MI6 agent Christopher Steele has finally agreed to meet with US officials to discuss
his relationship with the FBI, and the now-infamous dossier of unfounded claims against Donald
Trump which he assembled on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National
Committee.
The 54-year-old Steele has agreed to meet with investigators from the US Justice
Department's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), according to
The Times of London , after a former US official told Politico that the OIG report would
"try to deeply undermine" Steele.
The news marks a 180-shift in Steele's past refusals to engage with US authorities. In
April, Politico reported that Steele would not meet with the OIG to assist them with
their investigation, while
just last week , Reuters reported that he wouldn't meet with US attorney John Durham, who
was handpicked by AG William Barr to review the origins of the Trump-Russia probe.
Steele, a MI6 Russia specialist for more than two-decades, has worked with the FBI as a
confidential source since 2010. According to the report, he will retain the services of a top
American attorney if the interview goes ahead , and is only willing to discuss the narrow scope
of his dealings with US intelligence. Steele also wanted US officials to seek the approval of
the British government.
Of note, the Steele dossier was referred to as "
Crown material " in emails between US intelligence officials.
That said, a senior source told The Times : "As far as we are aware, no request has been
made to HMG [Her Majesty's government] on this matter. Any decision to co-operate would be a
matter for Mr Steele as this relates to issues arising many years after he left government
employment."
Last year Mr Steele, who runs a corporate intelligence company, was named as the author of
memos containing unsubstantiated allegations that the Kremlin held sexually lurid information
about Mr Trump .
Mr Steele's dossier led to an FBI inquiry, which became a two-year investigation presided
over by the special counsel Robert Mueller. That found that figures in the Trump campaign
team expected to benefit from Kremlin activities but cleared Mr Trump of liaising with
Russia. -
Times of London
In his dodgy dossier - a collection of 17 memos, some of which used Kremlin sources - Steele
claimed that the Trump campaign was part of a "well-developed conspiracy of co-operation" with
the Russian government in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 US election. Steele
claimed that the Kremlin was blackmailing Trump with a video of him encouraging prostitutes to
urinate on a bed once used by former President Obama.
Steele's work was commissioned by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was in turn
paid by lawyers for the Clinton campaign and the DNC.
Well, it was fairly obvious that Trump wasn't going out to meet the UK PM as she was
quitting at the end of the same week.
What was really done? That also is fairly obvious.
Official assurances were made to the Crown that Steele wouldn't be subject to capital
punishment. Also we probably had to promise that we wouldn't make him drink tea prepared from
an industrial sized tea bag that fits oh-so perfectly into a prison coffee machine drip
basket.
What with the UK being strong-armed by the EU technocrats into a no-deal Brexit, trading
with the USA is the only path forward that will keep the markets and the pound steady.
The EU will begin a 20-30 year slide into economic irrelevance as unpopular concessions
start to be made to appease EU member countries to remain in the Union.
Juncker will retire from the EU Commission and will become a tax avoidance consultant in
Luxembourg. He will do well until he is reported lost at sea during a suspicious yachting
trip.
At least Langley comes up with better lies that take somewhat longer to unravel.
Steele is a patsy who only went out on a limb because the Clintons, Langley, Quantico, et.
al. got to his ego, schmoozed and flattered him about his intelligence, then waved their law
enforcement badges and guaranteed that everything would be fine.
Probably set up a nice fat bank account somewhere too, along with other very nice
benefits.
Steele never thought to plan for insurance just in case the scam got busted.
But he had better take out some form of insurance now, because crossing the Clintons will
prove fatal.
He can work out a deal with the DoJ but the Clintons don't like loose ends.
It seems that Horowitz got the jump on Barr. Horowitz's job is to cover up crimes by the
government with official sounding nonsense. So, what, Horowitz just offered Steele immunity
for his testimony. You can't make this stuff up. All the criminals get offered immunity. In
some circles this might be considered obstruction of justice to offer immunity to those who
should be criminally indicted. I still say the President needs to call out the military and
arrest them all, start waterboarding and find out where it leads. If a judge gets in the way
arrest him too. There is more than enough treason involved here to go around.
"Steele also wanted US officials to seek the approval of the British government.
Of note, the Steele dossier was referred to as "
Crown material " in emails between US intelligence officials."
This pretty much proves that Steele was working for Her Majesty's Government all along...
unlike claims about Putin, here is a direct link to a foreign government conspiring with IC
traitors to effectively launch a Cold Coup in the US... the way any decent Banana Republic
gets bitch-slapped by the Colonial Office.
Yeah well Horowitz is protecting the deep state. He's a shill, so don't expect anything to
come of it. That's why Steele will meet with him and not Barr.
Looks like ZH commenters audience wants heads on Comey and Brennan on the plate. That's a bad sign for Dems chances in
2020 elections: the loger Russiagate is in the center of attention the lesser are their chances to win elections and Dems top
brass is closely linked with Russiagate color revolution plotters in intelligence agencies and as such clearly can be charged
with sedution.
Notable quotes:
"... In May, a dispute erupted over whether Comey or Brennan pushed to include the Steele Dossier in the US intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference. According to Fox News , an email chain exists indicating that Comey told his subordinates that Brennan insisted on the dossier's inclusion, while a former CIA official " put the blame squarely on Comey ," according to the report. ..."
"... "Comey and Brennan have made a lot of statements, some under oath, about the origins of the Trump Russia investigation, the timing and role of the Steele dossier and reasons for surveillance of Trump campaign officials. As I've been saying for awhile now, some of that is inconsistent with the contents of classified documents and the sworn testimony of other witnesses," Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told The Hill. ..."
"... "And more recently, some of what Brennan and Comey have been saying is now inconsistent with one another. As Attorney General Barr said this morning, it just doesn't jive. Someone isn't telling the truth," he continued. - The Hill ..."
"... Perhaps Congressional Republicans will focus next on Joseph Mifsud - the Maltese professor and Clinton ally who 'seeded' the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton ..."
"... The CIA needs to be broken into intelligence and information collection and reporting and Covert operations needs to go to the military. ..."
"... The FBI needs to be broken into criminal and CI organizations. Give CI to DIS ..."
"... This is rather stunning. In letters from Representative Doug Collins to Inspector General Horowitz and AG Bill Barr, Collins identifies Deputy Asst. Director Peter Strzok as the official who leaked grand jury information to the media and yet the DOJ refused to prosecute. Incredible." ..."
Congressional Republicans have set their sights on former FBI Director James Comey and
former CIA Director John Brennan for their roles in the Trump-Russia 'witch hunt' that may have
been conducted illegally using flimsy evidence.
In particular, GOP lawmakers along with President Trump are looking to blame the two former
intelligence chiefs over the use of the highly controversial Steele report - created by former
UK spy Christopher Steele .
The dossier, a shadowy document that makes a series of salacious allegations about Trump,
has long been a flashpoint for Republicans.
Some Republicans allege that FBI investigators relied too heavily on it to obtain a
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter
Page. Some of the allegations in the dossier have been verified, while others were proven
false or remain unsubstantiated. - The
Hill
In May, a dispute erupted over whether Comey or Brennan pushed to include the Steele Dossier
in the US intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference. According to Fox
News , an email chain exists indicating that Comey told his subordinates that Brennan insisted
on the dossier's inclusion, while a former CIA official " put the blame squarely on Comey ,"
according to the report.
According to former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), communications between Comey and Brennan are the
key to unlocking the decisions behind the dossier .
"Whoever is investigating this, tell them to look for emails between Brennan and Comey in
December of 2016 ," Gowdy told Fox News 's Sean Hannity last month.
Republican lawmakers took Gowdy's cue.
"Comey and Brennan have made a lot of statements, some under oath, about the origins of
the Trump Russia investigation, the timing and role of the Steele dossier and reasons for
surveillance of Trump campaign officials. As I've been saying for awhile now, some of that is
inconsistent with the contents of classified documents and the sworn testimony of other
witnesses," Rep. John
Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told The Hill.
"And more recently, some of what Brennan and Comey have been saying is now inconsistent
with one another. As Attorney General Barr said this morning, it just doesn't jive. Someone
isn't telling the truth," he continued. - The
Hill
Attorney General William Barr has placed Connecticut US attorney John Duham in charge of
reviewing the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, while President Trump gave Barr
complete power to declassify information linked to the investigation - leading Democrats to
suggest that Trump would 'pursue a political agenda' while investigating the politicized 'witch
hunt' against him.
"Selectively declassifying sources and methods in order to serve a political agenda will
make it harder for the intelligence community to do their jobs protecting this country from
those who wish to do us harm," said Senate Intelligence Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA).
Perhaps Congressional Republicans will focus next on
Joseph Mifsud - the Maltese professor and Clinton ally who 'seeded' the rumor that Russia
had dirt on Hillary Clinton .
joego1 , 6 minutes ago
They want to protect their "sources and methods" for treason- **** their secret elite
society
boattrash , 10 minutes ago
" "Whoever is investigating this, tell them to look for emails between Brennan and Comey
in December of 2016... " "
Does this imply that we're just now considering looking into their emails mid-way
through 2019? For. ****'s. Sake.
Python1342 , 8 minutes ago
What makes you think they don't have it , remember during discovery, you never know
when, how, who where the evidence come from...
boattrash , 5 minutes ago
'What makes you think they don't have it "
Well, they're still walking around, stirring ****, instead of twitching at the end of a
******* rope. That was my first clue.
Shift For Brains , 12 minutes ago
Something that is often overlooked despite the absolutely surreal nature of the fact: Both
FBI director Comey and CIA chief Brennan were overt communists (if voting for communists
qualifies you as a communist) as recently as the 70s and 80s.
Does anyone have an idea how you rise to the top of two of the most sensitive intelligence
positions in the USA with a background like that? Do you think they maybe got a little help
from folks who wanted them there?
Only in what was formerly known as The United states of America could those who supported
communism rise to those positions.
This is NEVER going to end with voting out the incumbents or re-organizing government,
i.e. shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. It will end either with the total enslavement
of America as we have seen in other totalitarian states or those who are orchestrating this
will be brought to swift, and final, judgement by ordinary Americans.
PerilouseTimes , 13 minutes ago
Sure, the GOP is going to make everything all right. You would be better off voting for
goop than GOP.
Gold Banit , 18 minutes ago
Wow! How did America get so dumb?
Wake up and bend over you American sheep (people) and smile as your Masters (politicians)
are going to **** you up the *** again...Fact
Welcome to America, the home of the dumb naive brainwashed and just *******
stupid....Fact
The USA!
The USA Is The Most Corrupt Lying Nation On The Planet....Fact
Hillary Clinton will never be charged and will never go to jail...Fact
The USA was behind 911....Fact
The USA did not land a man on the Moon....Fact
Half of the USA can't read...Fact
Half of the USA is dumb naive brainwashed and stupid....Fact
Half of the USA still think that Russians voted in the 2016 election...Fact
Half of the USA think that Hillary Clinton is their President...Fact
Half of the USA can't find USA on a map...Fact
The USA has the most fat ugly people on the planet.....Fact
pelican , 20 minutes ago
The CIA needs to be broken into intelligence and information collection and reporting and
Covert operations needs to go to the military.
The FBI needs to be broken into criminal and CI organizations. Give CI to DIS.
This attitude which clearly exists that they are above the white house and congress needs
to dealt with.
hoytmonger , 27 minutes ago
This is just more distraction from the actual corruption to fill the endless hours of
cable news shows and keep the sheep at each other's throats.
Joebloinvestor , 29 minutes ago
Wray should be at a podium daily expressing his contempt for FBI agents that ruined the
agency.
Instead, he proves he is as worthless as Danny Werfel was at the IRS.
enough of this , 29 minutes ago
The walls are closing in on the sneaky Praetorians, who thought they could pull off their
half-*** scheme unscathed. But daylight has a way of shining through the sand they attempted
to throw in our face.
Those two traitors are only the start. If the list of those sent to prison or executed
does not include many more than Comey and Brennan then you know those two are ust the
sacrifices the Deep State offers up to keep doing business as usual.
iSage , 30 minutes ago
Bring them into a room, read them their rights and try them for Treason, it is time!
VWAndy , 30 minutes ago
Its the DC two step folks. We seen this before. They all talk about justice with a tear in
the eye like it was some kinda wonderful thing. And yet the crooks are still running the
show.
If Trump wanted to win he woulda been declassifying stuff on a daily basis from day one.
Its not like he could run out of dirt to bury the corrupt with.
muhfugger , 40 minutes ago
All investigations of anybody except the lowest deep state sewer rat ends up as "crimes
noted... decline to prosecute". So why would I expect anything different from these 2
clowns.
Karl Marxist , 40 minutes ago
Because if this **** were thoroughly investigated, the Clintons would be a huge target but
also Teresa May and the Queen of Pirates herself. Wow! I mean, wouldn't FASAB 56 enter into
all this? And the missing $21 trillion from the federal budget?
VWAndy , 44 minutes ago
Its not about politics folks. Its just plain old corruption of every level of government. Same as it ever was.
Let me know when they start locking them all up.
muhfugger , 43 minutes ago
You and I in a concentration camp is more likely.
DingleBarryObummer , 39 minutes ago
the screwing around will continue until morale improves
VWAndy , 43 minutes ago
Really none of the crooks look worried about going to jail. They laugh at the very
idea.
MadelynMarie , 40 minutes ago
So far, it's not looking like anyone is going to jail. If the DOJ refuses to prosecute
smaller fish like Strozk and McCabe, then what's the likelihood of Comey and Brennan going to
prison??
"This is rather stunning. In letters from Representative Doug Collins to Inspector General
Horowitz and AG Bill Barr, Collins identifies Deputy Asst. Director Peter Strzok as the
official
who leaked grand jury information to the media and yet the DOJ refused to prosecute.
Incredible."
"Citing the ongoing internal investigation of FBI leaks to media, from the 2018
OIG report on FBI conduct , today the Office of Inspector General outlined a preponderance of evidence against a corrupt FBI
Deputy Asst. Director. However, the DOJ is refusing to prosecute"
"The
568-pages contained a multitude of examples of FBI misconduct (media leaks etc.), but the
same IG report summary said "no illegal activity was discovered." In the Sessions/Rosenstein
led DOJ there was a disconnect between the summary/conclusions and the body of evidence.
With that in mind, how could the Bill Barr DOJ prosecute on evidence of behavior from
within a report where the Rod Rosenstein DOJ conclusion was no evidence of "intentional
wrongdoing"?
In short, he can't."
Nature_Boy_Wooooo , 49 minutes ago
Make them pay the American taxpayers back for the money wasted on the phone Russia
investigation.
Oldwood , 54 minutes ago
"Selectively declassifying sources and methods in order to serve a political agenda will
make it harder for the intelligence community to do their jobs protecting (THEMSELVES) from
those who wish to do (THEM) harm," said Senate Intelligence Vice Chairman Mark Warner
(D-VA).
muhfugger , 44 minutes ago
Warner is treasonous DEEP STATE and needs to be dealt with accordingly.
Consuelo , 56 minutes ago
"GOP Targets Comey And Brennan As Investigations Heat Up"
That's right. Keep the plebes entertained with palace intrigue while the architects and perpetrators of
this Treasonous Criminality sail off into the calm sunset of $600k speaking engagements and
feminist book tours with their daughter-by-another-man...
Everybodys All American , 49 minutes ago
Comey and Brennan will either sing or face the consequences of this hoax themselves. It
will be their choice and if they want to bring down Obama this is the best way to go about
doing it.
yerfej , 59 minutes ago
Two sets of laws, one for academia, courts, media, and bureaucracy who are all progressive
leftists. If the moron people don't wake up right now we will be living under state elites
who HATE us.
"... However, Williamson was not alone in his anti-Russian stance. It was under May's leadership that the controversial government-funded Integrity Initiative program really began to flourish. Designed to "counteract Russian propaganda" it instead deceptively engaged in spreading disinformation about Russia and even the UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, by hiring journalists, academics and commentators who would all sing from the same hymn sheet when it came to discourse about Russia in the press. ..."
"... What was most chilling about the revelations in the Integrity Initiative hacked documents was the extent to which policy makers within the inner workings of the establishment are apparently obsessed about an imminent "Russian threat" and are prepared to go to considerable lengths to persuade the British population of this. ..."
"... Even more unnerving was the discussion that there was need for some event to be staged in order to heighten the U.K. population's awareness of a Russian threat. The timing was uncanny: this was not long before the poisoning took place of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, which has, along with multiple discrepancies in the British narrative, led some analysts to ask whether the whole incident was indeed orchestrated by British secret services. ..."
"... Staged or not, May's handling of the Skripal incident left much to be desired. Even her experience of handling the Litvinenko affair as home secretary hadn't taught her a great deal. Before any concrete evidence was produced to implicate the Russian government in the poisoning, May was already issuing ultimatums to the Russian president. Her infamous phrase that the government concluded it was "highly likely" Russia was responsible for the poisoning even entered itself into the Russian vocabulary and became something of a household joke in Russia. ..."
"... So what can we expect from the next prime minister of the not-so-Great Britain? Whoever it is has their work cut out not only to unite the Conservative party, but the country. In terms of improving relations with Russia -- as long as the Tories remain in power, and the "deep state" or civil service continues to push its aggressive anti-Russian agenda -- , we are unlikely to see any significant change in policy. ..."
"... The UK under May has continued to serve as a “coalition partner” in the US-Saudi-Israeli Axis engineered and perpetuated dirty war against the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies. Let’s not forget Theresa May’s well practiced phrase, “like the United States, we believe”: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-39591476 . May has consistently believed US claims about the April 2017 Khan Shaykhoun incident, the April 2018 Douma incident, and other alleged chemical “attacks” in Syria. ..."
"... The UK under May also has remained the base for two leading disinformation operations supporting the the assault against Syrian government: Rami Abdulrahman’s Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Eliot Higgins’ Bellingcat. ..."
"... As of 31 March 2018, the British government had provided £38.4m in funding to the Al Qaeda allied White Helmets propaganda organization. In April 2018 the Trump administration suspended funding of the White Helmets. The US had provided more than $33 million to support the group since 2013. ..."
"... The British government remains a primary funder of the White Helmets propaganda organization. Posing as an impartial rescue force, the White Helmets work exclusively side-by-side armed militants including US State Department, UN, and EU designated foreign terrorist organizations. Their primary function is not “rescuing” anyone, but to manage a public relations campaign aimed at swaying public and political opinion, leveraging “humanitarian” sympathy worldwide ..."
"... In November 2016, video showed two White Helmets members staging a rescue operation for the Mannequin Challenge meme. In May 2017, video showed White Helmets members removing a man’s body following his execution by armed militants in Daraa. In June 2017, a member of the White Helmets was suspended indefinitely for assisting armed militants in the burial of mutilated corpses of Syrian government soldiers. ..."
"... Apropos, the last two paras about the Civil Service in Britain; Up until the last 2 decades or so, some of the brightest and best talents entered the Civil Service, good pay, good career prospects and good pension. Then this was hollowed out, everything ‘public sector’ was vilified and privatized and starved of funding. ..."
"... The race to the bottom is keenly contested. ..."
"... Without Russian money they are certainly not the world’s 6th largest economy and it appears that unless they want to side with China against the USA which is improbable, no impossible, they will lose Chinese Capital as well after Brexit. ..."
"... And again, a Mr. Jim Mellon a for real billionaire, several times over I should think, the same guy who carpetbagged Russia after the collapse of the CCCP. His gleanings were called “privatization”… of poor mother Russia. ..."
"... The US has it’s own deep state problem of civil servants, especially alphabet soup agencies who are accustomed to operating in the dark and think that they, not the political appointees make policy ..."
UK Prime Minister Theresa May's political career officially ended in tears last Friday, as
the woman who declared that she would provide "strong and stable" leadership when she came to
power three years ago, but who proved in the end to be not quite so strong or stable as she
broke down in front of the press outside 10 Downing Street.
She had in fact, arguably one of the most disastrous records of a UK prime minister to date.
A total of 50 cabinet resignations since she
took office , far more than any of her recent predecessors; together with scandals such as
the Grenfell Tower
disaster , Windrush
scandal , hostile environment policy and record levels of homelessness and poverty. And
that's not to mention her inability to deliver Brexit, which effectively led to her demise.
Indeed however tempting it may be to feel sorry for May -- she has been surrounded by
political vultures all vying for her position for months now -- one is minded of the words of
British political commentator Owen Jones who, when asked
recently if he felt sorry for the prime minister, noted that May's tears were simply those of
self-pity and were absent at times when they would have been appropriate, such as in the
aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed 72 lives.
'Permanent Crisis'
One may be inclined to think that if she was so unsuccessful on the domestic front, then
perhaps in the area of foreign policy May could have had a better record. No such luck. We only
have to look at the considerable deterioration in relations with Russia to understand that
under her leadership, Britain's standing in the world has diminished. Prominent British
journalist Patrick Cockburn has even gone as far to say that Britain is now "entering a period
of permanent crisis not
seen since the 17th century."
But arguably back in the 17th century the U.K. was more competent in the art of diplomacy
than it is now. May's defense minister, Gavin Williamson, with his comment that Russia should
"go away and shut up" epitomized the extraordinary lack of finesse and savoir-faire the May
government had when dealing with Russia.
His bellicose tone unfortunately went hand-in-hand with a completely misplaced notion of
Russia presenting to the UK some kind of genuine threat, as he argued earlier this year that
the UK had to "enhance its lethality" against such well-resourced states, as opposed to
concentrating its energies on Islamic terror groups. He was then accused by fellow politicians
of "sabre-rattling" in what were widely seen as misguided and provocative statements.
However, Williamson was not alone in his anti-Russian stance. It was under May's
leadership that the controversial government-funded Integrity Initiative program really
began to flourish. Designed to "counteract Russian propaganda" it instead deceptively engaged
in spreading disinformation about Russia and even the UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, by
hiring journalists, academics and commentators who would all sing from the same hymn sheet when
it came to discourse about Russia in the press.
What was most chilling about the revelations in the Integrity
Initiative hacked documents was the extent to which policy makers within the inner workings
of the establishment are apparently obsessed about an imminent "Russian threat" and are
prepared to go to considerable lengths to persuade the British population of this.
May with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hangzhou, China, 2016. (Wikimedia Commons)
Uncanny Timing
Even more unnerving was the discussion that there was need for some event to be staged
in order to heighten the U.K. population's awareness of a Russian threat. The timing was
uncanny: this was not long before the poisoning took place of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal
and his daughter, which has, along with multiple discrepancies in the British narrative, led
some analysts to ask whether the whole incident was indeed orchestrated by
British secret services.
Staged or not, May's handling of the Skripal incident left much to be desired. Even her
experience of handling the Litvinenko affair as
home secretary hadn't taught her a great deal. Before any concrete evidence was produced to
implicate the Russian government in the poisoning, May was already issuing ultimatums to the
Russian president. Her infamous phrase that the government concluded it was "highly likely"
Russia was responsible for the poisoning even entered itself into the Russian vocabulary and
became something of a household joke in Russia.
The decision to publicly accuse another state of attempting murder on British soil with
evidence that only amounted to "a nerve agent of a type produced by Russia," was utterly
reckless, not only deeply harming relations with Russia, but undermining the credibility of the
U.K. as a whole. And despite it being an attempt to bolster the PM's position at a time when
desperately needed to generate support for her upcoming Brexit white paper – this itself,
given a delayed Brexit and divided country, proved fruitless.
So what can we expect from the next prime minister of the not-so-Great Britain? Whoever
it is has their work cut out not only to unite the Conservative party, but the country. In
terms of improving relations with Russia -- as long as the Tories remain in power, and the
"deep state" or civil service continues to push its aggressive anti-Russian agenda -- , we are
unlikely to see any significant change in policy.
One could hope that a certain Boris Johnson, himself named after a Russian
émigré, and the leading candidate to replace May, could seek to build bridges in
this regard, but his record on the Skripal case leaves room for doubt. The PM is after all a
figurehead, and the UK civil service remains a driving force of policy-making.
As former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair once said: "You cannot underestimate how much
they [the civil service] believe it's their job to actually run the country and to resist the
changes put forward by people they dismiss as 'here today, gone tomorrow' politicians. They
genuinely see themselves as the true guardians of the national interest, and think that their
job is simply to wear you down and wait you out."
Says it all really .
As one reads this article it is primarily remarkably how closely it resembles
America’s past, present and future. Of course, England has long been known as
Washington’s lap dog. Unsurprisingly, what we seem to be best at is sales and PR. The
UK is far from the only “ally” we have that has followed us off the cliff.
And as the various publics look down and see the snake pit into which our style of
“democracy” and Winners Take All capitalism actually means they want out.
Unfortunately, the winners and our leaders have taken all already, including not only the
money, but the power. The shameful scams of NATO and politicizing the EU turned out to be new
ways to suck the lifeblood out of the earths “Others,” both in our countries and
in the “Others” in Africa, Asia, and everything above and below our borders.
So how do we get out of this? We don’t. Every empire from Cyrus To Babylon,
Alexander’s to The Pharaohs’ and Heraclius, the Spanish, Portuguese, and British
have collapsed in the dust and led to long periods of darkness, inhabited by The Four
Horsemen of The Apocalypse.
If you look around us, still mostly living in luxury unknown to the ancient non-winners,
all of the signs are there. In the multiple-party system in most of “free” Europe
or our Two-party system there’s but decline. Boris won’t save England and none of
the truly potentially electable quacks in our Democrats list are going to get us out of this.
Clinton didn’t, Obama didn’t and what’s up won’t. No one but Tulsi
Gabbard even talks about or has a foreign policy beyond being for peace and plenty for all.
Sure. Dumb.
I hate to sound gloomy-doomy, because I’m not. I’m a writer and a writer is an
observer. Watching all of this, including my own 2008 economic demise, is fascinating.
Gabbard isn’t going to be elected. We’ll get our own Mrs. May maybe, or more
Trump, Bolt-on or the fat guy who will initiate some wars that we’ll win like we did
with Vietnam and Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. ad nauseum. I’m not saying be dumb; I’m
saying be realistic, analytical, interested, and vocal, but come the collapse, be physically
and psychologically prepared (everything that Hillary wasn’t, for example.)
Abe , May 31, 2019 at 12:51
The UK under May has continued to serve as a “coalition partner” in the
US-Saudi-Israeli Axis engineered and perpetuated dirty war against the Syrian government and
its Russian and Iranian allies. Let’s not forget Theresa May’s well practiced phrase, “like the United
States, we believe”: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-39591476 . May has consistently believed US claims about the April 2017 Khan Shaykhoun incident, the
April 2018 Douma incident, and other alleged chemical “attacks” in Syria.
The UK under May also has remained the base for two leading disinformation operations
supporting the the assault against Syrian government: Rami Abdulrahman’s Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights and Eliot Higgins’ Bellingcat.
As of 31 March 2018, the British government had provided £38.4m in funding to the Al
Qaeda allied White Helmets propaganda organization. In April 2018 the Trump administration
suspended funding of the White Helmets. The US had provided more than $33 million to support
the group since 2013.
The British government remains a primary funder of the White Helmets propaganda
organization. Posing as an impartial rescue force, the White Helmets work exclusively
side-by-side armed militants including US State Department, UN, and EU designated foreign
terrorist organizations. Their primary function is not “rescuing” anyone, but to
manage a public relations campaign aimed at swaying public and political opinion, leveraging
“humanitarian” sympathy worldwide.
As of 31 March 2018, the British government had provided £38.4m in funding to the
White Helmets. In April 2018 the Trump administration suspended funding of the White Helmets.
The US had provided more than $33 million to support the group since 2013.
In November 2016, video showed two White Helmets members staging a rescue operation for
the Mannequin Challenge meme. In May 2017, video showed White Helmets members removing a
man’s body following his execution by armed militants in Daraa. In June 2017, a member
of the White Helmets was suspended indefinitely for assisting armed militants in the burial
of mutilated corpses of Syrian government soldiers.
On the night of 21 July 2018, Israel allowed 422 people – 98 White Helmet volunteers
and their family members – to cross the Israeli annexed Syrian Golan Heights and into
Jordan. A Syrian government official condemned the evacuation of White Helmets as a
“criminal operation” that had revealed “the terrorist nature” of the
group. In September 2018, the UK granted asylum to about 100 White Helmet staff and relatives
that had been evacuated to Jordan.
AnneR , May 31, 2019 at 09:22
Good Riddance to very Bad Rubbish (mind you that also applies to the whole of the Tory lot
plus the Blairites).
Yes May’s government has much to make amends for – and not just for and to the
survivors of Grenfell Towers, the Windrush Generation families, but also to: the Yemenis, the
Chagossians, the Syrians. It would have behooved her to have a smaller wardrobe and a larger,
effective compassion for those the (imperialist) British have done over numerous times up to
and including today. Even small gestures of real compassion, of real recognition of the
ugliness of Britian’s imperial past wrongdoings by way of simple apology are apparently
beyond her and her government (including the Civil Service).
As for Britain’s “standing” – it is about bloody time that this
small island off the western Eurasian coast put up and shut up and retired. Why on earth
should it have any *standing*? What *good* has it ever done? (And I ask this as someone born
there, whose father was in the army helping to maintain the Raj – much to my much later
disgust, though, disgracefully, not his.)
Bob of Bonsall , May 31, 2019 at 05:11
To be fair, and as much as it pains me to do so, I must point out that the Grenfell
tragedy and Windrush fiasco were as much due to Labour decisions as they were to Tory
incompetence.
John A , May 31, 2019 at 03:01
Apropos, the last two paras about the Civil Service in Britain; Up until the last 2
decades or so, some of the brightest and best talents entered the Civil Service, good pay,
good career prospects and good pension. Then this was hollowed out, everything ‘public
sector’ was vilified and privatized and starved of funding.
For these reasons, most of
the ‘brightest and best’ now shun the Civil Service for a career in casino
banking and similar avenues instead. The calibre of Civil Service advice has nose-dived
accordingly.
As with everything else in Britain post Thatcher, everything is for sale, get rich quick,
plod along with little or no pay increases and less and less job security, or starve homeless
on the streets are the options available these days.
Zhu , May 31, 2019 at 04:51
Sounds like the USA!
Douglas Turnbull , May 30, 2019 at 22:20
The continuing barbaric capitalist nightmare and its sad psychopathic 1% and the destructive antics of its sycophants...
Tom Kath , May 30, 2019 at 20:13
“Something rotten” is not restricted to the state of Denmark, Britain, or USA.
It is not even restricted to the “West”, so we must seek more fundamentally for
the source of this world’s abject immoral disgustingness. The race to the bottom is
keenly contested.
KiwiAntz , May 30, 2019 at 20:09
At last, for the long suffering Brits? The Maybot has finally danced her “Robotic
Dance” off the World scene to the cheers & high fives of most of the British
people, who have thoroughly had a gutsful of her duplicitous behaviour & disastrous
mishandling of Brexit!
And the article lists her shameful record during the period she was
Prime Minister, especially the Glenfell Tower tragedy & her pathetic response along with
the criminal culpability of the disgusting Conservative Tory Party & its role in this
travesty?
Their murderous Policies & austerity directly led to this disgrace? So its good
riddance to a contemptible woman, a abject failure & a loser who was good for absolutely
nothing except walking on stages & doing really bad dance moves!
LJ , May 30, 2019 at 18:39
She was all the Tories could come up with to keep Corbyn out of the office of Prime
Minister. There should certainly have been a General Election after David Cameron crashed the
ship of state with Brexit.
Boris Johnson would certainly complete that job so someone else
will have to play dartboard until the next election. Despite what the Guardian and BBC and
the rest say. And in spite of the Zionist attack on Corbyn he will be Prime Minister. Long
Overdue. Britain is Great no more.
Without Russian money they are certainly not the
world’s 6th largest economy and it appears that unless they want to side with China
against the USA which is improbable, no impossible, they will lose Chinese Capital as well
after Brexit.
Good. I hope Scotland votes for Independence. Wales should as well. Britain
deserves to go to hell after their history as an Empire. London is 41% foreign born. Just who
are they anyway? The British? We here in the USA, or rather younger people here in the USA
should take a good look at what happens over the next 5 years there and put it your memory
banks.
elmerfudzie , May 30, 2019 at 17:37
Tainted tenure indeed! No one asks the right questions anymore. For example, where did all
that Brexit cash come from? As I commented previously at CONSORTIUMNEWS and it is redacted
here; “The Panama Papers signaled a need for radical change(s) in the EU banking laws.
Hiding money, legit or not from, fair and open taxation, has become increasingly difficult
for the upper crust….”
The BREXIT cash originated, no surprise folks, from a
Gibraltar based firm, where a Mr Arron Banks (big bucks Banks) a guy with money to burn, with
corporate holdings in the Isle of Man and too, one of his buddies, an Alan Kentish of the STM
group specializing in, oh you’ll love this, offshore wealth preservation! LOL
And
again, a Mr. Jim Mellon a for real billionaire, several times over I should think, the same
guy who carpetbagged Russia after the collapse of the CCCP. His gleanings were called
“privatization”… of poor mother Russia. Well, to make a long story short, Mr Kentish, the original pro-BREXITeer was arrested in Gibraltar under the UK’s Crime
Act for such suspicious money funneling(s). My oh my Ms May, what strange political
bedfellows you seem to have!
Jeff Harrison , May 30, 2019 at 17:37
Here today, gone to lunch as the late Douglas Adams put it. The US has it’s own deep
state problem of civil servants, especially alphabet soup agencies who are accustomed to
operating in the dark and think that they, not the political appointees make policy. Their
thinking is bolstered by Congresses who stonewall and delay approving personnel for
leadership positions in the civil service.
"... "All political analysis which favors either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is inherently worthless, because both parties are made of swamp and exist in service of the swamp. If you can't see that the entire system is one unified block of corruption and that ordinary people need to come together and unite against it, then you really don't understand what you're looking at." ..."
Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the
Earth. I recommend listening to the two-part interview of George Papadopoulos with Mark
Steyn, where he describes the convoluted plot to use him to bring down Trump.
What they did to this guy is truly disgusting. Brennan belongs in a prison cell, and he
should be sharing it with Mueller. Papadopoulos also has written a book about his
experiences called 'Deep State Target, How I got caught in the crosshairs of the plot to
bring down President Trump.
And, a final comment. Hillary Clinton proved beyond all doubt that she and not Trump was
not fit to be President. To engage in this scheme and then to raise tensions through the
roof with a nuclear superpower, which can destroy this country, is about as low and selfish
as it is possible to be.
As I stated on the open thread, to paraphrase Muller;
I don't give a s###. figure it out yourself, Im f***ing outta' here.
The whole point of impeachment, is to have a show trial, not actually impeach. If the
thing is on TV, the American people may watch it, and that would be interesting.
Not to worry though, Pelosi and Schumer won't let that happen. Appeasing their donors,is
all they care about.
psycho @ 2 quoting C. Johnston stated;
"All political analysis which favors either the Democratic Party or the Republican
Party is inherently worthless, because both parties are made of swamp and exist in service of
the swamp. If you can't see that the entire system is one unified block of corruption and
that ordinary people need to come together and unite against it, then you really don't
understand what you're looking at."
GCHQ has dismissed fresh allegations that it spied on Donald Trump's presidential campaign -
describing the claims as "utterly ridiculous".
Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst, has accused the British intelligence agency of helping
Barack Obama by spying on the billionaire businessman during the 2016 race.
The US president tweeted about the rumours on Wednesday after they were highlighted in a
report on the right-wing One America News Network.
Mr Trump wrote: "'Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson accuses United Kingdom Intelligence of
helping Obama Administration Spy on the 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign.' @OANN WOW!
"It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be
a beauty!"
Having been practically a recluse since since the 'fake dossier' alleging links between Donald Trump and Russia that he produced
was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, Christophe Steele has reportedly refused to cooperate with AG Barr's probes
Reuters reports that , according to a source with knowledge of the situation, Steele, a former Russia expert for the British
spy agency MI6, will not answer questions from prosecutor John Durham , named by Barr to examine the origins of the investigations
into Trump and his campaign team.
However, buried deep in
Reuters story is the same source claiming that Steele might cooperate with a parallel inquiry by the Justice Department's Inspector
General into how U.S. law enforcement agencies handled pre-election investigations into both Trump and Clinton.
In the past Steele has cooperated, willingly being interviewed twice in the special counsel's investigation, and submitting answers
in writing to the Senate Intelligence Committee, but apparently this time he is not willing.
With Steel refusing to cooperate, Joe DiGenova, former U.S. Attorney warned Monday on WMAL radio's
Mornings on the Mall radio show,
"this is full scale war," adding that "we are heading toward a gigantic, gigantic fight...
The intelligence community, which includes the FBI, is in full resistance to disclosing what they did during the presidential
campaign ."
Sara Carter reports that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to release his report on the FBI's handling of the
investigation into Trump within weeks.
These investigation will hold those in the intelligence and law enforcement community accountable, depending on what evidence
is discovered. This reporter is hearing from sources that it will be scathing. Those who abused their power and weaponized the tools
meant to target America's enemies against a political opponents should be held accountable . Tags
Politics Law Crime
It seems reasonable to demand Steele's extradition to America to explain his part in the conspiracy.
I mean is being a party to the conspiracy, attempted treason and sedition of the attempted overthrow of an elected President
not at least as important as Julian Assange who only made public some documents that someone else removed?
Oh these fuckers are scared to death. Comey lashing out at Trump...on and on. This is going to be great...and Trump will
play it perfect right into the election. And BIDEN was part of all of it. What a great next 6 years.
Funny, I was recently de-platformed on Twitter for tweeting to GCHQ (British Intelligence) that the UK's sordid involvement
in spying on the Trump campaign would be exposed and "no amount of British bluster could refute it...".
"... 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.
"... As for Ukraine, a Ukrainian court ruled in December that the country meddled in the US election when they revealed details of suspected illegal payments to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. ..."
"... Chaly confirmed that DNC insider of Ukrainian heritage, Alexandra Chalupa , approached Ukraine seeking information on Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's dealings inside the country, in the hopes of exposing them to Congress. ..."
"... Chalupa, who told Politico in 2017 that she had "developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives ," said she "occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton's campaign. ..."
"... In short, a DNC operative of Ukrainian heritage, who shared information with the Clinton campaign and worked with a convicted terrorist to spread misinformation to undermine the legitimacy of the 2016 election, approached the government of Ukraine in the hopes of obtaining "dirt" that would hurt the Trump campaign. ..."
Speaking with reporters at the White House on Friday before his trip to Japan, Trump
discussed his decision this week to issue a
sweeping declassification order
-
leaving it in the hands of Barr to determine exactly what happened to Trump and his campaign
before and after the 2016 US election.
"For over a year, people have asked me to
declassify. What I've done is declassified everything," said Trump, adding "He can look and
I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at
Ukraine
."
"It's the greatest hoax probably in the history of our country and
somebody has
to get to the bottom of it.
We'll see. For a long period of time, they wanted me to
declassify and I did."
(UK, Australia, Ukraine comment at 2:30)
"This is about finding out what happened," said Trump. "What happened and when did it
happen, because this was an attempted takedown of the president of the United States, and we
have to find out why."
"We're exposing everything. We're being a word that you like,
transparent. We're being, ultimately we're being transparent. That's what it's about. Again,
this should never ever happen in our country again."
After the Mueller report made clear that Trump and his campaign had in no way conspired
with Russia during the 2016 election, Democrats immediately pivoted to whether Trump
obstructed the investigation. Trump and his supporters, however,
immediately pivoted
to the conduct of the US intelligence community
, including the involvement of
foreign actors and possibly their governments.
According to a
report last week
, the discredited "Steele Dossier" - assembled by
former
MI6
spy Christopher Steele - was referred to as
"crown material"
in an
email exchange suggesting that former FBI Director James Comey insisted that CIA Director
John Brennan pushed for the inclusion of the dossier in the intelligence community
assessment (ICA) on Russian interference.
Moreover, much of "Operation Crossfire
Hurricane" - the FBI's official investigation into the Trump campaign -
occurred on
UK soil
, which is perhaps why the
New York Times
reported last September that
the UK begged Trump not to
declassify
'Russiagate' documents 'without redaction.'
Shortly after he announced his involvement with the Trump campaign, aide George
Papadopoulos was
lured to London
in March, 2016, where Maltese professor
and self-described
Clinton foundation member
Joseph Mifsud
fed him the rumor that Russia
had damaging information on Hillary Clinton. It was later
at a London bar
that
Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who FBI
agent Peter Strzok flew to London
to meet with
the day after
Crossfire Hurricane
was launched).
Two weeks
later
,
Papadopoulos would be bilked for information by Australian diplomat
(another
Clinton
ally
) Alexander Downer at a London bar, who relayed the Russia rumor to Australian
authorities, which alerted the FBI (as the story goes), which 'officially' kicked off the US
intelligence investigation.
We have now pinned Peter Strzok's boss, Bill Priestap, in London the week of May 6th, 2016
and on the 9th. The day before Alexander Downer was sent to spy on me and record our
meeting. Congress must release the transcripts and embarrass the deep state.
Yes, it is Treason. America wants hardcore a go-for-it
investigation. AG Barr please unleash the hounds on these
vermin. Our very democracy is on the line. Let the chips
fall!
As for Ukraine,
a Ukrainian court ruled in December that the country
meddled
in the US election
when they revealed details of suspected illegal payments to
former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
In 2016, while Mr. Manafort was chairman of the Trump campaign, anti-corruption
prosecutors in Ukraine disclosed that a pro-Russian political party had earmarked
payments for Mr. Manafort from an illegal slush fund. Mr. Manafort resigned from the
campaign a week later. -
New
York Times
Last week, President Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani met with a former Ukrainian
diplomat, Andril Telizhenko, who has previously suggested that the DNC worked with the
Kiev government in 2016 to dig up 'dirt' on then-candidate Donald Trump. Giuliani told
the
Washington Post
in a Friday interview that Telizhenko "was in Washington and
he came up to New York, and we spent most of the afternoon together," adding "When I
have something to say, I'll say it."
This comes on the heels of Giuliani canceling a trip to Ukraine to meet with
President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss the Manafort situation.
According to
The Hill
's John Solomon,
A former DNC operative steeped in Trump-Russia research
approached the
Ukrainian government looking for 'dirt' on then-candidate Donald Trump
during
the 2016 US election, citing written answers to questions submitted to Ambassador Valeriy
Chaly's office.
Chaly confirmed that
DNC insider of Ukrainian heritage, Alexandra Chalupa
,
approached Ukraine seeking information on Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's
dealings inside the country, in the hopes of exposing them to Congress.
Chalupa, who told
Politico
in
2017 that she had "developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including
investigative
journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives
," said
she "occasionally shared her findings with officials from
the DNC and Clinton's
campaign.
In short, a DNC operative of Ukrainian heritage, who shared information with the
Clinton campaign and worked with a convicted terrorist to spread misinformation to
undermine the legitimacy of the 2016 election, approached the government of Ukraine in
the hopes of obtaining "dirt" that would hurt the Trump campaign.
And Trump wants AG Barr to look at it
all
. He'll be
visiting the UK
next month,
meanwhile, where he can ask outgoing PM Theresa May, or the Queen, all about it.
I think the question everyone should be
asking themselves is... How many "deep
state" people has Trump's administration
prosecuted in the 2 years he's been in
office. The answer to that question is ZERO!
The charade is over dude!
the arab spring, begun in 2010 one year
after obama was elected destroyed libya,
syria, egypt and a bunch of other countries.
consider that the same tactics used in those
countries by a democrat president using the
same indoctrinated howler monkey people in
the same weaponized alphabet soup intel
agencies - were used against trump
the US got off lightly, this was an
attempted coup by libtard howler monkeys.
think of the upside if they are locked
up.
the world will truly be a safer place and
people will be happier and more secure.
The deep state under Obama spied on any
adversary they deemed a threat to the DNC.
Obama weaponized the DNC with the
CIA/FBI/and NSA. They spied on every GOP candidate. THATS
A FACT
They gave Hillary the debate questions
and now that crook Donna Brazile is a paid
contributor on FOX.
The media in this country is full of ****
and shysters
That remind me how old Kushner tried to smear his relative...
Notable quotes:
"... They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire, who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts. ..."
"... The "Russian" female is notably very attractive with a slender build. There is a honey-trap angle here as well. This would likely inspire the boasting (in order to impress her) on the part of the wingnut politician. ..."
"... The far-right is the Troy Horse of transnational corporations and capital and already discredited neoliberal stablishment which comes now disguised under the softening label of "populists". Beware, there seems to be a coordinated effort at several blogs in the ten previous days of the European elections to whitewash the far-right. ..."
"... So this very much hints something more. Right now there is a debate of cocain being visible on the table but this accusation points more towards schnickle with a babe imho. The babe to his right is not that ugly, admittely. ..."
"... As expected the hysteria of "russian" meddling have now publicized to weaken FPÖ in the EU election. Winners? NATO/US parties. ..."
"... Seems indeed to be a honeypot aspect to the entrapment, and it's quite possible Strache stepped down at once to avoid that part to come to light, so that the public revelations would be limited to the economic shenanigans and influence-peddling level. ..."
"... Also, this goes to show that the bulk of our Western politicians, across all the political spectrum, are a bunch of mediocre and quite corrupt fools. For him not to smell that this was a setup from the very first minute, it must be that such proposals are common place all across the board - which will only reinforce my suspicion that our societies, peoples and mankind as a whole would only benefit if we fully wiped out our economic, financial and political establishment and started from scratches. ..."
"... Blackmail, smear campaigns, various traps via honey or corruption, hookers and blow, gay sex, paedofilia, or what-have-you, - all or in combination. Politicians are "all" compromised in these ways. Buck the system or threaten the status quo - whereby it gets somebody's serious attention and the shite hits the fan. ..."
"... The savages in this neoliberal order use the secret services to subvert democracy. Deception and manipulation are the means used to corrupt the public domain. They would push the most pliable and ruthless leaders into office. Catastrophe and violence and disinformation are their most powerful weapons. But I still think that political processes and elections do matter; and what counts is a struggle to improve and reform the system of government. Doing our best to protect and maintain the integrity of electoral processes is something that requires both protests and political campaigns. ..."
"... The very strong implication certainly seems to be that there may be further video of Strache sleeping with the honey pot. He obviously knows what happened that night. If there were video cameras hidden everywhere, that was obviously one of the intentions behind the sting from the outset. ..."
"... B, please do an article on the Nazi penetration of the German security services, Interior Ministry, Army, CDU etc, and links to the NSU affair, shredding of millions of documents by the Interior Ministry when demanded by the courts as evidence, links with the Board members and advisory board members of German big business especially Siemens and Deutche Bank and Bayer, etc. ..."
"... It is a wonder Strache's remark "Journalists are the biggest whores on the planet" and how he says he can subvert an entire media outlet to his political agenda by even firing the few remaining fringe elements. ..."
"... I don't think Strache is as harmless as you portray him, B. You fall for his defence strategy if you attribute all his statements to the influence of alcohol. At that time, the man was very confident that he would soon be at the levers of power, which then materialized. It remains to be proven whether he did not put into practice anything of what he talked about at that house in Ibiza. After all, he was talking about the by far most influential newspaper in Austria. ..."
"... Of course it is true that it is the neoliberal globalisers who have brought us to where we stand today. But that doesn' make people like Strache and Salvini any less dangerous. If they rise to total power, the result will be a naked dictatorship. Strache was beaten with his own weapons, you don't have to be under any illusions. ..."
"... Who could have ordered such an elaborate sting operation? ..."
"... The sophisticated operation using actors and a villa prepared with hidden cameras and microphones shows that this is hardly a normal case of dirty campaigning by political opponents. Most likely, either it was an action by a secret service or someone with deep pockets hired former secret agents. ..."
"... If it was an action by secret services, the most plausible explanation seems to be that Western secret services targeted Strache because FPÖ is one of the parties who is in favor of restoring normal relations with Russia ..."
"... François Fillon comes to mind, a French conservative candidate who also had a quite a friendly attitude towards Russia - shortly before the elections, it was revealed (at least claimed) that Fillon had given his wife ficticious employment, and Fillon lost popularity, which helped Macron enormously. ..."
"... Probably, some of the things Strache said during this sting operation were inacceptable, and Fillon may also not be innocent, but if there is a systematic selective targeting of European politicians who want to normalize relations with Russia by secret services, that would be a huge problem for democracy. ..."
"... In 2016, Joseph Mifsud invited George Papadopoulos to Rome and introduced him to "Putin's niece" with the intent of smearing Trump as "Russian puppet" and destroying his election chances. In 2017, someone (who?) invited Heinz-Christian Strache to Ibiza and introduced him to "Russian billionaire's niece" with the intent of smearing Strache as "Russian puppet" and destroying his party's election chances. Notice a pattern? ..."
"... This is a clear case of Germany interfering in Austrian elections. Austria should deport 60 German diplomats, shut down German embassy in Vienna, and impose sanctions on Germany. Also put a German girl interested in Austrian politics in jail for 18 months. ..."
"... Thinking about it, after revealing e-mail of HRC, Podesta etc. were published, their core supporters were enraged about the dirty trick and did not pay attention to the disclosed content, while for the core opponents of HRC she was already sufficiently vilified so the net change in voting intentions that can be attributed to that incident was modest. ..."
"... Anyone who does not directly have his or her family's nose in the EU trough at this point knows that the policies espoused by transatlantic puppets like Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron push our countries and our continent towards self-destruction. Life in Europe, post-1968 and pre-2013, has been pretty damn good. There's absolutely no good reason for us to rip up our traditions or turn into a continent of immigrants and mobile job seekers. ..."
"... As Strache explains in the video, Austrian dirty tricks are done "via another country". ..."
"... To those who fill that politics of Strache are obnoxious and that justifies entrapment, remembers that methods of that type are not improvised, and that means that there is an apparatus that does it. We noted similarities with provocations against George Papadopoulos. In the latter case the target was cautious, after all, we had to be well aware of such methods. But anyone who is despised by NATO establishment are similar group can be on the receiving end, think about Assange. ..."
During the last days a right wing politician in Austria was taken down by using an elaborate
sting. Until Friday Heinz-Christian Strache was leader of the far right (but not fascist)
Freedom Party of Austria (FPOe) and the Vice Chancellor of the country. On Friday morning two
German papers, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegel
published (German)
reports (English) about an old video that was made to take Strache down.
The FPOe has good connections with United Russia, the party of the Russian President Putin,
and to other right-wing parties in east Europe. It's pro-Russian position has led to verbal
attacks on and defamation of the party from NATO supporting and neoliberal circles.
In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in
the FPOe, get invited for dinner to a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the
Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire plans large investments
in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the
Russian billionaire, who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner.
Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation but asks for returns in form of
mark ups on public contracts.
Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and
microphones.
A scene from the video. Source: Der Falter (vid, German)
During the six hour long party several schemes get proposed by the "Russian" and are
discussed. Strache rejects most of them. He insists several times that everything they plan or
do must be legal and conform to the law. He says that a large donation could probably be
funneled through an endowment that would then support his party. It is a gray area under
Austrian party financing laws. They also discuss if the "Russian" could buy the Kronen
Zeitung , Austria's powerful tabloid, and use it to prop up his party.
The evening goes on with several bottles of vodka on the table. Starche gets a bit drunk and
boosts in front of the "oligarch daughter" about all his connections to rich and powerful
people. He does not actually have these.
Strache says that, in exchange for help for his party, the "Russian" could get public
contracts for highway building and repair. Currently most of such contracts in Austria go to
the large Austrian company, STRABAG, that is owned by a neoliberal billionaire who opposes the
FPOe. At that time Strache was not yet in the government and had no way to decide about such
contracts.
At one point Strache seems to understand that the whole thing is a setup. But his right hand
man calms him down and vouches for the "Russian". The sting ends with Strache and his companion
leaving the place. The never again see the "Russian" and her co-plotter. Nothing they talked
about will ever come to fruition.
Three month later Strache and his party win more than 20% in the Austrian election and form
a coalition government with the conservative party OeVP led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Even
while the FPOe controls several ministries, it does not achieve much politically. It lacks a
real program and the government's policies are mostly run by the conservatives.
Nearly two years after the evening on Ibiza, ten days before the European parliament
election in which Strache's party is predicted to achieve good results, a video of the evening
on Ibiza is handed to two German papers which are known to be have strong transatlanticist
leanings and have previously been used for other shady 'leaks'. The papers do not hesitate to
take part in the plot and publish extensive reports about the video.
After the reports appeared Strache immediately stepped down and the
conservatives ended the coalition with his party. Austria will now have new elections.
On Bloomberg Leonid Bershidsky opines
on the case:
Strache's discussion with the Russian oligarch's fake niece shows a propensity for dirty
dealing that has nothing to do with idealistic nationalism. Nationalist populists often
agitate against entrenched, corrupt elites and pledge to drain various swamps. In the videos,
however, Strache and Gudenus behave like true swamp creatures, savoring rumors of drug and
sex scandals in Austrian politics and discussing how to create an authoritarian media machine
like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's.
I do not believe that the people who voted for the FPOe (and similar parties in other
countries) will subscribe to that view. The politics of the main stream parties in Austria have
for decades been notoriously corrupt. Compared to them Strache and his party are astonishingly
clean. In the video he insists several times that everything must stay within the legal realm.
Whenever the "Russian" puts forward a likely illegal scheme, Starche emphatically rejects
it.
Bershidsky continues:
Strache, as one of the few nationalist populists in government in the European Union's
wealthier member states, was an important member of the movement Italian Interior Minister
Matteo Salvini has been trying to cobble together ahead of the European Parliament election
that will take place next week. On Saturday, he was supposed to attend a Salvini-led rally in
Milan with other like-minded politicians from across Europe. Instead, he was in Vienna
apologizing to his wife and to Kurz and protesting pitifully that he'd been the victim of a
"political assassination" -- a poisonous rain on the Italian right-winger's parade.
...
This leaves the European far right in disarray and plays into the hands of centrist and
leftist forces ahead of next week's election. Salvini's unifying effort has been thoroughly
undermined, ...
This is also a misreading of the case. The right-wing parties will use the case to boost
their legitimacy.
Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a
British assist. The original aim was likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza
Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support for his party is not a
sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some
boosting while drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little
material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video was held back until the right moment to
politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was
thought to be now.
But that Strache stepped down after the sudden media assault only makes him more convincing.
The right-wing all over Europe will see him as a martyr who was politically assassinated
because he worked for their cause. The issue will increase the right-wingers hate against the
'liberal' establishment. It will further motivate them: "They attack us because we are right
and winning." The new far-right block Natteo Salvini
will setup in the European Parliament will likely receive a record share of votes.
Establishment writers notoriously misinterpret the new right wing parties and their
followers. This stand-offish sentence in the Spiegel story about Strache's party
demonstrates the problem:
In the last election, the party drew significant support from the working class, in part
because of his ability to simplify even the most complicated of issues and play the common
man, even in his role as vice chancellor.
The implicit thesis, that the working class is too dumb to understand the "most complicated
of issues", is not only incredibly snobbish but utterly false. The working class understands
very well what the establishment parties have done to it and continue to do. The increasing
vote share of the far-right is a direct consequence of the behavior of the neoliberal center
and of the lack of real left alternatives.
Last week, before the Strache video appeared, Craig Murray put his finger on the
wound:
The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause
of the crisis of confidence which is affecting almost all the institutions of western
representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami. It
was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated
and hoarded primarily through multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual
production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately funnelled wealth to
those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions.
...
The rejection of the political class manifests itself in different ways and has been diverted
down a number of entirely blind alleys giving unfulfilled promise of a fresh start –
Brexit, Trump, Macron. As the vote share of the established political parties – and
public engagement with established political institutions – falls everywhere, the
chattering classes deride the political symptoms of status quo rejection by the people as
"populism". It is not populism to make sophisticated arguments that undermine the received
political wisdom and take on the entire weight of established media opinion.
If one wants to take down the far right one has to do so with arguments and good politics
for the working class. Most people, especially working class people, have a strong sense for
justice. The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What was done during the
2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers
were rewarded with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people.
The public was then told that it must starve through austerity to make up for the loss of
money.
While I consider myself to be a strong leftist who opposes the right wherever possible, I
believe to understand why people vote for Strache's FBOe and similar parties. When one talks to
these people issues of injustice and inequality always come up. The new 'populist' parties at
least claim to fight against the injustice done to the common men. Unlike most of the
establishment parties they seem to be still mostly clean and not yet corrupted.
In the early 1990s Strache actually flirted with violent fascists but he rejected their way.
While he has far-right opinions, he and his like are no danger to our societies. If we can not
accept that Strache and his followers have some legitimate causes, we will soon find us
confronted with way more extreme people. The neoliberal establishment seems to do its best to
achieve that.
Posted by b on May 19, 2019 at 01:10 PM |
Permalink
b - thanks .. i agree "elaborate sting" and "the video was held back until the right
moment"... clearly this was a set up.. strache says he is going to pursue this legally..
"working class people, have a strong sense for justice. The political assassination of
Christian Strache is unjust." injustices are being done on a constant basis now and being
justified by the msm regularly.. i think this is part of the reason people are seeking
alternatives - whatever they might be... power to the people..screw the neoliberal agenda and
blackmail artists that are so rampant at present...
Funny thing is e.g.- a German comedian Jan Böhmerman knew before. Already in April he
said in a Video call live in Austian television duringthe TV-prize-giving of the trophy
"Romy" that he couldn´t attend personally to receive the price because right know he
was sitting together with some FPÖ-buddies in a Russian oligarch-villa on Ibiza,
sniffing cocain, drinking and negotiating the takeover of the "Krone-Zeitung" (the biggest
rag in Austira, smth like the "Bild" in Germany or "The sun" in Britain).
Your article here raises a number of important issues. More or less at random:
* If I understand your characterization of your political leanings, based on this and on
the perspectives MoA offers, I share many of your views. And whereas there may be a certain
Schadenfreude at seeing a right-wing, B-team operator reveal himself, I agree that the forces
behind the sting itself are of potentially far greater interest (and danger)..
* For every sting and smear such as this that we see, how many others take place sub rosa,
corrupting our political and social landscapes, leaving no evidence that might trigger
criticism or resistance?
* I'm not sure of how this plays out legally, but this seems not just to have been a
sting, but entrapment, in which (if these were law enforcement agents) we could protest that
the only illegal activity being proposed, was by those conducting the sting.
* If this was, as you suggest, authored by the BND, then this would be a clear instance of
election "meddling" -- though not of the sort that our shining democracies are now being
warned against. (At least President Putin will not be accused of conducting it, for once.
That oligarch's daughter could have come from anywhere, but of course Russia.) Russia gets
smeared is probably the larger aim, rather than this particularly Austrian politician.
The "Russian" female is notably very attractive with a slender build. There is a honey-trap
angle here as well. This would likely inspire the boasting (in order to impress her) on the
part of the wingnut politician.
I think the word is protofascist. b. you have got a blind spot seeing geopolitics everywhere. Truth is most of this is
simply a battle of billionaires. The key to understand the Ibiza video is the product placement. Everybody there drinks Red
Bull plus alcohol (I am not sure about the alcohol the loss of control of the politicians who
are present suggests cocaine).
The owner of Red Bull is an Austrian billionaire called Dietrich Mateschitz.
Mateschitz is a right wing crank building a media empire in Austria including an
"investigative platform" called addendum that is something like the Austrian version of
Breitbart.
For some reason "addendum" began to shoot against Rene Benzko, an Austrian real estate
billionaire, who intends to take over Kronenzeitung.
And guess what, Rene Benzko was mentioned in the video "as a friend", and a large part of
the conversation centered on taking over Kronenzeitung something Rene Benzko is involved
in.
Strache, Vice Chancellor of Austria, explained in the video for every Austrian to
understand, that his party's scheme is based on accepting illegal contributions via a ngo,
and lowering taxes in return.
According to what he says in the video he also intends to charge for water by selling the
right to the Latvian/Russien "niece of a Russian oligarch" or someone else prepared to pay to
his party's ngo.
Anybody who is not a billionaire voting for FPÖ after this must be braindead.
> with United Russia, the party of the Russian President Putin
Putin himself though stresses his non involvement in that party, he also tried to
bootstrap organizations that could supplant or even challenge U.R. at least in some
niches.
While U.R. probably is party of Russian ruling elites, it is hardly one-man-show of
LDPR/Zhirinovsky kind and whether Putin is "gray cardinal" of U.R. is very questionable.
It is said that children and drunk people always say the truth...
Why is it not to be taken into account what he said once drunk enough?
For to be a strong leftist, b, you spend a great effort in discharging this man, while
whitewashing the far-right saying they are no danger for our societies and assuring that they
are clean, when that is a thing you do not know since they have not had yet the possibility
to rule.
They are neither cleaner nor inocuous for our societies. For starters they have chosen as
scapegoat the migrants when who is to blame for the wave of migration is the US, NATO and
their imperial ambitions, so as to throw poor against poor and that way the elites could
continue quietly looting us, while we fight each other. You will never heard anything agsint
banks ans elites from anybody in the far-right.
FYI, it is not Matteo Salvini who is forming a coalition of the far-right to conflude to
European elections, but it is Bannon from his HQ in a Cisterciense monastery in Italy who is
commanding this operation. Salvini is really a piece, having supported Guiado and the
Venezuelan coup intend, and said what he would do with the Yellow Vests , "I don't go to the
Yellow Vests with Molotov cocktails, if anything, I put them in prison" ...
Then it is AfD, who goes also in the block, whose members have claimed the Germans should
be proud of the performance of the German Army during both WW....
Then Vox, financed by MEK and Israeli lobby and promoted by Bannon and the WH, who only wear
clear neoliberal economic policies in their, for the rest, confusing program.
The far-right is the Troy Horse of transnational corporations and capital and already
discredited neoliberal stablishment which comes now disguised under the softening label of
"populists". Beware, there seems to be a coordinated effort at several blogs in the ten
previous days of the European elections to whitewash the far-right.
"Glaubt er, man wäre bei Alkohol nachsichtiger? Offenbar schien er sich betrunken kaum
mehr im Griff zu haben - und dies ist wohlgemerkt seine Erklärung für die
Äußerungen im Video. Erst gegen Ende beginnt er eigenes Fehlverhalten
einzuräumen und bittet insbesondere seine Frau um Verzeihung, mit der er ein wenige
Monate altes Kind hat. Kenner Straches ahnten an dieser Stelle bereits, dass dieser sich
bereits für Dinge entschuldigt, die zu diesem Zeitpunkt der Öffentlichkeit noch gar
nicht bekannt sind."
Does he (Strache) really assume he would get more indulgence by blaming it on the
alcolhol? Obviously when being drunken he wasn´t in control of himself anymore - and
this is actually his explanation for his statements in the video. Somehow at the end he
finally begins admitting own misconduct and especially asks his wife for forgiveness, with
which he has a few months old child. Experts on Strache suspected from this moment on, that
he apologized for things which at this moment are not known to the public, yet"
So this very much hints something more. Right now there is a debate of cocain being
visible on the table but this accusation points more towards schnickle with a babe imho. The
babe to his right is not that ugly, admittely.
battle of billionaires.... Anybody who is not a billionaire voting for FPÖ after
this must be braindead.
Anyone who believes voting will change anything is braindead. Only supporting protest Movements (like Gillet Jeune) and free press/citizen journalism
(Wikileaks/Assange) will have any real effect.
Great piece - I dont see how Strache actually made anything wrong or atleast nothing not
normal to politicians that constantly seek out support by big, powerful people. Most likely
the deep state in Austria struck FPÖ just like FBI struck Trump.
As expected the hysteria of "russian" meddling have now publicized to weaken FPÖ in the
EU election.
Winners? NATO/US parties.
Not some very close relative like daughter or sister, which may be fearsome, as "russian
mafia" oligarch could be expected to "protect" her of ladykillers viciously. But also not some far relative who would be seen alien and have no financial support.
Just enough distance to be safe to hit on and try to share the oligarch's money. It was both honey&gold trap.
If voting would be such a waste, why would had taken so hard and long to achieve voting
for minorities and women?
Why the parties go to such efforts to campaign and disguise themselves as wolves with
sheepskin like the far-right?
Why would certain forces need to go to such editorial coordinated efforts through their
several blogs out there to give an impression of certain candidates which is opposite to what
they really are? Wikilieaks/Assange are part of this efforts, btw
Seems indeed to be a honeypot aspect to the entrapment, and it's quite possible Strache
stepped down at once to avoid that part to come to light, so that the public revelations
would be limited to the economic shenanigans and influence-peddling level.
Also, this goes to show that the bulk of our Western politicians, across all the political
spectrum, are a bunch of mediocre and quite corrupt fools. For him not to smell that this was
a setup from the very first minute, it must be that such proposals are common place all
across the board - which will only reinforce my suspicion that our societies, peoples and
mankind as a whole would only benefit if we fully wiped out our economic, financial and
political establishment and started from scratches.
Spanish Colonel ( ret.) Pedro Baños, who was postulated for head of the CNI by the
Socialist government of Pedro Sanchez, was object of slander campiagn as "pro-Russian" by the
Spanish cluster of Integrity Initiative, only for declarations on the prejudice of sanctions
for Spain, and nobody made such noise....
Blackmail, smear campaigns, various traps via honey or corruption, hookers and blow, gay sex,
paedofilia, or what-have-you, - all or in combination. Politicians are "all" compromised in
these ways. Buck the system or threaten the status quo - whereby it gets somebody's serious
attention and the shite hits the fan.
Enforcement and and penalties are selective. Selective enforcement. It's how "The Law" operates. Not defending the wingnut pig in the article. I appreciate Sasha's Trojan Horse allegory above.
wow...a bunch of elitist neoliberals with contempt for anyone lacking 10 zeroes on their
paychecks and zero useful policies use "russian collusion" to entrap and embarrass a
pseudo-right wing politician. who could ever imagine such a scenario? and why learn from the
masses you represent when james o'keefe gives you all the inspiration you need?
but at least they blocked the ascension of someone who would trade political favors for
money. that kind of nonsense simply won't do in western society.
Thanks for this explanation, b! I first saw this reported at Geroman's Twitter and used
machine translation of the article he linked, but it lacked the context which you provided.
This incident is subsumed within the larger conflict that's trying to keep EU from combining
with BRI/EAEU, which means its roots/culprits are NATO/Outlaw US Empire--it points to
desperation on their part.
Sorry, you don't see the Latvian/Russian woman. You see Gudenus' wife who is from
Serbia. Whatever the publishing papers got, it was a copy. More will come out.
The savages in this neoliberal order use the secret services to subvert democracy. Deception
and manipulation are the means used to corrupt the public domain. They would push the most
pliable and ruthless leaders into office. Catastrophe and violence and disinformation are
their most powerful weapons. But I still think that political processes and elections do
matter; and what counts is a struggle to improve and reform the system of government. Doing
our best to protect and maintain the integrity of electoral processes is something that
requires both protests and political campaigns.
So this very much hints something more. Right now there is a debate of cocain being
visible on the table but this accusation points more towards schnickle with a babe imho. The
babe to his right is not that ugly, admittely. Posted by: Bratislav Metulski | May 19, 2019 2:20:38 PM | 8
The very strong implication certainly seems to be that there may be further video of
Strache sleeping with the honey pot. He obviously knows what happened that night. If there
were video cameras hidden everywhere, that was obviously one of the intentions behind the
sting from the outset.
---
On the issue of "populism" and right-wing parties I confess I have a problem. I certainly
want to see the Establishment thrashed, and especially in next week's EU elections, and there
is no question that at the moment the right-wing parties have far more potential to upset the
establishment than the left. If "Populist" parties are able to radically upset the EU
Parliament, that should bring a much-needed hammer and axe to the anti-populist activities of
the EU, and hopefully lead to the breakup of the EU.
On the other hand, unlike B, I do have extremely strong worries about the rising power of
the far right and their connections to Nazis and neo-Nazis. I am concerned - even without the
involvement of Bannon, but far more so with - that the rise of "populism" is a calculated
policy of a Nazi segment of the Establishment that is designed specifically to usher in an
international Nazi movement across Europe and Latin America under the leadership of and
proxies of the - ever more and more Nazi behaving - US (which itself is in so many very real
ways descended from Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party and the Japanese war criminals including Bush's
family, tight connections with Nazi war criminals in the CIA, and historical leadership
figures in the CIA). The large scale and extremely high level infiltration of hardcore Nazis
in the German security services, Interior Ministry, Army, and CDU politics is a ticking
timebomb waiting for its moment. There seems to be similar high level Nazi infiltration in
many other countries.
We have to be careful what we wish for!
B, please do an article on the Nazi penetration of the German security services, Interior
Ministry, Army, CDU etc, and links to the NSU affair, shredding of millions of documents by
the Interior Ministry when demanded by the courts as evidence, links with the Board members
and advisory board members of German big business especially Siemens and Deutche Bank and
Bayer, etc.
Colonialism is a leech with two suckers, one of which sucks the metropolitan proletariat
and the other that of the colonies. If we want to kill this monster, we must cut off both
suckers at the same time. If only one is cut off, the other will continue to suck the blood
of the proletariat, the animal will continue to live, and the cut–off sucker will
grow again. The Russian Revolution has grasped this truth clearly. That is why it is not
satisfied with making fine platonic speeches and drafting "humanitarian" resolutions in
favor of oppressed peoples, but it teaches them to struggle; and helps them spiritually, as
proclaimed by Lenin in his theses on the colonial question. To the Baku Congress,
twenty–one Eastern nations sent delegates. Representatives of Western workers'
parties also participated in the work of this congress. For the first time, the proletariat
of the conquering Western States and that of the subject Eastern countries fraternally
joined hands and deliberated in common on the best means to defeat their common enemy,
imperialism .
Following this historic congress, despite internal and external difficulties,
revolutionary Russia has never hesitated to come to the help of peoples awakened by its
heroic and victorious revolution. One of its first important acts was the founding of the
University of the East.(...)
The sixty–two nationalities represented at the University form a "Commune." Its
chairman and functionaries are elected every three months by all the students.
A student delegate takes part in the economic and administrative management of the
University. All must regularly and in turn work in the kitchen, the library, the club, etc.
All "misdemeanors" and disputes are judged and settled by an elected tribunal in the
presence of all comrades. Once a week, the "Commune" holds a meeting to discuss the
international political and economic situation. From time to time, meetings and evening
parties are organized where the amateur artists introduce the art and culture of their
country.
The fact that the Communists not only treat the "inferior natives of the colonies"
like brothers, but that they get them to participate in the political life of the country,
is highly characteristic of the "barbarity" of the Bolsheviks. Treated in their native
country as "submissive subjects" or "protéges," having no other right but that to
pay taxes, the Eastern students, who are neither electors nor eligible for election in
their own country, from whom the right to express their political opinion is withdrawn, in
the Soviet Union take part in the election of the Soviets and have the right to send their
representatives to the Soviets. Let our brothers of the colonies who vainly seek a change
of nationality make a comparison between bourgeois democracy and proletarian
democracy.
These students have suffered themselves and have witnessed the sufferings of others.
All have lived under the yoke of "high civilization," all have been victims of exploitation
and oppression by foreign capitalists . Moreover, they passionately long to acquire
knowledge and to study. They are serious and full of enthusiasm. They are entirely
different from the frequenters of the boulevards of the Latin Quarter, the Eastern students
in Paris, Oxford, and Berlin. It can be said without exaggeration that under the roof of
this University is the future of the colonial peoples.
The colonial countries of the Near and Far East, stretching from Syria to Korea,
cover an extent of more than 15 million square kilometers and have more than 1,200 million
inhabitants. All these immense countries are now under the yoke of capitalism and
imperialism. Although their considerable numbers should be their strength, these submissive
peoples have never yet made any serious attempts to free themselves from this yoke. Not yet
having realized the value of international solidarity, they have not known how to unite for
the struggle. Relationships between their countries are not yet established as they are
among the peoples of Europe and America. They possess gigantic strength and do not yet
realize it. The University of the East, assembling all the young, active, and intelligent
leaders of the colonized countries, has fulfilled a great task, namely:
-It teaches to the future vanguard militants the principles of class struggle,
confused in their minds by race conflicts and patriarchal customs.
-It establishes between the proletarian vanguard of the colonies a close contact with the
Western proletariat, thus preparing the way for the close and effective cooperation which
will alone ensure the final victory of the international working class.
-It teaches the colonized people, hitherto separated from one another, to know one another
and to unite, by creating the bases of a future union of Eastern countries, one of the
wings of the proletarian revolution.
-It sets the proletariat of colonialist countries and example of what they can and must do
in favor of their oppressed brothers .
This is why it is needed to throw the workers from the West against the migrants from the
East and South, to avoid the invincible force they would constitute together.
This dirty work is made by the far-right in the name of corporate liberal elites.
They can play that they fight each other, but as soon as they get seats at the European
Parliament, you will find the previous allegedly opponents all together aligned in the same
Eurogroup. Time to time.
It is a wonder Strache's remark "Journalists are the biggest whores on the planet" and how he
says he can subvert an entire media outlet to his political agenda by even firing the few
remaining fringe elements. Yet here we can still talk about he was drunk, how his being set
up was unjust, and how the poor guy will have to miss his lovers' right cause in Italy. Those
vulgar masses are at it again! There can be no justification about the masses' support of
far-right causes and the clowns like him. If you think otherwise it is the likes of moonofalabama next in line to be "fired", or eliminated. Legitimize their causes and it is
Germany in 1920s all over again.
"Left/right", I agree, is nearly without semantic value. Nevertheless class interests
remain...how is it that this is so? Think about that, comrades.
And then consider wsws report about "At the annual meeting of the Bundeswehr reserve in
autumn 2016, Veith announced: "I dream that in 2026 there will be a provincial regiment in
each state with a charismatic commander, a troop flag and an organization of between 800 and
2,000 reservists to support the police and the Bundeswehr in emergency situations." " see>
"German government prepares troops for domestic missions" @ wsws.org
Considering the overall aspects, it's rational to expect all parties in Europe to make
plans, is it not? Of course the working class is not permitted to make such plans...is
it?
I don't think Strache is as harmless as you portray him, B. You fall for his defence strategy
if you attribute all his statements to the influence of alcohol. At that time, the man was
very confident that he would soon be at the levers of power, which then materialized. It
remains to be proven whether he did not put into practice anything of what he talked about at
that house in Ibiza. After all, he was talking about the by far most influential newspaper in
Austria.
Of course it is true that it is the neoliberal globalisers who have brought us to where we
stand today. But that doesn' make people like Strache and Salvini any less dangerous. If they
rise to total power, the result will be a naked dictatorship. Strache was beaten with his own
weapons, you don't have to be under any illusions.
I agree with you that this is not the big setback for the right the mainstream parties dream
of. But it won't help the fascists in spe in the future either.
Who could have ordered such an elaborate sting operation?
A first association might be the dirty, deceptive campaigning SPÖ used against
Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) - the Silberstein affair -, but I think the methods that were
chosen are too different to make a common source likely, Strache was targeted in a much more
sophisticated way. The Silberstein affair may, however, be the reason why the tapes have
partially been published now rather than before the last Austrian elections - at that time,
dirty campaigning might have been discredited too much for the tape to have the desired
effect,
The sophisticated operation using actors and a villa prepared with hidden cameras and
microphones shows that this is hardly a normal case of dirty campaigning by political
opponents. Most likely, either it was an action by a secret service or someone with deep
pockets hired former secret agents.
If it was an action by secret services, the most plausible explanation seems to be that
Western secret services targeted Strache because FPÖ is one of the parties who is in
favor of restoring normal relations with Russia.
François Fillon comes to mind, a
French conservative candidate who also had a quite a friendly attitude towards Russia -
shortly before the elections, it was revealed (at least claimed) that Fillon had given his
wife ficticious employment, and Fillon lost popularity, which helped Macron enormously.
Probably, some of the things Strache said during this sting operation were inacceptable, and
Fillon may also not be innocent, but if there is a systematic selective targeting of European
politicians who want to normalize relations with Russia by secret services, that would be a
huge problem for democracy.
In the case of Strache and FPÖ, a different motive may also be plausible. There are
connections between FPÖ and neonazis, and there are, in my view, legitimate concerns
that Strache is too close to such far-right networks. I don't think it is good when
right-wing populists whose rise is mainly due to the unpopularity of the neoliberal elites
are equated with Nazis too quickly.
But in the case of FPÖ, this is less far-fetched
than in the case of other European right-wing parties - historically, Nazis played an
important role in FPÖ in post-war Austria, and it is one of the current right-wing
parties that probably has more connections to the extreme right (e.g. via Burschenschaften)
than others. I could imagine that someone might have ordered and financed the sting operation
out of antifascist principles. While I may recognize the motivation as ethical and even
partially agree with it, I don't think the right means were chosen, and such dirty methods
can backfire.
"While I consider myself to be a strong leftist who opposes the right wherever possible, I
believe to understand why people vote for Strache's FBOe and similar parties"
Quite. It seems to me that only the Right and the Left have a clue right now, because they
have an instinctive mistrust of what they are told in the media.
People like "b" and Craig Murray are to be thanked for explaining that to us middling
voters.
You miss the most glaring "injustice". That which shows that GDP in most western countries
had doubled in the last 30 odd years, that earnings for the top quartile have gone up by
factors of 3 or 4. But that median earnings in US are unchanged, and in say UK are only up
10% or so (unless one is seeking to buy one's own house or flat).
All the improvements in inequality from 1930s to 1980s have been reversed in full.
"Populists" (or better "anti-elitists") are driven mostly by sheer anger at how a small group
had taken all the Economic gains of the last 35 years.
I don't know what b. saw in the video what I saw was a discussion of an Orban like take
over of Austria by FPÖ.
In other news people are arguing the following
- who will profit most - ÖVP
- why was the video not published after it was produced in 2017 - because ÖVP wanted a
coalition with FPÖ
- why was it published now - ÖVP has been renting advertising space for weeks for an
election in September (renting before the video came out), Sebastian Kurz will be the saviour
who will get the disappointed FPÖ vote
add
- why the emphasis on Kronenzeitung,
who were the people producing the video
why Red Bull everywhere - Red Bull media empire billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz publicly
announced that he would back Sebastian Kurz in 2017
ÖVP/Kurz/Mateschitz have moved so far to the right that there is not much space for
FPÖ anyway. His problems will return when he needs another coalition.
While the right wing parties in Europe don't have a problem with Putin, it does seem that
much of the Western European establish has gone full McCarthyite hysterical where they see
any contact for any reason with a Russian is automatically criminal. Aside from being a setup
it relied the underlying false flag of presenting the woman as a Russian (and hence guility
of some crime against the Austrians).
In fact, a suggestion for a column--personal impressions on whether everyday Europeans are
falling for anti-Russian propaganda. Polls in the US indicate that Americans simply do not
care (they could believe it, but not effecting their daily lives).
1. The ER (United Russia) party was founded by Sergey Shoygu, Yuriy Luzhkov, and Mintimer
Shaymiev. Its chairman is Dmitriy Medvedev, not Vladimir Putin. Putin is not even a member of
ER. Putin is the leader of ONF (All-Russia People's Front), which is a nation-wide discussion
platform for politicians, professionals, and NGOs.
2. Russian billionaire Igor Makarov denies having a niece: "I was the only child in the
family." (
Forbes.ru , in Russian).
3. In 2016, Joseph Mifsud invited George Papadopoulos to Rome and introduced him to
"Putin's niece" with the intent of smearing Trump as "Russian puppet" and destroying his
election chances. In 2017, someone (who?) invited Heinz-Christian Strache to Ibiza and
introduced him to "Russian billionaire's niece" with the intent of smearing Strache as
"Russian puppet" and destroying his party's election chances. Notice a pattern?
4. This is a clear case of Germany interfering in Austrian elections. Austria should
deport 60 German diplomats, shut down German embassy in Vienna, and impose sanctions on
Germany. Also put a German girl interested in Austrian politics in jail for 18 months.
Thinking about it, after revealing e-mail of HRC, Podesta etc. were published, their core
supporters were enraged about the dirty trick and did not pay attention to the disclosed
content, while for the core opponents of HRC she was already sufficiently vilified so the net
change in voting intentions that can be attributed to that incident was modest.
Leaving aside the discussion of of various factors in that election, this public reaction
is typical. Actually, in both cases the core supporters may be energized by the suspicion
that this trick was performed by a foreign government. I do not think that there is a
particular hostility toward Germany in Felix Austria, but the to the right wing Merkel
government is like red cape for a bull. The women who unleashed a wave of refugees. On top of
that, traditionally major parties of Austria gained reputation of dirty patronage, so the
voters who care about that issue probably do not vote for them.
I do not expect Austrians to demand expulsions of German diplomats -- interference in our
democracy -- or other sanctions, but nevertheless it stinks. Making sting operations on
politicians has corrupt potential even if it is done by domestic law enforcement, but foreign
intelligence services really do not have any excuse.
Thinking about it, the stings against George Papadopoulos described in his book were
remarkably similar.
That said, Austrians have a reputation of good manners etc., they will not unload their
frustration on a girl. BTW, why there are suspicions of Germany being involved? Again, even
extremist Austrians probably would like to have some proof before doing anything. I guess,
America is indeed exceptional.
For all those of you whining about the corruption of Strache, this is how business and
politics is done in Austria. Strache was just talking about the FPÖ's fair share after
an election which they would win.
This all starts with Austrian's Presidential Election of 2016. The FPÖ won the
presidential election a couple of years ago in May 2016. After the bell, postal votes
overturned it! – postal votes more than 90% in favour of the establishment candidate
Van der Bellen. Some constituencies full of Van der Bellen votes turned out to have 148% turn
out. There was a court case by the FPÖ about procedure and hinting at ballot
falsification. The case was judged by a (non-corrupt but under serious pressure) judge to
have enough merit that the elections had to
be annulled and the election rerun six months later . Austria went without a
president at all for six months!
For six months the mainstream Austrian media campaigned non-stop against the FPÖ and
Norbert Hofer. Huge efforts were made for voter turnout (it included huge bussing of
potential anti-FPÖ constituencies and bribing pensioners to vote against the FPÖ
via parties and cakes). With all of that, Van der Bellen scraped in on 4 December 2016, by
348,231 votes. Despite the non-stop anti-FPÖ propaganda and banging on drums, votes for
Hofer's fell by less than 100,000 (95,993 votes to be exact). It's just that with six months
to prepare the establishment had found enough "dead souls" to win the second round.
In the parliamentary elections of 15 October 2017, the FPÖ were set to win a strong
majority in parliament. To defeat the FPÖ and Strache, the conservatives
(Völkspartei) were forced to elect a male model non-university graduate 30 year old sex
symbol with no work experience outside of politics as party leader. Of course Sebastian Kurz
was mainly a figurehead for establishment figures in the venerable Völkspartei. Kurz
does have a mind of his own though (I had the opportunity to interact with him personally at
a local political discussion group in 2015) and it's hard to know exactly how much of his
policy is dictated to him and how much is off his own bat.
Going back to Austrian corruption, there are enormous sums at stake. There is a long
entrenched system of corruption in the establishment parties, the Völkspartei and the
SPÖ. Strabag does win most of the government contracts. Favour is regularly granted on
quid pro basis. The media landscape is very partisan and mostly for sale. Kurz's spiritual
predecessor as a powerful head of the Völkspartei if not direct predecessor Wolfgang
Schüssel was forced to retire from politics in 2011 due to never-ending corruption
scandals. Schüssel's longstanding finance minister Karl-Heinz Grasser was caught carrying
bags of cash to Lichtenstein and is still under investigation. If his mother-in-law were
not the richest woman in Austria (Swarovski Crystal) and devoted to her daughter (Grasser's
wife), he would long ago have been in jail.
Politically, Grasser knows where a lot of the bodies are buried from the Schlüssel
political machine so either he has to be kept out of jail or he may take others down with
him. In elite Austrian circles turning informant would be considered unsportsmanlike so
there's an uneasy truce still fought to this day in the courts where Grasser is kept out of
jail via procedural methods (detect a pattern) and Grasser doesn't rat out the others.
Strache's sin is not planning to use the advantages which accrue to the governing Austrian
party but getting caught out talking about it. Strache is something of a lout, not terribly
loyal (he was the Brutus who threw Jörg Haider under the bus in 2005 in a palace
putsch). He's a smoker in power who used his power to overturn some very positive
anti-smoking laws. But he's less corrupt than any of his equivalents in the Völkspartei
and is only a nose ahead of the his equivalents in the SPÖ. His politics and policies of
Austria for Austrians are pretty simple. Hence people vote for these policies.
Here's a sample of the SPÖ's wares in the 2010 Vienna elections:
Zu viel Fremdes tut niemandem gut. (Too many foreigners [or more literally: Too much
foreign] does nobody well.)
Wir bewahren unsere Heimatstadt. Die SPÖ macht sie uns fremd. (We maintain our
homeland-city. The SPÖ makes it foreign.)
Wir glauben an unsere Jugend. Die SPÖ an Zuwanderung. (We believe in our youth.
The SPÖ in immigration.)
Wir schützen freie Frauen. Die SPÖ den Kopftuchzwang (We protect free women.
The SPÖ protects the compulsory veil.)
Mehr Mut für unser Wiener Blut (More courage for our Viennese blood.)
Uns geht's um die Wiener (To us, it's about the Viennese)
The FPÖ has historically been weakest in Vienna but in 2010 they took 27% of the vote
in this SPÖ stronghold, their first step in what has been a steady march to power.
Anyone who does not directly have his or her family's nose in the EU trough at this point
knows that the policies espoused by transatlantic puppets like Angela Merkel and Emmanuel
Macron push our countries and our continent towards self-destruction. Life in Europe,
post-1968 and pre-2013, has been pretty damn good. There's absolutely no good reason for us
to rip up our traditions or turn into a continent of immigrants and mobile job seekers. We
instinctively abhor what is happening to our nations. By nature Strache is inclined this way
himself (he's no great thinker) and has the good sense to ride the wave.
For all those of you whining about the corruption of Strache, this is how business and
politics is done in Austria. Strache was just talking about the FPÖ's fair share after
an election which they would win.
So why did he step down?
Here's a sample of the SPÖ's wares in the 2010 Vienna elections:
...
"This stand-offish sentence in the Spiegel story about Strache's party demonstrates the
problem:"
In the last election, the party drew significant support from the working class, in
part because of his ability to simplify even the most complicated of issues and play the
common man, even in his role as vice chancellor.
"The implicit thesis, that the working class is too dumb to understand the "most
complicated of issues", is not only incredibly snobbish but utterly false..."
I can't agree that Spiegel's attitude to Strache's party is condescending toward the
working class. Right-wing parties tend to spout a lot of aggressively authoritarian spin tank
bullshit to encourage voters to tune out when a R-w politician is telling them what to think.
If Strache is adept at separating fact from fiction and superfluous verbiage, then people
would appreciate his candor.
In a Democracy, and in theory at least, politicians are supposed to represent and defend the
views of the people who voted for them, not vested intere$t$. Or so we've been led to
believe...
I'll always remember Spiegel as the folks whose photo-journalists torpedoed Crooked
Hillary's feeble-minded Cheonan (NK-SK) bullshit. That story vanished overnight. It's not
even referred to in NK smear campaigns. Dead & buried.
In a Democracy, and in theory at least, politicians are supposed to represent and
defend the views of the people who voted for them, not vested intere$t$. Or so we've been led
to believe...
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish
Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general
Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,
That's it.
The German constitution is absolutely clear that members of parliament represent all of
the people (ie different views and interests) and are bound by their own judgement and
conscience only.
As we are discussing Austria, lets see what the Austrian constitution says.
Austria has "linguistic and cultural diversity" and the protection of its grown native
peoples in its constitution, this means Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, Slovakian, Roma and
Hungarian.
So the Austrian constitution has a concept of a multinational state where different peoples
grow and are protected even if the Viennese "Stammtisch" does not like them.
There is no "democratic theory" that suggests representatives should follow the uninformed
and prejudiced views of their electorate against their better judgement.
Strache seems to have specialized in "fake news" - ie mostly invented stuff claiming
Muslims, immigrants or whoever were treated in a better way than native Austrians or
threatened native Austrians.
It is a very convenient technique when you plan to cut social services, you have someone to
blame.
To those who fill that politics of Strache are obnoxious and that justifies entrapment,
remembers that methods of that type are not improvised, and that means that there is an
apparatus that does it. We noted similarities with provocations against George Papadopoulos.
In the latter case the target was cautious, after all, we had to be well aware of such
methods. But anyone who is despised by NATO establishment are similar group can be on the
receiving end, think about Assange.
"... James Baker, meanwhile, told Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes last week that he's 'nervous' about the DOJ Inspector General's ongoing investigation into FBI/DOJ conduct surrounding the 2016 election. ..."
"... The Steele Dossier is the most amateurish piece of garbage they could think of. It was born out of some comments made by Trump during the debates when both he and his opponents started talking about hand size. ..."
"... When and if Barr and Horowitz get the information compiled, this is going to look worse than a school election of a class president for the 9th grade. Mostly testosterone and no where to put it. ..."
"... Ultimate CYA swamp creature. What ever happened to the "Comey Memo"? Has anybody actually seen it? Was it written on Windows? Can we see the metadata to prove when it was written? or was it penned on a bar napkin, and can be edited at any time. ..."
"... This guy is a lawyer. He owed a duty to inform the judge that his bosses were lying about the warrant. He owed a duty to counsel his bosses to make them stop what they were doing and consider if it was a violation. ..."
"... Unless he did those two things, he should go to jail and also be disbarred and also be subject to civil suits for those who had to pay attorney fees during the investigation. ..."
"... Why are they bending over backwards to protect the British, who were the real interferers in the American election. Clinton mob-CIA-MI6-Steele-Pablo Miller-Skripal-Steele-Clinton mob. ..."
"... Recall the Podesta email, re: DNC "hack": We're gonna make an example of this guy. So, they seem to know who it is that stole the emails, and they are going to "make an example" of him. And do recall the statement of Donna Brazile, who expressed fear for her own safety in the wake of the Seth Rich murder: "you don't know what these people are capable of". ..."
"... When listening to an account of an event on TV or written in a blurb on the internet, always ask, why do they want us to know this stuff? The answer is usually so they can hide what they are really doing. ..."
James Baker - the Obama FBI's top attorney (general counsel) said on Friday that he was skeptical about the Steele dossier, and
"concerned" about its veracity when the agency received it prior to the 2016 US election, according to the
Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross.
" It was more information that we viewed, that I viewed, skeptically from the outset , and I was concerned about it and
had a jaundiced eye, or looked at it with a jaundiced eye right from the outset," Baker told MSNBC 's Chuck Todd, adding "Steele
was and had been a source that we thought was reliable. He's reporting all this information. It looks alarming. We took it seriously,
but we tried to vet it. "
The dossier - a collection of memos compiled by an ex-British spy funded by Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and the DNC - was
used by the FBI to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Steele alleged
that Page provided the Trump campaign a Kremlin backchannel during the election.
Baker also told Todd that he thinks the FISA warrants against Page would have been granted without the dossier, and took a pregnant
pause when asked if the dossier was used to obtain FISA warrants on other people - saying "I don't think I should comment on that,
I'm not sure what else the government has confirmed," and adding " I don't want to confirm or deny anything about other potential
FISA applications. "
According to Fox News , an email chain exists which indicates that Comey told bureau subordinates that Brennan insisted on the
dossier's inclusion in the intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference . Also interesting is that the dossier
was referred to as "crown material" in the emails - a possible reference to the fact that Steele is a former British spy.
In a statement to Fox, however, a former CIA official "put the blame squarely on Comey ."
Comey, meanwhile, has attacked Attorney General William Barr for investigating him, tweeting on Friday "The AG should stop sliming
his own Department. If there are bad facts, show us, or search for them professionally and then tell us what you found."
Barr, has launched a
wide-ranging
investigation into FBI conduct during the 2016 election, making him public enemy #1 to the left . In a Friday interview with
Fox News , Barr said that the use of the Steele Dossier in the FISA warrant was a "very unusual situation," especially one "that
on its face had a number of clear mistakes and a somewhat jejue analysis. And to use that to conduct counterintelligence against
the American political campaign would be a strange development."
James Baker, meanwhile, told
Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes last week that he's 'nervous' about the DOJ Inspector General's ongoing investigation into FBI/DOJ
conduct surrounding the 2016 election.
Baker made clear that he wanted to speak "as openly as I possibly can" about the origin of the FBI's investigation into Donald
Trump - " to reassure the American people that it was done for lawful, legitimate reasons, and was apolitical, " according to the
Washington Examiner 's Jerry Dunleavy.
Things you will never read here, but hey, this is from the "failing" NYT so clearly fake news ...
Anti-money laundering investigators at Deutsche Bank flagged to bank executives multiple suspicious transactions on President
Donald Trump and Jared Kushner's accounts in 2016 and 2017.
Five current and former Deutsche Bank employees told the New York Times that after computer alerts flagged suspicious activity,
the specialists would put together recommendations urging bank executives to report the activity to the Treasury Department.
However, executives refused to act on the recommendations and kept the reports from the Department.
Tammy McFadden, an ex-Deutsche Bank employee who reviewed such alerts, said she found that money had been moved from Kushner
Companies to Russian individuals.
Breaking: We now know positively that there was Russian collusion. But it was via Obama, the Demonrats and their lapdog propaganda
apparatus the MSM, Trump was completely innocent. (Saul Alinsky-Always accuse your opponents of that for which you are guilty.
Your students, Obuttboy and Killiary studied you well, sensei)
They used a CIA spy asset, Stephen Halper, to feed Russian disinformation via the commie traitor Brennan head of Obuttboy's
CIA into their Demonrat Senate traitors who asked for an FBI investigation and that lying sack-0-**** Comey, head of the FBI,
complied using the so-called Steele "dossier" to obtain an illegal FISA warrant(s) to spy on members of the Trump team such as
Carter Page. Comey knew the dossier and the parallel constructed Brennan pack of lies were fiction yet put his signature on the
FISA application anyway blinded by his hatred of Trump and his girly-man nature. They used parallel construction to give an air
of credibility to the fictional script written by Glenn Simpson, head of Fusion GPS, employer of "hit by an ugly" stick Nellie
Ohr and paid to Hilliary and the DNC to smear Trump. The script was written in 2007.
Want more details? Please listen to Dan Bongino's Friday show and laugh your ******* head off at these spygate idiots now caught
naked as the tide recedes.
As Dan puts it so pithily, it's not James Bond, it's Bond, James. Its Gitmo for you morons and a Pulitzer to Dan Bongino. And
yet the MSM seems not to be aware of this? How can that be? Perhaps, as the commies like to say the MSM needs to be deconstructed,
literally!
never trust ANYTHING amerikans say ... I am the default example after we saved the World from Nazism - something the amerikan
rats are now funding and supporting - they betrayed me in 1945 and that traitor Gorby in 1986 with the NATO scam... and these
parameters will ALWAYS into the future determine our level of trust with America ..... it will be ZERO
This is like watching a movie director, producers and actors blame each other for a flop. They all thought it was a great
idea during pre-production, but after the critics take it apart and the public ignores it, they all turn on each other and say,
"I knew this was a piece of **** from the start!"
What gutless POS in DC! They don't mind leaking BS lies to the MSMutt's and taking bribes. DC is the biggest enemy the U.S.
has in the entire world. Scam Lie Cheat Steal and are total nerd pussies.
Yep.. Carter Page was such a "bad guy" that the FBI permitted him (and continues to do so) to walk around American and NEVER
be arrested.. Yep.. that was a pretty strong amount of evidence you guys had there for that FISA warrant.. And you never told
Trump either about this "Russian Mole" in his campaign as you're required to do (and as you did for the Chinese mole in Feinstein's
office)..
Glenn Simpson wrote the dossier with input from a Putin operative. They ran it through Steele simply to give it "credibility."
Wheel out the guillotine and get it lubed up. This is gonna be a busy summer. NOTHING can stop what is coming. Nothing.
I have read many articles from many sources including reading the Mueller Report as it was released to the public and tedious
it was.
I have come to the conclusions at this point that:
A. Many amateur actors not familiar with how to do counter intelligence were brought in by the Clinton campaign largely because
no expert would have touched what she was trying to do.
B: No one can explain from the very beginning what happened, who knew what when, nor how they were going to answer for it when
they got caught, if they got caught.
C. The Steele Dossier is the most amateurish piece of garbage they could think of. It was born out of some comments made
by Trump during the debates when both he and his opponents started talking about hand size.
D. When and if Barr and Horowitz get the information compiled, this is going to look worse than a school election of a
class president for the 9th grade. Mostly testosterone and no where to put it.
And yet FBI has said, that they took the Steele Report seriously because it confirmed a series of information, that FBi already
had, but check every line of the report. What was the result of that FBI examination we don't know.
Yeah, right. Comey will email SUBORDINATES to go on record that it's not HIS idea . . .but we'll go with the dossier anyway.
If you got a problem with Brennan, why not memorialize that in an email to Brennan?
Ultimate CYA swamp creature. What ever happened to the "Comey Memo"? Has anybody actually seen it? Was it written on Windows?
Can we see the metadata to prove when it was written? or was it penned on a bar napkin, and can be edited at any time.
In an alternate universe, we would have Comey, Clapper and Brennan in adjacent rooms, two chairs a table and harsh lighting.
Pretty rich for Comey to call for searching for facts professionally, like the clown car investigation under him was professional.
Unh huh. Surrrre.
This Baker *** hat and Obongo and crew looovved the "dossier" and thought it was just the ticket to be used against Trump and
his people. Just the most natural thing there was and oh so useful for their purposes. So WHAAAAT if the "dossier" stank like
dead cow. Surrre. What Democrat DOESN'T want to pursue a decapitation strategy? And surrre the basis for one was right there in
that socialist scumbag's "dossier." And, surrre, i believe Steele is no long were MI-6. Fisking Theresa May.
Surrre this *** hat was just brimming with effing skepticism and I'm surrre there are emails and memos expressing just that,
his skepticism.
I see parallels from the twenties with what's happening today. For example, Prohibition was meant to outlaw drinking. Instead,
it made drinkers into outlaws. Breaking the law became commonplace. New York closed 15,000 legal saloons when prohibition began.
Some 32,000 illegal speakeasy's replaced them. Upstanding citizens and mobsters became partners in crime, allied against federal
agents in the battle for booze.
Today, that battle is against feds for truth and justice.
This guy is a lawyer. He owed a duty to inform the judge that his bosses were lying about the warrant. He owed a duty to
counsel his bosses to make them stop what they were doing and consider if it was a violation.
Unless he did those two things, he should go to jail and also be disbarred and also be subject to civil suits for those
who had to pay attorney fees during the investigation.
Why are they bending over backwards to protect the British, who were the real interferers in the American election. Clinton
mob-CIA-MI6-Steele-Pablo Miller-Skripal-Steele-Clinton mob.
Had to be "buried" when Trump won, so MI6 took out Skripal and CIA took out Seth Rich.
Seth Rich and CIA? Don't think so. DNC has an army of lawyers, the kind that aren't in the phone book. They know lots of people
who are willing to do things for a price.
Recall the Podesta email, re: DNC "hack": We're gonna make an example of this guy. So, they seem to know who it is that
stole the emails, and they are going to "make an example" of him. And do recall the statement of Donna Brazile, who expressed
fear for her own safety in the wake of the Seth Rich murder: "you don't know what these people are capable of".
If this had not been an amateur job, we would still not know anything. There would be no investigation because the players
would never have been identified like 95% of all counter intelligence work. Seth Rich was killed in plain sight as a message to
some one else. He was probably the only innocent person involved at such a deep level.
When listening to an account of an event on TV or written in a blurb on the internet, always ask, why do they want us to
know this stuff? The answer is usually so they can hide what they are really doing.
"... In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire, who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts. ..."
"... Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones. ..."
"... The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy. ..."
"... Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was thought to be now. ..."
"... The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami. It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions. ..."
"... The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through austerity to make up for the loss of money. ..."
During the last days a right wing politician in Austria was taken down by using an elaborate sting. Until Friday Heinz-Christian
Strache was leader of the far right (but not fascist) Freedom Party of Austria (FPOe) and the Vice Chancellor of the country. On
Friday morning two German papers, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegelpublished
(German)
reports (English) about an old video that was made to take Strache down.
The FPOe has good connections with United Russia, the party of the Russian President Putin, and to other right-wing parties in
east Europe. It's pro-Russian position has led to verbal attacks on and defamation of the party from NATO supporting and neoliberal
circles.
In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to
a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire
plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire,
who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation
but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts.
Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones.
A scene from the video. Source: Der Falter (vid,
German)
During the six hour long party several schemes get proposed by the "Russian" and are discussed. Strache rejects most of them.
He insists several times that everything they plan or do must be legal and conform to the law. He says that a large donation could
probably be funneled through an endowment that would then support his party. It is a gray area under Austrian party financing laws.
They also discuss if the "Russian" could buy the Kronen Zeitung , Austria's powerful tabloid, and use it to prop up his party.
The evening goes on with several bottles of vodka on the table. Starche gets a bit drunk and boosts in front of the "oligarch
daughter" about all his connections to rich and powerful people. He does not actually have these.
Strache says that, in exchange for help for his party, the "Russian" could get public contracts for highway building and repair.
Currently most of such contracts in Austria go to the large Austrian company, STRABAG, that is owned by a neoliberal billionaire
who opposes the FPOe. At that time Strache was not yet in the government and had no way to decide about such contracts.
At one point Strache seems to understand that the whole thing is a setup. But his right hand man calms him down and vouches
for the "Russian". The sting ends with Strache and his companion leaving the place. The never again see the "Russian" and her co-plotter.
Nothing they talked about will ever come to fruition.
Three month later Strache and his party win more than 20% in the Austrian election and form a coalition government with the
conservative party OeVP led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Even while the FPOe controls several ministries, it does not achieve much
politically. It lacks a real program and the government's policies are mostly run by the conservatives.
Nearly two years after the evening on Ibiza, ten days before the European parliament election in which Strache's party is predicted
to achieve good results, a video of the evening on Ibiza is handed to two German papers which are known to be have strong transatlanticist
leanings and have previously been used for other shady 'leaks'. The papers do not hesitate to take part in the plot and publish extensive
reports about the video.
After the reports appeared Strache immediately
stepped down and the conservatives
ended the coalition with his party. Austria will now have new elections.
On Bloomberg Leonid Bershidsky
opines
on the case:
Strache's discussion with the Russian oligarch's fake niece shows a propensity for dirty dealing that has nothing to do with idealistic
nationalism. Nationalist populists often agitate against entrenched, corrupt elites and pledge to drain various swamps. In the
videos, however, Strache and Gudenus behave like true swamp creatures, savoring rumors of drug and sex scandals in Austrian politics
and discussing how to create an authoritarian media machine like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's.
I do not believe that the people who voted for the FPOe (and similar parties in other countries) will subscribe to that view.
The politics of the main stream parties in Austria have for decades been notoriously corrupt. Compared to them Strache and his party
are astonishingly clean. In the video he insists several times that everything must stay within the legal realm. Whenever the "Russian"
puts forward a likely illegal scheme, Starche emphatically rejects it.
Bershidsky continues:
Strache, as one of the few nationalist populists in government in the European Union's wealthier member states, was an important
member of the movement Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been trying to cobble together ahead of the European Parliament
election that will take place next week. On Saturday, he was supposed to attend a Salvini-led rally in Milan with other like-minded
politicians from across Europe. Instead, he was in Vienna apologizing to his wife and to Kurz and protesting pitifully that he'd
been the victim of a "political assassination" -- a poisonous rain on the Italian right-winger's parade.
...
This leaves the European far right in disarray and plays into the hands of centrist and leftist forces ahead of next week's election.
Salvini's unifying effort has been thoroughly undermined, ...
This is also a misreading of the case. The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy.
Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was
likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support
for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while
drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video
was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was
thought to be now.
But that Strache stepped down after the sudden media assault only makes him more convincing. The right-wing all over Europe will
see him as a martyr who was politically assassinated because he worked for their cause. The issue will increase the right-wingers
hate against the 'liberal' establishment. It will further motivate them: "They attack us because we are right and winning." The new
far-right block Natteo Salvini
will setup in the European Parliament will likely receive a record share of votes.
Establishment writers notoriously misinterpret the new right wing parties and their followers. This stand-offish sentence in the
Spiegel story about Strache's party demonstrates the problem:
In the last election, the party drew significant support from the working class, in part because of his ability to simplify even
the most complicated of issues and play the common man, even in his role as vice chancellor.
The implicit thesis, that the working class is too dumb to understand the "most complicated of issues", is not only incredibly
snobbish but utterly false. The working class understands very well what the establishment parties have done to it and continue to
do. The increasing vote share of the far-right is a direct consequence of the behavior of the neoliberal center and of the lack of
real left alternatives.
Last week, before the Strache video appeared, Craig Murray
put his finger on the wound:
The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting
almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami.
It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through
multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately
funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions.
...
The rejection of the political class manifests itself in different ways and has been diverted down a number of entirely blind
alleys giving unfulfilled promise of a fresh start – Brexit, Trump, Macron. As the vote share of the established political parties
– and public engagement with established political institutions – falls everywhere, the chattering classes deride the political
symptoms of status quo rejection by the people as "populism". It is not populism to make sophisticated arguments that undermine
the received political wisdom and take on the entire weight of established media opinion.
If one wants to take down the far right one has to do so with arguments and good politics for the working class. Most people,
especially working class people, have a strong sense for justice. The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What
was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded
with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through
austerity to make up for the loss of money.
While I consider myself to be a strong leftist who opposes the right wherever possible, I believe to understand why people vote
for Strache's FBOe and similar parties. When one talks to these people issues of injustice and inequality always come up. The new
'populist' parties at least claim to fight against the injustice done to the common men. Unlike most of the establishment parties
they seem to be still mostly clean and not yet corrupted.
In the early 1990s Strache actually flirted with violent fascists but he rejected their way. While he has far-right opinions,
he and his like are no danger to our societies. If we can not accept that Strache and his followers have some legitimate causes,
we will soon find us confronted with way more extreme people. The neoliberal establishment seems to do its best to achieve that.
Posted by b on May 19, 2019 at 01:10 PM |
Permalink
"... what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers. ..."
"... the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people. ..."
Couple of factors not mentioned. one is Israel and the other is more sinister still and tied
to the conclusions to be drawn from the Mueller report.
it may be true that Skripal helped Steele with some elements of the dossier compiled by
Steele, via SKripals handler Pablo Miller. It may be true that Skripal went "stir crazy" and an
attempt was made to silence him and his daughter - permanently, because they simply cold not be
trusted. a similar motivation could be drawn up against Russia - with the two Russians visiting
Salisbury used as diversionary "stool pigeons". It may be true that the "poisoning" was self
inflicted and was in fact a murder/suicide attempt as a result of depression along the ines
"what's the point of it all".
what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the
poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of
the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community
"needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister
influences of foreign powers.
what ought to be apparent is
- the same tactics used by the special prosecutor to investigate the "Russia collusion"
smoke screen erected by the howler monkeys in the US intel agencies (aided and abetter by
howler monkeys in UK intel agencies) to stymie the US executive branch (Trump) are likely to be
used by the the UK government and some more as well - in true Le Carre fashion, but with much
dumber and less principled actors than Smiley's people.
these tactics prevented (and continue to prevent) investigation and prosecution of heinous
corruption within the obama administration of the previous 8 years - these howler monkey
intelligence agency tactics include(d) entrapment, honeypots, racketeering, blackmail, de facto
kidnapping (in the case of Skripals), bribery, wire fraud, unauthorized wire-tapping, breach of
authorized intel agency activities (like the FBI operating overseas and the CIA operating
domestically in the US, false and unverified claims in FISA warrants, NSA providing unauthorized
information to the CIA and FBI etc)
- given the howler monkey activities of the alphabet soup, it is not beyond the imagination
to draw parallels with the CIA's reporting and analysis of situations on the ground wherever
they operate to provide intel ahead of military activity. the DOD has already proved complicit
by hiring Halper (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to assist with the entrapment of Trump
operative Papadopoulos. Mifsud is likely a CIA, not a Russian, asset.
- given that we have ample evidence of the howler monkeys in the alphabet soup seeking to
facilitate a coup against a sitting US president, it is certainly plausible that - as with the
US goverment sponsoring the mujaheedin, isis and al qaeda in afghanistan to fight the russians
in late 80's early 90's, Iraq yellow cake and WMD - that the howler monkeys paid the white
helmets to ovethrow assad and foment civil war in Syria - thus causing the migration of some 5
million syrians into europe, iraq, turkey, jordan, turkey and lebanon.
so , the case is that howler monkey activity in intel agencies of the UK and US (add
(F)rance to get FUKUS) are guilty of the manufacture of human conflict by fabricating evidence,
breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing
shitty analysis (howler monkeys are only good at swinging in trees and flinging ****) and
generally operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity.
this can only be brought into sharp relief if howler monkey activities were instead shown to
be powers for good rather than the geo-political risks that persist in Iran, North Korea,
Venezuela, Yemen, Libya and so on and so forth.
Never mind how much past conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on relied on
evidence and analysis thrown at us by the howler monkeys in the tree tops, how much of what we
we are doing now is a fabrication causing needless suffering by civilian (not politicians or
military engaged in conflict) populations?
the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE,
Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life
in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down",
reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of
people.
there are equivalents of strzok, page, ohr right throughout the US and UK government
"machines" operating overseas. think about that. crimes exposed by Barr et al in the US -
against a sitting president - are replicated wherever howler monkeys operate overseas as well.
Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting.
The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign
with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful
to your father.
This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump -
helped along by Aras and Emin.
What do you think is the best way to handle this information and would you be able to speak to Emin about it directly?
I can also send this info to your father via Rhona, but it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first.
Best
Rob Goldstone
On Jun 3, 2016, at 10:53, Donald Trump Jr. wrote:
Thanks Rob I appreciate that. I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time and
if it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released an email revealing that Nellie Ohr,
wife of former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, informed him that she was deleting
emails sent from Bruce Ohr's DOJ email account.
From: Nellie Ohr
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 12:49 PM
To: Ohr, Bruce (ODAG)
Subject: Re: Analyst Russian Organized Crime – April 2016
Thanks! I'm deleting these emails now
The full
email exchange is between Bruce Ohr, Lisa Holtyn, Nellie Ohr, and Stefan Bress, a first
secretary at the German Embassy, and is part of
339 pages of heavily redacted records from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Judicial Watch obtained the records through a March 2018 Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit filed after the Justice Department failed to respond a December 2017 request (
Judicial Watch
v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00490)).
Nellie Ohr's email has the same subject line as an email exchange with the subject line
"Analyst Russian Organized Crime – April 2016" in which Bress initiates a discussion with
Bruce Ohr and his top aide, Lisa Holtyn, proffering some "Russian analysts" to discuss a
variety of topics with Ohr, Holtyn, and other DOJ officials. Among those topics to be discussed
is "Impact of Russian influence operations in Europe ('PsyOps/InfoWar')."
Holtyn responds with, "I haven't had a chance to confer with Bruce yet, but would certainly
love to meet with the 'A Team'!" Bruce Ohr then says, "That time works for me as well." Bress
then provides the personal details/passport numbers of the German analysts who will be meeting
with Holtyn and Ohr. Holtyn tells Bress that the Ohr's would like to host the German delegation
for dinner and notes that Joe Wheatley and Ivana Nizich (a husband/wife team of DOJ Organized
Crime prosecutors and friends of the Ohr's) would join them as well.
Until he was demoted for his connection to the anti-Trump dossier, Bruce Ohr was a top
official at DOJ. A House Intelligence Committee memo
released by Chairman Devin Nunes said that Nellie Ohr was "employed by Fusion GPS to assist in
the cultivation of opposition research on Trump" and that Bruce Ohr passed the results of that
research, which was paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton
campaign, to the FBI. The " salacious
and unverified " Dossier was used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
surveillance warrant to spy on Carter Page.
These documents are part of Nellie Ohr's and the DOJ's
communications about Russia. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) recently wrote up a criminal
referral concerning her testimony before Congress that she had no knowledge of what was
going on during the Russia investigation at DOJ.
"This email is disturbing and suggests documents relevant to the improper targeting of
President Trump were destroyed," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
This production of documents
also revealed that Bruce Ohr remained in regular contact with former British spy and Fusion
GPS contractor Christopher Steele after Steele
was terminated by the FBI in November 2016 for revealing to the media his position as an
FBI confidential informant.
"... BREAKING: A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report... Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP. ..."
"... As one example, in its FISA application, the bureau repeatedly and incorrectly assured the court in a footnote that it "does not believe" British ex-spy Christopher Steele was the direct source for a Yahoo News article implicating Page in Russian collusion, and instead asserted that the Yahoo article provided an independent basis to believe Steele. - Fox News ..."
"... Graham noted a report by The Hill 's John Solomon that the FBI was specifically told that Steele was "keen" to leak his salacious dossier for the purpose of influencing the 2016 US election . The agency also knew that the document's claims were either unverified or disproven , yet it was used anyway against Trump and his campaign. ..."
"... Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are now blaming Loretta Lynch for the botched Hillary/email investigation. ..."
FBI-CIA Dispute Erupts Over Whether Comey Or Brennan Pushed Steele Dossier
by Tyler Durden Thu, 05/16/2019 - 10:25 0 SHARES
Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print
A dispute has erupted over whether former FBI Director James Comey or his CIA counterpart, John Brennan, promoted the unverified
Steele dossier as the Obama-era intelligence community targeted the Trump campaign.
According to Fox News , an email chain exists which indicates that Comey told bureau subordinates that Brennan insisted on the
dossier's inclusion in the intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference . Also interesting is that the dossier
was referred to as "crown material" in the emails - a possible reference to the fact that Steele is a former British spy.
In a statement to Fox, however, a former CIA official "put the blame squarely on Comey ."
"Former Director Brennan, along with former [Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper, are the ones who opposed James
Comey's recommendation that the Steele Dossier be included in the intelligence report," said the official.
"They opposed this because the dossier was in no way used to develop the ICA," the official continued. "The intelligence analysts
didn't include it when they were doing their work because it wasn't corroborated intelligence, therefore it wasn't used and it wasn't
included. Brennan and Clapper prevented it from being added into the official assessment. James Comey then decided on his own to
brief Trump about the document. "
James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan are starting to publicly argue who was pushing the dossier that ended up in the
intelligence community assessment on Russian interference. The RATS are beginning to turn on each other.
Former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy - a longtime
defender
of the FBI - told Fox News ' Martha MacCallum on Tuesday night that "Comey has a better argument than Brennan, based on what
I've seen."
In March, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested over Twitter that Brennan had "insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier"
be included in the January 2017 ICA .
BREAKING: A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included
in the Intelligence Report... Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP.
The dossier was ultimately not included in the ICA according to
previous testimony by Clapper. Meanwhile, word that Comey
had briefed President Trump personally on the dossier - "because he understood reporters already had that information and it could
become public soon if journalists had a "news hook," according to the
Associated Press . And as it so happens - the
fact that Comey briefed Trump is what CNN and Buzzfeed caim
legitimized
their decision to publicly release the salacious and unverified dossier.
Whether the FBI acted appropriately in obtaining the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to Trump campaign
aide Carter Page is now the subject not only of U.S. Attorney John Durham's new probe, but also the ongoing review by Justice
Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber has been conducting his own investigation separately,
although details of his progress were unclear.
As one example, in its FISA application, the bureau
repeatedly and incorrectly assured the court in a footnote that it "does not believe" British ex-spy Christopher Steele was
the direct source for a Yahoo News article implicating Page in Russian collusion, and instead asserted that the Yahoo article
provided an independent basis to believe Steele. -
Fox News
On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News that he was pushing to declassify documents which would expose the FBI's dismal
efforts to verify the claims within the dossier.
"There's a document that's classified that I'm gonna try to get unclassified that takes the dossier -- all the pages of it --
and it has verification to one side," said Graham. "There really is no verification, other than media reports that were generated
by reporters that received the dossier."
Graham noted a report by The Hill 's John Solomon that the FBI was specifically told that Steele was "keen" to leak his salacious
dossier for the purpose of influencing the 2016 US election . The agency also knew that the document's claims were either unverified
or
disproven , yet it was used anyway against Trump and his campaign.
The Italian prime minister has suddenly requested resignations from 6 deputy directors of Italian intelligence agencies: DIS,
AISI and AISE. This was all after I outed Mifsud in Rome and the president called the Italian prime minister. Italy has flipped
and are giving up Brennan.
The Italian prime minister has suddenly requested resignations from 6 deputy directors of Italian intelligence agencies:
DIS, AISI and AISE. This was all after I outed Mifsud in Rome and the president called the Italian prime minister. Italy has flipped
and are giving up Brennan.
U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber has been on the job for some months yet narry a peep out of him. There's not even any indication
that he gets out of bed in the morning.
He's a member of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, I imagine that should he ever get out of bed, he will whitewash whichever
agency has the most Mormons who might be affected by this scandal.
Back in the sixties, Jack Anderson, a serious investigative journalist and Mormon, noted that to Mormons the US Constitution
is a sacred document given to the founding fathers by God himself. Let's hope Huber honors this Mormon tradition.
Comey was going to blackmail Trump and be the white knight he thinks he is. Even if it were true (which it isn't) Trump didn't
give a ****. Especially after all the lies after lies of trash the Dems have sunk to (like with Kavanaugh). Never be ashamed of
**** you do, and you will be blackmail proof....except for the pedophiles in DC. We know they are there, and when we find out
who they are we will kill them. Comey's a douche.
If you kill all the pedophile in and associated with Washington, the streets will run with blood.
Imagine you or me. If we have a little sexual kink--even a little one--there is little we can do about it but fantasize or
find an occasional person/animal/or vegetable to accommodate us. But if you hold great power or are super-rich, you don't need
to fantasize. You can act out your little kink with impunity. If you hold great power or are super-rich and you have a very, very
evil kink, you can exercise it with impunity. I often thought of that looking at **** Cheney's eyes. They're the eyes of a madman.
He could have sliced and diced a man, woman, child or beast a day and gotten away with it. President Trump can grab them by the
***** (adult women) and why not. It's just a very personal way of shaking hands. But I see no insanity in his eyes at all. Hillary's
eyes remind me of Norman Bates on a bad day. And Biden. . . . Wow! A pervert of the first water but also a complete coward. Thank
God! One less sex monster in action.
Everyone knows that FBI, CIA, NSA etc., are all in the business of being in business. Helps that insider trading is not illegal
for Congress. Corporate America directs intelligence outfits. My opinion...well, ok, my chickens told me.
The hits just keep coming. It's not just Comey vs. Brennan. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are now blaming Loretta Lynch for the
botched Hillary/email investigation. Bruce Ohr is blaming DOJ and FBI officials for ignoring his "warnings" about Christopher
Steele and the dossier.
Comey is bashing Strzok, Page, and now Rosenstein. Rosenstein is firing back at Comey. Andrew McCabe is attacking anyone pretty
much with a pulse.
She's trying to protect herself. She already testified and spilled the beans about herself and her husband. And they threw
a criminal referral at her anyway. MARK MEADOWS REFERS NELLIE OHR TO DOJ FOR INVESTIGATION
This just gets juicier and juicier. Adm. Rogers of the NSA had found that FBI contractors were overusing the NSA database to
run searches/spying so he shut them down. In April 2016! Friends, Fusion GPS wasn't hired just to fabricate dirt on Trump, they
were hired to create cover for the spying that was already happening when they knew they got caught by Rogers. They were terrified
of what Rogers would do. Enter Fusion/Steele/dossier/European & Australian intelligence. The cover-up will be the death of them.
Wait until we find out who else they were spying on during this time.
Admiral Michael S. Rogers is a hero. He has everything. He knows exactly who was being spied on and when.
EDIT: So who the hell approved the original spying? We know Brennan pushed the dossier but who pushed Brennan? I smell Barry.
Alexander Downer former foreign minister is the one who was meddling - Australia's high
commissioner to the UK in 2016
Started whole Russiagate investigation against Trump's campaign by telling the FBI that a
drunken George Papadopoulos had said Russia had dirt on Hillary. Because of his diplomatic
standing the FBI took Downer seriously and it was a major factor in their decision to
investigate.
Alexander Downer also funnelled millions in Australian tax dollars to the Clinton
Foundation during Hillary's election campaign
"Downer is suspected of helping to "dishonestly" obtain $25 million from the Australian
government for the Clinton Foundation's Clinton HIV/AIDs Initiative (CHAI). Michael Smith
(former Australian police detective) says that he gave materials to the FBI containing
evidence that shows "corrupt October 2006 backdating of false tender advertisements
purporting to advertise the availability of a $15 million contract to provide HIV/AIDS
services in Papua New Guinea on behalf of the Australian government after an agreement was
already in place to pay the Clinton Foundation and/or associates."
Smith also found evidence of a "$10 million financial advantage dishonestly obtained by
deception between April 1, 2008, and Sept. 25, 2008, at Washington, D.C., New York, New York,
and Canberra Australia involving an MOU between the Australian government, the 'Clinton
Climate Initiative,' and the purported 'Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute
Inc.'"
"... According to Fox , Barr is "serious" and has assembled a team from the DOJ to participate in the probe, adding that Durham is known as a "hard-charging, bulldog" prosecutor according to their source. ..."
"... Sources familiar with matter say the focus of the probe includes the pre-transition period -- prior to Nov. 7, 2016 - - including the use and initiation of informants , as well as potential Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses. ..."
"... An informant working for U.S. intelligence posed as a Cambridge University research assistant in September 2016 to try extracting any possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia from George Papadopoulos, then a Trump foreign policy adviser, it emerged earlier this month. Papadopoulos told Fox News the informant tried to "seduce" him as part of the "bizarre" episode. ..."
"... Durham has a history of serving as a special prosecutor, investigating wrongdoing among national security officials - including the FBI's ties to a Boston crime boss, as well as accusations of CIA detainee abuse. ..."
"... According to the report, Durham's review would run in parallel with the ongoing DOJ probe by Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz. Meanwhile, Republicans have been seeking answers from US Attorney for Utah, John Huber, who was appointed by former AG Jeff Sessions to review FBI and DOJ surveillance abuses, as well as authorities' handling of the probe into the Clinton Foundation . ..."
"... As part of the FBI's FISA application on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, the FBI cut-and-pasted from a disputed Washington Post article which suggested that the Trump campaign may have been compromised. The agency also repeatedly told the FISA court that it "did not believe" UK ex-spy Christopher Steele was the source of a Yahoo News article written by Michael Isikoff which implicated Page in Russian collusion. ..."
"... London court records , however, reveal that contrary to the FBI's statements, Steele had briefed Yahoo News and other media outlets in the fall of 2016 at the urging of his employer Fusion GPS - which the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had paid for anti-Trump opposition research. This information was withheld from FISA judges during the application to surveil Page. ..."
"... Steele told Kavalec that Russia had a "technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election," which recruited US emigres to "do hacking and recruiting. Steele added that "Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian consulate in Miami." ..."
"... Except that's a lie - as Kavalec debunked the assertion in a bracketed comment: " It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami. " ..."
"... Could it be that Mueller was in charge of the Boston mobster thing, and he ended up with a giant promotion to head of the agency? So what exactly happened as a result of that "investigation"? ..."
"... So, Huber was Sessions' special stooge put in place to help smother the truth? ..."
"... Catch 22. They all have the same paymaster. Kinda like asking whores to testify against their pimps. ..."
"... Alexander Downer also funnelled millions in Australian tax dollars to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary's election campaign ..."
Attorney General William Barr has appointed US Attorney John H. Durham of Connecticut to examine the origins of the Trump-Russia
investigation to determine if the FBI's spying on the Trump campaign was "lawful and appropriate," according to Fox News .
The move comes as the Trump administration has demanded answers over the use of "informants" on his 2016 campaign.
According to Fox , Barr is "serious" and has assembled a team from the DOJ to participate in the probe, adding that
Durham is known as a "hard-charging, bulldog" prosecutor according to their source.
Sources familiar with matter say the focus of the probe includes the pre-transition period -- prior to Nov. 7, 2016 - -
including
the use and initiation of informants , as well as potential Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses.
An informant working for U.S. intelligence posed as a Cambridge University research assistant in September 2016 to try
extracting any possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia from George Papadopoulos, then a Trump foreign policy adviser,
it emerged earlier this month. Papadopoulos told Fox News the informant tried to "seduce" him as part of the "bizarre" episode.
Durham previously has investigated law enforcement corruption, the destruction of CIA videotapes and the Boston FBI office's
relationship with mobsters. He is set to continue to serve as the chief federal prosecutor in Connecticut. -
Fox News
Of note - in January House Republicans Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows
wrote to Durham , saying that they had "discovered" he was "investigating former FBI General Counsel James Baker" over unauthorized
leaks to the media, adding "We know the DOJ and FBI departed from traditional investigative and prosecutorial practices, and insufficiently
adhered to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Durham has a history of serving as a special prosecutor, investigating wrongdoing among national security officials - including
the FBI's ties to a Boston crime boss, as well as accusations of CIA detainee abuse.
According to the report, Durham's review would run in parallel with the ongoing DOJ probe by Inspector General (IG) Michael
Horowitz. Meanwhile, Republicans have been seeking answers from US Attorney for Utah, John Huber, who was appointed by former AG
Jeff Sessions to review FBI and DOJ surveillance abuses, as well as authorities' handling of the probe into the Clinton Foundation
.
Not much has come of Huber's investigation, while Republicans have cautioned that he has spoken with few key witnesses and whistleblowers.
Durham's appointment comes about a month after Barr told members of Congress he believed "spying did occur" on the Trump campaign
in 2016. He later said he didn't mean anything pejorative and was gathering a team to look into the origins of the special counsel's
investigation.
As part of the FBI's FISA application on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, the FBI cut-and-pasted from a disputed Washington
Post article which suggested that the Trump campaign may have been compromised. The agency also repeatedly told the FISA court that
it "did not believe" UK ex-spy Christopher Steele was the source of a Yahoo News article written by Michael Isikoff which implicated
Page in Russian collusion.
London court records , however, reveal that contrary to the FBI's statements, Steele had briefed Yahoo News and other media
outlets in the fall of 2016 at the urging of his employer Fusion GPS - which the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) had paid for anti-Trump opposition research. This information was withheld from FISA judges during the application to surveil
Page.
What's more, the FBI could not verify the dodgy dossier Steele assembled . Speaking Fox on 'Sunday Morning Futures,' Senate Judiciary
Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said "There's a document that's classified that I'm gonna try to get unclassified that takes the
dossier -- all the pages of it -- and it has verification to one side," adding "There really is no verification, other than media
reports that were generated by reporters that received the dossier."
Graham cited a recent report from
The Hill 's John Solomon which reveals that the FBI was specifically informed that Steele had admitted he was "keen" to influence
the 2016 election with his document.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec's
written account of her
Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the
Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence
operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline . -
The Hill
Solomon also
reported last week that a high-ranking government official who met with Christopher Steele in October 2016 determined that information
in the Trump-Russia dossier was inaccurate , and likely leaked to the media.
Ten days before the FBI used the now-discredited dossier to apply for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to
spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, Steele met with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec, who took handwritten
notes of the encounter.
Steele told Kavalec that Russia had a "technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election," which recruited
US emigres to "do hacking and recruiting. Steele added that "Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian consulate in
Miami."
Except that's a lie - as Kavalec debunked the assertion in a bracketed comment: " It is important to note that there is no
Russian consulate in Miami. "
What makes this particularly damning is that the FBI swore on October 21, 2016 to the FISA judges that Steele's "reporting has
been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings," and that the FBI deemed him to be "reliable" and was "unaware of any derogatory
information pertaining" to the former British spy who was working for Fusion GPS - the firm paid by the DNC and the Clinton campaign
to come up with dirt on Donald Trump.
And now U.S. Attorney John Durham will sort out exactly what happened, we can only hope.
that rank stench hitting your nostrils is the clinton criminal syndicate. they have, from their beginning days in arkansas,
killed, bribed, extorted, blackmailed, stole, and fucked their way through the political system. if you wonder why they aren't
in Leavenworth, think of ALL the "government employees, i.e., representatives, diplomats, congressmen/women, etc., protecting
these vermin from the light of the truth. they have found "the way" to find and keep friends in the deep state. they make you
an offer you can't refuse............
Something doesn't smell right on this one. Could it be that Mueller was in charge of the Boston mobster thing, and he ended
up with a giant promotion to head of the agency? So what exactly happened as a result of that "investigation"?
This guy Durham has a very suspicious looking mustache. Comey may end up as Biden's VP. Just sayin'.
"Steele told Kavalec that Russia had a "technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election," which recruited
US emigres to "do hacking and recruiting. Steele added that "Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian consulate
in Miami."
Except that's a lie - as Kavalec debunked the assertion in a bracketed comment: " It is important to note that there is no
Russian consulate in Miami. "
Alexander Downer former foreign minister is the one who was meddling - Australia's high commissioner to the UK in 2016
Started whole Russiagate investigation against Trump's campaign by telling the FBI that a drunken George Papadopoulos had said
Russia had dirt on Hillary. Because of his diplomatic standing the FBI took Downer seriously and it was a major factor in their
decision to investigate.
Alexander Downer also funnelled millions in Australian tax dollars to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary's election
campaign
"Downer is suspected of helping to "dishonestly" obtain $25 million from the Australian government for the Clinton Foundation's
Clinton HIV/AIDs Initiative (CHAI). Michael Smith (former Australian police detective) says that he gave materials to the FBI
containing evidence that shows "corrupt October 2006 backdating of false tender advertisements purporting to advertise the availability
of a $15 million contract to provide HIV/AIDS services in Papua New Guinea on behalf of the Australian government after an agreement
was already in place to pay the Clinton Foundation and/or associates."
Smith also found evidence of a "$10 million financial advantage dishonestly obtained by deception between April 1, 2008, and
Sept. 25, 2008, at Washington, D.C., New York, New York, and Canberra Australia involving an MOU between the Australian government,
the 'Clinton Climate Initiative,' and the purported 'Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute Inc.'"
I agree with you. It is about branding. Coke versus Pepsi but more committed. I don't think that way but Democrats seem to.
The ones I know are filled with hate. The real paradigm is World Government v. Nation States, not Dem v. Repub.
Congreff could have done some little thing about the DS aholes that lied in testimony, but a fat zero. Clapper was a slam dunk
as they say at this time of year in bubble bouncing. Come to thing of it, and sing along with the bouncing ball----"I'm Forever
Blowing Bubbles"......
Barring (no pun intended) the images of Hillary and Obama being lead in cuffs into a black Tahoe on the 6 oclock news, I don't
think it will go anywhere as the MSM won't report it.
All you people who recently said, "Nothing will happen. Wake me if anyone gets indicted." SEE? We told you the tide had turned
with a new sheriff, Russia hoax investigation over. Now, the gauntlet drops. Talk about needing to buy some popcorn!
Good info. Very interesting. I was aware of Mike Rogers role but I discounted it
because:
1) It came too late (October 2016) and got little real media attention before the election.
2) Although NSA discovered irregularities in the Spring, they didn't get aired until
October? Maybe because he reports to the President?
3) It is said that Rogers informed Trump. Yet Trump didn't little if anything as a
result.
In the end, "Russiagate" continued despite Rogers info. Almost as though the Deep State
consensus was to initiate a new McCarthyism - which has been my operating theory for months.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Will anyone be prosecuted for "Russiagate"? I doubt it. Everyone involve will say they
were doing their jobs. Their "intent" based on patriotic duty.
"... If Mifsud is the asset of any foreign intelligence service, it is Britain's -- but that is a story for another day. ..."
"... We learn from the Mueller report (Volume I, p. 193) that Mifsud was interviewed by the FBI on February 10, 2017, a couple of weeks after the bureau started interviewing Papadopoulos. Mifsud denied that, when he met Papadopoulos in London on April 26, 2016, he either knew about or said anything about Russia's possession of Clinton-related emails. ..."
"... The Trump-Russia investigation continued for over two years after the FBI's interview of Mifsud. Mueller took over the probe in May 2017. During his 22 months running the investigation, Mueller charged many people (including Papadopoulos) with lying to the FBI. But he never charged Mifsud. The government has never alleged that Mifsud's denial was false. ..."
"... First, there is no evidence in Mueller's report that Mifsud had any reason to know the operations of Russia's intelligence services. ..."
"... Downer's flawed assumption that Papadopoulos must have been referring to the hacked DNC emails was then inflated into a Trump–Russia conspiracy theory by Clinton partisans in the Obama administration -- first at the State Department, and then in the Justice Department, the FBI, and the broader intelligence community -- all agencies in which animus against Donald Trump ran deep. ..."
"... Although Papadopoulos is extensively quoted in the Mueller report, the prosecutors avoid any quote from Downer regarding what Papadopoulos told him at the meeting. This is consistent with Mueller's false-statements charge against Papadopoulos, which includes the aforementioned 14-page "Statement of the Offense" that studiously omits any reference to Papadopoulos's May meeting with Downer, notwithstanding that it was the most consequential event in Papadopoulos's case. (See pp. 7–8, in which the chronology skips from May 4 to May 13 as if nothing significant happened in between.) ..."
George Papadopoulos leaves after his sentencing hearing at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., September
7, 2018.
(Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
The State Department and an Australian diplomat grossly exaggerated Papadopoulos's claims -- which were probably
false anyway.
C
hicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI's Trump-Russia
investigation. There was a false premise, namely: The Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed
emails related to Hillary Clinton. From there, through either intentional deception or incompetence, the
foreign ministries of Australia and the United States erected a fraudulent story tying the Trump campaign's
purported knowledge to the publication of hacked Democratic National Committee emails.
That is what we learn from the saga of George Papadopoulos, as fleshed out by the
Mueller report
.
The investigative theory on which the FBI formally opened the foreign-counterintelligence probe code-named
"Crossfire Hurricane" on July 31, 2016, held that the Trump campaign knew about, and was potentially complicit
in, Russia's possession of hacked emails that would compromise Hillary Clinton; and that, in order to help
Donald Trump, the Kremlin planned to disseminate these emails anonymously (through a third party) at a time
maximally damaging to Clinton's campaign.
There are thus two components to this theory: the emails and Russia's intentions.
I. Papadopoulos Knew Nothing about the DNC Emails -- and Probably Nothing about Any Emails
The one and only source for the email component of the story is George Papadopoulos. He, of course, is a
convicted liar -- convicted, in fact, of lying to the FBI during the very same interviews in which he related
the detail about emails. Moreover, the Mueller report confirms that he is simply unreliable: To inflate his
importance, he overhyped his credentials and repeatedly misled his Trump-campaign superiors regarding his
discussions with people be believed had connections to the Russian regime -- who they were and what they were in
a position to promise.
Other than Papadopoulos's own word, there is no evidence --
none --
that he was told about emails by Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic whom the FBI and the Mueller
investigation deceptively portrayed as a Russian agent.
As I've previously detailed
, because the investigation could not establish that Mifsud was a Russian agent,
Mueller's charge against Papadopoulos is artfully framed to obscure this weakness. Carefully parsed, Mueller
allegation is that Papadopoulos
had reason to believe Mifsud was a Russian agent
-- not that Mifsud actually was one.
If Mifsud is the asset of any foreign intelligence service, it is Britain's -- but that is a story for
another day.
We learn from the Mueller report (Volume I, p. 193) that Mifsud was interviewed by the FBI on February 10,
2017, a couple of weeks after the bureau started interviewing Papadopoulos. Mifsud denied that, when he met
Papadopoulos in London on April 26, 2016, he either knew about or said anything about Russia's possession of
Clinton-related emails.
The Trump-Russia investigation continued for over two years after the FBI's interview of Mifsud. Mueller
took over the probe in May 2017. During his 22 months running the investigation, Mueller charged many people
(including Papadopoulos) with lying to the FBI. But he never charged Mifsud. The government has never alleged
that Mifsud's denial was false.
There appear to be very good reasons for that.
First, there is no evidence in Mueller's report that Mifsud had any reason to know the operations of
Russia's intelligence services.
Second, prior to being interviewed by the FBI in January 2017, Papadopoulos never reported anything about
Russia having emails -- neither to his Trump-campaign superiors, to whom he was constantly reporting on his
conversations with Mifsud; nor to Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat whose conversation with
Papadopoulos was the proximate cause for the formal opening of the FBI probe. (As further detailed below,
Papadopoulos told Downer the Russians had damaging information;
he did not say emails
.)
It was only when he was interviewed by the FBI in late January 2017, nine months after his conversation with
Mifsud, that Papadopoulos is alleged to have claimed that Mifsud said the Russians had "thousands" of "emails
of Clinton." There is no known recording of this FBI interview, so there is no way of knowing whether (a)
Papadopoulos volunteered this claim that Mifsud mentioned emails or (b) this claim was suggested to
Papadopoulos by his interrogators' questions. We have no way of knowing whether Papadopoulos is telling the
truth (which, for no good reason, he kept hidden from his Trump-campaign superiors) or if he was telling the
FBI agents what he thought they wanted to hear (which is what he often did when reporting to the Trump
campaign).
But the email component is only half the concocted story.
II. Papadopoulos Had No Knowledge of Russia's Intentions
There is no evidence whatsoever, including in the 448-page Mueller report, that Papadopoulos was ever told
that Russia intended, through an intermediary, to disseminate damaging information about Clinton in a manner
designed to hurt Clinton's candidacy and help Trump's. There is, furthermore, no evidence that Papadopoulos
ever said such a thing to anyone else -- including Downer, whom he famously met at the Kensington Wine Rooms in
London in early May 2016 (the record is not clear on whether it was May 6 or May 10).
The claim that Papadopoulos made such a statement is a fabrication, initially founded on what, at best, was
a deeply flawed assumption by Downer, the Australian diplomat.
On July 22, 2016, the eve of the Democratic National Convention and two months after Downer met with
Papadopoulos, WikiLeaks began disseminating to the press the hacked DNC emails. From this fact, Downer drew the
unfounded inference that
the hacked emails must have been what Papadopoulos was talking about
when he said Russia had damaging
information about Clinton.
Downer's assumption was specious, for at least four reasons.
1) In speaking with Downer, Papadopoulos never mentioned emails. Neither Downer nor Papadopoulos has ever
claimed that Papadopoulos spoke of emails.
2) Papadopoulos did not tell Downer that Russia was planning
to publish
damaging information about Clinton through an intermediary. There is no allegation in the
Mueller report that Mifsud ever told Papadopoulos any such thing, much less that Papadopoulos relayed it to
Downer. Mueller's report says:
Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had met with high-level Russian government officials during his recent
trip to Moscow. Mifsud also said that, on the trip, he learned that the Russians had obtained "dirt" on
candidate Hillary Clinton. As Papadopoulos later stated to the FBI, Mifsud said that the "dirt" was in the
form of "emails of Clinton," and that they "have thousands of emails."
(Vol. I, p. 89 & n. 464). In neither the Mueller report nor the "
Statement
of the Offense
" that Mueller filed in connection with Papadopoulos's plea (pp. 6–7) have prosecutors
claimed that Mifsud told Papadopoulos what Russia was planning to do with the "dirt," much less why. And, to
repeat, Mifsud denied telling Papadopoulos anything about emails; Mueller never alleged that Mifsud's denial
was false.
3) Papadopoulos says the emails he claims Mifsud referred to
were not the DNC emails
; they were
Clinton's own emails
. That is, when Papadopoulos claims that Mifsud told him that Russia had "dirt" in the
form of "thousands" of "emails of Clinton," he understood Mifsud to be alluding to the thousands of State
Department and Clinton Foundation emails that Clinton had stored on a private server. These, of course, were
the emails that were being intensively covered in the media (including speculation that they might have been
hacked by hostile foreign intelligence services) at the time Mifsud and Papadopoulos spoke – i.e., April 2016,
when neither Mifsud nor Papadopoulos had any basis to know anything about hacked DNC emails.
4) The DNC emails did not damage Clinton in any material way, and it would have been ridiculous to imagine
that they would. They were not Clinton's emails and she was not a correspondent in them. The emails embarrassed
the DNC by showing that the national party favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders. But Clinton was already the
certain nominee; nothing in the emails threatened that outcome or set her back in the race against Donald
Trump.
The State Department and the FBI Distort What Papadopoulos 'Suggested'
Downer's flawed assumption that Papadopoulos must have been referring to the hacked DNC emails was then
inflated into a Trump–Russia conspiracy theory by Clinton partisans in the Obama administration -- first at the
State Department, and then in the Justice Department, the FBI, and the broader intelligence community -- all
agencies in which animus against Donald Trump ran deep.
To recap, though Downer initially dismissed his conversation with Papadopoulos as trite gossip, he suddenly
decided their discussion was significant after the hacked DNC emails were published. In late July, he
personally went to the American embassy in London to report the two-month-old conversation to Elizabeth Dibble,
the chargé d'affaires (i.e., the deputy chief of mission, who was running the embassy because Matthew Barzun,
the U.S. ambassador and heavyweight Democratic-party fundraiser, was on vacation).
Although Papadopoulos is extensively quoted in the Mueller report, the prosecutors avoid any quote from
Downer regarding what Papadopoulos told him at the meeting. This is consistent with Mueller's false-statements
charge against Papadopoulos, which includes the aforementioned 14-page "Statement of the Offense" that
studiously omits any reference to Papadopoulos's May meeting with Downer, notwithstanding that it was the most
consequential event in Papadopoulos's case. (See pp. 7–8, in which the chronology skips from May 4 to May 13 as
if nothing significant happened in between.)
Instead, Mueller carefully describes
not what Papadopoulos said
to Downer,
but
what Downer understood Papadopoulos had "suggested,"
namely 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 Hillary Clinton.
The "Trump Campaign" here is Papadopoulos; the "Russian government" is Mifsud. But Papadopoulos was as
low-ranking as it got in the Trump campaign, and Mifsud -- the source of the "indications" -- was not part of the
Russian government at all.
More to the point, even if it were mistakenly assumed that Mifsud was a Russian-government operative
(notwithstanding that the FBI could easily have established that he was not), there is no evidence that Mifsud
ever told Papadopoulos that the Russian government was planning to assist the Trump campaign by anonymously
releasing information damaging to Clinton.
In his February 2017 FBI interview, Mifsud denied saying anything to Papadopoulos about Clinton-related
emails in the possession of the Kremlin. Of course, Mifsud could be lying. But there is no evidence that he
would have been in a position to know. As we've noted, Mueller never charged Mifsud with lying to the FBI.
Interestingly, prosecutors allege that Mifsud "falsely" recounted the last time he had seen Papadopoulos;
but prosecutors do not allege that Mifsud's denial of knowledge about Russia's possession of emails is false
(Vol. I, p. 193).
Moreover, the Mueller report does not allege that Papadopoulos ever claimed Mifsud told him the Russians
would try to help Trump by anonymously releasing information damaging to Clinton. Again, instead of quoting
Papadopoulos, prosecutors repeatedly and disingenuously stress the "suggestion" that Papadopoulos purportedly
made -- as if the relevant thing were the operation of Downer's mind rather than the words that Papadopoulos
actually used.
Prosecutors acknowledge that Papadopoulos's conversation with Downer is "contained in the FBI case-opening
document and related materials" (Vol. I, p. 89, n. 465). But Mueller's report does not quote these materials,
even though it extensively quotes other investigative documents. Mueller does not tell us what Papadopoulos
said.
Here is how the report puts it (Vol. I, p. 192) in explaining why Papadopoulos was interviewed in late
January 2017 (my italics):
Investigators approached Papadopoulos for an interview based on his role as a foreign policy advisor to
the Trump Campaign and
his suggestion to a foreign government representative that Russia had indicated it could assist the Campaign
through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton.
The "suggestion" that Papadopoulos said such a thing is sheer invention. Plainly, it is based on the wayward
deduction by Downer and the State Department that Russia's anonymous publication (via WikiLeaks) of the hacked
DNC emails must have been what Papadopoulos was talking about. But that is not what Papadopoulos was talking
about.
Distorting Papadopoulos's Role to Obscure Reliance on the Steele Dossier
This deduction was not just unfounded but self-interested. The State Department (very much including the
American embassy in London) was deeply in the tank for Clinton. Downer has a history with the Clintons that
includes arranging a $25 million donation to the Clinton Foundation in 2006, when he was Australia's foreign
minister and then-senator Hillary Clinton was the favorite to become U.S. president in 2008. For years,
furthermore, Downer has been closely tied to British intelligence, which, like the British government broadly,
was anti-Trump. (More on that in the future.)
The State Department's Dibble immediately sent Downer's information though government channels to the FBI.
About three weeks earlier, Victoria Nuland, the Obama administration's top State Department official for
European and Eurasian affairs, had supported the FBI's request to meet former British intelligence officer
Christopher Steele in London. Steele was the principal author of the Clinton-campaign-sponsored faux
intelligence reports (the unverified "Steele dossier"), which claimed -- based on anonymous sources and multiple
layers of hearsay -- that Russia was plotting to help Trump win the election, and that it had been holding
compromising information about Hillary Clinton.
On July 5, agent Michael Gaeta, the FBI's legal attaché in Rome (who had worked with Steele on the FIFA
soccer investigation when Steele was still with British intelligence), met with Steele at the latter's London
office. Steele permitted him to read the first of the reports that, over time, would be compiled into the
so-called dossier. An alarmed Gaeta is said to have told Steele, "I have to report this to headquarters."
It is inconceivable that Gaeta would have gone to the trouble of clearing his visit to London with the State
Department and getting FBI headquarters to approve his trip, but then neglected to report to his headquarters
what the source had told him -- to wit, that the Trump campaign was conspiring with the Kremlin to undermine the
2016 election.
As I have previously detailed
, after the hacked DNC emails were published, Steele (whose sources had not
foretold the hacking by Russia or publication by WikiLeaks) simply folded this event into his preexisting
narrative of a Trump–Russia conspiracy.
Prior to early July, when the FBI began receiving Steele-dossier reports (which the State Department would
also soon receive), the intelligence community -- particularly the CIA, under the direction of its
hyperpolitical director, John Brennan -- had been theorizing that the Trump campaign was in a corrupt
relationship with Russia. Thanks to the Steele dossier, even before Downer reported his conversation with
Papadopoulos to the State Department, the Obama administration had already been operating on the theory that
Russia was planning to assist the Trump campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be
damaging to Clinton. They had already conveniently fit the hacked DNC emails into this theory.
Downer's report enabled the Obama administration to cover an investigative theory it was already pursuing
with a report from a friendly foreign government,
as if that report had triggered the Trump-Russia investigation
. In order to pull that off, however, it was
necessary to distort what Papadopoulos had told Downer.
To repeat,
Papadopoulos never told Downer anything about emails
. Moreover, the Mueller report provides no basis for
Papadopoulos to have known that Russia was planning the anonymous release of information damaging to Clinton in
order to help Trump; nor does the Mueller report allege that Papadopoulos actually told Downer such a thing.
The State Department's report to the FBI claiming that Papadopoulos had "suggested" these things to Downer
was manufactured to portray a false connection between (a) what Papadopoulos told Downer and (b) the hacking
and publication of the DNC emails. That false connection then became the rationale for formally opening the
FBI's Trump-Russia investigation -- paper cover for an investigation of the Trump campaign that was already
under way.
Editor's Note:
This
column has been amended to reflect that it is unclear whether the meeting between Papadopoulos and Downer
occurred on May 6, 2016, or on May 10, 2016.
"... Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by the special counsel ; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed { Go Deep } where George Papadopoulos was approached by a known CIA operative named Charles Tawil. ..."
"... In interviews Papadopoulos said he was uncomfortable with the way the encounters had taken place. He became suspect of Tawil's motives; something didn't feel right. Instead of keeping the cash, Papadopoulos gave the money to an attorney in Greece before traveling back to the U.S. on July 27th, 2017. ..."
"... Upon arrival at Dulles airport on July 27th, 2017, Robert Mueller had FBI agents waiting. Papadopoulos was stopped and his bags were searched; however, he did not have the cash because he smartly left it in Greece with his lawyer. Papadopoulos was detained overnight by FBI agents, and questioned. ..."
"... [W]hen he was arrested [detained] at Dulles Airport on July 27 after coming off a flight from Munich, prosecutors had no warrant for him and no indictment or criminal complaint . The complaint would be filed the following morning and approved by Howell in Washington. ..."
"... All of it suggests something of a scramble, rather than a carefully prepared plan to take Papadopoulos into custody. ( more ) ..."
"... Papadopoulos has stated the special counsel threatened him with charges of acting as a unregistered agent for Israel. There's a clear picture here . ..."
"... #1) Papadopoulos was lured to Israel and paid in Israel to give the outline of a FARA premise (ie. Papadopoulos is an agent of Israel). #2) Bringing $10,000 (or more) in cash into the U.S., without reporting, is a violation of U.S. treasury laws. Add into that aspect the FARA violation and the money can be compounded into #3) laundering charges. ..."
"... Andrew Weissmann was conducting an entrapment scheme that would have ended up with three violations of law: (1) Treasury violation; (2) FARA violation; (3) Money laundering . All it needed was Papadopoulos to carry the undeclared cash into the U.S. ..."
"... Lastly, to repeat, this entire scenario was constructed by the DOJ/FBI team operation in 2017. The members of the Special Counsel were running the entrapment operation; the FBI agents were participating in the operation. This is not *investigating* criminal conduct; this is manufacturing criminal conduct. ..."
"... Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was in charge of the Mueller Special Counsel. ..."
"... The only way DAG Rosenstein and Robert Mueller didn't know about the operation is if they both claim that Andrew Weissmann was completely rogue and in control over the FBI agents. ..."
Recently release FOIA documents into the special counsel team of Robert Mueller reveal the remarkable trail of a 2017 entrapment
scheme conducted by Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann to target George Papadopoulos.
Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by
the special counsel ; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed {
Go Deep } where George Papadopoulos was approached by a
known CIA operative named Charles Tawil.
In 2017 George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona were approached in Greece by a
known CIA/FBI operative , Charles Tawil.
Mr. Tawil enlisted George as a business consultant, under the auspices of energy development interests, and invited him to Israel.
On June 8th, 2017, in Israel under very suspicious circumstances, where Papadopoulos felt very unnerved, Mr. Tawil hands him $10,000
in cash for future consultancy based on a
$10k/month retainer .
On June 9th, 2017, according to his book, Papadopoulos and Tawil fly back to Cyprus.
... ... ...
In interviews Papadopoulos said he was uncomfortable with the way the encounters had taken place. He became suspect of Tawil's
motives; something didn't feel right. Instead of keeping the cash, Papadopoulos gave the money to an attorney in Greece before traveling
back to the U.S. on July 27th, 2017.
Upon arrival at Dulles airport on July 27th, 2017, Robert Mueller had FBI agents waiting. Papadopoulos was stopped and his
bags were searched; however, he did not have the cash because he smartly left it in Greece with his lawyer. Papadopoulos was detained
overnight by FBI agents, and questioned.
[ ] Stanley said Papadopoulos arrived on a Lufthansa flight from Munich that touched down at about 7 p.m . on July 27, and
the FBI intercepted him as soon as he got off the plane.
"He was arrested [detained] before he got to Customs and he was then held at the airport before being brought to
a law enforcement office," Stanley recalled. (
link )
[W]hen he was arrested [detained] at Dulles Airport on July 27 after coming off a flight from Munich, prosecutors
had no warrant for him and no indictment or criminal complaint . The complaint would be filed the following morning and approved
by Howell in Washington.
And when prosecutors filed the complaint the next day they got a spoken order from Howell to seal it, but followed up with
a written request that they could take to the magistrate in Alexandria, where they showed up almost an hour later than she expected.
All of it suggests something of a scramble, rather than a carefully prepared plan to take Papadopoulos into custody. (
more )
Here's where the recent revelations come in. According to Andrew Weissmann's schedule on June 13th, 2017, he was in conversations
surrounding the basis of a Cyprus Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT):
6/8/17 US intelligence asset Charles Tawil gives George $10K cash in Israel 6/9/17 George Papadopoulos flies to Cyprus w $10K 6/13/17
Andrew Weissmann starts series of "Cyprus MLAT" meetings with FBI 6/13/17 Andrew Weissmann phone call w/ FBI Money Laundering and
Asset Recovery "MLARS" section of FBI.
It would appear Weissmann was well aware of the Cyprus "Tawil operation" and engaged in communication regarding Cyprus. Additionally,
he was discussing "Money Laundering and Asset Recovery" w/ FBI. [MLARS Link
]
Taken in combination with hindsight of the search for the cash, and lack of a pre-existing warrant at the airport, this is clear
evidence of a coordinated operation to entrap Papadopoulos.
Remember, the preferred approach toward targeting Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos surrounded FARA (Foreign Agent
Registration Act) lobbying violations. Papadopoulos has stated the special counsel threatened him with charges of acting as a
unregistered agent for Israel. There's a clear picture here .
#1) Papadopoulos was lured to Israel and paid in Israel to give the outline of a FARA premise (ie. Papadopoulos is an agent
of Israel). #2) Bringing $10,000 (or more) in cash into the U.S., without reporting, is a violation of U.S. treasury laws. Add into
that aspect the FARA violation and the money can be compounded into #3) laundering charges.
[A "laundering" charge applies if the money is illegally obtained. The FARA violation would be the *illegal* aspect making the
treasury charges heavier. Note: the use of the airport baggage-check avoids the need for a search warrant.]
Andrew Weissmann was conducting an entrapment scheme that would have ended up with three violations of law: (1) Treasury violation;
(2) FARA violation; (3) Money laundering . All it needed was Papadopoulos to carry the undeclared cash into the U.S.
However, because Papadopoulos suspected something, and left the money in Greece with his lawyers, upon arrival at the airport
the operation collapsed in reverse . No money means no treasury violation, no laundering and no evidence of the consultancy
agreement (which would have been repurposed in the DOJ filing to mean lobbying for Israel via Mr. Tawil who would have become
a confidential informant and witness).
That operational collapse is why the FBI agents were "scrambling" at the airport and why they had no pre-existing criminal complaint.
The entrapment's success was contingent upon the cash.
Lastly, to repeat, this entire scenario was constructed by the DOJ/FBI team operation in 2017. The members of the Special
Counsel were running the entrapment operation; the FBI agents were participating in the operation. This is not *investigating* criminal
conduct; this is manufacturing criminal conduct.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was in charge of the Mueller Special Counsel.
The only way DAG Rosenstein and Robert Mueller didn't know about the operation is if they both claim that Andrew Weissmann
was completely rogue and in control over the FBI agents.
Oh, wait, what does the Mueller report say about the FBI agents and their chain-of-legal guidance and command?
... ... ...
With events happening in June/July 2017 Rod Rosenstein, Robert Mueller, former FBI legal counsel Jim Baker, former Deputy FBI
Director McCabe, together with current FBI legal counsel Dana Boente and current FBI Director Wray were what? Hoodwinked?
"... They suspect the dossier creators may have been involved in Mueller's operation, and even had a hand in his final report, because the special counsel sent his team to London to meet with Steele within a few months of taking over the Russia collusion investigation in 2017. Also, Mueller's lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, had shared information he received from Fusion with the media. ..."
"... Mueller's reliance on the Steele dossier is raising questions because it occurred long after FBI Director James B. Comey described the dossier as "salacious and unverified." U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the report should be renamed "The Mueller Dossier," because he says it contains a lot of similar innuendo. ..."
"... Steele's 17-memo dossier alleged that the Trump campaign was involved in "a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" with the Russian government to rig the 2016 presidential election in Trump's favor. It claimed this conspiracy "was managed on the Trump side by Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, who was using foreign policy adviser Carter Page and others as intermediaries." ..."
"... Specifically, the dossier accused Page of secretly meeting with Kremlin officials in July 2016 to hatch a plot to release dirt on Hillary Clinton. And it accused Manafort of being corrupted by Russian President Vladimir Putin through his puppets in the Ukraine. ..."
Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent more than $732,000 on outside
contractors, including private investigators and researchers, records show, but his office
refuses to say who they were. While it's not unusual for special government offices to
outsource for services such as computer support, Mueller also hired contractors to compile
"investigative reports" and other "information."
The arrangement has led congressional investigators, government watchdog groups and others
to speculate that the private investigators and researchers who worked for the special
counsel's office might have included Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, the private research
firm that hired Steele to produce the Russia collusion dossier for the Clinton campaign.
They suspect the dossier creators may have been involved in Mueller's operation, and even
had a hand in his final report, because the special counsel sent his team to London to meet
with Steele within a few months of taking over the Russia collusion investigation in 2017.
Also, Mueller's lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, had shared information he received from
Fusion with the media.
Raising additional suspicions, Mueller's report recycles the general allegations leveled in
the dossier. And taking a page from earlier surveillance-warrant applications in the Russia
investigation, it cites as supporting evidence several articles -- including one by Yahoo! News
-- that used Steele and Fusion as sources.
Mueller even kept alive one of the dossier's most obscene accusations -- that Moscow had
"compromising tapes" of Trump with Russian hookers -- by slipping into a footnote an October
2016 text Trump lawyer Michael Cohen received from a "Russian businessman," who cryptically
intimated, "Stopped flow of tapes from Russia."
Lawyers for the businessman, Giorgi Rtskhiladze (who is actually a Georgian American), are
demanding a retraction of the footnote, arguing Mueller omitted the part of his text where he
said he did not believe the rumor about the tapes, for which no evidence has ever surfaced.
Mueller's reliance on the Steele dossier is raising questions because it occurred long after
FBI Director James B. Comey described the dossier as "salacious and unverified." U.S. Rep.
Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the report should be
renamed "The Mueller Dossier," because he says it contains a lot of similar innuendo.
Even though Mueller failed to corroborate key allegations leveled in the dossier, Nunes said
his report twists key facts to put a collusion gloss on events. He also asserted that it
selectively quotes from Trump campaign emails and omits exculpatory information in ways that
cast the campaign's activities in the most sinister light.
Steele's 17-memo dossier alleged that the Trump campaign was involved in "a well-developed
conspiracy of cooperation" with the Russian government to rig the 2016 presidential election in
Trump's favor. It claimed this conspiracy "was managed on the Trump side by Campaign Chairman
Paul Manafort, who was using foreign policy adviser Carter Page and others as
intermediaries."
Specifically, the dossier accused Page of secretly meeting with Kremlin officials in July
2016 to hatch a plot to release dirt on Hillary Clinton. And it accused Manafort of being
corrupted by Russian President Vladimir Putin through his puppets in the Ukraine.
Likewise, Mueller's report focuses on Manafort and Page and whether they "committed crimes
by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government's efforts
to interfere with the 2016 presidential election." Though the investigation did not establish
that Page coordinated with the Russian government, the Mueller report implies there may be a
kernel of truth to the dossier's charges.
"In July 2016, Campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page traveled in his personal capacity
to Moscow and gave the keynote address at the New Economic School," according to the section on
him. "Page had lived and worked in Russia between 2003 and 2007. After returning to the United
States, Page became acquainted with at least two Russian intelligence officers, one of whom was
later charged in 2015 with conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of Russia."
"Page's July 2016 trip to Moscow and his advocacy for pro-Russian foreign policy drew media
attention," Mueller's narrative continued. "July 2016 was also the month WikiLeaks first
released emails stolen by the GRU [Russian intelligence] from the DNC." "Page acknowledged that
he understood that the individuals he has associated with were members of the Russian
intelligence services," the report added, implying that Page in the 2015 case (referenced
above) knowingly cavorted with Russian spies, which echoes charges Steele made in his
dossier.
But federal court records make it clear that Page did not know that those men were Russian
agents. Mueller also left out of his report a detail RealClearInvestigations has previously
reported: that Page was a cooperating witness in the case in question, helping the FBI
eventually put a Russian agent behind bars in 2016.
Nor did Mueller see fit to include in his report another exculpatory detail revealed in
agent Gregory Mohaghan's complaint and reported earlier by RCI -- namely, that the Russians
privately referred to Page as "an idiot" who was unworthy of recruitment. Excluding such
details is curious, given that the Mueller report quotes from the same FBI complaint and cites
it in its footnotes. Similarly, in its section dealing with Manafort, the Mueller report echoes
the dossier's claims that the Trump campaign chairman was in cahoots with the Kremlin, even
though Mueller never charged him with conspiring to collude with Russia
The special prosecutor's report indicated that one of Manafort's Kremlin handlers was
Konstantin Kilimnik. "Manafort briefed Kilimnik on the state of the Trump Campaign and
Manafort's plan to win the election," it said. "That briefing encompassed the Campaign's
messaging and its internal polling data. It also included discussion of 'battleground' states,
which Manafort identified as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota."
Except that this wouldn't have been an unusual conversation: Kilimnik was a longtime
Manafort employee who ran the Ukraine office of his lobbying firm. Footnotes in Mueller's
report show that Manafort shared campaign information to impress a former business partner,
Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was suing him over financial losses. Mueller failed to tie
the information exchange to Russian espionage. He also failed to mention that Deripaska is an
FBI informant.
Mueller's team worked closely with dossier author Steele, a long-retired British
intelligence officer who worked for the Clinton campaign. Mueller's investigators went to
London to consult with Steele for at least two days in September 2017 while apparently using
his dossier as an investigative road map and central theory to his collusion case. Steele now
runs a private research and consulting firm in London, Orbis Business Intelligence.
It's not clear if Mueller's office paid Steele, but recently released FBI records show the
bureau previously made a number of payments to him, and at one point during the 2016 campaign
offered him $50,000 to continue his dossier research. Steele was also paid through the Clinton
campaign, earning $168,000 for his work on the dossier.
Expenditure statements show that the Special Counsel's Office outsourced "investigative
reports" and "information" to third-party contractors during Mueller's investigation into
alleged Russian "collusion" during the 2016 presidential election. Over the past few months,
Mueller's office has rejected several formal requests from RealClearInvestigations for contract
details, including who was hired and how much they were paid.
Washington-based Judicial Watch suspects Mueller's office may have farmed out work to the
private Washington research firm Fusion GPS or its subcontractor Steele, both of whom were paid
by the Clinton camp during the 2016 presidential election. Several law enforcement and Hill
sources who spoke with RCI also believe Steele and Fusion GPS were deputized in the
investigation.
The government watchdog group has requested that the Justice Department turn over the
contracting records, along with all budget requests Mueller submitted to the attorney general
during his nearly two-year investigation. It's also requested all communications between the
Special Counsel's Office and the private contractors it used. A Judicial Watch spokesman said
its Freedom of Information Act request is pending.
Special counsel spokesman Peter Carr declined comment when asked specifically if Mueller's
team hired or collaborated with Fusion GPS or any of its subcontractors. Mueller took over the
FBI's Russia probe in May 2017, whereupon he hired many of the agents who handled Steele and
pored over his dossier.
For the first reporting period ending Sept. 30, 2017, and covering just four months, the
Special Counsel's Office reported paying $867 to unnamed contractors for "investigative
reports/information," along with $3,554 in "miscellaneous" payments to contractors. In the next
reporting period ending March 31, 2018, the office stopped breaking out investigative reports
and information as a separate line item, lumping such contractual services under the category
"Other," which accounted for a total of $10,812, or more than 4% of the total spending on
outside contracts.
For the six months ending Sept. 30, 2018 -- the latest reporting period for which there is
data -- Mueller's office showed a total of $310,732 in payments to outside contractors. For the
first time, it did not break out such expenses into subcategories, though it noted that the
lion's share of the $310,000 was spent on "IT services."
Mueller concluded his investigation and delivered his final report in March. The next
expenditure report, for the period October 2018-March 2019, will cover contract work directly
tied to compiling the report. Asked if the contracting details were classified, Carr demurred.
If the information is not deemed classified, it must be made public, Judicial Watch
maintains.
Republican critics on the Hill say Mueller's written narrative was slanted to give the
impression there still might be something to the dossier's most salacious allegations, even
though Mueller found no evidence corroborating them or establishing that Trump or his campaign
coordinated or cooperated with Russian meddling in the election.
"Whoever wrote the report leaves you with the idea there's still something to all the
allegations of collusion that were first promoted by the dossier," said a witness who was
interviewed by Mueller's investigators late in the probe and is referenced in the report.
In a section on Donald Trump Jr., moreover, the report gives the misimpression that the
president's oldest son was collaborating with WikiLeaks on the release of the Clinton campaign
emails. "Donald Trump Jr. had direct electronic communications with WikiLeaks during the
campaign period," it stated.
In fact, Trump got an unsolicited message through his Twitter account from WikiLeaks. He
described the outreach as "weird" in an email to senior Trump campaign staff at the time. Other
contemporaneous messages make it clear he had no advance knowledge about any Clinton emails
released by WikiLeaks.
The FBI first began receiving memos from Steele's dossier in early July 2016 and used the
documents as the foundation for its October 2016 application for a warrant to wiretap the
private communications of Page. These milestones are missing from the Mueller report's
chronology of events. In fact, neither Steele nor his dossier is mentioned by name anywhere in
the first half of the report dealing with collusion, though their allegations are hashed
out.
Some Mueller critics are focused on the role played by his top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann,
a Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter with longstanding ties to Steele and Fusion GPS.
"Weissman had a lot to do with the way the report was written," said author Jerome Corsi,
who, as a friend of Trump confidant Roger Stone, was targeted by Mueller. "That's why it's
basically a political document." Corsi said he spent more than 40 hours with Mueller's
prosecutors and investigators, who grilled him about possible ties to WikiLeaks but never
charged him with a crime.
Formerly a top Justice Department official under Obama, Weissmann not only donated to
Clinton's presidential campaign but also attended her election-night party in New York City in
November 2016. Three months earlier, he was briefed on Steele's dossier and other dirt provided
by the Clinton contractor and paid FBI informant.
In early 2017, Weissmann helped advance the Russia collusion narrative by personally sharing
Steele's and Fusion's dirt on Trump and his advisers with Washington reporters. In an April
2017 meeting he arranged at his office, Weissmann gave guidance to four Associated Press
reporters who were investigating Manafort, according to internal FBI documents.
Among other things, they discussed rumors that Manafort used "some of the money from shell
companies to buy expensive suits." A month later, Weissmann became the lead prosecutor handling
the Manafort case for Mueller. His February 2018 indictment of Manafort highlights, among other
things, the Trump adviser's taste for expensive suits. Attempts to reach Weissmann for comment
were unsuccessful.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said there are signs Mueller may have hired
"researchers" like Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, who worked with Steele on the dossier,
along with Edward Baumgartner and Nellie Ohr, who have worked for Fusion GPS, which originally
hired Steele in June 2016 after contracting with the Clinton campaign.
"I ran into Glenn at the 2017 Aspen Security [Forum], and I distinctly remember him leaning
in and claiming he was working for the government," said one associate, who wished to remain
anonymous. Congressional investigators say Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, has
been feeding Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate investigative tips regarding Trump
and his associates, including Manafort. In 2017, for instance, he urged Democrats specifically
to look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank, which has financed some of Trump's businesses,
because he suspected some of the funding may have been laundered through Russia.
Around the time Simpson began coordinating with Democratic investigators looking into
Trump's bank records, Mueller subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for financial records for Manafort and
other individuals affiliated with Trump. Simpson did not return calls and emails seeking
comment.
Founded by the journalist-turned-opposition researcher, Fusion has rehired Steele to
continue his anti-Trump work with millions of dollars in left-wing funding from The Democracy
Integrity Project, a Washington-based nonprofit started in 2017 by former FBI analyst Daniel
Jones, who also worked for Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
In March 2017, Jones met with FBI agents to provide them data he collected from IT
specialists he hired to analyze web traffic between servers maintained by the Trump
Organization and a Russian bank mentioned in the dossier. The traffic turned out to be
innocuous marketing emails, or spam.
Investigative journalist Paul Sperry is a regular contributor to RealClearInvestigations
and has written news or op-ed pieces for the New York Post, New York Times and Wall Street
Journal. His books include 'The Great American Bank Robbery' (2011), and 'Crude Politics: How
Bush's Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism' (2003).
"... 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. ..."
"... Both Shulyar and Chalupa said the purpose of their initial meeting was to organize a June reception at the embassy to promote Ukraine. According to the embassy's website, the event highlighted female Ukrainian leaders, featuring speeches by Ukrainian parliamentarian Hanna Hopko, who discussed "Ukraine's fight against the Russian aggression in Donbas," and longtime Hillary Clinton confidante Melanne Verveer, who worked for Clinton in the State Department and was a vocal surrogate during the presidential campaign. ..."
"... Almost as quickly as Chalupa's efforts attracted the attention of the Ukrainian Embassy and Democrats, she also found herself the subject of some unwanted attention from overseas. ..."
"... Chalupa, though, indicated in an email that was later hacked and released by WikiLeaks that the Open World Leadership Center "put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort." ..."
"... In the email, which was sent in early May to then-DNC communications director Luis Miranda, Chalupa noted that she had extended an invitation to the Library of Congress forum to veteran Washington investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. Two days before the event, he had published a story for Yahoo News revealing the unraveling of a $26 million deal between Manafort and a Russian oligarch related to a telecommunications venture in Ukraine. And Chalupa wrote in the email she'd been "working with for the past few weeks" with Isikoff "and connected him to the Ukrainians" at the event. ..."
"... A DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party's political department, not a researcher. She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its dossiers on the subjects, the official said, stressing that the DNC had been building robust research books on Trump and his ties to Russia long before Chalupa began sounding alarms. ..."
"... Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a Ukrainian former diplomat who served as the country's head of security under Poroshenko but is now affiliated with a leading opponent of Poroshenko, said it was fishy that "only one part of the black ledger appeared." He asked, "Where is the handwriting analysis?" and said it was "crazy" to announce an investigation based on the ledgers. He met last month in Washington with Trump allies, and said, "of course they all recognize that our [anti-corruption bureau] intervened in the presidential campaign." ..."
"... Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov, piled on, trashing Trump on Twitter in July as a "clown" and asserting that Trump is "an even bigger danger to the US than terrorism." ..."
"... Avakov, in a Facebook post, lashed out at Trump for his confusing Crimea comments, calling the assessment the "diagnosis of a dangerous misfit," according to a translated screenshot featured in one media report, though he later deleted the post. He called Trump "dangerous for Ukraine and the US" and noted that Manafort worked with Yanukovych when the former Ukrainian leader "fled to Russia through Crimea. Where would Manafort lead Trump?" ..."
Manafort's work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked
in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant,
for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records,
though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC's arm for engaging expatriate
Democrats around the world.
A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine,
Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching
Manafort's role in Yanukovych's rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych's political party.
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.
She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton's campaign, Chalupa said. In January 2016 -- months
before Manafort had taken any role in Trump's campaign -- Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump's campaign,
"I felt there was a Russia connection," Chalupa recalled. "And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved
in this election," said Chalupa, who at the time also was warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was "Putin's
political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections."
he said she shared her concern with Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar,
during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy. According to someone briefed on the meeting, Chaly said that Manafort was very
much on his radar, but that he wasn't particularly concerned about the operative's ties to Trump since he didn't believe Trump stood
much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination, let alone the presidency.
That was not an uncommon view at the time, and, perhaps as a result, Trump's ties to Russia -- let alone Manafort's -- were not
the subject of much attention.
That all started to change just four days after Chalupa's meeting at the embassy, when it was reported that Trump had in fact hired
Manafort, suggesting that Chalupa may have been on to something. She quickly found herself in high demand. The day after Manafort's
hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC's communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative
familiar with the situation.
A former DNC staffer described the exchange as an "informal conversation," saying "'briefing' makes it sound way too formal,"
and adding, "We were not directing or driving her work on this." Yet, the former DNC staffer and the operative familiar with the
situation agreed that with the DNC's encouragement, Chalupa asked embassy staff to try to arrange an interview in which Poroshenko
might discuss Manafort's ties to Yanukovych.
While the embassy declined that request, officials there became "helpful" in Chalupa's efforts, she said, explaining that she
traded information and leads with them. "If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to
follow up with." But she stressed, "There were no documents given, nothing like that."
Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia to point them in the right
directions. She added, though, "they were being very protective and not speaking to the press as much as they should have. I think
they were being careful because their situation was that they had to be very, very careful because they could not pick sides. It's
a political issue, and they didn't want to get involved politically because they couldn't."
Shulyar vehemently denied working with reporters or with Chalupa on anything related to Trump or Manafort, explaining "we were
stormed by many reporters to comment on this subject, but our clear and adamant position was not to give any comment [and] not to
interfere into the campaign affairs."
Both Shulyar and Chalupa said the purpose of their initial meeting was to organize a June reception at the embassy to promote
Ukraine. According to the embassy's website, the event highlighted female Ukrainian leaders, featuring speeches by Ukrainian parliamentarian
Hanna Hopko, who discussed "Ukraine's fight against the Russian aggression in Donbas," and longtime Hillary Clinton confidante Melanne
Verveer, who worked for Clinton in the State Department and was a vocal surrogate during the presidential campaign.
Shulyar said her work with Chalupa "didn't involve the campaign," and she specifically stressed that "We have never worked to
research and disseminate damaging information about Donald Trump and Paul Manafort."
But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she instructed him to help
Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia. "Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people
who did, then I should contact Chalupa," recalled Telizhenko, who is now a political consultant in Kiev. "They were coordinating
an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa," he said, adding "Oksana was keeping it all quiet,"
but "the embassy worked very closely with" Chalupa.
In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide
an update on an American media outlet's ongoing investigation into Manafort.
Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, "If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump's involvement
with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September."
Chalupa confirmed that, a week after Manafort's hiring was announced, she discussed the possibility of a congressional investigation
with a foreign policy legislative assistant in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who co-chairs the Congressional Ukrainian
Caucus. But, Chalupa said, "It didn't go anywhere."
Asked about the effort, the Kaptur legislative assistant called it a "touchy subject" in an internal email to colleagues that
was accidentally forwarded to Politico.
Kaptur's office later emailed an official statement explaining that the lawmaker is backing a bill to create an independent commission
to investigate "possible outside interference in our elections." The office added "at this time, the evidence related to this matter
points to Russia, but Congresswoman Kaptur is concerned with any evidence of foreign entities interfering in our elections."
•••
Almost as quickly as Chalupa's efforts attracted the attention of the Ukrainian Embassy and Democrats, she also found herself
the subject of some unwanted attention from overseas.
Within a few weeks of her initial meeting at the embassy with Shulyar and Chaly, Chalupa on April 20 received the first of what
became a series of messages from the administrators of her private Yahoo email account, warning her that "state-sponsored actors"
were trying to hack into her emails.
She kept up her crusade, appearing on a panel a week after the initial hacking message to discuss her research on Manafort with
a group of Ukrainian investigative journalists gathered at the Library of Congress for a program sponsored by a U.S. congressional
agency called the Open World Leadership Center.
Center spokeswoman Maura Shelden stressed that her group is nonpartisan and ensures "that our delegations hear from both sides
of the aisle, receiving bipartisan information." She said the Ukrainian journalists in subsequent days met with Republican officials
in North Carolina and elsewhere. And she said that, before the Library of Congress event, "Open World's program manager for Ukraine
did contact Chalupa to advise her that Open World is a nonpartisan agency of the Congress."
Chalupa, though, indicated in an email that was later hacked and released by WikiLeaks that the Open World Leadership Center
"put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort."
In the email, which was sent in early May to then-DNC communications director Luis Miranda, Chalupa noted that she had extended
an invitation to the Library of Congress forum to veteran Washington investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. Two days before the
event, he had published a story for Yahoo News revealing the unraveling of a $26 million deal between Manafort and a Russian oligarch
related to a telecommunications venture in Ukraine. And Chalupa wrote in the email she'd been "working with for the past few weeks"
with Isikoff "and connected him to the Ukrainians" at the event.
Isikoff, who accompanied Chalupa to a reception at the Ukrainian Embassy immediately after the Library of Congress event, declined
to comment.
Chalupa further indicated in her hacked May email to the DNC that she had additional sensitive information about Manafort that
she intended to share "offline" with Miranda and DNC research director Lauren Dillon, including "a big Trump component you and Lauren
need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I'm working on you should be aware of." Explaining that she didn't
feel comfortable sharing the intel over email, Chalupa attached a screenshot of a warning from Yahoo administrators about "state-sponsored"
hacking on her account, explaining, "Since I started digging into Manafort these messages have been a daily occurrence on my yahoo
account despite changing my password often."
Dillon and Miranda declined to comment.
A DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party's political department, not a researcher.
She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its
dossiers on the subjects, the official said, stressing that the DNC had been building robust research books on Trump and his ties
to Russia long before Chalupa began sounding alarms.
Nonetheless, Chalupa's hacked email reportedly escalated concerns among top party officials, hardening their conclusion that Russia
likely was behind the cyber intrusions with which the party was only then beginning to grapple.
Chalupa left the DNC after the Democratic convention in late July to focus fulltime on her research into Manafort, Trump and Russia
. She said she provided off-the-record information and guidance to "a lot of journalists" working on stories related to Manafort
and Trump's Russia connections, despite what she described as escalating harassment.
... ... ...
•••
While it's not uncommon for outside operatives to serve as intermediaries between governments and reporters, one of the more damaging
Russia-related stories for the Trump campaign -- and certainly for Manafort -- can be traced more directly to the Ukrainian government.
Documents released by an independent Ukrainian government agency -- and publicized by a parliamentarian -- appeared to show $12.7
million in cash payments that were earmarked for Manafort by the Russia-aligned party of the deposed former president, Yanukovych.
The New York Times, in the August story revealing the ledgers' existence, reported that the payments earmarked for Manafort were
"a focus" of an investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption officials, while CNN reported days later that the FBI was pursuing an
overlapping inquiry.
Clinton's campaign seized on the story to advance Democrats' argument that Trump's campaign was closely linked to Russia. The
ledger represented "more troubling connections between Donald Trump's team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine," Robby Mook, Clinton's
campaign manager, said in a statement. He demanded that Trump "disclose campaign chair Paul Manafort's and all other campaign employees'
and advisers' ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities, including whether any of Trump's employees or advisers are currently representing
and or being paid by them."
A former Ukrainian investigative journalist and current parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, who was elected in 2014 as part
of Poroshenko's party, held a news conference to highlight the ledgers, and to urge Ukrainian and American law enforcement to aggressively
investigate Manafort.
"I believe and understand the basis of these payments are totally against the law -- we have the proof from these books," Leshchenko
said during the news conference, which attracted international media coverage. "If Mr. Manafort denies any allegations, I think he
has to be interrogated into this case and prove his position that he was not involved in any misconduct on the territory of Ukraine,"
Leshchenko added.
Manafort
denied receiving any off-books cash from Yanukovych's Party of Regions, and said that he had never been contacted about the ledger
by Ukrainian or American investigators, later telling POLITICO "I was just caught in the crossfire."
According to a
series of memos reportedly compiled for Trump's opponents by a former British intelligence agent, Yanukovych, in a secret meeting
with Putin on the day after the Times published its report, admitted that he had authorized "substantial kickback payments
to Manafort." But according to the report, which was
published Tuesday
by BuzzFeed but remains unverified. Yanukovych assured Putin "that there was no documentary trail left behind which could provide
clear evidence of this" -- an alleged statement that seemed to implicitly question the authenticity of the ledger.
The scrutiny around the ledgers -- combined with that from
other stories about his
Ukraine
work -- proved too much, and he
stepped down from the
Trump campaign less than a week after the Times story.
At the time, Leshchenko suggested that his motivation was partly to undermine Trump. "For me, it was important to show not only
the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world," Leshchenko
told the Financial Times about two weeks after his news conference. The newspaper noted that Trump's candidacy had spurred "Kiev's
wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election,"
and the story quoted Leshchenko asserting that the majority of Ukraine's politicians are "on Hillary Clinton's side."
But by this month, Leshchenko was seeking to recast his motivation, telling Politico, "I didn't care who won the U.S. elections.
This was a decision for the American voters to decide." His goal in highlighting the ledgers, he said was "to raise these issues
on a political level and emphasize the importance of the investigation."
In a series of answers provided to Politico, a spokesman for Poroshenko distanced his administration from both Leshchenko's efforts
and those of the agency that reLeshchenko Leshchenko leased the ledgers, The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. It was created
in 2014 as a condition for Ukraine to receive aid from the U.S. and the European Union, and it signed an evidence-sharing agreement
with the FBI in late June -- less than a month and a half before it released the ledgers.
The bureau is "fully independent," the Poroshenko spokesman said, adding that when it came to the presidential administration
there was "no targeted action against Manafort." He added "as to Serhiy Leshchenko, he positions himself as a representative of internal
opposition in the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko's faction, despite [the fact that] he belongs to the faction," the spokesman said, adding,
"it was about him personally who pushed [the anti-corruption bureau] to proceed with investigation on Manafort."
But an operative who has worked extensively in Ukraine, including as an adviser to Poroshenko, said it was highly unlikely that
either Leshchenko or the anti-corruption bureau would have pushed the issue without at least tacit approval from Poroshenko or his
closest allies.
"It was something that Poroshenko was probably aware of and could have stopped if he wanted to," said the operative.
And, almost immediately after Trump's stunning victory over Clinton, questions began mounting about the investigations into the
ledgers -- and the ledgers themselves.
An official with the anti-corruption bureau told a Ukrainian newspaper, "Mr. Manafort does not have a role in this case."
And, while the anti-corruption bureau told Politico late last month that a "general investigation [is] still ongoing" of the ledger,
it said Manafort is not a target of the investigation. "As he is not the Ukrainian citizen, [the anti-corruption bureau] by the law
couldn't investigate him personally," the bureau said in a statement.
Some Poroshenko critics have gone further, suggesting that the bureau is backing away from investigating because the ledgers might
have been doctored or even forged.
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a Ukrainian former diplomat who served as the country's head of security under Poroshenko but is now affiliated
with a leading opponent of Poroshenko, said it was fishy that "only one part of the black ledger appeared." He asked, "Where is the
handwriting analysis?" and said it was "crazy" to announce an investigation based on the ledgers. He met last month in Washington
with Trump allies, and said, "of course they all recognize that our [anti-corruption bureau] intervened in the presidential campaign."
And in an interview this week, Manafort, who re-emerged as an informal advisor to Trump after Election Day, suggested that the
ledgers were inauthentic and called their publication "a politically motivated false attack on me. My role as a paid consultant was
public. There was nothing off the books, but the way that this was presented tried to make it look shady."
He added that he felt particularly wronged by efforts to cast his work in Ukraine as pro-Russian, arguing "all my efforts were
focused on helping Ukraine move into Europe and the West." He specifically cited his work on denuclearizing the country and on the
European Union trade and political pact that Yanukovych spurned before fleeing to Russia. "In no case was I ever involved in anything
that would be contrary to U.S. interests," Manafort said.
Yet Russia seemed to come to the defense of Manafort and Trump last month, when a spokeswoman for Russia's Foreign Ministry charged
that the Ukrainian government used the ledgers as a political weapon.
"Ukraine seriously complicated the work of Trump's election campaign headquarters by planting information according to which Paul
Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman, allegedly accepted money from Ukrainian oligarchs," Maria Zakharova said at a news briefing,
according to a transcript of her remarks posted on the Foreign Ministry's website. "All of you have heard this remarkable story,"
she told assembled reporters.
•••
Beyond any efforts to sabotage Trump, Ukrainian officials didn't exactly extend a hand of friendship to the GOP nominee during
the campaign.
The ambassador, Chaly, penned an op-ed for The Hill, in which he chastised Trump for a confusing series of statements in which
the GOP candidate at one point expressed a willingness to consider recognizing Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian territory of
Crimea as legitimate. The op-ed made some in the embassy uneasy, sources said.
"That was like too close for comfort, even for them," said Chalupa. "That was something that was as risky as they were going to
be."
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk warned on Facebook that Trump had "challenged the very values of the free world."
Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov, piled on, trashing Trump on Twitter in July as a "clown" and asserting that
Trump is "an even bigger danger to the US than terrorism."
Avakov, in a Facebook post, lashed out at Trump for his confusing Crimea comments, calling the assessment the "diagnosis of a
dangerous misfit," according to a translated screenshot featured in one media report, though he later deleted the post. He called
Trump "dangerous for Ukraine and the US" and noted that Manafort worked with Yanukovych when the former Ukrainian leader "fled to
Russia through Crimea. Where would Manafort lead Trump?"
The Trump-Ukraine relationship grew even more fraught in September with reports that the GOP nominee had snubbed Poroshenko on
the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the Ukrainian president tried to meet both major party candidates,
but scored only a meeting with Clinton.
Telizhenko, the former embassy staffer, said that, during the primaries, Chaly, the country's ambassador in Washington, had actually
instructed the embassy not to reach out to Trump's campaign, even as it was engaging with those of Clinton and Trump's leading GOP
rival, Ted Cruz.
"We had an order not to talk to the Trump team, because he was critical of Ukraine and the government and his critical position
on Crimea and the conflict," said Telizhenko. "I was yelled at when I proposed to talk to Trump," he said, adding, "The ambassador
said not to get involved -- Hillary is going to win."
This account was confirmed by Nalyvaichenko, the former diplomat and security chief now affiliated with a Poroshenko opponent,
who said, "The Ukrainian authorities closed all doors and windows -- this is from the Ukrainian side." He called the strategy "bad
and short-sighted."
Andriy Artemenko, a Ukrainian parliamentarian associated with a conservative opposition party, did meet with Trump's team during
the campaign and said he personally offered to set up similar meetings for Chaly but was rebuffed.
"It was clear that they were supporting Hillary Clinton's candidacy," Artemenko said. "They did everything from organizing meetings
with the Clinton team, to publicly supporting her, to criticizing Trump. I think that they simply didn't meet because they thought
that Hillary would win."
Shulyar rejected the characterizations that the embassy had a ban on interacting with Trump, instead explaining that it "had different
diplomats assigned for dealing with different teams tailoring the content and messaging. So it was not an instruction to abstain
from the engagement but rather an internal discipline for diplomats not to get involved into a field she or he was not assigned to,
but where another colleague was involved."
And she pointed out that Chaly traveled to the GOP convention in Cleveland in late July and met with members of Trump's foreign
policy team "to highlight the importance of Ukraine and the support of it by the U.S."
Despite the outreach, Trump's campaign in Cleveland gutted a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that called for
the U.S. to provide "lethal defensive weapons" for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian incursion, backers of the measure charged.
The outreach ramped up after Trump's victory. Shulyar pointed out that Poroshenko was among the first foreign leaders to call
to congratulate Trump. And she said that, since Election Day, Chaly has met with close Trump allies, including Sens. Jeff Sessions,
Trump's nominee for attorney general, and Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, while the ambassador
accompanied Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Ukraine's vice prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, to a round of Washington
meetings with Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), an early Trump backer, and Jim DeMint, president of The Heritage Foundation, which played
a prominent role in Trump's transition.
•••
Many Ukrainian officials and operatives and their American allies see Trump's inauguration this month as an existential threat
to the country, made worse, they admit, by the dissemination of the secret ledger, the antagonistic social media posts and the perception
that the embassy meddled against -- or at least shut out -- Trump.
"It's really bad. The [Poroshenko] administration right now is trying to re-coordinate communications," said Telizhenko, adding,
"The Trump organization doesn't want to talk to our administration at all."
During Nalyvaichenko's trip to Washington last month, he detected lingering ill will toward Ukraine from some, and lack of
interest from others, he recalled. "Ukraine is not on the top of the list, not even the middle," he said.
Poroshenko's allies are scrambling to figure out how to build a relationship with Trump, who is known for harboring and prosecuting
grudges for years.
A delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians allied with Poroshenko last month traveled to Washington partly to try to make inroads
with the Trump transition team, but they were unable to secure a meeting, according to a Washington foreign policy operative familiar
with the trip. And operatives in Washington and Kiev say that after the election, Poroshenko met in Kiev with top executives from
the Washington lobbying firm BGR -- including Ed Rogers and Lester Munson -- about how to navigate the Trump regime.
Weeks later, BGR reported to the Department of Justice that the government of Ukraine would pay the firm $50,000 a month to "provide
strategic public relations and government affairs counsel," including "outreach to U.S. government officials, non-government organizations,
members of the media and other individuals."
Firm spokesman Jeffrey Birnbaum suggested that "pro-Putin oligarchs" were already trying to sow doubts about BGR's work with Poroshenko.
While the firm maintains close relationships with GOP congressional leaders, several of its principals were dismissive or sharply
critical of Trump during the GOP primary, which could limit their effectiveness lobbying the new administration.
The Poroshenko regime's standing with Trump is considered so dire that the president's allies after the election actually reached
out to make amends with -- and even seek assistance from -- Manafort, according to two operatives familiar with Ukraine's efforts
to make inroads with Trump.
Meanwhile, Poroshenko's rivals are seeking to capitalize on his dicey relationship with Trump's team. Some are pressuring him
to replace Chaly, a close ally of Poroshenko's who is being blamed by critics in Kiev and Washington for implementing -- if not engineering
-- the country's anti-Trump efforts, according to Ukrainian and U.S. politicians and operatives interviewed for this story. They
say that several potential Poroshenko opponents have been through Washington since the election seeking audiences of their own with
Trump allies, though most have failed to do do so.
"None of the Ukrainians have any access to Trump -- they are all desperate to get it, and are willing to pay big for it," said
one American consultant whose company recently met in Washington with Yuriy Boyko, a former vice prime minister under Yanukovych.
Boyko, who like Yanukovych has a pro-Russian worldview, is considering a presidential campaign of his own, and his representatives
offered "to pay a shit-ton of money" to get access to Trump and his inaugural events, according to the consultant.
The consultant turned down the work, explaining, "It sounded shady, and we don't want to get in the middle of that kind of stuff."
Looks like Chalupa was an important player in Steele dossier. That suggests Ukrainian diaspora, and possibly Ukrainian SBU links.
Notable quotes:
"... Just worth noting that in the hand-written notes taken by Bruce Ohr after meetings with Chris Steele, there is the comment that the majority of the Steele Dossier was obtained from an expat Russian living in the US, and not from actual Russian sources in Russia. ..."
"... That would tend to work against theories that involve Skripal in a significant role in generating the dossier; though it would not rule him out in a more peripheral role ..."
"... We can also conclude neither bruce ohr, or the expat russian living in the us are neutral players in any of this too.. Was someone paid a fee to say something?? ..."
"... Steele is a stranger to the truth in any event so I wouldn't set much store by it – though if the dossier is third hand material at best it certainly explains why it is such rubbish. Steele's ability to get cash by selling steaming nonsense to the gullible is amazing. ..."
"... "A Ukrainian political consultant has revealed to Sputnik that former MI6 agent Christopher Steele sought and paid for researchers in Ukraine to concoct fake stories about Donald Trump prior his election as US president to use in the now-infamous dossier that supposedly contained damning evidence of Russia-Trump collusion. ..."
"... Radio Sputnik's Lee Stranahan spoke previously with Ukrainian political consultant and former diplomat Andrii Telizhenko about his connections to a Democratic National Committee (DNC) operative named Alexandra Chalupa who also worked for clients in Ukrainian politics. Chalupa told Politico in January 2017 that beginning in 2015, she pulled on a network of sources she'd established in Kiev and Washington to try and turn up dirt on Trump, once his star began to rise in the Republican primary campaign." ..."
Just worth noting that in the hand-written notes taken by Bruce Ohr after meetings with Chris Steele, there is the comment
that the majority of the Steele Dossier was obtained from an expat Russian living in the US, and not from actual Russian sources
in Russia.
That would tend to work against theories that involve Skripal in a significant role in generating the dossier; though it
would not rule him out in a more peripheral role.
We can also conclude neither bruce ohr, or the expat russian living in the us are neutral players in any of this too..
Was someone paid a fee to say something?? your last comment-conclusion is very shaky at best..
Could you give a link to the source of that info? Steele is a stranger to the truth in any event so I wouldn't set much
store by it – though if the dossier is third hand material at best it certainly explains why it is such rubbish. Steele's ability
to get cash by selling steaming nonsense to the gullible is amazing.
"A Ukrainian political consultant has revealed to Sputnik that former MI6 agent Christopher Steele sought and paid for
researchers in Ukraine to concoct fake stories about Donald Trump prior his election as US president to use in the now-infamous
dossier that supposedly contained damning evidence of Russia-Trump collusion.
Radio Sputnik's Lee Stranahan spoke previously with Ukrainian political consultant and former diplomat Andrii Telizhenko
about his connections to a Democratic National Committee (DNC) operative named Alexandra Chalupa who also worked for clients in
Ukrainian politics. Chalupa told Politico in January 2017 that beginning in 2015, she pulled on a network of sources she'd established
in Kiev and Washington to try and turn up dirt on Trump, once his star began to rise in the Republican primary campaign."
"... Also note: Crowdstrike planted the malware on DNC systems, which they "discovered" later - https://disobedientmedia.com/2017/12/fancy-frauds-bogus-bears-malware-m
..."
"... And look who else sits on the Atlantic Council - http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/about/experts/list/irene-chalupa why it's the
sister of Andrea Chalupa, unregistered foreign agent employed by the DNC as a "Consultant", whose entire family is tied to Ukraine Intelligence.
..."
"... Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor for Ukraine's propaganda channel Stopfake.org She is a Ukrainian Diaspora leader. The
Chalupas are the first family of Ukrainian propaganda. She works with and for Ukrainian Intelligence through the Atlantic Council, Stopfake.org,
and her sisters Andrea (EuromaidanPR) and Alexandra. ..."
(if that's too 'in the weeds' for you, ask your tech guys to read and verify)
And look who else sits on the Atlantic Council -
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/about/experts/list/irene-chalupa
why it's the sister of Andrea Chalupa, unregistered foreign agent employed by the DNC as a "Consultant", whose entire family
is tied to Ukraine Intelligence.
Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor for Ukraine's propaganda channel
Stopfake.org She is a
Ukrainian Diaspora
leader. The Chalupas are the first family of Ukrainian propaganda. She works with and for Ukrainian Intelligence through
the Atlantic Council, Stopfake.org, and her sisters Andrea (EuromaidanPR) and Alexandra.
"... Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years. ..."
"... Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Are they using Crowdstrike to carry this out? ..."
"... Meet the real Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, part of the groups that are targeting Ukrainian positions for the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. These people were so tech savvy they didn't know the Ukrainian SBU (Ukrainian CIA/internal security) records every phone call and most internet use in Ukraine and Donbass. Donbass still uses Ukrainian phone and internet services. ..."
"... This is a civil war and people supporting either side are on both sides of the contact line. The SBU is awestruck because there are hundreds if not thousands of people helping to target the private volunteer armies supported by Ukrainian-Americans. ..."
"... 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 by Alexandra Chalupa? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection. These words mirror Dimitri Alperovitch's identification process in his interview with PBS Judy Woodruff. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... Still, this is not enough to show a conflict of interest. Alperovitch's relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers do. 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. ..."
"... According to Robert Parry's article 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? ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... Alperovitch and Fancy Bear tweet each other? ..."
"... Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network ..."
"... In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA. 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 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... Pravy Sektor Hackers and Crowdstrike? ..."
"... 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. ..."
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 between Dmitri Alperovitch's claims which are reflected in JAR-1620296 and
this article is that 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?
Later in this article you'll meet and know a little more about the real "Fancy Bear and Cozy
Bear." 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 article is lengthy because the facts need to be in one place. 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?
The December 29th JAR adds a flowchart that shows how a basic phishing hack is performed. It
doesn't add anything significant beyond that. Noticeably, they use both their designation APT
28 and APT 29 as well as the Crowdstrike labels of Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear separately.
This is important because 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.
The
Hill.com article about Russia hacking the electric grid is a perfect example of why this
intelligence is political and not taken seriously. If any proof of Russian involvement existed,
the US would be at war. Under current laws of war, there would be no difference between an
attack on the power grid or a missile strike.
According
to the Hill "Private security firms provided more detailed forensic analysis, which the FBI
and DHS said Thursday correlated with the IC's findings.
"The Joint Analysis Report recognizes the excellent work undertaken by
security companies and private sector network owners and operators, and provides new indicators
of compromise and malicious infrastructure
identified during the course of investigations and incident response," read a statement. The
report identities two Russian intelligence groups already named by CrowdStrike and other
private security firms."
In an interview with Washingtonsblog , William Binney, the creator of the NSA global
surveillance system said "I expected to see the IP's or other signatures of APT's 28/29 [the
entities which the U.S. claims hacked the Democratic emails] and where they were located and
how/when the data got transferred to them from DNC/HRC [i.e. Hillary Rodham Clinton]/etc. They
seem to have been following APT 28/29 since at least 2015, so, where are they?"
According to the latest Washington Post story, Crowdstrike's CEO tied a group his company
dubbed "Fancy Bear" to targeting Ukrainian artillery positions in Debaltsevo as well as across
the Ukrainian civil war front for the past 2 years.
Alperovitch states in many articles the Ukrainians were using an Android app to target the
self-proclaimed Republics positions and that hacking this app was what gave targeting data to
the armies in Donbass instead.
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.
"But the Russians used the app to turn the tables on their foes, Crowdstrike says. Once a
Ukrainian soldier downloaded it on his Android phone, the Russians were able to eavesdrop on
his communications and determine his position through geo-location.
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."
Because Ukrainian soldiers are using a smartphone app they activate their geolocation to use
it. Targeting is from location to location. The app would need the current user location to
make it work.
In 2015 I wrote an article that showed many of the available open source tools that
geolocate, and track people. They even show street view. This means that using simple means,
someone with freeware or an online website, and not a military budget can look at what you are
seeing at any given moment.
Where Crowdstrike fails is insisting people believe that the code they see is (a) an
advanced way to geolocate and (b) it was how a state with large resources would do it. Would
you leave a calling card where you would get caught and fined through sanctions or worse? If
you use an anonymous online resource at least Crowdstrike won't believe you are Russian and
possibly up to something.
If you read that article and watch the video you'll see that using "geo-stalker" is a better
choice if you are on a low budget or no budget. Should someone tell the Russians they
overpaid?
According to Alperovitch, the smartphone app
plotted targets in about 15 seconds . This means that there is only a small window to get
information this way.
Using the open source tools I wrote about previously, you could track your targets all-day.
In 2014, most Ukrainian forces were using social media regularly. It would be easy to maintain
a map of their locations and track them individually.
From my research into those tools, someone using Python scripts would find it easy to take
photos, listen to conversations, turn on GPS, or even turn the phone on when they chose to.
Going a step further than Alperovitch, without the help of the Russian government, GRU, or FSB,
anyone could
take control of the drones Ukraine is fond of flying and land them. Or they could download
the footage the drones are taking. It's copy and paste at that point. Would you bother the FSB,
GRU, or Vladimir Putin with the details or just do it?
In the WaPo article Alperovitch states "The Fancy Bear crew evidently hacked the app,
allowing the GRU to use the phone's GPS coordinates to track the Ukrainian troops'
position.
In that way, the Russian military could then target the Ukrainian army with artillery and
other weaponry. Ukrainian brigades operating in eastern Ukraine were on the front lines of the
conflict with Russian-backed separatist forces during the early stages of the conflict in late
2014, CrowdStrike noted. By late 2014, Russian forces in the region numbered about 10,000. The
Android app was useful in helping the Russian troops locate Ukrainian artillery positions."
In late 2014,
I personally did the only invasive passport and weapons checks that I know of during the
Ukrainian civil war.
I spent days looking for the Russian army every major publication said were attacking
Ukraine. The keyword Cyber Security industry leader Alperovitch used is "evidently."
Crowdstrike noted that in late 2014, there were 10,000 Russian forces in the region.
When I did the passport and weapons check, it was under the condition there would be no
telephone calls. We went where I wanted to go. We stopped when I said to stop. I checked the
documents and the weapons with no obstacles. The weapons check was important because Ukraine
was stating that Russia was giving Donbass modern weapons at the time. Each weapon is stamped
with a manufacture date. The results are in the articles above.
Based on my findings which the CIA would call hard evidence, almost all the fighters had
Ukrainian passports. There are volunteers from other countries. In Debaltsevo today, I would
question Alperovitch's assertion of Russian troops based on the fact the passports will be
Ukrainian and reflect my earlier findings. There is no possibly, could be, might be, about
it.
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? Could the investment made by Google and some
very large players have anything to do with the media Crowdstrike is causing?
According to Alperovitch, the CEO of a $150 million dollar cyber security company "And when
you think about, well, who would be interested in targeting Ukraine artillerymen in eastern
Ukraine who has interest in hacking the Democratic Party, Russia government comes to mind, but
specifically, Russian military that would have operational over forces in the Ukraine and would
target these artillerymen."
That statement is most of the proof of Russian involvement he has. That's it, that's all the
CIA, FBI have to go on. It's why they can't certify the intelligence. It's why they can't get
beyond the threshold of maybe.
Woodruff then asked two important questions. She asked if Crowdstrike was still working for
the DNC. Alperovitch responded "We're protecting them going forward. The investigation is
closed in terms of what happened there. But certainly, we've seen the campaigns, political
organizations are continued to be targeted, and they continue to hire us and use our technology
to protect themselves."
Based on the evidence he presented Woodruff, there is no need to investigate further?
Obviously, there is no need, the money is rolling in.
Second and most important Judy Woodruff asked if there were any questions about conflicts of
interest, how he would answer? This is where Dmitri Alperovitch's story starts to unwind.
His response was "Well, this report was not about the DNC. This report was about information
we uncovered about what these Russian actors were doing in eastern Ukraine in terms of locating
these artillery units of the Ukrainian army and then targeting them. So, what we just did is
said that it looks exactly as the same to the evidence we've already uncovered from the DNC,
linking the two together."
Why is this reasonable statement going to take his story off the rails? First, let's look at
the facts surrounding his evidence and then look at the real conflicts of interest involved.
While carefully evading the question, he neglects to state his conflicts of interest are worthy
of a DOJ investigation. Can you mislead the federal government about national security issues
and not get investigated yourself?
If Alperovitch's evidence is all there is, then the US government owes some large apologies
to Russia.
After showing who is targeting Ukrainian artillerymen, we'll look at what might be a
criminal conspiracy.
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?
Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years.
Using facts accepted by leaders on both sides of the conflict, the main proof Crowdstrike shows
for evidence doesn't just unravel, it falls apart. Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a
reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Are they using Crowdstrike to
carry this out?
Real Fancy Bear?
Meet the real Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, part of the groups that are targeting Ukrainian
positions for the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. These people were so tech savvy they
didn't know the Ukrainian SBU (Ukrainian CIA/internal security) records every phone call and
most internet use in Ukraine and Donbass. Donbass still uses Ukrainian phone and internet
services.
These are normal people fighting back against private volunteer armies that target their
homes, schools, and hospitals. The private volunteer armies like Pravy Sektor, Donbas
Battalion, Azov, and Aidar have been cited for atrocities like child rape, torture, murder, and
kidnapping. That just gets the ball rolling. These are a large swath of the Ukrainian
servicemen Crowdstrike hopes to protect.
This story which just aired on Ukrainian news channel TCN shows the SBU questioning and
arresting some of what they call an army of people in the Ukrainian-controlled areas. This news
video shows people in Toretsk that provided targeting information to Donbass and people
probably caught up in the net accidentally.
This is a civil war and people supporting either side are on both sides of the contact line.
The SBU is awestruck because there are hundreds if not thousands of people helping to target
the private volunteer armies supported by Ukrainian-Americans.
The first person they show on the video is a woman named Olga Lubochka. On the video her
voice is heard from a recorded call saying " In the field, on the left about 130 degrees. Aim
and you'll get it." and then " Oh, you hit it so hard you leveled it to the ground.""Am I going
to get a medal for this?"
Other people caught up in the raid claim and probably were only calling friends they know.
It's common for people to call and tell their family about what is going on around them. This
has been a staple in the war especially in outlying villages for people aligned with both sides
of the conflict. A neighbor calls his friend and says "you won't believe what I just saw."
Another "fancy bear," Alexander Schevchenko was caught calling friends and telling them that
armored personnel carriers had just driven by.
Anatoli Prima, father of a DNR(Donetsk People's Republic) soldier was asked to find out what
unit was there and how many artillery pieces.
One woman providing information about fuel and incoming equipment has a husband fighting on
the opposite side in Gorlovka. Gorlovka is a major city that's been under artillery attack
since 2014. For the past 2 1/2 years, she has remained in their home in Toretsk. According to
the video, he's vowed to take no prisoners when they rescue the area.
When asked why they hate Ukraine so much, one responded that they just wanted things to go
back to what they were like before the coup in February 2014.
Another said they were born in the Soviet Union and didn't like what was going on in Kiev.
At the heart of this statement is the anti- OUN, antinationalist sentiment that most people
living in Ukraine feel. The OUNb Bandera killed millions of people in Ukraine, including
starving 3 million Soviet soldiers to death. The new Ukraine was founded
in 1991 by OUN nationalists outside the fledgling country.
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.
In the last article exploring the
DNC hacks the focus was on the Chalupas . The article focused on Alexandra, Andrea, and
Irene Chalupa. Their participation in the DNC hack story is what brought it to international
attention in the first place.
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 by Alexandra Chalupa? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and
obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection. These words mirror
Dimitri Alperovitch's identification process in his interview with PBS Judy Woodruff.
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.
Still, this is not enough to show a conflict of interest. Alperovitch's relationships with
the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state
supported hackers do. 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.
In my
previous article I showed in detail how the Chalupas fit into this. A brief bullet point
review looks like this.
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
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 , "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.
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 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.
Alperovitch and Fancy Bear tweet each other?
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?
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 an interview with
Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA. 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."
In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The
network communication goes through a secondary source. This is something you do when you don't
want to be too obvious. Here is another example of that.
Ukrainian Intelligence and the real Fancy Bear?
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.
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.
Trying to keep it hush hush?
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.
Pravy Sektor Hackers and Crowdstrike?
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.
From the Observer.com , " Andrea
Chalupa -- the sister of DNC
research staffer Alexandra Chalupa -- claimed on
social media, without any evidence, that despite Clinton
conceding the election to Trump, the voting results need to be audited to because
Clinton couldn't have lost -- it must have been Russia. Chalupa hysterically
tweeted to every politician on Twitter to audit the vote because of Russia and claimed the TV
show The Americans
, about two KGB spies living in America, is real."
Quite possibly now the former UK Ambassador Craig Murry's admission of being the involved
party to "leaks" should be looked at. " Now both Julian
Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia . Do we credibly
have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access
to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access.
After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for
truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has
released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for
inconvenient truth telling."
"Foreign agents introduced Ukranian politician to US political figures in secretive
lobbying arrangement" [
OpenSecrets ]. "Foreign agents and lobbyists accused of orchestrating a disinformation
campaign attacking former Ukrainian Prime Minister and 2019 presidential candidate Yulia
Tymoshenko actually introduced her to key U.S. political players last year, an investigation
by the Center for Responsive Responsive Politics has found. New FARA records reveal foreign
agents and lobbyists on the payroll of Livingston Group, a lobbying firm run by former Rep.
Bob Livingston (R-La.), played a previously unreported role in Tymoshenko's meetings with
lawmakers during a December 2018 trip to Washington, D.C., including House Intelligence
Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)." • Mostly
Republicans, to be sure, but Schiff's presence is interesting. UkraineGate. SaudiGate.
UAEGate .
Sometime in the next 4 weeks, the Justice Department's inspector general will release an internal review that will reveal the
origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Among other matters, the IG's report is expected to determine "whether there was sufficient
justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place." Critics of the Trump-collusion
probe believe that there was never probable cause that a crime had been committed, therefore, there was no legal basis for launching
the investigation.
The findings of the Mueller report– that there was no cooperation or collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign– seem
to underscore this broader point and suggest that the fictitious Trump-Russia connection was merely a pretext for spying on the campaign
of a Beltway outsider whose political views clashed with those of the foreign policy establishment.
In any event, the upcoming release of the Horowitz report will formally end the the first phase of the long-running Russiagate
scandal and mark the beginning of Phase 2, in which high-profile officials from the previous administration face criminal prosecution
for their role in what looks to be a botched attempt at a coup d'etat.
Here's a brief summary from political analyst, Larry C. Johnson, who previously worked at the CIA and U.S. State Department:
" The evidence is plain–there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments,
to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia. The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called
Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in
the US and UK and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign." (
"How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election" , Larry C. Johnson, Consortium News)
Bingo. Attorney General William Barr has already stated his belief that spying on the Trump campaign "did occur" and that, in
his mind, it is "a big deal". He also reiterated his commitment to thoroughly investigate the matter in order to find out whether
the spying was adequately "predicated", that is, whether the FBI followed the required protocols for such spying, or not. Barr already
knows the answer to this question as he is fully aware of the fact that the FBI used information that they knew was false to obtain
warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Having no hard evidence of cooperation with the Kremlin, senior-level FBI officials and their
counterparts at the Obama Justice Department used parts of an "opposition research" document (The Trump Dossier) that they knew was
unreliable to procure warrants that allowed them to treat a presidential campaign the same way the intelligence agencies treat foreign
enemies; using electronic surveillance, wiretapping, confidential informants and "honey trap" schemes designed to gather embarrassing
or incriminating information on their target. Barr knows all of this already which is why the Democrats are doing everything in their
power to discredit him and have him removed from office.
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4855
His determination to "get to the bottom of this" is not just a threat to the FBI, it's a threat to multiple agencies that may
have had a hand in this expansive domestic espionage operation including the CIA, the NSA, the DOJ, the State Department and, perhaps,
even the Obama White House. No one knows yet how far up the political food-chain the skulduggery actually goes, but Barr appears
to be serious about finding out.
Here's Barr again:
"Many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single confidential informant .I would
like to find out whether that is in fact true. It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence effort
designed to stop the threat as it's being represented."
In other words, Barr knows that the Trump campaign was riddled with spies and he is going to do his damnedest to find out what
happened. He also knows that the FISA warrants were improperly obtained using the shabby disinformation from an opposition research
"hit piece" (The Steele Dossier) that was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, just like he knows that government agents had
concocted a strategy for leaking classified information to the media to fuel the public hysteria. Barr knows most of what happened
already. It's just a matter of compiling the research in the proper format and delivering it in a way that helps to emphasize how
trusted government agents abused their power by pursuing a vicious partisan plot to either destroy the president's reputation or
force him from office. Like Barr said, that's a "big deal".
The name that seems to feature larger than all others in the ongoing Trump-Russia saga, is James Comey, the former FBI Director
who oversaw the spying operations that are now under investigation at the DOJ. But was Comey really the central figure in these felonious
hi-jinks or was he a mere lieutenant following directives from someone more powerful than himself? While the preponderance of new
evidence suggests that the FBI was deeply involved, it does not answer this crucial question. For example, just this week, a report
by veteran journalist John Solomon, showed that former British spy Christopher Steele admitted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
Kathleen Kavalec that his "Trump Dossier" was "political research", implying that the contents couldn't be trusted because they were
shaped by Steele's political bias. Kavalec passed along this information to the FBI which shrugged it off and then, just days later,
used the dossier to obtain warrants to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Think about that for a minute. The FBI had "written
proof . that Steele had a political motive", but went ahead and used the dossier to procure the warrants anyway. That's what I'd
call a premeditated felony.
But evidence of wrongdoing is not proof that Comey was the ringleader, he was just the hapless sad sack who was left holding the
bag. The truth is, Comey was just a reluctant follower. The real architect of the Trump-Russia treachery was the boss-man at the
nation's premier intelligence agency, the CIA. That's where the headwaters of this shameful burlesque are located, in Langley. More
on that in a minute, but first check out this excerpt from an article at The Hill which sums up Comey's role fairly well:
(There) "will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White
House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what's causing the 360-degree
head spin.
"There are early indicators that troubling behaviors may have occurred in all three scenarios. Barr will want to zero in on
a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA
director.
In addition, the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA
sources ("assets," in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher
Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious "government investigator" posing as Halper's assistant and cited in The New
York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more
than an FBI counterintelligence case." (
"James Comey
is in trouble and he knows it" , The Hill)
Why is the Inspector General so curious as to whether Comey "was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous
White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director? And why did Comey draw from "a cast of characters " . that "all
appear to have their genesis as CIA sources"??
Could it be that Comey was just an unwitting pawn in a domestic regime change operation launched by former CIA Director John Brennan,
the one public figure who has expressed greater personal animus towards Trump than all the others combined? Could Trump's promise
to normalize relations with Russia have intensified Brennan's visceral hatred of him given the fact that Russia had frustrated Brennan's
strategic plans in Ukraine and Syria? Keep in mind, the CIA had been arming, training and providing logistical support to the Sunni
militants who were trying to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al Assad. Putin's intervention crushed the jihadist militias delivering
a humiliating defeat to Generalissimo Brennan who, soon after, left office in disgrace. Isn't this at least part of the reason why
Brennan hates Trump?
Regular readers of this column know that I have always thought that Brennan was the central figure in the Trump-Russia charade.
It was Brennan who first referred the case to Comey, just as it was Brennan who "hand-picked" the analysts who stitched together
the dodgy Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which said that "Putin and the Russian government aspired to help Trump's election
chances.") It was also Brennan who persuaded Harry Reid to petition Comey to open an investigation in the first place. Brennan was
chief instigator of the Trump-Russia fiasco, the omniscient puppet-master who persuaded Clapper and Comey to do his bidding while
still-unidentified agents strategically leaked stories to the media to inflame passions and sow social unrest. At every turn, Brennan
was there guiding the perfidious project along. According to journalist Philip Giraldi, the CIA may have even assisted in the obtaining
of FISA warrants on Trump campaign aids as this excerpt from an article at The Unz Review indicates:
"Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve several
requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the British
and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan was
able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the concerns
about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence
sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped.
And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee." (
"The Conspiracy Against Trump" , Philip
Giraldi)
Can you see how important this is? The FBI was having trouble getting warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, so Brennan helped
them out by persuading his foreign intelligence allies (the British and other European intelligence services) to come up with bogus
"intercepted communications linked to American sources," which helped to secure the FISA warrants. We have no idea of what these
foreign agents heard on these alleged intercepted communications, all we know is that they were effectively used to achieve Brennan's
ultimate objective, which was to acquire the means of taking down Trump via a relentless and expansive surveillance campaign.
According to a report in The Guardian (where the story first appeared.):
"GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters) played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI's Trump-Russia
investigation, which began in late July 2016. One source called the British eavesdropping agency the "principal whistleblower".
("British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia ", The Guardian)
Okay, so Brennan twisted a few arms and got his foreign Intel buddies to make uncorroborated claims that got the investigative
ball rolling, but then what? If there was any meat to Brennan's foreign intel, then Mueller would have dug it up and used it in his
report, right? But he didn't. Why?
Because there was nothing there, the whole thing was a sham from the get go. Brennan probably "sexed up" the intelligence so it
would sound like something it really wasn't. (Think: WMD) Again, if there was even a scintilla of hard evidence that Trump's campaign
assistants were in bed with Russia, Mueller would have shrieked it from every mountaintop across America. But he didn't, because
there wasn't any. There was no cooperation, no conspiracy and no collusion. Trump was falsely accused. End of story.
Here's more from the same article:
"The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team
and Moscow ahead of the US election." (Guardian)
"The extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team and Moscow"???
Really? This is precisely the type of hyperventilating journalism that fueled the absurd conspiracy theory that the president
of the United States was a Russian agent. It's hard to believe that we're even discussing the matter at this point.
There was an interesting aside in John Solomon's article that suggests that he might be thinking along the same lines. He says:
"One legal justification cited for redacting the Oct. 13, 2016, email is the National Security Act of 1947, which can be used to
shield communications involving the CIA or the White House National Security Council."
Why would Solomon draw attention to "to shielding communications involving the CIA or the White House", after all, the bulk of
his article focused on the State Department and the FBI? Is he suggesting that the CIA and Obama White House may have been involved
in these spying shenanigans, is that why Kavalec's damning notes (which stated that Steele's dossier could not be trusted.) have
been retroactively classified?
Take a look at this email from the FBI's chief investigator in the Russia collusion probe, Peter Strzok, to his fellow agents
in April 2017.
"I'm beginning to think the agency (CIA) got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn't shared it completely with us. Might
explain all those weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as source of some leaks."
-Peter Strzok.
Ha! So even the FBI's chief investigator was in the dark about the CIA's shadowy machinations behind the scenes. Clearly, Brennan
wanted to prevent the other junta leaders from fully knowing what he was up to.
All of this is bound to come out in the inspector general's report sometime in the next month or so. Both Attorney General William
Barr and IG Horowitz appear to be fully committed to revealing the criminal leaks, the illegal electronic surveillance, the improperly
obtained FISA warrants, and the multiple confidential human sources (spies) that were placed in the Trump campaign. They are going
to face withering criticism for their efforts, but they are resolutely moving forward all the same. Bravo, for that.
Bottom line : The agents and officials who conducted this seditious attack on the presidency never thought they'd be held accountable
for their crimes. But they were wrong, and now their day of reckoning is fast approaching. The main players in this palace coup are
about to be exposed, criminally charged and prosecuted. Some of them will probably wind up in jail.
"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine."
There is ZERO evidence that Russia played ANY role in the 2016 USSA election and yet are sanctioned to the max, threatened
with war etc. HOWEVER there IS proof of the UK/GCHQ involvement.
I am waiting to see if Trump still goes to the UK in June or if he tells them he is "busy with more important things at home"
aka F...off.
Apocalypse, I would say that word describes it pretty well.
Middle English Apocalipse "Revelation (the New Testament book)," borrowed from Anglo-French, borrowed from Late Latin
apocalypsis "revelation, the Book of Revelation," borrowed from Greek apokálypsis "uncovering, disclosure, revelation,"
from apokalyp-, stem of apokalýptein "to uncover, disclose, reveal" (from apo- APO- + kalýptein "to cover, protect,
conceal," of uncertain origin) + -sis -SIS
"No one knows yet how far up the political food-chain the skulduggery actually goes"
Too kind. We all know it is impossible that Susan Rice did not know -- she would have to authorize the FBI to conduct any foreign
spying operations.
And if Susan Rice knew, it is impossible that Barack Obama didn't know. And approved of it, if only by not putting a stop to
it.
The string that hasn't been pulled yet is the role of British intelligence. Brennan is obviously not a very bright man. He's
a post-turtle, so how a dull-witted former communist ended up as head of the CIA is yet another story that needs looking into.
Was he actually a British mole?
The intersection of British establishment political goals and donated assets in the operation of this plot is nakedly obvious.
It will be for Barr to expose that "angle", with the distinct possibility the ultimate origin of this scheme was the Blairite
UK civil service who wished to eliminate a potentially powerful political actor who repeatedly and strongly indicated his unreserved
support for Brexit.
All the things you mentioned were obfuscated by Clinton, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Cheney, several Generals, heads of
state, foreign intelligence. Do you think someone just snaps a finger and the MIC disappears?
You conflate 'past' leadership with the current. The deep state is crumbling. We need to keep digging and indicting until Rothschild
takes a one way rocket off planet Earth.
It will only end when treasonous traitor hang by their necks. I'm still hoping and informing others.
"I've talked to the members of the Israeli government at the highest levels. I know who they want elected here. It's not
Hillary Clinton." – Former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani
The TRUMP Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Israhell.
"... Breaking news today, courtesy of the New York Times , is that a man with a long history of working with the CIA and a female FBI Informant, traveled to London in September of 2016 and tried unsuccessfully to entrap George Papadopolous. The biggest curiosity is that US intelligence or law enforcement officials fully briefed British intelligence on what they were up to. ..."
"... The FBI disingenuously claims they ran Azra Turk at Papadopolous because they were alarmed ostensibly by Russia's attempts to disrupt the 2016 election. But Papadopolous was not seeking out Russian contacts. He was being baited. It was Mifsud and others tied to British and US intelligence who were bringing up the "opportunity" to work with the Russians. ..."
"... The boomerang from the Democratic Party's failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia's 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow's pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton . ..."
"... In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort 's dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress. ..."
"... It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey* interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg ..."
"... Neoliberals and neoconservatives (ie zionists) were behind it and continue to push it. Trump ran to the left of Clinton on both domestic and foreign policy. That's why he won, and why the establishment must present his election as de facto illegitimate, because otherwise they would be forced to admit that the bipartisan convergence around both finance driven economic policy and war on terror interventionism that has described elite politics since Clinton has been a disaster for most ordinary Americans -- of all types and political persuasions -- and needs to be destroyed root and branch. ..."
"... What's the likelihood that Carter Page was a plant in the Trump campaign? After all, he had a history with the US IC and was used as bait in an FBI case to prove Russian operatives' recruiting efforts. It's thought he's the Under Cover Employee alluded to in this case, which resulted in the successful prosecution of Russian spies: ..."
"... Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources (including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were employed by the bureau in this operation: ..."
Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson
The preponderance of evidence makes this very simple--there was a broad, coordinated effort
by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments, to target Donald Trump and
paint him as a stooge of Russia.
The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called Russian collusion case
against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement
organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom and organizations aligned with the
Clinton Campaign.
Breaking news today, courtesy
of the New York Times, is that a man with a long history of working with the CIA and a
female FBI Informant, traveled to London in September of 2016 and tried unsuccessfully to
entrap George Papadopolous. The biggest curiosity is that US intelligence or law enforcement
officials fully briefed British intelligence on what they were up to. Quite understandable
given what we now know about British spying on the Trump Campaign.
The Mueller investigation of Trump "collusion" with Russia prior to the 2016 Presidential
election focused on eight cases:
Proposed Trump Tower Project in Moscow
George Papadopolous --
Carter Page --
Dimitri Simes --
Veselnetskya Meeting at Trump Tower (June 16, 2016)
Events at Republican Convention
Post-Convention Contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak
Paul Manafort
One simple fact emerges--of the eight cases or incidents of alleged Trump Campaign
interaction with the Russians investigated by the Mueller team, the proposals to interact with
the Russian Government or Putin originated with FBI informants, MI-6 assets or people paid by
Fusion GPS, not Trump or his people. There is not a single instance where Donald Trump or any
member of his campaign team initiated contact with the Russians for the purpose of gaining
derogatory information on Hillary or obtaining support to boost the Trump campaign. Not
one.
Simply put, Trump and his campaign were the target of an elaborate, wide ranging covert
action designed to entrap him and members of his team as an agent of Russia.
Let's look in detail at each of the cases.
THE PROPOSED TRUMP TOWER PROJECT IN MOSCOW, according to Mueller's report, originated with an FBI Informant--Felix Sater.
Here's what the Mueller Report states:
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a
Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted
Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a
Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov.
Sater had
known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov
during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and
proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would
license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own.
Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the
Mueller Report).
Mueller,
as I have noted previously , is downright dishonest in failing to identify Sater as an FBI
informant. Sater was not just a private entrepreneur looking to make some coin. He was a fully
signed up FBI informant. Sater's status as an FBI snitch was first exposed in 2012. Sater also
was a boyhood chum of Michael Cohen, the target being baited in this operation. Another
inconvenient fact excluded from the Mueller report is that one of Mueller's Chief Prosecutors,
Andrew
Weissman, signed the deal with Felix Sater in December 1998 that put Sater into the FBI
Informant business .
All suggestions for meeting with the Russian Government, including Putin, originated with
Felix Sater. The use of Sater on this particular project started in September 2015.
Papadopolous was targeted by British and U.S. intelligence starting in late December 2015,
when he is offered out of the blue a job with the
London Centre of International
Law and Practice Limited (LCILP) . The LCILP has all of the hallmarks of an
intelligence front company. LCILP began as an offshoot from another company -- EN
Education Group Limited -- which describes itself as "a global education
consultancy, facilitating links between students, education providers and organisations with an
interest in education worldwide".
EN Education and LCILP are owned and run by Nagi Khalid Idris, a 48-year-old British citizen
of Sudanese origin. For no apparent reason Idris offers Papadopolous a job as the Director of
the LCILP's International Energy and Natural Resources Division. Then in March of 2016, Idris
and Arvinder Sambei (who acted as an attorney for the FBI on a 9-11 extradition case in the
UK), insist on introducing Joseph Mifsud to Papadopolous.
It is Joseph Mifsud who introduces the idea of meeting Putin following a lunch in
London:
"The lunch is booked for March 24 at the Grange Holborn Hotel,. . . . "When I get there,
Mifsud is waiting for me in the lobby with an attractive, fashionably dressed young woman with
dirty blonde hair at his side. He introduces her as Olga Vinogradova." (p. 76)
"Mifsud sells her hard. "Olga is going to be your inside woman to Moscow. She knows
everyone." He tells me she was a former official at the Russian Ministry of Trade. Then he
waxes on about introducing me to the Russian ambassador in London." (p. 77)
"On April 12, "Olga" writes: "I have already alerted my personal links to our conversation
and your request. The embassy in London is very much aware of this. As mentioned, we are all
very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump. The Russian Federation
would love to welcome him once his candidature would be officially announced."
And it is Mifsud who raises the possibility of getting dirt on Hillary:
"Then Mifsud returns from the Valdai conference. On April 26 we meet for breakfast at the
Andaz Hotel, near Liverpool Street Station, one of the busiest train stations in London. He's
in an excellent mood and claims he met with high-level Russian government officials. But once
again, he's very short on specifics. This is becoming a real pattern with Mifsud. He hasn't
offered any names besides Timofeev. Then, he leans across the table in a conspiratorial manner.
The Russians have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, he tells me. "Emails of Clinton," he says. "They
have thousands of emails."
Here again we encounter the lying and obfuscation of the Mueller team. They falsely
characterize Mifsud as an agent of Russia. In fact, he has close and longstanding ties to both
British and US intelligence (
Disobedient Media lays out the Mifsud mystery in detail ).
Mifsud was not alone. The FBI and the CIA also were in the game of trying to entrap
Papadopolous. In September of 2016, Papadopolous was being wined and dined by Halper (who has
longstanding ties to the US intelligence community) and Azra Turk, an FBI Informant/researcher
( see NY
Times ).
The FBI disingenuously claims they ran Azra Turk at Papadopolous because they were alarmed
ostensibly by Russia's attempts to disrupt the 2016 election. But Papadopolous was not seeking
out Russian contacts. He was being baited. It was Mifsud and others tied to British and US
intelligence who were bringing up the "opportunity" to work with the Russians.
CARTER PAGE
The section of the Mueller report that deals with Carter Page is a total travesty. Mueller
and his team, for example, initially misrepresent Page's status with the Trump campaign--he is
described as "working" for the campaign, which implies a paid position, when he was in fact
only a volunteer foreign policy advisor. Mueller also paints Page's prior experience and work
in Russia as evidence that Page was being used by Russian intelligence, but says nothing about
the fact that Page was being regularly debriefed by the CIA and the FBI during the same period.
In other words, Page was cooperating with US intelligence and law enforcement. But this fact is
omitted in the Mueller report.
Mueller eventually accurately describes Page's role in the Trump campaign as follows:
In January 2016, Page began volunteering on an informal, unpaid basis for the Trump Campaign
after Ed Cox, a state Republican Party official, introduced Page to Trump Campaign officials.
Page told the Office that his goal in working on the Campaign was to help candidate Trump
improve relations with Russia. To that end, Page emailed Campaign officials offering his
thoughts on U.S.-Russia relations, prepared talking points and briefing memos on Russia, and
proposed that candidate Trump meet with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
In communications with Campaign officials, Page also repeatedly touted his high-level
contacts in Russia and his ability to forge connections between candidate Trump and senior
Russian governmental officials. For example, on January 30, 2016, Page sent an email to senior
Campaign officials stating that he had "spent the past week in Europe and had been in
discussions with some individuals with close ties to the Kremlin" who recognized that Trump
could have a "game-changing effect . .. in bringing the end of the new Cold War. The email
stated that " [t]hrough [his] discussions with these high level contacts," Page believed that
"a direct meeting in Moscow between Mr. Trump and Putin could be arranged.
The Mueller presentation portrays Carter Page in a nefarious, negative light. His contacts
with Russia are characterized as inappropriate and unjustified. Longstanding business
experience in a particular country is not proof of wrong doing. No consideration is given at
all to Page's legitimate concerns raising about the dismal state of US/Russia relations
following the US backed coup in the Ukraine and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by
Russia.
Page's association with the Trump campaign was quite brief--he lasted seven months, being
removed as a foreign policy advisor on 24 September. Page was not identified publicly as a
Trump foreign policy advisor until March of 2016, but the evidence presented in the Mueller
report clearly indicates that Page was already a target of intelligence agencies, in the US and
abroad, long before the FISA warrant of October 2016.
While serving on the foreign policy team Page continued his business and social contacts in
Russia, but was never tasked by the Trump team to pursue or promote contacts with Putin and his
team. In fact, Page's proposals, suggestions and recommendations were either ignored or
directly rebuffed.
The timeline reported in the Mueller report regarding Page's trip to Russia in early July
raises questions about the intel collected on that trip and the so-called "intel" revealed in
the Steele Dossier with respect to Page. Carter admits to meeting with individuals, such as
Dmitry Peskov and Igor Sechin, who appear in the Steele Dossier. Page's meetings in Moscow
turned out to be innocuous and uneventful. Nothing he did resembled clandestine activity. Yet,
the Steele report on that visit suggested just the opposite and used the tactic of guilt by
association to imply that Page was up to something dirty.
The bottomline for Mueller is that Page did not do anything wrong and no one in the Trump
Campaign embraced his proposals for closer ties with Russia.
DMITRI SIMES
The targeting and investigation of Dmitri Simes is disgusting and an abuse of law
enforcement authority. Full disclosure. I know Dmitri. For awhile, in the 2002-2003 time
period, I was a regular participant at Nixon Center events. For example, I was at a round table
in December 2002 on the imminent invasion of Iraq. Colonel Pat Lang sat on one side of me and
Ambassador Joe Wilson on the other. Directly across the table was Charles Krauthammer. Dmitri
ran an honest seminar.
The entire section on Dmitri Simes, under other circumstances, could be viewed as something
bizarre and amusing. But the mere idea that Simes was somehow an agent of Putin and a vehicle
for helping Trump work with the Russians to steal the 2016 election is crazy and idiotic. Those
in the FBI who were so stupid as to buy into this nonsense should have their badges and guns
taken away. They are too dumb to work in law enforcement.
Dmitri's only sin was to speak calmly, intelligently and rationally about foreign policy
dealings with Russia. We now know that in this new hysteria of the 21st Century Russian scare
that qualities such as reason and rationality are proof of one's willingness to act as a puppet
of Vladimir Putin.
TRUMP TOWER MEETING (JUNE 9, 2016)
This is the clearest example of a plant designed to entrap the Trump team. Mueller, once
again, presents a very disingenuous account:
On June 9, 2016, senior representatives of the Trump Campaign met in Trump Tower with a
Russian attorney expecting to receive derogatory information about Hillary Clinton from the
Russian government. The meeting was proposed to Donald Trump Jr. in an email from Robert
Goldstone, at the request of his then-client Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian real-estate
developer Aras Agalarov. Goldstone relayed to Trump Jr. that the "Crown prosecutor of Russia
... offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that
would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia" as "part of Russia and its government's
support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr. immediately responded that "if it's what you say I love it,"
and arranged the meeting through a series of emails and telephone calls.
The meeting was with a Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
The Russian attorney who spoke at the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had previously worked
for the Russian government and maintained a relationship with that government throughout this
period oftime. She claimed that funds derived from illegal activities in Russia were provided
to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. Trump Jr. requested evidence to support those claims,
but Veselnitskaya did not provide such information.
Ignore for a moment that no information on Hillary was passed or provided (and doing such a
thing is not illegal). The real problem is with what Mueller does not say and did not
investigate. Mueller conveniently declines to mention the fact that Veselnitskaya was working
closely with the firm Hillary Clinton hired to produce the Steele Dossier. NBC News reported on
Veselnitskaya:
The information that a Russian lawyer brought with her when she met Donald Trump Jr. in June
2016 stemmed from research conducted by Fusion GPS, the same firm that compiled the infamous
Trump dossier, according to the lawyer and a source familiar with the matter.
In an interview with NBC News, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya says she first received
the supposedly incriminating information she brought to Trump Tower -- describing alleged tax
evasion and donations to Democrats -- from Glenn Simpson , the Fusion GPS owner, who had been
hired to conduct research in a New York federal court case.
Even a mediocre investigator
would recognize the problem of the relationship between the lawyer claiming to have dirty,
damning info on Hillary with the firm Hillary hired to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. This was
another botched set up and the Trump folks did not take the bait.
EVENTS AT THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION
This portion of the Mueller report is complete farce. Foreign Ambassdors, including the
Russian (and the Chinese) attend Republican and Democrat Conventions. Presidential candidates
and their advisors speak to those Ambassadors. So, where is the beef? Answer. There isn't any.
That this "event" was considered something worthy of a counter intelligence investigation is
just one more piece of evidence that law enforcement and intelligence were weaponized against
the Trump campaign.
POST-CONVENTION CONTACTS WITH RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR KISLYAK
Ditto. As noted in the previous paragraph, trying to criminalize normal diplomatic contacts,
especially with a country where we share important, vital national security interests, is but
further evidence of the crazy anti-Russian hysteria that has infected the anti-Trumpers.
Pathetic.
MANAFORT
If Paul Manafort had rebuffed Trump's offer to run his campaign, he would be walking free
today and still buying expensive suits and evading taxes along with his Clinton buddy, Greg
Craig. Instead, he became another target for DOJ and intel community and the DNC, which were
desperate to portray Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. Thanks to John Solomon of The Hill, we now
know the impetus to target
Manafort came from the DNC :
The boomerang from the Democratic Party's failed attempt to connect
Donald Trump to Russia's 2016 election meddling
is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow's pesky neighbor,
Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases
tried, to help Hillary
Clinton .
In its most detailed account yet, Ukraine's embassy in Washington says a Democratic National
Committee insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump's campaign chairman
and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.
In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor
Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on
Paul Manafort 's dealings inside the country, in
hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.
Manafort was not colluding, but the Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration most
certainly were.
Take these eight events as a whole a very clear picture emerges--US and foreign intelligence
(especially the UK) and US law enforcement collaborated in a broad effort to bait the Trump
team with ostensible Russian entreaties in order to paint Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. That
effort is now being exposed and those culpable will hopefully face justice. This should sicken
and alarm every American regardless of political party. Will justice be served?
I just read the following about special visas approved for some of the FBI "operatives"
(from SD at CTH): "It wasn't just the CIA that was using spies to "dirty up" Trump
associates. The FBI was doing it too. There was the infamous Natalia Veselnitskaya who is
known for her part in the Trump Tower meeting. She had been banned from the country but got a
special visa signed off by Preet Bahara of the FBI, Southern District of New York. Henry
Greenburg, the known FBI informant who tried to entrap Roger Stone, also got a special visa.
And I'm sure there are many more "
IMO, there is no coming back from this. Apart from this Deep State coup attempt, we have seen
that democracy is a shame, it's all theater. The Establishment (which includes GOP) is
constantly working to undermine Trump and thwart his plans to do what the American people
want and elected him for. What I've found quite disturbing is that the controlling puppet
masters have not let up in trying to remove or neutralize Trump. As if they can't wait even 4
years to again fully stack the deck and regain total control. They are not willing to concede
that 2016 was a political black swan event involving a celebrity billionaire American icon.
And conceding and allowing this fluke to be rectified I'm 4 short years is worse than their
pushback exposing the political system as a rigged game.
The events of the last 2.5 years have radically altered my views. I no longer have any
faith in democracy (voting), the government, the federal courts, law enforcement, et al. And
I can't see me regaining any faith in them. What I have seen in the past 2.5 years is kind of
like finding out my wife of decades, whom I idolized, has been cheating with my friend from
childhood, whom I would've laid down my life for. And all the other people close to me not
telling me.
It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and
was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were
intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about
U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey*
interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg
*Tracey, btw, is on the left. But like Glenn Greenwald and others on the left he is an
honest journalist interested in the truth.
The "left" was not behind and does not buy into this Russia psyop. Neoliberals and
neoconservatives (ie zionists) were behind it and continue to push it. Trump ran to the left
of Clinton on both domestic and foreign policy. That's why he won, and why the establishment
must present his election as de facto illegitimate, because otherwise they would be forced to
admit that the bipartisan convergence around both finance driven economic policy and war on
terror interventionism that has described elite politics since Clinton has been a disaster
for most ordinary Americans -- of all types and political persuasions -- and needs to be
destroyed root and branch.
To see how and why the "left" differs from corporate identity-politicking liberals in the
above regard consider how it is that Tulsi Gabbard is both the Dem candidate most respected
by principled Trump supporters on this site and others and the Dem candidate most reviled,
ignored, and slandered by DNC liberals and neocons alike.
The enemy to principled conservatives and the left in this country is the bipartisan
establishment corporate neoliberalism of the RNC and DNC alike.
What's the likelihood that Carter Page was a plant in the Trump campaign? After all, he had a
history with the US IC and was used as bait in an FBI case to prove Russian operatives'
recruiting efforts. It's thought he's the Under Cover Employee alluded to in this case, which
resulted in the successful prosecution of Russian spies:
Page is just a goofball grifter. He's not a plant. That is silly. When they saw names like
Page and Manafort the Democrats pounced because they knew the could cast aspersions.
I'm not sure about Mifsud. I think it would be hard for Mueller to knowingly indict
Papadop if Mifsud were an asset of the US (or even known to be an asset of allies). I think
it is more likely Mifsud was a free agent.
All these guys Mifsud, Page, Papadop were grifters, not doing real work. Just running
around trying to make a buck by claiming to facilitate meetings. It's a shame it bit them and
not a crime to do what they did. At the same time, I can't help but see some kharmic justice.
GET A JOB, you poly sci lightweights!
This anonymous commentator has never spent time in senior levels of business or government.
There is a whole class of people who do not see themselves as Grifters but more as "ideas
men".
The best offer valuable perspectives on the world, can really open doors and otherwise add
value. At the other end of the spectrum are con men. Political campaigns and large
corporations of any sort attract these people in droves. The skill in management is to sort
the wheat from the chaff. Trump is good at that.
Yes, Page often comes off as a bit crazy and incoherent. But he may be crazy like a fox. In
the end he was never charged with ANYTHING and it's my understanding he represented himself
legally throughout the investigation, opting not to hire counsel. I find it odd that others
were prosecuted for process crimes but he escaped even THAT fate.
His participation in the Trump campaign, limited as it was, was nevertheless KEY in
finally obtaining a FISA warrant after other attempts failed.
Consider it silly if you want. I view him at least worthy of suspicion. His hapless
demeanor could be his schtick , when his education, experience and IC connections are
taken into consideration.
Page represents himself poorly even when he knows a lot is on the line. Look at how
frustrated Gowdy got with him. Clearly Page didn't learn much from plebe year in terms of 5
basic responses. Compare the difference with Barr for instance.
While the Trident program is a big deal, every now and then USNA has mids that are
diligent about getting good grades but not very smart. I knew one my year. Page is clearly in
that vein. Don't miss that he didn't get into any elite program after graduation (SWO is the
default). And that he was a poly sci major. The saying is "poly sci, QPR high" (QPR is
quality point rating or GPA). Of course this is not to say there aren't some good SWOs or
poly sci majors. But there's a definite correlation I'm noting. It fits with what his
reputation is.
Furthermore, the guy has had an uneventful career, bouncing around. He went to a lower
bulge bracket (not Goldman) and didn't seem to stick. And his Russian colleagues said he was
an idiot and a boaster. We're not talking i-banker smart. Wouldn't trust him to do an NPV or
other economic analysis. And then after that we have the grifting and the shmoozing.
Kid is a lightweight. A slightly less coffee-boy coffee boy.
''They cannot convict based on a law that was passed after the act was committed''
Money laundering has always been against the law of course....the NY law just firmed up
the due diligence that is suppose to be done in transactions. I don't think there is a statute of limitations on things like
fraud, tax evasion and money laundering but I will check it out to see
Catherine, in current PC thinking, merely passing the salt to a Russian guest at a dinner
party makes you "an unregistered foreign agent" of Russia bent on implementing Putin's evil
plans.
As for certifying real estate deals, the same crowd would view buying someone a MacDonalds
hamburger as attempted bribery.
''As for certifying real estate deals, the same crowd would view buying someone a MacDonalds
hamburger as attempted bribery.''
Hardly. 7 million dollar cash deals for a condo thru a shell company is a red flag
however..as is buying property for 1 million and selling it unimproved the next year for 2
million...or buying a house in LA 11 million and selling it 9 months later for 8 million.
That 'in between money" is someone's pay off....that's how it works.
Money laundering is epidemic in the US and Europe....Israeli mafia, Russian oligarchs,
African dictators looting their country's treasury and running it through a real estate
washing machine deal. Far be from me to sweep the fairy dust out of Trump supporters eyes but, as I said,
Trump's troubles are far from over. We will see what comes out in the future.
The soft coup against Donald Trump failed. He has to run hard and sure to win in 2020 to
avoid an indictment in NY State when he leaves the Presidency. Corporate Democrats will do
their damnedst again to put forth their weakest pro war candidate like the aged, apparently
demented, Joe Biden. This fiasco and the recent coup attempt in Venezuela make the Keystone
Cops appear competent.
I put this all down to Washington DC being completely isolated inside their credentialed
bubble. It is just like corporate CEOs, who think they know exactly what they are doing. But,
in reality, they are destroying the stabilizing middle class by extracting and hording wealth
and turning mid-America into their colony. Globalist and nationalist oligarchs are after each
other's throat over who controls the flow of money.
We live on a very finite world dependent on one sun in an expanding universe. Just like
Boeing, Bayer or Volkswagen, the splintering world is starting to crash all around them. Even
as they deny it, this is a multi-polar world now. It is not going back without a world war
which would destroy civilization and could make the world uninhabitable for humans.
And the best that our government can do is warn us not to wash our chicken before cooking it
because washing merely spreads the salmonella that our food industry is unable to prevent
from infecting it.
The trouble is that those CEO's do know exactly what they are doing. Making money the
only way possible in a business environment in which outsourcing can sometimes be the only
thing that pays.
The idea was that Trump was going to change that environment. Bannon calls its "economic
nationalism" but in truth it's now just economic survival. Survival for those whose jobs are
outsourced. Survival for the country as a whole, ultimately. That was Trump's core programme. It was the programme that made him different from all
other Western politicians, "populist" or status quo. Do you see any sign that it's being
implemented, or has that programme too got bogged down in the swamp?
If we are speaking about criminal justice, there is some chance that we will see persons such
as Jim Comey, who persists in his smug higher calling act, prosecuted for what was a clear
cut violation in divulging classified material through a lawyer intermediary to the NYT. I
suspect the higher calling bit has been prompted in part because he knows that he screwed up
both on the facts and in law and he is justifying his screw up to himself, and possibly also
rehearsing his defense, with the rationale that he was only trying to do the right thing.
Yeah, he may have had the facts all wrong, the Russians, etc, etc, but the worst that can be
said is that he had been competent, there was no intent. That defense doesn't do much for the
FBI's once held reputation for competence, but that appears to be gone anyway.
With regard to what will be turned up concerning the actual roots of the travesty, the
heavily politicized faux investigation into the Clinton e mails and targeting of the Trump
campaign on a predicate that is somewhere between nebulous and non existant, I think a
criminal prosecution arising from that investigation, even if it is serious, is unlikely for
two main reasons. First, what will be the charged violations? As best I can see right now,
they will have to entail some imaginative application of fraud statutes, defrauding the FISC,
defrauding the US, informants and assets lying to their handlers, or process crimes like Bob
Mueller's partisan posse relied upon (ugly); and second, something like the Comey defense
will interpenetrate all the individuals and entities involved: we may have been incredible
bunglers, but that is the worst of it. We really believed these charlatans who conned us into
this debacle. Sorry, but we thought we were doing the right thing.
Now if we are talking about seeing some kind of political or moral justice, I'm not too
optimistic we will get much satisfaction there either and we will probably have to wait for
history. The reason is that Barr will conduct this investigation by the rule book. That means
that what we see developed through the process, indictment, prosecution, etc, is likely
all,that we will ever see. Barr is very unlikely to produce a politcized manifesto to be
employed as a smear weapon like the once reputable Mueller did.
Anyway, until we see a special FGJ empanelled, some search warrants executed, some tactical
immunities offered, everything is on the come.
What probability do you assign that any top official will be indicted and prosecuted? I
mean Brennan, Clapper, Comey & Lynch.
Second, what probability do you assign that Trump will declassify the relevant documents
and communications like the FISA application,the originating EC, the tasking orders for
FBI/CIA spying, etc.
The question really comes down to Trump. Does he really want to expose the Swamp and pay
the price or just use it for rhetorical & political purposes? When considering
probabilities and looking at his track record in office on foreign policy relative to his
campaign stance, I would say the probability is less than 30% that Brennan & Clapper will
be indicted.
The question is only very partly what Trump wants, in some abstract sense. Situations like
this commonly have a strong escalatory logic. So one needs to ask whether or not he has
rational reason to believe that unless he can destroy those who have shown themselves
prepared to stop at nothing to destroy him, they will eventually succeed.
If the answer is yes - and while I think it may very well be, I am not prejudging the
issue - then a key question becomes whether Trump will conclude that his most promising
loption is to go after the conspirators by every means possible.
Involved here are questions about who he is listening to, and how competent they are.
But the escalatory processes are not simply to do with what Trump decides. In particular,
a whole range of legal proceedings are involved. The referral in relation to Nellie Ohr is
likely to be the fist of a good few. In addition, Ed Butowsky's lawsuits, and those against
Steele, have unpredictable potentialities.
The intelligence & law enforcement apparatus in collusion with the media and the
establishment of both parties went after him hard. As Larry notes here, they went to
considerable effort to entrap those related to his campaign to impugn him. Mueller spent $35
million trying to find an angle. Even after the Mueller report stated there was no collusion
they're sill after him. So that's not going to end any time soon.
Trump may have good instincts but his judgment of people so far to staff his
administration is not very inspiring. He had Jeff Sessions as his AG and he let him hang in
there for nearly two years while Mueller ran riot. He's surrounded himself with neocons on
foreign policy. It seems his only real advisor is Jared. Everyone else he's got around him
are from the same establishment that's going after him. He hasn't taken advise from Devin
Nunes, who has done more to uncover the sedition than anyone else. If he had he would have by
now declassified all the documents & communications. The impression I have is his primary
motivation is building his brand & less about governance and wielding power. Take for
example his order to withdraw from Syria. Bolton & the Pentagon are thumbing their noses
at him.
Well, there have been several criminal referrals prior to the recent one on Nellie Ohr.
There's the McCabe referral and the 8 referrals by Devin Nunes. I've not read any report of
the empaneling of a grand jury yet. I agree with you that these law suits have the potential
for great embarrassment, however to hold those responsible for the sedition accountable will
require iron will & intense focus on the part of Trump to get his AG to assign
prosecutors who don't have the axe to "protect" the "institution" and to create an
opportunity for public awareness of the extent that law enforcement & intelligence became
a 4th branch of government. My opinion is that his skill is in his instinctual understanding
of the current political zeitgeist and his ability to manipulate the media including social
media to project his brand. He's not an operational leader making sure his team executes his
vision & strategy.
Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy
Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources
(including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were
employed by the bureau in this operation:
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
A foreign intelligence asset was used to justify surveillance of Trump[ and some of his associates
Notable quotes:
"... What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent? ..."
"... The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant"). ..."
"... The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale. ..."
"... Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power. ..."
"... I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors. ..."
"... if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know? ..."
"... Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost. ..."
"... Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance. ..."
"... From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. ..."
"... He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI. ..."
"... its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered. ..."
"... Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this? ..."
"... A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies. ..."
"... It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries ..."
"... If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary. ..."
"... An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him ..."
"... A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination ..."
"... 'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.' ..."
"... I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief. ..."
"... Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it. ..."
"... Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs. ..."
"... Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly: ..."
"... Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. ..."
"... One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...? ..."
"... What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this? ..."
"... Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun? ..."
"... British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy. ..."
"... British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion. ..."
"... Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people. ..."
"... still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources ..."
"... I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia. ..."
"... Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are. ..."
"... It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things ..."
The revelations from US Government records about the FBI/Intel Community plot to take out Donald Trump continue to flow thanks
to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch. The latest nugget came last Friday with the release of FBI records detailing their recruitment
and management of Britain's ostensibly retired Intelligence Officer, Christopher Steele. He was an officially recruited FBI source
and received at least 11 payments during the 9 month period that he was signed up as a Confidential Human Source.
You may find it strange that we can glean so much information from
a document dump that is almost
entirely redacted . The key is to look at the report forms; there are three types--FD-1023 (Source Reports), FD-209a (Contact
Reports) and FD-794b (Payment Requests). There are 15 different 1023s, 13 209a reports and 11 794b payment requests covering the
period from 2 February 2016 thru 1 November 2016. That is a total of nine months.
These reports totally destroy the existing meme that Steele only came into contact with the FBI sometime in July 2016. It is important
for you to understand that a 1023 Source Report is filled out each time that the FBI source handler has contact with the source.
This can be an in person meeting or a phone call. Each report lists the name of the Case Agent; the date, time and location of the
meeting; any other people attending the meeting; and a summary of what was discussed.
What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive
contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent?
The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA)
and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps
who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant").
We can be pretty sure this predates any alleged Russian "hacking" (unless it occurred as a result of alleged Russian hacking
of the DNC in 2015).
This needs to be pinned down if anyone is to be successfully prosecuted for creating this treasonous hoax.
A very closely related topic, Victor Davis Hanson is onto something but it is darker than he suggests,
https://www.nationalreview.... Paraphrasing, he gives the typical, rally around the flag we must stop the Russians intro but
then documents how govt flaks abused their power to influence our elections and then makes the point, 'this is why the public
is skeptical of their claims'.
The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their
hand on the scale.
Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are
trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the
mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't
support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power.
I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in
the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors.
What I can't figure out is: if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the
Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance
with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know?
Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them
to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost.
Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie
that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance.
From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole
thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews
by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. And of course the media narrative that Rep. Nunes, Goodlatte and others were endangering "national
security" by casting aspersions on the "patriotic" law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got
their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI.
Of course, he had most likely already done so and its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered
to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered.
Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was
not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this?
The point is not merely a quibble. A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law
enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as
'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies.
It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of
agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries.
Another related matter has to do with the termination of Steele as a 'Confidential Human Source.'
It has long seemed to me that it was more than possible that this was not to be taken at face value. If, as seems likely,
both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately
involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information
to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary.
An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back
channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him.
A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the
supposed termination.
When on 31 January 2017 – well after the publication of the dossier by BuzzFeed – Ohr provided reassurance that he could continue
to help feed information to the FBI, Steele texted back:
"If you end up out though, I really need another (bureau?) contact point/number who is briefed. We can't allow our guy to be
forced to go back home. It would be disastrous."
At that point, Solomon tells us that 'Investigators are trying to determine who Steele was referring to.' This seems to me
a rather important question. It would seem likely, although not certain, that he is talking about another Brit. If he is, would
it have been someone else employed by Orbis? Or someone currently working for British intelligence? What is the precise significance
of 'forced to go back home', and why would this have been 'disastrous'?
Another crucial paragraph:
'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in
London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence
probes in American history.'
The earlier contacts may be of little interest, but there again they may not be.
As it happens, it was following Berezovsky's arrival in London in October 2001 that the 'information operations' network he
created began to move into high gear. It is moreover clear that this was always a transatlantic operation, and also fragments
of evidence suggest that the FBI may have had some involvement from early on.
I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large
measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures
close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication
which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief.
The original attempt came in a radio programme broadcast by the BBC – which was to become known to some of us as the 'Berezovsky
Broadcasting Corporation' – on 16 December 2006, presented by Tom Mangold, a familiar 'trusty' for the intelligence services.
(A transcript sent out from the Cabinet Office at the time is available on the archived 'Evidence' page for the Inquiry, at
http://webarchive.nationala... , as HMG000513. There is an interesting and rather important question as to whether those who
sent it out, and those who received it, knew that it was more or less BS from start to finish.)
The programme was wholly devoted to claims made by the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets, who was presented as an independent
'due diligence' expert, without any mention of the rather major role he had played in the original 'Orange Revolution.'
Back-up was provided by his supposed collaborator in 'due diligence', the former FBI operative Robert 'Bobby' Levinson. No
mention was made of the fact that he had been, in the 'Nineties, a, if not the lead FBI investigator into the notorious Ukrainian
Jewish mobster Semyon Mogilevich.
The following March Levinson would disappear on the Iranian island of Kish, on what we now know was a covert mission on behalf
of elements in the CIA.
Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether
the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson
were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important
issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it.
Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including
McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense.
So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs.
Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem
to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly:
Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with
the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted
his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation
culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. His initial contact with old friends at the FBI Eurasian
Crime Task Force is awfully similar to his contacting these same friends in 2016 after deciding his initial Trump research was
potentially bigger than mere opposition research.
One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get
'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously
I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt
on Trump...how is this not the same...?
Even worse is that the FBI was using this same foreign agent that a presidential
candidate had hired to get dirt on an opponent... Even knowing nothing about legalities this just doesn't look very good...
Stupid question? As the Col. has explained, the President can declassify any document he pleases. So, why doesn't Donaldo unredact
the redacted portions of these bullcrap docs? What is he afraid of? That the Intel community will get mad and be out to get him?
Isn't time for him to show some cojones?
Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this
have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence
source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation
that may have already begun?
British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete),
his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated
desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting
others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has
not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too
big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy.
Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing
agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? And therefore without having to mess about with any formal FISA warrant
thingy's ... But, then use what might be found (or plausibly alleged) to try to get a proper FISA warrant later on (July 2016)?
'Parallel Discovery' of sorts; with Fusion GPS also a leaky cut-out: channelling media reports to be used as confirmation of Steele's
"raw intelligence" in the formal FISA application(s)?
Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they
would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates,
" Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching
him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, "
That's a good question, could it legally enable an end run around the FISC until enough evidence was gathered for a FISC surveillance
authorization?.
I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the
NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws
they have that prohibits spying on their people.
Only a matter of time until someone figured out the same method could be used to "meddle" in national affairs.
I understand, but still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources such as Steele about
a very high profile American citizen and businessman -- aren't our intelligence services competent enough to have known and discovered
as much if not more about Trump than other countries' intelligence services? I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years
ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In
my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia.
Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them
are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these
people think they are.
It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things.
Brennan role in weaponizing dossier now became more clear.
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, Fusion GPS hiring of Nellie Ohr -- the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr -- also shows that Steele's role in producing the dossier may be exaggerated. Ohr is a Stanford Ph.D. whose expertise is Russia and she appears to be fluent in Russian. She may have conducted interviews or written parts of the dossier. ..."
"... The dossier, however, only has Steele's name on it -- helping to credential the research as an "intelligence product." ..."
"... A Democratic consultant and Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra Chalupa, told the Clinton campaign about Manafort's work for Yanukovich. "I flagged for the DNC the significance of his hire," Chalupa told CNN in July of this year. ..."
"... Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS in April, shortly after Trump hired Manafort. Manafort's role now allowed Simpson to highlight corruption that he already knew to exist, from his reporting. A line from the dossier states: ..."
"... Steele -- it notes -- had not lived or worked in Russia for nearly 25 years, but his name "at a minimum" would be useful in marketing whatever his firm pulled together. Plus, Steele had a good relationship with the FBI and could "spill secrets" to journalists. ..."
"... it is likely that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook cited Fusion GPS's work in a July 22 interview after embarrassing leaks of Democratic National Committee emails. He told ABC News's George Stephanopoulos that "some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." ..."
"... The FBI did launch an investigation into possible collusion, however, known by "only a dozen or so people at the FBI," including then-director James Comey and Peter Strzok, who was chosen to supervise the investigation. ..."
"... She said by August 2016, the CIA had "verified the key finding of the dossier" to the point that it was having "eyes only" top secret meetings with President Obama about it. ..."
"... CIA Director John Brennan had also briefed top lawmakers on Russian efforts to help Trump last summer and had said the CIA had limited legal ability to investigate Russian connections to Trump, prompting Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) to write a public letter to the FBI -- which collects domestic intelligence -- about the threat of Russian interference. ..."
"... It appears that Brennan was briefing Reid on the Steele dossier. ..."
"... Brennan apparently sent the dossier to the White House, prompting the "eyes only" meetings. ..."
"... The Post also writes that the "material was so sensitive that CIA Director John O. Brennan kept it out of the president's daily brief, concerned that even that restricted report's distribution was too broad." ..."
"... But as Tablet asks, "if the material was so sensitive that it had to be kept out of the PDB and withheld from the Senate majority leader, why was someone telling The Washington Post about it?" ..."
Did the Obama administration launch an investigation into the Trump campaign based solely off of unverified political opposition
research? And was that "research" dressed up and given more credibility than it should have? It appears that way
based on an
investigation of open-source information by Tablet.
The outlet's investigation begins with a June 24, 2017, Facebook post by Mary Jacoby, the wife of Glenn Simpson, the former
Wall Street Journal reporter who started Fusion GPS, the firm behind the dossier.
Jacoby, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who once shared bylines with Simpson, bragged how her husband was not getting
the credit he deserved for the dossier.
"It's come to my attention that some people still don't realize what Glenn's role was in exposing Putin's control of Donald Trump,"
she wrote on Facebook. "Let's be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn."
Until this day, the dossier is often referred to as the "Steele dossier," named after the former British spy Christopher Steele
who is believed to have authored the document.
Steele's background has been used by collusion-believers to argue that the document is credible. But Jacoby's post suggests that
Steele might not have played as big of a role in the dossier as he is given credit.
Indeed, Fusion GPS hiring of Nellie Ohr -- the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr -- also shows that Steele's
role in producing the dossier may be exaggerated. Ohr is a Stanford Ph.D. whose expertise is Russia and she appears to be fluent
in Russian. She may have conducted interviews or written parts of the dossier.
The dossier, however, only has Steele's name on it -- helping to credential the research as an "intelligence product."
Tablet also took a look at Simpson and Jacoby's work for the WSJ . In April 2007 -- in the lead-up to the 2008 election
-- they co-wrote a story about Republican links to Russians.
In that story, titled "How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington," they detail how prominent Republicans helped open doors
for "Kremlin-affiliated oligarchs and other friends of Vladimir Putin."
They reported on Viktor Yanukovich, who had paid political fixer Paul Manafort to introduce Yanukovich to powerful Washington,
DC, figures. They later reported on May 14, 2008, that Manafort's lobbying firm was escorting Yanukovich around Washington. Yanukovich
would later become president of Ukraine in 2010.
Tablet explains how their reporting may have been the origins of the Trump dossier:
So when the Trump campaign named Paul Manafort as its campaign convention manager on March 28, 2016, you can bet that Simpson
and Jacoby's eyes lit up. And as it happened, at the exact same time that Trump hired Manafort, Fusion GPS was in negotiations
with Perkins Coie, the law firm representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, to see if there was interest in the firm continuing
the opposition research on the Trump campaign they had started for the Washington Free Beacon. In addition to whatever sales pitch
Simpson might have offered about Manafort, the Clinton campaign had independent reason to believe that research into Manafort's
connections might pay some real political dividends: A Democratic consultant and Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra
Chalupa, told the Clinton campaign about Manafort's work for Yanukovich. "I flagged for the DNC the significance of his hire,"
Chalupa told CNN in July of this year.
Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS in April, shortly after Trump hired Manafort. Manafort's role now allowed Simpson to highlight
corruption that he already knew to exist, from his reporting. A line from the dossier states:
Ex-Ukrainian President YANUKOVYCH confides directly to PUTIN that he authorised (sic) kick-back payments to MANAFORT, as alleged
in western media Assures Russian President however there is no documentary evidence/trail.
Tablet notes that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would later find corruption by Manafort related to money laundering (before he
joined the Trump campaign). It also points out that Tony Podesta -- Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's brother -- worked
for Manafort at the time he represented Yanukovich. (The Podesta Group disbanded this year after those connections were made public,
and the special counsel is reportedly investigating Podesta too.)
Tablet notes that while Simpson had begun working on the dossier on Trump collusion with Russia, he was also working for a Russian
lawyer to undermine an American law called the Magnitsky Act and that Steele may have been hired to disguise that contradiction.
Steele -- it notes -- had not lived or worked in Russia for nearly 25 years, but his name "at a minimum" would be useful in
marketing whatever his firm pulled together. Plus, Steele had a good relationship with the FBI and could "spill secrets" to journalists.
Ohr -- Simpson's next hire -- also hadn't lived in Russia for decades and was "not a spy, or even a journalist." "In this world,
she was definitely an amateur," Tablet writes.
"Presumably, as a result of all the above, much of the reporting in the dossier is recognizably the kind of patter that locals
in closed or semi-closed societies engage in to impress expats -- the kind of thing you hear in a bar, or on the cab ride from the
airport to the hotel," it says.
Tablet then goes into the bad shape of U.S. intelligence on Russia -- likely making officials less skeptical of the dossier even
though, to date, they have not been able to confirm any of its allegations on collusion.
And Tablet notes that it is likely that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook cited Fusion GPS's work in a July 22 interview
after embarrassing leaks of Democratic National Committee emails. He told ABC News's George Stephanopoulos that "some experts are
now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump."
At that point, a tech firm had attributed the leaks to Russia but was not able to explain why. The FBI was looking at the leak
but had not yet publicly determined political motivation.
"But the DNC and Clinton campaign did have an oppo-research firm under contract that was in the middle of putting together a file
that would claim that the Russians were trying to get Trump elected," Tablet notes.
The FBI did launch an investigation into possible collusion, however, known by "only a dozen or so people at the FBI," including
then-director James Comey and Peter Strzok, who was chosen to supervise the investigation.
But by late October, they had not yet found any evidence that showed Russia was working to elect Trump. So, ten days before the
election, angry Clinton supporters and unnamed intelligence officials
spoke to
the New York Times in an October 31, 2016, story about what the investigation had found so far.
Jacoby would post that story in her June 24 Facebook post, slamming the FBI and accusing it of "ineptitude," while the CIA "hopped
to and immediately worked to verify" the dossier.
She said by August 2016, the CIA had "verified the key finding of the dossier" to the point that it was having "eyes only"
top secret meetings with President Obama about it.
Thus, while the document could not be verified and was not used in any intelligence assessment because of its inability to be
verified, it was now the topic of meetings with the president.
CIA Director John Brennan had also briefed top lawmakers on Russian efforts to help Trump last summer and had said the CIA
had limited legal ability to investigate Russian connections to Trump, prompting Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) to write a public letter
to the FBI -- which collects domestic intelligence -- about the threat of Russian interference.
Reid then wrote another letter to Comey after he reopened the investigation into Clinton's emails -- accusing him of letting Trump
slide.
"It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his
top advisers, and the Russian government -- a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every
opportunity," he wrote.
"I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public and yet, you continue to resist calls
to inform the public of this critical information."
That "information" Reid was referring to was the dossier, according to Tablet:
According to David Corn's Oct. 31, 2016, article in Mother Jones , the Nevada lawmaker was referencing the findings
of "a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence."
Corn now explains that the "former Western intelligence officer -- who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters
and who now works with a U.S. firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients" is Christopher Steele. According
to Corn, Steele said 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."
It appears that Brennan was briefing Reid on the Steele dossier.
Brennan apparently sent the dossier to the White House, prompting the "eyes only" meetings.
"An envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried 'eyes
only' instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides," the
Washington
Post
reported on June 23, 2017.
"So was the Steele dossier in the envelope?" Tablet asks.
The Post writes that inside that envelope "was an intelligence bombshell" -- a report drawn from sourcing deep inside
the Russian government that detained Putin's direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the presidential race,
defeat or at least damage Hillary Clinton, and help elect Donald Trump.
The Post also writes that the "material was so sensitive that CIA Director John O. Brennan kept it out of the president's
daily brief, concerned that even that restricted report's distribution was too broad."
But as Tablet asks, "if the material was so sensitive that it had to be kept out of the PDB and withheld from the Senate majority
leader, why was someone telling The Washington Post about it?"
Tablet writes:
Sources and methods are the crown jewels of the American intelligence community. And yet someone has just told a major American
newspaper about a "report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that captured Putin's specific instructions."
If the CIA had a human intelligence source that close to Putin, publication of the Post article could have exposed that
source -- doing incalculable damage to American national security. He and many of his loved ones would then have presumably died
horrible deaths.
Or, as Mary Jacoby surmised, it was her husband's handiwork that landed on the president's desk.
The public's tax dollars were spent on creating fake "evidence" to tie Trump with Russia, a false narrative that
put the planet at heightened risk for nuclear war, for the sake of the Clinton's hurt feelings.
Notable quotes:
"... In other words, the public's tax dollars were spent on creating fake "evidence" to tie Trump with Russia, a false narrative that put the planet at heightened risk for nuclear war, for the sake of the Clinton's hurt feelings. ..."
"... Even more interesting is the close relationship Isikoff had with the DNC during the 2016 Presidential election. According to an email from the DNC released by Wikileaks , Isikoff attended the "Open World Society's forum" as the guest of DNC official Ali Chalupa. In the email, Chalupa states that she was invited to the forum to speak specifically about Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for Donald Trump. Chalupa goes on to state that she has been working with Isikoff for the past few weeks and that at the event, she was able to get him "connected him to the Ukrainians." She adds: ..."
"... "I invited Michael Isikoff whom I've been working with for the past few weeks and connected him to the Ukrainians. More offline tomorrow since there is a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I'm working on you should be aware of." ..."
On Friday, the much anticipated
"Nunes Memo"
was finally released to the general public.
Disobedient
Media previously reported on the push to prevent the memo from being released. While there is much contained in the four pages,
the most glaring issue contained in the memo is the FBI's willful concealment of pertinent details of which they were required by
law to turn over to the FISA court when seeking the initial surveillance warrant on
Carter Page , a former volunteer foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign.
According to the memo, former director James Comey signed three FISA applications on behalf of the FBI. Additionally, Deputy Director
Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente, and acting Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein, each signed one or more applications on behalf of the DOJ.
Under 50 U.S.C. § 1805(d)(1) , a FISA order on
an American citizen must be renewed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) every 90 days. In order to protect the
rights of Americans, each subsequent renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. This means that the in order to be granted
a renewal, the government is required to produce all material and relevant facts to the court, including any information which may
be potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application.
On four separate occasions the Obama administration essentially claimed before the FISA court that Page had betrayed his country
by working for a hostile foreign nation, and therefore it was necessary that the government violate his Fourth Amendment rights.
However, in this case, the government purposely withheld relevant information from the government not once, but four separate times.
According to the memo, at no time during the initial application process for the warrant to surveil Page, or in any of the three
renewals of that application, did the government disclose to the FISA Court the nature of their relationship with Christopher Steele,
his relationship with the Democratic National Committee (DNC), or his relationship with the Clinton campaign. Instead, the memo simply,
yet vaguely states that, "Steele was working for a named U.S. person."
Instead, the government purposefully withheld information from the court that the "dossier" compiled by Steele was done so on
behalf of the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was further withheld from the court that the DNC had paid Steele over $160,000
for his work in compiling this "dossier", and that the money was
funneled to Steele through the law firm Perkins Coie,
which represents both the Hillary Clinton campaign as well as the DNC in legal matters. According to the
National Review , the Clinton campaign and the DNC
paid at least $9.1 million to Perkins Coie from mid-2015 to late 2016.
The government further held from the court the fact that the FBI had authorized payments to Steele. According to the
New York Post , in October 2016 the FBI contracted
to pay Steele $50,000 to "help corroborate the dirt on Trump."
In March of 2017, CNN also reported that the FBI had entered into an
arrangement with Steele, whereby they agreed to
cover all of his expenses.
While it is extremely disconcerting that the government willfully concealed the existence of their financial relationship with
Steele, a foreign national, what is more troubling is the fact that the government used tax payer dollars to do so. In other words,
every single American who did not vote for Hillary Clinton, whether they voted for Trump or a third party candidate or did not vote
at all – were forced to finance the Clinton campaign-funded opposition research.
In other words, the public's tax dollars were spent on creating fake "evidence" to tie Trump with Russia, a false narrative that
put the planet at heightened risk for nuclear war, for the sake of the Clinton's hurt feelings.
Why the media refuses to mention or cover this fact, this author does not know. But this is an extremely important fact that every
American, whether left, right, up, down, should remember, as it is the perfect example of the corruption which exists within our
tax payer-funded institutions, which we are told to have nothing but the utmost respect for.
According to the memo, in an effort to corroborate Steele's dossier, the FBI extensively cited a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News
article by Michael Isikoff, titled " U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump
adviser and Kremlin ", which focuses on Page's July 2016 trip to Moscow. However, when presenting this article to the court the
FBI falsely assessed that Steele did not provide this information directly to Isikoff. Meaning that the FBI was aware that the article
they presented to the court was not corroborating evidence from a separate source, because the information in the article was provided
to Isikoff by Steele himself. In fact, as the memo points out, Steele himself has stated in British court filings that in September
2016 he met with Yahoo News , as well as several
other outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker.
What's more, in an article published on January 12, 2017, Isikoff reports
on a story by the Wall Street Journal in which Christopher Steele is identified as the author of the infamous dossier, and even notes
that Steele was an " FBI asset ". However, what is
most striking about this article is the fact that despite receiving the underline information which served as the basis for his own
article in September, Isikoff pretends have not known that Steele was the source of the dossier.
Even more interesting is the close relationship Isikoff had with the DNC during the 2016 Presidential election. According
to an email from the DNC released by Wikileaks ,
Isikoff attended the "Open World Society's forum" as the guest of DNC official Ali Chalupa. In the email, Chalupa states that she
was invited to the forum to speak specifically about Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for Donald Trump. Chalupa goes on
to state that she has been
working with Isikoff for the past few weeks and
that at the event, she was able to get him "connected him to the Ukrainians." She adds:
"I invited Michael Isikoff whom I've been working with for the past few weeks and connected him to the Ukrainians. More
offline tomorrow since there is a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something
I'm working on you should be aware of."
According to the memo, Steele's relationship with the FBI as a source continued until late October 2016, when he was terminated
for what the FBI defines as the most serious violations, "an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI".
This unauthorized disclosure occurred in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones
article by David Corn, the reporter who broke the infamous Mitt Romney
"47 Percent" story.
Again, the FBI did not notify the court that Steele was leaking information to media outlets, or that he was terminated by the
FBI after doing so for the second time.
Before and after his termination, Steele maintained contact with then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, whose wife,
Nellie Ohr, was employed by Fusion GPS. Ohr would later tell the FBI in an interview in September 2016, that Steele had stated that
he, "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president."
Lastly, the memo also reveals that the Steele dossier was so crucial to the investigation, that Deputy Director McCabe testified
in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information. This admission
by the former Deputy Director is damning, as it proves that, if it were not for the Clinton campaign and DNC funded dossier created
by a foreign national, there would have been no surveillance of Page, and ultimately there would have never been a special counsel
appointed.
At the end of the day, every American, regardless of their position on the political spectrum, should be worried about the fact
that the FBI and DOJ sought and were granted a warrant to spy on an opposing political campaign based on a document that the FBI
itself had neither verified or corroborated. If the FISA court does in fact employ strict "safeguards" and procedures in order to
ensure that the rights of American citizens are not being systematically violated, how is it that the FBI and DOJ were able to obtain
a surveillance warrant based on unverified allegations? And why did Congress overwhelmingly vote to
reauthorize
Section 702? Vote up! 15 Vote down! 0
This whole ball of wax should be in the public hands. Straight up clear cut case for a real civilian grand jury. As far removed
from the government control as possible. Its a corruption issue. Nobody in government has clean hands.
This is a problem because across the 5-eyes intel agencies are being given extra-judicial powers to do basically whatever they
want without oversight and without legal boundaries. This assumes the agencies will never become politicised, and that no individual
within the agencies will ever have an axe to grind against an ex, or a petty hatred to pursue, or political agendas of their own.
What FISA-gate shows is that this is clearly not the case. We need the reimposition of free speech, transparency and of civilian
rule of government.
Only an informed public can really be in charge of its elected government. We need to be in charge again because civilians
are fast being kettled into a snare where we have no say in the decisions that our governments take. It's being decided by the
deep state bureaucracy
The article is two years old now. Looks like Paul Craig Roberts was right. A very strange thing is that Trump proved to be
very good for weapon industry and not so bad for neocons. Still the coup is continuing.
Notable quotes:
"... There is an "elite" coup attempt underway against the U.S. President-elect Trump. ..."
"... The coup is orchestrated by the camp of Hillary Clinton in association with the CIA and neoconservative powers in Congress. ..."
"... The plan is to use the CIA's "Russia made Trump the winner" nonsense to swing the electoral college against him. The case would then be bumped up to Congress. Major neocon and warmonger parts of the Republicans could then move the presidency to Clinton or, if that fails, put Trump's vice president-elect Mike Pence onto the throne. The regular bipartisan war business, which a Trump presidency threatens to interrupt, could continue. ..."
"... The institutional Trump enemies are: ..."
"... The weapons industry which could lose its enormous sales to its major customers in the Persian Gulf should a President Trump reduce U.S. interference in the Middle East and elsewhere. ..."
"... The neoconservatives and Likudniks who want the U.S. as Israel's weapon to strong arm the Middle East to the Zionists' benefit. ..."
"... The general war hawks, military and "humanitarian interventionists" to whom any reduction of the U.S. role as primary power in the world is anathema to their believes. ..."
"... The CIA-controlled European media, the politicians in Washington's European vassal states, NATO officials, and the brainwashed European peoples will support the coup against Trump. ..."
"... PCR has gone senile. Trump IS the elite ..."
"... And Trump will continue the MidEast wars. He made it clear. ..."
"... The CIA, along with Boeing and all the other contractors, banks, insurers, and rabble of the Wall Street machine are the Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... Andrea Chalupa @AndreaChalupa Dec 11 ..."
"... 1.) Electoral College meets Dec. 19. If Electors ignore #StateOfEmergency we're in, & Trump gets elected, we can stop him Jan. 6 in Congress ..."
"... 2.) If any objections to Electoral College vote are made, they must be submitted in writing, signed by at least 1 House member & 1 Senator ..."
"... 3.) If objections are presented, House & Senate withdraw to their chambers to consider their merits under procedures set out in federal law. ..."
The below theses are thus far only a general outlay...
There is an "elite" coup attempt underway against the U.S. President-elect Trump.
The coup is orchestrated by the camp of Hillary Clinton in association with the CIA and neoconservative powers in Congress.
The plan is to use the CIA's "Russia made Trump the winner" nonsense to swing the electoral college against him. The
case would then be bumped up to Congress. Major neocon and warmonger parts of the Republicans could then move the presidency
to Clinton or, if that fails, put Trump's vice president-elect Mike Pence onto the throne. The regular bipartisan war business,
which a Trump presidency threatens to interrupt, could continue.
Should the coup succeed violent insurrections in the United States are likely to ensue with unpredictable consequences.
No general plan has been published. The scheme though is pretty obvious by now. However, the following contains some speculation.
The priority aim is to deny Trump the presidency. He is too independent and a danger for several power centers within the ruling
U.S. power circles. The selection of Tillerson as new Secretary of State only reinforces this (Prediction: Bolton will not get
the Deputy position.) Tillerson is for profitable stability, not for regime change adventures.
The institutional Trump enemies are:
The CIA which has become the Central Assassination Agency under the Bush and Obama administrations. Huge parts
of its budgets depend on a continuation of the war on Syria and the drone assassination campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan
and elsewhere. Trump's more isolationist policies would likely end these campaigns and the related budget troughs.
The weapons industry which could lose its enormous sales to its major customers in the Persian Gulf should a President
Trump reduce U.S. interference in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The neoconservatives and Likudniks who want the U.S. as Israel's weapon to strong arm the Middle East to the Zionists'
benefit.
The general war hawks, military and "humanitarian interventionists" to whom any reduction of the U.S. role as primary
power in the world is anathema to their believes.
The article is a documented and accurate description of a coup that is underway. The extraordinary lies that are being perpetrated
by the media and by members of the US government have as their obvious purpose the prevention of a Donald Trump presidency. There
is no other reason for the extraordinary blatant lies for which there is not a shred of evidence. Indeed, there is massive real evidence
to the contrary. Yet the coup proceeds and gathers steam.
President Eisenhower warned us more than a half century ago of the danger that the military/security complex presents to US democracy.
In the decades since Eisenhower's warning, the military/security complex has become more powerful than the American people and is
demonstrating its power by overturning a presidential election.
Will the coup succeed?
In my opinion, former and present members of the US government and the media would not dare to so obviously and openly participate
in a coup against democracy and an elected president unless they expect the coup to succeed.
It is an easy matter for the ruling interests to bribe electors to vote differently than their states. The cost of the bribes
is miniscule compared to the wealth and income streams that a trillion dollar annual budget provides to the military/security complex.
The fake news of a Putin/Trump election-stealing plot generated by unsupported allegations of present and former members of US intelligence,
the lame-duck President Obama, and the presstitute media provide the cover for electors to break with precedent "in order to save
America from a Russian stooge."
The CIA-controlled European media, the politicians in Washington's European vassal states, NATO officials, and the brainwashed
European peoples will support the coup against Trump.
The only ones speaking against the coup are the voters who elected Trump-all of whom are alleged to have been deceived by Russian
fake news -- the Russian government, and the 200 websites falsely described by the Washington Post and the secret organization PropOrNot
as Russian agents.
In other words, those objecting to the coup are the ones described by the coup leaders as those who made the coup necessary.
I do not know that the coup will succeed, but looking at the commitment so many high level people have made to the coup, I conclude
that those bringing the coup expect it to succeed.
Therefore, we should take very seriously the expectation of success that those who control levers of power are demonstrating.?
As usual, Paul Craig Roberts is dead-on correct. Just wish Mr. T. would hook him up in some way in the new admin as an economic
adivosor of some sorts. He could make a yuuuuuuuge difference.
Above and beyond what is going on behind the scenes they are pushing for all out civil war. If the electors vote for Trump then
it's on to Jan.20 where multiple sources are calling out for an outright riot. Michael Moore is calling for a not a protest but
a revolution. In response, Trump supporters are now being encouraged to be 2nd amendment patriots to defend against a left wing
radical takeover. No matter what happens you can sure you won't hear the truth on the MSM. In fact TPTB are making sure right
now they shut down the "alt- right" lest any more muppets awaken.
"A whole group of trolls has been assigned to denigrate PCR's warning, which underlines its importance."
Count me in as one of those trolls, because I find PCR to be a sensationalist. In less than two weeks, limp-dick Obama won't
have another word to say about the "Russian hack", aka bullshit, and nothing Hillbilery has to say about anything will make any
more noise than a goose flying backwards and farting in a thunderstorm.
The CIA, along with Boeing and all the other contractors, banks, insurers, and rabble of the Wall Street machine are the
Military Industrial Complex.
The Imperial City (D.C.) of Isengard and Mordor (Wall Street) want fresh bodies and blood to enrich themselves. No more pointless
wars! No more body bags for blood money!
When the hell will the U.S. Military cut off the head of the beast and restore the Republic?
We can hope Trump can hack his way there, but if not, step up soldiers!
This may be the last chance, tipping point is here.
I have believed PCR is controlled opposition for a while now. I also believe the electors will, like the American People, deliver
Trump to the Oval Office. I also believe this whole mess is mainly aimed at undermining Trump's mandate from the People so repugs
in CONgress can give him a hard time. That won't work either because they'll be inundated with demands from their constituencies.
Screw 'em.
I agree with the premise of this article, but disagree that the deep state expects to succeed in a coup via the Electors. Using
the tired metaphor, the deep state plays chess. They are merely laying the groundwork for something later.
Paul Craig Roberts...the Armed Forces are with Trump. The CIA are a bunch of effete college girly-boys that should be outed
and either be arrested or die for crimes against the state.
FUCK THE CIA and their contractors. Whores for sale to the highest bidder. Enemies of the Republic. Death to them all!
If the Defense-Industrial Complex does overturn the election, their victory will be their pyrrhic last stand and it will be the
end of its dominance. The American people will totally destroy it.
what the United States and NATO are doing on Russia's western frontier is similar to what the German Wehrmacht did in preparation
for Operation Barbarossa.
...but we lost because every POTUS since JFK is a show pony or he goes to the glue factory (and he knows it). The establishment
won again so we wait in the shadows for the aging angry beast to die...
So, all indications are that he will receive > 270 electoral votes on 12/19, so the next day of action for this cabal is Jan.
6th when they can again attempt to overturn?
So we will have a lot of propaganda thrown at us yet again trying to influence that, but a) how many people actually pay attention
to this crap expecially over the holiday season, and b) how many people pay attention to the MSM anymore anyhow.
That is a large part of their angst - nobody seems to be listening to their bullshit.
I think that's when the House actual gives there nihil obstat and impramatur to the electoral college votes, and so members can
attempt to hang the process up there as per this below which was in the original article.
Andrea Chalupa @AndreaChalupa Dec 11
1.) Electoral College meets Dec. 19. If Electors ignore #StateOfEmergency we're in, & Trump gets elected, we can stop him Jan.
6 in Congress
2.) If any objections to Electoral College vote are made, they must be submitted in writing, signed by at least 1 House member
& 1 Senator
3.) If objections are presented, House & Senate withdraw to their chambers to consider their merits under procedures set out
in federal law.
...
Once Trump gets in office the resultant corruption probe afterwards should be epic! We'll know by Monday if the electoral college
stays the course or steers the country towards anarchy.
Seems to me the CIA and the POTUS has made a complete mess of the world. Do the people really have a desire for them to solve
the problem when they caused the problem??? I think not!
I have CIA contacts.
They are freaked. .. It is even affecting some of them in the physical health department. (Not enough of them. IMHO.)
Now is NOT the time to fold to intimidation or threats. Now is the time to double down and make them back up threats and/or
expose themselves and show exactly which side they are on.
They DO NOT have enough manpower or assets in the states (or anywhere) to silence everyone.
If the Satanic Witch or other Ass Wipes Inc puppet other than Donald Trump (I'm not 100% sure about him but he is the best
shot we have, IMO.) gets put into office, shaking off these assholes will be much harder or impossible all together.
And BTW, in case you think you can just close your eyes and tuck back in a hole until the battle is over they have plans well
under way to kill you and your family anyway. .. I'm sure if you have read any of my previous posts you know what some of those
ways are.
That's my field report and firm recommendations for 12/17/16.
Live Hard, The CIA / CeyeA Are Not The Good Guys Here, Not Even Close, Die Free
I notice Trump has more than a few ex military people around him. A few generals. I wonder if the would call to active military
to stand down? Or to counter a coup?
My first thoughts after Trump selected the Generals was to organize a Military-lead counter coup. He has also aligned a massive
amount of wealth by his other appointments. I pray & hope I am correct.
The Republican electors their families and the GOP have way too much to lose. Republicans will never get elected again...and all
their lives would be in danger. Plus you would get domestic terror groups spring up across the country. Remember Trump won most
of the counties so his support is strong and getting stronger.
The soros and clintons of the world will not be able to control the backlash as they think..and you really would then see russia
and china stiring up big trouble in america.
Donald Trump, doesn't strike me as the type of person, that would lay down for such criminality... and if he puts up a fight,
like I think he will, anyone that supports him will fight with him. You can count me in that fighting group!
"FBI's Steele story falls apart: False intel and media contacts were flagged before FISA" [
The Hill ]. "[Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec's] observations were
recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify
securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign
adviser Carter Page and the campaign's contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked
collusion theory
[T]he FBI swore on Oct. 21, 2016, to the FISA judges that Steele's 'reporting has been
corroborated and used in criminal proceedings' and the FBI has determined him to be 'reliable'
and was 'unaware of any derogatory information pertaining' to their informant, who
simultaneously worked for Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
and the Clinton campaign to find Russian dirt on Trump . She quoted Steele as saying, "Payments
to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami," according to a copy of her
summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens
United.
Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: "It is important to note
that there is no Russian consulate in Miami." Kavalec, two days later and well before the FISA
warrant was issued, forwarded her typed summary to other government officials. The State
Department has redacted the names and agencies of everyone she alerted. It is unlikely that her
concerns failed to reach the FBI." •
"It is unlikely" is doing a lot of work there; surely we can find out of the FBI was on the
distribution list of Kavalec's memo? That said, wowsers, does Steele look sketchy.
This "shadowy Russian" might well be Sergey Skripal. This suggests that Steele dossier was CIA operation with British MI6 as transfer mechanism and
Steele as a cover. And implicates Brennan. So this is next level of leaks after "Stormy Daniel"...
Another NYT leak out of a set of well coordinated leans from anonymous intelligence officials ;-) Poor Melania...
Notable quotes:
"... But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times. ..."
"... If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries. ..."
"... More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what. ..."
"... Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down. ..."
"... the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy ..."
"... How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind ..."
"... You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS? ..."
"... "U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds. ..."
"... Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it... ..."
"... Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us. ..."
"... 'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot. ..."
"... i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump. ..."
"... Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth." ..."
"... And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works ..."
"... So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw? ..."
When they said "Russian collusion", few expected it to be between the CIA and a "shadowy
Russian operative." And yet, according to a blockbuster NYT report, that's precisely what
happened.
* * *
The CIA paid $100,000 last year to a Russian operative who claimed to have derogatory
information about President Trump, including a video tape of the Republican engaged with
prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. If the video showed Trump, it would support claims made in
the infamous Steele dossier, the salacious opposition research report financed by the Clinton
campaign and DNC.
But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other
information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to
a fascinating report from The New York Times.
American spies made contact with the Russia early in 2017 after he offered to sell the Trump
material along with cyber hacking tools that were stolen from the NSA that year, according to
The Times. U.S. intelligence officials told The Times they were so desperate to retrieve those
tools that they negotiated with the operative for months despite several red flags, including
indications that he was working in concert with Russian intelligence.
Another red flag was the Russian's financial request. He initially sought $10 million for
the information but dropped the asking price to $1 million.
After months of negotiations, American spies handed over $100,000 in cash in a brief case to
the Russian during a meeting in Berlin in September.
The operative also offered documents and emails that purported to implicate other Trump
associates, including former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But The Times viewed the
documents and reported that they were mostly information that is already in the public
domain.
The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers, showed the video
purported to be Trump to a Berlin-based American businessman who served as his intermediary to
the CIA. But according to the Times, the footage and the location of the viewing raised
questions about its authenticity.
The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was
Trump, and there was no audio. The Russian also showed the video to his American partner at the
Russian embassy in Berlin, a sign that the operative had ties to Russian intelligence.
The Russian stonewalled the production of the cyber tools, and U.S. officials eventually cut
ties, according to The Times. After the payout in Berlin, the man provided information about
Trump and his associates of questionable veracity.
The Americans gave him an ultimatum earlier in 2018 to either play ball, leave Western
Europe, or face criminal charges. He left, according to The Times, which interviewed U.S.
officials, the American intermediary and the Russian for its article.
The Times' U.S. sources -- who appear to paint the American side in a positive light -- said
that they were reluctant to purchase information because they did not want to be seen buying
dirt on the president.
The officials also expressed concern that the Russian operative was planting disinformation
on behalf of the Russian government. U.S. officials were worried that the Russian government
has sought to sow discord between U.S. intelligence agencies and Trump. The revelation that the
CIA purchased dirt on him would likely do the trick.
The Times report also has other new details.
Four other Russians with ties to the spy world have surfaced over the past year offering to
sell dirt on Trump that closely mirrors allegations made in the dossier, according to the
article. But officials have reason to believe that some of sellers have ties to Russian
intelligence agencies.
The Times also provides new details on Cody Shearer, a notorious operative close to the
Clintons. Shearer was recently revealed to have shopped
around a so-called "second dossier" prior to the campaign which mirrored the sex allegations of
the Steele report.
According to The Times, he has criss-crossed Europe over the past six months in an attempt
to find video footage of Trump from the Moscow hotel room. Shearer claimed to have information
from the FSB, Russia's spy service, that a video existed of Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow
hotel room.
He shared a memo making the allegations with his friend and fellow Clinton fixer, Sidney
Blumenthal. Blumenthal in turn passed the memo to his friend, Jonathan Winer, a Department of
State official. Winer then gave the information to Steele who provided it to the FBI in October
2016.
Steele also provided information to Winer, who wrote up a two-page memo that was circulated
within the State Department.
Trump has denied allegations that he used prostitutes in Moscow. He has called the dossier a
"hoax" and "crap."
* * *
On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted that "according to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony
secrets on "Trump" to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be
paid over time. I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is
all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!
Of course, if Trump really wants to "drain the swamp", any such decision would have
originate with him. Tags PoliticsCommercial Banks
Release the pee pee video now! No one pee peed in the $100,000 video in question. The
15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump,
and there was no audio. And how can anyone be more fascinated by the prospect of pee pee than
by the fact that US intelligence agencies were buying bad information from extremely shady
foreigners in an attempt to overthrow the President of the United States?
Trump is starting to assume that the people are dumber than Obowel did. Earth to Don, you
sir have the drain pump, you sir have surrounded yourself with Swamp creatures.... You sir
are.............
According to this, the Russians stole the hacking tools needed to cut through the Swamp
levee, which were developed by the NSA, and now the CIA cannot buy them back. Now, since the
USA wanted its Swamp, the Russians are more than happy to let the USA drown in its swamp.
Anyone have a link for the Qanon posts. I haven't seen them in a couple of weeks since he
left 8chan where he was posting. I don't want the Youtube BS, I just want the link... anyone
got one. Its strangely not googleable... LOLZ.
If you think that the CIA is a U.S. intelligence agency working on the best interests of
the United States, you better wake up and smell the treason. They only work for the best
interests of themselves.
Here is a question. Why does the CIA not come out and clear the air re: Trump?
I mean they were even paying people to come up with dirt. He is now your president and the
country is a fucking mess. Should the CIA not come out and say we tried but we got nothing?
They do have the ability to fix all this Trump shit and yet crickets.
And the best interests of clients. The CIA started out is the muscle for the Dulles
Brothers clients who were being booted out of various countries they were super-exploiting.
The Agency hasn't looked back since.
Nobody got whizzed on. That lurid fantasy came soley out of the head of Hillary Clinton,
given to Blumenthal, passed around and made to look like it came from Russia.
It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald
firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a
building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT
being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping
backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in
front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist
passports floating gently down from the sky.
RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had
CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban
hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief
of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn
Monroe.
The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a
thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b)
in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the
Cold War...
Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope
needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle
attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit
stationary targets reliably.
Drain the swamp! Townsquare justice for Odumbo and Hitlery! George Soros to bathe in the
Amazon River with 1 million Piranha Fish until it completely disappears. Drain the evil
Dumorat swamp. Drain the banana republic CIA and FBI. Our tax dollars and constitution did
not pay for this shit.
With today's technology, the CIA is most likely working on a fake video for you right now.
They might release it on Vimeo or Netflix to cover the costs and give themselves plausible
deniability. To add a finishing touch they will make a fake video of Julian Assange claiming
he is releasing it. You'll be in hog heaven. Which is where folks like you go just before
being slaughtered by your owners and turned into spam.
Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to
Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...
And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even
pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in
my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!
No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and
evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7
during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.
So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is
so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull
off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency?
You can't have it both ways.
We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all
day, where would we be without them?
Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to
Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...
And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even
pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in
my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!
No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and
evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7
during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.
So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is
so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull
off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency?
You can't have it both ways.
We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all
day, where would we be without them?
More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help
themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia
is still being stoked no matter what.
Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does
that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine,
McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to
Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the
rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down.
Good point in the last sentence. If someone is going to "drain the swamp" it is going to
have to be the president of the United States. I think I'm correct that he can fire anyone
that works in the executive department for cause. He can also order investigations or hire
people who will launch real investigations.
Mr. President, if you want to "drain the swamp," drain it.
If there was a video it would of been leaked during the election, they have nothing that
sticks on the guy.
All the evidence thus far states
Obama Hillary the FBI, DNC, CIA all spied on Trump and colluded with foreign governments
(U.K. , Ukraine , Russia) to try and dig up dirt to use against Trump (and they more or less
failed).
They turned over every rock they could, look at that stupid hot-mic video in the bus, how
many hours of video did they have to go through to dig up that crumb? they went back
searching through 30+ years of content and thats all they could come up with.... some locker
room talk lol
People have to just face it.
Your government was and still is corrupt and its a weaponized system of control, Your
government colluded with the enemy in a desperate attempt to stop Trump from becoming
president. Your government started a sham "Russia investigation" to cover up its own crimes.
Your government applied a different standard of justice to the clintons than it would have to
you or anyone else.
To date ZERO evidence has been brought forward that Trump or anyone in his campaign did
anything wrong, and the only people that have done anything wrong so far were picked by "the
swamp" to fill positions..... all the others fell into petty perjury Traps on meaningless
topics and insignificant factoids.
Isn't it lovely to find out that your money and mine is being used by government agents to
give us the government they want?
It's sort of like a thug robbing you and using part of your money to pay another thug to
rough you up from time time to time if you ask any questions with the thugs believing it's
for our own good.
Thanks, Hillary, for looking out for us. You and your best buds are the best. Such
bighearted givers! Meanwhile, give our regards to your partner in slime Obama, although it
must pain you to have been bested by 'Beavis' who thinks so much of himself to balance out
how little he impresses anyone who knows him.
"U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can
call off the hounds.
Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of
power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this
himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it...
As taxpayers can we sue the CIA for misusing our funds? Pretty sure that buying sex videos
for commercial release isn't part of the CIA's lawful mandate even at bargain prices.
Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US
intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on
their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own
treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big
bad russkies tricked us.
my sauces tell me that pink pussyhat wearing hollywood types have been called in because
they have a doppelganger for trump and access to 30,000 sexually abused victims that can act
as Russian prostitutes for just ten bucks each. snapchat has a trump emoji that can be transplanted onto any porn video star - male or
female - thus confirming that trump is a serial (serious?) user of ladies of the night
my sauces also tell me that the CIA offers a reward of 100,000 bucks (or 10 BTC) for every
photo-shopped (snap-shopped or porn-shopped) material.
of course, the CIA already owns many many porn movie studios and films, but it would
prefer third "party" movies - not from epstein's island where its operatives choose to rela
with a pizza.
the CIA "pink" budget for such movies is limited to just 5,000 clips or 5 billion of
taxpayers funds, whichever is the higher.
'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the
Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it
hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly
elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope.
Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a
long shot.
i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds.
this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to
trump.
Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I
copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a
cloth."
And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but
my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works.
So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and
more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers
for procurers of hosebags for him to screw?
I mean if they're so concerned about Trump and a couple of hookers... Better put some ice on that, CIA.
You all are so ridiculous and fooled with your "drain the swamp" bs. It's a great idea but
Trump doing it is a joke, I mean just look at who he has hired, what's wrong with you all are
you blind?!!
He can't even fill 1/3 of the government positions he's supposed to and the ones he has
have no business holding the positions given to them and are so incompetent, downright
criminal or just personally horrendous humans that they can't stay in office more than a few
months. All their blatant and moronically concocted lies are backing them into corners every
day that they just try and lie out of again. America is over if we really have gotten to the
point that a group like Trump's has support, it's just astonishing.
"... 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.
Newly released evidence suggests Ukraine played key role in creating
Trump–Russia collusion narrative at behest of Obama officials
As Ukraine underwent dramatic changes
in 2014, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden played a critical role in the Obama
administration's involvement in the revolution that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych.
Following the revolution, Biden would use his influence to help force the creation of the
troubled National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU). Notably, during the 2016 election campaign,
information leaked from NABU about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort that helped to create
the false narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to win the election.
Biden also would use the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to
pressure Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor general. At the time, the
prosecutor had been investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas giant that had appointed
Biden's son, Hunter, as a board member.
President Donald
Trump 's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, recently said, "Keep your eye on Ukraine." In his
comments to the
Washington Examiner , Giuliani highlighted the "plot to create an investigation of
President Trump, based on a false charge of conspiracy with the Russians to affect the 2016
elections."
Obama Administration's 2014 Involvement
On or shortly before Feb. 4, 2014, Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary for European and
Eurasian affairs in the Obama State Department, had a conversation with the U.S. ambassador to
Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, which was intercepted and leaked .
In the call, Nuland and Pyatt appeared to be discussing the ouster of Yanukovych and the
installation of opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk as prime minister.
Nuland favored opposition leader Yatsenyuk over his main rivals Vitali Klitschko and Oleh
Tyahnybok, telling Pyatt: "I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the
governing experience. He's the what he needs is Klitschko and Tyahnybok on the outside."
Toward the end of the conversation , then-Vice President Biden
was discussed as being willing to help cement the changeover in Ukraine:
Geoffrey Pyatt: "We want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come
out here and help to midwife this thing. The other issue is some kind of outreach to
Yanukovych, but we probably regroup on that tomorrow as we see how things start to fall into
place."
Victoria Nuland: "So, on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note [Biden's national security
adviser Jake] Sullivan's come back to me VFR [direct to me], saying you need Biden, and I said
probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details] to stick. So Biden's
willing."
Nuland and Pyatt met with Ukrainian opposition leaders Klitschko and Yatsenyuk, along with
then-President Yanukovych, just days later on Feb. 7, 2014.
Events then moved swiftly. On Feb. 22, 2014, Yanukovych was
removed as president of Ukraine and fled to Russia. On Feb. 27, 2014, Yatsenyuk, the
candidate favored by Nuland, was installed as prime minister of Ukraine.
Klitschko was left out. Notably, Yatsenyuk would later resign
in April 2016 amid corruption accusations.
Biden's Involvement in Ukraine
In April, Biden would get personally involved, as would his son, Hunter. On April 18, 2014,
Hunter Biden was
appointed to the board of directors for Burisma–one of the largest natural gas
companies in Ukraine.
Four days later, on April 22, 2014, Vice President Biden traveled to Ukraine ,
offering his political support and $50 million in aid for Yatsenyuk's shaky new government.
Poroshenko, a billionaire politician, was elected as president of Ukraine on May 25, 2014.
Biden became close to both men and helped Ukraine obtain a four-year, $17.5
billion IMF package in March 2015.
In October 2016, Foreign Policy wrote a lengthy article, "
What Will Ukraine Do Without Uncle Joe ," which described Biden's role in the removal of
Ukraine's general prosecutor, Victor Shokin. Shokin, the choice of Poroshenko, was portrayed as
fumbling a major corruption case and "hindering an investigation into two high-ranking state
prosecutors arrested on corruption charges."
The United States pushed for Shokin's removal, and Biden led the effort by personally
threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees. In an interview
with The Atlantic, Biden recalled telling Poroshenko: "Petro, you're not getting your billion
dollars. It's OK, you can keep the [prosecutor] general. Just understand -- we're not paying if
you do." Shokin was removed by
Poroshenko shortly thereafter, in early 2016.
But according to reporting by The Hill, at the time of his firing, Shokin had been
investigating Burisma. Shokin's investigation into Burisma had previously been
disclosed in June 2017, by Front News International.
Burisma is
owned by Nikolai Zlochevsky (also known as Mykola Zlochevsky), the former minister of
ecology for Ukraine. According to
Front News , Zlochevsky issued
a "special permit for the extraction of a third of the gas produced in Ukraine" to his own
company, Burisma.
According to the Ukrainian nonprofit Anti Corruption Action Center, Zlochevsky owns 38
permits held by 14 different companies -- with Burisma
accounting for the majority with 33 of the permits. Zlochevsky left Ukraine after
Yanukovych fled to Russia during the Ukrainian Revolution known as
Euromaidan.
Investigation Into Burisma
In the spring of 2014, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office opened an investigation at
the behest of the UK prosecutors office, which was investigating money laundering allegations
against Zlochevsky and had
just frozen $23.5 million in assets allegedly belonging to him in early April 2014. Shokin,
who wasn't appointed as general prosecutor until February 2015, wasn't yet involved in the
case.
Ukrainian prosecutors
refused to provide the UK with needed documents, and in January 2015, a British court
ordered the assets unfrozen. This action was pointedly called out in a
speech by Pyatt, who stated, "In the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the
UK authorities had seized $23 million in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian
people."
Instead of receiving cooperation from Ukrainian prosecutors, they "sent letters to
Zlochevsky's attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result, the money was
freed by the UK court, and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus."
On Feb. 10, 2015, Shokin was appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine, and he picked up the
investigation into Burisma, which reportedly continued until his formal resignation in February
2016.
Around the same time that Zlochevsky's assets were being frozen in the UK, Burisma appointed
Hunter Biden to its board on April 18, 2014. Hunter's compensation had never been disclosed by
Burisma, which is a private company, but Ryan Toohey, a Burisma spokesman,
told The New York Times that Biden's compensation was "not out of the ordinary" for similar
board positions.
However, according to The Hill's
reporting , Hunter Biden's firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was receiving regular
payments -- "usually more than $166,000 a month" -- from Burisma. The payments ran from the
spring of 2014 through the fall of 2015 and reportedly totaled more than $3 million.
The Hill article included a written answer from Shokin, who told Solomon that his
investigation into Burisma had included plans for "interrogations and other crime-investigation
procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden."
According to Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, following Shokin's forced
dismissal, the Burisma investigation was transferred to Sytnyk's NABU, which then reportedly
closed the investigation sometime in 2016.
The Kyiv Post on March 27 published an
editorial written by three members of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv that
disputed Lutsenko's interview with The Hill. They claim that two cases relating to Burisma are
still being investigated by NABU:
"Two cases regarding the extraction of licenses by Zlochevsky's companies and embezzlement
of public funds at the ministry's procurements during Zlochevsky's Ministerial tenure remain
active and are investigated by NABU."
They also claim that "none of the criminal proceedings against Burisma were closed by NABU."
They acknowledged that the case concerning illegal issuance of licenses to extract natural
resources were transferred to NABU in December 2015, but claim that SAP missed procedural
deadlines for a lawsuit on canceling those licenses.
The politics within Ukraine are extremely complicated, and corruption is endemic, often
leading to conflicting accounts of events.
US Pressure to Investigate Manafort
In January 2016, top Ukrainian corruption prosecutors and officials from Obama's National
Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ) met in
Washington, according to an April 26
article by The Hill.
The meeting, which was reportedly billed as "training," apparently also touched on two other
matters -- the revival of a closed investigation into payments to U.S. figures from Ukraine's
Russia-backed Party of Regions and the closure of an ongoing Ukrainian investigation into
Burisma.
According to The Hill's reporting, the Ukrainian Embassy confirmed that meetings were held,
but said it "had no record that the Party of Regions or Burisma cases came up in the
meetings."
A Jan. 22, 2016, NABU press
release confirmed that NABU Director Artem Sytnyk was in Washington from Jan. 19 to 21.
At the same time as the NABU meeting with Obama officials, Vice President Biden
also met with senior Ukrainian officials. On Jan. 21, 2016, Biden
met with Poroshenko, the president of Ukraine. According to the
White House release , the two leaders agreed "to continue to move forward on Ukraine's
anti-corruption agenda."
Just six days earlier, on Jan 15, 2016, Biden had met with Ukrainian Prime Minister
Volodymyr Groysman, promising to commit $220 million in new assistance to Ukraine that
year.
Notably, several months later, Sytnyk and Ukrainian Member of Parliament Serhiy Leshchenko
would
publicly disclose the contents of the Ukrainian "black ledger" to the media, which
implicated Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort. The revelation would force Manafort from
the campaign.
Leshchenko also served as a source for various individuals, including journalist Michael
Isikoff and Democratic National Committee (DNC) operative Alexandra Chalupa. In addition,
Leshchenko served as a direct source of information for Fusion GPS -- and its researcher,
former CIA contractor Nellie Ohr.
Another Ukrainian-related meeting also took place in January 2016 when Chalupa, a
Ukrainian-American, informed an
unknown senior DNC official that she believed there was a Russian connection with the Trump
campaign. Notably, this theme would be picked up by the Clinton campaign in the summer of 2016.
Chalupa also told the official to expect Manafort's involvement in the Trump campaign.
How Chalupa knew to expect Manafort's involvement with the Trump campaign in January remains
unknown, but her forecast proved prescient, as Manafort
reached out to the Trump campaign shortly after, on Feb. 29, 2016, through a mutual
acquaintance, Thomas J. Barrack Jr. According to Manafort, he and Trump hadn't been in
communication
for years until the Trump campaign responded to Manafort's offer.
As The Epoch Times
previously reported , on May 30, 2016, Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr sent an email to
her husband, high-ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and three other DOJ officials to alert them
of the discovery of the "Reported Trove of Documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions' 'Black
Cashbox.'" It was this discovery that led to Manafort's resignation from the Trump campaign in
August 2016.
On Aug. 14, 2016, The New York Times published an article
alleging that payments to Manafort had been uncovered from the Party of Regents' "black box" --
the 400-page handwritten ledger released by Leshchenko. The article proved to be a fatal blow
for Manafort, who resigned from the Trump campaign just days later.
NABU Ties to FBI
Following the successful overthrow of Yanukovych, Joe Biden had a direct hand in the
formation of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), as he personally "pushed for the
creation of an independent anti-corruption bureau to combat graft," according to an Oct. 30,
2016, article by
Foreign Policy .
NABU was formally established in October 2014 in response to pressure
from not only the U.S. State Department and Biden, but also by the International Monetary Fund
and the European Commission.
Despite the international push, the fledgling anti-corruption unit took more than a year to
actually become a functioning unit. During this time, NABU officials began establishing a
relationship with the FBI. In early 2016, NABU Director Sytnyk announced
that his bureau was very close to signing a memorandum of cooperation with the FBI and by
February
2016 , the FBI had had a permanent representative onsite at the NABU offices.
On June 5, 2016, Sytnyk met with U.S. Ambassador Pyatt to
discuss a more formalized relationship with the FBI and, on June 30, 2016, NABU and the FBI
entered into a
memorandum of understanding that allowed for an FBI office onsite at NABU offices to focus on
international money laundering cases. The relationship was renewed
for an additional two years in June 2017.
NABU has repeatedly refused to make the memorandum of understanding with the FBI public and
went
to court in 2018 to prevent its release. After receiving an unfavorable opinion from the
Kyiv District Administrative Court, NABU appealed the ruling, which was overturned in its favor
by the Sixth Administrative Court of Appeal.
Sytnyk, along with parliamentarian Leshchenko, became the subject of an investigation in
Ukraine and in December 2018, a Kyiv court
ruled that both men "acted illegally when they revealed that Manafort's surname and
signature were found in the so-called black ledger of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych's
Party of Regions," the Kyiv Post
reported on Dec. 12, 2018.
The court noted the material was part of a pre-trial investigation and its release "led to
interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests
of Ukraine as a state."
Leshchenko had publicly adopted a strong anti-Trump stance, telling the Financial
Times in August 2016 that "a Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American
foreign policy" and that it was "important to show not only the corruption aspect, but that he
is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world." Leschenko
noted that the majority of Ukrainian politicians were "on Hillary Clinton's side."
In December 2017, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Lutsenko
accused Sytnyk of allowing the FBI to conduct illegal operations in Ukraine, claiming that
the "U.S. law enforcers were allegedly invited without the permission required and in breach of
the necessary procedures." Lutsenko
continued by asking, "Who actually let the foreign special service act in Ukraine?"
Taras Chornovil, a Ukrainian political analyst, also questioned the FBI's activities,
writing that "some kind of undercover operations are being conducted in Ukraine with direct
participation (or even under control) of the FBI. This means the FBI operatives could have
access to classified data or confidential information."
Lutsenko called for an audit of NABU,
claiming to "possess information of interest to the auditors" and was pushing for Sytnyk's
resignation, along with that of Nazar Kholodnitskiy, the Specialized Anti-Corruption
Prosecutor's Office (SAP). According to
reporting by Euromaidan Press, Lutsenko's efforts failed "thanks to the reaction from
Ukraine's American partners."
Michael Carpenter, an adviser to Joe Biden, personally issued a public warning to Lutsenko
and others pushing for Sytnyk's removal, stating, "If the Rada votes to dismiss the head of the
Anticorruption Committee and the head of the NABU, I will recommend cutting all U.S. government
assistance to #Ukraine , including security
assistance."
Sytnyk remains in his position as NABU's director.
Pinchuk's Ties to Leshchenko,
Clintons
On April 11, 2019, Greg Craig, Obama's former White House counsel and a partner at law firm
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, was indicted
for lying about and concealing his work in Ukraine. Craig, who reportedly worked closely with
Manafort, was paid
more than $4 million to produce an "independent" report justifying Ukraine's trial and
conviction of the former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko. Notably, Craig's name was not
included in the "Black Ledger" leak from Leshchenko and Sytnyk.
The indictment notes that "a wealthy private Ukrainian" was fully funding the report. In a
recent YouTube video
, Craig publicly stated that "it was Doug Schoen who brought this project to me, and he told me
he was acting on behalf of Victor Pinchuk, who was a pro-western, Ukrainian businessman who
helped to fund the project."
"The Firm understood that its work was to be largely funded by Victor Pinchuk," Skadden
wrote in recent FARA filings .
Pinchuk put out a statement on Jan. 21, denying any financial involvement:
"Mr. Pinchuk was not the source of any funds used to pay fees of Skadden in producing their
report into the trial and conviction of Yulia Tymoshenko. He was in no way responsible for
those costs. Neither Mr. Pinchuk nor companies affiliated with him have ever been a client of
Skadden. Mr. Pinchuk and his team had no role in the work done by Skadden, including in the
preparation or dissemination of the Skadden report."
Pinchuk is the founder of Interpipe, a steel pipe manufacturer. He owns Credit Dnipro Bank,
several ferroalloy plants and a media empire. He is married to Elena Pinchuk, the daughter of
former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.
Pinchuk has been accused of profiting immensely from the purchase of state-owned assets at
severely below-market prices through political favoritism.
Between April 4 and April 12,
2016, Ukrainian parliamentarian Olga Bielkova had
four meetings , with Samuel Charap (International Institute for Strategic Studies), Liz
Zentos (National Security Council), Michael Kimmage (State Department), and David Kramer
(McCain Institute).
FARA documents
filed by Schoen showed that he was paid $40,000 a month by Pinchuk (page 5) -- in part to
arrange these meetings.
Schoen attempted to arrange another 72 meetings with congressmen and media (page 10). It's
unknown how many of these meetings, if any, took place.
Schoen also helped Pinchuk establish ties with the Clinton Foundation. The Wall Street
Journal reported on
March 19, 2015, how Schoen connected Pinchuk with senior Clinton State Department staffers in
order to pressure former Ukrainian President Yanukovych to release Tymoshenko–a political
rival of Yanukovych–from jail. And the relationship between Pinchuk and the Clintons
continued. According to the Kyiv
Post :
"Clinton and her husband Bill, the 42nd U.S. president, have been paid speakers at the
annual YES and other Pinchuk events. They describe themselves as friends of Pinchuk, who is
known internationally as a businessman and philanthropist."
Although exact numbers aren't clear,
reports filed by the Clinton Foundation indicate that as much as $25 million of Pinchuk's
donations went to the Clinton organization.
Pinchuk also has ties to Leshchenko, the Ukrainian MP who leaked the information on
Manafort. Leshchenko had been a frequent speaker at the Ukrainian Breakfast , a traditional private event
held at Davos, Switzerland, and hosted by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and has also been
pictured with Pinchuk at multiple other events.
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed
on Twitter @themarketswork.
"... 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. 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
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.
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.
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed
on Twitter @themarketswork.
"... The FBI opened a counterintelligence probe after learning of Papadopoulos' encounter with another shadowy figure, a Maltese professor called Joseph Mifsud who said he had 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton and claimed to be accompanied by Russian President Vladimir Putin's niece. Mifsud has now vanished. ..."
"... Papadopoulos described her in his book as attractive, and said soon after they met she started asking him questions about Trump and Russia. 'There is no way this is a Cambridge professor's research assistant,' Papadopoulos recalled thinking. He wrote in his book, 'Deep State Target' about meeting her: 'Azra Turk is a vision right out of central casting for a spy flick. She's a sexy bottle blonde in her thirties, and she isn't shy about showing her curves -- as if anyone could miss them. She's a fantasy's fantasy. 'If this is what academic researchers look like, I've been going to the wrong school,' I laugh to myself.' ..."
"... Papadoulos remembers that her initial approach began with the email: 'Let's meet for a drink. I'm looking forward to meeting you.' At the meeting, he says he told her: 'I have nothing to do with Russia, and I don't know anyone else who has anything to do with Russia, either. 'But she keeps pushing. She puts her hand on my arm. She says I'm more attractive in person than in my pictures. She says I've been doing important work. It's all a come-on,' he writes. ..."
'I don't think she was FBI, I think she was CIA': George Papadopoulos recounts how 'curvy blonde' agent posing as a researcher
tried to extract Trump-Russia information from him in London - and he believes British spooks helped plan it
George Papadopoulos believes Britain helped the U.S. spy on him in 2016
It emerged Thursday that the FBI arranged for an 'attractive' woman to approach him for information after he made contact
with a government informant
The woman - a so-called researcher named Azra Turk - was trying to extract information to determine if the Trump campaign
was working with Russia
Papadopoulos spoke of the meeting during an appearance on Fox News
Trump has claimed Obama administration 'spied' on his campaign; his attorney general Bill Barr says he is investigating origins
of Russian collusion claims
Published: 01:49 EDT, 3 May 2019 | Updated: 03:15 EDT, 3 May 2019
Former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos says he believes Britain helped the U.S. spy on him when a 'curvy blonde' agent posing
as a researcher approached him to try and determine if the Trump campaign was working with Russia. The FBI arranged for an 'attractive' woman to approach Papadopoulos for information after he made contact with a government informant
back in 2016, it emerged on Thursday. Papadopoulos' contact with academic Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor who has served as an informant, had already
come to light amid the Mueller probe.
But it was revealed on Thursday that the FBI also dispatched an investigator, who said she was a researcher called Azra Turk,
to accompany Halper as part of its counterintelligence probe. The investigator met with Papadopoulos at a London bar in September 2016 - two months before the election that brought Trump to
office.
Following a New York Times report about the meeting on Thursday, Papadopoulos went on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight to describe
how he was approached by the investigator and to claim the the UK was in on it too. Former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos says he believes Britain helped the U.S. spy on him when a 'curvy blonde' agent posing
as a researcher approached him to try and determine if the Trump campaign was working with Russia
Papadopoulos, who has written about his encounter with the 'sexy bottle blonde in her thirties' in a new book, ended up serving
12 days in prison after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI when he was questioned by investigators during the Mueller probe.
'I received an unsolicited email in September of 2016 from a man who was suggesting that he wanted to pay me $3,000 to write a
report on energy security questions and I was an expert on it at the time and Israel, Turkey and Cyprus,' Papadopoulos told Fox News.
'I looked him up because I'd never heard of him. I saw that he had worked in four administrations and he was a professor at Cambridge
so accepted his offer and he flew me to London where he paid for my five-star hotel and he said before I meet with you I want you
to meet my assistant.'
Papadopoulos said he was immediately suspicious because he recognize the name - Azra Turk - as being Turkish. He said some of
his passed work wasn't viewed favorably by Turkey.
'I went and I met with her and she was very suggestive as you can understand, younger, very flirtatious,' he said of their meeting.
'I right away understood this wasn't a Cambridge assistant and she barely spoke English and she was very flirty and was trying
to do two things, want to extract information about my professional connections in the Middle East and two to see if I had any information
that she could potentially extract from meat on a Trump Russia which is nonsense.
'From that moment I knew there was something wrong and I was laughing about it but now of course The New York Times reported that
she was some sort of agent but I don't think she was FBI, I think she was CIA.'
Papadopoulos went on to say that he didn't think it was a coincidence that Trump started tweeting about UK interference last week.
'The day I met with them in London, I was invited by the British ministry of foreign affairs to meet with them at their offices,'
he said.
'I believe the British actively were spying on me as well and I believe part of what President Trump was tweeting last week about
the British spying was about this involvement in this operation.'
Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos had an encounter with a woman named 'Azra' Turk who the FBI dispatched to seek
information from him. He described as a curvaceous 'sexy bottle blonde in her thirties' and writes that he discerned she was part
of a 'honey trap'
The revelations in the Times report on Thursday came amid mounting questions over the origins of the Russian collusion claims,
which eventually led to the commissioning of the Mueller inquiry - and which Bill Barr, Trump's attorney general, says he is actively
investigating.
According to the Times, 'Turk' was a government investigator posing as Halper's research assistant. She was not operating under
her real name.
President Trump has fumed that the early days of the Russia probe amounted to 'Spygate,' and his attorney general used the term
'spying' to what went on, testifying on Wednesday that he didn't consider the word a 'pejorative.'
'I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal,' Barr had earlier testified, saying the question was whether it was 'adequately
predicated.'
The FBI opened a counterintelligence probe after learning of Papadopoulos' encounter with another shadowy figure, a Maltese professor
called Joseph Mifsud who said he had 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton and claimed to be accompanied by Russian President Vladimir Putin's
niece. Mifsud has now vanished.
Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page also raised suspicions with his Russia contacts and campaign trip to Moscow, and became
the subject of a secret surveillance warrant.
Papadopoulos described her in his book as attractive, and said soon after they met she started asking him questions about Trump
and Russia. 'There is no way this is a Cambridge professor's research assistant,' Papadopoulos recalled thinking. He wrote in his book, 'Deep State Target' about meeting her: 'Azra Turk is a vision right out of central casting for a spy flick.
She's a sexy bottle blonde in her thirties, and she isn't shy about showing her curves -- as if anyone could miss them. She's a fantasy's
fantasy. 'If this is what academic researchers look like, I've been going to the wrong school,' I laugh to myself.'
When Papadopoulos landed in London on September 15, 2016, the woman invited him out for drinks. They met up at the Sofitel St.
James.
Papadoulos remembers that her initial approach began with the email: 'Let's meet for a drink. I'm looking forward to meeting you.' At the meeting, he says he told her: 'I have nothing to do with Russia, and I don't know anyone else who has anything to do with
Russia, either. 'But she keeps pushing. She puts her hand on my arm. She says I'm more attractive in person than in my pictures. She says I've
been doing important work. It's all a come-on,' he writes.
She attended a subsequent meeting with Papadopoulos and Halper at the exclusive private Travellers Club, an institution frequented
by British diplomats and - reputedly - members of Britain's foreign spy agency, MI6.
Halper would later ask Papadopoulos about hacked Democratic emails and whether Wikileaks was helping the Trump camp. He says he was
angry over the line of questioning and ended the meeting. In an email following their encounter, Turk called their meeting the 'highlight of my trip.' She wrote him a message saying: 'I am excited about what the future holds for us :)' – ending with an emoji.
Papadapoulos served 12 days in jail for lying to the FBI when he was questioned by investigators during the Mueller probe.
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.
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.
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 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. ..."
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.
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.
Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website
TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.
"... As we noted yesterday based on an earlier Hill report on the Kavalec-Steele notes, Steele was flagged for admitting that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline, as his client was "keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8." ..."
"... Kavalec also flagged several places in her notes in which she suspected that Steele might be leaking information to the press . "June -- reporting started," she wrote. "NYT and WP have," she added, in an apparent reference to The New York Times and The Washington Post. ..."
"... She then quoted Steele as indicating that he was "managing" four priorities -- "Client needs, FBI, WashPo/NYT, source protection," - a clear indication that media outreach was part of his job. ..."
"... Except that the FBI's FISA request from October 2016 - which relied almost entirely on Steele's work - was marked "verified application" prior to the FBI's submission to the court. ..."
According to newly unearthed memos which were retroactively classified by the DOJ, a high-ranking government official who met
with Christopher Steele in October 2016 determined that information in the Trump-Russia dossier was inaccurate , and likely leaked
to the media, according to
The Hill 's John Solomon.
Ten days before the FBI used the now-discredited dossier to apply for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to
spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, Steele met with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec, who took handwritten
notes of the encounter.
Steele told Kavalec that Russia had a "technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election," which recruited US
emigres to "do hacking and recruiting. Steele added that "Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian consulate in Miami."
Except that's a lie - as Kavalec debunked the assertion in a bracketed comment: " It is important to note that there is no Russian
consulate in Miami. "
Kavalec, two days later and well before the FISA warrant was issued, forwarded her typed summary to other government officials.
The State Department has redacted the names and agencies of everyone she alerted.
But it is almost certain the FBI knew of Steele's contact with State and his partisan motive . That's because former Assistant
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland says she instructed her staff to send the information they got from Steele to the bureau immediately
and to cease contact with the informer because "this is about U.S. politics, and not the work of -- not the business of the State
Department, and certainly not the business of a career employee who is subject to the Hatch Act." -
The Hill
What makes this particularly damning is that the FBI swore on October 21, 2016 to the FISA judges that Steele's "reporting has
been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings," and that the FBI deemed him to be "reliable" and was "unaware of any derogatory
information pertaining" to the former British spy who was working for Fusion GPS - the firm paid by the DNC and the Clinton campaign
to come up with dirt on Donald Trump.
As we
noted yesterday based on an earlier Hill report on the Kavalec-Steele notes, Steele was flagged for admitting that his research
was political and facing an Election Day deadline, as his client was "keen to see this information come to light prior to November
8."
Notes and testimony from senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr make clear Steele admitted early on that
he was "desperate" to get Trump defeated in the election, was working in some capacity for the GOP candidate's opponent, and
considered his intelligence raw and untested. Ohr testified that he alerted FBI and other senior Justice officials to these concerns
in August 2016. -
The Hill
Kavalec also flagged several places in her notes in which she suspected that Steele might be leaking information to the press
. "June -- reporting started," she wrote. "NYT and WP have," she added, in an apparent reference to The New York Times and The Washington
Post.
She then quoted Steele as indicating that he was "managing" four priorities -- "Client needs, FBI, WashPo/NYT, source protection,"
- a clear indication that media outreach was part of his job.
Those same notes suggest Steele spun some wild theories to State, including one that the Russians had a "plant in DNC" and
had assembled an "HRC dossier," apparent references to the Democratic National Committee and Clinton.
She expounded in her typed memo. "The Russians have succeeded in placing an agent inside the DNC," she quoted Steele as saying.
Steele offered Kavalec other wild information that easily could have been debunked before the FISA application -- and eventually
was, in many cases, after the media reported the allegations -- including that:
Trump lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to Prague to meet with Russians;
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort owed the Russians $100 million and was the "go-between" from Russian President Vladimir
Putin to Trump;
Trump adviser Carter Page met with a senior Russian businessman tied to Putin;
The Russians secretly communicated with Trump through a computer system. -
The Hill
Those rumors were debunked by Special counsel Robert Mueller's April report, despite barely mentioning Steele and a passing reference
to his infamous dossier being "unverified."
Except that the FBI's FISA request from October 2016 - which relied almost entirely on Steele's work - was marked "verified
application" prior to the FBI's submission to the court.
Eventually, Steele was fired to the FBI for leaking to the media and then lying about it - however that happend after the FISA
warrant was approved - and according to The Hill , the court was not notified about it until a few months later, well after the election.
In short, the FBI undoubtedly lied to their teeth to the FISA court in order to obtain a warrant to surveil Carter Page and the
Trump campaign.
" This is no "nothingburger," and any official, pundit or Facebook friend who says otherwise is spinning, in denial, not too
bright, or James Comey. There has to be an independent investigation of the conduct of the FBI now. Every American should support
that.
The FBI..this Country's Secret Police, Gestapo, KGB...whatever you prefer. The Deep State enforcement arm. Anyone who thinks
otherwise is a complete fool.
The USA is such a shitshow right now. A month ago hillary suggested that china hack trumps tax returns, then this week they
leaked. Surprise? russia, china; america is its own worst enemy. watch.
The FBI is anti-American and completely corrupt, the entire agency should be disbanded. Nobody will ever trust it again. It
is just another corrupt arm of the DNC.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been awake to the truth and not listening to the Deep State propaganda on
the fake news media outlets.
Yes, what was described above is definitely treason. The real question is not Did it happen , but instead, At who's
direction did all of this conspire and occur ?
In my opinion, this goes all the way to the top in the Obama regime. The collusion angle in all of this I believe occurred
between the 5 Eyes Network of countries controlled by the Deep State. So I believe foreign allies where attempting to interfere
in US elections.
It is so unsubstantiated , that Comey and the FBI decided to use the garbage to lie to a FISA judge in the FISA court
to get a warrant to spy on citizen and candidate Trump. Then the spying was being reported back to Obama in daily FBI briefings
about his political adversary. I find it doubtful that Comey and company didn't pay Steele under the table for lies, knowing the
whole time Steele was lying.
"I've talked to the members of the Israeli government at the highest levels. I know who they want elected here. It's not
Hillary Clinton." – Former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani
The Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Israhell.
"Ten days before the FBI used the now-discredited dossier to apply for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant
to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, Steele met with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec, who took handwritten
notes of the encounter." Kavalec worked under Nuland, and Nuland worked under John Kerry, who has been suspiciously below the
radar in all this. I'd like to see his testimony before congress.
"... Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his new book War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback and in an ebook edition. ..."
"... What we are witnessing now is the almost complete ignorance in the MSM and among people like Clapper about the extraordinary damage done to the Russian economy under Clinton in the 1990s, a story well told by Mr. Cohen in the book "Failed Crusade." The immense hypocrisy of accusing Russia of interference in 2016 leaves me breathless. The US has been interfering in the affairs of every major country on earth, beginning with War of 1812 ..."
"... I recall an interesting comment by Mao Zedong about the Cuban Missile Crisis in which Mao said that Nikita Khrushchev was stupid to put missiles in Cuba and he was a coward to take them out. ..."
"... Based on the recent conversations between Stephen Cohen and John Batchelor, I'll paraphrase Mao's comment to say that the intelligence agencies were stupid to originate Russiagate and the Democrats and their media allies are cowards not to stop it. ..."
"... Pompous comes out and says the US is back and we're a force for good. This in the face of widespread destruction all over the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of dead, the creation of numerous groups of crazy zealots that we created, cultivated, and supported to be our proxies in the overthrow of elected governments. All of that death and destruction, including that perpetrated by our proxies is 100% the fault and responsibility of the United States. But Pompous and the American people in general are so myopic that they don't see all that. Thank you, worthless press. If the press actually told the American people what was being done in their name, I think most of us would be disgusted but they don't. They cheer lead for the beltway and their imperial pretensions. ..."
"... If Clapper and Brennan actually created a sting operation against the Trump Campaign, would you denounce that act? If Obama had approved such an operation, would you believe he was ethically entitled to do such? ..."
N ow in its third year, Russiagate is the worst, most corrosive, and most fraudulent
political scandal in modern American history. It rests on two related core allegations: that
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an "attack on American democracy" during the 2016
presidential campaign in order to put Donald Trump in the White House, and that Trump and his
associates willfully colluded, or conspired, in this Kremlin "attack." As I have argued from
the outset -- see my regular commentaries posted at
TheNation.com and my recent book War With
Russia? -- and as recently confirmed, explicitly and tacitly, by special prosecutor
Robert Mueller's report, there is no factual evidence for either allegation.
Nonetheless, these Russiagate allegations, not "Putin's Russia," continue to inflict grave
damage on fundamental institutions of American democracy. They impugn the integrity of the
presidency and now the office of the attorney general. They degrade the many Democratic
members of Congress who persist in clinging to the allegations and thus the Democratic Party
and Congress. And they have enticed mainstream media into one of the worst episodes
of journalistic malpractice in modern times .
But equally alarming, Russiagate continues to endanger American national security by
depriving a US president, for the first time in the nuclear age, of the diplomatic
flexibility to deal with a Kremlin leader in times of crisis. We were given a vivid example
in July 2018, when Trump held a summit with the current Kremlin occupant, as every president
had done since Dwight Eisenhower. For that conventional, even necessary, act of diplomacy,
Trump was widely accused of treasonous behavior, a charge that persists. Now we have another
alarming example of this reckless disregard for US national security on the part of
Russiagate zealots.
On May 3, Trump called Putin. They discussed various issues, including the Mueller report.
(As before, Putin had to know if Trump was free to implement any acts of security cooperation
they might agree on. Indeed, the Russian policy elite openly debates this question, many of
its members having decided that Trump cannot cooperate with Russia no matter his intentions.)
A major subject of the conversation was unavoidably the growing conflict over Venezuela,
where Washington and Moscow have long-standing economic and political interests. Trump
administration spokespeople have warned Moscow against interfering in America's neighborhood,
ignoring, of course, Washington's deep involvement for years in the former Soviet republics
of Ukraine and Georgia. Kremlin representatives, on the other hand, have warned Washington
against violating Venezuela's sovereignty. Increasingly, there is talk, at least in Moscow
policy circles, of a Cuban Missile–like crisis, the closest the United States and
Russia (then Soviet Russia) ever came to nuclear war.
To the extent, however remote, that Venezuela might grow into a Cuba-like US-Russian
military confrontation, would Trump be sufficiently free of Russiagate allegations to resolve
it peacefully, as President John Kennedy did in 1962? Judging by mainstream media commentary
on the May 3 phone conversation, the answer seems to be no. Considering the mounting
confrontation in Venezuela, Trump was right, even obligated, to call Putin, but he got no
applause, only condemnation. To take some random examples:
§ Democratic Representative David Cicilline asked CNN's Chris Cuomo rhetorically on
May 3, "Why does the president give the benefit of doubt to a person who attacked our
democracy?" while assailing Trump for not confronting Putin with the Mueller report.
§ The same evening, CNN's Don Lemon editorialized on the phone call: "The president
of the United States had just a normal old call with his pal Vladimir Putin. Didn't tell him
not to interfere in the election. Like he did in 2016, like he did in 2018, like we know he
is planning to do again in 2020 . You just don't seem to want us to know exactly what was
said . Nothing to see when the president talks for more than an hour with the leader of an
enemy nation. One that has repeatedly attacked our democracy and will do so again." (Lemon
did not say on what he based the expanded, serial charges against Putin and thus against
Trump or his allegation about the 2018 elections, which congressional Democrats mostly won,
or his foreknowledge about 2020 or generally and with major ramifications why he branded
Russia an "enemy nation.")
§ We might expect something more exalted from James Risen ,
once a critical-minded investigative reporter, who found it suspicious that "Trump and Putin
were both eager to put the Mueller report behind them," even for the sake of needed
diplomacy.
§ Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Eric Swalwell, both candidates for the
2020 Democratic presidential nomination, also
expressed deep suspicion regarding the Trump-Putin phone talk. Swalwell was sure it meant
that Trump "acts on their behalf," that he "is putting the Russians' interests ahead of the
United States' interests." (Voters may wonder if these candidates and quite a few others who
continue to promote extremist Russiagate allegations are emerging American statesmen.)
§ Not surprisingly,
a Washington Post opinion writer argued that the phone call meant "Trump is
counting on Russian help to get reelected."
None of these "opinion leaders" mentioned the danger of a US-Russian military
confrontation over Venezuela or elsewhere on the several fraught fronts of the new Cold War.
Indeed, retired admiral James Stavridis, once supreme allied commander of NATO forces and
formerly associated with Hillary Clinton's campaign, all but proposed war on
Russia in retaliation for its "attack on our democracy," including "unprecedented
measures" such as cyberattacks.
Russiagate's unproven allegations are an aggressive malignancy spreading through America's
politics to the most vital areas of national security policy. A full nonpartisan
investigation into their origins is urgently needed, but US intelligence agencies were almost
certainly present at their creation, which is why I have long argued that
Russiagate is actually Intelgate . If so, James Comey, then FBI director, was present at
the creation, though initially in a lesser role than were President Barack Obama's CIA
Director John Brennan and intelligence overlord James Clapper.
Comey recently deplored Attorney General William Barr's declaration that US intelligence
agencies resorted to "spying" on the Trump campaign. (In fact, Barr mischaracterized what
happened: The agencies, first and foremost Brennan's CIA, it seems, ran an entrapment
operation against members of the campaign.) Comey warned
Barr that he will discover that Trump "has eaten your soul."
It would be more accurate to say -- and certainly more important -- that baseless
Russiagate allegations are eating America's national security.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host
of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at
TheNation.com .
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton
University. A Nation contributing editor, his new book War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is
available in paperback and in an ebook edition.
Phillip Sawicki says: May 9, 2019 at 7:52 pm
What we are witnessing now is the almost complete ignorance in the MSM and among people
like Clapper about the extraordinary damage done to the Russian economy under Clinton in the
1990s, a story well told by Mr. Cohen in the book "Failed Crusade." The immense hypocrisy of
accusing Russia of interference in 2016 leaves me breathless. The US has been interfering in
the affairs of every major country on earth, beginning with War of 1812.
In case people have
forgotten, The US sought to annex Canada. The Canadians resisted, and so then the US set up a
false flag attack in 1845 to start the Mexican-American War. Hundreds of interventions in
other countries, but if someone is alleged to have done so to us, it's a capital crime. What
arrogance!
Victor Sciamarelli says: May 9, 2019 at 4:17 pm
I recall an interesting comment by Mao Zedong about the Cuban Missile Crisis in which Mao
said that Nikita Khrushchev was stupid to put missiles in Cuba and he was a coward to take
them out.
Based on the recent conversations between Stephen Cohen and John Batchelor, I'll paraphrase
Mao's comment to say that the intelligence agencies were stupid to originate Russiagate and
the Democrats and their media allies are cowards not to stop it.
Another point is that the downside of the policy elites' belief in "American exceptionalism"
is that it is also a trap. They claim our "indispensable nation" rests upon values and
principles such as the rule of law, respect for human rights, and freedom of speech, even
though reality often tells us something different.
Thus, if Putin is a thug, if not a murderer, who attacked the US, undermined our democracy,
and is an autocrat who cares nothing about our values and principles, then what place is
there for diplomacy because you can't negotiate or compromise our immutable principles and
values.
Another observation is we often hear the statement that, "All options are on the table." This
sounds tough to an American mind because it includes nuclear weapons. All options means all
options. Nonetheless, someone else might interpret this to mean you are not confident or
certain that your conventional forces are capable of doing the mission and you are more
likely or willing to resort to a nuclear weapon. This can make any confrontation whether in
Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, or Iran more dangerous that it needs to be.
In addition, Trump has sent an aircraft carrier group to the Middle East. The Guardian on May
6, 2019, stated that according to one report, information passed on by Israeli intelligence
contributed to the US threat assessment.
If we are now approaching war based on Israeli intelligence then I think we are also
approaching our Dr. Strangelove moment.
Jeffrey Harrison says: May 9, 2019 at 11:55 am
Arrogance, myopia. Those two words define the US today.
Pompous comes out and says the US is back and we're a force for good. This in the face of
widespread destruction all over the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of dead, the creation
of numerous groups of crazy zealots that we created, cultivated, and supported to be our
proxies in the overthrow of elected governments. All of that death and destruction, including
that perpetrated by our proxies is 100% the fault and responsibility of the United States.
But Pompous and the American people in general are so myopic that they don't see all that.
Thank you, worthless press. If the press actually told the American people what was being
done in their name, I think most of us would be disgusted but they don't. They cheer lead for
the beltway and their imperial pretensions.
This Stavridis bozo is a prime example. "all but proposed war on Russia in retaliation for
its "attack on our democracy," including "unprecedented measures" such as cyber attacks." I
realize that we are in a post proof world where any claim, no matter how inane, is
automatically taken as proven. No actual proof required. The "attack on our democracy" is
based on this totally bogus claim (never proven) that Russia hacked into the DNC's e-mails
(on a server that no law enforcement agency ever inspected to prove the claim of hacking)
that undermined our democracy by revealing how corrupt and slimy the DNC actually is. All the
while we're so myopic that we don't see the Republican party destroying our democracy from
within with voter ID requirements for a non-existent problem, gerrymandering themselves into
a permanent majority of a minority, voter suppression schemes such as purging voter rolls,
closing polling places, and generally making it difficult for people to vote.
But this Stavridis bozo wasn't done yet. The Russians he claims perpetrated unprecedented
measures such as cyber attacks. Really? The only cyber attacks that I'm actually aware of in
the US were actually perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security who was playing
bureaucratic turf games. The admiral's ignorance is in full display when he forgets the
STUXTNET worm that absolutely was a cyber attack on Iran by the US and Israel, and that the
NSA hacked the personal cell phone of Angela Merkel, the Prime Minister of Germany, and the
trick revealed by Ed Snowden that the NSA would open computer boxes destined for certain
countries and install chips that would allow us to control the server, or that the only known
backdoor in a piece of Hauwei equipment was installed there by the NSA.
I'm suspecting that we need to clean up our act a lot more that most of the rest of the
world.
J McCormick says: May 8, 2019 at 11:57 pm
So much scorn heaped on members of the opposition party and the media and what I hear here
is a call for respect for and deference to the office of the presidency.
If there is cause for concern and worry , and I fervently believe that there is , I leave
it to others to offer up what they believe that cause might be.
History records that that the Congress relinquished powers that were properly theirs
(trade, war powers) and now they so far appear impotent in the face of executive overreach
when an effective check on the executive branch is critically needed.
Even if your opinion runs counter to mine I am reasonably certain we agree that
dysfunction and chaos rule the day in Washington and beyond.
Clark Shanahan says: May 9, 2019 at 6:26 pm
"So much scorn heaped on members of the opposition party and the media"
Tell me, J., do you believe Russia is our adversary?
If so, when did they become such?
If Clapper and Brennan actually created a sting operation against the Trump Campaign,
would you denounce that act?
If Obama had approved such an operation, would you believe he was ethically entitled to do
such?
Former British spy Christopher Steele made a stunning admission during an October 11, 2016 meeting
with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec, just
10 days
before the
FBI used his now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page and the campaign's ties to Russia,
according to
The
Hill
's John Solomon.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec's
written
account
of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the
Hillary
Clinton
campaign-funded British intelligence operative
admitted that his research
was political and facing an Election Day deadline
. -
The
Hill
According a typed summary of the meeting - which sat buried for over 2 1/2 years until an
open-records litigation by Citizens United - Steele said that his client "is keen to see this
information come to light prior to November 8," the date of the 2016 US election. Also
attending the meeting was an employee of Steele's Orbis Security firm, Tatyana Duran.
And according to
The Hill
, Kavalec's notes of the meeting - including this stunning
admission -
do not appear to have been provided to the House Intelligence Committee
for its
Russia probe, according to former Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA).
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4855
"They tried to hide a lot of documents from us during our investigation, and it usually turns
out there's a reason for it," Nunes told
The Hill
's Solomon, who notes that One member of
Congress had
transmitted the memos to the DOJ's Inspector General, Michael Horowitz
out
of concern that the IG's office had never seen it either.
The FBI has
retroactively classified
Kavalec's notes on 4/25/2019, despite the
fact that it was originally marked unclassified in 2016. It is set to "Declassify on 12/31/2041,"
25 years after the 2016 election.
The apparent effort to hide Kavalec's notes from her contact with Steele has
persisted for some time.
State officials acknowledged a year ago they received a copy of the Steele dossier in July
2016, and got a more detailed briefing in October 2016 and referred the information to the FBI.
But what was discussed was not revealed. Sources told me more than a year ago that
Kavalec had the most important (and memorialized) interaction with Steele before the FISA
warrant was issued, but FBI and State officials refused to discuss it, or even confirm it
.
The encounter, and Kavalec's memos, were forced into public view through Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) litigation by Citizens United. Yet, all but a few lines have been
redacted after the fact. Officials are citing as the reason national security, in the name of
the FBI and a half-century-old intelligence law. -
The
Hill
"This new information proves why the attorney general must conduct
a
thorough investigation
of the investigators," said Citizens United president and informal Trump
adviser David Bossie, adding that Kavalec's notes
suggest there was an illegal effort to
"frame" Trump with bogus collusion allegations
According to one source who has seen the notes,
they also contain information on
Steele's political ties which have not been given to Congress.
"There's a connection to
Hillary Clinton in the notes," said the source.
Two days after the meeting with Steele, Kavalec
sent an email
alerting
others - with the only unredacted portion of import reading: "You may already have this information
but wanted to pass it on just in case."
Meanwhile, the memo also sheds light on the DNC's role in hiring Steele:
The three sentences visible in her memo show that
U.S. officials had good reason to
suspect Steele's client and motive in alleging Trump-Russia collusion because they were
election-related and facilitated by the Clinton-funded Fusion GPS founder
, Glenn
Simpson.
"Orbis undertook the investigation into the Russia/Trump connection at the behest of an
institution he declined to identify that had been hacked," Kavalec wrote.
At the time, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was the highest-profile victim of
election-year
hacking
.
"The institution approached them based on the recommendation of Glenn Simpson and Peter
Fritsch (specialists in economic crime, formerly of the WSJ)
and is keen to see this
information come to light prior to November 8
," Kavalec wrote. "Orbis undertook the
investigation in June of 2016." Steele's firm Orbis was a subcontractor to Fusion GPS, and WSJ
refers to The Wall Street Journal. -
The
Hill
The significance of Kavalec's notes is monumental, even with redactions,
as it
is definitive proof that the US government had full knowledge that the foundation of their FISA
warrant had a political motive and an Election Day deadline to make public. We also know, according
to the report,
that this information was transmitted before the Page FISA warrant to people
whose job is so sensitive their identity had to be protected.
In short, there's virtually
no way the FBI didn't know what they were dealing with.
Documents and testimony from Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, whose wife
Nellie
worked for Fusion GPS
, show
he
told the FBI
in August 2016 that Steele was "desperate" to defeat Trump and his work had
something to do with Clinton's campaign.
Kavalec's notes make clear the DNC was a likely client and the election was Steele's deadline
to smear Trump.
Likewise, there is little chance the FBI didn't know that Steele, then a bureau informant,
had broken protocol and gone to the State Department in an effort to make the Trump dirt
public. -
The
Hill
Meanwhile, former FBI Director James Comey continues to maintain his pious routine as he peddles
his lucrative book, while his Deputy Andrew McCabe's book deal just went to print in February.
Meanwhile, former FBI Director James Comey continues to
maintain his pious routine as he peddles his lucrative book,
while his Deputy Andrew McCabe's book deal just went to print
in February.
Where are the asset forfeiture laws when you need 'em??
So who ultimately retroactively classified the information?
Whoever did it should start looking at what tree they want to hang
from.....or start singing like a canary! LOL
Former Asst. AG (Head of the NSD National Security Division)
John Carlin
knew
Carter Page was not a Russian agent
,
yet that did not stop Carlin from preparing a FISA warrant in
October 2016 to hoax the FISA court into believing that Carter
Page was an agent of Russia.
Carlin essentially did a
"kamikaze dive" in assuring the
Obama administration's
"insurance policy" against the election of Donald Trump
would
move forward.
Carlin withheld from the FISA court critical
details of an NSA Inspector General report,
and an ongoing
Compliance review, that the FBI and its contractors were engaged
in Fourth Amendment violations of the rights of Americans.
Carlin quit just days before the FISA warrant on Carter Page
was submitted and approved. Two days later, the NSA informed the
Court that the Obama Department of Justice and FBI had been
abusing the FISA process since at least 2011.
John Carlin, interestingly, was Robert Mueller's Chief of Staff
when Mueller was Director of the FBI.
"... But in a widely-overlooked interview on CNN on May 3, Clapper admitted that spying had occurred. When asked by Wolf Blitzer whether spying had occurred, Clapper said that "it's not a term of art used by intelligence people" but admitted that "I guess it meets the dictionary definition of surveillance or spying, a term I don't particularly like." ..."
"... Going by the alias Azra Turk, this yet-unknown woman was reportedly sent to meet with Papadopoulos by one of the FBI agents who had previously spoken at Halper's Cambridge Intelligence Seminars." Washington Examiner ..."
"... I have suggested before that Clapper and the FISA court judges are the weakest spots in the array of Russiagate conspirators. The FISA judges are suggested to the Chief Justice by the DoJ for appointment. This occurs after close vetting for probable compliance with anything communicated by DoJ as desired outcomes in cases brought to them. After all, who knows them better than the DoJ lawyers who argue in the courts they come from? ..."
"... Clapper is a weakling filled boundless ambition and handicapped by limited intelligence. He has no particular allegiance to anything or anyone except himself and will seek forgiveness for his misdeeds if pressed hard. ..."
"James Clapper admits FBI's actions 'meet the dictionary definition' of 'spying'" Wash
Examiner
""I was amazed at that and rather disappointed that the attorney general would say such a
thing," Clapper said. "The term 'spying' has all kinds of negative connotations and I have to
believe he chose that term deliberately."
But in a widely-overlooked interview on CNN on May 3, Clapper admitted that spying had
occurred. When asked by Wolf Blitzer whether spying had occurred, Clapper said that "it's not a
term of art used by intelligence people" but admitted that "I guess it meets the dictionary
definition of surveillance or spying, a term I don't particularly like."
Clapper conceded this point following a May 2 story in the New York Times
that revealed that a woman who had been posing as the assistant of Stefan Halper, a
Cambridge University professor who himself had worked as a Trump campaign informant on behalf
of the FBI, was herself working undercover for the FBI. Going by the alias Azra Turk, this
yet-unknown woman was reportedly sent to meet with Papadopoulos by one of the FBI agents who
had previously spoken at Halper's Cambridge Intelligence Seminars." Washington Examiner
------------
I have suggested before that Clapper and the FISA court judges are the weakest spots in the
array of Russiagate conspirators. The FISA judges are suggested to the Chief Justice by the DoJ for appointment. This occurs
after close vetting for probable compliance with anything communicated by DoJ as desired
outcomes in cases brought to them. After all, who knows them better than the DoJ lawyers who
argue in the courts they come from?
Clapper is a weakling filled boundless ambition and handicapped by limited intelligence. He
has no particular allegiance to anything or anyone except himself and will seek forgiveness for
his misdeeds if pressed hard.
If Lindsay Graham needs initial targets for his very own "witchhunt," he should start with
these people. pl
I don't think Lindsey is gonna do much other than showboat. The only person who should
have the motive and has the power to take action is Trump. I'm skeptical he has the
wherewithal to push it through. He'll likely delegate to Barr and who knows if Barr really
wants to rock the boat.
"... The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program. ..."
"... One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely. ..."
"... I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. ..."
"... Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant. ..."
"... That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, ..."
"... Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ..."
"... Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking " ..."
"... I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported. ..."
"... Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive: ..."
"... I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government? ..."
"... Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution. ..."
"... Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front. ..."
"... So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal. ..."
Do not focus on July 2016 as the so-called start of the counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump. That is a lie. We
know, thanks to the work of Judicial Watch, that the FBI had signed up Christopher Steele as a Confidential Human Source (aka CHS)
by February of 2016. It is incumbent on Attorney General Barr to examine the contact reports filed by Steele's FBI handler (those
reports are known as FD-1023s). He also, as I have noted in a previous post, needs to look at the FD-1023s for Felix Sater and Henry
Greenberg. But these will only tell a small part of the story. There is a massive intelligence side to this story.
The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer
of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive
steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives,
the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie
Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified
the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This
information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting."
This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.
One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was
CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka
the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely.
This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel
and the people they were communicating with overseas. You don't have to have access to intelligence information to understand this.
For example, you simply have to ask the question, "how did George Papadopoulos get on the radar." I am confident that a survey
of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially,
his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone
unless their name is in an intelligence report. We also know that Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump
and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann), initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Don't take my word for it, that's what Robert Mueller reported:
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately
September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert),
a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately
2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later
contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and
brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee
of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).
Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency
put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the
direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from
a registered FBI informant.
By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign
Manager John Podesta's email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:
" That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, " Budowski replies, later adding: "
Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ."
The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway. This was more the opposition research.
This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition
research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets--
Hakluyt: there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about
with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against
Donald Trump.
Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co. , founded by three former British intelligence
operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations
pay huge sums. . . .
Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's
Henry
Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6
[British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking "
I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI
for launching the investigation into
George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that
led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's
associates conspired," The Times reported.
Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially,
he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network
reported in a January 2016 exclusive:
But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client
cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.
His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation
of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.
Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain--there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET
intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation
mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story. This cannot be allowed to happen again.
Having watched interviews of Papadopoulos on TeeVee I would say that this creature would be easy to manipulate. His ego is so
enormous that a minimal effort would be required.
I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what
I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that
he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect
that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government?
The guts of the matter was well expressed by Judge T.S. Ellis when he made the distinction between different results which
can be expected from exerting pressures on witnesses: they may 'sing' - which is, commonly, in the interests of justice - but,
there again, they may 'compose', which is not.
Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law
enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses
to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should
be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution.
Yes, indeed, many a composition have been elicited by prosecutors in criminal cases. The issue is there is no penalty for prosecutorial
misconduct while the advancement points ratchet up with each conviction. The incentives are aligned perfectly for the "institution"
to run rough shod on ordinary Americans. Only those wealthy enough to fight the unlimited funds of the government have a chance.
But of course in matters relating to national security there is the added twist of state secrets that protects government malfeasance.
I don't know how the national security state we continue to build ever gets rolled back. A small victory would be for Trump
to declassify all documents and communications relating to the multifaceted spying on his campaign and as Larry so eloquently
writes to frame him as a Manchurian Candidate. At least the public will learn about what their grandchildren are paying for. But
it seems that Trump prefers tweeting to taking any kind of action. Not that it would matter much as half the country will still
believe that Trump deserves it until the tables are turned on their team. While most Americans will say to use Ben Hunt's phrasing
Yay! Constitution. Yay! Liberty. they sure don't care as the state oligarchy tighten their chokehold.
Yes, he seems young and ambitious enough to be easy (and willing) prey. Having been involved in some local political campaigns
though, I've observed that more and more than before, young people like him are hyper-concerned with networking. Papadopoulos'
ego aside, of course he and many people who sign on hope to make self-serving connections. Not only that, it's also been my observation
that casual sexual hook-ups go with the territory, and not only among young, single guys like him. I have to say I've been shocked
a few times by how risky and cavalier some liaisons have been that've come to my attention, considering "public figures" are involved.
No doubt that's why a "honeypot" was dispatched to try to help entrap Papadopoulos.
Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes
spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before
the country move forward on any front.
So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele
via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal.
Papadopolos was very young hence the nativity getting sucked in. The ego helped for sure. Probably exciting to be part of something
important probably for the first time since he started working for Trump campaign
One thing that's always concerned me about Larry's informative and insightful essays on these matters is how can we be assured
that the IC documentation mentioned has been filled out honestly and accurately -- or that the forms even still exist and haven't
been conveniently "lost" or surreptitiously destroyed?
"... This is problematic for Comey in light of Mueller's findings. There are strict guidelines governing when the FBI can task a confidential source or a government undercover operative to collect against a U.S. citizen. Normally this is restricted to a full investigation, and normally restricted to the United States, not overseas. ..."
"... There is a sense that Comey's team was not checking the boxes, did not have adequate predication, and may have tasked sources before an investigation was even officially opened. Barr should pull case files and dig in on this. ..."
"... In addition, the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources ("assets," in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious "government investigator" posing as Halper's assistant and cited in The New York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence case ..."
"... James Comey is right to be apprehensive. He himself ate away at the soul of the FBI, not in small bites but in dangerously large ones. ..."
Comey adjudged the president as "amoral." He declared the attorney general to be
"formidable" but "lacking inner strength" unlike -- the inference is clear -- Comey himself. A
strategy of insulting the executioner right before he swings his ax is an odd one but, then,
Comey has a long record of odd decisions and questionable judgment.
"Amoral leaders [referring to the president] have a way of revealing the character of those
around them," wrote Comey without a hint of irony or self-awareness. Those whom the former FBI
director assembled around him probably rue the day they ever met the man. Most are now fired or
disgraced for appalling behaviors that Comey found easy to manipulate to advance his
decisions.
ADVERTISEMENT
Then, just to make sure his op-ed was odd-salted to the max, Comey mused that the president
"eats your soul in small bites." OK, let's step back for a moment: James Comey appears to be in
trouble. His strange, desperate statements and behaviors betray his nervousness and
apprehension. In a way, it's hard to watch.
Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the
investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General
Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney
John Huber , along with Barr's promised examination, are completed, Comey's mishandling of
the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.
Ideally, Barr's examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary
streams.
The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump
campaign were adequately, in Barr's words, "predicated." This means he will examine whether
there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an
investigation in the first place.
The Mueller report's conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence
investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey's own pronouncement, that the
Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.
The second will be whether Comey's team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines
while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was
sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an
American citizen.
The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas
emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director
and attorney general. This, above all, is what's causing the 360-degree head spins.
There are early indicators that troubling behaviors may have occurred in all three
scenarios. Barr will want to zero in on a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of
confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA director.
Without diving into the weeds, it's important to understand that FBI counterintelligence
investigations generally proceed sequentially from what is called a preliminary investigation
or inquiry (PI) to a full investigation (FI). To move from a PI to an FI requires substantial
information -- predication -- indicating investigative targets acted as agents of a foreign
power.
This is problematic for Comey in light of Mueller's findings. There are strict guidelines
governing when the FBI can task a confidential source or a government undercover operative to
collect against a U.S. citizen. Normally this is restricted to a full investigation, and
normally restricted to the United States, not overseas.
There is a sense that Comey's team was not checking the boxes, did not have adequate
predication, and may have tasked sources before an investigation was even officially opened.
Barr should pull case files and dig in on this.
In addition, the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all
appear to have their genesis as CIA sources ("assets," in agency vernacular) shared at times
with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher Steele, to Carter
Page himself, and now a mysterious "government investigator" posing as Halper's assistant and
cited in The New York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was
manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence
case.
Some in the media have suggested that the Times article was an attempt by the FBI to justify
its early confidential source actions. But current FBI Director Christopher Wray has shown that
he would like to excise the cancerous tumor that grew during Comey's time and not just keep
smoking. It's hard to imagine current FBI executives trying to justify past malfeasance.
James Comey is right to be apprehensive. He himself ate away at the soul of the FBI, not in
small bites but in dangerously large ones. It was a dinner for one, though: His actions are not
indicative of the real FBI. The attorney general's comprehensive examination is welcome and, if
done honestly and dispassionately, it will protect future presidential candidates of both
parties and redeem the valuable soul of the FBI.
Kevin R. Brock, former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, was an FBI
special agent for 24 years and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He is a
founder and principal of NewStreet Global
Solutions , which consults with private companies and public-safety agencies on strategic
mission technologies.
Peter Strzok, his
little girlfriend Lisa Page, Andy McCabe, John Brennan, Sally Yates & Bruce Ohr immediately come to mind.
Horowitz is investigating those FISA warrant applications & Barr is investigating the origins of the Russia
collusion delusion.
Investigate them, arrest them the same way Roger Stone was arrested & interrogate them the same way Michael
Flynn was interrogated. Then offer them a deal.
If they flip on their lords & masters at the DNC, they get one weekend in a country club prison. If they don't
flip, they get 20 years in a real prison.
The next 18 months are going to be fascinating.
Neal
Stephen
an hour ago
This report reads, in fact, as if Trump was supposed to cooperate in his own obstruction. And because he
didn’t, he’s guilty of obstruction. ‘Donald Trump attempted to obstruct our coup,’ is how this should read.
‘Donald Trump attempted to obstruct our effort to throw him out of office,’ is how this report should read.
It’s made to order for people who want to continue running this operation to get rid of Trump. … The report
itself says there was no collusion.
We have a representative republic, and the popular vote doesn’t matter and it never has, by design. So all
these are just exercises in mathematics.
Hillary winning the popular vote by three million doesn’t mean anything, period.
If you want to have fun and if you’ve got some time, go to YouTube or wherever you go to find videos and
find election night coverage and start at 6 or 7 p.m. Eastern, any network, and watch it for a couple
hours. And as you get close to 9 o’clock, you will see a 180 degree shift from an attitude of jocularity
and confidence and happiness.” Because this was it, this was the glass ceiling being shattered or cracked,
however you look at it, the first female president, Hillary Clinton, walking away with it in a landslide.
But then as they get close to 9 o’clock, panic begins to settle in, and they shortly thereafter realize
that it ain’t falling out the way they thought it was going to. And as they start fearing and realizing
that Hillary is gonna lose, it’s one of the greatest things you can watch. Go back and relive that.
Liberals must be defeated not convinced
One of the central figures to the Russian-collusion narrative is Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud. He is the man that helped
allegedly jumpstart the counterintelligence investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump's 2016 campaign when he allegedly
told Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, including her emails.
In Special Counsel Robert Mueller's final report on the investigation, Mifsud is portrayed as being intimately connected to
the Putin regime in Russia. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have similarly portrayed Mifsud as a "cutout" who gave
Papadopoulos information on behalf of the Russians in order to influence the 2016 election.
But as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) wrote in
a letter
sent to the
U.S. State Department and the CIA last Friday, if Mifsud is the dangerous liaison Mueller made him out to be, then many more
Western politicians have been compromised, as many have had their own contact with the professor.
"Alternatively, if Mifsud is not in fact a counterintelligence threat, then that would cast doubt on the Special Counsel's
fundamental depiction of him and his activities, and raise questions about the veracity of the Special Counsel's statements and
affirmations," Nunes wrote.
"It should be noted that the Special Counsel declined to charge Mifsud with any crime even though, to justify seeking a prison
sentence for Papadopoulos, the Special Counsel claimed Papadopoulos' untruthful testimony 'undermined investigators' ability to
challenge the Professor [Mifsud] or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States,'" Nunes continued.
"Furthermore, it's still a mystery how the FBI knew to ask Papadopoulos specifically about Hillary Clinton's emails, on multiple
occasions throughout 2016-17 before having interviewed Mifsud, if the FBI hadn't already somehow received this information
directly or indirectly from Mifsud himself."
Nunes included in his letter photos of Mifsud with British politician Boris Johnson, member of the Italian military, and a
former member of the United Kingdom's Joint Intelligence Committee. Mueller's report also explains that Mifsud met Papadopoulos
at Link Campus University, described as "a for-profit institution headed by a former Italian government official." As Nunes
wrote, the report "omits" additional information about the university, which a Guardian report cited by Mueller's team claimed
the school "had a reputation for being closely connected to some elements within the Italian intelligence services." Mifsud, the
article quoted someone saying, collaborated regularly with the university.
This contradiction in Mueller's report should remind us of another problem with the final report,
as
described by
The Federalist's Margot Cleveland (full disclosure: I also have a byline at The Federalist). Cleveland pointed
out that "Not once in the 448-page tome does Mueller mention an investigation into whether Russia interfered with the U.S.
presidential election by feeding dossier author Christopher Steele misinformation." That dossier has been the "evidence" for many
of the media and Democrats' claims of collusion between Trump and Russia.
Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to providing false statements to the FBI when he told him in January 2017 that he had the meeting
with Mifsud
before
he joined the Trump campaign. It was Papadopoulos' April 26, 2016 meeting with Mifsud -- which he told
FBI agents about -- where he learned the Russians allegedly had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. Weeks later, Papadopoulos would tell
Australian diplomate Alexander Downer about this gossip, which has been reported as the event that sparked the investigation into
the campaign.
The Daily Caller
reported
that Papadopoulos has
said he never told anyone on Trump's campaign about what Mifsud told him, and Mueller's report makes clear there's no evidence to
contradict those claims.
"... The encounter, and Kavalec's memos, were forced into public view through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation by Citizens United. Yet, all but a few lines have been redacted after the fact. Officials are citing as the reason national security, in the name of the FBI and a half-century-old intelligence law. ..."
"... the documents suggest there was an illegal effort to "frame" the future president with bogus Russia collusion allegations. "This new information proves why the attorney general must conduct a thorough investigation of the investigators," he said. ..."
"... we have written proof the U.S. government knew well before the FBI secured the FISA warrant that Steele had a political motive and Election Day deadline to make his dossier public. ..."
"... Documents and testimony from Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS , show he told the FBI in August 2016 that Steele was "desperate" to defeat Trump and his work had something to do with Clinton's campaign. ..."
"... Kavalec's notes make clear the DNC was a likely client and the election was Steele's deadline to smear Trump. ..."
"... That makes the FBI's failure to disclose to the FISA judges the information about Steele's political bias and motive all the more stunning. And it makes the agents' use of his unverified dossier to support the warrant all the more shameful. ..."
If ever there were an admission that taints the FBI's secret warrant to surveil Donald Trump 's campaign, it sat buried for more than
two-and-a-half years in the files of a high-ranking State Department official.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec's written account
of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence
operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day
deadline.
State officials acknowledged a year ago they received a copy of the Steele dossier in July
2016, and got a more detailed briefing in October 2016 and referred the information to the
FBI.
But what was discussed was not revealed. Sources told me more than a year ago that Kavalec
had the most important (and memorialized) interaction with Steele before the FISA warrant was
issued, but FBI and State officials refused to discuss it, or even confirm it.
The encounter, and Kavalec's memos, were forced into public view through Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) litigation by Citizens United. Yet, all but a few lines have been
redacted after the fact. Officials are citing as the reason national security, in the name of
the FBI and a half-century-old intelligence law.
David Bossie, head of Citizens United and an informal Trump adviser, said the documents
suggest there was an illegal effort to "frame" the future president with bogus Russia collusion
allegations. "This new information proves why the attorney general must conduct
a thorough investigation of the investigators," he said.
Sources tell me there also are handwritten notes from the meeting, with information about
Steele's political ties, that have not been given to Congress. "There's a connection to Hillary
Clinton in the notes," said one source who has seen them.
Perhaps those will come to light soon.
The mere four sentences that the FBI allowed State to release, unredacted, show that Kavalec
sent an email two days after her encounter with Steele, alerting others.
"You may already have this information but wanted to pass it on just in case," Kavalec wrote
in the lone sentence the FBI and State released from that email . The
names of the recipients, the subject line and the attachments are blacked out.
Interestingly, one legal justification cited for redacting the Oct. 13, 2016, email is the
National
Security Act of 1947 , which can be used to shield communications involving the CIA or the
White House National Security Council.
The three other sentences visible in her memo show that U.S. officials had good reason to
suspect Steele's client and motive in alleging Trump-Russia collusion because they were
election-related and facilitated by the Clinton-funded Fusion GPS founder, Glenn Simpson.
"Orbis undertook the investigation into the Russia/Trump connection at the behest of an
institution he declined to identify that had been hacked," Kavalec wrote.
At the time, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was the highest-profile victim of
election-year hacking
.
"The institution approached them based on the recommendation of Glenn Simpson and Peter
Fritsch (specialists in economic crime, formerly of the WSJ) and is keen to see this
information come to light prior to November 8," Kavalec wrote. "Orbis undertook the
investigation in June of 2016." Steele's firm Orbis was a subcontractor to Fusion GPS, and WSJ
refers to the Wall Street Journal.
Everything else in the memo was blacked out. The FOIA notes contain this explanation for the
redactions: "Classified by FBI on 4/25/2019 -- Class: SECRET."
In other words, the FBI under Director Christopher Wray classified the document as "secret"
just a few days ago. To add injury to insult, the FBI added this hopeful note: "Declassify on
12/31/2041." That would be 25 years after the 2016 election.
Despite the heavy redactions, Kavalec's notes have momentous consequence.
For the first time, we have written proof the U.S. government knew well before the FBI
secured the FISA warrant that Steele had a political motive and Election Day deadline to make
his dossier public.
And we know that information was transmitted before the Carter Page FISA warrant to one or
more people whose job is so sensitive that their identity had to be protected. That means there
is little chance the FBI didn't know about Steele's political client, or the Election Day
deadline, before requesting the FISA warrant.
Documents and testimony from Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, whose wife
Nellie worked for Fusion GPS , show
he told the FBI in August 2016 that Steele was "desperate" to defeat Trump and his work had
something to do with Clinton's campaign.
Kavalec's notes make clear the DNC was a likely client and the election was Steele's
deadline to smear Trump.
Likewise, there is little chance the FBI didn't know that Steele, then a bureau informant,
had broken protocol and gone to the State Department in an effort to make the Trump dirt
public.
That makes the FBI's
failure to disclose to the FISA judges the information about Steele's political bias and
motive all the more stunning. And it makes the agents' use of his unverified dossier to support
the warrant all the more shameful.
Kavalec's notes shed light on another mystery from the text messages between the FBI's Pete
Strzok and Lisa Page, which first revealed the politically-biased nature of the Trump collusion
probe.
Strzok, the lead FBI agent on the case, and Page, a lawyer working for the FBI deputy
director, repeatedly messaged each other in October 2016 about efforts to
pressure and speed the review of the FISA warrant.
For instance, on Oct. 11, 2016, Strzok texted Page that he was "fighting with Stu for this
FISA," an apparent reference to then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stu Evans in DOJ's
national security division.
A few days later, on Oct. 14, Strzok emailed Page he needed some "hurry the F up pressure"
to get the FISA approved.
If the evidence is good and the FISA request solid, why did the FBI need to apply
pressure?
The real reason may be the FBI was trying to keep a lid on the political origins, motives
and Election Day deadline of its star informant Steele.
And that would be the ultimate abuse of the FBI's FISA powers.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has
exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists'
misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political
corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at
The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports .
When we saw these tweets from George Papadopoulos, we thought we could help him out with some answers. If you can
get them to George, please do.
Has congress figured out why Peter Strzok's former
boss, Bill Priestap, was in London (of all places) the days before Alexander Downer was sent to spy on me and lie
about our meeting? If not, time to get a move on it.
Britain is in a political crisis. To push Brexit hard, declassifying the spy
role of the David Cameron government on Trump and his team is paramount. Congress can not overlook the vital
importance of London as the center of the coup attempt.
Bill
Priestap was the Director of the FBI national security division and would have gone to the London CIA "office" for
a meeting. There he would have met with Stefan Halper and Gina Haspel who was, at the time, head of the London CIA
office and would have been in charge of the connections with Robert Hannigan (British GCHQ) and John Brennan who
planned and executed the wiretapping of Trump Team at Trump Towers. Haspel's communications, when released, will
reveal the full scope of the CIA led international attack on the 2016 presidential election.
Gina Haspel would have known about the coup. If she has not reported
all of this to the President Trump, she is complicit in the overthrow attempt and is guilty of HIGH TREASON.
Pictured:
Evil SES Conspirator
Keep in mind, Peter Strzok was a CIA Regional Director who John
Brennan appointed as the head of Crossfire Hurricane, the CIA counter-intelligence operation to "take out"
candidate Trump – later it became the Mueller Witch Hunt after 13 different iterations spanning:
the CIA (John Brennan),
FBI (James Comey, Andrew McCabe, James Baker, etc.),
DoJ (Loretta Lynn, Sally Yates, Andrew Weisseman),
State Department (Victoria Nuland, Jonathon Winer, Hilary Clinton, John Kerry),
ODNS (James Clapper),
NSA (Admiral Mike Rogers)
and the White House senior staff (directly to Obama, Biden, Jarret, Rice, Powers,
etc.).
Bill Preistap was the supervisor for Strzok and Lisa Page who also worked for
John Carlin
in the Department of Justice National Security Division under Sally Yates. Then Strozk and Page
continued their CIA operation as they were appointed to Mueller's Special Council Investigation.
Gina Haspel worked directly for the instigator of the Crossfire Hurricane operation – John Brennan. It would
have been impossible for Haspel not to have known about the British spying from London since it was reported in UK
newspaper on a weekly basis. She certainly was controlling
Stefan Halper
,
Josef Mifsud
,
Stephan Roh
, Alexander Downer, Andrew Wood, John McCain, Mark Warner, Adam Schiff and the other conspirators.
All of these facts are well known and reported in open source documents. As the 53 testimonies of the House
Intelligence Committee are released, we will see the house of cards all fall down and Gina Haspel will go with it.
Mueller Mifsud blunder is indicative of the quality of this "Investigation". The final results desired were established before
any investigating took place.
This is definitely a cover up. Mueller could call Jina Haspel and get all the information about Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud
who tried to tie George Papadopoulos to Russia. It is definitely available via regular CIA channels as
CIA Director Gina
Haspel is Complicit with the Attempted Overthrow of Trump
.
Bill Priestap was the Director of the FBI national security division and would have gone to the London CIA "office" for a
meeting. There he would have met with Stefan Halper and Gina Haspel who was, at the time, head of the London CIA office and would
have been in charge of the connections with Robert Hannigan (British GCHQ) and John Brennan who planned and executed the wiretapping
of Trump Team at Trump Towers. Haspel's communications, when released, will reveal the full scope of the CIA led international
attack on the 2016 presidential election.
On May 3, 2019 Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) requested information on Friday from the State Department, CIA, FBI and NSA on operative
Joseph Mifsud (
May3,
2019)
Notable quotes:
"... So how many companies or agencies that you know of, when you say, hey, I'm quitting, and they say, hey, what about a free four-to-five-day vacation in Rome? We're going to fly you there. We're going to put you up for free. We're going to give you food... And all you have to do is meet this guy Mifsud, right... We're trying to get to the bottom of Mifsud . So, as we talked about it on the last segment, this guy originates the investigation. We know that the Mueller team wrote this Mueller dossier. They used a lot of these news stories that, in fact, sometimes were generated by leaks from the FBI. ..."
"... Robert Mueller never inquired about Peter Strzok and Lisa Page's "insurance policy" when he fired Strzok. When Mueller testifies in front of the House Judiciary Committee, I'm going to ask why he never even asked about what evidence might have been polluted by Strzok and Page. ..."
"... Come ON! YOU KNOW THIS is ********! There was no Russian disinformation and that sounds just like out of the Integrity Initiative in the UK and sponsored by the foreign office that seeks to quell Russian disinformation. ..."
"... This whole thing is DELIBERATE to demonize Russia.. ..."
"... Hillarys conflicts of interests never reveled as Secretary of State can and should be investigated by House Democrats instead of magical fabrications of obstruction of justice by Barr..... ..."
"... Mueller and the other intel guys were there to be an exit strategy for the dems, hide the bodies, and make sure to bungle or destroy any evidence that could be used against them. no duh ..."
"... Steele was a Confidential Human Source on the FBI payroll back in 2016. Steele had a handling agent. I'd sure like to know who the handler was. So, how directly the **** is Steele not a liar? ..."
Barr replied that he had yet to "go through the full scope of [Mueller's] investigation to
determine whether he did address or look at all into those issues," but that he would "try to
assemble all the existing information out there about it, not only for the Hill investigations and
the OIG, but also to see what the Special Counsel looked into. So I really couldn't say what he
looked into."
Meanwhile,
Barr said that he has assembled a DOJ team
to examine Mueller's investigation, findings, and
whether the spying conducted by the FBI against the Trump campaign in 2016 was improper.
Mueller's second major oversight
- which we have touched on repeatedly - is
the
special counsel's portrayal of Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud was a Russian agent
-
when
available evidence suggests he may have been a Western agent.
Weeks after returning from Moscow, Mifsud - a self-described
Clinton
Foundation member
- 'seeded' the rumor that Russia had 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton with Trump
campaign adviser George Papadopoulos on April 26, 2016, according to the Mueller report.
As Rep.
Devin Nunes (R-CA) noted on
Fox News
on Sunday, "
how is it that we spend
30-plus-million dollars on this, as taxpayers and they can't even tell us who Joseph Mifsud is?
"
"...this is important, because, in the Mueller dossier, they use a fake news story to describe
Mifsud. In one of those stories, they cherry- pick it," Nunes added.
BARTIROMO: Then he's working for Trump. So how come somebody from Britain, Australia, Italy,
they're all reaching out to him? And, by the way, how come this London Center of International
Law reached out to Papadopoulos on LinkedIn to go work there, after Ben Carson withdrew?
NUNES: And I think a better question is, is that -- so, Papadopoulos claims that he was quitting
this London Center.
So how many companies or agencies that you know of, when you say, hey, I'm quitting, and they
say, hey, what about a free four-to-five-day vacation in Rome? We're going to fly you there.
We're going to put you up for free. We're going to give you food...
And all you have to
do is meet this guy Mifsud, right... We're trying to get to the bottom of Mifsud
. So,
as we talked about it on the last segment, this guy originates the investigation. We know that
the Mueller team wrote this Mueller dossier. They used a lot of these news stories that, in
fact, sometimes were generated by leaks from the FBI.
Now, I don't think the American people expect 20 DOJ lawyers and 40 FBI agents to write a
450-page report that's built off of news stories that in many cases they generated.
Why I particularly have a problem with this is -- with one of the stories is because they pick a
news story, and then they cherry-pick from it.
So they use it partly to describe where
Mifsud worked, but then they fail to say in that same story that they have given support to by
using it in the Mueller dossier
, they cherry-pick it. -Via
RealClearPolitics
As
conservative commentator
and former US Secret
Service agent
Dan Bongino
notes of Mifsud, "either we have a Russian asset who's
infiltrated the highest echelons of friendly Intelligence Services, or we have a friendly who was
setting up George Papadopoulos."
Perhaps Mueller's reportedly scheduled testimony next week will shed more light on
why
he failed to question the possible role of Russian disinformation with the Steele Dossier
,
and
why he didn't flush out who Joseph Mifsud really is
.
Other omissions, meanwhile, are on the table as well...
Robert Mueller never inquired about Peter Strzok and Lisa
Page's "insurance policy" when he fired Strzok. When Mueller testifies in front of the House Judiciary Committee,
I'm going to ask why he never even asked about what evidence might have been polluted by Strzok and Page.
Hillary paid Perkins Coie to pay Fusion GPS to write a fake
dossier and then paid Christopher Steele to try to infuse what
they wrote with a little authenticity. To anyone who is not brain
dead, the whole dossier read like 4chan fan fiction and was
laughable from the very start. The whole thing was an obvious set
up to all observers (even the Dems though they will cling to their
lies to the very end and continue to double down). Most people are
growing tired of their antics and their virtue signalling and
moralizing.
The House Committee will just mute the microphones and prevent
anyone from asking a worthwhile probing question to Mueller during
the hearing. It will be the usual circus, but totally transparent
to all who do not suffer from chronic TDS.
'why he failed to question the possible role of Russian
disinformation with the Steele Dossier
, and
why he didn't
flush out who Joseph Mifsud really is
.".
Come ON! YOU KNOW
THIS is ********! There was no Russian disinformation and that
sounds just like out of the Integrity Initiative in the UK and
sponsored by the foreign office that seeks to quell Russian
disinformation.
This whole thing is DELIBERATE to demonize Russia..
The only "Russian disinfo came from SKRIPAL who has now been
poisoned and taken to a secret location to serve out the remainder
of his life so that he never talks again!
Here is your Hillary Russian agent connected to 2016 election and
the true obstruction of justice pirate :
"
CHELSEA CLINTON
On Sep. 22, 2011
, Barry Diller appointed Chelsea Clinton, then
a college student, to be a director of IAC/Interactivecorp which
has a current market value of $10 billion. At the same time,
Diller appointed Sonali De Rycker of Accel Partners LLP London and
formerly Goldman Sachs. Accel is the largest inside shareholder in
Facebook after Mark Zuckerberg.
It should also be noted that on
Mar.
11, 2009
, IAC/Interactivecorp received what has been, in
effect, a PERMANENT CONFIDENTIALITY EXEMPTION from the SEC from
reporting its Google AdSense revenue numbers in its public
reporting. This is totally outrageous.
See
the redacted
revenue numbers from Google AdSense on
IAC/Interactivecorp's
10-K, Exhibit 10-25 on Mar. 11, 2009
.
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had an ethical duty to
disclose to the public her conflicts of interest in Chelsea
Clinton's appointment as director of IAC/Interactivecorp in 2011.
Given Chelsea's ties to Facebook director and venture capitalist
Accel Partners, the Clinton's engaged in obstruction of justice in
the
Leader v. Facebook
patent infringement lawsuit as well
as the
Ceglia v. Zuckerberg
contract dispute. Also,
Chelsea's relationship to Barry Diller shows that mainstream media
was engaging in undisclosed bias for the Clintons and against
Donald Trump."
Hillary paid Facebook starting on Nov. 26, 2009 to write a "
Template for winning elections" directed by RUSSIAN Dmitry
Schevelenko of FACEBOOK.
Hillarys conflicts of interests never reveled as Secretary of
State can and should be investigated by House Democrats instead of
magical fabrications of obstruction of justice by Barr.....
If this wasn't such comic relief for conservatives it would be
written as a template for losers.👎😄🌾
Mueller and the other intel guys were there to be an exit strategy
for the dems, hide the bodies, and make sure to bungle or destroy
any evidence that could be used against them. no duh
So... if we investigate The Mueller Report, is that a
Special-Special Counsel, or a Super-Special Counsel?
Either way,
the target is a Counsel investigation that was not so special
(read corrupted).
Competent counter-intelligence guards against being caught...
these fools were already in over their heads by the time it dawned
on them that victory was not assured.
And to that end, there is no one in the intelligence community
that would have had an early inkling that HRC could blow (poor
choice of words, sorry to creep you out) the election (against any
Republican nominee) save for someone with authority (executive),
motivation (legacy), and accurate polling. Gee... who could that
have possibly been?
Mueller's appointment by Rosenstein was illegal and the stated
purpose of said investigation was outside the scope of a Special
Counsel.
The purpose of the report is to propagate and lend some
credibility to the lies that Russia somehow interfered in our
elections, hacked the DNC, and Mifsud was a Russian agent.
These claims have already been conclusively disproven by
multiple sources. Mifsud is MI6 hiding in Italy so he doesn't get
Skripal'ed.
Hmmm. You would think Mueller and his team would vet the
authenticity of Steele dossier and look into the bleach biting of
Hitlery's e-mail server since both were prima facie evidence in
this whole charade. The fact this wasn't done is quite damning in
and of itself and suggests the Mueller team was complicit in the
entire "Russian Collusion" hoax.
"confided that the Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team
valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton."
And how is this
different from the Venezuela, Syria, Libya, Iran False Flags
???????? Not one time has Hit-Lary personnel written or spoken
that the leaked intel about the DNC and Clinton 2019 presidential
campaign was False....the whole Russia-Gate is a Cover-up of the
Crimes of the DNC and Deep State during the Obozo Administration,
during the electoral Process for the 2019 Presidential Elections,
by the DNC, Clinton's, and the Deep State - NeoCon's.......Thats
why Trump won the Election.... We the People are tired of the
never ending **** show in D.C., and We the People voted for anyone
running on the Novel Idea of Change!!!!
Everyone in America knows that the Mueller investigation was a
fraud predicated on fabricated evidence, that Obama used
government intelligence agencies to spy on and entrap the
political opposition, and that Crooked Hillary Clinton and her
minions are guilty of numerous crimes, mishandling of classified
information being the least of these offenses.
The only thing
the whole country is waiting for is to find out what these *******
criminals are going to get away with.
"... Remember, historically The Washington Post is the preferred outlet for the CIA and Intelligence Community within Deep State to dump their "leaks" and stories. The State Department "leaks" to CNN for the same purposes. ..."
Did NSA Admiral Mike Rogers Warn Trump On
November 17th, 2016?
Sometimes the utilization of Timelines means you have to look at the new information with
a keen awareness of specific events. In hindsight, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers may
have notified Team Trump of Obama's Intelligence Community (James Clapper and John
Brennan) spying on their activity.
As you look at the FISA request dates below, it's important to note that NSA Director
Admiral Mike Rogers would be keenly aware of both the June request – Denied, and the
October request – Granted. Pay specific attention to the October request.
"October"!
.
June 2016: FISA request.
The Obama administration
files a request
with the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump
and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.
October 2016: FISA request.
The
Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a
computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found --
but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at
National
Review
later
notes
.
The
Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the
high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.
♦
On Tuesday November 8th, 2016 the election was held. Results announced Wednesday November
9th, 2016.
♦
On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met
with President-Elect Donald Trump.
♦
On Friday November 18th
The Washington Post reported
on a
recommendation in "October"
that Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position:
The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to
President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers,
be removed.
The recommendation, delivered to the White House
last month
, was made by Defense
Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.,
according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
[ ]
In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer,
Rogers, without
notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower
.
That caused consternation at senior levels of the administration, according to the
officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters.
(
link
)
Remember, historically The Washington Post is the preferred outlet for the CIA and
Intelligence Community
within Deep State
to dump their "leaks"
and stories. The State Department "leaks" to CNN for the same purposes.
On Saturday November 19th
Reuters reported
on the WaPo Story and
additional pressure by Defense Secretary Ash Carter and DNI James Clapper to fire Mike
Rogers.
[ ]
The Washington Post reported that a decision by Rogers to travel to New York to meet
with Trump on Thursday without notifying superiors caused consternation at senior levels
of the administration, but the recommendation to remove him predated his visit. (
link
)
The Intelligence Community -at the direction of President Obama- made a request to
a FISA court for the NSA to spy on Donald Trump in June 2016. It was denied.
In October the Intelligence Community (NSA) -at the direction of President Obama-
made a second request to the FISA court for the NSA to spy on Donald Trump. It was
approved.
At around the same time (October), as the second request to FISA, (Def Sec) Ash
Carter and (DNI) James Clapper tell President Obama to dump NSA Director Mike Rogers.
A week after the election, Mike Rogers makes a trip to Trump Tower without telling
his superior, James Clapper; which brings about new calls (November media leaks to WaPo)
for President Obama to dump Mike Rogers.
Occam's Razor
.
NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers didn't want to participate in the spying scheme (Clapper,
Brennan, Etc.), which was the baseline for President Obama's post presidency efforts to
undermine Donald Trump and keep Trump from digging into the Obama labyrinth underlying his
remaining loyalists. After the October spying operation went into effect, Rogers unknown
loyalty was a risk to the Obama objective. 10 Days after the election Rogers travels to
President-Elect Trump without notifying those who were involved in the intel scheme.
Did NSA Director Mike Rogers wait for a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information
Facility) to be set up in Trump Tower, and then notify the President-elect he was being
monitored by President Obama?
.Seems likely.
"... For over two years, anyone who suggested that the Russia investigation was a sham was harshly ridiculed by establishment mouthpieces as a conspiracy theorist. The notion that the Obama Justice Department (led by Eric " wingman " Holder and then Loretta " tarmac " Lynch) could have conspired with other US intel agencies and foreigners to paint Donald Trump as a Russian stooge was considered beyond the pale. ..."
"... Then we found out that virtually the entire FBI's top brass absolutely hate Donald Trump and supported Hillary Clinton; the former of whom the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation against, while giving Hillary a pass despite the fact that she destroyed evidence from her homebrew basement server while under subpoena. We were asked to believe that the FBI's extreme biases played no role in their investigations, while the left insisted that special counsel Robert Mueller was going to confirm fairy tales of Russian collusion peddled by a Clinton-funded dossier. ..."
"... And then the Mueller report came out - blowing the Russian collusion narrative out of the water, while painting a damning picture that suggests the entire genesis of the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, Crossfire Hurricane , was a setup ..."
"... We have now pinned Peter Strzok's boss, Bill Priestap, in London the week of May 6th, 2016 and on the 9th. The day before Alexander Downer was sent to spy on me and record our meeting. Congress must release the transcripts and embarrass the deep state. ..."
"... Mifsud was working for US intelligence services and seeded Papadopoulos with the 'dirt' rumor in order to kick off the FBI's counterintelligence operation. ..."
"... In short - based on what we know, it appears that Joseph Mifsud was part of a setup by Western intelligence services on then-candidate Donald Trump. ..."
"... A Company Whose Director Represents Joseph Mifsud Changed Its Name To "No Vichok Ltd" After The Salisbury Attack. "Novichok" was the nerve agent used to poison fmr GRU agent Sergei Skripal when the UK govt was caught lying about the analysis from Porton Down ..."
"... In his letter, Nunes says it is " still a mystery how the FBI knew to ask Papadopoulos specifically about Hillary Clinton's emails " if the bureau had not spoken with Mifsud. - Washington Examiner ..."
"... "If he is in fact a Russian agent, it would be one of the biggest intelligence scandals for not only the United States, but also our allies like the Italians and the Brits and others. Because if Mifsud is a Russian agent, he would know all kinds of our intelligence agents throughout the globe," said Nunes during a recent interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity. ..."
"... Why are there zero citations to Mifsud's 302 in the Mueller Report? ..."
For over two years, anyone who suggested that the Russia investigation was a sham was harshly ridiculed by establishment
mouthpieces as a conspiracy theorist. The notion that the Obama Justice Department (led by Eric "
wingman
"
Holder and then Loretta "
tarmac
"
Lynch) could have conspired with other US intel agencies and foreigners to paint Donald Trump as a Russian stooge was
considered beyond the pale.
Then we found out that virtually the entire FBI's top brass
absolutely hate Donald Trump
and supported Hillary
Clinton; the former of whom the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation against, while giving Hillary a pass
despite the fact that she
destroyed evidence
from her homebrew basement server while under subpoena. We were asked to believe that the FBI's extreme biases played no
role in their investigations, while the left insisted that special counsel Robert Mueller was going to confirm fairy tales
of Russian collusion peddled by a Clinton-funded dossier.
And then the Mueller report came out
- blowing the Russian collusion narrative out of the water, while
painting
a damning picture that suggests the entire genesis of the FBI's counterintelligence investigation,
Crossfire Hurricane
, was a setup
.
One of those brave enough to risk his reputation laying out what was going on
before
the Mueller report
dropped is
conservative commentator
and former US Secret Service agent
Dan Bongino
- who has repeatedly mentioned the suspicious role of self-described
Clinton Foundation member
Joseph Mifsud,
who
seeded the rumor that
Russia had 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton
to Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos on April 26, 2016 -
shortly
after returning from Moscow,
according to the Mueller report.
Two weeks later
,
Papadopoulos
would be bilked for information by Australian diplomat (another
Clinton
ally
) Alexander Downer at a London bar, who relayed the Kremlin 'dirt' rumor to Australian authorities, which alerted
the FBI (as the story goes), and operation Crossfire Hurricane was thus hatched.
We have now pinned Peter Strzok's boss, Bill Priestap, in London the week of May
6th, 2016 and on the 9th. The day before Alexander Downer was sent to spy on me and record our meeting. Congress must
release the transcripts and embarrass the deep state.
As Bongino lays out, there are
two working theories about Mifsud
. The first is that he's a
Russian
asset who tried to bait the Trump campaign
. The second is that Mifsud
was working for US intelligence services
and
seeded Papadopoulos with the 'dirt' rumor in order to kick off the FBI's counterintelligence operation.
"So either we have a Russian asset who's infiltrated the highest echelons of friendly Intelligence Services, or we have
a friendly who was setting up
@GeorgePapa19
- That's
the real scandal. This was not spying, this was entrapment."
pic.twitter.com/wGnV8HHur1
We know that Papadopoulos met multiple times with Mifsud in the first half of 2016:
March 14 2016
–
Papadopoulos
first meets Mifsud in Italy
– approximately one week after finding out he will be
joining the Trump team.
March 24 2016
– Papadopoulos,
Mifsud, Olga Polonskaya and unknown fourth party meet in a London cafe.
April 18 2016
– Mifsud
introduces Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev, an official at a state-sponsored think tank called Russian International
Affairs Council.
April 26 2016
– Mifsud
tells Papadopoulos he's met with high-level Russian government officials who have "dirt" on Clinton. Papadopoulos
will
tell the FBI
he learned of the emails prior to
joining the Trump Campaign.
May 13 2016
– Mifsud emails Papadopoulos an update of
"recent conversations".
Note:
Papadopoulos and Mifsud reportedly
both
worked
at the London Centre of International Law Practice. -
The
Markets Work
In short - based on what we know, it appears that Joseph Mifsud was part of a setup by Western intelligence
services on then-candidate Donald Trump.
Did You Know:
A Company Whose Director Represents Joseph Mifsud Changed Its Name To "No Vichok Ltd" After The Salisbury Attack.
"Novichok" was the nerve agent used to poison fmr GRU agent Sergei Skripal when the UK govt was caught lying about the
analysis from Porton Down
Great claims require great evidence, however,
which is why Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has requested a wide swath of
documents about Mifsud from several federal agencies.
As the
Washington
Examiner
reports, Nunes - the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, "
seeks information about who
Mifsud was working for at the time
and wrote in a letter that special counsel Robert
Mueller "omits any
mention of a wide range of contacts Mifsud had with Western political institutions and individuals"
in his report
on Russian interference in the 2016 election."
The special counsel's
sentencing
memo
to the District Court for the District of Columbia said Papadopoulos hindered the FBI's ability to get to
Mifsud. "The defendant's lies undermined investigators' ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or
arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States
on February 11, 2017 and he has not returned to the United States since then," the memo said.
In his letter, Nunes says it is "
still a mystery how the FBI knew to ask Papadopoulos specifically about
Hillary Clinton's emails
" if the bureau had not spoken with Mifsud. -
Washington
Examiner
"If he is in fact a Russian agent, it would be one of the biggest intelligence scandals for not only the United States,
but also our allies like the Italians and the Brits and others. Because if Mifsud is a Russian agent, he would know all
kinds of our intelligence agents throughout the globe," said Nunes during a recent interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity.
Look deeper at the Report re: Mifsud. One interesting omission --
Why are there zero citations to Mifsud's 302 in the Mueller Report?
"Once the Mueller report is put to bed, and it will be soon, this committee is going to look long and hard at how all of this
started," Graham said. "We're going to look at the FISA warrant process. Did Russia provide Christopher Steele the information about
Trump, that turned out to be garbage, that was used to get a warrant on an American citizen and if so, how did the system fail? Was
there a real effort between Papadopoulos and anybody in Russia to use the Clinton e-mails stolen by the Russians, or is that thought
planted in his mind? I don't know, but we're going to look."
There is definite some split in the US elite. That's why Trump survived the color revolution. This is actually
debate about future for the USA neoliberal socisty and referendum of "Full spectrum Dominance" policies.
Notable quotes:
"... Attorney General William Barr told the Senate Judiciary Panel this week that he has assembled a team at the Justice Department to probe whether the spying conducted by the FBI against the Trump campaign in 2016 was improper, reports Bloomberg . ..."
"... Barr suggested that he would focus on former senior leaders at the FBI and Justice Department. ..."
"... As Bloomberg notes, Barr's review could receive a boost by a Thursday New York Times article acknowledging that the FBI sent a 'honeypot' spy to London in 2016 to pose as a research assistant and gather intelligence from Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos over possible Trump campaign links to Russia. ..."
"... During Barr's Wednesday testimony, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) told Barr " It appears to me that the Obama administration, Justice Department and FBI decided to place their bets on Hillary Clinton and focus their efforts" when it came to investigating the Trump campaign. ..."
"... On Thursday, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) issued a criminal referral for Nellie Ohr - a former Fusion GPS contractor who passed anti-Trump research to her husband, then the #4 official at the DOJ. ..."
"... The FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign after a self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation, Joseph Mifsud, fed Papadopoulos the rumor that Russia had "dirt" on Clinton. That rumor would be coaxed out of the former Trump aide by another Clinton-connected individual - Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who would notify authorities of Papadopoulos' admission, officially launching the investigation. ..."
"... They all play for the same (((Globalist))) team. NO ONE is going to jail. They are performers, vamping until the 'event(s)' come to pass, which will 'change the ******* subject,' bigly. NO ONE is going to jail. ..."
"... The Mueller/Russia charade has been obvious to anyone with half a brain for over two years. If you still believed it after it was exposed that Hillary paid for the dossier, then you are truly an idiot. ..."
"... It makes no difference what you think of Trump. I think he is a Zionist tool. But if you have not yet seen that the Mueller/Russia nonsense is 100% Hillary's butthurt doing then you are truly an idiot. ..."
"... Bathtub Barry did nothing about “Russian” interference. Absolutely nothing. Why oh why did Obama do absolutely nothing? Because he inserted spies into the campaign and the administration. And you think trump would trust a staff member at that point? And if he would of brought Kushner who he thinks he could trust you would of skewered him. Please keep making the point for all of us. https://youtu.be/ybvmu7kM8z0 ..."
"... We shall see. I'm not getting my hopes up that justice will be served. For one thing, Barr is keeping alive the RU meddled narrative. Now that could be either to pin it on Barry for not stopping it, but it could also be to keep Mueller et al. out of prison by lending legitimacy to the SC. ..."
"... Barr, Huber and Horowitz ..... We shall see. The fact that Sessions chose Huber and Horowitz does not make me confident that justice will be served. ..."
Attorney
General William Barr told the Senate Judiciary Panel this week that he has assembled a team at
the Justice Department to probe whether the spying conducted by the FBI against the Trump
campaign in 2016 was improper, reports
Bloomberg .Barr suggested that he would focus on former senior leaders at the FBI
and Justice Department.
"To the extent there was overreach, what we have to be concerned about is a few people at
the top getting it into their heads that they know better than the American people," said
Barr.
Barr will also review whether the infamous Steele dossier - a collection of salacious and
unverified claims against Donald Trump, assembled by a former British spy and paid for by the
Clinton campaign - was fabricated by the Russian government to trick the FBI and other US
agencies. (Will Barr investigate whether Steele made the whole thing up for his client, Fusion
GPS?)
"We now know that he was being falsely accused," Barr said of Trump. "We have to stop using
the criminal justice process as a political weapon."
Mueller's report didn't say there were false accusations against Trump. It said the
evidence of cooperation between the campaign and Russia "was not sufficient to support
criminal charges." Investigators were unable to get a complete picture of the activities of
some relevant people, the special counsel found.
Although Barr's review has only begun, it's helping to fuel a narrative long embraced by
Trump and some of his Republican supporters: that the Russia investigation was politically
motivated and concocted from false allegations in order to spy on Trump's campaign and
ultimately undermine his presidency . -
Bloomberg
As Bloomberg notes, Barr's review could receive a boost by a Thursday New York Times
article acknowledging that the FBI sent a 'honeypot' spy to London in 2016 to pose as a
research assistant and gather intelligence from Trump foreign policy adviser George
Papadopoulos over possible Trump campaign links to Russia.
The Trump re-election campaign immediately seized on the Times report as evidence that
improper spying did occur. "As President Trump has said, it is high time to investigate the
investigators," said Trump campaign manager, Brad Parscale in a statement.
During Barr's Wednesday testimony, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) told Barr " It appears to me
that the Obama administration, Justice Department and FBI decided to place their bets on
Hillary Clinton and focus their efforts" when it came to investigating the Trump campaign.
Depending on what Barr finds, his review of the Russia probe could give Trump ammunition
to defend himself in continuing congressional inquiries -- and in a potential impeachment for
obstructing justice. Barr told senators that Trump's actions can't be seen as obstruction if
he was exercising his constitutional authority as president to put an end to an illegitimate
investigation.
Barr's efforts follow two years of work by a group of House Republicans who have been
conducting dozens of interviews regarding the FBI's and Justice Department's conduct in the
early stages of investigation of Trump and his campaign. -
Bloomberg
On Thursday, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) issued a
criminal referral for Nellie Ohr - a former Fusion GPS contractor who passed anti-Trump
research to her husband, then the #4 official at the DOJ.
On Thursday, Meadows said that Barr's "willingness to investigate the origins of the Russia
investigation is the first step in putting the questionable practices of the past behind us,"
and that the AG's "tenacity is sure to be rewarded."
The FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign after a
self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation, Joseph Mifsud, fed Papadopoulos the rumor that
Russia had "dirt" on Clinton. That rumor would be coaxed out of the former Trump aide by
another Clinton-connected individual - Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who would notify
authorities of Papadopoulos' admission, officially launching the investigation.
Barr says he wants to get to the bottom of it.
His review will examine the above chain of events that set the investigation into motion,
and whether any US agencies were engaged in spying on or investigating the Trump campaign
before the probe was officially launched .
Barr said he's working with FBI Director Christopher Wray "to reconstruct exactly what
went down." He said he has "people in the department helping me review the activities over
the summer of 2016."
Notably, Barr said his aides will be "working very closely" with the Justice Department's
inspector general, Michael Horowitz.
Horowitz is conducting his own investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation
and whether there were abuses when the FBI obtained a secret warrant from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court in October 2016 to spy on another foreign policy adviser to
the campaign, Carter Page. -
Bloomberg
Barr will also investigate when the DOJ and FBI knew that the Democratic Party and Clinton
was Steele .
Behind closed doors all of these republicans, and democrats are laughing together,
drinking, having their steak and lobster dinners while the masses think that something is
happening for their side. More theater, more wasting time and money, always taking down
America from within, one day at a time! Government means force, violence, lying, thieving,
murdering, and those are it's best qualities.
So whom does the "probe" consist of? Who's investigating the investigators? This is kinda
like the mafia policing itself. In my opinion, this is all show just to make the plebs think
some form of justice is afoot. When lengthy prison sentences and executions for treason
begin, then we'll KNOW justice is being served. Same thing with the banksters.
They all play for the same (((Globalist))) team. NO ONE is going to jail. They are performers, vamping until the 'event(s)' come to pass, which will 'change the
******* subject,' bigly. NO ONE is going to jail.
The Mueller/Russia charade has been obvious to anyone with half a brain for over two
years. If you still believed it after it was exposed that Hillary paid for the dossier, then
you are truly an idiot.
It makes no difference what you think of Trump. I think he is a Zionist tool. But if you
have not yet seen that the Mueller/Russia nonsense is 100% Hillary's butthurt doing then you
are truly an idiot.
If Justice is not served in this case (and truly served, i.e. Obama impeached and
imprisoned) and some scum bag like any of the democrat candidates become president, it is
going to be the dark ages in the US, economically, morally and psychologically.
Because he didn’t trust any one because Bathtub Barry did nothing about
“Russian” interference. Absolutely nothing. Why oh why did Obama do absolutely
nothing? Because he inserted spies into the campaign and the administration. And you think
trump would trust a staff member at that point? And if he would of brought Kushner who he
thinks he could trust you would of skewered him. Please keep making the point for all of us.
https://youtu.be/ybvmu7kM8z0
We shall see. I'm not getting my hopes up that justice will be served. For one thing,
Barr is keeping alive the RU meddled narrative. Now that could be either to pin it on Barry
for not stopping it, but it could also be to keep Mueller et al. out of prison by lending
legitimacy to the SC.
Barr, Huber and Horowitz ..... We shall see. The fact that Sessions chose Huber and
Horowitz does not make me confident that justice will be served. We shall see, shortly I
hope.
If justice is not served the Republic is truly dead.
"... That report is going to be a bombshell. It is going to open up the investigation on a very high note, and there are going to be criminal referrals in it. ..."
"... The FISA court abuse is the center of this entire abuse of governmental power, and the chief judge in that court has already ruled that the FBI broke the law and that the people at the head of the justice department, Sally Yates, John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security all knew about it and lied to the FISA court about it... ..."
"... He [Rogers] discovered the illegal spying. He went personally to the FISA court and briefed the Chief Judge and worked with her for months to uncover the people who did it. The FISA court has already told the Justice Department who lied to that court and that has been given to [Attorney General] Bill Barr already. ..."
It is about the rule of law and privacy. The Obama administration for more than four years
before the 2016 election allowed four contractors working for the FBI to illegally surveil
American citizens -- illegally. The FISA court has already found that. There is the Horowitz
report coming out in May or possibly early June. There's another report that everyone has
forgotten about involving James Comey alone. That will be out in two weeks. That report is
going to be a bombshell. It is going to open up the investigation on a very high note, and
there are going to be criminal referrals in it.
The FISA court abuse is the center of this entire abuse of governmental power, and the chief
judge in that court has already ruled that the FBI broke the law and that the people at the
head of the justice department, Sally Yates, John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for
national security all knew about it and lied to the FISA court about it...
There's a hero in this story and it is not a lawyer. There is a hero. His name is Admiral
Mike Rogers. He was the head of the National Security Agency.
He [Rogers] discovered the illegal spying. He went personally to the FISA court and briefed
the Chief Judge and worked with her for months to uncover the people who did it. The FISA court
has already told the Justice Department who lied to that court and that has been given to
[Attorney General] Bill Barr already.
The investigation was weak and biased: the real McCarthyism witch hunt. Mueller Mifsud blunder now will be played by Nunes
and other republicans to the fullest extent possible, althouth this is only a tip of the iceberg of Mueller corruption. Other
parts are too dangerous to expose and will be swiped under the carpet.
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller begins, on Page 1, with this assertion: "The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion." Maybe so, but Mueller, who is not averse to editorializing and contextualizing elsewhere in the report, gives readers no historical background or context for this large generalization. ..."
"... Readers might wonder if, had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, there even would have been a Russiagate and Mueller investigation. ..."
"... Mueller repeatedly attributes to Trump campaign members and Russians who interacted in 2016, potentially in sinister or even criminal ways, a desire for "improved U.S.-Russian relations," for "bringing the end of the new Cold War," for a "new beginning with Russia." ..."
"... As reflected in the text and footnotes, Mueller relies heavily on reports by US intelligence agencies , but without treating the recorded misdeeds of those agencies, particularly the CIA under John Brennan , in promoting the Russiagate saga. ..."
"... Mueller reports that Mifsud "had connections to Russia" (p. 5), although a simple Google search suggests that Mifsud was indeed an "agent" but not a Russian one, as widely alleged in media accounts. ..."
"... Toward the end of the first volume (pp. 144, 146), Mueller produces a truly stunning revelation, though he seems unaware of it. After the 2016 US presidential election, the Kremlin "appeared not to have preexisting contacts with senior officials around the President-Elect." Even more, "Putin spoke of the difficulty faced by the Russian government in getting in touch with the incoming Trump Administration . Putin indicated that he did not know with whom formally to speak and generally did not know the people around the President-Elect." ..."
"... So much for all the shameful Russiagate allegations of Trump-Putin collusion, conspiracy, even treason. Surely it means the United States needs another, different investigation, one into the actual origins and meaning of this fraudulent, corrosive, exceedingly dangerous, and still unending American political scandal. ..."
Special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III's two-volume
"
Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election "
is not an easy read -- not unlike those manuals that come boxed with "easy to assemble"
multipart children's toys on Christmas Eve. Nonetheless, considering the exceedingly damaging
effects Russiagate has had on America at home and abroad for nearly three years, the report
will long be studied for what it reveals and does not reveal, what it includes and does not
include.
Because of my own special interest in Russia, I read carefully the first volume, which
focuses on that country's purported role in the scandal. I came away with as many questions
about the report as about the role of Moscow and that of candidate and then President Donald
Trump. To note a few:
Mueller begins, on Page 1, with this assertion: "The Russian government interfered in the
2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion." Maybe so, but Mueller, who is
not averse to editorializing and contextualizing elsewhere in the report, gives readers no
historical background or context for this large generalization.
In particular, was the
interference -- or "meddling," as media accounts characterize it -- more or less "sweeping and
systematic" than was Washington's military intervention in the Russian civil war in 1918 or its
very intrusive campaign to re-elect Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996 -- or, on the other
side of the ledger, the role of the Soviet-backed American Communist Party in US politics in
the 20th century? That is, what warranted a special investigation of this episode in
a century of mutual American-Russian interference in the other's politics? Put somewhat
differently: Readers might wonder if, had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, there even
would have been a Russiagate and Mueller investigation.
It has occasionally been suggested that Russiagate was originated by high-level US
officials who disliked candidate Trump's pledge to "cooperate with Russia." This suspicion
remains unproven, but throughout, Mueller repeatedly attributes to Trump campaign members and
Russians who interacted in 2016, potentially in sinister or even criminal ways, a desire for
"improved U.S.-Russian relations," for "bringing the end of the new Cold War," for a "new
beginning with Russia."
Even Russian President Vladimir Putin is reported to have wanted
"reconciliation between the United States and Russia." (See, for example, pp. 5, 98, 105, 124,
157.) The result is, of course, to discredit America's once-mainstream advocacy of
détente. Mueller even brands American pro-détente views -- as Presidents
Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan held in the 20th century -- as "pro-Russia foreign policy
positions" (p. 102). Does this mean that Americans who hold pro-détente views today, as
I and quite a few others do, are to be investigated for their "contacts" with Russians in
pursuit of better relations? Mueller seems to say nothing to offset this implication, which has
already adversely affected a few Americans mentioned and not mentioned in his report.
As reflected in the text and footnotes, Mueller relies heavily on reports by US intelligence
agencies , but without treating the recorded misdeeds of those agencies, particularly
the CIA under John
Brennan , in promoting the Russiagate saga. He also relies heavily on contemporary media
accounts of Russiagate as it unfolded, but without taking into account their journalistic
malpractices, as abundantly documented by
Matt Taibbi , who equates the malpractice with news reports leading up to the US invasion
of Iraq.
Nor does Mueller consider alternative scenarios and explanations, as any good historical
or judicial investigation must do. For example, he accepts uncritically the Clinton/Democratic
National Committee allegation that Russian agents hacked and disseminated their emails in 2016.
Again, maybe so, but why did he not do his own forensic examination or even mention the
alternative finding by VIPS that they were stolen and leaked by an insider? Why did he not
question Julian Assange, who claimed to know how and through whom the emails reached WikiLeaks?
And how to explain Mueller's minimal interest in the shadowy professor Joseph Mifsud, who
helped entrap George Papadopoulos in London?
Mueller reports that Mifsud "had connections to
Russia" (p. 5), although a simple Google search suggests that Mifsud was indeed an "agent" but
not a Russian one, as widely alleged in media accounts.
Though he may do so in the second volume of the report, Mueller oddly does not focus in
the first volume on the Steele dossier, where it surely belongs as a foundational Russiagate
document and whose anti-Trump "information" is now widely acknowledged to have been "salacious
and unverified." At one point, however, Mueller delivers a telling report: "Trump would not pay
for opposition research" (p. 61). Can this be anything other than a damning, if oblique,
judgment on the Clinton campaign, which is known to have paid for the Steele
dossier?
Toward the end of the first volume (pp. 144, 146), Mueller produces a truly stunning
revelation, though he seems unaware of it. After the 2016 US presidential election, the Kremlin
"appeared not to have preexisting contacts with senior officials around the President-Elect."
Even more, "Putin spoke of the difficulty faced by the Russian government in getting in touch
with the incoming Trump Administration . Putin indicated that he did not know with whom
formally to speak and generally did not know the people around the President-Elect."
So much for all the shameful Russiagate allegations of Trump-Putin collusion, conspiracy,
even treason. Surely it means the United States needs another, different investigation, one
into the actual origins and meaning of this fraudulent, corrosive, exceedingly dangerous, and
still unending American political scandal.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host
of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at
TheNation.com .
Congressional Republicans are "working to finalize" a criminal referral of Russiagate lynchpin
Nellie Ohr, the wife of the Justice Department's former #4 official Bruce Ohr.
Nellie was hired
by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, where she conducted
extensive opposition research
on Trump family members and campaign aides
, which she
passed along to Bruce on a
memory stick
.
Of note, the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to produce the salacious and unverified
"Steele Dossier," which was created by former UK spy Christopher Steele and used
Kremlin
sources
.
Meanwhile, today we learn from
The
Hill
's John Solomon that Nellie Ohr exchanged
339 pages of emails with DOJ
officials, including her husband Bruce, and met with DOJ prosecutors
while working for Fusion
GPS
.
Now,
a series of "Hi Honey" emails from Nellie Ohr to her high-ranking federal
prosecutor-husband and his colleagues raise the prospect that Hillary Clinton-funded opposition
research was being funneled into the Justice Department during the 2016 election through a
back-door marital channel.
It's a tale that raises questions of both conflict of
interest and possible false testimony.
Ohr has admitted to Congress that, during the 2016 presidential election, she worked for
Fusion GPS -- the firm hired by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to perform
political opposition research -- on a project specifically trying to connect
Donald
Trump
and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to Russian organized crime.
Now, 339 pages of emails, from her private account to Department of Justice (DOJ) email
accounts,
have
been released
under a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative legal group
Judicial Watch. -
The
Hill
And according to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rep. Mark Meadows
"is working to finalize" a
criminal referral of Nellie
.
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4855
"Hi Honey, if you ever get a moment you might find the penultimate article interesting --
especially the summary in the final paragraph," Nellie emailed Bruce on July 6, 2016 according to
the release. The article in question
suggested that Trump was a Putin stooge
. "If
Putin wanted to concoct the ideal candidate to service his purposes, his laboratory creation would
look like Donald Trump," Nellie bolded for emphasis.
As Solomon writes, "Such overt political content flowing into the email accounts of a DOJ
charged with the nonpartisan mission of prosecuting crimes is jarring enough.
It raises
additional questions about potential conflicts of interest when it is being injected by a spouse
working as a Democratic contractor trying to defeat Trump, and she is forwarding her own research
to his department and co-workers
."
House GOP investigators who reviewed Nellie Ohr's emails believe that their timing may be
essential to understanding how the false Russian narrative -- special counsel Robert Mueller
recently concluded there was no evidence of Trump-Putin collusion -- may have gotten such
credence inside DOJ and intelligence circles despite its overtly political origins.
For instance, just 24 days after the anti-Trump screed was emailed, both Ohrs met in
Washington with British intelligence operative Christopher Steele. Nellie Ohr testified that she
had known Steele from past encounters and learned at that
July
31, 2016, meeting
at the Mayflower Hotel that Steele, like herself, was working for Fusion
GPS on Trump-Russia research. She said she learned that Steele had concerns that he hoped the
DOJ or FBI would investigate, with help from her husband. -
The
Hill
Nellie, who speaks fluent Russian, worked with Fusion GPS between October 2015 and September
2016. She also admitted during her October 19, 2018 congressional testimony that she
favored
Hillary Clinton as a candidate,
and would have been less comfortable researching Clinton's
Russia ties (P. 105).
In 2010, she
represented the CIA's "Open Source Works" group
in a 2010 "
expert
working group
report on international organized crime"
along with Bruce Ohr and Fusion
GPS founder Glenn Simpson.
some have wondered if Nellie's late-life attraction to Ham radios was in fact a method of
covertly
communicating with others about the Trump-Russia investigation
, in a way which wouldn't be
surveilled by the NSA or other agencies.
was Nellie Ohr's late-in-life foray into ham radio an effort to evade the Rogers-led
NSA detecting her participation in compiling the Russian-sourced Steele dossier
? Just
as her husband's omissions on his DOJ ethics forms raise an inference of improper motive, any
competent prosecutor could use the circumstantial evidence of her taking up ham radio while
digging for dirt on Trump to prove her consciousness of guilt and intention to conceal illegal
activities. -
The
Federalist
Bruce Ohr was
demoted
twice
after the DOJ's Inspector General discovered that he lied about his involvement with
Simpson - who employed dossier author and former British spy, Christopher Steele.
Last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced that
his
panel would do a "deep dive" into the "other side" of the Trump-Russia investigation.
He
also called for the appointment of a new special counsel to look into abuse between the DOJ and
Obama administration while investigating Donald Trump and his campaign.
One would be foolish to think NSA doesn't monitor radio
communications! I know for a fact the Military does, and assume
they share this with NSA or the other 15 (FIFTEEN!) US *****
agencies. In the case of Amateur ("HAM") radio, fewer & fewer
people are taking time to study, learn and use it. Too bad. When
SHTF and landlines & cell phones don't work radio will be the ONLY
means of communication.
A criminal referral as I understand it, is just a suggestion to
please start a criminal investigation. What a farce. Why wasn't a
criminal investigation started 2 years ago? It's past time for an
indictment.
I just don't get it. An Ex-spy is hired (or the company he works
for) to generate **** about Trump, Any **** will do. All fictional
and all paid for fair and square with Hillary Bucks ? And then an
entire cohort of deeply embedded 'government officials' spreads,
promotes and pursues, stands behind, backs up and insistently
advances a complete fabrication as a 'probably true story ?" which
is shot to **** after two years of wasting how many millions on
Mueller **** juggling and delays all while under oath to uphold
the Constitution of these United States ? I'm just utterly
flabbergasted by this state of affairs. I knew the .gov was
corrupt but I had no idea these people were this despicable and
can only assume they must truly be 'fighting for their lives'. In
Any other 'pretending to be a fair government' society, these
creepy ****'s would be sitting in No-Bail Jail with access to only
their Attorney but not a ******* One of consequence has been seen
in cuff's. It's not like it's fine points of Law or anything like
that, this whole affair has been unsophisticated, unimaginative
and pretty much juvenile make-believe play acting , as if the head
of the FBI and CIA were pretty dense people when push comes to
shove. What a shitty paragraph in a future history book the
Clinton Cabal will turn out to be.
every one in deecee is married to some other person in some
other agency.
****.
that dumbshit blonde state dept. spokeshole for the HNIC,
the one who said jobs for the ragheads would eliminate
terrorism is the spokeshole for the CIA present day.
little roddie rosenstein's wife, lisa barsoomian is a
perfect example
that priestrap ****** at the FIBs' wife is the manager of
the largest private investigator company in deecee. surely
there is no part time or recycling going on there. surely.
if you want to compare dual citizenship members of congress,
find out how many members of congress have people on their
staffs who are married to CIA/FIB/NSA employees.
Leading up to the Mueller report, one of the long-promised "gotchas" peddled by the anti-Trump
media is that that Donald Trump Jr. would be indicted over a June 9, 2016 meeting in Trump Tower
with Russian representatives who promised negative information on Hillary Clinton.
Keep in mind, the Russian attorney who sought the discussion - Natalia Veselnitskaya -
met with Fusion GPS co-founder
Glenn Simpson
before and after the Trump Tower meeting.
Fusion was hired by the Clinton campaign and the DNC to produce the now-infamous "Steele
Dossier."
Also keep in mind that Trump Jr. reportedly shut down the meeting when it was obviously not
going to bear fruit.
Obvious setups
aside, former US Attorney Joe diGenova has penned an Op-Ed for
Fox
News
excoriating the media
for 'recklessly' promoting an untested
falsehood; that the meeting was illegal in the first place.
Don Jr. and the Trump Tower meeting -- What happens when fake news collides with
zero intent. The reporting on
Donald
Trump, Jr.'s treatment
in the
Mueller
report
has been woefully inaccurate.
The president's eldest son, an outspoken and unapologetic conservative, is a favorite punching
bag of the left. For more than two years, liberal journalists and shrieking "#resistance" activists
have salivated over the thought of seeing Don Jr. carted off in handcuffs.
To their dismay, there is only one crucial takeaway from the
Mueller
report's conclusions
about the utterly inconsequential "Trump Tower meeting" between Don Jr.,
several Russians, and others: neither Don Jr. nor anyone else involved in the meeting was charged
with any crime.
The reasons are clear. The entire theory about what was potentially illegal about the meeting
was speculative and untested. What's more, even if it were illegal, the report concluded that Don
Jr. didn't have the "willful" intent to break the law that would be necessary to make it a crime.
In their disappointment, Don Jr.'s detractors have latched on to a new theory: that he was
simply "too stupid" to be charged with a crime because he didn't know that his conduct was illegal.
They hang this blatant misconstruction on these words from the report: "the Office did not
obtain admissible evidence likely to meet the government's burden to prove beyond a reasonable
doubt that these individuals acted 'willfully,' i.e. with general knowledge of the illegality of
their conduct."
That's not just some minor technicality, absent which Robert Mueller's prosecutors would have
had Don Jr. in shackles while revelers in cat-eared pink hats danced in the streets. It's a central
element of the offense they were investigating, and they decided to clear Don Jr. because without
it there is no crime.
One often-used definition of "willful" intent states that it "requires proof beyond a reasonable
doubt that the defendant knew his or her conduct was unlawful and intended to do something that the
law forbids; that the defendant acted with a purpose to disobey or disregard the law."
In essence, in order to be charged with conspiring to cheat, you have to have been actually
meaning to cheat. That's the law. Without intent, there is no crime. And Mueller's team, even his
hand-picked Democrat attack dog Andrew Weissmann, knew they didn't have evidence to convince a jury
that Don Jr. meant to circumvent election laws when he typed "I love it" in response to a
tangentially-related British publicist's suggestion the Russian government might have "information
that would incriminate Hillary." Don Jr. even voluntarily released his email correspondence related
to that meeting.
But even if there were the requisite intent, the Mueller report still exonerates Don Jr.,
stating that "the government would likely encounter difficulty proving beyond a reasonable doubt
that the value of the promised information exceeded the threshold for a criminal violation."
Did you catch that?
For the English speakers among you, let me translate that from Weissmann-speak: "This 'crime' we
thought up as a way to nail Don Jr. is so speculative and unprecedented, we don't think there's a
court in the land that would let this fly."
The entire notion of a criminal conspiracy is predicated on the idea that the federal election
law's ban on campaigns taking "contributions" or "things of value" from foreign nationals also
applies to "dirt" on opposing candidates.
That's hardly an established interpretation of the law. In fact, no one has ever been convicted
of something similar. If "dirt" is a "thing of value" for campaign finance purposes, that is a
dangerously radical innovation with huge potential First Amendment implications.
Personally, I think it's a completely untenable interpretation, but don't take my word it.
Mueller and his team considered it, as well -- and then rejected it as too "difficult to prove" in
their report.
I wonder how many of the journalists calling Don Jr. stupid were so certain about this
far-fetched legal theory. I further wonder how many of them felt the same way when foreign national
Christopher Steele handed the Hillary Clinton campaign a whole dossier of "dirt" on President Trump
-- at a hefty, agreed-upon price, no less.
The whole thing is pure "#resistance" fantasy.
It was reckless for the media to promote the Trump Tower meeting as a crime, and it was
irresponsible for Mueller's report to discuss the matter using language that allows people who hate
Don Jr. to continue in that delusion.
"Russiagate without Russia" actually means "Isrealgate". This individual points that he mentions below does not matter. Russiagate was a carefully planned and
brilliantly executed false flag operation run by intelligences
agencies (with GB agencies playing an important in some episodes decisive role) and headed probably by Obama himself via Brennan. There
were two goals: (1) to exclude any possibility of detente with Russia and (2) to block any Trump attempts to change the USA foreign
policy including running foreign war that enrich Pentagon contractors and justify supersized budget for intelligence agencies. As such
is was a great success.
The fact that no American was indicted and that Mueller attempt to prosecute Russian marketing agneces failed does not matter. The
atmosphere is now posoned for a generation. Americans are brainwashed and residue of Russiagate will stay for a long, long time. Neocons
Bolton and Pompeo now run Trump administration foreign policy with Trump performing most ceremonial role in foreign policy domain.
In this sense Skripals poisoning was another false flag operation, which was the logical continuation of Russiagate. And Magnitsky
killing (with Browder now a primary suspect) was a precursor to it. Both were run from Great Britain.
It is actually interesting how Mueller report swiped under the carpet the role of Great Britain in unleashing the Russiagate hysteria.
Two important foreign forces in the 2016 US Presidential elections was the Israel lobby and Great Britain. Trump proved to be a
marionette not of Russia but of Israeli lobby. so sad...
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later). ..."
For more than two years, leading US political and media voices promoted a narrative that Donald Trump conspired with or was compromised
by the Kremlin, and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would prove it. In the process, they overlooked countervailing evidence and
diverted anti-Trump energies into fervent speculation and prolonged anticipation. So long as Mueller was on the case, it was possible
to believe that " The Walls Are Closing In " on the
traitor /
puppet / asset in the
White House
.
The long-awaited completion of Mueller's probe, and the release of his redacted report, reveals this narrative -- and the expectations
it fueled -- to be unfounded. No American was indicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Mueller's report
does lay out extensive evidence that Trump sought to impede the investigation, but it declines to issue a verdict on obstruction.
It presents no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with an alleged effort by the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton,
and instead renders this conclusion: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired
with the Russian government in its election-interference activities." As a result, Mueller's report provides the opposite of what
Russiagate promoters led their audiences to expect: Rather than detailing a sinister collusion plot with Russia, it presents what
amounts to an extended indictment of the conspiracy theory itself.
1. Russiagate Without Russia
The most fundamental element of a conspiracy is contact between the two parties doing the conspiring. Hence, on the eve of the
report's release, The New York
Times noted that among the "outstanding questions" that Mueller would answer were the nature of "contacts between Kremlin
intermediaries and the Trump campaign."
Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence
that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian
ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later).
It should be no surprise, then, to learn from Mueller that, when "Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen
began trying to make inroads into the new administration" after Trump's election victory, they did not know whom to call. These powerful
Russians, Mueller noted, "appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect."
If top Russians did not have "preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with" the people that they supposedly conspired with,
perhaps that is because they did not actually conspire.
To borrow a phrase from Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, when it comes to the core question of contacts between
Trump and the Russian government, we are left with a "Russiagate without Russia." Instead we have a series of interactions where
Trump associates speak with Russian nationals, people with ties to Russian nationals, or people who claim to have ties to
the Russian government. But none of these "links," "ties," or associations ever entail a member of the Trump campaign interacting
with a Kremlin intermediary. Russiagate promoters have nonetheless fueled a dogged media effort to track
every
known instance in which someone in Trump's orbit
interacted with " the Russians ," or
someone who can be linked
to them . There is nothing illegal or inherently suspect about speaking to a Russian national -- but there is something xenophobic
about implying as much.
2. Russiagate's Predicate Led Nowhere
The most glaring absence of a Kremlin intermediary comes in the case that ostensibly prompted the entire Trump-Russia investigation.
During an April 2016 meeting in Rome, a London-based professor named Joseph Mifsud reportedly informed Trump campaign aide George
Papadopoulos that "the Russians" had obtained "thousands of emails" containing "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. That information made its
way to the FBI, which used it as a pretext to open the "Crossfire Hurricane" probe on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos was later indicted
for lying to FBI agents about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud. The case stoked speculation that Papadopoulos acted as an
intermediary between
Trump and Russia
.
But Papadopoulos played no such role. And while the Mueller report says that Papadopoulos "understood Mifsud to have substantial
connections to high-level Russian government officials," it never asserts that Mifsud actuall y had those connections.
Since Mifsud's suspected Russian connections were the purported predicate for the FBI's initial Trump-Russia investigation, that
is a conspicuous non-call. Another is the revelation from Mueller that
Mifsud made false statements to FBI investigators
when they interviewed him in February 2017 -- but yet, unlike Papadopoulos, Mifsud was not indicted. Thus, even the interaction that
sparked the Russia-collusion probe did not reveal collusion.
3. Sergey Kislyak Had "Brief and Non-Substantive" Interactions With the Trump Camp
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's conversations with Trump campaign officials and associates during and after the 2016 election
were the focus of intense controversy and speculation, leading to the recusal of
Jeff Sessions, then attorney
general, and to the indictment of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
After an exhaustive review, Mueller concluded that Kislyak's interactions with Trump campaign officials at public events "were
brief, public, and non-substantive." As for Kislyak's
much –
ballyhooed meeting which Sessions in September 2016, Mueller saw no reason to dispute that it "included any more than a passing
mention of the presidential campaign." When Kislyak spoke with other Trump aides after the August 2016 Republican National Convention,
Mueller "did not identify evidence in those interactions of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government."
The same goes for Kislyak's post-election conversations with Flynn. Mueller indicted Flynn for making "false statements and omissions"
in an interview with the FBI about his contacts with Kislyak during the transition in December 2016. The prevailing supposition was
that Flynn lied in order to hide from the FBI an
election-related payoff or "
quid pro quo
" with the Kremlin. The report punctures that thesis by reaffirming the facts in Flynn's indictment: What Flynn hid from agents
was that he had "called Kislyak to request Russian restraint" in response to sanctions imposed by the outgoing Obama administration,
and that Kislyak had agreed. Mueller ruled out the possibility that Flynn could have implicated Trump in anything criminal by noting
the absence of evidence that Flynn "possessed information damaging to the President that would give the President a personal incentive
to end the FBI's inquiry into Flynn's conduct."
4. Trump Tower Moscow Had No Help From Moscow
The November 2018 indictment of Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was widely seen as damning, possibly impeachment-worthy,
for Trump. Cohen admitted to giving false written answers to Congress in a bid to downplay Trump's personal knowledge of his company's
failed effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. To proponents of the collusion theory, Cohen's admitted lies were proof that "
Trump is compromised by
Russia ," " full stop ."
But the Mueller report does not show any such compromise, and, in fact, shows there to be no Trump-Kremlin relationship. Cohen,
the report notes, "requested [Kremlin] assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to build the project and with
financing." The request was evidently rejected. Elena Poliakova, the personal assistant to Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov,
spoke with Cohen by phone after he e-mailed her office for help. After their 20-minute call, the report says, "Cohen could not recall
any direct follow-up from Poliakova or from any other representative of the Russian government, nor did the [Special Counsel's] Office
identify any evidence of direct follow-up."
5. and Trump Didn't Ask Cohen to Lie About It
The Mueller report not only dispels the notion that Trump had secret dealings with the Kremlin over Trump Tower Moscow; it also
rejects a related impeachment-level "bombshell." In January, BuzzFeed News
reported that Mueller had evidence that Trump "directed" Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. But according to
Mueller, "the evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen's false testimony," and that
Cohen himself testified "that he and the President did not explicitly discuss whether Cohen's testimony about the Trump Tower Moscow
project would be or was false." In a de-facto retraction, BuzzFeed updated its story with an
acknowledgment
of Mueller's conclusion .
6. The Trump Tower Meeting Really Was Just a "Waste of Time"
The June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower was
widely
dubbed
the
" Smoking
Gun ." An e-mail chain showed that Donald Trump Jr. welcomed an offer to accept compromising information about Clinton as "part
of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." But the pitch did not come from the meeting's Russian participants, but instead
from Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist acting on their behalf. Goldstone said that he invented "publicist puff" to secure
the meeting, because in reality,
as he told NPR , "I had no idea what I was talking about."
Mueller noted that Trump Jr.'s response "showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist
candidate Trump's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information [emphasis mine]."
The report further recounts that during the meeting Jared Kushner texted then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort that it was a "waste
of time," and requested that his assistants "call him to give him an excuse to leave." Accordingly, when "Veselnitskaya made additional
efforts to follow up on the meeting," after the election, "the Trump Transition Team did not engage."
7. Manafort Did Not Share Polling Data to Meddle in the US Election
In January, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators about several matters, including sharing Trump polling data and
discussing a Ukraine peace plan with a Ukrainian-Russian colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik, during the 2016 campaign. According to Mueller,
the FBI "assesses" that Kilimnik has unspecified "ties to Russian intelligence." To collusion proponents, the revelation was dubbed
" the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual
collusion " and even the "
Russian collusion smoking gun ."
Mueller, of course, reached a different conclusion: He "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling
data and Russia's interference in the election," and, moreover, "did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian
government on its election-interference efforts." Mueller noted that he "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing"
the polling data, but also acknowledged (and bolstered) the explanation of his star witness, Rick Gates, that Manafort was motivated
by proving his financial value to former and future clients.
Mueller also gave us new reasons to doubt the assertions that Kilimnik himself is a Russian intelligence asset or spy. First,
Mueller did not join
media pundits in asserting such about
Kilimnik. Second, to support his vague contention that Kilimnik has, according to the FBI, "ties to Russian intelligence," Mueller
offered up a list of " pieces of the Office's
Evidence" that contains no direct evidence. For his part, Kilimnik has repeatedly stated that he has no such ties, and recently
told The Washington Post that Mueller never attempted to interview him.
8. The Steele Dossier Was Fiction
The Steele dossier -- a collection of Democratic National Committee-funded opposition research alleging a high-level Trump-Russia
criminal relationship -- played a critical role in the Russiagate saga. The FBI relied on it for leads and evidentiary material in
its investigation of the Trump campaign ties to Russia, and prominent
politicians ,
pundits , and
media
outlets promoted it as
credible .
The Mueller report,
The New York Times
noted last week , has "underscored what had grown clearer for months some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared
to be false, and others were impossible to prove." Steele reported that low-level Trump aide Carter Page was offered a 19 percent
stake in the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft if he could get Trump to lift Western sanctions. In October 2016 the FBI, citing
the Steele dossier, told the FISA court that it "believes that [Russia's] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other
individuals associated with" the Trump campaign. The Mueller report, however, could "not establish that Page coordinated with the
Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."
The Steele dossier claimed that Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet Russian agents in the summer of 2016. In April 2018, McClatchy
reported to much fanfare that Mueller's team "has evidence" that placed Cohen in Prague during the period in question. Cohen later
denied the claim under oath, and Mueller agreed, noting that Cohen "never traveled to Prague."
After reports emerged in August 2016 that the Trump campaign had rejected an amendment to the Republican National Committee platform
that called for arming Ukraine, Steele claimed that it was the result of a quid pro quo. The Mueller report "did not establish that"
the rejection of the Ukraine amendment was "undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia."
9. The Trump Campaign Had No Secret Channel to WikiLeaks
In January, veteran Republican operative and conspiracy theorist Roger Stone caused a stir when he was indicted for lying to Congress
about his efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks. But Mueller's indictment actually showed that Stone
had no communications with WikiLeaks
before the election and no privileged information about its releases . Most significantly, it revealed that Trump officials were
trying to learn about the WikiLeaks releases through Stone -- a fact that underscored that the Trump campaign neither worked with
WikiLeaks nor had advance knowledge of its e-mail dumps.
Mueller's final report does nothing to alter that picture. Its sections on Stone are heavily redacted, owing to Stone's pending
trial. But they do make clear that Mueller conducted an extensive search to establish a tie between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign,
and Stone -- and came up empty. New
reporting from The Washington Post underscores just how far their farcical efforts went. The Mueller team devoted
time and energy to determine whether far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, best known for promoting the false claim that Barack
Obama was born outside the United States, served as a link between Stone and WikiLeaks. Mueller's prosecutors "spent weeks coaxing,
cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist, as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories," the Post
reports. "At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself." It is unsurprising that this led Mueller's prosecutors to
ultimately declare, according to Corsi's attorney, "We can't use any of this."
10. There Was No Cover-Up
The Mueller report does not just dispel the conspiracy theories that have engulfed political and media circles for two years;
it puts to rest the most popular, recent one: that Attorney General William Barr engaged in a
cover-up . According to the dominant narrative, Barr was
somehow concealing Mueller's damning evidence
, while Mueller, even more improbably, stayed silent.
One could argue that Barr's summary downplays the obstruction findings, though it accurately relays that Mueller's report does
"not exonerate" Trump. It was Mueller's decision to leave the verdict on obstruction to Barr and make clear that if Congress disagrees,
it has the power to indict Trump on its own. Mueller's office assisted with Barr's redactions, which proved to be, as Barr had pledged,
extremely limited. Despite containing numerous embarrassing details about Trump, no executive privilege was invoked to censor the
report's contents.
In the end, Mueller's report shows that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative embraced and evangelized by the US political and
media establishments to be a work of
fiction . The American public
was presented with a far different picture from what was expected, because leading pundits, outlets, and politicians ignored the
countervailing facts and promoted maximalist interpretations of others. Anonymous officials also leaked explosive yet uncorroborated
claims, leaving behind many stories that were subsequently discredited, retracted, or remain unconfirmed to this day.
It is too early to assess the damage that influential Russiagate promoters have done to their own reputations; to public confidence
in our democratic system and media; and to the prospects of defeating Trump, who always stood to benefit if the all-consuming conspiracy
theory ultimately collapsed. The scale of the wreckage, confirmed by Mueller's report, may prove to be the ultimate Russiagate scandal.
"... The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks. ..."
"... Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done. ..."
"... President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. ..."
"... The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence, ..."
"... According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. ..."
"... This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. ..."
"... Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control. ..."
"... In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department. ..."
"... The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA. ..."
"... As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. ..."
"... Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia. ..."
"... The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected. ..."
"... This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest. ..."
"... Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know: ..."
"... War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff. ..."
"... The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages. ..."
"... That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers. ..."
The British Role in 'Russiagate' Is About to Be Fully Exposed April 8, 2019
20190408-russiagate-exposed-brits.pdf
The "fake news" media has now dropped its pretense of having ever had any intention of allowing the truth -- as documented in
U.S. Attorney General Barr's summary of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's report, exonerating President Donald Trump of having
"conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" -- to thoroughly refute the Russiagate "Big Lie." Soon, however, it is certain
that the deliberate, British Intelligence-originated, military-grade disinformation campaign carried out against the United States,
including to this day, will be exposed.
The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix
the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth,
along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all
that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental
stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks.
"It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat," says the Chinese proverb. Yet, although the Mueller
report was called a "nothing burger," it was not: it still presented the potentially lethal lie that twelve Russian gremlins, code-named
Guccifer 2.0, hacked the DNC. Sundry media meatheads thus continue to blog and broadcast about "what else is really there."
The false Russian hack story, still being repeated, marches on, undeterred, like the emperor without any clothes. One lame-brained
variation, promoted in order to cover up the British role, states that Hillary Clinton, rather than Trump, colluded with the Russians.
It is being repeated by Republicans and Democrats alike, some of them malicious, some of them confused, and all of them completely
wrong. The media, such as the failed New York Times and various electronic media, must be forced to either admit the truth,
or be even more thoroughly discredited than they already have been. They must stop their constant repetition of this Joseph Goebbels-like
Big Lie. There must be a vigorous dissemination of the truth by all those journalists, politicians, activists and citizens that love
truth more than their own assumptions, including about President Trump, or other dearly-held systems of false belief.
Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard
Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several
years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper
policy motivation: why it was done.
A New Cultural Paradigm
The world is actually on the verge of ending the military conflicts among the major world powers, such as Russia, China, the United
States, and India. These four powers, and not the City of London, are the key fulcrum around which a new era in humanity's future
will be decided. A new monetary and credit system brought into being through these four powers would foster the greatest physical
economic growth in the history of humanity. In addition, discussions involving Italy working with China on the industrialization
of the African continent (discussions which could soon also involve the United States) show that sections of Europe want to join
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and leave the dying trans-Atlantic financial empire behind.
The recent announcement of a United States commitment to return to the Moon by 2024 can, in particular, become the basis for a
proposal to other nations -- for example, China, Russia, and India, all of whom are space powers of demonstrated capability -- to
resolve their differences on Earth in a higher, joint mission. As Russia's Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin said in a recent interview:
"I am a fierce proponent of international cooperation, including with Americans, because their country is big and technologically
advanced, and they can make good partners Especially since personal and professional relations between Roscosmos and NASA at the
working level are great."
There is also the possibility of ending the danger of thermonuclear war. President Trump, speaking on April 4 of the prospects
for world peace, stated:
"Between Russia, China, and us, we're all making hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is
ridiculous. I think it's much better if we all got together and didn't make these weapons those three countries I think can come
together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace."
This is a statement of real importance. Such an outlook is a rejection of the "perpetual crisis/perpetual war" outlook of the
Bush-Obama Administration, a four-term "war presidency" which was abruptly, unexpectedly ended in 2016. The British were not amused.
It is to stop this new cultural paradigm, pivoted on the Pacific and the potential Four Powers alliance, that British imperial
forces have deployed. The 2016 election of President Trump, and his personal friendship with President Xi Jinping and desire to work
with President Putin, are an intolerable strategic threat to the eighteenth-century geopolitics of the British empire. They have
repeatedly used Russiagate to disrupt the process of deliberation among Presidents Xi, Trump, and Putin, thus increasing the danger
of war. Russiagate, in the interest of international security, must be ended by exposing it for the utter fraud that it is.
The Truth Set Free
President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office,
Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of
America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American
people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again
to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and
Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth,
and the truth would set them free.
The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican
forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street,
or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection
against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase
the American Declaration of Independence,
"The history of the present Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the
undermining of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
DOCUMENTATION
While Robert Mueller found that there was "no collusion" between Donald Trump or the Trump Campaign and Russia, he also filed
two indictments regarding alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first alleges that 12 members of Russian Military
Intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta and delivered the purloined files to WikiLeaks for strategic publication before the
July 2016 Democratic National Convention and in October 2016, one month before the election. The second indictment charges the Internet
Research Agency, a Russian internet merchandising and marketing firm, with running social media campaigns in the U.S. in 2016 designed
to impact the election. When the fuller version of the Mueller report becomes public, it is certain to recharge the claims of Russian
interference based on the so-called background "evidence" supporting these indictments.
The good news, however, is that investigations in the United States and Britain, have unearthed significant contrary evidence
exposing British Intelligence, NATO, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine, as the actual foreign actors in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election. We provide a short summary of the main aspects of that evidence to spark further investigations of the British intelligence
networks, entities, and methods at issue, internationally. More detailed accounts concerning specific aspects of what we recite here
can be found on our website.
The Russian Hack That Wasn't
The Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an association of former U.S. intelligence officials, have demonstrated that
the Russian hack of the DNC alleged by Robert Mueller, was more likely an internal leak,
rather than a hack conducted
over the internet. William Binney, who conducted the main investigations for the VIPS, spent 30 years at the National Security Agency,
becoming Technical Director. He designed the sorts of NSA programs that would detect a Russian hack if one occurred. Binney conducted
an actual forensic examination of the DNC files released by WikiLeaks, and the related files circulated by the persona Guccifer 2.0,
who Robert Mueller claims is a GRU creation. Binney has demonstrated that the calculated transfer speeds and metadata characteristics
of these files are consistent with downloading to a thumb drive or storage device rather than an internet-based hack. This supports
the account by WikiLeaks of how it obtained the files. According to WikiLeaks and former Ambassador Craig Murray, they were obtained
from a person who was not a Russian state actor of any kind, in Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks offered to tell the Justice Department
all about this, and actual negotiations to this effect were proceeding in early 2017, when Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director James
Comey acted to sabotage and end the negotiations.
Further, as opposed to the hyperbole in the media and in Robert Mueller's indictment, analysis of the Internet Research Agency's
alleged "weaponization" of Facebook in 2016 involved
a paltry total of $46,000 in Facebook
ads and $4,700 spent on Google platforms . In an election in which the major campaigns spend tens of thousands of dollars every
day on these platforms, whatever the IRA thought it was doing in its amateurish and juvenile memes and tropes was like throwing a
stone in the ocean. Most of these activities occurred after the election and never mentioned either candidate. The interpretation
that these ads were designed to draw clicks and website traffic, rather than influence the election, must be considered.
The "evidence" for Mueller's GRU hacking indictment was provided, in part, by CrowdStrike, the DNC vendor that originated the
claims that the Russians had hacked that entity. CrowdStrike is closely associated with the Atlantic Council's Digital Research Lab
(DRL), an operation jointly funded by NATO's Strategic Communications Center and the U.S. State Department, to counter Russian "hybrid
warfare." CrowdStrike has been caught more than once falsely attributing hacks to the Russians and the Atlantic Council's DRL is
a font of anti-Russian intelligence operations.
The British Target Trump
According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump
and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence
leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. The former head
of the Russia Desk for MI6 and protégé of Sir Richard Dearlove, Christopher Steele, fresh from working for British Intelligence,
the FBI, and U.S. State Department in the 2014 Ukraine coup, assembled in 2016 a phony dossier called Operation Charlemagne, claiming
widespread Russian interference in European elections, including in the Brexit vote. By the spring of 2016, Steele was contributing
to a British/U.S. intelligence task force on the Trump Campaign which had been convened at CIA headquarters under John Brennan's
direction.
This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British
soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. The personnel employed in these operations all had multiple
connections to the British firm Hakluyt, to Steele's firm Orbis, and to the British military's Integrity Initiative. Sometime in
the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then head of GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief John Brennan personally. Hannigan abruptly
resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage
control.
Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were already on the radar and under investigation by the same British, Dearlove-centered intelligence
network and by Christopher Steele specifically. Flynn had been defamed by Dearlove and Stefan Halper, as a possible Russian agent
way back in 2014 because he spoke to Russian researcher Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner sponsored by Dearlove's Cambridge Security Forum.
Or, at least that was the pretext for the targeting of Flynn, who otherwise defied British intelligence by exposing Western support
for terrorist operations in Syria and sought a collaborative relationship with Russia to counter ISIS. Manafort was under FBI investigation
throughout 2014 and 2015, largely in retaliation for his role in steering the Party of the Regions to political power in Ukraine.
In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian
state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine.
Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department.
In or around June 2016, Christopher Steele began writing his dirty and bogus dossier about Trump and Russia. This is the dossier
which claimed that Trump was compromised by Putin and that Putin was coordinating with Trump in the 2016 election. The main "legend"
of this full-spectrum information warfare operation run from Britain, was that Donald Trump was receiving "dirt" on Hillary Clinton
from Russia. The operations targeting Page and Papadopoulos consisted of multiple attempts to plant fabricated evidence on them which
would reflect what Steele himself was fabricating in the dirty dossier. At the very same time, the infamous June 2016 meeting at
Trump Tower was being set up. That meeting involved the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, it was alleged in a series of
bizarre emails written by British publicist Ron Goldstone to set up the meeting, could deliver "dirt" on Hillary Clinton direct from
the Russian government. Veselnitskaya didn't deliver any such dirt. But the entire operation was being monitored by State Department
intelligence agent Kyle Parker, an expert on Russia. Parker's emails reveal deep ties to the highest levels of British intelligence
and much chatter between them about Trump and Russia.
A now-changed version of the website for Christopher Steele's firm, Orbis, trumpeted an expertise in information warfare operations,
and the networks in which Steele runs are deeply integrated into the British military's Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative
is a rapid response propaganda operation using major journalists in the United States and Europe to carry out targeted defamation
campaigns. Its central charge, according to documents posted by the hacking group Anonymous, is selling the United States and Western
Europe on the immediate need for regime change in Russia, even if that involves war.
Much has been made by Republicans and other lunkheads in the U.S. Congress of Steele's contacts with Russians for his dossier.
They claim that such contacts resulted in a Russian disinformation operation being run through the duped Christopher Steele. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
MI6's Dirty Dossier on Donald Trump: Full-Spectrum Information Warfare
On its face, Steele's dossier would immediately be recognized as a complete fabrication by any competent intelligence analyst.
He cites some 32 sources inside the Russian government for his fabricated claims about Trump. What they allegedly told him is specific
enough in time and content to identify them. To believe that the dossier is true or that actual Russians contributed to it, you must
also believe that that the British government was willing to roll up this entire network, exposing them, since the intention was
for the dossier's wild claims to be published as widely as possible. By all accounts, Britain and the United States together do not
have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy
tradecraft. Steele's fabrication also uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19% of the energy
company Rosneft, (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for lifting sanctions) to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes
and misdemeanors.
Other claims in the dossier were published, publicly, in various Ukrainian publications. The famous claim that Trump directed
prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama seems to be plagiarized from similarly fake 2009 British propaganda
stories about Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome, "defiling" Putin's bed. According to
various sources in the United States, this outrageous claim was made by Sergei Millian. George Papadopoulos has stated that he believes
Millian is an FBI informant, recounting in his book how a friend of Millian's blurted this out when Millian, Papadopoulos and the
friend were having coffee.
The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate
Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former
senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is
no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA.
Despite its obvious fake pedigree, Steele's dossier was laundered into the Justice Department repeatedly, by the CIA and State
Department and the Obama White House. It was used to obtain FISA surveillance warrants turning key members of the Trump Campaign
into walking microphones. It was circulated endlessly by the Clinton Campaign to a network of reporters in the U.S. known to serve
as scribes for the intelligence community. John Brennan used it to conduct a special emergency briefing of the leading members of
the U.S. Congress charged with intelligence responsibilities in August of 2016 and to brief Harry Reid, who was Senate Majority Leader
at the time. All of this activity meant that the salacious accusation that Trump was a Putin pawn and the FBI was investigating the
matter, leaked out and was used by the Clinton Campaign to defame Trump for its electoral advantage. When Trump won, Steele's nonsense
received the stamp of the U.S. intelligence community and official currency in the campaign to take out the President.
As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against
Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the
National Endowment for Democracy. The individuals involved might be named Veterans of the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, since all of
them also worked on this operation. It is no accident that Victoria Nuland, the case agent for the Ukraine coup, played a major role
in bolstering Steele's credentials for the purpose of selling his dirty dossier to the media and to the Justice Department. This
went so far as Steele giving a full scale briefing on his fabricated dossier at the State Department in October 2016.
Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there
to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda,
against Russia.
The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications
Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department.
Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly,
in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected.
This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the
attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That
is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with
ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest.
"in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe"
Perhaps add mainstream media to the list of such sincere believers, they will fire their own real journalists.
David Walters , April 24, 2019 at 13:14
"This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some
sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated
assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies."
Absolutely correct.
Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the student body of Texas A&M University,
my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent
that dark "art".
Right, David Walters, and see Pompous Pompeo now. The only truths he's told was to a student body of Texas A&M University –
his own alma mater – the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steal.
Even though he's left his post as CIA Director and assumed his current post of Secretary of State. Pompous Pompeo continues his
CIA traits of lying, cheating, and stealing. It's in a way similar to a phrase, "A leopard never changes its spots". This is why
the DPRK govt issued a Persona Non Grata on Pompous Pompeo – that he isn't a bona fide diplomat, but a CIA official.
CWG , April 22, 2019 at 17:15
Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.
There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably, Putin would have favored Clinton, since
she could be bought. Trump can't.
What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT a FISA warrant. They only obtained
that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.
Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That was apparent ever after Devin Nunes
did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying on him.
Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason) they needed to cover that up as quickly
as possible.
So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying till this very day. The same lie through
which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign was being pushed openly.
The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential Election'.
They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump through lying to the FISA Court, which
again, is treason. According to the Constitution, lying to the FISA court= Treason.
In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the Attorney General. At all costs, they
needed to try and hide what really happened.
So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire Trump campaign!'.
'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.
Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire story. It was only later on that Sarah
Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.
The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be able to achieve three main objectives.
1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential Election.
2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order to 'take them down'.
Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a crime that had ANYTHING to with with
the elections. NONE.
They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people are willing to believe the lie'.
So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many people as possible. 'Russian Collusion,
Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia. Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..
Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?
Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign.
There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the Presidential Election.
That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama regime!!
So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?
He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with Russia.
The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.
His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude with the Russians'.
Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.
They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about. Yet it was not.
The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.
It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.
The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
"Russia'.
So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?
A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY Russians.
And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was only a distraction)
B: Russians hacked the DNC.
That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.
Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.
It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire regime in order to let Clinton win the
Presidency.
That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!
In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad things.
That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence' that Russia somehow did bad things.
Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question 'why did Obama spy on the Trump
Campaign'.
Let's go a bit deeper still.
Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push? The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?
After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.
If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP
the real crime', what would happen?
They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately
proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.
They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing anything wrong, it would show us all
THEY were the criminals.
They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.
That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon still don't seem to see all
that.
They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is simply not true. It's a Mueller created
LIE.
That LIE = the Insurance Policy.
What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about preventing Trump from being elected.
Although true, that is only A.
They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and would find out they were illegally spying
on him!
The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected President.
What's the punishment for Treason?
About Assange and Seth Rich.
Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which seems to be succesfull, the Deep
State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that lie.
Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.
If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be exposed.
No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for his life.
Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48
While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is
that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the
overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not
have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.
Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.
boxerwars , April 22, 2019 at 17:13
RE: "A Russian Agent Smear"
:::
Was Pat Tillman Murdered?
JUL 30, 2007
I don't know, but it seems increasingly conceivable. Just absorb these facts:
O'Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman
was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" again and again when he was killed,
O'Neal said
In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman's head were so close together that it appeared the
Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
The motive? I don't know. It's still likeliest it was an accident. But there's some mysterious testimony in the SI report about
nameless snipers. A reader suggests the following interpretation:
News this weekend said that there were "snipers" present and the witnesses didn't remember their names. I believe that's code
in the Army–these guys were Delta. In the Tillman incident, these snipers weren't part of the unit and they were never mentioned
publicly before. That's a key indicator that they weren't supposed to be acknowledged.
If you've ever read Blackhawk Down, Mark Bowden explains how he grew frustrated because interviewed Rangers kept referring
to "soldiers from another unit" while claiming they didn't know the unit ID or the soldiers' names. It took him months to crack
the unit ID and find people from Delta who were present at the fight.
Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, the Delta operators who earned Medals of Honor in Mogadishu, have always been identified as
snipers, too.
If my theory is correct, the Delta guys could have fired the shots – a three-round burst to the forehead from 50 yards is impossible
for normal soldiers and Rangers, but is probably an easy shot for those guys. But because Delta doesn't officially exist and Tillman
was a hero, nobody in the Army would want to have to explain exactly how the event went down. Easier just to claim hostile fire
until the family forced them to do otherwise.
This makes some sense to me, although we shouldn't dismiss the chance he was murdered. Tillman was a star and might have aroused
jealousy or resentment. He also opposed the Iraq war and was a proud atheist. In Bush's increasingly sectarian military, that
might have stirred hostility. I don't know. But I know enough to want a deeper investigation. My atheist readers will no doubt
admire the way Tillman left this world, according to the man who was with him:
As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman's side started praying. "I thought I was praying to myself,
but I guess he heard me," Sgt. Bryan O'Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. "He said something like,
'Hey, O'Neal, why are you praying? God can't help us now."'
(Maybe the Congress can )
////// The USA is aghast with "smears" and "internal investigations" and promised but never produced "White Papers" 'as the
world turns' and circles continents Dominated by American Military Power / Predominantly Barbarous / Uncivilized Use of Force
/ and Arrogantly Effective in it's use of Dominating Military Power.
\\\\ The Poorer Peoples of the World accept their lots-in-life with some acceptance of reality vis-a-vis the "lot-in-life"
they've been alleged/assigned.
/// But How Do We Accept The Fact that our Self-Sacrificiing Hero,Pat Tillman, was slaughtered in Afghanistan,
(WITH POSITIVE PROOF) – by his own Fellow American soldiers – ???
!!!! What i'm say'n is, if Tillman represents the Life Surrendering "American Hero"
WHY DID HIS FELLOW "AMERICAN SOLDIERS" ASSASSINATE & MURDER HIM ???????
AND WHY IS THIS STORY BURIED ALONG WITH MANY OTHER SMEAR Stories
that provide prophylactic protection for all the Trump pianist prophylaxis cover
Up for the Right Wing theft of American Democracy under FDR
In favor of Ayn Rand's prevalent OBJECTIVISM under Trump.
"Capitalism and Altruism
are incompatible
capitalism and altruism
cannot coexist in man,
or in the same society".
President Trump represents
Stark & Total Capitalism
Just as "Conservative Party"
Core is in The Confederacy
AKA; The RIGHT WING
The Right Wing of US Gov't
Is All About PRESERVING
Confederate States' Laws
Written by Thomas Jefferson
Prior to The Constitution, which
became the Received/Judicial
Constitutional Law of the Land in
The Republic of the "United States"
It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to deteriorate the more his actions
and statements are attacked and countered? You know what happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them
down? They get weapons and start killing people.
There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the least being he's clearly mentally unfit.
Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation".
Nancy Pelosi stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda "for now". She's now
making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are: noise.
The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one issue to run on next year: getting
rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters,
the same ones they were positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip service to progressive
policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions once the donations start coming, but the common underlying
theme was and continues to be "Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."
In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because
Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton
campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they
disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November.
Eddie S , April 24, 2019 at 21:14
Exactly right, EKB -- - you can't ballroom dance without a partner! Also reminds me of the couples you occasionally run into
where one partner repeatedly runs-down the other, and you get the feeling that the critical partner doesn't have much going on
in his/her life so they deflect that by focusing on the other partner
Johnny Ryan S , April 22, 2019 at 13:38
Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did
you know:
1)Obama Appoints CrowdStrike Officer To Admin Post Two Months Before June 2016 Report On Russia Hacking DNC
2) CrowdStrike Co-Founder Is Fellow On Russia Hawk Group, Has Connections To George Soros, Ukrainian Billionaire
3) DNC stayed that the FBI never asked to investigate the servers – that is a lie.
4) CrowdStrike received $100 million in investments led by Google Capital (since re-branded as CapitalG) in 2015. CapitalG is
owned by Alphabet, and Eric Schmidt, Alphabet's chairman, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. More than just
supporting Clinton, leaked emails from Wikileaks in November 2016 showed that in 2014 he wanted to have an active role in the
campaign.
-daily caller and dan bongino have been bringing these points up since 2016.
Deniz , April 22, 2019 at 12:36
The Right is currently salivating over the tough law enforcement rhetoric coming out of Barr and Trump.
It reminds me of when Obama was running for office in 2008 when everyone, including myself, was in awe of him. What kept slipping
into his soaring anti-intervention speeches, was a commitment to the good war in Afghanistan, which seemed totally out of place
with the rest of his rhetoric. The fine print was far more reflective of his administration actions as the rest of it his communications
turned out to be just telling people what they wanted to hear.
War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff.
The argument about not inserting Rich and the download is a good one as a defense strategy but doesn't help with finding the
truth about the emails. We can only hope that pursuing the truth and producing it will have a cumulative effect and the illusory
truth effect will include this truth.
Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:00
>>> ". . . doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails."
The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that
they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages.
Why should we much care how they were acquired and provided to the publisher?
Lily , April 22, 2019 at 17:55
That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about
the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony
Blair are lyers and mass murderers.
All three of them are free, earning millions with their publicity whereas two brave persons who were telling the truth have
been tortured and are still in jail. Reality has become like the most horrible nightmare. Everything simply seems to have turned
upside down. No writer would invent such a primitive plot. And yet it is the unbelievable reality.
Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21
I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out
JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John
Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be
a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create.
While I knew about Nellie Ohr and her DOJ husband , what I didn't know was that while she
worked for Fusion GPS , fusion was a FBI contractor that had access to NSA database until
Admiral Rogers shut it down .
Sounds Like Brennan's CIA laundered information to EX-CIA Nellie Ohr when she was working
for Fusion GPS who then laundered this info to Steele , another person employed by Fusion who
then gave this back to Bruce Ohr of DOJ who then gave it to the FBI . And they all got paid
for their " research " . This then was used to deceive the FISA court . But Admiral Rogers
went to this court and warned Trump of the spying and violations of constitutional rights .
Shortly after Obama fired admiral Rogers . Sounds fishy to me ? what do you think ?
"... Significantly, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on December 11th, 2018 that "ad accounts linked to Russia" spent about $4,700 in advertising" to politically influence Americans during the 2016 presidential election season. ..."
The Mueller Report is now public, and our Mainstream Media have filled the airways with all sorts of commentaries and interpretations.
We know that - despite the very best efforts of the dedicated Leftist attorneys on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff - there
was absolutely no coordination between members of the Trump campaign, or any of his staffers, with Russians. No additional charges
have come as a result, other than accusations made earlier of "process crimes" (e.g. failure to report earnings on tax forms, failure
to report lobbying work, or not telling investigators what they demanded to hear -- "crimes" that practically every politician in
Washington has been guilty of at one time or another and would normally not cause much of a stir). None of these involved Russia.
Of course, that finding has not satisfied many Democrats or the unhinged Leftist crazies in the media, who continue to have visions
of "collusion" -- a kind of communications Alzheimers that has poisoned our media now for years. Thus, Representative Eric Swalwell
(who is one of nearly two dozen Democrats running for president) continues to assert that there was "collusion," as does the irrepressible
(and irresponsible) Adam Schiff: "it's there in plain sight," they insist, "if you just look hard enough, and maybe squint just a
bit -- or maybe have those specialized 3-D Russia glasses!"
Such political leaders -- along with those further out in the Leftist loonysphere like Representatives Maxine Waters and Alexandra
Ocasio-Cortes -- continue down their Primrose path of post-Marxist madness.
But beyond the collusion/coordination issue, the past couple of weeks have been filled with a swirling controversy concerning
what is called "obstruction of justice." And once again, the fundamental issues have been incredibly politicized. Special Counsel
Robert Mueller had an obligation, if he and his minions discovered "obstruction of justice," that is, concerted and illegal attempts
to obstruct the investigations by the president or his staff, to present charges to the Department of Justice. Yet, all he was able
to do was assemble a farrago of "he said/she said" instances, none of which rose to the level of criminal activity. Apparently President
Trump told a subaltern "I wish would you fire Mueller," or he wished in a speech in his joking style that "if the Russians had Hillary's
emails, they would release them," or he had a private conversation with Vladimir Putin when they met (as all national leaders do!),
or his son met with a Russian attorney who supposedly had some "dirt" on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which did not turn out to
be the reason for the Trump Tower meeting at all).
None of the ten or eleven cited instances came anywhere close to being actionable or criminal under settled law. In each instance
cited, the president's actions (or desires) fell within his purview and authority under Article II of the Constitution. And regarding
Trump's desire to fire Mueller, he was on solid legal ground; the Supreme Court in its 1997 decision, Edmonds vs. the United States
, declared that "inferior" officials, including an independent counsel, could be removed by presidential action as part of
his delegated powers . And, in any case, Mueller
was not dismissed.
Mueller had an obligation after examining these situations to make a finding; he did not. By so doing, by avoiding decisions and
stringing out such instances in an obviously political sense, he abdicated his responsibility and did his best to impugn Donald Trump
and his administration and thus offer grist for continued Democrat attacks on the president all the way through the 2020 election.
Mueller left it up to the Attorney General William Barr and Congress to decide how to proceed. And that is where we are today.
The one issue that both Democrats and most Republicans seem to agree on, the issue which both say is "proven conclusively" by
Mueller is that the Russians "attempted to interfere and did interfere" in our 2016 election.
Interesting, is it not, that the Republicans who zealously defend the president and attack the obviously political nature of the
Mueller Report would accept, as if on faith and without question, the accusations of Russian interference, also contained in the
report?
Turn on Fox and watch, say, Martha MacCallum (e.g., "The Story," April 24, 2019) declare "we all know now without doubt that the
Russians tried to interfere" in our elections, or listen to most any GOP congressman repeat that same narrative with unquestioning
certitude.
But that assertion - is it truly backed up factually? Where is the evidence, other than largely questionable information sourced
from our largely discredited intelligence agencies which, as we know, had a determined goal of overthrowing the president by any
means possible?
Almost three years have passed from the first fake news that appeared in the media on the subject of "Russian collusion," a concerted
effort launched to discredit at first the Donald Trump candidacy and then sabotage his presidency, including his efforts to stabilize
Russian-American relations.
As proof of Russian actions, the Mueller Report cites the indictments against twenty-five Russian citizens who were indicted for
attempted "interference" (those Russians are, let us add, quite conveniently out of the country and thus not prosecutable). When
those indictments were issued, Russia pointed out the flimsy, unsupported and transparently made-up nature of the charges, and demanded
that American authorities provide conclusive proof. Such requests were rebuffed.
In order to evaluate the evidence, the Russian government proposed reestablishing the bilateral expert group on information security
that the Obama Administration had terminated, which could have served as a platform for conversation on these matters. The American
side was also invited to send Justice Department officials to Russia to attend the proposed public questioning of the Russian citizens
named by Mueller. Additionally, Russia offered to publicize the exchanges between the two countries following the publication of
the accusations of cyberattacks, exchanges which were conducted through existing channels between October 2016 and January 2017.
Our government refused every offer.
A careful analysis, in fact, fails to show any substantial evidence of Russian cyberattacks and attempts to "subvert democracy."
By some estimates, possibly $160,000 -- a paltry sum -- was spent by the Russians during 2016 on social media activities in the United
States. Does anyone wish to discover and compare the amount the Chinese Communists or the Saudis would have expended during the same
period, for their continued influence and power in Washington and inside-the-Beltway?
It is helpful to examine the charges that have been made, some included in the Mueller Report and accepted blindly by most pundits
and politicians, both on the Left and by establishment conservatives.
The Russian government, via their embassy in Washington, has published
a 120 page "white paper,"
The Russiagate Hysteria: A Case of Severe Russiaphobia , responding to the accusations made against them since 2016. Obviously,
the Russian document has a particular viewpoint and very specific goal, but that should not deter us from examining it and evaluating
its arguments. (I have written on Russia and its relations with the United States on a number of occasions since 2015 and had pieces
published by The Unz Review , Communities Digital News , and elsewhere.
On my blog , "MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey," I have authored
a dozen columns addressing this question).
Here following I list twenty-one claims made regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election and in American domestic affairs.
I follow each claim with the Russian response and how others, as noted, have also responded. In most cases I retain the original
text, at times with my editing, but, in every case, with all the referenced sources.
These twenty-one claims should be examined more closely and more calmly, and the "Russophobic" hysteria we have experienced during
the past several years needs to be put aside for the sake of rational investigative inquiry -- and discovering how the Managerial
State and global elites have attempted a "silent coup" against what's left of our republic.
These claims and the responses deserve respectful consideration and detailed responses:
CLAIM: Russia "meddled" in the U.S. elections by conducting influence operations, including through social media.
FACT
All of the claims of Russian trolls that surfaced over the last few years (such as Russians using the Pokémon Go mobile
game and sex toy ads
to meddle in the elections
– ) are so preposterous and contradictory that they virtually disprove themselves.
Not to mention the absurdity of the whole notion of 13 persons and 3 organizations (whichever country they might represent)
charged on February 16, 2018, by Robert Mueller with criminally interfering with the elections, affecting in any way electoral
processes in a country of more than 300 million people.
It is telling that when pressed about the scope of the alleged influence campaign, representatives of American social media
companies give numbers, that even if they were valid (and there's no evidence of a connection to the Russian government), are
so minuscule as to be basically non-existent. For example, Facebook has identified 3,000 Russia-linked ads costing a total
of about $100,000. That's a
miniscule number of ads
and a fraction of Facebook's revenues, which totaled $28 billion. Facebook estimates that 126 million people might – the
emphasis is on the word "might" – have seen this content. But this number represents just 0.004% of the content those people
saw on the Facebook platform.
Significantly, Google CEO Sundar Pichai
testified
to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on December 11th, 2018 that "ad accounts linked to Russia" spent
about $4,700 in advertising" to politically influence Americans during the 2016 presidential election season.
To further cast doubt on the allegations, an American watchdog group "Campaign for Accountability" ("CFA") admitted on September
4th, 2018, that it deliberately posted propaganda materials on Google disguised as "Russian hackers from the Internet Research
Agency" to check how they would be filtered for "foreign interference". Google officials then accused the CFA as having ties
to a rival tech company "Oracle". In other words,
corporate intrigues disguised
as "Russian interference".
As American media has admitted, out of several dozen pre-election rallies supposedly organized by Russians, Special Counsel
Mueller mentions in his indictment that only a couple actually appear to have successfully attracted anyone, and those that
did were sparsely attended and, almost without exception, in deep-red enclaves that
would have voted for Trump anyway
.
Amidst all the hysteria about the alleged Russian meddling it is worth reading various research studies which show, quoting
"The Washington Post", that it is Americans, in particular our intelligence service,
that peddle disinformation
and hate speech.
According to Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, the scale and scope of domestic
disinformation is much larger than any foreign influence operation. And academics from the Harvard's Shorenstein Center on
Media, Politics and Public Policy document in their study that there had been major spikes in outright fabrication and misleading
information proliferating online before the 2018 U.S. election. A "significant portion" of the disinformation appeared to come
from Americans, not foreigners, the Harvard researchers said.
CLAIM:Russian hackers accessed computer servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and leaked materials through Wikileaks
and other intermediaries
FACT
As President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin noted in his interview with NBC on June 5, 2017, when flatly denying
any allegations of Russia interfering in internal affairs of the U.S., that today's technology is such that the final internet
address can be masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one will be able to understand the origin of that address. It is possible
to set up any entity that may indicate one source when, in fact,
the source is completely different .
No evidence has been presented linking Russia to leaked emails. In fact, there are credible studies arguing that DNC servers
are much more likely to have been breached by someone with immediate and physical access. In 2017 a group of former officers of
the U.S. intelligence community, members of the "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity" (VIPS), met with then-CIA Director
Mike Pompeo to present their findings.
Another counterargument to the "Russian hackers" claim is that the DNC files published by Wikileaks were initially stored under
the FAT (File Allocation System) method which is not related to internet transfers and can only be forwarded to an external device
such as a thumb drive.
It is also suspicious that the DNC prohibited the FBI from examining the servers. Instead, a third-party tech firm was hired,
"Crowd Strike", which is known for peddling the "Russian interference" claims. And soon enough it, indeed, announced that "Russian
malware" has been found, but again no solid evidence was produced.
According to the respected former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter,
the indictment by the Mueller
team on July 13, 2018 of the 12 supposed Russian operatives was
a politically motivated fraud . As Ritter explains, Mueller seems to have borrowed his list from an organizational chart of
a supposed Russian military intelligence unit, contained in a classified document from the NSA titled "Spear-Phishing Campaign
TTPs Used Against U.S. And Foreign Government Political Entities", which
was published by The Intercept online. As stated in that document, this is just a subjective judgement, not a known fact.
Ritter concludes, that this is a far cry from the kind of incontrovertible proof that Mueller's team suggests as existing to support
its indictment.
Moreover, it is telling that the indictment
was released just before the
meeting between President Putin and Trump in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, seemingly as if the aim was to intentionally derail the
bilateral summit.
CLAIM: Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.
FACT
As concluded in the summary of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, the investigation did not find that the Trump campaign
or anyone associated with
it conspired
or coordinated with Russia
If the Mueller team, having all the resources of the U.S. government, after 22 months of work,
many millions
of dollars spent , more than 2800 subpoenas issued, nearly 500 search warrants and 500 witness interviews, didn't find any
evidence of "collusion", it is simply because there was never any. The whole claim of collusion was launched and peddled by the
same group of Democrats, liberal-leaning media and the so-called "Never Trump Republicans", as it became clear that Donald Trump
had real chances of winning the election. And later it morphed into a campaign to derail the newly-elected President agenda, including
his efforts to mitigate the damage done to U.S.-Russian relations.
CLAIM: Hacking of American political institutions was personally ordered by the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
FACT
This claim is based on nothing else but the infamous fraudulent
"Steele Dossier" , paid for by political opponents [i.e., the Hilary Clinton campaign] of Donald Trump, and
wild conjectures that "nothing in Russia happens without Putin's approval" .
Needless to say, zero proof is presented. By the same logic, nothing in the U.S. happens without the President's approval.
For example, is he also responsible for Edward Snowden? After all, Mr. Snowden was doing work for the U.S. intelligence services.
Or the deaths of all the civilians killed abroad by U.S. drone strikes? Every minute detail approved by the President?
CLAIM: Russia did not cooperate with the U.S. in tracing the source of the alleged hacking.
FACT
Russia has repeatedly offered to set up a professional and de-politicized dialogue on international information security only
to be rebuffed by the U.S. State Department. For instance, following the discussion between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald
Trump in Hamburg on July 7, 2017, Russia forwarded to the U.S. a proposal to reestablish a bilateral working group on cyber threats
which would have been a perfect medium to discuss American concerns. Moreover, during his meeting with Donald Trump in Helsinki
on July 17, 2018, Vladimir Putin offered to allow U.S. representatives to be present at an interrogation of the Russian citizens
who were previously accused by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller of
being guilty of electoral interference.
Furthermore, in February 2019 the Russian government suggested publishing bilateral correspondence on the subject of unsanctioned
access to U.S. electronic networks, which was conducted between Washington and Moscow through the Nuclear Threat Reduction Centers
in the period from October 2016 to the end of January 2017.
Needless to say, all Russian offers were rejected. A conclusion is naturally reached that American State Department officials
have little interest in hearing anything that contradicts their own narrative or the discredited version of the CIA.
CLAIM: Russia is interfering in elections all over the world
FACT
No credible evidence has been produced not only of Russia's supposed meddling in the U.S. political processes, but to support
similar allegations made by the U.S. in respect to other countries. For example, former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster
insinuated that Russia was interfering in
the Mexican presidential elections of 2018. However, Mexican officials,
including
the president of the Mexican Senate Ernesto Cordero Arroyo, and Ambassador to Russia Norma Pensado
during a press conference in Moscow in February, 2018, debunked
this baseless claim.
Another example of fake news were reports saying that U.S.
was increasingly convinced that Russia hacked French election on May 9, 2017. However, on June 1, 2017, the head of the French
government's cyber security agency said no trace
was found of the claimed Russian hacking group behind the attack. On the other hand, the history of U.S. interfering in other
countries' elections
is well documented by American sources (see: ).
For example, a Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H. Levin, has scoured the historical record and
found 81 examples of U.S. election influence operations from 1946- to 2000. Often cited examples include Chile in 1964, Guyana
in 1968, Nicaragua in 1990, Yugoslavia in 2000, Afghanistan in 2009, Ukraine in 2014, not to mention Russia in 1996! And how else
could the current situation in Ukraine and Venezuela be described, with U.S. representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker openly pressuring
Ukrainian voters
to support the incumbent , and Washington
possibly plotting a
coup in Caracas?
CLAIM: The lawsuit of the Democratic National Committee against the Russian Federation related to "interference in the election"
has a legal standing.
FACT
The DNC filed a civil lawsuit on April 20, 2018 against the Russian Federation and other entities and individuals. Named as
defendants in the lawsuit are the Russian Federation; the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU); the
GRU operative using the pseudonym "Guccifer 2.0"; Aras Iskenerovich Agalarov; Emin Araz Agalarov; Joseph Mifsud; WikiLeaks; Julian
Assange; the Trump campaign (formally "Donald J. Trump for President, Inc."); Donald Trump, Jr.; Paul Manafort; Roger Stone; Jared
Kushner; George Papadopoulos; Richard W. Gates; and unnamed defendants sued as John Does 1–10. The DNC's complaint accuses the
Trump campaign of engaging in a racketeering enterprise in conjunction with Russia and WikiLeaks.
Even irrespective of the fact that there was no "interference" in the first place, the case has no legal standing. Exercise
of U.S. jurisdiction over the pending case with respect to the Russian Federation is a violation of the international law, specifically,
violation of jurisdictional immunities of the Russian Federation arising from the principle of the sovereign equality of states.
CLAIM: Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak was a spy.
FACT
In March of 2017 U.S. media
began libeling
Sergey Kislyak a "top spy and spy-recruiter" This preposterous claim was based on nothing but his contacts with Trump confidant
Senator Jeff Sessions – carrying out work any ambassador would do. Per the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961,
among core diplomatic functions is ascertaining
by all lawful means conditions
and developments in the receiving state, and that certainly includes openly meeting leaders of Congress on Capitol Hill. Even
former CIA Director John McLaughlin
noted that Mr. Kislyak is an experienced diplomat, not a spy.
CLAIM: Russian Embassy retreat in Maryland was an intelligence base
FACT.
Among the unlawful acts that U.S. administrations undertook was the expropriation of a legal Russian property in Maryland,
a summer retreat near the Chesapeake Bay under the pretext
it was used for intelligence gathering. But where is the supposed-treasure trove of alleged spy equipment that U.S. authorities
reportedly found there? Why not show them publicly to back up the claim? After the expropriation and the claims, not a word –
silence.
The retreat, "dacha" as Russians would call it, was bought by the former Soviet Union in 1972. Since then, it was used for
recreation, including hosting a children's summer camp and regularly entertaining American visitors. One of the more popular events
was the stop-over during the annual Chesapeake Regatta, completed with an expansive tour of the property. Presumably U.S. intelligence
services could have used this for years to inspect the property. Why was nothing ever mentioned before the Obama Administration
action?
CLAIM: The meeting in Trump Tower in New York on June 9, 2016 between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya
was to discuss compromising materials that Russian had on Hillary Clinton.
FACT
According
to testimony provided to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Ms. Veselnitskaya focused on explaining the illicit activities
of U.S.-British investor Bill Browder, wanted in Russia for crimes, and brought attention to the adverse effects of the so-called
"Magnitskiy Act", adopted by U.S. Congress in 2012 and lobbied for by Browder.
CLAIM: Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, met with Russians in Prague to "collude".
FACT
It was reported in American media that the Justice Department special counsel had evidence that Donald Trump's personal lawyer,
Michael Cohen, secretly made a trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign to meet with Russian representatives,
a fact also mentioned
in the discredited "Steele Dossier". This was given as further evidence of "collusion". But Cohen vehemently denied this –
under oath. Passport records
indicate
that he never was in Prague. He was actually on vacation with his son at the supposed time. Given that he publicly turned
on his former boss and still denied the fact of ever going to Prague disproves this claim further.
CLAIM: Former member of the Trump campaign team Carter Page was a Russian intelligence asset.
FACT
According to members of Congress and journalistic investigations, the redacted declassified documents of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISC, also called the FISA Court)
show that the main source used by U.S. counterintelligence to justify spying on Mr. Page was the fraudulent so-called "Steele
Dossier".
Thus, Mr. Page for obvious reasons was not accused by the team of Robert Mueller of being involved in a "Russian conspiracy".
CLAIM: On August 22, 2018, The Democratic National Committee filed a claim with the FBI, accusing the "Russian hackers" of
infiltrating its electoral database.
FACT
Several days later members of the Democratic Party
admitted that it was a "false alarm", as it was simply a security check-up performed at the initiative of the Democratic Party's
affiliate in Michigan.
CLAIM: On August 8, 2018 U.S. Senator Bill Nelson accused Russia of breaching the infrastructure of the voter registration
systems in several local election offices of Florida.
FACT
Florida's Department of State spokesperson, Sarah Revell, stated on August 9, 2018, that Florida's government had not received
any evidence from competent authorities that Florida's voting systems or election records had been compromised. The U.S. Department
of Homeland Security and the FBI also
could not confirm in any manner the accusations.
CLAIM: In September, 2017 the U.S. media, referring to the Department of Homeland Security, accused Russia of "cyberattacks"
on electoral infrastructure in 21 states during the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.
FACT
On September 27, 2017, Wisconsin and California authorities stated that their electoral systems were not targeted by cyberattacks.
On November 12, 2017, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said in a CBS interview that the "hackers' activity" had
no significant consequences and did not influence the outcome of the elections. And, indeed, the
source of those attacks was not clear.
CLAIM: Russia meddled in the Alabama 2017 Senate elections to help the Republican candidate.
FACT
Despite
the initial claims , it turned out that a group of Democratic tech experts decided to imitate so-called "Russian tactics"
in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate racе. Even more jarring is the fact that one participant in the "Alabama project", Jonathon
Morgan, is chief executive of "New Knowledge", a cyber security firm that
wrote a scathing account
of Russia's social media operations in the 2016 election that was released in 2018 by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Once
again, we have one of the main private sector players in hyping the Russian threat caught red-handed.
CLAIM: Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's presidential campaign chairman, was a secret link to Russian intelligence.
FACT
Trump's former campaign chairman was hit with two indictments from Mueller's office. However, even as American media notes,
both cases have nothing to do with Russia and stemmed from his years as a political consultant for the Ukrainian government and
his failure to pay taxes on the millions he earned, his failure to report the foreign bank accounts he used to stash that money,
and his failure to report his work to the US government. In his second case in Virginia,
he was also charged with committing bank fraud to boost his assets when the Ukraine work dried up.
In fact, serious concerns have been raised in the U.S. that it was Ukrainian officials who tried to influence the 2016 elections
by leaking compromising
materials on Mr. Manafort.
The Ukrainian connection is also prevalent in the case of money transferred to accounts of American politicians. For instance,
according to a "New York Times" article, Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk
donated over
10 million dollars to the "Clinton Foundation while just 150 thousand dollars to the "Trump Foundation".
CLAIM: Russia compromised the Vermont power grid.
FACT
On December 31, 2016, "The Washington Post", accused "Russian hackers" of compromising the Vermont power grid. The local company,
"Burlington Electric", allegedly traced a malware code in a laptop of one of its employees. It was stated that the same "code"
was used to hack the Democratic Party servers in 2016. However, the "Wordfence" cybersecurity firm checked "Burlington Electric"
for hacking, and said that the malware code was openly available, for instance, on a web-site of Ukrainian hackers . The attackers
were using IP-addresses from across the world. "The Washington Post"
later admitted that conclusions on Russia's involvement were false.
CLAIM: Russian Alfa Bank was used as a secret communication link with the Trump campaign .
FACT
In October 2016 a new "accusation" appeared,
alleging that a message exchange between the Alfa Bank server and Trump organizations indicated a "secret" Trump – Russia
communication channel.
CLAIM: Russia cracked voter registration systems during the 2016 U.S. elections.
FACT
In July 2016 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security accused Russia of gaining unauthorized access to electronic voter registration
systems in Arizona. But on April 8, 2018, "Reuters",
referring to a high-ranking U.S. administration official, wrote there was no proof Russia had anything to do with the mentioned
cyberattack.
CLAIM: Russian Embassy bank transactions were linked to "election interference".
FACT
American publication "Buzzfeed"
repeatedly claimed that U.S. authorities flagged Russian Embassy financial transfers as suspicious, many of them dated around
the 2016 election. In reality, the media outlet, by twisting the facts and placing them out of context, made routine banking transactions
– salary transfers, payments to contractors – look nefarious.
It is not
uncommon for embassy personnel to receive larger payouts, transfer or withdraw larger sums of money at the end of their work.
Furthermore, leaking of confidential banking information of persons and organizations protected by diplomatic immunity raised
concerns about the likely involvement of security services.
The
arrest in October 2018 of a U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network official, charged with leaking
information both about the Russian Embassy accounts and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, provides further proof to
the theory of political skullduggery.
* * *
Most of these responses have not been fully examined or addressed by major media, nor, for that matter, by Fox News, dominated
as it is by an almost instinctive Neoconservative Russophobia (the one possible exception being Tucker Carlson).
For the American Left, since the collapse of Communism and the growth of a traditionalist nationalism (under Vladimir Putin),
Russia has become a convenient target. When the Soviets were in power prior to 1991, the USSR was seen as a "progressive" presence
in the world, even if by the requirements of American politics the Left was forced to make ritualistic condemnations of the more
extreme elements of Soviet statecraft. Now that post-Communist Russia bans same sex marriage, glorifies the traditional family,
and the conservative Russian Orthodox Church occupies a special position of esteem and prominence, that admiration has turned
to fear and loathing. And that Russia and its president have been viewed as favorable to the hated Donald Trump doubly confirms
that hostility and targeting.
For the dominant Neoconservatives and many Republicans, contemporary Russia is seen as "anti-democratic," "reactionary," and
a threat to American world hegemony (and the refusal to bow to that hegemony, whether economically, politically, or culturally).
Indeed, as a major intellectual force, Neoconservatism owes much of its origins to Eastern European and Russia Jews, many of whose
ancestors were at direct odds with the old pre-1917 Tsarist state. That animus, those nightmares of pogroms and oppression, have
never completely subsided. A modern traditionalist, Orthodox Russia is viewed as antithetical to their more liberal, even Leftwing
ideas (e.g., increasing "conservative" acceptance of same sex marriage, "moderate" feminism, and a whole panoply of "forward looking"
views on civil rights issues -- all of which are present on Fox News.)
Memory of "the bad old days" has never disappeared.
None of this history should prevent a close examination of the current accusations against Russia, nor our search for the truth.
Much -- perhaps the future of Western civilization itself -- depends on it.
"... Deerlove was also directly involved in setting up several Trump Campaign operatives for fake links to Russia (George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Gen. Flynn), together with British intelligence assets Joseph Mifsud and CIA asset Stefan Halper, a close ally of Deerlove at Cambridge. ..."
"... Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News Tuesday that he will immediately investigate three cases of suspected "set ups," efforts to create fake connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians, all directly run by British operatives: the Mifsud role with Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer in falsely connecting George Papadopoulos to Russian spies; Halper and Deerlove setting up Gen. Flynn with fake Russian connections; and the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, set up by the slimy British operative Rob Goldstone. ..."
On Thursday morning, Attorney General William Barr is scheduled to release the Mueller
report, with redactions, according to laws regarding security and the privacy of Grand Jury
proceedings. While the Trump haters and conspirators are preparing various operations to keep
Russiagate going, despite the report's exoneration of Trump's imagined "collusion," the reality
that the British ran the entire operation, as identified from the beginning by EIR, is now
bursting out into the open, and is threatening to be the subject of criminal investigations in
the Department of Justice and in the Congress.
The Daily Caller's Chuck Ross on Tuesday ran an article titled: "Former British Spymaster
Has Flown Under the Radar in Russia Probe, Despite Links to Key Figures." He names Richard
Deerlove, MI6 chief from 1999 to 2004, as a key operative working with fellow MI6 operative
Christopher Steele, the author of the now discredited dossier on Trump's supposed collusion
with Russia. Deerlove was also directly involved in setting up several Trump Campaign
operatives for fake links to Russia (George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Gen. Flynn), together
with British intelligence assets Joseph Mifsud and CIA asset Stefan Halper, a close ally of
Deerlove at Cambridge.
Meanwhile, Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told
Fox News Tuesday that he will immediately investigate three cases of suspected "set ups,"
efforts to create fake connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians, all directly
run by British operatives: the Mifsud role with Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer in
falsely connecting George Papadopoulos to Russian spies; Halper and Deerlove setting up Gen.
Flynn with fake Russian connections; and the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian
lawyer, set up by the slimy British operative Rob Goldstone.
What's more, the VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) issued a public
Memorandum for President Trump on Tuesday, called "The Fly in the Mueller Ointment," warning
him that the Mueller report, despite finding no evidence of collusion, maintains the lie that
the Russians hacked leading Democratic Party computers and provided their emails to Wikileaks,
falsely described as a Russian front. Detailing their forensic proof that the emails were
downloaded, not hacked, the VIPS warn the President that if these lies are allowed to stand,
the idea that Trump was elected due to Russian "interference" in the election will remain, "and
that melody will linger on for the rest of your presidency, unless you seize the moment.... You
are the President, and there may be no better time than now to face them down." (see Bill Binney interview with
LPAC.)
03/28/2016 With the increasing propaganda wars, we thought a reminder of just how naive many
Westerners are when it comes to their news-feed. As
Arjun Walia, of GlobalResearch.ca, notes, Dr. Ulfkotte went on public television stating
that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding
that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job.
He recently made an appearance on RT news to share these facts:
I've been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not
to tell the truth to the public.
But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to
bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia -- this is a point of no return and
I'm going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate
people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have
done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over
Europe.
Donald Trump
has apparently accused the UK of conspiring to help the Obama administration spy on his presidential
campaign, saying "when the truth comes out, it will be a beauty!".
The US president promoted the conspiracy
theory on Twitter by quoting a right-wing US news organisation's headline, which according to Mr Trump read: "Former
CIA analyst Larry Johnson accuses United Kingdom Intelligence of helping Obama Administration Spy on the 2016 Trump
Presidential Campaign."
Mr Trump added: "WOW! It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be a
beauty!"
GCHQ, the UK government's chief digital spying organisation, branded the allegation "utterly ridiculous".
"As we have previously stated, the allegations that GCHQ was asked to conduct 'wire tapping' against the then
President Elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored," the agency told Reuters.
The claim appears to stem from Mr Johnson, a former CIA analyst who is a longtime critic of US intelligence and a
defender of Russia.
Mr Johnson has previously claimed without providing evidence the CIA, and not Moscow, may have been behind
the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, and has frequently appeared on Russian state media to reject US
intelligence conclusions of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Guardian
reported in 2017 Britain's intelligence agencies had alerted their US counterparts to
suspicious "interaction" between figures connected to the Trump campaign and Russian agents, but that it was part of
a "routine exchange" of information and that CGHQ never carried out a targeted operation against Mr Trump or his
team. There is no evidence the Obama administration conducted a spying operation against the Trump campaign.
Mr Trump's tweet followed one last month in which he suggested Britain had
invented Russian election interference
in order to "bait" the US into taking a hard line against Moscow.
It comes two years after GCHQ was
forced to deny it "wire tapped" Trump Tower
in 2016, after the White House promoted a Fox News pundit's
allegation Barack Obama bypassed US intelligence by using the UK's spy centre to obtain details of Mr Trump's
conversations.
"They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored," GCHQ said at the time.
The president, who has access to information provided by the world's most powerful intelligence agencies, later
told reporters "you should be talking to Fox" when asked about the claim.
Mr Trump's tweet comes just 40 days before he is due in the UK on a state visit.
"... RT has been able to capitalise on growing mistrust of western media among westerners. During the breaking of the coverage of many political scandals, RT articles aggressively raised issues that many felt were not being pursued by the western media, which is frequently seen as covering up non-PC stories. Many users believe that RT is willing to talk about incidents that western media will not, a belief that RT actively encourages. As such, many users of a both far-right and far-left disposition are willing to listen to RT, even being aware of RT's control by the government, rather than western media. ..."
"... On page four of this this interesting sentence we find the following sentence: " Driving a wedge between Russians and government is key. " ..."
"... It is interesting to see that Integrity Initiative was ahead of the game when it came to punishing Russia for its involvement in Crimea's move to independence from Ukraine to the point that their greatest hope was that there would be regime change in Russia. ..."
"... As you can see from these documents, Integrity Initiative, a government-funded, not-for-profit charity has a mandate to ensure that the West is immune to Russia's ongoing propaganda campaign by providing propaganda of its own. ..."
While
it received relatively little coverage from the Western mainstream media establishment, a
recent 42 megabyte upload on an Anonymous server provides us with an inside glimpse into
the genesis of the Western anti-Russia narrative.
According to the documents, an organization (rather ironically) named Integrity Initiative with the moniker
"Defending Democracy Against Disinformation" was organized to mobilize global public opinion
against Russia and its agenda as you can see on the organization's "About" webpage:
The non-for-profit charity was set up in 2015 as a partnership of several independent
organizations led by The Institute for Statecraft. It claims that it is dedicated to "
education in good governance and to enabling societies to adapt to a rapidly changing
world. ", a rather benign mission statement. In its first two years, it was funded by
private individuals, however, funding for 2017 and 2018 was largely provided by governments,
particularly the United Kingdom, reflecting the U.K.'s appreciation of the " importance of
the threat, and a wish to support civil society programmes seeking to rebuild the ability of
democratic societies to resist large scale, malicious disinformation and influence
campaigns."
According to the documents a number of organizations including the United States Department of
State, the U.K.'s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), NATO, Facebook and the Lithuanian
Ministry of Defense were looking to fund the Integrity Initiative as you can see here:
Integrity Initiative
states the following about its services:
" It is inevitable that a programme tackling disinformation in Europe finds itself spending
much of its time addressing the activities of the Russian State, including those carried out
through its intelligence services. The Kremlin has invested more operational thought, intent
and resource in disinformation, in Europe and elsewhere in the democratic world, than any other
single player. "
Not surprisingly, Integrity Initiative has comments on the leaking of its own documents by
Anonymous:
" We note both the attempts by Russian state propaganda outlets to amplify the volume of
this leak; and the suggestion by a major Anonymous-linked Twitter account that the Kremlin
subverted the banner of Anonymous to disguise their responsibility for it...
It is of course a matter of deep regret that Integrity Initiative documents have been stolen
and posted on line, still more so that, in breach of any defensible practice, Russian state
propaganda outlets have published or re-published a large number of names and contact details.
We have not yet had the chance to analyse all of the documents, so cannot say with confidence
whether they are all genuine or whether they include doctored or false material.
Although it is clear that much of the material was indeed on the Integrity Initiative or
Institute systems, much of it is dated and was never used. In particular, many of the names
published were on an internal list of experts in this field who had been considered as
potential invitees to future cooperation. In the event, many were never contacted by the
Integrity Initiative and did not contribute to it. Nor were these documents therefore included
in any funding proposals. Not only did these individuals have nothing to do with the programme
– they may not even have heard of us. We are of course trying to contact all named
individuals for whom we have contact details to ensure that they are aware of what has
happened. "
With that background, let's look at four of the documents that were posted.
1.) A undated document discussing Russia's use of social media as a proxy for
propaganda:
Note the following comments regarding Russia Today aka RT:
" RT has been able to capitalise on growing mistrust of western media among westerners.
During the breaking of the coverage of many political scandals, RT articles aggressively raised
issues that many felt were not being pursued by the western media, which is frequently seen as
covering up non-PC stories. Many users believe that RT is willing to talk about incidents that
western media will not, a belief that RT actively encourages. As such, many users of a both
far-right and far-left disposition are willing to listen to RT, even being aware of RT's
control by the government, rather than western media. "
Here is a page from the document which discusses the target audiences for Russian social
media propaganda:
Note that the memo clearly states that Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik are
targeting an audience that is "distrusting of statecraft and major media groups.". I wonder why
Westerners would be distrusting of their own media?
2.) A 2017 document outlining plans for developing an American arm of Integrity
Initiative:
Note that the writer of the memo states that the West is badly in need of a reassertion of
U.S. leadership and that America needs to rebuild its understanding of Russia and how to deal
with it. It also notes that the international community needs to rebuild its understanding of
Russia to ensure that Western governments get the popular support that democracies require
(i.e. a strongly anti-populist movement).
3.) An undated document showing how Integrity Initiative is planning to expand "expert
clusters" to other nations including Austria, Canada, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland
among others:
4.) A
January 2015 document showing Integrity Initiative's views on setting up anti-Russia
sanctions with the goal of changing Russia's behaviour, peace in Ukraine, a return of Crimea
and, most importantly, possible regime change in Russia:
On page four of this this interesting sentence we find the following sentence:
" Driving a wedge between Russians and government is key. "
It is interesting to see that Integrity Initiative was ahead of the game when it came to
punishing Russia for its involvement in Crimea's move to independence from Ukraine to the point
that their greatest hope was that there would be regime change in Russia.
As you can see from these documents, Integrity Initiative, a government-funded, not-for-profit
charity has a mandate to ensure that the West is immune to Russia's ongoing propaganda campaign
by providing propaganda of its own. It's certainly a good thing that Integrity Initiative has
the "real truth" and is willing to pressure us into seeing the global geopolitical quagmire
with its 20/20 vision. Apparently, integrity in this post-truth era is in the eye of the
beholder/purveyor.
"Carnage needs to destroyed" mentality is dominant among the USA neoliberal elite and drives the policy toward Russia.
They all supported neoconservative extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda directed on weakening Russian and
establishing of world dominance. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya. ..."
"... And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'
In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background,
which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate
about him not being president.'
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion
GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.
This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or
some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both
in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.
And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it
was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the
area.
Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which
clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander
Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on
your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.
The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.
In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry
– the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.
Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier,
which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein
in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.
Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling
attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio
4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets,
backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.
The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available
– evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes
of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played
a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.
Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind
of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction
of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.
What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest
a sale had been completed.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very
happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent
spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.
All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich
and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder.
For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.
(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews
both with Mogilevich and Levinson at
In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to
prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.
Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential
threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions
north of the Litani.
These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that
somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later
to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.
What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the
part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian
side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.
Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking
'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.
Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic
downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William
Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.
So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that
material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem
that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.
All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen
for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella
was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's
personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was
sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who
then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence
which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate
Russia in supplying materials.
There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether
Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears
that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian
intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)
It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which
claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional,
Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's
offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.
It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here,
a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.
Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called
Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.
In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe
World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the
Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.
Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's
death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain,
but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as
Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)
That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase
nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:
'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve
year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents
state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear
limited life components and you can read for weeks).'
What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility,
in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of
ones which lasted longer.
For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.
What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily
smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide
to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring
to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.
In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited
for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'
According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would
you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?
As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned
with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to
ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.
In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been
describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties,
and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another
day.
A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according
to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious
of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.
Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full
dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation
suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.
thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..
it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy
and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..
Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone
I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.
Re: Levinson
# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier
by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved
he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.
# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson
went to Jablonski with it.
# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum
czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson?
The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing
came of it.
I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.
As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg
is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.
I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive
solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that
the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields.
Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have
been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. "
David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making.
Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf
of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration
cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but
not fundamentally.
I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their
policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.
It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing
themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace
to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of
defiance which they will not tolerate.
And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear.
That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to
defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.
So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a
counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.
Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.
In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry
favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness
would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two
birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage
and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.
Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming
media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century
endorsed her.
Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in.
Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything
possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is
clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling
the Borg pundits.
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.
Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called
consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda
in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp.
This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous
American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously
and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier
on atlantic side.
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''
The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.
'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG)
dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded
as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that
with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a
former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski
favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241,
251 - 256]
'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'
State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used
against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the
Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task
force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition
of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization
of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis"
and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time."
Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since
he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know
how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion,
did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental
people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan
back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that
in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting,
even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports
and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the
terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start
to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such
an escalation.
I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain
more pointers.
It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.
An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander
Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian
attempts to get hold of him. An extract:
'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and
afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the
largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'
Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which
Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.
Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:
'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge
on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing
charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly
smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to
win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'
So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has
changed.
For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always
judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial
Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:
'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [£1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent
political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign
passports for its "very, very special clients".
'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that
it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars
stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".
Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us
think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter,
Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:
'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He
said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he
must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko
by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would
have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'
When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about
the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was
immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.
She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator,
David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting
the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.
Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as
a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.
What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary
claim about Shvets:
'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government
quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically
motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable
posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq,
Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.
'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the
National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll
at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general
who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding
Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.
'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated
the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky
and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's
Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky
contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia
Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb
in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'
Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many
things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What
later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling
her as to the side for which he was working.
It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the
Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like
others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.
An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation
specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria'
was actually credible.
This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of
the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have
been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking,
and for similar action against Syria.
Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with
Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.
There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been
another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.
A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing.
This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or
indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High')
might be a start.
Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story
had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that
is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')
The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one
feel as though one wanted to throw up.
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.}
No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the
fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian
Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy
of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were
spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George
Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.
Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it
is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat
it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.
Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered
a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving
forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before
any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914.
Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information
on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention
of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the
matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption
the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the
memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and
dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.
The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem
for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At
that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones
in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems
ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They
are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet
and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google
also allows searches with more than one term. This link -
- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories"
on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.
If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what
you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.
"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in
the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.
The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations"
(hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping
boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many
of the contributors know it from inside.
In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle
between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product
of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible,
but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never
going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the
Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for
the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative
Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.
So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly
not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact
with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government
pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.
The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the
Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.
Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will
be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative
appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat
of the BEF.
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break
- David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname
comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament
names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
The hard, blinding truth:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it,
and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting
their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out
all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and
even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.
And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments
being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.
Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article
he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions
by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."
Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case
being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information
to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.
"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily
redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department
last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "
I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress
will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's
court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI
is lying.
What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos
on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that
are based on classified documents.
We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status.
You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am
thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak
their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are
anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a
political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.
Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are,
in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you.
You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant
to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from
Northeestern
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist.
I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians
- they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.
David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of
material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though
not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That
you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities
are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the
States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because
of that.
The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as
"salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other
professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling
around unsupervised?
The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't
seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm
boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever
they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon
might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about
what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced
with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but
for the general public, that bit more untenable.
So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he
was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have
to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far
as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group
then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.
I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up
on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out
so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least
as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type,
they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to
pay him until he left UK service. pl
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.
Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of
the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet
I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK
side.
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about
the "golden showers"? "
I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations
and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public
wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.
So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media
is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.
Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I
doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.
But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK
get mixed up in it?
When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on
SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised
and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.
A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played
a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact
that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario
Scaramella.
When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European
Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.
His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques,
and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium
forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.
So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case
as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract
from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their
prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'
The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive
summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.
The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and
Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December
2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:
'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War
to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic-
Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'
Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet
Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:
'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references
to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations
made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them
[presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had
been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti
warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say
that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company
of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange
Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'
The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':
'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's
sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations
made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news
and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI.
Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there
were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the
assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella
notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for
the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini.
Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'
In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward
Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation
had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography
– which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella
which had been described in the wiretap request.
As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who
could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the
three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.
In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from
Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.
Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes
to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.
'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to
the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies
implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed
by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with
him.'
From a fax dated 7 November 2005:
'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged
sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document
file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get
him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re:
Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even
then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'
From a fax dated 5 December 2005:
'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with
regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who
gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA
disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to
London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella
on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling
file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'
In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was
unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be
in a chaotic state.
However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp
unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed
to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves
for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus
justifications.
Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on
the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June
and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.
(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)
And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided
to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence
in the Inquiry.
Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come
from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.
Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin
years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the
supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.
The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged
about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame
Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')
I know something of spectroscopy. The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis
itself or its instrumentation. The paragraph that you have quoted:
"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his
team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to
brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."
And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics
- which did not and could not exist in this situation.
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was
managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there
is to know?
I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too
complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri
Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele
Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.
Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality?
Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.
By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the
date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage
in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.
Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to
obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.
Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those? The German link is different. How about the Iranian? or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?
another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime
and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s
Mueller's Lies About George Papadopolous by Larry C Johnson
This article provides a comprehensive presentation of facts and an analysis that
demonstrates the disengenuity and dishonestly of the Mueller Report with respect to George
Papadopolous.
The egregious, dishonest misreprensentation about Papadopolous is introduced on page 1 on
page 1 of the Mueller report:
In late July 2016, soon after WikiLeaks's first release of stolen documents, a foreign
government contacted the FBI about a May 2016 encounter with Trump Campaign foreign policy
advisor George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos had suggested to a representative of that foreign
government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it
could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. That information prompted the FBI on July
31, 2016, to open an investigation into whether individuals associated with the Trump Campaign
were coordinating with the Russian government in its interference activities.
The claim that Papadopoulos had information from a source representing Russia is
demonstrably false. As I noted in my previous article,
Special Counsel Mueller--Disingenuous and Dishonest , the FBI was going after the Trump
team as early as September 2015. Let's take a look at George Papadopolous' account: ( The
following are excerpts from: George Papadopolous. "Deep State Target." Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/deep-state-target/id1446495998
)
"I really like Energy Stream, but three months into the job, I am approached by a man named
Nagi Khalid Idris who offers me a position at the London Centre of International Law
Practice.
Idris is an interesting figure. As it turns out, he is the first in a handful of interesting
figures I am about to meet. A Sudanese-born UK citizen, he's the founder of EN Education Group
Limited -- an education consultancy operation that's core business seems to be placing students
from Arab countries in international settings. " (p. 50)
"I really like Energy Stream, but three months into the job, I am approached by a man named
Nagi Khalid Idris who offers me a position at the London Centre of International Law
Practice.
Idris is an interesting figure. As it turns out, he is the first in a handful of interesting
figures I am about to meet. A Sudanese-born UK citizen, he's the founder of EN Education Group
Limited -- an education consultancy operation that's core business seems to be placing students
from Arab countries in international settings. " (p. 61)
"I really like Energy Stream, but three months into the job, I am approached by a man named
Nagi Khalid Idris who offers me a position at the London Centre of International Law
Practice.
Idris is an interesting figure. As it turns out, he is the first in a handful of interesting
figures I am about to meet. A Sudanese-born UK citizen, he's the founder of EN Education Group
Limited -- an education consultancy operation that's core business seems to be placing students
from Arab countries in international settings. " (p. 62)
The next day, . . . . "Nagi comes by my office again. His attitude has suddenly changed.
It's a night-and-day difference. He starts telling me that there is someone I have to meet, a
very important person who will be "very useful to me during my time with Trump. I remember Nagi
telling me, "He's a man who knows many people." Then he insists I join him at a conference at
Link Campus University in Rome.
And he calls in a director with the LCILP whom I've never laid eyes on.
"You have to meet her," he tells me while we wait. "Her name is Arvinder Sambei. She's
setting up our team at the conference, and she can help arrange the introduction." (pp
64-65)
"[Nagi] keeps at me, insisting I had to go to Rome. "It's a three-day conference. It will
help you with Trump."
"After that session, I'm sitting in a conference room when Nagi Idris approaches. At his
side is a well-dressed man in his mid-fifties.
"George," Nagi says. "This is Professor Joseph Mifsud, and you should talk."
Joseph Mifsud is the man Nagi had planned for me to meet, the man Nagi had asked Arvinder
Sambei to contact, and the man Nagi had portrayed as a major player, a guy with diplomatic
experience and "extensive contacts. A man, in other words, who can change my life.
It turns out Mifsud has a PhD in Education from Queen's University, Belfast, which isn't
exactly what I'd expect from a guy reputed to be politically connected. But Mifsud spins
himself as a worldly insider, a guy with an I-have-connections-everywhere arrogance. He offsets
that by flashing warmth and interest in me. He asks about my background. He asks if I have
Russian contacts. I shake my head.
"I heard you have connections," I say. "And that you might be able to help me with the
campaign."
"Oh yes, absolutely. Let's talk tonight. Let's go to dinner." (pp. 70-71)
[At dinner] "Mifsud says: "I'm going introduce you to everyone and set up a meeting between
Trump and Putin."
"That's an excellent idea," I say. "You really think it can be arranged?"
"Oh, yes. I can do it."
"That would be amazing." (p. 74)
"Mifsud emails me a few days later when I'm back in London to tell me he wants to introduce
me to somebody very important. When am I available?
I respond with some possible dates. Then I head to the LCILP offices where I run into Nagi
Idris. He's very excited. He tells me I'm going to meet Putin's niece. That Mifsud knows her
and is going to introduce us." (p. 75)
"The lunch is booked for March 24 at the Grange Holborn Hotel,. . . . "When I get there,
Mifsud is waiting for me in the lobby with an attractive, fashionably dressed young woman with
dirty blonde hair at his side. He introduces her as Olga Vinogradova." (p. 76)
"Mifsud sells her hard. "Olga is going to be your inside woman to Moscow. She knows
everyone." He tells me she was a former official at the Russian Ministry of Trade. Then he
waxes on about introducing me to the Russian ambassador in London." (p. 77)
"on April 12, "Olga" writes: "I have already alerted my personal links to our conversation
and your request. The embassy in London is very much aware of this. As mentioned, we are all
very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump. The Russian Federation
would love to welcome him once his candidature would be officially announced."
So I have no choice but to hurry up and wait. I communicate this back to the campaign
managers, primarily Stephen Miller." (p. 101)
"Then Mifsud returns from the Valdai conference. On April 26 we meet for breakfast at the
Andaz Hotel, near Liverpool Street Station, one of the busiest train stations in London. He's
in an excellent mood and claims he met with high-level Russian government officials. But once
again, he's very short on specifics. This is becoming a real pattern with Mifsud. He hasn't
offered any names besides Timofeev. Then, he leans across the table in a conspiratorial manner.
The Russians have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, he tells me. "Emails of Clinton," he says. "They
have thousands of emails." (p. 104)
[In early May 2016] "two military attachés at the US embassy in London, Terrence
Dudley and Gregory Baker, reach out to me to set up a meeting. "
(NOTE -- this meeting comes in the wake of controversial comments Papadopolous made to a
reporter criticizing UK Prime Minister Cameron). (p. 117).
"They take me to a private club known far and wide as The Rag -- the same place we hosted
the 2015 Energy Stream Conference. Its real name is The Army and Navy Club" (p. 117)
"They spare no expense during our meeting, dropping at least $500. They ask me what I'm
doing in London." (p.118)
"IT'S A WET, ugly London evening on May 10, 2016, when I go meet Erika Thompson and her
boss, Australian High Commissioner Alexander Downer." (p. 125)
"Downer is oozing aggression by comparison. After our introduction, the first thing he says
is, "Tell your boss he needs to leave my friend David Cameron alone, and you should leave him
alone too.'" (p. 127)
"Downer starts talking: He tells me he's connected to a British security firm called
Hakluyt. He boasts about being a board member and that the firm has a great presence in London
and close ties to the Obama administration. "We advise many governments," he says." (p.
128)
"And then something happens.
Or more accurately, Downer later claims something happens.
In his version of events, he asks me a question about Russia and Trump.
I then tell him that the Russians have a surprise or some damaging material related to
Hillary Clinton.
I have no memory of this. None. Zero. Nada." (p. 130)
The Papadopolous account reveals several things. First, George is an earnest but naïve
young man. He did not realize he was being set up.
Second, George's multiple emails to Corey Lewandowski were intercepted by both GCHQ and the
NSA. It is clear now, with the benefit of hindsight, that these communications were transmitted
as SIGINT Intelligence Reports. Investigation by Attorney Bill Barr will show that these
reports were "unmasked."
Third, the people who brokered the contacts with Mifsud -- Nagi and Arvinder Sambei -- have
ties to British and US intelligence organizations and the FBI.
Arvinder Sambei's ties, for example, are reported by
Disobedient Media :
" Mifsud and Papadopoulos's co-director Arvinder Sambei was also the former FBI British
counsel working 9/11 cases for Robert Mueller. She also runs a consultancy which deals with
Special Investigative Measure (SIMs) which is just a posh description for covert espionage and
evidence gathering. She has worked for major intelligence and national law agencies in the
past. She wore two hats as a director of London Centre and a consultant for the Global Center
on Cooperative Security (GCCS), a counter-terrorism think tank which is sponsored by the
Australia, Canada, UK and US governments. Alexander Downer's former Chief of Staff while at the
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade now works for the Global Center. Mifsud was
also due to meet with Australian private intelligence figures in Adelaide in March 2016. So.
Australia is certainly a major focus for the investigation."
Sambei's critical role in introducing Papadopolous to Joseph Mifsud is not, in my view, a
mere coincidence.
Joseph Mifsud bears all the hallmarks of an MI-6 intelligence asset (please refer to my
previous article,
Special Counsel Mueller: Disingenuous and Dishonest . Introducing Papadopolous to Mifsud is
a classic humint covert action. In this case the plan was to select an individual -- a
naïve, inexperienced eager soul--who had access to the Trump campaign, who could be fed
compromising information and put into an incriminating situations that would feed the concocted
meme that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians.
The entire concept of working with the Russians and having Trump meet with Putin was a meme
introduced and encouraged by Joseph Mifsud. George Papadopolous was an unwitting, albeit eager,
patsy.
Then we have Alexander Downer. He is closely tied to the Clintons. Bill and Alexander signed
a deal that produced millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation. Downer, despite his
credentials and pedigree, was not an honest actor. I believe that he was engaged in a
pre-planned political dirty trick, to feed the lie that the Trump campaign was working with the
Russians to "steal" Hillary's emails.
Remember. The critical meeting with Downer took place while the Russians were ostensibly
hacking the DNC. This is not a tin-foil hatted conspiracy theory. The facts are clear.
And there is more. George Papodopoulus was entrapped by individuals linked to British MI-6 and the CIA with offers to provide
meetings with Russians and Putin. The Mueller account is a lie:
In late April 2016, Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, immediately after Mifsud 's return from a trip
to Moscow, that the Russian government had obtained "dirt" on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. One week later,
on May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government 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.
Papadopoulos shared information about Russian "dirt " with people outside of the Campaign, and the Office investigated whether
he also provided it to a Campaign official. Papadopoulos and the Campaign officials with whom he interacted told the Office that
they did · not recall that Papadopoulos passed them the information. Throughout the relevant period of time and for several months
thereafter, Papadopoulos worked with Mifsud and two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian
government. That meeting never came to pass.
Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur -- -i.e., Joseph Mifsud -- -as some simple guy with ties to Russia's political
elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on
the forefront of exposing Mifsud's ties to
western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular .
Mifsud's alleged links to Russian intelligence are summarily debunked by his close working relationship with Claire Smith, a major
figure in the upper echelons of British intelligence. A number of Twitter users recently observed that Joseph Mifsud had been
photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud's LINK campus in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed
later reported that the professor's name and biography had been removed from the campus' website, writing that the mysterious removal
took place after Mifsud had served the institution for "years."
WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally
pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: "[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year
member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both
be present in this [photo]."
The photograph in question originated on Geodiplomatics.com, where it specified that Joseph Mifsud is indeed standing next to
Claire Smith, who was attending a: " Training program on International Security which was organised by Link Campus University and
London Academy of Diplomacy." The event is listed as taking place in October, 2012. This is highly significant for a number of reasons.
This is not a mere matter of Mueller and his team "failing" to disclose some important facts. If they were operating honestly
they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three -- Sater and Greenber -- alleged Russian
stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community.
The issue was also
raised by WikiLeaks's
Julian Assange
, just days before the Ecuadorian government silenced him last March. Assange's Twitter
thread cited research by
Chris Blackburn
,
who spoke with
Disobedient
Media
on multiple occasions covering Joseph Mifsud's ties to British intelligence figures and
organizations, as well as his links to
Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, the FBI, CIA
and the private cyber-security firm Crowdstrike.
We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in
the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they
return us to the earliest reporting on the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the
Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members of Mueller's investigation. What we
are left with is an indication of collusion between factions of the US and UK intelligence community in
fabricating evidence of Trump-Russia collusion: a scandal that would have rocked the legacy press to its core,
if Western establishment-backed media had a spine.
In
Disobedient Media's
previous coverage of Blackburn's work, he described his experience in intelligence:
"I've been involved in numerous investigations that involve counter-intelligence techniques in the past. I
used to work for the
9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism
, one of the biggest tort actions in American history. I helped
build a profile of Osama bin Laden's financial and political network, which was slightly different to the one
that had been built by the
CIA's Alec Station
,
a dedicated task force which was focused on Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Alec Station designed its profile to
hunt Osama bin Laden and disrupt his network. I thought it was flawed. It had failed to take into account
Osama's historical links to Pakistan's main political parties or that he was the figurehead for a couple of
organizations, not just Al-Qaeda."
"I also ran a few conferences for US intelligence leaders during the Bush administration. After the 9/11
Commission published its report into the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon it created a public
outreach program. The US National Intelligence Conference and Exposition (
Intelcon
)
was one of the avenues it used. I was responsible for creating the 'View from Abroad' track. We had guidance
from former Senator Slade Gorton and Jamie Gorelick, who both sat on the 9/11 Commission. We got leaders such
as Sir John Chilcot and Baroness Pauline Neville Jones to come and help share their experiences on how the US
would be able to heal the rifts after 9/11."
"The US intelligence community was suffering from severe turf wars and firewalls, which were hampering
counter-terrorism efforts. They were concentrating on undermining each other rather than tackling terrorism. I
had mainly concentrated on the Middle East, but in 2003 I switched my focus to terrorism in South Asia."
Counter Terrorism, Not Counter Intelligence, Sparked Probe
In an article published by
The Telegraph
last
November, the paper acknowledged the following:
"It forces the spotlight on whether the UK played a role in the FBI's investigation launched before the 2016
presidential election into Trump campaign ties to the Kremlin Mr. Trump's allies and former advisers are
raising questions about the UK's role in the start of the probe, given many of the key figures and meetings
were located in Britain One former top White House adviser to Mr. Trump made similar insinuations, telling
this newspaper: "You know the Brits are up to their neck." The source added on the Page wiretap application:
"I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don't want to be
implicated in, along with FBI, counter-terrorism and the CIA.
" [Emphasis Added]
The article
cites
George Papadopoulos, who asked why the "British intelligence apparatus was weaponized against Trump and his
advisers." Papadopoulos has also addressed the issue at length via Twitter. In response to the Telegraph's
coverage of the issue, Chris Blackburn wrote via
Twitter
: "The
Telegraph story on Trump Russia acknowledges that activities involving counter-terrorism are at the heart of
the scandal not counter-intelligence. If the [London Centre for International Law Practice] was British state,
not private, some Commonwealth countries are going to be seriously pissed off."
Blackburn spoke with Disobedient Media, saying: "If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph
Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange happened to George Papadopoulos during the
campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with people who have
intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice. A recent article in
The Telegraph
also
alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of
International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations, doing counter-terrorism work for the
Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their
intelligence
agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal."
[Emphasis Added]
Blackburn discussed this differentiation with Disobedient Media: "Counter-terrorism is obviously involved in
more kinetic, violent political actions-concerning mass casualty events, bombings, assassinations, poisonings,
and hacking. But, the lines are blurring between them. Counter-intelligence cases have been known to stretch
for decades- often relying on nothing more than paranoia and suspicion to fuel investigations.
Counter-terrorism is also a broader discipline as it involves tactical elements like hostage rescue, crime
scene investigations, and explosive specialists. Counter-Terrorism is a collaborative effort with
counter-terrorism officers working closely with local and regional police forces and civic organizations. There
is also a wider academic field around countering violent, and radical ideology which promotes terrorism and
insurgencies. Cybersecurity has become the third major discipline in intelligence. The London Center of
International Law Practice, the mysterious intelligence company that
employed both Papadopoulos and Mifsud
,
had also been working in that area."
Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the
investigation, saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to
make Papadopoulos' activities look like they were something else. As counter-terrorism and counterintelligence
are close in tactics and methods, it would seem that they were used because they share the same skill sets –
covert evidence gathering and deception. It's basically sleight of hand. A piece of theatre would be more
precise. However, we don't know if the FBI knew it was real or make-believe. It's more likely that the CIA
played the FBI with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency."
Mueller's Team And Joseph Mifsud
Zainab Ahmad
, a
member
of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As
pointed out by
Blackburn
, Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event in 2017. In recent days, Blackburn
wrote via
Twitter
:
"Zainab Ahmad is a major player in the Russiagate scandal at the DOJ. Does she work for SC Mueller? She was at
a GCCS event in May 2017. Arvinder Sambei, a co-director of the [London Centre of International Law Practice],
worked with Joseph Mifsud, [George Papadopoulos] and [Simona Mangiante]. She's a GCCS consultant."
Blackburn told this author: "Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele
dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism conference in New York with the Global Center on
Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged Russian spy, had been working
within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia."
<img src="https://i2.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/zainab-work.png?resize=295%2C300&ssl=1" alt="" width="295" height="300" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/zainab-work.png?resize=295%2C300&ssl=1 295w, https://i2.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/zainab-work.png?resize=768%2C782&ssl=1 768w, https://i2.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/zainab-work.png?resize=1006%2C1024&ssl=1 1006w, https://i2.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/zainab-work.png?w=1560&ssl=1 1560w" sizes="(max-width: 295px) 100vw, 295px" data-recalc-dims="1" />
Zainab
Ahmad (AHMAD). Image via the Combatting Terrorism Center, West Point
"Richard Barrett,
the Former Chief of Counter-Terrorism at MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence department traveled with Mifsud to
Saudi Arabia to give a talk on terrorism in 2017. Ex-CIA officers, US Defense, and US Treasury officials were
also there. The London Centre of International Law Practice's relationship to the Global Center had been
established in 2014. The Global Center on Cooperative Security made Martin Polaine and Arvinder Sambei
consultants, they then became directors at the London Centre of International Law Practice."
"The Global Center on Cooperative Security's first major UK conference was at Joseph Mifsud's London Academy
of Diplomacy (LAD). Mifsud then followed Arvinder Sambei and Nagi Idris over to the London Centre of
International Law Practice. Sources have told me that Mifsud was moonlighting as a specialist on
counter-terrorism and Islamism while working at LAD which explains why he went to work in counter-terrorism
after LAD folded."
"I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various
elements that popped up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global
Center before Mueller was appointed as special counsel is also troubling."
Days ago,
The
Hill
reported on Congressional testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he
warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic and linked to the Clintons. Critically,
The Hill
writes:
"Those he briefed included Andrew Weissmann, then the head of DOJ's fraud section; Bruce Swartz, longtime
head of DOJ's international operations, and
Zainab Ahmad
, an accomplished terrorism prosecutor
who, at the time, was assigned to work with Lynch as a senior counselor. Ahmad and Weissmann would go on to
work for Mueller, the special prosecutor overseeing the Russia probe." [Emphasis Added]
This point is essential, as it not only describes Ahmad's role in Mueller's team but places her at a crucial
pre-investigation meeting.
Last year,
Blackburn
noted the connection between Mifsud and
Arvinder
Sambei
, writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel, works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran
joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy. Sambei then brought Mifsud over
to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US State too."
Sambei has been
described
elsewhere as a "Former practising barrister, Senior Crown Prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution
Service of England & Wales, and Legal Adviser at the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ), Ministry of Defence."
[British spelling has been retained]
<img src="https://i0.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/AS-2016-cut.jpg?resize=300%2C296&ssl=1" alt="" width="300" height="296" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/AS-2016-cut.jpg?resize=300%2C296&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/AS-2016-cut.jpg?w=455&ssl=1 455w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" data-recalc-dims="1" />
Arvinder
Sambei. Image via the Public International Law Advisory Group
That Sambei has been so
thoroughly linked to organizations where Mifsud was a central figure is yet another cause of suspicion
regarding allegations that Joseph Mifsud was a shadowy, unknown Russian agent until the summer of 2016. She is
also a direct link between Robert Mueller and Mifsud.
Blackburn wrote via
Twitter
: "Arvinder Sambei helped to organize LCILP's counter-terrorism and corruption events. She used her
contacts in the US to bring in Middle Eastern government officials that were seen to be vulnerable to graft.
Lisa Osofsky, former FBI Deputy General Counsel, was working with her." Below, Arvinder is pictured at a London
Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP) event.
<img src="https://i2.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/sambeilcilp.jpg?resize=720%2C566&ssl=1" alt="" width="720" height="566" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/sambeilcilp.jpg?w=720&ssl=1 720w, https://i2.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/sambeilcilp.jpg?resize=300%2C236&ssl=1 300w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" />
Arvinder
Sambei, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter
As Chris
Blackburn told this author: "
Mifsud and Papadopoulos's co-director Arvinder Sambei was also the former
FBI British counsel working 9/11 cases for Robert Mueller.
She also runs a consultancy which deals
with Special Investigative Measure (SIMs) which is just a posh description for covert espionage and evidence
gathering. She has worked for major intelligence and national law agencies in the past. She wore two hats as a
director of London Centre and a consultant for the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), a
counter-terrorism think tank which is sponsored by the Australia, Canada, UK and US governments. Alexander
Downer's former Chief of Staff while at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade now works for
the Global Center. Mifsud was also due to meet with Australian private intelligence figures in Adelaide in
March 2016. So. Australia is certainly a major focus for the investigation." [Emphasis Added]
<img src="https://i0.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Lisa-Osofsky.jpg?resize=720%2C524&ssl=1" alt="" width="720" height="524" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Lisa-Osofsky.jpg?w=720&ssl=1 720w, https://i0.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Lisa-Osofsky.jpg?resize=300%2C218&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/disobedientmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Lisa-Osofsky.jpg?resize=370%2C270&ssl=1 370w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" />
Lisa
Osofsky, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter
An
Embarrassment For John Brennan?
Disobedient Media
previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to
Washington DC to share 'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer
of 2016. This writer noted that "
The
Guardian
reported Hannigan's announcement that he would step down from his leadership position with the
agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017. Jane Mayer, in her
profile of Christopher Steele published in the
New
Yorker,
also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director
John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. What is so curious about this
briefing
"deemed so
sensitive it was handled at director-level"
is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and
not Mike Rogers at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner."
Blackburn told Disobedient Media: "Former Congressman Trey Gowdy, who has seen most of the information
gathered by Congress from the intelligence community concerning the Russia investigation, said that if
President Trump were to declassify files and present the truth to the American public, it would "
embarrass
John Brennan
." I think that is pretty concrete for me, but it's not definitive. I know the polarization and
spin in Washington has become perverse, but that statement is pretty specific for me. If Brennan is involved,
it is most probably through Papadopoulos who sparked off the 'official' investigation at the FBI. He also made
sure the Steele dossier was spread through the US government."
Blackburn added: "Chris Steele was also working on FIFA projects, and a source has told me that he was
working to investigate the Russian and Qatari World Cup bids. The London Centre of International Law Practice
has been working with Majed Garoub, the former Saudi legal representative of FIFA, the world governing body for
soccer. He's also been working against the Qatari bid. Steele likes to get paid twice for his investigations."
"Mifsud has also been associated with Prince Turki the former Saudi intelligence chief, Mifsud and the
London Academy of Diplomacy used to train Saudi diplomats and intelligence figures while Turki was the Saudi
Ambassador to London. Turki is a close friend of Bill Clinton and John Brennan. Nawaf Obaid was also courting
Mifsud and tried to get him a cushy job working with CNN's Freedom Project at Link Campus in Rome. He also
knows John Brennan. Intelligence agencies like to give out professional gifts like this plum academic position
for completing missions. In the US, it is widely known that intelligence agencies gift the children of assets
to get them into prestigious Ivy League schools."
At minimum, we can surmise that Mifsud was not a Russian agent, but was an asset of Western intelligence
agencies. We are left with the impression that the Mifsud saga served as a ploy, whether he participated
knowingly or not. It seems reasonable to conclude that the gambit was initially developed with participation of
John Brennan and UK intelligence. Following this, Mueller inherited and developed the Mifsud narrative thread
into the collusion soap opera we know today.
Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a
collusion scandal to subvert a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West
and a nuclear-armed power.
"... evidence has surfaced that suggests Mifsud was anything but a Russian spy, and may have actually worked for British intelligence. ..."
"... This new evidence culminates in the ground-breaking conclusion that the UK and its intelligence apparatus may be responsible for the invention of key pillars of the Trump-Russia scandal. ..."
"... Mifsud strongly denied claims that he was associated with Russian intelligence, telling Italian newspaper Repubblica that he was a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Clinton Foundation, adding that his political outlook was "left-leaning." Last month, Slate reported Mifsud had 'disappeared', as did some of the other figures linking the UK to the Trump-Russia scandal. This aspect will be discussed in more detail below. ..."
"... WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: "[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo] ..."
"... A particularly compelling factor indicating that Mifsud's working relationship with Claire Smith suggests his direct connection with UK intelligence is Smith's membership of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) , a supervisory body overseeing all UK intelligence agencies. The JIC is part of the Cabinet Office and reports directly to the Prime Minister. The Committee also sets the collection and analysis priorities for all of the agencies it supervises. Claire Smith also served as a member of the UK's Cabinet Office. ..."
"... In summary, Mifsud's appearance with Claire Smith at the LINK campus, in addition to her discussion on intelligence at yet another university where Mifsud was also employed, as well as her long-standing role in UK intelligence vetting and her position as a member of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee, would suggest that the roving scholar is not a Russian agent, but is actually a UK intelligence asset. ..."
"... Claire Smith is not the only British official associated with Mifsud. He was a speaker at an event by the Central European Initiative alongside former British diplomat Charles Crawford, whose postings included Moscow, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Warsaw. Crawford is listed as a visiting Professor with the same London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD) where Mifsud served as Director, associated with Stirling University. This adds more weight to the idea that Mifsud is a familiar figure among the upper echelons of the UK intelligence and foreign policy establishment. ..."
Over the last few months, Professor Joseph Mifsud has become a feather in the cap for those pushing the
Trump-Russia narrative. He is characterized as a "Russian" intelligence asset in mainstream press, despite his
declarations to the contrary. However, evidence has surfaced that suggests Mifsud was anything but a Russian
spy, and may have actually worked for British intelligence.
This new evidence culminates in the ground-breaking
conclusion that the UK and its intelligence apparatus may be responsible for the invention of key pillars of
the Trump-Russia scandal. If true, this would essentially turn the entire RussiaGate debacle on its head.
To
give an idea of the scope of this report, a few central points showing the UK connections with the central
pillars of the Trump-Russia claims are included here, in the order of discussion in this article:
Mifsud
allegedly discussed
that Russia has 'dirt' on Clinton in the form of 'thousands of emails' with George
Papadopoulos in London in April 2016.
The following month,
Papadopoulos
spoke with Alexander Downer,
Australia's ambassador to the UK, about the alleged Russian dirt on Clinton
while they were drinking at a swanky Kensington bar, according to The Times. In late July 2016, Downer
shared his tip with Australian intelligence officials who forwarded it to the FBI.
Robert Goldstone, a key figure in the 'Trump Tower' part of the RussiaGate narrative, sent Donald Trump
Jr. an email claiming Russia wanted to help the Trump campaign. He is a British music promoter.
Christopher Steele, ex-MI6, who worked as an MI6 agent in Moscow until 1993 and ran the Russia desk at
MI6 HQ in London between 2006 and 2009. He produced the totally unsubstantiated 'Steele Dossier' of
Trump-Russia allegations, with funding from the Clinton campaign and the DNC.
Robert Hannigan, the head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share
'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan.
Each of these strands of UK-tied elements of the Russiagate narrative can be substantially dismantled on
close inspection. This untangling process leads to the surprising conclusion that UK intelligence services
fabricated evidence of collusion in order to create the appearance of a Trump-Russia connection.
This trend begins with Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese scholar with an eclectic academic history who
Quartz
described as
an "enigma," while legacy press has enthusiastically characterized him as a central personality in the
Trump-Russia scandal.
The
New York Times
described Mifsud as an "enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia",
citing his regular involvement in the annual meetings of the
Valdai Discussion Club
,
a Russian-based think-tank, as well as
three short articles
he wrote in support of Russian policies.
Mifsud strongly denied claims that he was associated with Russian intelligence, telling
Italian newspaper Repubblica
that he was a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the
Clinton Foundation, adding that his political outlook was "left-leaning." Last month,
Slate
reported
Mifsud had 'disappeared', as did some of the other figures linking the UK to the Trump-Russia scandal. This
aspect will be discussed in more detail below.
To contextualize Mifsud's eclectic academic career in terms of intelligence service, it is helpful to note
that research undertaken by this author and Suzie Dawson as part of the
Decipher You
project has repeatedly shown the close ties – an outright merger in many cases – between the intelligence
community and academia. This enmeshment also takes place with think-tanks, NGOs, and in the corporate sphere.
In this light, Mifsud's brand of 'scholarship' becomes far less mysterious.
Mifsud's alleged links to Russian intelligence are summarily debunked by his close working relationship with
Claire Smith, a major figure in the upper echelons of British intelligence. A number of
Twitter users
recently
observed that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence
Committee
at Mifsud's LINK campus in Rome
.
Newsmax
and
Buzzfeed
later
reported that the professor's name and biography had been removed from the campus' website, writing that the
mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for "years."
WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a
Twitter
thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: "[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the
UK Joint Intelligence Committee
and eight-year member of the
UK Security Vetting panel
both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this
[photo]."
The photograph in question originated on
Geodiplomatics.com
, where it specified that Joseph Mifsud is indeed standing next to Claire Smith, who
was attending a: " Training program on International Security which was organised by
Link Campus
University and London Academy of Diplomacy
." The event is listed as taking place in October, 2012.
This is highly significant for a number of reasons.
(Image deleted) Claire
Smith standing with Joseph Mifsud, on the left side of the back row.
First, the
training program Smith attended
with high-ranking members of the Italian military
was organized by the
London Academy of
Diplomacy
, where Joseph Mifsud served as Director, as noted by
The Washington Post.
That Claire Smith was training military and law enforcement officials alongside Mifsud
in 2012
during her tenure as a member of the UK Cabinet Office Security Vetting Appeals Panel
,
which oversees the vetting process for UK intelligence placement, strongly suggests that Mifsud has been
incorrectly characterized as a Russian intelligence asset. It is extremely unlikely that Claire Smith's role in
vetting UK intelligence personnel would lead to her accidentally working with a Russian agent.
The connection between Mifsud and Smith does not end at bumped elbows in a photograph. Mifsud's
LinkedIn
profile
lists the
University of Stirling
as a place of occupation in connection with his
service as Director of the London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD), where Claire Smith served as a visiting professor
from 2013-2014 according to her
LinkedIn
profile
. This adds yet another verifiable connection between a man who is at the center of already-flimsy
Trump-Russia allegations and a high-ranking British intelligence figure.
(Picture deleted) Claire
Smith's LinkedIn profile details her service on the Security Vetting Appeals
Panel while also occupied as a
visiting Professor at Stirling University
Claire Smith also hosted a seminar titled "
Making
Sense of Intelligence
" at the University of Stirling. The event registration form describes her career,
including her service as Deputy Chief of Assessments Staff in the Cabinet Office, as a member of the UK Joint
Intelligence Committee and her completion of an eight-year term as a member of the UK Security Vetting and
Appeals Panel.
A particularly compelling factor indicating that Mifsud's working relationship with Claire Smith suggests
his direct connection with UK intelligence is Smith's membership of the UK's
Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)
, a supervisory body overseeing all UK intelligence agencies. The JIC is
part of the Cabinet Office and reports directly to the Prime Minister. The Committee also sets the collection
and analysis priorities for all of the agencies it supervises. Claire Smith also served as a member of the UK's
Cabinet Office.
In summary, Mifsud's appearance with Claire Smith at the LINK campus, in addition to her discussion on
intelligence at yet another university where Mifsud was also employed, as well as her long-standing role in UK
intelligence vetting and her position as a member of the
UK Joint Intelligence Committee,
would
suggest that the
roving scholar
is not a Russian agent, but is actually a UK intelligence asset. The possibility that such a
high-ranking member of this extremely powerful intelligence supervisory group was photographed standing next to
a "Russian" asset unknowingly is patently absurd.
This finding knocks the first pillar out from under the
edifice of the Trump-Russia allegations. It provides an initial suggestion of the UK's involvement in procuring
the 'evidence' that fueled the debacle.
Claire Smith is not the only British official associated with Mifsud. He was a speaker at an event by the
Central European Initiative
alongside former British diplomat Charles Crawford, whose postings included
Moscow, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Warsaw. Crawford is listed as a visiting Professor with the same London Academy
of Diplomacy (LAD) where Mifsud served as Director, associated with Stirling University. This adds more weight
to the idea that Mifsud is a familiar figure among the upper echelons of the UK intelligence and foreign policy
establishment.
The final nail in the coffin of the theory that Mifsud is a Russian spy is this photograph of Mifsud
standing next to Boris Johnson, the UK Foreign Secretary, as reported by
The Guardian.
The
photograph, taken in October 2017 –
nearly a full year after the US Presidential election and nine months
after Mifsud's name appeared in newspaper headlines worldwide as allegedly involved in Russian meddling in that
election –
is either highly embarrassing for the hapless Mr Johnson, or it's not, because Joseph Mifsud is
actually a valued and security-vetted asset to the United Kingdom.
Image
via The Guardian (deleted): Boris Johnson pictured at the dinner with the 'London professor',
Joseph Mifsud (left) and
Prasenjit Kumar Singh.
Another aspect of the RussiaGate claims tied to the UK includes
the reported conversation between
George
Papadopoulos and Alexander Downer,
Australia's High Commissioner to the UK who was based in London. The
pair reportedly spoke about the alleged Russian 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton while they were drinking at a swanky
bar in London. According to
Lifezette
, Downer
is closely tied with The Clinton Foundation via his role in securing $25 million in aid from his country to
help the Clinton Foundation fight AIDS.
He is also a member of the advisory board of
London-based Hakluyt & Co
,
an opposition research and intelligence firm set up in 1995 by three former UK intelligence officials and
described as "
a retirement
home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers
, but it now also recruits from the worlds of
management consultancy and banking". Whereas opposition research group Fusion GPS has received all the media
attention so far, Lifezette states that Hakluyt is "a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition
research and intelligence firm with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign".
Yet another UK link to a central pillar of the Trump-Russia narrative is British music promoter Robert
Goldstone, who was
reported
to have organized a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian nationals in June 2016. In the
email chain setting up the Trump Tower meeting, both before and after the meeting, the only real 'evidence' of
collusion with Russia come from Goldstone's own emails; none-too-subtle heavy hints about 'Russian help'
dropped by Goldstone but later – after the emails became public – walked back by him as "
hyping
the message and using hot-button language to puff up the information
I had been given."
Some have speculated
that Goldstone was also involved with British or US intelligence efforts to concoct the RussiaGate narrative.
As soon as his name emerged in the press, Goldstone – like Christopher Steele and Joseph Mifsud – went into
'hiding'. Multiple
press
reports
claimed he had done so out of fear for his
safety, a claim also made about Christopher Steele when his name first became public. Indeed, the
UK government
issued a DA Notice
(a press suppression advisory notice) to the British press to suppress the ex-spy
Steele's name. It is notable that, of all the people swept up into the ever-burgeoning RussiaGate
investigation, it is only the UK-linked witnesses – Mifsud, Steele, Goldstone – who have felt the need to go
into hiding when their role has been exposed.
The New York Times
summed up the contents of Christopher Steele's dossier: "Mr. Steele produced a series of
memos that alleged a broad conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the
2016 election on behalf of Mr. Trump. The memos also contained unsubstantiated accounts of encounters between
Mr. Trump and Russian prostitutes, and real estate deals that were intended as bribes."
Press reports
also relate that Steele was ordered by an English court to appear for a videotaped deposition
in London as part of an ongoing civil litigation against Buzzfeed for publishing the unverified dossier, for
which Steele was paid $168,000 by Glenn Simpson's company Fusion GPS, who were in turn paid by Mark Elias of
law firm Perkins Coie, lawyers to both the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC.
In his thread on the role of UK intelligence interference in the 2016 US Presidential race,
Assange also noted
how Christopher Steele used another former UK ambassador to Moscow, Sir Andrew Wood, to funnel the dossier to
Senator John McCain in a way that moved the handover out of London, to Canada. It's often said that no one ever
really leaves the UK security services when they retire – many 'former' MI6 or MI5 officers' private
intelligence businesses are dependent on maintaining good contacts among their ex-colleagues – so it is
interesting to note that Sir Andrew Wood says he was
"instructed"
-- by
former British spy Christopher Steele -- to reach out to the senior Republican, whom Wood called "a good man,"
about the unverified document.
Lastly, Robert Hannigan, former head of British intelligence agency GCHQ, is another personality of note in
the formation of the RussiaGate narrative and its surprisingly deep links to the UK. The
Guardian
noted that
Hannigan announced he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the
inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017. Jane Mayer in her profile of Christopher Steele published
in the
New Yorker
also
noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on
alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
What is so curious about this briefing
"deemed so sensitive it was
handled at director-level"
is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers
at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner.
The central supporting pillars of the RussiaGate allegations hinge on figures with close ties to British
intelligence and UK nationals. Even establishment media like
The Guardian
reported
that British spies from GCHQ were the first to alert US authorities to so-called Russian interference. Did the
entire narrative originate with UK intelligence groups in an effort to create the appearance of Russian
collusion with the Trump Presidential campaign, much as the Guccifer 2.0 persona was used in the US to
discredit WikiLeaks' publication of the DNC emails?
If it was not Russia at the heart of a complex operation to topple the Clinton campaign in 2016, then was
British Intelligence responsible for creating false narratives and mirage-like 'evidence' on which the
Trump-Russia scandal could hinge?
Put another way, if UK intelligence is responsible for manufacturing the Trump-Russia allegations, it
suggests that the UK's efforts formed an international arm running concurrently with domestic US 'Deep State'
efforts to sabotage Trump's presidential campaign and/or oust him once he had been elected.
Is British intelligence involvement in RussiaGate, as outlined above, the international version of
CrowdStrike and former FBI figures manufacturing the Guccifer 2.0 persona specifically to smear WikiLeaks via
false allegations of a Russian hack of the DNC? Have we been looking in the wrong place – at the wrong country
– to unearth the so-called 'foreign meddling' in the 2016 US election all along?
The country was divided before Mueller Report. Now it is even more divided.
Notable quotes:
"... We wouldn't know that a Clinton-linked operative, Joseph Mifsud, seeded Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos with the rumor that Russia had 'Dirt' on Hillary Clinton - which would later be coaxed out of Papadopoulos by a Clinton-linked Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, and that this apparent 'setup' would be the genesis of the FBI's " operation crossfire hurricane " operation against the Trump campaign. ..."
"... We wouldn't know about the role of Fusion GPS - the opposition research firm hired by Hillary Clinton's campaign to commission the Steele dossier. Fusion is also linked to the infamous Trump Tower meeting , and hired Nellie Ohr - the CIA-linked wife of the DOJ's then-#4 employee, Bruce Ohr. Nellie fed her husband Bruce intelligence she had gathered against Trump while working for Fusion , according to transcripts of her closed-door Congressional testimony. ..."
"... Now the dossier -- financed by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee , and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele -- is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries . - NYT ..."
"... The report was debunked after internet sleuths traced the IP address to a marketing server located outside Philadelphia, leading Alfa Bank executives to file a lawsuit against Fusion GPS in October 2017, claiming their reputations were harmed by the Steele Dossier. ..."
"... And who placed the Trump-Alfa theory with various media outlets? None other than former FBI counterintelligence officer and Dianne Feinstein aide Dan Jones - who is currently working with Fusion GPS and Steele to continue their Trump-Russia investigation funded in part by George Soros . ..."
"... Of course, when one stops painting with broad brush strokes, it's clear that the dossier was fabricated bullshit. ..."
"... after a nearly two-year investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and roughly 40 FBI agents and other specialists, no evidence was found to support the dossier's wild claims of "DNC moles, Romanian hackers, Russian pensioners, or years of Trump-Putin intelligence trading ," as the Times puts it. ..."
"... As there was spying, there must necessarily also have been channels to get the information thus gathered back to its original buyer - the Clinton campaign. Who passed the information back to Clinton, and what got passed? ..."
"... the NYTt prints all the news a scumbag would. remember Judith Miller, the Zionazi reporter the NYT ..."
"... There was no 'hack.' That is the big, anti-Russia, pro-MIC lie which all the other lies serve. ..."
"... Seth Rich had the means and the motive. So did Imran Awan, but it would make no sense for Awan to turn anything over to wikileaks . . .he would have kept them as insurance. ..."
"... Until the real criminals are processed and the media can be restored you don't have a United States. This corruption is beyond comprehension. You had the (((media)) providing kickbacks to the FBI for leaked information. These bribes are how CNN was on site during Roger Stones invasion. ..."
"... So now the narrative is, "We were wrong about Russian collusion, and that's Russia's fault"?! ..."
As we now shift from the "witch hunt" against Trump to 'investigating the investigators' who spied on him - remember this; Donald
Trump was supposed to lose the 2016 election by almost all accounts. And had Hillary won, as expected, none of this would have seen
the light of day .
We wouldn't know that a Clinton-linked operative, Joseph Mifsud,
seeded Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos with the rumor that Russia had 'Dirt' on Hillary Clinton - which would later be
coaxed out of Papadopoulos by a Clinton-linked Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, and that this apparent 'setup' would be the
genesis of the FBI's "
operation crossfire hurricane " operation against the Trump campaign.
We wouldn't know about the role of Fusion GPS - the opposition research firm hired by Hillary Clinton's campaign to commission
the Steele dossier. Fusion is also linked to the infamous
Trump Tower meeting , and hired
Nellie Ohr - the CIA-linked wife of the DOJ's then-#4 employee, Bruce Ohr. Nellie fed her husband Bruce intelligence she had
gathered against Trump while working for Fusion ,
according to transcripts of her closed-door Congressional testimony.
And if not for reporting by the Daily
Caller 's Chuck Ross and others, we wouldn't know that the FBI sent a longtime spook, Stefan Halper, to infiltrate and spy on
the Trump campaign - after the Obama DOJ paid him over $400,000
right before the 2016 US election (out of more than $1 million he received while Obama was president).
According to the New
York Times , the tables are turning, starting with the Steele Dossier.
[T]he release on Thursday of
the report
by the special counsel , Robert S. Mueller III, underscored what had grown clearer for months -- that while many Trump aides
had welcomed contacts with the Russians, some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were
impossible to prove . Mr. Mueller's report contained over a dozen passing references to the document's claims but no overall assessment
of why so much did not check out.
While Congressional Republicans have vowed to investigate, the DOJ's Inspector General is considering whether the FBI improperly
relied on the dossier when they used it to apply for a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The IG also wants
to know about Steele's sources and whether the FBI disclosed any doubts as to the veracity of the dossier .
Attorney General Barr, meanwhile, said he will review the FBI's conduct in the Russia investigation after saying the agency
spied on the Trump
campaign .
Doubts over the dossier
The FBI's scramble to vet the dossier's claims are well known. According to an April, 2017
NYT report , the FBI agreed
to pay Steele $50,000 for "solid corroboration" of his claims . Steele was apparently unable to produce satisfactory evidence - and
was ultimately not paid for his efforts:
Mr. Steele met his F.B.I. contact in Rome in early October, bringing a stack of new intelligence reports. One, dated Sept.
14, said that Mr. Putin was facing "fallout" over his apparent involvement in the D.N.C. hack and was receiving "conflicting advice"
on what to do.
The agent said that if Mr. Steele could get solid corroboration of his reports, the F.B.I. would pay him $50,000 for his efforts,
according to two people familiar with the offer. Ultimately, he was not paid . -
NYT
Still, the FBI used the dossier to obtain the FISA warrant on Page - while the document itself was heavily shopped around to various
media outlets . The late Sen. John McCain provided a copy to Former FBI Director James Comey, who already had a version, and briefed
President Trump on the salacious document. Comey's briefing to Trump was then used by CNN and BuzzFeed to justify reporting on and
publishing the dossier following the election.
Let's not forget that in October, 2016, both Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta promoted the conspiracy theory
that a secret Russian server was communicating with Trump Tower.
The report was debunked after internet sleuths traced the IP address to a marketing server located outside Philadelphia, leading
Alfa Bank executives to file a lawsuit against Fusion GPS in October 2017, claiming their reputations were harmed by the Steele Dossier.
And who placed the Trump-Alfa theory with various media outlets? None other than former FBI counterintelligence officer and Dianne
Feinstein aide Dan Jones - who is currently working with Fusion GPS and Steele to continue their Trump-Russia investigation funded
in part by
George Soros .
Russian tricks? The Times notes that Steele "has not ruled out" that he may have been fed Russian disinformation while assembling his dossier.
That would mean that in addition to carrying out an effective attack on the Clinton campaign, Russian spymasters hedged their
bets and placed a few land mines under Mr. Trump's presidency as well.
Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who now lives outside Washington, saw that as plausible. "Russia has huge experience
in spreading false information," he said. -
NYT
In short, Steele is being given an 'out' with this admission.
A lawyer for Fusion GPS, Joshua Levy, says that the Mueller report substantiated the "core reporting" in the Steele memos - namely
that "Trump campaign figures were secretly meeting Kremlin figures," and that Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, had directed
"a covert operation to elect Donald J. Trump."
Of course, when one stops painting with broad brush strokes, it's clear that the dossier was fabricated bullshit.
The dossier tantalized Mr. Trump's opponents with a worst-case account of the president's conduct. And for those trying to
make sense of the Trump-Russia saga, the dossier infused the quest for understanding with urgency.
In blunt prose, it suggested that a foreign power had fully compromised the man who would become the next president of the
United States.
The Russians, it asserted, had tried winning over Mr. Trump with real estate deals in Moscow -- which he had not taken up --
and set him up with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013, filming the proceedings for future exploitation. A handful of aides
were described as conspiring with the Russians at every turn.
Mr. Trump, it said, had moles inside the D.N.C. The memos claimed that he and the Kremlin had been exchanging intelligence
for eight years and were using Romanian hackers against the Democrats , and that Russian pensioners in the United States were
running a covert communications network . -
NYT
And after a nearly two-year investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and roughly 40 FBI agents and other specialists, no
evidence was found to support the dossier's wild claims of "DNC moles, Romanian hackers, Russian pensioners, or years of Trump-Putin
intelligence trading ," as the Times puts it.
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, and key Democrats backing away from talks of impeachment, let's see if lady justice will
follow the rest of us down the rabbit hole.
This is why the whole FISA court is a joke. What is their remedy if their power is abused? What happens. Well,... the FISA
courts was lied to and found out about it in the early 2000's. Mueller was FBI chief. So they got a strongly worded dressing-down,
a mark in their permanent record from high school, and NO ONE was fired... no one was sanctioned, no agent was transferred to
Alaska.
Fast forward 10 or 12 years and the FBI is doing this **** again. Lying to the court... you know the court where there are
no Democrat judges or Republican judges.. they are all super awesome.... and what is the remedy when the FISA court is told they've
been lied to by the FBI and used in a intel operation with MI6, inserting assets, into a freaking domestic Presidential campaign!!!
and then they WON. Good god.
And what do we hear from our court? Nadda. Do we hear of some Federal Judges hauling FBI and DOJ folks in front of them and
throwing them in jail? Nope. It appears from here... that our Federal Justices are corrupt and have no problem letting illegal
police-state actions go on with ZERO accountability or recourse. They could care less evidently. It's all secret you know... trust
us they say.. Why aren't these judges publicly making loud noises about how the judiciary is complicit , with the press, in wholesale
spying and leaking for political reasons AND a coup attempt when the wrong guy won.???
Where is awesome Justice Roberts? Why isn't he throwing down some truth on just how compromised the rule of law in his courts
clearly are in the last 10 years? The FISA court is his baby. It does no good for them to assure us they are concerned too, and
they've taken action and sent strongly worded letters. Pisses me off. ? Right? heck of rant...
When did Russians interfere in our elections?? 2016. Who was president when Russians interfered with elections?? oobama. Who
was head of the CIA?? Brennan. Who was National Intelligence director?? Clapper. Who was head of the FBI when the Russians interfered
in our elections?? Comey. The pattern is obvious. When Trump was a private citizen the oobama and all his cabinet appointees and
Intel Managers had their hands on all the levers and instruments of Government..and did nothing . Your oobama is guilty of treason
and failing his Oath Of Office...everybody knows this.
This article is still a roundabout gambit to blame Russia.
Fair enough, where's Bill Browder? In England. Browder's allegations were utilized to try and damage Russia, even though Russia
(not the USSR), is about the most reliable friend America has.
Russia helped Lincoln, and were it not for that crucial help, there'd be no America to sanction Russia today. The Tsar paid
for that help with his dynasty, when Nicholas II was murdered, and dethroned.
Americans are truly ungrateful brutes..
Now, sanctions, opprobrium, and hatred are heaped on Russia, most cogently by chauvinistic racists, who look down their noses
at Rus (Russ) and yet, cannot sacrifice 25 millions of their own people, for the sake of others.
Russians are considered subhuman, and yet, the divine spark of humanity resides solely in their breasts. The zionists claim
a false figure of 6 million for a faux holocaust, and yet, nobody pays attention to the true holocaust of 25 millions, or the
many millions before that disastrous instigated war.
That the Russians are childlike, believing others to be like them, loyal, self sacrificing, and generous, has now brought the
world to the brink of armageddon, and still, they bear the burden of proof, though their accusers, who ought provide the evidence,
are bereft of any..
Thomas Jefferson it was, who observing whatever he observed, exclaimed in cogent agitation, that "I fear for my countrymen,
when I remember that God is Just, and His Justice does not repose forever".
Investigate Jared and Ivanka Kushner, along with Charles Kushner, and much ought be clear, no cheers...
I don't buy that "Few bad apples at the top", "Good rank and file" Argument. I have never seen one. We should assume everyone
from the top to the bottom of FBI, DOJ, and State, just to get started, probably every other three better agency is bad. At least
incompotent, at worst treasonous.
As there was spying, there must necessarily also have been channels to get the information thus gathered back to its original
buyer - the Clinton campaign. Who passed the information back to Clinton, and what got passed?
the NYTt prints all the news a scumbag would. remember Judith Miller, the Zionazi reporter the NYT used to push
the Iraq war with all sorts of ********? after the war was determined to be started under a false premise and became common knowledge
there were no wmds in iraq the nyt came forward and reported the war was ******** as if they were reporting breaking news.
they have done the same thing here. they pushed the russiagate story with both barrels even though the informed populace knew
it was ******** before trump was sworn in as potus. now that the all the holes in the story are readily apparent the nyt comes
forward with breaking revelation that something is wrong with the story.
The Seth Rich investigation; where is it now? Murder of a campaign staffer; tampering with or influencing an election, is it
not? Hmmm... When nine hundred years old you become, look this good you will not.
Once upon a time there was a Bernie supporter. And his name was Seth Rich. Then there was a "botched robbery", which evidence
that was concluded on, I have no idea. Do you? Anyhow, The End.
Seth Rich had the means and the motive. So did Imran Awan, but it would make no sense for Awan to turn anything over to
wikileaks . . .he would have kept them as insurance.
Why wouldn't Assange name the source for the DNC emails? Is this a future bargaining chip? And what if he did name Seth Rich?
He would have to prove it. Could he?
They've got Assange now...Maybe they should ask him if it was Seth Rich who gave him the emails?
Maybe even do it under oath and on national television. I don't think it's still considered "burning a source" if your source
has already been murdered....
Until the real criminals are processed and the media can be restored you don't have a United States. This corruption is
beyond comprehension. You had the (((media)) providing kickbacks to the FBI for leaked information. These bribes are how CNN was
on site during Roger Stones invasion.
Treason and Sedition is rampant in America and all SPY roads lead to Clapper, Brennan and Obama...This needs attention.
The media is abusive and narrating attacks on a dully elected president
Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who now lives outside Washington, saw that as plausible. "Russia has huge experience
in spreading false information," he said. -
NYT
You have got to be ******* kidding me. So now the narrative is, "We were wrong about Russian collusion, and that's
Russia's fault"?!
"... As I noted in my previous piece-- The FBI Tried and Failed to Entrap Trump --Sater was an active FBI undercover informant. ..."
"... An honest prosecutor would have and should have disclosed this fact. He, Sater, was the one encouraging the Trump team to cozy up to Russia. Mueller does not disclose one single instance of Trump or Cohen or any of the Trump kids calling Sater on the carpet and chewing his ass for not bringing them deals and not opening doors in Russia. Omitting this key fact goes beyond simple disingenuity. It is a conscious lie. ..."
"... The circumstantial evidence indicates that Sater was doing this at the behest of FBI handlers. We do not yet know who they are. ..."
"... We also have the case of Michael Caputo and Roger Stone being approached by a Russian gangster named Henry Greenberg. ..."
"... How does a guy like Vorkretsov/Greenberg, with an extensive criminal record and circumstantial ties to the Russian mob gain entrance into the United States? Very simple answer. He too was an FBI informant : ..."
"... Please take time to read the full dossier at democrat dossier . This is more than an odd coincidence. This is a pattern. The FBI was targeting the Trump campaign and personnel in a deliberate effort to implicate them in wanting to work with Russians. ..."
"... Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur -- -i.e., Joseph Mifsud -- -as some simple guy with ties to Russia's political elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on the forefront of exposing Mifsud's ties to western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular . ..."
"... A number of Twitter users recently observed that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud’s LINK campus in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor’s name and biography had been removed from the campus’ website, writing that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for “years.” ..."
"... WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: “[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo].” ..."
"... This is not a mere matter of Mueller and his team "failing" to disclose some important facts. If they were operating honestly they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three--Sater and Greenber--alleged Russian stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community. ..."
"... Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss. ..."
"... Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation . THe IRGC being labelled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. ..."
"... You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference. ..."
"... The Special Relationship is hopefully entering the divorce stage. None too soon. Great work, Mr. Johnson. ..."
While President Trump is correct to celebrate the Mueller Report’s conclusion that no one on Trump’s side of the ledger attempted
to or succeeded in collaborating or colluding with the Russian Government or Russian spies, there remains a dark cloud behind the
silver lining. And I am not referring to the claims of alleged obstruction of justice. A careful reading of the report reveals
that Mueller has issued findings that are both disingenuous and dishonest. The report is a failed hatchet job. Part of the failure
can be attributed to the amount of material that Attorney General Barr allowed to be released. It appears that Bill Barr's light
editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team.
Let us start with the case of trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. If you were to believe that the Steele Dossier accurately
reported Vladimir Putin's attitude towards Trump, then a Trump real estate deal in Moscow was a slam dunk. According to one of Steele's
breathless reports:
The Kremlin's cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business
deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament.
How ever, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.
Then there is reality. The impetus, the encouragement for the Moscow project came from one man--Felix
Sater.
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately
September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate
development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov.J07 Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014,
had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City.30S Sater later contacted Rozov
and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the
Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert.
(see page 69 of the Mueller Report).
To reiterate--if the Steele Dossier was based on truthful intelligence then the Trump organization only had to sit back, stretch
out their hands and seize the moment. Instead, little Felix Sater keeps coming back to the well. In January 2016, according to the
Mueller report,
Sater then sent a draft invitation for Cohen to visit Moscow to discuss the Trump Moscow project,along with a note to "[t]ell
me if the letter is good as amended by me or make whatever changes you want and send it back to me."
After a further round
of edits, on January 25, 2016, Sater sent Cohen an invitation -- signed by Andrey Ryabinskiy of the company MHJ -- to travel to
"Moscow for a working visit" about the "prospects of development and the construction business in Russia," "the various land plots
available suited for construction of this enormous Tower," and "the opportunity to co-ordinate a follow up visit to Moscow by
Mr. Donald Trump..
This produced nothing. No deal, no trip. But Sater persisted:
Beginning in late 2015, Sater repeatedly tried to arrange for Cohen and candidate Trump, as representatives of the Trump Organization,
to travel to Russia to meet with Russian government officials and possible financing partners. . . .
Into the spring of 2016, Sater and Cohen continued to discuss a trip to Moscow in connection with the Trump Moscow project.
On April 20, 2016, Sater wrote Cohen, " [t)he People wanted to know when you are coming?,,
On May 4, 2016, Sater followed up:
“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 he 2 big guys where [sic) the question. I said I would confirm and revert.”
On May 5, 2016, Sater wrote to 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 will be there as well.”
On June 14, 2016, Cohen met Sater in the lobby of the Trump Tower in New York and informed him that he would not be traveling
at that time.
Why was Felix Sater the one repeatedly identified pushing to arrange deals with the Russians and yet did not face any subsequent
charges by the Mueller team? Sater had been working as part of the Trump team since 2003. Why is it that the proposed deals and travel
to Moscow came predominantly from Felix Sater?
As I noted in my previous piece--The
FBI Tried and Failed to Entrap Trump--Sater was an active FBI undercover informant. He had been working with the
FBI since 1998. When he agreed to start working as an undercover informant aka cooperator in December 1998 guess who signed off on
the deal? Andrew Weissman. You can see the
deal here. It was signed 10
December 1998.
An honest prosecutor would have and should have disclosed this fact. He, Sater, was the one encouraging the Trump team to
cozy up to Russia. Mueller does not disclose one single instance of Trump or Cohen or any of the Trump kids calling Sater on the
carpet and chewing his ass for not bringing them deals and not opening doors in Russia. Omitting this key fact goes beyond simple
disingenuity. It is a conscious lie.
The circumstantial evidence indicates that Sater was doing this at the behest of FBI handlers. We do not yet know who they are.
But Sater's behavior and status as an FBI Informant was not an isolated incident. We also have the case of Michael Caputo and
Roger Stone being approached by a Russian gangster named Henry Greenberg. According to
democratdossier.com:
Greenberg's birth name is Gennady Vasilievich Vostretsov, the son of Yekatrina Vostretsova and Vasliy Vostretsov. He later adopted
new names twice as a result of two different marriages and became Gennady V. Arzhanik and later Henry Oknyansky. Henry Greenberg
is not a legal alias, but he uses it quite commonly in recent years.
But you would not know this from reading the Mueller report. Mr. Disingenuous strikes again:
In the spring of 2016, Trump Campaign advisor Michael Caputo learned through a Florida-based Russian business partner that another
Florida-based Russian, Henry Oknyansky (who also went by the name Henry Greenberg), claimed to have information pertaining to
Hillary Clinton . Caputo notified Roger Stone and brokered communication between Stone and Oknyansky.
Oknyansky and Stone set
up a May 2016 in-person meeting. 260 Oknyansky was accompanied to the meeting by Alexei Rasin, a Ukrainian associate involved
in Florida real estate. At the meeting, Rasin offered to sell Stone derogatory information on Clinton that Rasin claimed to have
obtained while working for Clinton. Rasin claimed to possess financial statements demonstrating Clinton's involvement in money
laundering with Rasin's companies. According to Oknyansky, Stone asked if the amounts in question totaled millions of dollars
but was told it was closer to hundreds of thousands. Stone refused the offer, stating that Trump would not pay for opposition
research.
How does a guy like Vorkretsov/Greenberg, with an extensive criminal record and circumstantial ties to the Russian mob gain entrance
into the United States? Very simple answer. He too
was an FBI informant:
In an affidavit, Vostretsov explained to an immigration judge he worked for the FBI for 17 years throughout the world, including
in the US, Iran and North Korea. He explained in the same paperwork the FBI granted him several temporary visas to visit the US in
exchange for information about criminal activities.
Please take time to read the full dossier at
democrat dossier. This is more than
an odd coincidence. This is a pattern. The FBI was targeting the Trump campaign and personnel in a deliberate effort to implicate
them in wanting to work with Russians.
And there is more. George Papodopoulus was entrapped by individuals linked to British MI-6 and the CIA with offers to provide
meetings with Russians and Putin. The Mueller account is a lie:
In late April 2016, Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, immediately after Mifsud 's return from a trip
to Moscow, that the Russian government had obtained "dirt" on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. One week later,
on May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government 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.
Papadopoulos shared information about Russian "dirt " with people outside of the Campaign, and the Office
investigated whether he also provided it to a Campaign official. Papadopoulos and the Campaign officials with whom he interacted
told the Office that they did · not recall that Papadopoulos passed them the information. Throughout the relevant period of time
and for several months thereafter, Papadopoulos worked with Mifsud and two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the
Campaign and the Russian government. That meeting never came to pass.
Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur -- -i.e., Joseph Mifsud -- -as some simple guy with ties to Russia's political
elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on
the forefront of exposing Mifsud's ties to
western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular.
Mifsud’s alleged links to Russian intelligence are summarily debunked by his close working relationship
with Claire Smith, a major figure in the upper echelons of British intelligence. A number of Twitter users recently observed
that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud’s LINK campus
in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor’s name and biography had been removed from the campus’ website, writing
that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for “years.”
WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith
in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: “[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint
Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link
University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo].”
The photograph in question originated on Geodiplomatics.com, where it specified that Joseph Mifsud
is indeed standing next to Claire Smith, who was attending a: “…Training program on International Security which was organised by
Link Campus University and London Academy of Diplomacy.” The event is listed as taking place in October, 2012. This is highly significant
for a number of reasons.
This is not a mere matter of Mueller and his team "failing" to disclose some important facts. If they were operating
honestly they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three--Sater and Greenber--alleged
Russian stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community.
When you put these facts together it is clear that there is real meat on the bone for Barr's upcoming investigation of the "spying"
that was being done on the Trump campaign by law enforcement and intelligence. These facts must become a part of the public consciousness.
The foreign country that worked feverishly to meddle in the 2016 Presidential election and the subsequent rule of Donald Trump is
the United Kingdom. Russia is the patsy.
turcopolier, 20 April 2019 at 10:44 PM
IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO apparatus
to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position.
falcemartello, 20 April 2019 at 11:28 PM
Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look
at the new boss same as the old boss.
It was obvious from way back in June 2016 when most of the fabricated /novella known as the Steele Dossier was floating around
and the role Fusion GPS played in the Clinton POTUS machine. There is a lot out there but as per usual smokey mirrors and deception.
I live you with this one thought.
Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME
and the Russian Federation . THe IRGC being labelled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying
to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism.
You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a
racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence
conference.
Rick Merlotti
The Special Relationship is hopefully entering the divorce stage. None too soon. Great work, Mr. Johnson.
"... It wasn't just Mifsud and Halper, it was everyone -- the head of the London law firm where Papadopoulos was working, as well as his immediate boss at the firm -- everyone was working to set him up as "Trump's liason with the Russians". ..."
Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos is also available on YouTube (for those who have
difficulty playing it on Patreon). It's two hours long, but if you have any interest in the
Russiagate, you should listen to it.
It wasn't just Mifsud and Halper, it was everyone -- the
head of the London law firm where Papadopoulos was working, as well as his immediate boss at
the firm -- everyone was working to set him up as "Trump's liason with the Russians".
Not only they lost all moral authority. UK MSM became openly neofascist in some areas exceeeding the press of Third Riech and the
USSR in distortions and falsifications. .
Notable quotes:
"... Corruption of government and media, is also exceedingly dangerous, for everyone's mental health. People begin to subconsciously know that they are being lied to, but they cannot accept it, because the lies conflict with their worldview, which quite naturally is based on trust for authority, and that nice man reading the news on TV. ..."
"... In 2004, Karl Rove in The Bush Government " Guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do' ..."
Even if the Skripal affair WAS staged, you shouldn't get too excited about it. In fact, you should be rather pleased because
it would demonstrate that the tired, incompetent old UK is still capable of mounting an operation of which young, vigorous, competent
Russia would be proud.
The UK can fake events with the best of them! I would find that reassuring rather than deplorable because it's a nasty world
out there.
The Government and the media, have not been telling the whole truth for a long time. Sometimes they blatantly lie. Most people
still believe most of what they say, as there is an in-built trust of authority, for some very good historical reasons. The Skripal
story, made it obvious to a large number of people, that some of it could not be true. Most still believe it or din't take much
notice. The arrest of Julian Assange made it clearer, to an even larger number of people, that the government and the media, had
lost all moral authority. Still many people didn't take much notice, or were convinced by the lies in the media, that he was a
rapist and should be in jail.
The lies and corruption from government, is now increasingly out in the open. I believe that this is deliberate. I also think
that it is exceedingly dangerous for society for multiple reasons. We are conditioned to accept authority as our moral guide.
They act as an example of acceptable behaviour. If society as a whole, behaved like government, all trust would break down. Virtually
all functions of society are based on trust. Without such trust, nothing will work.
Corruption of government and media, is also exceedingly dangerous, for everyone's mental health. People begin to subconsciously
know that they are being lied to, but they cannot accept it, because the lies conflict with their worldview, which quite naturally
is based on trust for authority, and that nice man reading the news on TV.
I believe this has all been pre-planned, and it will result in a disastrous effect on all society, unless something happens
to bring the governments and media back to truth and sanity. I have no idea what that might be, but I expect it will not be pleasant.
The following was an early warning of the mass insanity affecting The US Government. It has spread like a highly infectious
disease.
In 2004, Karl Rove in The Bush Government " Guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined
as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world
really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying
that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's
how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'
"... The Steele dossier is British, Orbis intelligence = British, Institute for statecraft / Integrity Initiative =
British, Skripal defection. Location, evidence, statements = British, the list goes on and on. ..."
"... The UK's propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. ..."
The Steele dossier is British, Orbis intelligence = British, Institute for statecraft / Integrity Initiative = British,
Skripal defection. Location, evidence, statements = British, the list goes on and on.
You'd think someone might have noticed something of a trend by now.
They just don't bother anymore, the level of double black psy-ops and gaslighting is a mine field of disinformation. That's what
you get when Washington - Obama, gives the green light to propagandizing their people. It's escalated, like we haven't noticed,
under Trump despite his pathetic attempts at assuring folks it's fake news.
The UK's propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. I watched about 10 minutes of a
documentary about Easter Island, as an example, and it was revisionist to the nth degree. Just absolute rubbish insinuating that
white European travelers destroyed the Island. This is what British kids are now being marinated in, "He who controls the past"
"Here is what we now know, per intelligence gleaned form federal law enforcement sources with insider knowledge of what amounts
to a plot by U.S. intelligence agencies to secure back door and illegal wiretaps of President Trump's associates:
Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA’s Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and
possibly Trump himself. To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of
Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ. The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial
of two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump associates. GCHQ did not work from London or the
UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping
surveillance on Trump associates. The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier compiled by former
British spy Christopher Steele. The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and
Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump’s associates appear compromised. Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ
began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner. After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency
could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian lawyer at the meeting
Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into
the United States or the UK, federal sources said. By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole
to wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones and emails of U.S. citizens inside the
United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil
at Fort Meade. The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged
Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the evidence is considered “poisoned fruit.”
-----------.
Someone left this link in a comment to LJ, but as ringmaster of this circus, I choose to publish this as the best summary of all
the threads of the supposed conspiracy that I have seen thus far. pl
Wikipedia page on Paul Manafort says that the FBI began a criminal investigation into him in 2014, associated with his previous
dealings in Ukraine. He could have been a target of surveillance and wiretapping since then.
I therefore think Manafort was the key the intelligence agencies used to get to into Trump's organisation. It may have been
initially incidental to their ongoing, and much earlier surveillance of Manafort.
Robert Poling said...
Thank-you for this summary. If confirmed, Brennan (and others in the group he formed to spy on Trump and Trump's campaign)
should go to jail. Congress specifically forbid American spy agencies spying on American citizens in the U.S. Since that Congressional
action, the CIA and NSA have gotten around it by having foreign partners among the 'five eyes' do the collecting and then passing
the information back to us.
The spying on Trump was done at the behest of Obama and his minions. I'm reminded of an American president who was hounded
from office by the mainstream press for sending minions to spy and collect dirt at the opposition's political headquarters. He
had to resign and leave office. Several involved in the burglary went to jail and lost their livelihoods. Why is this situation
today any different and why is there a delay in prosecuting them? It's because the major media is bought out and controlled by
Trump's political opponents and not demanding justice, indeed is providing cover and excuses for them
B, here's a remarkable fact: The Skripal Novichok perfume bottle assassination story is is
eerily similar to episode 2 of BBC show 'Killing Eve' where an assassin uses a perfume bottle
to kill her target and where later an innocent person accidentally dies after coming into
contact with said perfume bottle.
The episode aired around a month after the Skripal attack but well before the other 2
people fell ill and the perfume bottle theory emerged.
"... Is the NYT promoting Gina Haspel as someone who deserves a more influential position than the nation's top torturer? She wouldn't be the first such criminal being subtly encouraged to try for DJT's job in the future. ..."
"... And there was a video of him bringing her to the microphone on the subject of 5G which amazed me: Trump Invites Ivanka To Talk About 5G Deployment In The U.S. I think Trump truly believes Ivanka is presidential material! ..."
"... Tinfoil-hat opinion time: if you have a credible threat against Ivanka, you control Trump. If you want to gain a different kind of leverage - like to talk him into quitting in 2020 - promise him you'll work hard to put her in the White House. ..."
"... Still tin-foiling, but I think a version of this happened in 1992. Iran Contra was closing in, and the Democrats had the goods on Bush Senior. I buy into the conspiracy notion Bush Sr. was offered a deal where the matter would be dropped if he left office, and with a "sweetener" that one of his boys would be advanced to the White House. This didn't hurt the Powers That Be, for the chosen democrat was a rare Pro-Choice Republican posing as a democrat. ..."
"... Bill Clinton was a warmongering neocon nut who governed domestically as a Republican. ..."
"... The problem lies with people in generation after generation being fooled by the same or similar ruses used before, which is why The Who exhorted people to not let themselves "get fooled again." ..."
"... The UK & EU both face crises caused by their adherence to Neoliberal economics, but Neoliberal governments hold sway in almost every EU nation and UK despite the damage they've caused. ..."
"... Here's a link for anyone who still doesn't believe Trump is on the dark side: Trump vetoes resolution ending U.S. involvement in Yemen ..."
"... Looks like Trump is only a compassionate humanitarian on behalf of Syrian kids. With 14 school children killed in Yemen a week ago, not so much. ..."
"... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
"... The Brits were lying, Haspel was lying, and either Trump believed her or pretended to. ..."
By "meaningful intellectual activity", Craig Murray is referring to critical thinking skills, having an open mind and being
able to consider all options and possibilities. We can agree that Theresa May and the people who make up her Cabinet and government,
and a sizeable proportion of the Tories, may well be deficient in these activities.
I have read something of how David Cameron worked his way up to leadership of the British Conservatives years ago. Coming from
a wealthy family (his father was a stockbroker who enjoyed posthumous notoriety when his name surfaced in the Panama Papers),
Cameron went to the "right" schools (which count Prince Andrew and Prince Edward as former students, btw), Eton College and then
Oxford University where he enrolled in the politics / economics course that prepares students for careers in politics - it's popularly
called "PPE". After university he went to work for the Conservative Party.
You could say Cameron's path had already been mapped out for him and the decision was not his to deviate from it. Probably
the same can be said of some other people in Theresa May's Cabinet.
And what can be said of a UK Defence Secretary of whom the love of his life is a pet Mexican tarantula?
You are being sarcastic, tongue in cheek, correct? I also wonder who could have done such a thing?
But seriously, the value of Solzhenitsyn is not in the quality of his prose, which is very difficult to read, then in the relevance
of his topics. He did document how power over others and ultimately totalitarianism manifest themselves in the fallible human
nature. Humans cannot rule themselves properly, but usually psychopaths must rule (use & abuse) others. A whole system can be
created on top of psychopathy of a few individuals (does this ring a bell?). Of course, the claim that Solzhenitsyn was a critic
of Communism is equivalent to the claim that Animal Farm is a description of Communism. Both are good social critique turned into
yet another political/brainwashing tool. It is art because it describes human nature across artificial boundaries, especially
the ideological one: left versus right.
On another matter, I have started skipping comments where Trump is being bashed. In addition to being leftist TDS, this is
a perfect indication that the commenter has got no clue what is really going on, so how could he/she explain anything to others?
Is the NYT promoting Gina Haspel as someone who deserves a more influential position than the nation's top torturer? She
wouldn't be the first such criminal being subtly encouraged to try for DJT's job in the future.
If an idea like that ever gets into Trump's head, Haspel is a goner. Have you noticed how he said he considered Ivanka for
the World bank?
"Donald Trump reveals he considered making Ivanka head of World Bank because she's 'good with numbers'"
Tinfoil-hat opinion time: if you have a credible threat against Ivanka, you control Trump. If you want to gain a different
kind of leverage - like to talk him into quitting in 2020 - promise him you'll work hard to put her in the White House.
Still tin-foiling, but I think a version of this happened in 1992. Iran Contra was closing in, and the Democrats had the
goods on Bush Senior. I buy into the conspiracy notion Bush Sr. was offered a deal where the matter would be dropped if he left
office, and with a "sweetener" that one of his boys would be advanced to the White House. This didn't hurt the Powers That Be,
for the chosen democrat was a rare Pro-Choice Republican posing as a democrat.
Bill Clinton was a warmongering neocon nut who governed domestically as a Republican.
As it turns out, the "smart one" (Jeb) lost his first step by not immediately getting to be Governor of Florida. That left
the Codpiece Commander, and all his sins were airbrushed away, the Supreme Court intervened, and he entered the White House. Good
deal for Pappy Bush, BTW. Him and Reagan got to keep their gold shine, and President Dumbya did all which was expected of him.
Thanks Jen & Piotr for your comments regarding my take on Murray's missive.
The problem lies with people in generation after generation being fooled by the same or similar ruses used before, which
is why The Who exhorted people to not let themselves "get fooled again."
The UK & EU both face crises caused by their adherence to Neoliberal economics, but Neoliberal governments hold sway in
almost every EU nation and UK despite the damage they've caused.
It's certainly a muddle. Trump vetoing the legislation to cease supporting Saudi in Yemen will further help the turn to the
East. And tomorrow will bring something else.
400 children killed since January 2019 in Yemen and 85,000 have died from malnutrition in the past 3 and a half years and Trump
vetoes resolution to end U.S. involvement.
So far as I understand your question, the Neocon York Times link from above had this about the kids and the ducks:
Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened
by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were
inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.
The Brits were lying, Haspel was lying, and either Trump believed her or pretended to.
"... The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene: ..."
"... Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose: ..."
"... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
"... Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option. ..."
"... If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked. ..."
"... The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him: ..."
"... The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. ..."
"... The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men. ..."
"... The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead. ..."
"... It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing. ..."
"... Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter. ..."
"... Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss. ..."
"... Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War. ..."
"... after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative.. ..."
"... once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible. ..."
"... Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians. ..."
"... The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both. ..."
"... Haspel will not be fired. ..."
"... It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). .. ..."
"... The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. ..."
An ass kissing portrait of Gina Haspel,
torture
queen and director of the CIA, reveals that she lied to Trump to push for more
aggression against Russia.
In March 2018 the British government asserted, without providing any evidence, that the
alleged 'Novichok' poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal was the fault of Russia. It urged
its allies to expel Russian officials from their countries.
The U.S. alone expelled
60 Russian officials. Trump
was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year
ago the Washington Post described the scene:
President Trump seemed distracted in March as his aides briefed him at his Mar-a-Lago
resort on the administration's plan to expel 60 Russian diplomats and suspected spies.
The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of
Russians as its European allies -- part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the
poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.
"We'll match their numbers," Trump instructed, according to a senior administration
official. "We're not taking the lead. We're matching."
The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials
said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian
officials -- far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.
The president, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely
equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the
media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.
The expulsion marked a turn in the Trump administration's relation with Russia:
The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration's increasingly
hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive
measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close
relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The past month, in particular, has marked a major turning point in the
administration's stance, according to senior administration officials. There have been
mass expulsions of Russian diplomats, sanctions on oligarchs that have bled billions of
dollars from Russia's already weak economy and, for the first time, a presidential tweet
that criticized Putin by name for backing Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Today the New York Timesportraits Gina
Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position.
They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her
shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its
own purpose:
Last March, top national security officials gathered inside the White House to discuss
with Mr. Trump how to respond to the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal,
the former Russian intelligence agent.
London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian
operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical. ... During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump.
She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told
the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not
the only victims of Russia's attack.
Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children
hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals.
She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently
killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.
Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but
pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the
pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he
embraced the strong option.
The Skripal case was widely covered and we
followed it diligently (scroll down). There were no reports of any children affected by
'Novichok' nor were their any reports of dead ducks. In the official storyline the
Skripals, before visiting a restaurant,
fed bread to ducks at a pond in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury.
They also
gave duck-bread to three children to do the same. The children were examined and their
blood was tested.
No
poison was found and none of them fell ill . No duck died. (The duck feeding episode
also disproves
the claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching a door handle.)
If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British
government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced
policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked.
The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were
fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to
manipulate him:
The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people
who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.
Co-workers and friends of Ms. Haspel push back on any notion that she is manipulating
the president. She is instead trying to get him to listen and to protect the agency,
according to former intelligence officials who know her.
The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own
policies. Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game:
Ms. Haspel won the trust of Mr. Pompeo, however, and has stayed loyal to him. As a
result, Mr. Trump sees Ms. Haspel as an extension of Mr. Pompeo, a view that has helped
protect her, current and former intelligence officials said.
Posted by b on April 16, 2019 at 08:37 AM |
Permalink
I don't see how it's possible to manipulate someone (and especially the US president) into
doing something they don't want to do with lies like the ones described here. On the
contrary presidents, CEOs etc. favor the staffers who tell them the kind of lies they want
to hear in order to reinforce what they wanted to do in the first place.
I've never seen any reason to alter my first position on Trump, that like any other
president he does what he wants to do.
The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create
trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life
with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma
all agency owned men.
The joke 7in the final scene Robert Redford tells See Eye A man Cliff Robertson that he
gave all the evidence to the NY Times. What a joke. The NY Times and the Wash Post are the
mouthpieces for the SEE Eye A. The AP news sources most of their stories from those two
papers and other lackey See Eye A newspapers.
One final criticism in moon's story. The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the
President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead.
After this, she got the top job, so what is the real lesson here? Sociopathic liars get
promoted....or you can tell the truth, try to be honorable and fade into obscurity.. In a nest of psychos, you have to really be depraved to become the top psycho...
Nuke it for orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Backing up Russ's point, when will you realise the "buck stops" on Trump's desk for any
and all departments he oversees, which are run by his appointees? Trump is dedicated to
creating a neoconservative foreign policy melded to a neoliberal economic policy favouring
his corporate fascist sponsors. Recently, you've been all over the Assange indictment,
Trump's relationship with Nuttyahoo and the related rollback of JCPOA. Is this what you
want to see continued into a second term?
There is much evidence to show Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy"
where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing
candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the
point where no one can tell the difference.
They haven't got there quite yet but once the judiciary is controlled by GOP ideologues
it's game over. And McConnell is dedicating his life to make that the reality ASAP.
Meanwhile back at the ranch we are dedicated to knocking down any and all potential
opposition to this GOP hostile takeover for some reason I've yet to fathom.
Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire
Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game[Pompeo]
Hopefully yes to all four propositions. Why am I sceptical though (except conceivably
the first)?
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. He's the first POTUS in decades I
believe to not even pretend to like dogs by having an official White House dog and every
policy his Administration can take against animals, they have taken. I'm not even sure I
buy the spin that he cared about dead kids either. And NYT readers know this about him, so
I don't understand what the point of peddling this fiction is other than to paint Torture
Queen in some kind of good light (and we KNOW that she certainly doesn't care about dead
anything).
another example of trump's stupidity and pathological inability to think for himself. he
gets his views from fox and his policy from bolton. his equally vapid daughter and kushner
whine to him about sooper sad syria pictures they saw in a sponsored link while googling
for new tmz gossip.
even worse that this is the twat in charge of one of russiagate's main instigating "deep
state" agencies. he spent the entirety of his presidency railing against their various lies
then takes this wankery at face value. it's just like the "chinese soldiers in venezuela";
if those pictures were legit they'd have been splattered over every front page and
permanently attached to screeching cnn and msnbc segments demanding trump "finally get
tough" on "putin's russia".
my only surprise is that she didn't tell him about british babies ripped from incubators
and dipped in anthrax powder.
the nyt shilling for a soCIopAth? not that surprising.
The consultant in emergency medicine at Salisbury hospital wrote to The Times, shortly
after the Skripal incident. His choice of words was odd, and some have said they indicate
no novichok poisoning occurred. Leaving that to one side, his letter certainly puts paid to
the idea that more than three people (the Skripals and the policeman, DCI Bailey) were
poisoned.
https://www.onaquietday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DocSaysNoNerveAgentInSalisbury.jpg
" the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, "
There was no attack on the Skripals. or on anyone else.
The Russophobia in whose context it falls, is of a higher order, in which a fabricated
narrative of a Skripal-like attack had an important function.
The Skripals were perfectly happy to lend their name to the fabrication, and are living
happily, probably in New Zealand.
The Daily Beast article that b linked to describes how many serious, well-informed people
felt that Haspel was unsuitable to lead the CIA. Even more strange and troubling was that Haspel was supported by Trump's nemesis,
John Brennan.
Despite all that, MAGA Trump still nominated her. Any notion that Trump is at odds with, or "manipulated" by, Haspel, Bolton, or Pompeo is
just propaganda. We've seen such reporting before (esp. wrt Bolton) and Trump has taken no
action.
I see that Trump derangement is alive and well here at MoA. Commenters talk as if Trump is
the first president stupid enough to be manipulated by the security agencies and shadow
government sometimes referred to as a "deep state". People don't have to be historians or
look back to Rome, just read the books about how the great general who "won WWII" was used
by the oligarchy which had full control of US foreign policy throughout Eisenhower's term in
office.
Works produced after WWII, C. Wright Mills, The Power elite was written in 1956,The
Brothers and The Divil's Chessboard each about the Dulles Brothers and how they operated US
foreign policy for the interests of the oligarchy, and the work Peter Phillips, GIANTS: The
Global Power Elite and the work of David Rothkopf which thoroughly describes the feudal
system under which the Western cultures are ruled.
The US government is a pantomime it is a show it has no power.
How many here can honestly say they understand that the US dollar itself and the ENTIRE
GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM is privately owned. Why do you think the "banks were bailed out"?
because the banks were in power not the government. The US is 22 trillion in debt - the
oligarchy is the creditor - take over the US gov. and you have a powerless pile of
debt.
Around 6,000 people control 85% of global assets until that changes nothing will change.
The oligarchy won virtually all the mines and control the price of all basic commodities
necessary for modern life, the internet, oil of course and more.
What is failing and what has failed over and over for 500 years is Western Civilization and
its three "great religions" which preach obedience, oppression, domination by a one god
suffocating mythology.
But the oligarchy doesn't own just the basic commodities, it owns the religions and it owns
the drugs and all illegal trade as well.
Western "civilization" is really nothing more than one vast feudal kingdom, with royal
courts in DC, Tel Aviv and Ryiadh. Wheather there is a god or not, religion is made of
flesh and blood not miracles. No Rabbi or Priest or Imam claims visitations by god to
instruct them on doctrine - they are flesh and blood and they want power so they behave
like sycophants to the money they need to expand their power...all for the good souls under
their care.
Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired
to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more
likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter.
What can we expect from a tv personality who became a US president? A man who ran with an
advertisement worthy of a business man like him, "Make America Great Again." How does he go
about doing it? Giving more money to the military industrial-Congressional complex, even
though we are really flat broke. Using aggressive tactics used by Wall Street in hostile
company takeovers to really intimidate other nations. And hire and place those he really
agrees with in important positions who really reflect his true feelings. I'm sure when he
spoke with Haspel before offering her the job, he brought up the topic of torture and
agreed with her on its use on terrorists.
I think there's a reasonable case to be made that they conspired not to stop Trump but
to further speculation of Trump's "collusion" with Russia (what would later be known as
Russiagate). The "collusion" and "Russia meddled" accusations are what fueled the new
McCarthyism.
I'll just add to Jerry's comment at #3 that the final line in the movie "Day of the Condor"
is something like "But will they print it?" which really spoke to the message of the film
in its entirety. The condor being an endangered bird for whom the hero is named, and the
beginning outrage being the brutal murder of book lovers researching useable plot details
for the 'company'makes this message current and applicable to what we see in the Skripal
case. And instead of librarians, we now have online commenters, a doughty breed, and we
have Assange.
Instead of 'Will they print it?' I am wondering 'Will they make another movie about
it?'
Remind me, where is Yulia Skripal these days? Well and truly 'disappeared' it seems. The
mask is off. the snarling face of the beast is there for all to see.
What a total waste of an article discussing a story published in NYT or WaPo.
b, the World has divided itself into those who consume alternative media such as this
and stupidos who consume MSM. There is nothing in-between that you are attempting to
discuss and dissect here. NYT = cognitive value zero.
Fake News not worth one millisecond of our time, not even to decode what the regime
wants us to know, we know all that already. Personally, I am only interested in the new
methods of domestic repression, what is next after the warning of Assange arrest, future
rendition and torture. The Deep Stare appears to be coming out into open, will it soon get
rid of the whole faux democracy construct and just use iron fist to rule? It already impose
its will as the rule of law. All of the Western block is heading in this direction.
Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn,
completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its
contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold
for their putative boss.
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. Mataman | Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM
This assumes that Trump would primarily care about the ducks (and children) when he
approved a massive expulsion, rather that his image and "ah, in that case it would look bad
if we do not do something really decisive".
In any case, I was thinking why NYT would disclose something like that. The point is
that readers of Craig Murray (not so few, but mostly Scottish nationalists who are also
leftist and have scant possibilities and/or inclination to vote in USA) and MoonOfAlabama
would quickly catch a dead fish here, but 99.9% of the public is blissfully unaware of any
incongruences in the "established" Skripal narrative.
BTW, it is possible that the journalist who scribbled fresh yarn obtained from CIA did it
earnestly. Journalists do not necessarily follow stories that they cover -- scribbling from
given notes does not require overtaxing the precious attention span that can be devoted to
more vital cognitive challenges. I am lazy to find the link, but while checking for news on
Venezuela, I stumbled on a piece from Express, a British tabloid, where Guaido was named a
"figurehead of the oposition" supported by "450 Western countries". My interpretation was
that more literate journalists were moved for to more compelling stories as Venezuela went
to the back burner.
Yes, indeed, the Skripal Affair is one of the obviously contrived stunts we've seen.
Just outrageous in its execution. On a par with the US having a man who didn't even run for president of Venezuela swear
himself in and then pressure everyone to accept him as president.
Interesting, I had no idea Gina Haspel - aka, The Queen of Blood - played a role. I
thought it was all original dirty work by Britain's Theresa May. Boy, I hope people are through with the false notion that if women just get into
leadership, the world will become a better gentler place.
Macron was (afaik?) the only EU 'leader' who was quoted in the MSM as bruiting re. the
Skripal affair a message like:
.. no culpability in the part of Russia has been evidenced .. for now...
I suppose he was enjoined to shut his gob right quick (have been reading about brexit so
brit eng) as nothing more in that line was heard.
Hooo, the EU expelled a lot of Russ. diplomats, obeying the USuk, which certainly
created some major upsets on the ground.
Some were expelled, went into other jobs, other places, but then others arrived, etc.
The MSM has not made any counts - lists - of names numbers - etc. of R diplos on the job -
anywhere. As some left and then others arrived.
Once more, this was mostly a symbolic move, if extremely nasty, insulting, and
disruptive.
Theresa May's speech re. Novichok, Independent 14 March 2018:
.. on Monday I set out that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a
Novichok: a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia. Based on this capability,
combined with their record of conducting state sponsored assassinations – including
against former intelligence officers whom they regard as legitimate targets – the UK
Government concluded it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and
despicable act. ..
imo, the media has, once again, simply taken its lead from trump himself, & started
making things up completely. & you're absolutely correct in pointing out that, much
like trump's true believers, the msm's targeted audience never even notices...
Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY
Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of
which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power
sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter
hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War.
after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the
msm will not be talking about integrity initiative..
what i didn't know is what @18 lysias pointed out.."Haspel was CIA station chief in
London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In
her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it.
That Brennan supported her argues for the latter." ditto jr's speculation @20 too...
so gaspel shows trump some cheap propaganda that she got from who??
my main problem with b's post - i tend to see it like kiza @23) is maintaining the idea
trump isn't in on all of this.. the thought trump is being duped by his underlings.. if he
was and it mattered, he would get rid of them.. the fact he doesn't says to me, he is in on
it - get russia, being the 24/7 game plan of the west here still..
Please stop listening to idiot libertarians and their "US is flat broke" meme.
The reality is that: so long as Americans transact in dollars, the United States government
can tax anytime it feels like by issuing new dollars via the Fed.
Equally, so long as 60% of the world's trade is conducted in dollars, this is tens to
hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxation surface area.
The MMT people - I don't agree 100% with everything they say, but they do understand the
actual operation of fiat currency.
The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to
hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency
devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy.
I doubt Haspel knew the ducks were fake - she was probably just given stuff to pass up
the chain.
It is a lot like John Kerry who was shown convincing satellite data of the BUK launch that
hit MH17 - but no one could be bothered to pass on even the launch site coordinates to the
JIT. I'm sure this stuff goes on all the time, and of course, once Teresa May has spoken in
Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative
version of the truth is possible.
Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to
get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might
have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger
one to blame the Russians.
The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both
originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about
both.
"The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion
to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that
currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy."
The useful idiocy is most surprising among US farmers. In the 19th century they broadly
understood that fiat money was good for chronic low-wealth debtors like themselves, while
hard money was bad and a gold standard lethal. This was the basis of the Populist movement.
Nothing has changed financially, but today's farmers, and the low-wealth debtor class in
general, seem more likely to be goldbuggers than to have any knowledge of economics or of
their own political history.
karlof1 36
Once a faction becomes submerged in the Mammon theocracy and becomes nothing but
mercenary nihilists, thinking is no longer necessary or desirable, except to come up with
attractive, pseudo-plausible lies.
This certainly characterizes "the right" (including liberals), but they have no monopoly
on it. By now "the left" is nearly as thoughtless and instrumental on behalf of Mammon,
except to the extent that a few people are starting to really grapple with what it means to
have an intrinsically ecocidal and therefore suicidal civilization. That's really the only
thought frontier left, all else has been engulfed in Mammon, productionism, scientism and
technocracy.
I remind that Mussolini wasted his legislature.. 1 balmy after noon @ a roadside spot.
it made his government stronger.?
It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no
one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes
anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). ..
The actors in
government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the
rest of the world. Everyone in the government is covering for the behaviors of someone else
in government, the MSM has raised the price of a pencil to just under a million, stock
markets are bags of hot thin air, and everyone in side and outside of the centers of power
at all levels of government have lied thru their teeth so much that their teeth are melting
from the continuous flow of hot deceitful air.
Corrupt is now the only qualification for
political office, trigger happy screwball the only qualification for the police and the
military and . making progress is like trying to conduct a panty raid at a female nudist
camp.
John Anthony La Pietra , Apr 16, 2019 3:47:03 PM |
link
Why I am all for wire tapping and all other spying by the CIA and FBI ...get all the uber Jews
and all the politicians and make it public.
Would be delighted if all the news channels did nothing but play the tapes on the daily news.
Following is a transcript of the Oct. 22, 1992 conversation with President David Steiner
of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) recorded without his knowledge by New
York businessman Haim (Harry) Katz. Its existence was first revealed to the Washington Times
and its release triggered Steiner's resignation.
(sample)
HK: Let me tell you, I was planning, I was planning to, to . . . Inouye, by the way, is in
real trouble? He's been there forever. . .
DS: Yeah! Well, we might lose him. There's been such a sea change, such trouble this year, I
can't believe all our friends that are in trouble. Because there's an anti-incumbency mood,
and foreign aid has not been popular. You know what I got for, I met with [U.S. Secretary
of State] Jim Baker and I cut a deal with him. I got, besides the $3 billion, you know
they're looking for the Jewish votes, and I'll tell him whatever he wants to hear . .
.
HK: Right.
DS: Besides the $10 billion in loan guarantees which was a fabulous thing, $3 billion in
foreign, in military aid, and I got almost a billion dollars in other goodies that people
don't even know about .
HK: Such as?
DS: $700 million in military draw-down, from equipment that the United States Army's going
to give to Israel; $200 million the U.S. government is going to preposition materials in
Israel, which Israel can draw upon; put them in the global warning protection system; so when
if there's a missile fired, they'll get the same advanced notification that the U.S., is
notified, joint military exercises -- I've got a whole shopping list of things .
-- The gang is also very stupid. From Halper-the-spy and his incompetent handler Brennan
to the obnoxious zionists of Ledeen kind they, the members of the "gang", show incompetence
and the self-endangering and stupid amorality.
By destroying whatever decent has been in the western civilization so far, and by
spreading the rot around, the gangsters have been destroying their children's &
grandchildren's future.
The fact that Glenn Greenwald proved to be a despicable pressitute cast a long shadow of
Snowden and Assange.
Notable quotes:
"... Not mentioned by any of the major news media is the fact that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (sic), renowned for its interference in foreign elections, funding terrorists and overthrowing governments the US doesn't approve of. ..."
A quick comment about the two Russian alleged assassins, exposed, we are told by the
'investigative' Website, Bellingcat. Not mentioned by any of the major news media is the fact
that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (sic), renowned for its
interference in foreign elections, funding terrorists and overthrowing governments the US
doesn't approve of.
Media Lens picked up on this awhile back in reference to another Western financed
outfit, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), funded by the UK Foreign Office. I've
also expanded this by quoting from Media Lens' other article that deals with Western-funded
disinfo, ' Douma: Part 1
– Deception In Plain Sight':
Liberal corporate journalists and politicians have been impressed by the fact that SOHR
and White Helmets claims have been supported by ostensibly forensic analysis supplied by the
Bellingcat website, which publishes 'citizen journalist' investigations. As we noted
in a recent alert, Bellingcat is funded by the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is funded by the US government and is 'a notorious
vehicle for US soft power'. – '
The Syrian Observatory – Funded By The Foreign Office ', Media Lens, June 4
2018
It's worth quoting more of the Media Lens article as it exposes the nature of Western
so-called lefties and their attachment to Western (funded) propaganda outfits:
In the New Statesman, Paul Mason
offered a typically nonsensical argument, linking to the anti-Assad website,
Bellingcat:
'Despite the availability of public sources showing it is likely that a regime Mi-8
helicopter dropped a gas container onto a specific building, there are well-meaning people
prepared to share the opinion that this was a "false flag", staged by jihadis, to pull the
West into the war. The fact that so many people are prepared to clutch at false flag theories
is, for Western democracies, a sign of how effective Vladimir Putin's global strategy has
been.'
Thus, echoing Freedland's reference to 'denialists and conspiracists', sceptics can only
be idiot victims of Putin's propaganda. US media analyst Adam Johnson of FAIR accurately
described Mason's piece as a 'mess', adding :
'I love this thing where nominal leftists run the propaganda ball for bombing a country 99
yards then stop at the one yard and insist they don't support scoring goals, that they in
fact oppose war.'
Surprisingly, the Bellingcat website, which publishes the findings of 'citizen journalist'
investigations, appears to be taken seriously by some very high-profile progressives.
In the Independent, Green Party leader Caroline Lucas also
mentioned the Syrian army 'Mi-8' helicopters. Why? Because she had read the same
Bellingcat blog as Mason, to which she linked:
'From the evidence we've seen so far it appears that the latest chemical attack was likely
by Mi-8 helicopters, probably from the forces of Syria's murderous President Assad.'
On Democracy Now!, journalist Glenn Greenwald said of
Douma:
'I think that it's -- the evidence is quite overwhelming that the perpetrators of this
chemical weapons attack, as well as previous ones, is the Assad government '
This was an astonishing comment. After receiving fierce challenges (not from us),
Greenwald partially retracted, tweeting :
'It's live TV. Something [sic – sometimes] you say things less than ideally. I think
the most likely perpetrator of this attack is Syrian Govt.'
We wrote to Greenwald asking what had persuaded him of Assad's 'likely' responsibility for
Douma. (Twitter, April 10, direct message)
The first piece of evidence he sent us (April 12) was the Bellingcat blog mentioning
Syrian government helicopters cited by Mason and Lucas. Greenwald also sent us a
report from Reuters, as well as a
piece from 2017, obviously prior to the alleged Douma event.
This was thin evidence indeed for the claim made. In our discussion with him, Greenwald
then completely retracted his claim (Twitter, April 12, direct message) that there was
evidence of Syrian government involvement in the alleged attack. [My emph. WB] – '
Douma: Part
1 – Deception In Plain Sight'
"... Attorney General Barr stated the obvious--law enforcement and intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump's campaign ..."
"... I had learned in December 2016 from friends inside the intelligence community that there was collaboration with the Brits to collect and disseminate intel on persons on the Trump campaign. With Trump's tweet making news, I was invited by RT (i.e., Russia Today) to come on one of their news programs and discuss the matter that same afternoon. ..."
"... I then shared what I had learned about British intelligence ops to intercept U.S. communications on people affiliated with the Trump campagin with members of VIPS—i.e., Veteran Intelligence Professionals. One of these colleagues shared my analysis without my knowledge with Judge Andrew Napolitano. ..."
"... The Brits reportedly initiated collection on their own. The “collection” from those intercepted conversations and emails were shared with the Obama Administration through normal intelligence channels—i.e., principally the NSA. It is important to note that the Brits targeting and collecting on Americans is not illegal. We are foreigners as far as they are concerned. They can collect anything. ..."
"... The Independent ..."
"... I felt sorry for the Judge and knew he was being railroaded. But I did not expect a phone call from him, asking for my help. He called and asked me to help. Prior to the phone call on Thursday, March 16, 2017, I had never spoken to the Judge. We were not even casual acquaintances. ..."
"... Grynbaum is a classic example of what is wrong with the journalism today. For starters, he manufactured the “Frederick Forsyth” quote. I said no such thing. Besides fabricating a quote, he refused to address the substance of my information regarding the activities and conduct of British GCHQ. Instead, he went for the “Whitey” smear. ..."
"... This was a dark period for me. People I thought I could rely on abandoned me. I was on my own. But not for long. Rescue came via Judge Napolitano and an unlikely source, The Guardian—a left leaning British newspaper. The Judge was brought back on air at Fox on March 29, 2017 and stood his ground: ..."
"... On Wednesday morning, Napolitano returned to the network, making an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” His first order of business? Doubling down on the claims that got him suspended in the first place. (From the Washington Post, 29 March 2017, Amy Wang). ..."
"... Two weeks later, on April 13 th , The Guardian not only confirmed what I had said about GCHQ (note, in some of my on air interviews I stupidly and mistakenly called the British spy agence GHCQ) but identified other countries as well who were collecting intelligence, i.e., intercepting communications : ..."
"... There is a simple bottomline—My information was accurate and reliable. Also, I had the story before anyone else. Journalists and pundits were unwilling to listen. ..."
"... Former national security adviser Susan Rice privately told House investigators that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates was in New York late last year, multiple sources told CNN. ..."
"... Do you understand what this means? If you have never had a clearance and had access to NSA material then you probably fail to understand how profound this is. Let me explain. There were multiple intelligence reports released by the NSA. I am pretty certain all were classified as Top Secret. Some of these may have been generated by NSA, but most, according to the Guardian piece I mentioned above, were from foreign liaison. The names of the American citizens were initially obscured--e.g., Subject 1 or Subject 2. Hence the "request" to unmask. In other words, identify the nameless person by name. That, boys and girls, is known as spying. ..."
"... Bill Barr is now getting the Larry Johnson treatment for daring to speak a simple, self-evident truth. One big difference. Barr can set in motion the legal process to indict and prosecute those American traitors in the law enforcement and intelligence community who violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and used their positions to launch a political witch-hunt. Stay tuned. ..."
"... Thank you for this clarifying account. I used to read NoQuarter back in the day, and had been mystified when it was taken down. Now I understand, and am glad that Col. Lang has facilitated your return to blogging. ..."
Attorney General Barr stated the obvious--law enforcement and intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump's campaign -- and touched
off an incredible display of stupidity and obtuseness among the Trump haters. Me? I was cheering because Bill Barr confirmed what
I said two years ago. Unfortunately, for daring to speak a simple truth in the spring of 2017 I immediately was a target of the hate
Trump media mob.
I was attacked for telling the public the truth that foreign intelligence--the British to be precise--were spying on the Trump
campaign and passing this info along to US intelligence. But the Brits were not acting unilaterally. There was full cooperation and
activity by U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI. Another word for this is "COLLUSION."
My speaking out brought about a furious counter attack by the media. People inside the Department of Justice reached out to my
business partner and denounced me as a crank and conspiracy theorist. Because of that backlash I took down my blog, NoQuarter, and
"retired" from blogging. Thanks to generosity of Colonel Lang, I eventually climbed back onto the blogging saddle.
Let me take you back to the events that unfolded after Donald Trump tweeted on March 4, 2017 that he was being wiretapped by the
FBI. The media establishment erupted in laughter and saw this as just one more piece of evidence proving Trump's mental instability.
But I had a different take.
I had learned in December 2016 from friends inside the intelligence community that there was collaboration with the Brits to collect
and disseminate intel on persons on the Trump campaign. With Trump's tweet making news, I was invited by RT (i.e., Russia Today)
to come on one of their news programs and discuss the matter that same afternoon.
Worth noting that my appearance on RT made no waves and generated no pushback. That tells you everything you need to know about
RT’s alleged influence over public and punditry opinion as an alleged arm of Russian propaganda.
I then shared what I had learned about British intelligence ops to intercept U.S. communications on people affiliated with the
Trump campagin with members of VIPS—i.e., Veteran Intelligence Professionals. One of these colleagues shared my analysis without
my knowledge with Judge Andrew Napolitano.
Napolitano went on Fox on Monday, March 13, 2017 and declared:
On Monday, Fox News Channel judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano alleged that three intelligence sources
had confirmed to him that the Obama administration used GCHQ (Britain's NSA) to spy on President Trump during the 2016 election so
that there would be no paper trail.
"Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the 'chain of command' to conduct the surveillance
on Trump," he said. "Obama didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of
Justice."
"What happened to the guy who ordered this? Resigned three days after Trump took office," he added.
The Judge got some key nuances wrong. Obama, to my knowledge, did not ask the Brits/GCHQ to do anything on his behalf. The Brits
reportedly initiated collection on their own. The “collection” from those intercepted conversations and emails were shared with the
Obama Administration through normal intelligence channels—i.e., principally the NSA. It is important to note that the Brits targeting
and collecting on Americans is not illegal. We are foreigners as far as they are concerned. They can collect anything.
The Judge’s comments set off a firestorm. In a matter of hours, Fox News Corporation, responding to pressure from the British
Government, took Napolitano off the air.
The Independent, a British newspaper, reported as follows:
A legal analyst who claimed British intelligence could have helped spy on
Donald Trump during his bid to become US president has been taken off
the air.
The Independent understands that Mr Napolitano is not expected to appear on the Fox News
Channel anytime in the near future.
The analyst's claim that GCHQ had helped former
president Barack Obama bug Trump Tower was cited last week by White
House press secretary Sean Spicer, sparking a diplomatic incident.
I felt sorry for the Judge and knew he was being railroaded. But I did not expect a phone call from him, asking for my help. He
called and asked me to help. Prior to the phone call on Thursday, March 16, 2017, I had never spoken to the Judge. We were not even
casual acquaintances.
Judge Napolitano, clearly smarting over the public lashing he was receiving, asked if I would be willing to speak to a New York
Times reporter, Michael Grynbaum, about the matter. I agreed to do so. That was a mistake. Here is how Grynbaum reported
what I did not say:
Mr. Napolitano also has a taste for conspiracy theories, which led him to Larry C. Johnson, a former
intelligence officer best known for spreading a hoax about Michelle Obama. . . .
But Mr. Johnson, who was himself once a Fox News contributor, said in a telephone interview that Mr.
Napolitano called him on Friday and requested that he speak to The New York Times. Mr. Johnson said he was one of the sources for
Mr. Napolitano’s claim about British intelligence.
Mr. Johnson became infamous in political circles after he spread false rumors in 2008 that Michelle
Obama had been videotaped using a slur against Caucasians. In the interview on Friday, Mr. Johnson acknowledged his notoriety, but
said that his knowledge of surveillance of Mr. Trump came from sources in the American intelligence community. Mr. Napolitano, he
said, heard about his information through an intermediary.
“It sounds like a Frederick Forsyth novel,” Mr. Johnson said.
Grynbaum is a classic example of what is wrong with the journalism today. For starters, he manufactured the “Frederick Forsyth”
quote. I said no such thing. Besides fabricating a quote, he refused to address the substance of my information regarding the activities
and conduct of British GCHQ. Instead, he went for the “Whitey” smear.
If you are not familiar with that episode, permit me to refresh your memory or create a new one for you. It is a simple story—I
allowed myself to be used by Clinton campaign, Sid Blumenthal in particular, to spread a rumor that turned out to be untrue.
I was an ardent supporter of Hillary in 2007 and 2008. I had previously briefed her in 2007 on the war in Iraq and found her,
at least in a one-on-one setting, to be very intelligent and very well informed. But that was then. Her subsequent conduct as the
Secretary of State, especially how she mishandled the Benghazi incident, ended any chance that I would ever support her for any role
in which the lives of American military, diplomats or intelligence officers are on the line.
After that briefing, I found myself as an unofficial member of the Clinton for President team via my friendship with Sid Blumenthal.
I had enormous respect for Sid and his wife. I thought they were good people. The only thing I now know for certain is that they
are fiercely loyal to the Clintons.
As the contest between Hillary and Barach Obama heated up, Sid would call me from time to time with suggestions of articles I
could write or pieces that could be run on my now defunct blog--NoQuarterUSa.net. I was more than happy to help. I believed then
(and have been vindicated by the passage of time) that Barack Obama was just a pretty face with no significant experience and he
would be a terrible President.
Then came the fateful phone call from Sid Blumenthal in late May 2008. He told me he had learned of a tape that was circulating
in restricted circles that featured Michelle Obama using the derogatory phrase, “whitey.” Armed with that tidbit of gossip I turned
to an old friend in the media community and he too confirmed he had heard the same thing (stupidly, I never considered the possibility
that Sid was spreading this far and wide and that I was getting blowback).
When I mentioned the possible existence of this tape to a Republican friend of mine and former CIA colleague in California, I
was shocked when he said, “I have a friend who has seen and heard the tape. That was enough for me. Based on these two sources, I
wrote the story up at NoQuarterUSA.net.
It went viral. But nothing surfaced. I became uneasy. So I went back to Sid and pressed him for more information. He in turn sent
me to David Brock of Media Matters. (I had met Brock previously at the Blumenthal home watching election returns in 2006.) Brock
told me that the information came from female friend who insisted she had seen and heard the slur by Michelle Obama.
The matter became more confused when the Obama campaign sent out an email to their campaign workers claiming that Michelle said
“WHY DID HE” rather than the pejorative, “WHITEY.” That led me to believe there was substance to the Blumenthal/Brock rumor.
Ultimately the story died out. No tape surfaced, but I bore the blame as the “Whitey” guy. With the benefit of hindsight I now
understand that I was an unwitting but willing tool in a David Brock dirty trick. No such tape ever surfaced. I can only conclude
that the desperation of the Clinton campaign to win was so extreme that they would stoop to use a racist meme to smear Obama.
I regret what I did in writing the story up. But it did not originate with me. It started with David Brock. Which brings me back
to the Napolitano affair.
After Grynbaun identified me as one of Judge Napolitano’s sources, it was open season on me. Not one of the media outlets—except
for CNN and the Politico — even took the time to reach out to me and ask me to tell my side of the story. Instead, they recirculated
talking points from Media Matters.
Here is what I told Brian Stelter during this period:
Talk about Chutzpah. David Brock started the Whitey rumor (I will happily take a polygraph on that point) and then has the audacity
to attack me and dismiss my information (via Media Matters) simply because I had passed on rumors where he was the original source:
Media Matters first traced Napolitano's wiretapping conspiracy back to an interview on the state-sponsored Russian television
network RT with the former CIA analyst and discredited conspiracy theorist Larry C. Johnson, who previously promoted false claims
that Michelle Obama used a racial slur against Caucasian people.
This was a dark period for me. People I thought I could rely on abandoned me. I was on my own. But not for long. Rescue came via
Judge Napolitano and an unlikely source, The Guardian—a left leaning British newspaper. The Judge was brought back on air at Fox
on March 29, 2017 and stood his ground:
On Wednesday morning, Napolitano returned to the network, making an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
His first order of business? Doubling down on the claims that got him suspended in the first place. (From the Washington Post, 29
March 2017, Amy Wang).
Two weeks later, on April 13th, The Guardian not only confirmed what I had said about GCHQ (note, in some of my on
air interviews I stupidly and mistakenly called the British spy agence GHCQ) but identified other countries as well who were collecting
intelligence, i.e.,
intercepting communications:
Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts
between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.
GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious
“interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said.
This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.
Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information
on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said.
There is a simple bottomline—My information was accurate and reliable. Also, I had the story before anyone else. Journalists and
pundits were unwilling to listen.
We know a lot more today then we did in the Spring of 2017. George Papadopoulos was targeted by a MI-6 covert action designed
to portray him as a lackey of Russia and promoting Russia to the Trump campaign. Carter Page was spied upon under four separate FISA
warrants that were based on the fictitious Steel Dossier. And a CIA "contractor", Stefan Halper, played the role of an agitator trying
to lure Papadopoulos into implicating himself in a Russian plot.
Former national security adviser Susan Rice privately told House
investigators that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates
was in New York late last year, multiple sources told CNN.
The New York meeting preceded a separate effort by the UAE to facilitate a back-channel communication between Russia and the incoming
Trump White House.
Do you understand what this means? If you have never had a clearance and had access to NSA material then you probably fail to understand
how profound this is. Let me explain. There were multiple intelligence reports released by the NSA. I am pretty certain all were
classified as Top Secret. Some of these may have been generated by NSA, but most, according to the Guardian piece I mentioned above,
were from foreign liaison. The names of the American citizens were initially obscured--e.g., Subject 1 or Subject 2. Hence the "request"
to unmask. In other words, identify the nameless person by name. That, boys and girls, is known as spying.
Bill Barr is now getting the Larry Johnson treatment for daring to speak a simple, self-evident truth. One big difference. Barr can
set in motion the legal process to indict and prosecute those American traitors in the law enforcement and intelligence community
who violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and used their positions to launch a political witch-hunt. Stay tuned.
Thank you for this clarifying account. I used to read NoQuarter back in the day, and had been mystified when it was taken down.
Now I understand, and am glad that Col. Lang has facilitated your return to blogging.
And just in time to see some of your tormentors - and unsurprisingly the very same tormentors of our constitutional republic
- be (hopefully) called to account for their actions.
The Lame Stream Media have much for which to answer concerning their part in all of this; they have abrogated their role as
even-handed watchdogs through their open-eyed and monolithic dissemination of hyper-partisan, cultural marxist agitprop, much
of it focused on character assassination of those who did not share their beliefs, and yet more noxiously by throttling the expression
of contrary argumentation across the board.
But the genuine opprobium should be reserved for those officers and officials, sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution,
who determinedly worked to instead disregard and undermine the Constitution, and the constitutional republic which it undergirds.
Money quote: "The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from
the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White
House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. There are clear parallels between the end stages
of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from
reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against
the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not
lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate."
Notable quotes:
"... Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’ ..."
"... Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .) ..."
"... Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them. ..."
"... ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’ ..."
"... The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same. ..."
"... A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation. ..."
"... In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’) ..."
"... 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." ..."
"... I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language. ..."
"... The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. ..."
"... There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate. ..."
"Dan, Thanks for the reference, which I will follow up. Unfortunately, although Bongino has produced a lot of extremely valuable
material, a lot of it is buried in the 'postcasts', searching through which is harder than with printed materials. It would greatly
help if there were transcripts, but of course those cost money.
I am still trying to fit the exploding mass of information which has been coming out into a coherent timeline. Part of the
problem is that there is so much appearing in so many different places. In addition to trying to think through the implications
of the information in this post and the subsequent exchanges of comments, I have been trying to make sense of evidence coming
out about the British end of the conspiracy.
An important development here has been rather well covered by Chuck Ross, in a recent ‘Daily Caller’ piece headlined ‘Cambridge
Academic Reflects On Interactions With 'Spygate’ Figure’ and one on ‘Fox’ by Catherine Herridge and Cyd Upson, entitled ‘Russian
academic linked to Flynn denies being spy, says her past contact was “used” to smear him.’ However, the evidence involved has ramifications
which they cannot be expected to understand, as yet at least.
At issue is the attempt to use the – apparently casual – encounter between Lieutenant-General Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova at a
dinner in Cambridge (U.K.) in February 2016 to smear him by, among other things, portraying her as some kind of ‘Mata Hari’ figure.
Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016
– a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with
Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’
This suggests that this was not simply a case Halper acting on his own. It also I think brings us back to the central importance
of Flynn’s visit to Moscow in December 2015.
Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come.
It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk
.)
Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This
points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians
might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic,
with Dearlove certainly among them.
Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:
‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to
cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes
#Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’
Meanwhile, another interesting recent ‘tweet’ comes from Eliot Higgins, of ‘Bellingcat’ fame. He is known to some skeptics as
‘the couch potato’ – perhaps he should be rechristened ‘king cockroach.’ It reads:
‘Looking forward to gettin g things rolling with the Open Information Partnership, with @bellingcat, @MDI_UK, @DFRLab, and @This_Is_Zinc
https://www.openinformation...’
There is an interesting ‘backstory’ to this. The announcement of an FCO-supported ‘Open Information Partnership of European Non-Governmental
Organisations, charities, academics, think-tanks and journalists’, supposedly to counter ‘disinformation’ from Russia, came in a
written answer from the Minister of State, Sir Alan Duncan, on 3 April.
In turn this followed the latest in a series of releases of material either leaked or hacked from the organisations calling themselves
‘Institute for Statecraft’ and ‘Integrity Initiative’ by the group calling themselves ‘Anonymous’ on 25 March.
The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium
whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium
member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same.
A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian
organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible
explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation.
An interesting paragraph reads as follows:
‘An expanded research component could generate better understanding of the drivers (psychological, sociopolitical, cultural
and environmental) of those who are susceptible to disinformation. This will allow us to map vulnerable audiences, and build scenario
planning models to test the efficiency of different activities to build resilience of those populations over time.’
They have not yet got to the point of recommending psychiatic treatment for ‘dissidents’, but these are still early days. The
‘Sovietisation’ of Western life proceeds apace.
In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different
countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright
to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they
need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’)
Study of the proposal hacked/leaked by ‘Anonymous’ bring out both the ‘boondoggle’ element – there is a lot of state funding available
for people happy to play these games – and also the strong transatlantic links.
A particularly significant presence, here, is the ‘DFRLab’. This is the ‘Digital Forensic Research Lab’ at the ‘Atlantic Council’,
where Eliot Higgins is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’ The same organisation has a ‘Cyber Statecraft Initiative’ where Dmitri Alperovitch
is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’
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."
OT but related, just watched a former naval Intelligence officer, now working for the Hoover Institute interviewed on FOX about
the Rooshins in Venezuela. Said, the 100 Russians are there to protect Maduro because he cannot trust his own army. Maduro's days
are numbered because he is toxically unpopular.
Got me thinking, our Intelligence services are good at psy-ops and keeping our gullible MSM in line but God help us if we ever
actually needed real Intelligence about a country. I remember about a month ago how all of these 'Think Tank Guys' were predicting
how the only people loyal to Maduro were a few of his crony Generals, that the rank and file military hated him and there were
going to be mass defections.
It didn't happen and we are all just supposed to forget that.
[not a socialist, don't have any love for Maduro, I just know that I will never learn anything of about Venezuela from these think
tank dudes, we are just getting groomed]
Venezuela isn't about "socialism," or even Maduro--it's about the oil. They have the largest proven reserves in the world, though
much of it is non-conventional and would need a ton of investment to exploit. But it's their oil, not ours, and we have no right
to meddle in their internal affairs.
Venezuela is neither about socialism nor oil in my opinion. It is everything to do with the neocons. And Trump buying into their
hegemonic dreams. Notice the resurrection of Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame as the man spearheading this in a triumvirate
with Bolton & Pompeo. IMO, a perfect foil for Putin & Xi to embroil the US in another regime change quagmire that further weakens
the US.
"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."
True; and true. It is also true that the Clinton e-mail investigation was faux, a limp caricature of what an investigation
would look like when it is designed to uncover the truth. Allowing a subject's law firm to review the subject's e-mails from when
she was in government for relevancy is beyond preposterous. An investigation conducted in the normal way by apolitical Agents
in a field office would not walk away from a trove of evidence empty handed.
The inter-relatedness and overlapping of DoJ, CIA, and FBI personnel assigned to the Clinton e-mail case, the Russophobic nightmare
of a 'case' targeting Carter Page, and by extension, the Trump presidential campaign, and yes, the Mueller political op, all reek
of political bias and ineptitude followed by more political bias; and then culmination in a scorched earth investigation more
characteristic of something the STASI might have undertaken than American justice.
Early morning raids, gag orders, solitary confinements, show indictments that will never see adjudication in a court room - truly
unbelievable.
In your opinion was this surveillance, criminal & counter-intelligence investigation as well as information operations against
Trump centrally orchestrated or was it more reactive & decentralized?
There are so many facets. Fusion GPS & Nellie Ohr with her previous CIA connection. Her husband Bruce at the DOJ stovepiping
the dossier to the FBI. Brennan and his EC. Clapper and his intelligence assessment. Halper, Mifsud, Steele along with Hannigan
and the MI6 + GCHQ connection. Downer and the Aussies. FISA warrants on Page & Papadopolous. The whole Strzok & Page texting.
Comey, Lynch & the Hillary exoneration. McCabe. Then all the Russians. And the media leaks to generate hysteria.
I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its
about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal
had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary,
increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language.
And yet the chatterati
continued to chatter and invent ludicrously unreal worlds and analyses of the actual world they lived in until... bang... it was
no more.
I'd skip the first few chapters which are full of impenetrable marxist jargon.
The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go.
This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House.
It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler.
There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion
is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their
facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising
inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire
crashes we may not be so fortunate.
"... Rhetorical question: if Nellie Ohr and Stephan Halper are/were associated with the CIA (just saw an item claiming Halper's father-in-law was in the CIA during the Cuban Missile Crisis), what sour-visaged BIG DOT could they be connected to??? ..."
"... One of the biggest revelations seems to be that the Ohrs met with Steele on July 30, 2016, where Steele relayed his concerns and showed them some of his reports. Bruce Ohr says he reached out to the FBI immediately to relay Steele's information. The investigation was started at the FBI on July 31, and this investigation targeted Carter Page of Steele Dossier fame. ..."
Courtesy of U.S. Representative Doug Collins (Repub. Georgia), transcripts have been released of committee interviews of five people
about the attempt to de-legitimize the election and inauguration of an elected president, and to create conditions for his removal.
They can be viewed and downloaded for reading.
Interview on 27 June 2018 of Peter Strzok, former Deputy Assistant Director of the
FBI Counterintelligence Division, 312 pages--
Bruce Ohr is still an attorney in the Department of Justice. In 2010 he was the chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering
Section of the Criminal Division. This June 2010 paper from the National Institute of Justice and the National Criminal Justice
Reference Service, "Expert Working Group on International Organized Crime", lists on page 30 (pdf page 34) that Bruce Ohr had that
position at the DOJ and Nellie Ohr was a researcher at Open Source Works in Washington DC--
The beginning of a CIA paper from 16 November 2010 entitled "Russia: Security Concerns About Iran's Space Program Growing", describes
the Open Source Works--
"This report was prepared by the Open Source Works, which was charged by the Director for Intelligence with drawing on language-trained
analysts to mine open-source information for new or alternative insights on intelligence issues. Open Source Works' products,
based only on open source information, do not represent the coordinated views of the Central Intelligence Agency."
Despite the open source evidence that the Open Source Works was "charged by the Director for Intelligence with drawing on language-trained
analysts to mine open-source information", there was a little tap dancing during Nellie Ohr's interview about her work for the CIA
and others. During questions by Congressman Jim Jordan (Repub. Ohio), on page 17--
"Mr. Jordan: Walk me through the clients you did contract work for. Was this U.S. Government?
Ms. Ohr: U.S. Government.
Mr. Jordan: Various agencies in the United States Government.
Ms. Ohr: Yes.
Mr. Jordan: Tell me the agencies?
Mr. Berman [Nellie Ohr's lawyer]: I'm not sure how to address this. I'm not sure
what the U.S. Government agencies' positions are, given various agreements she signed as parts of her independent contracting
relationships. So she's willing to answer questions, I just don't know -- don't want to put her at risk of violating employment
agreements she had at the time, especially with U.S. Government
agencies.
Mr. Jordan: Is it fair to say you worked with some of the intelligence-based agencies in the United States Government.
Ms. Ohr: Yes.
Mr. Jordan: Did you work for the CIA?
Mr. Berman: Again, I would raise the same concerns, sir, if we're going to get into specifics."
Nellie Ohr then said on page 18--
"Ms. Ohr: Mitre. Mitre Corporation, which in turn had contracts with U.S. Government clients.
Mr. Jordan: Got it.
Ms. Ohr: Through most of 2008. And then starting in 2008, I worked for Open Source Works."
A Washington Post newspaper article of 16 August 2018 about Bruce Ohr says-- "Ohr was associate deputy attorney general until
late 2017, when the DOJ learned of his contacts with Steele. He briefly continued as head of Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task
Forces (OCDETF) but then lost that job, too. It's unclear what role he plays now at the DOJ."
At his interview with the Congressional committees on 28 August 2018, he stated his current position: "Mr. Ohr: Good morning.
My name is Bruce Ohr. I am a senior counsel in the Office of International Affairs in the Criminal Division of the Department of
Justice."
Rhetorical question: if Nellie Ohr and Stephan Halper are/were associated with the CIA (just saw an item claiming Halper's
father-in-law was in the CIA during the Cuban Missile Crisis), what sour-visaged BIG DOT could they be connected to???
For what its worth, Jeff Carlson from the Epoch Times somehow got access to most of these transcripts a bit earlier this year,
and did some analysis that is worth checking out. HIs knowledge of the whole situation and ability to put pieces together is very
impressive.
One of the biggest revelations seems to be that the Ohrs met with Steele on July 30, 2016, where Steele relayed his concerns
and showed them some of his reports. Bruce Ohr says he reached out to the FBI immediately to relay Steele's information. The investigation
was started at the FBI on July 31, and this investigation targeted Carter Page of Steele Dossier fame.
They have been trying to say it was the Papadopoulos information, which they got in April or May, that initiated the investigation.
That seems unlikely to me, and instead a blatant cover-up. People who have been paying close attention to the case would remember
that we didn't hear anything about Papadopoulos until well into the case.....first Google results seem to be August 2017.
I think they started employing that as a cover story after the dossier was outed and became obviously dubious.
"... T]he main spokesman for these accusations was Serhiy Leshchenko , a Ukrainian politician and journalist who works closely with both top Hillary Clinton donors George Soros and Victor Pinchuk, as well as to the US Embassy in Kyiv. ..."
"... The New York Times should also explain why they didn't mention that Leshchenko had direct connections to two of Hillary Clinton biggest financial backers. Victor Pinchuk, the largest donor to the Clinton Foundation at a staggering $8.6 million also happened to have paid for Leshchenko's expenses to go to international conferences. George Soros, whose also founded the International Renaissance Foundationthat worked closely with Hillary Clinton's State Department in Ukraine, also contributed at least $8 million to Hillary affiliated super PACs in the 2016 campaign cycle . – Lee Stranahan via Medium ..."
"... Meanwhile, according to former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr, Leshchenko was a source for opposition research firm Fusion GPS , which commissioned the infamous Trump-Russia dossier. ..."
"... Nellie Ohr, a former contractor for the Washington, D.C.-based Fusion GPS, testified on Oct. 19 that Serhiy Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist turned Ukrainian lawmaker, was a source for Fusion GPS during the 2016 campaign. ..."
RT CrossTalk host Peter Lavelle and The Duran's Alex Christoforou take a look at new
evidence to surface from Ukraine that exposes a plot by the US Embassy in Kiev and the National
Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) to leak Paul Manafort's corrupt dealings in the
country, all for the benefit of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Via
Zerohedge
Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has launched an investigation into the head of
the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau for allegedly attempting to help Hillary Clinton
defeat Donald Trump during the 2016 US election by releasing damaging information about a "
black
ledger " of illegal business dealings by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
"Today we will launch a criminal investigation about this and we will give legal assessment
of this information," Lutsenko said last week, according to
The Hill.
Lutsenko is probing a claim from a member of the Ukrainian parliament that the director of
the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Artem Sytnyk, attempted to the benefit
of the 2016 U.S. presidential election on behalf of Hillary Clinton .
A State Department spokesman told Hill.TV that officials aware of news reports regarding
Sytnyk. –
The Hill
"According to the member of parliament of Ukraine, he got the court decision that the NABU
official conducted an illegal intrusion into the American election campaign," said Lutsenko,
speaking with The Hill's John Solomon about the anti-corruption bureau chief, Artem
Sytnyk.
"It means that we think Mr. Sytnyk, the NABU director, officially talked about criminal
investigation with Mr. [Paul] Manafort, and at the same time, Mr. Sytnyk stressed that in such
a way, he wanted to assist the campaign of Ms. Clinton ," Lutsenko continued.
Solomon asked Lutsenko about reports that a member of Ukraine's parliament obtained a tape
of the current head of the NABU saying that he was attempting to help Clinton win the 2016
presidential election, as well as connections that helped release the black-ledger files that
exposed Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort 's wrongdoing in Ukraine .
"This member of parliament even attached the audio tape where several men, one of which
had a voice similar to the voice of Mr. Sytnyk, discussed the matter." –
The Hill
What The Hill doesn't mention is that Sytnyk released Manafort's Black Book with
Ukrainian lawmaker
Serhiy Leshchenko – discussed in great length by former Breitbart investigator
Lee Stranahan , who has been
closely monitoring this case.
Serhiy Leshchenko
T]he main spokesman for these accusations was Serhiy
Leshchenko , a Ukrainian politician and journalist who works closely with both top
Hillary Clinton donors George Soros and Victor Pinchuk, as well as to the US Embassy in
Kyiv.
James Comey should be asked about this source that Leshchenko would not identify. Was the
source someone connected to US government, either the State Department or the Department of
Justice?
The New York Times should also explain why they didn't mention that Leshchenko had direct
connections to two of Hillary Clinton biggest financial backers. Victor Pinchuk, the largest
donor to the Clinton Foundation at a staggering $8.6 million also happened to have paid for
Leshchenko's expenses to go to international conferences. George Soros, whose also founded
the International Renaissance Foundationthat worked closely with Hillary Clinton's State
Department in Ukraine, also contributed at least $8 million to Hillary affiliated super PACs
in the 2016 campaign cycle . –
Lee Stranahan via Medium
Meanwhile, according to former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr, Leshchenko was a source for
opposition research firm Fusion GPS , which commissioned the infamous Trump-Russia dossier.
Nellie Ohr, a former contractor for the Washington, D.C.-based Fusion GPS, testified on
Oct. 19 that Serhiy Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist turned Ukrainian lawmaker,
was a source for Fusion GPS during the 2016 campaign.
"I recall they were mentioning someone named Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian," Ohr said
when asked who Fusion GPS's sources were, according to portions of Ohr's testimony confirmed
by The Daily Caller News Foundation. – Daily
Caller
Also absent from The Hill report is the fact that Leshchenko was convicted in
December by a Kiev court of interfering in the 2016 US election .
A Kyiv court said that a Ukrainian lawmaker and a top anticorruption official's decision
in 2016 to publish documents linked to President Donald Trump's then-campaign chairman
amounted to interference in the U.S. presidential election .
The December 11 finding came in response to a complaint filed by another Ukrainian
lawmaker, who alleged that Serhiy Leshchenko and Artem Sytnyk illegally released the
documents in August 2016, showing payments by a Ukrainian political party to Trump's
then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
The documents, excerpts from a secret ledger of payments by the Party of Regions, led to
Manafort being fired by Trump's election campaign.
The Kyiv court said that the documents published by Leshchenko and Sytnyk were part of an
ongoing pretrial investigation in Ukraine into the operations of the pro-Russian Party of
Regions . The party's head had been President Viktor Yanukovych until he fled the country
amid mass protests two years earlier.
-RadioFreeEurope/Radio Liberty (funded by the US govt.).
So while Lutsenko – Solomon's guest and Ukrainian Prosecutor is currently going after
Artem Sytnyk, it should be noted that Leshchenko was already found to have meddled in the 2016
US election.
Money quote: "Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots
that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets
should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion.
But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union. "
Notable quotes:
"... Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally. ..."
"... There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge. ..."
In 2016, Andrei Lvovich Nekrasov, a well-known Russian film-maker, playwright, theater director, and actor, released a docudrama
entitled, The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes . Although the film won many artistic accolades, including a special commendation
from the Prix Europa Award for a Television Documentary, public screenings were abruptly canceled in both Europe and the United States.
Political pressure from various constituents and the threat of lawsuits from William Browder, the American-British billionaire and
human-rights activist, ensured the limitation of the film to a single website. To the knowledge of this author, there has been only
one public screening of The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes in the United States. In June 2016, Seymour Hersch, a renowned investigative
journalist, presided over a showing of the film at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that generated much controversy. The American press
has not been kind to either the film or the director, Andrei Nekrasov. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker,
and The Daily Beast all seem to agree that the film is an overt work of Russian propaganda that aims to introduce confusion
about the circumstances leading to the death of tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, in the minds of the viewers. The Putin administration,
which has been the prime target of both the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Accountability Act and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Human
Rights Accountability Act, has good reason to promote a film that questions the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's untimely death
in Moscow's Butyrka Prison in 2009.
Despite a flood of persuasive articles and editorials by well-known journalists suggesting that this inconvenient film deserves
no more than a quick burial, I was drawn to reconsider both the film and the political controversy that it continues to create for
two main reasons. First, as the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own recent presidential campaigns show, we can never entirely
prohibit the intrusion of propaganda or politically slanted content into the public sphere. Instead, as a historian and faculty member
who serves at a public university, I believe that it is my job to teach our students how to diagnose an issue, and how to consider
the many sides that a story necessarily involves. As an intellectual process this has immense value both in and of itself. Source
criticism is a time tested and reliable means through which we can make sense of an event or a phenomenon. Our students need to learn
both the mechanics and the intellectual value of analyzing a source and should be able to evaluate the nature of political content
whether it is embedded in a Facebook post, a scholarly article, or a documentary.
The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes can serve as an important vehicle to introduce the contested nature of historical
truth, and as a prism, it allows us to view the multiple modes through which various versions of the truth are disseminated in the
twenty-first century. Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a
real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating
analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative.
The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's
death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary.
Second, I am concerned by the fact that both critics and supporters have turned the debate about the film into a referendum on
William Browder, his business dealings as well as his global human rights activism, and the Putin administration. In this interview
with Andrei Nekrasov, I turn the spotlight back on the film-maker, his motivations for making the film, and on his political experiences
since the release of the film. It is important to remember that in the past Nekrasov has made several politically charged films including
Disbelief (2004), and Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007) -- films that are extremely critical of the
Putin administration. Nekrasov, a student of philosophy and literature, is in the unique position of having experienced censorship
in the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia, and in the democratic countries of Western Europe and the United States.
1) Why did you want to make a film about the Magnitsky Act? What drew you to this project?
Andrei Nekrasov : I felt that the story of Magnitsky, in its accepted version, was very powerful and important. I thought that
Sergei Magnitsky was a hero, and I wanted to tell the story of the modern hero, my compatriot. His case seemed very special because
Magnitsky, a tax lawyer (in reality, an accountant) had come from the world of capitalism, to symbolize all that is good and moral
in modern Russia. I believed that Magnitsky did not surrender under torture and sacrificed his life fighting corruption.
2) Who has funded the making of this film and what motivated them to invest in this production?
AN : The film was produced by Piraya Film, a Norwegian company. There is a long list of funders, and none are from Russia. (Please
visit www.magnitskyact.com for further information). And they are all
very "mainstream." I believe in the United States and Russia it is easier to construe the specific reasons that motivate funders,
who are mostly private, to support a project. In Europe, where more public money is available for the arts, the state is more or
less obliged to fund the cultural process. So I submit an idea to a producer, and if they like it, they introduce it into a complex
system of funding that is supposed to be politically neutral. Only quality matters, in theory. In practice "quality" has political
aspects, and its interpretation is open to prejudices.
But it would be a simplification to say the film was funded because I had set out to tell Browder's version of the Magnitsky case.
Those funders who were (through their commissioning editors) monitoring the editing process, ZDF/ARTE, for example, became aware
of the inconsistencies in Browder's version and supported my investigation into the truth. What they did not realize was who, and
what, we were all dealing with. They did not realize that Browder was supported by the entire political system of North America and
Western Europe. They realized that only when they were told by politicians to stop the film. And they obeyed, contrary to what I
thought was their principles.
3) How has the role of censorship, both in Russia and the West, affected your artistic career?
AN : Censorship has had a very strong and damaging impact on my career. But while censorship in Russia had never been something
surprising to me, the way that the film T he Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes was treated by western politicians was totally
unanticipated and shocking. Yet, intellectually, the experience was very illuminating. The pro-Western intelligentsia of Russia,
a class to which I have belonged, idolizes the West and believes that the freedom of expression is an essential and even intrinsic
part of Western culture. The notion that the interests of economically powerful groups can set a geopolitical agenda and that easily
overrides democratic freedom of expression is considered to be a remnant of Soviet era thinking. So I had to have a direct and personal
experience of Western censorship to realize that that notion is rooted in reality.
The issue of censorship in Russia is, on the other hand, often misunderstood in the West. There is no direct political censorship
of the kind that existed in the Soviet Union, and that possibly exists in countries like China today. Many popular Russian news outlets
are critical of the government, and of Putin personally as evidenced by the content in media outlets such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya
Gazeta, Dozhd TV, New Times, Vedomosti, Colta. ru, and others. The internet is full of mockery of Putin, his ministers and of
his party's representatives. There is neither a system nor the kind of wellresourced deep state structures that control the flow
of information. Many Russian media outlets, for example, repeat Browder's story of Magnitsky killed by the corrupt police with the
state covering it up. All that is perfectly "allowed" while Putin angrily condemns Browder as a criminal and Browder calls himself
Putin's number one enemy. In reality, it is not allowed but simply happens because of the lack of consistent political censorship.
However, you will hardly ever hear a proper analysis and criticism in the Russian media of the big corporations, and of the oligarchs
that make up the state. It is also true that such acute crises as military operations, such as Russian-Georgian war of 2008 produce
intolerance to the voices of the opposition. My film Russian Lessons (2008) about the suffering of the Georgians during that
short war and its aftermath wasbanned in Russia. But nationalism is not only a government policy. It's the prevailing mood. The supposedly
democratic leader of the opposition, that the West seems to praise and support, Alexei Navalny, was on the record insulting Georgians
in jingo-nationalistic posts during the war. The film industry is, of course, easier to steer in the "right direction" as films,
unlike articles and essays, are very expensive to produce. But Russia is a complex society, deeply troubled, but also misunderstood
by the West. If my films, such as Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File , and Russian Lessons (2010) were attacked
by pro-government media, then some of my articles were censored by the independent, "opposition" outlets, such as Ekho Moskvy
.
4) Did you actually begin filming the movie with an outcome of supporting Browder's story in mind, as you represent in the
film, or did you plan from the start of the filming process to end the film as it now stands?
AN : I started filming the story. I totally believed in the story that Browder had told me, and all the mainstream media repeated
after him.
5) You know that there are many more "disappeared" journalists and others listed in the formal US Congress Magnitsky Act
who have suffered from the effects of corrupt power in Russia. Why did you not address the fates of some of those others as well
in your film?
AN : I may be misunderstanding this question, but I do not see how addressing the fates of "disappeared" journalists and others'
would be relevant to the topic of my film in its final version. I obviously condemn the "disappearance" of journalists and others.
In Russia journalists disappear usually by being "simply" shot (not in "sophisticated" Saudi ways), and as far as I remember only
one is referred to in The Magnitsky Act , Paul Khlebnikov. He was the editor of Forbes, Russia , and was shot in 2004
when Bill Browder was a great fan of Vladimir Putin and continued to be for some time. I have not seen any evidence or even claim,
that Putin may have been behind that murder. I was a friend of Anna Politkovskaya, perhaps the most famous of all Russian journalists
who was assassinated in the recent past. She is featured in my film, Poisoned by Polonium .
The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a
fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally
sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international
organizations.
6) Does William Browder's role in the formulation of the Magnitsky Act invalidate its value and that of the Global
Magnitsky Act, in seeking to provide protection for those suffering from the effects of deadly and corrupt power such as the recently
deceased Saudi Arabian journalist, Jamal Khashoggi?
AN : Let me, for the argument's sake, pose myself what would seem like a version of your question: "Would Browder's role in creating
a weapon that could protect someone like Khashoggi from deadly and corrupt power invalidate that weapon?" My answer would be, no,
it would not invalidate that weapon. However, we are dealing with a fallacy here, in my humble opinion. The Magnitsky Act, in
my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of
Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was
he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never
mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people
named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen
and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights
of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent
investigator or judge.
Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West
is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be
built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But
the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union.
Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Chatterjee, along with Steven Marks,
Mary Neuberger, and Steve Sabol, edited The Wider Arc of Revolution in three volumes (Slavica Publishers).
Fred - I don't think it's going to go away that easily. This is the BBC web site today, again
keeping alive much the same theme as your man of courage. We're moving on from whether Trump
was a Russian agent to whether Trump deliberately attempted to stop us finding out whether he
was a Russian agent -
"But Mr Mueller declined to draw a conclusion on whether Mr Trump had obstructed
justice, saying only that the president could not be exonerated.
Attorney General Barr, who was appointed by the president, concluded in his summary of
the report that there was not enough evidence to determine if the president had committed the
offence."
So it's too useful a theme to be let go entirely, and fits with the general suspicion of
Russian interference.
It's a difficult one, that. Looking at the Integrity Initiative and 77 Brigade it's clear
that information warfare at all levels - academia, the media, on down to the little
subsidized web sites and right on down to the individuals who are paid to insert comments on
social media - is now regarded in England as an integral part of Intelligence work.
Presumably everyone else is doing it too so why not the Russians? But to trace the huge
political movements of our time back to Moscow, as if they were due to sinister Russians
cleverly playing us via social media and other propaganda outlets, seems to me to be grossly
overdone. After all, if it were that easy it would have worked for the West too. Iran would
now be another Syria and Syria long since gone.
No, even the most ardent Russophobes on our side of the Atlantic might have to admit
sometimes that the reason we're screwed up in Europe at present is that we've screwed
ourselves up. We are not uniformly happy prosperous peoples who would continue to be
uniformly happy and prosperous were it not for Moscow. So it must be in the States.
Even so, the Russians are still the get-out for many. On English web sites "Putin done it"
surfaces regularly as the reason for us voting Brexit. There were suggestions that he had
stirred up the Yellow Vests in France. The Italians are sometimes viewed with suspicion for
the same reason.
And I got caught up in an unusual traffic hold-up just this morning. I can't prove to you
it was the Russians. But can you prove to me it wasn't?
What sets disinformation apart from other forms of manipulative or persuasive
content
Why today's information environment amplifies disinformation
What is Disinformation? Is it Different from Propaganda?
Disinformation is a relatively new word. Most observers
trace it back to the Russian word dezinformatsiya , which Soviet planners in the
1950s defined as "dissemination (in the press, on the radio, etc.) of false reports intended
to mislead public opinion." Others suggest that the
earliest use of the term originated in 1930s Nazi Germany. In either case, it is much younger
(and less commonly used) than ' propaganda, ' which originated in
the 1600s and generally connotes the selective use of information for political effect.
Whether and to what degree these terms overlap is subject to debate. Some define propaganda
as the use of non-rational arguments to either advance or undermine a political ideal, and
use disinformation as an alternative name for undermining propaganda. Others consider
them to be separate concepts altogether. One popular distinction holds that disinformation
also describes politically motivated messaging designed explicitly to engender public
cynicism, uncertainty, apathy, distrust, and paranoia, all of which disincentivize citizen
engagement and mobilization for social or political change. "Misinformation," meanwhile,
generally refers to
the inadvertent sharing of false information.
Analysts generally
agree that disinformation is always purposeful and not necessarily composed of outright
lies or fabrications. It can be composed of mostly true facts, stripped of context or blended
with falsehoods to support the intended message, and is always part of a larger plan or
agenda. In the Russian context, observers
have described its use to pursue Moscow's foreign policy goals through a "4D" offensive:
dismiss an opponent's claims or allegations, distort events to serve political
purposes, distract from one's own activities, and dismay those who might
otherwise oppose one's goals.
Analysts generally agree that disinformation is always purposeful and not necessarily
composed of outright lies or fabrications. It can be composed of mostly true facts,
stripped of context or blended with falsehoods to support the intended message, and is
always part of a larger plan or agenda."
Disinformation in the Digital Age
The reemerging interest in disinformation is
not because such techniques are novel. There are similarities between the contemporary 4D
model and, for example, Soviet active
measures . Rather, a
growingconsensus
asserts that while the use of disinformation is not new, the digital revolution has
greatly enhanced public vulnerability to manipulation by information -- a trend which is
predicted to continue .
In part, these changes have been wrought by the advent of
new social media platforms and their growing dominance over advertising revenues.
This shift in the media funding environment has weakened traditional media gatekeepers,
changed incentives for content providers, and promoted the rise of unprofessional and/or
unscrupulous outlets capable of drawing large audiences at a low cost. As digital advertising
assumes an ever-larger role in shaping news consumption, targeted advertising allows for more
sophisticated forms of propaganda: for example, in September of 2017, Facebook
disclosed that roughly 3,000 ads related to divisive US political issues were purchased
by a network of 470 accounts and pages suspected to be run out of Russia. The company says
that at
least a quarter of those ads were geographically targeted. Twitter
later deleted two hundred accounts linked to those same Facebook accounts and pages and
revealed that in 2016, the Russian state-funded broadcaster RT spent $274,100 on advertising
targeting users in the United States.
Research suggests the total scale of "low quality political information" on those
platforms during the 2016 US elections was much larger, particularly in swing states. The
degree of Russian influence on this market for digital disinformation is unknown;
post-election, researchers are launching new efforts to track and analyze
it.
Although there is no universal definition, fake news generally refers to misleading
content found on the internet, especially on social media."
The Rise of 'Fake News'
The role of disinformation in recent elections has given rise to another distinct, but
related, term: '
fake news .'
Although there is no universal definition, fake news generally refers to misleading
content found on the internet, especially on social media. One analysis lays
out five types of fake news, including intentionally deceptive content, jokes taken at face
value, large-scale hoaxes, slanted reporting of real facts, and coverage where the truth may
be uncertain or contentious. These are not new: an
example of fake news from 2011 involves websites masquerading as real news organizations
to spread false information about the health benefits of acai berries.
Much of this content is produced by for-profit websites and Facebook pages
gaming the platform for advertising revenue. By producing tailored false content targeted
at the views, concerns, and preferences of social media users, these pages can generate tens
of thousands of interactions and thousands of dollars a month. In 2015, Facebook began
taking steps
to curtail this content, which it called a form of "news feed spam." By 2016, it became clear
the problem was growing out of control. Fabricated and fiercely partisan political content --
much of it
produced abroad for profit -- in some instances
outpaced engagement with credible mainstream news outlets.
Facebook initially downplayed the
potential influence of fake news, although it also pledged to pursue a response involving
expanded partnerships with fact-checkers, increased emphasis on detection and reporting,
warning labels for untrustworthy stories, and a crackdown on for-profit fake news pages.
Twitter
also reacted , developing an experimental prototype feature to allow users to report
"fake news" and exploring the use of machine learning to detect automated accounts spreading
political content.
Is Fake News Disinformation?
More often than not, fake news does not meet the definition of disinformation or
propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to a
larger agenda. One attempt to classify
various types of misleading and manipulative news content separates misinformation
(inadvertent sharing of false information) from disinformation, which is deliberate, and
arranges examples by motivation and degree of deception. Most of the fake news described
above falls somewhere in the middle: not inadvertent, but motivated by profit rather than
influence. To the degree that its purpose can be described as political, fake news begins to
resemble more insidious content.
Fake news' political prominence does have lessons for analysts of disinformation. Fake
news draws audiences because it validates their political preconceptions and worldviews,
capitalizing on media consumers' confirmation
bias . Many argue that because social media curates content according to user
preferences, it has a
polarizing effect that leaves consumers more vulnerable to manipulation in this way.
Political actors have been able to use this to their advantage by producing incendiary
content that spreads rapidly through grassroots online networks (some call this "
political astroturfing ").
More often than not, fake news does not meet the definition of disinformation or
propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to
a larger agenda."
Marketing, Public Affairs, Public Diplomacy, and other "Information
Campaigns"
Some analysts also differentiate
between various types of "information campaigns" -- organized attempts to communicate with
large groups of individuals -- which may include marketing, public affairs, and public
diplomacy. All of these terms are worth disentangling from each other and from propaganda and
disinformation writ large.
Marketing and public relations rely on a mix of facts, opinions, and emotional cues to
persuade audiences and build affinity between individuals and brands or organizations. As
promotional activities meant to augment or protect the reputation of the messenger, their
goals may be commercial or political, or they may simply aim to generate publicity. Similarly
promotional is public diplomacy, which states utilize to represent their viewpoints to
foreign audiences and promote positive associations with that country among foreign publics.
Done well, public diplomacy distinguishes
itself from propaganda by never intentionally spreading false information or relying on
non-rational means of persuasion (though marketing and public relations, of course, may rely
on such non-rational devices).
Marketing, public relations, public diplomacy, and similar information campaigns are all
related to the field of " strategic
communication ," broadly defined as the purposeful use of information and messaging to
advance the mission of a given organization, be it a corporate, government, non-profit, or
military actor. In the military context, a 2007 paper
from the U.S. Army War College emphasizes that strategic communication in a military
context aims to influence adversaries, reassure allies, and persuade publics. Because it may
be impossible to deceive one of these audiences without deceiving others, some
advocate that "deception should be rigorously forbidden in strategic communication" and
that the use of disinformation should never fall under the rubric of strategic
communication.
Done well, public diplomacy distinguishes itself from propaganda by never intentionally
spreading false information or relying on non-rational means of persuasion."
Intent as a Distinguishing Feature
Some
argue the intent of the messenger is crucial to distinguishing between different types of
messages. This makes it difficult to draw a bright, clear line between marketing, public
relations, and public diplomacy, on one side, and propaganda and disinformation on the other.
This is especially true when the content in question includes both objective fact and
subjective interpretation but no clear falsehood, because it may be unclear whether the
message reflects a genuine perspective or an intent to mislead. When content does include
falsehoods, it may be unclear whether they are accidental or purposeful.
If an information campaign uses falsehoods and emotional appeals not to persuade or
attract but to disrupt, divide, confuse, or otherwise damage target audiences' understanding
or political cohesion, it more closely aligns with disinformation and its undermining
function. This is not solely the realm of the state:
many activities undertaken by
non-state actors may also fit this description.
If an information campaign uses falsehoods and emotional appeals not to persuade or
attract but to disrupt, divide, confuse, or otherwise damage target audiences'
understanding or political cohesion, it more closely aligns with disinformation and its
undermining function."
Information Operations as a Tool of Political Influence
Information campaigns with these goals in mind are now sometimes referred to as
"information operations," a term until recently used primarily by defense officials in
referring broadly to the use of communications in military operations. In April 2017,
Facebook
described "information (or influence) operations" on the platform, which aim "to achieve
a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome" using "a combination of methods, such as false news,
disinformation, or networks of fake accounts (false amplifiers) aimed at manipulating public
opinion." In the run-up to the 2017 French presidential election, Facebook deleted 30,000
fake French accounts from the platform, providing a sense of the scale these operations can
reach.
In that election, an information operation (
likely of Russian origin ) released
hacked documents just before the beginning of a legally mandated election news blackout
in order to damage the campaign of Emmanuel Macron, the eventual winner. The manipulation of
information has been a
feature of Syria's civil war since the conflict's beginning.
Research from a diverse set of country case studies suggests that a wide array of
political, military, and private actors now routinely use social media to manipulate public
opinion. Italy's populist Five Star Movement, for instance,
is tied to a large constellation of online disinformation outlets. Taiwanese democracy
must grapple with both
domestic and cross-strait sources of disinformation. Information operations, including
those involving the use of disinformation during elections, are likely to remain a tool of
political influence well into the foreseeable future.
Brief prepared by Dean Jackson, International Forum for Democratic Studies.
It is now apparent with the
release
of the Mueller investigation findings
, that the great storm that has embattled the US
government and establishment since 2016 over supposed Russia-Trump collusion during the US
elections,
originates not from a genuine tangible source, but a constant stream of
rhetoric driven by partisan corporate media.
One certainty though is the Western
narrative of Russia as a 'malign influence' will not go away.
While America's liberal establishment continues to rage at Trump, Europe allies, under the
influence of Washington, maintain their aggressive stance towards Russia following the
catastrophic
US
meddling in Ukraine
in 2014 and the subsequent
reunification
of Crimea with Russia
.
The question is how can the narrative of 'malign Russian influence' be kept going?
Mainstream media will continue its role in this, but Western governments are also pouring
resources into promulgating certain narratives while containing others.
This week, hackers released more documents from the UK government-funded project
known as the
Integrity
Initiative
, revealing British government plans to build an umbrella network of
organisations across Europe to counter 'Russian disinformation'.
The following is a look at one of the EU projects already operating to ensure European
populations do not stray from this constructed narrative that at times crosses over into real
xenophobic racism, or Russophobia.
While researching this phenomenon, it was impossible not
to find some of the EU's counter-propaganda material quite funny.
If we want to know the meaning of disinformation, the American think tank known as the
National
Endowment for Democracy
which
funds
regime change
in the service of US corporate interests, has its own
definition
,
but it's not important – so long as we believe Russia or the Nazis invented the problem. In fact,
if we search the word 'disinformation,' a good number of the results tell us it originated in
Russia and is the baby of Stalin or the KGB. If we are not careful, we could end up thinking that
dishonesty is an inherent characteristic of Russians, a view actually
promoted
by
the former US Director of National Intelligence,
James Clapper
, who,
coincidentally was caught '
wilfully
'
lying
to
Congress.
The view of Russians being hard-wired for corruption was also promoted by the
New York Times
in
an article published in February,
The
Putin I knew; the Putin I know
, written by Franz J Sedelmeyer, exposing deep prejudice
behind the corporate media's shallow identity politics.
But this narrative fails to credit the CIA, which has spent decades crafting skills
carrying out the most grotesque deceptions in history targeted abroad and at home.
To
leave out the role of the CIA in disinformation must be the equivalent of writing an omelette
recipe and leaving out the eggs. In fact, the CIA doesn't just carry out disinformation campaigns,
as Victor Marchetti, former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA described it:
the
CIA manufactures history
. Not to recognise American intelligence services or government in
the history of disinformation while painting Russia as its mother is to deprive America of the
recognition it deserves for one of its most notable institutions. Somewhat ironically, you can
learn all about the history of disinformation from both
Google
and
the
National
Endowment for Democracy
which are two entities which have received financial support from the
CIA.
What about the EU? Does Brussels think that Russia is an inherently dishonest nation? Are they
aware that the CIA could be manufacturing Europe's history this very moment? Members of the
European Parliament (MEPs) so concerned about disinformation might want to study the documented
atrocities
of
the CIA, some of which were carried out in Europe. Perhaps they are not aware of the
US
intelligence services' role
in the history of subterfuge in Europe:
memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a
fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American
wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.
Paradoxically, given the probability rate of the CIA meddling in the EU, MEPs should consider
putting out a public warning:
The CIA is the most likely source of disinformation in Europe today. It manufactures
crises – and we've plenty of those.
But none of it. Instead, the European Parliament is fixated on ensuring its populations
fear
Russia
and are accepting of the narratives pushed on them. The EU released a new
report
this
month repeating the narratives it has been accumulating to justify increasing actions against
Russia, particularly since 2014 following the reunification of Crimea. It has passed a resolution
stating that Russia could no longer be considered a strategic partner of the EU:
While condemning the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea, as well as Russia's
continued violation of the territorial integrity of Georgia and Moldova, Members stressed that
the EU cannot envisage a gradual return to business as usual until Russia fully implements the
Minsk Agreement and restores the territorial integrity of Ukraine
Members condemned Russia's involvement in the Skripal case, and in disinformation
campaigns and cyberattacks carried out by the Russian intelligence services aimed at
destabilising public and private communications infrastructure and at increasing tensions within
the EU and its Member States
They are concerned about the relations between the Russian government and the extreme
right-wing and populist nationalist parties and governments in the EU, such as in Hungary. They
also recalled that the interference of Russian state actors in the referendum campaign on Brexit
is currently under investigation by the UK authorities
As Russia can no longer be considered a strategic partner in the current circumstances,
Members believe that the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement should be reconsidered
As well as the coordinated strategic isolation of Russia by the EU, members of the G7 have
signed up to a
Rapid
Response Mechanism
(RRM) designed to:
see hostile states publicly 'called out' for their egregious behaviour – with coordinated
international attribution of cyber and other attacks.
The agreement involves
sharing intelligence
,
attribution of hostile activity
and
forming a
common narrative and response,
effectively a military-like propaganda
coordination between the countries that can be applied for a chosen agenda.
To protect its version of history the EU has created
mechanisms
to
fight off alternative realities, narratives, or truths – which ever word fits – claiming any fact
or opinion contrary to those of the stated EU decree must be condemned as pro-Kremlin, pro-Russian,
or 'Putinist', a derogatory depiction presently supported by the corporate media. The EU claims
these 'alternative narratives' are the product of a Russian disinformation campaign and has
developed resources to 'disprove' that disinformation. These are the EU vanguards of
truth
set
up and funded by the European Council in 2015: the
European External Action Service East
Stratcom Task Force
or unaffectionately known here as Team
East
Stratcom
. A brief study of their work only leads to further concerns about who is
manufacturing history, but also to the likely conclusion that Team East Stratcom is made up of
media studies students who drink beer and watch RT all day.
Here's how Team East Stratcom describes itself in a Q&A:
Does the team engage in counter-propaganda?
No. It identifies and corrects disinformation
Counter-propaganda vs correct disinformation (you say tomatto, I say tomayto).
Julian King, the EU's security commissioner, has described it as a
counter-propaganda
cell
. Come on Brussels, make up your mind.
What does Team East StratCom do, and what is the role of its website
EUVDisinfo
?
The Task Force reports on and analyses disinformation trends, explains and exposes
disinformation narratives, and raises awareness of disinformation coming from Russian State,
Russian sources and spread in the Eastern neighbourhood media space
RUSSIAN MEMES: Official EU conspiracy theory diagram explains how 'Russian disinfo'
permeates mainstream western discourse (
EU
External Action
2017)
Firstly, who defines what is disinformation? Is it just assumed that any information emanating
from a Russian media outlet is automatically disinformation?
Narratives and sources. Does this mean that any narrative which matches a Russian one is then
classed as
Russian
in origin? If a Western alternative media outlet publishes a narrative
which happens to match that of a Russian media outlet, does this then mean that the said
alternative media outlet is 'under Russian influence', or 'in league with the Kremlin'? Could such
a politicized method of labelling lead to potential McCarthyite targeting of independent
journalists?
The Task Force does not target opinions and does not seek to "blacklist" anyone. It
checks facts and identifies disinformation coming from Russian State, Russian language and
Eastern
Neighbourhood
media. It focuses on the disinformation message, not the messenger.
Yet, individual journalists are identified in many of these so-called 'disinformation cases' and
described as supporters of one leader or other on the EU's list of bogeymen. Team East StratCom –
there is no need to be shy about McCarthyism. Certain mainstream media stalwarts of establishment
narratives are more upfront about whom they do and do not want in the club, as Oliver Kamm of
The
Times
has demonstrated:
For an agency already struggling with the concept of truth, Team
East StratCom
is
not off to a great start.
So how does Team East StratCom protect EU narratives? The European Council made it
clear
in
2015 they wanted to counter narratives about
regime
change
in
Ukraine
and
its consequences. In fact, about half of its 'disinformation cases' are about Ukraine:
Ukraine tops the EUvsDisinfo database as the most frequent target with 461 references among
a total of 1,000 disinformation cases reported in the course of 2018.
So how does Team East StratCom counter propaganda sorry correct disinformation? The following
are a few case samples that help to illuminate their methodologies (although with a budget increase
from €1.1 million in 2018 to €3 million in 2019, it may find new and diverse ones):
Disinformation Example 1: Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe
Team East StratCom argues that undermining the credibility of Ukraine benefits Russia. It
reports that RT Deutsch described Ukraine as the most corrupt country in Europe. It then tries to
debunk this using
Transparency International
's
corruption perception index, a chart which is created and paid for by Western neoliberal
governments – the same ones that help to keep corrupt governments in power so long as they provide
opportunities to serve Western corporate interests.
Team East StratCom tries to disprove this case by drawing our attention away from corruption in
Europe to corruption worldwide. This puts 60 countries ahead of Ukraine. That is sneaky Team East
StratCom because, aside from Russia, which we must believe is the most corrupt country in Europe,
Ukraine actually tops the list. So why does the EU want to hide the extent of corruption in
Ukraine and is it the only thing being hidden about the country? According to Russian Foreign
Ministry Spokeswoman
Maria Zakharova
the West wants
to stop the world from recognising Crimea as part of Russia's territory. In order to do this it
must maintain a manufactured reality; the narrative of Ukraine being a victim of Russian aggression
and in no way a liability due, at least in part, to the West's meddling. This approach also entails
downplaying any suggestion that
the
West planned and orchestrated
a
coup d'etat
in Kiev in February 2014.
Disinformation Example 2: Far-right groups in Ukraine
This extract by Team East StratCom criticises the reporting of far-right groups in Ukraine:
Dehumanise, demoralise, make Ukraine the guilty party
Pro-Kremlin disinformation about Ukraine targets audiences in Russia, in Ukraine and in
third countries, including the West. Domestic audiences in Russia are e.g. faced with
narratives which dehumanise Ukrainians and show the authorities in Kyiv as a cynical modern heir
to 20th century Nazism. Such a strategy can turn Ukraine into an acceptable target of the
Kremlin's military aggression.
The involvement of far right groups in the run-up to and during 2014 Maidan events and
since
,
has already been widely reported across much of the global mainstream media, for example,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
and
here
,
as well as in alternate media. To suggest that this narrative is Russian disinformation is
ludicrous. What's more, the
European
Parliament
have already recognised in 2012 the threat of the far-right parties like Svoboda and
Pravi Sektor in Ukrainian politics:
Parliament goes on to express concern about the rising nationalistic sentiment in
Ukraine, expressed in support for the Svoboda Party, which, as a result, is one of the two new
parties to enter the Verkhovna Rada. It recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views
go against the EU's fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic
parties in the Verkhovna Rada not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party.
Team East StratCom, you are implying the EU dehumanised Ukraine! But then the EU did later
drop
its
objection as members of the same racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic party
gained
positions in Ukraine's government
, so perhaps you will be forgiven. Perhaps sowing a little
confusion of its own, is Brussels.
Disinformation Example 3: Russia is depicted as a 'defender' and a 'peacekeeper' and
the West – as the villain
.
Team East Stratcom likes using Twitter graphics as evidence when 'disproving pro-Kremlin
disinformation.' Never mind history, reason and common sense – just bring out a nice Twitter
graphic! According to disinfo mavens, any spike in Twitter activity with the words 'Russia'
'Moscow' or 'Putin' in reference to Venezuela is proof of a 'pro-Kremlin' disinformation campaign,
says Team East StratCom. Here is
their
graphical chart
of Twitter traffic:
But Russia is an ally of Venezuela so why would this not be reflected on Twitter when there is a
blatant attempt by a Western aggressor to impose its military and economic will on Venezuela? Such
was the situation in February when the US tried to pressure the Venezuelan government into allowing
in trucks, supposedly carrying humanitarian aid, into the country. Aid as a Trojan Horse for
weapons has historical context, especially with regards to the US and its new special envoy to
Venezuela,
Elliot Abrams
, a
convicted
war criminal
who illicitly supplied weapons to death squads in Nicaragua, El Salvador and
Guatemala on behalf of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s. Now that he is special envoy to
Venezuela, it is common sense to suspect foul play. Can such people really be seen as peacekeepers,
Team East Stratcom? And using a Twitter graphic to divert attention from a flagrant coup attempt by
an aggressive power is more than a little contemptible. What's more, a few days afterwards, one of
those trucks carrying supplies was found to contain nails and other materials useful for making
barricades:
And so to sum up the tactics used by Team East StratCom for 'disproving pro-Kremlin
disinformation', based on the above cases alone, a list could include for starters:
Categorical denial of any wrongdoing by Western powers or NATO members
Label any information emanating from a Russia media outlet as 'disinformation' or
'Kremlin propaganda'
Discredit alternate media journalists who stray from Official
Washington/London/Brussels position
Diversion and distraction – dazzle the public with colourful Twitter graphics
Remove any key political, geopolitical context
Obscure or erase history
Use of online tools like the Corruption Index promoted by same Western governments
that fund bloody imperialist wars
Use emotive, jingoistic themes
Associate perceived ideological opponents with leaders on Western bogeyman list
Repetition of pejorative terms and ad hominem smears such as 'pro-Kremlin' and'
'Putinist' to create division
Infer that any dissenter in the West is a 'traitor.'
But Team East StratCom can't erase history or delete context or bore us half to death
with those Twitter graphics and still expect to retain their credibility.
What's more, given the Russia-Trump collusion narrative has been exposed as a hoax, Team East
StratCom really ought to
let
that one go
.
"... The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years. ..."
"... It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land. ..."
"... Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans. ..."
"... The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other. ..."
"... The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system. ..."
The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates
the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people
will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been
systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years.
It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people.
Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any
kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land.
Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum
level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because
Russians are subhumans.
Whatever they do, it's always wrong, bad, oppressive, etc. Russians are bad because they're bad. They must be "taught a lesson",
"put into their place". It would, of course, be beneficial and highly profitable for Europeans to break with Anglo-Saxons and
to live in peace and harmony with Russia, but Europeans simply can not overcome their racism towards Russians. The young Europeans
are just as racist, with their incessant memes about "squatting Russians in tracksuits", "drunken Russians", etc., as if there's
nothing else that is notable about a country of 147 million people.
The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of
Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored,
as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring
with each other.
The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call
their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course,
endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language
with the same Cyrillic writing system.
"... While all the establishment may not have been aware that Trump had massive Zionist help in 2016 to make the argumentative distraction look credible in the media, all the establishment is now on board. Trump is the Chosen of the elites, he is holding all the cards. Tomorrow he is signing over sovereignty of the Golan Heights to Israel as a gift to Netanyahu and the oligarchs and the Board of Genie Oil in thanks for conspiring together to ensure Trump became President. ..."
The establishment represented by Bill Barr is 110% behind Trump. He is now clear on all
charges because Mueller discovered it was Zionist oligarchs who put Trump in power with the
help of at least 2 Zionist Russian oligarchs to provide the Russia red herring that served as
a massive distraction for the real collusion.
Mueller and Barr both delivered their report and conclusions precisely when the AIPAC
EXTRAVAGANZA begins celebrating 4 more years of Trump as Mueller has provided Trump with
bragging rights from here to 2020.
While all the establishment may not have been aware that Trump had massive Zionist help in
2016 to make the argumentative distraction look credible in the media, all the establishment
is now on board. Trump is the Chosen of the elites, he is holding all the cards. Tomorrow he
is signing over sovereignty of the Golan Heights to Israel as a gift to Netanyahu and the
oligarchs and the Board of Genie Oil in thanks for conspiring together to ensure Trump became
President.
It's all coming together on schedule just in time for the AIPAC CELEBRATION set to HAIL
Trump.
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.
"... 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. ..."
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."
In Ber 2018 Kusher security clearance wasdongraded.
Notable quotes:
"... Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner to their advantage were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico, the current and former officials said. ..."
"... Kushner's interim security clearance was downgraded last week from the top-secret to the secret level, which should restrict the regular access he has had to highly classified information, according to administration officials. Washpost ..."
" Officials in at least four countries have privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law
and senior adviser, by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience,
according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports on the matter.
Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner to their advantage were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico,
the current and former officials said.
It is unclear if any of those countries acted on the discussions, but Kushner's contacts with certain foreign government officials
have raised concerns inside the White House and are a reason he has been unable to obtain a permanent security clearance, the officials
said.
Kushner's interim security clearance was downgraded last week from the top-secret to the secret level, which should restrict the
regular access he has had to highly classified information, according to administration officials. Washpost
------------------
Most people will probably be struck by the fall from grace of Kushner and other WH staff dilettantes. I am not terribly interested
in that. What strikes me is that this is the third major compromise of US SIGINT products in the last year. The first was the felonious
disclosure to the press of US intelligence penetration of Russian diplomatic communications. the second was the disclosure to the
press of penetration of GRU communications. In this one the oral or written discussions among the officials of several foreign countries
are revealed. These conversations were probably encrypted.
Is Jeff Sessions still alive? Why are there no prosecutions for these felonies? pl
"... Benjamin Netanyahu supports US rejection of Iran nuclear deal: 'Israel has opposed Iran's nuclear deal from the start' Attacking Mr Obama proposal of dealing with Iran, he added: "We must all stand together to stop Iran's march of conquest, subjugation and terror." Mr Chomsky said Mr Putin had never made such a speech to Congress, which political observers said was unique in the way a foreign leader so acidly attacked the policy of the US government. "Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress trying to calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president," he said. ..."
"... The power of the pro-Israel lobby has long been one of the contentious, and disputed, issues in Washington. In 2007, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, published The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy , which described the lobby as "loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction". ..."
In comments in which he accused much of the media of concentrating on stories he considered marginal and ignoring issues such
as the "existential threat" of climate change, the 89-year-old linguist said in much of the world, the US media's focus with Russia's
alleged interference in the 2016 was "a joke".
"First of all, if you're interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts
or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support," he said.
Speaking to Democracy Now, Mr Chomsky
added : "Israeli intervention
in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel,
Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to
try to undermine the president's policies - what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015."
In March 2015, at the invitation of then Republican House Speaker John Boehner, and assisted by Israel's Ambassador to the US,
Ron Dermer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the joint houses of Congress about the yet to be signed Iran nuclear
deal. He did so without formally informing the White House, something said to have infuriated Barack Obama, whose administration
would the following month join a seven-party agreement to limit Iran's alleged nuclear weapons ambitions.
In a speech to Congress that was boycotted by more than 50 Democrats, Mr Netanyahu made clear his opposition to the deal.
"This deal won't be a farewell to arms," said Mr Netanyahu, to loud applause. "It would be a farewell to arms control. And the
Middle East would soon be crisscrossed by nuclear tripwires. A region where small skirmishes can trigger big wars would turn into
a nuclear tinderbox."
Benjamin Netanyahu supports US rejection of Iran nuclear deal: 'Israel has opposed Iran's nuclear deal from the start'
Attacking Mr Obama proposal of dealing with Iran, he added: "We must all stand together to stop Iran's march of conquest,
subjugation and terror." Mr Chomsky said Mr Putin had never made such a speech to Congress, which political observers said
was unique in the way a foreign leader so acidly attacked the policy of the US government. "Did Putin come to give an address
to the joint sessions of Congress trying to calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president," he said.
"And that's just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence. So if you happen to be interested in influence of. foreign influence
on elections, there are places to look. But even that is a joke."
The power of the pro-Israel lobby has long been one of the contentious, and disputed, issues in Washington. In 2007, John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, published
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy , which described the lobby as "loose coalition of individuals and organisations
who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction".
The group's annual convention is a frequent stopping off point for politicians seeking election or reelection, and Mr Netanyahu
has addressed it several times. In 2016, top speakers included Vice President Joe Biden, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton,
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Governor John Kasich, Senator Ted Cruz, and Speaker Paul Ryan.
The group's website says: "The mission of AIPAC is to strengthen, protect and promote the US-Israel relationship in ways that
enhance the security of the United States and Israel."
Neither the Israeli Embassy in Washington or AIPAC immediately responded to enquiries about Mr Chomsky's claim.
In his comments to Democracy Now, Mr Chomsky said the media was "focusing on issues which are pretty marginal. There are much
more serious issues that are being put to the side".
"Of all Trump's policies, the one that is the most dangerous and destructive, in fact poses an existential threat, is his policies
on climate change, on global warming," he said. "That's really destructive. And we're facing an imminent threat, not far removed,
of enormous damage. The effects are already visible but nothing like what's going to come."
He added: "These are the kinds of issues that should be under discussion. Instead here is a focus on what I believe are marginalia."
"... At Netanyahu's behest, Flynn and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly took the lead in the lobbying to derail the U.N. resolution, which Flynn discussed in a phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (in which the Russian diplomat rebuffed Flynn's appeal to block the resolution). ..."
"... In this case, what Flynn and Kushner were doing was going directly against US foreign policy, because Obama wanted the resolution to pass; He just didn't want to vote for it because that would cross the Israel lobby in the United States. The US finally ended up abstaining on the resolution and it passed 14-0. ..."
"... But before that happened, Flynn went to the Russians and to Egypt, both members of the Security Council, and tried to get the resolution delayed. But all of Israel's machinations to derail this resolution failed and that is what Mueller was investigating, the intervention and disruption of American foreign policy by private citizens who had no official role. ..."
"... While I think Bibi is an idiot, I also think the Logan Act is overinvoked, overstated, probably of dubious legal value and also of dubious constitutional value. ..."
"... In short, especially because Trump had been elected, though not yet inaugurated, I think he is not at all guilty of a Logan Act violation. This is nothing close to Spiro Agnew calling Anna Chenault from the airplane in August 1968. ..."
"... Probably true, although evidence of extreme collusion with Israel eliminates any case against Russia, with whom we have far more reasons for amity. Bringing out the Israel collusion greatly improves public understanding of political corruption. Perhaps it will awaken some to the Agnew-Chennault betrayal of the people of the US. ..."
"... It's ironic that Russia-gate is turning out to be Israel's effort to distract attention from its complete control over the Democratic party in 2016. From Israeli billionaires behind the scenes to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at the helm. ..."
"... "Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an enemy state." So that is how it works, the White House says it is an enemy state and therefore it is. The so called declaration is the hammer used for trying to make contact with Russia a criminal offense. We are not at war with Russia although we see our leaders doing their best to provoke Russia into one. ..."
"... The Israel connection disclosed by the malpracticer hack Mueller in the recent Flynn-flam just made Trump bullet-proof (so to speak). ..."
"... So Mueller caught Kushner and Flynn red-handed, sabotaging the Obama administration? What of it? He can't use that evidence, because it would inculpate the Zionist neocons that are orchestrating his farcical, Stalinist witchhunt. And Mueller, being an efficient terminator bot, knows that his target is Russia, not Israel. ..."
"... So Mueller will just have to continue swamp-fishing for potential perjurers ahem witnesses, for the upcoming show trials (to further inflame public opinion against Russia and Russia sympathizers). And continue he will, because (as we all know from Schwarzenegger's flicks), the only way to stop the terminator is to terminate him/it first. ..."
"... Trump and Kushner have nothing to worry about, even if a smoking gun is found that proves their collusion with Israel. That's because the entire political and media establishment will simply ignore the Israeli connection. ..."
"... Journalists and politicians will even continue to present Mike Flynn's contacts as evidence of collusion with Russia. They'll keep on repeating that "Flynn lied about his phone call to the Russian ambassador". But there will be no mention of the fact that the purpose of this contact was to support Israel and not any alleged Russian interference. ..."
"... I think you have it right Brendan. The MSM, Intelligence Community, and Mueller would never go down any path that popularized undue Israeli influence on US foreign policy. "Nothing to see here folks, move along." ..."
"... The Nice Zionists responsible for the thefts and murders for the past 69 years along with the "Jewish Community" in the rest of the world will resolve the matter so as to be fair to both parties. This is mind-boggling fantasy. ..."
"... FFS, Netanyahu aired a political commercial in Florida for Romney saying vote for this guy (against Obama)! I mean, it doesn't get any more overtly manipulative than that. Period. End of story. ..."
"... God, I hate to go all "Israel controls the media" but there it is. Not even a discussion. Just a fact. ..."
"... I also have to point out that he "fist pumped" Hillary Clinton at Mohammed Ali's eulogy. If he's as astute as he purports to be, he has to know that Hillary would have invaded Syria and killed a few hundred thousand more Syrians for the simple act of defiantly preserving their country. By almost any read of Ali's history, he would have been adamantly ("killing brown people") against that. But there was Silverstein using the platform to promote, arguably, perpetual war. ..."
"... Yeah I found a couple of Silverstein's statements to be closer to neocon propaganda than reality: "Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby . . ." "Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to Trump instead." My impression was that the whole "terrible relationship between Obama and Netanyahu" was manufactured by the Israel lobby to bully Obama. However these are small blips within an otherwise solid critique of the Israel lobby's influence. ..."
The Israel-gate Side of Russia-gate December 23, 2017
While unproven claims of Russian meddling in U.S. politics have whipped Official Washington
into a frenzy, much less attention has been paid to real evidence of Israeli interference in
U.S. politics, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.
In investigating Russia's alleged meddling in U.S. politics, special prosecutor Robert
Mueller uncovered evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressured the Trump
transition team to undermine President Obama's plans to permit the United Nations to censure
Israel over its illegal settlement building on the Palestinian West Bank, a discovery
referenced in the plea deal with President Trump's first National Security Adviser Michael
Flynn.
At Netanyahu's behest, Flynn and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly took
the lead in the lobbying to derail the U.N. resolution, which Flynn discussed in a phone call
with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (in which the Russian diplomat rebuffed Flynn's appeal
to block the resolution).
I spoke on Dec, 18 with independent journalist and blogger Richard Silverstein, who writes
on national security and other issues for a number of blogs at Tikun Olam .
Dennis Bernstein: A part of Michael Flynn's plea had to do with some actions he took before
coming to power regarding Israel and the United Nations. Please explain.
Richard Silverstein:
The Obama administration was negotiating in the [UN] Security Council
just before he left office about a resolution that would condemn Israeli settlements.
Obviously, the Israeli government did not want this resolution to be passed. Instead of going
directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to
Trump instead. They approached Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner became involved in this. While
they were in the transition and before having any official capacity, they negotiated with
various members of the Security Council to try to quash the settlement resolution.
One of the issues here which is little known is the Logan Act, which was passed at the
foundation of our republic and was designed to prevent private citizens from usurping the
foreign policy prerogatives of the executive. It criminalized any private citizen who attempted
to negotiate with an enemy country over any foreign policy issue.
In this case, what Flynn and Kushner were doing was going directly against US foreign
policy, because Obama wanted the resolution to pass; He just didn't want to vote for it because
that would cross the Israel lobby in the United States. The US finally ended up abstaining on
the resolution and it passed 14-0.
But before that happened, Flynn went to the Russians and to Egypt, both members of the
Security Council, and tried to get the resolution delayed. But all of Israel's machinations to
derail this resolution failed and that is what Mueller was investigating, the intervention and
disruption of American foreign policy by private citizens who had no official role.
This speaks to the power of the Israel lobby and of Israel itself to disrupt our foreign
policy. Very few people have ever been charged with committing an illegal act by advocating on
behalf of Israel. That is one of the reasons why this is such an important development. Until
now, the lobby has really ruled supreme on the issue of Israel and Palestine in US foreign
policy. Now it is possible that a private citizen will actually be made to pay a price for
that.
This is an important development because the lobby till now has run roughshod over our
foreign policy in this area and this may act as a restraining order against blatant disruption
of US foreign policy by people like this.
Bernstein: So this information is a part of Michael Flynn's plea. Anyone studying this would
learn something about Michael Flynn and it would be part of the prosecution's
investigation.
Silverstein:
That's absolutely right. One thing to note here is that it is reporters who
have raised the issue of the Logan Act, not Mueller or Flynn's people or anyone in the Trump
administration. But I do think that Logan is a very important part of this plea deal, even if
it is not mentioned explicitly.
Bernstein: If the special prosecutor had smoking-gun information that the Trump
administration colluded with Russia, in the way they colluded with Israel before coming to
power, this would be a huge revelation. But it is definitely collusion when it comes to
Israel.
Silverstein: Absolutely. If this were Russia, it would be on the front page of every major
newspaper in the United States and the leading story on the TV news. Because this is Israel and
because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby and they have so much influence
on US policy concerning Israel, it has managed to stay on the back burner. Only two or three
media outlets besides mine have raised this issue of Logan and collusion. Kushner and Flynn may
be the first American citizens charged under the Logan Act for interfering on behalf of Israel
in our foreign policy. This is a huge issue and it has hardly been raised at all.
Bernstein: As you know, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has made a career out of investigating the
Russia-gate charges. She says that she has read all this material carefully, so she must have
read about Flynn and Israel, but I haven't heard her on this issue at all.
Silverstein:
Even progressive journalists, who you'd think would be going after this with a
vengeance, are frightened off by the fact the lobby really bites back. So, aside from outlets
like the Intercept and the Electronic Intifada, there is a lot of hesitation about going after
the Israel lobby. People are afraid because they know that there is a high price to be paid. It
goes from being purely journalism to being a personal and political vendetta when they get you
in their sights. In fact, one of the reasons I feel my blog is so important is that what I do
is challenge Israeli policy and Israeli intervention in places where it doesn't belong.
Bernstein: Jared Kushner is the point man for the Trump administration on Israel. He has
talked about having a "vision for peace." Do you think it is a problem that this is someone
with a long, close relationship with the prime minister of Israel and, in fact, runs a
foundation that invests in the building of illegal Israeli settlements? Might this be
problematic?
Silverstein:
It is quite nefarious, actually. When Jared Kushner was a teenager, Netanyahu
used to stay at the Kushner family home when he visited the United States. This relationship
with one of the most extreme right political figures in Israel goes back decades. And it is not
just Kushner himself, but all the administration personnel dealing with these so-called peace
negotiations, including Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, the ambassador. These are all
orthodox Jews who tend to have very nationalist views when it comes to Israel. They all support
settlements financially through foundations. These are not honest brokers.
We could talk at length about the history of US personnel who have been negotiators for
Middle East peace. All of them have been favorable to Israel and answerable to the Israel
lobby, including Dennis Ross and Makovsky, who served in the last administration. These people
are dyed-in-the-wool ultra-nationalist supporters of [Israeli] settlements. They have no
business playing any role in negotiating a peace deal.
My prediction all along has been that these peace negotiations will come to naught, even
though they seem to have bought the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, which is something new in the
process. The Palestinians can never accept a deal that has been negotiated by Kushner and
company because it will be far too favorable to Israel and it will totally neglect the
interests of the Palestinians.
Bernstein: It has been revealed that Kushner supports the building of settlements in the
West Bank. Most people don't understand the politics of what is going on there, but it appears
to be part of an ethnic cleansing.
Silverstein:
The settlements have always been a violation of international law, ever since
Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967. The Geneva Conventions direct an occupying power to
withdraw from territory that was not its own. In 1967 Israel invaded Arab states and conquered
the West Bank and Gaza but this has never been recognized or accepted by any nation until
now.
The fact that Kushner and his family are intimately involved in supporting
settlements–as are David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt–is completely outrageous. No
member of any previous US administration would have been allowed to participate with these
kinds of financial investments in support of settlements. Of course, Trump doesn't understand
the concept of conflict of interest because he is heavily involved in such conflicts himself.
But no party in the Middle East except Israel is going to consider the US an honest broker and
acceptable as a mediator.
When they announce this deal next January, no one in the Arab World is going to accept it,
with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia because they have other fish to fry in terms of
Iran. The next three years are going to be interesting, supposing Trump lasts out his term. My
prediction is that the peace plan will fail and that it will lead to greater violence in the
Middle East. It will not simply lead to a vacuum, it will lead to a deterioration in conditions
there.
Bernstein: The Trump transition team was actually approached directly by the Israeli
government to try to intercede at the United Nations.
Silverstein:
I'm assuming it was Netanyahu who went directly to Kushner and Trump. Now, we
haven't yet found out that Trump directly knew about this but it is very hard to believe
that Trump didn't endorse this. Now that we know that Mueller has access to all of the emails
of the transition team, there is little doubt that they have been able to find their smoking
gun. Flynn's plea meant that they basically had him dead to rights. It remains to be seen what
will happen with Kushner but I would think that this would play some role in either the
prosecution of Kushner or some plea deal.
Bernstein: The other big story, of course, is the decision by the Trump administration to
move the US embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. Was there any pre-election collusion in that
regard and what are the implications?
Silverstein:
Well, it's a terrible decision which goes against forty to fifty years of US
foreign policy. It also breaches all international understanding. All of our allies in the
European Union and elsewhere are aghast at this development. There is now a campaign in the
United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the announcement, which we will
veto, but the next step will be to go to the General Assembly, where such a resolution will
pass easily.
The question is how much anger, violence and disruption this is going to cause around the
world, especially in the Arab and Muslim world. This is a slow-burning fuse. It is not going to
explode right now. The issue of Jerusalem is so vital that this is not something that is simply
going to go away. This is going to be a festering sore in the Muslim world and among
Palestinians. We have already seen attacks on Israeli soldiers and citizens and there will be
many more.
As to collusion in all of this, since Trump always said during the campaign that this was
what he was going to do, it might be difficult to treat this in the same way as the UN
resolution. The UN resolution was never on anybody's radar and nobody knew the role that Trump
was playing behind the scenes with that–as opposed to Trump saying right from the get-go
that Jerusalem was going to be recognized as the capital of Jerusalem.
By doing that, they have completely abrogated any Palestinian interest in Jerusalem. This is
a catastrophic decision that really excludes the United States from being an honest broker here
and shows our true colors in terms of how pro-Israel we are.
As most regular readers of CN already know, some dynamite books on the inordinate amount
of influence pro-Israel zealots have on Washington:
1.) 'The Host and the Parasite' by Greg Felton
2.) 'Power of Israel in the United States' by James Petras
3.) 'They Dare to Speak Out' by Paul Findley
4.) 'The Israel Lobby' by Mearsheimer and Walt
5.) 'Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of U.S. Power' by James Petras
I suggest that anyone relatively knew to this neglected topic peruse a few of the
aforementioned titles. An inevitable backlash by the citizens of the United States is
eventually forthcoming against the Zionist Power Configuration. It's crucial that this
impending backlash remain democratic, non-violent, eschews anti-Semitism, and travels in a
progressive in direction.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 5:47 pm
Which one would you suggest? I already read "The Israel Lobby."
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:38 pm
Findley and Mearsheimer are certainly worthwhile. I will look for Petras.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:38 pm
If you haven't already read them, the end/footnotes in "The Israel Lobby" are more
illuminating.
That influence is also shown, of course, by the fact that Obama waited until the midnight
hours of his tenure and after the 2016 election to even start working on this resolution.
While I think Bibi is an idiot, I also think the Logan Act is overinvoked, overstated,
probably of dubious legal value and also of dubious constitutional value.
In short, especially because Trump had been elected, though not yet inaugurated, I think
he is not at all guilty of a Logan Act violation. This is nothing close to Spiro Agnew
calling Anna Chenault from the airplane in August 1968.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:41 pm
Probably true, although evidence of extreme collusion with Israel eliminates any case
against Russia, with whom we have far more reasons for amity. Bringing out the Israel
collusion greatly improves public understanding of political corruption. Perhaps it will
awaken some to the Agnew-Chennault betrayal of the people of the US.
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:32 am
It's ironic that Russia-gate is turning out to be Israel's effort to distract attention
from its complete control over the Democratic party in 2016. From Israeli billionaires behind
the scenes to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at the helm.
The leaked emails showed the corruption
plainly, and based on the ACTUAL evidence (recorded download time), most likely came from a
highly disgruntled insider. The picture was starting to spill into public view. I'd estimate
the real huge worry was that if this stuff came out, it could bring out other Israeli
secrets, like their involvement in 9/11. That would mean actual jail time. Might be hard to
buy your way out of that no matter how much money you have.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 10:48 pm
The Logan act states that anyone who negotiates with an enemy of the US, and Israel is not
defined as an enemy.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 6:59 pm
The Logan act would not apply here, although I wish it would. I don't think anyone has
been convicted based on this act, and they were part of a transition team not to mention the
Logan act clearly states a private citizen who attempts to negotiate with an enemy state, and
that certainly doesn't apply to Israel. In this administration their bias is so blatant that
they can install Kushner as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestine peace process while his
family has a close relationship with Netanyahu, and he runs a foundation that invests in the
building of illegal settlements which goes against the Geneva conventions. Hopefully Trump's
blatant siding with Israel will receive a lot of backlash as did his plan to make Jerusalem
the capital of Israel.
I also found that so called progressive internet sites don't cover this the way they
should.
Al Pinto , December 24, 2017 at 9:16 am
@Annie
"The Logan act would not apply here, although I wish it would."
You and me both .
From the point of starting to read this article, it has been in my mind that the Logan act
would not apply here. After reading most of the comments, it became clear that not many
people viewed this as such. Yes, Joe Tedesky did as well
The UN is the "clearing house" for international politics, where countries freely contact
each other's for getting support for their cause behind the scene. The support sought after
could be voting for or against the resolution on hand. At times, as Israel did, countries
reach out to perceived enemies as well, if they could not secure sufficient support for their
cause. This is the normal activity of the UN diplomacy.
Knowing that the outgoing administration would not support its cause, Israel reached out
to the incoming administration to delay the vote on the UN resolution. I fail to see anything
wrong with Israel's action even in this case; Israel is not an enemy state to the US. As
such, there has been no violation of any acts by the incoming administration, even if they
tried to secure veto vote for Israel. I do not like it, but no action by Mueller in this case
is correct.
People, just like the article in itself, implying that the Logan Act applies in this case
are just plain wrong. Not just wrong, but their anti-Israel bias is in plain view.
Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an
enemy state. Even then, Russia contacting the incoming administration is not a violation of
the Logan Act. That is just normal diplomacy in the background between countries. What would
be a violation is that the contacted official acted on the behalf of Russia and tried to
influence the outgoing administration's decision. That is what the Mueller investigation
tries to prove hopelessly
"Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an
enemy state." So that is how it works, the White House says it is an enemy state and
therefore it is. The so called declaration is the hammer used for trying to make contact with
Russia a criminal offense. We are not at war with Russia although we see our leaders doing
their best to provoke Russia into one.
Annie , December 24, 2017 at 1:55 pm
Thanks for your reply. When I read the article and it referenced the Logan Act, which I am
familiar with in that I've read about it before, I was surprised that Bernstein and
Silverstein even brought it up because it so obviously does not apply in this case, since
Israel is not considered an enemy state. Many have even referenced it as flimsy when it comes
to convictions against those in Trump's transition team who had contacts with Russia. No one
has ever been convicted under the Logan Act.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:41 pm
The Logan Act either should apply equally, or not apply at all. This "Russia-gate" hype
seems to apply it selectively.
mrtmbrnmn , December 23, 2017 at 7:36 pm
You guys are blinded by the light. The Israel connection disclosed by the malpracticer
hack Mueller in the recent Flynn-flam just made Trump bullet-proof (so to speak).
There is no doubt that Trump is Bibi's and the Saudi's ventriloquist dummy and Jared has
been an Israel agent of influence since he was 12.
But half the Dementedcrat Sore Loser Brigade will withdraw from the field of battle (not
to mention most of the GOP living dead too) if publically and noisily tying Israel to Trump's
tail becomes the only route to his removal. Which it would have to be, as there is no there
there regarding the yearlong trumped-up PutinPutinPutin waterboarding of Trump.
Immediately (if not sooner) the mighty (pro-Israel) Donor Bank of Singer (Paul), Saban
(Haim), Sachs (Goldman) & Adelson (Sheldon), would change their passwords and leave these
politicians/beggars with empty begging bowls. End of $ordid $tory.
alley cat , December 23, 2017 at 7:45 pm
So Mueller caught Kushner and Flynn red-handed, sabotaging the Obama administration? What
of it? He can't use that evidence, because it would inculpate the Zionist neocons that are
orchestrating his farcical, Stalinist witchhunt. And Mueller, being an efficient terminator
bot, knows that his target is Russia, not Israel.
Mueller can use that evidence of sabotage and/or obstruction of justice to try to coerce
false confessions from Kushner and Flynn. But what are the chances of that, barring short
stayovers for them at some CIA black site?
So Mueller will just have to continue swamp-fishing for potential perjurers ahem
witnesses, for the upcoming show trials (to further inflame public opinion against Russia and
Russia sympathizers). And continue he will, because (as we all know from Schwarzenegger's
flicks), the only way to stop the terminator is to terminate him/it first.
Leslie F. , December 23, 2017 at 8:28 pm
He used it, along with other info, to turn flip Flynn and possibly can use it the same way
again Kusher. Not all evidence has end up in court to be useful.
JWalters , December 23, 2017 at 8:40 pm
This is an extremely important story, excellently reported. All the main "facts" Americans
think they know about Israel are, amazingly, flat-out lies.
1. Israel was NOT victimized by powerful Arab armies. Israel overpowered and victimized a
defenseless, civilian Arab population. Military analysts knew the Arab armies were in poor
shape and would not be able to resist the zionist army.
2. Muslim "citizens" of Israel do NOT have all the same rights as Jews.
3. Israelis are NOT under threat from the indigineous Palestinians, but Palestinians are
under constant threats of theft and death from the Israelis.
4. Israel does NOT share America's most fundamental values, which rest on the principle of
equal human rights for all.
Maintaining such a blanket of major lies for decades requires immense power. And this
power would have to be exercised "under the radar" to be effective. That requires even more
power. Both Congress and the press have to be controlled. How much power does it take to turn
"Progressive Rachel" into "Tel Aviv Rachel"? To turn "It Takes a Village" Hillary into
"Slaughter a Village" Hillary? It takes immense power AND ruthlessness.
War profiteers have exactly this combination of immense war profits and the ruthlessness
to victimize millions of people. "War Profiteers and the Roots of the War on Terror" http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com
Vast war profits easily afford to buy the mainstream media. And controlling campaign
contributions for members of Congress is amazingly cheap in the big picture. Such a squalid
sale of souls.
And when simple bribery is not enough, they ruin a person's life through blackmail or
false character assassination. And if those don't work they use death threats, including to
family members, and finally murder. Their ruthlessness is unrestrained. John Perkins has
described these tactics in "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man".
For readers who haven't seen it, here is an excellent riff on the absurdly overwhelming
evidence for Israel's influence compared to that of Russia, at a highly professional news and
analysis website run by Jewish anti-Zionists. "Let's talk about Russian influence" http://mondoweiss.net/2016/08/about-russian-influence/
mike k , December 23, 2017 at 8:44 pm
Hitler and Mussolini, Trump and Netanyahoo – matches made in Hell. These characters
are so obviously, blatantly evil that it is deeply disturbing that people fail to see that,
and instead go to great lengths to find some complicated flaws in these monsters.
mike k , December 23, 2017 at 8:49 pm
Keep it simple folks. No need for complex analyses. Just remember that these characters as
simply as evil as it gets, and proceed from there. These asinine shows that portray mobsters
as complex human beings are dangerously deluding. If you want to be victimized by these
types, this kind of overthinking is just the way to go.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 9:00 pm
There is a modern theory of fiction that insists upon the portrayal of inconsistency in
characters, both among the good guys and the bad guys. It is useful to show how those who do
wrongs have made specific kinds of errors that make them abnormal, and that those who do
right are not perfect but nonetheless did the right thing. Instead it is used by commercial
writers to argue that the good are really bad, and the bad are really good, which is of
course the philosophy of oligarchy-controlled mass publishers.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:54 pm
A very important article by Dennis Bernstein, and it is very appropriate that non-zionist
Jews are active against the extreme zionist corruption of our federal government. I am sure
that they are reviled by the zionists for interfering with the false denunciations of racism
against the opponents of zionism. Indeed critics face a very nearly totalitarian power of
zionism, which in league with MIC/WallSt opportunism has displaced democracy altogether in
the US.
backwardsevolution , December 23, 2017 at 9:18 pm
A nice little set-up by the Obama administration. Perhaps it was entrapment? Who set it
up? Flynn and Kushner should have known better to fall for it. So at the end of his
Presidency, Obama suddenly gets balls and wants to slap down Israel? Yeah, right.
Nice to have leverage over people, though, isn't it? If you're lucky and play your cards
right, you might even be lucky enough to land an impeachment.
Of course, I'm just being cynical. No one would want to overturn democracy, would
they?
Certainly people like Comey, Brenner, Clinton, Clapper, Mueller, Rosenstein wouldn't want
that, would they?
Joe Tedesky , December 23, 2017 at 10:33 pm
I just can't see any special prosecutor investigating Israel-Gate. Between what the
Zionist donors donate to these creepy politicians, too what goods they have on these same
mischievous politicians, I just can't see any investigation into Israel's collusion with the
Trump Administration going anywhere. Netanyahu isn't Putin, and Russia isn't Israel. Plus,
Israel is considered a U.S. ally, while Russia is being marked as a Washington rival. Sorry,
this news regarding Israel isn't going to be ranted on about for the next 18 months, like the
MSM has done with Russia, because our dear old Israel is the only democracy in the Middle
East, or so they tell us. So, don't get your hopes up.
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:33 am
It's true the Israelis have America's politicians by the ears and the balls. But as this
story gets better known, politicians will start getting questions at their town meetings.
Increasingly the politicians will gag on what Israel is force-feeding them, until finally
they reach a critical mass of vomit in Congress.
Joe Tedesky , December 24, 2017 at 11:12 am
I hope you are right JWalters. Although relying on a Zionist controlled MSM doesn't give
hope for the news getting out properly. Again I hope you are right JWalters. Joe
Actually, Netanyahu was so desperate to have the resolution pulled and not voted on that
he reached out to any country that might help him after the foreign minister of New Zealand,
one of its co-sponsors refused to pull the plug after a testy phone exchange with the Israeli
PM ending up threatening an Israeli boycott oturnef the KIwis.
He then turned to his buddy, Vladimir Putin, who owed him a favor for having Israel's UN
delegate absent himself for the UNGA vote on sanctioning Russia after its annexation of
Crimea.
Putin then called Russia's UN Ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, since deceased, and asked him to
get the other UNSC ambassadors to postpone the vote until Trump took over the White House but
the other ambassadors weren't buying it. Given Russia's historic public position regarding
the settlements, Churkin had no choice to vote Yes with the others.
This story was reported in detail in the Israeli press but blacked out in the US which,
due to Zionist influence on the media, does not want the American public to know about the
close ties between Putin and Netanyahu which has led to the Israeli PM making five state
visits there in the last year and a half.
Had Clinton won the White House we can assume that there would have been no US veto. That
Netanyahu apparently knew in advance that the US planned to veto the resolution was, I
suspect, leaked to the Israelis by US delegate Samantha Power, who was clearly unhappy at
having to abstain.
Abe , December 24, 2017 at 12:39 am
The Israeli Prime Minister made five state visits to Russia in the last year and a half to
make sure the Russians don't accidentally on purpose blast Israeli warplanes from the sky
over Syria (like they oughtta). Putin tries not to snicker when Netanyahu bloviates ad
nauseum about the purported "threat" posed by Iran.
He thinks Putin is a RATS ASS like the yankee government
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:34 am
"This story was reported in detail in the Israeli press but blacked out in the
US"
We've just had a whole cluster of big stories involving Israel that have all been
essentially blacked out in the US press. e.g. "Dionne and Shields ignore the Adelson in the room" http://mondoweiss.net/2017/12/jerusalem-israels-capital
This is not due to chance. There is no doubt that the US mainstream media is wholly
controlled by the Israelis.
alley cat , December 24, 2017 at 4:49 am
"He [Netanyahu] then turned to his buddy, Vladimir Putin "
Jeff, that characterization of Putin and Netanyahu's relationship makes no sense, since
the Russians have consistently opposed Zionism and Putin has been no exception, having
spoiled Zionist plans for the destruction of Syria.
"Had Clinton won the White House we can assume that there would have been no US
veto."
Not sure where you're going with that, since the US vote was up to Obama, who wanted to
get some payback for all of Bibi's efforts to sabotage Obama's treaty with Iran.
For the record, Zionism has had no more rabid supporter than the Dragon Lady. If we're
going to make assumptions, we could start by assuming that if she had won the White House
we'd all be dead by now, thanks to her obsession (at the instigation of her Zionist/neocon
sponsors) with declaring no-fly zones in Syria.
Brendan , December 24, 2017 at 6:18 am
Trump and Kushner have nothing to worry about, even if a smoking gun is found that proves
their collusion with Israel. That's because the entire political and media establishment will
simply ignore the Israeli connection.
Journalists and politicians will even continue to present Mike Flynn's contacts as
evidence of collusion with Russia. They'll keep on repeating that "Flynn lied about his phone
call to the Russian ambassador". But there will be no mention of the fact that the purpose of
this contact was to support Israel and not any alleged Russian interference.
Skip Scott , December 24, 2017 at 7:59 am
I think you have it right Brendan. The MSM, Intelligence Community, and Mueller would
never go down any path that popularized undue Israeli influence on US foreign policy.
"Nothing to see here folks, move along."
The zionist will stop at nothing to control the middle east with American taxpayers
money/military equiptment its a win win for the zionist they control America lock stock and
barrel a pity though it is a great country to be led by a jewish entity.
What will Israel-Palestine look like twenty years from now? Will it remain an apartheid
regime, a regime without any Palestinians, or something different. The Trump decision, which
the world rejects, brings the issue of "final" settlement to the fore. In a way we can go
back to the thirties and the British Mandate. Jewish were fleeing Europe, many coming to
Palestine. The British, on behalf of the Zionists, were delaying declaring Palestine a state
with control of its own affairs. Seeing the mass immigration and chafing at British foot
dragging, the Arabs rebelled, What happened then was that the British, responding to numerous
pressures notably war with Germany, acted by granting independence and granting Palestine
control of its borders.
With American pressure and the mass exodus of Jews from Europe, Jews defied the British
resulting in Jewish resistance. What followed then was a UN plan to divide the land with a
Jerusalem an international city administered by the UN. The Arabs rebelled and lost much of
what the UN plan provided and Jerusalem as an international city was scrapped.
Will there be a second serious attempt to settle the issue of the land and the status of
Jerusalem? Will there be a serious move toward a single state? How will the matter of
Jerusalem be resolved. The two state solution has always been a fantasy and acquiescence of
Palestinians to engage in this charade exposes their leaders to charges of posturing for
perks. Imagined options could go on and on but will there be serious options placed before
the world community or will the boots on the ground Israeli policies continue?
As I have commented before, it will most probably be the Jewish community in Israel and
the world that shapes the future and if the matter is to be resolved that is fair to both
parties, it will be they that starts the ball rolling.
Zachary Smith , December 24, 2017 at 1:34 pm
As I have commented before, it will most probably be the Jewish community in Israel and
the world that shapes the future and if the matter is to be resolved that is fair to both
parties, it will be they that starts the ball rolling.
The Nice Zionists responsible for the thefts and murders for the past 69 years along with
the "Jewish Community" in the rest of the world will resolve the matter so as to be fair to
both parties. This is mind-boggling fantasy.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 5:56 pm
Truly mind-boggling. Ahistorical, and as you say, fantasy.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 5:48 pm
FFS, Netanyahu aired a political commercial in Florida for Romney saying vote for this guy
(against Obama)! I mean, it doesn't get any more overtly manipulative than that. Period. End
of story.
$50K of Facebook ads about puppies pales in comparison to that blatant, prima facia,
public manipulation. God, I hate to go all "Israel controls the media" but there it is. Not even a discussion. Just a fact.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:11 pm
Just for the record, Richard Silverstein blocked me on Twitter because I pointed out that
he slammed someone who was suggesting that the Assad government was fighting for its
(Syria's) life by fighting terrorists. Actually, more specifically, because of that he read
my "Free Palestine" bio on Twitter and called me a Hamas supporter (no Hamas mentioned) and a
"moron" for some seeming contradiction.
I also have to point out that he "fist pumped" Hillary Clinton at Mohammed Ali's eulogy.
If he's as astute as he purports to be, he has to know that Hillary would have invaded Syria
and killed a few hundred thousand more Syrians for the simple act of defiantly preserving
their country. By almost any read of Ali's history, he would have been adamantly ("killing
brown people") against that. But there was Silverstein using the platform to promote,
arguably, perpetual war.
Silverstein is probably not a good (ie. consistent) arbiter of Israeli impact on US
politics. Just sayin'.
This may be a tad ot but it relates to the alleged hacking of the DNC, the role debbie
wasserman schultz plays in the spy ring (awan bros) in house of rep servers: I have long
suspected that mossad has their fingers in this entire mess. FWIW
Good site, BTW.
Zachary Smith , December 24, 2017 at 7:35 pm
I can't recall why I removed the Tikun Olam site from my bookmarks – it happened
quite a while back. Generally I do that when I feel the blogger crossed some kind of personal
red line. Something Mr. Silverstein wrote put him over that line with me.
In the course of a search I found that at the neocon NYT. Mr. Silverstein claims several
things I find unbelievable, and from that alone I wonder about his ultimate motives. I may be
excessively touchy about this, but that's how it is.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 8:51 pm
Yeah Zachary, "wondering about ultimate motives" is probably a good way to put it/his
views. He's obviously conflicted, if not deferential in some aspects of Israeli policy. He
really was a hero of mine, but now I just don't get whether what he says is masking something
or a true belief. He says some good stuff, but, but, but .
P. Michael Garber , December 24, 2017 at 11:54 pm
Yeah I found a couple of Silverstein's statements to be closer to neocon propaganda than
reality: "Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel
lobby . . ." "Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible
relations, they went to Trump instead." My impression was that the whole "terrible relationship between Obama and Netanyahu" was
manufactured by the Israel lobby to bully Obama. However these are small blips within an otherwise solid critique of the Israel lobby's
influence.
Late Robert Parry was a great investigative reporter...
Notable quotes:
"... So, the open secret of Israeli influence is studiously ignored, even as presidential candidates prostrate themselves before the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both appeared before AIPAC in 2016, with Clinton promising to take the U.S.-Israeli relationship "to the next level" – whatever that meant – and Trump vowing not to "pander" and then pandering like crazy. ..."
"... Israeli officials and AIPAC also coordinate their strategies to maximize political influence, which is derived in large part by who gets the lobby's largesse and who doesn't. On the rare occasion when members of Congress step out of line – and take a stand that offends Israeli leaders – they can expect a well-funded opponent in their next race, a tactic that dates back decades. ..."
"... Well-respected members, such as Rep. Paul Findley and Sen. Charles Percy (both Republicans from Illinois), were early victims of the Israeli lobby's wrath when they opened channels of communication with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the cause of seeking peace. Findley was targeted and defeated in 1982; Percy in 1984. ..."
"... Today, many U.S. pols grovel before the Israeli government seeking a sign of favor from Prime Minister Netanyahu, almost like Medieval kings courting the blessings of the Pope at the Vatican. ..."
"... During the 2008 campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu viewed with suspicion, traveled to Israel to demonstrate sympathy for Israelis within rocket-range of Gaza while steering clear of showing much empathy for the Palestinians. ..."
"... Money, of course, has become the lifeblood of American politics – and American supporters of Israel have been particularly strategic in how they have exploited that reality. ..."
"... One of Israel's most devoted advocates, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has poured millions of dollars in "dark money" into political candidates and groups that support Israel's interests. Adelson, who has advocated dropping a nuclear bomb inside Iran to coerce its government, is a Trump favorite having donated a record $5 million to Trump's inaugural celebration. ..."
"... Israel's involvement in U.S. politics also can be covert. For instance, the evidence is now overwhelming that the Israeli government of right-wing Prime Minister Menachem Begin played a key role in helping Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980 strike a deal with Iran to frustrate President Jimmy Carter's efforts to free 52 American hostages before Election Day. ..."
"... In a 1992 memoir, Profits of War , former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe also noted that Begin and other Likud leaders held Carter in contempt. ..."
"... "Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp David," Ben-Menashe wrote. "As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from Israel, did not create a comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue hanging on Israel's back." ..."
"... Ben-Menashe was among a couple of dozen government officials and intelligence operatives who described how Reagan's campaign, mostly through future CIA Director William Casey and past CIA Director George H.W. Bush, struck a deal in 1980 with senior Iranians who got promises of arms via Israel in exchange for keeping the hostages through the election and thus humiliating Carter. (The hostages were finally released on Jan. 20, 1981, after Reagan was sworn in as President.) ..."
"... In particular, NED has been at the center of efforts to flip elections to U.S.-backed candidates, such as in Nicaragua in 1990, or to sponsor "color revolutions," which typically organize around some color as the symbol for mass demonstrations. Ukraine – on Russia's border – has been the target of two such operations, the Orange Revolution in 2004, which helped install anti-Russian President Viktor Yushchenko, and the Maidan ouster of elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. ..."
"... NED president Carl Gershman, a neoconservative who has run NED since its founding in 1983, openly declared that Ukraine was "the biggest prize" in September 2013 -- just months before the Maidan protests -- as well as calling it an important step toward ousting Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2016, Gershman called directly for regime change in Russia. ..."
"... In some European circles, the neocons are described as "Israel's American agents," which may somewhat overstate the direct linkage between Israel and the neocons although a central tenet of neocon thinking is that there must be no daylight between the U.S. and Israel. The neocons say U.S. politicians must stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel even if that means the Americans sidling up to the Israelis rather than any movement the other way. ..."
"... Since the mid-1990s, American neocons have worked closely with Benjamin Netanyahu. Several prominent neocons (including former Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser and Robert Loewenberg) advised Netanyahu's 1996 campaign and urged a new strategy for "securing the realm." Essentially, the idea was to replace negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab states with "regime change" for governments that were viewed as troublesome to Israel, including Iraq and Syria. ..."
"... Bush also could pursue "regime change" in Syria only as a proxy effort of subversion, rather than a full-scale U.S. invasion. President Barack Obama escalated the Syrian proxy war in 2011 with the support of Israel and its strange-bedfellow allies in Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni-ruled Gulf States, which hated Syria's government because it was allied with Shiite-ruled Iran -- and Sunnis and Shiites have been enemies since the Seventh Century. Israel insists that the U.S. take the Sunni side, even if that puts the U.S. in bed with Al Qaeda . ..."
"... In Campaign 2016, both Clinton and Trump wore their love for Israel on their sleeves, Clinton promising to take the relationship to "the next level" (a phrase that young couples often use when deciding to go from heavy petting to intercourse). Trump reminded AIPAC that he had a Jewish grandchild and vowed to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. ..."
"... By contrast to Israel's long history of playing games with U.S. politics, the Russian government stands accused of trying to undermine the U.S. political process recently by hacking into emails of the Democratic National Committee -- revealing the DNC's improper opposition to Sen. Bernie Sanders's campaign -- and of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta -- disclosing the contents of Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street and pay-to-play aspects of the Clinton Foundation -- and sharing that information with the American people via WikiLeaks. ..."
Special Report: As Official Washington fumes about Russia-gate, Israel's far more
significant political-influence-and-propaganda campaigns are ignored. No one dares suggest a
probe of Israel-gate, says Robert Parry.
The other day, I asked a longtime Democratic Party insider who is working on the Russia-gate
investigation which country interfered more in U.S. politics, Russia or Israel. Without a
moment's hesitation, he replied, "Israel, of course."
Which underscores my concern about the hysteria raging across Official Washington about
"Russian meddling" in the 2016 presidential campaign: There is no proportionality applied to
the question of foreign interference in U.S. politics. If there were, we would have a far more
substantive investigation of Israel-gate.
The problem is that if anyone mentions the truth about Israel's clout, the person is
immediately smeared as "anti-Semitic" and targeted by Israel's extraordinarily sophisticated
lobby and its many media/political allies for vilification and marginalization.
So, the open secret of Israeli influence is studiously ignored, even as presidential
candidates prostrate themselves before the annual conference of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee. Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump both appeared before AIPAC in 2016, with Clinton promising to take the
U.S.-Israeli relationship "to the next level" – whatever that meant – and Trump
vowing not to "pander" and then pandering like crazy.
Congress is no different. It has given Israel's controversial Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu a
record-tying three invitations to address joint sessions of Congress (matching the number
of times British Prime Minister Winston Churchill appeared). We then witnessed the Republicans
and Democrats competing to see how often their members could bounce up and down and who could
cheer Netanyahu the loudest, even when the Israeli prime minister was instructing the Congress
to follow his position on Iran rather than President Obama's.
Israeli officials and AIPAC also coordinate their strategies to maximize political
influence, which is derived in large part by who gets the lobby's largesse and who doesn't. On
the rare occasion when members of Congress step out of line – and take a stand that
offends Israeli leaders – they can expect a well-funded opponent in their next race, a
tactic that dates back decades.
Well-respected members, such as Rep. Paul Findley and Sen. Charles Percy (both Republicans
from Illinois), were early victims of the Israeli lobby's wrath when they opened channels of
communication with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the cause of seeking peace. Findley
was targeted and defeated in 1982; Percy in 1984.
Findley recounted his experience in a 1985 book, They Dare to Speak Out: People and
Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby , in which Findley called the lobby "the 700-pound
gorilla in Washington." The book was harshly criticized in a New York Times review by Adam
Clymer, who called it "an angry, one-sided book that seems often to be little more than a
stringing together of stray incidents."
Enforced Silence
Since then, there have been fewer and fewer members of Congress or other American
politicians who have dared to speak out, judging that – when it comes to the Israeli
lobby – discretion is the better part of valor. Today, many U.S. pols grovel before the
Israeli government seeking a sign of favor from Prime Minister Netanyahu, almost like Medieval
kings courting the blessings of the Pope at the Vatican.
During the 2008 campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu viewed with suspicion,
traveled to Israel to demonstrate sympathy for Israelis within rocket-range of Gaza while
steering clear of showing much empathy for the Palestinians.
In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney tried to exploit the tense Obama-Netanyahu
relationship by stopping in Israel to win a tacit endorsement from Netanyahu. The 2016 campaign
was no exception with both Clinton and Trump stressing their love of Israel in their
appearances before AIPAC.
Money, of course, has become the lifeblood of American politics – and American
supporters of Israel have been particularly strategic in how they have exploited that
reality.
One of Israel's most devoted advocates, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has poured millions
of dollars in "dark money" into political candidates and groups that support Israel's
interests. Adelson, who has advocated dropping a nuclear bomb
inside Iran to coerce its government, is a Trump favorite having donated
a record $5 million to Trump's inaugural celebration.
Of course, many Israel-connected political donations are much smaller but no less
influential. A quarter century ago, I was told how an aide to a Democratic foreign policy
chairman, who faced a surprisingly tough race after redistricting, turned to the head of AIPAC
for help and, almost overnight, donations were pouring in from all over the country. The
chairman was most thankful.
The October Surprise Mystery
Israel's involvement in U.S. politics also can be covert. For instance, the evidence is now
overwhelming that the Israeli government of right-wing Prime Minister Menachem Begin played a
key role in helping Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980 strike a deal with Iran to frustrate
President Jimmy Carter's efforts to free 52 American hostages before Election Day.
President Jimmy Carter signing the Camp David peace agreement with Egypt's Anwar Sadat and
Israel's Menachem Begin.
Begin despised Carter for the Camp David Accords that forced Israel to give back the Sinai
to Egypt. Begin also believed that Carter was too sympathetic to the Palestinians and –
if he won a second term – would conspire with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to impose a
two-state solution on Israel.
Begin's contempt for Carter was not even a secret. In a 1991 book, The Last Option ,
senior Israeli intelligence and foreign policy official David Kimche explained Begin's motive
for dreading Carter's reelection. Kimche said Israeli officials had gotten wind of "collusion"
between Carter and Sadat "to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories
occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian
state."
Kimche continued, "This plan prepared behind Israel's back and without her knowledge must
rank as a unique attempt in United States's diplomatic history of short-changing a friend and
ally by deceit and manipulation."
But Begin recognized that the scheme required Carter winning a second term in 1980 when,
Kimche wrote, "he would be free to compel Israel to accept a settlement of the Palestinian
problem on his and Egyptian terms, without having to fear the backlash of the American Jewish
lobby."
In a 1992 memoir, Profits of War , former Israeli intelligence officer Ari
Ben-Menashe also noted that Begin and other Likud leaders held Carter in contempt.
"Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp David," Ben-Menashe
wrote. "As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from Israel, did not create a
comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue hanging on Israel's back."
So, in order to buy time for Israel to "change the facts on the ground" by moving Jewish
settlers into the West Bank, Begin felt Carter's reelection had to be prevented. A different
president also presumably would give Israel a freer hand to deal with problems on its northern
border with Lebanon.
Ben-Menashe was among a couple of dozen government officials and intelligence operatives who
described how Reagan's campaign, mostly through future CIA Director William Casey and past CIA
Director George H.W. Bush, struck a deal in
1980 with senior Iranians who got promises of arms via Israel in exchange for keeping the
hostages through the election and thus humiliating Carter. (The hostages were finally released
on Jan. 20, 1981, after Reagan was sworn in as President.)
Discrediting History
Though the evidence of the so-called October Surprise deal is far stronger than the current
case for believing that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign, Official Washington and the
mainstream U.S. media have refused to accept it, deeming it a "conspiracy theory."
President Ronald Reagan, delivering his Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1981, as the 52 U.S.
hostages in Iran are simultaneously released.
One of the reasons for the hostility directed against the 1980 case was the link to Israel,
which did not want its hand in manipulating the election of a U.S. president to become an
accepted part of American history. So, for instance, the Israeli government went to great
lengths to discredit Ben-Menashe after he began to speak with reporters and to give testimony
to the U.S. Congress.
When I was a Newsweek correspondent and first interviewed Ben-Menashe in 1990, the Israeli
government initially insisted that he was an impostor, that he had no connection to Israeli
intelligence. However, when I obtained documentary evidence of Ben-Menashe's work for a military
intelligence unit, the Israelis admitted that they had lied but then insisted that he was just
a low-level translator, a claim that was further contradicted by other documents showing that
he had traveled widely around the world on missions to obtain weapons for the Israel-to-Iran
arms pipeline.
Looking back over the history of U.S.-Israeli relations, it is clear that Israel exercised
significant influence over
U.S. presidents since its founding in 1948 , but the rise of Israel's right-wing Likud
Party in the 1970s – led by former Jewish terrorists Menachem Begin and Yitzhak
Shamir – marked a time when Israel shed any inhibitions about interfering directly in
U.S. politics.
Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in the photo from his U.S. Naval Intelligence ID.
Much as Begin and Shamir engaged in terror attacks on British officials and Palestinian
civilians during Israel's founding era, the Likudniks who held power in 1980 believed that the
Zionist cause trumped normal restraints on their actions. In other words, the ends justified
the means.
In the 1980s, Israel also mounted spying operations aimed at the U.S. government, including
those of intelligence analyst Jonathan
Pollard , who fed highly sensitive documents to Israel and – after being caught and
spending almost three decades in prison – was paroled and welcomed as a hero inside
Israel.
A History of Interference
But it is true that foreign interference in U.S. politics is as old as the American
Republic. In the 1790s, French agents – working with the Jeffersonians – tried to
rally Americans behind France's cause in its conflict with Great Britain. In part to frustrate
the French operation, the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Wanted Poster of the Palestine Police Force offering rewards for the capture of Stern Gang
terrorists: 1. Jaacov Levstein (Eliav), 2. Yitzhak Yezernitzky (Shamir), 3. Natan
Friedman-Yelin
In the Twentieth Century, Great Britain undertook covert influence operations to ensure U.S.
support in its conflicts with Germany, while German agents unsuccessfully sought the
opposite.
So, the attempts by erstwhile allies and sometimes adversaries to move U.S. foreign policy
in one direction or another is nothing new, and the U.S. government engages in similar
operations in countries all over the world, both overtly and covertly.
It was the CIA's job for decades to use propaganda and dirty tricks to ensure that pro-U.S.
politicians were elected or put in power in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, pretty much
everywhere the U.S. government perceived some interest. After the U.S. intelligence scandals of
the 1970s, however, some of that responsibility was passed to other organizations, such as the
U.S.-funded
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID).
NED, USAID and various "non-governmental organizations" (NGOs) finance activists,
journalists and other operatives to undermine political leaders who are deemed to be obstacles
to U.S. foreign policy desires.
In particular, NED has been at the center of efforts to flip elections to U.S.-backed
candidates, such as in Nicaragua in 1990, or to sponsor "color revolutions," which typically
organize around some color as the symbol for mass demonstrations. Ukraine – on Russia's
border – has been the target of two such operations, the Orange Revolution in 2004, which
helped install anti-Russian President Viktor Yushchenko, and the Maidan ouster of elected
pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
NED president Carl Gershman, a neoconservative who has run NED since its founding in 1983,
openly declared that Ukraine was "the biggest
prize" in September 2013 -- just months before the Maidan protests -- as well as calling it
an important step toward ousting Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2016, Gershman called directly
for regime change in Russia.
The Neoconservatives
Another key issue related to Israeli influence inside the United States is the role of the
neocons, a political movement that emerged in the 1970s as a number of hawkish Democrats
migrated to the Republican Party as a home for more aggressive policies to protect Israel and
take on the Soviet Union and Arab states.
Prominent neocon intellectual Robert Kagan. (Photo credit: Mariusz Kubik,
http://www.mariuszkubik.pl)
In some European circles, the neocons are described as "Israel's American agents," which may
somewhat overstate the direct linkage between Israel and the neocons although a central tenet
of neocon thinking is that there must be no daylight between the U.S. and Israel. The neocons
say U.S. politicians must stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel even if that means the
Americans sidling up to the Israelis rather than any movement the other way.
Since the mid-1990s, American neocons have worked closely with Benjamin Netanyahu. Several
prominent neocons (including former Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, Douglas Feith,
David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser and Robert Loewenberg) advised Netanyahu's 1996 campaign and
urged a new strategy for "securing the realm." Essentially, the idea was to replace
negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab states with "regime change" for governments that
were viewed as troublesome to Israel, including Iraq and Syria.
By 1998, the Project for the New American Century (led by neocons William Kristol and Robert
Kagan) was pressuring President Bill Clinton to invade Iraq, a plan that was finally put in
motion in 2003 under President George W. Bush.
But the follow-on plans to go after Syria and Iran were delayed because the Iraq War turned
into a bloody mess, killing some 4,500 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Bush could not turn to phase two until near the end of his presidency and then was frustrated
by a U.S. intelligence estimate concluding that Iran was not working on a nuclear bomb (which
was to be the pretext for a bombing campaign).
Bush also could pursue "regime change" in Syria only as a proxy effort of subversion, rather
than a full-scale U.S. invasion. President Barack Obama escalated the Syrian proxy war in 2011
with the support of Israel and its strange-bedfellow
allies in Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni-ruled Gulf States, which hated Syria's
government because it was allied with Shiite-ruled Iran -- and Sunnis and Shiites have been
enemies since the Seventh Century. Israel insists that the U.S. take the Sunni side, even if
that puts the U.S. in bed
with Al Qaeda .
But Obama dragged his heels on a larger U.S. military intervention in Syria and angered
Netanyahu further by negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program rather than
bomb-bomb-bombing Iran.
Showing the Love
Obama's perceived half-hearted commitment to Israeli interests explained Romney's campaign
2012 trip to seek Netanyahu's blessings. Even after winning a second term, Obama sought to
appease Netanyahu by undertaking a three-day trip to Israel in 2013 to show his love.
Still, in 2015, when Obama pressed ahead with the Iran nuclear agreement, Netanyahu went
over the President's head directly to Congress where he was warmly received, although the
Israeli prime minister ultimately failed to sink the Iran deal.
In Campaign 2016, both Clinton and Trump wore their love for Israel on their sleeves,
Clinton promising to take the relationship to "the next level" (a phrase that young couples
often use when deciding to go from heavy petting to intercourse). Trump reminded AIPAC that he
had a Jewish grandchild and vowed to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Both also bristled with hatred toward Iran, repeating the popular falsehood that "Iran is
the principal source of terrorism" when it is Saudi Arabia and other Sunni sheikdoms that have
been the financial and military supporters of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, the terror groups
most threatening to Europe and the United States.
By contrast to Israel's long history of playing games with U.S. politics, the Russian
government stands accused of trying to undermine the U.S. political process recently by hacking
into emails of the Democratic National Committee -- revealing the DNC's improper opposition to
Sen. Bernie Sanders's campaign -- and of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta -- disclosing
the contents of Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street and pay-to-play aspects of the Clinton
Foundation -- and sharing that information with the American people via WikiLeaks.
Although WikiLeaks denies getting the two batches of emails from the Russians, the U.S.
intelligence community says it has high confidence in its conclusions about Russian meddling
and the mainstream U.S. media treats the allegations as flat-fact.
The U.S. intelligence community also has accused the Russian government of raising
doubts in the minds of Americans about their political system by having RT, the
Russian-sponsored news network, hold debates for third-party candidates (who were excluded from
the two-party Republican-Democratic debates) and by having RT report on protests such as Occupy
Wall Street and issues such as "fracking."
The major U.S. news media and Congress seem to agree that the only remaining question is
whether evidence can be adduced showing that the Trump campaign colluded in this Russian
operation. For that purpose, a number of people associated with the Trump campaign are to be
hauled before Congress and made to testify on whether or not they are Russian agents.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other establishment-approved outlets
are working with major technology companies on how to marginalize
independent news sources and to purge "Russian propaganda" (often conflated with "fake
news") from the Internet.
It seems that no extreme is too extreme to protect the American people from the insidious
Russians and their Russia-gate schemes to sow doubt about the U.S. political process. But God
forbid if anyone were to suggest an investigation of Israel-gate.
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 ).
Trump is definitely deeply compromised politician, a marionette of a lobby, but not Russian
lobby. Just look at
Jared Kushner and Ivanka role in WH (the books Kushner Inc
shed some light on Trump son-in-law) This is both nepotism and pandering to Israeli lobby. As one
Amazon reviewer put it "I'd also advise counting your fingers after you shake hands with any of
the Kushners..." and "The best way to describe Kushner and Ivanka is that they are both nothing
but "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" - unpatriotic, self-enriching, lying, scheming, tax dodging
POS's."
Trump campaign was a large extent financed by Sheldon Adelson . Trump connection to
convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein are also of great concerns (
Flight logs reveal trips Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz took on Jeffrey Epstein's private jet
Daily Mail Online ) if we view this as an attempt to compromise and then control US
politicians. And the content of the hard drive of Anthony Wiener laptop was never revealed. Death
of Seth Rich was highly suspicious as was the content of Podesta email box. Mueller did not dare
to move his investigation in this direction.
Top-ranking Democrat, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman, Jerry Nadler did the rounds of
Sunday's political shows this morning but it wasn't until he reached the safety of CNN that he
decided to unleash his 'facts' in response to the narrative-crushing conclusions reached by
special counsel Robert Mueller.
"We know there was collusion," Nadler insisted several times during an appearance on CNN's
"State of the Union" while shrugging off Mueller's apparent facts - " Why there's been no
indictments, we don't know. "
"The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone
associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016
U.S. presidential election. As the report states: `[T]he investigation did not establish that
members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its
election interference activities.' |"
From page one of the Barr letter to the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and
Senate Judiciary Committees.
https://www.scribd.com/document/402973432/AG-March-24-2019-Letter-to-House-and-Senate-Judiciary-Committees#from_embed
Some call this merely the "end of the beginning." Further revelations will be emerging,
including from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz. " J ustice Department
Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed Thursday his office is still investigating
possible abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the DOJ and FBI in their
investigation into President Trump and associates of his 2016 campaign," reported the
Washington Examiner this week.
However, AG Barr's letter retells the tale of Russian Interference in our elections,
according to Mr. Mueller and his team's investigation and indictments. So, the anti-Trump
camp will undoubtedly continue to question the 2016 election results, and blame the defeat of
HRC on the "Reds." One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British
Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.
David Kramer, a long-time advisor to late Senator John McCain, revealed that he met with two Obama administration officials
to inquire about whether the anti-Trump dossier authored by former British spy Christopher Steele was being taken seriously.
In one case, Kramer said that he personally provided a copy of the dossier to Obama National Security Council official Celeste
Wallander.
In a deposition on Dec. 13, 2017 that was recently posted online, Kramer said that McCain specifically asked him in early December
2016 to meet about the dossier with Wallander and Victoria Nuland, a senior official in John Kerry's State Department. Senator McCain
asked me to meet with both of them to see if this was being taken seriously in the government," Kramer said.
"And Senator McCain asked you to meet with them?" Kramer was asked to clarify.
"Yes, just to see if this was being taken seriously. I think he wanted to do -- this was his kind of due diligence before he went
to Director Comey."
Kramer testified that in his conversations with Nuland and Wallander he was told by both of them that each were aware of the dossier
and that Nuland "thought Steele was a serious person."
Kramer revealed that he gave a copy of the dossier to Wallander, who was familiar with the contents but did not have a copy.
"I had a subsequent conversation with Ms. Wallander in which I gave her a copy of the document. That was probably around New Year's,"
he said.
"She had not seen it herself until I had shown it to her," Kramer added. "She had heard about it. And she didn't know the status
of it."
In the same testimony, the McCain associate revealed that he held a meeting about the dossier with a reporter from BuzzFeed News
who he says snapped photos of the controversial document without Kramer's permission when he left the room to go to the bathroom.
That meeting was held at the McCain Institute office in Washington, Kramer stated.
BuzzFeed infamously
published Steele's full dossier on January 10, 2017 setting off a firestorm of news media coverage about the document.
Prior to his death, McCain admitted to personally handing the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey but he refused repeated
requests for comment about whether he had a role in providing the dossier to BuzzFeed, including numerous inquiries sent to his office
by this reporter.
In his
book published last year, McCain maintained he had an "obligation" to pass the dossier charges against Trump to Comey and he
would even do it again. "Anyone who doesn't like it can go to hell," McCain exclaimed.
Kramer, meanwhile, also said that he briefed others reporters on the dossier contents, including CNN's Carl Bernstein, in an effort
to have the anti-Trump charges verified.
The same day BuzzFeed released the full dossier, CNN first
reported
the leaked information that the controversial contents of the dossier were presented during classified briefings inside classified
documents presented one week earlier to then-President Obama and President-elect Trump.
Kramer said that he believed McCain was sought out in order to provide credibility to the dossier claims.
"I think they felt a senior Republican was better to be the recipient of this rather than a Democrat because if it were a Democrat,
I think that the view was that it would have been dismissed as a political attack," Kramer stated.
The controversial Fusion GPS firm hired Steele to do the anti-Trump work that resulted in the compilation of the dossier. Fusion
GPS was paid for its anti-Trump work by Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee via the Perkins Coie
law firm.
Kramer's testimony sheds a new light on the role of the Obama administration in disseminating the largely-discredited dossier
that was reportedly involved in the FBI's initial investigation into the Trump campaign and unsubstantiated claims of Russian collusion.
Also Comey
cited the dossier as evidence in a successful FISA application to obtain a warrant to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a
former adviser to President Trump's 2016 campaign. The testimony also revealed how McCain was utilized to give the wild dossier charges
a credibility boost.
Nuland and dossier
Nuland's specific role in the dossier episode has been the subject of some controversy for her.
In their
book , "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump," authors and reporters
by Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that Nuland gave the green light for the FBI to first meet with Steele regarding his dossier's
claims. It was at that meeting that Steele initially reported his dossier charges to the FBI, the book relates.
Steele sought out Rome-based FBI Special Agent Michael Gaeta, with whom he had worked on a previous case. Before Gaeta met with
Steele on July 5, 2016, the book relates that the FBI first secured the support of Nuland, who at the time was assistant Secretary
of State for European and Eurasian Affairs specializing in Russia.
Regarding the arrangements for Steele's initial meeting with the FBI about the dossier claims, Isikoff and Corn report:
There were a few hoops Gaeta had to jump through. He was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Rome. The FBI checked with Victoria
Nuland's office at the State Department : Do you support this meeting ? Nuland, having found Steele's reports on Ukraine to have
been generally credible, gave the green light.
Within a few days, on July 5, Gaeta arrived and headed to Steele's office near Victoria station . Steele handed him a copy
of the report. Gaeta, a seasoned FBI agent, started to read . He turned white. For a while, Gaeta said nothing . Then he remarked,
"I have to report this to headquarters."
The book documents that Nuland previously received Steele's reports on the Ukrainian crisis and had been familiar with Steele's
general work.
Nuland faced confirmation
questions
prior to her appointment as assistant secretary of state over her reported role in revising controversial Obama administration
talking points about the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks. Her
reported changes sought to protect
Clinton's State Department from accusations that it failed to adequately secure the woefully unprotected U.S. Special Mission in
Benghazi.
Nuland's name surfaced in a flurry of news media reports last year about the dossier and Kerry's State Department.
Sidney Blumenthal
An extensive New Yorker profile
of Steele named another former official from Kerry's State Department for alleged involvement in circulating the dossier. The
magazine reported that Kerry's chief of staff at the State Department, John Finer, obtained the contents of a two-page summary of
the dossier and eventually decided to share the questionable document with Kerry.
Finer received the dossier summary from Jonathan M. Winer, the Obama State Department official who acknowledged regularly interfacing
and exchanging information with Steele, according to the report. Winer previously conceded that he shared the dossier summary with
Nuland.
After his name surfaced in news media reports related to probes by House Republicans into the dossier, Winer authored a Washington
Post
oped in which he conceded that while he was working at the State Department he exchanged documents and information with Steele.
Winer further acknowledged that while at the State Department, he shared anti-Trump material with Steele passed to him by longtime
Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whom Winer described as an "old friend." Winer wrote that the material from Blumenthal – which
Winer in turn gave to Steele – originated with Cody Shearer, who is a controversial figure long tied to various Clinton scandals.
Nuland, Winer Give Conflicting Accounts
There are seeming discrepancies between Winer and Nuland about actions taken involving the dossier.
Nuland described in a Politico podcast
interview
what she claimed was her reaction when she was presented with Steele's dossier information at the State Department.
She said that she offered advice to "those who were interfacing with" Steele, immediately telling the intermediary or intermediaries
that Steele "should get this information to the FBI." She further explained that a career employee at the State Department could
not get involved with the dossier charges since such actions could violate the Hatch Act, which prevents employees in the executive
branch of the federal government from engaging in certain kinds of political activities.
In a second interview, this one with CBS's Face The Nation, Nuland also stated that her "immediate" reaction was to refer Steele
to the FBI.
Here is a transcript of the
relevant
section of her February 5 interview with Susan B. Glasser, who described Nuland as "my friend" and referred to her by her nickname
"Toria":
Glasser: When did you first hear about his dossier?
Nuland: I first heard -- and I didn't know who his client was until much later, until 2017, I think, when it came out. I first
heard that he had done work for a client asserting these linkages -- I think it was late July, something like that.
Glasser: That's very interesting. And you would have taken him seriously just because you knew that he knew what he was talking
about on Russia?
Nuland: What I did was say that this is about U.S. politics, and not the work of -- not the business of the State Department,
and certainly not the business of a career employee who is subject to the Hatch Act, which requires that you stay out of politics.
So, my advice to those who were interfacing with him was that he should get this information to the FBI, and that they could evaluate
whether they thought it was credible.
Glasser: Did you ever talk about it with anyone else higher up at the department? With Secretary Kerry or anybody else?
Nuland: Secretary Kerry was also aware. I think he's on the record and he had the same advice.
Nuland stated that Kerry "was also aware" of the dossier, but she did not describe how he was made aware. She made clear that
she told "those who were interfacing" with Steele to go to the FBI since any State Department involvement could violate the Hatch
Act.
Her Politico podcast interview was not the only time she claimed that her reaction was to refer Steele to the FBI.
On Face The Nation on February 4, Nuland engaged in the following
exchange in which she stated her "immediate" reaction was to refer Steele to the FBI (emphasis added):
MARGARET BRENNAN: The dossier.
VICTORIA NULAND: The dossier, 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."
And that was our reaction when we saw this. It's not our -- we can't evaluate this. And frankly, if every member of the campaign
who the Russians tried to approach and tried to influence had gone to the FBI as well in real time, we might not be in the mess
we're in today.
Nuland gave the two interviews after her name started surfacing in news media reports involving Kerry's State Department and the
dossier. Her name also came up in relation to a criminal referral of Steele to the Justice Department in the form of a letter authored
last year by Sen. Chuck Grassley, who at the time chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
The Grassley-Graham criminal referral
contains redacted information that Steele received information from someone in the State Department, who in turn had been in
contact with a "foreign sub-source" who was in touch with a redacted name described as a "friend of the Clintons."
Numerous media reports have since stated that the source of information provided to the State Department that was in turn passed
on to Steele was Cody Shearer, a controversial figure tied to the Clintons who is also an associate of longtime Clinton friend Sidney
Blumenthal. According to sources who
spoke
to CNN, Shearer's information was passed from Blumenthal to Winer, who at the time was a special State Department envoy for Libya
working under Kerry. Winer
says that Kerry personally recruited him to work at the State Department.
It is Winer's version of events that seems to conflict with Nuland's.
In an
oped published in the Washington Post, Winer identified Nuland as the State Department official with whom he shared Steele's
information. Winer writes that Nuland's reaction was that "she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material."
He does not relate any further reaction from Nuland.
Winer wrote in the Washington Post (emphasis added):
In the summer of 2016, Steele told me that he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald
Trump, his campaign and senior Russian officials. He did not provide details but made clear the information involved "active measures,"
a Soviet intelligence term for propaganda and related activities to influence events in other countries.
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.
I was allowed to review, but not to keep, a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department. I prepared a
two-page summary and shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made
aware of this material.
That was the extent of Winer's description of Nuland's reaction upon being presented with Steele's dossier claims. Nuland's public
claim that her "immediate" response was to refer Steele to the FBI since State involvement could violate the Hatch Act seems to conflict
with the only reaction that Winer relates from Nuland – that she felt Kerry should be made aware of the dossier information.
In Winer's Washington Post oped, he writes that Steele had a larger relationship with the State Department, passing over
100 reports relating to Russia to the U.S. government agency through Winer. Winer wrote that Nuland found Steele's reports to be
"useful" and asked Winer to "continue to send them."
He wrote:
In 2013, I returned to the State Department at the request of Secretary of State John F. Kerry, whom I had previously served
as Senate counsel. Over the years, Steele and I had discussed many matters relating to Russia. He asked me whether the State Department
would like copies of new information as he developed it. I contacted Victoria Nuland, a career diplomat who was then assistant
secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and shared with her several of Steele's reports. She told me they were useful
and asked me to continue to send them. Over the next two years, I shared more than 100 of Steele's reports with the Russia experts
at the State Department, who continued to find them useful. None of the reports related to U.S. politics or domestic U.S. matters,
and the reports constituted a very small portion of the data set reviewed by State Department experts trying to make sense of
events in Russia.
Kramer and the dossier
In his book, "The Restless Wave," McCain provided an inside account of how he says he came across the dossier.
He wrote that he was told about the claims in the document at a security conference in Canada in November 2016, where he was approached
by Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and friend of ex-British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier.
McCain wrote that Wood told him Steele "had been commissioned to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Russian
agents as well as potentially compromising information about the President-elect that Putin allegedly possessed."
McCain, however, did not address the obvious question of whether he was told exactly who "commissioned" Steele to "investigate"
the alleged Russian ties. The dossier was paid for by Clinton's campaign and the DNC.
McCain goes on to describe Wood as telling him Steele's work "was mostly raw, unverified intelligence, but that the author strongly
believed merited a thorough examination by counterintelligence experts."
The politician says the dossier claims described to him were "too strange a scenario to believe, something out of a le Carré novel,
not the kind of thing anyone has ever actually had to worry about with a new President, no matter what other concerns."
Still, McCain says he reasoned that "even a remote risk that the President of the United States might be vulnerable to Russian
extortion had to be investigated."
McCain concedes Wood told him he had not actually read the dossier himself, and writes that he wasn't sure if he ever met Wood
before and couldn't recall previously having a conversation with Wood. Still, McCain took Wood's word for it when Wood vouched for
Steele's credibility. "Steele was a respected professional, Wood assured us, who had good Russian contacts and long experience collecting
and analyzing intelligence on the Kremlin," McCain wrote.
Present at the meeting with Wood and McCain was Kramer, who McCain writes agreed to "go to London to meet Steele, confirm his
credibility and report back to me."
McCain doesn't detail Kramer's visit to London beyond simply writing, "When David returned, and shared his impression that the
former spy was, as Sir Andrew had vouched, a respected professional, and not to outward appearances given to hyperbole or hysteria,
I agreed to receive a copy of what is now referred to as 'the dossier.'''
McCain leaves out exactly where Kramer obtained his dossier copy.
The Washington Post
reported last February that Kramer received the dossier directly from Fusion GPS after McCain expressed interest in it. Those
details marked the clearest indication that McCain may have known that the dossier originated with Fusion GPS, meaning that he may
have knowingly passed on political material to the FBI.
Also, in a New York Times oped in January,
GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritch wrote that they helped McCain share their anti-Trump dossier with the Obama-era intelligence
community via an unnamed "emissary."
In his own testimony, Kramer relates conversations with Simpson about the dossier.
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.
Credibility of the US government and Justice system was greatly undermined, if not destroyed
by the Russiagate. Inability to investigate more plausible election interference by British an,
Saudi and Israeli actors by Mueller paints him as a despicable political operative working for
Clintons, not an independent Prosecutor, who diligently investigate the foreign interference in
elections.
The role of Rosenstein is the role of co-conspirator in a plot to deprive Trump of the
Presidency or, at least, for force him to pursue the Deep State foreign policy, which is totally
bankrupt policy. And they succeeded in this. Trump wet kiss with neocons was probably the part of
the deal.
Notable quotes:
"... When even Trump who was the victim of the machinations cares only to tweet witch hunt, why would anyone expect that any of those involved in the attempted "coup" would be held to account? ..."
"... I wondered about that myself. When I was doing clan work in Europe, recruiting UK citizens was absolutely forbidden. I needed special dispensation from Bonn Station to not declare my Russian assets to the Brits when they merely traveled to the UK. I think Steele's relationship with the FBI was not as a standard recruited asset or informer. It was a business contract. An article from a year ago sheds some light on that relationship. The first instance concerns his assistance in the FIFA investigation. ..."
When even Trump who was the victim of the machinations cares only to tweet witch hunt, why
would anyone expect that any of those involved in the attempted "coup" would be held to
account?
No one is going to face any consequences - legal or other. Hell, most of them will make money
from writing books about their "dedicated service." When was the last time the swamp applied
the laws to one of it's own. Answer: never.
The laws are enforced on us - the "deplorables out there," not the swamp creature
"elite." We are not governed, we are ruled.
And sadly that situation is as much the result of an indifferent and ignorant populace as
the behavior of the ruling class.
"One other important sidetone--there has been a longstanding agreement among the 5 Eyes
(i.e., US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to NOT recruit as assets each other's
spies. Christopher Steele's employ with the FBI violates this policy."
I see Steele's surfacing again. Might I put in a minor query. Does this longstanding
agreement cover retired personnel?
I wondered about that myself. When I was doing clan work in Europe, recruiting UK citizens
was absolutely forbidden. I needed special dispensation from Bonn Station to not declare my
Russian assets to the Brits when they merely traveled to the UK. I think Steele's
relationship with the FBI was not as a standard recruited asset or informer. It was a
business contract. An article from a year ago sheds some light on that relationship. The
first instance concerns his assistance in the FIFA investigation.
"Steele might have been expected to move on once his investigation of the bidding was
concluded. But he had discovered that the corruption at FIFA was global, and he felt that it
should be addressed. The only organization that could handle an investigation of such scope,
he felt, was the F.B.I. In 2011, Steele contacted an American agent he'd met who headed the
Bureau's division for serious crimes in Eurasia. Steele introduced him to his sources, who
proved essential to the ensuing investigation. In 2015, the Justice Department indicted
fourteen people in connection with a hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes and
kickbacks."
The second instance of Steele's cooperation with the FBI even had a peripheral
relationship with Trump. "Several years ago, the FBI hired Steele to help crack an
international gambling and money-laundering ring purportedly run by a suspected Russian
organized-crime figure named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The syndicate was based in an apartment
in Trump Tower. Eventually, federal officials indicted more than thirty co-conspirators for
financial crimes. Tokhtakhounov, though, eluded arrest, becoming a fugitive. Interpol issued
a "red notice" calling for his arrest. But, in the fall of 2013, he showed up at the Miss
Universe contest in Moscow -- and sat near the pageant's owner, Donald Trump."
According to the New Yorker magazine article, it was standard Orbis procedure to warn
authorities about national security threats. Steele warned German authorities about IS
militants using the refugee flow to infiltrate Europe. "When Steele took his suspicions about
Trump to the FBI in the summer of 2016, it was in keeping with Orbis protocol, rather than a
politically driven aberration."
Within the FBI, I'm sure Steele was coded as a source in some way as a standard procedure
to use his information. We did the same with our non-asset sources in DOD. Hell, I was even
coded as an intelligence asset when I was a SMU operative/case officer. This was different
from the reporter number all case officers are given.
Philip Giraldi, on March 13, 2018, has an essay about this New Yorker article: 'Christopher
Steele as seen by the New Yorker. Liberal fantasies beatify the messenger.' This is in the
Unz Review.
www.unz.com/pgiraldi/christ... .
Mayer doesn't mention that Steele was almost certainly identified as MI6 during the
years (possibly 1990-1993) that he was stationed in Moscow under diplomatic cover. Russian
counterintelligence agents broke into his apartment, used the toilet, left it unflushed; they
stole his wife's best shoes. He was definitely identified by 1999 when he was in Paris. There
was a DSMA notice. Too late. Then, in 2006, when Steele is said to have had the Russia desk,
there was the highly embarrassing electronic spy rock in a Moscow park. Surely he held some
responsibility for that? And if Steele was a Russian expert why were his talents being wasted
in Afghanistan?
John Helmer quotes some old intelligence hands who deny that he was a particularly
impressive agent or was deeply knowledgeable about Russia. Steele never went back to Russia
after 1992 or 1993. Mayer, in the New Yorker article, makes no mention of what surely were
setbacks for British intelligence regarding Russia in which Steele likely was playing a large
part.
We've been here before in this discussion. The question remains-- was Steele an unwitting
puppet of a Russian master counterstrike, an aikido throw which has badly shaken and
distracted America? DH, we await your comments. Has TTG gone wobbly?
I'm also fairly certain RIS was aware of Steele's status as an MI6 officer when he was
stationed in Moscow. I would think anyone working out of a diplomatic embassy is first
assumed to be an intelligence officer by the host nation. I stayed away from embassies and
other government facilities just to avoid that taint. The one time I was summoned to an
embassy, I conducted extensive surveillance detection measures both before and after the
visit and I wore a disguise.
It was a normal matter for intelligence officers to be cycled through Afghanistan and Iraq
post 9-11, no matter what their former expertise. I did my turn. CIA's "Russia House" was
bitter about their fall from the pinnacle to be replaced by all things CT during that
time.
Was some of the raw information in Steele's dossier planted by RIS? That's very possible.
Several experienced former US intelligence officers have voiced that possibility, especially
about the more salacious bits of the dossier.
That's a nice piece in the New Yorker. They mention the golden shower episode in Moscow,
however, left out Loretta Lynch. "In was in her role as district attorney that her
involvement in the Fifa investigation began. Over the course of five years in Brooklyn..."
See the BBC article on FIFA from 2015: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32912118
So did Loretta Lynch talk to Christopher Steele during this case or did Steele just
talk to the FBI agent who was years later in London? When did then US attorney for New York's
Eastern District Lorretta Lynch get informed and by which FBI agent? Who did that agent tell
about the Steele dossier, when did it get to the AG's ears, and when did she tell
Obama?
"On January 5, 2017, it became clear that at least two Washingtonians remained in the dark
about the dossier: the President and the Vice-President. " Oh, apparently AG Lynch never told
Obama, because????????
Another New Yorker Enigma: "Robert Hannigan, then the head of the U.K.'s intelligence
service the G.C.H.Q., had recently flown to Washington and briefed the C.I.A.'s director,
John Brennan, on a stream of illicit communications between Trump's team and Moscow that had
been intercepted. (The content of these intercepts has not become public.) "
So the UK has been spying on US Presidential candidates? Oh, they said they were "illicit"
communications. What does that mean? Who was communicating with Whom? And how did G.C.H.Q.
decide these communications were "illicit" but others, well they'd have to have them all to
make a comparison, wouldn't they? Put a ribbon on top of that one. DId they also intercept
any of Hilary's communications?
Given that Steele played an important role in at least two major FBI investigations
leading to multiple indictments, I would assume Lynch knew about Steele. Whether they ever
conversed, I don't know.
Comey was not at all sure about Lynch's impartiality. It would not surprise me if he kept
details of the Russian investigation, including the dossier, from her. She probably learned
about it shortly before Obama and Trump were briefed on the dossier. Obama knew enough about
the Russian investigation, without the dossier, to warn Putin to knock it off in September
2016.
I don't know if the Brits spied on our Presidential candidates. I wouldn't doubt it. We
bugged Merkel's phone. What I am sure of is that the Brits spy on every Russian of importance
within their capabilities. If Trump's campaign was in contact with those Russians, the Brits
would know about it. They obviously thought those conversations were illicit enough to inform
their US counterparts and reveal that they did monitor members of the Trump campaign. They
wouldn't have done that just for shits and giggles.
"They obviously thought those conversations were illicit enough to inform their US
counterparts and reveal that they did monitor members of the Trump campaign."
They thought it illicit? Listening is one thing, giving information to aid your country's
government's preferred candidate is interference in an election process - ours. How many
times has our ally the UK interfered with US elections? They had plenty of help from the FBI
and DOJ here in the US in 2016. Who elected GCHQ to be arbiters of US elections? I can't
find them in the US Constitution. Using the FBI and DOJ to sabatouge your party's political
opponents, that's third world government standards.
If the Brits wanted to directly influence the election, they would have publicly released
their information about "illicit' contacts. Keeping it within intelligence channels does
nothing to influence an election. I would hope the Brits would never hold back on information
concerning a possible CI threat.
TTG - thank you for your reply above. The picture one gets of Steele is no longer that of
a loose canon who somehow got himself involved in a presidential election campaign. It is
that of an experienced and respected professional working in tandem, if perhaps
unconventionally, with other professionals.
And perhaps thinking that he or his contacts back home had stumbled over important
information showing that a presidential candidate was compromised. That information possibly
being the tip of the iceberg and urgently demanding further investigation.
But that makes what happened all the more unusual -
1. Why didn't the further investigation happen? Surely the fact that such an important
matter wasn't thoroughly investigated, and that using all possible resources in the States
and abroad, shows that it was no serious investigation in the first place?
And more to the point here -
2. If those involved were professionals working away soberly at a necessary investigation,
what were they doing suddenly branching out into a smear campaign?
For none, even the originators of the dossier, are claiming that the more discreditable
part of the Steele dossier is true. That is not Intelligence material. It is sensationalised
smear material.
This objection has been met in part with the claim that the dossier was all raw unsifted
Intelligence and therefore was released as is.
But surely experienced Intelligence professionals don't suddenly pitch raw unsifted
Intelligence into the middle of the political arena while they are supposed to be still
assessing that intelligence?
Irrespective of the question of whether Trump was compromised the question therefore
arises - what were American officials doing running a smear campaign against a presidential
candidate?
Which leads back to the original question. What officials this side of the Atlantic were
also involved, and how high did the authorisation for their involvement go in England.
.
On a matter I'm better informed about, I don't see the Colonel quietly farming away in
Kent. I see him striding across the limitless expanse of a Scottish grouse moor. If our lot
had known their business they'd have worked that into their offer.
The counterintelligence investigation was in progress through the lead up to the 2016
election and is still in progress. Through 2016, it was done in a remarkably quiet fashion.
That's how these investigations are supposed to work. No one hears about them until there is
an arrest or indictment. That's how Mueller is running his investigation. We hear nothing
from him except for the indictments already issued. And they are characteristically slow and
methodical, usually spanning years before an arrest is made.
None of this investigation, including Steele's reporting was used in a pre-election smear
campaign. In my opinion, the reason the Obama administration did not publicize the idea of
Russian interference with the election and possible involvement of Trump campaign officials
is that it would surely have been seen as a partisan smear campaign. The public did not hear
of the Steele dossier until well after the election was over.
It was not just British intelligence involved in collecting on Russian interference in
the election. The Estonians, the Dutch, the Australians and probably others contributed to
the intelligence picture. We may not learn the full extent of that cooperation for many
years. Given the changing nature of information warfare and social media manipulation, I
sincerely wish the full extent of that intelligence is made public quickly. Sure that would
probably also cramp Western media manipulation capabilities, of which we are far from
innocent, but the sunlight would help inoculate all of us against this malignant
phenomenon.
The retirement farm and the big stipend sounds pretty good. I could do without the best club
and the career assistance. Sounds like they appreciated you a lot more than DIA.
DIA made me an SES-4 with presidential rank (Distinguished). Looks like the Brits expected me
to have a lot of access. They claimed these guys were off the reservation. and that they were
not authorized to pitch me.
Off the reservation my ass. I would say those Brits were a bunch of cheeky blokes who did not
do a thorough enough job of assessing your susceptibility to recruitment.
You seem more upset over this than I was. We accepted their false statements of innocence
betrayed by their own and went right on working with them. Why would they try this? Simple.
As we do they wanted to know what we were not telling them. everyone does it. A basic
principle. Recruit your liaison.
You're right. I never worked out of an embassy or in any long term liaison function. If I was
the target of such a pitch, it would have meant that I was blown along with any operations I
was involved with. For me, it would have been life altering.
Thanks for this. I am wondering what Larry Johnson and the other members of this Committee of
Correspondence make of the possible connection between Christopher Steele, Pablo Miller, and
Sergei Skripal?
Some of Craig Murray's speculations in his latest post on the Skripal incident
regarding the coordinated role of Orbis Intelligence, the BBC, and the British state (which
issued a DSMA notice prohibiting press mention of Pablo Miller) are quite plausible. Murray
is, like the members of this committee, a veteran of the game....
Was Skripal coerced/encouraged by Miller to serve as one of Steele's unattributed
Russian "sources"? Did he later get cold feet? Or did he later attempt to buy his way back
into Russia with the claim that he could provide proof that the Dossier was a fraud? Or was
he working as a triple agent the whole time? Were the two sightseeing Russians "Borishov" and
"Petrov" sent to retrieve something from Skripal?
Try this. This theory ties together all the incoherencies of the official explanation better
than anything I have seen. And, I'm pleased to see it is getting reprinted here and
there.
https://michaelantonyblog.w...
I concur. This is the most plausible explanation of what really happened in Salisbury that I
have read so far.
Colonel - might this theory be worth a dedicated SST post? It is 5,000 words, so perhaps
Patrick, David Habakkuk, or another interested member of the committee would be happy to
summarize the salient details (e.g. that Borisov & Petrov intended to return to Russia
with Sergei Skripal). The author's contact details are in the comments section re reprint
rights.
In yet another stunning blow to the so-called "Steele Dossier" assembled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the former chief
of the (MI6) said the hastily cobbled-together report by his former employee is "overrated" and its salacious claims against Donald
Trump unlikely to be verified, as the
Daily Wire
's Ashe Schow reports.
Following an appearance at the Jamestown Foundation's
12th annual terrorism conference in Washington
D.C., Sir John Scarlett - who headed the British Secret Intelligence Service from 2004 to 2009, fielded a question from journalist
Nicholas Ballasy, who asked Scarlett what he thought of the dossier and if he believed what was written in it.
"Well, no," said Scarlett, adding "I looked at it and I thought these are commercial intelligence reports; I don't know about
the sources -- they might be right, they might be wrong and they'll probably be overrated and they've been overrated. "
When asked if the dossier could ever be verified, Steele's former boss said "No."
Ballasy then asked Scarlett if he was surprised that Steele would produce the dossier using unverified information, to which the
former MI6 head replied:
"Well, they were commercial intelligence reports and they were visibly that so there's a question of why they were there and where
they came from and who commissioned them and so on," adding" So, I've tended to see them in that context and never quite of political
significance for obvious reasons and actually if you think about it, people have talked about them in a really big way a year or
so ago and they haven't really made that much of a difference. "
"As I said, I suspect, all I can say, is they are overrated. "
When asked about what Steele was like to work with, Scarlett replied: " I'm not going to comment ," before walking away. We're
guessing he's probably tired of MI6 having been mentioned in the same breath as Steele for the last several years.
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?
Notable quotes:
"... Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? ..."
"... "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." ..."
"... Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
"... The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. ..."
"... As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career". ..."
"... Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance. ..."
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from
an article at the excellent Medialens
And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...
I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services: While it might be difficult to identify precisely
the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources)
on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.
As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:
"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."
Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished
journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.
And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct
Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret
state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed
forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.
As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of
the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood
at the end of their career".
Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent
is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.
A brief history
Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a
cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest
Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.
Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf
of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.
The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the
Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided
by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists
and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.
According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism
served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour
of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.
And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret
service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.
In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives'
Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.
And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.
David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media
and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody
in every office in Fleet Street"
Leaker King
And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing
companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications".
Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear
he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction".
Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet
Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot". King was also closely
involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.
Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according
to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.
David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security
scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament.
Maxwell and Mossad
According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the
1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.
In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6
were equally as strong.
Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that
he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks
were fascinating.
For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse
during the Cold War."
The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster
Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked
to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted
to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms
of first-hand knowledge."
And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph
and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to
handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.
Lawson strongly denied the allegations.
Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan
McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security
services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland
Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not
being used." (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)
Growing power of secret state
Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.
But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official
Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into
the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.
Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.
According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by
the Rockingham cell within the MoD.
A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant
attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.
Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.
Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein
has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of
the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early
in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies
about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group,
the Iraqi National Congress.
Sexed up – and missed out
During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the
ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government
(in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.
The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that
drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition?
But those facts will be forever secret.
Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was
ignored by the inquiry.
Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of
WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US
President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress
and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.
Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the
propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published
stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker
than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures,
especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."
Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence
services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.
~
Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John
Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International
Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.
"... President Trump ripped Christopher Steele after it was revealed that the former British spy used a 'citizen journalist' article from CNN's now-defunct 'iReports' website as part of his research. ..."
"... it was actually Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos telling Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton which reportedly launched the "Witch Hunt." ..."
President Trump ripped Christopher Steele after it was revealed that the former British spy
used a 'citizen journalist' article from CNN's now-defunct 'iReports' website as part of his
research.
"Christopher Steele backed up his Democrat & Crooked Hillary paid for Fake &
Unverified Dossier with information he got from "send in watchers" of low ratings CNN. This is
the info that got us the Witch Hunt!"
Report: Christopher Steele backed up his Democrat & Crooked Hillary paid for Fake
& Unverified Dossier with information he got from "send in watchers" of low ratings CNN.
This is the info that got us the Witch Hunt!
Of note, it was actually Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos telling Australian diplomat
Alexander Downer that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton which reportedly launched the "Witch
Hunt." That said, let's also remember that it was Maltese professor and self-professed member
of the Clinton Foundation, Joseph Mifsud, who told Papadopoulos of the supposed Russian intel
in the first place . Some have referred to it as an
entrapment scheme .
CNN iReport?
Steele made the awkward revelation during a deposition last year in a case involving
Russian entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev, who claims his companies Webzilla and XBT Holdings were
defamed by Steele after the dossier was published by BuzzFeed.
Steele was asked during the deposition how he verified allegations about Gubarev's
companies and whether he found "anything of relevance concerning Webzilla," according to the
newly released transcripts of the deposition.
"We did. It was an article I have got here which was posted on July 28, 2009, on something
called CNN iReport ," Steele said. –
Fox News
CNN iReport, which is long gone, was clearly disclaimed as a " user-generated site ,"
warning that " the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked or screened before
they post ."
As Fox notes, even the site's banner included the slogan "Unedited. Unfiltered.
News." and made clear that users who submit content do not work for CNN.
Except super-spy Steele apparently missed that fact, or didn't care, as part of his
'extensive' research
"Do you understand that CNN iReports are or were nothing more than any random individuals'
assertions on the internet?" an examiner asked Steele.
"No, I obviously presume that if it is on a CNN site that it may has [sic] some kind of CNN
status. Albeit that it may be an independent person posting on the site," Steele replied.
"... Ohr stated in his testimony: "What I had said, I think, to Mr. Rosenstein in October of 2017 was that my wife was working for Fusion GPS The dossier, as I understand it, is the collection of reports that Chris Steele has prepared for Fusion. ..."
"... Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of information heading into Fusion GPS." ..."
"... Rep. Mark Meadows asked Ohr during testimony "Did Chris Steele get paid by the Department of Justice? Ohr's response: "My understanding is that for a time he was a source for the FBI, a paid source. ..."
Department of Justice senior official Bruce Ohr's testimony contradicts testimony given by other senior government officials and
key witnesses who testified before Congress regarding the FBI's investigation into President Trump's 2016 campaign and alleged collusion
with the Russian government, according to the full transcripts released Friday.
Ohr's 268-page testimony, released by Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, reveals inconsistency
and contradiction in testimony given by Glenn Simpson, founder of embattled research firm Fusion GPS and Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein, who is set to leave his post sometime this month.
It also reveals that many questions are still left unanswered.
The Contradictions and The Revelations
1. Glenn Simpson suggests in his testimony to the Senate that he never spoke to anyone at the FBI about Christopher Steele, the
former British spy he hired to investigate the Trump campaign during the election. However, Ohr suggest otherwise telling former
Rep.Trey Gowdy under questioning "As I recall, and this is after checking with my notes, Mr. Simpson and I spoke in August of 2016.
I met with him, and he provided some information on possible intermediaries between the Russian government and the Trump campaign."
2. In another instance, Simpson's testimony also contradicts notes taken by Ohr after a meeting they had in December, 2016. Unverified
allegations were decimated among the media that the Trump campaign had a
computer server that was linked to a Russian bank in Moscow: Alpha Bank. Simpson suggested to the Senate that he knew very little
about the Trump -Alpha Bank server story and couldn't provide information. But Bruce Ohr's own handwritten notes state that when
he met with Simpson in December 2016, Simpson was concerned over the Alpha Bank story in the New York Times. "The New York Times
story on Oct. 31 downplaying the connection between
Alfa servers
and the Trump campaign was incorrect. There was communication and it wasn't spam," stated Ohr's notes. This suggests that Simpson
was well aware of the story, which was believed by congressional investigators to have started from his research firm.
3. Ohr testified to lawmakers that Simpson provided information to federal officials that was false regarding Cleta Mitchell,
a well-known Republican campaign finance lawyer, and information regarding the National Rifle Association. Sean Davis, with the Federalist
pointed this out in a tweet today. Read one of those
stories here.
Bruce Ohr testified that Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS provided to federal officials information we know to
be false regarding Cleta Mitchell, a Republican campaign finance attorney, and the NRA. Giving false statements to federal officials
is a crime under 18 U.S.C. 1001. pic.twitter.com/vm0tc4ft5R
4. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would not answer questions to lawmakers during testimony about when he learned that
Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, was working for Fusion GPS. Just check this out from Rep. Matt Gaetz's
interview with Judge Jeanine on Fox News.
"Rod Rosenstein won't tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS," said Gaetz, in August, 2018.
"So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues at the Department of Justice that in violation of law that required
him to disclose his wife's occupation his sources of income. He did not do that. So when did all of the other people at the Department
of Justice find this out because Rod Rosenstein, I've asked him twice in open hearing and he will not give an answer. I think there's
a real smoking gun there."
However, in Ohr's testimony he says he told the FBI about his wife's role at Fusion GPS but only divulged his role to one person
at the DOJ:
Rosenstein. At the time, Rosenstein was overseeing the Trump-Russia probe, and had taken the information from Ohr and gave it
to the FBI. Just read The Hill's John Solomon
full story here for the full background on Ohr's testimony. I highlighted an important date below: remember Rosenstein wouldn't
answer lawmakers questions as to when he knew about Nellie Ohr. It also appears he failed to tell lawmakers about the information
he delivered to the FBI.
Ohr stated in his testimony: "What I had said, I think, to Mr. Rosenstein in October of 2017 was that my wife was working
for Fusion GPS The dossier, as I understand it, is the collection of reports that Chris Steele has prepared for Fusion.
Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided
to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of information
heading into Fusion GPS."
5. Ohr also told lawmakers in his testimony that the former British spy, Christopher Steele was being paid by the FBI at the same
time he was getting paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. However, there was another player paying Steele and it was
a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska, a tycoon connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin, had well known animus
toward his former friend Paul Manafort.
Rep. Mark Meadows asked Ohr during testimony "Did Chris Steele get paid by the Department of Justice? Ohr's response: "My
understanding is that for a time he was a source for the FBI, a paid source.
In the testimony Ohr also revealed that Steele had told him details about his work with Deripaska saying Deripaska's attorney
Paul Hauser "had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with" Deripaska.
Ohr said Manafort "had stolen a large amount of money from" the Russian Oligarch and that Hauser was "trying to gather information
that would show that."
"... General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children. ..."
"... Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War". ..."
"... The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war. ..."
"... the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces. ..."
"... The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening ..."
"... In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing. ..."
"... The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. ..."
"... Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet. ..."
"... But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day. ..."
The American Public has gotten exactly what it deserved. They have been dumbed-down in our poor-by-intention school systems. The
moronic nonsense that passes for news in this country gets more sensational with each passing day. Over on Fox, they are making
the claim that ISIS fighters are bringing Ebola over the Mexican Border, which prompted a reply by the Mexican Embassy that won't
be reported on Fox.
We continue to hear and it was even reported in this very fine article by Ms. Benjamin that the American
People now support this new war. Really? I'm sorry, but I haven't seen that support anywhere but on the news and I just don't
believe it any more.
There is also the little problem of infiltration into key media slots by paid CIA Assets (Scarborough and brainless Mika are
two of these double dippers). Others are intermarried. Right-wing Neocon War Criminal Dan Senor is married to "respected" newsperson
Campbell Brown who is now involved in privatizing our school system. Victoria Nuland, the slimey State Department Official who
was overheard appointing the members of the future Ukrainian Government prior to the Maidan Coup is married to another Neo-Con--Larry
Kagan. Even sweet little Andrea Mitchell is actually Mrs. Alan Greenspan.
General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC.
MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market.
Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being
CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli
Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women
and Children.
Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is
connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option
discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to
a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior
put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War".
Yesterday there was a coordinated action by all of the networks, which was clearly designed to support the idea that the generals
want Obama to act and he just won't. The not-so-subtle message was that the generals were right and that the President's "inaction"
was somehow out of line-since, after all, the generals have recommended more war. It was as if these people don't remember that
the President, sleazy War Criminal that he is, is still the Commander in Chief.
The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our
various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that
they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war.
Finally, this Sunday every NFL Game will begin with some Patriotic "Honor America" Display, which will include a missing man
flyover, flags and fireworks, plenty of uniforms, wounded Vets and soon-to-be-wounded Vets. A giant American Flag will, once again,
cover the fields and hundreds of stupid young kids will rush down to their "Military Career Center" right after the game. These
are the ones that I pity most.
Let's be frank: powerful interests want war and subsequent puppet regimes in the half dozen nations that the neo-cons have been
eyeing (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). These interests surely include industries like banking, arms and oil-all of
whom make a killing on any war, and would stand to do well with friendly governments who could finance more arms purchases and
will never nationalize the oil.
So, the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come
back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact
that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark
forces.
IanB52, 10 October 2014 6:57pm
The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening. When I'm down at the gym they always have CNN on (I can
only imagine what FOX is like) which is a pretty much dyed in the wool yellow jingoist station at this point. With all the segments
they dedicate to ISIS, a new war, the "imminent" terrorist threat, they seem to favor talking heads who support a full ground
war and I have never, not once, heard anyone even speak about the mere possibility of peace. Not ever.
In media universe there
is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing.
I'd imagine that these media companies have a lot stock in and a cozy relationship with the defense contractors.
Damiano Iocovozzi, 10 October 2014 7:04pm
The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. The media doesn't report on anything but
relies on repeating manufactured crises, creating manufactured consent & discussing manufactured solutions. Follow the oil, the
pipelines & the money. Both R's & D's are left & right cheeks of the same buttock. Thanks to Citizens United & even Hobby Lobby,
a compliant Supreme Court, also owned by United States of Corporations, it's a done deal.
Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer
have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department
to your favorite media outlet.
Let me give you one clear example. A year ago Barack Obama came very close to bombing Syria to
kingdom come, the justification used was "Assad gassed his own people", referring to a sarin gas attack near Damascus. Well, it
turns out that Assad did not initiate that attack, discovered by research from many sources including the prestigious MIT, it
was a false flag attack planned by Turkey and carried out by some of Obama's own "moderate rebels".
But all that research from
MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written
still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and
distorts and misrepresents the news every day.
The
New York Times is out with a puff piece ahead of the highly anticipated DOJ Inspector
General report expected any day now detailing the FBI's (mis)conduct during the 2016 US
election. The Times piece is brought to you by yet more leaks from the FBI, with their account
of the operation against the Trump campaign prior to former Director Comey's firing and the
appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel.
Key takeaways:
The FBI's codename for the operation which began 100 days before the US election was
Crossfire Hurricane, in reference to a lyric in the Rolling Stones song Jumpin' Jack
Flash.
The FBI sent counterintelligence agents, one of whom was Peter Strzok, to London in the
summer of 2016 to meet with Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, to describe his meeting
with Trump campaign advisor, George Papadopoulos.
The meeting with Downer was described as "highly unusual," and "helped provide the
foundation for a case that, a year ago Thursday, became the special counsel
investigation."
The FBI kept details of the operation secret from most of the DOJ - with "only about five
Justice Department officials" aware of the full scope of the case.
Fearful of leaks, they kept details from political appointees across the street at the
Justice Department. Peter Strzok, a senior F.B.I. agent, explained in a text that Justice
Department officials would find it too "tasty" to resist sharing. "I'm not worried about our
side," he wrote. -
NYT
It was an assignment so secretive that Peter Strzok giddily texted his side piece about it
on an unsecured line. It's also weird for NYT to characterize the meeting as "not yet
reported" seeing as how Strzok's texts about it have been out for months. https://t.co/lbvTZksLJrpic.twitter.com/QSA7TedpTM
Former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn was under investigation, along with Paul
Manafort and another advisor "suspected of being a Russian agent himself."
Christopher Steele's anti-Trump dossier memos didn't reach the FBI until mid-September
2016.
The F.B.I. bureaucracy did agents no favors. In July, a retired British spy named
Christopher Steele approached a friend in the F.B.I. overseas and provided reports linking
Trump campaign officials to Russia. But the documents meandered around the F.B.I.
organizational chart, former officials said. Only in mid-September, congressional
investigators say, did the records reach the Crossfire Hurricane team .
Strzok texted his mistress Lisa Page with doubts over the case.
"I cannot believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive
connections," Mr. Strzok wrote soon after returning from London.
Donald Trump was not under investigation, "but his actions perplexed the agents."
" A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump's advisers
to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government's disruptive efforts.
"
"It's like the deep state all got together to try to orchestrate a palace coup,"
Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, said in January on Fox Business Network.
Bruce
Ohr. (Aug. 28, 2018) . TRANSCRIPT of Interview before an Executive Session jointly between
the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, p. 184. U.S. Congress.
Bruce Ohr speaking about Nellie Ohr, TRANSCRIPT p. 184
One month before the 2016 Nov. election, Nellie Ohr moved from the DOJ and FusionGPS that
was paid by the DNC and Clinton Foundation via hers and Obama's law firm Perkins Coie LLP to
created the "Steele dossier". Then she went to work for Clinton Foundation donor/Clinton Speech
sponsor VeriSign, Inc.
Blooming Barricade , Mar 14, 2019 5:36:22 PM |
link
Pierre Omidyar opens up new Integrity Initiative
Omidyar's Democracy Fund has also helped to finance the "News Integrity Initiative," a
name that evokes the U.K.'s notorious Integrity Initiative. The latter group claimed to be an
independent charity battling foreign disinformation until it was exposed by hackers as a
propaganda mill run by military officers and covertly funded by the British Foreign Office to
cultivate public opinion in support of heightened conflict with Russia. Leaked communications
revealed how the Integrity Initiative mobilized clusters of journalists, self-styled
disinformation experts, academics and political figures throughout the West to advocate for a
long-term war footing against the Russian menace.
For its part, the News Integrity Initiative is a murky $14 million operation intended to
"combat media manipulation" through a network of "journalists, technologists, academic
institutions, non-profits, and other organizations." The set-up is eerily evocative of the
influence clusters developed by the British Integrity Initiative. Few specifics are provided,
however, on what the group actually does.
A hint about the agenda of the News Integrity Initiative lies in a grant of $1 million it
made to an outlet called Internews in 2017. The bulk of Internews' money -- some 80 percent
of it -- comes from the U.S. government. It has also received backing from liberal financier
George Soros and USAID, which provided the group with seed money for a Russian-language
television network, helped drive the pro-NATO color revolution in the Republic of Georgia,
and published footage of Russian casualties in Chechnya to erode Russian public support for
the war.
In countries that are considered official and semi-official enemies of the United States,
Internews has organized de facto boot camps for opposition journalists. "In the Middle East,"
says Internews founder David Hoffman, "training sessions often begin with discussion of
whether Internews is really U.S. propaganda or the CIA." However Hoffman answers the
question, it is abundantly clear that his outlet has advanced Washington's priorities abroad
behind the guise of independent journalism.
In November 2017, the News Integrity Initiative hosted a workshop alongside Internews and
the Omidyar-backed First Draft News in Kiev, Ukraine, according to the initiative's managing
director, Molly de Aguiar. Kiev is today a nexus for intelligence-connected media crusaders
and a launch pad for projects ostensibly aimed at countering Russia's "information warfare."
But, what exactly the News Integrity Initiative was doing there was left unsaid.
While Omidyar ploughs his fortune into organizations that claim to be countering
"disinformation," especially of the Russian variety, he has established a culture factory to
publicize the supposed feats of the journalists often hyped up by the cartel of media
transparency groups and fact-checking sites he funds.
Unfortunately, I have been taken up with the doings of another Christopher – surnamed
Donnelly – whose antics with the 'Institute for Statecraft' and 'Integrity Initiative'
seem just as ludicrous as those of Steele, and equally destructive.
I hope to come back to the implications of what has been coming out on your side about the
dossier attributed to Steele in more depth in the none-too-distant future, particular if in
fact the depositions made by him and David Kramer are unsealed reasonably promptly, but some
background remarks may be worth throwing into the discussion.
It cannot be repeated often enough that an enormous amount of damage has been done as a
result of people forming their impressions of MI6 from David Cornwell, aka John Le
Carré, rather than Graham Greene.
A critical point is that, while if 'humint' is pursued by competent people, it can be
invaluable, if pursued by incompetents, like so many of those Greene had known in his time in
the wartime MI6, and portrayed so marvellously in 'Our Man in Havana', it is common for an
'echo chamber' to be set up, where people are told what they want to hear.
Those providing the 'echo' may genuinely share the delusions involved – or they may
cynically exploit these, as part of a deliberate strategy of making the incompetents
instruments of their own agendas (as MI5 and the Naval Intelligence Division did with the
Abwehr during the war. MI6, largely incompetent apart from the section Philby ran, was
marginal.)
That precisely this kind of 'echo chamber' had been set up by the Berezovsky group with
people like Steele was the thrust of a pointed remark made by Andrei Lugovoi in the press
conference on 31 May 2007 where he responded to the Crown Prosecution Service request for his
extradition.
"... Bruce Ohr testified that Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS provided to federal officials information we know to be false regarding Cleta Mitchell, a Republican campaign finance attorney, and the NRA. Giving false statements to federal officials is a crime under 18 U.S.C. 1001. pic.twitter.com/vm0tc4ft5R ..."
"... "Rod Rosenstein won't tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS," said Gaetz, in August, 2018. "So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues at the Department of Justice that in violation of law that required him to disclose his wife's occupation his sources of income. He did not do that. So when did all of the other people at the Department of Justice find this out because Rod Rosenstein, I've asked him twice in open hearing and he will not give an answer. I think there's a real smoking gun there." ..."
"... in Ohr's testimony he says he told the FBI about his wife's role at Fusion GPS but only divulged his role to one person at the DOJ: Rosenstein. ..."
"... It also appears he failed to tell lawmakers about the information he delivered to the FBI. ..."
"... Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of information heading into Fusion GPS." ..."
"... In the testimony Ohr also revealed that Steele had told him details about his work with Deripaska saying Deripaska's attorney Paul Hauser "had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with" Deripaska. Ohr said Manafort "had stolen a large amount of money from" the Russian Oligarch and that Hauser was "trying to gather information that would show that." ..."
Department of Justice senior official
Bruce Ohr's
testimony contradicts testimony given by other senior government officials and key witnesses who testified before Congress regarding
the FBI's investigation into President Trump's 2016 campaign and alleged collusion with the Russian government, according to the
full transcripts released Friday.
Ohr's 268-page testimony, released by Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, reveals inconsistency
and contradiction in testimony given by Glenn Simpson, founder of embattled research firm
Fusion
GPS and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is set to leave his post sometime this month.
It also reveals that many questions are still left unanswered.
The Contradictions and The Revelations
Glenn Simpson suggests in his testimony to the Senate that he never spoke to anyone at the FBI about Christopher Steele,
the former British spy he hired to investigate the Trump campaign during the election. However, Ohr suggest otherwise telling
former Rep.Trey Gowdy under questioning "As I recall, and this is after checking with my notes, Mr. Simpson and I spoke in
August of 2016. I met with him, and he provided some information on possible intermediaries between the Russian government
and the Trump campaign."
In another instance, Simpson's testimony also contradicts notes taken by Ohr after a meeting they had in December, 2016.
Unverified allegations were decimated among the media that the Trump campaign had a
computer server that was linked to a Russian bank in Moscow: Alpha Bank. Simpson suggested to the Senate that he knew very
little about the Trump -Alpha Bank server story and couldn't provide information. But Bruce Ohr's own handwritten notes state
that when he met with Simpson in December 2016, Simpson was concerned over the Alpha Bank story in the New York Times. "The
New York Times story on Oct. 31 downplaying the connection between
Alfa servers and the Trump campaign was incorrect.
There was communication and it wasn't spam," stated Ohr's notes. This suggests that Simpson was well aware of the story, which
was believed by congressional investigators to have started from his research firm.
Ohr testified to lawmakers that Simpson provided information to federal officials that was false regarding Cleta Mitchell,
a well-known Republican campaign finance lawyer, and information regarding the National Rifle Association. Sean Davis, with
the Federalist pointed this out in a tweet today. Read one of those
stories here.
Bruce Ohr testified that Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS provided to federal officials information we know to be false regarding
Cleta Mitchell, a Republican campaign finance attorney, and the NRA. Giving false statements to federal officials is a crime
under 18 U.S.C. 1001. pic.twitter.com/vm0tc4ft5R
4. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would not answer questions to lawmakers during testimony about when he learned that
Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, was working for Fusion GPS. Just check this out from Rep. Matt Gaetz's
interview with Judge Jeanine on Fox News .
"Rod Rosenstein won't tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS," said Gaetz, in August,
2018. "So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues at the Department of Justice that in violation of
law that required him to disclose his wife's occupation his sources of income. He did not do that. So when did all of the other
people at the Department of Justice find this out because Rod Rosenstein, I've asked him twice in open hearing and he will
not give an answer. I think there's a real smoking gun there."
However, in Ohr's testimony he says he told the FBI about his wife's role at Fusion GPS but only divulged his role to one
person at the DOJ: Rosenstein.At the time, Rosenstein was overseeing the Trump-Russia probe, and had taken the information from Ohr and gave it to the
FBI. Just read The Hill's John Solomon
full story here for the full background on Ohr's testimony. I highlighted an important date below: remember Rosenstein wouldn't
answer lawmakers questions as to when he knew about Nellie Ohr. It also appears he failed to tell lawmakers about the information
he delivered to the FBI.
Ohr stated in his testimony: "What I had said, I think, to Mr. Rosenstein in October of 2017 was that my wife was working for
Fusion GPS The dossier, as I understand it, is the collection of reports that Chris Steele has prepared for Fusion GPS."
Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided
to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of
information heading into Fusion GPS."
5. Ohr also told lawmakers in his testimony that the former British spy, Christopher Steele was being paid by the FBI at the
same time he was getting paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. However, there was another player paying Steele and
it was a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska, a tycoon connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin, had well known
animus toward his former friend Paul Manafort.
Rep. Mark Meadows asked Ohr during testimony "Did Chris Steele get paid by the Department of Justice?
Ohr's response: "My understanding is that for a time he was a source for the FBI, a paid source.
In the testimony Ohr also revealed that Steele had told him details about his work with Deripaska saying Deripaska's attorney
Paul Hauser "had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with" Deripaska.
Ohr said Manafort "had stolen a large amount of money from" the Russian Oligarch and that Hauser was "trying to gather information
that would show that."
Looks like Orr was one of the central figures of the conspiracy against Trump in Justice Department. And it was Orr wife
who probably had written parts of the dossier at the request of CIA Brennan and other conspirators in CIA (who were acting via
controlled by them counterintelligence division at FBI)
Notable quotes:
"... Christopher Steele, a "former" MI-6 officer, had been a paid FBI informant for several years. ..."
"... Bruce Ohr met with Glenn Simpson in August 2016, which totally contradicts Simpson's previous sworn testimony that he did not meet with Ohr until after the 2016 election. ..."
"... Ohr informed FBI and senior DOJ officials, who signed off on the FISA application in October 2016 to spy on Carter Page, that the "dossier" had a tainted political history. ..."
"... What is truly remarkable about Ohr's testimony is that his explanation for repeated meetings and contacts with Christopher Steele do not make sense. I am referring specifically to Ohr's claim that Steele wanted him, Ohr, to pass info to the FBI. ..."
"... This guy is a senior DOJ official. He is a former prosecutor. He knows that the minute he accepts anything from Steele and then passes it on to the FBI that he, Ohr, became a fact witness. He is part of the chain of custody. More importantly, Ohr, knowing that Steele is on the FBI payroll, should have refused to accept any information and direct Steele to talk to his Agent/handler. Period. ..."
"... One other important sidetone--there has been a longstanding agreement among the 5 Eyes (i.e., US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to NOT recruit as assets each other's spies. ..."
"... In light of all of this one can only conclude that Bruce Ohr is lying about the real reason for meeting with Steele or that he is a complete moron. There is no other possible explanation or excuse. I do not think that Ohr is a moron. He does not strike me as a man of limited intelligence. I think he is lying. I believe that the reason Steele approached Ohr was to provide some insulation to the FBI, which was engaged in an act of sedition. The FBI was interfering in the 2016 election and working to destroy Donald Trump. ..."
"... As more transcripts and documents come into the sunlight, we will get a clearer picture of the corruption at both the FBI and the DOJ. The FISA applications to spy on a US citizen, Carter Page, are without foundation. I am sure that William Barr appreciates this point and will press for action against those who willingly engaged in such despicable actions. ..."
Sorry to have been out of pocket (I've fled the wintry north for a new home in Florida). I
am back, so to speak, and ready to write a bit. Last week's release by Congressman Collins of
the interview transcript of Bruce Ohr, who appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last
year is quite damning of the FBI and the DOJ. If our system of justice is truly blind and
committed to fairness, there is little doubt that former FBI and DOJ officials--Comey, McCabe,
Yates and Rosenstein--will be facing serious legal jeopardy. They have lied.
The biggest "revelations" from Ohr are as follows:
Christopher Steele, a "former" MI-6 officer, had been a paid FBI informant for several years.
Bruce Ohr met with Glenn Simpson in August 2016, which totally contradicts Simpson's previous
sworn testimony that he did not meet with Ohr until after the 2016 election.
Ohr informed FBI
and senior DOJ officials, who signed off on the FISA application in October 2016 to spy on
Carter Page, that the "dossier" had a tainted political history.
I put "revelations" in quotations because we already knew most of this--specifically
Steele's status as a paid informant and the failure of the FBI and DOJ to verify the accuracy
of the so-called dossier. The new meat on the bone is Ohr's claim that he met with Simpson in
August 2016. Simpson swore under oath that no such meeting took place. That's a substantive lie
and, if the Flynn case is a guide, Mr. Simpson will be looking at prison.
What is truly remarkable about Ohr's testimony is that his explanation for repeated meetings
and contacts with Christopher Steele do not make sense. I am referring specifically to Ohr's
claim that Steele wanted him, Ohr, to pass info to the FBI. Think about this for a moment--Ohr
knows that Steele is a paid FBI informant. That means Steele has an FBI agent who is his
conduit into the FBI. That Agent handles interviews and writes up reports. Why in the hell
would Steele approach Ohr and not his FBI handler? Because Steele did not want to create a
record, i.e., a 302, that would have been generated if he had followed protocol and gone thru
normal channels.
And Ohr? This guy is a senior DOJ official. He is a former prosecutor. He knows that the
minute he accepts anything from Steele and then passes it on to the FBI that he, Ohr, became a
fact witness. He is part of the chain of custody. More importantly, Ohr, knowing that Steele is
on the FBI payroll, should have refused to accept any information and direct Steele to talk to
his Agent/handler. Period.
One other important sidetone--there has been a longstanding agreement among the 5 Eyes
(i.e., US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to NOT recruit as assets each other's spies.
Christopher Steele's employ with the FBI violates this policy.
In light of all of this one can only conclude that Bruce Ohr is lying about the real reason
for meeting with Steele or that he is a complete moron. There is no other possible explanation
or excuse. I do not think that Ohr is a moron. He does not strike me as a man of limited
intelligence. I think he is lying. I believe that the reason Steele approached Ohr was to
provide some insulation to the FBI, which was engaged in an act of sedition. The FBI was
interfering in the 2016 election and working to destroy Donald Trump.
As more transcripts and documents come into the sunlight, we will get a clearer picture of
the corruption at both the FBI and the DOJ. The FISA applications to spy on a US citizen,
Carter Page, are without foundation. I am sure that William Barr appreciates this point and
will press for action against those who willingly engaged in such despicable actions.
Department of Justice senior official
Bruce
Ohr's
testimony contradicts testimony given by other senior government officials and key
witnesses
who testified before Congress regarding the FBI's investigation into President
Trump's 2016 campaign and alleged collusion with the Russian government, according to the full
transcripts released Friday.
Ohr's 268-page testimony, released by Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee Georgia
Rep. Doug Collins,
reveals inconsistency and contradiction in testimony given by Glenn
Simpson, founder of embattled research firm
Fusion
GPS
and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein,
who is set to leave his post sometime
this month.
It also reveals that many questions are still left unanswered.
The Contradictions and The Revelations
1. Glenn Simpson suggests in his testimony to the Senate that he never spoke to anyone
at the FBI about Christopher Steele, the former British spy he hired to investigate the Trump
campaign during the election. However, Ohr suggests otherwise
telling former Rep.Trey
Gowdy under questioning "As I recall, and this is after checking with my notes, Mr. Simpson and I
spoke in August of 2016. I met with him, and he provided some information on possible
intermediaries between the Russian government and the Trump campaign."
2. In another instance, Simpson's testimony also contradicts notes taken by Ohr after a
meeting they had in December, 2016. Unverified allegations were decimated among the media that the
Trump campaign had a
computer
server
that was linked to a Russian bank in Moscow: Alpha Bank.
Simpson suggested to
the Senate that he knew very little about the Trump -Alpha Bank server story and couldn't provide
information. But Bruce Ohr's own handwritten notes state that when he met with Simpson in December
2016, Simpson was concerned over the Alpha Bank story in the New York Times. "The New York Times
story on Oct. 31 downplaying the connection between
Alfa
servers
and the Trump campaign was incorrect. There was communication and it wasn't spam," stated Ohr's
notes. This suggests that Simpson was well aware of the story, which was believed by congressional
investigators to have started from his research firm.
3. Ohr testified to lawmakers that Simpson provided information to federal officials
that was false regarding Cleta Mitchell,
a well-known Republican campaign finance lawyer,
and information regarding the National Rifle Association. Sean Davis, with the Federalist pointed
this out in a tweet today. Read one of those
stories
here.
4. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would not answer questions to lawmakers during
testimony about when he learned that Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, was working for Fusion GPS.
Just check this out from Rep. Matt Gaetz's
interview
with Judge Jeanine on Fox News
.
"Rod Rosenstein won't tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion
GPS," said Gaetz, in August, 2018.
"So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues at the Department of
Justice that in violation of law that required him to disclose his wife's occupation his sources
of income. He did not do that. So when did all of the other people at the Department of Justice
find this out because Rod Rosenstein, I've asked him twice in open hearing and he will not give
an answer. I think there's a real smoking gun there."
However, in Ohr's testimony he says he told the FBI about his wife's role at Fusion GPS
but only divulged his role to one person at the DOJ:
Rosenstein.
At
the time, Rosenstein was overseeing the Trump-Russia probe, and had taken the information from Ohr
and gave it to the FBI. Just read The Hill's John Solomon
full
story here
for the full background on Ohr's testimony. I highlighted an important date below:
remember Rosenstein wouldn't answer lawmakers questions as to when he knew about Nellie Ohr. It
also appears he failed to tell lawmakers about the information he delivered to the FBI.
Ohr stated in his testimony: "What I had said, I think, to Mr. Rosenstein
in October
of 2017
was that my wife was working for Fusion GPS The dossier, as I understand it,
is the collection of reports that Chris Steele has prepared for Fusion GPS."
Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or
whatever that she had provided to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in
the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of information heading into Fusion
GPS."
5. Ohr also told lawmakers in his testimony that the former British spy, Christopher
Steele was being paid by the FBI at the same time he was getting paid by the Hillary Clinton
campaign and the DNC.
However, there was another player paying Steele and it was a Russian
oligarch named Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska, a tycoon connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin,
had well known animus toward his former friend Paul Manafort.
Rep. Mark Meadows asked Ohr during testimony "Did Chris Steele get paid by the Department of
Justice?
Ohr's response: "My understanding is that for a time he was a source for the FBI, a paid
source.
In the testimony Ohr also revealed that Steele had told him details about his work with
Deripaska saying Deripaska's attorney Paul Hauser "had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul
Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with" Deripaska.
Ohr said Manafort
"had stolen a large amount of money from" the Russian Oligarch and that Hauser was "trying to
gather information that would show that."
"... The stories about Russian intelligence supposedly filming Trump in a high-end Moscow hotel with prostitutes have been circulating around Washington for months. I was briefed about them by a Hillary Clinton associate who was clearly hopeful that the accusations would be released before the election and thus further damage Trump's chances. But the alleged video never seemed to surface and the claims had all the earmarks of a campaign dirty trick. ..."
"... However, now the tales of illicit frolic have been elevated to another level. They have been inserted into an official U.S. intelligence report, the details of which were leaked first to CNN and then to other mainstream U.S. news media outlets. ..."
"... In American history, legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was infamous for using his agency to develop negative information on a political figure and then letting the person know that the FBI had the dirt and certainly would not want it to become public – if only the person would do what the FBI wanted, whether that was to reappoint Hoover to another term or to boost the FBI's budget or – in the infamous case of civil rights leader Martin Luther King – perhaps to commit suicide. ..."
"... Still, perhaps the more troubling issue is whether the U.S. intelligence community has entered a new phase of politicization in which its leadership feels that it has the responsibility to weed out "unfit" contenders for the presidency. During the general election campaign, a well-placed intelligence source told me that the intelligence community disdained both Clinton and Trump and hoped to discredit both of them with the hope that a more "acceptable" person could move into the White House for the next four years. ..."
"... Then, after the election, President Obama's CIA began leaking allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin had orchestrated the hacking of Democratic emails and provided them to WikiLeaks to reveal how the DNC undermined Sen. Bernie Sanders's campaign and what Clinton had told Wall Street bigwigs in paid speeches that she had sought to keep secret from the American people. ..."
"... Now, we are seeing what looks like a new phase in this "stop (or damage) Trump" strategy, the inclusion of anti-Trump dirt in an official intelligence report that was then leaked to the major media. ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
"... There are moments in history when it seems almost the entire population of a nation has been struck with deafness and blindess. This maybe one such moment for the United States as a political elite begins the process of tearing the Union apart. ..."
"... The Craft of Intelligence, by Allen Dulles, (1965, if memory serves; alas, that book's text seems unavailable on the internet) ..."
"... At Kent State the National Guard was quite willing to shoot "their own people". The increasingly militarized Police of the US have been getting lots of practice shooting at "their own people". ..."
"... I'm wondering if we are seeing the beginnings of a President Pence. ..."
"... Why are you in the US so keen on destroying any credibility of your government? ..."
Exclusive: President-elect Trump is fending off a US intelligence leak of unproven allegations
that he cavorted with Russian prostitutes, but the darker story might be the CIA's intervention in
U.S. politics, reports Robert Parry.
The decision by the U.S. intelligence community to include in an official report some unverified
and salacious accusations against President-elect Donald Trump 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.
Legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
In this case, as leaders of the U.S. intelligence community were pressing Trump to accept their
assessment that the Russian government had tried to bolster Trump's campaign by stealing and leaking
actual emails harmful to Hillary Clinton's campaign, Trump was confronted with this classified "appendix"
describing claims about him cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.
Supposedly, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan included
the unproven allegations in the report under the rationale that the Russian government might have
videotaped Trump's misbehavior and thus could use it to blackmail him. But the U.S. intelligence
community also had reasons to want to threaten Trump who has been critical of its performance and
who has expressed doubts about its analysis of the Russian "hacking."
After the briefing last Friday, Trump and his incoming administration did shift their position,
accepting the intelligence community's assessment that the Russian government hacked the emails of
the Democratic National Committee and Clinton's campaign chief John Podesta. But I'm told Trump saw
no evidence that Russia then leaked the material to WikiLeaks and has avoided making that concession.
Still, Trump's change in tone was noted by the mainstream media and was treated as an admission
that he was abandoning his earlier skepticism. In other words, he was finally getting onboard the
intelligence community's Russia-did-it bandwagon. Now, however, we know that Trump simultaneously
had been confronted with the possibility that the unproven stories about him engaging in unorthodox
sex acts with prostitutes could be released, embarrassing him barely a week before his inauguration.
The classified report, with the explosive appendix, was also given to President Obama and the
so-called "Gang of Eight," bipartisan senior members of Congress responsible for oversight of the
intelligence community, which increased chances that the Trump accusations would be leaked to the
press, which indeed did happen.
Circulating Rumors
The stories about Russian intelligence supposedly filming Trump in a high-end Moscow hotel with
prostitutes have been
circulating around Washington for months. I was briefed about them by a Hillary Clinton associate
who was clearly hopeful that the accusations would be released before the election and thus further
damage Trump's chances. But the alleged video never seemed to surface and the claims had all the
earmarks of a campaign dirty trick.
However, now the tales of illicit frolic have been elevated to another level. They have been inserted
into an official U.S. intelligence report, the details of which were leaked first to CNN and then
to other mainstream U.S. news media outlets.
Trump has denounced the story as "fake news" and it is certainly true that the juicy details –
reportedly assembled by a former British MI-6 spy named Christopher Steele – have yet to check out.
But the placement of the rumors in a U.S. government document gave the mainstream media an excuse
to publicize the material.
It's also allowed the media to again trot out the Russian word "kompromat" as if the Russians
invented the game of assembling derogatory information about someone and then using it to discredit
or blackmail the person.
In American history, legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was infamous for using his agency
to develop negative information on a political figure and then letting the person know that the FBI
had the dirt and certainly would not want it to become public – if only the person would do what
the FBI wanted, whether that was to reappoint Hoover to another term or to boost the FBI's budget
or – in the infamous case of civil rights leader Martin Luther King – perhaps to commit suicide.
However, in this case, it is not even known whether the Russians have any dirt on Trump. It could
just be rumors concocted in the middle of a hard-fought campaign, first among Republicans battling
Trump for the nomination (this opposition research was reportedly initiated by backers of Sen. Marco
Rubio in the GOP race) before being picked up by Clinton supporters for use in the general election.
Still, perhaps the more troubling issue is whether the U.S. intelligence community has entered
a new phase of politicization in which its leadership feels that it has the responsibility to weed
out "unfit" contenders for the presidency. During the general election campaign, a well-placed intelligence
source told me that the intelligence community disdained both Clinton and Trump and hoped to discredit
both of them with the hope that a more "acceptable" person could move into the White House for the
next four years.
Hurting Both Candidates
Though I was skeptical of that information, it did turn out that FBI Director James Comey, one
of the top officials in the intelligence community, badly damaged Clinton's campaign by deeming her
handling of her emails as Secretary of State "extremely careless" but deciding not to prosecute her
– and then in the last week of the campaign briefly reopening and then re-closing the investigation.
Then, after the election, President Obama's CIA began leaking allegations that Russian President
Vladimir Putin had orchestrated the hacking of Democratic emails and provided them to WikiLeaks to
reveal how the DNC undermined Sen. Bernie Sanders's campaign and what Clinton had told Wall Street
bigwigs in paid speeches that she had sought to keep secret from the American people.
The intelligence community's assessment set the stage for what could have been a revolt by the
Electoral College in which enough Trump delegates could have refused to vote for him to send the
election into the House of Representatives, where the states would choose the President from one
of the top three vote-getters in the Electoral College. The third-place finisher turned out to be
former Secretary of State Colin Powell who got four votes from Clinton delegates in Washington State.
But the Electoral College ploy failed when Trump's delegates proved overwhelmingly faithful to the
GOP candidate.
Now, we are seeing what looks like a new phase in this "stop (or damage) Trump" strategy, the
inclusion of anti-Trump dirt in an official intelligence report that was then leaked to the major
media.
Whether this move was meant to soften up Trump or whether the intelligence community genuinely
thought that the accusations might be true and deserved inclusion in a report on alleged Russian
interference in U.S. politics or whether it was some combination of the two, we are witnessing a
historic moment when the U.S. intelligence community has deployed its extraordinary powers within
the domain of U.S. politics. J. Edgar Hoover would be proud.
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 ).
Excuse the mixed metaphors, but this looks like another entirely predictable nail in the coffin
of US democracy, as the chickens come home to roost. For some time it has been quite obvious the
CIA has been pulling strings from behind the scenes to make whatever puppet occupies the White
House dance to its tune. But it won't end there. Only when the CIA climbs completely out of the
coffin can the epic finale between the CIA, FBI and NSA begin.
The big question is as to how long the people of states like Texas and Florida stand by in
the wings as the theater catches fire.
There are moments in history when it seems almost the entire population of a nation has been
struck with deafness and blindess. This maybe one such moment for the United States as a political
elite begins the process of tearing the Union apart.
Jean-David , January 12, 2017 at 11:22 am
Don't mix your metaphors before they are hatched. ;-)
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Bill Bodden , January 12, 2017 at 2:05 pm
There are moments in history when it seems almost the entire population of a nation has
been struck with deafness and blindess. This maybe one such moment for the United States as a
political elite begins the process of tearing the Union apart.
The United States has been accused of decadence for decades by Americans and non-Americans
without much concern being shown by anyone not in a certain minority. The great tragedy of a decadent
way of life is its durability.
In 1961 William Lederer's book, "A Nation of Sheep" revealed the abuse of American power and
the ignorance of the American people regarding this misrule. Nothing much has changed since then
except the names of the aggressors and their primary geographic areas of intended domination.
The mass of people are essentially clueless and content to believe whatever lies and salacious
tales are told them from the nation's Towers of Babel. This is in line with human history that
shows people of authoritarian dispositions tend to be more aggressive and dominant in politics
and commerce and the masses accept their lot as long as they get enough crumbs from establishment's
plate..
(The title of the book was also an insult to sheep, but that is another story.)
The saying goes, "power corrupts," but i believe that it is the corrupt who seek power to begin
with.
Most people are content to live and let live, to live by the golden rule, mind their own and reciprocate
kindness etc., etc.
Then there are those who get a thrill from exercising control over others. Those are the ones
who shoot straight to the top.
Jack Flanigan , January 14, 2017 at 1:47 am
An interesting and clear observation. As an australian I note our system is dominated by two
major parties (and I mean dominated) similar to the US. The two parties are vehicles for ambitious
and corrupt individuals to fast track political careers. The power rests in these organizations
and attracts the corrupt like bees to honey.
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Curious , January 12, 2017 at 6:09 pm
Bill, regarding your sense of human history I might add that for many centuries people couldn't
read, except for the aristocracy and the religious sects mostly. The reformation produced a 100
year war and literacy was at an all time low in Luthers time but something motivated them to fight
for such a long time, and it wasn't information nor intellect.
Where has our literacy gone which would prevent a repeat of endless war and violence these
days? Oh yes, corporate controlled media hiring people who are certain to have no critical thinking
skills, no moral rudder, nor worldly experience to shed the scales from their eyes. We are almost
in pre-Gutenberg times of short attention spans and 140 character 'news truths' covering the landscape
of the ignorant. One can only hope the Tower of the oligarchs Babel has rapidly decaying clay
feet. We certainly know how to reduce cultures more ancient than ours to ashes without so much
as a second thought regarding the sanctity of life. Where are all the pro-lifers now? Oh yeh,
that's only in the womb, and after the umbilical cord is cut they are fair game for destruction.
The US values we rave about will really hurt when other cultures treat us as they have been treated.
Curious , January 12, 2017 at 6:32 pm
Or better yet, we are in Gutenberg times where the "type" is set by the big players and the
papers around the country keep the same type and only add ink. It's their only function now at
the national level to inhibit discourse, excluding this site of course.
Reply
Curious , January 12, 2017 at 6:34 pm
Or better yet, we are in times of the early press machines, where the "type" is set by the
big players and the papers around the country keep the same type and only add ink. It's their
only function now at the national level, meant to inhibit discourse and ideas. (excluding this
site of course)
Reply
Wendi , January 12, 2017 at 5:41 pm
In its Hoover relation, this article reprises the passage in The Craft of Intelligence, by
Allen Dulles, (1965, if memory serves; alas, that book's text seems unavailable on the internet).
It describes the power struggle involved post-FDR, during-HST 1946-48, at the institution of
the CIA (The Agency was not legislatively enacted, only instituted through Executive Order.)
Hoover opposed the creation of an intelligence collection that would compete with the FBI's monopoly
of spies snoops and snitches.
The compromise settlement set the FBI with domestic coverage and the CIA with international
haunts for its spooks.
Come the the present day, they still have turf wars in power rivalry for budget money.
However, in effect, after the budget shuffle the two legions merge their 'assets' - making each
one double its real size. They join in advocating for (the oxymoronic) 'authoritarian morality,'
gaining both the unlawfulness funded in the Judiciary with same unlawfulness, (or, being 'outlaw,'
'above the law'), funded by the Executive.
You can depend that they employ the same techniques. Coercion, extortion, blackmail, assassination,
torture, defamation, slander and Press Release aspersion. The polity is hung pendant on those
strings the outlaws pull. Or, 'hanged' pendant.
As Hoover, so Clapper et al.
Trump seems to have reconsided, maybe recanted, his defiance of 'intelligence' after he has
seen some truth in it regarding things he knows he did in places he knows he was. He knows he
dare not let the public see him through the cyclopian 'eye' of the intelligentia illumination.
_____
My wit sez, Lo! That explains his undocumented wife - he heard about Russian mail-order brides
and flew off to visit the showroom. And brought back some capital equipment, manufactured in foreign
lands.
Bill Bodden , January 12, 2017 at 10:04 pm
The Craft of Intelligence, by Allen Dulles, (1965, if memory serves; alas, that book's
text seems unavailable on the internet)
Try alibris or abebooks dot coms. They have copies.
Good comment Bryan, but I wonder if we should pay attention at all to this decline of everything,
not only of democracy. Yet, I wish to highlight two humorous comments which best characterise
the situation.
The first one was a title I saw on Russia-Insider website: "Trump watch out! John Brennan throws
even a kitchen sink at Trump in desperation."
The other was a comment by a zero-hedge reader: "Trump could have had sex with a goat in a
Moscow hotel room and be videod as much as I care if he only delivers on his election promises.
I voted based on his policy promises, not on his sexual preferences."
The sexual smear is so 20th century, the same as the CIA – obsolete.
Kiza , January 13, 2017 at 11:39 am
To continue on the humorous side, the vile RT has one on the Pornhub reporting a huge increase
in searches for "Golden Showers". Perhaps the kiddies are adding a new term to their vocabularies.
It seems that Trump supporters are many and varied, and very loyal. To pretend that all these
shenanigans were needed to help elect him against such a faulty candidate as Hillary is pathetic
in the extreme. The terrible results, when we see how the new Administration is being gently helped
by the Senate including Democrats, will be bad for us all if their warlike statements lead to
facts. However, Obama's sending of 2800 tanks and 4000 troops to help Germany(!) and Poland against
"Russian aggression" right now, plus Hillary's promises, do not give a hopeful alternative scenario
for the "land of the free" or peace on earth.
Reply
W. R. Knight , January 12, 2017 at 11:06 am
The saddest part of this entire debacle is that the intelligence agencies, as well as main
stream media, the president and most members of Congress have destroyed their own credibility.
Lacking credibility, they cannot be believed; and when they cannot be believed, they cannot be
trusted; and a government that cannot be trusted is doomed.
J. D. , January 12, 2017 at 1:35 pm
Trump proved more feisty than expected at his first press conference as President-Elect, hitting
back at both Buzzfeed ('You're fake news" and CNN ("you're organization is terrible") And went
on to say that "If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks? That's called an asset, not a
liability," describing the urgency of cooperation in defeating terrorism. Lost in the shuffle
however was the source of the lies - British intelligence agencies.In fact, the NYTimes reported
Jan. 6 that the official report released last week by the US intelligence agencies, which accused
Putin of subverting the U.S. election, also came from British intelligence, which "raised an alarm
that Moscow had hacked into the Democratic National Committee's computer servers, and alerted
their American counterparts.Talk about foreign interference.
Get with the program! We are supposed to believe that all we have heard from and about the
CIA in this century was pure and innocent incompetence, and should therefore continue to put all
of our faith in their motives and methods.
Reply
The entire sordid mess needs to be dismantled brick by brick and rebuilt from the ground up.
Washington should be razed to the ground. It is beyond rescuing. it is beyond saving. It is rotten
from the foundations to the pinicle of the obilisk. The American People should declare war on
Washington DC and invade the place and clean house. Bring the Guillotine along with them and the
baskets for the heads.
The stench is overwhelming. It needs to be cleaned up. No it needs to be wiped from the face
of the earth. One of the founding fathers said that periodically, the tree of democracy had to
be watered with blood. That time has arrived.
Reply
Znam Svashta , January 12, 2017 at 11:22 am
George Orwell predicted our current mess in his classic, "1984". Interestingly, that was the
year that the neocons took over the Pentagon's Office of Risk Assessment, the State Department,
and the whore-house American media.
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Lin Cleveland , January 12, 2017 at 11:50 am
What's going on here? I think Julian Assange may be on to something. ( my bold )
"Hillary Clinton's election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling
class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a D.C. insider , he is part of
the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of
other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an
existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilizing the pre-existing
central power network within D.C. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly,
but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States:
change for the worse and change for the better."–Julian Assange
floyd gardner , January 12, 2017 at 2:02 pm
Thanks, Lin [for your 'bold.' Assange and Snowden are two voices "in the wilderness" always
worth listening to.
Reply
Jessejean , January 12, 2017 at 2:10 pm
Brilliant– as always. No matter how vilified JA is and no matter how much he's lied about,
he still is a force for reason and subversion, both of which we desparately need. Thanks for the
quote.
Reply
D5-5 , January 12, 2017 at 4:50 pm
Curious to me in the two-pronged attack on Trump (a. demonizing to delegitimize and replace
with Pence coming from the political establishment; b. hysterical fear of Trump coming from left
wing journalism sources including left-oriented alternative news sites) is why the hysteria in
the left continues so virulently. Assange's comment, to me, is balanced and sober. We don't know
what will happen out of Trump and his collection of "idiosyncratic personalities," we don't know
what will turn out "change for the worse and change for the better," and all the fear-mongering
from people like Robert Reich, appearing regularly in Truthdig, is entirely speculative. I then
question–would these same people on the left, that I once thought to be colleagues, prefer Hillary
Clinton and "consolidation of power in the existing ruling class"? This fracturing in what I had
thought was an intelligent left opposition is disturbing.
As an "old leftie" myself, I'd have to agree with Paul Craig Roberts that there IS no left
anymore. It was co-opted and bought by Big Money. Maybe we need to forget about "left" and "right"
and operate according to our own minds rather tha taking our cues from apologists for the establishment
like Robert Reich. But it sounds like you're already doing that.
Reply
Mark West , January 12, 2017 at 5:10 pm
Change that will undoubtedly benefit the privileged in a big way.
I don't give a crap about if Trump had prostitutes. That's between he and his wife. What I
do care about is if there are Trump financial threads to Russia and if his team had illegal meetings
with Moscow before the election. There are too many questions that need to be answered.
Why does Trump continue to dote on Putin? He's a vicious killer who has no qualms of eliminating
his opponents. Those are facts.
Why won't he release his tax returns? It could only mean he is hiding something.
What benefit does the world intelligence community gain in smearing a president elect? Is it
financial? idealogical? Power? Are they not tied and beholdened more to the entrenched financial
hierarchies then to the ever changing political landscape?
What advantage did this operative from British intelligence gain from compiling this info?
Money, fame, a 2nd home in Portugal?
How does anyone watching that press conference not come away with the chilly realization that
our president-elect is psychologically impaired? My god you don't have to be a trained psychologist
to see the guy has some serious mental health issues.
Anna , January 12, 2017 at 9:54 pm
"He's a vicious killer " – this is a music for the Kagans' clan
Reply
JayHobeSound , January 13, 2017 at 4:10 am
"What advantage did this operative from British intelligence gain from compiling this info?"
Reportedly he asked his neighbours to feed his cats and he went into hiding. Bizarre.
'Why does Trump continue to dote on Putin? He's a vicious killer who has no qualms of eliminating
his opponents. Those are facts.'
Facts? I'm pretty familiar with Putin's career and I've seen nothing to suggest that Putin is
a killer at all.
Can you provide links to evidence? Not just links to other people making assertions without evidence,
please.
Reply
Truth First , January 13, 2017 at 6:20 pm
"Why does Trump continue to dote on Putin? He's a vicious killer who has no qualms of eliminating
his opponents. Those are facts."
You talking about Trump or Putin? In any case has Russia or Putin killed as many people as America
or Obama. The "facts" say no, not even close.
Reply
stinky rafsanjani , January 16, 2017 at 9:36 am
vicious killer? since when is that a bad thing? jinkies, obama of nobel fame
sends missiles and drones around the planet, bombing and killing for fun and
profit. why, he even orders the assassination of citizens of his own country,
without trial even. meanwhile, putin has, umm look! a squirrel!
James van Oosterom , January 16, 2017 at 11:45 am
Nobody said it was a bad thing. You're inferring things. Stick to squirrels . Ah yes, the door .
Reply
Andreas Wirsén , January 12, 2017 at 11:54 am
A "new phase" in Intelligence meddling with presidential candidates, yes – but only in how
openly they stand behind it as the source. Campaigns to scandalize unwanted primary challengers
have been alleged before. Senator Gary Hart, for one, has said in interviews he believes he was
caught in a honey trap, which cost him his candidacy.
floyd gardner , January 12, 2017 at 2:08 pm
Gary Hart, a potentially strong contender, was also [like Trump] not up to Deep State's standards
in Russophobia.
Reply
LongGoneJohn , January 12, 2017 at 12:04 pm
Didn't Trump just acknowledge that attacks on cyber US infrastructure including the DNC takes
place, in a general way? That is what his statement read and to me that does not sound like "Trump
acknowledges Russian DNC hack" at all.
So is it me, or ?
floyd gardner , January 12, 2017 at 2:12 pm
No, LGJ, it's not just you who can read through MSMB[ullsh t.]
Reply
Michael Morrissey , January 12, 2017 at 12:05 pm
If Trump & Co. accept "the intelligence community's assessment that the Russian government
hacked the emails," they are only saying that, as is common knowledge, everybody hacks everybody.
This is not, as Parry says, an acceptance of the intelligence "assessment" that Putin or Russian
hackers released the emails, or even got them. Assange and Murray have said unequivocally that
the source was inside the DNC, which means it cannot have been the Russians.
Zachary Smith , January 12, 2017 at 1:07 pm
Assange and Murray have said unequivocally that the source was inside the DNC, which means
it cannot have been the Russians.
Assange and Murray might be right, and they might not. There is a term being tossed around
– "cutout". Just because an intermediary claims to be a DNC leaker doesn't mean he actually was
such.
Under the circumstances I just don't care. Now if the Russians or Chinese or Ugandans or anybody
else had done more than facilitate the release of true information useful to voters, I'd be agitated
myself. Not that I'd expect anybody else to be. US votes have been hacked ever since the no-verify
touchscreen devices were first introduced, and nobody in authority has given a hoot about it.
Jessejean , January 12, 2017 at 2:18 pm
Zachary–you are so right. It drives me crazy that Bush got away with stealing the voting system
and all the Damn Dems care about is using it themselves. And now it drives me crazy that the Clintonistas
took down Bernie and are getting away with it. With that cat's paw Obusha hanging around to "work"
on rebuilding the DNC, we'll never see democracy again.
Sam F , January 13, 2017 at 6:52 am
We must indeed Dump the Dems. We need a progressive party.
There is a strong progressive majority everywhere which is being deliberately fragmented by
the Dems. In the US, Clinton supporters must unify not only with the critics of Dem warmongering
for Israel and KSA, but also with the Trumpers who want economic security in a rapacious oligarchic
state. Clinton supporters will have to admit their mistake and abandon the Dems as a scam of oligarchy
serving only as a backstop for the Repubs.
The solution is for a third party to align moderate progressives (national health care, no
wars of choice, income security) with parts of the traditional right (fundamentalists, flag-wavers,
make America great) leaving out only the extreme right (wars, discrimination, big business imperialism),
use individual funding, and rely upon broad platform appeal to marginalize the Dems as the third
party.
RMDC , January 13, 2017 at 9:28 am
Sam F. I agree with you but you have to stop using the term "progressive." The Clinton faction
of the demo party owns that term. It arose with John Podesta's Center for American Progress. Podesta
is the ideologue of contemporary progressivism. It has nothing to do with the Progressive movement
of the early 20th century.
The right term is Sander's term: Democratic Socialism. I know socialism is a problematic term,
too, but at least it is now claimed by the right people.
Sam F , January 13, 2017 at 2:20 pm
RMDC: Do you think "Progressive" can be brought back to its original meaning, or given a better
one, despite people falsely claiming to be progressive? Sanders' term might be incorporated into
that. It would be nice to deny the fakers the use of it.
Truth First , January 13, 2017 at 6:23 pm
"we'll never see democracy again."
Humm? When did we last see that "democracy" thing?
Reply
Bill Cash , January 12, 2017 at 12:08 pm
Trump could end all this by releasing his tax returns but he won't do it. I believe the intelligence
community had fears that once inaugurated, Trump would squash the whole thing. The Russian connection
is the only theory that connects all the dots. I'm waiting t see what happens with Assange. Will
he suddenly be able to go to Sweden?
As far as Trump's behavior, don't forget he was accused of raping a 13 year old girl but the woman
had to withdraw the suit because her life was threatened.
Why is your post such a strong reminder of Pizzagate?
Reply
Furtive , January 12, 2017 at 11:48 pm
Wont make any difference what t he does. He's an outsider. There's no escape except trying
& convicting the traitors running obama.
Reply
Wm. Boyce , January 12, 2017 at 12:14 pm
Very interesting column. I guess Mr. Trump is getting a lesson in who really runs things around
here.
Reply
Patricia Victour , January 12, 2017 at 12:22 pm
Unless Trump killed a prostitute on film, how could whatever is on the alleged video be any
worse than the pussy-grabbing debacle and all the other accusations of sexual predation? I don't
think you can embarrass Trump. He would just brush it off, and his base would probably think he
was a super stud.
Wm. Boyce , January 12, 2017 at 12:52 pm
Oh, I don't know, they could well have much worse stuff to leak, given Mr. Trump's complete
lack of control of his desires.
Zachary Smith , January 12, 2017 at 12:59 pm
I collected a lot of "stuff" on Trump from the internet in the past year, and was surprised
to see virtually none of it used against him. My best guess is that Hillary & Co. didn't think
it was necessary against their carefully selected "easiest" opponent. That "stuff" is still available,
and might well be used to buttress wilder and unverifiable claims.
col from oz , January 12, 2017 at 7:49 pm
Yesterday on anther site i wrote how Hillary was complicit in a very serious charge.
Please watch video titles, where is Eric braverman on you tube . I have watched some and most
of the material gives you the reality of what is occurring. A example is this. A fact is Gaddafi
wanted to have some kind of gold backed Dina money policy. Fact. So Libya had a lot of gold maybe
hundreds of tons. Where is it now. Did the "invaders' get it with their usual cut out Libyan man?
In the spirit of trying to make a better world i put this up, it seems political unbiased however
it shows the Clinton as they are?
"Libya's Qadhafi (African Union 2009 Chair) conceived and financed a plan to unify the sovereign
States of Africa with one gold currency (United States of Africa). In 2004, a pan-African Parliament
(53 nations) laid plans for the African Economic Community – with a single gold currency by 2023.
"African oil-producing nations were planning to abandon the petro-dollar, and demand gold payment
for oil/gas Qaddafi had done more than organize an African monetary coup. He had demonstrated
that financial independence could be achieved. His greatest infrastructure project, the Great
Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project
was being funded interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya's own state-owned bank.
That could explain why this critical piece of infrastructure was destroyed in 2011. NATO not only
bombed the pipeline but finished off the project by bombing the factory producing the pipes necessary
to repair it."
Speaking of "leaks", isn't the specific accusation in this case that Trump paid a prostitute
to "take a leak" on the bed where he believed the Obamas had spent the night? (So I guess it was
the prostitute that had "worse stuff to leak"!)
Gregory Herr , January 12, 2017 at 8:58 pm
And while no one at Trump's press conference mentioned the specifics, Trump stated, "Does anyone
really believe that story? I'm also very much of a germaphobe, by the way, believe me."
The Saker writes in "The Neocon's Declaration of War Against Trump":
"After several rather lame false starts, the Neocons have now taken a step which can only be
called a declaration of war against Donald Trump. [ ] All of the above further confirms to me
what I have been saying over the past weeks: if Trump ever makes it into the White House (I write
'if' because I think that the Neocons are perfectly capable of assassinating him), his first priority
should be to ruthlessly crack down as hard as he legally can against those in the US "deep state"
(which very much includes the media) who have now declared war on him. I am sorry to say that,
but it will be either him or them – one of the parties here will be crushed. [ ]
As I predicted it before the election, the USA are about to enter the worst crisis in their
history. We are entering extraordinarily dangerous times. If the danger of a thermonuclear war
between Russia and the USA had dramatically receded with the election of Trump, the Neocon total
war on Trump put the United States at very grave risk, including civil war (should the Neocon
controlled Congress impeach Trump I believe that uprisings will spontaneously happen, especially
in the South, and especially in Florida and Texas). At the risk of sounding over the top, I will
say that what is happening now is putting the very existence of the United States in danger almost
regardless of what Trump will personally do. Whatever we may think of Trump as a person and about
his potential as a President, what is certain is that millions of American patriots have voted
for him to "clear the swamp", give the boot to the Washington-based plutocracy and restore what
they see as fundamental American values. If the Neocons now manage to stage a coup d'etat against
Trump, I predict that these millions of Americans will turn to violence to protect what they see
as their way of life
If a coup is staged against Trump and some wannabe President à la Hillary or McCain gives the
order to the National Guard or even the US Army to put down a local insurrection, we could see
what we saw in Russia in 1991: a categorical refusal of the security services to shoot at their
own people. That is the biggest and ultimate danger for the Neocons: the risk that if they give
the order to crack down on the population the police, security and military services might simply
refuse to take action. If that could happen in the "KGB-controlled country" (to use a Cold War
cliché) this can also happen in the USA."
Zachary Smith , January 12, 2017 at 12:54 pm
If a coup is staged against Trump and some wannabe President à la Hillary or McCain gives
the order to the National Guard or even the US Army to put down a local insurrection, we could
see what we saw in Russia in 1991: a categorical refusal of the security services to shoot
at their own people.
At Kent State the National Guard was quite willing to shoot "their own people". The increasingly
militarized Police of the US have been getting lots of practice shooting at "their own people".
I suspect that's why a great many of them joined up in the first place. Finally, carefully chosen
drone operators thousands or tens of thousands of miles away won't have the slightest problem
slaughtering evildoers. That's what they do all the time in their regular jobs.
Brad Owen , January 12, 2017 at 3:44 pm
Don't forget veterans, millions of them. When THEY stepped up to the North Dakota pipeline,
security forces backed off. Backwards' described scenario could be our "1991" moment to break
free and break the Deep State, and reinstating Glass-Steagall would break their Imperial paymasters
in The City and The Street. A new World could suddenly come about, faster than even the USSR/Warsaw
Pact disappeared.
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Bill Bodden , January 12, 2017 at 10:14 pm
At Kent State the National Guard was quite willing to shoot "their own people". The increasingly
militarized Police of the US have been getting lots of practice shooting at "their own people".
Police departments all over the U.S. and other nations have a long history of acting as goon
squads and occasional firing squads for their local establishments. Lots of examples in labor
histories.
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Peter Loeb , January 13, 2017 at 8:23 am
KILLING OUR OWN PEOPLE .
Special thanks to Zachary Smith.
In the US it's called "heroism", patriotism" and the rest. But if we are
inconvenienced to kill our own people, we can kill other peoples'
people. Gigantic weapons deals to Saudi Arabia and Israel
are proof of that.
By the way, did anyone happen to notice in the NDAA (Defense Authorization
Act) the increase of funds to rebels in another country whose goal is to
defeat the Syrian Government?
-Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
PS For those who object to our killing our own people in the US join
Black Lives Matter.
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Oleg , January 13, 2017 at 2:53 am
At the very least, the US should get rid of this prolonged waiting period between the elections
and actual assuming power by the president-elect. It was meant to facilitate the orderly transition
of power, but as we see now it is serving just the opposite goals. I cannot believe Obama is so
keen on hurting Trump he is ready to badly hurt his own country as well.
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Zachary Smith , January 12, 2017 at 12:37 pm
Whether this move was meant to soften up Trump
The motive I see is to "soften" him up for his impeachment. Given Trump's temperament, it could
be a winning strategy for the people who prefer President Pence. In my barely informed opinion,
that would include a majority of both parties in both houses of the US congress.
Joe Tedesky , January 12, 2017 at 1:41 pm
Read section 4 of the 25th amendment .
"Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of
the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the
President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written
declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the
Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President."
I'm wondering if we are seeing the beginnings of a President Pence. Although Donald Trump may
give one some consternation to his being a qualified person to sit in the Oval Office, Mike Pence
may bring down the house with his religious leanings inside of his political philosophy. Either
way we Americans are in for a most interesting time of it in our country's brief history. We should
all probably prepare ourselves for the worst, and hope that the best will happen.
Zachary wasn't Mike Pense your governor, or do I have you in the wrong state?
Realist , January 12, 2017 at 4:27 pm
Fascinating and disturbing at the same time. That section was surely MEANT to apply to the
president's health and physical capacity to do the job. However, a declaration by the VP (supported
only by a simple majority of the cabinet or the congress) "that the President is unable to discharge
the powers and duties of his office" can be based in an insurrection, a coup, or simply the erosion
of political capital. Gerald Ford could have argued that Richard Nixon no longer had the support
to govern (which is what Nixon himself conceded as the basis for his resignation). It basically
gives the VP and whatever insurgents he can muster the ability to quickly overthrow the sitting
president without the inconvenience of an impeachment and trial in the Senate. It could be the
Maidan without the messy blood all over the pavement. How wonderful.
Very resourceful of you in looking that up, Joe. I would never have imagined the seeds for
a coup existed right in the constitution.
Kiza , January 13, 2017 at 9:16 am
I have a saying: For the people in law-enforcement, law is a fringe benefit. Those who control
law always use it as a tool. Have you ever heard of a coup which was not based on some law, even
if it was the one written post-festum by the coup plotters? In other words, a coup is never difficult
to justify by the winners.
I have no doubt that the coup that Joe describes is possible. But the issue for the coup plotters
has always been: what happens with all the Trump voters after such a coup, the millions of them?
Will they sit and just watch the destruction of their social contract?
To some extent such US coup dilemma is not dissimilar to the nuclear war dilemma: easy to start,
difficult to finish.
Joe Tedesky , January 13, 2017 at 10:53 am
KIza, nice to hear from you it's been awhile.
Read this link. Trump got 26.8% of the total citizenry to vote for him. In all honesty I haven't
seen any polls on how the American populace shakes out on these controversies such as this most
recent fake news story, but I would imagine that a clever beat down campaign would be able to
soften the blowback .but then again I agree with you to some extent, that by pushing Trump out
of office this would have to have some kind of consequence that would not be pretty.
Joe, in general I am trying to highlight that it is one thing to bamboozle sheeple with a talk
of democracy (which does not exist) and another to openly crush even this reassuring lie. I just
cannot see the end game of a US coup and Trump is but a minor obstacle if they want to start it.
Therefore, they really want to make a Trump a lame and controllable President, not to take
over. Maintaining a reassuring lie of democracy is a much more sophisticated and efficient control
mechanism than direct control. I may we wrong but I do believe that Trump is just being house
trained/broken by TPTB in front of our eyes.
You write: I have not seen any polls how American populace shakes out on these controversies.
My reading of the online beat is that the Trump voters are not swayed, whilst the Clinton voters
use the "controversy" as confirmation that they were right all along about Trump. But then Clinton
voters would receive a confirmation even from an oily rag thrown in their direction. In other
words, a mountain shook and a mouse was born – almost no change at all on either side.
Joe Tedesky , January 13, 2017 at 12:56 pm
KIza your comparing Trump's attackers to how the MH17 story was spun is right on.
Trump is an easy target since his nature is certainly different than that of the usual norm
of our politico class who are cookie cutter politicians on the whole. I'm disappointed by how
people such as Michael Moore are going out of their way attacking Trump, while they completely
ignore how corrupt and dishonest the Clinton's are.
I wouldn't go so far as to predict that Trump supporters won't rebel against his impeachment,
but there again I believe the Trump supporters would be out numbered due to an over aggressive
media who could sway the majority into believing we must get Trump out of office. Any other method
other than impeachment is to horrible to even contemplate, so let's hope that all of our concerns
turn to ashes, and that for the good or bad of it that Trump finishes out his first term in good
health.
Kiza , January 13, 2017 at 8:19 pm
Yes, Joe, those 26.8% of citizenry who voted for Trump are built into 75-76% of citizenry who
do not believe in the MSM any more and in the John Brennan's two kitchen sinks, that is, his two
top secret but leakable kompromat dossiers on Trump – the first one apparently from an MI6 agent
and the second one promoted by the BBC (source unknown yet).
But this is not about Clintons any more, this is about the owners of the Clintons training/braking
Trump to be like the Clintons. If they cannot have a Clinton as a President, they want to have
a President as Clinton. If kompromat does not work, maybe a billet will, their patience is limited.
Always enjoyable to exchange thoughts with you Joe.
Joe Tedesky , January 13, 2017 at 11:14 am
Realist, considering how our country's founders were a bunch of slave owners declaring how
all men are created equally well need I say more?
Words are just words, that is until lawyers interpret these legal words into a reality, which
doesn't always fit into our own personal definition of a certain word usage. You and I deal with
this stuff all the time. Whether it be a traffic ticket, or an ordinance summons, we read one
thing, and the judge administers another thing. Prisons are filled with people who swear with,
'yeah but' explanations which give these prisoners no relief what so ever so I do think these
crafty legislators could pull a fast one, and install Mike Pence into the White House. Let's you
and I hope that I'm the one out in left field with my 25th amendment comment, and that we won't
end up with a Christian whack job as our president.
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Zachary Smith , January 12, 2017 at 5:23 pm
Yeah, Pence was elected Governor of Indiana. But despite this state being one of the most conservative
in the nation, Pence was too "nutty" and "far-right" for Mississippi North, and would have surely
been defeated. Now the man is one heartbeat/one impeachment conviction from becoming President
of the United States.
Quote: "From his denial of climate change to his belief in creationism, Pence is the most
hard-right radical to ever appear on a national ticket. Just this week a federal court had to
block his atrocious bill barring Syrian refugees from his state because his reasoning that Syrians
scare him is discriminatory."
Quote: "it is a literal truth, Mr. Speaker, to say that I am in Congress today because of
Rush Limbaugh, and not because of some tangential impact on my career or his effect on the national
debate; but because in fact after my first run for Congress in 1988, it was the new national voice
emerging in 1989 across the heartland of Indiana of one Rush Hudson Limbaugh, III, that captured
my imagination.""
It's a fact we are very, very close to having a Rush 'druggie' Limpaugh clone as President.
In my opinion, Pence is Trump's worst mistake up till now. If they can't have Hillary, for the
neocons and neo-liberals and the Christian End-Timers there remains Worse-Than-Hillary Mike Pence.
Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist
Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors. With Republican control
of the House and Senate and the prospect of dramatically and decisively tilting the balance
of the Supreme Court to the far right, the incoming administration will have a real shot at
bringing the fire and brimstone of the second coming to Washington.
"The enemy, to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That's the only legitimate
government," contends Jeff Sharlet, author of two books on the radical religious right, including
"The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power." "So when they speak
of business, they're speaking not of something separate from God, but they're speaking of what,
in Mike Pence's circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system
is God-ordained."
Zachary I looked forward to your reply, since you always have references to your level headed
comments .so thanks for getting back to me.
In my world I don't even like bringing up the word God, or religion, since I believe a government
should be governed in a truly secular way. Who I pray to, and who I pay taxes to, are two completely
different things. My devotion to God is a very private matter, and I don't need some politician
interpreting God's greatness to me in anyway. So with that if Mike Pense wants to preach the gospel
to me, then he should resign from public office and become a full fledged preacher and even then
I will not go to his mean spirited church. Amen.
Realist , January 13, 2017 at 3:13 pm
What a troubling coincidence that Hulu is releasing its production of "the Handmaid's Tale"
by Margaret Atwood this April, which tells the story of the United States government being taken
over by extreme Christian fundamentalists and the consequences, especially to women and religious
dissenters. Read the book by Atwood and you'll see where Isis/Daesh got many of their ideas on
punishment and control of the masses. The Spanish Inquisition was six hundred years ago, but its
urges lie just beneath the veneer of our civilised modern world. Human nature hasn't changed,
only technology has. I thought this country was in danger of playing out the novel during Dubya's
administration, as 9-11 was exactly the kind of pretext for such a takeover in the book's plot
narrative and the Islamic world was portrayed as the great global adversary just as many Americans
believe in the real world. Trump has never struck me as a religious man, certainly not a zealot,
but Pence, with a little help from the Deep State, he could bring this disturbing novel to life.
Bill Bodden , January 12, 2017 at 10:16 pm
I'm wondering if we are seeing the beginnings of a President Pence.
A very plausible and ominous possibility.
Joe Tedesky , January 13, 2017 at 12:53 am
Seriously Bill even taking into consideration how some like Glenn Beck along with Rick Santelli
ridiculed an early President Obama back in 2009, I can't recall a more hostile media such as the
likes of how this current day corporate media is going after Trump. True, that Donald Trump by
just being Donald Trump can be an outrageous person with his words and actions, but still I just
can't get over the 24/7 media coverage, and how most of it isn't good coverage at that. This leaves
me to wonder if we all are not being setup for something big.
With Trump's winning streak putting away a whole herd of Republican primary candidates, and
how he sent 'low energy Jeb' packing, and then to go on and beat Hillary by his winning the Electoral
vote, he has had a great run. Now Donald Trump is battling not only the CIA/FBI/NSA, but he is
also bumping up against the congressional establishment. You know that McCain and Graham hate
him, but you can only bet that there is yet much more to come.
I'm sorry, but I don't sense there is much good to come with all of this. Thanks for the reply.
Kiza , January 13, 2017 at 9:57 am
Joe, I wonder if people missed the crazy similarity of the media campaign on the Trump "report"
and the one on MH17 ?
It appears that the TPTB have decided that if they generate enough media screaming, the lack
of proof does not matter any more.
Thus, I have become a strong proponent of the theory that whatever TPTB use outside, it is
only a practice for what they will use (more productively) inside. Drones anyone?
Joe Tedesky , January 13, 2017 at 1:06 pm
KIza read my comment above, it pertains to what you brought up here.
All this turmoil and a dysfunctional Congress insures that nothing will change. The 1% loves
the status quo and will do anything to preserve it. Simply a smokescreen to keep US from dealing
with the corporate stranglehold on our government.
An Empire in decline.
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Mike Flores , January 12, 2017 at 1:24 pm
While others laugh and make jokes, those of us who study Intel know that what just happened
with the leaked report was that the CIA has involved itself in U.S. politics, which it is forbidden
to do. How did the alliance between the Democratic Party and CIA begin? President Truman had allowed
200 Nazi Intel agents to come into the U.S. – including the men who created the blueprint for
the holocaust. Fearing Joe McCarthy would discover this, the CIA faked an Intel report and has
spent decades ever since lying about Joe. They actually confessed that his 2 lists were correct,
so they had to fool him with a fake dossier right before the Army hearings to shake his confidence.
Just search CIA AND THE POND and you will find on their website STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE in the
last third of the article a full confession of framing Joe. This Facebook photo album THE REAL
JOSEPH McCARTHY is packed with forbidden information and can be viewed with this link by anyone
whether they are on FB or not. The alliance between the Democratic Party and CIA began by hiding
the people responsible for the holocaust. ( We should keep in mind Truman was KKK and forbade
the bombing of the train tracks to the death camps. The reason soldiers were not prepared for
the camps was that none had been told about them. Truman did not want our troops wasting time
on them). Interesting to note that absolutely no one has ever done an article or book on the impact
of the beliefs of the KKK on the 5 Democrats who were Presidents and Klansmen in the 20th century.
That would reveal the true nature of the Democratic Party.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10153995222685986.1073741929.695490985&type=1&l=6dd1544b9d
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Bill , January 12, 2017 at 1:37 pm
You don't mention President Obama, but it certainly seems likely that he's involved with this.
Who told Brennan and Clapper to go on TV to hype the intelligence reports and bad-mouth the next
President?
And were the leakers within the agencies acting on their own, or were they given orders from
above? There's a conspiracy going on and it's not my imagination.
Does the behavior rise to the level of treason or espionage?
Furtive , January 12, 2017 at 11:58 pm
Obama is a deadhead it is Brennan who instructs him. But who instructs Brennan?
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Michael Morrissey , January 12, 2017 at 1:46 pm
As I have just learned from another reader's comment on another article, David Spring has augmented
his earlier article to an 85-page expose. Seems it was both a leak and a hack, but in neither
case by "the Russians."
I hope Ray McGovern and especially Wm Binney (and some Trump guy) read this and tell us what
they think!
I read it last night. Very much worth the couple of hours it took.
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Realist , January 14, 2017 at 3:42 am
Well, that's THE comprehensive treatment in a nutshell. Everything documented chronologically.
Nothing important left out. Everything explained clearly and concisely. As organised as possible
and argued like a philosopher rather than a lawyer. The man has exceptional writing skills as
well as incredible computer knowledge. I'd like to see him question Clapper on the witness stand.
I hope that President Trump puts the Justice Department on this case to do a thorough investigation,
including potential indictments of spooks that perjured themselves and/or engaged in partisan
activities during the election and its ugly aftermath.
Reply
Oleg , January 12, 2017 at 2:47 pm
I am really surprised to no end. Why are you in the US so keen on destroying any credibility
of your government? I do not really know what would happen in the US but in Russia there would
be riots. Any leader in Russia can govern only until he/she is trusted. Think Tsar Nicholas II,
Gorbachev I hope it will not get to this and some sanity will prevail in your country.
Bill Bodden , January 12, 2017 at 10:22 pm
Why are you in the US so keen on destroying any credibility of your government?
What credibility? Oleg, if you check the graphic at the top of the right sidebar on this page
you will see a reference to "I. F. Stone" who was one of this nation's great journalists of the
20th Century. He is noted for a dictum that says, "All governments lie." All governments certainly
include the U.S. government. You can get plenty of examples of lies with a little effort.
Bill Bodden , January 12, 2017 at 11:12 pm
Lies out of government agencies and elected politicians are not the only problem. Hypocrisy
is another and has been part of American governance since the writing of the Declaration of Independence
by slave owners who said that all men are created equal with the right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. Now hypocrisy is rampant with politicians decrying alleged Russian intervention
is U.S. elections with the claim that it is wrong for any nation to interfere in the elections
of another nation. There is no nation on the planet that interferes in the governments of other
nations than the United States.
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Oleg , January 13, 2017 at 3:02 am
Well, I certainly agree, but a government can still be largely trusted even if they resort
to some petty lies. As we all do too sometimes. But this this is not a petty thing, this is an
intentional attack on the whole institution of elections and democracy when they try to impeach
the elected President because some part of the establishment, not the people, dislike him. This
has a potential to really get very dangerous, and having any kind of uprisings (as was also mentioned
by other commenters above) in a country like the US is extremely dangerous for the whole world.
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Abe , January 12, 2017 at 3:01 pm
Anyone in Washington seeking a golden shower from a couple of Russian prostitutes just has
to hop on one of those all-expenses-paid AIPAC junkets to Israel.
It's truly amazing how streams of urine help elevate one's anxiety about Iran's nuclear energy
program.
American journalist and activist Chris Hedges noted a key purpose of the declassified report
"Russia's Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election" from the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI):
"to justify the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization beyond Germany, a violation
of the promise Ronald Reagan made to the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the
Berlin Wall. Expanding NATO in Eastern Europe opened up an arms market for the war industry. It
made those businesses billions of dollars. New NATO members must buy Western arms that can be
integrated into the NATO arsenal. These sales, which are bleeding the strained budgets of countries
such as Poland, are predicated on potential hostilities with Russia. If Russia is not a threat,
the arms sales plummet. War is a racket."
Israeli arms sales to Europe more than doubled from $724 million in 2014 to $1.63 billion in
2015. http://jfjfp.com/?p=83806
Israel is the leading arms exporter in the world per capita (2014), and ranks 11th among the
top 20 exporters of military equipment and systems (2011-15).
75-80% of Israeli military exports are generated by just three companies - the state-owned
Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries and the publicly traded Elbit Systems.
The largest categories of Israeli military exports are upgrading aircraft and aerospace systems
(14%), radar and electronic systems (12%), drones (11%), and intelligence and information systems
(10%).
In 2015, the Russian government described Israel's delivery of lethal weapons to Ukraine as
"counterproductive". There is a close arms trade and production co-operation between Israel and
Poland. Israeli companies have invested in building arms manufacturing facilities in Poland.
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jfl , January 12, 2017 at 3:26 pm
However, in this case, it is not even known whether the Russians have any dirt on Trump.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something
in them which will hang him.
- said to have been said by redhat richelieu
what is known is that the nsa/cia/fbi have all the dirt on everyone, and that they use it
on the leaders of the eu, for instance.
if the only thing that comes out of this filthy little exercise is the death of the nsa/cia/fbi
– superpower america's superstazi – by executive fiat it will have been worth trump's election.
it's either that or another dead president. with pence playing lbj.
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F. G. Sanford , January 12, 2017 at 3:41 pm
Funny how these "leaks" work, isn't it? If there really were an "insider" able to provide insight
on the deepest, darkest secrets that had been gathered by Russian intelligence, why would any
responsible intelligence agency completely destroy that asset only to expose a mundane fetish
like "golden showers"? But don't anybody dare leak "The Torture Report". Don't even consider leaking
information about war crimes, election fraud, financial crimes, murder, state corruption or state
sponsorship of terrorism.
Just my opinion, but here's how it really went. The "hack" scenario is a diversion from the
"leak" scenario. The "deep state" didn't really want Hillary. While she may superficially represent
their interests, the Clinton machine is too knowledgeable, too experienced and too selfish and
self-centered to predictably execute their programs. The Clintons have plenty of dirt on them.
But they had enough dirt on her to compromise her electability. They don't want Trump either,
but they can manufacture or dig up enough dirt to compromise his Presidency. Their first choice
was Jeb Bush. Their second choice is Mike Pence.
The DNC stuff was leaked by an insider, and the Podesta stuff was hacked by the NSA. The only
plausible alternative points to hacking attempts by the neo-Nazi Ukrainian hacking outfit "RuH8",
not the Russians.
A bunch of recent articles seek to analyze Barack Obama's legacy, personality and motivations.
That's all superfluous. The "real deal" has been well documented. His grandparents were CIA His
mother was CIA His first job after law school was with Banking international Corporation, a CIA
"front company". He was groomed and thoroughly vetted.
Nobody wants to hear the truth or look at real evidence. The circumstantial – though well documented
– evidence connecting Ted Cruz's father to the anti-Castro Cubans, the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald
is actually much more plausible and substantial than the evidence for "Russian hacking" of the
election, yet the general public has no problem dismissing that as a "conspiracy theory".
Between the two, Trump was perceived – mistakenly – as the lesser threat to the "deep state".
Just a guess, but we may be about to see all hell break loose.
It's about time some journalists and researchers started naming names and making lists. The
"New McCarthyism" uses lists to good advantage. It creates the perception of a vast subversive
network dedicated to destroying our "democracy". Until some names are named and fingers pointed,
the "deep state" and its intelligence community enforcement arm will continue to control the "democracy"
we don't really have. Blackmail is just one of their methods, and it's far from the worst.
My favorite quotes from the "Company Intelligence Report":
"However, he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow " (Is this a pun?)
"PUTIN angry with senior officials who "overpromised" on TRUMP and further heads likely to
roll as result. Foreign minister LAVROV may be next" (What Putin is going to make him change the
sheets in Trump's hotel room?)
" TRUMP has paid bribes and engaged in sexual activities there but key witnesses silenced and
evidence hard to obtain" (Were the "key" witnesses the same ones that claim Putin shot down MH-17?)
I think they dug up the script writers from "The Man from Uncle" and put them back to work.
This sounds like a Quinn Martin Production straight out of a Hollywood "B Movie".
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Abe , January 12, 2017 at 10:24 pm
First Draft coalition "partner" BuzzFeed is leading the charge to make fake news, hybrid war
propaganda, and hoaxes "more shareable and more social"
FG, I'm not gay, but I always scroll down to find your comment. You are always looking into
the big picture, not the big illusion.
backwardsevolution , January 13, 2017 at 1:44 am
Gregory – I agree. His comments are always very good.
Reply
Joe Tedesky , January 13, 2017 at 1:07 pm
Me three.
F. G. Sanford , January 13, 2017 at 6:41 pm
Thanks to all – sometimes I wonder if it's worth putting in my two cents. We're probably a
statistically insignificant group of readers on the world's stage, but I like to think at least
it's worth a try.
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We must organize beyond cyberspace as this is a coup in action. CIA is greatest meddler of
all nations, coups and assassinations well documented. DC is the Aegean stable that must be cleaned,
a truly Herculean task and We the People have to get organized because this planet is imperiled.
Agree with Dan that whole sordid mess is beyond a swamp, a stinking pit and pitchforks are necessary!
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LJ , January 12, 2017 at 4:36 pm
It's more doublethink logic from the Intelligence heads. It would require a tremendous leap
of faith for anyone with a brain to think that Russia/Putin/Lavrov would use this info, if it
existed at all, in public manner. To do so wouldn't help them achieve a goal and it would only
hurt Russia .. The tape would never become public even if it existed. That means this rumor is
clearly slander and was aimed at some political end. . Where is the smoking gun?, sorry. By the
way , Putin is friends with Bertoloscini , Sarkozy and other notorious womanizers and is known
to like women himself. This is not something he would do. He is not a mobster. This is puerile
and it is coming from the Democrats although the word is that George Bush initially hired the
guy, the former MI5 spy, who wrote the dossier/smear piece on Trump in the first place. . Hoover
would have kept it in shop and tried to leverage Trump himself.
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Bernie , January 12, 2017 at 5:09 pm
There's an article at ABC News today about US tanks rolling into Poland. This reminds me of
Nazis rolling into Austria in 1938 and then Poland on Sept 1, 1941 to start WWII. "American soldiers
rolled into Poland on Thursday, fulfilling a dream some Poles have had since the fall of communism
in 1989 to have U.S. troops on their soil as a deterrent against Russia. Some people waved and
held up American flags as U.S. troops in tanks and other vehicles crossed into southwestern Poland
from Germany and headed toward the town of Zagan, where they will be based. "
Abe , January 12, 2017 at 6:32 pm
Like Poland, Ukraine is eager to express its devotion to the Reich, er, its "Euro-Atlantic
aspirations".
If only for the sake of NATO "cooperation" and "capacity building", Poland and Ukraine have
much to forgive and forget:
Of course, reports of Russian "euphoria" remain "unconfirmed".
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Mark West , January 12, 2017 at 5:36 pm
Absurd. Who is this "they" everyone is talking about? How many are/is this 'they'? 5, 10 20?
Who is in control of 'they'? Who's in charge? The political elite? Do they have a club and do
they meet for bridge every Tuesday? Do they have a secret handshake? Are they all really Mason's?
This conspiracy holds no credibility because 'they' is just an 'idea'. That is all. Until someone
can give names of those who are responsible and running this political elite then its all storybook
conjecture. We should be more concerned with the obvious psychological dementia affecting the
president elect. He was a total looney tune in that press conference.
What you are saying with this list then, Wendi, it is not the political elites, intelligence
agencies or career politicians whoTrump continuously rails against as the cause for the end of
the American Empire. It is the financial hierarchies that Trump so desperately wants to be a part
of. Putin is obviously at the top of this list and Trump sees him as a way to become a player
in this club. That makes sense to me.
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Dr. Ibrahim Soudy , January 12, 2017 at 6:14 pm
"THEY" are the people who control the MONEY. They are referred to as the BANKERS. Those are
a mafia that runs the political circus BEHIND the scene. The parties and elections are a diversion
to keep the idiots busy arguing with each other like the crazy fans of sports teams. The BANKERS
always make sure that the "idiots" are choosing between alternatives that ultimately BOW to the
BANKERS. Read for example the following:
– "All the President's Bankers" by Naomi Prins.
– "Memoirs" by David Rockefeller.
– "The Crisis of Democracy" a publication of the Tri-Lateral Commission on their website.
-Goldman, Wall Street and Financial Terrorism | The Inline image 2
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-whetten/goldman-wall-street-and-f_b.. .
Jun 19, 2010 · The most disturbing aspect of the recent Goldman Sachs lawsuit isn't just the legal
violations involved Goldman, Wall Street and Financial Terrorism.
-Goldman Sachs Are Financial Terrorists | FacebookInline image 1 http://www.facebook.com/Stop.Goldman
Goldman Sachs Are Financial Terrorists. 95,662 likes · 6,188 talking about this. Get the Honest
truth on the economy, this page sponsors no organization
Those will give you a good start ..Good Luck.
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Sam F , January 13, 2017 at 7:29 am
Perhaps you do not mean the ridicule you suggest. The effects of economic aristocracy and political
conspiracy are of course not "storybook conjecture" but the combined deductions of experienced
observers. That would become conjecture only if specific persons were accused, which is seldom
done without evidence.
The demand for detailed evidence of an old-fashioned conspiracy to effect societal trends is
not valid. It becomes propaganda when used to attack the means by which we all deduce that events
are driven by cabals, or loose organizations of interested parties. While we are occasionally
surprised by the detailed evidence that emerges long after events, even that is incomplete and
not very relevant.
The means of ridicule shows its invalidity. There is no reason to speculate upon clubs, meetings,
or handshakes, as there is no need for such specific or antiquated organization. No modern organization
works that way, no one has suggested that, and no one here has reasoned from such nonsense, but
rather from well documented effects of cabals. So I hope that you merely overstated a wish for
more evidence.
Robert, Could it not be true that the real losers in the neocon push to extend the American
dominion might actually be the intelligence services? They have become so politicized in domestic
politics since the Iraq War build up (a la Rice, Chaney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Powell) that
they figure they can shape American public opinion to support any war, no matter how "unthreatening"
the enemy (say Russia) might actually be. Originally they were basically "fact collectors" (objective)
– at first from around the world, but since 9/11's Patriot Act, at home also. Then, they became
"interpreters and analyzers of motives" which takes a bit of a weed-gee board (subjective!) on
the part of the "experienced eye". When whatever these very effective (and appreciated) fact collectors
opine suddenly becomes gospel in their "estimates" (interpretation), we have lost the ability
to even influence the fate of our nation. Is this the country I grew up in? Or, has it been this
way since we were led so effectively to support World War I? Take care, HM
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Thurgle , January 12, 2017 at 6:44 pm
The NYT skirts around the issue of who paid the huge sums for the research that produced the
story of Trump's alleged sexcapades in Moscow. They never say the funders are unknown, but instead
use devices like the passive tense to avoid saying. But it would be very interesting to know who
signed the checks. Apparently, there was a Republican funder during the primaries who stopped
payment when Trump prevailed, whereupon Fusion found a Clinton backer to write their checks. It
would be very interesting to know who these funders were and why the MSM seems so keen to avoid
saying.
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BlackPete , January 12, 2017 at 7:46 pm
When it comes to cavorting with prostitutes JFK was the undisputed champion. Given the high
regard JFK is held in in some circles maybe Trump's alleged misbehaviour is a positive sign. Also,
now that Trump's behaviour has been made public isn't the Russian threat to expose him now worthless
and their alleged hold/influence gone?
Mark West , January 12, 2017 at 8:01 pm
Its not about the hookers. That's useless drivel. It's about the potential of illegal financial
dealings with Russia prior to the election. Just show the damn tax returns. What the hell is he
afraid of? What could possibly go wrong?
Are you keen on asking Clintons to reveal their financial dealings with Saudis, the sponsors
of 9/11?
How about the Kagans' clan being currently "supported" financially by Qatari?
And this is much more interesting than tax return: "The NYT skirts around the issue of who paid
the huge sums for the research that produced the story of Trump's alleged sexcapades in Moscow.
They never say the funders are unknown, but instead use devices like the passive tense to avoid
saying. But it would be very interesting to know who signed the checks. Apparently, there was
a Republican funder during the primaries who stopped payment when Trump prevailed, whereupon Fusion
found a Clinton backer to write their checks. It would be very interesting to know who these funders
were and why the MSM seems so keen to avoid saying."
It is controlling, deceptive, organized, bloody and does not give a "rat ass" about the needs
of any other human being on earth who does not belong to it!
It neither tolerates opposing views from anybody who does not belong to its members nor allows
the outsiders to organize . It is determined to be the lens through which everybody under its
control see the rest of the world; any conclusion drawn by the besieged population, based on what
it is forced to see, must conform to the "DEEP STATE" norms; otherwise, you are in deep trouble.
The POTUS or the Congress must toe lines dictated by the members of this organization, (the Deep
State). We are observing that no effort is being spared to see to it that President-Elect toes
the "DEEP STATE" line; it is deep and scary indeed!
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John , January 12, 2017 at 8:40 pm
Russia is the half naked female in the magic show The real slight of hand is the relationship
with the American oligarch and china .wow !!! . talking about messing with the bottom line some
of you big brain folks will get this in 4 ..3 2 ..lol
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There is little doubt that the obvious blackmail will never be covered in that light by main
stream media. To those of us who are historians or are natural skeptics or have actually lived
through those times, this is all fairly obvious. They are trying to put Donald Trump in a corner
so he can be controlled.
I suspect that is why Trump retained Steve Bannon for. Not just a house racist but someone
who can get down and dirty on those that dish up dirt on Trump. We'll have to see if it works.
Headlines: "Donald unleashes TwitterBomb on CIA". But he'll have to go on the internet since the
CIA owns the press in the USA.
He has two choices. Listen to the CIA and do their bidding which is the requirement to start
WWIII with Russia or resist and be smeared in the press. It's an uphill battle too. Unlike Silvio
Berlusconi or Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump does not actually own the press. That will make it
especially hard to do.
This thing is shaping up to be a geopolitical oil war. Rex and the Russians vs the Saudi/CIA
Team USA.
All I can say is fine America. Don't give a damn about privacy. Don't give a damn about anything.
But one of these days this massive spying ring gathering every shred of any and all traces of
your life and filing them away forever cannot be good. It will most certainly not end well.
When AI has us all pinned up against a wall threatening to out all of us if we do not do exactly
what it wants then what will we do?
We need some privacy laws. Also we need to throw the main stream media out with the trash.
It is pure evil. Back in the day, the press wouldn't run the stories about MLKs extramarital affairs
it recorded secretly. The press demanded to know the source of the B.S. and the FBI did not want
to tip their hand so the Mexican standoff led to the suicide letter which said "if you accept
the Nobel Prize, we will shame you and ruin you and you should consider preserving you legacy
by killing yourself instead. At least the MSM had some ethical standards and smelled a rat and
refused to run the stories. Imagine that. If MLK was alive today we and we still had segregation,
people and the media would fight to keep it! MLK would be a portrayed in the press as a philandering
bad guy. A sexual predator. The Civil Rights movement would end in a quagmire of gossip surrounding
its leader.
The Republicans have certainly had their fun with it too making Monica Lewinsky describe to
a court the distinctive features of the president's privates. I bet they were rolling in the aisles
when that happened. Now it's their turn. Will they defend Trump or will they hope that perhaps
Mike Pence would make a better leader.
All this tawdry B.S. really gets old fast. I could care less what people do in private as long
as nobody gets hurt.
One person abroad when asked what they thought about Bill Clinton's circumstances replied they
were confused since after all we were not electing the Pope. Amen. I feel the same way about Trump.
It's all B.S.
The problem is America can't remember what happened yesterday. We are collectively like terminal
Alzheimer patients. Two seconds after we see something, we forget it and are completely susceptible
to B.S.in two seconds after we forgot what just happened which ignores the facts which occurred
a mere two seconds earlier but we are none the wiser since we can't remember what happened more
than two seconds ago. That means there are a lot of opportunities each day to fool us.
What ever happened to the story about James Comey influencing the election? We just forgot
it. What ever happened to all of the other historically "likely suspects" thought to have been
likely suspects in vote rigging schemes. They are all absent and not presented as possible influencers
of the election by our CIA owned press. Instead we are presented with a fake narrative filled
with salacious gossip and naughty bits designed to turn public opinion into a weapon for further
increases in militarization and military spending while preserving foreign relationships which
benefit wealthy investors.
We need to wake up and start taking some strong medicine to ward off the Alzheimer disease
that is affecting us in order to put the daily snow job presented by the MSM and the CIA into
perspective. That perspective would include what just happened two seconds ago.
Unfortunately, that is not likely to happen since the medication would have to include administering
it to the MSM too.
The ability of the MSM to erase our collective memory and present us with a new fake narrative
on any given day should ring alarm bells that we are obviously vulnerable to being fooled.
We are being fooled. Every day. Time to start taking the meds.
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Jurgen , January 12, 2017 at 10:01 pm
This is no "deep state" this is rather in-plain-sight US Government at work.
Trivial task:
1) Create a dense smoke screen by broadcasting on every single TV channel non-stop anti-Russian
and anti-Trump*** hysteria (they know it can't go wrong – they know Trump would try to reply to
every single fake thus making their task easier and the picture even more colorful)
2) Behind that smoke screen ship few thousands of US troops and tanks over to Poland and to those
parasitic micro quasi-states in Baltic and by doing that de-facto lay foundation for 4-5 new military
bases,
which (yet another NATO expansion) otherwise would not be approved and likely axed by Trump. But
now it went through s-m-o-u-ht-ly, like a butter. Highest class of the old Shell Game. Where CIA,
FBI and other spook shops are used as shills and the population of the US are total losers (everyone's
taxes will be used to pay for that yet another NATO expansion).
3) Behind the same smoke screen Obamacare has just been demolished late last night, congrats 20
million of poor folks!
*** Just wait till grainy videos surface showing some naked figures – one of them would be
vaguely resembling Trump.
That'd be no hard task for talented movie makers from either PSYOP or/and PAG (just remember their
masterpieces featuring Jessica Lynch and other ones featuring fat "Osama bin Laden"-looking dude).
Note: Authorization to create and finance state Propaganda apparatus, S.2943, was quietly passed
late Friday night Dec.23 behind the smoke screen of the same anti-Russian and anti-Trump hysteria,
thus what we are seeing now is perfectly lawful – propaganda machine at full throttle, who said
bureaucracy is slow(?)
As a non-citicen one has to wonder about the mind boggling machination the US politic is capable
of.
After WW2 the European countries looked upon the USA as the beacon of democratic values.
How bitter for the young generation to find, bit by bit, that behind the American facade lurked
a system
of smoke and mirrors. As ruthless as the very system they replaced in Europe. Slowly sugarcoating
their deep aims of domination. Under words like freedom,liberty and equality there is the underlying
unbelievable lust for money and with it power. From a human point of view, and the thinking person,
the politics and aims of the United States of America is an abomination for all the worlds people.
Oleg , January 13, 2017 at 3:27 am
I certainly agree with you, but also I am really saddened that this pattern is far from being
unique and repeats itself all over and over again. The power corrupts, and it is true for states
as well as for people. But the US are indeed a sad champion in hypocrisy. Their predecessors were
not as skilled in hiding their true intentions behind the screen of freedom and all other very
attractive values. This makes it especially hard to accept.
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Brad Owen , January 13, 2017 at 5:08 am
You've fingered the wrong culprits, or rather indicted fellow victims. It's the same bloody,
titled ruling class and their managerial elites in business and banking from old-line European/British
families who've been playing their Imperial games and still are. THEY created the late 19th century
Synachist Movement for Empire (SME) that gave birth to Fascism and its' feverish twin NAZIism,really
just movements to update the workings of the old-fashioned European Empires. It's also the Cecil
Rhodes/Milner RoundTable Group that dove-tailed with SME machinations to update old Empires, campaigning
strenuously, through their managerial elites on Wall Street, to recapture their "rogue colony"
USA and bring it into the British version of Empire. Right at the moment of FDR's death (may have
been assassination), the tables were turned on us, with Churchill leading stupid Truman around
by the nose speaking of iron curtains and Red Scares and Cold Wars. FDR's intelligence community
was taken over by Anglophile RoundTable allies in the post-war 40s. Having helped win the battles,
we lost the War to the fascist/NAZI SME and RoundTable groups who never received so much as a
scratch from all the bombs and bullets. Have you seen the show Hunting Hitler? WWII never ended,
the methods of fighting just changed.
Brad Owen , January 13, 2017 at 5:44 am
P.S. Not only did WWII never end, just a change in fighting methods, BUT the SME/RoundTable
Groups managed to get the two most powerful allies turned against each other: USSR and USA, so
that we, together, couldn't focus on the REAL enemy; SME/RoundTable group of elites (which would
have happened under FDR in post-war. He would have been President until January 1949 if he hadn't
died/been killed, Stalin told FDRs son that "that Churchill gang killed him" been trying to do
the same to Stalin) and THIS is why Trumps' Russophilia is such a grave and real threat to our
Establishment.
Joe Tedesky , January 13, 2017 at 1:13 pm
Brad you hit the nail on the head with your comments here .bravo!
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John P , January 14, 2017 at 9:55 pm
Where on earth did you get this fable. Roosevelt had polio and needed a wheelchair, he was
a heavy smoker, had high blood pressure, angina followed by congestive heart failure all finalized
by a stoke. He had been weakening over a long period. This is all before the days of polonium
the USSR uses to kill its foes today.
Russia wasn't following the agreements drawn up in Yalta and fair free elections were not provided
in Poland and many Poles who fought for the allies in the war felt betrayed. The Soviets went
their own way, so were we to tell the Poles, tough.
Allied convoys, mainly British, at great cost in ships and men, supplied the Russians with war
supplies. They faced U-boats and heavily armed German battle-cruisers in freezing arctic waters.
After the war Germany got assistance in rebuilding, but the British were held to paying off debts
for US build liberty ships used to replace ships lost on the Atlantic convoys. I had an uncle
who's ship was sunk and very luckily, after much time in a life boat, was picked up. Many Americans
sat back and watched until Pearl Harbour. The British had warned the Americans some time before,
that they had lost contact with one of the Japanese fleets they were following, and you can guess
the consequences.
Britain saw what was coming when Germany attacked Poland and declared war on Germany. We didn't
have much. My father was almost killed assisting surgeon in a Liverpool hospital and luckily had
to leave to go out in an ambulance. When he came back the OR was gone. Bombed out. Luckily on
another occasion, the day staff had been told to stay on duty with the night staff and the nursing
residence was flattened. We had rationing until 1950, and had to grow food in our small back garden,
sprouts, peas, cabbage. We had 6 chickens and a rooster, a source of much needed nutrition from
eggs. I remember my mother weeping terribly after telling the police she had lost her ration books.
As a young lad I went on a search and eventually found them in the folds of a chair. You may never
have had to live through something like that.
And if you think America is any better than others, read "What is America?" by Ronald Wright.
Learn about the Trail of Tears and traders knowingly giving natives blankets used by whites with
small-pox.
Brad Owen , January 15, 2017 at 6:47 am
You relate the manufactured cover story, thanks to the anglophile Intel community that took
over in post-war forties, and did their typical change of the narration, much like they do today
with the phony crap about Russian aggression. This kind of sh!t has been going on since the revolution,
as the wealthy and powerful Imperial Tories never left and never relented. I got this"fable" from
EIR and Tarpley.net. It makes more sense to me than the current fable we call history. Check it
out for yourself, it amounts to mountains of articles and essays. It took me years to piece it
all together and relay it adequately in brief paragraphs. Choose to believe there is no over-arching
Imperial ruling class inimical to the interests of commoners if you want. I refuse to be blind
to it anymore.
David F., N.A. , January 12, 2017 at 10:18 pm
What if the intelligence community wasn't choosing between HRC and Trump, but, in stead, between
HRC and Pence. So no matter who won, wouldn't this hedged election mean business as usual?
Sorry, HRC, but for this downward neoliberal/fascist spiral thingy to work, you lesser-of-2-evil
conservaDems are just going to have to learn to share with the equally-corrupt conservatives.
See ya in 4 (or maybe 8 (naw, 4)).
Hail to the de facto Chief. da dada da dada dada dada da.
Reply
Furtive , January 12, 2017 at 11:36 pm
You forgot to declare who is the drag queen in this matter?
Let's warn these evil psychopaths that a JFK OUTCOME IS OFF LIMITS.
That is the inference of your article.
By the way, Trump NEVER READ THE REPORT PRIVATELY. THERE WAS AN ORAL PRESENTATION, & CLAPPER
& Brennan took the CLASSIFIED documents back with them. Trump never read the 2 pg libel nor was
it discussed in the presentation.
Carl Rising-Moore , January 13, 2017 at 2:38 am
This is also reminiscent of Hoover and JFK. When JFK attended Hoover's office, he was handed
the President's file. JFK read some of the file while Hoover waited. When JFK stood up to leave,
Hoover told the President that the file remains with him. No wonder JFK and Bobby hated this dangerous
psychopath.
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John P , January 12, 2017 at 11:43 pm
It's all slime, Americans let their political system fall into the trap of big money (lobbying
system and PACs) and neo-liberalism. I have no faith that Trump has the capabilities to be a good
president. His dialogue is simple, his temper easily aroused as are his feelings of hurt. He shows
little historical knowledge or political skills and speaks in a petty childish way. Who is going
to pay for the southern border wall ?! What is going to replace Obama's medical care programs,
more big business institutions ?! To me it looks like the Palestinians are on the Titanic run
by captain Trump and his son-in law, and only minutes to go. What real in depth policies has Trump
ever stated ?! Look out because Trump has a habit of passing on the bills be it cash, broken promises
or a road you never thought he would take.
And yes we need a calming down and discussion between the US, Russia and China, but I don't see
any hope in the line of folks Trump has chosen or Clinton. To me, Trump is like passenger on an
aircraft in which the pilot has expired and he is relying on others to tell him what to do because
he has no idea or understanding.
I think this and a world where jobs have been taken by microprocessors and robots, is a very dangerous
place and we don't need a blind narcissist leading the way. Sadly Bernie Sanders got burnt on
the stake.
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Carl Rising-Moore , January 13, 2017 at 2:28 am
At times like this I miss the wise words of the late Chalmers Johnson. Chalmers was not encouraged
by the possibility of America stepping back from her efforts to control the entire world. He felt
the deep state was too committed to America's Full Spectrum Dominance. Is this the sloppy end
to the legacy of the Sole Super Power? Or, is this just the middle of the play before curtain
call?
When Russia came to the aid of Syria, I believed that we were entering the Multipolar World Order.
Hopefully that is still possible but better sooner than later before we enter the No World Order
of endless chaos. Does the American deep state really want to play Russian Roulette with live
nucs?
Joe Tedesky , January 13, 2017 at 1:16 pm
I wish Chalmers Johnson were still with us, and able to comment on our current events good
of you to bring his name up.
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John P , January 15, 2017 at 7:01 pm
I'm sorry Brad. With your EIR's reference, the first story I saw concerned Obama-care connected
to some Nazi policies. Next they claim global warming is fake. The US was the only western nation
without a national health program. People die because they haven't the money to pay for drugs
or health care. The health of a labourer is more important to them that a rich bloke sitting at
a desk. And excuse me but back in the late 60s I studied astronomy besides my major, another science,
and even then learned that both CO2 and methane each trap the sun's energy and cause temperatures
to rise. That was long before global warming came to peoples attention. Sorry, your story is pure
fiction.
Also, Trump hasn't a clue what he's talking about as far as global warming is concerned. Take
a look at the temperatures in the far north. They have been warmer than ever while we down here
are having huge cycles of heat and cold and are experiencing the fury that those changes can induce.
Dieter Heymann , January 16, 2017 at 2:23 pm
As a scientist you ought to know that CO2 and methane do not trap the sun's energy but absorb
upward IR radiation from Earth part of which they radiate back towards Earth's surface part out
into space. The blanket I use on my bed at night does not trap the heat generated by me either.
If it did it might catch fire?
John P , January 16, 2017 at 4:13 pm
Dieter I was just trying to make it simple, not write an article for Nature. The point being
so many people don't believe that we are altering the earths climate through burning fossil fuels.
We take down our forests, and plants are a big reason we are here as they take in carbon dioxide,
utilize the suns energy through photosynthesis and create organic compounds thus setting the stage
for further developments. There is so much irrationality out there brought on by job losses through
technology, and this creates huge divisions within society and that can lead to awful consequences
as history has shown.
I not sure some would understand the true science behind it. The subject was a reliance on a web
site that promoted climate change denial and a mentioned link between Obamacare and Nazism. Is
that a firm foundation of reliance ?
John P , January 16, 2017 at 4:33 pm
Just to clarify, I said astronomy wasn't my major, it was microbiology and medical sciences.
I had an interest in star gazing and following the planets.
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Jamie , January 16, 2017 at 1:54 pm
Many liberals fail to understand that Hillary was the chosen candidate of the deep-state and
international finance capital. Unlike the unwashed masses - these forces don't care if politician
has a 'D' or 'R' next to their name. It is how well they will serve capital.
"... Who needs enemies when he has British "friends"? ..."
"... Nellie Ohr, via her earlier FISA 702 searches (illegally done while acting as a contractor), wrote most of the dossier which she sent to Christopher Steele. Steele then laundered the product to make it look legit. That's why he was paid chump change for his 'work.' He basically took Ohr's work, put it on his letterhead, and collected his check. ..."
Former MI6 spy Christopher Steele has suddenly backed out of a planned video appearance at a
pro-democracy gathering in Baltimore next week for a group founded by Trump-hating chess champ
Garry Kasparov, according to Politico
.
The author of the largely unverified Trump-Russia dossier had been scheduled to discuss
disinformation on a panel moderated by Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, which is set
to include Atlantic Council fellow Evelyn Farkas - a former deputy assistant secretary of
defense who
notably slipped up on live TV and admitted in March 2017 that the Obama administration had
been spying on the Trump campaign.
Applebaum said that Steele had gotten "cold feet" last week and canceled on the advice of
his legal counsel . As the Daily Caller 's
Chuck Ross notes, this would have been Steele's first public remarks in the nearly two years
since BuzzFeed published his dossier.
Perhaps Steele was 'spooked' by testimony last week from former Trump attorney Michael Cohen
, who debunked a key claim in the dossier that he traveled to Prague in August 2016 to meet
with Kremlin officials in order to arrange clandestine payments to hackers who stole emails
from the Clinton campaign and the DNC.
Cohen only denied the Prague allegation during his open testimony, but GOP
California Rep. Devin Nunes suggested on Monday that the former Trump fixer disputed all
of the dossier's allegations during a closed-door hearing before the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence last Thursday. - Daily Caller
Steele's dossier was commissioned by Hillary Clinton's campaign through law firm Perkins
Coie, which paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn commissioned Steele to
assemble the collection of reports which relied heavily on Kremlin officials.
The dossier was used by the US intelligence community to obtain a FISA surveillance warrant
on Trump campaign aide Carter Page - along with anyone he was in communication with. Steele's
report claimed that there was a "well-developed conspiracy of co-operation" between the Trump
campaign and the Kremlin.
The reports, which circulated among U.S. intelligence officials beginning in the summer of
2016 and were later published by BuzzFeed, helped set off a chain of events that led to the
appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. In the years since Steele authored his
reports, evidence has emerged of extensive contacts between Trump's aides and various Russian
state-aligned actors, while many of the most salacious allegations in Steele's reports remain
unconfirmed or at least partially debunked. - Politico
The conference Steele backed out of will continue without him - and "will examine and
wrestle with the underlying threats to liberal democracy and propose strategies to reinvigorate
it," according to promotional materials.
Also in attendance will be Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.),
former Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and former undersecretary of
defense for George W. Bush Paul Wolfowitz, per Politico . It is being organized by the Renew
Democracy Initiative chaired by chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
You mean that war monger Wolfowitz is still around and the Democripts are using him now??
One of the main players in the big lie to invade Iraq and the liberal dem's are hosting him,
Jesus ******* sheep, I have see it all now!
Also in attendance will be Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp
(D-N.D.), former Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and former
undersecretary of defense for George W. Bush Paul Wolfowitz, per Politico. It is being
organized by the Renew Democracy Initiative chaired by chess grandmaster Garry
Kasparov.
How the hell do you skip out on this list of rock stars?
This **** is so obvious. We have known all of this for months and the media drops it out
like it is some sort of new development.
Wow, really? Nooooooooooooooooooooooo. Trump was framed? No ****!
Steele should be WATERBOARDED! Let's find out what he knows. What goes around comes around
to Mr. MI6 and his foreign interference with the U. S. elections and the Trump campaign.
Sounds like a leftist-neocon-rino confab to appeal to the non-thinking sheep. Wolfowitz is
more dangerous and has caused more death and destruction than el chapo. See wolfowitz
doctrine..
Opposition research paid for by a known gangster Hillary Clinton and disguised as an
"investigation" attempted to remove a sitting U.S president. A thoroughly corrupt FBI
participated in said attempted coup and no conspirators have been brought to justice to date.
Corruption top to bottom and all conspirators need to be arrested tried and convicted.
Executions are in order for Obama and Clinton and the rest should be allowed to die of old
age in prison.
And not one ******* thing has happened to any of them, not a single one. And, I sadly
suspect, this will be the case 10 years from now too. Nobody is going to be held accountable
and the only ones who will suffer are the American people due to the treasonous behavior of
the last administration and the deep state. **** 'em.
"The conference Steele backed out of will continue without him - and "will examine and
wrestle with the underlying threats to liberal democracy and propose strategies to
reinvigorate it ," according to promotional materials."
So basically, they'll be proposing strategies on how to further destroy it.
"the collection of reports which relied heavily on Kremlin officials."
No, they did not . At least not until there is some independent verification that
any "Kremlin officials" actually had a hand in Steele's fabalist work of art. That he had any
outside help from Russians of any sort (or anyone else for that matter) remains an utterly
meritless claim. If he did have help, it was more likely from British intelligence officials
having a good laugh at the gullibility of the American ones.
There is no way to know if Steele wrote his "dossier" extemporaneously while curled up
with his favorite lady and smoking dope in his London flat. Continuing to present this claim
as if it's an established fact bars inquiry into other explanations which may prove far more
.... intriguing.
Did anyone ever bother to ask for the manifest of any possible flights to Prague. Maybe
easier, before Mueller deposed him...anyone check with American Airlines to see if he bought
tickets? And this Steele guy, how did he ever work for MI6 and not learn to encrypt files,
set up shell organizations, false identities to not be tied to the dossier? Did he perform an
online home request for a FEDex pickup/drop off with signature required accompanied w/ DL and
passport?
Moron! The Senate Intelligence Committee has no legal authority under international law to
extradite him. He must first be charged with a felony under domestic law before extradition
is even a possibility. However, once he is charged with a felony and extradited, he has a
right under the Fifth Amendment to remain silent.
Footnote: The right to remain silent before your accusers is based historically on Jesus
of Nazareth's remaining silent before the Sanhedrin and before Pilate when asked if he was
the Messiah. It worked its way into western law when the west was a Christian homeland.
Nellie Ohr, via her earlier FISA 702 searches (illegally done while acting as a
contractor), wrote most of the dossier which she sent to Christopher Steele. Steele then
laundered the product to make it look legit. That's why he was paid chump change for his
'work.' He basically took Ohr's work, put it on his letterhead, and collected his check.
Except Nellie was working for Brennan and it was fed thru' Ukraine to Steele. There are multiple cover ups going on here,whatever is simple isn't close to the truth.
The only thing he was trying to do was to help Hillary, Bin-Hossain and their Mob Syndicate to satage a Coup -- -And overthrow the dully elected president....!!!!
Videos of Browder disposition in the United States in which he contradicts all his
public tales about the Russian fraud case against him, and ofthe fate of his accountant
Sergei Magnitsky - Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4
Imagine if Trump was as evasive in a deposition with Mueller as Broder was in the videos. It
just reinforces my view that Americans have no problem at all with hypocrisy, probably to do
with exceptionalism.
the videos on browder - 4 parts - focus on him being questioned in 2015...you could skip to
the last one near the end, but vid 3 and 4 are both pretty good and gaining an insight into
browder.. i am sure most here don't need any more insight into browder then they already
have... the data in the video is organized by some canucks back east in quebec i suppose..
53 million in aid from canada to the border of venezuala, mostly in columbia and some in
brazil.. that is more then twice the amount coming from the usa... interesting video
discussing this
here.. i am sure crystia freeland had a direct hand in this.. maybe she can get a date
with brandscum...
Videos of Browder disposition in the United States in which he contradicts all his public
tales about the Russian fraud case against him, and ofthe fate of his accountant Sergei
Magnitsky - Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4
Imagine if Trump was as evasive in a deposition with Mueller as Broder was in the videos. It
just reinforces my view that Americans have no problem at all with hypocrisy, probably to do
with exceptionalism.
the videos on browder - 4 parts - focus on him being questioned in 2015...you could skip to the
last one near the end, but vid 3 and 4 are both pretty good and gaining an insight into
browder.. i am sure most here don't need any more insight into browder then they already
have... the data in the video is organized by some canucks back east in quebec i suppose..
53 million in aid from canada to the border of venezuala, mostly in columbia and some in
brazil.. that is more then twice the amount coming from the usa... interesting video discussing
this
here.. i am sure crystia freeland had a direct hand in this.. maybe she can get a date with
brandscum...
Was Epstein "Lolita exress" a special operation to compromise Us politicians?
Notable quotes:
"... Of course it shouldn't be Mueller, he's probably on video there too. I bet ((Mossad)) has video on a lot of the "goy" D.C. traitors. ..."
"... Judge Rules Plea Deal For "Orgy Island Billionaire" Broke Federal Law. My response : I would bet money that there are a whole lot of "plea deals" that broke federal law. I think the new AG BARR needs to look at all of these deals. The ones that come to mind are the plea deals given to members of both the CLINTON and 'OBOZO' administrations. ..."
"... Start with the Awan bros! ..."
"... "Epstein will likely live out his life as a free man (unless new offenses are committed, or if other victims of his sex trafficking in different jurisdictions come forward. There's no statute of limitations on sex trafficking)." If the prosecutor was corrupt, then the above is not a true statement ..."
"... "... ferried Bill Clinton and actor Kevin Spacey to his "Orgy Island" aboard his plane, which has been termed "the Lolita Express... " ..."
Nice timing. Right after a prostitution sting nets some pretty high-profile players in . . .
S. Florida.
bh2 , 5 hours ago
It isn't Epstein who they were most trying to protect, even though he was the one directly
charged. It was all the cronies in political life who hung out with him on his island "paradise".
Perhaps now the underage women who were molested will be able to name names. Could be
interesting. Trump should dump Acosta like a hot rock.
NiggaPleeze , 4 hours ago
Well I'd rather Mueller spend time looking into the activities at Epstein island than this
Russian crap. There's a real threat to national security if the Orangutan is compromised,
which IMO, he very much seems to be. And IMO, that is where the real "collusion" probably
lies.
Of course it shouldn't be Mueller, he's probably on video there too. I bet ((Mossad)) has
video on a lot of the "goy" D.C. traitors.
GUS100CORRINA , 5 hours ago
Judge Rules Plea Deal For "Orgy Island Billionaire" Broke Federal Law. My response : I would bet money that there are a whole lot of "plea deals" that broke
federal law. I think the new AG BARR needs to look at all of these deals. The ones that come
to mind are the plea deals given to members of both the CLINTON and 'OBOZO'
administrations.
sodbuster , 4 hours ago
Start with the Awan bros!!!!!!!!!!!
spoonful , 5 hours ago
"Epstein will likely live out his life as a free man (unless new offenses are committed,
or if other victims of his sex trafficking in different jurisdictions come forward. There's
no statute of limitations on sex trafficking)." If the prosecutor was corrupt, then the above
is not a true statement - the case can be retried as a fraud on the court by a so-called
"officer of the court" - the new Labor Secretary . . . drumroll please . . . Alex Acosta . .
. appointed as a cabinet member by the President, who just so happens to be a potential
witness in the very same case.
sixsigma cygnusatratus , 5 hours ago
"... ferried Bill Clinton and actor Kevin Spacey to his "Orgy Island" aboard his plane,
which has been termed "the Lolita Express... "
Wait, so is he going to be CEO of Disney or will it be Netflix?
See the real connection between the fake Steele Dossier and the Skipal hoax.
The UK MI6 is behind everything with Australia and Nato. War with Russia is coming to
avoid the Brexit. It has been planned 5 years ago. The Brexit is just a good excuse.
The continued NATO harassment, sanctions and campaigns of lies and false accusations
against Russia, including the blatant war rhetoric of the British Defence Secretary, do not
bode well for the future. For the US to tear up nuclear arms treaties and then blame Russia
is beyond shameful: it is destroying all possibility of negotiations to avert war. The Kerch
Strait incident staged by the puppet regime in Kiev, sending gunboats into the Kerch Strait
without observing the 2003 Protocol requiring them to notify in advance the Port of Kerch (a
protocol observed by the dozens of ships that go through the Strait peacefully every day) was
clearly part of a NATO plan to set up a major naval clash in the Black Sea.
That clash (followed by an attempt to recapture Crimea or at least blow up its magnificent
bridge, a reproach to a man who cannot even build a wall) may be expected in coming months,
perhaps as a distraction from Brexit or a way of derailing it. NATO, in short, is on a clear
trajectory towards war with Russia, which their deluded worldview convinces them they can
win.
Their initial use of Russia as a scapegoat and bogeyman to unite the NATO vassals against
a common threat, keeping Europe in subjection to America, has got out of hand, and is
heading, under the impetus of hysterical rhetoric, towards actual war. Unless decent people
unite to stop this escalation then the nuclear catastrophe will occur.
Exposing the barefaced lie of the Skripal false flag attack may be a step towards averting
that global cataclysm.
"... In 1940, as war raged in Europe, British intel officers in New York and Washington worked to elect candidates who favored U.S. intervention, defeat those who advocated neutrality, and silence or destroy the reputations of American isolationists they deemed a menace to British security. Scores -- perhaps hundreds -- of Americans who believed that fighting fascism justified unethical and, at times, illegal behavior, worked for British intelligence or cooperated with London's efforts. ..."
"... Churchill, the U.K.'s savvy wartime prime minister, knew that Britain could survive and repel an anticipated German invasion only if it received massive amounts of aid from the U.S., and that ultimate victory over the Nazis would require American military involvement. ..."
"... To pull the U.S. into Britain's efforts would require first winning public opinion -- making newspapers and radio programs the front lines in the battle to persuade Americans to elect politicians willing to back Britain over those who promoted an "America First" agenda. SIS, the British intelligence agency, flooded American newspapers with fake stories, leaked the results of illegal electronic surveillance and deployed October surprises against political candidates. ..."
"... Over the 18 months between Britain's humiliation at Dunkirk and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the scale and intensity of the SIS's efforts in the United States were without parallel in the history of relations between allied democracies. ..."
Overt intelligence operations, propaganda, fake news stories, dirty tricks -- all were used
in a foreign government's audacious attempt to influence U.S. elections. It wasn't 2016; it was
1940, and the operations were employed not by a hostile adversary, but by America's closest
ally, the United Kingdom.
Though technology has advanced, and the two nations' motives could not have been more
different, critical aspects of Russia's alleged covert efforts to bolster the campaign of
Donald Trump echo the tactics that Britain's Secret Intelligence Service pioneered seven
decades ago. In 1940, as war raged in Europe, British intel officers in New York and Washington
worked to elect candidates who favored U.S. intervention, defeat those who advocated
neutrality, and silence or destroy the reputations of American isolationists they deemed a
menace to British security. Scores -- perhaps hundreds -- of Americans who believed that
fighting fascism justified unethical and, at times, illegal behavior, worked for British
intelligence or cooperated with London's efforts.
Winston Churchill's goals were as clear Vladimir Putin's motives are murky. Churchill, the
U.K.'s savvy wartime prime minister, knew that Britain could survive and repel an anticipated
German invasion only if it received massive amounts of aid from the U.S., and that ultimate
victory over the Nazis would require American military involvement. He also knew that decisions
to send food, fuel and weapons across the Atlantic, and to dispatch troop ships to follow in
their wake, lay in the hands of the president and a hostile Congress. To pull the U.S. into
Britain's efforts would require first winning public opinion -- making newspapers and radio
programs the front lines in the battle to persuade Americans to elect politicians willing to
back Britain over those who promoted an "America First" agenda. SIS, the British intelligence
agency, flooded American newspapers with fake stories, leaked the results of illegal electronic
surveillance and deployed October surprises against political candidates.
Over the 18 months between Britain's humiliation at Dunkirk and the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, the scale and intensity of the SIS's efforts in the United States were without parallel
in the history of relations between allied democracies.
The SIS and its American collaborators went to great lengths to obscure the ties between
their activities and the British government. These links have since come to light largely
because William Stephenson, the Canadian businessman who headed British Security Coordination
(BSC), the official front for SIS operations in North and South America from 1941–1945,
commissioned a history of the organization's operation. Declassified in 1999,
that history provides a remarkably candid picture of London's espionage and propaganda
activities. Alongside other documents available in the U.K. National Archives, this history
shows that, as it sought to shift America out of neutrality, British intelligence was
restrained only by the certainty that the blowback from public exposure would have been
disastrous.
The story of British government efforts to influence American elections and public opinion
is a cautionary tale, providing a lesson that is all too relevant today about the power of
propaganda and covert operations to alter history. It also demonstrates how difficult it can be
to differentiate in real time between legitimate concerns and imaginary conspiracy theories --
and, perhaps, provides a glimmer of hope about the resilience of American democracy.
***
American communists, fascists and isolationists complained bitterly and loudly in
1940 and 1941 that Britain was secretly manipulating the U.S. media as part of a campaign to
pull America into the war. These accusations, confidently dismissed by liberal politicians and
newspapers as paranoid ravings, were inaccurate only in that they were understated. Even the
most alarmist commentators and conspiracy-mongers underestimated the depth and effectiveness of
British covert activity.
British intelligence employed the full range of cloak-and-dagger techniques in America in
1940 and 1941: forgeries, seductions, burglaries, electoral dirty tricks, physical
surveillance, intercepting and reading letters sent under diplomatic seal, illegally bugging
offices and tapping phones. British intelligence even listened in on a telephone call in June
1940 between President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House and his ambassador to Britain,
Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. A report on the call was quickly relayed to Churchill, alerting him that
the U.S. was making contingency plans in case the U.K. fell to the Nazis.
While the British government strongly backed Roosevelt, it hedged its bets by working behind
the scenes to increase the chances that Republicans would pick a presidential candidate in 1940
who would join the fight against fascism.
The Republican Party, lacking a consensus about a standard-bearer or platform, was in
disarray in June 1940 as its national convention approached. BSC worked behind the scenes to
smooth the path for a nominee who favored intervention. One element of the BSC's operations
surfaced on June 25, when the New York Herald reported on a poll of convention
delegates. Surprisingly, given the isolationist positions espoused by GOP stalwarts like Thomas
Dewey, Robert Taft and Herbert Hoover, the poll -- which the Herald wrote was "conducted
by Market Analysts, Inc., an independent research organization" -- found that three-fifths of
GOP delegates supported helping the allies "with everything short of war." In fact, Market
Analysts, Inc., was anything but independent. Its head, Sanford Griffith, was an American who
had secretly been working for British intelligence since the 1930s, and regardless of the
population surveyed, its polls consistently advocated U.S. interventionism in Europe.
Among Market Analysts' clients was the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, a
group led by William Allen White, a nationally syndicated columnist influential among liberal
Republicans. In his column, White wrote that the GOP delegate poll demonstrated that leading
Republican isolationists were out of touch with the party's members, and that Wendell Willkie
-- who had not run in the presidential primaries and had switched his party affiliation from
Democratic to Republican only a few months ahead of the national convention -- best represented
Republicans' views. While all of the other Republican contenders advocated steering clear of
the war in Europe, Willkie argued that "America's first line of defense is Great Britain." It
is impossible to determine exactly how influential BSC's assistance was, but Willkie went into
the convention an underdog and -- to London's delight, and the astonishment of the Republican
establishment -- emerged as the GOP candidate.
In addition to Griffith's operation, BSC funded and coordinated the activities and messaging
of a number of American anti-fascist organizations. One of these, an informal group of wealthy
businessmen and journalists called the Century Group, operated during the campaign as a liaison
between the British government, the White House and the Willkie campaign. It brokered an
agreement from Willkie to refrain from criticizing a proposal that allowed Roosevelt to
unilaterally authorize the transfer of scores of mothballed destroyers to Britain. As the first
president to snub George Washington's precedent of voluntarily stepping down after two terms,
FDR was acutely aware of the threat posed by accusations that he was behaving like a dictator,
so even the hint of such an accusation from the Republican candidate may have scuttled the
deal. On August 30, 1940, BSC's agents secured Willkie's commitment to acquiesce to the
transfer. Assured that he wouldn't pay a devastating political price, Roosevelt announced the
deal at a press conference four days later.
The BSC's work on Willkie's behalf was an exception. For the most part, it focused not on
promoting candidates, but rather on defeating elected officials who opposed American
intervention in the war.
Among those opponents was Rep. Hamilton Stuyvesant Fish III, a Republican and leading
isolationist who had represented New York's Hudson Valley in Congress since 1920. By picking a
high-profile target, the campaign against Fish was intended to "put the fear of God into every
isolationist senator and congressman in the country," according to a letter a BSC agent sent in
fall 1940.
To do this, the BSC created, funded and operated the Non-Partisan Committee to Defeat
Hamilton Fish, which among other activities, circulated a pamphlet juxtaposing Fish, Adolf
Hitler and Nazis. Another photo appeared to show Fish meeting with Fritz Kuhn, the "American
Hitler" who led the German-American Bund and was, at the time, serving a prison sentence for
embezzlement. Contrary to the caption -- "Hamilton Fish inspecting documents with Fritz Kuhn"
-- the Republican congressman had never met privately with Bund leader. The photo had been
taken at a 1938 public hearing that Congressman Fish had organized to discuss a proposed ban on
paramilitary groups like the Bund.
Another bit of British-engineered fake news had an ironic twist, accusing Fish of being a
pawn of a foreign power. They alleged that Nazis funneled money to Fish by renting his
properties at inflated high rates as a means of subsidizing pro-German propaganda efforts. On
October 21, Drew Pearson and Robert Allen reported the story in their hugely influential
Washington Merry-go-Round column -- a true October surprise.
Though Fish won reelection, his margin of victory was just 9,000 votes, half the size of his
win in 1938. In an after-action report to BSC and since archived at FDR's presidential library,
Griffith stated that the local Democratic Party had put practically no effort into defeating
Fish, and that an additional "$2,000 or $3,000 a week or two ahead would have been sufficient
to put it over." Even after the U.S. entered the war, the BSC stayed on Fish's case, planting
scurrilous stories in 1942 that helped cut his margin of victory to 4,000 votes. In 1944, they
finally beat him. Fish claimed it had taken "most of the New Deal Administration, half of
Moscow, $400,000, and Governor Dewey to defeat me." As the BSC history later crowed: "He might
-- with more accuracy -- have blamed BSC."
***
In addition to secretly intervening in campaigns , BSC funded and coordinated the
efforts of pro-intervention American political organizations and of associations of emigres
from Nazi-occupied countries that lobbied Congress and the public for a muscular U.S. response
to Hitler.
BSC also tried to shape public opinion by feeding a stream of true, partially true and
completely fabricated stories to sympathetic reporters and columnists. Some -- like Edgar Ansel
Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News and Ulric Bell of the Louisville Courier-Journal
-- worked directly with British intelligence officers, but most of the journalists who
cooperated with BSC did so through American intermediaries. Among them was Walter Winchell, one
of the most widely read columnists of the time, who routinely ran BSC items supplied by an
intermediary.
Although few of the American reporters and editors who disseminated BSC propaganda were on
the British payroll, it is not an exaggeration to characterize them as British agents or
"subagents," the latter being operatives directed by individuals who communicated with
professional intelligence officers. In fact, this is precisely how the BSC thought about them.
"The conduct of political warfare was entirely dependent on secrecy," notes the BSC history.
"For that reason, the press and radio men with whom BSC maintained contact were comparable with
subagents and the intermediaries with agents. They were thus regarded." In 1991, Edmond Taylor,
an American journalist and active collaborator with the Brits during World War II, told a
historian that British intelligence agents "connived" with "Americans like myself who were
willing to go out of regular (or even legal) channels to try to bend U.S. policy towards
objectives that the British, as well as the Americans in question, considered desirable."
One of the journalists in charge of BSC's propaganda efforts described his unit's activities
in a 1942 memo to the British Foreign Office without mincing words. He wrote that his remit
included "subversive propaganda in the United States for the exposure and destruction of enemy
propaganda [and] countering isolationist and appeasement propaganda which is rapidly taking on
the shape of a Fascist movement, conscious or unconscious." Weekly reports to London from
British agents in New York tallied the number of stories that had been planted in American
newspapers.
The BSC history draws a straight line from planting pro-British stories in American
newspapers to Roosevelt's decision to send destroyers to England. The transfer happened,
according to BSC, because Stephenson had "means at his disposal for influencing American public
opinion in favour of aid to Britain. In fact, covert propaganda, one of the most potent weapons
which BSC employed against the enemy, was harnessed directly to this task."
***
The British government had a well-oiled, coordinated, worldwide strategy during World
War II for generating and disseminating rumors, which it called "sibs," short for
sibilare , the Latin word for whisper or hiss . Many of the sibs were
silly or outlandish -- for example, rumors that man-eating sharks from Australia had been
deposited in the English Channel to consume downed German aviators -- but British intelligence
took them extraordinarily seriously. "The object of propaganda rumours is in no sense to convey
the official or semi-official views of H.M.G. [His Majesty's Government] by covert means to
officials in the countries concerned," read one classified wartime report. "It is rather to
induce alarm, despondency and bewilderment among the enemies, and hope and confidence among the
friends, to whose ears it comes."
New sibs were approved by an organization called the Underground Propaganda Committee (UPC),
which met weekly in London during the war. While rumors spread in Europe by word of mouth, in
the U.S., they were disseminated through a network of friendly reporters and, starting in the
spring of 1941, by the Overseas News Agency, a news service that received subsidies from, and
was controlled by, the BSC. ONA articles appeared in newspapers around the country. Especially
prior to Pearl Harbor, these stories were picked up by newspapers in Germany, Japan and
occupied countries.
To cite a typical example, at a meeting of the UPC on August 8, 1941, a decision was made to
release a series of sibs that, according to the meeting minutes, were "intended to suggest that
the Fuehrer, who is alone responsible in the face of a good deal of opposition for the Russian
campaign, is becoming more and more unbalanced as he realises that the vast gamble is
miscarrying." Eight days later, the New York Post ran an article supplied by ONA citing
"circumstantial evidence for a belief that Hitler is not at the Russian front, but at
Berchtesgaden suffering from a severe nervous breakdown." The article went on to assert that
the Fuehrer's personal physician had recently traveled to Switzerland to consult with the famed
psychiatrist Carl Jung to discuss "the rapid deterioration of Hitler's mental condition," which
ONA asserted was characterized by delusional rages in which he confused the contemporary battle
for Smolensk with a World War I battle in France.
On July 11, 1941, the UPC approved a sib for distribution in the U.S. newspapers, where
Japanese diplomats would read it, indicating that if Tokyo attacked Indochina, the Soviet Union
would attack Japan by air. The next day, the New York Times and other American
newspapers ran an AP story that cited "reliable persons" reporting that Japan was poised to
"make a move against French Indo-China soon." The story noted that "Russia has a large air
force within easy range of Japan's vulnerable centers of population."
In August 1941, the New York Times published ONA's report that the death of a
130-year-old Bedouin soothsayer was seen in the Middle East as "a sign of a coming defeat for
Hitler." Also in the soothsaying business, the BSC sponsored a U.S. tour for Louis de Wohl, a
Hungarian "astro-philosopher." In press conferences and an appearance at the annual convention
of the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers, de Wohl announced that the stars
predicted doom for Hitler and success for Roosevelt. Newspapers credulously reported his
statement that a "yogi once told me a man born on the date Hitler came into power would cause
his downfall. Hitler rose to power on Jan. 30, and that is Roosevelt's birth date."
***
The BSC operations in the U.S. weren't all frivolity and fake news; many were much
more serious.
Using undercover agents, the BSC conducted a yearlong investigation of a scheme by
congressional staff to insert pro-Nazi propaganda into the Congressional Record and to
use congressional franking privileges to distribute it. The BSC then coordinated media
exposés of the franking scandal and supplied federal prosecutors with information on the
pro-Nazi plot, resulting in several convictions.
Elsewhere in Washington, the BSC targeted the embassy used by the Vichy French, illegally
tapping its phones, burglarizing embassy property and deploying a female operative to seduce
Vichy officials. That intel was then used as the basis for a series of newspaper articles
revealing Vichy diplomats' efforts to help Nazi Germany -- stories that the BSC then arranged
to be printed under the byline of an American journalist. The resulting public furor severely
curtailed the Vichy government's American activities.
With the clarity of hindsight, some may write off as a historical curiosity the
extraordinary efforts by Britain to influence American public opinion and the results of
elections, arguing that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's impetuous declaration of
war vaporized notions of neutrality, rendering efforts to propel America into the war
superfluous. But in fact, given the depth and strength of the opposition to FDR's efforts to
support Britain in 1940 and 1941 -- and the importance of that lifeline, which pro-British
propaganda made possible -- it is clear that the efforts of British intelligence officers and
their American recruits helped change history.
In the summer of 1941, the Roosevelt administration strained its political muscles in an
all-out push to persuade Congress to amend an emergency military conscription law and extend
mandatory service from one year to 2½ years. After the White House exerted all its
strength, on August 12, the House passed the extension by a one-vote margin. It is easy to
imagine, though impossible to prove, that the efforts of the BSC's operatives to bend the
public and bully politicians away from isolationism, tipped the balance in favor of the law. If
it had not squeaked through Congress, the U.S. military would have had to send tens of
thousands of men home, substantially weakening the position of American forces on the verge of
war.
America's first experience of large-scale foreign interference in its elections holds
lessons that are relevant today, including the fact that SIS continued to target its American
political foes until at least 1944 -- long after the United States committed itself to the war.
If history is any guide, Donald Trump's inauguration may not mark the end of Russia's attempts
to sway American politicians and public opinion.
"... 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. ..."
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.
"George Papadopoulos revealed [redacted] that individuals linked to Russia, who took
interest in Papadopoulos as a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, informed him in late
April 2016 that Russia [two lines redacted].
Papadopoulos's disclosure, moreover, occurred against the backdrop of Russia's aggressive
covert campaign to influence our elections, which the FBI was already monitoring.
We would later learn in Papadopoulos's plea that the information the Russians could assist
by anonymously releasing were thousands of Hillary Clinton emails."
my problem with this is wikileaks released the e mails via a search-able archive on march
16th 2016...
I still don't see how anything papadopolous said is relevant time wise.. what am i missing
here, other then the obvious fact papadopolous looks like a lousy liar.. apparently he got
this from Joseph Mifsud who as it turns out was 'director of the London Academy of Diplomacy'
and etc - according to the nyt here - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/world/europe/russia-us-election-joseph-mifsud.html
and from the nyt article "Mr. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about
his conversations with the "professor." Mr. Mifsud is referred to in the papers only as "the
professor," based in London, but a Senate aide familiar with emails involving Mr. Mifsud --
lawmakers in both the Senate and the House are investigating Russia's role in the election --
confirmed that he was the person cited."
the whole thing of Russia influencing the usa election seems built on via a number of
sketchy characters at best..
at any rate - this is what emptywheel thinks is relevant in an otherwise irrelevant memo
from schiff... i don't get how it is!
Looks like all of them were Brennan men. CIA used FBI counterintelligence and counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal.
Notable quotes:
"... We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members of Mueller's investigation. ..."
"... If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange happened to George Papadopoulos during the campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with people who have intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice ..."
"... A recent article in The Telegraph also alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations, doing counter-terrorism work for the Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal." ..."
"... Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the investigation, saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos' activities look like they were something else. ..."
"... It's more likely that the CIA played the FBI with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency." ..."
"... Zainab Ahmad , a member of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed out by Blackburn , Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event in 2017 ..."
"... "Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ..."
"... I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as special counsel is also troubling ..."
"... Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic and linked to the Clintons ..."
"... Last year, Blackburn noted the connection between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei , writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel, works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy. Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US State too." ..."
"... Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share 'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that " The Guardian reported Hannigan's announcement that he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017. ..."
"... Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing "deemed so sensitive it was handled at director-level" is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner." ..."
"... There are more and more articles saying that the FBI, CIA, M14 15,16 yada yada, were overly concerned about Trump. Their sin...caring too much for the USA. They attempted a coup de'etat for "our" own good...we... being "we the people". To quote Abe Lincoln "You will find that all the arguments in favour of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, -- not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." Lincoln did not mince words ..."
In April last year, Disobedient Media broke coverage of the British involvement in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, asking
why
All Russiagate Roads Lead To London , via the quasi-scholar Joseph Mifsud and others.
The issue was also raised by WikiLeaks's Julian Assange , just days before
the Ecuadorian government silenced him last March. Assange's Twitter thread cited research by
Chris Blackburn , who spoke with
Disobedient Media on multiple occasions covering Joseph Mifsud's ties to British intelligence figures and organizations, as well
as his links to
Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, the FBI, CIA and the private cyber-security firm Crowdstrike.
We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the
Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on
the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members
of Mueller's investigation. What we are left with is an indication of collusion between factions of the US and UK intelligence
community in fabricating evidence of Trump-Russia collusion: a scandal that would have rocked the legacy press to its core, if Western
establishment-backed media had a spine.
In
Disobedient Media's previous coverage of Blackburn's work, he described his experience in intelligence:
"I've been involved in numerous investigations that involve counter-intelligence techniques in the past. I used to work for
the
9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism , one of the biggest tort actions in American history. I helped build a profile
of Osama bin Laden's financial and political network, which was slightly different to the one that had been built by the
CIA's Alec Station , a dedicated task force which was focused on Osama bin
Laden and Al-Qaeda. Alec Station designed its profile to hunt Osama bin Laden and disrupt his network. I thought it was flawed.
It had failed to take into account Osama's historical links to Pakistan's main political parties or that he was the figurehead
for a couple of organizations, not just Al-Qaeda."
"I also ran a few conferences for US intelligence leaders during the Bush administration. After the 9/11 Commission published
its report into the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon it created a public outreach program. The US National Intelligence
Conference and Exposition (
Intelcon ) was one of the avenues it used. I was responsible for creating the 'View from Abroad' track. We had guidance from
former Senator Slade Gorton and Jamie Gorelick, who both sat on the 9/11 Commission. We got leaders such as Sir John Chilcot and
Baroness Pauline Neville Jones to come and help share their experiences on how the US would be able to heal the rifts after 9/11."
"The US intelligence community was suffering from severe turf wars and firewalls, which were hampering counter-terrorism efforts.
They were concentrating on undermining each other rather than tackling terrorism. I had mainly concentrated on the Middle East,
but in 2003 I switched my focus to terrorism in South Asia."
Counter Terrorism, Not Counter Intelligence, Sparked Probe
In an article published by The Telegraph last November, the paper acknowledged
the following:
"It forces the spotlight on whether the UK played a role in the FBI's investigation launched before the 2016 presidential election
into Trump campaign ties to the Kremlin... Mr. Trump's allies and former advisers are raising questions about the UK's role in
the start of the probe, given many of the key figures and meetings were located in Britain... One former top White House adviser
to Mr. Trump made similar insinuations, telling this newspaper: "You know the Brits are up to their neck." The source added on
the Page wiretap application: "I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don't want to
be implicated in, along with FBI, counter-terrorism and the CIA. " [Emphasis Added]
The article cites George Papadopoulos, who asked why the "British intelligence
apparatus was weaponized against Trump and his advisers." Papadopoulos has also addressed the issue at length via Twitter. In response
to the Telegraph's coverage of the issue, Chris Blackburn wrote via Twitter
:
"The Telegraph story on Trump Russia acknowledges that activities involving counter-terrorism are at the heart of the scandal...not
counter-intelligence. If the [London Centre for International Law Practice] was British state, not private, some Commonwealth
countries are going to be seriously pissed off."
Blackburn spoke with Disobedient Media, saying:
" If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange
happened to George Papadopoulos during the campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with
people who have intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice.
A recent article in The Telegraph also alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA
using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations,
doing counter-terrorism work for the Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their
intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal." [Emphasis Added]
Blackburn discussed this differentiation with Disobedient Media:
"Counter-terrorism is obviously involved in more kinetic, violent political actions-concerning mass casualty events, bombings,
assassinations, poisonings, and hacking. But, the lines are blurring between them. Counter-intelligence cases have been known
to stretch for decades- often relying on nothing more than paranoia and suspicion to fuel investigations. Counter-terrorism is
also a broader discipline as it involves tactical elements like hostage rescue, crime scene investigations, and explosive specialists.
Counter-Terrorism is a collaborative effort with counter-terrorism officers working closely with local and regional police forces
and civic organizations. There is also a wider academic field around countering violent, and radical ideology which promotes terrorism
and insurgencies. Cybersecurity has become the third major discipline in intelligence. The London Center of International Law
Practice, the mysterious intelligence company that
employed
both Papadopoulos and Mifsud , had also been working in that area."
Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the investigation,
saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos' activities look
like they were something else.
As counter-terrorism and counterintelligence are close in tactics and methods, it would seem that they were used because they
share the same skill sets - covert evidence gathering and deception. It's basically sleight of hand. A piece of theatre would be
more precise. However, we don't know if the FBI knew it was real or make-believe. It's more likely that the CIA played the FBI
with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency."
Mueller's Team And Joseph Mifsud
Zainab Ahmad , a
member of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed
out by Blackburn , Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event
in 2017. In recent days, Blackburn wrote via Twitter :
"Zainab Ahmad is a major player in the Russiagate scandal at the DOJ. Does she work for SC Mueller? She was at a GCCS event
in May 2017. Arvinder Sambei, a co-director of the [London Centre of International Law Practice], worked with Joseph Mifsud, [George
Papadopoulos] and [Simona Mangiante]. She's a GCCS consultant."
Blackburn told this author:
"Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism
conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged
Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia."
Zainab Ahmad (AHMAD). Image via the Combatting Terrorism Center, West Point
"Richard Barrett, the Former Chief of Counter-Terrorism at MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence department traveled with Mifsud
to Saudi Arabia to give a talk on terrorism in 2017. Ex-CIA officers, US Defense, and US Treasury officials were also there. The
London Centre of International Law Practice's relationship to the Global Center had been established in 2014. The Global Center
on Cooperative Security made Martin Polaine and Arvinder Sambei consultants, they then became directors at the London Centre of
International Law Practice."
"The Global Center on Cooperative Security's first major UK conference was at Joseph Mifsud's London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD).
Mifsud then followed Arvinder Sambei and Nagi Idris over to the London Centre of International Law Practice. Sources have told
me that Mifsud was moonlighting as a specialist on counter-terrorism and Islamism while working at LAD which explains why he went
to work in counter-terrorism after LAD folded."
"I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped
up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as
special counsel is also troubling."
Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional
testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic
and linked to the Clintons. Critically, The Hill
writes:
"Those he briefed included Andrew Weissmann, then the head of DOJ's fraud section; Bruce Swartz, longtime head of DOJ's international
operations, and Zainab Ahmad , an accomplished terrorism prosecutor who, at the time, was assigned to work with Lynch as a senior
counselor. Ahmad and Weissmann would go on to work for Mueller, the special prosecutor overseeing the Russia probe." [Emphasis
Added]
This point is essential, as it not only describes Ahmad's role in Mueller's team but places her at a crucial pre-investigation
meeting.
Last year, Blackburn noted the connection
between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei , writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel,
works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy.
Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US
State too."
Sambei has been described elsewhere as a "Former
practising barrister, Senior Crown Prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service of England & Wales, and Legal Adviser at the Permanent
Joint Headquarters (PJHQ), Ministry of Defence." [British spelling has been retained]
Arvinder Sambei. Image via the Public International Law Advisory Group
That Sambei has been so thoroughly linked to organizations where Mifsud was a central figure is yet another cause of suspicion
regarding allegations that Joseph Mifsud was a shadowy, unknown Russian agent until the summer of 2016 . She is also a direct link
between Robert Mueller and Mifsud.
Blackburn wrote via Twitter : "Arvinder Sambei helped to organize LCILP's
counter-terrorism and corruption events. She used her contacts in the US to bring in Middle Eastern government officials that were
seen to be vulnerable to graft. Lisa Osofsky, former FBI Deputy General Counsel, was working with her." Below, Arvinder is pictured
at a London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP) event.
Arvinder Sambei, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter
As Chris Blackburn told this author:
" Mifsud and Papadopoulos's co-director Arvinder Sambei was also the former FBI British counsel working 9/11 cases for Robert
Mueller. She also runs a consultancy which deals with Special Investigative Measure (SIMs) which is just a posh description for
covert espionage and evidence gathering. She has worked for major intelligence and national law agencies in the past. She wore
two hats as a director of London Centre and a consultant for the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), a counter-terrorism
think tank which is sponsored by the Australia, Canada, UK and US governments. Alexander Downer's former Chief of Staff while
at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade now works for the Global Center. Mifsud was also due to meet with Australian
private intelligence figures in Adelaide in March 2016. So. Australia is certainly a major focus for the investigation." [Emphasis
Added]
Lisa Osofsky, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter
An Embarrassment For John Brennan?
Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share
'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that "
The Guardian reported Hannigan's announcement that
he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23
January 2017.
Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the
New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown
to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and
Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing "deemed
so sensitive it was handled at director-level" is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers
at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner."
Blackburn told Disobedient Media:
"Former Congressman Trey Gowdy, who has seen most of the information gathered by Congress from the intelligence community concerning
the Russia investigation, said that if President Trump were to declassify files and present the truth to the American public,
it would " embarrass John Brennan ." I think that
is pretty concrete for me, but it's not definitive. I know the polarization and spin in Washington has become perverse, but that
statement is pretty specific for me. If Brennan is involved, it is most probably through Papadopoulos who sparked off the 'official'
investigation at the FBI. He also made sure the Steele dossier was spread through the US government."
Blackburn added: "Chris Steele was also working on FIFA projects, and a source has told me that he was working to investigate
the Russian and Qatari World Cup bids. The London Centre of International Law Practice has been working with Majed Garoub, the former
Saudi legal representative of FIFA, the world governing body for soccer. He's also been working against the Qatari bid. Steele likes
to get paid twice for his investigations."
"Mifsud has also been associated with Prince Turki the former Saudi intelligence chief, Mifsud and the London Academy of Diplomacy
used to train Saudi diplomats and intelligence figures while Turki was the Saudi Ambassador to London. Turki is a close friend
of Bill Clinton and John Brennan. Nawaf Obaid was also courting Mifsud and tried to get him a cushy job working with CNN's Freedom
Project at Link Campus in Rome. He also knows John Brennan. Intelligence agencies like to give out professional gifts like this
plum academic position for completing missions. In the US, it is widely known that intelligence agencies gift the children of
assets to get them into prestigious Ivy League schools."
At minimum, we can surmise that Mifsud was not a Russian agent, but was an asset of Western intelligence agencies. We are left
with the impression that the Mifsud saga served as a ploy, whether he participated knowingly or not. It seems reasonable to conclude
that the gambit was initially developed with participation of John Brennan and UK intelligence. Following this, Mueller inherited
and developed the Mifsud narrative thread into the collusion soap opera we know today.
Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal to subvert
a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power.
What ********. Britain was part of the group pulling of 911 along with the American and Jewish establishment. Blackburn was
the inside guy, posing as an outsider, to deflect attention from the real perpetrators. These people always have agents on both
sides of every issue in the same way they fund two "opposing" political parties and fund two "opposing" sides in the media.
Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal
to subvert a US Presidency , and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power .
It's called TREASON .
Whoever, 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
SteeleGate---his mate Skripal, boss Pablo Miller----novichok---Porton Down---anything to blame Russia in the end. After 30
dys of shutdown personnel of CIA, FBI and DOJ can be changed legally: draining of the swamp and DECLAS can begin with proper Military
Tribunals in place. This according to Q who shared all of this, so it was not a conspiracy theory that the Q team exposed, but
just MSM and Deep State in their last panic mode. Justice will now be able to follow: maybe rel end of endless wars too!
There are more and more articles saying that the FBI, CIA, M14 15,16 yada yada, were overly concerned about Trump. Their sin...caring
too much for the USA. They attempted a coup de'etat for "our" own good...we... being "we the people". To quote Abe Lincoln "You will find that all the arguments in favour of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, -- not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." Lincoln did not mince words
So now we have an international conspiracy of care. Not one power grubber in the group. A syndicate of misunderstood do gooders.
But not having the consent of the people, but rather trying to undo, and foil the consent of the people.
This part of the Declaration applies
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
-- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish
it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal
to subvert a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power..."
Why do you not call it a coup d'etat? That is what it is, nothing less. If it were about something Trump did you would use
the harshest possible language. Why not tell the truth here. Let the American people know what happened.
Go to a large library and cross-reference James Jesus Angleton, Kim Philby, Miles Copeland and Nicholas Elliott in the "spy" books.
Soon you will begin to see that MI6 was there at the OSS and later CIA inceptions.
At the hidden deep levels, both these agencies serve the GLOBALIST' enterprise, and have since the start.
Then you will understand Steele and the "five eyes" involvement in the Russia hoax.
The former head of Boris Berezovsky's
security service spoke about the relationship between famous blogger Alexey Navalny and the
British MI6 intelligence service. He succeeded in exporting about 60 servers containing a huge
amount of correspondence and documents.
"23rd December, 2007 - to the head of the Secret Intelligence Service A. Belt.
Report of agent Solomon about ending Navalny's verification and the assignment of the
pseudonym "freedom".
Had a conversation over an encrypted communication channel between the employee and the CRS
(SIS) and agent Solomon. The agent got approval for a confidential cooperation with Alexei
Navalny. It was mentioned that it is necessary for Navalny to arrange financial support to
carry out the tasks within the framework of special operation "Shiver" to undermine the
existing constitutional order in the Russian Federation. Navalny has a nickname of "freedom",
reads one of the documents.
Agent Solomon is the notorious William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital, inspirer of the
Magnitsky act, and a person who made a fortune in Russia in the 90's.
Operation "Shiver" had already been developed at Langley in 1986. The documents were signed
by then-CIA Director William Casey. The main goal of the project was to "change the
constitutional and political system in Eastern Europe and the USSR".
Tasks are described in as much detail as possible: to change the political and
constitutional state system, to acquire control over financial flows, and to extract assets
from emerging economies.
The USSR has not existed for a quarter of a century, however, the project "Shiver" is still
relevant.
"Browder spreads lies, and all his company is based solely on lies. Navalny is his student
and successor of his ideas. They partly work together, working in parallel. They absolutely
face the same direction," said Pavel Karpov, a former investigator of the Moscow Criminal
Investigations Department. He is one of those who has stirred Browder's "snake nest" and opened
schemes of tax evasion and illegal purchase of shares in Russia under the leadership of
Hermitage Capital.
Here is an example of correspondence between Navalny and Browder in 2006:
"Let me very frankly formulate what I want to offer. I will teach you to grab the monsters
of the Russian economy by the balls. Soon you will become a hero of the minority shareholders
and can have their reputational capital. Probably, and political. In return I ask you to
support me when my problems come out. Am I clear?" asks Browder to Navalny. "Your information
in exchange for the loyalty of my potential. However, I'm afraid you banked on the wrong
figure. I could have problems even in my party. There I seem to be a nationalist," -- says
Navalny.
Then, under the leadership of Browder, and with his financial support, the still unknown
blogger opened the cycle of revelations. At the same time the scene appears banker Vladimir
Ashurkov. He dealt with money matters for "revelatory activities".
"Agent "freedom" was acquainted with the first phase of the secret denunciation of the
conviction of corruption and embezzlement of Russian state assets. To implement the first phase
of the plan, agent "freedom" was funded to the amount of 100 million rubles. The first part of
funds, 7 million rubles, will be transferred to our authorised representative of the Moscow
Helsinki Group until January 26th. Agent A. Belt".
The activities of the Hermitage Capital in Moscow has been completely phased out as auditor
Sergey Magnitsky was appointed to clean up any traces that remained.
"People say that he was Browder's lawyer. This is an outright lie! He was an accountant, who
was engaged in tax evasion for Browder, i.e. registered companies through which money was
withdrawn from. As I was told by Magnitsky himself, these millions were withdrawn by his own
chief, who, as I learned later, was Mr. Browder," recalls journalist Oleg Lurie.
When Magnitsky was arrested, Navalny wrote to Browder, "William, sincerely sorry. People get
used to like those who suffer in our country I'm not saying that the suffering of Sergei is
your trump card, but the more these journalists and people will learn about this suffering, the
less they will want to know what is happening".
Browder's goal was to create the maximum noise possible with information, however the
situation abroad with the "legal auditor" responded little.
"20th September 2009. To the Director of Central Intelligence.
A conversation between agent Solomon and an employee of MI6.
Further growth of public resonance will be gone unless we make adjustments to the plans of
our ongoing special events. In his message to the agent, based on information available for it,
he noted the deteriorating health of Magnitsky. It was proposed to the agent, through
authorized persons in the penitentiary system of Russia, to organize a disruption of medical
assistance to Magnitsky. The deterioration of his health will be designated as a medical error
that could lead to his death. Please pay special attention to this information", -- stated the
documents.
Magnitsky was literally sacrificed. In November 2009, he died in the hospital of the
"Matrosskaya Tishina" detention facility, and Browder announced that the prisoner was tortured,
he was also refused medical care. And then there was the "Magnitsky list".
Here is what is said in the secret documents about it:
"January 23, 2010. Sash reports on a meeting with the agent "freedom", during which he gave
the agent $300,000 for the upcoming program to support the "Magnitsky list" on social networks.
The report of the agent Sash also said that the project is linked with the death of Sergei
Magnitsky, and already in the early stages it greatly undermined the credibility of Russian
citizens in the Russian judicial and law enforcement system. This leads to growing chaos in the
Russian judicial and law enforcement system, a reduction of its credibility, and a reduction in
the credibility of Vladimir Putin. Agent A. Belt".
All this time, Browder warned Navalny against political activity.
"We have our own tasks. Bill asks you to be careful. Urge you not to interfere in the
electoral process -- it is not your task. Monitoring, reporting -- Yes. Protests -- no," --
said in his message.
Apparently, the situation has since changed. It is noteworthy that the Skype accounts of Browder and Navalny, where they started talking
in 2006, are still operational. But we failed to contact subscribers.
"... The 38-year-old Soviet-born businessman now lives in the United States. He trained as a military interpreter at university and changed his name when he entered the U.S., his father said ..."
"... And Millian - real name Sergei Kukut or, in Belarussian, Siarhei Kukuts - has hinted that he could be in danger, blaming shadowy forces in London. He said that thanked God he was 'alive and healthy' and is able to 'tell the truth' that he had no involvement in the allegations against Trump, with whom he has claimed to have a business relationship. Trump has angrily denied any sexual impropriety in Moscow, and also dismissed claims from Millian that the pair had a business link, while Putin has denied holding 'kompromat' on the new U.S. president. ..."
"... his father Milediy Kukut revealed: 'He has asked the US government for protection - but was told he had to sort it all himself.' ..."
EXCLUSIVE: Russian businessman named as source for spy's dossier of
filthy claims about Trump has asked for U.S. government protection - and was refused
Sergei Millian has been named as the ultimate source for discredited claims that Donald
Trump ordered prostitutes to commit degrading sex acts in Moscow
Milediy Kukut, the father of the 38-year-old Soviet-born businessman tells DailyMail.com
his son asked for protection over fears for his safety
In an interview with Russian television not reported in the West, Millian said he had no
information on Trump
'All that was presented was some doubtful statements of third parties,' he said - not
denying that he had engaged in gossip about Trump
Millian, who changed his name when he became a U.S. resident, revealed to have trained as
'military interpreter' as a student and is now doing business in China
He was brought up in one-party Belarus, whose strongman leader is ally of Vladamir Putin
and still visits his family in dilapidated Soviet-style town
Published: 15:49 EST, 31 January 2017 | Updated: 18:10 EST, 31 January 2017
The mysterious 'source' of explosive and unsubstantiated allegations that Donald Trump
cavorted with Russian prostitutes asked for 'protection' from the US government, but was turned
down, his father has disclosed.
Soviet-born businessman Sergei Millian, 38, who Dailymail.com can reveal was trained as a
military interpreter before moving to the U.S., allegedly boasted to third parties that Moscow
had compromising video of the US president engaging in lewd sexual acts that could be used to
blackmail him.
These dynamite assertions were then - it has been claimed - passed without his knowledge by
at least one intermediary to British ex-MI6 agent Christoper Steele.
Those allegations formed the purported basis of the former spy's 'dirty dossier' which
rocked Washington when its contents became public.
Now it can be disclosed that Millian has voiced fears for his own safety, at the same time
as denying that he was in any way the source for the dossier.
Protection: Sergei Millian asked for the U.S. government to protect him after he was named
as the source of the most salacious claims in the dirty dossier. He denies having information
on Trump, whom he is now thought to have first met in 2007
Defiant: The 38-year-old Soviet-born businessman now lives in the United States. He trained
as a military interpreter at university and changed his name when he entered the U.S., his
father said
Back home: Sergei Millian (right) remains a frequent visitor to his family in a dilapidated
village in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, his father Milediy Kukut (left) told
DailyMail.com
+17
Impoverished: One-party state Belarus is impoverished and Sharkaŭshchyna, a town 125
miles from the capital of Minsk, is among its most economically troubled areas
Upbringing: Millian's parents still live at the second-floor, Soviet-era apartment where he
was brought up. His father drives the red Lada car (left), another Soviet-era h
Location: Belarus is a key ally of Vladimir Putin's Russia and Millian's native town of
Sharkaŭshchyna is 125 miles from its capital, Minsk
His father told DailyMail.com that the businessman had requested protection in the U.S.,
where he has lived since 2001.
And Millian - real name Sergei Kukut or, in Belarussian, Siarhei Kukuts - has hinted that he
could be in danger, blaming shadowy forces in London. He said that thanked God he was 'alive and healthy' and is able to 'tell the truth' that he
had no involvement in the allegations against Trump, with whom he has claimed to have a
business relationship. Trump has angrily denied any sexual impropriety in Moscow, and also dismissed claims from
Millian that the pair had a business link, while Putin has denied holding 'kompromat' on the
new U.S. president.
With Steele in hiding, and Millian last seen in Atlanta, DailyMail.com went to his native
Belarus, an economic basket case labeled the last dictatorship in Europe under strongman
Alexander Lukashenko, a longstanding Putin ally.
At the dilapidated town where Milliam was brought up, his father Milediy Kukut revealed: 'He
has asked the US government for protection - but was told he had to sort it all himself.'
Kukut, 63, said he did not know if his son had approached the FBI or another US law
enforcement agency after he was 'besieged' in the wake of The Wall Street Journal linking him
to the dossier.
"... Who provided former British spy Christopher Steele with the salacious and unverified information in the dossier? That's one question I'd like clarity on ..."
"... And it would also be interesting to hear from Sergei Millian, who is widely reported to be an unwitting source of information contained in the dossier, which was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. ..."
"... There is a reason why Republicans did not do so when they controlled the house. Think Uniparty! The Dems and Reps are two faces of the same party! The Uniparty did not want this to happen! Now that the Reps are minority, they can act like Reps because majority Dems won't grant their request! See how that works!!!! ..."
"... Think Uniparty! Then everything will suddenly start to make sense to you! ..."
"... Democrat politicians are lying to the people who care about MUH RUSSIA. These politicians don't care about it. They never did. From the start it was nothing more than a way to keep a certain powerful faction of their party in line by dangling MUH RUSSIA keys in front of them. ..."
"... They can't stop because the mindless rage monsters they whipped up (aka the shrieking base of the ever-growing left wing of the Party that lives on Cuntbook and Twatter) will turn on them if they do ..."
Making matters more interesting, Republicans today also put forward a motion to subpoena
around a dozen witnesses. Those people, including officials involved in the FBI's Russia
investigation as well as people likely to be familiar with the compilation of the Steele
dossier. Of course, those people may not say what the Democrats want to hear so the Democrats
rejected the motion.
It's actually a brilliant idea – we need more interviews. I think the Republicans
should pounce on this opportunity to question these witnesses. Hopefully, they will ask some
poignant questions we still don't have answers to.
Who provided former British spy Christopher Steele with the salacious and unverified
information in the dossier? That's one question I'd like clarity on.
"Since the Democrats previously sought testimony from these individuals, such as James
Baker and Sergei Millian, we assume they still want to speak to them," said Jack Langer,
spokesman for committee Republican Rep. Devin Nunes.
"It's even possible some witnesses can help explain the 'more than circumstantial
evidence' of Trump-Russia collusion that the Democrats claimed to have found two years ago
but, inexplicably, never revealed to Committee Republicans or anyone else."
James Baker is the former FBI General Counsel who was close friends with former FBI
Director James Comey. Baker is now the subject of a leak investigation. He reportedly accepted
documents from Perkins Coie, the law firm used by the Democratic National Committee and the
Hillary Clinton campaign to pay for the unverified dossier.
And it would also be interesting to hear from
Sergei Millian, who is widely reported to be an unwitting source of information contained
in the dossier, which was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
These witnesses would surely have some interesting information to share if they were under
questioned by the committee. I'm not sure it's information that would benefit Schiff's claim
that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But I'm certain it would shed
light on what really happened with the dossier and the internal machinations of the FBI's probe
into the campaign.
Read the press release below from the House Intelligence
Committee:
Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued the following
statement today on sending the transcripts of interviews from the committee's Russia
investigation to the Special Counsel's office.
Republicans are happy the Democrats are joining us in reiterating what the Republican-led
committee already voted to do in September 2018 -- make all the transcripts available to the
executive branch, including the Special Counsel's office, as part of the process of
publishing them for the American people to see.
In light of the unacceptable delay in the Director of National Intelligence's
declassification review, we hope the Democrats will now join us in further increasing
transparency by voting to immediately publish all the unclassified transcripts that we
previously sent to the executive branch.
Additionally, we call on our Democratic colleagues to grant our request to subpoena
numerous witnesses whose testimony the Democrats had previously sought in connection with the
committee's Russia investigation.
... Republicans today also put forward a motion to subpoena around a dozen witnesses.
Those people, including officials involved in the FBI's Russia investigation as well as
people likely to be familiar with the compilation of the Steele dossier. ...
It's a damn shame they didn't make that motion a month ago when they were in the majority
on the committee.
There is a reason why Republicans did not do so when they controlled the house. Think
Uniparty! The Dems and Reps are two faces of the same party! The Uniparty did not want this
to happen! Now that the Reps are minority, they can act like Reps because majority Dems won't grant
their request! See how that works!!!!
This is how deep state protects it crime family members Rep and Dems! Think Uniparty! Then everything will suddenly start to make sense to you!
freedommusic
Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security Submit Joint Report on Impact of Foreign Interference on Election and
Political/Campaign Infrastructure in 2018 Elections
Although the specific conclusions within the joint report must remain classified, the Departments have concluded there is
no evidence to date that any identified activities of a foreign government or foreign agent had a material impact on the
integrity or security of election infrastructure or political/campaign infrastructure used in the 2018 midterm elections for
the United States Congress.
So no Russian interference in the 2018 election. What about any domestic interference? I don't see that mentioned...
deepelemblues
MUH RUSSIA has been a never-ending chain of diminishing returns for two and three quarter years
Democrat politicians are lying to the people who care about MUH RUSSIA. These politicians don't care about it. They
never did. From the start it was nothing more than a way to keep a certain powerful faction of their party in line by
dangling MUH RUSSIA keys in front of them. Jingle-jangle, jingle-jangle...
They can't stop because the mindless rage monsters they whipped up (aka the shrieking base of the ever-growing left
wing of the Party that lives on Cuntbook and Twatter) will turn on them if they do with a tantrum of historic
proportions
Your average black Democrat voter don't care about this MUH RUSSIA ********
Your average hispanic Democrat voter don't care about this MUH RUSSIA ********
Your average white Democrat voter don't care about this MUH RUSSIA ********
Only the hyperpoliticized REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE machines whose entire lives are wrapped up in DUH STRUGGLE care about
this MUH RUSSIA ********
TeraByte
I can only refer to history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proscription
In the Roman Empire enemies of the state were blacklisted and they simply vanished.
"... Then a funny thing happened. Robert Mueller's press guy issued an unprecedented statement calling the Buzzfeed story pure, unadulterated bullshit. Whoops!! ..."
"... How many of of the FBI and DOJ's top leadership from the Obama administration have gotten fired and are being investigated for criminal conduct? ..."
"... Enema works for me but reading reports on the analysis of Ohr's transcript, I'm not even sure an enema is going to be enough for the fbi. I think the only solution is liquidation. ..."
"... Bill Barr clean out the DOJ? I wouldn't count on it. He is a member in good standing of the swamp ..."
Remember when Dan Rather self-immolated his credibility in a desperate attempt to take out George W. Bush? The Killian documents
controversy (also referred to as Memogate or Rathergate) involved six purported documents critical of U.S. President George W. Bush's
service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73.
Four of these documents[1] were presented as authentic in a 60 Minutes II broadcast aired by CBS on September 8, 2004, less than
two months before the 2004 presidential election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate the documents.[2][3][4]
Subsequently, several typewriter and typography experts concluded the documents were forgeries.[5][6]
Well, looks like Buzzfeed did not learn from history. Buzzfeed set the media world on fire on Friday with a story that appeared
well sourced that claimed Donald Trump had directed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal
that never came to fruition. The mainstream media went into hyper impeachment drive.
This was the nail in the Trump coffin as far as they were concerned. Trump was as good as dead.
Then a funny thing happened. Robert Mueller's press guy issued an unprecedented statement calling the Buzzfeed story pure,
unadulterated bullshit. Whoops!!
The Trump is dead meme quickly evaporated. Why did Mueller do this? The answer is simple. Bill Barr.
The soon to be new Attorney General is known as a man of impeccable integrity with a minimal tolerance for bullshit. Mueller,
as an old friend of Barr, knew that he had to do something dramatic to distance himself and his staff from this toxic story.
Once Barr is installed in office, stand by. The Department of Justice and the FBI will received the equivalent of a high powered
enema. Both are sick institutions and need to have the feces flushed out.
"...Bill Barr. The soon to be new Attorney General is known as a man of impeccable integrity with a minimal tolerance for bullshit."
Mr. Barr seems as swampy as they get. He played a key role in the mass surveillance of all Americans and is the classic beltway
sophist who has done much to reinterpret the constitution eviscerating the Bill of Rights. His past actions don't make him a man
of integrity unless of course being in service to the national security state is considered virtuous.
I believe Mr. Johnson's optimism of Barr's nomination leading to a "high powered enema" at the DOJ & FBI is unfounded. IMO,
none of the seditionists will be held to account. In any case POTUS Trump seems quite content with tweeting witch hunt rather
than declassifying and ordering a prosecutor convene a grand jury and have Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and all the other putschists
testify.
"He played a key role in the mass surveillance of all Americans"
He served under H.W. Bush who lost to Clinton. Obama did just what, beside get great protection from Brennan, Clapper, Comey
and a list of others you haven't named yet. How many of of the FBI and DOJ's top leadership from the Obama administration
have gotten fired and are being investigated for criminal conduct? What kind of support do you think the Trump administration
was getting from those outstanding civil servants for the past two years?
"What kind of support do you think the Trump administration was getting from those outstanding civil servants for the past
two years?"
Well, it is the Trump administration that nominated Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray and now Barr. How many of those fired have
testified to a grand jury? They're nicely ensconced with their lucrative sinecures until the next Borg administration. Mueller
has spent tens of millions in going after Trump campaign minions. Where is the witch hunt against Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Lynch,
et al? Of course its not that POTUS has no agency here. He can order declassification and the appointment of a prosecutor with
a stroke of pen. Tweeting however is more like his pace.
Rather interviewed me in the library of the Army and Navy Club in DC at the height of the excitement over the obviously approaching
US invasion of Iraq in 2002. At one point he asked me if the Bushies were going to invade Iraq. I told himthat should not even
be a question. He did not believe me.
The only difference is that Rather had some small degree of credibility before the incident in question. I don't believe that
Buzzfeed has ever had a shred of credibility to anyone with the slightest ability to think.
Enema works for me but reading reports on the analysis of Ohr's transcript, I'm not even sure an enema is going to be enough
for the fbi. I think the only solution is liquidation.
This is a tragedy for past good /honest fbi agents but the fbi currently
is a pestilence on this country which claims to be a nation of laws.
From comments: "Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document
breaks down once you focus on individual claims. " What?!?
Notable quotes:
"... FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn't believe a key claim contained in the "Steele Dossier ..."
"... The Post 's Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats, reports the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross. ..."
"... Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down once you focus on individual claims. ..."
"... Steele, using Kremlin sources, claimed in his dossier that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin officials for the purpose of discussing "deniable cash payments" made in secret so as to cover up "Moscow's secret liaison with the TRUMP team." ..."
FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn't believe a key claim contained in the
"Steele Dossier," the document the Obama FBI relied on to obtain a surveillance warrant on a member of the Trump campaign.
The Post 's Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump
attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats,
reports the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross.
"We've talked to sources at the FBI and the CIA and elsewhere -- they don't believe that ever happened," said Miller during the
October event which aired Saturday on C-SPAN.
We literally spent weeks and months trying to run down... there's an assertion in there that Michael Cohen went to Prague to
settle payments that were needed at the end of the campaign. We sent reporters to every hotel in Prague, to all over the place
trying to - just to try to figure out if he was ever there, and came away empty . -Greg Miller
Ross notes that WaPo somehow failed to report this information, nor did Miller include this tidbit of narrative-killing information
in his recent book, "The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy."
Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down
once you focus on individual claims.
Steele, using Kremlin sources, claimed in his dossier that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August 2016 to meet
with Kremlin officials for the purpose of discussing "deniable cash payments" made in secret so as to cover up "Moscow's secret liaison
with the TRUMP team."
Cohen's alleged Prague visit captured attention largely because the former Trump fixer has vehemently denied it, and also
because it would seem to be one of the easier claims in Steele's 35-page report to validate or invalidate.
Debate over the salacious document was reignited when
McClatchy reported April 15 that
special counsel Robert Mueller had evidence Cohen visited Prague. No other news outlets have verified the reporting, and Cohen
denied it at the time.
Cohen last denied the dossier's allegations in late June, a period of time when he was gearing up to cooperate with prosecutors
against President Donald Trump . Cohen served as a cooperating witness for prosecutors in both New York and the special counsel's
office. - Daily Caller
Cohen's attorney and longtime Clinton pal Lanny Davis vehemently denied on August 22, one day after Cohen pleaded guilty in his
New York case - that Cohen had never been to Prague, telling Bloomberg " Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier,
but he has never been to Prague in his life ."
Trump never ceases to crack me up. While his (terrible) current lawyer, declares on TV that there was collusion but it just
didn't last long, Trump calls his former lawyer/fixer at "Rat".
This is just too funny, I mean this is the President of the United States calling his former personal lawyer a "Rat" which
of course is a common mob term for a witness testifying against you.
monkeyshine
Of course it never happened, just like Manafort didn't make 3 trips to London to meet Julian Assange. These fictions were just
used as a pretext for diving into the backgrounds of Trump's political supporters and find crimes to charge them with.
The Cohen raid was particularly egregious, a likely violation of attorney-client privilege. Not suprisingly the American Bar Association
is silent.
brewing_it
So here is a WaPo reporter saying they sent reporters to every hotel in Prague to find out if Cohen had been there, they spent
weeks and weeks researching, interviewing, and nothing. What they are not saying is that they also spent shitloads of Bezo's money
exploring all the other fake dossier claims.
And nothing.....all you hillarytards have been completely scammed by, your pulses sent aflutter with clickbait and page views
and thats it. So sorry you losers.
Demologos
Yeah, like rubles are worth anything outside of Russia. Gold on the other hand ...
But seriously, you two should get a room. If you can't see the conspiracy in the Strzok/Page texts, the setup of Papadapoulous
by the Brits, the phony FISA warrant using the FBI informant, the setup of General Flynn, and the seedy cast of characters in
the DOJ breaking laws right and left, you should be checked for brain wave activity. You probably think the Russians paid for
all of the above too. Go suck a bag of Russian dicks.
Among few good things that Trump have done to the USA is that he destoryed credibility of
neoliberal MSM. They all are now firmly belong to the "fake news" catagory.
Notable quotes:
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political 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 Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
So the corporate media have gone and done it again. As they have, repeatedly, for the last
two and half years, they shook the earth with
a "bombshell" story proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Donald Trump colluded with the
Russians to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton, or at least committed an impeachable
felony in connection with something to do with the Russians, or Ukrainians, or other Slavic
persons which story turned out to be inaccurate, or not entirely accurate, or a bunch of
horseshit.
This time it was BuzzFeed's Jason Leopold, " a
reporter with a checkered past " (i.e., a history of inventing
his sources ) who broke the "bombshell" Russiagate story that turned out to be a bunch of
horseshit. Leopold, and his colleague Anthony Cormier, reported that Trump had directed his
attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about plans to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow,
thus suborning perjury and obstructing justice. Their sources for this "bombshell" story were
allegedly "two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the
matter."
Approximately twenty-four hours later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office (i.e., the
office "involved in an investigation of the matter") stated that the BuzzFeed story was "not
accurate," which is a legal term meaning "a bunch of horseshit."
BuzzFeed is standing by its story , and is working to determine what, exactly, Mueller's
office meant by "not accurate." Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's Editor-in-Chief, has called on Mueller
"to make clear what he's disputing."
Liberals and other Trump-obsessives have joined in the effort to interpret the Special
Counsel's office's cryptic utterance. French hermeneuticists have been reportedly called in to
deconstruct the meaning of "accurate." Professional Twitter
semioticians are explaining that "not accurate" doesn't mean "wrong," but, rather, refers
to something that is "accurate," but which the user of the word doesn't want to disclose
publicly, or that legal terms don't mean what they mean or something more or less along those
lines.
But Greenwald's list is just a small sample of the Russiagate stories that have turned out
to be horseshit. For the record, here are several more:
"Seventeen intelligence agencies"
confirm Russia interfered in the U.S. elections (
New York Times ) Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum (
The Guardian ) Russia interfered in the German elections ( Reuters )
Russia hacked the French elections ( Politico and numerous other
outlets ) Michael Cohen conspired with the Russians in Prague ( BuzzFeed
)
I am using the terms "horseshit" and "a bunch of horseshit" (as opposed to terms like
"failures" and "errors"), not just to be gratuitously vulgar, but, also, to try to make a
point. One is not supposed to use these terms in connection with "serious," "respected" news
outlets. Which is why journalists like Greenwald and Aaron Maté (who have extensively
reported on the corporate media's ongoing production and dissemination of horseshit) do not use
such terms in the course of their reporting, and instead use less inflammatory terms like
"false," "inaccurate," "mistake," and "error." Principled journalists like Greenwald and
Maté are constrained by (a) their journalistic ethics, (b) their integrity, and (c)
their belief in the idea of a "free and independent press," which is one of the pillars of
Western democracy.
Being neither a respected journalist nor a believer in the existence of an "independent
press," I am under no such constraints. Because I'm not trying to get or keep a job, or
maintain a "respectable" reputation, I'm free to call a spade a spade and a bunch of horseshit
a bunch of horseshit. I am also free to describe "journalists" like Leopold,
Luke Harding ,
Craig Timberg ,
Franklin Foer , and many of their corporate media colleagues (not to mention
TV clowns like Rachel Maddow ) as the liars and rank propagandists they are. I don't need
to pretend their fabricated stories are simply the result of "shoddy journalism," or
"over-reliance on official sources," or any other type of "error" or "failure." These people
know exactly what they are doing, and are being extremely well paid to do it. They went to
school to learn how to do it. Then they butt-sucked and back-stabbed their way up the ladder of
establishment power to be able to do it.
Yes, of course, there are still principled journalists working for the corporate media, but
they are doing so by walking a very fine line. No one has to tell them where it is. Every
professional journalist knows precisely where it is, and what it is there for. Though they are
permitted to walk right up to it, occasionally (to keep them from feeling like abject whores),
one step over it and they will be cast into the Outer Darkness of the Blogosphere and
excommunicated from the Church of Respectable Journalism. If you don't believe me, just ask
Seymour Hersh, or John Pilger, or any other journalistic heretic.
If Russiagate serves no other useful purpose, it is at least exposing the corporate media as
the propaganda factories that they are. Given the amount of obviously fabricated horseshit they
have disseminated during the last two years, you'd have to be a total moron or a diehard
neoliberal cultist not to recognize the function they perform within the global capitalist
ruling establishment (which is essentially no different than the function the establishment
media perform in any other society, namely, to disseminate, maintain, and reify the official
narrative of its ruling classes).
Sadly, there's no shortage of morons and cultists. I don't blame the morons, because well,
they're morons. The cultists are another species entirely. These are people who, no matter how
often the corporate media feed them another "explosive," "bombshell" Russiagate story that
turns out to be a bunch of horseshit, will defend the concept of the "independent media" like
head-shaven, bug-eyed Manson followers. Confront them with facts contradicting their beliefs
and they close their eyes and start chanting and humming and repetitiously babbling banishing
spells. The notion that the Western corporate media may serve the interests of the ruling
establishment (just like the media in every other society serve that society's ruling classes)
is unimaginable and tantamount to heresy.
This fetishization of "the independent press" is a phenomenon unique to Western capitalism.
Basically, it's a childish fairy tale, like believing that Santa Claus is an actual person or
that voting in elections in a corporate oligarchy has anything to do with actual democracy.
Think about it dispassionately for a minute. Why would any ruling establishment permit a
genuinely "independent" press to disseminate ideas and information willy-nilly throughout
society? If it did, it wouldn't last very long.
Most people understand this intuitively, which is why the corporate media relentlessly
repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press," over, and over, and over again.
Seriously, switch on NPR, or have a look at The Guardian or the Washington Post, or any of the
other corporate media repeatedly reminding you how "independent," "free" and "democratic" they
are. It's essentially Neuro-linguistic programming.
So let's not be shocked when the corporate media continue to bombard us with "bombshell"
stories about Trump and Russia that turn out to be horseshit. Personally, I welcome these
stories. The more corporate media horseshit the better! Who knows, if they dish out enough
blatant horseshit, more people might lose their "trust in the media," and begin to investigate
matters themselves. I know, that makes me a Nazi, right? Or at least a Russian propagandist? I
mean, encouraging folks to distrust the corporate media? Isn't there some kind of law against
that? Or have they not quite gotten around to that yet?
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political 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 Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
The Associated Press (AP) reports the latest bad news for the press: " Just 6 Percent of
People Say They Trust the Media ."
Carole Feldman and Emily Swanson began: Trust in the news media is being eroded by
perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans' skepticism about what they
read on social media. Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the
media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public's view of
other institutions.
Most people understand this intuitively, which is why the corporate media relentlessly
repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press,"
People inversely brag about their short comings.
Militarized police states brag about their freedom.
A well heeled synchophant brags about his independence.
Dudes with small dicks -- big belt buckle and big hat.
I used to listen to the BBC and NPR until the corporo-globalist bias became unbearable. I
laughed at incidents such as Marketplace mocking the public's concern about GMO's. But it
went off the rails in 2016. They may have backed off from Trump Derangement Syndrome a bit
since then, but I've noticed that they have to call themselves "credible." Maybe if they say
that enough times we'll believe it, eh?
The Greenwald link is pretty important and I bookmarked it. These fake news outlets do
everything in their power to scrub these mistakes from the Google machine once they happen.
They remove stories, videos -- everything, in the hopes of shoving it all down the memory
hole. And since other fake news outlets don't hold them accountable, they get away with it.
This is why it's important to take screen shots of fake news and download videos if possible,
to create a record that's permanent and useful when you need it.
More than 6% of the population are technically, and this is the technical term, retarded
-- they are mentally disabled.
I know it's obvious our media is propaganda, but I don't think it's quite so obvious such
that adults watching Sesame Street who fully enjoy it (nothing wrong with that!) are aware of
it.
I would like to think it's true, but I think the Associated Press article is not true,
after all, can you identify their funding sources?
This fetishization of "the independent press" is a phenomenon unique to Western
capitalism. Basically, it's a childish fairy tale, like believing that Santa Claus is an
actual person or that voting in elections in a corporate oligarchy has anything to do with
actual democracy.
Great article. Articles on this theme should be published daily. The fetish must be
destroyed.
There is at least one other person who calls corporate media what it is, and it ain't
"mainstream."
"Sparkie" ain't gonna be happy about it either."Sparky" chewed me out good for correcting
the incomparable and always superb Linh Dinh for using the disgusting and inaccurate term,
"mainstream" when referring to coprophilic media. Oh, and speaking of "horseshit" one wag
suggested we call it main steam media, for accuracy as well as for giggles and that's
fine by me.
the corporate media relentlessly repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent
press," over, and over, and over again. Seriously, switch on NPR, or have a look at The
Guardian or the Washington Post, or any of the other corporate media repeatedly reminding
you how "independent," "free" and "democratic" they are. It's essentially Neuro-linguistic
programming.
It's blatantly obvious that the same can be said about the self-legitimizing term,
"mainstream," too, so bless you sir, and to (bleep) with the Sparkies of the world.
Confront them with facts contradicting their beliefs and they close their eyes and start
chanting and humming and repetitiously babbling banishing spells.
Not only is Hopkins correct, but what he says about corporate media is not new. The Civil
Rights movement presented by the media was false. The media promotion of the US re-engaging
in Europe in the post WW1 period so we could defend dear ole England and sacred democracy.
The media preparing us for our need to fight WW1 so we could end all wars was false. The
media stirring us to go into Cuba and end the awfully evil Spanish Empire so we could start
the process of ending all empires
N o doubt it is a pleasure for you because C.J. Hopkins managed to scribble 1500
words about fake news without even once mentioning the CIA.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public
believes is false."
-- CIA Director, William Casey
Of course, our resident Bumpkin of Unz would have you believe that the CIA is a
corporation.
"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
-- former CIA Director William Colby
So you see Sheete, the term "corporate media" is entirely inaccurate -- a red herring, a
misleading label, a pig in a poke -- because it entirely excludes, avoids, overlooks, and
completely dismisses the role of our intelligence agencies in creating fake news ,
a.k.a. disinformation and propaganda.
The notion that the Western corporate media may serve the interests of the ruling
establishment (just like the media in every other society serve that society's ruling
classes) is unimaginable and tantamount to heresy.
This comes close to the term "regime media," which I like as a replacement for the
clunky-but-common terms "Mainstream Media" or MSM. "
Hopkins uses "corporate media," which appears fifteen times here including in the
title.
Several commenters have noted the problems with the term "mainstream media":
While better than "mainstream media," I'm not sure "corporate media" is sufficient.
"Corporate media," as a term, may wrongly convey the notion that the 'media' in question
complaisantly both [1] broadcasts the ruling ideology (interventionist capitalist
liberal democracy and multicultacracy) and [2] 'megaphones' (Steve Sailer's useful term)
against enemies thereto, coordinating our regular Two-Minute Hates.
That characterization misses an important point, to wit:
The 'media' (in the sense of the "MSM") as we know it today, is itself consciously
part of the ruling apparatus . Not complaisantly, but actively; not lackeys on the
side, but right at the regime's core. A useful distinction. Hence "regime media."
Jun. 14, 2012 These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America
That's consolidated from *50* companies back in 1983. But the fact that a few companies
own everything demonstrates "the illusion of choice," Frugal Dad says.
Tom Charles Huston testified before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee,
on the 43-page plan he presented to the President Nixon and others on ways to collect
information about anti-war and "radical" groups, including burglary, electronic
surveillance, and opening of mail.
Lippmann-Dewey debate, which is known to academics but not the general public in the
United States, the home country of both authors. Obviously, John Dewey is famous as one
of the most important American philosophers, and for his international influence in the
field of education. By contrast, Walter Lippmann has been somewhat forgotten, though he
was a major journalist in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a widely familiar author at the
time, and wrote some cynical things about American democracy. The story America tells
itself politically is that since we're a democracy in which the citizens rule themselves,
there is a paramount need for an excellent public education so that the citizens can vote
wisely. We ourselves are the leaders. But of course it doesn't work that way in practice.
We actually have a surplus of ignorant and uninformed people who pay no attention to the
nuances of policy, and who vote based on the workings of demagoguery and short-sighted
self-interest. Any number of foolish decisions have been made by the American public.
This leads Lippmann to take the somewhat cynical line that America is destined to be
ruled by technocrats. We need experts to run things; the people are too clueless to rule
themselves. We'll pretend we have a democracy, but we actually don't. Now, Dewey reads
this, and he is temperamentally more optimistic, and he thinks: 'This is a really
stimulating book, but Lippmann is wrong. He is setting the bar too high for the people.
People were never supposed to be educated in depth about every issue, which is an
impossible demand. Even Lippmann doesn't have the time to master every issue, and he
covers politics for a living. Instead, Dewey says, political issues generate their own
publics in each case. I might care deeply about seven political issues. I might care
about national health insurance, but I don't care about gay marriage, or vice versa. So I
get involved in one debate and not the other. I take the trouble of becoming informed
about issues that interest me.
@Hail
Hail says: "The 'media' (in the sense of the "MSM") as we know it today, is itself
consciously part of the ruling apparatus. Not complaisantly, but actively; not lackeys on
the side, but right at the regime's core ":
Exactly. The MSM is the government [CIA/NSA/ etc. etc.] grinning right at you as
it continually lies , albeit behind a very thin veil of supposed integrity/respectability
that the general public still refuses to see through.
By way of illustration of this "outrageous" assertion of mine, here is part of a video
analysis of the original 5 channel US MSM "live" coverage of the morning of Sept. 11 2001,
which clearly demonstrates that on that morning, all 5 US networks broadcast entirely fake
"live" footage [ i.e. C.G.I. prefabricated imagery] for about 102 minutes :
So you see Sheete, the term "corporate media" is entirely inaccurate
I never claimed it was perfect. I do claim that the term, "mainstream," in this context
is entirely inaccurate and misleading. And you should be nice, as you admonished me,
regarding the author of this article. As for your complaint that he didn't mention the CIA,
may I remind you that he wrote, as you noticed, an article, not an encyclopedia.
Anyway, you have yet to establish that the CIA and our corporate masters are entirely
separate entities. Even a Dumb Sheete such as myself would find it somewhat, if not
entirely, incredible if they were.
But of course too everyone knows by now that Jews, Israel and Mossad did 9/11 all by
their lonesomes, and the CIA and the Air Force had nothing to do with it.
Ahem, you forgot to mention big, coprophilic, media. Please try to practice the
inclusiveness that you preach.
one step over [the line] and they will be cast into the Outer Darkness of the
Blogosphere and excommunicated from the Church of Respectable Journalism. If you don't
believe me, just ask Seymour Hersh, or John Pilger, or any other journalistic
heretic.
To this list I might also add CBS' Sharyl Attkisson, and Larry Conners of KMOV-TV, who
had the big brass balls to question the $85 million the Obamas spent on vacations.
NR kicked Derb to the curb, but that gutter's littered with Internet flotsam who
presumed integrity.
@Sean
Sean says: "Lippmann-Dewey debate, which is known to academics but not the general
public in the United States, the home country of both authors. "
Debate summary: 2 know-it-alls debating about how "best" to run everybody else's lives
[and with straight faces, I've no doubt].
Two sides of the same [pro-statist] coin, in other words. Oh, and one minor issue one
"thinks" that a ruling technocracy is "the answer".
Sean says: "Obviously, John Dewey is famous as one of the most important American
philosophers, and for his international influence in the field of education."
You mean: Dewey was important in the field of "public education" , otherwise known as
brainwashing.
Do you think Trump is in anyway worse than his predecessors?
Well from my perspective, he's worse than his predecessors because, for a brief period of
time, he offered to hand me over to Putin!
Well, I would imagine you do have skin in the game because of that.
Also, he doesn't seem to have the level of he doesn't read briefing reports or have any
specifications at all about what this guy's up to.
What is your opinion on the future of America as a result of what Putin did during the 2016
election? Has he succeeded in striking a permanent blow against democracy in this country, for
lack of a better way of putting it?
Well, I believe that the institutions of United States are now being tested. It's kind of
like a it's a virus that has now has tried to infect the United States. I believe the
institutions are the immune systems in the United States. I think that United States will
survive this attack, and as far as Putin is concerned, I think that he has done himself very
grave long-term harm to his own interests. Because the next regime in the United States is
going to come down so hard on Putin, he's not going to know what hit him. He's playing such a
short-term game that he doesn't understand that whether it's Democrats or Republicans, any
normal reasonable person will want to be absolutely, devastatingly aggressive towards Russia
after Trump is finished.
So in a sense this pop-culture image of Putin as a grand strategist you think is flawed?
I think he's a highly effective short-term tactician and a very, very stupid strategist,
because his long-term interests are not served by alienating the entire Western world to sort
of rally against him. He can do all these frauds and scams and tricks on a short-term basis,
but pretty much everybody understands what he's up to.
The problem is not Russia; the problem is the crisis of neoliberalism in the USA. And related legitimization of neoliberal
elite, which now Deep State is trying ot patch with anti-Russian hysteria
Notable quotes:
"... That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the "secrecy of presidential private meetings has been the rule, not the exception." He continues, "There's nothing unusual about withholding information from the bureaucracy about the president's private meetings with foreign leaders . Sometimes they would dictate a memo afterward, sometimes not." Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US "bureaucracy," sometimes met privately with Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev's translator was present. ..."
Baseless Russiagate allegations continue to risk war with Russia.
Anti-Trump Frenzy Threatens to End Superpower Diplomacy | The Nation
The New Year has brought a torrent of ever-more-frenzied allegations that President Donald Trump has long had a conspiratorial relationship
-- why mince words and call it "collusion"? -- with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.
Why the frenzy now? Perhaps because Russiagate promoters in high places are concerned that special counsel Robert Mueller will
not produce the hoped-for "bombshell" to end Trump's presidency. Certainly,
New York Times columnist
David Leonhardt seems worried, demanding, "The president must go," his drop line exhorting, "What are we waiting for?" (In some
countries, articles like his, and there are very many, would be read as calling for a coup.) Perhaps to incite Democrats who have
now taken control of House investigative committees. Perhaps simply because Russiagate has become a political-media cult that no
facts, or any lack of evidence, can dissuade or diminish.
And there is no new credible evidence, preposterous claims notwithstanding. One of The New York Times '
own recent "bombshells,"
published on January 12, reported, for example, that in spring 2017, FBI officials "began investigating whether [President Trump]
had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests." None of the three reporters bothered to point out that those "agents
and officials" almost certainly included ones later reprimanded and retired by the FBI itself for their political biases. (As usual,
the Times buried its self-protective disclaimer deep in the story: "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly
in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.")
Whatever the explanation, the heightened frenzy is unmistakable, leading the "news" almost daily in the synergistic print and
cable media outlets that have zealously promoted Russiagate for more than two years, in particular the Times , The Washington
Post , MSNBC, CNN, and their kindred outlets. They have plenty of eager enablers, including the once-distinguished Strobe Talbott,
President Bill Clinton's top adviser on Russia and until recently president of the Brookings Institution.
According to Talbott
, "We already know that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker . Trump has been colluding
with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency." In fact, we do not "know" any of this. These remain merely widely disseminated
suspicions and allegations.
In this cult-like commentary, the "threat" of "a hostile Russia" must be inflated along with charges against Trump. (In truth,
Russia represents no threat to the United States that Washington itself did not provoke since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.)
For its own threat inflation, the Times featured not an expert with any plausible credentials but Lisa Page, the former FBI
lawyer with no known Russia expertise, and who was one of those reprimanded by the agency for anti-Trump political bias. Nonetheless,
the Times quotes Page
at length : "In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western
alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability to spread our democratic ideals."
Perhaps we should have guessed that the democracy-promotion genes of J. Edgar Hoover were still alive and breeding in the FBI, though
for the Times , in its exploitation of the hapless and legally endangered Page, it seems not to matter.
Which brings us, or rather Russiagate zealots, to the heightened "threat" represented by "Putin's Russia." If true, we would expect
the US president to negotiate with the Kremlin leader, including at summit meetings, as every president since Dwight Eisenhower has
done. But, we are told, we cannot trust Trump to do so, because,
according to The Washington Post , he has repeatedly met with Putin alone, with only translators present, and concealed
the records of their private talks, sure signs of "treasonous" behavior, as the Russiagate media first insisted following the Trump-Putin
summit in Helsinki in July 2018.
It's hard to know whether this is historical ignorance or Russiagate malice, though it is probably both. In any event, the truth
is very different. In preparing US-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits since the 1950s, aides on both sides have arranged "private
time" for their bosses for two essential reasons: so they can develop sufficient personal rapport to sustain any policy partnership
they decide on; and so they can alert one another to constraints on their policy powers at home, to foes of such détente policies
often centered in their respective intelligence agencies. (The KGB ran operations against Nikita Khrushchev's détente policies with
Eisenhower, and, as is well established, US intelligence agencies have run operations against Trump's proclaimed goal of "cooperation
with Russia.")
That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the "secrecy
of presidential private meetings has been the rule, not the exception." He continues, "There's nothing unusual about withholding
information from the bureaucracy about the president's private meetings with foreign leaders . Sometimes they would dictate a memo
afterward, sometimes not." Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US "bureaucracy," sometimes met privately with Kremlin
leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev's translator was present.
Nor should we forget the national-security benefits that have come from private meetings between US and Kremlin leaders. In October
1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met alone with their translators and an American official who took
notes -- the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished. The result,
in 1987, was the first and still only treaty abolishing an entire category of such weapons, the exceedingly dangerous intermediate-range
ones. (This is the historic treaty Trump has said he may abrogate.)
And yet, congressional zealots are now threatening to subpoena the American translator who was present during Trump's meetings
with Putin. If this recklessness prevails, it will be the end of the nuclear-superpower summit diplomacy that has helped to keep
America and the world safe from catastrophic war for nearly 70 years -- and as a new, more perilous nuclear arms race between the
two countries is unfolding. It will amply confirm a thesis set out in my book
War with Russia? -- that anti-Trump
Russiagate allegations have become the gravest threat to our security.
The following correction and clarification were made to the original version of this article on January 17: Reagan and Gorbachev
met privately with translators during their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, not February, and Reagan was also accompanied
by an American official who took notes. And it would be more precise to say that the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed
in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished.
Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU and author of the new book
War with Russia? From Putin and
Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate . This commentary is based on the most recent of his weekly discussions of the new US-Russian
Cold War with the host of the John Batchelor radio show. (The podcast is
here . Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at
TheNation.com . )
Buzzfeed was once notorious for
traffic-generating "listicles" , but has since become an impressive outlet for deep
investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the
news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story
that, like so many others of its kind,
blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the
extremely rare step to
label its key claims "inaccurate."
But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures
in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by
the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news,
the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger
they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets
(particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most
embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is
so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end
with (dis)honorable mention status.
Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave
threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media
outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would
expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories.
That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media
clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors"
went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the
same agenda and script:
10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)
On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that
C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false :
9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity
Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)
On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S.
electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along
with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's
notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S.
electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was
false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:
8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares
Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost
Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)
On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post
published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian
infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being
"routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of
at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation
campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."
Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that
reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge
Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig,
and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul
Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note
in memory appended to the top of the article (but
not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the
media ecosystem):
7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a
Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)
On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the
Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story
and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network.
6. Russia Attacked
U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave
Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)
On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC
spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia
was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic
or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea
what to make of it.
But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered
any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective
psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds"
the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean
male cricket during mating season.
5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to
Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)
4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three
Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)
On November 27, 2018, the Guardian
published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed
to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,
and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators
exploded.
Seven weeks later,
no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged;
the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into
hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian
official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:
3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its
Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew
in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)
On July 27, 2018, CNN
published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that
President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two
problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that
"contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis
was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous
other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however,
to this date has refused to do either:
2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and
Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)
1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to
the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)
The morning of December 9, 2017, launched
one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so
grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a
major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and
Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public.
Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to
have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have
been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked
emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC
videos
here ).
There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally
and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks
archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before.
Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and
MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian
message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole
world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all
got the date of the email wrong.
To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong
in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete
silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple,
independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating
– and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources
who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.
Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the
internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just
what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing
is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he
awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously
is:
Dishonorable Mention:
ABC News' Brian Ross is fired for
reporting Trump told Flynn to make contact with Russians when he was still a candidate;
in fact, Trump did that after he won.
The New York Times c laimed Manafort provided
polling data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a person "close to the Kremlin"; in fact, he
provided them to Ukrainians, not Russians.
Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked
Ukrainian artillery apps;
they then retracted it .
Bloomberg and the WSJ reported Mueller subpoenaed Deustche Bank for Trump's financial
records; the NYT said
that never happened .
Rachel Maddow devoted 20 minutes at the start of her show to very melodramatically
claiming a highly sophisticated party tried to trick her by sending her a fake Top Secret
document modeled after the one published by the Intercept, and said it could only have come
from the U.S. Government (or the Intercept) since the person obtained the document before it
was published by us and thus must have had special access to it; in fact,
Maddow and NBC completely misread the metadata on the document ; the fake sent to Maddow
was created after we published the document, and was sent to her by a random member of the
public who took the document from the Intercept's site and doctored it to see if she'd fall
for an obvious scam. Maddow's entire timeline, on which her whole melodramatic conspiracy
theory rested, was fictitious.
The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all "17 intelligence
agencies" agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally
retracted that in June, 2017: "The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies --
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not
approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community."
AP claimed on February 2, 2018, that the Free Beacon commissioned the Steele Dossier;
they thereafter acknowledged that was false and
noted, instead: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was
initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until
after Democratic groups had begun funding it."
Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered
"sex for favors" were
totally false (and scurrilous).
After a Russian regional jet crashed on February 11, 2018, shortly after it took off from
Moscow, killing all 71 people aboard, Harvard Law Professor and frequent MSNBC contributor
Laurence Tribe
strongly implied Putin purposely caused the plane to go down in order to murder Sergei
Millian, a person vaguely linked to George Papadopoulos and Jared Kushner; in fact, Millian
was not on the plane nor, to date, has anyone claimed they had any evidence that Putin
ordered his own country's civilian passenger jet brought down.
Special mention:
As I've said many times, the U.S. media has become quite adept at expressing extreme
indignation when people criticize them; when politicians conclude that it is advantageous to
turn the U.S. media into their main adversary; and when people turn to "fake news" sites.
If, however, they were willing to devote just a small fraction of that energy to examining
their own conduct, perhaps they would develop the tools necessary to combat those problems
instead of just denouncing their critics and angrily demanding that politicians and news
consumers accord them the respect to which they believe they are entitled.
"... Sedition is a crime and it is clear that the multiple seditious acts of II and IfS toward many countries and with their band of controlled journalists was a deliberate and planned activity. ..."
"... I don't expect any prosecutions but there is a chance of promotional impediments applying to some of those named. At least for the next month. Every named employee of II and IfS is an enemy of democracy and its people ..."
It should be pointed out that the Integrity Initiative recently claimed on Twitter that some of the documents leaked in batch
#4 were not theirs and had been misrepresented as part of the organisation.
It doesn't really matter, though: all that we know, anti-socialist shills writing propaganda on behalf of II (Nimmo, Cohen,
Reid-Ross) have confirmed their own roles, and the Twitter account was proven to have pushed out slanderous material on Jeremy
Corbyn.
Note that "misrepresented" could have referred to the inclusion of the Corbyn slide show document which was presented at but
created by the II.
This organisation and all of those part of it should be treated as enemies of the people, as they have attacked, disingenuously
and using smears,
-Yellow Vests
– Jill Stein
-Jeremy Corbyn
-George Galloway
-Seuams Milne
-German Left Party
-French Left Party
-French Communist Party
-Greek Communist Party
-Podemos
-Norwegian Red Party
-Norwegian Socialist Left Party
-Swedish Left Party
-Swedish Greens
-International Anti-NATO Groups
-Greyzone Project
-Julian Assange
-MintPressNews
Via
-Infiltrating Corbyn and Sanders campaigns
-Inserting propaganda anonymously into local media including the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, The Times, the Guardian, and more
-Using social media to orchestrate hate and dismissal campaigns against those mentioned above
-Hosting events for collaboration between members
-Building online "clusters" to deploy and shape discourse in the media and elsewhere
By repeating or openly collaborating with:
-Ben Nimmo
-Oz Katergi
-Anne Applebaum
-Peter Pomerantsev
-Bellingcat
-Atlantic Council
-Carole Cadwalladr
-David Aaronovitch
-Center For A Stateless Society
-PropOrNot
-Alexander Reid-Ross
-Nick Cohen
-Michael Weiss
-Jamie Fly
-Jamie Kirchick
Directed by:
-Tory Government
-NATO
-Facebook
-German Multinationals
Sedition is a crime and it is clear that the multiple seditious acts of II and IfS toward
many countries and with their band of controlled journalists was a deliberate and planned activity.
I don't expect any prosecutions but there is a chance of promotional impediments applying to some of those named. At least
for the next month. Every named employee of II and IfS is an enemy of democracy and its people.
And, one last bit from the BBC report on March 8, 2018:
"...Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she
found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost
control of her bodily functions.
The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the
recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.
She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical
agent on Ms Skripal's face or body.
The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, but added
that she "feels fine"
Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever...
"... Recall that, leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal Integrity Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military intelligence specialists. Politicians and academics have reacted with fury to news a covert Government-funded unit had been attacking the official opposition in Parliament. ..."
The UK government and other Western governments and the US in recent years have had increasing
difficulties persuading enough of their populations as to the legitimacy of the foreign
policies that they have been pursuing.
And at the same time, Western countries have been going through a period of political crisis
and economic crisis.
Piers Robinson, Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of
Sheffield, further explains:
I think a lot of this drive is as much about trying to shore up shaky official narratives and
trying to shore up political systems in a situation of political crisis, as it is actually
about countering Russian propaganda.
I would suspect that that's a little bit of an excuse here to really what's going on of
problems much closer to home. This is not just to do to UK, this is Europe-wide. And there are also indications from the
documents that they are intending to start to have some kind of impact within the United
States. So, it's a very wide-ranging network that seems to be established.
The reason why it needs to be covert, of course, is that if a media organization, or if a
journalist is to let on that he, or she, is involved in a program, which quite clearly is
pushing a particular agenda, then the credibility of that journalist will be damaged.
And this is really what is very deceptive about the Integrity Initiative . It's about
co-opting journalists and academics into, essentially, a campaign, which appears to be a
propaganda campaign, in order to manipulate opinions.
And the only way that can really work effectively, is if readers and viewers don't know that
what they're reading is something which has emerged from a particular political agenda.
Recall that, leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal Integrity
Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military
intelligence specialists. Politicians and academics have reacted with fury to news a covert
Government-funded unit had been attacking the official opposition in Parliament.
So, it's not accidental that the organized and systematic propaganda campaign against labour
party has actually started under Corbyn's leadership. And that the campaign contains a lot of
personal attacks against the leader of the Labour party. That's because, of course, Jeremy
Corbyn is driving the party out of the neoliberal machine that has been dominating the UK
politics for decades.
But it seems that the agents of the neoliberal establishment are really desperate as they see
that the new narratives are not particularly successful.
It would not be exaggerating to suggest that the attacks against Leftist leaders like Jeremy
Corbyn and Bernie Sanders essentially bring the opposite effect. That's because especially the
younger generations have turned their back to the mainstream media.
And they understand that the more the media attack Corbyn and Sanders, the stronger the
indication that these leaders are not part of the neoliberal establishment that ruined their
lives becomes.
"... But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the "incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that Abigail was a very worthy winner. ..."
"... Colonel McCourt was appointed Chief Nursing Officer on February 1 2018, just one month before the Skripal incident happened. Colonel McCourt lives in Larkhill, a garrison town some 11 miles from Salisbury. She is known to visit elsewhere. ..."
"... That is such a great article b. I have had a great wry chuckle at the folly of human hubris. Fancy setting up your own daughter for an award. Certainly looks less and less like novichok and more like novifraud with every passing day. ..."
"... Not only is the military mother Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola , she is also the last line of defence for the Army medics and other healthcare workers fighting the deadly disease ..."
"... what a stroke of luck Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola was there, arguably the most qualified person in all of Britain to attend to the Skripals. ..."
"... The story of the heroic Abigail McCourt in helping to save the Skripals must be too good for the likes of The Fraudian and other so-called "progressive" MSM outlets to resist. Strange that such a narrative was not brought up until now, coming close to the anniversary of the poisoning and the deadline for Britain's exit from the EU. ..."
"... Curious that Abigail McCourt received basic first aid training at school (in which she would have been taught CPR) yet when Spire FM hosts spoke to her, she says that her training was not needed. In almost the same sentence, she says Julia Skripal was not breathing. ..."
"... Off-Guardian on Twitter wonders if Alison McCourt had been involved in Exercise Toxic Dagger (chemical weapons training exercise) staged by The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Royal Marines in February 2018: ..."
"... The main area for shoppers to park in Salisbury is just north of the Maltings (site of the alleged attack) so it's not surprising that someone shopping in Salisbury would pass the bench the Skripals were found on. What is surprising it that none of the family seems to have suffered any effects from the Novichok. ..."
"... The Skirpal case, the Maidan coup and the related MH17 downing, the various gas attacks in Syria, the most recent bombing incident also in Syria, the Mueller investigation in its entirety - the sheer incompetence shown by the US and British deep states is simply staggering, and in sharp contrast to the investigative ability of this and other sites. ..."
"... It all adds up to stasi state bullshit. They are so arrogant and cocksure of the controlled media that they can even draw attention to the provocation by seeking an award for a family member despite the prominence of the mother and her role in the power structure. Knowledge, of course, will remain limited to those who are canny enough not to believe the received propaganda wisdom of the five eyes spy state. ..."
"... So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army? ..."
"... Even though this could have gone a long, long way to explaining the biggest discrepancy in the government narrative (i.e. Novicock is way, way deadly only, err, umm, they didn't die). How odd. How very, very odd. You'd almost think that the government considered that acknowledging that fact would open up more questions than it would answer. Hard to see why..... ..."
"... Recall that it was recently established and published that the Steele Dossier was compiled to act as an Insurance Policy in the event Trump won the election. See here . I posted this news as a comment and b picked up on it too, but that aspect of the Dossier is omitted from his essay above. We can see that the Dossier--like Blair's Dodgy Dossier to sell the illegal war on Iraq--has had a massive impact on Trump's presidency, which, whether you like Trump or not, is a matter of grave concern for the institutions of governance of the USA, and IMO is very close to treason. ..."
"... Sure, the nurse revelation is curious to say the least, but I'm far more interested in the entire disinformation network built by the British along with previous and current versions operated by CIA here in USA. Think back to what Bill Casey said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false," then Rove's boast: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." ..."
"... Add those to all the 100% evidence free accusations made against Russia, China, Venezuela, Syria, other nations and private individuals--the "universal sports doping" by Russian athletes was a massive smear proven to be 100% false--and you can understand why I call it BigLie Media. Clearly, the Skripal story's utter fantasy. But the Brits will kill their own to insure the story isn't compromised--Dr. David Kelly, Dawn Sturgess, and quite likely Sergei Skripal, and likely others from incidents in the further past. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative was also heavily involved in promoting an anti-Russian agenda such as the Skripal affair. ..."
"... reminds me of the kuwaiti ambassador's daughter in the runup to the first gulf war. ..."
"... 'So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army?' And how embarrassing for our 'fearless' journalists and tabloid truth seekers! Let the crowd cry out 'shame'! ..."
On March 4 2018 the British/Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia
were found incapacitated on a bench in Salisbury. The British government asserts that they were affected by a chemical poison
of the so called Novichok group. The case led to a diplomatic conflict as Britain accused Russia of an attempt to kill the
Skripals. No evidence was provided by the British government to support those accusations. The Skripals have since been
vanished.
Today an intriguing new detail of the case came to light. Spire FM , a local
radio station in Salisbury,
reports of a young woman, Abigail McCourt, who was given a 'Lifesaver Award' for her
involvement in the Skripal case:
The 16 year old, from Larkhill, was the first to spot two people collapsed on a bench in
the Maltings on March 4th and didn't hesitate to help. Abigail quickly alerted her mum, a
qualified nurse, who was nearby and together they gave first aid to the victims until
paramedics arrived.
It soon became clear this was no ordinary medical incident, but the poisoning of a
former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, with Novichok.
...
Immediately following the incident and with the world's media focused on Salisbury, the
pair didn't want any want press attention and kept their involvement quiet.
But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the
"incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award
at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that
Abigail was a very worthy winner.
Earlier reports mentioned that a 'military nurse' had attended to the Skripals. Following
the above report Elena Evdokimova checked the name of the young women's mothers and found a
curiosity:
We were right, it was Alison McCourt who was that"unknown military nurse" who,
absolutely randomly, happened to be near the bench where #Skripals collapsed . Spire FM
alleges that it was her daughter Abigail alerted her, but no one mentioned her before
...
Colonel A L McCourt OBE ARRC QHN - Assistant Head Health Strategy / Chief Nursing Officer
(Army) - Senior Health Advisor (Army) Department.
Colonel McCourt was appointed Chief Nursing Officer on February 1 2018, just one month
before the Skripal incident happened. Colonel McCourt lives in Larkhill, a garrison town some
11 miles from Salisbury. She is known to visit elsewhere.
As I read this I had two thoughts. The first one is that the Brits have lost the competence
they once had with this stuff. "Operation Mincemeat" was, according to all accounts, a marvel
in planning, execution, and getting the desired reactions from the German High Command. The
"Double-Cross System" turned the extremely risky invasion at Normandy into a success. The
recent stuff is a comedy by comparison.
excellent reporting.. still we have little written collaborative evidence.. just as in 9/11
just top dogs saying improbable things.
What seems to me important now is to develop as you have done a set of hypotheses. and to
hack at them until we hit the ones which all evidence cannot dispute. Using your summary I
rewrite in hypothesis form,
hypothesis 1: Steele's dirty dossier is not related to the Skripal case.
hypothesis 2: Steele's dossier is not the result of an integrity initiative.
hypothesis 3: Downing street personnel were not involved in integrity initiative
hypothesis 4: media reported only supportable facts.
hypothesis 5: Neither the USA or any of its agencies were involved
hypothesis 6: Neither Israel or any of its agencies were involved
hypothesis 7: Neither Saudi Arabia or any of its Arab partners were involved
hypothesis 6: Neither Republicans or Democrats in America were involved.
hypothesis 8: the FBI had no part in this.
hypothesis 9: Developing sufficient misinformation to justify attacking Nord 2
pipeline was not one of the objectives of the integrity initiative.
hypothesis 10: No private interest supported organizing a false flag op against
Russia
Too good. That is such a great article b. I have had a great wry chuckle at the folly of
human hubris. Fancy setting up your own daughter for an award. Certainly looks less and less like novichok and more like novifraud with every passing
day.
Not only is the military mother Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent
battlefield against ebola , she is also the last line of defence for the Army medics
and other healthcare workers fighting the deadly disease.
what a stroke of luck Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against
ebola was there, arguably the most qualified person in all of Britain to attend to the
Skripals.
Coincidence? Probably like most here, I think not. But isn't this something of an own goal?
If indeed things are as we suspect, why would you put the daughter up for an award? Wouldn't
you want the can of worms this presents to remain unopened? Can they be this incompetent?
Well, looking at the Brexit process, I guess we know the answer to that last by now
rhetorical question.
The story of the heroic Abigail McCourt in helping to save the Skripals must be too good for
the likes of The Fraudian and other so-called "progressive" MSM outlets to resist. Strange
that such a narrative was not brought up until now, coming close to the anniversary of the
poisoning and the deadline for Britain's exit from the EU.
b, you are too suspicious. Nothing to see here.
Clearly way beyond a serious matter, this dastardly attack on Skripals by the Soviets, er,
the Russians, er, Putin.
In Canada our eloquent foreign Minister, in a barrage of outraged talking the talk that
was accompanied by making four Russian diplomats walk the walk home, said in words that will
surely take their high place in the history of inspired speeches, along with Churchill's
'Never have so many done so much for so few', and MLK's 'I have a nightmare':
And her words re the March 4 nerve agent attack on a close ally and partner of Canada "a
despicable, heinous and reckless act" that potentially endangered the lives of hundreds"
Strange - no military hospital in Salisbury but then there aren't military hospitals in
Britain anymore. Instead the military use civilian hospitals with a Ministry of Defence
Hospital Unit attached but none near Salisbury. The Ministry of Defence Hospital Units do not
treat operational casualties who are treated at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine at
Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in Birmingham. You'd think the Chief Nursing Officer for the
British Army, Colonel McCourt would work out off the most important site for defence medicine
in the UK (QEH in Birmingham) but instead she's based at Larkhill which from memory is where
the Royal Artillery is located.
Not so strange - The area inhabited by the British Army north of Salisbury (more specifically
north of the A303 road was classified as deprived because of the lack of shopping facilities,
so most residents of this area do their shopping in Salisbury which has the best shopping in
the area. There are now a Tesco superstore and a branch of Lidl in Tidworth so perhaps it's
not so deprived anymore.
The main area for shoppers to park in Salisbury is just north of the Maltings (site of the alleged attack) so it's not surprising that someone shopping in
Salisbury would pass the bench the Skripals were found on. What is surprising it that none of
the family seems to have suffered any effects from the Novichok.
The Skirpal case, the Maidan coup and the related MH17 downing, the various gas attacks in
Syria, the most recent bombing incident also in Syria, the Mueller investigation in its
entirety - the sheer incompetence shown by the US and British deep states is simply
staggering, and in sharp contrast to the investigative ability of this and other sites.
The US is fracturing, the EU is fracturing, and therein lies the greatest danger. With the
overplayed sanctions only making the sanctioned effect work arounds to the point that the
primacy of the US dollar is threatened, with the contain China train having left the station
and recently pulling into a station purpose built on the dark side of the moon, their only
options look to be to either go nuclear or go away.
2019 looks to be a most interesting year!
exiled off mainstreet , Jan 19, 2019 6:05:32 PM |
link
It all adds up to stasi state bullshit. They are so arrogant and cocksure of the controlled
media that they can even draw attention to the provocation by seeking an award for a family
member despite the prominence of the mother and her role in the power structure. Knowledge,
of course, will remain limited to those who are canny enough not to believe the received
propaganda wisdom of the five eyes spy state.
So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to
be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief
Nurse Of the British Army?
Even though this could have gone a long, long way to explaining the biggest discrepancy in
the government narrative (i.e. Novicock is way, way deadly only, err, umm, they didn't
die). How odd.
How very, very odd. You'd almost think that the government considered that acknowledging that fact would open
up more questions than it would answer. Hard to see why.....
I am beginning to wonder if Sir Humphrey Appleby and some of his colleagues are conducting a
deliberate hoax, piling impossibility upon impossibility and contradiction upon
contradiction, just to see how long it takes the unbelievably gullible British public to get
the joke and start throwing cabbages and rotten fruit. Not so funny for the poor woman who died - but then, as Sir Humphrey has often been heard
to remark, one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Recall that it was recently established and published that the Steele Dossier was compiled to
act as an Insurance Policy in the event Trump won the election.
See here . I posted this news as a comment and b picked up on it too, but that aspect of
the Dossier is omitted from his essay above. We can see that the Dossier--like Blair's Dodgy
Dossier to sell the illegal war on Iraq--has had a massive impact on Trump's presidency,
which, whether you like Trump or not, is a matter of grave concern for the institutions of
governance of the USA, and IMO is very close to treason.
Sure, the nurse revelation is curious to say the least, but I'm far more interested in the
entire disinformation network built by the British along with previous and current versions
operated by CIA here in USA. Think back to what Bill Casey said, "We'll know our
disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,"
then Rove's boast: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's
actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Add those to all the 100% evidence free accusations made against Russia, China, Venezuela,
Syria, other nations and private individuals--the "universal sports doping" by Russian
athletes was a massive smear proven to be 100% false--and you can understand why I call it
BigLie Media. Clearly, the Skripal story's utter fantasy. But the Brits will kill their own
to insure the story isn't compromised--Dr. David Kelly, Dawn Sturgess, and quite likely
Sergei Skripal, and likely others from incidents in the further past.
So, while it seems comical, this is all deadly serious.
The Integrity Initiative was also heavily involved in promoting an anti-Russian agenda such
as the Skripal affair.
Either Chris Donnelly of the Institute for Statecraft (IoS), (formally of the British
Army's Soviet Studies Research Centre at Sandhurst), or UK General Sir Richard Barrons
reportedly stated that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response,
then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it
out of the political space."
great coverage b.. thank you... it's either a coincidence theory, or a conspiracy theory...
no other choices, until the uk gets down to doing an open investigation on integrity
initiative...the investigators investigating the investigators.. ain't going to happen...
similar deal in the usa now.. basically this will be when hell freezes over - a very long
time if ever.. meanwhile the skripals are persona non grata... it would be very interesting
to find out where they are kept... it looks like their is no chance for any type of normal
life for them here on out... even if the novihoax didn't kill them, the uk has done the
equivalent.. it is hard not to tie operation toxic dagger into all of this... the
coincidences are just too great..
@ petri.. thanks for the that.. how did you manage to figure that one out? does that mean
that allison mccourt is the daughter of pablo miller, or was allison from another
relationship/marriage? of course m16 and some folks know the answer to this amazing
coincidences and probably are unable to openly say..
@ Glen Brown and bevin with their correction to my comment.....thanks
I was not in my best of mind and along with misspelling his name I projected my desire for
more movement by the UK opposition in light of having the government paying folks to work
against them.....my bad idealism........
If it is true that Alison McCourt is married to Pablo Miller as Petri Kohn asserts in
comment #1 then it looks like the daughter is being groomed for big things in the UK
government.....16 years old and already an award for criminal complicity.
Petri Krohn@1 - ? Only thing I could find is a reference to her husband Hugh - a
prison officer - and her two kids, Abagail (now 16) and Cameron (now 14). That was from a
DailyMail
article (I know...) from Dec. 20, 2014. She was spending time away from them during
Christmas when she was sent to Sierra Leone for the Ebola outbreak. The article also mentions
time away from Hugh and Abagail in 2003 when she was deployed to Iraq. Couldn't find anything
about Pablo Miller being married or having kids, but many mentions of his home in Salisbury.
Nice conjecture, except that those who devised the Dossier specifically said it was to be
used as insurance in case Trump won. Please see article I linked to in my comment.
The daughter is what's know as a "cutout". You can't have the "nurse of all nurses" be the
first on the scene. But, they didn't even bother with the daughter having to call mama at
home. She was luckily "nearby", presumably lurking behind a tree.
She might have been the commanding officer of 22 Field Hospital but now she's moved
on.
From the QARANC website:
Following promotion to Lieutenant Colonel in 2011, Alison attended the Advanced Command and
Staff Course. Her initial SO1 appointment was as Chief of Staff, Headquarters 2nd Medical
Brigade in York in Aug 2012. Alison assumed Command of 22 Field Hospital in July 2013 and
deployed the Unit to Sierra Leone on Op GRITROCK in Oct 14. She was awarded an OBE for her
leadership of 22 Field during Op GRITROCK.
On promotion to Colonel in Dec 2015 she assumed an appointment in the newly established
Senior Health Advisors department and has been the lead for Assurance and now Health
Strategy in that area.
Alison assumed the appointment of Chief Nursing Officer for the Army on 1 Feb 18.
@1 petri... unless they hooked up after 2014, your theory doesn't look very likely...
further to @36 paveways comment from the daily mail dec 20 2014 article - Even though
Lieut Col McCourt is a veteran of campaigns in Iraq and the Balkans, she admits this tour of
duty has taken a toll, and that she has depended on the support of her husband Hugh, a prison
officer, to help her through it. While this is her first Christmas apart from her children,
she is accustomed to leaving them and her husband behind. In 2003, she left Abigail, then
aged just eight months, in Hugh's arms while she went to Iraq to treat British soldiers
wounded in the Gulf War. She returned there in 2008 for a second tour of duty.
Lieut Col McCourt said: 'I have a very supportive husband. On both occasions I went to
Iraq he took sabbaticals from his job to ensure that our family life was maintained. Yes, it
was hard to say goodbye so soon after having my first child but you immerse yourself in your
work, and on an operational tour everyone is missing someone. This Christmas he'll be with
the children and my mum will join them at the family home in Aldershot. Of course I miss them
all but our focus has to be saving lives here.'
Suppose you were Russian and believed that the west would not attack because of the checks
and controls that exist in western democracy. Suppose a deadly incident occurred and Russia
was blamed and an attack became more likely. Suppose that (as a Russian) you knew Russia
wasn't involved and that the evidence was very sketchy and didn't make sense. Suppose this
was was all in the public domain but instead of the incident being questioned it was just
accepted and Russia was sanctioned and other western and allied countries (despite knowing it
was nonsense) joined in.
You might as a Russian come to believe that evidence didn't matter, that the west could
manipulate their populations at will and the idea that there was some "restraint" on western
attacks would be shown to be fanciful. You might, as a Russian, become very concerned that
you might be attacked and there was a lack of restraint on the west.
The west are blaming Russia for something they didn't do but, also, showing that they know
that Russia didn't do it and, more, letting Russia know they framed them, and showing Russia
that the evidence doesn't matter. Perhaps, not UK incompetence, maybe, it's all psyops.
Mr Moon, you have excelled yourself! A brilliant article, worthy of a standing ovation!
'So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed
to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief
Nurse Of the British Army?' And how embarrassing for our 'fearless' journalists and tabloid truth seekers! Let the
crowd cry out 'shame'!
John Helmer raises an important question, why does the roof of Sergei's house need to be
removed? Tongue firmly planted in cheek. The air leakage through the front door of Sergei's
house must be through the roof! How else does the fumes from novichok get from the front door
handle to the roof? Sure hope they do a proper energy efficient rebuild. Can't go wasting
that soon to be arriving at Perfidious Albion's shores horror of horrors, Russian gas. North
Sea gas wont last much longer.
The
Washington Post's Greg Miller reported Sunday that President Donald Trump's confiscation
of the translator's notes from a one-on-one conversation with Russian President Vladimir
Putin in 2017 was "unusual." This is incorrect. It was unprecedented. There is nothing like
it in the annals of presidential history.
Not really. Other U.S. leaders held long private meetings with their counterparts without
notes being taken.
When Richard Nixon met Leonid Brezhnev he did not even bring his own interpreter:
Nixon would meet Brezhnev alone, the only other person in attendance being Viktor
Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter. "Our first meeting in the Oval Office was private, except
for Viktor Sukhodrev, who, as in 1972, acted as translator." Nixon on Brezhnev's 1973 visit.
RN, p.878 . Therefore, the only "notes" that would exist would be those of the Soviet
interpreter. Not sure he would have time to make notes and translate and, even if he did so,
whether those notes would be housed in any US archive.
Nixon's White House office was bugged. There are probably tape recordings of the talks.
There might also be recordings of the Trump-Putin talks.
Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev began their second day of talks with a private meeting that had
been scheduled to last 15 minutes but ran for nearly 70 minutes, with only interpreters
present . They met in a small room in the Soviet Mission , with the Soviet leader seated in a
small armchair and Mr. Reagan on a sofa.
In the afternoon, they meet alone for a little over 20 minutes and then again for 90
minutes. All told, the two leaders have spent 4 hours and 51 minutes alone , except for
interpreters, over the two days here.
That the FBI agents involved in the decision were avid haters of Russia and of Trump has
surely nothing to do with it. That the opening of a counter-intelligence investigation gave
them the legal ability under Obama's EO12333 to use NSA signal intelligence against Trump is
surely irrelevant.
What the FBI people really were concerned about is Trump's public record of favoring Russia
at each and every corner.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to counter
its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the headlines below.
With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of Russian influence over
him is surely justified.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He
is reluctant to counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just
consider the headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense
suspicions of Russian influence over him is surely justified.
When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Russia,
than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin's influence,
knowingly or unwittingly, could he end up doing Russia so many favors.
Suppose that ... CIA-MI6 were trying to ensure the election of Trump, not Hillary. As
I described in previous comments , Trump's election followed a logical progression that,
in sum, indicate manipulation on his behalf. Hal Duell @21 mentions some of the psyop
reality-making: White Helmets, MH-17, Skripal, etc. Karlof1 @30 notes the absolute hubris of
the Empire's "we make our own reality".
Lets say Integrity Initiative, working with CIA and MI6, wanted to use the 2016 election
to cast aspersion on the Russians. A populist running against Hillary was the logical choice.
The narrative: only with Russian help could a challenger hope to win against Hillary.
"Russian meddling" and Wikileaks as Russian agent are major "wins" for the establishment.
Integrity Initiative was formed soon after Kissinger's Op-Ed in August 2014 and before Trump
began his run for President.
"... The current round of bullshit is not about justifying the investigation, it is about concealing MI6 taking a leading role in the attempted coup. ..."
A Russian American was put on sanctions list based on Forbes list of Russian billionaires.
This guy founded a high tech industrial laser company employing over a thousand American
workers. Forbes realized they f'ed this guy over and took him off their Russian billionaire
list. But too late--he remains sanctioned.
In my experience, just about everyone here, including hordes of supposedly educated people
who really should know better, believe it. They really do. However, most of them don't
care--it's merely something to snark about or score points in a political conversation with,
not anything they perceive as an actual threat to their way of life.
It's nothing more than the undying legacy of anti-communism and racism thrown in for good
measure. It echoes the German Nazis and their treatment of Slavs (slaves, unter menchen). We
need only look at how the US viewed the Japanese (and the Germans) during WWII, with
Roosevelt calling for their extermination (I'll find the source).
And of course, there's US slavery and extermination of the original inhabitants that also
feeds into the psychosis.
London was said to be very subdued the day news came through that Sweden's Charles the twelfth
had been crushed at Poltava in 1709 . North Western European economic interests have clashed
with Russian across many centuries. Had Charles been successful in the Ukraine a new level of English and Swedish alliance was
in the offing .
I just read about Trump's AG candidate, commenting on the 'Russian interference' in US
elections ....and i'm struck that these are not stupid people....they are either totally
IGNORANT of the facts and analysis .....or they are good ol boys, ready to tow the deep state
lie, so they too can feed at the trough. It saddens me in either case ....what hope can one
entertain when such cretins and low lifes are the supposed LEADERS of the democratic west. I
hold no hopes.
Proof by absurdity. Trump and Deep State work together. MAGA is a policy choice as much as it is a
campaign slogan. Everyone wants to rail against the anti-Trump forces. Oh it feels so good. That Trump has
proven to be a faux populist like Obama is ignored. WTF? Welcome to the rabbit hole.
I didn't live through the entire Anti-Communist Crusade, but was certainly cognitively aware
of it from JFK's inauguration in 1961 until the USSR's dissolution. I very closely studied
the events that led to an emergent Russian Federation and the device meant to corral the
"Near-Abroad"--The Commonwealth of Independent States. Admittedly, I was somewhat horrified
by Yeltsin's attack on Russia's Duma's White House in 1993 and eagerly read Kargalitsky's
account as it was the only one written by a Parliamentarian in English and published in 1994.
It was possible to discern the outright looting of Russia and former Soviet nations, but the
depth of evil involved wasn't made clear until some publications in the late 1990s
documenting the Rape of Russia; all of which made clear what the underlying intent of the
Anti-Communist Crusade entailed, and that that Crusade wouldn't end until Russia was
absolutely broken and enslaved by NATO/Outlaw US Empire. As many have opined, the Cold
War/Anti-Communist Crusade never ended; rather, it just entered a new phase/chapter, and
that's what we're living through today. But as b portrays, the level of hysterics paraded via
BigLie Media go far beyond anything from the previous chapter and probably outweigh those
employed during Red Scares I and II combined.
It seems fairly plain to see that delusional madness and anger have combined as the
motivating factors, but why/what sparked them and when? IMO, when was during Carter's
presidency with the why/what being several seemingly disparate but connected happenings:
Church Committee Hearings; Stagflation; Iranian Islamic Revolution; OPEC actions; losing grip
on Latin America; informal end to War on Poverty, and institution of Neoliberalism and
Zerosumism; changing of Coldwarrior Guard to Israel First Coldwarrior Guard. The culmination
was CIA gaining control of Executive with DCI GHW Bush becoming Veep to senile, dementia
addled POTUS Reagan.
Interconnected with the above is the prepping of the World Trade Center buildings for
demolition during Clinton's 2nd term, the operative question being: Would the False Flag be
perpetrated by Gore/Liberman, or was Bush/Cheney deemed to do the deed by Deep State actors;
or does this aspect even matter--Liberman was as much of a Neocon as Cheney, all 4 are Israel
Firsters, and Gore was already a War Criminal due to his participation in Clinton's numerous
illegalities. Sure, the Bush/Cheney cabal was more radical; but given what we observed during
Clinton/Gore, Deep State support was quite abundant. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was
finished and Kosovo created, Afghanistan was already targeted and Joint Vision 2010
--the blueprint for the Outlaw US Empire's Full Spectrum Dominance Policy--was published in
1996. Interestingly, at no time known to me has the Policy articulated by the authors of
Joint Vision 2010 or its update Joint Vision 2020 been announced by any POTUS
or senior member of the Duopoly as THE #1 policy goal of the Outlaw US Empire despite both
papers being available to the public. (If he were still alive, IF Stone would have written
about both umpteen numbers of times; while true to form, BigLie media remains 100% mute.)
Despite all the preparations and Trillions of dollars spent and looted, The failure to
implement the Yinon Plan seems to be directed at Russia, although it was indigenous Iraqis
who are responsible for the plan's defeat.
So, is the lying vitriol we're subjected to the result of Russian actions or the inability
to attain the #1 policy goal due to mistakes made at all levels--Deep State and Federal
Government? Recall that Russia/Putin didn't start to actively parry Outlaw Empire moves until
2008, well after the Yinon Plan's defeat by Iraqis.
Blooming Barricade , Jan 15, 2019 5:02:35 PM |
link
This inane narrative has gone too far. It's actually threatening chances for human survival
with its nationalism, poor focus, and banality:
--
"The key focus of the so-called "left" in the world's most polluting country, run by an
ecocidal vandal who deserves to be in the running for most destructive rulers of all time, is
whether or not that vandal is taking orders from the Russian Federation.
Let me repeat that: in the most wasteful society in human history, the forces designated
to oppose the rape of the planet and corporate slavery are concerned with treason and
betrayal of the "nation."
MSNBC: "The worst case scenario that we`ve all been talking about, which is the
possibility that the president had somehow been co-opted and was in the pocket of the
Russians."
THIS is the "worst case scenario" according to the "social justice" network of the
American "left?"
If we were to step back and look at this terrible situation honestly, we could only
conclude that American liberals, and the Democratic Party, are right-wing nationalist forces
concerned with geopolitical gambits and preservation of military alliances.
This isn't the politics of 2019, or 1999. It's the politics of 1819 - but even then, it's
the right wing politics of 1819, as there was already a left dedicated to popular solidarity
and social ownership existing, clandestinely, in the shadows of European cities.
It's worth analyzing how a "Seattle" would play out if it were to occur in the context of
today's US political discourse: the protestors would be seen as nationalist anti-Semites
doing the bidding of Putin, and perhaps Xi Jinping. The leaking of the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment would be condemned instantly as "information warfare." A focus on environmental
issues would be viewed in the context of "energy geopolitics." Indymedia would be shut down
by the authorities as a vehicle for "sowing discord" in Europe against NATO and
liberalism."
@14 karlof1... good post.. i don't know the answer to your questions, but it seems like a bit
of both but mostly the later... i am unaware of this joint vision 2010 paper..
As b points out, and Erelis @6, among others confirms, Kaplan's article in Slate is
worthless. Discredited by everything that has happened over the past two years.
The question is whether it matters. Who reads Slate? Are those who follow Kaplan anything
more than partisans, far beyond the reach of logical argument, committed to the Zionist
project and US hegemony, who read him for comfort and laughs rather than critically.
Kaplan, after twenty odd years of consistently being wrong and consistently impelling the
United States into foreign disasters, costly in lives and treasure, is a busted flush
politically. The only people his ravings effect are the true believers who are simply looking
for someone to articulate their idiotic prejudices.
This, after all is a man whose wife, an Obama/ Clinton favourite, parodying Marie Antionette,
midwifed the Bandera Reich in Kiev.
There is little point in arguing with him, just feed him ever more rope and he will hang
himself, his spouse, his country(s) and the Ukraine and its allies too.
Given the part we know about how self serving, corrupt and incompetent our IC is I fear it is
the tip of the iceberg. So many decades they have learned they can do as they will with
impunity. If I am not mistaken they are partly self financing through likely illegal and
unethical activities. They have gone rogue. Currently the dems think it's fitting however
they will also feel the bite. How will we ever gain control of our country.
Which are more salient--domestically: The attacks on Russia or those against Trump? Lots of
Trumpian, GOP and Corporate Democrat policy ploys go against the majority of the polity and
the National Interest. Unfortunately, the bloc known as the Resistance includes a 5th Column
consisting of most Corporate Democrats, who are essentially Republicans wearing donkey heads.
BigLie Media wants to promote the GOP & Corporate Democrat policy ploys, so the
anti-Russian news assault serves to cover-up popular domestic issues, like
this one regarding taxation and related income disparity . (Amazing that 60
Minutes provided Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez airtime to outline her proposals--airtime that
was meant to cut her down to size but backfired.)
As I outlined earlier, what I see as the struggle is for control of the Federal
Government--CIA/Deep State vs the American People--with the Anti-Communist Crusade used as
cover to diminish rights while enriching actors controlling government, which is exactly what
we see now. Yes, Trump's a player, but with few friends and little coaching. Arguably, his
only asset is the position he occupies.
The Wall Street Journal
continues to counter the liberal
mainstream media's Trump Derangement Syndrome , dropping uncomfortable truth-bombs and
refusing to back off its intense pressure to get to the truth and hold those responsible,
accountable (in a forum that is hard for the establishment to shrug off as 'Alt-Right' or
'Nazi' or be 'punished' by search- and social-media-giants) .
And
once again Kimberley Strassel - who by now has become the focus of social media attacks for
her truth-seeking reporting - does it again. Confirming what
we detailed yesterday - that The Justice Department was fully aware that the notorious
Steele Dossier was connected to Hillary Clinton and might be biased, a crucial detail which was
omitted just weeks later from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant used to
spy on the Trump campaign - Strassel makes the aggressive and correct statement that the
Justice Department official's testimony raises new doubts about the bureau's honesty.
Via The
Wall Street Journal,
Everybody knew.
Everybody of consequence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department
understood fully in the middle of 2016 - as the FBI embarked on its counterintelligence probe
of Donald Trump - that it was doing so based on disinformation provided by Hillary Clinton's
campaign.
That's the big revelation from the transcript of the testimony Justice Department official
Bruce Ohr gave Congress in August. The transcripts haven't been released, but parts were
confirmed for me by congressional sources. Mr. Ohr testified that he sat down with dossier
author Christopher Steele on July 30, 2016, and received salacious information the opposition
researcher had compiled on Mr. Trump. Mr. Ohr immediately took that to the FBI's then-Deputy
Director Andy McCabe and lawyer Lisa Page. In August he took it to Peter Strzok, the bureau's
lead investigator. In the same month, Mr. Ohr believes, he briefed senior personnel in the
Justice Department's criminal division: Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz, lawyer
Zainab Ahmad and fraud unit head Andrew Weissman. The last two now work for special counsel
Robert Mueller.
More important, Mr. Ohr told this team the information came from the Clinton camp and warned
that it was likely biased, certainly unproven.
"When I provided [the Steele information] to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is
source information," he testified.
"I don't know how reliable it is. You're going to have to check it out and be aware. These
guys were hired by somebody relating to -- who's related to the Clinton campaign, and be
aware."
He said he told them that Mr. Steele was "desperate that Donald Trump not get elected," and
that his own wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier. He confirmed
sounding all these warnings before the FBI filed its October application for a surveillance
warrant against Carter Page. We broke some of this in August, though the transcript provides
new detail.
The FBI and Justice Department have gone to extraordinary lengths to muddy these details,
with cover from Democrats and friendly journalists.
A January 2017 memo from Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee's top Democrat,
flatly (and incorrectly) insisted "the FBI's closely-held investigative team only received
Steele's reporting in mid-September."
A May 2018 New York Times report repeated that claim, s aying Mr. Steele's reports didn't
reach the "Crossfire Hurricane team," which ran the counterintelligence investigation, until
"mid-September."
This line was essential for upholding the claim that the dossier played no role in the
unprecedented July 31, 2016, decision to investigate a presidential campaign. Former officials
have insisted they rushed to take this dramatic step on the basis of a conversation involving a
low-level campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, which took place in May, before the dossier
officially came into the picture. And maybe that is the case. Yet now Mr. Ohr has testified
that top personnel had dossier details around the time they opened the probe.
The Ohr testimony is also further evidence that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court in its Page warrant application. We already knew the bureau failed to inform
the court it knew the dossier had come from a rival campaign. But the FISA application
additionally claimed the FBI was "unaware of any derogatory information pertaining" to Mr.
Steele, that he was "reliable," that his "reporting" in this case was "credible," and that the
FBI only "speculates" that Mr. Steele's bosses "likely" wanted to "discredit" Mr. Trump.
Speculates? Likely? Mr. Ohr makes clear FBI and Justice officials knew from the earliest
days that Mr. Steele was working for the Clinton campaign, which had an obvious desire to
discredit Mr. Trump. And Mr. Ohr specifically told investigators that they had every reason to
worry Mr. Steele's work product was tainted.
Strassel concludes succinctly - and ominously for anyone who still believes that 'we, the
people' have any freedom left, that the testimony has three other implications.
First, it further demonstrates the accuracy of the House Intelligence Committee
Republicans' memo of 2018 - which noted Mr. Ohr's role and pointed out that the FBI had not
been honest about its knowledge of the dossier and failed to inform the court of Mrs. Ohr's
employment at Fusion GPS.
Second, the testimony also destroys any remaining credibility of the Democratic response,
in which Mr. Schiff and his colleagues claimed Mr. Ohr hadn't met with the FBI or told them
anything about his wife or about Mr. Steele's bias until after the election.
And third, the testimony raises new concerns about Mr. Mueller's team . Critics have noted
Mr. Weissman's donations to Mrs. Clinton and his unseemly support of former acting Attorney
General Sally Yates's obstruction of Trump orders. It now turns out that senior Mueller
players were central to the dossier scandal. The conflicts of interest boggle the mind.
And Strassel concludes unequivocally, the Ohr testimony is evidence the FBI itself knows how
seriously it erred. The FBI has been hiding and twisting facts from the start.
Correct me if I'm wrong but let's see if I've got this right. The so-called "information"
looked like ****, smelled like **** and tasted like **** and the world's premier
investigative organization took that ****, knowing full well it was shitty, to the FISA Court
to begin their treasonous pursuit of an American president contrary to the Constitution they
vowed to protect. And they're still at it today because they can't admit their actions are
far more illegal than what they falsely allege Trump did. Did I miss anything?
So general Flynn gives a few questionable statements to the FBI and he's prosecuted.
Hillary gives a whole ******* false dossier to the FBI and the whole FBI and Justice
Department lick her *******?
The general statute of limitations for noncapital federal crimes is five years. (18 U.S.C.
§ 3282.) This statute of limitations applies to perjury, filing a false bankruptcy form,
embezzlement, bribery, and destroying records, and all other bankruptcy crimes.
And those conflicts of interest have pretty much been public knowledge for over a year.
Yet nothing is done and the Mewliar ****-show just keeps chugging along. When you look at it
objectively there is really one primary reason for that . . . because the MSM (other than the
WSJ) refuses to cover those conflict of interest issues (among many other issues that would
be detrimental to the 'Russian collusion' investigation). Enemy of the people indeed.
I am not sure if it can happen as these agency's control and power is greater than rule of
law but to really get back to the original principles of our constitution, we have to do away
with just about all of them. Those trator Clintonite, Bushites and Obamaite clans were
hellbent on destroying this country and they sure have done a good job of it. One more
globalist presidents and that is it; adios gringos.
The FBI did not err. The FBI did nothing wrong. People within the FBI broke laws. People
within the FBI committed fraud, abuse of power under color of authority. Lets not let these
rotten apples hide behind the facad of the FBI
********. Many rank and file FBI agents knew what was going and did and said nothing. They
are sworn to uphold the Constitution not to obey every **** sucker in their chain of command.
They all put their personal ease and comfort ahead of doing the right and leagal thing.
Shitcan the lot of them.
"... The British Establishment has done with the concepts of honor. The loudest lying voices against Russia belong either to the whoring "aristocrats," who found that war profiteering (by any means) pays well, or the opportunistic parvenu like Gavin Williamson representing the vulgarity and intellectual inadequacy of the Establishment. ..."
annamaria says: April 10,
2018 at 2:44 pm GMT 100 Words On the British Establishment:
The Skripal affair is better understood in the context of "sir" Savile' knighthood -- when the
influential pedophile had been raping and molesting kids for 40 years and none stood up to the
criminal. The BBC has dutifully refused to publish anything that would upset "sir" Savile. The
Scotland Yard looked the other way -- precisely as the Establishment ordered them to do.
Savile' specialty were orphans. He was the embodiment of British Establishment.
The British Establishment has done with the concepts of honor. The loudest lying voices
against Russia belong either to the whoring "aristocrats," who found that war profiteering (by
any means) pays well, or the opportunistic parvenu like Gavin Williamson representing the
vulgarity and intellectual inadequacy of the Establishment.
FBI and DOJ officials may have misled federal judges in zeal to obtain warrant targeting
Carter Page just weeks before Election Day
When the annals of mistakes and abuses in the
FBI's Russia investigation are finally written, Bruce Ohr almost certainly will be the No. 1
witness, according to my sources.
The then-No. 4 Department of Justice (DOJ) official briefed both senior FBI and DOJ
officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele's Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that
the British intelligence operative's work was opposition research connected to Hillary
Clinton's campaign and might be biased.
Ohr's briefings, in July and August 2016, included the deputy director of the FBI, a top
lawyer for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and a Justice official who later would become
the top deputy to special counsel Robert Mueller.
"... Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract. ..."
"... While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent. ..."
Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who
appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal. Leventhal has been a staffer at the State
Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation,
misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative
memo, he is listed as a current team member:
Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with
"counter-propaganda," the State Department's Global Engagement Center
has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My
old job at the State Department was as chief propagandist," confessed former Global
Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it
and they have to do it to their own population and I don't necessarily think it's that
awful."
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's
international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying
smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an
outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he
would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would
marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation.
His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the
messenger.
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's
international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying
smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an
outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he
would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would
marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation.
His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the
messenger.
Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000
British pounds) for a 50% contract.
While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own
Linkedin page
lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were
true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.
Mueller investigation is a continuation of JFK assassination by other means.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Now, as the 'Russian influence' narrative is dying down, the anti-Trump - anti-Russian campaign is moving to new grounds. ..."
"... Initiating a counter-intelligence investigation, for which there was no basis, gave the FBI, and later the Mueller investigation, unfettered access to NSA 'signals intelligence' that could then possibly be used to incriminate Trump or his associates. ..."
"... It was the Obama administration which had given the FBI access to this tool : ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Trump is no populist. A populist can't be elected by the money-based US political system. Trump's election was almost certainly arranged ..."
"... Then why did Trump nominate Gina Haspel as head of the CIA? She is the acolyte of Trump nemesis Brennan. Why does Trump choose people like Nikki Halley, Pompeo, Bolton? ..."
"... "I very much dislike most of Trump's domestic and foreign policy. But he was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people." ..."
"... the assassination of JFK opened the floodgates of blatant depravity perpetrated by those whose greed and lust for power will ultimately destroy us. ..."
"... There are trends: A growing US citizen realization that their political system prior to Trump was nearly completely corrupt; the Clintons are more broadly understood as the pathological criminals that they are; the Podesta emails with their sick connotations remain 'in the air' - See Ben Swann's work, for example. The Clinton Foundation is far more broadly understood as a massive criminal enterprise. ..."
"... "Pompeo met on October 24 [at Trump's request] with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community's official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year's theft of data from DNC computers. Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was "leaked," not hacked, "by a person with physical access" to the DNC's computer system." ..."
"... In short the last two years have been about trying to defeat Trump but the attackers are looking more and more wounded, and Trump, well, he's hanging in there. General Kelly and others have described Trump's work ethic as exhausting. ..."
"... Trump has been put under intense investigation by Deep State hacks who are determined to see him impeached. And all they have come up with is that he is a compulsive pussy-grabber (no shit, hey?). ..."
"... Well, if he has then he has hidden them extraordinarily well, because Mueller with all his resources hasn't found any. Indeed, Mueller's investigation is so well-resourced that the only conclusion I can reach is that Trump has no such skeletons. ..."
"... "Simply put, the Russia NIA is not an "IC-coordinated" assessment -- the vehicle for such coordination, the NIC, was not directly involved in its production, and no NIO was assigned as the responsible official overseeing its production. Likewise, the Russia NIA cannot be said to be the product of careful coordination between the CIA, NSA and FBI -- while analysts from all three agencies were involved in its production, they were operating as part of a separate, secretive task force operating under the close supervision of the Director of the CIA, and not as an integral part of their home agency or department." ..."
"... Escalation towards war with Russia was a matter of public record in late pre-election 2016, thanks to Clinton News Network ... now ask yourselves where is that general in the press conference nowadays? ..."
"... For a thorough update on the Integrity Initiative and its offshoots, check out the latest from legal investigator Barbara Boyd. ..."
"... To defeat the "Deep State" in the U.S., it is essential to understand the role of British Intelligence. While it is essential to know the role of Hillary Clinton, Obama, Comey, DOJ/FBI operatives, et.al., it is even more important to understand the geopolitical assumptions behind Russiagate. And for that, one must turn to the British. ..."
"... The aim of the counterintelligence operation and of the Russiagate hoax was not to build a prosecution case against President Trump. It was to put the United States in constitutional limbo by creating a parallel and competing center of constitutional legitimacy. ..."
"... Very difficult to judge: what is the result of infighting in the US vs. any agreed-on never mind coherent foreign policy? That the question is even asked - all over the world now - spells stage one collapse. ..."
"... Trump's nationalist credentials are further belied by such things as: adding TPP provisions to the new North American trade agreement; attacking Syria based on false flags; arming Ukraine; pulling out of the INF treaty and engaging in an unnecessary and costly arms race; actively seeking to overthrow the governments of Iran and Venezuela; etc. ..."
"... My own theory about 2016 is that everybody miscalculated. Trump was (IMO) running as an ego-building publicity stunt. Hillary (and her Deep State sponsors) had actively helped Trump get the nomination with hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity which also enhanced the bottom lines of Big Media. His multiple flaws were airbrushed away. ..."
Despite the loss of major narratives, the war of the deep state against U.S. President Trump continues unabated. The main of tool
in this war are allegations of relations between Trump and anything Russia. The war runs along several parallel paths.
The narrative war in the media is most visible one. When any of the fake stories about Trump and Russia gets debunked and disposed,
new ones are created or others intensified.
In parallel to these propaganda efforts the deep state created an investigation that Trump has no way to escape from. Enabled
by one of the Obama administrations last acts the investigation is using signal intelligence to entrap and flip the people surrounding
Trump (see section three below). The big price will be Trump himself. Here we take a look at what transpired during the last weeks.
One major anti-Trump narrative was that 'Russian influence' helped to put him into office. This was based on the alleged nefarious
influence a Russian clickbait company, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Peterburg, had on the U.S. electorate. That explanation
never made sense. Little of the IRA activities had to do with the election. It used sockpuppets on Facebook and Twitter to attract
people to websites filled with puppy pictures or similar nonsense. The IRA would then sell advertisement and promotions on these
sites.
This
was obvious for anyone following the factual content of the news instead of the 'opinions' a whole bunch of anti-Trump 'experts'
and the media formed around them.
That the Mueller investigation finally indicted several of the IRA's officers over minor financial transactions was seen as a
confirmation of the political aspects of the IRA activities. But nearly all the reporting left out that Mueller
confirmed the commercial intent behind the IRA and its activities. There is nothing political in the accusations. Indeed point
95 of the Mueller
indictment
of the IRA says:
Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the accounts to receive money from real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions
and advertisements on the ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages. Defendants and their co-conspirators typically charged certain
U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content on their popular false
U.S. persona accounts , including Being Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist.
Part of the false narrative of a political influence campaign was the claim that the $100,000 the IRA spent for advertisement
to promote its clickbait webpages through Facebook ads somehow moved people to vote for Trump. But 56% of the IRA ads ran after the
election, 25% of all its ads were never seen by anyone. How a few $10,000 for ads only few saw moved an election that was fought
with several billions spent by each candidate's campaign was left unexplained.
[T]he common understanding is that Russia's interference efforts included sophisticated targeting of specific voting groups on
Facebook, which could have made the difference in states that Trump narrowly won on his way to an electoral-vote victory.
That understanding about Russia's sophisticated targeting, though, is not supported by the evidence -- if it's not flat-out
wrong.
...
Most of the ads purchased by the Russians didn't specify a geographic target smaller than the United States on the whole, according
to a Post review of the ads released by the House Intelligence Committee. Those that did target specific states heavily targeted
those that weren't really considered targets of the 2016 election, such as Missouri and Maryland. And of those ads that did target
specific states, most happened well before or well after the final weeks of the campaign.
All the claims that some Russian sockpuppets influenced the 2016 elections were and are nonsense. The IRA sockpuppets never had
any political intent.
Likewise the allegations that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC and Clinton crony Podesta's email are mere assertions for which
no hard evidence was ever provided. The only known fact is that the emails and papers were real, and that there content revealed
the shoddiness of Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and her campaign.
Now, as the 'Russian influence' narrative is dying down, the anti-Trump - anti-Russian campaign is moving to new grounds. Last week
the New York Times claimed that Paul Manafort, who for some time ran the Trump election campaign, gave public and internal
polling data to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska:
Manafort Accused
of Sharing Trump Polling Data With Russian Associate . A day after that sensational claim made a large splash throughout U.S.
media the New York Times recanted:
CORRECTION: PAUL MANAFORT asked KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK to pass TRUMP polling to the Ukrainian oligarchs SERHIY LYOVOCHKIN & RINAT
AKHMETOV, & not to OLEG DERIPASKA, as originally reported. We have corrected the story & I deleted a tweet repeating the error.
Duh. Manafort gave polling data to his Ukrainian fixer Konstantin Kilimnik with the request to pass it along to Ukrainian oligarchs
for who he had worked before joining the Trump campaign. Kilimnik had long
worked for the International Republican Institute office in Moscow. The IRI is a CIA offshot under Republican Party tutelage
that is used to influence politics abroad. Its long time head was the deceased hawkish Senator John McCain. While he worked with
Kilimnik in the Ukraine, Manafort concentrated on moving the Ukraine towards the European Union and away from Russia. His and Kilimnik
efforts were always opposed to Russian interests. But the NYT and others falsely
try to pass them off as the opposite
with the sole purpose of feeding the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign.
Another anti-Trump/anti-Russian propaganda effort is a new sensational NYT piece on obvious misbehavior in the upper rows
of the FBI :
In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the
president's behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests
, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions
constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for
Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence.
The NYT lets it seem as if the decision to launch a counter-intelligence investigation related to Trump was as based
on some reasonable suspicion the FBI had. It was not. This was an act of revenge by the upper anti-Trump echelons in the FBI with
which they attempted to undermine Trump's presidency. Note what the claimed suspicion was based on:
Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference
in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign
trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention
platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.
Other factors fueled the F.B.I.'s concerns, according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Christopher Steele, a former
British spy who worked as an F.B.I. informant, had compiled memos in mid-2016 containing unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials
tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail and bribe him.
Trump made a joke during the election campaign asking Russia to release the 30,000 emails Hillary Clinton had deleted from her
illegal private email server. There is no requirement, as far as I know, for any candidate to criticize this or that country. How
can not following the non existing requirement to criticize Russia be suspicious? The Republican Party did not soften its convention
platform on Ukraine. It rejected an amendment that would have further sharpened it. Overall the Republican platform was
more hawkish than the Democratic one. The
Steele dossier was of course from A to Z
made up nonsense paid for
by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
It is non sensible to claim that these were reasonable suspicions sufficient to open a counter-intelligence investigation. The
hasty FBI move to launch a counter-intelligence operation obviously had a different motive and aim.
Strzok and Page sent other text messages that raise the possibility they were discussing opening up a counterintelligence investigation
against Trump before Comey's firing.
"And we need to open the case we've been waiting on now while Andy is acting ," Strzok wrote to Page on the day of Comey's
ouster.
Andy is Andrew McCabe, who served as deputy FBI director.
Page gave some indication in her congressional testimony in July 2018 that the text message was a reference to an investigation
separate from the obstruction probe that has already been reported.
Normally the FBI needs to clear such counter-intelligence investigations with the Justice Department. In this case it
did not do so at all :
In the case of the investigation into Trump, the FBI's decision to open a file on the president so quickly after Comey's firing
in May 2017 was a source of concern for some officials at the Justice Department because the FBI acted without first consulting
leadership at the department . But those worries were allayed when, days later, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed
to oversee the Russia probe ...
After Comey was fired, the FBI made a very hasty move, without reasonable suspicion and without informing the Justice Department,
to launch a counter-intelligence operation involving the sitting president and his administration. What was the real purpose of this
move?
Initiating a counter-intelligence investigation, for which there was no basis, gave the FBI, and later the Mueller investigation,
unfettered access to NSA 'signals intelligence' that could then possibly be used to incriminate Trump or his associates.
On his way out the door, we all were wallowing in our winter of discontent, Obama signed an executive order...
...
The order revised the rules around intelligence sharing among our intel community. Specifically, it made the firehose of raw intelligence
collected by the NSA directly accessible to the FBI and CIA. Instead of having to ask for intel and getting what they filtered
down the FBI and CIA could directly access the unfiltered "SigInt" or signals intelligence. Intercepted phone calls, emails, raw
intel from human sources. Everything our vast intelligence vacuum hoovers up, available directly... but only for counterintel
and foreign intel purposes .
The NSA can sit on virtually every communication into and out of the U.S. that takes place over networks. Obama made it possible
for the FBI to directly access everything they had on Trump, et al. Obama supercharged the FBI's ability to investigate Trump.
The Obama administration
enacted the changed executive order EO 12333 in early January 2017, shortly before Trump took over:
Previously, the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or
the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The N.S.A.'s analysts passed on only information
they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information.
Now, other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by
the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for "minimizing" privacy intrusions.
...
[T]he 12333 sharing procedures allow analysts, including those at the F.B.I., to search the raw data using an American's identifying
information only for the purpose of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence investigations , not for ordinary criminal cases.
And they may do so only if one of several other conditions are met, such as a finding that the American is an agent of a foreign
power.
However, under the rules, if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to
the Justice Department.
At that time Peter Lee, aka Chinahand,
already had the suspicion
that Obama was behind the FBI campaign against Trump.
With the changes in EO 12333 Obama gave the FBI the ability to launch a world wide snooping operation against the incoming Trump
administration under the guise of a 'counter-intelligence' operation. The hasty FBI move after Comey was fired activated this instrument.
The Mueller investigation has since used it extensively. 'Crimes' revealed through the snooping operation are turned over to the
Justice Department.
The NYT claim that the counter-intelligence investigation was initiated because of reasonable suspicion of Russian influence
over Trump is nonsense. It was initiated to get access to a set of tools that would allow unlimited access to communication of Trump
and anyone related to him. It was Obama who on his way out of the door gave the FBI these capabilities.
There are signs that the unlimited access the FBI and Mueller investigation have to signal intelligence is used to create prosecutions
via ' parallel construction ':
An active counterintel investigation means the Trump Administration's crimes were only as secure as the weakest link in their
weakest moment. We got hints of this early. Our intelligence folks picked up "signals intelligence" or SigInt from Russians talking
to Russians.
Those "signals" aren't the kind of evidence that finds its way into a courtroom. In fact, it's important that it doesn't. It would
burn sources and methods. It lays out the crimes and the players though... and then prosecutors find ways to make triable cases
other ways .
The public sees cases for specific charges carrying significant prison time without ever knowing that the NSA and prosecutors
knew so much more than they ever revealed. Now, apply those principles to the cases we've seen Mueller bring forward so far.
Mike Flynn: pleaded out to a minor charge, rolled over in full and then produced five rounds of documents. Likely: Flynn was
confronted with the intel they had on him and knew he was cooked. They knew the crimes. They heard and saw everything. There'd
be no escape.
By flipping and pleading out Flynn, all of that secret intel stays secret. Our intelligence efforts are protected. And Flynn
goes down. And he cooks a bunch of other gooses. He's savvy enough to know that once they have the intel, all that's left to do
is make the case.
...
The 'crime' that di Flynn in was misremembering a phone call he had with the Russian ambassador. Similar happened with Rick Gates,
Paul Manafort's righthand man and a member of Trump's transition team. Then it happened to Paul Manafort himself and to George Papadopoulos.
The Mueller investigation, thanks to the snooping Obama and the FBI enabled, knows the content of every phonecall, chat and email
any member of the Trump administration made and make to someone abroad (and likely also within the U.S.). It invites people as witnesses
and asks them about the content of a specific calls they made. If they misremember or lie - bang - Mueller has the transcript ready.
A crime has been created and an indictment for lying to the FBI will follow. This is what happened to Flynn and the others the Mueller
investigation entrapped and convicted.
Because of the counter-intelligence investigation the anti-Trump gang in the FBI hastened to initiate, the investigators got hands
on signal intelligence - phone calls, chats and emails - that allowed them to indict minor people for petty crimes and to flip them
to talk to the investigation.
The aim, in the end, was and is to build a prosecution case against President Trump for whatever minor and petty half-backed illegal
doing there may be.
To make such a prosecution and an indictment publicly palpable the media is assigned with launching story after story about nefarious
relations between Trump and anything Russia.
As we have seen above with the IRA story, the retracted NYT 's Manafort bang, and the NYT's false claims about
the motive of the FBI's counter-intelligence investigation, none of these stories hold up to diligent scrutiny. Today's Washington
Post adds another example of no-beef stories that insinuate mystic 'Russian influence' over Trump:
President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin
, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to
discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.
The rest of the story largely refutes the claim made in its headline and very first sentence:
Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
...
Trump generally has allowed aides to listen to his phone conversations with Putin ..
...
In an email, Tillerson said that he " was present for the entirety of the two presidents' official bilateral meeting in Hamburg,"...
After Trump had a first White House meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Washington, lots of leaks about the talk
appeared in the DC media. Trump was accused of giving information about an ISIS plot to the Russians that was allegedly secret.
It was not . Since then Trump clamped down on the number of participants, briefings and readouts for such talks. That is simply
a necessary and laudable behavior. Now the media try to construct that into 'Trump is concealing details' about talks with Russia
even when the U.S. Secretary of State and others are present in these.
Ever since Trump won the Republican primaries, the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration and the U.S. and British intelligence
services prepared to prevent a successful Trump presidency. The Steele dossier, created by 'former' British intelligence agents and
paid for by the Clinton campaign, was the basis for an FBI investigation that was seen
as
an insurance against a Trump win. Any possible Russia relations Trump might have came under scrutiny. This prevented him from
fulfilling his campaign promise of coming to better relations with Russia.
Shortly before Obama left the office he created the tool the FBI needed to put its investigation on steroids. When Trump fired
Comey for his handling of the Clinton email affair, the FBI put that tool into action. With unfettered access to signal intelligence
the Mueller investigation was able to entrap a number of Trump related people and to flip them to its side. It will use any information
they give up to find some angle under which Trump can be prosecuted and eventually impeached. Even if nothing comes off this investigations,
the media reports and slander all this created may well be enough to prevent an election of Trump for a second term.
I very much dislike most of Trump's domestic and foreign policy. But he was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign
the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people. Unfortunately I see no way
that Trump could escape from the hold it has gained over him. Exposing it as much as possible might well be his best defense.
It is information that is put out there that is never cross checked by the American people. They are too busy, too involved
with other things or too stupid to find out the true facts. It is hard to predict what will occur next year. I
feel it all depends who wins the primary on the Democrat side.
[Trump] ... was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign the media and the intelligence services have since
run against him undermines the will of the people.
There is a major flaw in reasoning here. Trump is no populist. A populist can't be elected by the money-based US political system.
Trump's election was almost certainly arranged:
The anti-Russia campaign began in earnest in 2014 (well before the 2016 election);
Trump's pre-election relationship to the Clinton's is highly suspect: they were likely to be much closer than we have
been led to believe;
An FBI informant worked for Trump for over 10 years - during the time that Mueller was FBI director;
Trump was the ONLY populist on the Republican side (out of 19 contenders!);
Sanders was a 'sheepdog'
and Hillary ran a terrible campaign in which she made obvious mistakes that a seasoned campaigner like herself would never
make;
British involvement in the election (Fusion GPS, Cambridge Analytica, a Brit 'spy' in the Sanders campaign, etc.) suggests
CIA-MI6 working together;
Trump Administration policies are consistent those of Clinton-Bush-Obama:
> Obamacare was not repealed "on day one" - it has been strengthened by not defending coverage for prior conditions;
> Trump put TPP provisions into his new North American trade deal;
> Trump continues ME meddling;
> Trump continues militarism and tax cutting;
> Etc.
The only major "difference" that I can think of are Trump's Wall and China tariffs. But these are consistent with the 'Deep
State' goals.
Surveys show that the "will of the people" is very different than the neoliberal, neoconservative policies that the establishment
fosters upon us.
MAGA is a POLICY CHOICE as much as it is a campaign slogan. It is designed to meet the challenge posed by Russia and China
and 'turn the page' on the deceit and duplicity of the Obama Administration just as Obama's "Change You Can Believe In" was designed
to turn the page on the the militarism of the Bush Administration. These BI-PARTISAN page-turnings ensure that there is no accountability
and provides each new Administration with a new sly story line that the public readily swallows. Each new Presidential charade
entertains and misdirects as the interests of the Empire are advanced with a refreshed box of tricks and dishonest narratives.
...war of the deep state against U.S. President Trump continues unabated.
Then why did Trump nominate Gina Haspel as head of the CIA? She is the acolyte of Trump nemesis Brennan. Why does Trump choose
people like Nikki Halley, Pompeo, Bolton?
The war of the Deep State is a psyop to crush dissent as the butt-hurt Deep State continues to pursue their dream of global
hegemony. Anyone that believes that Trump is no part of that psyop is delusional.
Wow, man. Thanks to you and all the regulars here who contribute to gathering relevant info from all kinds of sources. I hate
to repeat myself, but I feel that a little praise every 3 or 6 months is not too much spamming. This is what serious journalism
looks like.
Zachary Smith @2: ... I just don't buy into the "insurance" theory.
And I don't buy the theory that Hillary is hell bent on war. The Clinton's are very rational and calculating and no President has the freedom that your theory suggests. IMO what the Deep State has done under their man Trump is very similar to what the Deep State would have done if they had selected
Clinton instead. The fact is, a populist nationalist is what was deemed necessary to meet the challenge from Russia and China. And that is what
we got (surprise!).
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Furthermore, focusing on personality and Party is just what they want
"Watch what they do, not what they say" has a corollary: pay attention to the polices, not the politicians.
"I very much dislike most of Trump's domestic and foreign policy. But he was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign
the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people."
This pretty well sums it up for me. Being old enough to remember FDR and the brief rise of the middle class in the 40's, 50's
and 60's (and having benefited from that attempt at leveling the playing field), I am more than saddened at the downward spiral
of our nation. Politics have obviously never been clean and fair, but the assassination of JFK opened the floodgates of blatant
depravity perpetrated by those whose greed and lust for power will ultimately destroy us.
Of course b you have nothing here to offer except your opinion. Your views regarding the relentlessness of the US criminal justice
system are on target, just ask the underclasses about that. Once in view, you are never let be and in the US everyone can be found
guilty of something.
Rather nice to see the pampered son of inherited tax-free wealth on the receiving end for once, in my opinion.
Trump is a crook. Russian collusion is his smokescreen. His crimes have already been demonstrated through what little we already
know and there is still much we don't know and probably never will know.
This essay reads something like a veiled mea culpa from you.
You were wrong about Trump from the get go. Why not just admit it and move along? Why remain steadfastly in thrall to any shred
of rightwing, authoritarianism of the elite masquerading as populism?
Whatever Trump gets from the criminal justice system, Congress or the voters appears to be well-deserved. He has brought this
on himself and really there is no one else to blame even as he never will accept responsibility. He is stupid at best, dishonest
at best, a useful idiot at best.
Trump saved his ass financially after a series of disastrous business bankruptcies by accepting what appears by all indications
to be laundered money from literally hundreds of anonymous shell companies investing in his condos since at least 2008.
He has run roughshod over the emoluments clause quite openly.
I do believe, knowing what we know now, he will probably avoid indictment and escape impeachment, maybe only through resignation/pardon
but more likely the old fashioned way: defeat at the polls in 2020.
In many ways Trump has done some good by reinvigorating the US left (such as it is) and bringing at least enough cohesion in
the ranks of a badly splintered populace mainly among white females and white college educated voters who now reject the GOP,
or at least the GOP of Trump.
Whether this will lead to badly needed fixes for the heinous wealth inequality (started with Reagan) is doubtful but at least
the conversation is now underway (started with Bernie) which is the first step.
Tax increases, social security stabilisation, re-funneling wasted MIC billions to domestic programs for the poor, etc.
It is a start. Will it become a solution or a revolution in time?
That is up to the people who are still under the yoke of neoliberalism and global capital flight.
re:
Mike Flynn: pleaded out to a minor charge, rolled over in full and then produced five rounds of documents. Likely: Flynn was confronted
with the intel they had on him and knew he was cooked. They knew the crimes. They heard and saw everything. There'd be no escape.
By flipping and pleading out Flynn, all of that secret intel stays secret. Our intelligence efforts are protected. And Flynn goes
down. And he cooks a bunch of other gooses. He's savvy enough to know that once they have the intel, all that's left to do is
make the case.//
So the situation is worse than I thought. The clear inference is that (1) Flynn (and others) really did commit some major crimes,
and then (2) got off easy by admitting to a memory lapse (3) while cooking a bunch of other gooses.
Flynn does the easy (2) and gets away with (1) and (3), both very serious. This is justice?
As you may recall, the woman threatened conflict on cyberattacks.
"As president, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just like any other attack," the Democratic
presidential nominee said. "We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses."
Regarding the Deep State and Trump, Syria is in the process of winning against the neocons. And Iran has not yet been attacked.
Hillary has a record, and for the most part hasn't even tried to run away from it.
thanks b... the topic is so very tiring.. i am sick of hearing about it.. if the usa fell off a cliff and never came back again
- i would be fine with that.. thank you regardless, for taking it apart and trying ti dispel the bullshite.. it is so thick, it
defies logic.. i agree with @1 jose garcia, and @4 radiator...
trump is a crook... so what? most of the business class in the west are at this point! politics and crookery go hand in hand...
i would be surprised if it was any different at this point in time.. how about the intel agencies? you want to sleep with them?
lol..
There's either something wrong with this assumption, or something we're not being told...
The Mueller investigation, thanks to the snooping Obama and the FBI enabled, knows the content of every phonecall, chat
and email any member of the Trump administration made and make to someone abroad (and likely also within the U.S.). It invites
people as witnesses and asks them about the content of a specific calls they made. If they misremember or lie - bang - Mueller
has the transcript ready. A crime has been created and an indiction for lying to the FBI will follow. This is what happened to
Flynn and the others the Mueller investigation entrapped and convicted.
Option 1. Something wrong?
If you're being cross-examined in a court or pseudo-legal forum about things you may or may not remember, you have the right to
decline to answer a question, or to preface any and every answer with the phrase "If I remember correctly blah blah blah..."
Option 2. Something we're not being told?
If the interrogators were able to ambush Flynn, then it's probably because they didn't acquaint him with all of his rights, or
he didn't have a lawyer with him.
Trump's not stupid. He won't blunder into a situation bereft of any semblance of legal Human Rights protections designed to
ambush him. And if he can't have a lawyer with him when the questions start, then he can probably refuse to attend without breaking
any law.
@donkeytale There has been close to three years of serious investigative intent to lay a glove on Trump (HRC's team, the FBI and
Mueller) and there is only the merest scratch of a womaniser (which with three marriages doesn't come as a surprise). What is
quite remarkable, despite all the investigative effort, is how clean Trump has managed to keep himself despite building a fortune
in one of the toughest cities in the world, building himself up through the eras of the five families, junk bonds and ponzi schemes
and soviet union mobsters, not to mention the corruption of the poltical classes and regulatory abuses and unionised labor.
For the world's he moves in, the only explanation that gives him enough protection is that for a long time Trump has been a
protected FBI asset for one of the field offices, possibly now senior service figures. And it's this deep relationship with well
connected parts of the FBI or other secret services that has given him the ability to steer past the various attempts by the deep
state. Why, for instance, do we have such a lot of leakage of the inner workings of the anti-Trump FBI? Some part of the deep
state has become disgusted at the spying (eg on congress), the blackmailing, the warmongering, and deep corruption of the anti-constitutionalists,
and Trump is their vengence. You just have to decide which side you are on...
I read that as Testing - perhaps a trial/demonstration as a professional troll for somebody or other. How else to interpret "only the merest scratch of a womaniser" or "how clean Trump has managed to keep himself". Maybe I'm
surprised not to also see praise for the clever Government Shutdown.
meanwhile..trump and his appointees attack legitimacy of Venezuela govt.
Trump is in bad odor at home while seeking to attack other govts.
' Washington has explicitly expressed its support for a potential coup against the elected Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro,
by offering its backing to the opposition and stating outright it was time for a "new government."
"The Maduro regime is illegitimate and the United States will continue ... to work diligently to restore a real democracy"
to Venezuela, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters on his trip to the Middle East on Saturday, adding that Washington
would attempt to make the Latin American nations "come together to deliver that."' https://www.rt.com/news/448673-us-venezuela-time-new-government/
One thing the US deep state and their muller proxy would have on Trump, and most if not all of Trump's team, is collusion with
Israel (can this convert into charges of treason as threats). A weapon that is good for threats against and turning those around
Trump, and possibly used in as a last resort to remove Trump.
Adding to my post @ 18
Pat Lang has a post up "What is wrong with Trump?" "But, how does one explain his lack of action on the border? Does someone or
some thing in Russia, Israel, the UK, his former business associates, have something really juicy on Trump, something that he
fears to unleash through decisive action? pl"
Collusion with Israel is something neither side - team Trump and the deep state - would wish to bring into the open, but this
may be the only thing they have on Trump.
"On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike
Rogers traveled to New York and met with President-Elect Donald Trump.
On Friday November 18th The Washington Post reported
on a recommendation in "October" that [NSA Director
Admiral Mike Rogers] Mike Rogers be removed from his
NSA position:
The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's
intelligence community have recommended to President
Obama that the director of the National Security
Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.
In a move apparently unprecedented for a military
officer, Rogers, without notifying superiors, traveled
to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump
Tower.
Occam's Razor. NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers
didn't want to participate in the spying scheme [on
Trump]
(Clapper, Brennan, Etc.), which was the baseline for
President Obama's post presidency efforts to undermine
Donald Trump and keep Trump from digging into
[who knows what crimes]"
After the visit by Rogers, Trump vacated Trump Towers. There is considerable irony in the Mueller 'probe' and the continuing avalanche of MSM lies and evasions and spin etc pertaining
to Trump.
There are trends: A growing US citizen realization that their political system prior to Trump was nearly completely corrupt;
the Clintons are more broadly understood as the pathological criminals that they are; the Podesta emails with their sick connotations
remain 'in the air' - See Ben Swann's work, for example. The Clinton Foundation is far more broadly understood as a massive criminal
enterprise.
Serious criminality at the highest levels of the FBI is now far more obvious to far more people
MSM as evil propaganda is more widely understood.
It is understood widely that the DNC material to Wikileaks was not 'hacked' (Binney)
From the theintercept.com :
"Pompeo met on October 24 [at Trump's request] with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower
who co-authored an analysis published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community's
official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year's theft of data from DNC computers. Binney and the other former
officials argue that the DNC data was "leaked," not hacked, "by a person with physical access" to the DNC's computer system."
In short the last two years have been about trying to defeat Trump but the attackers are looking more and more wounded, and
Trump, well, he's hanging in there. General Kelly and others have described Trump's work ethic as exhausting.
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) paid $100,000 for Facebook ads and then charged its customers for the clickbait service (between
25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content). So even if the IRA didn't manage to make a profit, the net cost for them must have been much lower than $100,000. Does anyone
know how much revenue it made from that operation? Facebook must know but they've kept quiet about it. Same with Mueller.
Thank you, b. I am so glad I did not vote for Obama a second time around. A very rotten duopoly has taken over the US government,
all based on the premise that money is speech and money runs government, the people be damned. Hence the shutdown being orchestrated
by money, with Trump in the crosshairs.
I also very much adhere to your final paragraph's sentences. Let no one be in any doubt - what is underway is no less than
traitorous activity, a clear violation of the US Constitution, motivated by corrupt individuals whose meanness is beyond dispute.
How it can be redressed at this very late stage beggars the mind; I can only hope it be done as peacefully as possible.
If this is really true, then it's a clear sign of decline: Obama sacrificed a huge chunk of American freedom just for the sake
of personal political revenge. The USA is transitioning from a laissez faire to a highly burocratized, byzantine economy.
Shortly after the USSR's experiment with communism collapsed, I read an article which suggested that if the noise from that fall
was loud, even louder will be the noise when the second shoe (the American experiment with capitalism) falls.
And this is the crux of why I appreciate The Donald. His is the most honest face the US can present to the world at this point
in time. So look at it closely, and marvel at where we have come to.
I am so glad I did not vote for Obama a second time around.
LOL (first time I've ever written this!)
You made the same mistake I did in 2008. The deck was really stacked in that election, though I was too blind to see it at
the time. Smiling & smooth-talking black face issuing zillions of promises, and this was right after the Codpiece Commander. It
took me a whole year to realize I'd been suckered, and by 2012 understood the fix was STILL on. Obama had lost most all of his
glitter by then, so the Power Elites arranged his opposition to be a financial predator/Mormon bishop paired up with the most
awful Libertarian POS I've ever seen. Speaking the honest truth here, I'd prefer to have Sarah Palin as POTUS to Paul Ryan. What
a combo! That's why I offered anybody I met 10:1 odds on Obama winning. Hillary thought she had had seen a winning pattern from
all that, and arranged to have as her opponent a fellow named Donald Trump.
@15 Zachary Smith "How else to interpret 'only the merest scratch of a womaniser' or 'how clean Trump has managed to keep himself'."
Zachary Smith, I have been posting here for a number of years, and on this I have to agree with the newcomer Tess Ting
Trump has been put under intense investigation by Deep State hacks who are determined to see him impeached.
And all they have come up with is that he is a compulsive pussy-grabber (no shit, hey?).
To my mind Trump is a very offensive human being, but that isn't an impeachable character trait.
I had assumed that he would have skeletons in his cupboard that would be grounds for impeachment.
Well, if he has then he has hidden them extraordinarily well, because Mueller with all his resources hasn't found any.
Indeed, Mueller's investigation is so well-resourced that the only conclusion I can reach is that Trump has no such skeletons.
As I say, that is extraordinary.
But - apparently - also true.
Blooming Barricade , Jan 13, 2019 9:21:09 PM |
link
Astonishing how out in the open the military coup plotting against Venezuela is right now, it was consisted an outrage to overthrow
Allende and that was even before direct proof of US involvement, now the anti-war and left wing consciousness of the public and
the intellectual class has been so corroded that nobody care and many even see an attempted coup as a god thing. The ideological
counter revolution in full swing.
@ Yeah, Right who wrote:
"
Indeed, Mueller's investigation is so well-resourced that the only conclusion I can reach is that Trump has no such skeletons.
"
I would just bring your attention to the possibility that bringing Trump down brings them down as well. Your assertion that
Trump doesn't have any skeletons in the closet is laughable.
Also consider that most of what is known comes from compromised sources and much of the house of cards we live is built on
sketchy assumptions.
Cui Bono for Trump?
I am beginning to understand how Trump fits the elite plan and instead of your "grab them by the pussy" thought change it to
"they have him by the balls". They played his ego to get him to run the race and then, gee, he won.
I now see Trump as the last great hope of the elite to carve out as big a chunk as they can of the new world....and try and
hold onto it. The ongoing proxy conflicts will keep the musical chair game playing for a bit more but then something is going
to stop the music.
A shrink told me once that after fire came music. What comes after music?
How did I know that you would be first up after b's exhaustive story on the IC's corruption and utterly obvious attempt to
take Trump down to cry, "Fiction."
Here is a reply to all your points:
- yes, the Russia-bad narrative was picking up steam before Trump's election. The MSM and TPTB incorrectly surmised that there
would be enough anti-Russia fervor among the masses that pinning the accusation on Trump would stick. It did not. It is evidence
of THEIR stupidity.
- you must have never heard of keeping your enemies close. The Clintons are powerbrokers. Trump used them. Maybe he did like them
at one point, but clearly shat on his relationship with them and since the election they have truly been trashed and unable to
recover any good fortune or power. The Dems made a mistake will backing HRC. They weren't acting under Deep State orders once
again, Occam's Razor dictates that stupidity is the culprit here.
- How does FBI informant in campaign neccessarily implicate Trump in conspiracy and not confirm IC's weasely attempts to dig up
dirt?
- Look at prior Repub primaries? Notice anything? Populists don't float in the Yacht Club Party, do they? Trump was an anomoly
indicitive of the times (again, Occam's Razor).
- Again, it is absolutely absurd and suspicious that you can not admit that the Dems are a party of retards and that they consistently
step over quarters to pick up pennies.
- Your opinion that Trump's policies do not differ from the Dems needs qualifying. I don't agree that his domestic policies align
and verdict is still out on his FP. We know he is not a True-Believer, which is good.
- British involvement again suggests that the IC is compromised and globalized yielding national sovereignty to centralized planning.
Trump deserves that ire and proves that there is a contest afoot.
If Trump's corporate bankruptcies are so well-known, and picked over several times by different media sources (even Snopes
has covered them), surely any other behaviour or incident that might call Trump's character or ethics into question must have
been uncovered by Robert Mueller by now?
I can't imagine the scale of exploding heads among the media talking heads and the establishment of the two parties, IF, Trump
gets re-elected. DC would be in serious melt down. After 4 years of continuous assault the voters may actually repudiate the corporate
media and the DC elites in the 2020 elections.
In any case with the Democrat candidates starting to announce we are essentially into the next presidential campaign. I don't
think it is smart to under-estimate Trump's electoral chances.
"Normally the FBI needs to clear such counter-intelligence investigations with the Justice Department. In this case it did
not do so at all:"This sounds like the same "kangaroo court" MO Scott Ritter detailed a few years ago:
"Simply put, the Russia NIA is not an "IC-coordinated" assessment -- the vehicle for such coordination, the NIC, was not directly
involved in its production, and no NIO was assigned as the responsible official overseeing its production. Likewise, the Russia
NIA cannot be said to be the product of careful coordination between the CIA, NSA and FBI -- while analysts from all three agencies
were involved in its production, they were operating as part of a separate, secretive task force operating under the close supervision
of the Director of the CIA, and not as an integral part of their home agency or department."
Why does it have to be either-or?; it could have been for insurance AND warmongering narrative/dog whistling.
Escalation towards war with Russia was a matter of public record in late pre-election 2016, thanks to Clinton News Network
... now ask yourselves where is that general in the press conference nowadays?
NemesisCalling @31: Here is a reply to all your points
Well, you haven't replied to all my points, nor have you addressed the the thrust of my remarks. But I'll answer the issues
that you raised so my view is clear to everyone.
= - yes, the Russia-bad narrative was picking up steam before Trump's election. The MSM and TPTB incorrectly surmised that there
would be enough anti-Russia fervor among the masses that pinning the accusation on Trump would stick. It did not. It is evidence
of THEIR stupidity. Wrong. Firstly, I was referring to the anti-Russia imperative in official circles NOT to the propaganda effort. That imperative
intensified greatly after Russia blocked USA-proxy takeover of Syria (2013), and Crimea and Donbas (2014). In fact,
Kissinger
wrote a WSJ Op-Ed in Aug 2014 that issued a cryptic call for MAGA.
"picking up steam before Trump's election" needs some unpacking. The anti-Russia fervor among the masses has been
entirely concocted, and mostly AFTER 2014.
Nothing has stuck to Trump because there's no substance to the allegations.
= - you must have never heard of keeping your enemies close. The Clintons are powerbrokers. Trump used them. Maybe he did like
them at one point, but clearly shat on his relationship with them and since the election they have truly been trashed and unable
to recover any good fortune or power. The Dems made a mistake will backing HRC. They weren't acting under Deep State orders once
again, Occam's Razor dictates that stupidity is the culprit here. What does Occam's Razor have to say about the remarkable continuity of US foreign and domestic policy for the last 30 years?
Trump and the Clintons were known to be close. Even their daughter's were/are close.
Are you unaware of the CIA connections of Clinton, Bush, and Obama? Should we assume that Trump is free of any such connection?
= - How does FBI informant in campaign neccessarily implicate Trump in conspiracy and not confirm IC's weasely attempts to dig
up dirt? The FBI informant (Felix Sater) worked for Trump from about 2001 to 2013. This was essentially the same period in which Mueller
was FBI Director. Mueller and Comey are close and are connected to the Clinton's.
The informant wasn't investigating Trump or digging up dirt on him, he was informing on the Russian mob, and probably using
employment by Trump to get closer to the mob. FBI/counter intel might have also used info provided to turn some of the Russians
into US intel assets.
= - Look at prior Repub primaries? Notice anything? Populists don't float in the Yacht Club Party, do they? Trump was an anomoly
indicitive of the times (again, Occam's Razor). Have you heard of the Tea Party? Have you heard of Obama using the IRS against the Tea Party? Seems that a Republican populist
would get a lot of votes against the hated Hillary who championed Obama's "legacy".
- Again, it is absolutely absurd and suspicious that you can not admit that the Dems are a party of retards and that they
consistently step over quarters to pick up pennies. You can't admit that the Dem's have failed the left so consistently that it is unlikely to be due to their mental capacity
or an accident of circumstance.
= - Your opinion that Trump's policies do not differ from the Dems needs qualifying. I don't agree that his domestic policies
align and verdict is still out on his FP. We know he is not a True-Believer, which is good. I didn't say that they don't differ from the Dems, I said that Trump policies are consistent with policies of previous Administrations
and that Hillary likely would've ruled in much the same way.
= - British involvement again suggests that the IC is compromised and globalized yielding national sovereignty to centralized
planning. Trump deserves that ire and proves that there is a contest afoot The US IC is undoubtedly primary and universally acknowledged to be the lead in the US-Brit Intel relationship.
The only 'contest' I can discern is how best to fool the people.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
You seem to believe that a populist outsider can be elected President. And, you also believe that a US President can be both
all powerful (Obama) or constrained by Deep State whim (Trump).
You also seem to believe that Trump's rhetoric is gospel-truth and means what you think it does. Surprise! "Negotiation with
Russia" doesn't mean peace. Troop 'pull out' doesn't mean it'll happen any time soon (and possibly never). Anti-TPP doesn't mean
he won't implement TPP provisions in other trade agreements. Etc.
PS The establishment doesn't benefit DESPITE our populist President's, they benefit BECAUSE we are willing to believe that
our populist President's work for US.
Jr, it was a fruitless endeavor, to be sure, but I gave it a shot.
For the record, I never counted Trump as savior, although he could very well be if he continues on getting caught with his
dick in his hand as the empire around him crumbles. He's not a true believer, but he can at the very least be a useful idiot for
the real anti-imperialists in the world.
It is of note that Oleg Deripaska is not a stranger to the world of politics and politicians. Before his fortunes changed dramatically,
Oleg Deripaska was well-known for entertaining world politicians on his luxury yacht moored off Kassiopi in the northwest corner
of the Greek Island of Corfu.
The Rothschilds have an estate outside Kassiopi. Among the many high-powered friends and guests
of Deripaska was UK Tory politician, George Osborne, who visited him on his yacht at Kassiopi while still British Chancellor of
the Exchequer. Osborne and EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, a powerful force in Tony Blair's government, were both guests at a
function held aboard the yacht in 2008. Baron Mandelson's position in the EU, at the time, led to accusations of a conflict of
interest.
Among other movers and shakers, John McCain was also a friend of Oleg Deripaska, but that friendship may have soured
after the virtual collapse of the Russian billionaire companies. McCain was more a fairweather friend than a stalwart ally through
thick and thin. The reason I mention these tidbits is because the corporate media fails to join all the pieces that show just
how corrupt Western politicians have become.
For a thorough update on the Integrity Initiative and its offshoots, check out the latest from legal investigator Barbara Boyd.
To defeat the "Deep State" in the U.S., it is essential to understand the role of British Intelligence. While it is essential
to know the role of Hillary Clinton, Obama, Comey, DOJ/FBI operatives, et.al., it is even more important to understand the geopolitical
assumptions behind Russiagate. And for that, one must turn to the British.
It would help to get a handle on the precise nature and format of these FBI "under oath" fishing expeditions if the FBI released
transcripts of a few of the recent hi-profile Q & A sessions. If suspects are being convicted for misdemeanors of dubious relevance
to the stated aim of the Mueller Crusade then transcripts would allow inconsistencies to be counted and evaluated. It would also
be interesting to discover whether the FBI uses a seductive approach to questioning, or a confrontational approach, given the
petty nature of the 'crimes' exposed to date.
The aim of the counterintelligence operation and of the
Russiagate hoax was not to build a prosecution
case against President Trump. It was to put the United States in constitutional limbo by creating a parallel and competing center
of constitutional legitimacy.
The Obama Administration would live on in the structure of this "investigation", without ever having
to relinquish power to Trump. The investigation would form the center of "The Resistance", with the ability to question the legitimacy
of the Trump Administration.
I didn't say that they don't differ from the Dems, I said that Trump policies are consistent with policies of previous Administrations
and that Hillary likely would've ruled in much the same way.
This is very true but only in the same sort of overgeneralised sense with you populate your latest CT. That is, sweep any of
the plainly ridiculous assumptions in your theory under the widest possible rug available to conspiratards.
At least you aint exactly drinking the Orange Kool-Aid like so many of the posters on this thread. That's a big positive in
my book. As for them, it's more a reflection of the love for rightwing authoritarianism than for Trump himself. What they really
wish for is a crafier, shrewder Amerikkkan version of Putin, but they accept Trump because his bumbling is the existential proof
of US decline in relative power, as if such proof was necessary.
And if you overlook all Trump's achievements (such as they are):
1. Obamacare/Medicaid expansion repeal and subsequent degradation of the enrollment and funding processes by executive degree
when appeal failed thanks only to McCain's "in yo office sucka" thumbs down vote.
2. Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations (basically same thing)
3. SCOTUS and federal bench selections
The US system is meant to create a uniparty environment whereby opposing views are compromised into a "third way" legislative
process.
I grok this system is broken and completely controlled by the wealthiest (show me a political system anywhere that you prefer
that is not controlled by the wealthiest) but the funding mechanisms need changing before there will ever be significant change
to governing processes.
Trump through his ignorance, corruption and loose lips has tilted the playing field left. Hilliary through her elitism, arrogance,
corruption and lack of retail political skills gets a big assist in the same tilting.
Those who believe (if any truly do) that Trump represents anything more than the end of Reaganist conservatism are "wishin'
and hopin'" as Dusty Springfield would say.
I do applaud those who are willing to show in the comments that they suffer from the real "Trump Derangement Syndrome," such
as your good buddy James. They're all crooks, in his opinion.
So what is it Jim? Do you excuse Trump only or do you excuse them all? LMAO
Putin January 2017 - "You know, there is a category of people who leave without saying goodbye, out of respect for the situation
that has evolved, so as not to upset anything. And then there are people who keep saying goodbye but don't leave. I believe the
outgoing administration belongs to the second category.
What are we seeing in the United States? We are seeing the continuation of an acute internal political struggle despite the
fact that the presidential election is over and it ended in Mr Trump's convincing victory. Nevertheless, in my opinion, several
goals are being set in this struggle. Maybe there are more, but some of them are perfectly obvious."
The first is to undermine the legitimacy of the US president-elect. By the way, in this regard, I would like to point out that
whether deliberately or not, these people are causing enormous damage to US interests. Simply enormous. The impression is that,
after a practice run in Kiev, they are now ready to organise a Maidan in Washington to prevent Trump from taking office."
Posted by: pretzelattack , Jan 14, 2019 10:05:43 AM |
link
sure, no doubt trump has been involved in financial improprieties; this in no way means he colluded with Russia to fix the election,
or that russia on its own hacked the election, or any of the other false narratives the ic is trying to cram down our throats
with the connivance of the msm and (mostly, but there are some republicans pushing it, too) the "centrist" dems.
And the clintons have their own skeletons, but they seem to be judgement proof with the aid of comey et al.
The only real difference between Trump and the Clintons at end of the day is they are smart lawyers who obviously better understand
how to navigate the treacherous legal waters surrounding them.
They also know what the definition of "is, is" and how to carefully craft their words in public, while Trump is all loose cannon
all the time ahd his legal representation appears to follow his lead, IE Giuliani and Cohen.
Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Jan 14, 2019 9:45:39 AM | 45:
We are seeing the continuation of an acute internal political struggle despite the fact that the presidential election is
over and it ended in Mr Trump's convincing victory.
Not really. What we are seeing is Deep State controlled media force-feeding the public a toxic concoction: the narrative of a
political struggle that centers on anti-Russia hysteria.
Maybe you missed Romney's Op-Ed in which he praised Trump's pro-establishment policies while attacking his Russia-friendly
'pull out' from Syria. That's the best example of the two-faced establishment bullsh*t.
Welcome to the rabbit hole.
Robert Snefjella , Jan 14, 2019 10:57:29 AM |
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What is loosely called 'globalism', consisting of various trends and ideologies and practices: the EU and the aborted for now
'North American Union' and satellites, and cell phones able to instantly transmit images from the other side of the planet, and
so on, has also importantly aimed at and advocated for and implemented various means by which national sovereignty was eroded.
And this erosion meant a reduction of the ability of a country's people to wield an effective national politics, let alone
something vaguely democratic, or to implement policies which were at odds with the various globalist institutions and imperatives
and programs. So we've seen on numerous occasions, for example, the IMF impose its globalist economic 'recipe' on a nation's economic
policies.
And even the destruction of Libya in 2011 was primarily or importantly directed at preventing Libya from implementing a national
financial strategy intended to give African countries an alternative to the depredations of global financial 'business as usual'.
But over the last two years the movement to restore or renovate national sovereignty has made something of a comeback.
So for example, Macron as recently as roughly two years ago was being lauded as a great new leader of the globalist project,
and both he and Merkel have gone on record decrying the very concept of national sovereignty.
But now Macron and Merkel are largely reviled, especially Macron, by their people, and 'populist' enthusiasm strengthens. You
can see the same trend in virtually every European country.
And in the United States, the tens of millions of 'deplorables' backing Trump are doing so partly, perhaps mostly, because
he champions the restoration of national sovereignty and has questioned dominant globalist institutions.
Now for those who are committed to the view that Trump doesn't really mean it, that he isn't really an American nationalist,
and so on, well, fine, believe what you like. But in the end, Trump's base of support is nationalistic, and that is as I noted
above a very general trend that is quickly manifesting.
Re. the USA, when the handmaidens of power, aka politicians, the servant class in an oligarchic corporatist 'state,' are alarmingly
seen to fight to the death in public it is crystal clear that control (which may take the shape of relatively informal and obscure
networks ) is lost, .. > the 'fight' will only serve to weaken all parties.
Trump is loathed because he upset the apple cart and revealed weakness and fissures in the system. (+ possibly because he is
an upstart, from the wrong side of whatever, has bad hair, is dumb, a thief, more )
He ran as an anti-establishment maverick:
"Drain the Swamp!"
"Lock her up!"
"Build the Wall!"
- and was elected only for that reason. It was disconcertingly easy to do, which is also terrifying to the PTB. Plus, election/voter
fraud did not perform as expected - help !! The MSM promoted him with mega 24/24 coverage - help !!
As the no. 1 disruptive foe is merely an elderly scummy biz type, an intruder, some other entity like malignant agressive Russia
had to be associated with him. (Yes, is was Obama-Clinton who started the highjinks + the following Mueller investig.; see b at
top - also, bashing Russia gradually took wing as it recovered under Putin, the Ukraine plots did not work out, etc. *Crimea!*
the last straw! ..)
If Obama had announced that 2K USA personnel were to be withdrawn from Syria because the good folks want their wonderful husbands
and wives, great ppl, our folks, home soon, they have dutifully served, etc. the MSM and anyone who bothered to digest that news
would have clapped and sent off pixel sparkles and sweet tweets.
Very difficult to judge: what is the result of infighting in the US vs. any agreed-on never mind coherent foreign policy? That
the question is even asked - all over the world now - spells stage one collapse.
Now for those who are committed to the view that Trump doesn't really mean it, that he isn't really an American nationalist,
and so on, well, fine, believe what you like. But in the end, Trump's base of support is nationalistic ..."
Did Obama really mean it when he touted "Change You Can Believe In"? No. His rhetoric was meant to turn the page
from the Bush Administration excesses and convince the world that USA was not the threat that they perceived us to be. In fact,
he was given a Nobel Prize for essentially not being Bush. But it was all psyop. Obama refused to hold CIA accountable for rendition
and torture, refused to stop NSA pervasive spying, conducted covert wars and regime change ops, bragged of his drone targeting
skills, made Bush tax cuts permanent, bailed out bankers, etc.
Does Trump really mean his nationalism? Only to the extent that a nationalist was needed to meet the challenge from Russia
and China. People don't fight for globalist principals.
US is still a member of NATO, still involved in the Middle East, still has hundreds of bases around the world.
Trump's nationalist credentials are further belied by such things as: adding TPP provisions to the new North American trade
agreement; attacking Syria based on false flags; arming Ukraine; pulling out of the INF treaty and engaging in an unnecessary
and costly arms race; actively seeking to overthrow the governments of Iran and Venezuela; etc.
Is there a requirement for an open trial on these sort of things. I'm not sure about the US, but normally gag orders are all
that's required to keep something quiet. All the people around Trump could be taken down in this way with charges that would stick.
Apparently the only one they cannot take down in this way is the president (Another post up now at SST on the legalities of investigating
the president). As far as I know, the president can only be taken down by impeachment so I guess they wouldn't try to use collusion
with Israel for that unless they could keep what they were impeaching him for secret.
And in the United States, the tens of millions of 'deplorables' backing Trump are doing so partly, perhaps mostly, because
he champions the restoration of national sovereignty and has questioned dominant globalist institutions.
Yes, "Amerikkka First" represents nationalism for sure. Many, maybe most Amerikkkans have always been nationalistic and detest
globalist structures because they view them as limiting Amerikkka's rightful global sovereignty. This is a fine distinction
I believe gets lost in commentary such as yours. Trump isn't looking to retreat from Amerikkkan Exceptionalism at all, it his
raison d etre for the tariffs and increases in military spending.
The movement which elected Trump represents the nostalgic view of a lost Amerikkkan dominance over the globe, which of course
they blame on those hated Democratic and Republican establishment globalists, Bushes, Clintons and Obama.
You see all that and then assume that the Hillary-Trump contest was genuine?
Why not assume that the Deep State's candidate won in every election since Carter and work from there.
That first is a difficult one to answer, for I quite agree with you on the second part. Rigged elections from Carter on to
the present day matches my own thoughts as well. In 2000 "they" had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get their man in
office, but GWB did indeed move into the White House.
My own theory about 2016 is that everybody miscalculated. Trump was (IMO) running as an ego-building publicity stunt. Hillary
(and her Deep State sponsors) had actively helped Trump get the nomination with hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity
which also enhanced the bottom lines of Big Media. His multiple flaws were airbrushed away. Hillary ran a horrible campaign because
she is an arrogant and "entitled" woman. The incompetence of that campaign simply didn't uncover the extent to which she was hated
by so many people. (myself included, but I didn't vote for the torture-loving Trump, either)
The biggest mistake of all was not having any plan in place to use the touch-screen voting systems (think "Diebold") to
nail down her victory. Again an opinion, but I think that was judged to be a little too risky plus the fact it was obviously
totally unnecessary. Hillary didn't have a "loss" speech prepared, and Trump didn't have a "victory" one.
This is why I call Trump an "accidental" President. I'll admit the Deep State has reacted pretty well since 2016, but they're
still playing catchup. Israel - to name just one - remains in shell shock.
Further to American's general support for Trump's declared intention of reduction of troops in Syria and Afghanistan, the Daily
Caller on the 9th of January 2019 cited 56 % in support, 20 % not sure, and 27 % opposing. This is after MSM and general national
political outrage and 'deep concern' over Trump's decision.
Note that US involvement in Syria has been justified by the most lurid of lies and disinfo continually poured for years into
American's psyches. For Tulsi Gabbard to have a direct conversation with Assad (the designated 'butcher of Damascus', the 'horrid
monstrous dictator' accused over and over of attacking his own people, often with chemical weapons from barrel bombs, and especially
targeting children and hospitals: the man can have no soul, no heart! We must help the Syrians in their struggle against this
animal!) was an outrage!
So not only do most Americans want American troops out of Syria, it would seem that there is some growing immunity among the
people of the United States to their diet of diseased propaganda.
The populist hero must be portrayed as an "outsider" that takes on the establishment. Obama was positioned in much the same way.
Trump is no "outsider". He is very establishment. Even before running for President, he had access that ordinary people never
get.
Trump only won because of a bizarre technicality of the American electoral system.
You are directing our attention to what the establishment wants us to see. It ignores Hillary's spectacular failure: snubbing
of Sanders progressives; Cold shoulder to black voters; insult to white voters ("deplorables"); choosing not to campaign in crucial
states; the wierdness of Bill Clinton being discovered meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch (Bill Clinton is one of
the most recognizable people in America - why why why would be meeting with the Attorney General on an airport tarmac?), etc.
If the race were easy, Trump woundn't be a populist hero, would he? And Hillary's winning the popular vote is a nice consolation
prize to the Clinton's. Plus, it nicely sets up the fake Deep State vs. Trump conflict.
While Trump is a member of the elite establishment that practically owns the country he has always been a pariah for one main
reason. He does not honor the unspoken code of never exposing inside information about other elite members. He is a big mouth.
Given that, the establishment and their propaganda arm of the media have been out to get him even before he was elected. His presidency
has largely been an inside struggle. However, Trump is clever and crafty. During his tenure he has been give access to tremendous
amounts of information about his political enemies and he continues to bait, insult and fire them, pushing them deeper and deeper
into insanity.
He will fight fire with fire. If they attempt to impeach him he will tit for tat release information incriminating
his enemies. I view this as a positive direction for the US in the long run. ALL of these people need to be banished to "Elba".
Maybe they will fight to the death of both sides. One can dream.
"... "Democratic hopes for a wave election that could carry them to a significant House majority have been tempered in recent weeks amid a shifting political landscape ." ..."
Harley Schlanger – After months of hyping the prospects for a Democratic Party sweep
into control of the U.S. House in the November 6 midterm elections, the anti-Trump fanatics in
the "Fake News" mainstream media seem to be recognizing that the dramatic change in thinking
among Americans, which led to Donald Trump's victory in November 2016, was not a momentary
phenomenon.
The lead election story in the {Washington Post} on October 21 reflects this recognition, in
its opening sentence:; "Democratic hopes for a wave election that could carry them to a
significant House majority have been tempered in recent weeks amid a shifting political
landscape ." While the rest of the article is full of the usual slanders against the
President and his supporters, the underlying tone reflects the fear of those behind the coup
attempt to topple Trump, that Americans have awakened to the fact that the British, and their
allies among the Obama-Clinton Democrats, Bush Republicans, and lying media, remain committed
to overturning the result of the 2016 election.
Trump has been holding election rallies across the country, with large, wildly enthusiastic
crowds greeting him, cheering his charge that his opponents are conducting a witch hunt against
him, due to their fear that he -- and they -- are taking the country back from the
free-trading, war-mongering, anti-growth globalists who drove the nation into a ditch during
the Bush and Obama administrations. That the media continues to distort his comments, and to
push instead the largely-rejected fake narrative of "Russian meddling-Trump collusion" as being
responsible for his election, only serves to strengthen the anti-establishment mood of the
voters, which does not always show up in the polls.
To fully defeat the coup, it is essential that the British role in initiating "Russiagate"
be exposed , as it also explains the slavish devotion to British imperial geopolitics that
characterized the approach of the Bush and Obama administrations, and was embraced by his 2016
opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump won his election by ruthlessly exposing how those policies
risked triggering World War III and a global economic crash, and voters responded to his
promise to work for peaceful cooperation with Russia and China, and against the predatory City
of London/Wall Street financial system.
It is therefore highly significant that the former U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C.,
Joseph DiGenova, identified the British role explicitly in an interview with that city's radio
station, WMAL, on October 15. Asked about the delay in declassifying documents related to the
secret FISA Court warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, DiGenova identified the hand of
British intelligence, in collaboration with the Obama Administration, which would be proven
once those documents become public. The British and the Australian governments begged for Trump
to delay the declassification.
The release of these documents is what scares the British, he said. "British MI6 conducted
illegal electronic surveillance on U.S. citizens at the request of the FBI and [CIA's] Brennan
.Illegal spying by the Brits. That's why the Brits are going crazy."
"That's a remarkable issue," he continued. "We talk about domestic surveillance all the
time. But when you stretch out to work with foreign governments–read 'collude'–to
spy on an American citizen, that really opens up an entirely different can of worms. It opens
up a huge criminal liability on the part of American intelligence officials, especially
Brennan. Brennan actually visited London, before all this started, and visited MI6 and GCHQ
before it started ."
After speaking further about the complicity of Obama intelligence officials in illegal
spying and involvement in the coup attempt, DiGenova explained how they planted the Russiagate
story through a typical FBI sting operation. The documents "will show Halper [a joint asset of
the CIA and MI6] used a CIA agent to entrap Papadopoulos and Page [two low-level Trump campaign
advisers], and funnel back to U.S. [lies about Russian involvement], to the FBI, to get the
FISA warrant. [To get] MI6 and GCHQ to do illegal overseas surveillance of the these
people–totally illegal! The application [for a FISA warrant] presents [Page] as in
cahoots. They knew it was all fabricated." He characterized the entire operation as "so much
worse than Watergate."
DiGenova warned that "if Republicans lose the House, these investigations are over because
[Senate Intelligence Chair] Burr is a chicken–the only way it will come out is through a
criminal investigation by DOJ, and that won't happen unless Sessions and Rosenstein are gone
after the election. If we lose the House, all of the investigations come to an end. Every one
of them."
President Trump is well aware of this, and that is why he is making it a theme of his
campaign rallies. As the [Washington Post] story reveals, this strategy is having an effect,
and threatens to derail the hopes of the anti-Trumpers for taking over the Congress on November
6, as winning a Democratic majority is a pre-condition for an impeachment of the President.
He essentially became a Republican Obama, save Nobel Peace Price. If Obama was/is a CIA-democrat, this guy is a
Deep State controlled republican. In any case he betrayed his voters in a way that resembles Obama betrayal. One has a
fake slogan "change we can believe in" that other equally fake "Make [middle] America Great Again" (which means restoration
of well-being of middle class and working class in my book, not the continuation of Obama foreign wars, and tax cuts for for
corporations and super rich.
And that means that he lost a considerable part of his electorate: the anti-war republicans
and former Sanders supporters. He might do good and not to try to run in 2020. He definitely is no economic nationalist.
Compare his policies with Tucker Carlson Jan 2, 2019
speech to see the difference. He is
"national neoliberal" which rejects parts of neoliberal globalization based on treaties and
prefer to bully nations to compliance that favor the US interests instead of treaties.
And his "fight" with the Deep State resemble so closely to complete and unconditional
surrender, that you might have difficulties to distinguish between the two.
Most of his appointees would make Hillary proud. That that extends beyond rabid neocons like Haley, Mattis, Bolton and
Pompeo.
Notable quotes:
"... The Washington Post is without a doubt the most pro-establishment among all large mainstream publications, not only do they defend the narratives of the Deep State but actively attacks anyone who challenges them. ..."
"... Jeff Bezos owner of the Washington Post is also a contractor with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board all part of doing everything he can to cozy up and ingratiate himself to the establishment on which his empire is built. ..."
"... It's really sad that people in the public believe this stuff. It's insane and ridiculous. We're living in an Insane Asylum and the ones who should be there for the safety of themselves and others are walking around giving orders to Media and USG, fomenting war and making a mockery of laws and "normal behaviors. ..."
"... They flooded the news with the old Helsinki/Putin stuff to hide the real news. Lisa Page's testimony revealed that John Carlin, Mueller's former chief of staff was running the Russia investigation from the DOJ end, showing another conflict of Mueller's. Now Mueller is covering for two best friends, Comey and Carlin and he has to frame Trump to save them. ..."
"... The testimony also showed FBI David Bowditch was heavily involved, and Bowditch is now 2nd in command at the FBI and blocking the public release of witness testimony, and one reason for it is it reveals his involvement. ..."
"... It is also now revealed that John Brennan CIA had the dossier before the FBI, and the dossier was likely written by Nellie Ohr, who belonged to a CIA group, and then the dossier was laundered by Steele to look like foreign intelligence to get the Crossfire Hurricane investigation started on Trump. You would think it would be big news that Russians may have had nothing to do with the dossier but the media doesn't see it that way ..."
Washington
Post stating that he "has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details" of his
discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin - telling Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in a
phone interview that he would be willing to release the details of a private conversation in
Helsinki last summer.
"I would. I don't care," Trump told Pirro, adding: "I'm not keeping anything under wraps. I
couldn't care less."
"I mean, it's so ridiculous, these people making up," Trump said of the WaPo report.
The president referred to his roughly two-hour dialogue with Putin in Helsinki -- at which
only the leaders and their translators were present -- as "a great conversation" that
included discussions about "securing Israel and lots of other things."
"I had a conversation like every president does," Trump said Saturday. "You sit with the
president of various countries. I do it with all countries." -
Politico
In July an attempt by House Democrats to subpoena Trump's Helsinki interpreter was quashed
by Republicans.
"The Washington Post is almost as bad, or probably as bad, as the New York Times," Trump
said.
When Pirro asked Trump about a Friday night New York Times report that the FBI had opened an
inquiry into whether he was working for Putin, Pirro asked Trump "Are you now or have you ever
worked for Russia, Mr. President?"
"I think it's the most insulting thing I've ever been asked," Trump responded. "I think it's
the most insulting article I've ever had written."
Trump went on an
epic tweetstorm Saturday following the Times article, defending his 2017 firing of former
FBI Director James Comey, and tweeting that he has been "FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush
or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President. At the same time, & as I have often
said, getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. I fully expect that someday
we will have good relations with Russia again!"
rumcho
Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for Washington Post, five years later he gets a government contract with the CIA for $600
million. Are you connecting the dots? You do the numbers. This is how fascism works. Bezos is a crony capitalist joker.
is Trump waiting for Mueller to lay down his cards? Head him off at the pass and arrest Obama, Rice, Jarrett, Lynch, Comey,
Rosenstein and McCabe all on day 1
best defense is a good offense. Make the narrative about Dem sedition not impending House impeachment hearings.
You are President, start acting like it. Make them fear you.
your re-election depends on Mike Obama not being your opponent.
Let it Go
WaPo, again?
The Washington Post is without a doubt the most pro-establishment among all large mainstream publications, not only do
they defend the narratives of the Deep State but actively attacks anyone who challenges them.
Jeff Bezos owner of the Washington Post is also a contractor with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board all
part of doing everything he can to cozy up and ingratiate himself to the establishment on which his empire is built. The
article below delves into how WaPo is behind many of the big stories that manipulate America and moves the needle of public
opinion in huge ways.
It's really sad that people in the public believe this stuff. It's insane and ridiculous. We're living in an Insane Asylum
and the ones who should be there for the safety of themselves and others are walking around giving orders to Media and USG,
fomenting war and making a mockery of laws and "normal behaviors.
shadow54
They flooded the news with the old Helsinki/Putin stuff to hide the real news. Lisa Page's testimony revealed that
John Carlin, Mueller's former chief of staff was running the Russia investigation from the DOJ end, showing another conflict
of Mueller's. Now Mueller is covering for two best friends, Comey and Carlin and he has to frame Trump to save them.
The testimony also showed FBI David Bowditch was heavily involved, and Bowditch is now 2nd in command at the FBI and
blocking the public release of witness testimony, and one reason for it is it reveals his involvement.
It is also now revealed that John Brennan CIA had the dossier before the FBI, and the dossier was likely written by
Nellie Ohr, who belonged to a CIA group, and then the dossier was laundered by Steele to look like foreign intelligence to
get the Crossfire Hurricane investigation started on Trump. You would think it would be big news that Russians may have had
nothing to do with the dossier but the media doesn't see it that way.
Then there is the news that Fusion GPS worked with the Democracy Integrity Project and Knew Knowledge to run a fake Russian
bots campaign against Roy Moore. The Democracy Integrity Project was started by Feinstein's aide and with New Knowledge wrote
a report on Russian bots for the Senate Intelligence Committee. So the Senate Intelligence Committee hired creators of fake
Russian bots to write a report on Russian bots.
"... On Friday November 18th The Washington Post reported on a recommendation in "October" that [NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers] Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position: The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed. ..."
"... After the visit by Rogers, Trump vacated Trump Towers. ..."
"On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met
with President-Elect Donald Trump.
On Friday November 18th The Washington Post reported on a recommendation in "October"
that [NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers] Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position: The
heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to President
Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be
removed.
In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers, without notifying
superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower.
Occam's Razor. NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers didn't want to participate in the spying
scheme [on Trump]
(Clapper, Brennan, Etc.), which was the baseline for President Obama's post presidency
efforts to undermine Donald Trump and keep Trump from digging into [who knows what
crimes]"
After the visit by Rogers, Trump vacated Trump Towers.
There is considerable irony in the Mueller 'probe' and the continuing avalanche of MSM
lies and evasions and spin etc pertaining to Trump.
There are trends: A growing US citizen realization that their political system prior to
Trump was nearly completely corrupt; the Clintons are more broadly understood as the
pathological criminals that they are; the Podesta emails with their sick connotations remain
'in the air' - See Ben Swann's work, for example. The Clinton Foundation is far more broadly
understood as a massive criminal enterprise.
Serious criminality at the highest levels of the FBI is now far more obvious to far more
people
MSM as evil propaganda is more widely understood.
It is understood widely that the DNC material to Wikileaks was not 'hacked' (Binney)
From the theintercept.com :
"Pompeo met on October 24 [at Trump's request] with William Binney, a former National
Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis published by a
group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community's
official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year's theft of data from DNC
computers. Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was "leaked," not
hacked, "by a person with physical access" to the DNC's computer system."
In short the last two years have been about trying to defeat Trump but the attackers are
looking more and more wounded, and Trump, well, he's hanging in there. General Kelly and
others have described Trump's work ethic as exhausting.
A perfectly good article, I'm sure, but why diffuse ourselves [and engender feelings of
fear and hopelessness as you express] when a strategic pressure point has presented?
Johnstone makes no mention of Bill Browder. Nor do the [100, so far] commenters.
BILL BROWDER is a key figure in the anti-Trump, anti-Russia hysteria. The notorious Trump
Tower meeting was about the Magnitsky Act, a fabrication by Browder to hide his financial
crimes. Browder "testified" in the Senate expressly to demonize Putin. Browder's contacts in
the IC, the Jewish Lobby, and the fawning media have enabled his propaganda assault this
week. He's appeared -- unchallenged, virtually unquestioned -- on countless talk shows. But
he's been running scared at the mention of interrogation by Russians. There are huge holes in
his story, made clear in his deposition in the Prevezon case. The truth will bring him down!
And perhaps his Deep State supporters, along with him.
Ask your Senators if they've heard/read Browder's 2015 deposition in the Prevezon
case. (See comment 161 under The Untouchable Mr. Browder? by Israel Shamir for
links.)
BTW, have you seen "THE MAGNITSKY ACT – BEHIND THE SCENES" that Phil Giraldi
posted today? Debunking anti-Russian criminal sociopaths like Bill Browder will go a long way
to improving relations. Not to mention easing pressure on the unfortunate Trump.
@RobinG
UWell, we here in Russia know all this (about Browder) for quite a time. What new did you
find? It's just one story in long list of those written and spoken for western idiots like
Scripals
, MH17, chemicals in Syria and WMD in Iraq, Russian meddling in f-n US elections and so on.
Eat it all dummies.
"... By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US. ..."
The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing
foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US.
A bombshell
domestic spy scandal has been unfolding in Britain, after hacked internal communications exposed a covert UK state military-intelligence
psychological warfare operation targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied NATO countries under the cover of fighting
"Russian disinformation."
The leaked documents revealed a secret network of spies, prominent journalists and think-tanks colluding under the umbrella of
a group called "Integrity Initiative" to shape domestic opinion -- and to smear political opponents of the right-wing Tory government,
including the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
Until now, this Integrity Initiative domestic spy scandal has been ignored in the American media, perhaps because it has mostly
involved British names. But it is clear that the influence operation has already been activated in the US. Hacked documents reveal
that the Integrity Initiative is cultivating powerful allies inside the State Department, top DC think tanks, the FBI and the DHS,
where it has gained access to
Katharine Gorka and her
husband, the
fascist-linked cable news pundit
Sebastian Gorka .
The Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its network across the US, meddling in American politics and recruiting
"a new generation of Russia watchers" behind the false guise of a non-partisan charity. Moreover, the group has hired one of the
most notorious American "perception management" specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of pundits and cultivate relationships
with the media.
Back in the UK, Member of Parliament Chris Williamson has clamored for an investigation into the Integrity Initiative's abuse
of public money.
In a
recent editorial , Williamson drew a direct parallel between the group's collaboration with journalists and surreptitious payments
the CIA made to reporters during the Cold War.
"These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in
the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool," Williamson wrote.
"They manipulated the news agenda by recruiting leading journalists to write stories with the express purpose of influencing public
opinion in a particular way," the Labour parliamentarian continued. "Now it seems the British Establishment have dusted off the CIA's
old playbook and is intent on giving it another outing on this side of the Atlantic."
Unmasking a British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine
The existence of the Integrity Initiative was virtually unknown until this November, when the email servers of a previously obscure
British think tank called the Institute for Statecraft were hacked, prompting allegations of Russian intrusion. When the group's
internal documents appeared at a website hosted by Anonymous Europe, the public learned of a covert propaganda network seed-funded
to the tune of over $2 million dollars by the Tory-controlled UK Foreign Office, and run largely by military-intelligence officers.
Through a series of cash inducements, off the record briefings and all-day conferences, the Integrity Initiative has sought to
organize journalists across the West into an international echo chamber hyping up the supposed threat of Russian disinformation --
and to defame politicians and journalists critical of this new Cold War campaign.
A bid for
funding submitted by the Integrity Initiative in 2017 to the British Ministry of Defense promised to deliver a "tougher stance
on Russia" by arranging for "more information published in the media on the threat of Russian active measures."
The Integrity Initiative has also worked through its fronts in the media to smear political figures perceived as a threat to its
militaristic agenda. Its targets have included a Spanish Department of Homeland Security appointee, Pedro Banos, whose nomination
was scuttled thanks a media blitz it secretly orchestrated; Jeremy Corbyn, whom the outfit and its
media cutouts
painted as a useful idiot of Russia; and a Scottish member of parliament, Neil Findlay, whom one of its closest media allies
accused of adopting "Kremlin messaging" for daring to protest the official visit of the far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy
Parubiy -- the founder of two neo-Nazi parties and author of a white nationalist memoir,
"View From The Right."
These smear campaigns and many more surreptitiously orchestrated by the Integrity Initiative offer a disturbing preview of the
reactionary politics it plans to inject into an already toxic American political environment.
Lessons from "The Man Who Sold the War"
A newly released Integrity Initiative document reveals that the outfit plans an aggressive expansion across the US.
The Integrity Initiative claims to have already established a "simple office" in Washington DC, though it does not say where.
It also boasts of partnerships with top DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, CNA, and
close relationships with US officials.
A major hub of Integrity Initiative influence is the State Department's Global Engagement Center, a
de facto US government propaganda operation that was established by President Barack Obama to battle online ISIS recruitment,
but which was rapidly repurposed to counter Russian disinformation following the election of Trump.
He is John Rendon, best known as "The Man Who Sold
The War" -- several wars, in fact, but most notoriously the Iraq invasion. Rendon was the self-described "information warrior"
who planted fake news in the major US-UK media about non-existent WMD threats. With deep ties to the CIA and other military-intelligence
agencies, his PR firm was paid $100 million to organize and sell Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. In 2002, the New York Times
exposed a Pentagon program using Rendon to plant "disinformation" -- including "false stories" and "the blackest of black PR"
-- in media outlets around the world, in order to shape public opinion and sell the Iraq invasion.
John Rendon (left) with Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass, US Africa Command Chief of Staff (photo by US Africom Public Affairs)
Journalist James Bamford outlined a catalogue
of disinformation feats Rendon performed for the Pentagon, such as identifying "the biases of specific journalists and potentially
obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships." Bamford also
found proposals and programs Rendon was involved in that aimed to "'coerce' foreign journalists and plant false information overseas
[and] find ways to 'punish' those who convey the 'wrong message.'"
These tactics seem particularly relevant to his work with the Integrity Initiative, especially considering the internal documents
that reveal further Rendon-style plans to produce reports and studies to be
"fed anonymously into local media." (Among
the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily.)
Keeping Up with the Gorkas
Internal documents also refer to interactions between Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly and top Trump officials like
Katharine Gorka , a vehemently anti-Muslim Department of Homeland Security official, as well as her husband, Sebastian, who earned
right-wing fame during his brief tenure in Trump's White House.
The latter Gorka is an
open supporter of the Hungarian Vitezi Rend, a proto-fascist order that collaborated with Nazi Germany during its occupation
of Hungary. Following Trump's election victory in 2016, Gorka appeared for televised interviews in a black Vitezi Rend uniform.
Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb, with his wife, Katharine, on Election Night
Gorka was among the first figures listed on an itinerary for Donnelly to Washington this September 18 to 22. The itinerary indicates
that the two had breakfast before Donnelly delivered a presentation on "Mapping Russian Influence Activities" at the federally funded
military research center, CNA .
According to the itinerary, Donnelly was granted access to Pentagon officials like
Mara Karlin
, an up-and-coming neoconservative cadre
, and John McCain Institute executive director
Kurt Volker
, another neoconservative operative who also serves as the US Special Representative for Ukraine. Numerous meetings with staffers
inside the State Department's Office of Global Engagement were also detailed.
A Foreign Agent in the State Department?
Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal.
Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation,
misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team
member:
Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with "counter-propaganda," the State Department's
Global Engagement Center
has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My old job at the State Department was
as chief propagandist," confessed former
Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their
own population and I don't necessarily think it's that awful."
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's international network, the Global Engagement
Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian
disinformation smugly explaining how he would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem
smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation. His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message
and destroy the messenger.
Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract.
While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own
Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation
Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.
As a cut-out of the British Foreign Office and Defense Ministry, the Integrity Initiative's work with current and former US officials
and members of the media raises certain legal questions. For one, there is no indication that the group has registered under the
Justice Department's Foreign Agent Registration Act, as most foreign agents of influence are required to do.
Grants from the Neocons' Favorite Foundation
An Integrity Initiative memo states that the right-wing Smith Richardson Foundation has also committed to ponying up funding for
its US network as soon as the group receives 501 c-3 non-profit status. The foundation has already provided it with about $56,000
for covert propaganda activities across Europe.
The Smith Richardson Foundation has old ties to the US intelligence community and controversial cold war influence operations.
According to reporter
Russ Bellant , the foundation was secretly bankrolling radical right-wing "indoctrination campaigns for the American public on
cold war and foreign policy issues" -- programs that got the attention of Senator William Fulbright, who warned then-President Kennedy
of their dangers. At one of these indoctrination seminars, a Smith Richardson Foundation director "told attendees that 'it is within
the capacity of the people in this room to literally turn the State of Georgia into a civil war college,' in order to overcome their
opponents."
Smith Richardson has funded a who's who of the neoconservative movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War. "To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level
in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement,"
wrote journalist
Kelley Vlahos.
Besides Smith Richardson, the Integrity Initiative has stated its intention to apply for grants from the State Department "to
expand the Integrity Initiative activities both within and outside of the USA." This is yet another indicator that the US government
is paying for propaganda targeting its own citizens.
The "Main Event" in Seattle
An Integrity Initiative internal
document argues that because
"DC is well served by existing US institutions, such as those with which the Institute [for Statecraft] already collaborates," the
organization should "concentrate on extending the work of the Integrity Initiative into major cities and key State capitals [sic]
across the USA."
This December 10, the Integrity Initiative organized what it called its "main event" in the US. It was a conference on disinformation
held in Seattle, Washington
under the auspices
of a data firm called Adventium Labs. Together with the Technical Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, the Integrity
Initiative listed Adventium Labs as one of its "first partners outside DC."
Adventium is Minneapolis-based research and development firm that has reaped contracts from the US military, including a
recent $5.4 million cyber-security grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Inside a modest-sized hotel conference room, the Adventium/Integrity event
began with a speech by the Integrity Initiative's Simon Bracey-Lane. Two
years prior, Bracey-Lane appeared on the American political scene as a field worker for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential primary
run, earning media write-ups as the
"Brit for Bernie." Now, the young operator was back in the US as the advance man for a military-intelligence cut-out that specialized
in smearing left-wing political figures like Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader widely regarded as the British version of Sanders.
Bracey-Lane opened his address by explaining that Integrity Initiative director Chris Donnelly had been unable to appear at the
event, possibly because he was bogged down in the scandal back home. He proceeded to read remarks prepared by Donnelly that offered
a window into the frighteningly militaristic mindset the Integrity Initiative aims to impose on the public through their media and
political allies.
According to Donnelly's comments, the West was no longer in a "peace time, rules based environment." From the halls of government
to corporate boardrooms to even the UK's National Health System, "the conclusion is that we have to look for people who suit a wartime
environment rather than peacetime."
During Q&A, Bracey-Lane remarked that "we have to change the definition of war to encompass everything that war now encompasses,"
referring vaguely to various forms of "hybrid warfare."
"There is a great deal to be done in communicating that to young people," he continued. "When we mean being at war we don't mean
sending our boys off to fight. It's right here in our homes."
The emphasis on restructuring society along martial lines mirrored the disturbing thinking also on display in
notes of a private meeting
between Donnelly and Gen. Richard Barrons in 2016. During that chat, the two officers decided that the British military should
be removed from democratic supervision and be able to operate as "an independent body outside politics."
While Bracey-Lane's presentation perfectly captured the military mindset of the Integrity Initiative, the speakers that followed
him offered a diverse array of perspectives on the concept of disinformation, some more nuanced than others. But one talk stood out
from the rest -- not because of its quality, but because of its complete lack thereof.
Reanimating the "Red-Brown" Grifter
Alexander Reid Ross (left) and Emmi Bevensee at the Integrity Initiative's "main event" in Seattle
The presentation was delivered by Alexander Reid Ross, a half-baked political researcher who peddles computer-generated spiderweb
relationship charts to prove the existence of a vast hidden network of "red-brown" alliances and "syncretic media" conspiracies controlled
by puppeteers in Moscow.
Ross is a lecturer on geography at Portland State University with no scholarly or journalistic credentials on Russia. His students
have given him dismal marks at Rate My
Professors, complaining about his "terrible monotone lectures" and his penchant for "insert[ing] his own ideologies into our class."
But with a book, "Against the Fascist Creep," distributed by the well-known anarchist publishing house, AK Press, the middling academic
has tried to make his name as a maverick analyst.
Before the Integrity Initiative was exposed as a military-intelligence front operation, Ross was among a small coterie of pundits
and self-styled disinformation experts that followed the
group's Twitter account. The Integrity Initiative even retweeted his smear of War Nerd podcast co-host John Dolan.
In a series of articles for the Southern Poverty Law Center last year, Ross attempted to bring his warmed-over Cold War theories
to the broader public. He wound up trashing everyone from the co-author of this piece, Max Blumenthal, to Nation magazine publisher
Katrina Vanden Heuvel to Harvard University professor of international relations Stephen Walt as hidden shadow-fascists secretly
controlled by the Kremlin.
The articles ultimately
generated an embarrassing scandal and a series of public
retractions by the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen. And then, like some Dr. Frankenstein for
discredited and buried journalism careers, the British Ministry of Defense-backed Integrity Initiative moved in to reanimate Ross
as a sought-after public intellectual.
Before the Integrity Initiative-organized crowd, Ross offered a rambling recitation of his theory of a syncretic fascist alliance
puppeteered by Russians: "The alt right takes from both this 'red-brown,' it's called, or like left-right syncretic highly international
national of nationalisms, and from the United States' own paleoconservative movement, and it's sort of percolated down through college
organizing, um, and anti-interventionism meets anti-imperialism. Right?"
In a strange twist, Ross appeared on stage at the Integrity Initiative's Seattle event alongside
Emmi Bevensee , a contributor to the left-libertarian
Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank, whose tagline, "a left market anarchist think-tank" expresses its core aim of uniting
far-left anarchists with free-market right-libertarians.
Bevensee , a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona
and self-described "Borderlands anarcho into tech and crypto," concluded her presentation by asserting a linkage between the alternative
news site, Zero Hedge, and the "physical militarized presence in the borderlands" of anti-immigrant vigilantes. Like Bevensee, Ross
has written for C4SS in the past.
The irony of contributors to an anarchist group called the "Center for a Stateless Society" auditioning before The State – the
most jackbooted element of it, in fact – for more opportunities to attack anti-war politicians and journalists, can hardly be overstated.
But closer examination of the history of C4SS veers from irony into something much darker and more unsettling.
Pedophile Co-Founder, White Nationalist Associates
C4SS was co-founded in 2006 by a confessed
child rapist and libertarian activist, Brad Spangler, who set the group up to promote "Market anarchism" to
"replace Marxism on the
left."
When Spangler's child rape confessions emerged in 2015, the Center for Stateless Society founder was
finally drummed out by his colleagues.
There's more: Spangler's understudy and
deputy in the C4SS, Kevin
Carson -- currently listed as the group's "Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory"
-- turned out to be a longtime friend and defender
of white nationalist Keith Preston. Preston's name is prominently plastered on the back of Kevin Carson's book, hailing the C4SS
man as "the Proudhon of our
time" -- a loaded compliment, given Proudhon's unhinged
anti-Semitism . Carson
only disowned Preston in 2009,
shortly before Preston helped white nationalist leader Richard Spencer launch his alt-right webzine, Alternative Right.
The C4SS group currently participates in the annual Koch-backed International
Students For Liberty conference in Washington DC,
LibertyCon, a who's
who of libertarian think-tank hacks and Republican Party semi-celebrities like Steve Forbes, FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and Alan Dershowitz.
In 2013, C4SS's Kevin Carson tweeted out his dream fantasy that four Jewish leftists -- Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Corey Robin,
and Mark Potok -- would die in a plane crash while struggling over a single parachute. Potok was an executive editor at the Southern
Poverty Law Center, which last year retracted every one of the crank articles that Alexander Reid Ross published with them and
formally apologized for having run them.
For some reason, the super-sleuth Ross conveniently failed to investigate the libertarian group, C4SS, that he has chosen to partner
with and publish in. That ability to shamelessly smear and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links to the far-right
-- while cozying up to groups as sleazy as C4SS and authoritarian as the Integrity Initiative -- is the sort of adaptive trait that
MI6 spies and the Rendon Group would find useful in a covert domestic influence operation.
Ross did not respond to our request for comment on his involvement with the Integrity Initiative and C4SS.
Disinformation for Democracy
As it spans out across the US, the Integrity Initiative has
stated
its desire to "build a younger generation of Russia watchers." Toward this goal, it is supplementing its coterie of elite journalists,
think tank hacks, spooks and State Department info-warriors with certifiable cranks like Ross.
Less than 24 hours after Ross's appearance at the Integrity Initiative event in Seattle, he
sent a menacing email to the co-author
of this article, Ames, announcing his intention to recycle an old and discredited smear against him and publish it in the Daily Beast
-- a publication that appears to enjoy a
special relationship
with Integrity Initiative personnel.
Despite the threat of investigation in the UK, the Integrity Initiative's "network of networks" appears to be escalating its covert,
government-funded influence operation, trashing the political left and assailing anyone that gets in its way -- all in the name of
fighting foreign disinformation.
"We have to win this one," Integrity Initiative founder Col. Chris Donnelly
said , "because if we don't, democracy will be undermined."
making up lies to get paid. james angleton was paranoid (not that it seemed to make him more effective in counterintelligence)–these
people are just con artists, paid to be con artists.
i'm just waiting for "we have to undermine democracy in order to save it".
Agreed. Not only are they paid to make things up, but they have an ingenious scheme for paying themselves from narcotics and
arms dealing.
The most amazing feat of confidence artistry (apart from maybe the TARP bailout (c.f.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
) is their remarkable ability to convince the population they are needed and working on our behalf instead of being in jail
where they belong.
I submitted a long comment on this about an hour ago, which seems to have been eaten by the system. I won't repost it now,
but I'll do so later if it doesn't surface.
This is something that has repeatedly happened to me too recently – it often takes 2 or more hours for most of my recent posting
to surface on the site. It rarely disappears altogether, so I would assume your post will eventually arrive.
Same here on the delays. Keep a copy.
But anyway, very glad you posted this piece. Whatever we make of Patreon, it's one way to support Mark Ames' work.
Sir Alan Duncan, responding on behalf of the Government to Emily Thornberry's urgent question (Dec 12) on recent allegations
that the Foreign Office funded a company which carried out a smear campaign against the official Opposition.
What a frightful fellow that Alan Duncan is eh? Talks like a Mafia lawyer and he's supposed to be a national leader. He reminds
that other MP, the POS who interrogated David Kelly on TV, they both use the same style. Is it a qualification for legislator?
Just a minor note to start off. That image of "Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb". I think that Vitezi Rend actually refers
to the medal he wears on the left. The jacket itself more resembles the patrol jacket that British officers wore in the 19th century.
Moving on! Notice how the same players keep on coming up again and again in all these stories of skulduggery? John Rendon, the
Atlantic Council, Ajit Pai and Alan Dershowitz – the same scum-bags with a few new wannabe players. As an example.
The penchant that Brad Spangler, C4SS co-founder, has for under-age girls is disgusting of course but you have to put it into
the context of the people that you are talking about. If Spengler was more rich or more powerful, you might see his name on a
manifest for the "Lolita Express" but his activities would not be splashed about in an article like this one. That sort of activity
is given a level of protection if you are in the right group. And it is a good thing that that British General Richard Barrons
is retired as his comments are deserving of being cashiered.
Funny how a group that claims to be about protecting democracy wants to push it aside and install propaganda on a "1984" level
in the pursuit of their aims. I cannot decide if their target of Russia is a means or an end. If it is a means, that means using
the boogy-man of Russia to radically restructure western society to their tastes. If it is an end, well, it is true that Russia
has about $75 trillion in resources, mostly in Siberia and the east, so if it was broken up eventually, that would be a bonanza
of wealth appropriation.
I was thinking about the activities of this group and how they go about their activities, especially the smearing of anybody that
talks truth to power. I wonder if anybody here made the connection with this story and the PropOrNot website that came out of
nowhere about two years ago and that had the stamp of approval of the Washington Post. I would not be surprised if it turns out
to be that PropOrNot was a trial balloon in the United States for the Integrity Initiative to establish what it was capable of.
Just a thought.
He looks like an extra from Star Wars – one of those nazi guys working the bridge of the Death Star. The "look and feel" of
a lot of pre-war fascism strikes us as silly in retrospect, though it really wasn't at the time.
That tailored black jacket Sebastian wears looks like something Winston Churchill would have changed out of before that last
cavalry charge at Omdurman. It seems intentionally designed to mimic 19th century great power imperial army officer garb. Nostalgia
for the good times, apparently. Goes with his fascist priorities.
Let us not get carried away with the exuberance of discovering skulduggery among fascist elements of the media and politics.
This does not mean that the conspiracy means Russia is thereby a Goodie Twoshoes. It also does not mean that Russia is any less
a pain in the ass than it has heretorfore be characterized.
It does mean that there is less reason (any?) than ever to put much faith in FoxNews (already a mere propaganda machine) or
other orgs. I am uncomfortable hearing CNA is caught up in this as they are a pseudo government thinktank with some Pentagon influence.
If true, the story should be used to clear out some journalists and analyst riffraff. However, this story is surely not going
to restore, much less create, any integrity among the Beltway Punditry.
The article and related matters may also shed more light on the abrupt resignation of
Robert Hannigan from the leadership of GCHQ in January 2017 a few days after Trump's inauguration. Given previous revelations
about GCHQ and NSA spying on each other's citizens, what else is next in the UK and in the US and elsewhere?
After reading about that Carson character and others I am ready for a shower to try to wash off the disgust.
Yves Smith: Thanks for this. I am wondering about two stories that have been flapping around here for a few days: That odd
New Knowledge company that produced the report about Russian influence on the elections as well as the story about the case before
the Supreme Court of the US in which a company is invoking claims of sovereign immunity.
I have a feeling that New Knowledge definitely fits into the framework outlined by Ames above. A contractor that appears out
of nowhere with a "distinguished" board of concerned semi-liberals (at the trough)?
But what do I know? Some guy named Volodya showed up at my house and bought my vote in 2016 for two bottles of pickled mushrooms
Perfideus Albion is not just a neat saying, but a truth that the Irish, French and
Germans (etc.) have known forever, the people don't deserve it, but the
jumped up Tories do in spades.
Thank you for highlighting this article! It names names and connects some dots, including some connections reaching into the
U.S. It also describes propaganda mechanisms that have been around forever but have become pervasive today. A few protruding tips
of a massive iceberg, in my view. I'm sure *this* "bombshell" story will get the massive coverage it deserves in the MSM -- not!
That was interesting. Well argued all the way through I thought, but they could take a closer look at the unwinding of Yugoslavia;
what Serbia and Syria have in common is having been targeted by outside state powers for dissolution, responses did vary.
Thank you diptherio for posting the C4SS response. Such responses are helpful in evaluating issues like this, and we should
always be open to the other side when they take the time to reply. However, I can't agree that the response was "well argued."
The author does make some valid points, but mainly she resorts to ad hominem attacks on Ames (based on some juvenile antics at
eXile that are often used to smear him), or on both authors because they may have agreed with "Assadists" like Ambassador Peter
Ford or "9/11 Truthers" like Piers Robinson, whose claims about Syria or the White Helmets are, of course, Kremlin propaganda.
Which brings up why Blumenthal would have changed his position on Syria; it was not because of his gradual understanding of what
was really happening there. Rather, while he had once grasp the truth of the "revolution," he made the mistake of going to a Kremlin
gala and the Rooskies (and RT) got to him. Now he is just another propagandist. Nowhere that I can see does the author discuss
the major claims made in Ames and Blumenthal's article, or the evidence cited (except to say that if it was in RT or Sputnik,
we can ignore it anyway as propaganda). Nor does she address the actual defamation made by Alexander Ross-Reid through the SPLC
that pissed off Blumenthal in the first place. There are other problems (don't get me started on the "red-brown" smear), but that's
enough.
Having said all that, I do think that in their criticism of C4SS, Ames and Blumenthal perhaps did some unnecessary punching
down. They could have made clearer the distinction between organizations like the Integrity Initiative, that are pretty clearly
intelligence operatives or cut-outs, versus groups like C4SS that function more like "useful idiots" because of their ideological
position (e.g. equating U.S. and Russian imperialism in this case in their "anarchist" appeal). The latter are in no way as evil
as the former, in my mind.
You are clearly much more engaged with the related debates than I. I read the piece as a response to the punching down you
mention in your last paragraph and felt like I got a respectable read on someone still developing their arguments. I'm not informed
enough to argue with much of it, but having read Diana Johnstone's "Fools Crusade", the Syria/Serbia bit stuck in my craw.
I had thought about commenting on the ad hominems directed at Ames, but didn't want to get into the whole identity argument
embedded in much of the language of the post. While I disagree with many of her positions and attitudes on the state actions she
criticizes without, in my opinion, adequate grounding, I judged it a mostly good faith effort trying to find solid footing in
a world increasingly thick with distorted narratives.
It's hard to argue now, from anywhere with out power, without being someone's "useful idiot": trust has decayed to the point
where language impedes communication in the political sphere.
It's funny you should mention Johnstone's book. I normally would not use the derogatory term "useful idiot" for the very reason
you imply; most such people are acting in good faith. I admit that her comments on Syria irritated me. But the reason I sometimes
overreact to that sort of narrative is because of my own experiences as a useful idiot, starting with Yugoslavia. I fell for the
liberal "humanitarian" argument hook, line, and sinker in the 1990s, even though I considered myself a knowledgeable progressive
at the time. It wouldn't be the last time I was duped, but I'd like to think I'm a little wiser today.
I appreciate your comment. We definitely need to distinguish empire propagandists from the beliefs of people honestly trying
to find their way.
I thought the later part of Ames' piece was unnecessary. It's kind of the same sort of guilt-by-attending-same-conference thing
that I find annoying about the Russophobes.
Keep focused on government malfeasance, not basement brown-shirts.
Oh well, there would be a lot to argue here. In one side it is nice to see that the "Initiative" is being exposed although
it doesn't appear yet to trigger any significant response from supposedly democratic institutions like, let's say the english
parliament (at ransom by brexit).
Just to demonstrate how this article is well focused and pointed I wanted to comment on this bit:
(Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left
Spanish daily .)
YES! iIt is so true that the former "center-left" –if you wish– daily that years ago was a must read but has been degraded
to levels that I wouldn't have imagined, in a case that makes the Guardian as the "guardian of reporting-as-it should-be". One
has to bear in mind that the current most important shareholder of Grupo Prisa (owner of El Pais) is an english hedge fund Amber
Capital whose CEO,
Joseph
Oughorlian is chairman at Grupo Prisa and probably responsible for the Russia!Russia!Russia! campaign observed in this medium
that surprised me so much. You don't find nothing similar in Spain even in rigth and rigth of the rigth news outlets.
I believe this UK-based shareholder is clearly associated with the peculiar Russia!Russia!Russia! stance of the supposedly
centre-left daily.
For those of us from way back way back, these kooks relate to offshoots of the Watergate scandal, the original one, where people
working on those burglaries of psychiatrist's offices and Democratic headquarters got their start organizing small gangs of crooks
to infiltrate what was then a porous but trustable system of government – on they went to propose surveillance and collection
of data that was at first publicly laughed about but on they went. On they went. Technology with all its pluses has these minuses
we at first were able to counter (Church hearings) but the rats have scurried into all the back alleys and secretive pathways
that need a thorough cleanup. It can be done, but it needs to be done periodically. Hopefully this is finally the year when that
will happen.
Thank you, Yves. I believe these folk don't end up in a good place, but meanwhile they are wreaking havoc. The place to start,
after the brooms and mops, is to get money OUT of politics and restore a verifiable voting system that happens methodically and
is trustworthy. The citizenry will be behind this. We the people don't care how long it takes to vote or to find out who won.
We don't! Haste makes waste in more ways than we know.
Let's do this. And please, judges, do your duty or go to jail yourselves.
It's obvious that neither Ames or Blumenthal read the actual documents they're quoting from. Which is a shame considering the
relevant one involving the CIA's Operation Mockingbird comparison was only seven pages long. The CIA were merely imitating British
intelligence during the war and it is clearly stated as such when one of the replies involving General Sir Richard Barrons states
that they've done this before during the 1930s. The US didn't possess a foreign intelligence agency at the time and I'd fervently
argue that we still don't to this day.
but I've already commented about British Security Coordination in the aftermath of PropOrNot though and I'm reluctant to beat
a dead horse.
Ah, the smell (or should we say stench) of domestic propaganda in the morning, ironically by some of the same individuals who
brought us Iraq WMDs. While First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and other civil rights must be protected, it seems to
me that a careful balance can be drawn under new legislation that insulates us from such government-sponsored propaganda. We should
be able to rely on our government's representations. Instead, as with a former president who openly acknowledged, "My job is to
catapult the propaganda," the reverse, together with a related loss of trust, unfortunately seems to be increasingly the case.
Stop lying! What part of "of the People, by the People, for the People," is difficult to understand?
"... Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior. ..."
"... That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did. ..."
"... So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether. ..."
"... Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. ..."
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:
"Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made
many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the
rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a
glorious end!"
The tweet was warmly received and celebrated by Trump's supporters, despite the fact that it
says essentially nothing since "eventually" could mean anything.
Indeed, it's
looking increasingly possible that nothing will come of the president's stated agenda to
withdraw troops from Syria other than a bunch of words which allow his anti-interventionist
base to feel nice feelings inside. Yet everyone laps it up, on both ends of the political
aisle, just like they always do:
Trump supporters are acting like he's a swamp-draining, war-ending peacenik...
...his enemies are acting like he's feeding a bunch of Kurds on conveyor belts into
Turkish meat grinders to be made into sausages for Vladimir Putin's breakfast, when in
reality nothing has changed and may not change at all.
How are such wildly different pictures being painted about the same non-event? By the fact
that both sides of the Trump-Syria debate have thus far been reacting solely to narrative.
This has consistently been the story throughout Trump's presidency: a heavy emphasis on
words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions. A rude tweet can dominate
headlines for days, while the actual behaviors of this administration can go almost completely
ignored. Trump continues to more or less advance the same warmongering Orwellian globalist
policies and agendas as his predecessors along more or less the same trajectory, but frantic
mass media narratives are churned out every day painting him as some unprecedented deviation
from the norm. Trump himself, seemingly aware that he's interacting entirely with perceptions
and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often
claims he's "never said" things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don't matter in
this media environment, only narrative does.
Look at Russiagate. An
excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at
Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the
infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing
but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who
helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's
said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive
behavior.
That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every
breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and
it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way
is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant
analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available
evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as
well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and
there's no evidence that it did.
So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated
election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually
been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet
Union. With the nuclear brinkmanship this administration has been playing with its only nuclear
rival on the planet, it would be so incredibly easy for Trump's opposition to attack him on his
insanely hawkish escalation of a conflict which could easily end all life on earth if any
little thing goes wrong, but they don't. Because this is all about narrative and not facts,
Democrats have been paced into supporting even more sanctioning, proxy conflicts and nuclear
posturing while loudly objecting to any sign of communication between the two nuclear
superpowers, while Republicans are happy to see Trump increase tensions with Moscow because it
combats the collusion narrative. Now both parties are supporting an anti-Russia agenda which
existed in secretive US government agencies
long before the 2016 election .
And this to me is the most significant thing about Trump's presidency. Not any of the things
people tell me I'm supposed to care about, but the fact that the age of Trump has been
highlighting in a very clear way how we're all being manipulated by manufactured narratives all
the time.
Humanity
lives in a world of mental narrative . We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of
heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in
through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and
attention than the actual data itself. We use labels and stories for a reason: without them it
would be impossible to share abstract ideas and information with each other about what's going
on in our world. But those labels and stories get imbued with an intense amount of belief and
identification; we form tight, rigid belief structures about our world, our society, and our
very selves that can generate a lot of fear, hatred and suffering. Which is why it feels so
nice to go out into nature and relax in an environment that isn't shaped by human mental
narrative.
This problem is exponentially exacerbated by the fact that these stories and labels are
wildly subjective and very easily manipulated. Powerful people have learned that they can
control the way everyone else thinks, acts and votes by controlling the stories they tell
themselves about what's going on in the world using mass media control and financial political
influence, allowing ostensible democracies to be conducted in a way which serves power far more
efficiently than any dictatorship.
See how both A and B herd the public away from opposing the dangerous pro-establishment
agendas being advanced by this administration? The dominant narratives could not possibly be
more different from what's actually going on, and the only reason they're the dominant
narratives is because an alliance
of plutocrats and secretive government agencies exerts an immense amount of influence over
the stories that are told by the political/media class.
The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of
smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn.
It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics
are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only
potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that
it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether.
Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share
information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the
establishment propaganda machine is
acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the
internet are getting more and more severe. It is possible that this is what it looks like when
a thinking species evolves into a sane and healthy relationship with thought. Perhaps the
cracks that are appearing all over official narratives today are like the first cracks
appearing in an eggshell as a bird begins to hatch into the world.
"... Neither Rob nor I have a sound theory of what really happened in Salisbury. There are many possible explanations, but none
for which there is sufficient evidence. What we do know is that the British government lied and lies about the case from A to Z. ..."
"... This wasn't an accident blamed on Putin but a planned semi-assassination in which at least one of the victims was unaware of
the plan designed from the beginning to be used in the rolling anti-Putin regime change operation. ..."
Stuff To Read: Integrity Initiative, Skripal, Kaspersky ...
The is no original piece ready to post today, but here are some interesting links:
The Russian anti-virus company Kaspersky was contacted by someone who it found to be related to the U.S. National Security
Agency. Kaspersky immediately told the NSA about the contact. Following that tip the FBI arrested Harold T. Martin, a NSA contractor
who had collected the NSA entire arsenal of digital weapon at is home. Despite that very helpful tip by Kaspersky the U.S. government
continues to harass the company and to claim that it was working as an agent of the Russian government. Exclusive:
How a Russian firm helped catch an alleged NSA data thief , Kim Zettler, Politico
There are several new stories about the Integrity Initiative though still none in any mainstream media.
Over several months Rob Slane at The Blogmire did a detailed analysis of the Skripal case and the often contradictory
information that officials and media have published. Rob has the advantage of living in Salisbury, where the Skripals were allegedly
poisoned. Today he published the summation of his
series about the case:
Last but not least a 20 minute video by Prolekult about the (geo-)politics of Brexit and the Skripal mess in Britain.
Interestingly Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seems to be pushing the 'blame Russia' racket just as much as the Conservatives. (Disclaimer
- I do not endorse the views of the authors.):
History
is Marching | Part five: The Fall of the British Empire (vid)
Comments I posted this comment at Off Guardian. There are a couple of points that may be of interest:
The essential feature of this "Integrity Initiative" is that it is purportedly a charity or an NGO. Like Atlantic Council,
or Bellingcat, it is funded by government(s) but it has, as this video demonstrates, the capacity to distance itself from government,
Deniability.
Deniability is the central feature of all British regime change operations since 1945. The UK takes (took?) the UN Charter
and Nuremberg seriously. Not in the sense that it follows the rules but in so far as it tries not to get caught waging aggressive
wars and interfering in sovereign states by carrying out regime change operations.
Britain has become very good not just at keeping its secret operations secret and deniable. But, through its controls over
the media, stopping leaks by ensuring that whistle blowers are not heard.
What this case indicates is that people like Donnelly, contemptible careerists playing games with humanity's very existence,
have prevailed over the more cautious and sensible Civil Servants in the Foreign Office, who used to keep a lid on the irrepressible
folly of psychopaths like Christopher Nigel, and have been given license not only to kill but to do so without reference to 'M'
and Whitehall.
In this case, thanks to the weakness and demoralised state of the current government what has happened is that Donnelly has
improved on the rolling regime change operation against Russia, (consisting of taking advantage of opportunities to castigate
the Kremlin and blaming Putin for everything that goes wrong, every Russian expatriate's death, every botched poison gas gambit
by the White Helmets (another one of these NGOs run by 'retired MI types),).. improved on it to the extent that, now, rather than
waiting to comment on, and build frames around such events as Litvinenko's death, they are constructing them out of whole cloth.
The key word here is bricolage, as used by Levi Strauss to describe one of the characteristic reactions of traditional societies
to the irruption of western imperialism.
Donnelly, his acolytes and his dupes in the media are taking whatever they find lying around in the world and twisting it together
to form apparent events. The White Helmets, for example, attempt a chlorine gas attack on Syrian forces. It fails but rather than
deny that it ever happened British Intelligence convinces the media that, in fact the attack was not by the Jihadists but upon
them. The media dutifully takes its cues, from the clusters and, almost before you know it, the US is bombing Damascus on the
ground that Assad is carrying out poison gas attacks.
The MH17 affair is another instance: an airliner gets shot down, whether deliberately or not doesn't matter, and Russia is
blamed. All manner of phony 'evidence' is publicised. The real evidence such as Air Traffic Control records is suppressed. Sanctions
are imposed. Russia further isolated etc. Then we had the DNC emails, again, a leak probably by a decent person disgruntled by
the utter cynicism and criminality of the DNC's tactics in the primary elections. Twisted into something resembling a Russian
conspiracy against Clinton. Not one that anyone with enough brain to tie his shoelaces would credit but just enough to set the
media lynch mobs, led by their clusters, into operation.
All of which leads inexorably to Salisbury and the Skripals.
And here perhaps there is more than bricolage: rather than picking up what providence has delivered and making a passably plausible
story of it, here, one suspects, the matter was put together in advance. This wasn't an accident blamed on Putin but a planned
semi-assassination in which at least one of the victims was unaware of the plan designed from the beginning to be used in the
rolling anti-Putin regime change operation..
Which, and this is something that the old FO mandarins knew would happen if policy were left in the hands of Donnelly and Co,
(straight out of schoolboy comics like Magnet or Hotspur), has proved to be exactly what Russia needed: a series of kicks at the
Kremlin which drove it into the arms of Beijing and forced it to form an iron alliance which will lead not to regime change in
Moscow but to the destruction of the Atlantic empire.
Just would like to point out a small, interesting parallel between these Integrity Initiative documents and some of the mainstream
academic literature in the US about democracy, namely the use of the phrase "malign influence" to describe the influence of Russia
(and China). If one reads the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy (which names the NED as a partner or some such)
or the latest Freedom House report, one will find the academic version of the language used by mainstream journalism, warning
of the threat that Russia and China pose to the Western liberal democratic way of life.
I would call them a country run fully by intel agencies. I made a game today. Google research results are personalized. I asked several friends to search Google for „Integrity Iniative".
All the screenshots showed the same. One sputnik-Link, one to Nachdenkseiten, the rest international. Not one single main stream
medium was mentioned. Since November! There has been even a debate in the British parliament. If this is no top-down organized
consulting machine what is such a machine then?
@26 Ross Stanford. I had been posting on Craig Murray's website for nearly 10 years since I read his book Murder in Samarkand,
and very nearly turned up at the House of Commons as a witness - but he asked can anyone record this - which I did. I have never
actually met him. bevin posted for maybe a couple of years a couple of years ago. bevin wrote about The French political situation,
before it kicked off.
He is a very clever man, and to delete someone so intelligent who was almost literally predicting what was
likely to happen with yellow vests etc, seems a little bit both arrogant and immature in my my view. However all of us regardless
of our political views accept the Craig Murray is a Man of Great Integrity and Courage, even though on a lot of political issues
I disagree with him. Surely thats O.K. disagreeing about politics?
@30 The basic line seems to be that the West is vulnerable to Russian attacks because we have a free press. So why did it take
the free press such a long time to come up with a response? James Ball does admit that a secretive organization using government funding to slander Jeremy Corbyn might not have been a
great idea.
Posted this over at Mark Chapman's The New Kremlin Stooge blog:
The latest news from Salisbury: first, the park bench and the dining table walked the Path of Fire, then the guinea pigs
and a cat followed, a house may soon do so as well, and the latest perhaps to join the queue
Several comments attached to that post are of "wish we had Novichok in our shopping centre" or "they planned this all along"
type. It seems that Salisbury shopping centre as it is has not been doing well because of high rents previously imposed by Wiltshire
Council and it desperately needs a makeover. Call me cynical but maybe Wiltshire Council is using the poisoning incident to bring
forward its redevelopment plans for the Salisbury shopping centre that will all but kill off local businesses.
Blooming Barricade , Jan 9, 2019 6:17:08 PM |
link
@3
The irony is that, with a genuinely free press, RT would cease to have any appeal. The corporate media is hopelessly biased against
Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, as well as pro-war, opposed to anarchism, openly pro-capitalism, and fails to report on issues
like fracking, oligarchic trade deals Palestinian struggles, police state brutality against left, and almost every other topic
the public would want to know about.
Projects like PropOrNot and the Intgerity Initiative exist solely to prevent the public from
knowing about those things by locking down the information sphere against independent media (today they claimed that "neoliberalism"
and "neoconservatism" aren't real concepts but Russian-invented insults against the rules-based liberal world order.
George Galloway weighs in
on the chaos engulfing the Empire in Washington, London and Paris. The Neoliberal ship is foundering while the uplifting of people-based
policies of Russia and China keep them on track to reach their aims. Soon, if Trump keeps the government shutdown, those idled
federal workers just might be seen in the streets. George has a penchant for connecting things, and had this to say about Macron:
"The very conditions Macron strove so very hard to bring about in Damascus and that France DID help bring about in Kiev are
now rocking the very foundations of the French Republic."
The false flag of Austerity--Neoliberalism preying on its own as was predicted at its beginnings is what we're witnessing,
while the actors that created the situation cling with bloody hands to the ship of state unwilling to surrender the wheel to those
who might salvage the situation. Metaphorically, Rome burns while Nero and his Senators fiddle.
The Guardian has produced an article about Integrity Initiative. It was so poorly written that they had to close the comment section
after 138 comments. People do know a lot more than the Guardian thinks.
the guardian never keeps comment sections open long if too many posters start disagreeing with their preferred line. their other
tactic is simply never to open comments on posts where they think this is likely to happen. and of course they haven't even acknowledged
the luke harding travesty, as they continue to beg for donations to support their fearless independent journalism.
I thought James Ball made a gallant effort to exonerate Western media considering he probably had a team of editors breathing
down his neck. It's the lack of transparency that seems to upset him most. Perhaps his next article will be an in depth look at
how Integrity Initiative got government funding.
Hacking syndicate Anonymous has just released its fourth tranche of documents hacked from
the internal servers of the Institute for Statecraft and its subsidiary, the Integrity
Initiative. Several explosive files raise serious questions about the shadowy British state and
NATO-funded 'think tank' and its connections with the Skripal affair.
The files were
released just after 2:30pm GMT on January 4 -- I've barely scratched the surface of the
content, but what I've seen so far contains a panoply of bombshell revelations -- to say the
least, the organization(s) now have serious questions to answer about what role they played in
the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in March, and its aftermath both nationally and
internationally.
Sinister Timeline
One file
apparently dating to "early 2015" -- "Russian Federation Sanctions" -- written by the
Institute's Victor Madeira outlines "potential levers" to achieve Russian "behaviour change",
"peace with Ukraine", "return [of] Crimea", "regime change" or "other?". The suggested "levers"
span almost every conceivable area, including "civil society", "sports", "finance" and
"technology".
In the section marked "intelligence", Madeira suggests simultaneously expelling "every RF
[Russian Federation] intelligence officer and air/defense/naval attache from as many countries
as possible". In parentheses, it references 'Operation Foot' , the expulsion of over
1000 Soviet officials from the UK in September 1971, the largest expulsion of intelligence
officials by any government in history.
The section on sports also suggests "advocating the view [Russia] is unworthy of hosting
[sporting] events" -- and the section marked "information" recommends the sanctioning of
'Russian' media "in West for not complying with regulators' standards".
2015 File
Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions
In April that year, Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly was
promoted to Honorary Colonel of SGMI (Specialist Group Military Intelligence), and
in
October he met with General Sir Richard Barrons. Notes from the meeting don't make clear
who said what, but one despaired that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a
response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and
take it out of the political space."
"We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. We did this in the
1930s. My conclusion is it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something
dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside
government. We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the
national capabilities [and/or] capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of
resources to do it? We need this debate now. There is not a moment to be lost," they said.
Operation IRIS Begins
On 4 March 2018, former Russian military officer and double agent for MI6 Sergei Skripal and
his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England.
Within days, the Institute had submitted a proposal to the Foreign & Commonwealth
Office, "to study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news
spread and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.
The bid was accepted, and the Initiative's 'Operation Iris' was launched. Under its
auspices, the Institute employed 'global investigative solutions' firm Harod Associates to
analyze social media activity related to Skripal the world over.
It also conducted media monitoring of its own, with Institute 'research fellow' Simon
Bracey-Lane
producing regular 'roundups' of media coverage overseas, based on insights submitted by
individuals connected to the Initiative living in several countries. One submission, from an
unnamed source in Moldova, says they "cannot firmly say" whether the country's media had its
"own point of view" on the issue, or whether news organizations had taken "an obvious
pro-Russian or pro-Western position", strongly suggesting these were key questions for the
Initiative.
Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal
Incident
Moreover though, there are clear indications the Institute sought to shape the news
narrative on the attack -- and indeed the UK government's response.
One file dated March 11 appears to be a briefing document on the affair to date, with key
messages bolded throughout.
It opens by setting out "The Narrative" of the incident -- namely "Russia has carried out
yet another brutal attack, this time with a deadly nerve agent, on someone living in
Britain".
"Use of the nerve agent posed a threat to innocent British subjects, affecting 21 people and
seriously affecting a police officer. This is not the first time such an attack has been
carried out in the UK 14 deaths are believed to be attributable to the Kremlin Russia has
poisoned its enemies abroad on other occasions, most notably then-candidate for the Presidency
of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been
poisoned twice; and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also poisoned and later shot dead.
Since Putin has been running Russia, the Kremlin has a history of poisoning its opponents in a
gruesome way," the "narrative" reads.
The file goes on to declare the British response has been "far too weak it's essential the
government makes a much stronger response this time" -- and then lists "possible, realistic,
first actions", including banning RT and Sputnik from operating in the UK, boycotting the 2018
World Cup, withdrawing the UK ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador to
the UK, and refusing/revoking visas to leading Russians within Vladimir Putin's "circle", and
their families.
Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative
It's not clear who the document was distributed to -- but it may have been given to
journalists within the Initiative's UK 'cluster', if not others. This may explain why the
Institute's "narrative", and its various recommended "responses" utterly dominated mainstream
media reporting of the affair for months afterwards, despite the glaring lack of evidence of
Russian state involvement in the attack.
It's extremely curious so many of the briefing document's recommendations almost exactly --
if not exactly -- echo several of the suggested "levers" outlined in the 2015 document. It's
also somewhat troubling the "Global Operation Foot" spoken of in that file duly came to pass on
March 28 2018, with over 20 countries expelling over 100 Russian diplomats.
Likewise, it's striking Victor Madeira, the Institute staffer who made the recommendations
in 2015, made many media appearances discussing the poisoning following the incident
routinely documented by the Institute. Security consultant Dan Kaszeta also wrote a number
of articles for the Integrity Initiative website about chemical weapons following the attack --
including a July 14 article, How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the
Skripal attack? --receiving 40
pence per word .
Invoice submitted to
Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections
The Institute's bizarrely intimate connections with the incident don't end there. Another document
apparently dating to July 2018 contains the contact details of Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6
recruiter, handler and -- unbelievably -- neighbor in Salisbury. Anonymous claims the document
is an invitee list for a meeting the Institute convened between a number of individuals and
Syria's highly controversial White Helmets group, but this is yet to be verified.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the latest document dump raises yet further questions
about how and why it was BBC Diplomatic and Defense Editor Mark Urban -- who was in the same
tank regiment as Miller after leaving University -- came to meet with Skripal in the year
before his poisoning. When I attended the
launch of his book on the affair in October -- The Skripal Files -- he was evasive
on whether he played a role in connecting him with Skripal, and denied Miller was Skripal's
recruiter.
The latest trove also raises yet further questions about the activities of the Institute for
Statecraft and Integrity Initiative. In light of these revelations, reading the record of
Donnelly's meeting with General Barrons takes on an acutely chilling quality. It may be that
purely serendipitously the pair got their "catastrophe", their "something dreadful", which
"[woke] people up" and made the government "realise the problem" posed by Russia -- or it could
be they one way or another played a facilitative role of some kind.
After months of refusing to answer the vast number of questions I and thousands of others
have submitted to the paired organizations, it's high time for them to break cover, and be
honest with the public.
Images removed. Please brose the original to view them.
Notable quotes:
"... "Russian disinformation." ..."
"... "network of networks" ..."
"... It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence. ..."
"... "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" ..."
"... "global investigative solutions" ..."
"... What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow.... ..."
"... "pro-Russia troll accounts" ..."
"... "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case." ..."
"... Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" ..."
"... These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK." ..."
"... "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" ..."
"... "threat Russia poses." ..."
"... This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning ..."
"... One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot. ..."
"... "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history." ..."
"... "Makes you think " ..."
"... The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute. ..."
"... It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair. ..."
"... £2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019 ..."
"... It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance. ..."
The Integrity Initiative, a UK-funded group exposed in leaked files as psyop network, played a key role in monitoring and molding
media narratives after the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal, newly-dumped documents reveal. Created by the NATO-affiliated,
UK-funded Institute for Statecraft in 2015, the Integrity Initiative was
unmasked in November after hackers
released documents detailing a web of politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics involved in purportedly
fighting "Russian disinformation."
The secretive, government-bankrolled "network of networks" has found itself under scrutiny for
smearing UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
as a Kremlin stooge – ostensibly as part of its noble crusade against anti-Russian disinformation. Now, new
leaks show that the organization played a central role in shaping media narratives after Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia
were mysteriously poisoned in Salisbury last March.
It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented
following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence.
Operation Iris
Days after the Skripals were poisoned, the Institute solicited its services to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, offering to
"study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being
perceived" in a number of countries.
After receiving the government's blessing, the Integrity Initiative (II)
launched
'Operation Iris,' enlisting "global investigative solutions" firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity
related to Skripal.
What role did # IntegrityInitiative
play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers
from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow....
However, Harod's confidential
report
did more than just parse social media reactions to the Skripal affair: It compiled a list of alleged "pro-Russia troll accounts"
accused of "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case."
Among those who found themselves listed as nefarious thought-criminals were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a gentleman
from Kent who goes by Ian56 on Twitter.
Neocon Fascist, al-Qaeda Supporting Treasonous Scumbag @ Benimmo
is having a laugh with £2m of Taxpayers money. Nimmo should be IN JAIL for Fraud & Treason
"The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and Petrovas GRU agents"
- has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French yellow jackets. I kid you not.
Another
document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative"
of the Skripal incident, which blames Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally, as well as containing a number of recommended
actions.
These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to
Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the
UK."
Other suggestions included propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim
brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" and getting members of parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses."
It's not clear who the document was drawn up for, but it may have been provided to II-affiliated journalists in the UK and other
countries.
This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning
– which the UK and its allies unanimously blamed on Moscow.
Ahead of its time?
One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a
document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including
mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot.
Coincidentally, more than 100 Russian diplomats were expelled from 20 Western countries in an apparently show of solidarity with
the UK following the Skripal attack. At the time, UK Prime Minister Theresa May welcomed what she said was "the largest collective
expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history."
Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents, written long before the Salisbury events, also call for the arrest of RT and
Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding: "Makes you think "
The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made
all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the
alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler
and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute.
It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended
# IntegrityInitiative meetings. There
is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair.
It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity
Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were
drawn up years in advance.
"... The British Private Eye finds a relation between the Integrity Initiative and the Rendon Group which drove the propaganda for the Iraq invasion. ..."
Forgot to link this: The
Briefing note
on the Integrity Initiative by Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason and Piers Robinson is the most complete analysis of the
Integrity Initiative papers.
The British Private Eye finds a relation
between the Integrity Initiative and the Rendon Group which drove the propaganda for the Iraq invasion.
I'll have to say more on the issue. For some fun, check the attachment to this tweet. (Klarenberg writes for Sputnik.)
"Jornos for hire" are now mainstream. Much like escort services.
Again, it's pure projection. These vermin are literally incapable of looking at anything except in terms of how it can
be used as a weapon (or how it can be destroyed), so they automatically attribute that fundamentalist way of looking at things to everyone
else, and especially to the "enemy". So by definition anything Putin and the Russians do is some kind of "weaponization".
Notable quotes:
"... Yes! All true! But I weaponised Vladimir Putin to make media profits, newspapers (Guardian!), radio (BBC), internet (Bellingcat). Evidently only the Brits understand me. The US does the same in a different style. ..."
"... Here is what Americans really think about the anti-Russia hysteria coming from Washington: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/08/americans-on-russia-will-of-people.html Washington has completely lost touch with what Main Street America really believes. ..."
"... And besides humor I am sure Putin is also weaponizing calendars, at least in Japan. Maybe in exchange for keeping the Kuril islands: Putin calendar sales surpassing those of Japanese stars in Japan What I am wondering is, if the socalled "Western Elite" maybe actually believe what they are saying and are not aware that it is a self-created illusion they are chaught in. Otherwise I can not understand why they are again and again surprised if Russia is not behaving they way they expected. ..."
"... Yes, these are projections, and they tell us the final world war, a war of aggression by the US against China and Russia, will be a total war beyond our imaginations. (Unless real leftists and real lovers of peace can stop it.) ..."
"... I think this insane epidemic illustrates the degree to which the Western propaganda system has completely decoupled the population from reality. ..."
"... The underlying problem: Russia has weaponized telling the truth. ..."
"... Yes, I'd agree that's part of its purpose -- to prevent the unification of Eurasia, which as I wrote last week's proceeding apace. They're trying to wall off Japan too, so I wonder if Japanese media's as flush with the same garbage as BigLie Media. ..."
"... Although likely covered by weaponizing incompetence and stupidity, Putin has certainly weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's appalling lack of a professional diplomatic corp--just look at who he gets Trump to nominate to key diplomatic positions. ..."
"... Hey guys, guys, you are not getting the point man. There is something really creepy about this Russia place, like Midas. Everything they touch turns to weapons. ..."
"... But since the fall of Communism in Russia, I have lost all belief in anything like a new Cold War. After all, when I was in parochial school, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. Now, that has been accomplished. Russia's government is more Christian than Western governments ..."
"... Truth weaponized. Five eyes pulling out all stops in its propaganda campaign to defeat it. ..."
Several of the pieces listed in it are products of the recently uncovered
British government
financed disinformation campaign , or of similar efforts by other governments. But these are only a part of the general anti-Russian
reflex that is ingrained in our 'western' culture. Nothing else can explain the craziness of these 'weaponizing' claims.
The updated list with some 65 issues, ideas and things that Russia allegedly 'weaponizes' will hopefully help to convince people
that most of what is said or written about Russia is likewise blatant nonsense.
Yes! All true! But I weaponised Vladimir Putin to make media profits, newspapers (Guardian!), radio (BBC), internet (Bellingcat).
Evidently only the Brits understand me. The US does the same in a different style.
And besides humor I am sure Putin is also weaponizing calendars, at least in Japan. Maybe in exchange for keeping the Kuril
islands:
Putin calendar sales surpassing those of Japanese stars in Japan What I am wondering is, if the socalled "Western Elite"
maybe actually believe what they are saying and are not aware that it is a self-created illusion they are chaught in. Otherwise
I can not understand why they are again and again surprised if Russia is not behaving they way they expected.
Yes, these are projections, and they tell us the final world war, a war of aggression by the US against China and Russia,
will be a total war beyond our imaginations. (Unless real leftists and real lovers of peace can stop it.)
I think this insane epidemic illustrates the degree to which the Western propaganda system has completely decoupled the
population from reality. Now whether it's believed or not is neither here nor there as it's built upon decades of anti-communism
and the inherent racism of the Anglo-Saxon Empire that has demonized the Russians as essentially backward peasants who cannot
be trusted. Worse still, the Russkies have ginormous weapons!
I agree that both 'sides' in a phony cold war 2.0 weaponize just about anything of a controversial nature or event in civilization.
Both sides are advancing agenda that are leading humanity in the same direction even as they create a false adversarial paradigm.
This has been termed non linear psychological warfare under which such a confusing array of created realities leaves the greater
public unable to define what is real or a fabrication. It takes at least two or more to create the illusions and the 'other' can
simply be created/funded as controlled opposition and then even this can be published to further create more confusion within
the confusion. Carl Rove told us this. He just didn't tell us that the 'Empire' also includes Russia, China and any number of
other corporate national jurisdictions.
More seriously, this is not "stupidity" of the political class, as some pundits would have you believe. It is a well thought-out
retrenchment plan of attempting to institute a new "iron curtain" to separate Europe from Asia after the demise of unipolarity.
Yes, I'd agree that's part of its purpose -- to prevent the unification of Eurasia, which as I wrote last week's proceeding
apace. They're trying to wall off Japan too, so I wonder if Japanese media's as flush with the same garbage as BigLie Media.
Russia's weaponized Arctic
Ocean or perhaps Russia's weaponized the lack of proper marine maintenance. Russia's also weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's
lack of naval or other Arctic Ocean land-based infrastructure -- there's zip to support any off-shore drilling from Alaska's coastline.
IOW, Russia's weaponizing a plethora of Outlaw US Empire weaknesses.
And what the Sputnik article refers to as the heavy US icebreaker Polar Star is more roughly one half the size of the
nuclear powered Russian icebreaker 50 Years of Victory, 50 лет Победы . I suspect the Russians would call the Polar
Star a light icebreaker. Sputnik probably probably being polite.
Way back in the 1950s the Pentagon (specifically the Air Force) was all atwitter over unsubstantiated reports (again leaked by
the Air Force) that the Soviets (read: the Russians) were building a nuclear powered strategic bomber that would have unlimited
range and flight time. Well now. You know what that means? We gotta have one too! So guess what. The Air Force dutifully volunteered
to save the US and Western civilization from being bombed back to the stone age and godless communism all at the same time by
building a nuclear powered bomber of our own. To make a long story short the effort failed miserably. The project managed to last
into the Kennedy administration but was cancelled in favor of developing submarine launched ICBMs. While the nuclear bomber program
died it's spirit lived on. During the Carter administration the then chief of Air Force intelligence (yes I know there's no such
thing) became convinced that the russkies were building ground-based and orbiting death ray machines to use against US satellites
and ICBMs. Thus was born "Star Wars." Of course this fit in perfectly with the Reagan administration's defense views even though
the engineering and science simply didn't exist then of now. Well as the french say the "more things change the more they remain
the same"
Some people get weaponized on business trips to Moscow. This video shows how they do it...
https://youtu.be/8cs4tKdiiI4 Posted by: dh | Dec 17, 2018 10:36:48
AM | 15
Move over Russia make room for the Chinese weapon program.. its much more dangerous than the Russian disinformation program,
unlike Russia, the Chinese circumvent the USA Senate, the President, and the SCOUS and go directly to the poor, innocent governed
humans, lending them money, creating for them jobs and developing infra structure to make life easier; such will be the end of
us all. WE MUST REMEMBER Aake news and made up fictions are produced by the six entities that own 92 of the media. Without the
Internet and other public infra structure, the media could not smear you with its dirty tricks. Someone please pass the soap.
"weaponizing terrorism "? because until Putin all "terrorists" sat around talking and sipping tea like the goddamn mclaughlin
group? then again, given the outsize influence of objectively insane think tanks in DC, maybe they were onto something.
funny how this can also be seen as what psychology types call "projection". in a culture like the west's (especially the states)
where the economies are built on warfare and financial voodoo, everything is either "weaponized" or collateralized. look at anything
on that list and it's something from which someone "atlantic" has tried or will try to make money. of course, many things start
out weaponized and are then collateralized
. weaponized taxes? weaponized corporate welfare?
hey, if a bunch of white/israeli suburbanite music executives in LA can control rap, it should be pretty easy. side note: rap
is officially banned in iran. some say it's been deemed "satanic". Years ago when i was grooving to das efx or public enemy i'd
have disagreed but now that the big names are drake, minaj and meek mill...only malevolent supernatural evil can explain that.
I'm shocked to learn that "Russia is weaponizing its Coast Guard",
https://warisboring.com/russia-is-weaponizing-its-coast-guard/
The author seems quite angry the Russians are using their "Coast Guard" of all things, to defend their coast. He thinks they should
have used their Navy instead!
"The use of the Russian Federation Navy to close the strait would have been more likely to escalate because it would have
been a military-on-military clash. In contrast, using the Russian coast guard made it a law enforcement issue rather than a
military-sanctioned act of war. Russia is adept at using legal channels to pursue violations of justice. It now appears willing
to use its coast guard for this purpose.
Onshore, the situation in eastern Ukraine has been stuck in a rut. Perhaps the escalation in the Sea of Azov was seen by
the Russians as a means to break the impasse, using the flimsy legal cover provided by the coast guard. No similar terrestrial
options exist, as the Russians have exhausted their plausible deniability for operations by police, volunteers and undercover
"little green men."
While Russian seizure of the Azov coast was anticipated, it was not expected to use its coast guard. Utilizing the Russian
coast guard in this way opens a new range of options for Moscow, in the Sea of Azov and beyond."
Although likely covered by weaponizing incompetence and stupidity, Putin has certainly weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's appalling
lack of a professional diplomatic corp--just look at who he gets Trump to nominate to key diplomatic positions. Indeed, perhaps
this ought to be enlarged to include weaponizing mediocrity as portrayed by Trump's entire Cabinet. We can also see the great
strides Putin's made in making the Outlaw US Empire appear as the Ogre it is by weaponizing Anglo-American Exceptionalism. It
seems, given the above list and its additions via comments, that the Outlaw US Empire is most exceptional at being incapable of
weaponizing anything aside from its #1 go-to--The BigLie.
Strategic Message Code One , Dec 17, 2018 3:04:33 PM |
link
Hey guys, guys, you are not getting the point man. There is something really creepy about this Russia place, like Midas. Everything
they touch turns to weapons. I seen it here as well, every Russia thing is trouble of some kind, like there is nothing else
that comes from there. I seen Russian people and they ok, but now I'm frightened to get close to them in case I turn into a weapon.
Aan here too guys, Russia touches the west an the west as consequence are all buying weapons an using them everywhere, they cant
do nothing cause Russia makes them weaponators too. Oh my, we are doomed man and waponized press freakin me out aaaaaaahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A quote from the report mentioned in (50): "Although the NDS generally reflects the right priorities and objectives, it
is not supported by adequate investments. It is beyond the scope of this Commission's work to identify the exact dollar amount
required to fully fund the military's needs, but the available means are clearly insufficient to fulfill the strategy's ends.
This is true despite the two-year funding increase for FY2018 and FY2019 provided by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018."
What would be particularly interesting is also to see how the money flow is helping the (we all know it) struggling news organizations.
I believe many of these quasi-journalists are going hat in hand to various agencies that have some of that propaganda money. Most
of them would need to work for weeks getting paid a measly amount, but doing a couple of these anti-Russia pieces gets them paid
well. I certainly think the Guardian has such an arrangement with MI5/6.
The recipe is using the wonderwords like Putin, Russia,
'weaponizing', hackers, cyber, fake news...
I believe the Saker was pointing out a few days ago that the Border Guards were often more like spetsnaz than what we in the
west think of as a border patrol. The Russian Coast Guard has probably maintained the tradition.
I see culture's already been deemed weaponized, but
here's Putin's actual plan he laid out in his speech to a meeting of the Presidential Council for Culture and Art in St Petersburg
two days ago. Introductory remarks:
"... global competition in creating best conditions for self-fulfilment and revealing the potential of each individual is
growing, and the world's leading powers including Russia, rightly see it as a key to the future. Of course, a significant role
here will belong to establishing a vibrant, rich cultural space, which will be interesting and attractive not only for the
citizens of our country but also for the whole world."
Meanwhile within the Outlaw US Empire, Boy Scouts of America is about to
file for bankruptcy thanks
to the many sexual abuse lawsuits it now faces. This leads me to declare yet another Russian accomplishment: Putin has weaponized
Machiavellian divide and rule by enticing the Outlaw US Empire's Deep State -- years prior to his birth! -- to promote and escalate
what's known as the Culture Wars used to ensure a continuing inability to achieve solidarity by the USA's polity.
Anaya, I take it you took a look-see at its staff and there's a lot of them! Yeah, that's what prompted my own feelings about
it. The report has apparently been published but I've not yet seen it.
The '150 million' influenced by those scheming Russkies, has been floating for awhie. I first saw it used in a Euro-based setup,
funded by NATO I think. I'll try and dig it out as I remember writing something about.
This kind of "Weaponization" is far less expensive than say an F35 or a 13bn Ford class Aircraft carrier, but the more of them
you build the safer you will be from the "Weaponization" of coloring books. Nuke crayons now! The state of the US and its
military in my view is that they can't win a war against anyone, all they can do is blow up the world with nukes - the only question
is will they deny the world to everyone if they can't own it.
It's a shame we can't massively disseminate our weaponization of ridicule contained in b's article and our commentary. I wonder
how many comedians are making good money ridiculing the entire weaponization meme, and not just in English.
What I'd like to see at all US government pressers is for uncontrollable laughter to break out amongst the press when the spokesperson
begins speaking and continue until it leaves the podium, followed by the press exiting the room.
In case you haven't yet heard, Heather Nauert replaces Nutty Nikki as US ambassador to the UN so 'tis there that Matt Lee and
his fellow journos must trek (it's gonna be a long way to NYC) to get their regular dose of laughter.
Here in my exceptional country it is customary at the end of each year to declare a "word of the year", some from past years were
truthiness, Y2K and hashtag.
but it didn't go after the current Russian govt. It pointed out how the US imitates the Soviets in weaponizing psychiatry by
declaring dissidents crazy. You have to be insane to disagree with TPTB.
I'm sure the comedian replacing Nauert will be just as distracting and of similar character.
Did you happen to read Caitlin Johnstone's
Twenty-One Thoughts On The Persecution Of Julian Assange , particularly #s 8-10 as they relate to her essay about narratives?
All our rather witty ridicule is almost totally wasted on us--we don't need to hear it; it's those people Caitlin refers to in
her 8-10 that require the deep pin-prick of ridicule to snap them from their torpor and return them to reality and to rational
thinking.
The biggest weapon in the West arsenal is private finance. Private finance is the jackboot that keep nations/governments/individuals
in line. Private finance has been the primary weapon of control for centuries. China/Russia are trying to weaponize alternative
finance......and succeeding......which is why the world is all in a tither.
I think it has to do with what one has studied. I have four university degrees: B.A. in Classics from Princeton, A.B. in Classics
from Oxford, Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard, and a J.D. from Yale. I spent a lot of time in the U.S. military: four
years in the active duty U.S. Air Force, plus something like 15 years in the reserves, largely of the U.S. Navy. For as long as
the original Cold War lasted and Communism ruled Russia, I was a true believer in the Cold War. It now looks to me as if I was
misguided at the time, but that is what I believed, whether despite or because of my education, I don't know which.
But since the fall of Communism in Russia, I have lost all belief in anything like a new Cold War. After all, when I was
in parochial school, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. Now, that has been accomplished. Russia's government is more Christian
than Western governments. I think someone with a classical education like the one I got is more capable of thinking for himself.
I don't think my education disabled me from thinking critically and independently.
BB 93 Truth weaponized. Five eyes pulling out all stops in its propaganda campaign to defeat it.
Hoarsewhisperer 95 He may well be, but with the passing of several years and his actions in that time appear to be ardent
zionist. The swamp to him are those that frittered away US unilateral power and those that did not sufficiently support Israel.
What Trump views as the swamp is not what most of us view as the swamp. Kissinger was not forced upon Trump, rather his thinking
is in line with that of Kissinger.
"... To get an idea of how Gladio 2.0 is now investing each corner of our lives, including art and education, I saw recently on the flyer of a sculpture exhibition in a 5-eyes country that two artists, one born in 1901 and one in 1914 were "famous Cold War artists". Of course, there was nothing political in their work, the first died in 1966 and the other in 2003... ..."
To get an idea of how Gladio 2.0 is now investing each corner of our lives, including art
and education, I saw recently on the flyer of a sculpture exhibition in a 5-eyes country that
two artists, one born in 1901 and one in 1914 were "famous Cold War artists". Of course,
there was nothing political in their work, the first died in 1966 and the other in
2003...
In EU universities you now see all sorts of "labs" popping out, with EU funding from the
"digital" budget. They are trying to recruit people with a very odd profile: ambitious, ONG
oriented, IT familiar. The reason why these labs insist on the ONG type activities is
dubious. An example of US/EU sponsored project involving refugees in Greece, neurosciences
and mobile phones (check Harvard/Data&Society: Refugee Connectivity)
News that the BBC is trying to tie the Gilets Jaunes movement to the Kremlin reaches the
Russian Foreign Ministry. Betting that Lavrov, Zakharova and company are all having a laugh
as well.
Just when you think British news media couldn't fall any deeper into their rabbit hole ...
down, down farther they go into the abyss ... aaarrgghhh ...
"... Some of the people at the Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are banal presstitutes ready to oblige the top clients (management) for a modest pay, whereas others are real criminals whose ideas and orders have been endangering the western civilization -- and humankind at large. ..."
"... People are building their careers on this garbage! ..."
The Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are run by people.
These people display a stunning level of immorality by lying and war-mongering.
Some of the people at the Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are banal
presstitutes ready to oblige the top clients (management) for a modest pay, whereas others are real criminals whose ideas and
orders have been endangering the western civilization -- and humankind at large.
It would be proper to publish a roster of the presstitutes and their idiotic managers working at the Oxford University's Computational
Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project
About half an hour ago I opened News.Google.Com these are some of their major headlines:
Russians sought to recruit 'assets' through social media, Senate told - CNN . one hour
ago
Russua favored Trump, targeted African-Americans with election meddling, reports say -
NBC News . one hour ago
New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the operation's
scale and sweep - The Washington Post . today
Senate report finds millions of social media posts by Russians aimed at helping Trump,
GOP - USA TODAY . 2 hours ago
Silicon Valley may have done 'bare minimum' to help Russia investigation, Senate Intel
Committee told - CNN . one hour ago
I opened the one from the Washington Post:
Headline: "New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the
operation's scale and sweep"
Subtext: "The report, a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the
first to analyze the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate
Intelligence Committee."
The headline is meant to give the impression that the report was prepared at *The Behest*
of the Senate. If you read the article it would have you believe that it *was* written at the
behest of the Senate but does not say that specifically.
Well? Was it? I have tried to track it down and could use some assistance.
Buried in a CBS NEWS version of the article is this sentence: "The Committee welcomed the
research effort without endorsing either report's findings."
USA TODAY says it *was* "Senate Reports". The lead paragraph is this: "WASHINGTON –
The Senate released Monday a pair of reports that found Russia engaged in an all-out social
media campaign on Donald Trump's behalf during the 2016 election and continued to support him
after he took office."
"People are building their careers on this garbage!"
Josh said at #60
"What would be particularly interesting is also to see how the money flow is helping the
(we all know it) struggling news organizations. I believe many of these
quasi-journalists are going hat in hand to various agencies that have some of that
propaganda money. Most of them would need to work for weeks getting paid a measly amount,
but doing a couple of these anti-Russia pieces gets them paid well. I certainly think
the Guardian has such an arrangement with MI5/6. The recipe is using the wonderwords like Putin, Russia, 'weaponizing', hackers, cyber,
fake news..."
"... 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.' ..."
"... 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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
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).
Hackers who leaked documents from the Integrity Initiative, a shadowy outfit funded by the
UK government, claim they show its connections to the March 2018 alleged poisoning attack in
Salisbury and proposed actions against Russia. The Integrity Initiative (II) was set up in 2015
by the equally shadowy "Institute for Statecraft," according to the documents
published online in
November by hackers calling themselves a part of the Anonymous collective. While Anonymous
has denied the group was behind the leak, the Institute confirmed the authenticity of the first
batch of documents.
The hackers
posted a fresh batch of documents purportedly from the Initiative and the Institute on
Friday, hinting that both outfits had connections with Western media coverage of the March 2018
alleged poisoning of former Russian spy Sergey Skripal, and the actions against Russia taken
subsequently by the UK government and its allies.
One of the documents is the
confidential report by Harod Associates, a company hired by the Initiative to conduct
"mainstream & social media analysis" of the Skripal scandal coverage. The entire
undertaking was dubbed "Operation Iris."
Among those who found themselves named "Russian trolls" and Kremlin agents in the
report were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa and a gentleman from Kent who goes by
Ian56 on Twitter.
Wanna see something funny? 🤣
"The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and
Petrovas GRU agents" - has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French
yellow jackets. I kid you not. https://t.co/I3X4ypylAP
Another
document , dated March 11, 2018, contains a "Narrative" of the Skripal incident,
blaming Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally and containing a number of recommended
actions, such as boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2
gas pipeline from Russia to Germany and block Russian access to SWIFT international banking
system, but also to "ban RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK."
Other suggestions include propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicise what has been
happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion" (sic) and getting
members of Parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses."
The document dump also contains the April
14, 2018 email from Andy Pryce, whom the hackers describe as "chief propaganda man" at the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, containing the official government narrative of the Skripal
affair and the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria. Pryce ends the email by recommending
"good sources of further information" on alleged Russian propaganda, including the
Atlantic Council's DFR Lab, Bellingcat and Stopfake.
Documents obtained and published by the hackers also show connections between Skripal's
recruiter and neighbor Pablo Miller, the Institute for Statecraft, and the so-called rescue
group White Helmets, created in militant-held areas of Syria by a former British official in
2013.
It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended
#IntegrityInitiative
meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II
initiated the affair. https://t.co/Xv29Uk9z3e
There are also several invoices from Dan Kaszeta of the Institute for Statecraft, for
articles he wrote as supposedly a chemical weapons expert advancing the Institute's narrative
on both the Skripals and Syria.
The most intriguing, however, is
a document from 2015 , in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a
series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of
1971's Operation Foot. One of the actions by the UK, US and several other NATO countries in the
wake of claims that Russia used a nerve agent against Skripal was a mass expulsion of Russian
diplomats.
Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents written long before the Salisbury events
call for arrests of RT and Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding, "Makes you think
"
Previously published documents have revealed the Initiative and the Institute as being
involved in widespread
propaganda operations targeting not only foreign countries and media outlets – as one
might expect from someone doing the bidding of the Foreign Office – but also domestic political
figures , such as Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
"... Britain must surely be in the running for many reasons: among others, the sheer disaster that is Theresa May's government (and the various clowns and thuggish goons that constitute her Cabinet), the Brexit mess, the Skripal poisoning circus, Britain's own collapse in controlling the propaganda narrative on Syria and the revelations about Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, and their ties to the British military establishment. ..."
If Syria wins the award for Country of the Year 2018, I'd hate to see who gets the Wooden
Spoon for 2018. There must be quite a few serious contenders for that prize!
Britain must surely be in the running for many reasons: among others, the sheer
disaster that is Theresa May's government (and the various clowns and thuggish goons that
constitute her Cabinet), the Brexit mess, the Skripal poisoning circus, Britain's own
collapse in controlling the propaganda narrative on Syria and the revelations about Integrity
Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, and their ties to the British military
establishment.
US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian
interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b
above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into
promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)
Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses
(neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t
as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions
should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.
The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for
'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.
Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of
doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive
social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.
Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a
jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically
no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc.
having any clue.
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
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
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7 minutes ago Thanks Q! I bring up Montgomery all of the time here. The Eff Bee Eye and Dee oh Jay have all of the documents and are sitting on them. This is how the IC controls everything in the Swamp.
9
1
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.
Christian O. Bruch/ laif Benjamin Bidder
Chris Gloag/ WirtschaftsWoche
Mischa Japaridze/ AP/ Picture Alliance/ DPA
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 48/2019 (November 23rd, 2019) of DER SPIEGEL.
Charles Dharapak/ AP/ Picture Alliance/ DPA
490 9:39 PM
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2015 File
Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions
Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal
Incident
Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative
Invoice submitted to
Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections
