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Kid Berwyn
Kid Berwyn's Journal
Kid Berwyn's Journal
June 3, 2019
The Mueller Report alone is reason enough.
Add in all the stuff Schiff, Nadler and Cummings are going to uncover and it’s a long stretch for Diapers Donnie and Turtle Putin. And friends, of course.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/trump-intel-slip
June 2, 2019
KENNETH F. MCCALLION
Salon.com, JUNE 2, 2019
Excerpt...
The Mueller report is completely silent on the results of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation that was opened up shortly after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017. The next day, Trump then confided to Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S. the following day in the Oval Office that — referring to the FBI’s Russia investigation — the firing of “nut job” Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him. Trump then followed this confirmation by admitting to NBC’s Lester Holt in a televised interview at the White House that he had decided to fire Comey because of the “Russia thing.”
Alarmed FBI and Justice Department officials promptly opened up a counterintelligence investigation into whether the current occupant of the White House was so compromised by Russia that, for all intents and purposes, he was an active agent of a hostile foreign power. After all, Trump had sounded like a Russia apologist for many months. There was no reasonable basis for his apparent love of all things Russian and his inability to criticize the country or President Vladimir Putin, its autocratic leader, in any way. Firing the FBI director, in an evident attempt to derail the bureau’s investigation into the massive and coordinated attack by Russia on the U.S. electoral system, left no question that there was something seriously wrong in the White House and that there was an urgent need to mount an investigation as quickly as possible. For the first time in American history, there was a rational and actionable basis for believing that a sitting president of the United States was betraying his own country.
So, Mr. Mueller, what happened to this counterintelligence investigation? Attorney General William Barr and his deputy Trump sycophants now occupying key positions in the once-independent Justice Department won’t tell us what happened. Now that you are a private citizen, as a career public servant of the highest integrity, don’t you think you at least have an obligation to tell the House and Senate Intelligence committees whether there is a basis for believing that treason is afoot in the White House? And if so, what is being done about it?
The Mueller report also does not tell us anything about the treasure trove of financial data on Trump that the special counsel’s office inevitably collected in its wide investigative net during the two years of its investigation. Mueller was apparently reticent to cross the line in the sand that Trump drew, warning Mueller away from pursuing subpoenas of Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions who are sitting on ticking financial time bombs that could potentially reveal the extent of Trump’s ties with Russian oligarchs and Russian interests.
Continues...
https://www.salon.com/2019/06/02/former-federal-prosecutor-robert-mueller-left-many-questions-unanswered/
Former federal prosecutor: Robert Mueller left many questions unanswered
Where is the counterintelligence investigation — and the information on Trump's finances? Mueller must testifyKENNETH F. MCCALLION
Salon.com, JUNE 2, 2019
Excerpt...
The Mueller report is completely silent on the results of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation that was opened up shortly after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017. The next day, Trump then confided to Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S. the following day in the Oval Office that — referring to the FBI’s Russia investigation — the firing of “nut job” Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him. Trump then followed this confirmation by admitting to NBC’s Lester Holt in a televised interview at the White House that he had decided to fire Comey because of the “Russia thing.”
Alarmed FBI and Justice Department officials promptly opened up a counterintelligence investigation into whether the current occupant of the White House was so compromised by Russia that, for all intents and purposes, he was an active agent of a hostile foreign power. After all, Trump had sounded like a Russia apologist for many months. There was no reasonable basis for his apparent love of all things Russian and his inability to criticize the country or President Vladimir Putin, its autocratic leader, in any way. Firing the FBI director, in an evident attempt to derail the bureau’s investigation into the massive and coordinated attack by Russia on the U.S. electoral system, left no question that there was something seriously wrong in the White House and that there was an urgent need to mount an investigation as quickly as possible. For the first time in American history, there was a rational and actionable basis for believing that a sitting president of the United States was betraying his own country.
So, Mr. Mueller, what happened to this counterintelligence investigation? Attorney General William Barr and his deputy Trump sycophants now occupying key positions in the once-independent Justice Department won’t tell us what happened. Now that you are a private citizen, as a career public servant of the highest integrity, don’t you think you at least have an obligation to tell the House and Senate Intelligence committees whether there is a basis for believing that treason is afoot in the White House? And if so, what is being done about it?
The Mueller report also does not tell us anything about the treasure trove of financial data on Trump that the special counsel’s office inevitably collected in its wide investigative net during the two years of its investigation. Mueller was apparently reticent to cross the line in the sand that Trump drew, warning Mueller away from pursuing subpoenas of Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions who are sitting on ticking financial time bombs that could potentially reveal the extent of Trump’s ties with Russian oligarchs and Russian interests.
Continues...
https://www.salon.com/2019/06/02/former-federal-prosecutor-robert-mueller-left-many-questions-unanswered/
June 1, 2019
Trump’s Top Targets in the Russia Probe Are Experts in Organized Crime
Some of President Trump’s favorite targets in the Russia probe have spent their careers in the Justice Department and the FBI investigating organized crime and money laundering, particularly as they pertain to Russia.
NATASHA BERTRAND
The Atlantic, AUG 30, 2018
Bruce Ohr. Lisa Page. Andrew Weissmann. Andrew McCabe. President Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked these FBI and Justice Department officials as dishonest “Democrats” engaged in a partisan “witch hunt” led by the special counsel determined to tie his campaign to Russia. But Trump’s attacks have also served to highlight another thread among these officials and others who have investigated his campaign: their extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.
snip...
Trump’s latest obsession is with Bruce Ohr, a career Justice Department official who spent years investigating Russian organized crime and corruption—an expertise he shared with another Trump target named Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative who provided valuable intelligence on Russia to the State Department and the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force prior to authoring the Trump-Russia dossier in 2016. Ohr and Steele met in 2007, according to The New York Times, and stayed in touch as a result of their shared interests and mutual respect. Trump has tweeted about Ohr nearly a dozen times this month alone, complaining about his relationship with Steele and Ohr’s wife’s past work for Fusion GPS—the opposition-research firm that hired Steele in 2016 to research Trump’s Russia ties.
snip...
Trump’s fixation with seeing Ohr ousted from the Justice Department could be perceived as yet another attempt to undermine the credibility of the people who have investigated him. It could also be interpreted as an attack on someone with deep knowledge of the shady characters Trump and his cohort have been linked to, including Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob boss, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Putin who did business with Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. (Incidentally, another Manafort associate, the Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, admitted that he only managed to be in business because Mogilevich allowed him to be, according to a leaked 2008 State Department cable.) Ohr was involved in banning Deripaska from the U.S. in 2006, due to his alleged ties to organized crime and fear that he would try to launder money into American real estate. Nearly a decade later, Ohr and the FBI sought Deripaska’s help in taking down overseas criminal syndicates.
Snip...
The president has denied having any business ties to Russia, and his dream of building a Trump Tower Moscow never materialized. But his links to Russian oligarchs and mobsters from the former Soviet Union have been documented: Millions of dollars from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s developments and casinos throughout the 1990s, as the journalist Craig Unger has chronicled, as oligarchs looked for a place to hide their money in the West. The Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was once known as a hot spot for Brooklyn mobsters associated with the Russian Mafia, and quickly became the “favorite East Coast destination” of the top Russian mob boss Vyacheslav Ivankov, according to the 2000 book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. It was also repeatedly cited by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for having inadequate money-laundering controls.
Continues...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trumps-top-targets-in-the-russia-probe-are-experts-in-organized-crime/569056/
Never forget: as PRESIDENT Trump targeted the FBI Witch Hunters who were tracking Putin and his Mafiya.
REMINDER: Trump purged FBI of Russia counterintelligence experts.
From less than a year back:
Trump’s Top Targets in the Russia Probe Are Experts in Organized Crime
Some of President Trump’s favorite targets in the Russia probe have spent their careers in the Justice Department and the FBI investigating organized crime and money laundering, particularly as they pertain to Russia.
NATASHA BERTRAND
The Atlantic, AUG 30, 2018
Bruce Ohr. Lisa Page. Andrew Weissmann. Andrew McCabe. President Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked these FBI and Justice Department officials as dishonest “Democrats” engaged in a partisan “witch hunt” led by the special counsel determined to tie his campaign to Russia. But Trump’s attacks have also served to highlight another thread among these officials and others who have investigated his campaign: their extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.
snip...
Trump’s latest obsession is with Bruce Ohr, a career Justice Department official who spent years investigating Russian organized crime and corruption—an expertise he shared with another Trump target named Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative who provided valuable intelligence on Russia to the State Department and the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force prior to authoring the Trump-Russia dossier in 2016. Ohr and Steele met in 2007, according to The New York Times, and stayed in touch as a result of their shared interests and mutual respect. Trump has tweeted about Ohr nearly a dozen times this month alone, complaining about his relationship with Steele and Ohr’s wife’s past work for Fusion GPS—the opposition-research firm that hired Steele in 2016 to research Trump’s Russia ties.
snip...
Trump’s fixation with seeing Ohr ousted from the Justice Department could be perceived as yet another attempt to undermine the credibility of the people who have investigated him. It could also be interpreted as an attack on someone with deep knowledge of the shady characters Trump and his cohort have been linked to, including Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob boss, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Putin who did business with Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. (Incidentally, another Manafort associate, the Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, admitted that he only managed to be in business because Mogilevich allowed him to be, according to a leaked 2008 State Department cable.) Ohr was involved in banning Deripaska from the U.S. in 2006, due to his alleged ties to organized crime and fear that he would try to launder money into American real estate. Nearly a decade later, Ohr and the FBI sought Deripaska’s help in taking down overseas criminal syndicates.
Snip...
The president has denied having any business ties to Russia, and his dream of building a Trump Tower Moscow never materialized. But his links to Russian oligarchs and mobsters from the former Soviet Union have been documented: Millions of dollars from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s developments and casinos throughout the 1990s, as the journalist Craig Unger has chronicled, as oligarchs looked for a place to hide their money in the West. The Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was once known as a hot spot for Brooklyn mobsters associated with the Russian Mafia, and quickly became the “favorite East Coast destination” of the top Russian mob boss Vyacheslav Ivankov, according to the 2000 book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. It was also repeatedly cited by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for having inadequate money-laundering controls.
Continues...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trumps-top-targets-in-the-russia-probe-are-experts-in-organized-crime/569056/
Never forget: as PRESIDENT Trump targeted the FBI Witch Hunters who were tracking Putin and his Mafiya.
June 1, 2019
Planet is ablaze and the nation is led by a moron in the thrall of KGB.
Thank you for the kindness, riversedge! I knew you’d understand.
Yosemite on May 15, 2018
June 1, 2019
We do an end-run around the turtle.
Certainly he is in charge of the Senate. However, he depends on the loyalty of his caucus. They respond to their states’s voters.
Public opinion will solidify against the GOP after open hearings on prime time tv expose Trump for the treasonous turd he is.
To knock turtle out, we demonstrate how turtle himself is compromised by Russian oligarchs.
Mitch McConnell’s Ties to Russian Oil Money
https://medium.com/TheDemCoalition/mitch-mcconnells-ties-to-russian-oil-money-db56f16a4824
Impeachment will turn over a lot of KGOP rocks.
May 31, 2019
The Gravedigger of American Democracy
“If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.“
Source:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy/
May 29, 2019
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/vallee_magonia.html
Three men and a woman, actually. They fell from the sky, it would seem, in the vicinity of Lyon in what’s now eastern France, early in the ninth century. They came from a place called Magonia.
So the local mob believed, as they prepared to stone them to death.
We have the story from Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon (c. 779-840), in a treatise directed against “the absurd opinion of the common folk concerning hail and thunder.” Agobard prided himself on his enlightenment; Scripture, not superstition, was for him the touchstone of truth. Here’s the story he tells, as translated by W. J. Lewis for the Internet Medieval Sourcebook:
“But we have seen and heard of many people overcome with so much foolishness, made crazy by so much stupidity, that they believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. But when truth had prevailed, however, after much argument, the people who had exhibited the captives, in accordance with the prophecy (Jeremiah 2:26) ‘were confounded … as the thief is confounded when he is taken.’ ”
Continues...
https://www.davidhalperin.net/the-mystery-men-of-magonia/
Passport to Magonia
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/vallee_magonia.html
Three men and a woman, actually. They fell from the sky, it would seem, in the vicinity of Lyon in what’s now eastern France, early in the ninth century. They came from a place called Magonia.
So the local mob believed, as they prepared to stone them to death.
We have the story from Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon (c. 779-840), in a treatise directed against “the absurd opinion of the common folk concerning hail and thunder.” Agobard prided himself on his enlightenment; Scripture, not superstition, was for him the touchstone of truth. Here’s the story he tells, as translated by W. J. Lewis for the Internet Medieval Sourcebook:
“But we have seen and heard of many people overcome with so much foolishness, made crazy by so much stupidity, that they believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. But when truth had prevailed, however, after much argument, the people who had exhibited the captives, in accordance with the prophecy (Jeremiah 2:26) ‘were confounded … as the thief is confounded when he is taken.’ ”
Continues...
https://www.davidhalperin.net/the-mystery-men-of-magonia/
May 28, 2019
The Bankrupt Unelected Moron is a living Weapon of Mass Destruction. Spewing weaponized hate magnified by corporate media 24/7, Trump is a perpetual supervolcano of nonsense and spin that is repeated and believed by fools. Worse, his star image as POTUS puts him as wasted space in the memory banks of smart people. Worst, he does so at the behest of Vladimir Putin.
Tzar Bumba: Moron IS the Message
(With apologies to Marshall McLuhan)The Bankrupt Unelected Moron is a living Weapon of Mass Destruction. Spewing weaponized hate magnified by corporate media 24/7, Trump is a perpetual supervolcano of nonsense and spin that is repeated and believed by fools. Worse, his star image as POTUS puts him as wasted space in the memory banks of smart people. Worst, he does so at the behest of Vladimir Putin.
May 24, 2019
Ali Breland
Mother Jones, May 24, 2019
Facebook is letting a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) manipulated to make it appear as though she’s drunk or otherwise unwell stay on its platform even after YouTube has opted to remove it.
The video shows Pelosi talking at a public event on Wednesday, but is slowed down to make her seem less coherent and as though she’s slurring her words. Despite the video’s obvious inauthenticity, it went viral, accruing over 1 million views before being noticed by The Washington Post, the first outlet to report on it. The video has since racked up many more views after being tweeted by Rudy Guiliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney.
“What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi? Her speech pattern is bizarre,” Giuliani wrote in a now-deleted tweet. Guiliani later maintained that he had noticed some sort of “shift” in Pelosi’s speech.
The video appears to have originally gone viral on Facebook after being first posted on a page called Politics Watchdog. Facebook told Mother Jones that the video did not violate any of its community standards, and opted to keep the video up. A company representative said it would demote the video in its algorithms, which would preserve the video but make it less visible and harder to stumble onto. Facebook also pointed out that it began to display stories from fact-checking organizations it partners with, like Politifact, adjacent to the video. Most of the comments, however, that Facebook features prominently under the video take it as authentic and lambast Pelosi. As of Friday, the original version had 2.4 million views.
Continues...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/nancy-pelosi-drunk-video-facebook/
Facebook has Shown 2.4 Million Users a Doctored Video of Nancy Pelosi, and it Isn't Going to Stop.
The social media site takes a pass on battling misinformation.Ali Breland
Mother Jones, May 24, 2019
Facebook is letting a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) manipulated to make it appear as though she’s drunk or otherwise unwell stay on its platform even after YouTube has opted to remove it.
The video shows Pelosi talking at a public event on Wednesday, but is slowed down to make her seem less coherent and as though she’s slurring her words. Despite the video’s obvious inauthenticity, it went viral, accruing over 1 million views before being noticed by The Washington Post, the first outlet to report on it. The video has since racked up many more views after being tweeted by Rudy Guiliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney.
“What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi? Her speech pattern is bizarre,” Giuliani wrote in a now-deleted tweet. Guiliani later maintained that he had noticed some sort of “shift” in Pelosi’s speech.
The video appears to have originally gone viral on Facebook after being first posted on a page called Politics Watchdog. Facebook told Mother Jones that the video did not violate any of its community standards, and opted to keep the video up. A company representative said it would demote the video in its algorithms, which would preserve the video but make it less visible and harder to stumble onto. Facebook also pointed out that it began to display stories from fact-checking organizations it partners with, like Politifact, adjacent to the video. Most of the comments, however, that Facebook features prominently under the video take it as authentic and lambast Pelosi. As of Friday, the original version had 2.4 million views.
Continues...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/nancy-pelosi-drunk-video-facebook/
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