How the Pentagon failed to sell Afghan government's bunk 'Bountygate' story to US intelligence agencies - "Another New York Times Russiagate bombshell turns out to be a dud, as dodgy stories spun out by Afghan intelligence and exploited by the Pentagon ultimately failed to convince US intelligence agencies... the core elements of the story appear to have been fabricated by Afghan government intelligence to derail a potential US troop withdrawal from the country. And they were leaked to the Times and other outlets by US national security state officials who shared an agenda with their Afghan allies. In the days following the story’s publication, the maneuvers of the Afghan regime and US national security bureaucracy encountered an unexpected political obstacle: US intelligence agencies began offering a series of low confidence assessments in the Afghan government’s self-interested intelligence claims, judging them to be highly suspect at best, and altogether bogus at worst."
Pentagon says 'no corroborating evidence' of Russian bounties on US troops as media claims increase
Why we need a little skepticism, and more evidence, on Russian bounties - "The most fundamental task of both journalists and intelligence analysts is to clarify the often blurry line separating truth and falsehood. They must deal with a firehose of unverified claims pouring into their inboxes daily, and the consequences of lending credence to false reports can be severe. Sound analysis requires a careful balance between over- and under-connecting the dots. The recent track record in this endeavor, however, is discouraging. The Russian bounty controversy is the latest example... The initial question to ask in evaluating the veracity of the allegation is, how credible are the sources? Here, the answer: not very. According to the New York Times, the primary sources are militants and criminals captured and interrogated by Afghanistan’s government. But human sources are often intentionally or unintentionally misleading. Captured militants frequently tell their interrogators things they hope will win more lenient treatment. Others relate stories they honestly believe, but amount to little more than hearsay. “Curveball,” the aptly named source for the now discredited claim in 2002 that Iraq had built mobile biological weapons laboratories, simply lied to his intelligence handlers to advance his anti-Saddam agenda. The second question is, what other information might support or disconfirm the allegations? Here, too, there is reason for skepticism. The Times cites evidence of “large financial transfers” from Russian military intelligence to the Taliban. But scrutiny of that datapoint raises some puzzling questions. Between 14 and 22 Americans were killed in Afghanistan each year from 2016 to 2019; nine have been killed so far this year. If the Russian money indeed was sent to fund a bounty program within this time frame, why has it not had much impact? And if the Times report of large financial transfers — one of which was at least $500,000 — is accurate, it would appear that the typically tight-fisted Russians either were paying enormous sums per kill or were paying in advance, which is not how bounties usually work. Which brings us to a third question: Who benefits from these allegations? The list certainly includes the central Afghan government... The list also includes Trump’s domestic political opponents, who long have attempted to tar him with false accusations of working on the Kremlin’s behalf or even on its payroll. The discredited Russian collusion story is a prime example of this effort.Notably, the list does not include Russia... Even at the height of the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States refrained from such activity, despite engaging enthusiastically in proxy warfare in theaters around the world. The KGB even sought an explicit understanding with the CIA that neither organization would kidnap or assassinate its rival’s personnel, largely because it feared where such targeting could lead... Senior Democrats who have been quick to charge Trump with treason for failing to punish the Russians might recall their own support for striking nuclear deals and lifting sanctions on Iran not long ago, despite undisputed facts that Teheran provided actual training, operational intelligence and weapons to Iraqi insurgents that led to the killing and maiming of thousands of American soldiers."
U.S. Commander Says No American Deaths Linked To Russia Bounty Killing Scheme - "The New York Times reported on June 26 that President Trump was briefed on the bounty operation months ago, sparking criticism that the president knew of the Russian effort to kill U.S. troops and did not respond. The New York Times backed off the claim that Trump had knowledge of the scheme days later... Experts on Russia and Moscow’s inner workings say that such a plan would likely have not received approval from Russian President Vladimir Putin, though lower level officials could have pushed the bounty operation forward, according to The New York Times." So much for that fake news
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "During the 2016 presidential campaign former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and the DNC made the decision to highlight her experience in international matters and paint billionaire Donald Trump as dangerously ignorant on the subject. To that end they hired an opposition research firm (Fusion GPS), laundered through a law firm (Perkins Coie), to provide a degree of separation, to look into Trump’s record with Russia. The legwork was done by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. Steele used his contracts in Russia to collect rumors and, likely, fake Russian counter intelligence about Trump. Updates to this ‘dossier’ were then sent to the Clinton campaign and DNC who then starting spreading this information to the press, intelligence agencies, and key members in Congress (such as John McCain).In conjunction with this effort the founder of Media Matters, David, set up an operation to collect/create Russia-Trump stories and distribute them to friendly journalists via a dedicated emailing list. A DNC operative started working with Ukrainian leaders and the American embassy in Ukraine to find negative Trump-Russia information.U.S. intelligence then started investigating Trump and his advisory team. They used the false Steele dossier as the foundation for secret search warrants on Trump advisors. When Trump surprisingly won the election the press started reporting on the dossier contents, several individuals in the White House requested foreign intelligence involving Trump and his advisors be ‘demasked’, and the documents security level were lowered to allow a broader distribution (and the resulting leaks). As this story grew, those in Congress and in the Obama White House stated and leaked that they had seen evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. We now know that, privately and under oath, they never saw evidence of criminal conspiracy/collusion.Now working for Trump, James Comey and other top officials in the DOJ and FBI kept the embers of the investigations going while not fully informing the new president. This culminated in Comey’s firing and the assignment of Robert Mueller to investigate possible Russian conspiracy. Many of the members of his team turned out to be principles in the investigations of Trump’s campaign who then shaped the Mueller report. Later, when questioned by Congress, Mueller appeared ignorant about Fusion GPS and its involvement in the Steele dossier.Years later we learn that President Obama was getting updates on the Trump-related investigations that were not all communicated through his Attorney General and that Vice President Biden had also requested the unmasking of intelligence on the incoming President’s foreign policy advisors.As we know now, the Trump campaign was not in contact with Russia until after the election. The Russians didn’t believe that Trump would win so they made no effort to reach out to him or his advisors"
Russian Disinformation Fed the FBI’s Trump Investigation - WSJ - "Declassified footnotes to a Justice Department inspector general report show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation team investigating members of the Trump campaign received classified reports in 2017 identifying key pieces of the Steele dossier as products of a Russian disinformation campaign. This might be only the tip of the iceberg because other recently declassified information demonstrates that even more disinformation may have been planted in Christopher Steele’s reporting.Let that sink in. The FBI knew that at least some of its evidence against the Trump campaign, and maybe more, was likely part of a Russian disinformation campaign—evidence from a source that was “central and essential” for getting the first FISA warrant... Yet the FBI assistant director in charge of the investigation, Bill Priestap, told the inspector general that as of May 2017 (when Robert Mueller took over as special counsel), the FBI “didn’t have any indication whatsoever” that their evidence was part of a Russian disinformation campaign... The FBI team’s handling of these intelligence reports seems consistent with how it ran the entire investigation. From the opening of the investigation, the FBI team kept accumulating exculpatory information. Yet rather than wind the investigation down, they ramped it up. Minimally intrusive open-source searches became Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants and confidential human sources targeting campaign staffers.Then it got worse... The Steele dossier already ranks as one of the dirtiest political tricks of all time. The Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign paid for it, laundered it through friends and allies in the Justice and State departments, and spun it into a full-blown FBI investigation of her political rival. Then, after Donald Trump was elected, it was used as a political cudgel to bludgeon his administration and set up an 18-month special counsel investigation. Now it’s been revealed the FBI had evidence that it was based in substantial part on a Russian disinformation campaign."
Unbiased America - Posts | Facebook - "The primary source for the so-called Steel dossier was deemed a possible “national security threat” and was the subject of an FBI counter-intel probe from 2009 to 2011 for suspected contact with Russian intelligence officers. The FBI even initiated the process for applying for a wiretap on the source, identified elsewhere as Igor Danchenko, in July 2010, but dropped the issue after the source left the country in September 2010."
Russia Routed Millions to Influence Clinton in Uranium Deal, Informant Tells Congress - "Moscow routed millions of dollars to the U.S. expecting the funds would benefit ex-President Bill Clinton's charitable initiative while his wife, Hillary Clinton, worked to reset relations with Russia, an FBI informant in an Obama administration-era uranium deal stated."
Obama admin briefed on claims Hillary Clinton drummed up Russia controversy to vilify Trump, distract from emails - "The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) declassified information indicating that former President Obama's administration knew of allegations that former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was attempting to tie Trump to the Russia and distract from her email scandal before the 2016 presidential election."
Uncovering Russiagate’s Origins Could Prevent Future Scandals - "For more than two years, the FBI investigated a presidential campaign and then sitting president as a conspirator or agent of Russia. The story engulfed US media and political energy and had major consequences on domestic US politics and foreign relations. The probe found not only no Trump-Russia conspiracy, but barely even any contact between the two sides suspected of conspiring. Carrying a Russian passport (as the Russians in the Trump Tower meeting did), or falsely suggesting in an e-mail that you are acting at the Kremlin’s behest (as the British music publicist who arranged that meeting did), does not mean that you are actually working with the Russian government. Mueller, ultimately, showed no evidence that they—or any other suspected Kremlin intermediary—were Kremlin intermediaries. This helps explain why, as the report found, Kremlin officials trying to reach out to the Trump campaign after its election victory “appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.” And even with this all-consuming investigation now over, we still do not have a firm understanding of how it began... It is also important to find out the extent to which the FBI relied on the Steele dossier. We have yet to receive a credible explanation for why intelligence officials thought it was appropriate to take cues from an unverified collection of lurid conspiracy theories about Trump—all paid for by his political opponent. What has already been revealed is damning enough. The FBI cited the Steele dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in October 2016, telling the court that it “believes that [Russia’s] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with,” the Trump campaign. Its source for that wild supposition was Steele, whom it described as “Source #1” & “credible.”... If the FBI had investigated President Barack Obama for more than two years on the false allegation of conspiring with or being an agent of a foreign power, Democratic leaders would rightfully demand a full inquiry. It would set a dangerous precedent for liberals to now reject an effort to get answers only because those answers would not be politically expedient. If left unchecked now, the same intelligence services that involved themselves in domestic politics in 2016 could do so again against progressive candidates on similarly spurious grounds. The unfortunate reality is that under Trump, Democratic leaders and intelligence officials used the Russia investigation as a political weapon against his presidency. Now that it has proven baseless, Trump and his supporters have legitimate grounds to uncover how it began. The fact that Trump will use Russiagate’s failure as a political weapon is exactly why us skeptics on the left warned that its evidentiary holes would help him. Rather than complaining, those who brought us Russiagate should accept responsibility for handing Trump that opportunity, and work to ensure that the national security state does not receive opportunities to intrude again."
And this from The Nation
FBI Knew Russia Collusion Story Was Bogus - "Senator Lindsey Graham, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has released several hundred more documents from his committee’s investigation into the origins of the FBI investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign for president. Included in the document dump was the transcript of closed testimony given last June by former Justice Department official Dana J. Boente."
Byron York's Daily Memo: Now they tell us! Trump was tough on Russia! - "Democrats and their allies in the press spent the last four years accusing President Trump of being soft on Russia. And worse: Some called the president a Russian asset, a traitor, Putin's patsy, and much, much more. It was all BS, because behind the rhetoric was the stark reality that Trump, and his administration, have actually been tougher on Russia than many of his predecessors. Now, with the president on the way out, one lone voice in the anti-Trump press -- CNN, specifically -- has spoken the truth out loud.On CNN's "New Day" on New Year's morning, the network's Fareed Zakaria was asked how U.S. Russia policy under the new President Joe Biden might differ from policy under President Trump. "I think in general, there isn't going to be as much difference as people imagine," Zakaria said. "The Biden folks are pretty tough on Russia, Iran, North Korea. You know, the dirty little secret about the Trump administration was that while Donald Trump clearly had a kind of soft spot for Putin, the Trump administration was pretty tough on the Russians. They armed Ukraine. They armed the Poles. They extended NATO operations and exercises in ways that even the Obama administration had not done. They maintained the sanctions. So I don't think it will be that different.” The dirty little secret??? It was never a secret at all. All of the actions Zakaria listed were well known public policy during the Trump years. Any of Zakaria's colleagues, at CNN and in the press as a whole, might have cited them. But many instead chose to contribute to the media's Russia hysteria that began even before the president was inaugurated and continued through the years of Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Flash back a few years. On February 20, 2018, Trump tweeted, "I have been much tougher on Russia than Obama, just look at the facts. Total Fake News!" Much of the media stood up as one to denounce Trump's statement. "Simply false," said CNN. "That's not true," said TIME. "The facts suggest the opposite," said the Washington Post. "Mostly false," declared PolitiFact, adding that Trump's tweet "immediately drew guffaws among media commentators.” But of course, Trump's tweet was true, something that most of those media outlets cannot admit even today. But at the time, I texted with a Republican lawmaker who was baffled by the media denials. Of course Trump is tougher on Russia than Obama was, he noted. Then the evidence started coming in a fast and furious series of texts. Trump had: 1) Bombed Syria, Russia's main client, and unleashed the U.S. military in Syria, including against Russians; 2) Armed Ukraine; 3) Weakened the Iran nuclear deal, and would likely soon end it [which Trump later did]; 4) Browbeat NATO allies to increase defense spending; 5) Approved $130 billion in new defense spending; 6) Added low-yield nukes to the U.S. arsenal; 7) Started research and development on a new missile after Russia deployed a missile that did not comply with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty; 8) Shut down Russia's consulate in San Francisco; and 9) Pumped more U.S. oil and gas, making the U.S. more energy independent.Those were just the reasons at the time, in 2018. As time went on, Trump continued and expanded on all those Russia-limiting moves. Plus, he not only kept in place earlier sanctions against Russia, he added new ones. Trump was right, and the media consensus was wrong."
- Reality vs. Rhetoric: Assessing the Trump Administration’s Russia Policy - "Printed for the use of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe... policies thus far during the Trump administration have been less than friendly to Putin's regime, including quietly approving the first sale of lethal arms to Ukraine, which is a departure from the Obama administration's de facto lethal arms embargo. And as we know, the recent escalation of sanctions has further shaken the Kremlin elite... As a student, when I first started thinking about politics, Richard Nixon was president. And I remember reading an article in The Economist where Nixon was telling his supporters: Don't pay any attention to what I say, watch what I do. And I think, asRachel indicated, we're in a time when many people are starting to pay more attention to what Trump says than what he does... Briefly, what has he done? From the time that he came into office,there have been a long series of moves that can be regarded only as very unfriendly to the Putin regime... Russia didn't support Trump, per se. It supported those whom it considered tobe the most disruptive and divisive. This is why it supported Trump,why it supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary. It supported every divisive view. It supported Black Lives Matter and white supremacists,militant Islamists and violent Islamophobia. Moreover, the minute Trump won, Russia switched its support to try and bash us. And actually, youshould know that the most successful public event ever organized byRussian trolls was a public anti-Trump rally, organized on November 12th, 2016, just 4 days after his victory. Thousands attended,including filmmaker Michael Moore, who played the role of unwitting useful idiot... Trump is superbly equipped to deal with bullies because he is not a small bully himself. And it is a good thing in a world of bullies.
New York Times Investigation Finds Trump Doesn’t Owe Russia Money - "Following The New York Times’ attempts to prove President Donald Trump paid little to no taxes, the paper had to admit that the president doesn’t owe money to Russia... The Times then rattled off several conspiracy theories about how Trump owing Deutsche Bank really meant he owed the Russians before debunking the claims... the Times analysis twists, downplays, and ignores that Trump paid tens of millions of dollars in taxes over the years. He was able to get much of that money back due to the tax code and the nature of his business — real estate development and investment. For example, Trump paid $95 million in federal income taxes over 18 years from “The Apprentice.” The Times notes that he recouped most of that money from a $72.9 million refund that is the subject of a decade-long audit. Even with the refund, that leaves more than $20 million in federal income taxes over 18 years... the IRS kept the $1 million and $4.2 million that Trump paid during those years — he did not get it back. The $750 figure being cited by media outlets is in addition to what he already paid in taxes; it is not his total tax payments for the year. Trump also paid $24.3 million between 2000 and 2017 due to the alternative minimum tax."
Trump attacks Robert Mueller's 'hit squad' in row over 'wiped' phones - "members of the Russia investigation wiped information from at least 15 phones."
Barack Obama on Michael Flynn - WSJ - "Barack Obama is a lawyer, so it was stunning to read that he ventured into the Michael Flynn case in a way that misstated the supposed crime and ignored the history of his own Administration in targeting Mr. Flynn."
Flynn case bombshell: FBI analysts bought insurance fearing they'd be sued for misconduct
New Red Flags Emerging From FBI's Handling of Michael Flynn's Case - "Since the documents were released last week, much attention has focused on a handwritten note by FBI counterintelligence head Bill Priestap in advance of the January 2017 interview with Flynn that would result in the retired lieutenant general being charged with lying to federal agents: “What is our goal?” Priestap asked, “Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”"
Flynn Was Innocent All Along: He Was Pressured to Plead Guilty - "General Michael Flynn should never have pleaded guilty because he did not commit a crime. Even if he lied to the FBI, his lie was not "material." For a lie to be a crime under federal law, it must be material to the investigation – meaning that the lies pertain to the issues being legitimately investigated. The role of the FBI is to investigate past crimes, not to create new ones. Because the FBI investigators already knew the answer to the question they asked him—whether he had spoken to the Russian Ambassador—their purpose was not to elicit new information relevant to their investigation, but rather to spring a perjury trap on him. When they asked Flynn the question, they had a recording of his conversation with the Russian, of which he was presumably unaware. So his answer was not material to the investigation because they already had the information about which they were inquiring."
Obama knew details of Michael Flynn's wiretapped calls: docs - "Flynn’s calls weren’t considered criminal at the time, but documents unsealed last month showed that FBI officials secretly discussed whether their aim was to get Flynn fired, or to “get him to lie,” when they interviewed him at the White House"
Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties - "Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more... Pundits are cheering... One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.” Sullivan’s reaction was amplified by a group letter calling for Barr’s resignation signed by 2000 former Justice Department officials (the melodramatic group email reported as momentous news is one of many tired media tropes in the Trump era) and the preposterous “leak” of news that the dropped case made Barack Obama sad. The former president “privately” told “members of his administration” (who instantly told Yahoo! News) that there was no precedent for the dropping of perjury charges, and that the “rule of law” itself was at stake.Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, whatever, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. News that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks... Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer.Russiagate cases were often two-level offenses: factually bogus or exaggerated, but also indicative of authoritarian practices. Democrats and Democrat-friendly pundits in the last four years have been consistently unable to register objections on either front. Flynn’s case fit the pattern. We were told his plea was just the “tip of the iceberg” that would “take the trail of Russian collusion” to the “center of the plot,” i.e. Trump. It turned out he had no deeper story to tell. In fact, none of the people prosecutors tossed in jail to get at the Russian “plot” – some little more than bystanders – had anything to share. Remember George Papadopoulos, whose alleged conversation about “dirt” on Hillary Clinton with an Australian diplomat created the pretext for the FBI’s entire Trump-Russia investigation? We just found out in newly-released testimony by McCabe that the FBI felt as early as the summer of 2016 that the evidence “didn’t particularly indicate” that Papadopoulos was “interacting with the Russians.”If you’re in the media and keeping score, that’s about six months before our industry lost its mind and scrambled to make Watergate comparisons over Jim Comey’s March, 2017 “bombshell” revelation of the existence of an FBI Trump-Russia investigation. Nobody bothered to wonder if they actually had any evidence... In late 2015, Obama officials bragged to the Wall Street Journal they’d made use of FISA surveillance involving “Jewish-American groups” as well as “U.S. lawmakers” in congress, all because they wanted to more effectively “counter” Israeli opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. This is a long way from using surveillance to defuse terror plots or break up human trafficking rings. I can understand not caring about the plight of Michael Flynn, but cases like this have turned erstwhile liberals – people who just a decade ago were marching in the streets over the civil liberties implications of Cheney’s War on Terror apparatus – into defenders of the spy state. Politicians and pundits across the last four years have rolled their eyes at attorney-client privilege, the presumption of innocence, the right to face one’s accuser, the right to counsel and a host of other issues, regularly denouncing civil rights worries as red-herring excuses for Trumpism. I’ve written a lot about the Democrats’ record on civil liberties issues. Working on I Can’t Breathe, a book about the Eric Garner case, I was stunned to learn the central role Mario Cuomo played in the mass incarceration problem, while Democrats also often embraced hyper-intrusive “stop and frisk” or “broken windows” enforcement strategies, usually by touting terms like “community policing” that sounded nice to white voters. Democrats strongly supported the PATRIOT Act in 2001, and Barack Obama continued or expanded Bush-Cheney programs like drone assassination, rendition, and warrantless surveillance, while also using the Espionage Act to bully reporters and whistleblowers... In the last four years the blue-friendly press has done a complete 180, going from cheering Edward Snowden to lionizing the CIA, NSA, and FBI, and making on-air partners out of drone-and-surveillance all-stars like John Brennan, James Clapper, and Michael Hayden. There are now too many ex-spooks on CNN and MSNBC to count, while there isn’t a single regular contributor on any of the networks one could describe as antiwar. Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems some “dumb” Americans have had accepting them. On the campaign trail in 2016, I watched Democrats hand Trump the economic populism argument by dismissing all complaints about the failures of neoliberal economics. This mistake was later compounded by years of propaganda arguing that “economic insecurity” was just a Trojan Horse term for racism... The same mistake is now being made with civil liberties. Millions have lost their jobs and businesses by government fiat, there’s a clamor for censorship and contact tracing programs that could have serious long-term consequences, yet voters only hear Trump making occasional remarks about freedom; Democrats treat it like it’s a word that should be banned by Facebook (a recent Washington Post headline put the term in quotation marks, as if one should be gloved to touch it). Has the Trump era really damaged our thinking to this degree?"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "President Trump has pardoned Michael Flynn.When Flynn was jettisoned from the Trump administration before being confirmed the word was he’d lied about his activities to the Vice President. Can’t have that, so I was glad to see he was gone. A long while later he pled guilty to by perjury and I didn’t give it too much more thought.My opinion changed as information dribbled out on the investigation. A key element of the crime was that the lie had to be critical to the investigation. It wasn’t. Agents involved in the investigation questioned whether Flynn had deliberately lied. Flynn was not part of any illegal activity, nor was he covering for illegal activity. The FBI decided to close their investigation but one agent kept it open and went in for one more interview after discussing whether their goal was to catch him in a lie. Afterwards, the 302 record of the conversation was edited weeks later by that same agent and became the basis of the charges. Months later the guilty plea was forced out of a nearly bankrupt Flynn when they threatened to go after his son if he didn’t plead guilty.Fast forward to this year, and Flynn’s facing a judge who called him traitor, without any evidence, and is breaking judicial norms to keep the case alive over the objections of all attorneys.Convicting Flynn doesn’t feel like justice. I’m ok with this pardon."
The Bombshell Memory Hole - TK News by Matt Taibbi - "The New York Times published a massive expose about Donald Trump’s taxes on Sunday, starting the world on yet another trip up the Trump delirium coaster. The stages of the morality play are burned in our brains. Pundits scream bombshell, rush up a ladder of indignation, jump squealing into an abyss of apocalyptic predictions, dust off and do it again.How many of these stories have there been? A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? I tried physically counting and gave up. Our heads are packed with years of half-told stories that were discarded the instant they stopped having commercial or political utility. Some involved Trump, some not, who can remember them all? From sonic weapons in Cuba to spies gone dark to a secret bank server to hacker huddles in Prague to probable cause for an “agent of a foreign power” to Mike Flynn’s mistress to the Manafort-Assange confab to the exfiltrated agent with a home on Realtor.com to Putin’s niece and treason in Helsinki and North Korea and the Oval Office, we remember beginnings and not ends.This fall, Showtime released a movie about Jim Comey whose trailer features scenes of Russian prostitutes in a hotel elevator, on their way to give the Donald a pee show. This scene not only seems never to have happened but was revealed in recent weeks to have been spun by a Washington-based Brookings Institute analyst who was, no shit, the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation a decade ago. That doesn’t mean Igor Danchenko was a spy, but considering the awesome quantity of ink the pee story commanded across years of convulsive warnings about a compromised president, blue-state audiences at least deserved to hear this ridiculous development — and didn’t, apart from one item in the Washington Post and a Vox story pooh-poohing the news as a Republican fundraising stunt. For the rest of time, a plurality of the country will be frozen in the moment when this and dozens of other panic-switches were turned on, a campaign of titillating false starts now too numerous to be undone. Like many “bombshells,” the Times tax story contains real information, including potentially real outrages, like bank fraud or deducting consulting fees paid to his daughter. The headline revelation is Trump as metaphor for American finance generally, showing the appearance of wealth resting atop absurd fictions, with monster debts rolled into the next ice age and losses somehow appearing as his greatest assets, in ways inconceivable to regular people. At the end of the cycle, pundits will conclude that Trump has a story about being rich in place of actual wealth, making him (drumroll please) more like a con man than a tycoon.That this is the same analysis some of us made at the beginning of Trump’s national political run eons ago won’t matter. Nor will it matter that Trump’s returns ought to be as embarrassing to media antagonists and a string of “reputable” politicians as they are to him, given that it was screamed to high heavens for years, from op-ed pages and cable news panels and the floor of the U.S. Senate, that proof of secret links to Vladimir Putin would be found. This idea never had merit — no sane person can think an espionage conspiracy would be detailed in a tax return — but a parade of experts and officials contended just this, including Chuck Schumer, George Will, Rachel Maddow and countless others. What the Washington Post described as an "operating" assumption was pushed aside with an offhand Times passage, "Nor do [tax records] reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia." The Times later noted tax records "for the most part, lack the specificity required" to reveal troubling connections. This checked another predictable bombshell trope, the insertion of replacement mantras for old wrong ones, e.g. the "walls are closing in" becomes "We never expected to find collusion," "crimes are difficult to prove," etc. Sometimes replacement mantras are replaced, as in "Mueller was undone by obstruction" becoming "Mueller was undone by Bill Barr," only to later become the current line, "Mueller was a coward who sold us out." Within a week it will be legend that no one ever expected to find ties to Putin in Trump's returns.The priesthood has learned from the WMD episode and no longer bothers to revisit past assumptions. The standard is evolving fast. At least with taxes story, pundits had the decency to couch charges as hypotheticals ("What Trump's Tax Returns Could Reveal About Russia" was a typical formulation by CNN). Now core factual premises can be changed on a dime without acknowledgment, because the ascent up the indignation mountain has become the whole ritual. The recent case of Pulitzer-winning Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones and her nitwit editors doubling and tripling down on the provably false notion that they never called the date of 1619 America's "true founding" was particularly amazing, because it was so unnecessary, and brazen... The instant Trump decided to target the Times through an executive order creating a "1776 Commission," saying their project "rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression," news outlets circled wagons, including would-be Times competitors. CNN invited Jones-Hannah on to clear up the "misconception" that the project was intended to "rewrite history about when this nation was founded"... The closest and perhaps only analog to a Pulitzer-winner insisting she did not say something she did say on video many times is Donald Trump denying that he called John McCain a "loser." We've never seen anything like this in media, and it's hard to know what the point could be, beyond the intentional lowering of expectations.As infuriating, disturbing, and ethically absent as Trump often appears to be, he's sustained by his opposition being as unashamed to lie as he is, and being humorless, hectoring bores besides (witness Hannah-Jones, in the middle of the "true founding" double-down, insisting with a straight face that "truth is the goal" and "transparency and accountability are essential to a functioning democracy"). It's the only possible thing that could give him legitimacy, which is starting to feel intentional. Either that, or the core of this is turf war: having snuck past the usual gatekeepers to the White House, Trump appropriated the reality-distorting power the political establishment reserved for itself. You don't get to lie to the public, that's our job! Hence the venom, which feels too intimate to be anything but professional jealousy. The paper of record took another blow when a Canadian man who'd been the subject of a multi-part Times podcast about the bloody travails of an ISIS soldier was arrested for making the whole thing up.The acclaimed podcast series, called Caliphate, devoted entire segments to an Ontario resident named Shehroze Chaudhry who supposedly traveled to Syria and engaged in murderous escapades under the name "Abu Huzayhah."... When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took the unusual step of arresting Choudry for perpetrating a hoax, the Times didn't blink. Pressed by Washington Post writer Erik Wemple an increasingly isolated voice in the mainstream media reportage world the paper insisted it had not presented The Caliphate as fact. Instead, it said, "part of what the series explored was whether Abu Huzayfah's account was true," a transparent deflection Wemple didn't buy... For the better part of a century, most journalists understood there's no such thing as objectivity. It was accepted that every decision, from the size and placement of headlines to the order of quotes to whether or not to cover a thing at all, reflects editorial opinion. That didn't mean trying to get things right wasn't a worthy aspirational goal, but it did mean we knew papers like the Times were mostly being silly when they marketed themselves as incorruptible arbiters of The One Truth.Now the business has reversed course, acting like a gang of college freshmen who've just read Beyond Good and Evil for the first time. Objectivity is dead! There's no truth! Everything is permitted! The cardinalate has gone from pompous overconfidence in its factual rectitude to a bizarre postmodernist pose where nothing matters, man, and truth is whatever we can get away with saying.This quantitative approach to reality is Trump's exact attitude, with the enormous difference that Trump isn't pretentious about it."
Opinion | The Trump Campaign Conspired With the Russians. Mueller Proved It. - The New York Times
This is funny, considering the Mueller report said: "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities". Of course, War is Peace so this is proof that Mueller found that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia
John Bolton Rejects Atlantic Story: 'I Was There'; 'I Didn't Hear That' - "Former National Security Advisor John Bolton has disputed a story in The Atlantic claiming that President Donald Trump called fallen World War I soldiers “losers.” Bolton told the New York Times Friday that “I was there” and “I didn’t hear that.”The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg published an article titled “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’.” The story also claimed that Trump skipped a 2018 visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, where the fallen of the battle of Belleau Wood are buried, because he feared rain would ruin his hair. Goldberg’s sources were all anonymous. The White House vigorously denied the report, and several officials who accompanied Trump on his trip to Europe in 2018 denied that the president had ever said anything like that. Public documents also support the idea that the president’s visit was canceled due to weather, not because the president worried about his hair."
I guess Bolton's time being cheered by liberals just came to an end
The_War_Economy on Twitter - "Trump: *shakes hands for three hours without moving all the new recruits*
Trump: "Let's bring our troops home."
Trump: "Look at all this peace I've made, zero wars."
Trump: *meets with soldiers in hospital*
Trump: *flies to Iraq over Christmas*
Biden: "tRuMp HaTeS tHe MiLiTaRy""
Being Classically Liberal - Posts - "One would think that the practice of pushing out stories (or more accurately, hit pieces) based exclusively on anonymous sources would be considered journalistic malpractice by now..."
Byron York: A reality-based look at Trump and the post office - "Some of the accusations have grown so frantic that they resemble the frenzy of a couple of years ago over the allegation, from many of the same people, that Trump had conspired with Russia to fix the 2016 election... The idea that the Postal Service will not be able to handle the volume of mail in the election, or not be able to handle it within normal Postal Service time guidelines, does not make much sense. According to its most recent annual report, last year, in fiscal year 2019, the Postal Service handled 142.5 billion pieces of mail. "On a typical day, our 633,000 employees physically process and deliver 471 million mailpieces to nearly 160 million delivery points"... Some news reports have left the impression that the Postal Service will not be able to handle mail-in ballots without an immediate infusion of money from Congress. That is not the case.The Postal Service is not funded by a regular appropriation. It is, instead, an "independent agency" and is expected to support itself, beyond a yearly appropriation of about $55 million to cover the costs of mail for the blind and overseas balloting in elections.The Postal Service has lost money for a very long time... The Democratic commentariat cheered and signaled it is ready to press the issue until election day. "Trump donor & Postmaster General Louis DeJoy should be in the crosshairs of every relevant congressional committee, inspector general, prosecutor, investigative journalist, whistleblower, class action lawyer, editorial board, etc. etc. etc.," tweeted former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. No doubt that is precisely what will happen in the Democratic world and some major media outlets between now and Nov. 3. But shouldn't someone, sometime take a look at what is actually happening?"
Fauci: If we can safely shop at the grocery store, we can safely vote in person - "This confirms what Fauci said previously, and what I have argued for weeks. A handful of states have mature vote-by-mail systems that should be able to handle the presidential election demand this year, but those voters are used to those systems as well. The rest of the states — including all of the presumed battleground states, and most of the high-population states too — do not. Two of them, California and New York, held primaries with mass mail-in voting and ended up with high failure rates. New York took weeks just to unwind its primaries, and the Big Apple’s ballot failure rate exceeded twenty percent... Even if we’re disenfranchising one out of every twenty American voters, that’s a failure rate of 5%, and that would exceed the margins of victory in enough battleground states to undermine the outcome’s credibility."
We know liberals have wildly inaccurate and inflated perceptions of covid risk (despite claiming to be pro-science and idolising Fauci) so that explains their hysteria over voting. Of course, if you *want* the election to be contested because you fear the outcome (or want to hold riots to push your preferred outcome)...
Voting During the Pandemic Is Pretty Safe - The Atlantic - "Zeke Emanuel has a message for jittery Americans ahead of a momentous election: Voting in person during the coronavirus pandemic is about as safe as going to the grocery store.In early July, Emanuel—the bioethicist and former Obama-administration health adviser—led a group of experts in developing a detailed and widely circulated chart that advised Americans about the relative health risk of more than two dozen common activities. Taking a jog or having an outdoor picnic is low risk for transmission of COVID-19, for example, while going grocery shopping is slightly higher, but still relatively safe... In the risk-assessment chart—which Emanuel created with James P. Phillips, the chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University, and Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona—voting would also go in the same low-medium risk category as playing golf or tennis... Polls show a sharp divide between the parties on how people plan to cast their votes: A majority of Democrats want to vote by mail, while a majority of Republicans want to vote in person. Democrats have also swamped Republicans, to an unprecedented degree, in requests for absentee ballots in states that report such data by party, including North Carolina and Maine."
Trump Critics Push Conspiracy Theories About Postal Service Mailboxes - "there is no evidence that Trump has ordered USPS mailboxes locked or removed in order to stifle mail-in voting, many Democrats and Trump critics have shared photos circulating online to explain what they say is a plot to undermine the postal service... Former Vice President Joe Biden is the most prominent Democrat to tout the unfounded theory of voter-suppression-by-mail."
Blue Anon strikes again!
Obama and Biden Removed Thousand of Mail Collection Boxes - "“President Trump has made no secret about his desire to suppress voting in the November 2020 election,” said American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley. “His effort to raise doubts about the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to deliver ballots cast by mail is just one example of how he hopes to dissuade Americans from voting.”Democrats are calling the removal of collection boxes “voter suppression,” and Senator Jon Tester (D-Mt.) is calling for an investigation.Pop singer-turned-political-whiner Taylor Swift even accused Trump of being behind a “calculated dismantling of USPS.”"
Obama and Biden administration were not kind to USPS mailboxes - "Former President Barack Obama accused President Donald Trump of purposely attempting to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service in an effort to alter the results of the 2020 presidential election... The unfounded accusation was immediately amplified by the media, and the conspiracy theory took hold on social media. Even pop music singer Taylor Swift parroted the unsubstantiated allegation... USPS spokeswoman Kimberly Frum told The Hill that the removal of mailboxes is common.. between 2011 and 2016, there were roughly 14,000 USPS mailboxes removed, which was during the Obama-Biden administration... it wasn't only mailboxes that were on the chopping block during the Obama-Biden administration, 3,653 post offices were targeted to be shut down, according to a 2011 Washington Post article... The USPS was looking to cut costs because it was hemorrhaging money, as the mail delivery service has been doing for decades.The General Accounting Office, a government agency that provides auditing and analysis for Congress, said, "USPS financial viability continues to be high risk because USPS cannot fund its current level of services and financial obligations from its revenues."... Even Obama knew that the United States Postal Service was a money pit.In 2016, then-President Obama proposed that the USPS slash 12,000 jobs.In 2009, Obama compared the USPS with private mail carriers, and pointed out that they were thriving while the USPS consistently struggled."
Jeryl Bier on Twitter - "Turns out the Washington Post uncovered the Great Mailbox Conspiracy ELEVEN YEARS AGO! 2009: "...half of the blue boxes in the Washington area have disappeared in the last nine years, and 200,000 nationwide have been plucked up in the last 20 years, leaving 175,000 total."
