MUELLER 2

post 10/18 election,end game

see main for older

MERRI OK

see aCTIVE MEASURES

RUSSIA COLLUSION

see tenet media //RT intelligncer papadouplous

see russia-gate BS

deutsche bank money launder russia trump kids, justice kennedy kid

see obamagate 5/20

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MUELLER WENT AFTER OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE, TOLD FBI DOING CTR-INTELL BUT NO ONE DID?!

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simes dmitri oppos res on bill clinton

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an 8 26

Trump has repeatedly said that investigators exonerated him of accusations of improper connections with the Russian government, but a new report complicates that claim by exposing a previously-overlooked FBI investigation into those foreign ties.

“For the last year, the Trump administration’s efforts to seek retribution against intelligence officials and FBI agents who investigated Russia’s 2016 election meddling have been spearheaded by federal prosecutors in South Florida trying to build a criminal case,” reported The New York Times' Michael S. Schmidt on Monday. “But in recent weeks, the White House has added a dimension to its push to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation, releasing a trove of previously classified FBI memos that it says back up President Trump’s claims that a so-called deep state was out to get him.”

He added, “There is little new of substance in the documents, and nothing that fundamentally undercuts the FBI’s rationale for pursuing the Russia investigation. But the material does shed new light on an often overlooked aspect of the swirl of events surrounding Mr. Trump in his first months in office in 2017: the bureau’s remarkable decision to open a separate counterintelligence investigation into the president of the United States, and how that inquiry was sidetracked before it had much of a chance to get going.”

The article went on to argue that the investigation was prompted by Trump’s May 2017 firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, which senior officials and counterintelligence agents worried was done to obstruct his investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling.

“Referring to the counterintelligence inquiry, one of the declassified memos made public by the White House last week said: ‘The goal of the investigation is to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States and/or a violation of federal criminal statutes,’” Schmidt wrote.

Ultimately the FBI’s investigation was superseded by special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into potential collusion between Trump and Russia.

“When Mr. Mueller’s report was released in 2019, it said that the investigation had found no evidence that Mr. Trump and his campaign had conspired with the Russians during the 2016 election,” Schmidt wrote. “But Mr. Mueller declined to make a determination about whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice. The report did not contain a section on Mr. Trump’s personal ties to Russia and whether he was compromised or represented a counterintelligence threat.”

Schmidt continued, “Shortly after the report was released, Mr. Mueller testified about it before Congress, acknowledging under questioning that he had not examined whether, for example, Russian oligarchs had laundered money through Mr. Trump’s businesses.”

In July Anthony Scaramucci, a former communications director for Trump, argued that the president is indeed compromised by Russia.

“If Trump is disavowing NATO and breaking an 80 year tradition — something’s wrong,” Scaramucci posted on X. “If Trump is praising Vladimir Putin, whose entire economy is slightly smaller than the state of Texas — something’s wrong. If Trump is disavowing the 1994 defense agreement where we told Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons and we’d protect them — the agreement that got him impeached in his first term — something is wrong.”

Meanwhile in May, Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) argued Trump’s seeming hostility toward Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion is proof that the president has a pro-Russia bias. He described Trump as “totally failing” in Russia and that he favored Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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NO LNX

Thom Hartmann February 04, 2026

The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).

It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Vladimir Putin has basically owned Donald Trump for years, even before Trump ran for president in 2016.

They note of last week’s partial (about 50 percent) Epstein document release:

“The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. [Jeffrey] Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.”

Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it:

“Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running ‘the world’s largest honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates.”

In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US.

Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian organized crime oligarchs (including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this country using real estate. It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too.

America has the most lax and largely useless real estate transaction laws in the developed world, so a main way to launder such dirty cash is through cash-based real estate transactions (which are illegal in almost every other developed country).

And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.

As Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference:

“In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Similarly, Eric Trump told a friend, who later testified about it:

“‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”

This is one of the reasons Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation (the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure, which Republicans are currently blocking.

That alone is worth a call to your two US senators.

The documents released last week included a series of email conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power and profiting from it. They pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump:

“Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin valuable insight into Mr Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki. …“In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, ‘understood Trump after our conversations.’ …

“Earlier that month Epstein had also messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, to tell him Mr Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and was then staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris.” [Emphasis added]

Epstein, of course, died under deeply suspicious circumstances in jail while Trump was president (and now Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved to a country club type of facility where she reportedly spends the days training puppies). As Republican consultant Harlan Hill noted on Twitter at the time of Epstein’s supposed suicide:

“Dead men tell no tales. Just as Jeffrey Epstein starts to name names, he decides to kill himself? Mkay. Totally believable.”

So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior?

Might it provoke him to hang a photo of Putin in the White House?

Or go along with Putin’s daily slaughter of Ukrainian children?

Give Putin’s top diplomat information that burned a spy and an anti-Russia operation?

Tell the world that he trusts Putin over the US intelligence services?

Put a Putin-friendly conspiracy fan in charge of all US intelligence?

Severely damage NATO, a perpetual thorn in Putin’s side?

Shatter our alliances with the EU and other democratic nations in ways that may well last for generations?

Refuse to make America’s dues payments to the UN, causing that body to have to shut down, perhaps permanently, this summer?

Steal US intelligence secrets, including top-secret nuclear information, and put it in a place where Russian spies or their associates can easily access and photocopy it?

Unleash ICE in a way that turns Americans against each other leading to the “Second US Civil War” that Russian media and Putin’s #2 man (Medvedev) have been gleefully predicting?

Gut America’s soft power around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands mostly children, in the Third World while opening opportunities for Putin and Xi to pick them up as new alliances?

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

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

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

Throughout the campaign, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed specific types of help, and how, and when.

With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward Trump.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

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

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

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

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless he’s terrified.

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

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

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

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

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

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

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

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

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

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble (creating a brown-skinned refugee crisis in Europe, which both Putin and Orbán exploited).

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

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

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

In the years since, Trump continues to maintain a close relationship with Putin; most recently he revealed that he’d asked “a favor” of the Russian dictator to “pause” his murderous, war-crime bombing of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine “for one week.” Putin, being in the power position, chose to laugh at Trump and continued his assault on the nation, although he did throw Trump a bone by pausing his hits on Kiev for a few days.

These aren’t just “a few bad judgment calls” or a president with “strange foreign policy instincts.” These stories (and literally hundreds of others) point to a man who’s behaved, consistently and predictably, like someone under leverage, someone whose personal fear of exposure of some sort of major crime — like the ones we know Epstein was holding over other billionaires — outweighs his loyalty to the nation he swore to serve.

If Americans don’t demand real investigations, genuine accountability, and impeachment and jail time for what sure looks like the greatest counterintelligence failure in our history, we may lose what’s left of our democracy before the 2028 elections can fix things.

If Democrats can take control of either branch of Congress and if Schumer and Jeffries get spine transplants and begin a serious investigation into Trump’s destruction of the United States and our historic role in the world, they’ll have enough to keep them busy for years.

This is not about politics or personality. It’s about whether a country can survive being led by someone who looks captured and compromised by a foreign power. If even half of this is true, then staying quiet is the same as going along with it.

We must demand real investigations and real consequences, or accept that the presidency can be bought, blackmailed, and used against the country itself.

Let your elected officials know your thoughts on this, and don’t forget to demand your elected Republicans step up and defend America, too. You can reach your member of Congress and both your Senators via the congressional switchboard at: (202) 224-3121.

See you in the streets on March 28th!

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trump-family-anthony-kennedy-brett-kavanaugh-dark-towers

Trump family carried out a “coordinated White House charm offensive” to persuade Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote on the supreme court, to retire and clear the way for Brett Kavanaugh, according to a forthcoming book.

In Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction, David Enrich, the finance editor of the New York Times, describes how the German bank became the last major financial institution willing to lend to Donald Trump’s repeatedly defaulting business empire.

Long before Trump ran for the White House, Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin, worked as an investment banker at Deutsche. Enrich describes how he developed a relationship with Trump, his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, helping to finance real-estate deals no other bank would touch because of Trump’s record of failing to pay his debts to lenders, contractors and business partners.

“Even Trump’s friends would go to considerable lengths to avoid lending him money,” Enrich writes, adding that virtually the only person who would loan money to Trump was his father, Fred, who is widely known to have repeatedly bailed out his son.

Dark Towers will be published on 18 February. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Justin Kennedy was part of the US branch of Deutsche Bank from 1998 to 2009. Drawn to Trump’s risk-taking and glamour, he became a Trump confidant, sitting with the real estate impresario at the US Open tennis or in Manhattan nightclubs, and chaperoning huge loans to finance Trump’s real estate spending sprees.

Kennedy, who ran the bank’s commercial real-estate team, continued to lend to Trump even though Deutsche clients had suffered severe losses when Trump’s casino business collapsed and he declared bankruptcy.

After Kennedy set up his own finance and property firm in Florida, Enrich writes, he continued to help other members of the Trump family – Ivanka, Kushner and Donald Trump Jr – arrange financing for projects in New York. The New York Observer, which was owned by Kushner, put Kennedy on a list of the 100 most powerful people in New York real estate.

Once Trump was in office, he went out of his way to congratulate Justice Kennedy on his son, calling him a “special guy” and saying how much his own children loved him.

“Trump’s flattery,” Enrich writes, “was part of a coordinated White House charm offensive designed to persuade the ageing justice – for years, the court’s pivotal swing vote – that it was safe to retire, even with an unpredictable man in the Oval Office.”

Dark Towers describes how Ivanka Trump befriended the judge, sitting next to him at an inaugural lunch, regaling him with accounts of her close friendship with his son, then visiting the elder Kennedy at the supreme court, bringing her five year-old daughter to hear a case about arbitration agreements.

When Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement in June 2018, it gave Trump an opportunity to tip the court right with his nomination of Kavanaugh, in turn solidifying support among conservatives otherwise sceptical about Trump’s character.

Enrich writes that having helped to stabilise Trump’s business, Deutsche Bank now “indirectly” helped to stabilise his “floundering presidency”.

Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank was much discussed during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.

Enrich points to the separate relationships Deutsche Bank and Trump had with a Kremlin-linked Russian bank, VTB, suggesting: “Perhaps this was more than a coincidence.”

But he provides no direct evidence to support suspicions that funds supplied by Deutsche Bank to Trump over two decades came from Russian sources, and also notes that Deutsche executives deny any such direct financial relationship.

Rather, Enrich portrays the bank’s investments in Russia and in Trump as both being symptoms of a reckless investment culture and a pursuit of prestige, with insufficient checks from senior management and an outdated and fragmented computer data system.

Trump’s supporters inside the bank have also argued he had a relatively low overall debt burden, and that his real estate purchases were fundamentally sound investments.

Justin Kennedy did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

In a statement, Deutsche Bank said: “While elements of the narrative seem to be exaggerated to fit into a storyline, we have long acknowledged and sought to learn from our historical shortcomings.”

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an 12 24

guk

An analyst who once served as an advisor to former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign is now in the crosshairs of the FBI, and he's since taken to Russian state media to rail against President Joe Biden and the Department of Justice.

Citing the Rappahannock News, the Guardian reported that the FBI recently conducted a raid on the Huntly, Virginia home of Dmitri Simes, who was named more than 100 times in DOJ special counsel Robert Mueller's 2018 report. While it remains unknown what the FBI was seeking in its raid, the Rappahannock News confirmed with the agency that it was indeed "conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity" on the 132-acre property that Simes bought in 2021 for $1.63 million. Real estate site Zillow now estimates the five-bedroom, seven-bathroom, 8,577 square-foot house to be worth more than $2.2 million.

In an interview with Russian state-run media outlet Sputnik News, Simes son, Dmitri Jr. said is father has not been in the U.S. since 2022. He also suggested the raid was politically motivated.

"The Biden regime is terrified of being called out over Ukraine and Israel," Simes Jr. tweeted. "Elements of [the] Biden regime are trying to disrupt any possibility for deescalation with Russia and plunge America into World War III."

The elder Simes — who hosts a talk show on Russian state-run media outlet Channel One — told Sputnik that the raid was "clearly is an attempt to intimidate, not only somebody from Russia, but just anyone who goes against official policies and particularly against the deep state."

"My suspicion is that instead of trying to get me to come to the United States and to interrogate me or even to arrest me, their real purpose is to make sure that I would not come back," he added.

Simes is reportedly close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Russian media outlet Tass reporting that he attended a closed-door meeting with Putin in June. The Russian pundit also moderated a conversation with Putin at an economic forum in St. Petersburg last year. Previously, the Senate Finance Committee investigated Simes over his purported connections to Russian spy Maria Butina, who infiltrated MAGA circles during Trump's administration in efforts to set up a communications backchannel between Trump and Moscow.

According to the Guardian, Simes — who emigrated to the U.S. from Moscow in 1973 — served as an informal policy advisor to Trump's 2016 campaign after a meeting earlier that year with Jared Kushner (Trump's son-in-law). He reportedly advised the ex-president on a speech he wrote emphasizing greater cooperation between Washington and Moscow.

Prior to his work with Trump, Simes was an informal foreign policy advisor to former President Richard M. Nixon. He went on to lead the public policy think tank, the Center for the National Interest, which Nixon launched in 1994. Simes retired from the think tank in 2022.

Russian state media has leaned in on its support of Trump, even after he was convicted on 34 felony charges earlier this year. Russian pundit Dmitry Kulikov, who hosts "Solovyov Live," complained, "They wronged our Donald Trump" after the verdict. He and other Russian propagandists were openly hoping for a hung jury.

Click here to read the Guardian's report in full.

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no lnx

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

Thom Hartmann November 21, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what’s really going on here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the Mueller Report noted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

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

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are Trump’s real goals with these appointments?

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

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

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guk 9 24

Amid the recent crackdown on Russian influence in American media, a group of former Trump advisers and operatives have quietly helped build a pro-Russian website that frequently spreads debunked conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine, election fraud and vaccines.

Working alongside contributors for Kremlin state media, the former Donald Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos, his wife, Simona Mangiante, and others have become editorial board members of the website Intelligencer, which is increasingly becoming a source of news for those in the rightwing ecosystem.

The growth of the website, which has not been reported on before, comes at a time when the US is seeking to crack down on Russian influence ahead of the 2024 election. Recently, the justice department charged two members of RT (formerly known as Russia Today) with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering for payments they allegedly made to “recruit unwitting American influencers”. It also placed sanctions on RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, and nine other employees.

‘They’ve destroyed the place’: Trump repeats racist, anti-immigrant lies

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/13/trump-repeats-lies-haitian-immigrants)

Intelligencer appears to be gaining in popularity. It recently had its best month for internet traffic, with an increase of nearly 300% during August, according to data from Similarweb, and its articles have been shared on social media by the conspiracist Alex Jones and former Trump aide Roger Stone.

According to Emma Briant, an associate professor of news and political communication at Monash University in Australia, the use of well-known figures to spread pro-Russian political messages represents a shift in disinformation tactics.

“Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has increasingly been forced to rely on networks of proxies and influencers whose conspiracist ‘brand’ generates income and audiences through social media monetization and some of whom Russia has now been caught covertly subsidizing,” Briant said.

The website’s opaque ownership structure makes it difficult to understand its financial backing, and there is no direct evidence of Kremlin funding. There is no corporate entity listed anywhere on the website, just a business address in Los Angeles.

Although much of the website’s content focuses on issues relating to American politics, the site actually began in Australia, with a little-known media outlet called TNT Radio, which launched in 2022. Show hosts and guests frequently deny climate change, discuss culture war issues in the US, espouse pro-Russian viewpoints on the war in Ukraine, and spread conspiracy theories about Covid-19.

Jennifer Squires, one of the station’s owners, explained in an interview that Intelligencer began as a way for TNT Radio to have a written publication to complement its radio station. To develop the new site, Squires said she turned to George Eliason, an American journalist who has lived in eastern Ukraine for more than 10 years. Eliason, who already had a show on TNT Radio at the time, has formerly appeared on RT and blames Kyiv for the war in Ukraine.

But Squires said she and co-owner Mike Ryan quickly grew disillusioned with the website’s planned appearance, and sought to disassociate themselves from it. However, Eliason continued to develop it, involving several others who had previously appeared on his radio show. The site appears to have launched at the end of 2023 – and nearly half of Intelligencer’s board members are either former aides, surrogates or fake electors for Trump’s previous two campaigns.

“The editorial board is filled with very accomplished people. All are, or were, experts at the top of their field and extremely qualified to write articles inside their fields of knowledge,” Eliason said.

Perhaps the most well-known ex-Trump official is Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy aide on Trump’s 2016 campaign. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Kremlin-linked professor who told him Russia had dirt on Hilary Clinton.

Mangiante, his wife, has written several posts for the site about debunked conspiracy theories involving the Bidens and Ukraine. In January, she posted an interview with a former Ukrainian lawmaker, Andrii Derkach, who repeated false claims of bribery about the Biden family in Ukraine. In 2020, the US placed sanctions on Derkach, calling him an active Russian agent; Derkach, who now is running for political office in Russia, previously met with Rudy Giuliani and purported to offer evidence of corruption against the Bidens.

“Intelligencer appears to be one of several [Russia-friendly] operations targeting the upcoming US elections, leveraging a network of far-right figures and disinformation tactics,” Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said.

Mangiante, along with fellow board member Igor Lopatonok, appears to have parlayed this work into a new documentary about the Hunter Biden laptop saga called Hunter’s Laptop: Requiem for Ukraine. According to social media posts, the documentary premiered on 5 September at the Trump International hotel in Chicago. Eliason wrote the script, which was filmed by Lopatonok, who has frequently collaborated with Oliver Stone on prior anti-Ukrainian documentaries and fawning films of dictators.

“Mr Lopatonok wanted fresh eyes from an investigative journalist and a different perspective for the story,” Eliason said. “Through the combined interviews, we were able to plumb deeper and raise questions that had not been asked before.”

Eliason also said that the address listed on Intelligencer’s website was provided by Lopatonok.

Lopatonok did not respond to requests for comment. However, he now appears to have implemented part of his business in Moscow. According to Russian corporate records, Lopatonok and his wife, Vera Tomilova, also an Intelligencer board member, registered a Global 3 Pictures LLC in Moscow in February.

According to invitations for the Hunter Biden documentary premiere, the event was hosted by the Christian Orthodox Coalition, an organization which claims to educate Orthodox Christians on social and cultural issues. Four of the organization’s board members are also board members of Intelligencer, including Papadopoulos, Mangiante and Lopatonok.

The fourth board member is Olga Ravasi, who was formerly the chairwoman of Serbs for Trump in 2020 and currently runs the Serbian American Voters Alliance political action committee. In March, Intelligencer posted about a Serbs for Trump kick-off event in Wisconsin with the state’s Republican senator Ron Johnson and former Trump acting director of national intelligence Ric Grenell.

Three other editorial board members also have close connections to the Trump campaigns. Leah Hoopes and Greg Stenstrom, both from Pennsylvania, have written a book falsely alleging the 2020 election was stolen. Both of them have been litigants in court cases challenging the results of the election in Pennsylvania, and Hoopes was one of Pennsylvania’s fake electors, who falsely signed paperwork saying that Trump had won the election.

Tyler Nixon, Roger Stone’s personal attorney, also serves on the board and hosts his own show on TNT Radio. The former Radio Sputnik journalist Lee Stranahan is also involved.

Nixon, Hoopes, Stenstrom and Stranahan did not respond to requests for comment.

Most of the site’s content appears to be created by Eliason, and Trevor Fitzgibbon, who was the spokesperson for American Values 2024, a Super Pac that supported Robert F Kennedy Jr’s presidential campaign. The website has several posts promoting Kennedy’s campaign.

Eliason said that the website is funded out of pocket and the contributors contribute pieces because it “because it makes sense to them”.

Many of the articles promote debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines and fraud in the 2020 presidential election, as well as stories that are aggressively anti-Ukrainian. In a May article, Eliason referred to those who voted for a $61bn aid package for Ukraine as “reprehensible”.

However, the site has even more direct ties to Russia beyond its content. One of its board members is Anna Soroka, an adviser to Leonid Pasechnik, the head of the self-styled Luhansk People’s Republic. In February 2023, the US sanctioned Pasechnik, calling him the “Putin-appointed interim head of the former so-called Luhansk People’s Republic”.

In 2020, Bellingcat found that Soroka had emailed back and forth with Maj Gen Andrey Ilchenko, who has been linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU.

Intelligencer’s content has also attracted the eyes of European propaganda outlets. The website Pravda-en has linked to and promoted Intelligencer articles, including one that attacked the OCCRP report on Lopatonok. According to a February report by France’s Viginum agency, which was set up in 2021 to combat foreign disinformation, a group of websites that operate under the Pravda name are working in coordination to spread pro-Russian content across the European Union.

“With an editorial board that reads like a who’s who of Putinist propaganda, Intelligencer is not your usual Russian ‘fake news’ site,” Briant said. “We may see more efforts like Intelligencer, which brings together cohorts of recognizable pro-Russian writers and consolidates their effort into a respectable-looking ‘news’ platform aiming to promote Russia’s influence in the US election and beyond.”

This article was amended on 20 September 2024 to remove a reference to Garrett Ziegler among individuals who had reposted content from Intelligencer on social media. Ziegler has informed us that content was reposted by a fake Facebook account using his name.

an 8 23

a seasoned Federal Bureau of Investigation counterintelligence officer told the United States Senate Judiciary Committee that he was ordered by his superiors to "stop investigating Rudy Giuliani and to cut off contact with any sources who reported on corruption by associates of former President Donald Trump," according to a whistleblower complaint that was exclusively obtained by Business Insider's Mattathias Schwartz.

"The agent, who served 14 years as a special agent for the bureau, including a long stint in Russia-focussed counter-intelligence, claims in a 22-page statement that his bosses interfered with his work in 'a highly suspicious suppression of investigations and intelligence-gathering' aimed at protecting 'certain politically active figures and possibly also FBI agents' who were connected to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs," Schwartz writes. "Those figures, the statement claims, explicitly included 'anyone in the [Trump] White House and any former or current associates of President Trump.'"

Schwartz explains that the employee's account was "apparently leaked and posted in mid-July to a Substack newsletter. Insider has independently obtained a copy of the complaint and verified its authenticity, but has not corroborated all of its claims."

The unnamed individual said in an interview with Insider that he was motivated by the desire to "policymakers accountable, whether they're on the left or the right." According to Schwartz, the whistleblower felt the FBI was at "a decision point" and wondered, "Are we going to do public corruption or not?"

Schwartz continues, "The whistleblower told Insider that he was finally ordered to stop investigating Giuliani and the rest of the Trump White House in August 2022, after months of what he says were persistent efforts to frustrate his work,at a meeting with three FBI supervisors at a bureau field office. Insider was able to confirm the agent's account of the meeting with a second source with knowledge of what took place."

Schwartz notes that "the directions he received included a strict prohibition on filing intelligence reports relating to Giuliani or any other Trump associate" during an August 2022 meeting where he was fed "performance issues and concerns" despite having "eight consecutive years of "excellent" or "outstanding" work.

"In one case, the statement says, the agent developed information from confidential informants that Giuliani had allegedly done paid work for Pavel Fuks, a Ukrainian oligarch and 'asset of the Russian intelligence services.' (That charge was previously reported by Rolling Stone.) The whistleblower also looked into claims that Giuliani had fraudulently raised money from investors to produce a never-completed film about Joe Biden in the months before the 2020 election," Schwartz explains. "The agent's reporting on Giuliani wasn't received well in the bureau's New York field office, his statement says. 'In the midst of my reporting involving Giuliani, which had previously been identified by my supervisor as 'high impact,' my management told me they received a call from a supervisor in [the New York field office], who they did not identify,' the statement says. 'This supervisor had taken issue with my reporting.'"

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an ah 2 23

When former special counsel Robert Mueller released, in 2019, his in-depth report on Russian interference in the United States’ 2016 presidential election, then-President Donald Trump was quick to describe it as a total exoneration of him — a claim that was echoed repeatedly by a long list of right-wing media outlets. In reality, the Mueller report was more complex than that.

Mueller, a conservative Republican and former FBI director, concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians did not rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. But the Mueller report, when one really digs into it, shows that those interactions were at least questionable.

Moreover, Robert Mueller never said that the Russian government did not interfere in the 2016 election; that interference, according to Mueller, was quite real. And Mueller’s investigation led to criminal prosecutions of some of Trump’s close associates, including his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

CNN’s Michael Warren, on April 18, 2019, pointed out, “Mueller’s report concludes that it ‘did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in the election interference activities.’ That’s as clear as it can be, but Mueller also concluded that both the Russian government and the Trump campaign believed the other would be beneficial.”

Nonetheless, MAGA Republicans continue to dismiss Russiagate as an example of “Trump derangement syndrome” run amok. But libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young, in a lengthy article published by The Bulwark on February 8, stresses that Russiagate is “hardly” the “hoax” that “Trump cultists” claim it is.

Young cites two reasons why “Russiagate skeptics” were feeling giddy in January. But neither of them, she writes, mean that Russiagate was a mere “hoax.”

“Committed skeptics of ‘Russiagate’ — the scandal around Russian interference in the 2016 election with the intent of helping elect Donald Trump, and the Trump campaign’s collaboration with this effort — had a good month in January,” Young explains. “First, a study released on January 9 concluded that Russian disinformation and propaganda on Twitter, while a real phenomenon, did not significantly affect American attitudes — partly because the notorious Russian bots were, as The Intercept put it, ‘a small speck when compared to homegrown posters’ — or influence the results of the 2016 election.”

Young continues, “Then, on January 30, Columbia Journalism Review published a four-part report on Russiagate with a scathing analysis of media coverage by veteran investigative journalist Jeff Gerth. It concluded that the news media repeatedly fell short of professional standards in their handling of the story, compromising their objectivity and contributing to polarization and erosion of public trust in journalism. The reaction from the skeptics — a motley crowd that includes everyone from hardcore Donald Trump cultists to anti-anti-Trumpists to critics of America’s national security apparatus and various anti-establishment contrarians — was downright exuberant.”

But Young goes on to say that none of that means that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election didn’t happen.

“Some Democrats, shocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in November 2016, did fall back on exaggerated claims of Russian interference — including claims that there had been actual vote-tampering — instead of examining Clinton’s very real flaws as a candidate,” Young argues. “But it is no less true that plenty of conservatives have used the supposed ‘Russia hoax’ to promote narratives of Republican victimization…. Examining and critiquing the media’s handling of Russiagate is important and necessary,but it can be done without downplaying Russia’s very real assaults on election integrity in the U.S. and in other democracies.”

Young adds, “Otherwise, the ‘Russia hoax’ quickly becomes an excuse for everything from Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election to the enabling of Russia’s foreign aggression: in other words, the last refuge of scoundrels.”

READ MORE: Trump goes on hours-long rant against FBI after J6 committee criminal charges — and admits he lost

Read The Bulwark’s full report at this link.

===

who were 2 pol apptee?

an 8 22 ah

Since leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump hasn’t been shy about lambasting former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr— who he now despises for refusing to go along with the Big Lie and Trump’s false, totally debunked claim that widespread voter fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election. Trump now views Barr as a Republican who, like former Vice President Mike Pence, didn’t have the courage to stick by him.

But before the election, Barr’s critics often slammed him for being a Trump loyalist who defended Trump vigorously after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his final report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Attorney Neal Katyal, in an op-ed published by the New York Times on August 30, offers some reasons why a recently released March 24, 2019 memo paints such a troubling picture of Barr and his relationship with then-President Trump.

The memo, released by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on August 21, details Barr’s justifications for the DOJ clearing Trump of obstruction charges. These days, Trump views Barr as a traitor to the MAGA cause. But in 2019, he praised Barr as someone who had the backbone to come through for him in a way that former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions didn’t.

“The memo released last week by the Justice Department closing the book on the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election is a frightening document,” explains Katyal, a former solicitor genreal who is often featured as a legal expert on MSNBC. “Critics have rightly focused on its substance, slipshod legal analysis and omission of damning facts. But the process by which that memo, sent in March 2019, came to be is just as worrisome.”

The attorney continues, “Delivered to the attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, the memo was written by two political appointees in the Justice Department. Mr. Barr used the memo to go around the special counsel regulations and to clear President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice. If left to fester, this decision will have pernicious consequences for investigations of future high-level wrongdoing.”

Katyal goes on to offer some more reasons why he finds the March 24, 2019 memo so troubling.As Katyal sees it, the memo is an example of the United States’ system of checks and balances being undermined during the Trump years.

“The 2019 memo tendentiously argued that Mr. Trump committed no crimes — leaving the final decision on the matter to Republican-aligned appointees instead of to the independent special counsel,” Katyal notes. “The challenge in devising the regulations was to develop a framework for the prosecution of high-level executive branch officials — which is harder than it sounds, because the Constitution requires the executive branch to control prosecutions. So, we are left with one of the oldest philosophical problems: Who will guard the guardians?”

During Mueller’s investigation, many MAGA Republicans tried to paint him as a Democratic partisan — even though the former FBI director was a conservative and a lifelong Republican who had been on very friendly terms with the George W. Bush Administration. But during the Russian investigation, Mueller’s admirers often praised him for valuing country over party. When Democrats and Never Trump conservatives used the word “institutionalist” to describe Mueller in 2017 or 2018, it was meant as high praise.

A special counsel in a federal investigation, Katyal stresses, needs to be someone who is independent rather than partisan — which Special Counsel Mueller was. But Barr, Katyal laments, undermined Special Counsel Mueller’s work in the end.

“We created the role of special counsel to fill a void — to concentrate in one person responsibility and ultimate blame so that investigations would not be covered up from the get-go and to give that person independence from political pressure,” Katyal writes. “It is outrageous that Mr. Barr acted so brazenly in the face of this framework. The point of requiring a special counsel was to provide for an independent determination of any potential criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Trump. But the political appointees in his Justice Department took what was the most important part of that inquiry — the decision of whether he committed crimes — and grabbed it for themselves. This was a fundamental betrayal of the special counsel guidelines not for some principle, but because it protected their boss, Mr. Trump.”

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ref

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/bill-barr-donald-trumpjustice-department-mueller-obstruction-memo

bill Barr played a starring role in the January 6 committee’s public hearings this summer when he declared in videotaped testimony that Donald Trump’s election fraud claims were “bullshit,” “completely bullshit,” “stupid,” “crazy,” “complete nonsense,” and “a great, great disservice to the country.” But it’s important to remember that for the majority of the time he was serving as attorney general, Barr operated the Justice Department like it was the 45th president’s personal law firm and his title was “chief footstool to Donald Trump.” Yes, whether he was claiming, with a straight face, that the FBI had violated Trump’s “civil liberties,” using the DOJ to try to kill a rape defamation suit against the president, or attempting to bury the “urgent“ whistle-blower report that became the basis of the House’s first impeachment proceedings against Trump, Barr made his loyalties very, very clear. But in case you needed further evidence that the former AG was a total hack, today’s your lucky day!

On Wednesday, the government released the 2019 DOJ memo Barr used as justification for not charging Trump with obstructing the Mueller investigation, despite the fact that the special counsel found numerous instances of obstruction by Trump that could have resulted in him being charged with a crime, from firing FBI director James Comey and telling a White House lawyer to fire Robert Mueller to warning witnesses not to flip. Yet the memo, which was written, at Barr’s request, by Steven Engel, the former assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, and Ed O’Callaghan, the principal associate deputy attorney general, insist none of that was worth taking legal action, a conclusion they came to based on what some say was a twisting of facts and legal falsehoods.

For starters, the memo argues that obstruction charges are usually brought when an individual blocks the investigation and prosecution of an underlying crime, and since the Mueller probe did not establish one, they shouldn‘t charge Trump. That, of course, is not how the law works, which is why if you hide evidence from the cops about an attempted murder that didn’t actually result in someone being killed, you’d very likely still be in trouble. Then, there’s the memo writers’ claim that because other people didn’t go along with Trump‘s attempts to obstruct justice, he shouldn’t be charged. This is, once again, not how the law works!

As former Veterans Affairs employee and Mueller, She Wrote podcast host Allison Gill tweeted Wednesday, “That would be like if I told the getaway driver to blow up the bank and [if] they didn’t, I’m off the hook.” The memo also wildly asserts, without evidence, that Trump did the things he did, like asking White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, “not for an illegal purpose, but rather because he believed the investigation was politically motivated and undermined his administration’s efforts to govern.” It also cites the fact that Trump never literally used the word fire to McGahn when he was talking about Mueller, probably because he operates like a mafia boss who speaks in code. (In sworn testimony, McGahn said Trump called him at home and told him “Mueller has to go” and “call me back when you do it.”) As for Trump then instructing McGahn to lie about trying to get Mueller fired, we already know the Barr DOJ’s thoughts there, given that while testifying, Barr told lawmakers it was “not a crime” for the president to demand staffers lie to investigators.

Responding to the memo on Twitter, Norm Eisen, an attorney and former U.S. ambassador, wrote: “No wonder a series of judges have slammed Barr for dishonesty in connection with all this. It’s garbage. Anyone else woulda been prosecuted. Barr should be disciplined.” Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor and former prosecutor, told The New York Times: “It reads more like a defense lawyer’s brief than a full and balanced analysis citing the legal authorities.” Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor, described the memo as a “get out of jail free” card, telling The Times: “It’s hard to stomach a memo that amounts to saying someone is not guilty of obstruction for deliberately trying to induce witnesses not to cooperate with law enforcement in a major criminal investigation.”

Last year, two federal courts concluded that Barr had already decided not to charge Trump before commissioning the memo, and signed it after informing Congress of his decision. When it was released in redacted form in May 2021, Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote, “The agency’s redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum, and the excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the Attorney General to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time. The fact that [Trump] would not be prosecuted was a given.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/bill-barr-should-be-disciplined/

Legal experts are reviewing a legal memo that served as the basis for Attorney General Bill Barr deciding to not charge then-President Donald Trump with obstruction of justice, and they are calling it “garbage,” “disingenuous,” a “total whitewash,” and “ass-covering.”

The memo, published Wednesday afternoon by The New York Times, is dated March 24, 2019.

“For the reasons stated below,” it reads in part, “we conclude that the evidence described in Volume II of the Report is not, in our judgment, sufficient to support a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt that the President violated the obstruction-of-justice statutes. In addition, we believe that certain of the conduct examined by the Special Counsel could not, as a matter of law, support an obstruction charge under the circumstances. Accordingly, were there no constitutional barrier, we would recommend, under the Principles of Federal Prosecution, that you decline to commence such a prosecution.”

Norm Eisen, a well-known Harvard-educated attorney, former U.S. Ambassador, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and a CNN legal analyst calls the legal memo “garbage.”

“No wonder a series of judges have slammed Barr for dishonesty in connection with all this,” Eisen writes. “It’s garbage. Anyone else woulda been prosecuted. Barr should be disciplined.”

Attorney Andrew Weissman calls the memo “disingenuous” and a “total whitewash.”

He adds: “note no discussion of Barr telling Special Counsel Mueller that he should make the decision whether Trump obstructed justice. Why? Because new DOJ memo reveals they thought Mueller Report could be read to say he did obstruct! So Barr shd say the opposite.”

CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig calls the memo “ass-covering.”

“To recap,” he writes, detailing these bullet points:

:{:{}:

“Mueller failed by refusing to state a conclusion,” “Barr publicly distorted Mueller’s findings,” “DOJ drafted this flimsy, ass-covering memo,” “Barr misled a federal court about this bogus memo,” “Garland appealed on Barr’s behalf, and lost.”}:

This is a breaking news and developing story.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/barr-burning-man/

no lnx twt

Appeals court orders release of secret memo Barr 'used to undercut the Mueller report'

Jessica Corbett and Common DreamsAugust 21, 2022

A federal appeals court on Friday ordered the release of a 2019 memorandum about whether then-President Donald Trump obstructed Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

:{:{}:

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)—the watchdog fighting to reveal the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) memo prepared for then-Attorney General Bill Barr—celebrated the ruling as a win.

:{:{}:

"Attorney General Barr cited this memo as a reason not to charge President Trump with obstruction of justice," said CREW spokesperson Jordan Libowitz in a statement. "The American people deserve to know what it says. Now they will."

The unanimous ruling from three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed a lower court's opinion about the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel memo—a redacted version of which was made public last year.

D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, joined by Judges Judith Rogers and David Tatel, outlined how the DOJ tried to conceal most of the memo "based on the deliberative process privilege, which protects records documenting an agency's internal deliberations en route to a governmental decision," but the lower court judge, Amy Berman Jackson, rejected that argument.

Jackson determined the DOJ failed to show that the privilege applied—specifically, she found that the department "had not identified a relevant agency decision as to which the memorandum formed part of the deliberations," Friday's ruling highlights.

"The department's submissions, the court explained, indicated that the memorandum conveyed advice about whether to charge the president with a crime. But the court's in camera review of the memorandum revealed that the department in fact never considered bringing a charge," it continues. "Instead, the memorandum concerned a separate decision that had gone entirely unmentioned by the government in its submissions to the court—what, if anything, to say to Congress and the public about the Mueller report."

As Bloomberg detailed:

Srinivasan... wrote that any analysis in the memo about bringing obstruction charges was more like a "thought experiment."

Srinivasan noted that the department expressed "regret" about leaving a "misimpression that an actual charging decision was under consideration," but he wrote that it missed opportunities to address the true purpose of the memo.

The court rejected the government's request for another chance to make the case for keeping the full memo secret. Srinivasan wrote that the Justice Department might have successfully argued to keep the memo sealed if it had revealed the public messaging purpose from the beginning and then tried to invoke what's known as the deliberative process privilege, but that it was too late now.

The DOJ has a week to consider appealing the latest decision. The Washington Post reported that spokespeople for the department and Barr declined to comment.

Politico noted Friday:

Trump was never charged in Mueller's probe and the special prosecutor's final report declined to opine on whether what he did in response to the investigation amounted to a crime.

However, some Trump opponents have called on the Attorney General Merrick Garland to reconsider the issue now that Trump is no longer president. Release of the long-sought DOJ memo could fuel those calls and draw more unwanted attention to Trump's potential criminal liability at a time when he is besieged by a slew of other legal woes relating to his handling of classified government records, his role in inspiring many of those involved in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and his broader efforts to overturn Joe Biden's win in the 2020 presidential election.

As Common Dreams reported Thursday, a federal judge gave the DOJ a week to propose redactions to the warrant affidavit containing the information that led to last week's search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida home.

===

also fresh air

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-putin-soul-crushing-summit-showed-muellers-team-russia-benefited-from-the-2016-election-report

Federal prosecutors and FBI agents for special counsel Robert Mueller's Department of Justice (DOJ) office were left reeling after President Donald Trump publicly sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin following the Helsinki summit in 2018, according to memoir written by former Mueller prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann.

The memoir titled, "Where Law Ends[tyranny begins, enscribed on doj/ bldg]: Inside the Mueller Investigation" details the timeline of events that transpired just days after Mueller's office 12 Russian military intelligence officers were indicted for their alleged role in the alleged "hack and dump" leak operative carried out against Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Despite the charges and evidence presented to support the indictments, Trump defended Putin as he insisted the president simply said that his country was not responsible.

"I have President Putin," Trump said at the time. "He just said it's not Russia I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be."

"By this time, Trump not only had the conclusions of the original intelligence assessment, but the incontrovertible proof" from Mueller's team "to expand on and corroborate it," Weissmann wrote. "Still, Trump said, Putin 'was extremely strong and powerful in his denial,' and that was apparently enough for him."

According to the memoir, prosecutors in Mueller's office saw Trump's remarks as "surreal" and "soul crushing." Many found Trump's remarks to be relatively alarming.

"It was like they'd built up a mountain of incriminating evidence only to watch the prosecutor suddenly decide to call off the case and go home, just because the defendant said he wasn't guilty," Weissman added.

Weissmann continued, "The scene in Helsinki should have been stunning to the average American viewer, but for those within our office who'd poured energy into pinning down these facts, it was profoundly alarming.Here was our own president kowtowing to Putin, denying the election interference he had perpetrated on our nation and siding with a bloody dictator over a bipartisan consensus in the Senate and the nonpartisan conclusions of the IC that Putin had attacked our democracy."

Weissman's memoir, "Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation" was released on Tuesday, September 29.

===

an 920

ex-top prosecutor: Mueller didn’t 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…

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an 920

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/ex-top-prosecutor-mueller-didnt-investigate-trump-finances-or-interview-ivanka-over-fears-of-a-blowback/

ex-top prosecutor: Mueller didn’t 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, blamed Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s top deputy in the investigation, for stopping 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.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/former-fbi-agent-on-the-mueller-team-says-trump-was-badly-compromised-in-2016/

peter strock

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/hhs-official-who-manipulated-cdc-reports-on-19-has-deep-russian-ties-report/

no lnx twt

On September 11, Politico reported that Michael Caputo, assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, interfered in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s reports on COVID-19 in order to make them conform to President Donald Trump’s claims about the pandemic. And Caputo, journalist Mary Papenfuss reports in HuffPost, is drawing scrutiny for another reason as well: his ties to the Kremlin.

Caputo, Papenfuss notes, lived in Russia for six years and served as an adviser to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin from 1995-1999 before Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president. The HHS assistant secretary was an adviser to a subsidiary of Gazprom, an energy company owned by the Russian government — and Papenfuss points out thatCaputo “reportedly helped shore up Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reputation.”

“Caputo’s Kremlin ties were so concerning that he became a target of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election,” Papenfuss explains. “He was questioned but was not charged with any offenses. He also testified before the House Intelligence Committee that he had no contact with Russians while serving on the Trump campaign.”

:{:{}:

Caputo, a long-time ally of veteran GOP operative Roger Stone, has promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that it was the Ukrainian government, not the Kremlin, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election — and that the interference was in support of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, not Trump.Papenfuss notes that Caputo “has spread baseless accusations concerning activities in Ukraine by Joe and Hunter Biden. A key source of that Ukrainian smear, Andrii Derkach, turned out to be a Russian spy attempting to interfere in the current U.S. election, the Treasury Department revealed last week.”

During Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, Trump denounced the impeachment as “phony” — and he was also highly critical of the Russia investigation.

The Mueller report says of Caputo, “In the spring of 2016, Trump campaign advisor Michael Caputo learned through a Florida-based Russian business partner that another Florida-based Russian, Henry Oknyansky — who also went by the name Henry Greenberg — claimed to have information pertaining to Hilary Clinton. Caputo notified Roger Stone and brokered communication between Stone and Oknyansky. Oknyansky and Stone set up a May 2016 in-person meeting.”

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/richard-grenells-flynn-unmasking-noninformation-campaign

Right-wing media froth over “Obamagate” and bully press to play along

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 05/15/20

Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a former Fox News contributor and Republican Party stalwart who was appointed to lead the U.S. intelligence community because of his loyalty to President Donald Trump,provided a document of his own devising to Congress on Wednesday. It promptly leaked to the press. Republicans, including Trump himself, immediately seized on the content in the document as evidence of vast Obama administration malfeasance.

Fox hosts spent the next two days incessantly declaring that it vindicated their conspiracy theories, turning their attention away from the coronavirus pandemic. And more credible media outlets, buffeted by the partisan claims, responded with a flurry of stories, at times failing to properly contextualize the story.

Trumpists have declared Grenell’s document a smoking gun showing that disgraced former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about his calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, was a victim of an Obama administration conspiracy, and Fox is hyping that narrative with wall-to-wall coverage. In reality, the document provides almost no information whatsoever. It is simply a list of senior Obama administration officials who received Flynn’s name after they followed the National Security Agency’s standard process and asked the agency to unmask the identity of an individual generically referenced in an NSA report they were authorized to read. It does nothing to establish that any of the individuals named acted improperly in any way -- or even how many unmaskings were related to the Kislyak calls.

We’ve seen misinformation campaigns, where false or deceptive information is distributed, and disinformation campaigns, when that distribution is done with the full knowledge of its inaccuracy.Grenell is engaged in a noninformation campaign.He deliberately crafted and propagated a data point so vague that it is virtually meaningless on its own.But pro-Trump partisans -- particularly at Fox -- have easily picked up, misread (deliberately or not), and promoted the point, aligining it with their wild assumptions [// Qanon]. Those furious misinterpretations have in turn spurred attention from the mainstream press, driving the conspiratorial thinking into the broader public.

This is an intentional plan that corresponds with what the president wants from his director of national intelligence. “Trump hopes enough information will be released by his intelligence appointees to muddy the waters and lend a patina of confusion about what Mr. Obama may have done, according to people familiar with his thinking,” The New York Times reported Thursday.As the president struggles in reelection polling, Trump and his Fox propagandists are using the Flynn story to try to damage the credibility of former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s 2020 opponent.

Grenell’s noninformation campaign is the latest salvo in a years-long campaign by Trump and his Fox propagandists to turn the Russia investigation inside out, presenting the Trump associates who pleaded or were found guilty under its auspices as victims and those involved in carrying out the probe as criminals.

With vast swathes of the federal bureaucracy in the hands of partisans selected for their loyalty to the president, including the DNI and Justice Department, we should expect more of these releases -- and perhaps more dangerous actions -- in the coming months, as Trump’s supporters try to push the political debate away from the ongoing pandemic that has killed more than 80,000 Americans so far in order to secure his reelection.

The Trumpist defense of Michael Flynn

Michael Flynn is a retired general who served as Trump’s national security adviser during the 2016 presidential campaign, the transition, and the early days of his White House tenure. At various points during that timeline, Flynn was also assigned by Trump to find the Hillary Clinton emails he had publicly asked Russia to procure; was under investigation by the FBI, which was concerned with whether he was serving as a witting or unwitting agent of the Russian government; was illegally acting as an unregistered agent of the Turkish government, for which he was reportedly involved in discussions of a kidnapping plot; and was seeking Trump’s approval for a plan to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia after working as a paid adviser for the group behind the proposal.

On December 29, 2016, the day the Obama administration placed sanctions on Russia in response to its interference in the presidential election, Flynn called Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and urged him that Russia not retaliate for those sanctions. Flynn was fired as Trump’s national security adviser after reports surfaced that he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations, which opened Flynn up to blackmail from the Russian government. He would later repeatedly plead guilty as part of Mueller’s probe to lying to the FBI about those calls before renouncing that plea last year.

The position on Flynn among Trumpists like Fox host Sean Hannity is that he is an American hero, [started w/ ollie?]that there was no good-faith reason to probe any of his actions during that period, and that anyone involved in such an effort was a participant in the broad-ranging Obama administration conspiracy to take down Trump, which the president terms “OBAMAGATE.” [RECALL EACH TIME HE WRIGGLES OUT OF A LEGIT CHARGE, HE DECLARES HIS RIGHEOUSNESS/VICTIMHOOD, ASCRIBING EACH TO INCREASING DESPERATION BY DEMS, THEY TRIED TO IMPEACH ME ON DAY 1...]

Their argument features Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak in two ways: They argue that the FBI’s interview with Flynn was a nefarious “setup” and suggest that the leak about the conversation from a “senior government official” to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius for his 2017 column, which brought the call into public light, was anillegal attempt to take down Flynn and Trump by someone who had improperly “unmasked” his identity from intelligence intercepts.

William Barr’s Justice Department showed last week that the Trump administration is putting the force of the federal government behind Fox’s conspiracy theories when it filed a dubious and virtually unprecedented motion seeking to drop the government’s case against Flynn,[THIS SORT OF SUCCEEDED 7/20, STILL BEING FOUGHT IN CT?] citing the FBI’s interview tactics. And on Wednesday, Grenell tried to use his own power as the director of national intelligence to provide grist in support of the other fork of the Flynn defense.

“Unmasking” and what Grenell’s document shows

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Grenell had declassified [VS POMPEO IG REPORT IS CLASSIFIED?!]and provided to the Justice Department what the paper described as “an Obama-era document related to President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn” and “a list of Obama administration officials who sought to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials.” Later that day, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson sent a letter to Grenell and Barr asking for the document. Grenell provided it to the senators on Wednesday, and it was immediately leaked to CBS News’ Catherine Herridge, a former Fox reporter whose work often promotes Republican talking points. Herridge then published the letter on Twitter. (The document did not turn out to be precisely what the Times had reported. It had been generated on May 4, not during the “Obama era,” and dealt solely with cases involving Flynn, not “Trump associates” more generally.)

In NSA reports derived from the legal surveillance [FISA FBI SCREWUP LATER FOUND?] of foreign targets, analysts anonymize (“mask”) the names of U.S. persons to protect their privacy. It is routine for senior officials to ask the NSA to reveal (“unmask”) those identities in cases where they believe that information is necessary to understand the intelligence. The NSA has a standard procedure for doing this, including a review of the justification of the person seeking the unmasking. For context, Trump administration officials sought and received the unmasking of U.S. persons from the NSA more than 10,000 times in 2019 and nearly 17,000 times in 2018.

The document is a list created at Grenell’s request of several dozen “officials who submitted requests” to the NSA between Trump’s election and the end of January 2017 to unmask an identity which turned out to be Flynn, as detailed in an attached memorandum to Grenell from NSA Director Paul Nakasone. It provides the names of the officials, which include then-Vice President Biden, Cabinet secretaries, and intelligence agency leaders, and the date on which their requests were processed. It is the second version of the document -- as Nakasone detailed, the list was originally provided in alphabetical order but revised to be chronological.

That’s it.

Contrary to the insinuations from the right-wing figures, the document provides no evidence that any single unmasking was related to Flynn’s calls with Kislyak. In fact, the record suggests none of them were the original unmasking that first discovered Flynn had made the call, as that one was done by the FBI from its own intercept, not the NSA’s. Nor does it show that Flynn was in some way targeted -- by definition, unmasking occurs when senior administration officials don’t know the name of an American referenced in an intelligence report.

Indeed, there is no indication in the document that anyone listed behaved inappropriately -- in fact, it makes clear that the Obama-era unmaskings happened by the book. “Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request,” it states. It also points out that the NSA cannot confirm that any of the persons who requested the unmaskings eventually saw the information.

Grenell’s noninformation plot

Grenell is totally unqualified for his post. While previous occupants of his position ran intelligence agencies, he at most was a consumer of their products during a brief stint as U.S. ambassador to Germany. What he brings to the table instead, along with unswerving loyalty to the president, is broad experience in public relations and shaping news cycles, which he honed as a spokesperson for Republican politicians and for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, a strategic communications consultant for domestic and foreign clients, a Fox contributor, and a notably unhinged Twitter troll.

Grenell personally requested, sought revisions to, declassified, and provided the document to Congress in precisely this form, showing precisely what he wanted to become public.

If he wanted the document to include more information -- by for example, including the actual documents for which Flynn’s name was unmasked, or summaries thereof -- it would. Without that, despite the right-wing chorus linking Grenell’s document to Flynn’s Kislyak calls, it doesn’t provide evidence that any single unmasking had anything to do with them.In fact the majority of the unmaskings predate the calls and thus could not be related. Indeed, it doesn’t even indicate that Flynn was a participant in the intercepts used in the intelligence reports in which his name was unmasked, as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage points out:

If Grenell had wanted the document to include less information -- by, for example, limiting the date range to after Flynn’s December 29 calls with Kislyak, which would reduce the list from 39 names to only eight -- it would.

What he produced is a very long list of names that maximized its impact, with no information whatsoever that any of them were involved in something the least bit inappropriate. That is, presumably, exactly what he wanted to do.

Perhaps Grenell has no evidence of wrongdoing, and few or none of the unmaskings reference the Kislyak calls (which is not implausible, as the FBI derived and distributed its own intercepts of the call with no masking as part of their already in-progress counterintelligence probe of Flynn). In that case, he’s declassified and released this information for a political purpose.

Perhaps he does have that evidence, but isn’t releasing it for now so he can continue to dribble documents out and generate more news stories as the presidential election approaches. In that case, he’s withholding that informationfor a political purpose.

Fox’s propagandists understand that their role in this noninformation campaign is to fill in the gaps left by the document with feverish, often fact-free speculation. Fox’sTucker Carlsondescribed Flynn’s unmasking as a “domestic spying operation” that was “hidden under the pretext of national security,” and that the Obama administration officials involved are “amoral creeps” who committed “felonies” and should be “punished.”

His prime-time colleague Hannity by asking, “What did Barack Hussein Obama know and when did he know it?Tonight, we willunravel the biggest abuse of power scandal in American history.” He also attacked Biden for “lying” about the story and claimed on Wednesday that if the officials involved in Flynn’s unmasking don’t face “justice,” “the great American republic will disintegrate before your eyes.” Despite how little information the Grenell document provides, they are convinced that it vindicates their conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, Fox personalities are attacking the mainstream press for not obsessing over the story,with Hannity arguing that this proves they are “Democratic shills.” On Friday, Trump himself picked up that angle, praising the Fox morning show for “covering, supremely, the greatest political scandal in the history of the United States, OBAMAGATE,” while pillorying CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as “Fake News” for failing to do so.

It’s no coincidence that Trump and Fox are trying to bully the mainstream press into giving the story more attention. They are counting on journalists to repeat the failures of the 2016 electionand flood the zone with context-free scandal coverage that dirties up the president’s opponent. That’s the play Trump is calling, and the leaders of the Justice Department and intelligence community are eagerly supporting the effort, and will likely continue dropping noninformation and disinformation until Election Day.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/democrats-warn-the-fbi-that-a-gop-senator-is-laundering-a-foreign-operation-to-attack-biden-report/

On Monday, Politico reported that Democratic congressional leaders have sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding a briefing on foreign efforts to target members of Congress as part of an influence campaign.

“Among the Democrats’ concerns is that a Senate investigation being led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has become a vehicle for ‘laundering’ a foreign influence campaign to damage Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the demand,” reported Natasha Bertrand. “Though the letter did not mention the Johnson investigation, it included a classified addendum that the two sources say identified the probe as one of the sources of their concern.”

The letter was signed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA).

Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, opened the investigation ostensibly to audit the origins of the Russia investigation in the previous administration. But even some Republicans have raised concerns that the overly political nature of the probe will backfire on them.

===

720 spoke out on stone commutation

according to a report at the Daily Beast, some Republicans, as well as advisors to Donald Trump, are questioning Sen. Lindsey Graham’s decision to relitigate the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into the Trump administration’s connections to Russia so close to the election saying it could come back to haunt both the president and Graham himself.

Last week Graham, who heads up the Senate Judiciary Committee, stated that he was willing to call Mueller back to testify again about his investigation and that has some conservatives nervous.

In an interview with the Beast this week, Graham admitted, “I was reluctant to call him because it was hard to watch [him testify] in the House. I just think, if he decided to comment on the Stone case… OK, let’s hear what you’ve got to say.”

While the White House has been silent about Graham’s plans, some Trump allies –including one of the president’s former attorneys –are wondering if it is not all a big mistake.

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

“Republicans and even prominent figures in pro-Trump media are split, not just as to whether Mueller should be called back to the Hill but whether it’s a good idea at all to re-litigate his probe at a time when the president is struggling both to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and with his re-election bid against former Vice President Joe Biden,” the report states, adding that Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, a confidant of the president thinks Grahams needs to back off of his plans.

“In a recent episode, Carlson decried how many GOP bigwigs, including some on-air at his own network, were so intensely focused on Russiagate at the expense of policies that could affect millions of Americans,” the Beast reports, quoting Carlson saying, “Who cares how many Benghazi hearings we have? We are supposed to care, but why should we? How did Peter Strzok’s text messages become more important than saving American jobs from foreign nationals who are taking them? It is lunacy! We fall for it every time.”

Add former Trump attorney John Dowd to the list of critics of the recalling of Mueller, saying he’s not sure Graham is up to the job of pressing the former special counsel.

“I don’t quite understand Sen. Graham… I’m never quite sure what he’s up to,” he told the Beast. “When he called [Rod] Rosenstein, he didn’t even ask him… ‘What was the factual basis to appoint a special counsel?’ So, I’m not sure how reliable any [hearing of his] would be…I’m not sure what he’s about. But I thought his examination of Rosenstein was poor.”

“I read in the paper that the Democrats want to hear from Mueller [again, too]. I thought Graham was a Republican! I don’t understand what the guy’s doing! So what if the Democrats want [Mueller]. He’s the Republican chairman of the judiciary committee,” he continued. “[Why do it just] because the Democrats want it?”

The report also notes that Graham that some Republicans feel Graham needs to focus on his own re-election where he faces a stiff challenge from Democrat Jaime Harrison, who has amassed a $29 million campaign chest.

You can read more here.

wow, aha score zinger to trump opponent is qualification for high office, no matter lack of temperment or expertiese.

cf pod save 5/22/20 rice declass memo BO says do "by the book"

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/obamagate-is-fake-the-real-scandal-is-what-happened-to-hillary-clinton

===

WHY GO AFTER MUELLER NOW?

520 wa mon?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/bill-barrs-twisted-plot-to-use-the-doj-as-a-political-weapon-is-just-beginning/

no lnx

Bill Barr’s twisted plot to use the DOJ as a political weapon is just beginning

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly May 13, 2020

After the Trump administration stonewalled Congress on the release of any records or witnesses during the impeachment hearings, it is important to keep in mind that there is some material they are determined to make public.

Shortly after the attorney general assigned John Durham the task of investigating the Trump-Russia probe, the president announced that he had given Barr the authority to declassify any material pertaining to the investigation. That directive came the day before Trump accused FBI officials of treason and referred to Mueller’s investigators as “killers.”

Normally, it would be the director of national intelligence who would determine whether to release classified information. So before Barr could proceed, the administration needed to get rid of Dan Coates, who hadn’t demonstrated sufficient loyalty to Trump. With the president’s lackey, Richard Grenell, installed as acting DNI, the declassification process is now underway.

Last Thursday, Grenell released the transcripts of classified testimony before the House Intelligence Committee during their investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. That was the same day that the Department of Justice announced that they were dropping the charges against Michael Flynn. Thursday was a busy day. It is also when Grenell delivered a “satchel” of documents to Barr at the Department of Justice. ABC News is now reporting that they contain the names of “former Obama administration officials who were allegedly involved in the so-called ‘unmasking’ of former national security adviser Michael Flynn in his conversations with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.” According to Fox News, Barr plans to release the names as early as Tuesday.

What we can expect from this news is a renewal of the attacks on Obama’s national security advisor Susan Rice. If you remember, back in March of 2017, shortly after Trump tweeted that the Obama administration had his “wires tapped at Trump Tower,” Devin Nunes went to the White House for a clandestine meeting after which, he held a press conference saying that he had seen intelligence reports that indicated Trump and his associates were included in electronic surveillance.

As it turned out, what he had seen were reports on electronic surveillance of foreign adversaries in which the names of Trump campaign staff had been “unmasked.” Soon all of the attention about that unmasking turned into attacks on Rice. But when the materials Nunes had seen at the White House were shared with members of the House Intelligence Committee, this is what CNN reported.

After a review of the same intelligence reports brought to light by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and aides have so far found no evidence that Obama administration officials did anything unusual or illegal, multiple sources in both parties tell CNN.

Their private assessment contradicts President Donald Trump’s allegations that former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice broke the law by requesting the “unmasking” of US individuals’ identities. Trump had claimed the matter was a “massive story.”…

One congressional intelligence source described the requests made by Rice as “normal and appropriate” for officials who serve in that role to the president.

What is about to happen is the same thing I reported on Monday about what right-wing news outlets did with Rice’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Grenell and Barr are selectively leaking information (often with contradictory evidence redacted) that allows Trump’s enablers to cherry-pick statements to lie about the events surrounding the Russia probe and create what they’re calling the “Obamagate” narrative. These particular releases are a coordinated attempt to exonerate Michael Flynn and attack anyone who played a role in his prosecution.

If any of this sounds similar to what Barr did in the days before he released the Mueller report, it is probably because that is exactly what he is doing. He is twisting evidence to lay the groundwork for his coming actions with regard to the Durham investigation.

Back in May 2016, Benjamin Wittes warned us about all of this when he wrote about the fact that the least tyrant-proof part of the government is the Department of Justice. To demonstrate, he quoted Justice Robert Jackson.

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.

With an assist from Grenell, that is exactly the sword that Barr is wielding in an attempt to exonerate Trump and smear the previous administration. The attorney general is using the Department of Justice to create a hall of mirrors and, as Peter Wehner suggested, asking us to live within Trump’s lies.

Those who have worked for the Department of Justice under both Republican and Democratic presidents are sounding the alarm. For example, Mary McCord, who served as acting assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department wrote a piece for the New York Times titled, “Bill Barr Twisted My Words in Dropping the Flynn Case. Here’s the Truth.” Former federal prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg shot down one of Barr’s lies by documenting “The long list of people who thought Flynn’s lies were material.” Jonathan Kravis, the federal prosecutor who resigned over Barr’s intervention in the sentencing of Roger Stone, wrote:

In both cases [Stone and Flynn], the department undercut the work of career employees to protect an ally of the president, an abdication of the commitment to equal justice under the law. Prosecutors must make decisions based on facts and law, not on the defendant’s political connections. When the department takes steps that it would never take in any other case to protect an ally of the president, it betrays this principle.

Indeed, the department chose to assign these matters to a special counsel precisely to avoid the appearance of political influence. For the attorney general now to directly intervene to benefit the president’s associates makes this betrayal of the rule of law even more egregious.

That betrayal of the rule of law is why over 2,000 Justice Department alumni (including our own Julie Zebrak) have signed a statement calling on Congress to hold Barr accountable.

My two cents on the matter would be that we are still in the early stages of how Barr and Grenell are planning to betray the rule of law. They’ll be dropping a bucket-load of twisted lies in the coming months.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/newly-released-fbi-documents-reveal-extent-of-roger-stones-direct-communications-with-julian-assange-report/

veteran GOP operative and long-time Donald Trump ally Roger Stone, who was sentenced to three years in federal prison in February for felonies that included witness tampering and lying to Congress, continues to vie for a presidential pardon. Meanwhile, FBI documents continue to offer insights on Stone’s past communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: according to FBI documents made public this week, Stone asserted in a 2017 direct message via Twitter that if prosecutors came for him, “I will bring down the entire house of cards.”

The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that FBI documents show that Stone sent that message weeks after former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed to head the Russia investigation. According to AP reporters Eric Tucker, Colleen Long and Michael Balsamo, the FBI records “reveal the extent of communications between Stone and Assange, whose anti-secrecy website published Democratic e-mails hacked by Russians during the 2016 presidential election, and underscore efforts by Trump allies to gain insight about the release of information they expected would embarrass Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”

FBI records, according to AP, show that in a direct Twitter message sent inJune 2017, Stone “reassured Assange that the issue was ‘still nonsense’ and said, ‘As a journalist, it doesn’t matter where you get information — only that it is accurate and authentic.”

Stone, AP reports, mentioned a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for newspapers and magazines to publish the Pentagon Papers — documents about the Vietnam War that had been classified. The Trump ally, via Twitter, told Assange, “If the US government moves on you, I will bring down the entire house of cards. With the trumped-up sexual assault charges dropped, I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for — best regards. R.”

Stone, in that message, appeared to be referring to the Swedish government’s sexual assault case against Assange, which was dropped.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rump-to-nominate-texas-us-rep-john-ratcliffe-to-become-director-of-national-intelligence/

no lnx

Trump to nominate Texas US Rep. John Ratcliffe to become director of national intelligence

Written by The Texas Tribune March 1, 2020

By Stacy Fernández and Patrick Svitek, The Texas Tribune

Feb. 28, 2020

“Donald Trump to nominate U.S. Rep. John Ratcliffe to become director of national intelligence” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

U.S. Rep. John Ratcliffe, a Heath Republican, was nominated as director of national intelligence Friday, President Donald Trump said in a tweet.

“Would have completed process earlier, but John wanted to wait until after IG Report was finished. John is an outstanding man of great talent!” Trump said in the tweet.

The Washington Post reported the tweet was an apparent reference to an inspector general’s report about the investigation into the president’s campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Ratcliffe could not be reached immediately for comment Friday.

The announcement comes months after Ratcliffe withdrew from consideration for the job amid claims that he’d exaggerated parts of his biography, like his role as the leader of an immigration crackdown while he was a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Texas. Ratcliffe defended his record last year but said he didn’t want the national security and intelligence debate surrounding his confirmation, “however untrue,” to become a political issue.

Ratcliffe has been a fierce defender of the president during congressional hearings. He gained notoriety for berating former special counsel Robert Mueller during his appearance before the Judiciary Committee. Ratcliffe also defended Trump during impeachment hearings of the president.

Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick tweeted his congratulations to the congressman. Fellow Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Austin called Ratcliffe “a good man” and said in a tweet that he supported the nomination.

The Texas Democratic Party’s executive director, though, said Ratcliffe’s nomination was an insult to the intelligence community and that his “entire claim to fame” was his interchange with Mueller.

“Deeply unqualified and highly partisan, he fits right in with the Trump Administration but the results will be terrible and dangerous for the rest of the country,” state party executive director Manny Garcia said.

If Ratcliffe is confirmed to the post, it could create a vacancy in Texas’ 4th Congressional District. The district, which covers the northeast corner of the state, is safely Republican.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/02/28/us-rep-john-ratcliffe-gets-director-national-intelligence-nomination/.

The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state.

bit neglected re gig

Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), President Donald Trump’s newly announced pick to be the next director of National Intelligence overseeing the 17 U.S. intelligence services, doesn’t have much experience in intelligence. Previous occupants of the position have had long careers serving in the U.S. Senate, military, foreign service, or intelligence agencies. By contrast, Ratcliffe, a former U.S. attorney and small town mayor, is a third-term congressman who joined the House Intelligence Committee a scant six months ago.

What Ratcliffe really brings to the table is a willingness to protect Trump from the implications of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by parroting the fantasies of the president's most ardent Fox News defenders.

A few days after interviewing for the job, the congressman benefited from the opportunity to “essentially audition for the president” during Mueller’s Wednesday hearings, The New York Timesreported. If those hearings were Ratcliffe’s audition, then callbacks came Thursday when he used an interview on Fox & Friends, one of the president’s favorite programs, to play the network’s anti-Mueller hits to the audience of one.

On Fox, Ratcliffe claimed that the Mueller report was written by “a bunch of lawyers that didn’t like Donald Trump.” He suggested that the way “Russia really did interfere” with the election was with a “fake dossier” provided to Democrats. And he accused former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey of violating the Espionage Act, adding that the Justice Department probe that Attorney General William Barr has ordered could provide “accountability.”

“The big winner yesterday,” he added at one point, “was Donald Trump, because impeachment is dead."

[vid]

Trump is trying to replace someone who refused to operate in his personal interest with someone who will. Outgoing National Intelligence Director Dan Coats lost the president’s favor by loudly defending the U.S. intelligence service’s conclusion that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election to benefit Trump, and he has sounded the alarm that the Kremlin will target the 2020 elections as well. Ratcliffe, meanwhile, has adopted Fox host Sean Hannity’s moronic position that the “real collusion” during the 2016 election was between Russia and the Democrats.

Such a personnel shift can have profound consequences. Trump forced out former Attorney General Jeff Sessions because Sessions was unwilling to use the Justice Department to defend the president and punish his enemies. His replacement, Barr, had publicly indicated that he was willing to do so; as attorney general, Barr opened the investigation into the inception of the Mueller probe that Fox hosts had demanded.

Trump wants a National Intelligence director who will similarly parrot Fox conspiracy theories and use the office to the president’s benefit. In Ratcliffe, he believes he’s found his man.

===

omg witchhunt vengeance

an 220 vengeance

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/lindsey-graham-says-barr-has-process-for-biden-probe-russian-investigators-going-to-jail/

1219 note: mueller investigation was circumscribed (how/why) and went by doj memo that sitting prez could not be indicted [djt will later claim cannot be invesigated?]; mueller carefully laid out obstruction of justice then expected house to do its const duty to investigate/impeach; and actually mueller report is being revisited as impeach docs prepared?

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/sean-hannitys-bizarre-fixation-on-hillary-clinton-exposed-in-new-review-of-his-primetime-show/

no lnx

Sean Hannity’s bizarre fixation on Hillary Clinton exposed in new review of his primetime show

Written by Shira Tarlo / Salon September 11, 2019

It has been nearly three years since President Donald Trump clinched the White House, however Fox News host Sean Hannity has remained fixated on the Democrat nominated in the 2016 elections: Hillary Clinton.

During the last presidential election cycle, Hannity labeled his primetime show the “Stop-Hillary Express” because of its sustained focus on defeating the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. In the more than two years since Trump defeated Clinton and seized control of the White House, it appears the one-time conductor has continued taking his viewers for a ride on the anti-Clinton train.

From Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 through August 2019, Hannity mentioned Clinton in 505 of the 587 episodes of his program — a figure that represents 86 percent of his shows — according to a review conducted by Media Matters for America, a progressive news watchdog. And if you include mentions from guests, Clinton’s name was dropped in a staggering 91 percent of the episodes Hannity hosted over that time period.

Hannity’s apparent obsession with Clinton is “largely a reflection of his show’s focus on the dizzying conspiracy theory he constructed to defend Trump” from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters.

Gertz further explained: “Hannity places Clinton at the center of several key strands of that web. In his telling, 1) federal investigators should have been charging Clinton for crimes related to her email server rather than looking into Trump’s associates; 2) some of the attorneys involved in the probe had conflicts of interest because they supported her election; and 3) the investigators ignored the ‘real’ collusion with Russia that she supposedly engaged in through the Uranium One pseudoscandal and via an anti-Trump dossier that became part of the investigation.”

Since Clinton largely receded from the national political spotlight in the wake of her defeat, Hannity’s references to the former presidential hopeful decreased in each of the first four months of Trump’s administration, according to Media Matters.

In 2017, Hannity mentioned Clinton in 88 percent of the episodes he hosted in January after Trump’s inauguration, 76 percent in February, 70 percent in March and just 39 percent in April, the lowest total over the course of the study. That figure spiked to 79 percent in May. Since then, Hannity’s mentions haven’t fallen below 60 percent in any month since October of 2017.

Gertz noted that the longest consecutive streak in which Hannity mentioned Clinton on the shows he has hosted was 60 — from April 8, 2019 to July 12, 2019. Hannity did not mention Clinton on five shows he hosted between April 26, 2017, through May 2, 2017, the longest consecutive streak in which the Fox News host did not name-drop Clinton.

“When Hannity takes a night off, the ‘stop-Hillary express’ rolls on, as the show typically features the same guests and themes, including the Clinton-focused anti-Mueller conspiracy theory,” Gertz concluded. “His guest hosts mentioned Clinton in 63% of their episodes, and she was mentioned in 85% of the episodes they hosted during the period of the study.”

Watch the astonishing supercut of Hannity’s Clinton name-drops here:

did mueller antic/ dread rw fox BS attacks? modulated accordingly?!

ailes and atwater used tv to get bush41 electd in a way unprecedented? sorta bypass party? here merge of gop and fox:

For years, Sean Hannity has poisoned the well for special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into the investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. That effort came to a head when Mueller testified before two House committees, with Hannity effectively dictatingthe GOP’s strategy in handling Mueller. The night before the hearings, he urged congressional Republicans to focus their attention not on the results of the investigation, but on the investigators. And that’s exactly what many of them did, using questions ripped from Hannity’s program to demand Mueller weigh in on the network’s conspiracy theories.

One House Republican cited Gregg Jarrett, the Fox legal analyst who once argued on Hannity’s show that in light of the Mueller probe, “the FBI has become America’s secret police” like “the old KBG.” Another entered into the record an op-ed he had written for Hannity’s website. Others championed Hannity’s feverish focus on tangential topics like former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s memos, the research firm Fusion GPS and its founder, Glenn Simpson, and the purported political leanings of Mueller’s staff.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and a Hannity regular, devoted much of his opening statement during the afternoon hearing to the Fox host’s twisted theory that the real collusion during the 2016 presidential campaign was between Russia and the Democrats.

Watch this: We put together a full supercut of Hannity and other Fox figures juxtaposed with Republicans during the hearings, and it is utterly uncanny. There can be no more denying the facts: Fox News and the Republican Party have merged.

===

Following the release of the Mueller report, right-wing media and Republican lawmakers have asserted that now is time for the Department of Justice to investigate those who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. While some just lied that the report exonerated the president and his campaign, others are concerned enough to demand investigations into their political opponents. We've assembled more than two dozen examples. Here are just a few:

Fox host Sean Hannity: “If any of this started before July 31, the alleged beginning of the FBI's collusion investigation, we need to know when it started. And finally, we need to know this big question: What did he know? What did President Obama know? And when did he know it?”
Fox Business Host Stuart Varney: “I would simply like to know what did President Obama know about an ongoing spying operation into a competitor's political presidential campaign? … Will we find out what Hillary was doing?”
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on a Fox "straight news" program:“I actually believe you cannot allow the people from the internal, high levels of the FBI to get away with what they did here. ... There’s a lot of information, a lot of questions that still needs to be answered because this should never be allowed to happen to any other president again.”
Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier: Baier falsely gave credence to the idea that investigators need to be investigated, saying, “We don't yet know about the origins of the investigation, the [inspector general] may shed some light on this, as other investigations in the early stages.”

conspiracy theory to undermine mueller

mma

Fox News spent weeks in May 2017 spreading the conspiracy theories trying to link murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich to WikiLeaks.From Sean Hannity to Newt Gingrich to Steve Doocy, the objective was clear: If there were any possibility that Rich was the source of the emails, then it would not have been Russia. And if it were not Russia, Trump would be cleared of any malfeasance. But now, thanks to Robert Mueller's final report, we finally have proof that it was all a lie.

In 2017, following Rich's murder, right-wing conspiracy theories arose, asserting that the staffer had provided DNC emails to Wikileaks for publication. There was never a shred of evidence to support this conspiracy theory. No responsible news organization ran with anything close to this. But Fox News did.

This was a transparent attempt to protect Trump from the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to aid his campaign. After running with the story for days amidst criticism, Fox finally pulled the initial report. Hannity then continued pushing it, stopping only when Rich's family asked him to. Fox News eventually promised an internal investigation into the matter -- and this week marked 700 days since that promise. And still, we've heard nothing.

There is no reason to believe that anyone at Fox will be held accountable for their actions. Fox has never cared about the basic ethical standards accepted at most newsrooms. As Media Matters' Matt Gertz explained, "Fox is a propaganda outlet geared toward ensuring the continued dominance of Trump and his movement. The pain of Rich’s family is simply the cost of doing business."

Sen burr leak WH

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/gop-gang-of-eight-senator-leaked-all-five-major-trump-linked-targets-of-mueller-probe-to-the-white-house-after-fbi-briefing

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/republicans-are-pulling-out-all-the-stops-to-keep-the-public-from-ever-seeing-what-robert-mueller-discovered/

mma

Mark Levin lauds Fox News opinion shows for attacking the Mueller probe

Recent court filings suggest special counsel Robert Mueller is planning to indict additional Russians for crimes related to 2016 election interference.

Mueller has referred to “uncharged individuals” and “ongoing investigations” in the case involving Paul Manafort, and just last week sought to keep evidence restricted from Russians not yet charged but suspected of trying to “interfere with lawful U.S. government functions,” reported The Hill.

“My hunch is that we are going to see more indictments of Russians,” said Glenn Kirschner, former assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and now an MSNBC legal analyst.

The special counsel charged 13 Russians and three Russian firms last February with conspiracy to defraud the United States as part of a plot involving the Internet Research Agency, a so-called troll farm that manipulated social media to push divisive propaganda during the 2016 campaign.

Two Washington-based lawyers have been hired to represent Concord Management and Consulting, which allegedly funded the troll operation, and some legal experts believe Russia is hoping to obtain sensitive discovery documents from the U.S. attorneys.

Mueller objected last week to the company’s request for “sensitive” documents through pretrial discovery, and that court filing revealed that some U.S. government evidence had already been released as part of an apparent disinformation campaign intended to discredit the special counsel investigation.

The special counsel also argued that lifting restrictions on those docuents, which are currently subject to a federal judge’s protection order, would expose evidence about “uncharged individuals and entities” suspected of possible crimes “like those activities charged in the indictment.”

Mueller wrote in that court filing that his information could jeopardize “sources, methods and techniques” used to identify those foreign suspects, and last month he also acknowledged an active grand jury probe related to that case.

More than two dozen Russians and six Trump associates have been charged as part of the special counsel investigation, and a dozen more Russian intelligence officers have also been charged with hacking the Democratic National Committee and U.S. election infrastructure.

Acting attorney general Matt Whitaker has said Mueller’s probe was “close” to completion, echoing comments by the president’s personal attorneys, but legal experts say “all outward signs” suggest the investigation was “still active and ongoing.”

“I think there is reason to believe something else is coming, Randall Eliason, a George Washington University law professor, told The Hill. “I just don’t see any outward signs this investigation is close to wrapping up.”

January 25th, the FBI arrested Roger Stone and executed search warrants of his residences in Florida and New York. Stone was charged on seven counts of obstruction, giving false statements, and witness tampering as part of the special counsel's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Fox News immediately worked to minimize the importance of Stone's indictment.

The network utilized three forms of defense for Trump's longtime adviser:

Declare the indictments reveal nothing and assert that there's no evidence of collusion.
Criticize the manner in which Stone was arrested. As Chris Hayes, Elliot Williams, and others pointed out, Fox News suddenly cared about potential civil rights violations and a growing police state only when Roger Stone was arrested.
Deflecting by bringing up other officials, like Eric Holder, James Comey, Hillary Clinton, and more.

As Matt Gertz wrote of the role that Fox News plays in the Russia probe,"Hannity has primed his audience to reject any conclusions from the Mueller investigation and to support Trump if he fires the special counsel or demands the Justice Department take action against his political foes. If Trump decides toundermine the rule of law by taking such steps, he will have the fervent support of the Fox Host and his viewers."

And we know that Trump was watching the coverage on Fox. Speaking of that, Trump told Face The Nation in an interview airing today, "You have to get rid of the Russia witch hunt."

Also:Jerome Corsi said in an interview this week that Stone is "pressuring me to change my testimony." Meanwhile, Stone's explanation for his witness tampering charge was that he was trying to help Randy Credico.

Finally: Stone during the campaign repeatedly bragged about talking with Trump and senior campaign officials.

wsj

...

Federal ethics regulations governing the Justice Department are more generally focused on financial or legal conflicts of interest, rather than past commentary. Justice Department ethics lawyers offer advice, but not strict orders, about whether an official should recuse, though other officials have typically followed their guidance.

Mr. Whitaker has sometimes had a difficult relationship with other department officials, people familiar with the department’s leadership said. He was tapped to replace Jody Hunt, Mr. Sessions’ former chief of staff, who was a longtime Justice Department employee with a more relaxed management style than Mr. Whitaker’s more aggressive approach, people who know both men said.

:{:{}:

He had no relationship with Mr. Sessions or the rest of the department brass before arriving. He was installed at the suggestion of Leonard Leo, head of the influential Federalist Society, upon whom Mr. Trump relies when it comes to picking judges, who admired his style and connections to the conservative legal world, people familiar with the matter said. He has allies in the White House. When Mr. Rosenstein’s departure seemed imminent last month, White House and Justice Department officials crafted a plan to have Mr. Whitaker replace him, people familiar with it said.

Outward signs of the leadership shift were already evident Thursday. Mr. Whitaker attended a formal investiture for new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Mr. Sessions’ stead, reciting the lines from the lectern before the sitting justices. When a court clerk read aloud Justice Kavanaugh’s commission, the text concluded with the name of the signatory, Mr. Sessions.

...

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