Erdogan Tayyip turkey

see Turkey

see Rojava ocalan

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an 525

President Donald Trump's critics, both left and right, often use the word "unprecedented" to describe his actions. No previous president in U.S. history — not even Richard Nixon — contemplated deporting U.S. citizens to foreign prisons or took aggressive action against law firms for having clients he didn't like.

They typically mean "unprecedented" in the United States, not unprecedented elsewhere.

In an article published by The Atlantic on May 14, Andrew O'Donohue — a political scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts — warns that Trump is employing a legal strategy used by despots in other countries.

"Donald Trump’s attacks on the courts lack recent precedent in the United States," O'Donohue explains, "but they follow a clear pattern seen in backsliding democracies around the world. In many countries, when political leaders challenge the courts, the end result isn't merely a win in a single policy dispute. These attacks have a deeper, more destructive effect: They systematically weaken the courts as a check on the executive's power — opening the door for governments to abuse that power to target opponents and endanger democracy."

IFrame Content

The Harvard political science expert continues, "This fight takes place both inside and, importantly, outside the courtroom, in the arena of the public’s opinion. Even though citizens generally agree that governments should obey court orders, several would-be authoritarians — such as those in Turkey, Mexico, and El Salvador — have managed to defy the courts, while keeping the public on their side.

O'Donohue describes the "pattern" he has "studied" in "democratic backsliding globally" as "court-baiting."

"To understand this dynamic, consider a textbook example from Turkey," O'Donohue writes. "When Turkey’s long-serving leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, first rose to power in 2003, he initially faced powerful constraints from the judiciary. Whereas Erdoğan's party was religiously conservative, Turkey's courts were staunchly secular and issued dozens of decisions during Erdoğan’s first term to limit the government's sway over historically secular state institutions. To take down the judiciary, Erdoğan used the court-baiting playbook."

O'Donohue continues, "He proposed a constitutional amendment perfectly designed to galvanize public support — and trigger a showdown with the judiciary. In Turkey, the courts had repeatedly upheld a ban that prevented Muslim women from wearing the Islamic headscarf at universities in the name of upholding the constitution’s strict commitment to secularism."

Trump, O'Donohue argues, is using the "court-baiting playbook" in a similar fashion to Erdoğan in Turkey — and the goal is an "erosion of checks and balances."

"The experiences of other democracies offer a warning: Court-baiting starts by expanding executive power on a popular issue," O'Donohue writes, "but it can end with an unconstrained executive who destroys the cherished institutions of a free society."

*Andrew O'Donohue's full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).

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Alternet+ no lnx

Trump’s appointees are the Trojan horse that could lead to America’s strategic collapse

Thom Hartmann November 21, 2024

The mainstream media is baffled: Why would Trump promote candidates to oversee critical agencies with millions of employees and multi-billion-dollar budgets who have little to no management experience and have openly expressed hostility toward the institutions they’ll oversee?

I’ve seen legendary reporter Bob Woodward, who wrote several books about Trump, on three different TV shows this week asking to the effect of, “What could Trump possibly gain from these incompetent appointments?

If he just wanted loyalty, there’s no shortage of rational, competent members of the military and intelligence community who’re loyal to Trump.

So why is he selecting people like Hegseth, Gaetz, and Gabbard to run agencies that could directly involve confrontations with Russia?

Trump wants Gaetz for the job as our nation’s top law enforcement officer, Attorney General (who oversees the FBI), where he could block the FBI from investigating Trump’s embrace of Putin and Russia’s spying and disinformation efforts here in the US.

Why? Gaetz, after all, has called for Trump to “defund, get rid of, abolish the FBI…”; he apparently hates the agency that investigated and threatened to prosecute him.

Pete Hegseth, who Trump wants to put in charge of our Department of Defense, is openly critical of our NATO allies, saying they are, “self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to.”

Who else hates NATO? Vladimir Putin. Hegseth has also echoed Putin’s assertion that he doesn’t have designs on the Baltic states, arguing that he doubted Putin would go “much further” than the Polish border.

And both Hegseth and Gaetz have a history of lurid, possibly illegal sexual activity that could subject them to blackmail by a foreign power…like Russia.

Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump wants to put in charge of all 18 of America’s intelligence agencies — giving her full access to America’s darkest secrets and our spies buried deep within Russia and China — has repeatedly and openly embraced Vladimir Putin’s positions on world affairs.

Regarding Ukraine, she argued that Russia was forced to invade that country because, echoing Putin, she falsely claimed Ukraine was developing (with US help) biological weapons and conspiring with NATO to put troops on Russia’s border.

Former Secretary of State Clinton said Russia was “grooming” Gabbard, and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was equally blunt:

“There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”

And JD Vance, also selected by Trump and now our vice-president elect, has famously said:

“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” no doubt bringing cheers from the Kremlin.

So, what’s really going on here?

Is it possible that Trump isn’t trolling us or trying to do “dominance plays” with Congress, but actually wants these people to injure or destroy the agencies he’s putting them in charge of?

Is it even conceivable that Trump, in league with Putin (or at least sharing his goal of weakening and damaging America), actually wants our intelligence, defense, and investigative agencies to be gutted to the point of impotence?

That these appointees could be Trojan horses he’s planning to use to destroy America from within?

That he’s that angry with the country whose past leaders have ridiculed him, whose elites have rejected him all his life, and that has even tried to put him in prison?

That he’d like our country — which he disdains — to be brought to its knees?

That his loyalty, perhaps for years, has been to a country and system of government very different from America and what our founders envisioned?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

Just months ago, we discovered that he and Elon Musk have both been having regular, secret conversations with Putin for at least the past two years.

This embrace of a foreign dictator first cranked into visibility in 2016.

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documented more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump 2016 campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to that year’s election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, he let them know where Trump needed help, and when. Speculation is that they used that information for their successful 2016 Facebook campaigns.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison; he’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported two years ago last August that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or for bragging rights to impress dignitaries, businessmen, or ladies he brings back to his room?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can make money off them.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled by the Trump administration.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to criminally obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit former FBI Director Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence agencies that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli/American asset/spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that another longtime American spy, this one buried deep inside the Kremlin, was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’ translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press he believed it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed that information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all of our spies) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Did Trump ever return that document to the intelligence agencies? I can find no record of a news story suggesting that he did. It appears to have vanished.

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, a Trojan horse right here in America, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bildwhen the StB’s files were declassified.

It began when Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey after she fell down a flight of stairs and died.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.

“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor; he also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also charged as an unregistered agent of a foreign government (Turkey) while working in the White House: prosecutors said he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

The plot thickened when America learned, from a blockbuster 2022 report in Axios by Jonathan Swan, that just before leaving office, back on October 21, 2020, Trump had signed Executive Order 13957.

It would allow him to instantly fire as many as 50,000 senior federal employees encompassing the Civil Service management of every government agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, large parts of the Pentagon, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees.

And it wouldn’t stop there. As Donald Moynihan wrote for Slate about this “Schedule F” Executive Order:

“Schedule F would burn down the civil service system. It would be a government of the lawless leading the incompetent. …

“Government data unfavorable to the administration would be suppressed or altered. Public statements about what government actors are actually doing would become rarer and less believable. And questionable actions by the security forces to target political enemies and protect friends could become routine.

“Career public employees would be forced to choose between their oath to the Constitution—in effect, their oath to serve the public—and keeping their job. They will have their loyalty questioned based on which political organizations they associated with in college, or voter registration, or social media activity. Some will not go along with the program. They will be fired. Or never join the government in the first place.”

Trump didn’t have the time to push that executive order through the federal bureaucracy, but it gives us a clear picture of his vision for a second Trump administration, particularly since this is still on the Project 2025 agenda.

Campaigning to destroy NATO; opposing aid to Ukraine; demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential; utterly destroying our senior-most intelligence and military agencies; installing Trojan horses to lead them: Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

What are Trump’s real goals with these appointments?

As the old saying goes, “Watch what he does, not what he says.”

NOW READ: Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, the Democrats will live in Trump’s America

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https://www.alternet.org/turkeys-marginalized-deeply-afraid-erdogan/

runoff 52% good news

https://www.alternet.org/erdogan-eradicate-judiciary-free-press/

11 22 an ah

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised that if he won, there would be a strict separation between his businesses and his political activities. But according to reporting in the New York Times, foreign officials from six different countries “spent more than $750,000” at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. “when they were seeking to influence his administration, renting rooms for more than $10,000 per night.”

Times journalists Luke Broadwater and Eric Lipton, in an article published by the Times on Monday, November 14, report, “The governments of Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and China spent more money than previously known at the Trump International Hotel at crucial times in 2017 and 2018 for those countries’ relations with the United States, according to the documents, which were obtained by the House Oversight Committee and released on Monday.”

The foreign officials, according to Broadwater and Lipton, were big spenders.

“The Malaysian prime minister, for instance, hired a $1500 personal trainer during his stay at the Trump hotel in 2017,” the Times journalists note. “The Saudi Ministry of Defense rented several suites, costing $10,500 each, with rooms reserved under the name ‘His Excellency.’ Qatari officials spent more than $300,000 there in the weeks leading up to a meeting with Mr. Trump in 2018."

Broadwater and Lipton add, “The documents build on the public record of how Mr. Trump’s hotel brought in millions during his presidency from foreign governments. The Oversight Committee has previously estimated that the hotel received more than $3.75 million from foreign governments from 2017 to 2020, raising concerns about possible violations of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause.”

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, the New York Democrat who chairs the House Oversight Committee, told the Times that the documents “sharply call into question the extent to which President Trump was guided by his personal financial interest while in office rather than the best interests of the American people.”

“It paints an extremely troubling picture,” Maloney commented to the Times.

Broadwater and Lipton report, “The (House Oversight) Committee disclosed the latest documents as it released a letter from Ms. Maloney to the National Archives seeking additional documents about the Trump hotel and communications with foreign governments. The National Archives confirmed on Monday that it had received the letter. Ms. Maloney said the additional documents were needed to ‘determine whether former President Trump distorted U.S. foreign policy to serve his own financial interests at the expense of the American people and in violation of his oath of office.’”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-corruption-2648564184/

it's been a long, difficult week in Trumpworld with all of the incriminating reports of corruption surrounding President Donald Trump and his administration. With Election Day less than five days away, Trump is likely feeling the pressure as the opposing forces work over time to state their case and prove that he is unfit for the office of the presidency.

Many of the stories raise more questions about Trump's leadership and the hidden agendas of his White House officials and other members of his administration.

Here's a breakdown of the stories circulating this week:

1. Trump, Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Turkish Bank A new report by the New York Times has uncovered details about Trump and U.S. Attorney Bill Barr questionable handling of possible violations of U.S. sanctions involving billions of dollars worth of gold and cash that was funneled to Iran.

When Geoffrey S. Berman, a top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, traveled to the White House to speak with Barr and some of his top administrative officials about the criminal investigation into the state-owned Turkish bank, Halkbank, Barr suggested that the bank be allowed to avoid indictment by paying only a fine and admitting that some wrong was done. Barr's sentiments also echoed Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's words as he had reportedly asked Trump repeatedly to stop the investigation. Trump's presumed eagerness to please Erdogan has also raised questions about where the president truly stands. For Berman, Barr's request raised red flags and questions about whether or not Barr was colluding with foreign operatives.

"This is completely wrong," Berman later told lawyers in the U.S. Department of Justice, according to people who received intel about the proposal and Barr's reaction. "You don't grant immunity to individuals unless you are getting something from them — and we wouldn't be here."

This report is yet another cloud over Trump and his administration regarding where their loyalty lies.

2. Pompeo Family Email ScandalU.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was caught in the middle of an email scandal when it was revealed that he and his wife, Susan Pompeo had conducted official White House business using personal email addresses. Now, the couple is being investigated by both Congress and the State Department's inspector generals for "potential misuse of government resources." On multiple occasions, Susan Pompeo is said to have regularly utilized her personal email address for business matters, according to email correspondence.

"The emails show that Susan Pompeo routinely gives instructions to State Department officials from her personal email address about everything from travel plans and restaurant reservations to the elite Madison Dinners," according to NBC News.

Below is an example of the types of messages Susan Pompeo sent to a State Department official. The message captures a conversation between her and a State Department official whose name was redacted from the record.

"The dryer isn't hooked up... I think you told me someone was coming to fix that?" Susan Pompeo said via text message to a State Department official. "Ma'am – On it, I was told it was fixed. Let me get you an answer," the official responded by email hours later.

3. Rick Perry's Dirty DealingA new report centers on former United States Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and his involvement in an attempted scheme to help some of his friends profit off a massive gas deal. Although Perry has denied the allegations, there are multiple details that highlight Perry's ties to Ukraine, according to Pro Republica.

During a six-month investigation, reporters from Time magazine, WNYC and ProPublica discovered that "Perry and his staff at the Energy Department worked to advance energy deals that were potentially worth billions of dollars to Perry's friends and political donors."

Two of these deals seemed set to benefit Energy Transfer, the Texas company on whose board Perry served immediately before and after his stint in Washington. The biggest was worth an estimated $20 billion, according to U.S. and Ukrainian energy executives involved in negotiating them.

4. Wilbur Ross' Chinese Conflict of InterestLike Perry, Ross found himself at the center of controversy when he failed to separate from his business ties while serving as the U.S. Commerce Secretary. According to ForeignPolicy.com, documents appear to suggest that Ross' potential conflicts of interest surrounding Chinese business are much more evident than previously thought.

Here is a breakdown of the conflicts surrounding Perry, his business ties, and government affiliation.

In Chinese corporate documents obtained by Foreign Policy, Ross is listed as serving on the board of a Chinese joint venture until January 2019—nearly two years into his term as commerce secretary. That joint venture, now called Huaneng Invesco WLR (Beijing) Investment Fund Management Co., is an investment partnership formed in September 2008 between Huaneng Capital Services, the U.S. management company Invesco, and a firm Ross founded, WL Ross & Co. Huaneng Capital Services is an arm of China Huaneng Group, a major state-owned power producer.

As Election Day approaches, more incriminating reports are circulating and raising more questions about the integrity of the Trump administration.

320 deal w/ putin on syria? turkey fights syria idlib to block refugees?!

tom dispatch 3/20

...

Before zeroing in on Ukraine, however, let’s consider just a few of Giuliani’s other foreign ventures. Since leaving office as New York’s mayor, through Giuliani Partners, the Bracewell & Giuliani law partnership, and (after 2016) the giant law firm of Greenberg Traurig, along with Giuliani Security & Safety and Giuliani Capital Advisers, the former mayor has pulled in millions of dollars working on behalf of foreign clients, including highly controversial ones. Among those deals, contracts, and maneuvers, before and after Trump became president and hired his old friend Rudy to serve as his personal attorney in 2018, Giuliani has been involved in a far-flung series of deals: he’s been a paid lobbyist in Romania; had a cybersecurity contract inQatar; had deals in Colombia, Argentina, and El Salvador; worked shadow diplomacy (with a business angle) with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro; operated in Japan, Serbia, and Guatemala; and that only begins to tell the story.

Consider Turkey, starting in 2017. Back then, when Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was forced to resign after just a few weeks as national security advisor, it turned out that he had quietly (and without reporting it) been working on behalf of Turkey’s autocratic government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during the 2016 election campaign. Erdogan was disturbed by the presence of a dissident, Fethullah Gulen, in the United States. As an unregistered advocate for Turkey, Flynn lobbied in 2016 to have the United States expel Gulen and send him back to Turkey. Early the next year, Flynn was gone, but no fear, Rudy Giuliani promptly took up the same cause. He began urging President Trump to extradite Gulen to Turkey, where Erdogan was accusing him of having plotted an attempted coup d’état. (In the end, Gulen wasn’t expelled.)

Given Giuliani’s ability to mix policy with business, you won’t be surprised to learn that he was also enmeshed in more lucrative efforts in Turkey. At around the same time, he was lobbying Trump to endorse a prisoner swap involving one of his clients, an Iranian-born Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab whom the FBI had arrested in 2016 on charges of money laundering and trying to do an end run around economic sanctions on Iran. According to the New York Times,Zarrab had been working with Halkbank, a major Turkish bank with close ties to Turkish Finance Minister Berat Albayrak who is also President Erdogan’s son-in-law, to “funnel more than $10 billion in gold and cash to Iran.”

At first blush, it might seem odd for Giuliani to offer his services on behalf of an Iranian expat accused of trying to break U.S. sanctions whose family, it turned out, had close ties to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Curious, yes, but for Giuliani, business is business and there were bucks to be made. That he would use his connections to the Oval Office in an ultimately unsuccessful appeal for his client is even odder, given that Giuliani is otherwise a militant hardliner when it comes to demanding the overthrow of the Iranian government....

cozy up top dic, ~ trudeau macron

Trump held undisclosed meeting with Turkey’s dictator Erdoğan at NATO

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement December 4, 2019

Not the first time a foreign power has been the first to reveal Trump met with their top leaders.

turk secret police beat up ppl in am; army beats kurd womaN SOLdier who beat isis to death DN 11/4/19 video

overview 1019 AN

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-turkey-scored-the-trumps-green-light-to-occupy-a-massive-region-in-syria/

damn, i wanted to see what end times dominionist would say

Trump roasted for Turkey’s snub of Mike Pence: ‘Total humiliation of the USA’

Brad Reed / Raw StoryOctober 16, 2019

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an on Wednesday declared that he would not meet with American Vice President Mike Pence, who had traveled to the Turkish capital of Ankara to discuss a potential ceasefire in northern Syria.

Humanitarian catastrophe’: Civilians flee as Turkey launches military assault on Kurds in Syria

Jake Johnson / Common DreamsOctober 9, 2019

A spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) accused Turkish forces of deliberately targeting “civilian areas.”

Turkey has issued over 1,100 arrest warrants to people with suspected ties to exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom the government blames for a failed coup in 2016. Since 2016, at least 77,000 people have been arrested and around 130,000 fired from government and public sector jobs such as teaching, in a purge by the Turkish government.

Turkey Issues 1,100 Arrest Warrants in Opposition Crackdown

wh denies apology

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/recep-tayyip-erdogan-donald-trump-apologise-turkey-president-bodyguards-protesters-washington-dc-a7956751.html

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-turkey-erdogan-trump-protest-20170519-story.html

no link vid

...mark of these tumultuous political times that an act of outrageous viciousness this week by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bodyguards on peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C., has barely caused a public ripple.

The State Department communicated “our concern to the Turkish government in the strongest possible terms” and summoned the ambassador for a discussion, some members of Congress expressed outrage, but the White House has remained silent and three days later news coverage has faded.

It shouldn’t. Turkey needs to be pressed on this egregious behavior, in which Erdogan seems to be exporting the kind of ruthlessness he pursues at home.

The videos of the attack are disgusting. Two black-suited security men, one after the other, kick the face of a protester holding a bullhorn as he lay defenseless on the ground. They punch other protesters indiscriminately, chasing some around the park as police try vainly to separate them. Two women huddle on the ground, an overturned baby stroller nearby.

In all, 11 people were injured, including a police officer and two Secret Service agents, as police monitoring the protest were overwhelmed by the speed, ferociousness and scope of the attack.[7 hospitalized?]

Turkey needs to be pressed on this egregious behavior.

Washington police said they arrested two people who live in the D.C. area — presumably protesters or pro-Erdogan demonstrators — but Erdogan’s traveling security team enjoys diplomatic immunity, which means none will be held accountable for clearly criminal acts.

The Turkish news agency acknowledged that Erdogan’s security detail was involved, and the Turkish embassy blamed the protesters for “provoking” pro-Erdogan demonstrators. But the videos show an unprovoked attack led by what appears to be Erdogan’s security team and supported by the pro-Erdogan demonstrators.

The attack occurred outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence a little more than a mile from the White House, where Erdogan had hours before met with President Trump. The protesters were standing in Sheridan Circle Park across the street from the driveway to the residence when Erdogan’s motorcade pulled in.

In one of the most damning videos (see below), a man bends into the open back door of Erdogan’s car parked in the driveway outside the residence. Then the man stands and seems to say something to another man who nods then jogs off as others begin moving across the street and the attacks begin. After a few minutes, the black-suited security detail can be seen returning to the car, where Erdogan emerges and then enters the residence.

Turkish President Erdogan at the Turkish Embassy in Washington watching Tuesday’s violent clash

Video shows Turkish President Erdogan at the Turkish Embassy in Washington watching Tuesday’s violent clash. The protest was taking place across the street from the embassy.

It’s hard not to conclude that Erdogan personally gave the order for his men to attack the protesters. In a public park in Washington. Hours after meeting with President Trump.

This isn’t the first time Erdogan’s thugs have roughed up people during a visit to the U.S. In April 2016, a talk by Erdogan at the Brookings Institution in Washington was marked by clashes between protesters and with Erdogan’s bodyguards, who also roughed up reporters and tried to evict some from the event until Brookings threatened to cancel the talk.

So here’s an idea for the Trump administration. Deny Erdogan permission to enter the country again until it can exact an explicit promise that the Turkish thugs in black suits will do nothing more than protect their president. And that they will leave alone those who choose to exercise on American soil their 1st Amendment rights to speech and free assembly in telling Erdogan exactly what they think of him, and his increasingly dangerous and authoritarian regime.

But given how quick Trump was to congratulate Erdogan on his consolidation of power during a recent referendum, such a move is unlikely.

In fact, given Trump’s exhortations last year to campaign supporters to rough up protesters, and Trump’s urging then-FBI Director James B. Comey to jail journalists who publish leaked classified information, Trump probably viewed the goonish actions with a bit of jealousy.

http://www.alternet.org/giuliani-seeks-rescue-irans-money-man

nce upon a time, Rudy Giuiani was tough on Iran.

Last August, when the Obama administration returned $440 million from frozen Iranian bank accounts to Iran as part of the international deal to shutter Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Giuliani said, “I call that trading with the enemy."

Now Guiliani is defending in U.S. federal court a wealthy Turkish businessman who sought to flout U.S. and international sanctions on behalf of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Last month Giuliani joined the legal defense team of Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian dual national who is under indictment for, you guessed it, trading with the enemy.

Zarrab, who is being held in New York, has pleaded not guilty to four counts of conspiring to process hundreds of millions of dollars in financial transactions for Iranian businesses or Iran’s government from 2010 to 2015.

Iran's Money Man

According to the indictment, Zarrab's staff drafted a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in 2013, praising him for “neutralizing" U.S. sanctions. The letter expressed the hope that “the efforts and cooperation of the zealous children of Islamic Iran will result in an upward increase in the progress of our dear nation in all international and financial arenas.”

Zarrab and his network of companies sold gold to the Iranians and generated phony invoices for food and medicine. The transactions enabled the Iranians to evade international sanctions and move large amounts of money in and out of the country, ostensibly for its nuclear program, according to a Turkish prosecutor’s brief reviewed by Reuters.

Zarrab was first arrested in Turkey in December 2013 and charged with bribing cabinet ministers, triggering a national scandal. Zarrab’s commercial ventures reportedly generate over $11 billion annually.

Turkish president Recep Erdogan denounced the charges as a baseless conspiracy of his rivals. He fired the police and prosecutors who brought the case. Though charges against Zarrab and 13 other defendants were dropped, three ministers in Erdogan’s government had to resign. Erdogan and his family were personally implicated in Zarrab’s operation.

With a national referendum on Erdogan's powers coming up for a vote on April 16, the Zarrab affair remains a vulnerability for the incumbent strongman. Getting the charges against Zarrab dismissed before April 16 would fortify his regime.

Giuliani for the Defense

Zarrab thought he was untouchable until his arrest at Miami International Airport on March 19, 2016 as he took his pop star wife and daughter on vacation to Disneyland.

You might think Rudy Giuliani, the Iran hawk, would support U.S. law enforcement efforts to bring Zarrab to justice and expose the mechanism Iran used to evade sanctions on its nuclear program....

In Turkey, Erdogan’s harsh repression of ethnic and political enemies has essentially sunk his bid for entry into the European Union, plunged him into an unwinnable war with Kurdish rebels, and complicated his alliance with the United States against Islamic fundamentalism -- all potential barriers to his successful bid for unchecked power.

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