Russia, the U.S. and elections

There is no basis for any claims about a “stolen” presidential election. Nobody stole anything. No Russian operatives altered ballots or tampered with election machines, which is why the Obama administration itself has declared that state-by-state election results “reflect the will of the people.”

Was Russia able to—or intent upon—ensuring the victory of Donald Trump by, among other things, hacking into the Democratic National Committee computers? Meddling is one thing. Questions of intent and culpability, however, are not as easy to answer as some of Trump’s detractors would have it. Congressional investigations to explore what did, and did not, happen are perfectly appropriate, as long as they proceed in a genuine spirit of inquiry rather than attempting to ratify preexisting beliefs.

Indeed, any investigation would have to take into account that Washington itself has in the past tried to influence foreign elections, including in Russia during the 1990s. This is not to posit a symmetry between America, a democracy, and Russian, an authoritarian state. But it is notable that nearly all of the discussion about Russian hacking—with the exception of some experts who had been warning about these trends developing over the last several years—is taking place with an attitude that the November 2016 election is the equivalent of Captain Renault in Casablanca who is "shocked" to discover that gambling is taking place in Rick's Café Americain.

The most basic question is this: why is anyone surprised that the government of the Russian Federation might have had an interest in the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election? This is basic International Relations 101—countries have interests in the choices other nations make in terms of their leadership and policies based on whether they think they will be good or bad for their own welfare. This is why President Barack Obama urged British voters to reject leaving the European Union and supported the referendum in Italy on constitutional reform backed by his political ally Prime Minister Matteo—because keeping the UK in the EU and strengthening the Italian central government were both important to U.S. efforts to stabilize European affairs. (In both cases, Obama’s preferred outcomes were defeated at the polls by British and Italian voters.) In the U.S. campaign, one candidate signaled an openness to searching for common ground with Moscow, while the other indicated that U.S. policy would take an even harder line against Russian interests.

Thus, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted that it was “very rational” that Vladimir Putin might prefer to see Donald Trump become President of the United States in place of Hillary Clinton, on the expectation that a Trump administration might pursue U.S. polices more amenable to Russian interests. Similar calculations seem to have been made by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel, while, in a number of Central and East European countries, there was a strong preference for a Clinton victory.

The question becomes more problematic, however, when we move from the “interest” which another country may have in election outcomes to whether that country seeks to “influence” the outcome of the vote and the types of methods used to project that influence. When do steps taken beyond mere public statements of support for a candidate or policy position cross the line into illegitimate interference in the domestic political affairs of another country? While the United States does have laws on the books which address the question of direct financial support of U.S. candidates from overseas sources, what about support in the informational sector—particularly the use of media and cyber tools?

Much of the current discussion instead focuses on whether persons and entities either belonging to or working in the employ of the Russian government interfered in the campaign by intercepting and stealing private, confidential communications of U.S. officials and politicians and providing that material to media outlets, while simultaneously using other media organs under the control or patronage of the Russian state to disseminate a mix of fact and fiction into the overall international media bloodstream—all with the intent to damage the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and boost the electoral chances of Donald Trump.

To what extent this occurred, and to what extent it was responsible for Trump’s narrow victory, is what is now under debate. Given that Secretary Clinton lost an election she was overwhelmingly favored to win, the narrative of foreign interference may be a welcome balm to assuage a sense of failure among her supporters, but it should also not detract from the many missteps of her campaign—including ignoring former President Bill Clinton’s prophetic advice not to ignore key Rust Belt constituencies and the white working-class vote. Quantifying the effect that leaked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and senior campaign staff or that news stories calling into question Clinton’s health had on the overall vote is difficult to accomplish. As best as can be ascertained, alleged Russian assistance in obtaining and forwarding information helped to confirm pre-existing American voters’ concerns about Clinton, notably her reliability and honesty. Against another prospective Democratic nominee—Vice President Joe Biden, for instance—such efforts would have had much less impact. Nevertheless, the existence of evidence pointing to Russian efforts needs to be clarified and assessed, and to be part of the calculus about the future of U.S.-Russia relations—as well as on U.S. government policy about its own efforts to influence other countries’ political systems.

It is unfortunate, however, that so much of this discussion occurs in such an ahistorical context. If the United States national security establishment and the mainstream media had a series of serious conversations a few years back—when a clear warning shot was fired across the bow—we might not be in this position today with the credibility of both U.S. political and media institutions on the line—and with the possibility that the prediction of a second Cold War between Moscow and Washington has now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In February 2014, a mobile telephone conversation between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, having been intercepted by entities unknown but largely assumed to be acting on behalf of Russian interests, was leaked to the media. The Nuland-Pyatt exchanges, which the State Department, when given the opportunity, declined to characterize as "inauthentic", revealed that, contrary to public U.S. statements, Washington was playing more of a role in trying to direct the course of events in Ukraine, and in particular to guide the leadership of the Maidan protest movement. This included by-name discussions about which Ukrainian politicians the United States wanted to see in any new government—including prospective prime ministerial candidates. As the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus commented, despite official proclamations that the United States would let the Ukrainian people decide their own future, the transcript demonstrated that “the US has very clear ideas about what the outcome should be and is striving to achieve these goals.”

The conversation was also personally embarrassing to Nuland, because it broadcast her use of colorful language to disparage the efforts of the European Union to bring about a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis—and raised questions in both Brussels as well as many European capitals if there was indeed a gap between what the Assistant Secretary was saying publicly and to them versus what she really thought and was trying to achieve as a matter of policy. The leak even temporarily ruffled U.S.-European relations, with German chancellor Angela Merkel declaring that she found "these remarks totally unacceptable." It also suggested that the U.S. government was not going to let a Ukrainian political process work itself out but would play an active role in determining outcomes, and felt confident that it had levers at its disposal to ensure compliance.

In this incident, we saw several different factors coalesce. One was to put American officials on notice that it was foolhardy to place their trust in relatively flimsy cyber and digital defenses of their mobile and computing devices which could be overwhelmed by a determined party. The second was the effort to exposure the gap between public idealistic rhetoric and private, behind-the-scenes maneuvering. The Nuland disclosures would not have been found embarrassing or dishonorable by Prince Metternich or Talleyrand, who accepted as a matter of course that great powers should be able to move smaller states and their leaders around like pieces on a chessboard (after all, this is how the royal family of Greece was selected!)—but they posed problems precisely because they did not easily fit within a narrative of democracy promotion and American virtue. Finally, it was a warning—that Moscow was watching—and learning—from U.S. actions. After all, even prior to the Ukraine crisis of 2014, many Russians had had up front experience with how American operatives and media interventions (even if operating as private individuals and organizations) could sway elections in Russia, notably during the 1996 fight between Boris Yeltsin and Gennady Zyuganov. Moreover, the Russians—as well as many other countries around the world—do not recognize the niceties of a U.S. system where government grants are dispensed to quasi-non-governmental organizations (the various Institutes for democracy assistance or media outlets like the various “free radios”) but are inclined to view their activities as directed inspired by the U.S. government.

The Nuland affair demonstrated that Russia would be more inclined, in the future, to use these tools of shadowy interception and transmission against the United States—not only where America and Russia engaged in geopolitical competition in the former Soviet space, but ultimately in the West itself—including in both European and American politics. In other words, in the game of international political influence, Russia would no longer confine herself to the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet bloc nations.

Yet the Nuland leak was worth only a few days’ news stories, and then disappeared from consciousness. It apparently did not lead many in Washington to change their communication habits or to recognize that Russia might have an interest in finding more ways to publicize divergences between public statements and private realities of U.S. political figures in the hopes of generating embarrassment—in particular, in being able to expose to raw public view the private hypocrisy on which modern politics depends. It did not lead to any new appreciation for Russia’s ability to wield the tools of both cyber and soft power—based on a mix of dismissiveness of Russian capabilities and a misplaced faith that America was somehow an exceptional country in which such methods would somehow not work or bear influence.

Beyond that, this incident did not lead to any fundamental re-evaluation both of the utility of American efforts to influence the choice of leaders in other countries of the world or of the trajectory of U.S.-Russia relations. It is difficult to look at recent events in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, or even places like South Sudan—where U.S. diplomacy and pressure has been marshalled to encourage, cajole or prod the deposition or selection of leaders—and to see how precisely such efforts have benefited American strategic interests or even been successful in producing stable governments. Often, the long-term trajectory seems to be negative. Nor is there much assessment of the utility of U.S. support. Indeed, research released by Italy’s Banca Monte Dei Paschi suggests that Obama’s public statements of support for Renzi may in fact have contributed to the defeat of the recent referendum.

The Nuland incident should also have forced a serious conversation about U.S.-Russia strategic competition. That—along with Putin’s very revealing “spring” speech after the annexation of Crimea later that year—were very clear indications that the course of U.S. policy was at odds with Russian strategic preferences. If the clash was not desired, then a policy of recalibration was in order—including talks about new “rules of the road” for conduct in a variety of realms including cyberspace. If the clash was seen as unavoidable because of how U.S. interests were conceived, then actions taken afterwards were quite confusing. In Ukraine, the U.S. did enough to spoil relations with Russia but far too little to ensure the success of the Maidan movement. Efforts to combat Russian cyber and information operations were left unfunded or shut down. There were plenty of critiques about Russian behavior in Syria but nothing to change Moscow’s underlying calculus.

Similarly, the discussion today about how to respond lacks a certain strategic seriousness. Some political figures casually toss out grave consequences, up to even military strikes, to punish Russia for its supposed interference. Others continue to cling to fantasies that the U.S. can dispense sanctions on these matters yet retain complete Russian cooperation in other areas that are of importance to the United States.

Moving forward, the U.S. has several different options. After each major cyber incident over the past several years that is attributed to Russian sources, the Kremlin makes a call for codifying international practices that would restrict what countries can do in cyberspace. The U.S. has traditionally resisted such calls because preserving America’s freedom of action is more important for achieving U.S. interests and objectives. Accepting that Russia (and other countries) now have similar capabilities to influence U.S. developments may be one price to pay, just as the United States has had to accept the loss of its earlier monopoly on drone technologies. Alternatively, the United States could re-ramp up efforts to more effectively identify and combat such efforts at home, while enforcing stricter cyber and digital security and changing the habits of many Washingtonians who otherwise prefer to conduct their business via interceptable e-mails and mobile calls, to reduce vulnerabilities. The United States could make efforts by other government to influence U.S. elections in such fashion the central organizing principle of its relations—and to be prepared to pay the costs in other areas.

... ... ...

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/russia-neither-friend-nor-foe-18725?page=sho...

(Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone Magazine)

"Something About This Russia Story Stinks"

"Nearly a decade and a half after the Iraq-WMD faceplant, the American press is again asked to co-sign a dubious intelligence assessmen"


The Obama administration announced this week that nearly three dozen Russian nationals will be expelled from the country. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

... "we don't learn much at all about what led our government to determine a) that these hacks were directed by the Russian government, or b) they were undertaken with the aim of influencing the election, and in particular to help elect Donald Trump.

"The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds up.

"If the American security agencies had smoking-gun evidence that the Russians had an organized campaign to derail the U.S. presidential election and deliver the White House to Trump, then expelling a few dozen diplomats after the election seems like an oddly weak and ill-timed response. Voices in both parties are saying this now." -- Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone Magazine

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/something-about-this-russia-story-...

US intelligence report: Vladimir Putin 'ordered' operation to get Trump elected

Declassified assessment says Russia ‘had clear preference’ for Trump, who met with US intelligence chiefs on Friday but refused to endorse their findings

“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary (Hillary) Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/06/vladimir-putin-us-election-interfe...

(from RealClearPolitics.com)

Assange To Hannity: Source For WikiLeaks Was Not Russian Government
28.5k Shares

Posted By Ian Schwartz
On Date January 2, 2017

In an exclusive interview with FOX News Channel's Sean Hannity the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange said Russia was not the source for the DNC and John Podesta hacks.

Related Video: Hannity on Julian Assange: "I Believe Every Word He Says"

HANNITY: Can you say to the American people, unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta's emails, can you tell the American people 1,000 percent that you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.

Hannity's full interview with Assange will air Tuesday night at 10pm ET. More from the interview:

ASSANGE: Our publications had wide uptake by the American people, they're all true. But that's not the allegation that’s being presented by the Obama White House. So, why such a dramatic response? Well, the reason is obvious. They’re trying to delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House. They are trying to say that President-elect Trump is not a legitimate President...

ASSANGE: Our source is not a state party, so the answer for our interactions is no. But if we look at our most recent statement from the US government, which is on the 29th of December, OK, we had five different branches of government, Treasury, DHS, FBI, White House presenting their accusations to underpin Obama’s throwing out 29 Russian diplomats. What was missing from all of those statements? The word WikiLeaks. It’s very strange.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/01/02/assange_to_hannity_our_source_...

(from Powerlineblog.com)

Posted on January 5, 2017 by Scott Johnson in Intelligence, Russia

Ishmael Jones: From Russia with doubt

(Editor's Note : "The pseudonymous Ishmael Jones is a former CIA case officer and author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. He writes with a timely comment on the current intelligence controversy that is reaching a fever pitch. Mr. Jones advises that his commentary has been reviewed and approved by the CIA’s publications review board.) He writes:

CIA intelligence reporting stating that the Russian government hacked the presidential election in order to elect Donald Trump is false. It is merely a political attack against Donald Trump with the goal of delegitimizing his presidency.

The depth and quality of the CIA reporting are too good to be true. A December 16 NBC report states, for example: “Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used.” Everyone knows that a great deal of hacking comes out of Russia. But evidence of hacking does not lead to the conclusion that there was a Russian government conspiracy to get Mr. Trump elected.

Such a conclusion would require access to Putin’s inner circle and knowledge of Putin’s plans and intentions. Any spy that close to Putin would be one of the best intelligence sources of all time.

If such a source existed, he doesn’t exist any more. The leaked reporting would have put him in grave danger, and he would already have been imprisoned or executed.

The reporting instead reflects the political opinions and agendas of bureaucrats. CIA bureaucrats are a big blue voting machine with a long record of creating information harmful to Republican presidents. The danger to Mr. Trump is ratcheted up because the recent election influenced many people at the CIA to believe that Trump is the second coming of Hitler. And to stop Hitler, anything is ethical, even treason. CIA bureaucrats have chosen to attack Mr. Trump before he even takes office.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/01/ishmael-jones-from-russia-with-dou...

"The best analog to President Trump’s stance toward the Russia probe and his refusal to accept that Russian interference even happened is a husband who is suspected in his wife’s disappearance and repeatedly insists that she’s probably on a beach in Aruba having a good laugh at his expense.

"In any normal circumstance, by any conventional standard, Trump’s attitude and actions are ones that are only consistent with guilt. He has not only repeatedly insisted on his innocence, which the innocent and guilty do in equal measure, but insisted that the crime itself never actually happened."

"Trump did not obstruct a valid FBI investigation; he demanded the exposure of a false one. The “collusion” narrative was a fraud, plain and simple. We know that now. Hopefully, it won’t take another six months to grasp a second plain and simple truth: Collusion’s successor, the “obstruction” narrative, is a perversion.

"The Left loves narrative. The ever-expanding story manipulates time, space, and detail to fit a thematic framework. Political narrative has some surface appeal, but it is deeply flawed. It obscures plain and simple truth."

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448940/trump-obstruction-narrative-comey-k...

"Is ‘Russiagate’ Collapsing as a Political Strategy?"
by Norman Solomon | June 26, 2017

"The plan for Democrats to run against Russia may be falling apart.

"After squandering much of the last six months on faulting Russians for the horrific presidency of Donald Trump…

"After blaming America’s dire shortfalls of democracy on plutocrats in Russia more than on plutocrats in America…

"After largely marketing the brand of their own party as more anti-Russian than pro-working-people…

"After stampeding many Democratic Party-aligned organizations, pundits and activists into fixating more on Russia than on the thousand chronic cuts to democracy here at home…

"After soaking up countless hours of TV airtime and vast quantities of ink and zillions of pixels to denounce Russia in place of offering progressive remedies to the deep economic worries of American voters…

"Now, Democrats in Congress and other party leaders are starting to face an emerging reality: The “winning issue” of Russia is a losing issue.

"The results of a reliable new nationwide poll -- and what members of Congress keep hearing when they actually listen to constituents back home -- cry out for a drastic reorientation of Democratic Party passions. And a growing number of Democrats in Congress are getting the message.

“ ' Frustrated Democrats hoping to elevate their election fortunes have a resounding message for party leaders: Stop talking so much about Russia,' The Hill reported over the weekend. In sharp contrast to their party’s top spokespeople, 'rank-and-file Democrats say the Russia-Trump narrative is simply a non-issue with district voters, who are much more worried about bread-and-butter economic concerns like jobs, wages and the cost of education and healthcare.' "

... ...

Full text at the hyperlinked Headline, above.

Proejct Veritas : "American Pravda: 'Project Veritas' Catches CNN Producer Admitting Russia Story Is "Mostly Bullshit," "About Ratings" " Posted By Tim Hains | On Date June 27, 2017

Project Veritas (PJ) (undercover) Reporter: "So why is CNN like, 'Russia this, Russia that'?"

CNN producer John Bonifield: "Because it's ratings."

Project Veritas (PJ) (undercover) Reporter: "Because it's ratings?"

CNN producer John Bonifield: "Our ratings are incredible right now."

"It’s a business, people are like the media has an ethical phssssss…All the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school you’re just like, that’s adorable. That’s adorable. This is a business." - veteran CNN producer John Bonifield

PV Narrator : ... "The 'Russia' story and Trump have made CNN millions." ($)

... ...
"They're feeding their audience a false narrative in order to get ratings."

Tick, Tick, Tick: How Watergate unfolded can tell us a lot about the Trump–Russia scandal. | By Michelle Goldberg (Slate)

...

"In retrospect, it might seem like doubts about the scope of the scandal had been resolved by August 1973 when the hearings concluded. Yet according to the 1983 book The Battle for Public Opinion: The President, the Press, and the Polls During Watergate, a Harris poll found that 50 percent of respondents believed the media was giving Watergate “more attention than it deserved.” Another poll found that only 20 percent of Americans considered “Watergate, lack of confidence in government, or problems of Nixon and his administration” to be the most important problems facing the country. Most people were more concerned about inflation.

"In the latest issue of New York magazine, Frank Rich has a terrific cover story, “Just Wait: Watergate didn’t become Watergate overnight, either.” “Among those of us who want Donald Trump gone from Washington yesterday, there’s a fair amount of fear that he, too, could hang on until the end of a four-year term that stank of corruption from the start,” writes Rich. But the Watergate example, he argues, shows that the implosion of a presidency isn’t necessarily obvious as it’s happening."

Unable to face facts, they're clinging to this thin straw-- Nixon's fall was many months in coming. Thus, their hopes are pinned on some historical parallel with Watergate's events and details. But there is really no reasonable comparison.

Are these people seriously incapable of understanding how terribly they've been played--and are still being played-- by an utterly cynical Democratic Party? --a party abetted by national journalism which has now long been formed in the corporate elite's image, one which is now completely sold-out and ratings-driven? (See above at >10 proximity1:)

This attempt to reveal deep similarities between Nixon's Watergatge scandal and Trump's current administration doesn't work because there's no respectable basis to it. It's the product of a mass of people suffering through the trauma of deep psychological loss and disappointment. This is a stage of denial. And they offer the picture of duped suckers who deserve no sympathy at all. Their injuries are self-inflicted and they're going to continue until this ridiculous spell is broken.

It is hard to imagine at this point just what it would take to bring these people back to this side of reality.

(From The Intercept (online) : CNN Journalists Resign: Latest Example of Media Recklessness on the Russia Threat
| by Glenn Greenwald | June 27 2017, 3:03 p.m.

" Three prominent CNN journalists resigned Monday night after the network was forced to retract and apologize for a story linking Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund under congressional investigation. That article — like so much Russia reporting from the U.S. media — was based on a single anonymous source, and now, the network cannot vouch for the accuracy of its central claims.

In announcing the resignation of the three journalists — Thomas Frank, who wrote the story (not the same Thomas Frank who wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”); Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lichtblau, recently hired away from the New York Times; and Lex Haris, head of a new investigative unit — CNN said that “standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.” The resignations follow CNN’s Friday night retraction of the story, in which it apologized to Scaramucci:" ...

... "There are great benefits to be reaped by publishing alarmist claims about the Russian Threat and Trump’s connection to it. Stories that depict the Kremlin and Putin as villains and grave menaces are the ones that go most viral, produce the most traffic, generate the most professional benefits such as TV offers, along with online praise and commercial profit for those who disseminate them. That’s why blatantly inane anti-Trump conspiracists and Russia conspiracies now command such a large audience: because there is a voracious appetite among anti-Trump internet and cable news viewers for stories, no matter how false, that they want to believe are true (and, conversely, expressing any skepticism about such stories results in widespread accusations that one is a Kremlin sympathizer or outright agent)."

"There is no allegation that any American was a willing participant" in the Russian plan, and there is no allegation that it altered the outcome of the election, Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod J. Rosenstein said in a brief news conference discussing the indictment.

"Nonetheless, the indictment seriously undermines President Trump's repeated contention that the entire Russia investigation is a "hoax" or "witch hunt." It details specific activities the Russians took, initially focused on creating general discord in the U.S., but eventually focused specifically on boosting Trump's campaign."

_________________________________________

NOTE RE: Entrapment —— This post is UP-DATED (as appended below) Saturday, 26 October, 2019 :

__________________________________________

Cites:

my post from : Dec 5, 2017, 3:27am

“I also wonder whether Flynn's guilty-plea is irreversible at this point. In his place, if I could, I'd say, "I changed my mind: I'll see you in court. My plea is 'not guilty.'" Then, as part of his defense, he should show the F.B.I. engaged in entrapment.”

________________________________

(From The Federalist news website)

By Margot Cleveland || February 19, 2018

How A Plea Reversal From Michael Flynn Could Uncover More Federal Corruption || Did Robert Mueller’s office withhold other evidence in Michael Flynn’s prosecution, either from the FISA court or from Flynn’s attorneys? There is reason to believe so. ||

"On Friday, Judge Emmet Sullivan issued an order in United States v. Flynn that, while widely unnoticed, reveals something fascinating: A motion by Michael Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea based on government misconduct is likely in the works.

"Just a week ago, and thus before Sullivan quietly directed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to provide Flynn’s attorneys “any exculpatory evidence,” Washington Examiner columnist Byron York detailed the oddities of Flynn’s case. The next day, former assistant U.S. attorney and National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy connected more of the questionable dots. York added even more details a couple of days later. Together these articles provide the backdrop necessary to understand the significance of Sullivan’s order on Friday." ...

LOL!

____________________________________

UP-DATE : RE: Entrapment ——

from The Federalist (Washington, D.C.) | Opinion/Commentary

Sidney Powell Drops Bombshell Showing How The FBI Trapped Michael Flynn

'Mr. Flynn will ask this Court to dismiss the entire prosecution based on the outrageous and un-American conduct of law enforcement officials and the subsequent failure of the prosecution to disclose this evidence.' | by Margot Cleveland | Friday, October 25th, 2019
_____________________________

"Earlier this week, Michael Flynn’s star attorney, Sidney Powell, filed under seal a brief in reply to federal prosecutors’ claims that they have already given Flynn’s defense team all the evidence they are required by law to provide. A minimally redacted copy of the reply brief has just been made public, and with it shocking details of the deep state’s plot to destroy Flynn.

"While the briefing at issue concerns Powell’s motion to compel the government to hand over evidence required by Brady and presiding Judge Emmett Sullivan’s standing order, Powell’s 37-page brief pivots between showcasing the prosecution’s penchant for withholding evidence and exposing significant new evidence the defense team uncovered that establishes a concerted effort to entrap Flynn. Along the way, Powell drops half-a-dozen problems with Flynn’s plea and an equal number of justifications for outright dismissal of the criminal charges against Flynn.

"What is most striking, though, is the timeline Powell pieced together from publicly reported text messages withheld from the defense team and excerpts from documents still sealed from public view. The sequence Powell lays out shows that a team of 'high-ranking FBI officials orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president’s National Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of criminal activity—they already had tapes of all the relevant conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn—but for the purpose of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false.'

‘The Upper Echelon of the FBI Met to Orchestrate It All’

"First came FBI agent Peter Strzok’s text to FBI attorney Lisa Page 'as news of the "salacious and unverified" allegations of the "Steele dossier" dominated the media.' 'Sitting with Bill watching CNN. A TON more out. . . We’re discussing whether, now that this is out, we can use it as a pretext to go interview some people,” Strzok told his paramour.

"Then, quoting from a sealed statement by Strzok, Powell reveals that over next two weeks, there were 'many meetings' between Strzok and (FBI Deputy Director Andrew) McCabe to discuss 'whether to interview () National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and if so, what interview strategies to use.' And 'on January 23, the day before the interview, the upper echelon of the FBI met to orchestrate it all. Deputy Director McCabe, General Counsel James Baker, Lisa Page, Strzok, David Bowdich, Trish Anderson, and Jen Boone strategized to talk with Mr. Flynn in such a way as to keep from alerting him from understanding that he was being interviewed in a criminal investigation of which he was the target.'

"Next came 'Comey’s direction to "screw it" in contravention of longstanding DOJ protocols,' leading McCabe to personally call Flynn to schedule the interview. Yet none of Comey’s notes on the decision to interview Flynn were turned over to defense. Even Obama-holdover 'Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates candidly opined that the interview "was problematic" and "it was not always clear what the FBI was doing to investigate Flynn,' Powell stressed. Yet again, the prosecution did not turn over Yates’ notes, but only 'disclosed a seven-line summary of Ms. Yates statement six months after Mr. Flynn’s plea.' " ...

...

"Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and current adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity." (Federalist editors)

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI) of 16 December 1966 entry into force 23 March 1976, in accordance with Article 49

_________________________

(Relevant parts: Articles 19-22) as below

Article 19

1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:

(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;

(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or
morals.

Article 20

1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.
2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

Article 21

The right of peaceful assembly shall be recognized. No restrictions may be placed on the exercise of this right other than those imposed in conformity with the law and which are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, public order (ordre public), the protection of public health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Article 22

1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

2. No restrictions may be placed on the exercise of this right other than those which are prescribed by law and which are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, public order (ordre public), the protection of public health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. This article shall not prevent the imposition of lawful restrictions on members of the armed forces and of the police in their exercise of this right.

3. Nothing in this article shall authorize States Parties to the International Labour Organisation
Convention of 1948 concerning Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize to take legislative measures which would prejudice, or to apply the law in such a manner as to
prejudice, the guarantees provided for in that Convention.

The Federal Election Campagin Act and Commission regulations include a broad prohibition on foreign national activity in connection with elections in the United States. 52 U.S.C. § 30121 and generally, 11 CFR 110.20. In general, foreign nationals are prohibited from the following activities:

Making any contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or making any expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement in connection with any federal, state or local election in the United States;

Making any contribution or donation to any committee or organization of any national, state, district,

or local political party (including donations to a party nonfederal account or office building account);

Making any disbursement for an electioneering communication;

Making any donation to a presidential inaugural committee.

The hysteria over Russian bots has reached new levels
by Thomas Frank || Opinion || The Guardian (London) || Fri 23 Feb 2018 10.00 GMT

"The grand total for all political ad spending in the 2016 election cycle, according to Advertising Age, was $9.8bn. The ads allegedly produced by inmates of a Russian troll farm, which have made up this week’s ration of horror and panic in the halls of the American punditburo, cost about $100,000 to place on Facebook.

"A few months ago, when I first described those Russian ads in this space, I invited readers to laugh at them. They were “low-budget stuff, ugly, loud and stupid”, I wrote. They interested me because they cast the paranoid right, instead of the left, as dupes of a foreign power. And yet, I wrote, the American commentariat had largely overlooked them.

"Now that Robert Mueller’s office has indicted the Russian actors who are allegedly behind the ads, however, all that has changed. American pundits have gone from zero to 60 on this matter in no time at all – from ignoring the Facebook posts to outright hysteria over them.

"What the Russian trolls allegedly did was 'an act of war ... a sneak attack using 21st-century methods', wrote the columnist Karen Tumulty. 'Our democracy is in serious danger,' declared America’s star thought-leader Thomas Friedman on Sunday, raging against the weakling Trump for not getting tough with these trolls and their sponsors. 'Protecting our democracy obviously concerns Trump not at all,' agreed columnist Eugene Robinson on Tuesday.

The ads themselves are now thought to have been the product of highly advanced political intelligence. So effective were the troll-works, wrote Robert Kuttner on Monday, that we can say Trump 'literally became president in a Russia-sponsored coup d’etat'.

For thoughts on the finely tuned calculations behind this propaganda campaign, The Washington Post on Saturday turned to Brian Fallon, a former Hillary Clinton press secretary, who referred to the alleged Russian effort as follows: 'It seems like the creative instincts and the sophistication exceeds a lot of the US political operatives who do this for a living.'

Of what, specifically, did this sophistication consist? In what startling insights was this creativity made manifest? 'Fallon said it was stunning to realize that the Russians understood how Trump was trying to woo disaffected (Bernie) Sanders supporters ...'

"The Post added a few suspicious examples of its own. The Russian trolls figured out that battleground states were important. And: they tried to enlist disgruntled blue-collar voters in what the paper called the 'rust belt'.

"Okay, stop here. Since when is it a marker of political sophistication to know that some states are more persuadable than others? Or to understand that blue-collar voters are an important demographic these days?

"If you’re one of those people who frets about our democracy being in serious danger, I contend that the above passages from the Post’s report should push your panic meter deep into the red.

"This is the reason why: we have here a former spokesman for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, one of the best-funded, most consummately professional efforts of all time, and he thinks it was an act of off-the-hook perceptiveness to figure out that Trump was aiming for disgruntled Sanders voters. Even after Trump himself openly said that’s what he was trying to do."

_____________________________________________

"But all that aside, it may not be necessary to pry into informant files in order to find answers to the most pressing questions. Those answers may be found in the thousands of Strzok-Page texts. These provide a day-to-day narrative of the goings-on in the Clinton-emails and Trump-Russia investigations by two of the highest, most plugged-in officials in the government.

"This fact has eluded us for months, ever since the existence of the texts was first made known. Yes, a few explosive messages have captured our attention, most notably, Strzok’s 'insurance policy' assertion: An account of an August 15 discussion among top FBI officials in then-deputy director Andrew McCabe’s office, with Strzok observing that although it was highly unlikely 'Trump gets elected,' the government 'can’t take that risk' and needed an “insurance policy” against a Trump presidency. But for the most part, the texts have been dismissed as the ravings of star-crossed lovers whose loathing of Trump and disdain for Trump supporters should not be thought to reflect on the Bureau’s legions of hard-working non-partisans.

"That’s the wrong way to look at it.

"Strzok and Page are singularly well-informed, central players in the Clinton and Trump investigations. They tell us exactly what is going on and why — or at least they would if the Justice Department had not blacked out key parts of their running conversation."

From The Wall Street Journal
Potomac Watch

"Was Trump’s Campaign ‘Set Up’? " |
At some point, the Russia investigation became political. How early was it?

By Kimberley A. Strassel
May 17, 2018 7:06 p.m. ET
__________________________

"House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appeared on “Fox & Friends” Tuesday, where he provided a potentially explosive hint at what’s driving his demand to see documents related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Trump-Russia probe. 'If the campaign was somehow set up,' he told the hosts, 'I think that would be a problem.'

"Or an understatement. Mr. Nunes is still getting stiff-armed by the Justice Department over his subpoena, but this week his efforts did force the stunning admission that the FBI had indeed spied on the Trump campaign. This came in the form of a Thursday New York Times apologia in which government 'officials' acknowledged that the bureau had used 'at least one' human 'informant' to spy on both Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. The Times slipped this mind-bending fact into the middle of an otherwise glowing profile of the noble bureau—and dismissed it as no big deal.

But there’s more to be revealed here, and Mr. Nunes’s 'set up' comment points in a certain direction. Getting to the conclusion requires thinking more broadly about events beyond the FBI’s actions." ... ...

WSJ's Kim Strassel: "Mindboggling" That Obama's DOJ Spied On The Republican Party's Presidential Nominee | Posted By Ian Schwartz || On Date May 19, 2018

... ...

TUCKER CARLSON: Kim, so you've just heard Jim Clapper tell us it's a good thing. Do you think it would be worth just putting a permanent FBI or CIA spy in every presidential campaign going forward?

KIM STRASSEL: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Why not? It sounds like it would be a good thing, Tucker.

Look, you and I have been doing this for a long time. Can you think of any time in history when this has happened or when anyone thought it was OK for - by the way, the Department of Justice is being run by one political party, electronically surveilling and then also spying on the leading candidate, for a nominee for opposing party running for the presidency.

TUCKER CARLSON: It's almost too big to get your head around. And you've got to think -

STRASSEL: It's mindboggling.

CARLSON: - any other moment in the last 50 years, if this came to light, it would be considered a stop the presses moment. It would be a legitimate constitutional crisis and a scandal, people would go to prison. And, yet, this is passing almost without comment, except really on this channel and at your newspaper. Why?

STRASSEL: Well, the mainstream media doesn't want to have to put this the way it is because they still want the Russia collusion narrative to be true.

They still want a pretext to get this president out of office. And so, people are no longer using standard measures.

Look, I'm a libertarian. I don't want a government spying on anybody in any situation that's illegitimate. And so, I try to put that measure out there.

But one other thing too that I think is so astounding and that also deserves some note is the games the Department of Justice is playing in terms of coming clean with this information.

They have now flouted a subpoena from Chairman Nunes for weeks, saying that there is no way that they can give him the information he wants because it might put this source of theirs at risk.

And yet, they have over the past couple of weeks leaked more information about this person than was prior known and would be known and they're doing it all in order to get friendly media to write stories about how they did everything right in 2016, which, of course, we know they didn't.

... ...

___________________________________

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is asking the Justice Department for a document that lays out the full scope of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

22 May 2018 :

The “Sensitive Matter Team”

by Sharyl Attkisson || on May 22, 2018 || in News ||

_________________________

Newly-examined emails among high-ranking U.S. intel officials at the time—including then-Director James Comey and his chief of staff James Rybicki—reference a “sensitive matter team.”

Based on the context of the emails, the “sensitive matter” appears to be the Trump-Russia narrative, and political opposition research funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The research— known as the “Steele dossier”— was peddled to the press and secretly used, in part, to justify controversial FBI wiretaps against at least one Trump associate.

The emails were first obtained by the Justice Department Inspector General and recently turned over to the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray Monday asking for the identity of all members of the “sensitive matter team.”

According to Sen. Johnson’s letter, Comey chief of staff Rybicki emailed unidentified recipients on the morning of Jan. 6, 2017 stating, “(Director Comey) is coming to HQ briefly now for an update on the sensitive matter team.”

Later in the day, Comey briefed President-elect Trump on a few of the salacious, unverified allegations in the Steele dossier. The next day, Comey reported on his briefing in an email to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI General Counsel James Baker and Chief of Staff Rybicki. (All four men have since resigned or been fired from the FBI.)

“I said there was something Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wanted me to speak to President Elect Trump about alone or in a very small group,” Comey wrote in the email. “I then executed the session exactly as I had planned…I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook.” (Clapper now works as a CNN contributor.)

... ...

Sharyl Attkisson on Youtube.com :

Attkisson: Media no longer follows rules because of Trump

How Real Is Fake News? | Sharyl Attkisson | TEDxUniversityofNevada

(From The Federalist.com) :
I’m A Democrat, And The Left’s Russia Gaslighting Scares Me More Than Trump Does
|| My fellow Democrats are increasingly becoming the kind of low-information voters they despise and think are only on the other side. || By Saritha Prabhu || May 24, 2018

“I am an ordinary voter living far from the Beltway who feels gaslighted by our political and media establishments regarding the Russia investigation. Our current Yanny versus Laurel political moment is probably confusing even for professional political commentators. But for ordinary Americans it is a bewildering, disorienting spectacle.
“Which is it: Is Donald Trump a threat to the republic, or is the deep state the threat? Was the Russia investigation legit, or was it concocted by an out-of-control Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency? Was it an FBI “informant,” or was it a “spy”?
“Has America become Venezuela, as Republicans say, because the Obama administration spied on the campaign of a political adversary? Or has it become Venezuela, as Democrats say, because our current president is attacking his investigators?

“The answers to the above questions depend on which camp one is in. In our hyperpartisan times, each side has its own narrative.
“Each Side Couldn’t Be Farther From the Other”

“The Democrats and their supportive media outlets (CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times) have been saying for a year that Trump and his campaign likely colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election, that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will eventually find proof of it, and that Trump will, as a result, get impeached.
“Those on the Right point to the various leaks and reports to say there was no collusion, the Russia investigation was a set-up to undermine Trump’s presidency, and that the investigation needs to wrap up.

“Looking at all of this, one wonders: If Watergate had happened today, would there be a bipartisan, national consensus that the president had done grave misdeeds and needed to resign? Probably not. There would be two narratives, each spinning madly, with no consensus.

“I’m a Democrat, and it would be easier to accept my side’s version of unfolding events. It would certainly make my life easier when talking with my liberal friends. But facts are pesky things, and I’ve become increasingly aggravated by my own side. It seems the desire to win the 2016 election and Trump hatred has not only warped the Democratic political and media establishments, but exposed them for what they are.

“Yes, Trump is intemperate, narcissistic, and the most unconventional president ever. But it appears that his opponents in our political and media establishments are far worse: they wanted to subvert democracy to save it from Trump; they wanted to thwart the will of Trump’s 63 million voters and not just undermine his presidency, but to concoct an investigation to impeach him and get him out of office.
“Looked at this way, it appears that Trump’s election is vindicated for many reasons: There appears to be a deep state in this country comprising both Republicans and Democrats, which will not abide an outsider president.” … ...
“This Is a Horrible Look for Democrats”

(from The Federalist.com)

Corruption

It’s Time To Admit The Russia Investigation Was Illegitimate From The Start ||
While claims that the FBI properly inquired of connections between the Trump campaign and Russia were valid to a point, that point has long since passed. ||
____________________
By Margot Cleveland | May 23, 2018



“In the last week, as revelation upon revelation hit that Obama administration officials and career employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) spied on the Donald Trump campaign in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, the mainstream media, the Left, and Never Trump Republicans have fallen back on three ready responses.

“A solid plurality of this contingent continue to avert their eyes from the facts and dismiss the claims of misconduct as peddled by tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists. There is not much you can say to this faction, because they refuse to consider the proof.

“A second—and more extreme group—believes Trump conspired with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. There is not much you can say to this bunch either, because they are tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists.

“But the final group sees things differently. While they don’t necessarily believe Trump was treasonous, they argue that the FBI and other intelligence-gathering agencies rightly targeted the Trump campaign. With Russian-leaning Paul Manafort and Carter Page involved in the campaign, and Trump trolling Hillary with praise for Vladimir Putin, the government could not just ignore the risk, they posit. And there was no impropriety in doing so.

“I Was Once In Group Three, Too”

“For two years, I teetered between that third contingent and utter disinterest. But then we learned that the DOJ intentionally failed to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that the Democratic National Committee had paid for the Christopher Steele dossier. That unverified and mainly false dossier formed a significant part of the government’s application for a wiretap for former Trump aide Page.”

“This admission changed everything for me: I had spent nearly 25 years reviewing challenges to warrants based on claims of withheld (or false) evidence. However, unlike the typical criminal case in which a defendant later has access to the warrant application, in the case of a FISA court order, the target cannot view the information the government used to obtain a wiretap, making FISA court proceedings ripe for abuse.”

My rule of law alarms went off. Trump’s criticism of the Russia collusion investigation no longer sounded staged, and he no longer seemed paranoid. Then the revelations kept coming, as did leaks intended to harm Trump, change the narrative, or soften soon-to-be released news of other misconduct.

Meanwhile, what was not forthcoming was the information Congress requested, and when it belatedly arrived it was heavily redacted to protect “national security.” Then later releases revealed the national security excuse didn’t hold. So while claims that the FBI properly inquired of connections between the Trump campaign and Russia were valid to a point, that point has long since passed.

Was there good faith in the beginning? Did political appointees and career agents rightfully pursue leads to see if something was there? Or was the investigation always an insurance policy?

I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that there is a convincing mosaic of evidence that the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, and DOJ acted with improper motives—some related to the Obama administration’s general modus operandi, and some specific to Crossfire Hurricane.

Let’s Look at That Mosaic … …

(from "AmericanGreatness.com")

Dear Ex-Friends in #TheResistance

|| By Julie Kelly| May 30th, 2018

"Hey, what’s up. Long time no talk.

"I think the last civil conversations we had occurred just days before November 8, 2016. You were supremely confident Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election; you voted for her with glee. As a lifelong Republican, I bit down hard and cast my vote for Donald Trump. Then the unimaginable happened. He won.

"And you lost your fucking minds.

"I knew you would take the loss hard—and personally—since all of you were super jacked-up to elect the first woman president. But I did not imagine you would become totally deranged, attacking anyone who voted for Trump or supported his presidency as a racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic Nazi-sympathizer.

"The weirdness started on social media late on Election Night, as it became clear Hillary was going to lose. A few of you actually admitted that you were cradling your sleeping children, weeping, wondering what to tell your kindergartner the next morning about Trump’s victory. It continued over the next several days. Some of you seriously expressed fear about modern-day concentration camps. Despite living a privileged lifestyle, you were suddenly a casualty of the white patriarchy. Your daughters were future victims; your sons were predators-in-waiting. You threatened to leave Facebook because you could no longer enjoy the family photos or vacation posts from people who, once friends, became Literal Hitlers to you on November 8 because they voted for Donald Trump.

"I admit I was a little hurt at first. The attacks against us Trump voters were so personal and so vicious that I did not think it could be sustained. I thought maybe you would regain your sanity after some turkey and egg nog.

"But you did not. You got worse. And I went from sad to angry to where I am today: Amused.

"As the whole charade you have been suckered into over the last 18 months starts to fall apart—that Trump would not survive his presidency; he would be betrayed by his own staff, family, and/or political party; he would destroy the Republican Party; he would be declared mentally ill and removed from office; he would be handcuffed and dragged out of the White House by Robert Mueller for “colluding” with Russia—let me remind you what complete fools you have made of yourselves. Not to mention how you’ve been fooled by the media, the Democratic Party, and your new heroes on the NeverTrump Right.

"On November 9, you awoke from a self-induced, eight-year-long political coma to find that White House press secretaries shade the truth and top presidential advisors run political cover for their boss. You were shocked to discover that presidents exaggerate, even lie, on occasion. You became interested for the first time about the travel accommodations, office expenses, and lobbyist pals of administration officials. You started counting how many rounds of golf the president played. You suddenly thought it was fine to mock the first lady now that she wasn’t Michelle Obama. Once you removed your pussy hat after attending the Women’s March, you made fun of Kellyanne Conway’s hair, Sarah Sanders’ weight, Melania Trump’s shoes, Hope Hicks’ death stare; you helped fuel a rumor started by a bottom-feeding author that U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley slept with Donald Trump. You thought it was A-OK that Betsy DeVos was nearly physically assaulted and routinely heckled. You glorified a woman who has sex on camera for a paycheck.

"You have learned all kinds of new things that those of us who didn’t willfully ignore politics for the past eight years already knew. For example, we already knew that illegal immigrants were being deported and families were being separated. We already knew about misconduct at the Environmental Protection Agency. We already knew that politicians gerrymander congressional districts for favorable election outcomes. We already knew that citizens from certain countries had restricted access here.

"But American politics became a whole new thing for you.

"Some of your behavior has been kinda cute. It was endearing to watch you become experts on the Logan Act, the Hatch Act, the Second Amendment, the 25th Amendment, and the Emoluments Clause. You developed a new crush on Mitt Romney after calling him a “sexist” for having “binders full of women.” You longed for a redux of the presidency of George W. Bush, a man you once wanted imprisoned for war crimes. Ditto for John McCain. You embraced people like Bill Kristol and David Frum without knowing anything about their histories of shotgunning the Iraq War.

"Classified emails shared by Hillary Clinton? Who cares! Devin Nunes wanting to declassify crucial information of the public interest? Traitor!

"But your newfound admiration and fealty to law enforcement really has been a fascinating transformation. Wasn’t it just last fall that I saw you loudly supporting professional athletes who were protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem?" ... ...

The President in a Vise | Editorial of The New York Sun |
August 21, 2018

___________________________

"From President Trump’s point of view, it will be hard to put the gloss on the developments today in federal criminal court. First came news that the president’s erstwhile personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, would be pleading guilty, albeit without an obligation to turn state’s evidence. Then came news of a jury’s conviction of Mr. Trump’s erstwhile campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, on eight counts, albeit crimes unrelated to the president. The crimes of both are felonies.

"Yet if we were the judge — a stretch to be sure — we would reject the guilty plea in the one matter that intimately threatens Mr. Trump’s presidency. That is Michael Cohen’s claim that his role in arranging to pay so-called hush money to Stormy Daniels and another woman amounts to a violation of campaign finance law. That, at least to us, is by no means clear. If the law bars such payments, it’s probably unconstitutional. Americans deserve to have it tried in court."

... ...

"What needs to be kept in mind at every stage is that this whole investigation is not about Russian meddling. Everyone agrees that they did it and it was wrong. No one needs a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of that. This is part of an effort by the Democrats and their collaborators to overturn a presidential election that they thought they would win. No crime of which either man was pronounced guilty today is as foul as the campaign underway to foil the decision of the American people."

______________________________________________________

The American Spectator |

Let him keep indicting and convicting ham sandwiches. Most Americans won’t care. | August 22, 2018, 12:05 am

___________________________

Let the American People Decide Donald Trump's Fate

If Trump is as bad a president as Democrats say he is, then they should have no trouble pushing him out of office in 2020. The proper place to get a verdict on a president is not in a court of law or through a Senate impeachment hearing, but at the ballot box.

by Daniel McCarthy | August 22, 2018

________________________________________

"If you can’t impeach a president for lying about then sex, can you impeach one for buying the silence of a mistress? Common sense says “no,” but that won’t stop Democrats from making the most of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea to a campaign-finance violation involving Donald Trump and his alleged affairs.

"For a year and a half, President Donald Trump’s enemies have tried to make him out to be a new Nixon embroiled in a second Watergate, one that will end his presidency far advance of the voters having their say in November 2020. The more obvious comparisons between Trump and former President Bill Clinton somehow never get drawn by this president’s critics. But the parallels are unmissable (i.e. unmistakable). Even as Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation has failed to come up with evidence of a grand conspiracy between Trump and Putin to steal the 2016 election, various Trump associates—including Cohen and Paul Manafort—have been going down for tax evasion and similar petty crimes characteristic of sleazy political operators. The name “Webster Hubbell” comes to mind."

________________________________________

( The Washington Examiner )

Opinion | Media’s latest attempt to stand up to Trump is a giant self-own
by Becket Adams | August 22, 2018 08:21 AM

__________________________________________________________

Meanwhile, as millions of morons are fixated on such bullshit as the above-mentioned nonsense topic highlights, there's this going on:

(excerpted from the morally-lost, idiotic piece-of-shit pseudo-'news'paper, The Guardian (London))

Are we about to witness the most unequal societies in history? | by Yuval Noah Harari | Wed 24 May 2017 09.15 BST

___________________________

... ...

"Industrial economies relied on masses of common workers, while industrial armies relied on masses of common soldiers. Governments in both democracies and dictatorships invested heavily in the health, education and welfare of the masses, because they needed millions of healthy labourers to work in the factories, and millions of loyal soldiers to serve in the armies.

Consequently, the history of the 20th century revolved to a large extent around the reduction of inequality between classes, races and genders. The world of the year 2000 was a far more equal place than the world of 1900. With the end of the cold war, people became ever-more optimistic, and expected that the process would continue and accelerate in the 21st century.

In particular, they hoped globalisation would spread economic prosperity and democratic freedom throughout the world, and that as a result, people in India and Egypt would eventually come to enjoy the same rights, privileges and opportunities as people in Sweden and Canada. An entire generation grew up on this promise.

Now it seems that this promise was a lie." ... ...
________________________

(emphasis added)

The Truth Will Set Us All Free | By Victor Davis Hanson
| August 30, 2018
____________________________________

… …
“Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation was star-crossed from the start. His friend and successor as FBI director, James Comey, by his own admission prompted the investigation -- with the deliberate leaking of classified memos about his conversations with President Donald Trump to the press.

“Mueller then unnecessarily stocked his team with what the press called his ‘dream team’ of mostly Democratic partisans. One had defended a Hillary Clinton employee. Another had defended the Clinton Foundation.

“Mueller did not at first announce to the press why he had dismissed Trump-hating FBI operatives Lisa Page and Peter Strzok from his investigative team. Instead, he staggered their departures to leave the impression they were routine reassignments.

“But Mueller's greatest problem was his original mandate to discover whether Trump colluded with the Russians in 2016 to tilt the election in his favor.
“After 15 months, Mueller has indicted a number of Trump associates, but on charges having nothing to do with Russian collusion. They faced inordinately long prison sentences unless they ‘flipped’ and testified against Trump.

“We are left with the impression that Mueller cannot find much to do with his original mandate of unearthing Russian collusion, but he still thinks Trump is guilty of something.
“In other words, Mueller has reversed the proper order of jurisprudence.

“Instead of presuming Trump innocent unless he finds evidence of Russian collusion, Mueller started with the assumption that the reckless raconteur Trump surely must be guilty of some lawbreaking. Thus, it is Mueller's job to hunt for past crimes to prove it.

“While Mueller so far has not found Trump involved in collusion with foreign citizens to warp a campaign, there is evidence that others most surely were colluding -- but are not of interest to Mueller.” … … …

""Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

"The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."

REP. JACKIE SPEIER: "Clearly, Manafort has been not at all reluctant to continue to lie after he cut a deal with the special counsel. And he's seeking a pardon," (she also said.)

CHRIS MATTHEWS: For more I’m joined by California Congresswoman Jackie Speier, member of the House intelligence committee, and Daniel Goldman, former U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York. What a busy court that is.
Let me go to the congresswoman. We just spent about 15 minutes talking about the latest developments, "the Guardian" newspaper reports that has Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange three times, including a critical meeting apparently in March of 2016 about the time he went to work for the Trump campaign and about the time he went to work for the Trump campaign, at about the time we were getting the Podesta -- right after the Podesta stuff was coming out, and the hacking by the Russians, and then right before the DNC stuff was coming out from the Russians.

It's all starting to paint a picture of collusion between the people around Trump, including -- including Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi and Paul Manafort, et cetera, et cetera, and the Russians.

Your thoughts?

REP. JACKIE SPEIER: I think what it's also suggesting is that Manafort may have even committed treason, when all is said and done.

I mean, this is all becoming very clear. The president became manic with his tweets after he submitted his answers to questions by the special counsel. And I'm beginning to wonder if there were answers that he gave that now would suggest that maybe he wasn't being as truthful as he should have been.

“Is This It? A Trump-Hater’s Guide to Mueller Skepticism”

| Mueller’s comportment suggests a man who’s fallen prey to the same state of mind that warped Ken Starr—namely disgust over the people you’re investigating and a desire to justify the sunk capital. Even if the special counsel presents one hell of a report, Democrats must ask: was it worth it? | By T. A. Frank | 3 December 2018 17:22
__________________________________

“In the autumn of 1995, millions of Indians flocked to New Delhi after reports that a statue of Ganesha, the Hindu deity of good luck, was drinking milk from a spoon. It turned out that Ganesha, in the form of carved white stone, was a bit porous, and he wasn’t drinking the milk so much as getting coated in it, as each of the thousands of spoonfuls trickled down his side, but a collective thrill prevailed for a while. I relate this incident because its rhythms—big news, then frenzy, then comedown—bear a strong resemblance to those of Russiagate, with each development setting the Resistance into a frenzy of milk-buying and statue-feeding that fades only after a few days, replaced by an unspoken agreement to wait for further reports on Ganesha’s movements.

“For many Robert-Mueller-watchers, the air these days is electric. People sense the big shoes are about to drop. Donald Trump has submitted his written answers to Mueller’s questions. Paul Manafort has entered a plea agreement, but then continued to lie—at least according to Mueller. Jerome Corsi, fringe-right author and personality, is vowing to go to jail for life rather than sign on to Mueller’s version of events. Roger Stone is expecting to be indicted for something. So is Donald Trump Jr. And, most significant of all to those looking for a big payoff, Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the timeline of a deal he was trying to make to construct a 100-story Trump-branded tower in Moscow. It turns out that the deal exploration continued past the time Trump had secured the Republican nomination, and Cohen and his associate Felix Sater, a real-estate promoter and one-time racketeer, had even discussed giving Vladimir Putin a $50 million penthouse in the building. ‘This is it,’ people are saying. ‘This is the big one!’

“But, with all due reverence to the deity Ganesha, why? We see the familiar cycle of hype, and there’s no use fighting it, but, once heart rates have slowed, the same old question remains: so what? Some of the news, such as a Guardian (London) story that Manafort met three times with Julian Assange, seems to be based on nothing at all. But even the solid news turns out to be generally non-earth-shattering.”

I’m not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook, Craig Murray, Glenn Greenwald, Moon of Alabama, and many others). The short version is, The Guardian‘s Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed “Russians”) on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding’s earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on … well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous “intelligence sources.” After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece (employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it.

By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other “respectable,” “authoritative” outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian‘s story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump … well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and “leftists” who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange.

At this point, I imagine you’re probably wondering what this has to do with manufacturing “truth.” Because, clearly, this Guardian story was a lie … a lie The Guardian got caught telling. I wish the “truth” thing was as simple as that (i.e., exposing and debunking the ruling classes’ lies). Unfortunately, it isn’t. Here is why....

*
"Many of America's richest agree that extreme wealth inequality is a detriment to the economy.

" 'As the economy evolves, it reallocates resources,' billionaire Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett said on PBS Newshour in 2017. 'Now, the real problem, in my view, is ... the prosperity has been unbelievable for the extremely rich people.'

" 'If you go to 1982, when Forbes put on their first 400 list, those people had (a total of) $93 billion. They now have $2.4 trillion, (a multiple of) 25 for one,' Buffett said. 'This has been a prosperity that’s been disproportionately rewarding to the people on top.'

Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder and CEO of Facebook, has expressed a similar sentiment. ' We have a level of wealth inequality that hurts everyone' Zuckerberg said in his May 2017 commencement address at Harvard. 'Let's face it: There is something wrong with our system when I can leave Harvard and make billions of dollars in 10 years, while millions of students can't afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business.'

______________________

(emphasis added)

" In a democracy, anytime you get 57% of voters together, they should be 'ruling'! "

(The New York Post) (Opinion) Sorry, but hush-money payments won’t send Trump to prison | by Rich Lowry | December 13, 2018 | 8:13pm | Updated

..."Smith, the former FEC chairman, makes a telling point: If Trump had paid the women with campaign funds, his critics would certainly be screaming that he’d improperly diverted campaign resources for personal use." ...

(Quote)

As special counsel Robert Mueller presumably wraps up the Russia probe, one important point, about one important suspect, has escaped much scrutiny.

Evidence revealed over the past two years indicates former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page is the most diabolical Russian spy ever known. Ever.

Ten pieces of evidence support this conclusion:

1) ..... We know Carter Page is a diabolical Russian spy because the FBI wiretapped him. Under our laws, FBI agents cannot wiretap a U.S. citizen based merely on suspicion or hunches, or to fish for information; they must possess hard evidence indicating the target is currently — or imminently about to become — a foreign spy. So the FBI would not have wiretapped Page if it couldn’t meet the legal evidence threshold. (At least they shouldn’t have.)

2) ..... Page became a Russian spy after he assisted the FBI in a Russian spy case in 2013. It takes the most diabolical sort to be an asset for the FBI in one Russian spy case, and then to go on to become a Russian spy yourself! (At least that's what the FBI claims.)

3) ..... Page is so diabolical that he spied for Russia even as he knew the FBI was watching. (The FBI interviewed him in March 2016, prior to wiretapping him.) Only a seasoned operative with ice water in his veins would have the nerve to spy for Russia right under the FBI’s nose — and think he can get away with it! (At least that’s the FBI's apparent theory.)

4) ..... After the FBI interviewed Page, he traveled to Moscow, where he used to live and do business, in July 2016 to give a university commencement address. Obviously, this was a diabolical cover for a diabolical spy trip. Fusion GPS, the Democrats’ political opposition research team, would later tell the FBI that Page met with Russian officials on the trip. (Page later denied it under oath, but I think we all know who to believe here, don't we?)

5) ..... Page is so diabolical that the FBI reportedly sent onetime CIA operative Stefan Halper to meet multiple times with him (and also with another Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos) to gather information prior to opening the “Russia probe.” In fact, Halper, who later offered his services as a Trump foreign policy adviser, invited Page to his Virginia farm. (It’s important, after all, to get close to diabolical spies to shore up the evidence.) ...

... Clearly, all of this implies that the FBI’s efforts drew mounds of incriminating evidence enabling Mueller to quietly build an airtight case against the central figure in a wide-ranging conspiracy to change votes in Campaign 2016, at the direction of Donald Trump. We now await the indictments.

And yet ...

As of now, Carter Page hasn’t been charged with so much as lying to the FBI or filing a faulty tax return, let alone Russian spying. He endured the most intrusive, intimidating methods the government has at its disposal. He was the subject of media leaks. His reputation was destroyed. If he’s never charged with being a Russian spy, he’s either that slippery … or it would suggest that the top intelligence officials who targeted him were either incompetent or corrupt. It would seem to border on criminal. ...

(Endquote)

(See the full text, the remaining five points, at the hyper-link, above)

(from The Federalist) | New Documents Suggest The Steele Dossier Was A Deliberate Setup For Trump |

After nearly two years since the Steele dossier was published, it remains the cornerstone of the case for collusion. The dossier model has also given rise to similar operations. | by Lee Smith | 02 January 2019 |

_____________________________________

“A trove of recently released documents sheds further light on the scope and logistics of the information operation designed to sabotage an American election. Players include the press, political operatives from both parties, and law enforcement and intelligence officials. Their instrument was the Steele dossier, first introduced to the American public two years ago.

“A collection of reports compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, the dossier is now engraved in contemporary U.S. history. First marketed as bedrock evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, the dossier’s legitimacy took a hit after reports showed the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the work.

“The revelation that the dossier was used to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page compromised the integrity of the investigation the FBI had opened on Page and three other Trump associates by the end of July 2016. Nonetheless, that same probe continues today as the special counsel investigation.

“The revelation that the dossier was used to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page compromised the integrity of the investigation the FBI had opened on Page and three other Trump associates by the end of July 2016. Nonetheless, that same probe continues today as the special counsel investigation.

“The dossier plays a central role in Robert Mueller’s probe. In the unredacted portions of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo outlining Mueller’s scope are allegations that Trump adviser Paul Manafort colluded with Russian government officials interfering in the 2016 race. That claim is found in no other known document but the dossier. It is unclear whether further dossier allegations are in the redacted portions of the scope memo.

“Further, with Mueller in charge, the dossier-won warrant on Page was renewed a third, and final, time in June 2017. It expired in September, when confidential human source Stefan Halper reportedly broke off regular communications with Page.

The Dossier Model Is Being Replicated

“Paradoxically, it is the Mueller investigation that has most thoroughly tested the veracity of the dossier’s claims. After the FBI’s monitoring of Page for nearly a year, with access to his electronic communications prior to the warrant, the special counsel has brought no charges against the former Navy officer alleged in the dossier to be at the center of a criminal conspiracy.” ... ...

(full article at hyperlink)

“The dossier plays a central role in Robert Mueller’s probe.

"In the unredacted portions of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo outlining Mueller’s scope are allegations that Trump adviser Paul Manafort colluded with Russian government officials interfering in the 2016 race.

"That claim is found in no other known document but the dossier.

It is unclear whether further dossier allegations are in the redacted portions of the scope memo."

Recent hacked documents have revealed an international network of politicians, journalists, academics, researchers and military officers, all engaged in highly deceptive covert propaganda campaigns funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), NATO, Facebook and hardline national security institutions.

This “network of networks”, as one document refers to them, centers around an ironically named outfit called the Integrity Initiative. And it is all overseen by a previously unknown England-based think tank registered in Scotland, the Institute for Statecraft, which has operated under a veil of secrecy.

The whole operation appears to be run by, and in conjunction with, members of British military intelligence.

According to David Miller, professor of political sociology in the school of policy studies at the University of Bristol and the director of the Organization for Propaganda Studies, the Integrity Initiative “appears to be a military directed push.”

“The most senior government people are professional propagandists and spooks,” Miller explained. “The ‘charity’ lead on this (Chris Donnelly) was also appointed as a colonel in military intelligence at the beginning of the project — a truly amazing fact that suggests this is a military intelligence cut out.”

A minister for the UK FCO has officially confirmed that it has been funding the Integrity Network.

In addition to conducting diplomacy, the FCO oversees both the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) the UK equivalent to the National Security Agency, and the Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) commonly known as MI6.

The think tank that oversees the Integrity Initiative, the Institute for Statecraft, has also received funding from the British Army and Ministry of Defense.

Mark Curtis
✔
@markcurtis30
This is pretty major. UK govt admits that not only the Foreign Office but also the Army and the Ministry of Defence have funded the Institute for Statecraft, the body behind anti-Corbyn propaganda. https://bit.ly/2PBekNm

The entire extremely shady enterprise, as Miller explained, is an elaborate front for the British military-intelligence apparatus. Its covert coordination with friendly politicians and mainstream journalists recalls the Cold War-era intrigue known as Operation Mockingbird.

That scandal involved the unmasking of “more than 400 American journalists who…in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency,” as Carl Bernstein revealed in a 1977 Rolling Stone report.

The exposing of the Integrity Initiative has just scratched the surface of what appears to be a much more sophisticated, insidious, and extremely online version of Operation Mockingbird. With new internal documents appearing each week through a hacker’s organization called Anonymous Europe, the revelations are yielding one of the most potentially explosive national security scandals in recent times.

But even as members of Britain’s parliament thunder with demands for official accountability, the UK and US mainstream media still strangely refuses to touch the story.

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.

John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement that Skadden’s failure to register with the Justice Department “hid from the public that its report was part of a Ukrainian foreign influence campaign.”

The settlement doesn’t name the Skadden partner, but it appears to be Greg Craig, a former White House counsel under President Barack Obama who led the Ukraine work.

Politicians and academics have reacted with fury to news a covert Government-funded unit had been attacking the official opposition in Parliament.

Labour MSP Neil Findlay said: “It would appear that we have a charity registered in Scotland and overseen by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator that is funded by the UK Government and is spewing out political attacks on UK politicians, the Labour Party and the Labour movement.

“Such clear political attacks and propaganda shouldn’t be coming from any charity. We need to know why the Foreign Office have been funding it.”

David Miller, a professor of political sociology in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, added: “It’s extraordinary that the Foreign Office would be funding a Scottish charity to counter Russian propaganda which ends up attacking Her Majesty’s opposition and soft-pedalling far-right politicians in the Ukraine.

“People have a right to know how the Government are spending their money, and the views being promoted in their name.”

Retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner in October 2003 published a remarkable document online, “Truth From These Podia,” which I recommend. He found over 50 systematic and intentional lies that were generated for the express purpose of deceiving not some putative enemy but the press and the people of the United States and Britain.

He describes the evolution and structure of the White House’s Office of Global Communications — an office almost run by Rendon people — and how it generated news stories out of CENTCOM and elsewhere faster than the press could keep up in order to push deadlines and competition and thereby inhibit fact-checking.

As the stories come apart, sometimes in mere days or hours, the Rendon technique counsels that fabrications be allowed to “ linger” without comment.

This tactic is combined with message control — explaining why “Americans are not the running kind” can show up in two separate speeches in the same day by different members of the administration. Redefining all opposition to U.S. actions as “terrorists” is another example of building false associations through repetition — “echoing,” as it is called in the perception management trade.

How many times did we hear “September 11,” “terrorists” and “Saddam Hussein” in the same breath? Gardiner shows how this is a PSYOPS technique, a method to “construct memory.”

When the spinners get caught, they reconfigure the story with elliptical language, then let it “linger” some more. Weapons of mass destruction become a “weapons program,” then a “seeking” of WMD. George Tenet’s CIA “had questions” about the British forgery on Niger’s purported yellow-cake uranium. Caraccilo just “wanted to share that pride with the people back home.” And let the lingering constructed memory kick in as the next flurry of stories is released to bury the newly emergent lie.

Caraccilo, curiously enough, took the heat off the Bush administration in the Wilson-Plame case, and who could even remember the Jessica Lynch fable, the stage-management of Basra, the yellow-cake uranium, the Iraqi anthrax, the bio-weapons trailers, the Iraqis using American uniforms, the Iraqis who used white flags to lure their prey, the 10-year-old soldiers, the disappearing Scuds, the Iraqi killer drones, the Iraqi woman hanged by the Fedayeen for waving to an American, and the whole wretched list of fabrications that came and went — what I referred to in my book Full Spectrum Disorder as the CENTCOM lie of the day.

All of this was dutifully echoed by the press, blindly obedient to some self-censoring convention of their own, called “the presumption of goodwill and good faith,” which the press gives to government officials.

The Integrity Initiative has also recruited one of the most infamous American PR men to organize its clusters of journalists and political figures.

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.

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.)

_______________________________________


SHARYL ATTKISSON, (excerpt video from the program with a partial transcript) “FULL MEASURE”:

“Nearly two years ago, Special Counsel Mueller was named to investigate whether President Trump broke the law by somehow conspiring with Russian President Vladimir Putin to win the presidency. We still don’t know the outcome of that. But we’ve learned a lot about what some in our intelligence community have been up to. And some argue that’s proving to be an equally important— and chilling— story.

“From Trump associate Roger Stone to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, the Trump-Russia probe has indicted or convicted 34 people so far. And although Special Counsel Robert Mueller has yet to publicly pinpoint illegal Russia collusion on Trump’s part he’s still looking. Meantime, former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell is making an explosive allegation. She’s among those who believe there’s now compelling evidence pointing to a parallel scandal.

“In the simplest of terms if possible, what do you think is the story that's been uncovered in the past two years?

SIDNEY POWELL:
“That the entire Russia collusion narrative was made up. That the FBI and the intelligence community and the Department of Justice began an investigation against four American citizens simply because they worked for the opposition political candidate, that being Donald Trump.

“Powell, who calls herself politically independent, served as an assistant prosecutor under nine U.S. Attorneys, both Democrats and Republicans. Where many see 'Russia collusion' she sees systemic corruption inside the Justice Department and intelligence community. A topic she writes about in “License to Lie.” Crucial evidence, Powell claims, lies within these little-reported court documents— where our intel agencies get lambasted— not by partisans, but by the lead judge in the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

SIDNEY POWELL: —
“A 99-page opinion, in which she is taking the FBI to task for having given unlimited, unsupervised access to raw intelligence, that means the database of everything the NSA, the National Security Agency, collects on everybody. Word searches, keystrokes, what do you look at in Google, telephone information, calls, texts, you name it. Everything, every nightmare anybody has of information being collected by big brother, the FBI gave three private contractors unlimited, unsupervised access to that as far back as 2015.

“In an opinion dated October 2016, Judge Rosemary Collyer writes that an Inspector General found the FBI and National Security Agency—NSA—had committed “widespread” violations of key protections for Americans. And because they waited to notify the court until days before the election— many months after government watchdogs discovered the abuses— Collyer said the NSA was guilty of ‘institutional “lack of candor” ’ and ‘This is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.’

SHARYL ATTKISSON:
“The Judge's language in this opinion is pretty harsh. She says that there could be Constitutional violations—

SIDNEY POWELL:
“Oh there were—

SHARYL ATTKISSON:
“She may say there were Constitutional violations.

SIDNEY POWELL:
“Yes, at one point she talks about egregious Fourth Amendment violations.” …
…

(Bold-face emphasis added)

Most of the omissions occurred in FBI work that pre-dated Mueller’s arrival, the sources said. But the court wanted assurances the new sheriff in town was going to stop such widespread abuses.

Mueller told the court the FBI had created a new system called the Woods Procedures — named for the FBI lawyer who drafted them — to ensure FISA warrant applications were accurate and did not omit material information, according to Anderson’s congressional interview.

“My understanding is he committed to the court to address the problem and then that the series of reforms that we implemented, including the use of the Woods form, were the direct result of his engagement before the FISA court,” Anderson told Congress.

"Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"(1), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.(2)" ... (Wikipedia)

_______________

(1) "Ad hominem". Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, Incorporated.

(2) Dr. Michael C. Labossiere (2002–2010). "42 Fallacies: Ad Hominem" (PDF).

"If there really was nothing substantial and valid behind the allegations of Trump's 'Collusion' with 'Russians', then why did the Obama-Clinton Washington establishment go ape-shit over the matter, pulling out all the stops to criminalize 'collusion' between a presidential campaign and non-U.S. actors and interests?--and, in the process of making this a cause célèbre, get Trump out of office by hook or by crook? Why?"

"What is going on here?" :

(from The National Review magazine) | Law & the Courts|

Why Isn’t Assange Charged with ‘Collusion with Russia’?

| By Andrew C. McCarthy | April 13, 2019 7:06 PM

___________________________________________________

(quote)

The government would have a chance to prove in court that Russia was WikiLeaks’ source.

Prior to the publication of the stolen Democratic-party emails and internal documents, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks exhorted Russian government hackers to send them “new material.”

That is what we are told by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Russian intelligence officers. (I won’t offend anyone by calling them “spies” — after all, they were just doing electronic surveillance authorized by their government, right?*) Assange wanted the Russians to rest assured that giving “new material” to WikiLeaks (identified as “Organization 1” in the indictment) would “have a much higher impact than what you are doing” — i.e., hacking and then putting the information out through other channels.

But time was of the essence. It was early 2016. If Hillary Clinton was not stopped right there and then, WikiLeaks warned, proceedings at the imminent Democratic national convention would “solidify bernie supporters behind her.” Of course, “bernie” is Bernie Sanders, the competitor who could still get the nomination. But if Assange and the Russians couldn’t raise Bernie’s prospects, WikiLeaks explained, Mrs. Clinton would be a White House shoo-in: “We think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”

In a nutshell: Knowing that Russia had the capacity to hack the DNC and perhaps Clinton herself, WikiLeaks urged it to come up with new material and vowed to help bring it maximum public attention. By necessity, this desire to hurt Clinton would inure to Sanders’s benefit. And sure enough, WikiLeaks eventually published tens of thousands of the Democratic emails hacked by Russian intelligence.

So . . . I have a few questions.

... ...

WikiLeaks, Moscow, and Bernie Sanders

First, why was there no Sanders-Russia probe? Why, when President Obama directed John Brennan, his hyper-political CIA director, to rush out a report on Russia’s influence operations, did we not hear about the WikiLeaks-Russia objective of helping Sanders win the Democratic nomination? Brennan & Co. couldn’t tell us enough about our intelligence-agency mind readers’ confidence that Putin was rootin’ for Trump. Why nothing about the conspirators’ Feelin’ the Bern?

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think there is any basis for a criminal investigation of Senator Sanders. But there appears to have been no criminal predicate for a “collusion” investigation of Donald Trump, either — not a shred of public evidence that he conspired in the Putin regime’s hacking, other than that presented in the Clinton-campaign-sponsored Steele dossier (if you can call that “evidence” — though even Christopher Steele admits it’s not). Yet, Trump was subjected to an investigation for more than two years — on the gossamer-light theory that Trump stood to benefit from Moscow’s perfidy.

Yes, of course, this cui bono claim was amplified by what were said to be Trump’s intriguing, if noncriminal, ties to Russia. To my knowledge, however, the mythical pee tape of Steele lore has never been located; it is unlikely, then, that there are any Trump photos that compare, intrigue-wise, to a shirtless Bernie boozing it up in the Soviet Union. Surely that should have been worth a FISA warrant or four.

... ...

A more serious question: Why hasn’t Assange been indicted for criminal collusion with the Kremlin — the same hacking conspiracy for which Mueller indicted the Russian operatives with whom Mueller says Assange collaborated? The same conspiracy for which the president of the United States, though not guilty, was under the FBI’s microscope for nearly three years? (emphasis added)

(End quote)
... ...

_____________________________________________________

* From RealClearPolitics: (VIDEO) Comey: "I've Never Thought" of Electronic Surveillance as "Spying"

"With respect to Barr's comments, I really don't know what he's talking about when he talks about spying on the campaign." ... "It's very concerning because the FBI, the Department of Justice conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance. I have never thought of that as spying.""

"James Comey is in trouble and he knows it" |
BY KEVIN R. BROCK, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 05/07/19 09:30 AM EDT

"“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."

(THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL)

Steele's stunning pre-FISA confession: Informant needed to air Trump dirt before election

BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 05/07/19 06:00 PM EDT

FBI's Steele story falls apart: False intel and media contacts were flagged before FISA (emphasis added)

BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 05/09/19 03:00 PM EDT
(THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL)

“The FBI’s sworn story to a federal court about its asset, Christopher Steele, is fraying faster than a $5 souvenir T-shirt bought at a tourist trap.

“Newly unearthed memos show a high-ranking government official who met with Steele in October 2016 determined some of the Donald Trump dirt that Steele was simultaneously digging up for the FBI and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign was inaccurate, and likely leaked to the media.

“The concerns were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notestaken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016.

“Her 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.

“It is important to note that the 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.

“That’s a pretty remarkable declaration in Footnote 5 on Page 15 of the FISA application, since Kavalec apparently needed just a single encounter with Steele at State to find one of his key claims about Trump-Russia collusion was blatantly false.” …

(Photo Credit: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

"He Did It, Not Me!" | By Victor Davis Hanson| May 19th, 2019

... ...

"James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey are now all accusing one another of being culpable for inserting the unverified dossier, the font of the effort to destroy Trump, into a presidential intelligence assessment—as if suddenly and mysteriously the prior seeding of the Steele dossier is now seen as a bad thing. And how did the dossier transmogrify from being passed around the Obama Administration as a supposedly top-secret and devastating condemnation of candidate and then president-elect Trump to a rank embarrassment of ridiculous stories and fibs?

"Given the narratives of the last three years, and the protestations that the dossier was accurate or at least was not proven to be unproven, why are these former officials arguing at all? Did not implanting the dossier into the presidential briefing give it the necessary imprimatur that allowed the serial leaks to the press at least to be passed on to the public and thereby apprise the people of the existential danger that they faced?

"Why would not they still be vying to take credit for warning President Obama that Donald J. Trump was a likely sexual pervert, with a pathological hatred of Obama, as manifested in Trump’s alleged Moscow debauchery—a reprobate who used his subordinates to steal the election from Hillary Clinton and who still must somehow be stopped at all costs?

"That entire bought fantasy was the subtext of why Mueller was appointed in the first place. It was the basis for the persistent support to this day among the media and progressives for the now discredited notion of 'collusion.'

"The appointment of William Barr as attorney general has sobered the lawbreakers, and perhaps soon the media, which may not wish to go down the drain with their erstwhile FBI and CIA speaking-truth-to-power heroes.

"No longer are Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe along with a host of others insisting that they acted nobly. No longer are they in solidarity in their defiant opposition to Donald Trump.

"Now, for the first time, they are pointing fingers at one another, because they have come to realize that their prior criminality may not be rewarded, praised, or even excused, but rather prosecuted." ...

...

O! How happy! O! How rare!
The couple by chance so matched,
That every ‘itch’ of one of them
Is by the other ‘scratched.’

___________________________________

Nothing else so reveals the general people's incapacities to face and overcome prejudiced bias in their reasoning than the political controversies that
so bitterly divide them today.

Not only the general public but officials in the highest places in the active and formerly-serving political class from the executive, legislative and judicial branches as well as respected members of the national press corps failed to adequately reason through the controversy of the 2000 United States presidential election in which George W. Bush and Al Gore were, respectively, the Republican and Democratic party candidates. Legal principles were trampled and plain common-sense left begging in one of the most disgraceful failures of political reason in years.

This was followed by what in popular jargon we call the "Iraq 'weapons of mass-destruction' (WMD) affair" another enormous failure of sound reasoning in which millions of people were caught up for many months before it misled them to give tacit consent to a deliberately manipulative propagandistic fraud concocted and propagated by U.S. president George W. Bush, who'd begun a pre-invasion military build-up without any careful preliminary consideration; indeed, he ordered this in a calculated manner designed to present the American public with a fait accompli of embarrassing international proportions on the Kuwait-Iraq border.

The likelihood of Iraq's holding significant stocks of dangerous chemical weapons of mass-destruction was never adequately demonstrated. Instead, weeks of searches failed to produce any reasonably sound evidence that these existed. In an amazing public blunder, Secretary of State Colin Powell was found to have relied on shoddy arguments and documentation which was revealed as false or unreliable in its assertions supporting the supposed existence of WMD. In the end, none of this was of any decisive use in heading off a disaster the consequences of which we still live today, one which has ramified and infecting, poisoning more and more areas of public discourse.

Each time, a professionally-propagandized public was wearied to the point of simply wanting to "turn the page" and leave matters in to fester. Fester they have, ever since.

Public trust is now in a battered state and with it, the integrity of virtually all of the essential political institutions, electoral and governmental, on which the nation's political life depends to work effectively. Today, it simply cannot function effectively except by surprising accident. We are in a very serious political and moral mess as a nation and we got here by betraying the habits of fair, sound, honest reasoning. Those were traded to indulge in blatant partisan prejudice for crass expedient transitory ends. We are still no where near the start of any useful work toward reversing these trends. They continue to viciously eat away at the body-politic.
___________________________________

( From The Nation )

Foreign Policy
| Robert Mueller
| Trump and Russia

How Did Russia-gate Begin?
| Why Barr’s investigation is important and should be encouraged.

By Stephen F. Cohen | May 30, 2019

“It cannot be emphasized too often: Russia-gate—allegations that the American president has been compromised by the Kremlin, which may even have helped to put him in the White House—is the worst and (considering the lack of actual evidence) most fraudulent political scandal in American history. We have yet to calculate the damage Russia-gate has inflicted on America’s democratic institutions, including the presidency and the electoral process, and on domestic and foreign perceptions of American democracy, or on US-Russian relations at a critical moment when both sides, having “modernized” their nuclear weapons, are embarking on a new, more dangerous, and largely unreported arms race.

“Rational (if politically innocent) observers may have thought that when the Mueller report found no “collusion” or other conspiracy between Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, only possible “obstruction” by Trump—nothing Mueller said in his May 29 press statement altered that conclusion—Russia-gate would fade away. If so, they were badly mistaken. Evidently infuriated that Mueller did not liberate the White House from Trump, Russia-gate promoters—liberal Democrats and progressives foremost among them—have only redoubled their unverified collusion allegations, even in once-respectable media outlets. Whether out of political ambition or impassioned faith, the damage wrought by these Russia-gaters continues to mount, with no end in sight.

“One way to end Russia-gate might be to discover how it actually began. Considering what we have learned, or been told, since the allegations became public nearly three years ago, in mid-2016, there seem to be at least three hypothetical possibilities:

1. One is the orthodox Russia-gate explanation: Early on, sharp-eyed top officials of President Obama’s intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI, detected truly suspicious ‘contacts’ between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russians “linked to the Kremlin” (whatever that may mean, considering that the presidential administration employs hundreds of people), and this discovery legitimately led to the full-scale “counterintelligence investigation” initiated in July 2016. Indeed, Mueller documented various foreigners who contacted, or who sought to contact, the Trump campaign. The problem here is that Mueller does not tell us, and we do not know, if the number of them was unusual.

Many foreigners seek ‘contacts’ with US presidential campaigns and have done so for decades. In this case, we do not know, for the sake of comparison, how many such foreigners had or sought contacts with the rival Clinton campaign, directly or through the Clinton Foundation, in 2016. (Certainly, there were quite a few contacts with anti-Trump Ukrainians, for example.) If the number was roughly comparable, why didn’t US intelligence initiate a counterintelligence investigation of the Clinton campaign?

If readers think the answer is because the foreigners around the Trump campaign included Russians, consider this: In 1988, when Senator Gary Hart was the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, he went to Russia—still Communist Soviet Russia—to make contacts in preparation for his anticipated presidency, including meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. US media coverage of Hart’s visit was generally favorable. (I accompanied Senator Hart and do not recall much, if any, adverse US media reaction.)

2. The second explanation—currently, and oddly, favored by non-comprehending pro-Trump commentators at Fox News and elsewhere—is that “Putin’s Kremlin” pumped anti-Trump “disinformation” into the American media, primarily through what became known as the Steele Dossier. As I pointed out nearly a year and a half ago, this makes no sense factually or logically. Nothing in the dossier suggests that any of its contents necessarily came from high-level Kremlin sources, as Steele claimed. Moreover, if Kremlin leader Putin so favored Trump, as a Russia-gate premise insists, is it really plausible that underlings in the Kremlin would have risked Putin’s ire by furnishing Steele with anti-Trump “information”? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that “researchers” in the United States (some, like Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign) were supplying him with the fruits of their research.

3. The third possible explanation—one I have termed “Intel-gate,” and that I explore in my recent book War With Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate—is that US intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy, first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. More evidence of “Intelgate” has since appeared. For example, the intelligence community has said it began its investigation in April 2016 because of a few innocuous remarks by a young, lowly Trump foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos. The relatively obscure Papadopoulos suddenly found himself befriended by apparently influential people he had not previously known, among them Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, and a woman calling herself Azra Turk. What we now know—and what Papadopoulos did not know at the time—is that all of them had ties to US and/or UK and Western European intelligence agencies. …

(emphasis added in bold-face)

From The National Review

by Andrew McCarthy, “The Mueller Investigation Was Always an Impeachment Probe” | May 31, 2019 12:55 PM

…

Competing Views of Obstruction

As noted above, the apparent contradiction between Mueller and Barr is clarified by the timeline.

To grasp this, you must first understand that Mueller and his staff are completely result-oriented. If you’ve decided to act as counsel to a congressional impeachment inquiry rather than as a federal prosecutor, the objective is to get your evidence in front of Congress, with the patina of felony obstruction.

In the Nixon and Clinton situations, the rationale for impeachment was obstruction of justice. Significantly, the issue in impeachment cases is abuse of power, not courtroom guilt. Consequently, unlike a prosecutor, a counsel to a congressional impeachment committee does not need evidence strong enough to support a criminal indictment; just something reasonably close to that, enough to enable a president’s congressional opposition to find unfitness for high office.

Once you understand that, it is easy to see what happened here.

Mueller’s staff, chockablock with progressive activists, has conceptions of executive power and obstruction that are saliently different from Barr’s (and from those of conservative legal analysts who subscribe to Justice Scalia’s views on unitary executive power).

The attorney general believes that (a) obstruction charges may not be based on exercises of a president’s constitutional prerogatives—only on obviously corrupt acts (e.g., evidence destruction, bribing witnesses); (b) all executive power under the Constitution is reposed in the president; and thus, (c) when the chief executive takes actions the Constitution empowers him to take (e.g., firing or threatening to fire subordinates), it is not the place of an inferior executive officer, such as a federal prosecutor, to second-guess them as “corruptly motivated.” Recognizing how traumatic accusing a president of a crime is for the country, moreover, Barr thinks an obstruction offense would have to be crystal-clear and serious—you don’t tear the nation apart over something about which reasonable minds could differ.

By contrast, Mueller’s staff believes that (a) the executive bureaucracy is semi-autonomous in its areas of expertise, and thus Justice Department prosecutors are supreme, even over the president, in matters of law enforcement; (b) Congress had the constitutional power to, in effect, transfer executive authority from the president to prosecutors by enacting obstruction laws that may be enforced against the president; and therefore, (c) even if a presidential action is lawful in itself, a prosecutor may allege obstruction if the prosecutor believes the president’s motive was corrupt. Furthermore, little or no consideration should be given to whether a president’s allegedly obstructive act is especially clear or serious because the president (at least if the president is a Republican) must be treated like anyone else — otherwise, the president is placed above the law. (Democratic presidents, to the contrary, are the law — see, e.g., DACA, Obamacare decrees, IRS harassment of conservative groups, Fast and Furious stonewalling of Congress . . .)

... ...

(The American Spectator)

by David Catron | June 3, 2019, 12:06 AM

William Barr Is Washington’s Worst Nightmare | Nothing scares the denizens of D.C. more than an honest man

...

" Comey’s allusion to 'conspiracy theories' is particularly ironic now that we know the Russian collusion narrative he helped compose and leak to the media was the conspiracy theory that ate D.C. And the fired FBI director is by no means the only Washington insider having difficulty holding his water over AG Barr’s interest in the origins of the Russia Collusion scam. Former CIA director John Brennan has vehemently objected to President Trump’s decision to give Barr authority to 'declassify, downgrade, or direct the declassification or downgrading of information or intelligence that relates to the Attorney General’s review.'

I see it as a very, very serious and outrageous move on the part of Mr. Trump, once again, trampling on the statutory authorities of the Director of National Intelligence and the heads of the independent intelligence agencies. And it’s unclear to me what Mr. Barr is actually going to do. Is he investigating a crime?

This is an interesting question coming from a former CIA director who almost certainly orchestrated the attempted entrapment of George Papadopoulos by foreign intelligence “assets” Joseph Mifsud, Stefan Halper, Alexander Downer, et al. The transcript of his closed-door testimony before the House Judiciary Committee concerning these episodes reveals a series of bizarre encounters, including one in which he was given $10,000 in cash for no reason (which he never attempted to spend). Papadopoulos eventually spent 14 days in jail for misremembering some detail of these weird encounters during an interview with the FBI.

In addition to Comey and Brennan, various Democrats have questioned the Attorney General’s ability to objectively oversee an investigation into the origins of Russiagate. During a Sunday morning appearance on Face the Nation, for example, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) claimed, 'Mr. Barr has very little credibility with me.… because he time and again is not acting as our attorney general, but as a personal advocate for Donald Trump.' This is a standard talking point peddled by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and every other Democrat who doesn’t think well on his feet. Predictably, Sen. Warner offered no evidence to support his claim." ...

How to parse Senator Warner's cagey reply to the following interview-question--

Margaret Brennan CBS News Face the Nation (June 2, 2019) :

“But can you unequivocally state politics played absolutely no role in influencing the decision-makers when they opened and conducted this counter-inte—?” (interrupted by Sen. Warner)

Senator Mark Warner (D. - VA.):

“I saw absolutely no evidence that politics played any role—and again, if law enforcement and the F.B.I. had not opened an investigation when they had as much evidence as they did of Russian intervention, they would have been irresponsible—“

Observe the emphasis added above because only by paying close attention to the parts which are in italics and the parts which are underlined does one notice the Bait-and-Switch going on here.

The problem is simple. A clandestine counter-intelligence operation was opened under the Obama administration by U.S. intelligence agencies (C.I.A. and the D.N.I.) the design of which was to target (and apparently to discredit) Trump--both his presidential campaign and himself personally when those U.S. intelligence agencies sought to fraudulently obtain a FISA-warrant. FISA warrants concern foreign intelligence matters, beyond the borders of the U.S.; the F.B.I., however, is concerned with investigating domestic spying ( within the U.S. ) involving either U.S. citizens or foreign nationals. So, how is it that Trump and his campaign are targets of an intelligence agency's FISA-warrant application? And, if the F.B.I. is investigating Trump and his campaign, in this case, it's only as suspected agents of "collusion" with "Russia".

Warner tells us that the F.B.I. "would have been irresponsible" if ... (they) ... the F.B.I. had not opened an investigation when they had as much evidence as they did of Russian intervention

Rather than specify what is intended by "an investigation," Warner invites the listener to suppose that he means, not the supposed Trump-campaign connections with Russia-directed interference--because, if there even was a Russia-directed campaign to influence American voters (to change their minds), there were no such connections found with it to the Trump campaign, but, rather, strictly the suspected Russian interference uncoordinated with anyone in the Trump campaign.*

That is what Mueller's own two-year long inquiry ended by reporting: their investigation "did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

What we want to know is—yes or no—whether or not

“... politics played absolutely no role in influencing the decision-makers when they opened and conducted this counter-intelligence operation)—?”

Warner's answer was carefully constructed to avoid answering that question. Instead he tried to assure us that there was, so far as anything he personally saw, "no evidence that politics played any role" in the U.S. law enforcement agencies conduct, not the U.S. intelligence agencies' involvement in the FISA warrant application.

Warner emphatically did not say that, as far as he knows, "unequivocally ... politics played absolutely no role in influencing the decision-makers when they opened and conducted this...."

_______________________________


* and, on that, See "2" in the comments cited in >89 proximity1:, above.

… “ These considerations suggest that, in varying scope, a qualified immunity is available to officers of the executive branch of government, the variation being dependent upon the scope of discretion and responsibilities of the office and all the circumstances as they reasonably appeared at the time of the action on which liability is sought to be based. It is the existence of reasonable grounds for the belief formed at the time and in light of all the circumstances, coupled with good-faith belief, that affords a basis for qualified immunity of executive officers for acts performed in the course of official conduct.” (85) — cited from RONALD A. CASS*, DAMAGE SUITS AGAINST PUBLIC OFFICERS p. 1128 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW (Vol. 129:1110 1981)

____________________________

(85) 416 U.S. at 247-48. ( Scheuer v. Rhodes, 416 U.S. 232, 247-48 (1974).)

• * Professor Cass was, at the time of publication of this article, described this way,

"Assistant Professor of Law, University of Virginia. B.A. 1970, University of Virginia; J.D. 1973, University of Chicago. Commencing in August 1981, Professor Cass will be an Associate Professor of Law at Boston University."

He is today president of Cass & Associates, PC, and Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law.

See also: pp. 31-38:
What is Truth?: True Suspects and False
Defamation
Peter B. Kutner, University of Oklahoma
in Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law
Journal | Volume 19 Volume XIX (2008) | Number 1 Volume XIX Book 1

(from The New York Times) OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR | When Government Defames | By Aziz Huq | Aug. 10, 2017

... "But if a government official makes an intentional, false and harmful utterance, there is nothing to be done. In February, for example, hours after reporting critically on the Trump administration’s press operations, Alex Isenstadt of Politico found himself accused (apparently falsely) by anonymous White House officials of jeering at and dismissing the death of a Navy SEAL — the sort of cruel and vulgar act that might get a journalist fired. Under current defamation law, Mr. Isenstadt would have no recourse in that event.

"How did this gap in defamation law arise?

"When the government harms someone, a 1946 law called the Federal Tort Claims Act generally provides a judicial remedy. In 1988, in the Westfall Act*, Congress amended the earlier act to cover most personal injury claims brought against federal officials. These laws, however, carve out immunities for government officials when it comes to 'libel, slander, misrepresentation' as well as 'deceit.'

"Why those exceptions? Simple caution, explained Alexander Holtzoff, a special assistant in the office of the attorney general, in testimony to the House of Representatives in 1940. Better, he warned, to 'take it step by step.' Torts of the slip-and-fall variety are more straightforward than, say, a slander case. Congress would presumably get around to addressing those torts as well — except that it hasn’t.

... ...

"There is a simple solution. Congress should enact a judicial remedy for any person defamed by an official of the federal government speaking or writing to the public. To foreclose the need for burdensome discovery or depositions, liability would turn on whether a reasonable person in the official’s position would have known the statement was false (and not on what the official in fact knew). Discovery would be allowed in exceptional cases where a defense relied on factual assertions that could be tested only by careful judicial inquiry into what the official knew." ... ...

* 28 U.S. Code § 2679.Exclusiveness of remedy

28 U.S. Code § 2677. Compromise

(Ideas)*
Bill Barr’s Dangerous Claims | The attorney general has said the intelligence community was “spying” on the Trump campaign—language that risks a panoply of harms. | Jun 7, 2019 | by April Doss**

"Attorney General William Barr has repeatedly used the word spying to refer to the counterintelligence investigation into Russian contacts with Donald Trump’s team in 2016. Barr’s loose use of language risks a panoply of harms, undermining public confidence in three vital goods: the nonpartisan nature of the intelligence community’s work, the generally robust framework for intelligence oversight, and the facts and conclusions of the intelligence community itself.

"Does Barr know what he’s saying? In a recent interview on CBS, Barr said that ‘as a lawyer, I always interpret the word treason not colloquially, but legally.’ He also touted his intelligence background from his early days at the CIA. Like lawyers, intelligence analysts are trained to carefully consider the importance of their words. Analysts and lawyers alike know that word choice makes a difference in shading, tone, and received meaning, and that the audience matters when choosing your words.

“‘Spying’ is neither a legal standard nor a term of art. None of the statutes, executive orders, or minimization procedures that govern U.S. intelligence activities refers to ‘spying.’ Each of those legal authorities uses much more precise language, such as ‘electronic surveillance,’ ‘covert action,’ or the ‘collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination’ of information.

“Spying is a word that’s been shaped by pop culture, invoking John le Carré novels and James Bond movies. It also carries with it the echoes of the mid-1970s Church and Pike Committee investigations into abuses by the intelligence community (IC)—investigations that Barr says shaped his views of intelligence operations. Barr’s use of the word spying to describe a counterintelligence investigation can only have a negative effect on public perception. This is dangerous in a number of ways.” …
_________________________________________

(italics in the excerpt above as in the original text)

… “the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the Nixon re-election committee” … (emphasis added)

“What prompted the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to spy on American citizens on U.S. soil in the 1960s—in violation of its own charter?” … (emphasis added)

“A glimpse of the Nixon campaign's spying and disruptions are to be found in the ” … (emphasis added)

“The next day, Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman privately discussed how ... Nixon's aides had run ‘a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage’ ” … (emphasis added)

“Watergate was an extensive campaign of political spying and dirty tricks cooked up by President Nixon and his subordinates” … (emphasis added)


“On that December day Nixon agreed to cover-up a criminally insubordinate spying operation conducted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff inside the National Security Council because of the military’s strong, visceral dislike of Nixon’s foreign policy.” … (emphasis added)

”Reviving the Nixon Doctrine: NSA Spying, the Commander-In-Chief, and Excutive Power in the War on Terror” | by David Cole (Georgetown University Law Center) ” ( bold-face (emphasis added)

(Here we have an example of the use of "spying" in an academic paper!)

( The National Review | POLITICS & POLICY)
The FBI Tragedy: Elites above the Law | By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON |
June 11, 2019 6:30 AM

...

"Mueller thereby established a new but lunatic precedent in American jurisprudence in which a prosecutor who fails to find sufficient cause to indict a suspect nonetheless releases supposedly incriminating evidence, with a wink that the now-besmirched suspect cannot be exonerated of the alleged crimes. Think what Mueller’s precedent of not-not-guilty would do to the American criminal-justice system, as zealous prosecutors might fish for just enough dirt on a suspect to ruin his reputation, but not find enough for an indictment, thereby exonerating their own prosecutorial failure by defaming a 'guilty until proven innocent' suspect.

"It is becoming increasingly apparent that Mueller’s team knew early on in their investigation that his lead investigators Peter Strzok and Lisa Page had been correct in their belief that there was “no there there” in the charges of collusion — again the raison d’être of their entire investigation.

"Yet Mueller’s team continued the investigation, aggregating more than 200 pages of unverified or uncorroborated news accounts, online essays, and testimonies describing all sorts of alleged unethical behavior and infelicities by Trump and his associates, apparently in hopes of compiling their own version of something like the Steele dossier. Mueller sought to publish a compendium of Trump bad behavior that fell below the standard of criminal offense but that would nonetheless provide useful fodder for media sensationalism and congressional partisan efforts to impeach the now supposedly not-not guilty president.

"Note again, at no time did Muller ever investigate the Steele dossier that had helped to create his existence as special counsel, much less whether members of the FBI and DOJ had misled a FISA court by hiding critical information about the dossier to obtain wiretaps of American citizens, texts that Mueller himself would then use in his effort to find criminal culpability." ...

...

"Yet the question is not merely whether a Comey, McCabe, or Mueller is atypical of the FBI. Rather, where in the world, if not from the culture of the FBI, did these elite legal investigators absorb the dangerous idea that FBI lawyers and investigators could flout the law and in such arrogant fashion use their vast powers of the government to pursue their own political agendas? And why was there no internal pushback at a supercilious leadership that demonstrably had gone rogue? Certainly, the vast corpus of the Strzok-Page correspondence does reflect a unprofessional, out-of-control culture at the FBI.

"Just imagine: If an agent Peter Strozk interviewed you and overstepped his purview, would you, the aggrieved, then appeal to his boss, Andrew McCabe? And if Andrew McCabe ignored your complaint, would you, the wronged, then seek higher justice from a James Comey, who in turn might rely on a legal opinion from a Lisa Page or a brief from a James Baker? And failing that, might a Robert Mueller as an outside auditor rectify prior FBI misconduct?" ...

(The Hill, Washington, D.C.) Opinion | F.B.I.'s spreadsheet puts a stake through the heart of Steele's dossier ; 16 July 2019 by John Solomon, opinion contributor*

___________________________

(Excerpt)

..."lest anyone be tempted to think (Christopher) Steele's 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 that 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 90 percent of the dossier's claims to be either wrong, non-verifiable 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 views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill.

... " the IG found that “Comey’s characterization of the Memos as personal records finds no support in the law and is wholly incompatible with the plain language of the statutes, regulations, and policies defining Federal records, and the terms of Comey’s FBI Employment Agreements.”" ...

" Reminder: DNC Lawyers to Court, 'We Do Not Owe Voters an "Impartial" or "Evenhanded" Primary Election' " ( posted : Thursday, August 29, 2019)



When one's own natural political "home-party" is a wretched, vile, cesspool of corruption, beating the 'opposition' is meaningless and the first order of business is cleaning up one's own political back-yard.

If that means no alternative to allowing the formal 'opposition' party (also corrupt) to electorally beat the shit out of one's corrupt party candidates unitl the message gets through, then so be it.

Voters to DNC : "Go 'die'!, Motherfuckers!"

"Mark Zaid, one of the attorneys representing the intelligence community whistleblower at the center of the Democrats' ongoing impeachment inquiry, tweeted conspicuously in January 2017 that a 'coup has started' and that 'impeachment will follow ultimately.'

"Then, in July 2017, Zaid remarked, 'I predict ("@" "C(able)N(ews)N(etwork"))* will play a key role in @realDonaldTrump not finishing out his full term as president.' Also that month, Zaid tweeted, 'We will get rid of him, and this country is strong enough to survive even him and his supporters.'

"Amid a slew of impeachment-related posts, Zaid assured his Twitter followers that 'as one falls, two more will take their place,' apparently referring to Trump administration employees who defy the White House. Zaid promised that the 'coup' would occur in 'many steps.'

(NOTE ON A NEW BOOK)


On the Great Russia Caper | Matt Taibbi | 31 December, 2019 |
__________________________________

After the holidays, I’ll be starting a new serial book in this space, replacing Untitled-gate with The Great Russia Caper.

I spent a good part of the last three years, and much of this past summer and fall, talking to people in and around the Russia investigation. Two themes kept emerging, in conversation with everyone from targets of the investigation to government investigators to reporters bylined on “bombshell” news stories.

One is rank comedy. Elements of this story involve serious abuses of power, but the defining characteristic of the Russia controversy is the proud American ignorance of the main characters. In that respect, it’s similar to the Iraq story. That was about oil, yes, but our Commander-in-Chief also didn’t learn there was a difference between Sunnis and Shiites until a year after the invasion, saying: “I thought Iraqis were Muslims!”

The subtext of Russia-gate involves a Dr. Evil-style expansion of the surveillance state and the cynical commandeering of the news media for a xenophobic scare campaign. But the major plot twists are informed by slapstick clueless-ness.
The Russia “expert” whose dossier cripples a presidency doesn’t speak Russian (and hasn’t been there since the Buffalo Bills played in a Super Bowl). The FBI director has never heard of Gazprom. The ranking member of the Senate intelligence committee warms up for hearings on Russian interference by reading “Tolstoy and Nabokov.”

National security officials explaining the need to arm Ukraine invoke the specter of communism, dead for thirty years; the former head of the DNC worries the “communists” are “dictating the terms of the debate”; belief that the Cold War is still on runs so strong that intelligence officials blame Russia for mysterious “acoustic attacks” on American diplomats in China, Cuba, and Uzbekistan.

The idea of a Deep State plot to undermine Donald Trump is popular in Republican circles, but all this lunacy at least somewhat undermines that analysis. Russiagate turns out to be impossible to understand minus the element of sincere, if misguided or insane, belief. Investigators and then press figures reasoned themselves into one proposition, only to end up on a years-long roller-coaster embracing pee tapes and acoustic brain attacks and killer Putin-dolphins (trained for the inevitable trans-polar Russian assault).

A section of the recently-released report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz exemplifies how key players became captive to their own mind loops.

Horowitz found out key assertions about Trump-Russia collusion appeared to come from Russian oligarch and metals baron Oleg Deripaska, who in 2016 employed ex-spy Christopher Steele to help him in a lawsuit against Trump aide Paul Manafort. This was the same Deripaska whose ostensible ties to Russian intelligence would end up being central to Trump-Russia collusion theories, as he reportedly received polling data from the Trump campaign through a middleman.

In other words: when information was going to OlegDeripaska, he was an FSB villain. When it came from Deripaska, it was trusted. Why? Horowitz quoted counter-intelligence chief Bill Priestap:

Why the Russians, and (Deripaska) is supposed to be close, very close to the Kremlin, why the Russians would try to denigrate an opponent that the intel community later said they were in favor of who didn’t really have a chance at winning, I’m struggling with… I know from my Intelligence Community work: they favored Trump, they’re trying to denigrate Clinton, and they wanted to sow chaos. I don’t know why you’d run a disinformation campaign to denigrate Trump on the side.

To dig into one of the most serious investigative questions the country had ever faced – the possibility that a presidential candidate was in league with foreign intelligence – the FBI turned to an ex-spy with a reputation for “poor judgment” and a “lack of self-awareness” who happened to be on the payroll of both the rival presidential campaign and a Russian plutocrat pal of Vladimir Putin. Asked why they had confidence in this person and his sources, the sincere answer was, “Why would they lie?”

Intelligence officials launched an investigation based on a series of assumptions, then used those assumptions as a reason not to question the assumptions. As one congressional investigator put it to me, “You can’t make this shit up.”

… …

There’s no way for Americans, and especially progressives, to really appreciate what the Russia story means without going back to the domestic spying programs first exposed by reporters like Seymour Hersh in the mid-seventies.

Originally tabbed the “Son of Watergate,” Hersh’s December 1974 report about “huge” spying operations – detailed in an internal CIA document known as the “Family Jewels” – led to revelations of wide-scale domestic surveillance of antiwar and black liberation movements, assassination attempts, misinformation campaigns, surveillance of reporters, a mail-opening program, human experimentation, and other activities so revolting that Henry Kissinger, not exactly a shrinking violent when it comes to such authoritarian stuff, called it the “horrors book.” Public disgust reached the point where there were calls for the abolition of spy agencies in general.

But a second backlash after Watergate never happened. News agencies, concerned that investigative reporting had gone “too far” after unseating a president, backed off the domestic spy story. The Pulitzer Committee quietly decided not to consider Hersh’s report, because it was “over-written, overplayed, under-researched and underproven.” Of course, every last detail of the “underproven” story would turn out to be true, but that wouldn’t be known for sure until 2007, when the “Family Jewels” were finally declassified. By then, the agencies had regrouped, and the spy programs reinvigorated.

When he returned to the White House as Vice President, onetime Ford administration official Dick Cheney rebuilt the secrecy bureaucracy. Intensely concerned with restoring the powers the executive branch lost in the seventies of his bitter experience, Cheney armed all the new or revived spying programs with a protective Catch-22. Extreme measures undertaken on national security grounds would henceforth also be protected from legal challenge on the same national security grounds.

Anyone hoping to contest any of these activities – secret FISA monitoring, inclusion on a no-fly or even an assassination list, the receipt of a National Security Letter from the FBI demanding access to communications information, an ordinary criminal prosecution buttressed by secret evidence – first had to win a difficult battle to prove that any of these things had even taken place.

Once past that hurdle, there would be a second battle to see the government’s reasons for taking these actions. Then, another battle to win the right to contest them. And so on.

Throughout the last three years, this pattern has repeated, often in absurd fashion. The lowlight was probably Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s indictment of a series of Russians connected to the Internet Research Agency.

When lawyers for one of the defendants unexpectedly showed up in court, Mueller declared millions of pages of non-classified documents “sensitive,” and obtained a protective order preventing defense counsel sharing discovery evidence – with their own clients! Nobody in the ostensibly “liberal media” even blinked at this dystopian insanity.

This is the metaphor still playing itself out as Connecticut Attorney General John Durham winds up his investigation of the investigation. We’re still at the stage of fighting over how much the public is entitled to learn what secret measures were undertaken on its behalf. That it takes this long and is this difficult for even the President of the United States to learn what tools were used to investigate him should be an enormous red flag, even to those who despise Trump.

It’s my hope that if people see the long background of how such tools have been used against less prominent targets – from Muslims on the Watch List to inner-city drug defendants tried in “tip and lead” cases to Internet companies fighting long court battles just to publicly fight the secret subpoenas they’ve received from the FBI – they might start to think differently about this story.

Russia-gate is like the Iraq story in another sense. Even after we found out there were no WMDs, the intellectual argument for pre-emptive war remained. The pretext vanished but the idea persisted; we’re still over there. In the same way, the core ideas of the Russia caper are almost sure to survive Donald Trump.

In early 2017, the outgoing Obama government issued an Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference. Coverage focused on the notion that a foreign country had helped elect Trump, but the paper pushed other themes. It talked about Russian determination to fuel “radical discontent” and “dissatisfaction” among us, in order to “undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.”

The paper previewed concepts pundits would continue hammering for years:

● “Discord” in America is foreign-inspired;

● Complaints about financial inequality, wars, the inefficacy of American democracy, and other problems are also fueled by foreigners;

● There is danger in allowing crossover between the left and right populist movements appealing to these complaints;

● The free press and an unregulated Internet are the devil’s playgrounds, and the vigilance of experts is needed to protect us from foreign “disinformation.”

These ideas have pushed us into an experience straight out of Orwell: a dramatic and almost instantaneous flipping of popular assumptions. Self-described “progressives” who just a decade ago rallied behind the Dixie Chicks now gobble up scare tracts written in faux-Cyrillic texts about “assets” in our midst. The same terror before unseen threats that gripped small-town Americans after 9/11 has now conquered our urban upper classes. Donald Trump is not sufficient to explain this.

Even if public opinion doesn’t change, it feels worth writing a history of this madness. I hope future generations will be sane enough to disbelieve it.

Part one, next, begins with the Family Jewels, a War on Terror primer, and a pair of lawsuits.

© 2020 Matt Taibbi. See privacy and terms

"The idea of a Deep State plot to undermine Donald Trump is popular in Republican circles, but all this lunacy at least somewhat undermines that analysis. Russiagate turns out to be impossible to understand minus the element of sincere, if misguided or insane, belief. Investigators and then press figures reasoned themselves into one proposition, only to end up on a years-long roller-coaster embracing pee tapes and acoustic brain attacks and killer Putin-dolphins (trained for the inevitable trans-polar Russian assault)."

from Just the News (Washington, D.C.) website

FBI notes detail effort to catch Flynn in lie to 'get him fired' as Trump adviser | 'What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?' | by John Solomon | Last Updated: April 29, 2020 - 8:32pm

... ...

“Justice Department officials are investigating whether Priestap's notes were written in conjunction with meetings he had with top leaders like then-Director James Comey and then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, officials said. A special prosecutor is reviewing DOJ's and the FBI's handling of the Flynn prosecution, which led to the former Trump adviser and retired general pleading guilty to lying to the FBI under a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia case.

“Flynn's lawyer Sidney Powell filed a court motion last week saying new evidence has emerged showing Flynn was 'framed' and his conviction should be dismissed. The officials said the notes are part of that new evidence and had been withheld from Flynn's defense team for years even though they were potential evidence of innocence.

“More evidence is being produced in the next few days that will further illuminate the FBI's conduct in the case that is now at the center of the DOJ investigation, officials said.

“Among the new evidence released Wednesday night is an email chain involving former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and Strzok, the lead agent in the Russia probe known as Crossfire Hurricane. In the email exchange, the two and others discuss whether the FBI has to follow its normal rules and give Flynn the customary '1001 warning' at the start of his interview that if he misled agents he could be charged criminally.

“ 'I have a question for you,' Page wrote in an email that included Strzok. 'Could the admonition re 1001 be given at the beginning at the interview? Or does it have to come following a statement which agents believed to be false? Does this policy speak to that?'

“She added: 'It seems to be if the former then it would be an easy way to just casually slip that in, Of course you know sir federal law makes it a crime to...'
“A while later, Page gets an emailed response: 'I haven't read the policy lately, but if I recall correctly, you can say it any time. I'm 90 percent sure about that, but I can check in the a.m.'

“The mere fact that FBI agents were using phrase like 'slip that in' when talking about a warning designed to protect someone's constitutional rights is certain to give Flynn's lawyers more fodder to argue in court that his January 2017 interview was a set up as Powell has argued (,(sic))
… ...

(The Federalist (Washington, D.C.))

_______________________

Grassley Demands DOJ Release All Exculpatory Information On Michael Flynn | April 28, 2020 | By Chrissy Clark

"Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is calling on the Justice Department to release all exculpatory information related to the FBI’s handling of its case against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn." ...

... " 'This was a "rank setup." ' It was in essence a perjury trap, where the 'government questions a witness for the primary purpose of obtaining a statement from him in order to prosecute him later for perjury.' ”

The mysterious “Primary Subsource” that Christopher Steele has long hidden behind... is a former Brookings Institution analyst -- Igor “Iggy” Danchenko, a Russian national whose past includes criminal convictions and other personal baggage ignored by the FBI in vetting him and the information he fed to Steele, according to congressional sources and records obtained by RealClearInvestigations...

Danchenko, who was hired by Steele in 2016 to deploy a network of sources to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was arrested, jailed and convicted years earlier on multiple public drunkenness and disorderly conduct charges in the Washington area and ordered to undergo substance-abuse and mental-health counseling, according to criminal records.

"New York Times Manipulates F.B.I. Lawyer’s Guilty Plea To Hide Real Spygate News" | Because they were co-conspirators in the hoax, too many in the corporate media are serving as obstacles to holding the F.B.I. and other powerful government agencies accountable for their actions. | by
Mollie Hemingway
| August 17, 2020
(The Federalist)
__________________

"A New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his role perpetrating the Russia collusion hoax was tasked with framing the news that a former top F.B.I. lawyer was to plead guilty to deliberately fabricating evidence against a Donald Trump campaign affiliate targeted in the Russia probe. The resulting article is a case study in how to write propaganda.

"Adam Goldman broke, and cushioned, the news that former F.B.I. lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was to plead guilty to fabricating evidence in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (F.I.S.A.) warrant application to spy on Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page.

"His job was to present the news as something other than an indictment of the F.B.I.’s handling of the Russia collusion hoax, to signal to other media that they should move on from the story as quickly as possible, and to hide his own newspaper’s multi-year participation in the Russia collusion hoax. One intelligence source described it as an 'insult' to his intelligence and 'beyond Pravda,' a reference to the official newspaper of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Here’s how Goldman did it.

Mild Headline With Ludicrous Spin

"The New York Times used to put every Russia collusion story it had on the front page. Then, when the narrative fell apart, the Times moved on to a new narrative of redefining America as irredeemably racist.

"Even though Clinesmith’s guilty plea is directly relevant to the false story the Times peddled for years, and even though it broke the news of his guilty plea, the publication hid the story deep in the paper and put a boring headline on it. 'Ex-F.B.I. Lawyer Expected to Plead Guilty in Durham Investigation,' as if begging readers to move on. If they didn’t, the subhead told them that the news really wasn’t such a big deal. 'Prosecutors are not expected to reveal any evidence of a broad anti-Trump conspiracy among law enforcement officials,' it claimed, without, well, evidence.

"In fact, while the charging document was brief, it revealed that while Clinesmith deliberately fabricated evidence in the fourth warrant to spy on Page, all four warrants failed to mention the information the C.I.A. gave the F.B.I. months before the first warrant was filed. That information was that Page, a former Marine officer who graduated from the Naval Academy, had been a source for the agency, sharing information about Russians the agency was interested in. In fact, he’d done it for five years." ...

... "the memos' most explosive revelations are the sheer breadth of the FBI's insufficiently predicated dragnet targeting the Trump campaign, and the agents' clearly stated purpose of thwarting any Trump campaign effort to get dirt from Russia that could hurt his Democratic rival.

" 'The Crossfire Hurricane investigative team is attempting to determine if anyone in the Trump campaign is in a position to have received information either directly or indirectly from the Russian Federation regarding the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton,' one of the early FBI electronic communications (ECs) from Halper's undercover work stated.

You can read the memos here.
File
Halper Source Documents_final.pdf

"Ordinarily, FBI counterintelligence investigations that target Americans legally must be predicated on specific allegations that narrowly focus the bureau's spy powers on limited targets to avoid unnecessary infringement of privacy and civil liberties. But the Halper documents reveal a large, unfocused FBI search with little substantiation of alleged wrongdoing, and significant evidence that undermined the core allegations, experts told Just the News.

"Former FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence Kevin Brock said the information about Papadopoulos' foreign lobbying that the bureau used to open the Russia collusion probe failed to meet the bureau's own legal standards to justify the larger dragnet that encompassed Page and many other Trump officials.

" 'Normally when the FBI opens an investigation on a U.S. citizen, it has specific facts justifying an investigation of that person,' explained Brock, who led the implementation of many of the bureau's current rules for informants and intelligence gathering. "But here what the ECs are saying is they don't know who is involved and they are just conjecturing that someone in the Trump campaign might be in a position to receive help from Russia. You just can't open a full field investigation on conjecture.

" 'If you look at the FBI's ECs dispassionately, there is no clearly predicated basis for investigation for U.S. citizens, so it looks instead like subterfuge to justify an open-ended inquiry. The only sane, logical explanation why the Crossfire Hurricane team would doggedly perpetuate such an unfounded investigation is political bias,' Brock added.

"Brock's comments echo the words of one of the lead FBI agents in the Russia case, William Barnett, who last year told the Justice Department in a lengthy interview that there was never any credible evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, and that the investigation only persisted because there was a 'get Trump' attitude among investigators.

" 'BARNETT and others joked about how the investigation into collusion could be made into a game, which they referred to as "Collusion Clue",' the DOJ summary of Barnett's interview read. 'In the hypothetical game, investigators are able to choose any character conducting any activity in any location and pair this individual with another character and interpret it as evidence of collusion.'

You can read Barnett's full memo here. File: 04518073623.pdf

"Just the News obtained the new informant documents — previously classified at the 'secret' level — after Trump ordered hundreds of Russia collusion probe documents declassified during his final 24 hours in office last month. The informant documents chronicle the efforts by the FBI to direct Halper as a confidential human source from August 2016 through early 2017.

"Halper did not return a call seeking comment on one of the phones he used when he was working for the FBI. A woman who answered said she would pass along a message. Halper also did not reply to messages seeking comment sent to private and work email addresses. The FBI national press office in Washington declined comment." ...

(Subscriber material)
Subscribe to Matt Taibbi : https://taibbi.substack.com/

Rachel Maddow's Shocking New Low
With last night's loony response to the indictment of Igor Danchenko, the MSNBC anchor takes a bold leap off the credibility cliff

Matt Taibbi | Nov 5 | views 920 | comments 688 ||

"Yesterday, Special Counsel John Durham indicted Brookings Institute analyst Igor Danchenko, better known as the primary source for Christopher Steele, the ex-spy who compiled the now-infamous “Steele Dossier” on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. The case has implications for higher-ranking figures, but the indictment is most immediately devastating to the reputation of the many famous news personalities who hyped the Steele story. They almost all look terrible today, but the response by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was a thing beyond. Whatever the category below 'disgraced journalist' is, she entered it with gusto with last night’s performance.

"Much of the indictment concerns false statements Danchenko allegedly made to the FBI concerning his interactions with 'PR Executive-1,' described as a 'U.S.-based individual… who was a long-time participant in Democratic Party politics and was then an executive at a U.S. public relations firm.' New York Times reporter Charlie Savage received confirmation from the lawyer of a man named Charles Dolan that Dolan is, in fact, the executive:

(Twitter avatar for @charlie_savageCharlie Savage @charlie_savage
November 4th 2021
138 Retweets194 Likes)

"Russiagate is already a sizable boil on the face of American journalism, but the indictment of Danchenko has the potential to grow the profession’s embarrassment to fantastic dimensions. For instance, a key claim of the Steele dossier involved a 'well-developed conspiracy of cooperation' between Trump and Russia that supposedly went back years, and was managed on the Trump side by Paul Manafort and Carter Page. At one point, it was believed this claim was sourced to an anonymous phone call Danchenko thought came from the former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, Sergei Millian. Danchenko moreover reportedly told the FBI that he and the 'anonymous caller' made an appointment to meet in New York.

"The indictment, however, asserts that Danchenko never even spoke to Millian, repeatedly emailing him and getting no response.

" As for that trip to New York, hoo boy:

"From on about July 26, 2016 through July 28, 2016, DANCHENKO traveled to New York with a family member. On or about July 28, 2016, DANCHENKO visited, among other places, the Bronx Zoo with the family member. During this trip, DANCHENKO did not meet or communicate with Chamber President-I.

"It’s bad enough that the 'well-developed' conspiracy tale appears to have been sourced to a graduate of the Jayson Blair school of investigation, who was strolling in the Bronx Zoo during the time when he was supposedly landing the scoop of a lifetime (note that Steele himself reportedly believed the pee tape was sourced, “in part,” to Millian).

"Every reporter who touched that allegation should be ashamed, and Rachel is at the front of that huge crowd. (emphasis added) Among other things, she emphasized the importance of Steele’s 'broader assertions,' repeating the claim that the 'Russia regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years,' going so far as to praise Steele for keeping his 'head down' and listening to his 'deep cover sources' like Danchenko.

"However, that’s not the most damning part. It turns out at least one assertion by Steele, a relatively minor observation in an August 2016 report that claimed a senior member of Trump’s inner circle was glad when Paul Manafort resigned as campaign manager, came directly from Dolan, via Danchenko.

"The indictment shows an email chain in which Danchenko tells Dolan he’s working on a 'project against Trump' and is looking for any 'thought, rumor, allegation' that might be useful. Dolan replies, after Manafort’s resignation, that 'I had a drink with a GOP friend of mine' who told him 'a number of people wanted (Manafort) gone. It is a very sharp elbows crowd.' "

...

Opinion The New York Post | Inside the Clinton dossier and the con behind the Russiagate scandal | By Kimberley Strassel
November 5, 2021 9:05pm Updated

... "It was sent February 21, 2020, and Biden, or someone on the Biden campaign, wrote: 'Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be President. He doesn’t want me to be our nominee. If you’re wondering why — it’s because I’m the only person in this field who’s ever gone toe-to-toe with him.' ” ...
(emphasis added)

For Decades Biden Promised He Could Handle Putin | By Philip Wegmann - RCP Staff | February 23, 2022

... "Trump's America First anthem has led to his demonic buddy Putin forging a Russia First mission after Trump's loss."

... "After the resignation of Yeltsin (31 Dec. 1999), Putin became acting president, and less than four months later was elected outright to his first term as president and was reelected in 2004. As he was then constitutionally limited to two consecutive terms as president, Putin served as prime minister again from 2008 to 2012 under Dmitry Medvedev, and returned to the presidency in 2012 in an election marred by allegations of fraud and protests; he was reelected again in 2018. In April 2021, following a referendum, he signed into law constitutional amendments including one that would allow him to run for reelection twice more, potentially extending his presidency to 2036. ...

Or, as The New Yorker's Bob Mankoff put it,
"How about 'never'? Is 'never' good for you?"

Better Trumpian "America First-ers than lunatics or "America Never-ers!!!

Wisconsin Special Counsel Finds ‘Widespread Election Fraud’ In 2020 Nursing Homes | By Margot Cleveland | March 03, 2022

_________________________________________

“ 'Rampant fraud and abuse occurred statewide at Wisconsin’s nursing homes and other residential care facilities,' according to the Office of Special Counsel’s second interim report filed on March 1 with the Wisconsin Assembly. That conclusion represents but one of the key findings of election irregularities detailed in the nearly 150-page report—a report that also confirms the conclusion of the Racine County Sheriff’s office last fall that fraud occurred at nursing homes in Wisconsin.

"Special Counsel Michael Gableman, the retired state Supreme Court justice appointed by the Wisconsin Assembly to investigate integrity concerns about the 2020 election, vetted more than 90 nursing homes in five different counties before concluding there was 'widespread election fraud at Wisconsin nursing homes in November of 2020'

"According to the report, nursing home staff and administrators illegally handled absentee ballots, illegally assisted with 'marking' residents’ ballots, illegally 'witnessed' the voting, and possibly included forgery of the elderly residents’ signatures. Under Wisconsin law, these violations of the election code constitute fraud.

This Local Investigation Led to the Special Counsel

"The fraud uncovered by the special counsel’s office mirrored that revealed late last year by the Racine County Sheriff’s office. This local investigation led to the broader special counsel investigation.

"In the Racine County case, the sheriff’s office received a complaint of potential violations of state election law occurring at the Ridgewood Care residential facility. After conducting a thorough investigation of the complaint, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling held a press conference on October 28, 20221, in which lead investigator Sgt. Michael Luell methodically presented his findings.

"As Luell explained during an hour-long press conference, Section 6.875 of the Wisconsin election code provides the “exclusive means” of absentee voting in residential care facilities. That law requires local municipalities to dispatch two special voting deputies, or “SVDs,” to such facilities.

"Under the election code, those SVDs must personally deliver ballots to any residents of the facility who wish to vote and then witness the voting process. By law, only a relative or a SVD may assist the voter in the process, and after the ballot is completed, the SVD must seal the ballot envelope and deliver it to the elections clerk.

"The Ridgewood Care Center in Racine County violated every one of those mandates, Luell explained, with the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) holding blame for the blatant disregard of state election law taking place at residential facilities because the commission had directed municipalities not to 'use the Special Voting Deputy process to service residents in care facilities,' and to instead 'transmit absentee ballots to those voters by mail.'

"Based on the WEC’s illegal directive, Luell detailed how further violations of the election code occurred at the Ridgewood Care Center, with staffers improperly completing portions of the absentee ballots, mishandling and not securing ballots, and discussing the elections and candidates with the residents beyond merely reading them the ballots." ...

A Republican report on the 2020 election in Wisconsin endorsed a host of debunked claims of fraud and false assertions about lawmakers’ power to decertify President Biden’s victory, lending credence to the conspiracy theories that have gripped Republicans in the state for more than 16 months.

"As Special Counsel John Durham continues to expose more details of the 'SpyGate' or 'Russia collusion' scandal, it can be difficult for any apolitical, non-news-junkie member of the public to grasp the ongoing developments.

"After all, for more than five years, the corrupt legacy media has refused to report on scandal or done so with a slanted portrayal of the facts. So most Americans remain unaware of the Democrats’ years-long duplicity that sought to destroy first candidate and then President Donald Trump. Add to that reality the overlapping conspiracies and sprawling cast of characters involved, and it can be difficult to follow the story.

"That the scandal is dense, however, does not mean it should be ignored. To the contrary, the duplicity must not be disregarded because what Trump’s political enemies tried to accomplish over the course of five years represents the biggest threat our constitutional republic has seen in the last century.

"So for those who care about our country and her future but don’t want to be buried in the minutia of the scandal, here is your big-picture primer." ...

The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the Point of Absurdity

A development in the infamous laptop story further proves the "Russian Disinformation" tale was itself disinformation, shaming a herd of craven media stenographers | Matt Taibbi | TK News by Matt Taibbi

In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020.

Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley. For comic relief, start with the Intercept:

Editors Betsy Reed and Peter Maass in October 2020 refused to publish a Greenwald piece unless he addressed the “complexity” of the “disinformation issue,” with Reed condescendingly suggesting there was a lot of “in-house knowledge” the Pulitzer winner could “tap into.”

By “in-house knowledge,” Reed meant Robert Mackey and Jim Risen, two former New York Times reporters who’d already denounced the laptop story as conspiracy theory. Risen pooh-poohed those tumbling down the “Trump rabbit hole," ...

_______________________


...

... "(CNSNews.com*) – President Biden said on Monday that he would be willing for the United States to get involved militarily should China invade Taiwan, adding that “that’s a commitment we made.”

And as it has done so many times before, a White House official later corrected him, saying "our policy has not changed."

During a joint press conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, a reporter said to the president, “You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily, for obvious reasons. Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan, if it comes to that?”

“Yes,” Biden replied.

“That’s a commitment we made,” he continued. “That’s a commitment we made.” ...

* ("CNSNews.com is a division of the Media Research Center, a not-for-profit 501 (c)(3) organization.")

On July 13, 2018, a federal grand jury sitting in the District of Columbia returned an indictment against 12 Russian military intelligence officers for their alleged roles in interfering with the 2016 United States (U.S.) elections. The indictment charges 11 defendants(...) with a computer hacking conspiracy involving gaining unauthorized access into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, stealing documents from those computers, and staging releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The indictment also charges these defendants with aggravated identity theft, false registration of a domain name, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Two defendants(...) are charged with a separate conspiracy to commit computer crimes, relating to hacking into the computers of U.S. persons and entities responsible for the administration of 2016 U.S. elections, such as state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and U.S. companies that supplied software and other technology related to the administration of U.S. elections. The United States District Court for the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. issued a federal arrest warrant for each of these defendants upon the grand jury’s return of the indictment.

..."
By John Solomon

Updated: July 15, 2022 - 12:14am

"Democrats and their allies in the traditional news media have coined the term the "Big Lie" to dismiss anyone who questions the conduct of the 2020 election.

"But with each passing day, new irregularities, security vulnerabilities and illegalities are being unmasked by bombshell revelations from courts, legislators and other investigative bodies like the FBI and Homeland Security Department.

"The latest came last week when the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared that state election regulators had no legal authority to allow voters to cast ballots in mobile drop boxes, a jaw-dropping decision that invalidated the way tens of thousands of voters -- many of them Democrats -- cast their ballots,

"From Phoenix to Detroit, and Madison to Austin, there are now nearly two dozen credible confirmations of problems that undercut the claims of bureaucrats, journalists and Democrats that the November 2020 general election was perfect. In fact, it was quite imperfect.

"And while none of (the) revelations, at this point, will reverse the outcome of the presidential tally or unseat Joe Biden from the White House, they do build a compelling case that the bigger lie was that the 2020 election was flawless.

"Here are 21 important revelations uncovered by Just the News over the last 18 months of reporting, complete with substantiating evidence and links:

...
_______________________________________

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/bombshells-belie-big-lie-21-co...

Obviously, most of those who rally around a Big Lie do not do so from a place of deliberate deceptiveness — and they certainly wouldn't call it that. Take the Big Lie being spread by Trump: That the 2020 election was stolen from him. Like Hitler's Big Lie, all of Trump's "evidence" of fraud has been exposed as spurious, from the dozens of lost legal cases (he never once proved fraud in court) to the fact that his own attorney general and Vice President admitted the election had not been stolen. To believe that the election was stolen, one would have to envision a conspiracy including hundreds of Republicans as well as Democrats and absolutely no "smoking gun" leaks — an absurd concept if one tries to break it down logistically.

Yet the lack of substance is precisely the point, as Big Lies are structured to turn attention away from their lack of substance — in most contexts, a person with Trump's personal history and lack of evidence would never be taken seriously — by instead playing on the desires of their targets.

Former President Donald Trump, who fell nearly 21,000 votes short of winning Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, has never accepted defeat in the Badger State.

Not after his own recount request in Milwaukee and Dane counties actually increased Joe Biden’s margin of victory. Not after a series of lawsuits failed. Not after the election result was certified. Not after electoral votes were counted, after Biden was sworn in, or in the face of expert after expert saying there is no evidence of widespread fraud, and no way to undo the result.

So, maybe it’s no surprise that Trump now apparently wants to go back in time.

On July 8, 2022, the state Supreme Court ruled that Wisconsin law does not permit drop boxes anywhere other than election clerk offices and that only state lawmakers may make new policy stating otherwise — not the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which had issued guidance to clerks allowing them.

Following the decision, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, and Telegram to declare:

"Other States are looking at, and studying, the amazing Wisconsin Supreme Court decision declaring Ballot Boxes ILLEGAL, and that decision includes the 2020 Presidential Election."

In other words, he is claiming the decision is retroactive, and — in his view — could somehow cancel the result.

That’s plainly nonsense.