BLT ukraine 3
==
see earlier, origin is crowdstrike
see parnas derkach, rudy, ron j
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NO LNX
Only one thing is going to stand in Trump's way — and he knows it
Thom Hartmann April 28, 2025
It didn’t happen in some shadowy back alley or under the cover of night.
It happened in broad daylight — in the heart of an American courthouse.
Federal agents, acting without even the decency of a signed warrant, stormed into Judge Hannah Dugan’s courtroom on Friday morning and dragged her away like a common criminal. No warning. No legal process. No respect for the law she had spent a lifetime upholding.
But they made sure the cameras were there, so America could see what they were doing. Because this was not about justice. This was about terror.
This was a warning shot aimed directly at the beating heart of America’s judiciary:
“Fall in line — or you’re next.”
In that moment, the world’s oldest democracy lurched closer to the edge of authoritarian rule. In that moment, America became a little less free — and a lot more like the nightmare Vladimir Putin always hoped we’d become.
The FBI arrested Judge Hannah Dugan last Friday without even having a legal arrest warrant; this is as outrageous and police-state illegal as an administration can get.
And Pam Bondi’s performance Friday — after her federal agents swarm-raided this county judge — wasn’t staged for the general public.
The real audience was a very small, select group: America’s judges.
Their message is very simple: “P--- us off, judges, and you could end up in prison, too.”
Trump has already pacified the Article I branch of government — Congress — and now he’s in the process of pacifying the Article III branch, the Judiciary.
There are only 3 branches to our government: cowing both Congress and the nation’s Judiciary will leave only the president in charge of the entire country under all circumstances in all ways.
Nothing and nobody else will be able to stop him, short of a military coup (and he’s already decapitated the senior leadership of the military) or unending demonstrations in the streets (demonstrators who may soon face live ammunition).
That is called dictatorship. Real dictatorship. Vladimir Putin-style dictatorship where you are punished for the smallest deviation from orthodoxy and can find yourself in prison or sued into bankruptcy if you dare speak out in public.
It appears more and more every day that Putin is Trump’s mentor, if not his handler. Trump is doing everything he can, with help from a South African billionaire, to destroy the historic American infrastructure (which has been an example for the world for 250 years) and turn us into the newest member of the dictators club, joining Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Hungary, North Korea, and the rest of the fascist and authoritarian world.
To get there, now that they’ve pacified every single Republican member of Congress (most recently, Don Bacon criticized Trump’s schizophrenic tariffs; a day later he started talking about retiring), they only have to seize control of the Judiciary, and then nothing except We The People will stand in their way.
Nothing. Will. Stand. In. Trump’s. Way. Except We The People. And he knows it.
Look at the striking parallels between Putin’s strategies and Trump’s actions:
From installing Trump’s loyalists in the military and the federal police agencies of the Department of Justice and FBI, to his open threats against freedom of the press, to the GOP’s efforts to rig elections and purge voters, Trump’s subversion of US democracy looks eerily familiar.
He’s taking pages directly from the autocrat’s handbook.
Trump has openly quoted and praised autocrats like Putin and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who has presented his leadership in speeches to the GOP and CPAC as a model of an “illiberal” state.
Trump’s not hiding his admiration for dictators; he’s flaunting it. And now he’s putting the final stages of their script into action.
Trump’s movement toward authoritarianism follows “a known playbook. It’s unfolded in many other countries,” as journalist Anne Applebaum notes. “These are democratically elected leaders who characterize themselves or describe themselves as deserving of no opposition. So I am the true Hungarian, or I am the only real American.”
In a mere matter of weeks into his presidency, Applebaum says, Trump and his allies “have managed to push America into that space somewhere between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy.”
The speed is shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. It only took Hitler 53 days to completely end democracy in Germany. Others, like Lukashenko, Orbán, Putin, Mussolini, Duterte, El-Sisi, and Erdoğan took longer (none longer than two years), but you could argue that Trump has been working at this project for 9 years now.
Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, who studies how democracies slip into authoritarianism, warns that we’re heading toward what experts call “competitive authoritarianism”: regimes that “constitutionally continue to be democracies” with regular elections and legal opposition, but where “systematic abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.”
Make no mistake about what’s happening: Trump and his allies are methodically working through a four-step process to establish complete autocratic control, which will turn America into a one-man dictatorship.
- Terrorize Congress: Trump’s already largely succeeded here. Republican lawmakers now march in lockstep with his agenda, afraid to oppose him even when their consciences scream otherwise. The V-Dem Institute already warns that Trump’s actions are “extremely worrying” for American democracy.
- Terrorize the Media: Trump has, as The Washington Post writes, “relentlessly attacked the free press, another pillar that allows democracies to stand above authoritarian regimes,” as political scientists have noted. “He has echoed the worst dictators in history, calling journalists the ‘enemy of the people.’” With help from Elon Musk and other billionaires, he’s creating a media and social media environment where truth itself is under assault. And last week his administration threatened to arrest journalists and charge them with treason, an offense for which they could be executed.
- Terrorize Judges and Lawyers: What we witnessed Friday with the raid on a county judge and the arrest of a retired judge earlier in the week is just the beginning. The final step in this process will be intimidating the Supreme Court, and if Trump’s minions can first terrorize the entire federal judiciary, it will be much easier to terrorize members of the Court itself, just like Putin and Orbán have done. This follows dangerous cracks in democracy’s pillars that experts have been warning about.
- Terrorize Citizens: Once the above institutions are captured and there’s no more Constitutional opposition to Trump, the final phase begins: crushing individual dissent through fear, persecution, and potentially violence. This is the playbook Malcolm Nance detailed in his work analyzing Putin’s strategies to undermine American democracy and has already started against immigrants and student visa holders. If history tells us anything, American citizens will be next.
Most of this is already in place; time is running out fast.
Trump and his fellow fascists know their time is running out because elections are coming in a handful of months and their popularity is already crashing. They are at maximum power right now, and it is already beginning to decline.
This is another reason why they are pushing so hard to frighten judges, so they can implement the final destruction of any Constitutionally-based opposition to Trump’s one-man rule.
If Trump can consolidate authoritarian rule as quickly as some other historical dictators did, the complete (albeit hopefully temporary) end of American democracy could happen very rapidly, possibly even in the next few weeks or months. The window for action is closing fast.
But there’s still hope, because we’re still We The People. As long as our protest movement continues to grow and demand a stop to the damage Trump and Musk are doing to our democratic republic, we may be able to slow or even stop this anti-American cabal and reclaim our republic.
Our protesting in the streets and reaching out to legislators may encourage resistance within the media and courts, and might even inspire a handful of Republicans to stand against this wannabe dictator.
When democratic institutions fail, the last line of defense has always been citizens willing to take to the streets. Ukraine provides the most powerful recent example of how a determined populace can rescue democracy from Russian-inspired authoritarianism.
During Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests in 2014, over half a million people joined demonstrations in Kyiv to defend democracy against creeping authoritarianism. Those protests ultimately ended Viktor Yanukovych’s Russia-backed puppet regime (and kicked out its Russian-funded American advisor, Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager) and became known as the Revolution of Dignity.
Ukrainians stood firm in the streets despite violence and intimidation, and their courage changed history.
Ukraine’s later Orange Revolution similarly empowered ordinary citizens to engage in mass protests, with some lasting continously more than two weeks. This peaceful revolution successfully defended Ukraine’s democratic aspirations against Russian influence and showed the world that people power can overcome autocratic manipulation.
Putin fears democracy, particularly at his doorstep like in Ukraine and the Baltic states. He knows that democracy is contagious, and any spread near Russia, he believes, poses an existential threat to his autocratic rule. That’s why he invaded Ukraine, and that’s why he spent millions on social media trolls to support Trump’s election and his assault on our democratic institutions.
As Ukrainian historian Hanna Perekhoda warns, “If we let Russian authoritarians win, it will mean that the authoritarian forces also in our countries, in the U.S., for example, will grow stronger.”
If this assault on the Courts (and the implied intimidation of all judges including those on the Supreme Court) succeeds, and the media continues to bow down, the only thing left will be us in the streets.
The time for half-measures, “very strong letters,” and polite political disagreement has passed. We are watching in real-time as our 250-year experiment in democracy is being dismantled by a would-be dictator taking his cues from — or, at least, modeling his presidency on — Vladimir Putin.
This is not hyperbole. This is not partisan exaggeration. This is the stark reality facing our nation today. Fascism and dictatorship are at our doorstep.
Just last week, it was reported that Trump has now deported three American citizens, including a child taking cancer therapy.
Not content to just pull student visas and ask them to leave the country, Trump’s goons have been imprisoning students for writing OpEd articles for weeks. And now they’re show-arresting judges.
The arrest of Judge Dugan is not an isolated incident; it’s part a broader strategy to intimidate the judiciary and consolidate power.
When judges are arrested for upholding the principles of due process, the very foundation of democracy is at risk. This moment demands vigilance and action from all who value the rule of law.
The preservation of our democratic institutions depends on our collective response to such unprecedented challenges.
Buckle up, America. Democracy itself is on the line, and if the courts fall, we’ll be its last defenders.
NOW READ: Behind the 60-year Republican plot to destroy American democracy
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empty wheel timeline: https://www.emptywheel.net/portfolio-item/ukrainian-grifters-timeline/
February 5-10, 2018: Manafort working on “a new Peace initiative”
February 19, 2018: Manafort email pertaining to “peace” plan
February 21, 2018: Manfort emails document pertaining to “peace” plan to undisclosed recipients
February 23, 2018: Mueller reveals Rick Gates’ plea deal
February 24-28, 2018: Kilimnik and Manafort attempt to script testimony of Hapsburg Group flacks
March 2, 2018: Pentagon issues final approval to send Javelin missiles to Ukraine
March 3, 2018: Fruman participates in high donor meeting at Mar-a-Lago
March 9, 2018: Manafort working on polling regarding Ukraine “peace” plan for potential client
March 26, 2018: Manafort working on Ukraine “peace” plan
April 4, 2018: Kilimnik again attempts to witness tamper with Hapsburg Group flacks
Early April, 2018: Reported halt to Ukraine’s cooperation with Mueller
April 11, 2018: Parnas and Fruman form Global Energy Producers
April 19, 2018: Trump “hires” “free” defense attorney Rudy Giuliani
April 29, 2018: Someone first solicits help creating a website for GEP
May 8, 2018: Parnas and Fruman meet with Trump and six other people “about preparations for victory in the midterm elections;”
Fruman raises “America’s support for Israel and Ukraine,” topics about which “Trump … was absolutely positive”
May 2, 2018: NYT reports that Ukraine has stopped cooperating with Mueller probe
May 4, 2018: Manafort sends unnamed person information on Ukraine plan
May 15, 2018: Real estate lawyer Russell Jacobs deposits $1.26 million pass through funds into Aaron Investments LLC
May 15, 2018: Manafort document lists “Targets” and reflects commitment on his part to reach out to the Administration about them.
May 17, 2018: Parnas LLC Aaron Investments donates $325,000 to Trump PAC, America First Action in the name of GEP
May 21, 2018: Parnas has breakfast with Don Jr and Tommy Hicks Jr, head of America First
May 24, 2018: Someone again solicits help creating a website for GEP
June 8, 2018: Manafort charged with witness tampering; prosecutors more to revoke bail
June 21, 2018: GEP donates $50K to Ron DeSantis
September 14, 2018: Manafort enters into what would be a failed plea agreement, admitting he laundered money and influence on behalf of Ukrainian oligarchs, but entering into a five week process of learning what prosecutors know
Mid-to-late 2018: Rudy referred to Parnas and Fruman for work with “Fraud Guarantee”
Around November 2018: Rudy starts working for Parnas and Fruman
Late 2018: While Parnas and Rudy were eating together, “someone” approached Rudy and gave him information about Ukraine
February 14, 2019: Barr sworn in.
February, undated, 2019: Barr and Public Integrity lawyers reporting to Brian Benczkowski briefed on investigation into Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, though NYT reported lawyer questioned about Rudy in that time period.
March 5, 2019: Barr briefed on Mueller investigation.
March 22, 2019: Mueller investigation concludes.
March 24, 2019: Barr releases misleading “summary” of Mueller Report.
March 26, 2019: John Solomon posts column first reviewed by Joe DiGenova, Victoria Toensing, and Lev Parnas.
April 19, 2019: DOJ releases redacted Mueller Report.
May, undated, 2019: State IG Steve Linick receives Rudy dossier, passes on to FBI.
May 31, 2019: Barr does interview explaining his Durham investigation without once explaining any irregularities to justify investigation.
June 20, 2019: Campaign Legal Center submits supplemental complaint to FEC.
July 18, 2019: OMB informs Departments that Trump has ordered suspension of all aide to Ukraine.
July 25, 2019: Trump-Zelensky phone call.
Week after call, 2019: Whistleblower informs CIA General counsel Courtney Simmons Elwood, who speaks several times to NSC lawyer John Eisenberg.
August 12, 2019: Date of whistleblower complaint.
August 14, 2019: Elwood and Eisenberg inform National Security Division head, John Demers.
August 15, 2019: Demers reads transcript of call. Senior DOJ officials, including Jeffrey Rosen, Brian Benczkowski, and Barr informed.
“The deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and Brian A. Benczkowski, the head of the department’s criminal division, were soon looped in, according to two administration officials.
Department officials began to discuss the accusations and whether and how to follow up, and Attorney General William P. Barr learned of the allegations around that time, according to a person familiar with the matter. Although Mr. Barr was briefed, he did not oversee the discussions about how to proceed, the person said.”
August 26, 2019: IG Michael Atkinson hand delivers message on whistleblower complaint to Acting DNI Joseph Maguire.
September 3, 2019: Original classified OLC memo deeming the whistleblower complaint “not urgent,” treating Barr’s involvement as Top Secret.
September 20, 2019: Rudy, Parnas, Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova lunch at Trump International across the street from DOJ. Rudy also attends State Dinner for Australia.
September 24, 2019: Declassification of Telcon. Version of OLC memo hiding Barr’s involvement as classified issue.
September 26, 2019: Release of TelCon and whistleblower complaint. Justice Department explains non-prosecution:
“In August, the Department of Justice was referred a matter relating to a letter the director national intelligence had received from the inspector general for the intelligence community regarding a purported whistleblower complaint. The inspector general’s letter cited a conversation between the president and Ukrainian President Zelensky as a potential violation of federal campaign finance law, while acknowledging that neither the inspector general nor the complainant had firsthand knowledge of the conversation,” Kupec said.
Relying on established procedures set forth in the justice manual, the department’s criminal division reviewed the official record of the call and determined based on the facts and applicable law that there was no campaign finance violence and that no further action was warranted. All relevant components of the department agreed with this legal conclusion, and the department has concluded this matter,” Kupec concluded.
In another statement, Kupec said that Barr had not spoken with Mr. Trump about Ukraine investigating Biden, and that the president had not asked Barr to contact Ukraine or Giuliani.”
September 29, 2019: AP claims Barr was “surprised and angry” when he learned he had been lumped in with Rudy. His further denials include a lot of wiggle room (including unofficial contacts).
“Barr has not spoken with Trump about investigating Biden or Biden’s son Hunter, and Trump has not asked Barr to contact Ukranian officials about the matter, the department said. Barr has also not spoken with Giuliani about anything related to Ukraine, officials have said.”
October 1, 2019: State IG Steve Linick briefs Congress on opposition packet routed to him from Pompeo. Preservation letters to Parnas and Fruman.
October 4, 2019: Initial rough date for Rudy meeting with Benczkowski.
October 9, 2019: Parnas and Fruman lunch with Rudy at Trump Hotel across from DOJ, later that eventing they are indicted and arrested.
October 10, 2019: Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman arrest unsealed. Anonymous DOJ sources report that Barr was briefed in February and “in recent weeks.”
“Attorney General William Barr was briefed on the case in February, shortly after he was confirmed. Barr has received additional briefings in recent weeks and fully supports the case.”
October 11, 2019: NYT reports that Rudy under investigation for Ukraine work.
October 18, 2019: NYT reports that Rudy was lobbying Brian Benczkowski and lawyers from Fraud section in “a few weeks ago” about a very sensitive bribery case.
October 20, 2019: NYT story with on-the-record quote from Peter Carr states Benczkowski and fraud section lawyers would not have met with Giuliani if they had known of the investigation of his associates; it describes the meeting as taking place “several weeks ago.”
October 21, 2019: CNN adds DOJ clarification that Rudy was not central to investigation briefed to Barr in February, even though CI Agents were questioning witnesses by March, and that Public Integrity lawyers (who report to Benczkowski) were briefed.
Tags: Igor Fruman, Konstantin Kilimnik, Lev Parnas, Paul Manafort, Rudy Giuliani
kos http://redgreenandblue.org/2022/02/25/fossil-fuel-apologists-blame-everyone-putin-course/
russia invaded Ukraine yesterday, because “President Biden supports transgender rights, _{canceled}_ the Keystone XL pipeline, and like all world leaders, was bent to the incredible power of international energy and climate overlord Greta Thunberg.” That’s the view from denierland, and we honestly wish we were joking or exaggerating or otherwise misrepresenting the online reactions from climate and general rightwing “experts”
By Climate Denier Roundup
So here’s the roundup of reactions from crazytown:
No quicker than you can say “moment of uncertainty ripe for disinformation,” Tucker Carlson (who’s_{**been defending Putin**}_) _{had :{Marc Morano on his show to:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:}_ –what else – blame Biden _{and climate concern}_ for the Russian invasion.
Matt Walsh, a comedian of sorts who works at Ben Shaprio’s fracker-funded propaganda shop [DAILY WIRE] and has written a whole “children’s book” attacking trans people, _{tweeted that he was}_ “so glad that the west (sic) gave up on energy independence because Greta Thunberg yelled at us.” This is of course exactly backwards. If Greta’s calls for replacing fossil fuels with renewables were heeded, then countries would already be providing clean energy for themselves without needing to rely on Russia’s fossil fuels.
And despite what you may expect, Walsh was _{hardly}_ the _{only one}_ attributing Putin’s aggression to Greta Thunberg, _{as though that makes any sense at all}_.
Similarly nonsensical is tobacco-shill turned fossil fool Steve Milloy, who _{claimed Putin’s invasion is just like COVID and climate mandates}_, also quote-tweeted a story about Ukrainian people in traffic leaving Kyiv, with the comment “_{imagine you were in this and driving an EV}_”. As though it would be better to be beholden on the fossil fuels imported from Russia while Russia invades your country, than it would be to merely be reliant on the electricity generated by power plants running on Russian fuels.
While we’re imagining though, imagine having an electric car and clean energy grid to power it, so you’re not reliant on Russian fossil fuels for your car or electricity!
Similarly wrong yet Right wasDan Crenshaw, Texan Republican who has _{received $689,000 from the oil and gas industry}_ for his campaigns for one of the _{most obviously gerrymandered}_ districts in the country. He _{suggested}_ that the Keystone XL pipeline could have replaced the fossil fuels we import from Russia, as though that pipeline was for US consumption (and not the global market it’s already reaching anyway). “Relying on Russian oil is a choice.” he added, “And it’s a stupid one.”
And he’s right! It’d be infinitely smarter to not rely on oil at all!
(But we somehow doubt that’s what he meant.)
(Originally appeared at DailyKos)
https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/the-disturbing-tale-of-how-one-texas-democrat-devolved-into-a-far-right-putin-propagandist/
ME
Russell "Texas" Bentley was once a drug-dealing leftist but now he's devolved into a far-right extremist in support of Russian President Vladamir Putin.
The Putin advocate garnered attention from the far-right this week with his viral YouTube video explaining his position. Although the controversial video was removed from YouTube, it is still circulating on Twitter. Now, he's conducted an interview with Rolling Stone to further discuss how he made the transition.
According to Bentley's remarks, his goal aligns with that of Putin. He claims he desires to "bring 'Ukraine back into the Slavic family where it belongs and has been for 1,000 years.' As for the 'bad people' he hopes to see the hammer dropped on? They seem to include not only the rulers of Ukraine but the leaders of his former American homeland."
He added,"On VK — the Russian alternative to Facebook — Bentley posted that he was 'heading west with the Liberators of Ukraine. We may stop in Kiev, we may stop on the English Channel. We may liberate the USA.'"
[twt]
on Tuesday, March 1, Rolling Stone conducted a phone interview with Bentley.The propagandist, who described himself as an “auto-didact" and an "information warrior" for Russia, claims his distrust of the U.S. government has gradually swelled over the years.
His belief in conspiracies has also increased significantly. Like many other right-wing conspiracy theorists, Bentley has distorted beliefs about 9/11. He claims his U.S. military expertise have helped him to determine that 9/11 was "an inside job."
He said, "You can say what you want about building one and two, but building seven? Anyone that doesn’t understand that that was a pre-planned, pre-placed controlled demolition is either an idiot or a liar.”
Over the years, Bentley's disdain for the United States government waned while his fascination with Russia grew. When the Maidan Revolution began in Ukraine in 2014, Bentley became more determined to stand for Russia. He believes the overturn of the Russian-supported government in Kyiv was nothing more than "the work of the State Department and the CIA and Soros."
The Russian enthusiast reportedly packed up, broke up with his girlfriend and made his way to the frontlines Donbas. He recalled what life was like when he first arrived. “When I came here, I didn’t think I would live through the winter, bro,” says Bentley. “I didn’t hardly speak Russian. It was a major war with a full-on National Army against the people’s militia. And I was on the little guys’ side,” he said, as he claimed to believe he was "defending good people against abjectly evil people.”
As for the Russian assault on Ukraine, Bentley is adamant about his support of Putin although it will only lead to more innocent bloodshed. He concluded with an eerie prayer as the Russian invasion continues. “May God protect the innocent,” he said. “And may the rest of us get everything that we deserve.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/village-idiot-trump-would-have-let-putin-take-ukraine-no-questions-asked-journalist/
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/robert-reich-sobering-realities-ukraine/
MURDOCH? INTERESTING IT'S A FOSSIL FOOL DOING POLITICAL/MILITARY ATTACK?
i think i've seen this BS crit elsewhere
https://nypost.com/2022/02/25/john-kerry-just-reminded-us-of-how-unserious-a-statesman-he-really-is/
OPINION
John Kerry just reminded us of how unserious a statesman he really is
By Daniel Turner
February 25, 2022 8:58pm Updated
John Kerry, US special envoy for climate, speaks at the 58th Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany.
John Kerry's main concern about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is, you guessed it, the climate.
[MORE ON:
JOHN KERRY
John Kerry’s deadly Ukraine hot air
Nancy Pelosi spent almost $500K on private jets despite climate preaching
The comic cries of climate apocalypse — 50 years of spurious scaremongering
‘Not my lane’: John Kerry sidesteps China’s human rights violations]
To state the obvious, John Kerry is an unserious person. That’s not a reference to his wind-surfing or flip-flops or other classic campaign faux pas from days gone by.
With Ukraine suffering death and destruction at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s military, Kerry shared his true concern about the conflict: climate.
“A war is the last thing you need with respect to a united effort to try to deal with the climate challenge,” Kerry told a Reuters reporter. He then decried the “emissions” consequences of Russia’s invasion, adding, “You’re going to lose people’s focus . . . certainly big country attention, because they will be diverted” from the climate agenda.
Kerry’s remarks are aloof, callous, clueless — but, most of all, unserious.
In fact, hisclimate agenda is partly to blame for the current geopolitical mess. The Biden administration, from its first day in office, unleashed an attack on our once-robust energy industry. In pursuit of the Green New Deal, the socialist utopia that would ban the combustion engine, regulate diets and employ solar panels and wind turbines alone to power the nation, President Joe Biden & Co. sought to get rid of fossil fuels.
Russian President Vladimir Putin enters a hall to chair a Security Council meeting in Moscow, Russia.]
Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool/AP]
But by throttling the industry, they cut the global supply and prices rose accordingly. That hurt Americans, while making Vladimir Putin rich.
And a Vladimir Putin with surplus cash is a dangerous thing.
America’s shortsighted climate-change efforts are destabilizing world peace. This was not Biden or Kerry’s intention, but it is the consequence — and the more dangerous the world becomes, the more unserious “climate change” hysteria is.
[Get the latest updates in the Russia-Ukraine conflict with the Post’s live coverage.
Telling Putin not to invade Ukraine because of emissions is akin to lecturing those fleeing Kyiv to mask up and social distance. It’s a luxury they don’t have.
That is the climate agenda: the luxury of privileged elites. Families who can’t afford their heating bill or grocery bill thanks to energy-price-caused inflation don’t have the luxury of fretting about climate change. The 7,000 US soldiers headed to Germany right now don’t have the luxury of handwringing about their climate footprint.
John Kerry does, and he loves luxury, too.
Asked about the green contradiction of traveling on his private jet to win an environmental award in 2019, the unserious statesman claimed it was “the only choice for someone like me.” Reporters have tracked numerous such Air Kerry flights. Emissions? What emissions?
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry speaks during a press conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, at the foreign ministry headquarters in Cairo, Egypt.
With Ukraine suffering death and descrution at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s military, Kerry shared his true concern about the conflict: climate.
Kerry made his latest cringeworthy comments in Egypt as preparations begin for COP27, the international climate-change conference coming this fall to the Red Sea resort town of Sharm-el-Sheikh. If you’re going to fuss about the climate, you might as well do it in comfort. Last year’s conference in Glasgow, Scotland, boasted 40,000 people in attendance, along with 670 private jets: Kerry isn’t the only green hypocrite.
We didn’t elect John Kerry, so as climate czarin the White House, he’s unaccountable to Congress and therefore the American people who pay his salary. No one gets to look at his budgets. No one has oversight over his meetings, but there he goes on his private jet committing the United States to emissions reductions and punitive measures on fossil fuels.
[SEE ALSO
Biden slams Ukraine invasion as he reveals new sanctions that leave Putin untouched]
Meanwhile, the real threats are Russia, China, Iran and North Korea continuing to build weapons, steal technology, launch cyberattacks, engage in terrorism and now start a full-scale war, the likes of which Europe hasn’t seen in 75 years.
Take the threat of climate change seriously when John Kerry forgoes the private jets and luxury mega-conferences. Worry about rising sea levels when John Kerry sells his oceanfront mansion.
Until then, we need to stop the attack on America’s energy industry, attacks that have strengthened our enemies and weakened our own nation. Until we reverse Biden’s reckless and dangerous energy policies, we don’t have the luxury of worrying about tomorrow when we can’t afford life today.
Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit that advocates for American energy jobs.
Twitter: @DanielTurnerPTF
an 2 22
Fox News' Tucker Carlson is still defending his support of Russian President Vladamir Putin while dismissing the importance of Ukraine.However, key Republican voters appear to have a different opinion on the critical topic.
On Monday, February 21, the conservative political commentator fired back at Democratic critics during his segment of "Tucker Carlson Tonight." In response to the disapproval of his desire to speak with Putin, he said:
“We won’t be quiet, and not just because this is a news organization,” Carlson said on Monday evening. “Because we’re Americans, and we can talk to anyone we want. We can have any opinion we feel like having. That is not treason, it is not un-American. It’s the whole point of America."
Despite Carlson's claims, Politico is shedding light on a key group of Republican voters who strongly disagree with Carlson. Per Politico, Andrew Futey, who serves as the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America president and an active voice in Republican politics, explained the perspective of Ohio Ukrainians.
"Ohio’s Ukrainians are well-organized and politically active — a Midwestern constituency with a strong working-class element that actually votes in part on foreign policy, and punches above well above its size in their state’s politics, according to many Ukrainian Americans I recently spoke to in Ohio. There aren’t specific polls on Ukrainian voting patterns in the state, but traditionally these voters made up a “Reagan Republican-like community,” says Andrew Futey, president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, a nonpartisan national nonprofit that advocates for Ukrainian-American interests."
Futey also noted that “isolationismabsolutely, absolutely is not something the community grasps or will ever support."
Andy Fedynsky — the director of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland Ohio — also argues otherwise. Speaking to Politico, he refuted Carlson's arguments explaining why Ukraine is far more important than the conservative commentator realizes.
“Most of the history of Ukraine is never a history of taking someone else’s land, but rather defending its own,” said Bohdan Danylo, the bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, St. Josaphat Cathedral.
“If we, as a birthplace of democracy — and this democracy that is still standing, United States of America … if we think that today those principles are not defended by peace-loving and freedom-loving Ukrainians, we are mistaken,” Danylo also said.
Lubomir Zhybak, a Ukrainian pastor in Youngstown,Ohio had also sounded off about Carlson's rhetoric. In a letter he reportedly sent via Fox News' "Viewer Feedback" platform, he wrote, "The reason why I am writing to you is to express my disdain at your seemingly biased anti-Ukrainian statements that you recently made on your shows regarding the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia. I think your comments not only offend us, Ukrainians, but also the millions of Ukrainian people who have been murdered by the Soviets and Russians throughout the course of history."
As a critical battleground state for the Republican Party, candidates have to consider how the Ukrainian controversy could impact the midterm elections for the party. Although Carlson is a dominant voice among conservatives, he could be doing more harm than good with his relentless dismissal of Ukraine.
1 22 an
no lnx
Echoing ‘Vladimir Putin’s talking points’ is putting Fox News at odds with ‘pro-Ukraine’ Republicans: conservative
Fox News' Tucker Carlson speaking at the 2020 Student Action Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida,
Alex Henderson January 28, 2022
During the George W. Bush years, the right-wing media, including Fox News, were quick to parrot neoconservative talking points. But Fox News has since taken a much more Trumpian turn, and its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, often promotes MAGA isolationism and a hypernationalist “America first” ideology. That isolationism, Never Trump conservative David Frum stresses in an article published by The Atlantic on January 28, is putting Fox News pundits at odds with more hawkish conservatives when it comes to Russia and Ukraine.
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“Night after night,” Frum explains, “the host of the top-rated show on Fox News repeats Vladimir Putin’s talking points justifying aggression against Ukraine and opposing U.S. aid to that threatened sovereign country. Tucker Carlson’s influence is felt across right-wing social media, where it is amplified by figures such as Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Glenn Greenwald and Mollie Hemingway. A highly visible coterie of socially conservative intellectuals also argues the case against helping Ukraine.”
Frum continues, “Meanwhile, day after day, Republican officeholders in the House and the Senate urge more support for Ukraine. That list includes not only traditionalists such as Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, but also, many legislators who got close to former President Donald Trump, such as Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.”
President Joe Biden has had a much more hawkish tone with Russia and President Vladimir Putin than Trump, and Frum notes that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has “backed the Biden Administration’s approach, as have the top Republicans on the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committees.”
“Broadly, Republican elected officials and the think tanks that advise them are staunchly pro-Ukraine; conservative talkers, especially on TV and social media, are varying degrees of anti-Ukraine,” Frum observes. “Russia-Ukraine is becoming a trial of strength, not only between Putin and NATO, but between different parts of the conservative world…. As powerful as Fox News messaging is, scenes of violence after Russian aggression sends Ukrainian refugees streaming westward to safety would be powerful too.”
Frum adds, “Americans are never eager to get involved in other people’s fights, but they remain deeply committed to a vision of their country as a force for good in the world.” many twt
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The nation's attention is riveted on the drama unfolding in Washington, where House investigators are assembling evidence for their impeachment inquiry, and President Trump is refusing to cooperate. Our guest, Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green, says that, ironically, Trump's impeachment peril is the unintended result of an effort to help him.
Last spring, a book came out called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." Its author was Peter Schweizer, the head of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank founded by Schweizer and Steve Bannon. The book includes information about Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden and his activities in Ukraine when his father was the vice president.
The book raises questions about possible ethical violations and corruption related to Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine. The book received a lot of attention on Fox News, where it came to the attention of President Trump and led Trump to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to pressure the new government there to investigate the claims in Schweizer's book.
Joshua Green notes in a new article how this echoes the playbook that Schweizer and Bannon successfully used with their 2015 book "Clinton Cash," which raised questions about the propriety of Hillary Clinton's financial dealings and those of the Clinton Foundation. It led to investigations by the mainstream media. Joshua Green writes about politics for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain." He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.
DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Joshua Green, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You write that the allegations of corruption involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine were first aired in a book published last year by something called the Government Accountability Institute. What is the Government Accountability Institute?
JOSHUA GREEN: Well, theGovernment Accountability Institute is registered as a nonpartisan research organization. It was founded in 2012 by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief strategist, and Peter Schweizer, who, I believe, is now the president and still works there. And it bills itself as an investigatory outfit that investigates money and politics, corruption and that sort of thing.
DAVIES: Right. Who funds it?
GREEN: Well, we don't know all the funders, but one of its chief funders is Rebekah Mercer, who is part of the Mercer family, headed by Robert Mercer, the former co-chair of Renaissance Technologies, the big hedge fund. The Mercer family was and still is a major right-wing donor to various different causes, big Trump supporters, and a family that has come into the spotlight since Trump's election - also involved in Cambridge Analytica and some of the outfits that became famous and even notorious after the 2016 election.
DAVIES: The funding certainly comes from partisan sources. You know, the co-founder was Steve Bannon. What's interesting, as you write, is that the work - the research that it produced and the books that it produced weren't intended particularly to reach the conservative media or core Republican voters. What was the purpose?
GREEN: Well, the purpose of GAI originally was to, you know, investigate politicians. But given the conservative band of people like Bannon and Schweizer and their funders, the focus often tended to be Democrats. And in my book, I write about howSchweizer and Bannon resolved to go after Hillary Clinton a couple of years before the 2016 election, knowing that she was likely to emerge as the Democratic nominee.
So through GAI and its investigators, its forensic data scientists, you know, they pored over public records, corporate filings, dark Web scrapings to compile, you know, a damning book about Bill and Hillary Clinton in their work through their nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation, that was published about a month before Hillary launched her presidential campaign. And that book, "Clinton Cash," became an instant New York Times [PARTNERSHIP?!] bestseller and really tarnished Hillary Clinton's image just as she was entering the presidential fray.
DAVIES: And the interesting thing is that, you know, Bannon was not interested in just generating material for the conservative media. It was important that mainstream media draw on this research and, you know, give it their imprimatur tour too.
GREEN: That's exactly right. You know, Bannon's critique of how Republicans deal with the media goes back to the 1990s and Bill Clinton's impeachment, when he thought that Republicans really just wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber and they chased wild rumors and conspiracy theories and really put off ordinary voters. The media didn't listen to them. Voters didn't listen to them. OPPO RESEARCH
So with "Clinton Cash," he resolved to compile factual information that he wanted the mainstream media to pick up and amplify. And so he explicitly was not looking to reach a conservative audience, which is already going to be predisposed to dislike the Clintons, and was aiming to affect the votes in the views of independents and Democrats and the type of people that Hillary Clinton was counting on.It was important to Bannon that GAI's work be picked up and taken seriously by mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News.
DAVIES: And did those mainstream media organizations publish stories based on the research?
GREEN: Yeah, they did. I mean, famously, there was a New York Times story based on Schweizer's reporting. And it revealed this in the story, looking at a Clinton Foundation deal in a Russian-backed company called Uranium One that really took off and, I think, poisoned the public views of Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. And, as Bannon intended, a whiff of corruption attached itself to Hillary Clinton. Of course, that expanded as the media focused on her missing emails and Republicans pushed these ideas. But the book really succeeded in what Bannon had set out to do. And that was to raise doubts about the ethics and morals and fitness for the presidency of Hillary Clinton.
DAVIES: Right. And we should just note that there is nothing at all unusual about credible reporters getting tips and leads and information from partisan sources. They have to, of course, independently verify the information and assess its credibility. Were the books that the Government Accountability Institute writes generally accurate?
GREEN: Well, they were based on facts. And what these investigators did was go out and turn out examples of foreign donors that hadn't been disclosed and examples of behavior by former President Bill Clinton that seemed to be conducted on behalf of donors to the Clinton Foundation.You know, Schweizer's style is not to fabricate or allege illegality. Instead, he uses his reporting to lay out a suggestive timeline that leads readers to a conclusion that, hey, something is dirty here. This reeks of influence peddling. Something is not right. And it raises doubts about the subjects.
DAVIES: So the new book from Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute is called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." And it identified Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden as a target for some of the material. What did it find about Joe and Hunter Biden?
GREEN: Well, what it found was that Hunter Biden, the vice president's son, had become a highly paid director at a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma, a position that he didn't have any obvious qualifications for. But he did have a very famous last name, and the owner of the company was interested, I think, in building credibility. Schweizer also took a look at a private equity fund that Hunter Biden became involved in that drew a lot of money from Chinese investors at the same time that Hunter was flying to China on Air Force Two with his father, the vice president.
So in Schweizer's reporting, you know, this is made to look very fishy and possibly illegal and raise doubts about the ethics of Joe Biden and whether or not, you know, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination really belongs in that position or, you know, is in some way corrupt because of his son's business dealings.
DAVIES: No direct evidence that Joe Biden did anything to assist his son in either of those ventures, right? But there's an association.
GREEN: No. No, there isn't. And Bloomberg News, my employer, has done a lot of reporting and has turned up no wrongdoing.Other outlets have taken a look. I mean, what is going on and what Schweizer is good at finding are situations like this where, you know, I think any objective reader would come to the conclusion that, you know, but for Hunter's last name, he would not be in this position. You and I would not be offered a $50,000 a month board seat at a Ukrainian gas company because our father isn't vice president.
So it's the sort of - it's what, you know, Schweizer calls corruption by proxy. There's nothing explicitly illegal, but it's sort of morally corrupt and an indictment of our system in a way that populist Republicans and Democrats like to criticize.
DAVIES: The Clinton book got a ton of mainstream media attention and had an impact on the Clintons themselves. This book, did it get a lot of mainstream attention? Did it hurt harm the Bidens?
GREEN: You know, it really didn't. It came out in 2018, and it kind of came and went. It - you know, it didn't attach itself to Biden. It didn't become - it didn't drive the political news cycle in the way that "Clinton Cash" drove the 2015-2016 presidential news cycle. It got a decent amount of attention in conservative media, but it never really broke out into the mainstream.
You know, and I speculated in my Businessweek piece, a couple of reasons for this - one, Joe Biden wasn't yet a candidate, and so there wasn't that kind of urgency to look into his past. There might have been had the book come out later on. It also didn't focus only on the Biden's; it focused on John Kerry, Barack Obama, the Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.So I think that influenced how it was received. And of course, unlike "Clinton Cash," it wasn't focused on an actual Democratic presidential candidate; it was mainly focused on his son. And so there - it was sort of one degree removed from the primary actors.
I think all these things together help explain why the book didn't really break out until, that is, Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, became infatuated with it, started trying to investigate these things themselves and now has kicked off what has become an entire impeachment proceeding and put the book and the Bidens and Schweizer himself very much in the center of the 2020 presidential news cycle.
DAVIES: So when this book was launched with these stories, what were the ambitions of Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute?
GREEN: Well, I think the ambition was a reprise of what they'd seen with "Clinton Cash," that the mainstream media would look into this stuff and amplify it in the way that they had with the Clinton charges. You know, Steve Bannon, who kind of pioneered this model, has a phrase he likes to use - anchor left, pivot right. And what that means is you want to anchor this reporting on the left and the mainstream media - what Bannon considers the left - get them writing about it and then use the right-wing media to amplify what it is the mainstream media is saying and to kind of dominate the entire mediasphere.
So I think Schweizer and GAI were hoping that "Secret Empires," the Biden reporting, would be anchored in the mainstream media, and the whole process would repeat itself, but that never really happened with the second book.
DAVIES: So what did happen? Why do we know about it now?
GREEN: Well, we know about it now - it got a decent amount of attention in the right-wing media, onFox News, in the New York Post.And of course, some of - you know, one of the most loyal consumers of right-wing media is the president, Donald Trump, who according to reporting watches hours and hours of Fox News every day. So he was exposed to this reporting, exposed to the charges and the insinuations that Schweizer made. He's tweeted about the book. He's tweeted about Schweizer.
And, you know, based on everything we've heard from the whistleblower report, from the White House call transcript that was released at the end of September, Trump and Giuliani took it upon themselves to pick up the phone and try and advance Schweizer's reporting into the Bidens. I mean, essentially, calling the president of Ukraine and saying, hey,I know about this Biden stuff. I want you to look into this. I want you to investigate my political opponent. And, you know, if you don't, we're going to withhold this military aid - setting off all the alarm bells that have now led to the impeachment inquiry.
DAVIES: So it really was the president and Giuliani that took this and ran with it.
GREEN: It really was. I mean, the remarkable thing - a lot of people watch Fox News, watch right-wing media, get upset about the Clintons and the Bidens, but only one of them had the power to pick up the telephone, call the president of the Ukraine and put pressure on him to investigate the Bidens in hopes that they could turn up more damning information about Joe and Hunter Biden, knowing that Joe Biden was very likely to be his Democratic opponent in 2020.
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green about the origins of the story about Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine, which drew interest from President Trump and has now led to an impeachment inquiry. Green is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."
So President Trump has said that Joe Biden, when he was vice president - I guess in 2016 - sought to get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired, who was, at that time, investigating the company associated with Hunter Biden, his son - in effect, kind of scotching an investigation into his son by getting the prosecutor fired. What's the truth of this?
GREEN: Well, it is true what Trump says, but it is wildly misleading. Vice President Biden played a central role in overseeing U.S. policy in the Ukraine. But Biden, the Obama administration, Republicans in the Senate, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union were all putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to root out corruption and, particularly, to fire the chief prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin, who was not - who was essentially beholden to the oligarchs, was not doing the kind of corruption investigations they wanted.
So Biden threatened to withhold up to a billion dollars in aid from Ukraine if Shokin wasn't fired because he was so deeply corrupt. So Biden and the Obama administration were putting pressure on the Ukraine government to do more investigating of corruption not less, as Trump and his allies are insinuating.
And it's also - I mean, just to be clear, they weren't in - Ukrainian prosecutors were never investigating Hunter Biden. They were investigating an oligarch who owned - who is the co-founder of Burisma, the gas company, on whose board Hunter Biden served.
DAVIES: Right. And is it clear whether, at the time that he was fired,this prosecutor, Victor Shokin, was actually investigating the company?
GREEN: You know, it isn't clear.There have been conflicting reports on this. There does seem to have been an investigation into Burisma. But, you know, they paid a fine. That went away. At no point was Hunter Biden ever implicated in any kind of corruption. And part of what, I think, Trump and Giuliani were trying to do was to reopen this investigation and steer it toward Hunter Biden in hopes that they could find or maybe create damaging material around the Bidens.
DAVIES: There is a new chief prosecutor in Ukraine and was quoted as saying that he had opened an audit of a bunch of old investigations, including one into Burisma Holdings, the company that Hunter Biden was associated with. What does this portend?
GREEN: Well, it's not clear. I mean, one of the things, I think, a lot of people don't understand about the whole Ukraine situation is that Hunter Biden was never investigated by Ukrainian prosecutors. What happened was that they were investigating an oligarch named Mykola Zlochevsky, who co-founded Burisma.And so reopening investigations would be investigations into Burisma Holdings. But they - from what we know, that wouldn't affect or have anything specifically to do with Hunter Biden or his situation there.
One of the things that Trump and Giuliani are pushing for in these text messages and these - in these meetings and phone calls is for Ukrainian prosecutors to go further and specifically investigate the Bidens in hope that they can turn up dirt that can be used in the 2020 presidential campaign.
And as far as we know, there's no basis for investigating anything. There is no evidence that I'm aware of or that anybody has reported that would suggest that there was wrongdoing there.And Schweizer himself, in fact, in the New York Times today, has an op-ed saying that, you know, what transpired actually wasn't illegal under U.S. law. It was unseemly. It might have been unethical - the idea of putting a politician's son on a board as a way of maybe trying to influence the political process - but there was nothing illegal here. And that's very much Schweizer's style is not to allege illegality but to insinuate that there is something corrupt going on there.
And, I think, part of the way that this entire story went sideways and went crashing into this impeachment inquiry is that Trump is very much susceptible to the insinuation that there is something, you know, perfidious going on here and took it upon himself to, you know, push and amplify and even threaten people in hopes of advancing the story.
DAVIES: You mentioned that Peter Schweizer, the author of this book that was funded by the Government Accountability Institute, has an op-ed in The Times. He's arguing that there's a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for an American company operating in a foreign country to engage in, you know, bribery or nepotism to secure favor from governments in which they operate but that there's a big hole in the law in that there's nothing to prevent a foreign government from hiring the family of U.S. officials or creating relationships in order to, you know, create an appearance which helps their business. Does he have a point?
GREEN: I think he's got a perfectly good point. And that's exactly what seems to be going on with Hunter Biden. He had no traditional, professional qualification for the job that he held with Burisma, you know, and that in itself doesn't seem right. I think that is what Schweizer is pointing to.
Now, Trump and Republicans have taken it a lot further, twisting a lot of the facts about what was investigated, what the Obama administration and Biden were pressuring the Ukrainian government to do in 2016. But the basic fact that Hunter Biden was on this board and was probably there for political reasons, because there weren't really any other good reasons for him to be on the board - what Scheizer has pointed out here and what he says in his New York Times op-ed is that what Hunter Biden did was perfectly legal, but that, in itself, is a problem.
GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek. After a break, he'll talk with Dave Davies about how the controversy is affecting the Biden campaign and how Trump and his allies are fighting back with counter narratives that paint the president as the victim of Democratic attacks.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green. In a recent column, Green argues that President Trump's impeachment worries are actually the unintended result of an effort to help him. He says Trump picked up on research about Joe Biden developed by a conservative think tank and included in a book last year.
The material was intended to harm Biden's presidential campaign. But when Trump saw the story on conservative media and began urging Ukraine to investigate Biden, he created far bigger problems for himself. Trump is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry into whether he abused the authority of his office. When we left off, Green was talking about an op-ed published in The New York Times by Peter Schweizer, the author of the book with the allegations against Biden.
DAVIES: Are you surprised that The New York Times would publish an op-ed by Peter Schweizer, you know, who got funding from, you know, the Mercers and have a very strong political point of view?
GREEN: Yeah. You know, a little bit, given the controversy it kicked up in 2016 when Schweizer's reporting appeared on the front page - in other words, in the news pages. This piece today is in the opinion section, which I think is a little bit more appropriate for the author and the subject and the claims that he's making.
DAVIES: Right. And just going back to 2016, my understanding is that, you know, the author of the Times' reporting on the Clinton Foundations and the Uranium One story is reporting that they stand by, that they independently investigated all of this and found it credible and newsworthy. Do you disagree?
GREEN: No. I don't disagree with that at all. I mean, part of what made the GAI project so effective is that they didn't do what some conservative authors do, which is to, you know, fabricate or publish rumors. I mean, they're - all of this is based in fact. They certainly put their own spin on those facts. They insinuated that there was maybe more going on than was actually going on. But they really did turn up evidence of unreported donations, of relationships that just didn't seem right that, you know, any legitimate investigative reporter, were he or she to come across this information, would want to look into further. And that's exactly what happened.
So the fact that there is a grain of truth in a lot of what is written is one of the things that makes it so effective and that Bannon and Schweizer understood from the outset would get the mainstream media to pay attention and amplify these charges. I think what happened in 2016 that upsets liberals so much is that, you know, as this stuff was being published in the mainstream media, it was also being amplified and distorted in the right-wing media. And that was having a real effect on Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.
Her reputation was unquestionably tarnished. She was dogged by these charges and allegations. You add in the amplifying voice of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate calling her crooked Hillary and corrupt and I don't think there's any question - but that - it affected voters' views of her in a way that ultimately proved disastrous for Clinton's own candidacy and for Democrats.
DAVIES: One of the things that I think adds to the political potency is that the facts of a lot of these stories are so complicated, that it's really hard for an average reader to sort out what it all means. Was there subsequent reporting on the Uranium One story which cast the Clintons' actions in a different light?
GREEN: Nothing knocked it down. You know, the subsequent reporting - I mean, I think what a lot of Democrats objected to was the fact that this, frankly, partisan outfit and author and right-wing money had produced this information that had made its way onto the front page of The New York Times. And I spoke to the liberal activist David Brock at the time about Schweizer and Bannon. And he shook his head. And he Said, you know, looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus - meaning, you know, the intention all along from these guys was to poison the public image of Hillary Clinton. And by getting these charges onto the front pages of The New York Times, they essentially accomplished that mission. I think everything that happened subsequently with Trump's attacks and Clinton's loss in the 2016 election back that up. And this time around, with Joe and Hunter Biden, they were looking to do the same thing.
DAVIES: In the op-ed, the Times doesn't mention Peter Schweizer's association with the Government Accountability Institute or its funders, you know, the Mercers.What do you think of that?
GREEN: You know, if I were running the op-ed page, I think that's something I would've disclosed based on, you know, his background, the political lineage and what we saw in the 2016 presidential cycle.
DAVIES: So is all of this affecting the Biden campaign?
GREEN: You know, it's not clear that it is. I mean, Biden had been on a bit of a downward trajectory before Trump and the Ukraine charges really came into the news cycle. But, you know, he is - he's starting to slip now. I mean, in the latest averages of polls, Elizabeth Warren has nudged ahead of him. So, you know, it's not clear that this is a deadly development for Joe Biden's candidacy, but it certainly isn't helping.
DAVIES: Since the whistleblower complaint emerged, there's been a lot of information and text and the summary of the phone call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, which has led to this impeachment inquiry, which is clearly picking up steam. I mean, we're going to see, you know, testimony from other players in this including the former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch. The Trump administration says it is not going to cooperate with this because, you know, it's a witch hunt. Where do you see this going?
GREEN: Well, you know, the irony here is that Trump, by involving himself, you know, essentially made this entire project blow up in his face and committed actions that, at the very least, have launched an impeachment inquiry and I think are very likely to lead to his impeachment in the House whether or not the Senate ultimately chooses to remove him.
But what the whistleblower report showed, what the subsequent text messages that have now been revealed between the U.S. ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, and Bill Taylor, a top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, that show that the U.S. apparently was withholding military aid to help a political campaign, as Taylor put it in his text. That is the quid pro quo that Democrats are alleging. And I think if there is a trial in the House, that's what it's likely to show. And the evidence we've seen so far certainly supports that.
So I think, from an impeachment standpoint, Trump is in real trouble. Whether or not he's ultimately removed from office, we'll see. I'm skeptical. But certainly this isn't the outcome that Schweizer and GAI and I think Trump and Giuliani expected to happen when they started making noise about this over the summer.
DAVIES: Right. Well, the president's defenders are aggressively promoting other narratives. I mean, Giuliani, a couple of weeks ago, was on the ABC weekend show waiving an affidavit from Viktor Shokin, you know, the prosecutor that was fired in 2016, in which alleges that, in fact, he was investigating the company Hunter Biden's - was associated with. There are certainly reasons to doubt his credibility in the eyes of a lot of people. And then, you know, last week, Senator Ron Johnson had a heated exchange with Chuck Todd on "Meet The Press" in which he was arguing that there's all this credible evidence that people in the Ukraine were trying to hurt Trump and help Hillary Clinton in 2016. [RUSSIAN DISINFO] It's a very aggressive strategy to - you know, bringing up other stuff. What do you think the effect will be?
GREEN: Well, I think the intention on the part of Republicans is to muddy the waters and to turn the charges of corruption against Trump that we've seen laid out in the whistleblower report and the text messages - turn them back against the Democrats.
What is troubling to a lot of people is that a lot of these charges are based on discredited conspiracy theories. What Ron Johnson was talking about was a conspiracy theory that Trump and Giuliani have propagated that it wasn't Russia that hacked the Democratic National Committee servers in the 2016 election but Ukraine.That's something that's been knocked down by every intelligence official, U.S. and otherwise, who's looked into this. And yet, this is what's being propagated by Trump.
And I think a lot of Republican politicians, fearful of Trump's wrath and eager to toe the partisan line, have found themselves forced or obligated to repeat these wild charges in a way that bears no relationship to reality but is nonetheless, I think, muddying the waters and shaping public opinion in a way that is intended to mitigate the damage of the charges against Trump.
DAVIES: Is Steve Bannon playing a role in stoking any of these allegations?
GREEN: You know, he really isn't anymore. I mean, Bannon had a very public falling-out with Donald Trump in 2017, where Trump sort of publicly humiliated him and excommunicated him from the Republican Party. He lost his position as the head of Breitbart News, was essentially sent out into the wilderness.
I mean, Bannon is still around on the scene. He is focused more on China these days and trying to, I think, strengthen Trump's resolve to conduct the trade war. Trump did tweet favorably about him a couple of months ago. But there isn't a close relationship there in the way that there was during the presidential campaign.
DAVIES: Yeah. I asked because you wrote a book about Steve Bannon and talked to him a lot. He was also going around Europe trying to kind of build a, you know, nationalist, populist movement. How did that go?
GREEN: Well, it basically failed. I mean, the nationalist movements in Europe weren't really interested in an American political strategist coming in and telling them what to do. They didn't perform nearly as well in the May European parliamentary elections as Bannon and some of the nationalist contingent were hoping for.
And so he's focused mainly these days on kind of beating the war drums against China, going out and publicly defending Trump's aggression against China when it comes to tariffs and the trade war and that sort of thing, and seeking to remain relevant in that way. But so far, there has been no reproach with Trump and the White House, or the Mercer family, for that matter. And so he's off on his own.
DAVIES: You know, looking at the strategy of the Government Accountability Institute with this book, you know, the idea was to kind of repeat the playbook that worked with the Clinton candidacy in 2016, where you develop information, it becomes adopted by the mainstream media and becomes a scandal. And in this case, it seems like another - kind of a different weird thing happened, which is that it turned into a scandal for the president himself when he pursued a theory and then engaged in conduct which has resulted in this impeachment inquiry.
At the same time, Peter Schweizer, the author of the book funded by the Government Accountability Institute, is being quoted. I mean, the story is out there. I wonder how they view this - how it's all worked out.
GREEN:Well, the irony here is that the target was supposed to be the Bidens, not the president. And by the president becoming involved, you know, the original plan has kind of blown up. What may wind up happening - as you say, you know, Biden and these charges are very much in the news. That was part of the intention, even if the negative attention toward Trump wasn't part of the plan. What we could see end up happening is a kind of a murder-suicide where Trump really does take out his strongest Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, only, he winds up, in the process, getting himself impeached.
DAVIES: Well, Joshua Green, thanks so much for speaking with us again.
GREEN: Thank you. It's always a pleasure.
GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."
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Before he was elected mayor of New York City in 1993, Republican Rudy Giuliani was a federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York — and he had a reputation for being tough, focused and aggressive. But now, ironically, Giuliani finds himself being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice. His home and office in Manhattan were recently searched as part of a DOJ investigation of his Ukraine-related activities of the Trump era. And CNN's Marshall Cohen offers some insights on those search warrants in an article published on May 7.
Cohen explains, "The Justice Department's criminal investigation into Rudy Giuliani involves an international cast of characters: Trump White House allies, Republican lawyers, Ukrainian oligarchs, diplomats, right-wing journalists and other figures who aren't household names…. Giuliani has denied all wrongdoing and claimed the investigation itself is unconstitutional."
Cohen goes on to offer a "breakdown" of "the dozen Americans and Ukrainians who CNN has confirmed were mentioned by name in the search warrantsagainst Giuliani." Although there may be others mentioned in the warrants, Cohen notes, the people discussed in his article are the ones CNN has confirmed.
The 12 include Florida-based businessmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman; Florida-based businessman David Correia, an associate of Parnas and Fruman; former Ukraine prosecutors general Viktor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko; Kostiantyn Kulyk, a former Ukrainian official who worked under Lutsenko; attorneys Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova; conservative pundit John Solomon, known for his work with The Hill and the Washington Post in the past; former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; Glib Zagoriy, who served in the Ukrainian parliament; and Ukrainian Deputy Prosecutor General Gyunduz Mamedov.
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump was impeached by House Democrats after trying to bully Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him dig up dirt on now-President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. And House Democrats who pushed for the impeachment, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff of California, stressed that Trump seriously crossed the line by asking a foreign leader to investigate a political rival and withholding military aid to Ukraine in the hope of getting that investigation.
Trump loyalist Giuliani tirelessly railed against that impeachment in 2019 and went out of his way to smear the Bidens, promoting the far-right conspiracy theory that the real election interference in 2016 wasn't Russia interfering on behalf of Trump, but Ukraine interfering on behalf of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Cohen notes that Parnas, who paid Giuliani for half a million dollars of consulting work in 2018, "publicly flipped on Trump and Giuliani and implicated them in the anti-Biden schemes in Ukraine" and "assisted House Democrats with their impeachment inquiry against Trump in 2019." And Fruman, Cohen points out, "worked closely with Parnas and Giuliani to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine."
Shokin, according to Cohen, "allied with Giuliani to spread false claims of corruption against (Joe) Biden" and "falsely claimed he was fired because he was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company where Biden's son served on the board."
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/ukraine-prosecutor-reveals-he-was-likely-ousted-for-refusing-to-launch-hunter-biden-probe
no lnx
the ME
ormer top Ukrainian prosecutor believes he was ousted last year over his refusal to open an investigation into Hunter Biden; an investigation Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's aide ensured would be opened following former President Donald Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani's request.
During an interview with Buzzfeed,Rouslan Riaboshapkaon Wednesday, May 5, discussed a 2019 transcript that he believes is an indication that his firing was politically motivated. From Strasbourg, France,Riaboshapka highlighted a phone call between Giuliani and Andriy Yermak on July 22, 2019.
"It reveals an important detail," Riaboshapka said of the transcript. "Yermak promised Giuliani to open an investigation into Hunter Biden," the son of President Joe Biden. "I didn't know about the essence of the call. I didn't know Yermak promised to help Giuliani."
That call came just three days before Trump's infamous phone discussion with Zelensky which subsequently led to his first impeachment trial.
"Just let these investigations go forward," Giuliani said to Yermak at the time, according to the transcript. "Get someone to investigate this."
"We'll be ready ... to coordinate, to work and investigate everything, which you listed," Yermak responded. At a later point during the phone discussion, Yermak reassured Giuliani that the situation would be "deeply" investigated.
Riaboshapka is the second [erson to insist his firing was politically motivated. Back in April 2019, Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was also ousted. During Trump's impeachment trial, she also testified and revealed that she believed Giuliani and several Ukrainian political operatives were responsible for her firing.
However, Giuliani has denied any allegations of wrongdoing. Zelensky's office has also released a statement about the incident. According to Zelensky's office, neither Yermak nor the Ukrainian president pressured law enforcement agencies about the investigation.
"Mr. Riaboshapka's statements may be caused by internal political circumstances in Ukraine and have nothing to do with the foreign policy of the state," the statement from Zelensky's office read. "The Office of the President is interested in developing a strong system of independent law enforcement agencies in Ukraine."
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an 421 no twt lnx
Devin Nunes is caught up in Giuliani’s 'Russian mob' scandal: Trump impeachment prosecutor
Bob Brigham and Raw Story April 29, 2021
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has exposure in Rudy Giulian's legal scandal, according to former prosecutor Daniel Goldman, who served as majority counsel in Donald Trump's first impeachment trial.
Goldman offered his analysis after The New York Times reported that FBI agents also executed a search warrant at the home of Giuliani ally Victoria Toensing.
"This makes sense because, during the Ukraine impeachment investigation, we obtained draft retainer agreements between a Ukrainian official and Toensing and diGenova that Giuliani brokered," Goldman tweeted.
Podcast host Eric Garland noticed Goldman's analysis and added his summary of the situation.
"UM. SO GIULIANI AND TOENSING AND DIGENOVA WERE SIMULTANEOUSLY UNREGISTERED AGENTS OF UKRAINE *WHILE ON THE PAYROLL OF RUSSIAN MOB BOSS DMITRO FIRTASH* - while working for Trump. When he was President. And they all were conspiring with Russian intelligence," he wrote.
"Correct," Goldman said.
"And don't forget Devin Nunes and his sidekick Derek Harvey were involved too," he added.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/rudy-giuliani-2649955361
salon
On Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department placed sanctions on seven foreign members of Rudy Giuliani's inner circle who sought to interfere in the U.S. election and sway the results in Trump's favor.
The president has also reportedly dropped his reliance on Giuliani for his second impeachment trial, refusing to pay Giuliani for his unsuccessful post-election campaign to overturn November's results. Meanwhile, the New York State Bar Association has moved to disbar Giuliani this week. Needless to say, the week after he told thousands of Trump supporters to hold "trial by combat" before many of them violently stormed the U.S. Capitol with aims to halt the Constitutionally mandated certification of Joe Biden's Electoral College victory was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for Rudy Giuliani. [twt doc]
the Treasury's targets include Russian-linked Ukrainians Konstantin Kulyk, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, Andriy Telizhenko, Oleksandr Dubinsky, and –– most principally ––Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker sanctioned just last year, who played a key role in orchestrating the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory. It was with the help of these actors that Giuliani spearheaded a failed campaign to smear President-elect Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, with false claims of past corruption. Trump's call to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky –– in which the President pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden on his behalf –– would become the impetus for the President's own impeachment.
"Since at least 2019," said the Treasury in a statement on Wednesday, "Derkach and his associates have leveraged U.S. media, U.S.-based social media platforms, and influential U.S. persons to spread misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former U.S. officials engaged in corruption, money laundering, and unlawful political influence in Ukraine."
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a steadfast Trump loyalist, also attempted to add distance between his agency and Giuliani and his goons. "Russian disinformation campaigns targeting American citizens are a threat to our democracy [...] The United States will continue to aggressively defend the integrity of our election systems and processes."
"Trump has been blaming his longtime personal attorney and many others for the predicament he now finds himself in, though he has not accepted any responsibility in public or in private," CNN reported this week. "Giuliani is still expected to play a role in Trump's impeachment defense but has been left out of most conversations thus far."
The New York State Bar Association has also made moves to disavow Giuliani in light of last Wednesday's chaos. The Bar announced on Monday that it has launched an inquiry into Giuliani's role in Trump's months-long crusade to undermine the election. The group's bylaws make explicit reference to anyone "who advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States, or of any state, territory or possession thereof, or of any political subdivision therein, by force or other illegal means" and disowns anyone who has engaged in such activity.
The Association stated, "Mr. Giuliani's words quite clearly were intended to encourage Trump supporters unhappy with the election's outcome to take matters into their own hands," adding, "Their subsequent attack on the Capitol was nothing short of an attempted coup, intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power."
Giuliani, who called for "a trial by combat" in the rally leading up the riot on Capitol Hill, now faces the threat of permanent expulsion from the Bar, which would render him unlicensed to practice law in the state of New York. "We cannot stand idly by," said the Association, "and allow those intent on rending the fabric of our democracy to go unchecked."
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==
an 1220
Lev Parnas, a former business associate of Rudy Giuliani, made explosive allegations against outgoing Attorney General Bill Barr in a federal court filing on Tuesday. Parnas, who is under indictment for campaign finance violations and fraud charges, has accused Barr of timing his arrest last fall in order to prevent him from testifying at House impeachment hearings last fall.
The motion was filed in the Southern District of New York by attorneys for Parnas, a Ukrainian-born businessman who in 2018 and 2019 ran political errands in Ukraine on behalf of Giuliani and Trump. Parnas argues that his indictment last October was part of an intervention by Barr "to protect the President and thwart [Parnas'] potential testimony in the impeachment inquiry."
Parnas filed his complaint as reports broke that federal prosecutors in New York have discussed with Justice Department officials in Washington seeking a warrant for Giuliani's electronic communications, and, according to a person familiar with the case, at least one of the former New York mayor's cell phones. Approval from higher-ups at Justice is required before prosecutors may request a search warrant for any materials that may be protected by attorney-client privilege. It is unclear whether such approval has been granted in this case.
According to multiple reports and individuals familiar with the case, Giuliani's business dealings abroad have been part of a federal probe led by the FBI and the Southern District of New York — the very office Giuliani once led as U.S. attorney. Those investigations grew out of the arrest last October of Parnas and business partner Igor Fruman, who were detained at Dulles International Airport outside Washington as they waited to board an overseas flight. The two men were arrested just hours after meeting with Giuliani at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. According to the court filing, Giuliani was originally supposed to join Parnas and Fruman on their trip to Ukraine, but canceled earlier that day. Two other Giuliani associates also slated to make the trip had canceled a few days earlier, according to the document.
Prosecutors charged Parnas and Fruman, along with two other associates, with conspiring to make campaign donations on someone else's behalf and violating the federal prohibition on soliciting donations from foreign sources. A superseding indictment this September added fraud charges in connection with their company, Fraud Guarantee, which contracted with Giuliani to do promotional work. Giuliani has not been charged in connection with any aspect of the case. Parnas and Fruman have both pleaded not guilty.
In the new filing, Parnas lays out a series of events that he believes Barr helped engineer to secure his silence.
In late September, Parnas received a letter from House investigators asking him to preserve documents and prepare for a deposition. When Parnas told Giuliani about this, he was directed to attorney John Dowd, who had previously represented President Trump in connection with Robert Mueller's investigation of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair now serving time in prison. After securing the president's personal approval, Dowd took Parnas as a client.
On Oct. 8, a Tuesday, Dowd sent an email to a number of attorneys affiliated with Trump's defense team, calling the president "Boss" and promising that Dowd would "eliminate any doubt" that Parnas and Fruman would answer questions before Congress. Dowd then sent a letter to House investigators informing them that Parnas and Fruman would not appear for their scheduled deposition on Thursday, Oct. 10.
The next day, Parnas and Fruman were arrested. Two of the attorneys copied on Dowd's email were the same people who had been scheduled to fly with them to Europe. That night, Barr, who had been informed about the indictment in advance, met Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch for dinner in New York. The attorney general visited the Southern District offices the following morning on what aides described as a "routine" visit.
At the time of the arrest, however, the federal investigation into Parnas was not over, and did not in fact conclude for 11 more months, until a grand jury returned the fraud charges. It is not entirely clear why an immediate arrest was deemed necessary, although Parnas was described as a flight risk — on a trip the president's personal attorney was supposed to make with him.
Days after the arrest, Giuliani parted ways with his own attorney, Jon Sale, a prominent Miami lawyer Giuliani said he had retained for impeachment defense. Giuliani previously told Salon that Sale had been the person who first connected him with Parnas in 2018. He and Sale also shared a significant client: Venezuelan financier Alejandro Betancourt, who was under investigation in a multibillion-dollar money laundering probe and also knew Parnas.
Within a few weeks of these events, Parnas fired Dowd, after what he later described in a TV interview as a jailhouse loyalty shakedown.
"I called Dowd to come there. And I started seeing in the process of the bail stuff, the way things were going on ... I didn't feel they were trying to get me out," Parnas told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in January. "John Dowd, instead of comforting me and trying to calm me down and telling me I'm going to be OK, he started talking to me like a drill sergeant."
"Were they telling you to sacrifice yourself to protect the president?" Maddow asked.
"That's the way I felt," Parnas replied. He dismissed Dowd along with Kevin Downing, another former Manafort attorney. In subsequent months, Parnas apparently turned over evidence to House impeachment investigators, but was never called to testify, likely because of his tarnished reputation following the arrest.
Parnas' motion seeks to convince the court to turn over numerous documents about the circumstances surrounding his investigation and arrest, as well as the investigation (or lack thereof) of other people associated with the Ukraine affair.
To make his case, Parnas must show that Barr improperly intervened in the indictment. His filing cites numerous instances of the attorney general improperly inserting himself on Trump's behalf in other legal matters, such as the cases of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone and Trump sexual-assault accuser E. Jean Carroll. Parnas must also show that he and his associates were singled out for these campaign finance violations where others involved, such as the people who actually made the donations, were not.
The court filing quotes a voicemail Giuliani left with Parnas' attorney, the second half of which was apparently captured accidentally after Giuliani forgot to hang up. In the message, Giuliani asks whether it's possible to speak with or about Parnas, and leaves his number. After a pause, according to the transcript, Giuliani can be heard telling his attorney, who apparently was also present, "That's the soon-to-be-gotten-rid-of number." The two carry on a short conversation, then the voicemail ends.
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==
as in Fr Macron le pen hack then mix fake emails in tranche? 6 GRU indicted
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/hunter-biden-e-mail-story-has-all-the-marks-of-russian-involvement-intel-experts/
Supporters of President Donald Trump are hoping that e-mails found on a laptop allegedly belonging to former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, will be the "October surprise" that derails the older Biden's presidential campaign. The New York Post, owned by Fox News' Rupert Murdoch, published that story after receiving an alleged copy of Hunter Biden's hard drive from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — and more than 50 intelligence officials, according to Politico's Natasha Bertrand, have signed a letter saying that the story has the markings of a Kremlin propaganda operation.
Bertrand explains, "While the letter's signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them 'deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case' and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin's hand at work.'"
Intel experts who signed the letter range from Russ Travers, who served as acting director for the National Counterterrorism Center, to Rick Ledgett, former deputy director of the National Security Agency. Former Central Intelligence Agency directors or acting directors who signed the letter include John O. Brennan, Leon Panetta, Gen. Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin and Michael Morell.
The letter reads, "If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election — and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this."
The intel experts also said, "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the e-mails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not — and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement… (But) there are a number of factors that make us suspicious of Russian involvement…. Such an operation would be consistent with Russian objectives, as outlined publicly and recently by the intelligence community, to create political chaos in the United States and to deepen political divisions here — but also, to undermine the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and thereby help the candidacy of President Trump."
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/how-to-not-be-a-useful-idiot-for-the-rights-smear-machine/
Trump is trying hard to recreate the perfect storm that landed him in the White House in 2016 despite being the most unpopular candidate in the modern polling era. That year, the Clinton campaign's hacked emails were dribbled out over the final six weeks of the race. There wasn't much to them, but internal campaign communications tend to be frank and are easily mined for scandalettes. Having established the storyline that Clinton was as corrupt as Trump, they provided a steady stream of stories with "emails reveal" in the headlines which served to reinforce the right's narrative.
We can expect a similar stream of stories of ostensible "smoking guns" stemming from Hunter Biden's emails (whether hacked or fabricated) to come our way in the final weeks of this race.And some people who want to see themselves as fair will inadvertently amplify the right's preferred narratives by assuming that there must be something there.
So it's very important to keep in mind that the "scandal" is supposed to be that then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed for the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to stave off an investigation into Burisma Holdings--the Ukrainian gas company whose Board Hunter sat on--in order to protect his son. It is supposed to be a story about conflict of interest--of the elder Biden using the office of the Vice Presidency to help his son.
There is not a shred of truth to those claims. The effort to get Shokin fired "was prompted by a push for anti-corruption reforms developed at the State Department and coordinated with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund," The Washington Postreported. Andaccording to CNN, a bipartisan "letter from 2016 shows that Republican senators pushed for reforms to Ukraine's prosecutor general's office and judiciary, echoing calls then-Vice President Joe Biden made at the time."
Shokin was corrupt, and that was a problem. Vitaliy Kasko, a former deputy of Shokin's who resigned over his boss's habit of stymieing corruption probes, toldBloombergthat Shokin was not investigating Burisma during the period in question. "There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against" the firm or its owner. "It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015," Kasko said. And Daria Kaleniuk, a prominent Ukrainian anti-corruption crusader, told The Washington Post that"Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation."
Without some impropriety on Joe Biden's part, Hunter Biden's business ventures aren't a story. He isn't running for office. Like many, if not most children of the powerful, the younger Biden leveraged both his family name and the connections he'd made at Yale to land various business deal and secure a cushy, high-paying position on a corporate board. Both Hunter and Joe Biden have acknowledged that associating himself with a shady Ukrainian gas company--as opposed to, say, a reputable American or Western European firm--was an error of judgment, but it was neither illegal nor unethical. This isn't a meritocracy, and this is one way that wealth and power are reproduced from one generation to the next. It's distasteful and unfair, but that's a class issue, not a scandal. Hunter isn't running for office and his judgment, or lack thereof, isn't a matter of public concern.
Joe Biden spent years in the Senate, and year after year he ranked among the least wealthy members of that body. We know how he came into his wealth--mostly through a multi-million dollar book advance and speaking gigs after leaving office. Biden may not be everyone's cup of tea, but there's no evidence that he's corrupt.
===
an 920
ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley drop their Biden bombshell — and it’s an absolute dud
Mark Sumner / Daily Kos September 23, 2020
For months, Republican Senator Ron Johnson has promised to deliver a body blow to Joe Biden. Like the report being put together by William Barr and John Durham, this was one…
==
MUELLER WENT AFTER OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE, TOLD FBI DOING CTR-INTELL BUT NO ONE DID?!
===
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democrats-say-the-gops-attempt-to-smear-biden-accidentally-exposed-a-trump-officials-corrupt-scheme/
igor salon
the Republican report aimed at raising questions about the dealings of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Ukraine appears to have accidentally implicated former Energy Secretary Rick Perry in an energy scheme in the foreign nation, according to the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
Republicans led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., released their much-hyped report on Hunter Biden’s role at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma on Wednesday. However, it found no evidence of actual wrongdoing and relied largely on debunked claims, old statements and narratives pushed as part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
But the report did find new evidence related to Perry’s actions in Ukraine while he served in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
Amos Hochstein, a member of the supervisory board at the state-owned Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, told lawmakers that Perry “inappropriately pressured the Ukrainian government” to place Texas oil executive Robert Bensh on the board of the company while officials at the Department of Energy pressured the government to sign a deal with a “private business entity connected to Mr. Bensh,” according to a :{letter Wyden:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: sent to Department of Energy Inspector General Teri Donaldson.
perry also pressured the Ukrainian government to place one of his longtime campaign supporters, Michael Bleyzer, on the board during a trip to Ukraine for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in 2019, Wyden wrote. Bleyzer and his partner were later awarded a drilling contract in the country.
“Mr. Bleyzer’s contract that he was awarded was despite the fact that he was not the highest bidder in the process,” Hochstein told lawmakers. “Other . . . bids were higher, and therefore, Ukraine chose a bid that paid itself less.”
The heads of the state-owned Naftogaz conglomerate have since filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the contract, arguing that the Ukrainian government acted “illegally and with bias” in agreeing to the deal, Wyden noted.
“Witness testimony in this investigation has directly implicated former Secretary Rick Perry in alleged wrongdoing, and the department more broadly, in a scheme to undermine anti-corruption efforts that were implemented by Ukraine in partnership with the international community,” Wyden wrote.
Politico reported last year that Perry — who along with then-Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker were the “three amigos” who pushed a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine — played an active role in the Trump administration’s pressure on Zelensky, which ultimately led to thepresident’s impeachment.
ProPublica reported earlier this month that Perry repeatedly pushed deals that “were potentially worth billions of dollars to Perry’s friends and political donors” and could “stand to benefit” the secretary himself. Two of the deals, including one worth $20 billion, went to the Texas firm Energy Transfer. Perry served on the company’s board before and after his stint at the Energy Department and bought shares now worth about $800,000 three months after leaving his post, according to the report.
Ethics experts told the outlet that Perry’s efforts were violations of federal regulations. His actions also caught the attention of federal prosecutors, though he is reportedly not the target of any investigations.
The interview with Hochstein was part of the Senate Republicans’ investigation into whether Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma affected U.S. foreign policy. The report asserted that his position was “problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.” However, it did not include any new evidence suggesting his role affected the Obama administration’s policy. It also acknowledged that “the extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.”
Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the probe pushed “Russian disinformation.” He further described it as “an attempted political hit job facilitated by the State Department.”
A Finance Committee aide told Talking Points Memo that finding new evidence against the Trump administration “was certainly not Republicans’ goal.”
“While Republicans’ Ukraine investigation showed Vice President Biden did nothing wrong,” the aide said, “it succeeded in implicating former Secretary Perry in a corrupt scheme to pressure the Ukrainian government to change the board of Naftogaz.”
an 920
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/ex-top-prosecutor-mueller-didnt-investigate-trump-finances-or-interview-ivanka-over-fears-of-a-blowback/
Igor Derysh / Salon September 23, 2020
A former prosecutor on Robert Mueller’s team said in a new book that the special counsel decided not to pursue President Donald Trump’s finances or interviews with his children over…
a former prosecutor on Robert Mueller’s team said in a new book that the special counsel decided not to pursue President Donald Trump’s finances or interviews with his children over fears that the president would shut down the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Andrew Weissmann, who led the prosecution of former Trump campaign chief :{Paul Manafort:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}:, blamed Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s top deputy in the investigation, forstopping investigators from looking into the president’s finances in his new book “Where the Law Ends,” according to excerpts published by The Washington Post.
Weissmann wrote that Zebley also pushed another prosecutor to “stand down” from pursuing Trump Organization documents because it risked affecting the negotiations with the president’s legal team to set up an interview with Trump. Trump ultimately did not appear for an interview and submitted written answers largely claiming not to recall key details.
“Aaron had a way of gaslighting you, of making you question your own reality, that you were being too aggressive in your drive to pursue leads and push harder — like you were not enough of an adult,” he wrote. "Repeatedly during our 22 months in operation, we would reach some critical juncture in our investigation only to have Aaron say that we could not take a particular action because it risked aggravating the president beyond some undefined breaking point,” he added, according to a New York Times report on the book.
Weissmann also argued that Mueller was wrong not to issue a subpoena to compel Trump’s testimony.
“What are we saying to future presidents, and to future investigators, who will have our decision thrown in their face?” Weissmann said he told Mueller. “If we do not subpoena the president in this investigation, how can others justify the need to do so?”
Weissmann said he wonders whether the team had “given it our all” in light of the questions left unanswered by the probe.
“As proud as I am of the work our team did — the unprecedented number of people we indicted and convicted and in record speed for any similar investigation — I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more,” Weissmann wrote.
The former prosecutor listed a number of unanswered questions left open by the decision not to pursue Trump’s financial records.”We still do not know if there are other financial ties between the president and either the Russian government or Russian oligarchs,” he wrote. “We do not know whether he paid bribes to foreign officials to secure favorable treatment for his business interests, a potential violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that would provide leverage against the president. We do not know if he had other Russian business deals in the works at the time he was running for president, how they might have aided or constrained his campaign, or even if they are continuing to influence his presidency.”
Weissman noted elsewhere in the book that the same business account used to send hush money payments to Stormy Daniels after her alleged affair with Trump was also used to receive “payments linked to a Russian oligarch,” according to excerpts published by The New York Times.
==
ref 2
no lnx
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/politics/andrew-weissmann-mueller.html
Mueller’s Team Should Have Done More to Investigate Trump-Russia Links, Top Aide Says
A new book by one of the special counsel’s top deputies, Andrew Weissmann, is the first inside account of the investigation.
“We could have done more,” Andrew Weissmann, who was one of the top aides in the special counsel’s office, writes in a new book.
By Charlie Savage
Sept. 21, 2020
WASHINGTON — The team led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, failed to do everything it could to determine what happened in the 2016 election, shying away from steps like subpoenaing President Trump and scrutinizing his finances out of fear he would fire them, one of Mr. Mueller’s top lieutenants argued in the first insider account of the inquiry.
“Had we used all available tools to uncover the truth, undeterred by the onslaught of the president’s unique powers to undermine our efforts?” wrote the former prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, in a new book, adding, “I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more.”
The team took elaborate steps to protect its files of evidence from the risk that the Justice Department might destroy them if Mr. Trump fired them and worked to keep reporters and the public from learning what they were up to, Mr. Weissmann wrote in “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation,” which Random House will publish next week.
While he speaks reverently of Mr. Mueller, he also says his boss’s diffidence made him ill-suited for aspects of shepherding the politically charged investigation. He saw Mr. Mueller and his deputy, Aaron M. Zebley, as overly cautious.
Mr. Weissmann also defended against accusations by the president and his allies that he and other investigators were politically biased “angry Democrats”; Mr. Weissmann said his personal views had no bearing on the crimes that Russian operatives and Trump aides committed.
And he elevates particular details — for example, emphasizing that the same business account that sent hush payments to an adult film star who alleged an extramarital affair with Mr. Trump had also received “payments linked to a Russian oligarch.” The president has denied the affair; his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen controlled the account. Mr. Mueller transferred the Cohen matter to prosecutors in New York.
Previously a mafia and Enron prosecutor and then a lawyer at the F.B.I. for Mr. Mueller, who was the bureau’s director for 12 years, Mr. Weissmann ran one of three major units for the special counsel’s office. His “Team M” prosecuted Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort for numerous financial crimes. The goal was to flip him and learn whatever he knew about any Trump campaign links to Russia.
Mr. Manafort had worked for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, and the investigation uncovered ties by his business partner, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, to Russian intelligence. The book builds toward investigators’ discovery that Mr. Manafort had shared internal campaign polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, who flew to the United States to meet with Mr. Manafort during the campaign, asking whether Mr. Trump would permit a peace plan for Russia to essentially take over all of eastern Ukraine.
But while admitting this much, Mr. Manafort — seeing the dangle of a potential pardon from Mr. Trump — refused to cooperate further. Investigators did not obtain any final puzzle pieces and lacked the evidence to charge anyone in the campaign with a criminal conspiracy involving Russia’s covert electoral assistance.
“It would seem to require significant audacity — or else, leverage — for another nation to even put such a request before a presidential candidate,” Mr. Weissmann wrote of Mr. Kilimnik’s request. “This made what we didn’t know, and still don’t know to this day, monumentally disconcerting: Namely, why would Trump ever agree to this? Why would Trump ever agree to this Russian proposal if the candidate were not getting something from Russia in return?”
Mr. Weissmann explained the significance of Mr. Manafort’s interactions with Mr. Kilimnik — also a major focus of a recent bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, which explicitly labeled Mr. Kilimnik a Russian intelligence agent — more clearly than the Mueller report did.
Mr. Mueller had strictly forbidden leaks, and the special counsel team took extraordinary care to protect the high-profile, high-stakes investigation, Mr. Weissmann wrote. They kept window blind slats tilted at an angle to keep out prying eyes, shutting out natural light. They concocted an “almost comically elaborate and surreal” plan to sneak in “through the many hidden arteries of the courthouse” to obtain a grand jury indictment without tipping off reporters.
And worried about the possibility that Mr. Trump would fire them and the Justice Department would then seal off or destroy their evidence, the Mueller team members packed their numerous applications to judges for search warrants with extensive, up-to-date details about their investigation — ensuring they backed up their work beyond the reach of the executive branch.
Ty Cobb, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, also privately promised to be a “canary in the coal mine” and provide a heads up if Mr. Trump was going to fire the special counsel team, according to Mr. Weissmann. In an email, Mr. Cobb wrote that he “never made the commitment” described by Mr. Weissmann.
The investigation played out against the backdrop of regular vilification of the Mueller team by Mr. Trump and his allies like Fox News’s Sean Hannity — who turned out to be in regular contact with Mr. Manafort cooking up a “smear campaign” over text messages. Mr. Weissmann, a major target, wrote that such “ad hominem” insinuations of bias appealed to emotion rather than reason.
“I am a registered Democrat,” he wrote. “Does this make Paul Manafort or any of the other 32 people our office charged any less guilty? Did Russia not attack our democracy and disrupt our election with its self-described online information warfare operation? Which facts that we alleged in our various indictments — and to which many of those we indicted, including Manafort, would plead guilty — did our attackers believe were invented as a result of our alleged bias as ‘angry Democrats?’”
Mr. Trump’s allies have recently pointed with alarm to documents showing that cellphones issued to Mr. Mueller’s team were erased during the investigation; Mr. Weissmann twice entered an incorrect passcode too often, triggering a security measure that erased his phone. In an interview, he portrayed the concerns as a “tempest in a teapot” and said his understanding was that all emails and other such data from phones were backed up. He called on the Justice Department to release information about the special counsel’s data backup system.
Mr. Weissmann also wrote that he is not “anti-Trump” but rather “pro the rule of law.” Still, the distinction is less than clear in a book that also portrays Mr. Trump as a liar and a dangerous demagogue trying “to peel the world around him away from the rule of law — away from reason itself — and mold it to accommodate his desire for unchecked power.”
Mr. Weissmann was equally scathing about Attorney General William P. Barr, calling him an enabler and likening his misleading letter last spring about the then-still-secret Mueller report as a betrayal and “gut punch.”
Mr. Weissmann also criticized colleagues, portraying the special counsel team as divided between aggressive investigators like him, the F.B.I. special agent Omer Meisel and the prosecutor Jeannie Rhee — who headed “Team R,” which investigated Russian issues other than those centered on Manafort — and far more risk-averse law enforcement officials like Mr. Zebley who pulled punches.
In one episode in 2017, the Mueller team issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank for information about Mr. Manafort’s income in Ukraine. Deutsche Bank had also lent large sums to the Trump Organization, and the White House somehow found out about the still-secret subpoenas — though not their focus. The White House demanded to know what investigators were doing, andMr. Mueller authorized Mr. Zebley to tell the White House that they had not been seeking Mr. Trump’s financial information.
“At that point, any financial investigation of Trump was put on hold,” Mr. Weissmann writes. “That is, we backed down — the issue was simply too incendiary; the risk, too severe.”
The book provides many other examples of concessions large and small. Investigators did not try to question Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka — who had spoken in the lobby to a delegation of Russians who came to Trump Tower in June 2016 to meet with campaign leaders who had been promised that they were offering dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.
They “feared that hauling her in for an interview would play badly to the already antagonistic right-wing press — look how they’re roughing up the president’s daughter — and risk enraging Trump, provoking him to shut down the special counsel’s office once and for all,” he wrote.
Similarly, they did not subpoena the Trump Organization for emails about its efforts to develop a Trump-branded building in Moscow, which were active deep into the 2016 campaign.
And they did not immunize Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., a step that would have prevented him from being able to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying about matters like the Trump Tower meeting. Bound by grand-jury secrecy rules, Mr. Weissmann did not come out and say whether Donald Trump Jr. was threatened with or actually issued a subpoena and used his right against self-incrimination to repel it.
Mr. Weissmann laid much of the blame for what he saw as a pattern of timidity on Mr. Zebley, portraying him as a primary decision maker. “Repeatedly during our 22 months in operation, we would reach some critical juncture in our investigation only to have Aaron say that we could not take a particular action because it risked aggravating the president beyond some undefined breaking point.”
Mr. Weissmann acknowledged, but did not clearly address, concerns that the aging Mr. Mueller had lost a step, both declaring that he was capable of making the tough decisions despite “speculative concerns” about his health but also describing him in one scene as looking drained and worn down by his years of grueling public service.
While Mr. Zebley obtained Mr. Mueller’s sanction for many of his cautious directives, in one striking episode, Mr. Zebley appeared in Mr. Weissmann’s telling to have unilaterally agreed — without Mr. Mueller’s knowledge — to a request by the office of the deputy attorney general overseeing them, Rod J. Rosenstein, not to coordinate with state prosecutors “as it would undermine the president’s pardon power.”
Two other former officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, disputed the account. Mr. Rosenstein did not decline any request to share information with state prosecutors, a person familiar with his thinking wrote in an email.
Another person familiar with how the special counsel’s office interacted with Mr. Rosenstein’s office denied that there had been any agreement about sharing evidence with or withholding it from state prosecutors, and said Mr. Zebley had consulted with Mr. Mueller on every material decision.
On the failure to subpoena Mr. Trump, Mr. Mueller was determined to avoid “any public disagreements” with Mr. Rosenstein, Mr. Weissmann wrote. Because the special counsel regulations required telling Congress about any instance in which Mr. Rosenstein overruled him, Mr. Mueller never actually proposed subpoenaing Mr. Trump, instead coyly asking what Mr. Rosenstein’s reaction would be. Mr. Rosenstein just kept demurring.
In the end, Mr. Weissmann said in an interview, the caution was more justified early on to avoid provoking Mr. Trump into firing them before they could get going. But he and Ms. Rhee, among others, believed the office should have been willing to be more aggressive later on, after they had learned much of what Russia had done and had already used indictments to drag it into public view.
“We would have subpoenaed the president after he refused our accommodations, even if that risked us being fired,” he wrote. “It just didn’t sit right. We were left feeling like we had let down the American public, who were counting on us to give it our all.”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/biden-ukraine-recordings-oan/612454/
many lnx
Is OAN the Leading Edge of Russian Misinformation?
The Biden campaign says Trump’s favorite TV network is peddling the Kremlin’s lies.
EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
JUNE 11, 2020
In what appears to be a signal of intensifying political warfare ahead of the November election, One America News Network, the Trump-supporting cable channel that has been promoting anti-Biden conspiracies for several months, says it has obtained several hours of secret recordings of then–Vice President Biden’s conversations with Ukrainian officials. If such recordings exist, they’re likely linked to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine and a Russian intelligence operation, two former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine and a former ambassador to Russia told me. The OAN employee who claims to have the tapes would not say what was on them, other than suggesting that they will be revelatory.
In the audio that has been released elsewhere so far, Biden is heard dangling the promise of financial aid to Ukraine if its government ousted a prosecutor who was seen as corrupt—which Biden has previously said publicly was his goal, as part of a push for widespread reforms. Conspiracists have alleged that this was intended to help his son Hunter escape charges of corruption, but an audit by Ukraine’s former top prosecutor released last week found no evidence of illegal activity by Hunter in his capacity as an energy-company board member.
[MORE STORIES
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Democracy Versus Kleptocracy
FRANKLIN FOER
The Press Is Embracing False Equivalence—Again
JAMES FALLOWS
Rudy Giuliani: ‘You Should Be Happy for Your Country That I Uncovered This’
ELAINA PLOTT]
What is most remarkable here is that none of this is particularly surprising. Russian interference in the 2016 election has been closely studied over the past four years, and America’s vulnerabilities have only worsened in that time. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote recently, “Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020.” That OAN is now a player in such interference suggests an escalation that the Biden campaign has been bracing for.
Indeed, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul—who has recalled being secretly recorded himself, among other forms of harassment, when he was posted in Moscow—told me, "There’s never been a moment like this in American history.”
[Read Putin is well on his way to stealing the next election
That includes 2016. McFaul said what he’s seeing now reminds him of tactics the Kremlin has used against its domestic political opponents. “It’s not to convince you of a different point of view. It’s to convince you that there is no truth,” he said. “When it feels like nobody’s telling the truth and there is no truth, the reaction to that is despondency and demobilization.”
It’s hard not to feel some déjà vu here. In 2016, Russian intelligence agents hacked the emails of Democratic National Committee staffers and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and delivered them to WikiLeaks, as a way to get them into the American media. Some outlets learned a lesson from that episode, and have treated new Biden recordings out of Ukraine with care. Others have not. Andriy Derkach, who released the Biden tapes that have already come out, is a former member of a pro-Russian political party who graduated from a KGB-run academy in Moscow. OAN lends his efforts a veneer, however thin, of journalistic legitimacy.
The person now claiming to have more tapes is OAN’s Chanel Rion, the on-air personality who went with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, on his December trip to Ukraine in part to find information on Biden to help Trump. Rion, who has become famous for her conspiracy-inflected questions at White House briefings, emailed the Biden campaign May 29 claiming that she was working on an “in-depth report” about recordings that appear to be of Biden speaking with Petro Poroshenko, then the president of Ukraine. “We have over five hours of these recordings (beyond what has been posted online by Nabu Leaks),” she wrote, referencing a Ukrainian website suspected of Russian links.
Derkach, a politician known as the “Ukrainian Putin,” has been a proponent of the conspiracy theory that Ukraine was really behind the interference in the 2016 election instead of Russia. And he has previously been eager to provide damaging material about Biden for Trump’s sake. Derkach released a batch of recordings three weeks ago, claiming that they had been made by Poroshenko and given to him by “investigative journalists.” (Poroshenko has said the audio is “fabricated.”) Most mainstream-media outlets have decided that the recordings that have emerged so far offer “little new insight into Biden’s actions in Ukraine,” as The Washington Post’s Carol Morello wrote after the recordings were first released.
Giuliani, reached by text, did not comment on suspicions that the recordings have ties to Russian interests or intelligence, or on whether he was involved in getting any of them to OAN.
Rion was until recently an illustrator. She has said she joined members of the Trump family in 2016 for the New Hampshire primary’s victory party; she has also tweeted a drawing of Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein with the hashtag #spiritcooking, which is often associated with the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. On her website, she describes herself as “a fierce foe of anything Clinton, of everything Obama, and as a total and unrelenting enemy of academic left-liberalism and political correctness anywhere.”
In March, she cited a “monitored source” on air who’d said that the coronavirus had been linked to a lab in North Carolina; that source turned out to be a person who’d tweeted at her. She has asked wild questions at White House briefings, including one about whether Trump would pardon Barack Obama for unspecified crimes, and another about whether Trump’s lawyers would like to depose Joe Scarborough, after Trump floated a baseless accusation that he’d murdered an aide.
Rion’s email, which the Biden campaign forwarded to me, suggests that OAN is “producing an in-depth report on these recordings for OAN's Special Investigates series.” In a phone call on Sunday, she told me that she now expects to acquire much more than the five hours of recordings she mentioned in her email. Rion said that Derkach was just one of the people who have been giving her material. She said she has verified, with the help of “a couple of sources on the ground,” and with sources in the U.S. as well, that the recordings have no ties to Russian intelligence or interests. She would not explain her verification process, saying, “I don't want to tip off anybody.”
It was once unusual for the public to gain access to top-secret government documents, let alone private conversations between the American vice president and a foreign leader. But as countries around the world increase their cyberwar capabilities and their willingness to interfere in one another’s domestic politics, and as the democratization of publishing allows for the rapid spread of misinformation, media leaks of hard-to-verify and potentially doctored documents and recordings of government officials are becoming commonplace.
“It is common practice for Russian intelligence to help put out information in skewed forms in Ukraine, and forensic experts have seen that this information is doctored,” said John Herbst, a former career Foreign Service officer who served as the American ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006.“The Kremlin is a master at this sort of practice, and the sources in Ukraine providing this sort of information are known to be well connected in Moscow.”
Herbst was one of seven former ambassadors to Ukraine who wrote an open letter to Ukrainians two weeks ago, prompted by the already-public recordings. They said they are “disheartened by efforts to involve Ukraine in America’s domestic politics as the 2020 US presidential election approaches.”
“This all just confirms what we knew,” said Steven Pifer, another former ambassador to Ukraine, who signed the letter.
David A. Graham: What happened in Ukraine?
Russia would love to “somehow inject Ukraine back into American politics,” Pifer said. “There will be people on the American side who play into it—OAN is one.”
The Biden campaign says OAN’s willingness to play along is exactly why the network received the recordings. “In 2016 and ever since, hostile foreign actors have perpetrated insidious efforts to disfigure and poison American democracy. Yesterday’s hacked emails are today’s bugged phones and deepfakes,” Andrew Bates, a campaign spokesperson, told me.
An OAN spokesperson, Krista McClelland, did not respond to a request for comment about the suggestion that the recordings have links to Russian intelligence. Nor did she respond to the Biden campaign’s charges.
Other countries are stepping up their own efforts to get involved in this year’s elections; Iran and China, for example, have been linked to attempts to hack Biden and Trump campaign computers. But Russia continues to lead the misinformation game. The day after Rion reached out to Biden’s team, Sputnik—the Kremlin-owned propaganda service, which American intelligence has accused of being involved in the 2016 misinformation efforts—ran an interview with a former Poroshenko aide who claimed that he was the one who’d made the recordings, and that he’d given them to his lawyers to give the Trump administration. “Because of the coronavirus,” he said,” they are waiting. But in September, closer to elections, they will begin to use them more.”
There’s no evidence to support this. But the Trump campaign doesn’t seem to have much interest in dampening ideas like it: The communications director, Tim Murtaugh, didn’t respond to multiple emailsI sent about whether the campaign has more materials from Ukraine featuring Biden, and neither did White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley.
Election Day is in five months. And the people best positioned to knock down the Russian misinformation apparatus seem most interested instead in propping it up
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trump campaign getting little/no traction on ukraine biden, but
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active measures russia
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/democrats-raise-alarms-about-the-trump-administration-concealing-threats-to-the-2020-election/
no lnx
Democrats raise alarms about the Trump administration concealing threats to the 2020 election
Written by Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos August 7, 2020
Congressional Democrats are sounding the alarm bells about 2016 redux playing out in this year’s election with extensive foreign interference while American voters are left in the dark.
Shortly before a closed-door intelligence briefing for senators on Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the classified documents he had reviewed as “chilling.”
“Declassify this information,” he urged in a tweet. “Americans deserve & need to know about ongoing foreign interference (even sabotage) in our election system.”
Now three of his Democratic colleagues have written to FBI Director Chris Wray, urging him to go public with the attacks being leveled at U.S. elections by foreign actors. The Democrats—Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois; and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee—seem particularly concerned about foreign disinformation being targeted at Congress, laundered by certain members, and then disseminated to the public with the apparent imprimatur of a U.S. lawmaker. Specifically, Democrats believe they are seeing that play out with a probe GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is currently leading into Joe Biden’s Ukraine diplomacy while he was vice president.
“Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi noted in their July 13th letter to you that ‘Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November,’” the senators wrote to Wray, in a letter obtained by Politico. “We attended classified briefings from the intelligence community and FBI over the past week and our concerns with respect to this targeting have only grown.”
Pelosi and Schumer attached an addendum to their mid-July letter singling out Johnson’s inquiry as a vehicle for the spread of Russian disinformation.
The briefings have detailed malign actions taken by both Russia and China. Politico reports that in one briefing, William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, admitted under pressure from Pelosi that Russia is specifically trying to help Trump get reelected while politically damaging Biden.
The briefings have also singled out Ukrainian individuals by name such as Andrii Telizhenko and Andrii Derkach who have made dubious claims about both the Democratic National Committee and Joe Biden. Both men also say they have turned over information to Sen. Johnson’s investigators.
The letter from Menendez, Durbin, and Reed pressed Wray to brief all senators on the information so they would be aware of foreign efforts to manipulate them. “Members must understand the risks inherent in accepting information generated by foreign sources, especially those committees currently conducting investigations,” they wrote.
Johnson remains obstinate about such warnings, saying Democrats’ objections only lead him to believe he’s on the right track. Johnson, who gave Trump cover on his initial effort to illegally fabricate a Ukrainian investigation, seems dead set on delivering Trump the corrupt Ukraine probe that was scuttled last year by a whistleblower complaint. Apparently, voting to acquit Trump of soliciting foreign help in his reelection wasn’t enough for Johnson. Now he’s recreating the bogus investigation that even Ukrainian officials refused to conduct.
It should be incumbent on the FBI to make crystal clear to the American people who’s trying to manipulate this election and how they are trying to do so. Nothing less than the integrity of U.S. elections and the future of the republic are at stake.
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5/20 djt going after mueller/collusion, flynn
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/federal-judge-who-sentenced-roger-stone-to-prison-orders-trump-administration-to-turn-over-foiad-ukraine-emails/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-rudy-giuliani-became-the-shadow-secretary-of-state-with-shady-ties-sprawling-far-beyond-ukraine/
no lnx
How Rudy Giuliani became the shadow secretary of state — with shady ties sprawling far beyond Ukraine
President Donald J. Trump recognizes former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani prior to signing H.R. 1327; an act to permanently authorize the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund Monday, July 29, 2019, in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
Written by Bob Dreyfuss / TomDispatch March 6, 2020
Imagine, just for the sake of argument, that the president of the United States was an arrogant, information-challenged, would-be autocrat with a soft spot for authoritarian leaders from China, Russia, and North Korea to Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. And then, suppose that very president, while hollowing out the State Department and slamming its diplomats as “Deep State” troublemakers, were to name a voluble wheeler-dealer attorney as his unofficial, freelance White House go-between with shady characters worldwide. Imagine further that the president would do an end run around the professionals of the U.S. intelligence community — more Deep Staters, natch — and rely instead on conspiracy theories trundled back to Washington in that attorney’s briefcase.
Now, one last unimaginable thing, but humor me: accept that the attorney in question went by the name of Rudy Giuliani.
That, of course, is a reasonable description of the state of America in 2020. Three-plus years into Donald Trump’s misshapen presidency, as the “adults” fled the room one by one or were pushed to the exits, the president was left with a rump collection of family loyalists and third-tier yes-people around him.
Rarely, if ever, do mainstream media types take a step back to survey the classic Star Wars bar-like crew of know-nothings, Bible-thumpers, and connivers who’ve been assembled as Trump’s “team” and their breathtaking incompetence and perfidy. Luckily, with Giuliani in the mix, there’s at least one figure so wildly over-the-top that analysts and pundits have heaped scorn or ridicule on his head, and often his alone, as a person so outrageously unfit, so borderline deranged, so nakedly in it for profit that it’s impossible to consider him without marveling at the tragicomedy of it all.
Since 2017, however, Rudy Giuliani has emerged as Trump’s shadow secretary of state with his hands in American foreign policy and politics from Iran to Russia, Turkey to Ukraine and beyond. That means anyone, anywhere in the world, with a few million bucks to proffer and an angle to pursue in Washington can avoid Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Christian-right uber-hawk from Kansas, and sidle up instead to the former U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York and mayor of New York City.
During most of 2019, as is well known to anyone who even casually followed the impeachment proceedings in Congress, Giuliani had a starring role in President Trump’s conspiracy-laden efforts to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, were mixed up in something nefarious there. (To those in the reality-based world, of course, it was Russia, not Ukraine that meddled massively in 2016. And the Bidens, it’s clear, did nothing illegal in Kyiv.)
As we shall see, the Trump-Giuliani conspiracy theory about that country originated with and was “fertilized” by three individuals who’d earlier been caught up in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of the White House: Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security advisor in the White House; Paul Manafort, who chaired Trump’s election campaign; and Manafort’s Ukraine partner and ally, an apparent operative for Russia’s GRU intelligence service, Konstantin Kilimnik. In other words, the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine adventure did indeed get a boost from Vladimir Putin’s secret service and Moscow’s propaganda machine.
You’ll remember, perhaps, or maybe you’ve forgotten, that before Mike Pompeo was secretary of state, before his predecessor Rex (“Rexxon”) Tillerson even took the job, it looked for a while like Giuliani was going to get it. He and Donald Trump had been political friends-with-benefits since the mid-1990s, as evidenced by a cringe-worthy 2000 video of Trump placing his lips unbidden on Giuliani-in-drag’s “breast.” The former mayor had quietly sought to reposition himself as the reincarnation of Roy Cohn, the mob-connected lawyer who had been a mentor to the up-and-coming New York real estate tycoon. (“Where’s my Roy Cohn?”) It’s hardly surprising then that, following Trump’s surprise victory in November 2016, Giuliani began lobbying hard for the secretary of state job. At the same time, he was fervently urging the president-elect not to select never-Trumper Mitt Romney for it. (Giuliani did, however, also endorse John Bolton, Washington’s warmonger-in-chief, for the job.)
Back in 2016, a week or so after the election, a New York Times editorial drily noted that the appointment of Giuliani as secretary of state “would be a dismal and potentially disastrous choice,” that he lacked “any substantive diplomatic experience and has demonstrated poor judgment throughout his career,” appeared “unhinged,” and would come with a “flurry of potential conflicts of interest.” And keep in mind that, back then, Giuliani was only getting started.
In recent years, much has been written, and accurately so, about the exodus of veteran diplomats — ambassadors to toilers in the ranks — from a gutted Foggy Bottom and its global outposts under both Tillerson and Pompeo. Writing last October for Foreign Affairs, for instance, former diplomat William Burns noted that fewer people took the department’s entrance exam in 2019 than in any year in previous decades. “Career diplomats,” wrote Burns, “are sidelined, with only one of 28 assistant secretary-rank positions filled by a Foreign Service officer, and more ambassadorships going to political appointees in this administration than in any in recent history.” He added: “One-fifth of ambassadorships remain unfilled, including critical posts.”
At the State Department, as one ambassador told the Hill, morale “is at a new low, although I am not sure it could fall much lower than where it has been for the past three years.” And that decline only accelerated after the humiliating dismissal of the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch, whose ouster was orchestrated by Giuliani.
To be sure, the State Department was never a progressive bastion, not during the Cold War years nor in the era when America was the global hyperpower. It is, nonetheless, the main vehicle for any president wishing to use the levers of diplomacy rather than the oft-chosen military option. Now, with the adults gone and the diplomats increasingly neutered, we’re left with Trump and Giuliani. Neither hawks nor doves, they’re vultures, viewing every country as part of a vast veldt where they can pick at carcasses of every sort for their own business or political gain.
How to Become a Shadow Secretary of State
Giuliani’s foreign policy portfolio extends far and wide, though it was in Ukraine — specifically with that country’s many corrupt, Russian-leaning oligarchs — that he rocketed to world attention and helped trigger the president’s impeachment. In his world travels, Giuliani has combined his roles as businessman, security consultant, political fixer, and the president’s personal attorney into a mishmash of overlapping identities. He has, in other words, become a kind of walking, talking conflict-of-interest machine.
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.
Case in point: his long-time affiliation with the People’s Jihadists, otherwise known as the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq, or MEK. Like many of Giuliani’s escapades abroad, his efforts with MEK were a money-making project.Along with John Bolton, the late Senator John McCain, former National Security Advisor Jim Jones, and former Attorney General Mike Mukasey, Giuliani has for years been affiliated with the MEK, making perhaps a dozen appearances, mostly paid speeches, at its conventions and rallies.
The MEK has almost no support inside Iran, not only because it’s conducted a terror campaign against that country’s top officials since 1981, but because it operated with the backing of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein during and after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It’s also widely regarded as a cult. Last year, in the midst of his anti-Joe Biden skullduggery in Ukraine, in his 11th appearance at an MEK confab, Giuliani traveled to Albania, of all places, where the group has established a military and political base. There, he called Trump “heroic” for “doing away with the reckless nuclear agreement and putting [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] on the terrorist list.”
In 2018, this reporter attended one of the MEK’s large-scale events, held at a hotel in midtown New York City. General Jim Jones, who became an ultra-hawk after being ousted as President Obama’s national security advisor in 2010, spoke to the gathering first, noting proudly that he is supposedly on a list of people the government in Tehran plans to assassinate.
Rising to speak after Jones, Giuliani seemed jealous. “I hope I say enough offensive things that they’ll put me on that list to kill me,” he commented. Needless to say, both Jones and Giuliani are still alive and kicking, and there’s no evidence that either one is on any Iranian kill list. However, thanks in part to Giuliani’s hardline, anti-Iran advice to the president, that country’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, was indeed placed on a presidential kill list and drone assassinated as 2020 began.
And Then There Was Ukraine
It was, of course, in connection with Ukraine that Giuliani’s freelancing came to the world’s attention. In the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s impeachment report, his name is mentioned about 160 times. He’s cited, first and foremost because, in that infamous “perfect” July 2019 phone call of his, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work through him; because the former mayor was the primary organizer of the smear campaign against the actual ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was subsequently fired; and because it was he who, starting as early as May 2019, masterminded a months-long political witch hunt against the Bidens, demanding over and over that Ukraine carry out an ersatz investigation of the man the president then expected to be his chief 2020 election opponent.
Numerous figures, including Ambassador Bill Taylor, who succeeded Yovanovitch at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, would express dismay over Giuliani’s role as the “irregular” channel for the Trump administration’s Ukraine policy — the “Giuliani factor,” as Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker called it. The story of how all this led to the president’s impeachment is too well known to be rehashed here.
The Joe Biden/Hunter Biden part of the Ukraine story was straightforward enough in its own way. Far more complicated and troubling was the adherence of the president and Giuliani to a weird conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, used its intelligence service to try to sway the 2016 election. According to various official reports and in the opinion of virtually every expert who’s studied the matter, it was Russia that intervened to boost Trump’s election campaign. According to Trump and Giuliani, however, Ukraine meddled in 2016 on behalf of Hillary Clinton and indeed, they argue, the actual Democratic National Committee server somehow found its way to Kyiv, thanks to a computer security firm called CrowdStrike, which Trump claimed was owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. (It is not.)
Naturally enough, this Trump-Giuliani theory was nonsense, but according to the Washington Post, it had its origins — perhaps not surprisingly — in propaganda generated in Moscow. The Post reported that Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Manafort’s partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, “played a role in convincing Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite what both Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community have concluded, and that it was actually Ukraine.”
According to Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy, the Ukraine conspiracy theory originated with his boss who “parroted” the line from Kilimnik. And both Manafort and Kilimnik — who was indicted by Mueller — had ties to Moscow operatives and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, while Kilimnik himself was identified by Mueller and the FBI as part of Russia’s GRU.
As the Post concluded: “So we have two men [Manafort and Flynn] who have been convicted of offenses related to their Russia ties, have both lied to investigators about their interactions with Russian interests, and who apparently played a significant role in pushing a theory to Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 election. They instead pointed the finger at Russia’s nemesis, Ukraine, and that has apparently stuck with Trump for more than three years.”
And it was that line that would be spread eagerly by pro-Trump writers like the Hill’s John Solomon. In a review of Solomon’s pieces, released this month, the Hill’s editors analyzed 14 of his columns with titles like “As Russian collusion fades, Ukraine plot to help Clinton emerges.” In doing so, they found numerous troubling facts about Solomon, his sources, and his overall reporting. As the Hill report put it:
“Giuliani has indicated he was a key source of information for Solomon on Ukraine, telling the New York Times in November 2019 that he turned over information about the Bidens earlier in the year to Solomon. ‘I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,’ Giuliani said.
“The former New York City mayor later told the New Yorker he encouraged Solomon to highlight information on the Bidens and Yovanovitch, stating, ‘I said, “John, let’s make this as prominent as possible,”’ adding, “‘I’ll go on TV. You go on TV. You do columns.’”
Two colorful characters who acted as Giuliani’s Ukraine go-betweens, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, have been indicted on conspiracy chargesand, according to Fortune, Giuliani, too, could be indicted in that case. As CNN noted in January, it’s nearly unheard of for a U.S. Attorney’s office — in this case the one for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) — to end up indicting a former U.S. attorney who led the same district. CNN added: “The SDNY community has watched in disbelief as Giuliani continues to seek the spotlight even as the investigation has unfolded and expanded into new fronts on a nearly weekly basis. The impeachment inquiry has also unleashed new evidence regarding his role performing shadow diplomacy on behalf of President Donald Trump as recently as [mid-January].”
Indeed, Giuliani is still at it. In concert with a collection of corrupt ex-prosecutors in Ukraine and in his ongoing role as shadow secretary of state-cum-intelligence chief, Giuliani is still gathering conspiracy-riddled information on the Bidens in Kyiv — and Attorney General William Barr has obligingly created an “intake process in the field” to absorb Giuliani’s work product straight into the Department of Justice. One thing is guaranteed: “Secretary of State” Giuliani will have a clear field in Kyiv, since Ambassador Taylor was unceremoniously fired on January 1st of this year.
Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Bob Dreyfuss
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Midnight revelation: The OMB has been withholding emails that explicitly show Trump’s motives on Ukraine
Mark Sumner / Daily KosFebruary 2, 2020
A midnight court filing on Friday night revealed that the White House is refusing to release at least two dozen emails directly related to Donald Trump’s withholding of military assistance from…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/lev-parnas-is-afraid-of-bill-barr-he-should-be
no lnx
Lev Parnas is afraid of Bill Barr. He should be.
Written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute January 24, 2020
Lev Parnas recently told Rachel Maddow that he’s more afraid of Attorney General Bill Barr than he is of the mobbed-up foreign oligarchs he has betrayed. Barr, after all, can weaponize our prisons to punish Parnas.
“Am I scared?” he said. “Yes, because I think I’m more scared of our own Justice Department than these criminals right now.”
An attorney general willing to bend or even break the law—and certainly willing to conceal crimes and lie to the American people—can be a corrupt president’s last line of defense.
When a whistleblower in the White House reported that Trump was bribing and extorting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that report first went to Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who thought it was evidence Trump had committed a serious crime. Atkinson deemed it an “urgent concern” and then gave it to Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. Under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, Maguire was supposed to then hand it over to congressional intelligence committees. Instead, he made a pit-stop at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which handed it over to Bill Barr’s office.
Which is where it died, until ICIG Atkinson reached out to the House Intelligence Committee to let them know about Barr’s cover-up.
The whistleblower’s complaint is quite specific. “The whistleblower implicates Barr directly in the opening lines of the complaint,” Tessa Berenson wrote for Time magazine on September 26, 2019. She then quoted from the whistleblower:
“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.
“The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort.
“Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”
The language the whistleblower uses calls to mind the 1972 press reports of Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell hiring former FBI Agent Stephen King to physically assault and mollify Mitchell’s own wife to keep her quiet about his and Nixon’s crimes. (King, now 78, was richly rewarded for his lifetime of service to the GOP in a breathtaking way by Donald Trump; more about that in a minute.)
Like Mitchell before him, Barr has long experience covering up the crimes of a corrupt Republican president. We know, because Barr has done it before.
How Barr Earned the Moniker ‘Coverup-General’
The week of Christmas, 1992, George H.W. Bush was on his way out of office. Bill Clinton had won the White House the month before, and in a few weeks would be sworn in as president.
But Bush’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to Connecticut, Maine, or Texas (where he had mansions) but, rather, that he might end up in a federal prison. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was closing in fast on him, and Bush’s diary was a key to it all.
Walsh had been appointed independent counsel in 1986, to investigate the Iran-Contra crimes of the Reagan administration, and he’d already secured several convictions. The entire criminal enterprise was beginning to unravel, and the American people were watching with horror and fascination.
Did the plot start in the spring of 1980 during the Reagan vs. Carter election, as a way of having the Iranians hold the hostages long enough to humiliate President Carter and cost him the election? Did Bush campaign manager Bill Casey do it all himself, or, as with Nixon/Agnew in 1968, did the presidential candidate and his former CIA director and then-VP candidate, George H.W. Bush, participate?
The president of Iran during the hostage crisis, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, wrote for the Christian Science Monitor in 2013 that:
“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”
Or was the Iran-Contra conspiracy limited, as Reagan and Bush insisted (and Reagan confessed on TV), to later years in the Reagan presidency, in response to a hostage-taking in Lebanon? Who knew what, and when?
Walsh had zeroed in on Iran-related documents that were in the possession of Reagan’s former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who all the evidence showed was definitely in on the deal, and Bush’s diary that could corroborate it.
Weinberger was preparing to testify that Bush knew about the deal with Iran and even participated, and Walsh had already, based on information he’d obtained from the investigation into Weinberger, demanded that Bush turn over his diary from the campaign.
Bush was panicked. And he only had three more weeks of safety in office before Bill Clinton was to be sworn in.
So Bush called in his attorney general, Bill Barr, and asked his advice.
Barr was already in trouble for covering up another crime committed by Reagan and Bush a few years earlier: the selling of weapons of mass destruction to Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, in violation of federal law. Why not double down?
On October 19, 1992, iconic New York Times columnist William Safire referred to Barr not as “Attorney General” but, instead, as “Coverup-General,” noting that Barr was already covering up for Reagan and Bush—and, apparently, himself.
Safire wrote of Barr’s unwillingness to appoint an independent counsel to look into “Iraqgate” (what the newspapers were calling the Reagan/Bush administration’s illegal sale of WMDs to Iraq):
“Why does the Coverup-General resist independent investigation? Because he knows where it may lead: to Dick Thornburgh, James Baker, Clayton Yeutter, Brent Scowcroft and himself. He vainly hopes to be able to head it off…”
Just two months later, Bush was asking Barr for advice on how to avoid a second very serious charge in the Iran-Contra crimes. How, Bush wanted to know, could they shut down Walsh’s investigation before Walsh’s lawyers got their hands on Bush’s incriminating diary that they’d subpoenaed?
The story came out almost a decade later, although few seemed to notice; politics had moved on, Barr was in private practice, and a new Bush was president.
In April of 2001, safely distant from the swirl of D.C. politics, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center was compiling oral presidential histories, and interviewed Barr about his time as AG in the Bush White House. They brought up the issue of the Weinberger pardon, and Barr’s involvement in it.
Turns out, Barr was right in the middle of it.
“There were some people arguing just for [a pardon for] Weinberger, and I said, ‘No, in for a penny, in for a pound,’” Barr told the interviewer. “I went over and told the President I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others.”
Which is exactly what George H.W. Bush did, on Christmas Eve, 1992, when most Americans weren’t checking the news. The holiday notwithstanding, the result was explosive.
Americans knew that both Reagan and Bush were up to their necks in the Iran-Contra crimes, and both could be facing prison time as a result. The independent counsel had already obtained one conviction and three guilty pleas, and two other individuals were lined up for prosecution. And Walsh was closing in fast on Bush himself, who would lose his immunity in three weeks.
So, when Bush shut the investigation down by pardoning not only Weinberger, but also the five others known to be involved in the crime, destroying Walsh’s ability to prosecute anybody, the New York Times freaked out.
The headline of a story by David Johnston ran all the way across four of the six columns on the December 25, 1992, front page of the Times, screaming in all-caps: BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP.’
Bill Barr had struck.
Johnston’s second paragraph laid it out:
“Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger’s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush’s endorsement of the secret [weapons] shipments to Iran.” (emphasis added)
It was déjà vu all over again, as can be seen in William Safire’s coverage. Four months earlier, referring to Iraqgate, Safire opened his article, titled “Justice [Department] Corrupts Justice,” by writing:
“U.S. Attorney General William Barr, in rejecting the House Judiciary Committee’s call for a prosecutor not beholden to the Bush Administration to investigate the crimes of Iraqgate, has taken personal charge of the cover-up.”
Safire accused Barr of not only rigging the cover-up, but of being one of the criminals who could be prosecuted.
“Mr. Barr,” wrote Safire in August of 1992, “could face prosecution if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein’s perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine.” He added, “They [Barr and colleagues] have a keen personal and political interest in seeing to it that the Department of Justice stays in safe, controllable Republican hands.”
In August and September of 1992, Barr had succeeded in blocking the appointment of an investigator or independent counsel to look into Iraqgate. In December, Barr helped Bush shoot down another independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, and eliminated any risk that George H.W. Bush would be prosecuted for his Iran-Contra crimes.
Independent Counsel Walsh, wrote Johnston for the Times on Christmas Eve in 1992, “plans to review a 1986 campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush.” The diary would be the smoking gun that would nail Bush to the crimes.
“But,” noted Johnston, “in a single stroke, Mr. Bush swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986.”
Walsh didn’t take it lying down, even though he knew the cover-up was now finalized.
Johnston noted that, “Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that ‘the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.’”
As Johnston reported, Walsh added that the diary and notes he wanted to enter into a public trial of Weinberger represented, “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”
Walsh had been fighting to get those documents ever since 1986, when he was appointed and Reagan still had two years left in office. Bush’s and Weinberger’s refusal to turn them over, Johnston noted in the Times, could have, in Walsh’s words, “forestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan” through a “pattern of ‘deception and obstruction.’”
Barr successfully helped Bush decapitate the investigation into Bush’s crimes.
Now it appears that Barr is doing the same sort of cover-up work for Trump.
Part of a Pattern Among Republican Attorneys General
It’s amazing the power that an attorney general has, particularly when wielded by a man who thinks himself above the law and immune to public opinion.
Back in Nixon’s day, for example, Jeb Magruder told reporters Nixon had ordered his own attorney general, John Mitchell, to cover up parts of the Watergate break-in. (Magruder later went to prison for his actions.)
John Mitchell’s wife Martha learned about it and was in the process of telling United Press International reporter Helen Thomas the story over the phone when one of John Mitchell’s men burst in as she was saying, according to Thomas, “You just get away.”
Stephen King, then an ex-FBI agent whom Mitchell had assigned to watch his wife, had, according to Newsweek’s account of how veteran crime reporter Marcia Kramer heard it from Martha Mitchell, broken into the room, pulled the phone out of her hands and out of the wall, and then beat her black-and-blue and sedated her with an injection.
James McCord, who was convicted of conspiracy and burglary in the Watergate affair on behalf of Attorney General Mitchell and President Nixon, told a reporter: “Martha’s story is true—basically, the woman was kidnapped. … they kept her locked up and she began to be afraid for her life.”
Earlier, I mentioned that King would be repaid for his involvement in Mitchell’s cover-up: Today, King is the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, a post Donald Trump appointed him to in July of 2017 and Mitch McConnell’s Senate confirmed him to on October 5, 2017.
John Mitchell went to prison for his work for Nixon, although he continued to pull political strings from inside his prison cell. There’s something about Republican attorneys general that makes this kind of rulebreaking a pattern.
Barr’s Latest Cover-Up
Even more brazen than John Mitchell, Barr may today be pushing the Justice Department to use its investigative power to punish the president’s political enemies and cover up Trump’s crimes.
First, Barr lied to the American press and public about the contents of Robert Mueller’s report on at least 10 instances of criminal obstruction of justice by Trump, and multiple efforts to collude with foreign governments to become president. Barr is still hiding grand jury testimony that many speculate could land Trump and his co-conspirators in prison.
Barr’s Justice Department conducted investigations of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, and James Comey, and Barr had one of his prosecutors dig into the whistleblowers’ sources who spoke to Robert Mueller about Trump’s multiple attempts to collude with foreign governments, including Russia, to steal the 2016 election.
Lev Parnas, like Hitchcock’s “man who knew too much,” apparently fears that he’s going to be next and, because he actually participated in well-documented crimes at Trump’s request, he may end up with a long and particularly brutal prison term—or worse.
Barr also appears to be the key to Trump’s power at the moment. He covered up the gravity of the Muller investigation, nearly successfully hid the whistleblower’s report, and could be covering up dozens of other things that we don’t know about because… he’s covering them up.
As Parnas said to Maddow, “The difference between why Trump is so powerful now, and he wasn’t as powerful in ’16 and ’17… [is that] he became that powerful when he got William Barr.”
Democrats in the House who are considering where to next turn their investigation lens may well find a rich vein to mine in looking at Barr.
That is assuming, of course, that potential anti-Trump, anti-Barr witnesses like Parnas don’t start dying in federal custody like the man Bill Barr’s dad hired, Jeffrey Epstein. Were that to happen, congressional investigators may be left with no witnesses to interrogate.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 25 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/lev-parnass-lawyer-declared-open-war-on-ag-bill-barr-during-maddow-interview-attorney/
no lnx
Lev Parnas’s lawyer declared ‘open war’ on AG Bill Barr during Maddow interview: attorney
Lev Parnas and his attorney appear on The Rachel Maddow show.
Written by Bob Brigham / Raw Story January 25, 2020
The attorney for Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas appears to be using a novel legal strategy, attorney Luppe Luppen explained on Friday.
Joseph Bondy, the attorney for Parnas, was interviewed Friday evening by Rachel Maddow, following the day’s end of the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
Luppen, who offers legal analysis on his popular @nycsouthpaw Twitter account, came to a conclusion that seemed to surprise him after watching the interview.
“I’ve never seen a lawyer sit on a cable panel show and make that much news,” Luppen wrote.
CNN reporter Shimon Prokupecz had a question for Luppen.
“What is the ultimate strategy here?” Prokupecz asked. “It’s clear from his interview SDNY has no interest in him. He is suggesting Fruman behind the smear campaign against Yovanovitch. I can’t see SDNY being happy with any of this.”
“I feel foolish saying it, but it seems like he’s trying to change the leadership of the Justice Department,” Luppen replied.
“Barr shouldn’t be his main concern here,” Prokupecz replied. “He should be more concerned with the career public corruption prosecutors and the tenacious public corruption FBI team in NY investigating the case.”
“I agree, but so far he’s filed a request for Barr’s recusal, orchestrated a media campaign insinuating some dark ‘conflict’ is keeping SDNY from coming to the table with him, contributed evidence to the impeachment, and openly talked about a downward departure for helping congress,” Luppen noted.
“I don’t know what else it adds up to if not basically an open war on Barr and his boss. But again, I feel a bit foolish saying so,” he added.
southpaw
@nycsouthpaw
I’ve never seen a lawyer sit on a cable panel show and make that much news.
Shimon Prokupecz
@ShimonPro
What is the ultimate strategy here? It’s clear from his interview SDNY has no interest in him. He is suggesting Fruman behind the smear campaign against Yovanovitch. I can’t see SDNY being happy with any of this.
What is the ultimate strategy here? It’s clear from his interview SDNY has no interest in him. He is suggesting Fruman behind the smear campaign against Yovanovitch. I can’t see SDNY being happy with any of this.
— Shimon Prokupecz (@ShimonPro) January 25, 2020
southpaw
@nycsouthpaw
- 18h
Replying to @ShimonPro
I feel foolish saying it, but it seems like he’s trying to change the leadership of the Justice Department.
Shimon Prokupecz
?
@ShimonPro
Barr shouldn’t be his main concern here. He should be more concerned with the career public corruption prosecutors and the tenacious public corruption FBI team in NY investigating the case.
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7:38 PM - Jan 24, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
20 people are talking about this
Barr shouldn’t be his main concern here. He should be more concerned with the career public corruption prosecutors and the tenacious public corruption FBI team in NY investigating the case.
— Shimon Prokupecz (@ShimonPro) January 25, 2020
southpaw
@nycsouthpaw
- 18h
Replying to @ShimonPro
I agree, but so far he’s filed a request for Barr’s recusal, orchestrated a media campaign insinuating some dark “conflict” is keeping SDNY from coming to the table w/ him, contributed evidence to the impeachment, and openly talked about a downward departure for helping congress
southpaw
@nycsouthpaw
I don’t know what else it adds up to if not basically an open war on Barr and his boss. But again, I feel a bit foolish saying so.
I don’t know what else it adds up to if not basically an open war on Barr and his boss. But again, I feel a bit foolish saying so.
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 25, 2020
Andrew Peng
@TheAPJournalist
- 18h
?? Here’s a portion of the Parnas recording with President Trump—obtained by @ABC. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/recording-appears-capture-trump-private-dinner-ukraine-ambassador/story?id=68506437 …
Embedded video
Andrew Peng
@TheAPJournalist
Lev Parnas’ attorney Joseph Bondy reacts on @maddow to the just-released tape from @ABC
Embedded video
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7:23 PM - Jan 24, 2020
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33 people are talking about this
Lev Parnas’ attorney Joseph Bondy reacts on @maddow to the just-released tape from @ABC pic.twitter.com/wrt6QcQpgd
— Andrew Peng (@TheAPJournalist) January 25, 2020
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the lost boys of Ukraine: How the war abroad attracted American white supremacists
As President Trump goes through an impeachment trial in the…
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/mike-pence-denied-knowing-lev-parnas-then-his-lawyer-shared-a-video-of-them-together/
no lnx
Mike Pence denied knowing Lev Parnas — then his lawyer shared a video of them together
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon January 21, 2020
An attorney for Lev Parnas, the indicted former Rudy Guliani associate, shared a video of his client meeting Vice President Mike Pence after Pence denied knowing his client.
“Pence does indeed know the guy,” Parnas attorney Joseph Bondy wrote on Twitter as he published a 23-second clip of Parnas alongside Pence and his wife.
The video, set to the song “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire, shows Parnas holding Karen Pence’s hand before she says something to him and pats him on the back. Parnas is seen extending his hand toward Pence, apparently waiting for a handshake.
Bondy provided no details about the context of the video but added a quote from European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony to Congress, in which he said that “everyone was in the loop” on the Ukraine scheme that led to President Donald Trump’s impeachment.
Joseph A. Bondy
@josephabondy
.@VP Mike Pence does indeed know the guy. “”Everyone was in the loop.“ -Gordon Sondland” -Lev Parnas #LevRemembers #LetLevSpeak #TheyAllKnew
Embedded video
As he urges Congress to allow Parnas to testify, Bondy has shared numerous videos, all set to catchy tunes, showing his client meeting with the president, as well as his family members, Cabinet officials and congressional allies.
Bondy published the video of Pence after the vice president denied knowing Parnas.
“I don’t know the guy,” Pence told reporters, calling Parnas’ claim that he was aware of the Ukraine scheme “completely false.”
Parnas, who was indicted on charges of illegally funneling foreign money to Republicans, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week that Pence was aware of the effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
“I’m going to use a famous quote from [Ambassador Gordon] Sondland,” he said. “Everybody was in the loop.”
Parnas told Maddow that Pence canceled his scheduled trip to attend Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration after Parnas warned an aide of Zelensky that the vice president would not attend if an investigation into Biden was not announced.
“The announcement was the key at that time because of the inauguration, and I told him Pence would not show up, nobody would show up to his inauguration,” Parnas said. “It was particularly Vice President Mike Pence.”
Parnas claimed that Pence canceled the trip after Parnas spoke with Zelensky adviser Sergei Schaffer.
“It was after my phone call. The conversation that I laid out to Mr. Schafer was basically what I was told to do by Giuliani and the president,” Parnas said. “And then afterwards, I got back to them, saying he was going to get back to me later tonight.”
Parnas said that Schafer blocked his number on WhatsApp.
“I remember Rudy going, ‘OK. They’ll see.’ To my awareness, Trump called to say, ‘Make sure Pence doesn’t go [to the inauguration],'” Parnas told Maddow.
Asked if Pence canceled his trip because of the disagreement, Parnas replied, “It was, 100 percent. I know it was, 100 percent.”
Amee Vanderpool
@girlsreallyrule
Here is Lev Parnas confirming that Mike Pence knew exactly why his trip to Zelensky's inauguration was canceled and why Pence was going to Poland in place of Trump and was complicit in assisting with Trump's quid pro quo with Ukraine. #MaddowParnas
"Everybody was in the loop."
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White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham denied the allegation and called the former Giuliani associate who aided the shadow diplomacy effort in Ukraine a discredited witness.
“These allegations are being made by a man who is currently out on bail for federal crimes and is desperate to reduce his exposure to prison,” she said. “The facts haven’t changed: The president did nothing wrong and this impeachment, which was manufactured and carried out by the Democrats has been a sham from the start.”
But Jennifer Williams, Pence’s top adviser on Russia, testified to Congress that she was surprised when Pence’s trip to the inauguration was abruptly canceled and learned that the move was directed by Trump himself.
“My understanding from my colleague — and, again, I wasn’t there for the conversation — was that the president asked the vice president not to attend,” she testified.
Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry traveled to the inauguration in his stead.
Parnas told Maddow that Perry told Giuliani he would attend the inauguration and asked him what he should discuss with Zelensky. Perry told Giuliani that he got Zelensky to agree to publicly announce the investigations Giuliani had sought after the trip, Parnas claimed.
Parnas said Giuliani later “blew his lid” when Zelensky failed to mention the Bidens when he announced a wide-ranging corruption investigation.
“It wasn’t supposed to be a corruption announcement,” Parnas said. “It [had] to be about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.”
Amee Vanderpool
@girlsreallyrule
Lev Parnas says Rick Perry played a role with Ukraine and that he and Giuliani communicated about the investigations Trump wanted and Perry was sent in to push Zelensky for the quid pro quo.
There is no doubt now that the Senate must call witnesses, including Giuliani and Perry.
Embedded video
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Parnas’ attorney said he met regularly with the “BLT Team,” a name taken from the restaurant where the group convened several times a week on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The BLT team included Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, and US Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief aide.
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forget if this is disambig/disaggrgate or new
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https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress/article239353658.html
Devin Nunes on Wednesday publicly acknowledged for the first time that he spoke with Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani who allegedly helped carry out President Donald Trump’s campaign to pressure the Ukrainian government for investigations that would benefit Trump’s re-election.
Nunes was first connected to Parnassix weeks ago, when a Democratic investigation published phone records showing that Nunes spoke with Parnas and with Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. Nunes initially said he did not recall the conversation. with Parnas
This week, Nunes said in an interview on Fox News that he remembered the call.
“It was very odd, random, talked about random things. I said great, just talk to my staff, boom boom boom, which is normal, standard operating procedure.”
Nunes’ acknowledgment of the interaction coincided with Parnas’ appearance on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show. Parnas said he didn’t have much of a relationship with Nunes, although Parnas said he met with Nunes “several times” at a Trump hotel.
“He knows who I am,” Parnas said about Nunes.
Parnas said he worked with one of Nunes’ aides who was “looking into this Ukraine stuff also and wanted to help out….he had a lot of information already.”
Nunes’ office did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
WHAT TRUMP WANTED FROM UKRAINE
Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, was a vigorous Trump defender at the House impeachment hearings.
The hearings centered on diplomats’ testimony that the White House withheld security assistance from Ukraine as Trump pressed Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation into business dealings carried out by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
“I was in shock when I was watching the hearings...I text my attorney and said I can’t believe this is happening,” Parnas said. “Because they were involved in getting all this stuff on Biden.” The aide, Parnas said, had interviews with Ukrainian sources he helped arrange.
Parnas was indicted by federal prosecutors in October and charged with campaign finance violations. Prosecutors also allege that Parnas lobbied a congressman to remove the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.
Parnas turned documents over to the House Intelligence Committee this week that detail his role in pushing for Yovanovitch’s ouster. The government of Ukraine on Thursday announced thatit opened an investigation into alleged surveillance of the former ambassador.
As the Senate prepared to begin Trump’s impeachment trial Thursday, Parnas sparked a new furor, telling Maddow, “President Trump knew exactly what was going on” with all the Ukraine intrigue.
“He was aware of all my movements. I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president. I have no intent, I have no reason to speak to any of these officials,” Parnas said.
DEVIN NUNES ON FOX
In
, aired Wednesday night, Nunes raised questions about Parnas’ credibility.
“This is someone who’s been indicted for major felonies. It’s very odd that the Democrats have been playing cat and mouse with this guy. There’s some talk that he’s after an immunity deal, trying to get the Democrats to seek immunity,” Nunes said.
Last month, a Democratic report summarizing evidence gathered during the House impeachment inquiry detailed phone records showing Nunes, R-Tulare, spoke with Giuliani and Parnas in early April.
That was around the time when a series of opinion articles by conservative journalist John Solomon raised questions about Yovanovitch and ultimately led to her dismissal.
The phone records showed Nunes had at least three calls with Giuliani and two with Parnas. Giuliani also called a member of Nunes’ staff, Derek Harvey, on May 8, and a former Nunes staffer, Kashyap “Kash” Patel, who now works on the National Security Council.
Wednesday, Fox News host Martha McCallum noted that Nunes could not recall in a previous interview speaking with Parnas.
The question “was brand-new when that had come out when I was on your show. I just didn’t know the name, this name Parnas,” Nunes said.
“What I always like to remind people is we are dealing with people every day,” he said. “We’re an oversight committee. So we have incoming calls that come to my office, to my cell phone et cetera et cetera and then you know now that he had called my cell phone and I didn’t know his name,” Nunes said.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/sean-hannity-and-fox-news-are-up-to-their-hair-plugs-in-the-lev-parnas-affair/
no lnx
Sean Hannity and FOX News are up to their hair plugs in the Lev Parnas affair
Written by News Corpse, Daily Kos January 17, 2020
With each new day there are new and damning revelations affirming Donald Trump’s criminal behavior related to Ukraine and efforts to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden and subvert the 2020 election. The latest bombshells come from Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, whose nefarious activities include extorting Ukrainian President Zelensky and surveilling former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovich.
Parnas was interviewed on MSNBC Wednesday by Rachel Maddow in a wide ranging discussion that made it clear that Trump “knew exactly what was going on” and was lying about his feigned ignorance of Parnas and his mission. But the evidence of Trump’s guilt is abundant. Also interesting is the evidence of Hannity’s guilt, and that of Fox News.
Proof is emerging of Hannity’s relationship with the Giuliani Crew. Hannity himself is in bed with Parnas. They have had communications that resulted in Hannity tweeting about bogus allegations of Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election to help Hillary Clinton. That tweet was deleted, but remains archived. Trump, however, didn’t delete his subsequent tweet promoting Hannity’s story on the subject that same night. Likewise, The Giuliani Crew also communicated with Don Trump Jr, who posted a tweet attacking Yovanovich. So their is an unbroken chain of propaganda circling around between Trump, Giuliani, his Ukraine mob, Fox News, and back to Trump and his crime family.
What’s more, Parnas had much to share about the complicity of Fox News in Trump’s plot to coerce Zelensky into helping him smear Biden. The Giuliani team worked with right-wing author John Solomon to disseminate their lies. At the time Solomon worked for The Hill, but is now employed by Fox News. So naturally Hannity unleashed a furious assault on Parnas and the network that hosted him. Hannity’s rage was so intense that he lapsed into the sort of incoherent outbursts you might hear from a paranoid schizophrenic on a street corner shouting at passing cars (The video wouldn’t load on dKos, but you can see it here). He began…
“Yesterday, last-ditch effort, Hail Mary, smear job, yup the congenital liar attached new documents to the articles of impeachment. Including so-called evidence from a former Giuliani contact. Oh by the way on conspiracy TV. The guy is facing federal charges from the Southern District of New York. You don’t really want to mess with those people.”
Did you follow that? Apparently Hannity is upset that new incriminating evidence about Trump has come out. But he can’t rebut any of it, so he unloads a barrage of nasty adjectives. He glosses over the fact that Parnas is working with Trump’s lawyer, but hones in on his having been indicted. And while Hannity is adamant that that’s a problem for Parnas, it doesn’t seem to be a problem for other Trump comrades who are under indictment or already convicted, including his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his national security adviser Michael Flynn, his personal attorney Michael Cohen, and his fixer Roger Stone. Hannity continued…
“So [Parnas] goes right to state-run MSDNC conspiracy channel media. Keep in mind when people like him, trying to stay out of jail, think about this, how many times have we heard from the liberals ‘oh you can’t waterboard, or use enhanced interrogation because people will say anything, they’ll lie to make it end.’ Well people trying to stay out of jail, in my humble opinion, they’ll say anything.”
Now Hannity thinks that MSNBC is “state-run” media. You have to wonder what state Hannity thinks that it’s being run out of. It must be the “Deep State.” And it’s cute that Hannity is trying to connect an indicted defendant giving testimony to waterboarding. No one has tortured Parnas. He is simply doing what many defendants do when faced with prosecution. He’s turning state’s evidence. That’s a voluntary action to secure a lighter sentence. And it does not have the pitfalls of torture, where victims will indeed say anything to make it stop. A defendant providing testimony must tell the truth or any agreement made with prosecutors is null and void.
However, Hannity’s description of defendants saying anything to stay out of jail actually fits Trump much better. After all, he is known to be a pathological liar anyway. And he doesn’t have any agreement with prosecutors to worry about voiding. He’s lying through his capped teeth to avoid prison. And he clearly doesn’t care what he says, or how ludicrous the lie, if he thinks it will either deflect from his guilt or help him to evade accountability. The whole lot of them are neck deep in criminal behavior. And if more disclosures like those Parnas is serving up come to pass, they are all going to be sharing a cell block.
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dn
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/another-court-ruling-heightens-potential-for-more-ukraine-bombshells-to-drop/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-ordered-pentagon-to-delay-ukraine-aid-less-than-2-hours-after-zelensky-phone-call-foiad-emails
no lnx
Trump ordered Pentagon to delay Ukraine aid less than 2 hours after Zelensky phone call: FOIA’d emails
Written by News Corpse, Daily Kos December 22, 2019
The fact that Donald Trump has now been impeached (despite what the loons on Fox News say), hasn’t slowed the discovery of new evidence of his guilt. This is one of the reasons that it’s so important to ensure a comprehensive consideration of the Articles of Impeachment when they get transmitted to the Senate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knows this, and so do the vast majority of Americans who favor a full and fair hearing, including witnesses and document production.
The impeachment controversy has sparked as epic battle between Pelosi and the Senate’s GOP majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who has already announced that he has no intention of conducting a fair hearing and will be “taking his cues” from White House lawyers. In the meantime, new evidence has already emerged that appears to be profoundly damaging to Trump:
Chuck Schumer
SenSchumer
This email from Michael Duffey—approximately 90 minutes after President Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine—is all the more reason why we need Duffey and others to testify in a Senate trial.
The “sensitive nature”? What is that about?
A screenshot of the email from Michael Duffey]
That’s right. Less than two hours after Trump got off the phone with President Zelensky of Ukraine, he ordered the Defense Department to withhold military aid to a country that was being invaded at the time by Russia. The order included a directive to keep it quiet due to it’s “sensitive nature.”
Trump is fond of telling everyone to “read the transcript” of his phone call with Zelensky. He’s tweeted that demand 29 times in the past few weeks. Most recently, yesterday. He is referring to reading the notes made in a memo that describes his conversation with Zelensky. And he is apparently too oblivious to recognize that the memo actually confirms that he conditioned military aid on Zelensky’s promise to help him smear Joe Biden. What Trump said, in response to Zelensky’s inquiry about the aid, was…
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.”
That’s a textbook quid pro quo. Trump then talks about getting some information related to a debunked conspiracy theory about a computer server that belonged to the Democratic National Committee. But he quickly segues from that to explicit requests for dirt on Joe Biden:
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with [Rudy Giuliani and] the Attorney General [William Barr] would be great … so if you can look into it.”
This new memo was acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Center for Public Integrity.It is among the documents that the White House had previously refused to surrender to congressional investigators. There are many more that Trump continues to withhold. And he is still refusing to allow his staff to give testimony.
But if there’s one thing this memo proves, it’s that there is a real need to continue probing this criminal president and the accomplices in his administration. And when the Senate takes up the impeachment, they must permit the introduction of new evidence and testimony from relevant witnesses. The truth will likely come out eventually, anyway. But if Republicans in Congress allow Trump to deny access to it at this stage, they will be held accountable by both the courts and the voters.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/report-points-to-trump-1-as-the-ringleader-of-a-global-conspiracy/
"huge" rudy
no lnx
Report points to Trump, ‘-1,’ as the ringleader of a global conspiracy
Written by John Stoehr, The Editorial Board December 4, 2019
The House Intelligence Committee released its report Tuesday. In it were phone call records showing frequent contact between Rudy Giuliani and the White House. The records suggest in the most granular detail yet that the president of the United States is the leader of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.
But the call records do more than that. They offer a teachable moment. They provide an illustration, in miniature, of what a conspiracy looks like, and why it’s morally and legally wrong for the head of the world’s oldest democracy to engage in such conduct.
The House Intelligence report does not say Giuliani called Trump. Instead, it says the president’s personal attorney called a number designated as “-1.” Adam Schiff, the panel’s chairman, said his committee is investigating whether “-1” is Trump’s phone. The timing of calls and other strong circumstantial evidence, however, point to him.
Joe Biden announced his candidacy on April 25. Leading up to that date, Giuliani, Lev Parnas and John Solomon were in frequent contact, according to the call logs. Parnas was one of Giuliani’s henchmen. He’s now under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. Solomon was a reporter for The Hill, a Washington newspaper.
As mentioned in previous editions of the Editorial Board, Parnas, under Giuliani’s direction, connected Solomon to Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko used to be Ukraine’s top prosecutor. He was hugely corrupt, because he was intimately linked to Vladimir Putin. In interviews with Solomon, Lutsenko alleged that Joe Biden, when he was the vice president, tried to shield his son, Hunter Biden, from criminal investigation in Ukraine (a lie) and that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered with the 2016 presidential election (also a lie.) Lev Parnas was deeply involved in Solomon’s “journalism.” He was present at his interviews with Yuriy Lutsenko, according to reporting in Pro Publica.
This we knew. What didn’t know was the timing.
On the same day Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign, John Solomon wrote a falsehood-laden column “alleging that Ukraine had planted Russia collusion allegations against the Trump campaign,” according to the Post. “The column also described Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and questioned whether Biden had acted to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing an investigation, as the fired prosecutor has alleged.”
Coincidence? Unlikely.
The very same day, April 25, Giuliani received a call from “-1” (i.e., Trump). Giuliani then called Sean Hannity at Fox. A while later, Trump appeared on Hannity’s show to comment on Solomon’s report in The Hill. “That sounds like big, big stuff,” he said.
It could have been a coincidence, but again, unlikely. As I noted last week, Parnas’ attorney said he met regularly with the “BLT Team,” a name taken from the restaurant where the group convened several times a week on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The BLT team included Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, and US Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief aide.
Coincidence isn’t the right word to describe a president’s dirty lawyer getting a dirty prosecutor to tell a dirty reporter the president’s Democratic rival is dirty, and then getting a dirty TV host to ask the president to comment on the dirty reporter’s dirt.
The right word to describe all that is conspiracy.
Which can be criminal. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chief, is now serving time in federal prison for defrauding the United States. Legally, conspiracy doesn’t require an underlying crime. Prosecutors were only required to show Manafort conspired to “impair or obstruct the lawful function of any part of the government.”
I don’t know if the president’s conduct meets a statutory standard. I do think it meets a political one. Trump, as “-1,” is the ringleader of a global conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to consent to his leadership. There is no such thing as legitimate consent when presidents collude with enemies foreign and domestic to obstruct the free and fair process by which all Americans exercise self-governance.
This is a giant of a scandal. It dwarfs Watergate. It boggles the mind of ordinary Americans to contemplate the wide array of seedy underworld characters involved in a vast global conspiracy. (Another side of this involves another dirty former Ukrainian prosecutor who did a favor for a Ukrainian mobster fighting extradition to the US. Dmitry Firtash, the mobster, got Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor, to say Biden was dirty. That wonGiuliani’s attention. His friends diGenova and Toensing went to the US Department of Justice to plead with the US attorney general to go easy on Firtash.)
As I said, giant.
But these call logs bring the vastness of the conspiracy down to a human scale. Donald Trump talked to Giuliani, who talked to Parnas, who talked to Lutsenko, who talked to Solomon, who talked to Giuliani, who talked to Hannity, who talked to Donald Trump.
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