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The Russia Investigation: Trump Pardons Flynn (6 Viewers)

It’s like Marvels version of Hydra except the “secret club” is out in the open. 

“Hail Hydra.”

”Hail Russia.”

”Hail Corruption.”

”Hail Nationalism.”

Which is it?

 
Mario Kart said:
It’s like Marvels version of Hydra except the “secret club” is out in the open. 

“Hail Hydra.”

”Hail Russia.”

”Hail Corruption.”

”Hail Nationalism.”

Which is it?
Click to expand...
Amazing.  I watched Captain America the First Avenger and Winter Soldier for the first time Sunday night.  I couldn't help but see so many similarities too.  It's unsettling. 

 
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ren hoek said:
The "Trump Russia connections" storyline actually originated from a small neoconservative clique in Washington.  They were pushing antiRussian policy long before the 2016 elections- the Magnitsky Act, fighting ISIS in Syria, even tried to weaponize gay rights as a way to condemn Russia.  They badgered Obama for coordinating with the Russian military against ISIS in Syria.  They found Clinton to be a reliable conduit for their foreign policy brand, and Trump to be an existential threat to it.  It's hard to pinpoint exactly who this came from, but it clearly was consistent with their foreign policy views.

The Trump-Russia conspiracy theory is a madeup fabrication. It is a total falsehood.  It's a hoax.  Somebody made it up, and then news organizations mainstreamed it into the American conscience.  None of this was an accident.  None of it was an innocent mistake.  Just like WMDs in Iraq, and the news cycle's abject failure in reporting that episode, this was done to advance neoconservative goals, like sanctions with Russia, escalated tensions, a new nuclear arms race with Russia, bigger military budgets, a litany of proxy wars (Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela) that could trigger a wider conflict.  It allowed everything to be framed in terms where Vladimir Putin was basically the antichrist.  It allowed any move away from a confrontational stance by Trump to be cast as 'weak', 'returning the favor' to Putin, being a "traitor" again.  I remember very clearly when Trump was talking about pulling troops out of Syria, people immediately jumped to how it benefits the Kremlin, what a gift to Putin it was, etc.  There was a #treasonsummit hashtag for the meet in Helsinki.  It's a really simplistic and destructive worldview.  
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Well, it's a well known fact, Sonny Jim, that there's a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as the Pentavirate, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado, known as The Meadows.

So who's in this Pentavirate?

The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before he went tets-up. Oh, I hated the Colonel with is wee beady eyes! And that smug look on his face, "Oh, you're gonna buy my chicken! Ohhhhh!"

 Dad, how can you hate the Colonel?

Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smartarse!

 
the rover said:
Well, it's a well known fact, Sonny Jim, that there's a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as the Pentavirate, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado, known as The Meadows.

So who's in this Pentavirate?

The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before he went tets-up  kicked the bucket. Oh, I hated the Colonel with is wee beady eyes! And that smug look on his face, "Oh, you're gonna buy my chicken! Ohhhhh!"

 Dad, how can you hate the Colonel?

Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smartarse!
Click to expand...

 
the rover said:
Well, it's a well known fact, Sonny Jim, that there's a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as the Pentavirate, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado, known as The Meadows.

So who's in this Pentavirate?

The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before he went tets-up. Oh, I hated the Colonel with is wee beady eyes! And that smug look on his face, "Oh, you're gonna buy my chicken! Ohhhhh!"

 Dad, how can you hate the Colonel?

Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smartarse!
Click to expand...
This is how Hogwarts was founded. 

 
the rover said:
Well, it's a well known fact, Sonny Jim, that there's a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as the Pentavirate, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado, known as The Meadows.

So who's in this Pentavirate?

The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before he went tets-up. Oh, I hated the Colonel with is wee beady eyes! And that smug look on his face, "Oh, you're gonna buy my chicken! Ohhhhh!"

 Dad, how can you hate the Colonel?

Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smartarse!
Click to expand...
“Heed! Pants! Now!”

 
I was watching this CNN puffpiece on Mueller from February of 18, and I can tell a lot of you watch network television.  It's perfect, all the talking points are there.  It has aged so poorly.  The elevation of his personality to an almost godlike stature and complete whitewash of his history at the FBI are on display here.  Garett Graff talks like he could audition to be Mueller's personal ballwasher.  Trey Gowdy is here playing up the Mueller persona too and he knows his audience, he's really played both sides of this thing, really annoying how these people slip into whatever direction the political winds are blowing.  Really, watch the whole thing, it's embarrassing.  It's clear these news people had no idea who he really is and what he's actually capable of when they built this mythological narrative around him.  

 
The change came in the space of a single news cycle. Beginning before and ending after the congressional testimony of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the depth of America’s faith-based mania was laid bare. The Russiagate press managed to turn reality all the way around.

In the moment, while the event was being broadcast live, the assessment of the ex-FBI director’s performance as a congressional witness was nearly unanimous. Mueller was a confused, vulnerable human being, not an indefatigable force. 

“Very, very painful,” said longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod.

“I don’t know what the #Dems were expecting from #RobertMueller, but this probably isn’t it,” tweeted Howard Fineman.

“Mueller is struggling,” former prosecutor and Mueller subordinate Glenn Kirchner commented during the event. “It strikes me as a health issue.”

This was a monstrous indictment of media. The Special Counsel’s inability to follow questions or remember key details (he was “not familiar” with oppo firm Fusion-GPS!) exploded two years of hype.

Mueller was sold in hundreds of articles and TV features as earth’s most competent human, a real-life superhero. His close-lipped manner and razor intellect supposedly presented a living antidote to our blabbermouth numbskull president, Donald Trump. He was as a character straight out of Team America, an ex-Marine FBI chief by way of St. Paul’s, Princeton, and a grad program at the University of Awesome. “Batman is back to save America,” his former FBI second Timothy Murphy said in a typical story from two years ago, describing Mueller as “the hero America needs.”

This myth died on television.

The rise and fall of superhero Robert Mueller

 
How these two goofs didn’t know, or bother to find out, that Mueller was not up for the task of following difficult questions is hard to understand. Nadler and Schiff are both lawyers. A first-year law student wouldn’t put a witness on stand blind like that for a minute, let alone seven nationally-televised hours.

But they pressed on, convinced the Special Counsel could breathe new life into a case they believed had waned only because Mueller’s long report was a “dry, prosecutorial work product” that the public couldn’t or wouldn’t digest.

This in itself was crazy. Hopeful blue-staters across the country for months have indulged in readings of Mueller’s report like it was the word of God – with celebrity jackasses like Annette Bening, John Lithgow and Kevin Kline donning Rick Perry-style smart glasses to conduct televised deliverance of the gospel.

The report has been hyped plenty. It’s sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has now been on the New York Times bestseller list for thirteen weeks. In #Resistance America it’s as ubiquitous as Gideon’s Bible. What Nadler and Schiff seem to have wanted was something beyond familiarity with the work, like video of Mueller calling Trump a crook that could be used in commercials.  

Instead, they revealed something no one expected. Now we understood why the Special Counsel avoided live exchanges across two years of being one of the most famous people on earth.

When Mueller’s morning session in Nadler’s committee ended, NBC’s studio seemed like a funeral parlor.

“If, uh, Democrats were looking for a pristine ten to fifteen second sound bite that made the point they wanted to make, uh, it probably didn’t happen,” said Lester Holt.

Chuck Todd, who along with colleague Rachel Maddow has been one of the most energetic Russigate torchbearers, offered that on the bringing-Mueller-to-life front, the testimony was “a complete failure.” He added it “didn’t do anything to help” impeachment arguments.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-superhero-robert

 
Russiagate isn’t just about bad reporting. It was and is a dangerous political story about rallying the public behind authoritarian maneuvers in an effort to achieve a political outcome. Republicans who battered Mueller with questions weren’t wrong. Investigators in the Russia probe made extravagant use of informants abroad (in the less-regulated counterintelligence context), lied to the FISA court, leaked classified information for political purposes, opened the cookie jar of captured electronic communications on dubious pretexts, and generally blurred the lines between counterintelligence, criminal law enforcement, and private political research in ways that should and will frighten defense lawyers everywhere.

Proponents cheered the seizure of records from Trump’s lawyer Cohen, sending a message that attorney-client privilege is a voluntary worry if the defendant is obnoxious enough. The public likewise shrugged when prosecutors trashed Maria Butina as a prostitute, because Butina a) is Russian, and b) palled around with the NRA. This case has seen would-be liberals embracing guilt by association, guilt by nationality, guilt by accusation, entrapment, secret evidence, and other concepts that were considered an anathema to progressives as recently as the War on Terror period. In the name of preventing the “sowing of discord,” they’ve even embraced censorship.

Finally, in an effort to milk the Mueller report for maximum effect, Democrats – ostensibly the party of card-carrying ACLU members – are trying to uphold a vicious new legal concept, “not exonerated.” In a moment that provided a window into the authoritarian tendencies Mueller once expressed with more fluency, the Special Counsel declined under questioning by Ohio Republican Michael Turner to reject the idea that in our legal system, “there is not power or authority to exonerate.”

This was equivalent to no-commenting a question about whether people are innocent until proven guilty. In America, prosecutors don’t declare you exonerated, you are exonerated, until someone proves otherwise. Efforts to reverse this understanding are dangerous, Trump or no Trump. It’s appalling that Democrats are backing this idea.

All these excesses have been excused on the grounds that Trump must be stopped at all costs. But you don’t challenge someone for being racist and an enemy of immigrants, the poor, and the environment by turning the federal security apparatus into a Franz Kafka theme park. It’s fighting bad with worse. 

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-superhero-robert

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
God, again with Taibbi. At least acknowledge his comments after Helsinki.
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Taibbi has been one of the few well-sourced observers on the beat that hasn't called things for the big guy before, and probably won't stop now. I appreciate the coverage, much like I appreciated his Wall St. coverage. He's just not going to say what people want, regardless.   

 
rockaction said:
I just sent ren a PM thanking him for these articles. I had no idea he was posting excerpts here. I came in to post the same stuff. 

But I'll let him do it. Take it away, ren. 

Taibbi is pretty damning.  
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I’ve stated my enjoyment of Taibbi before but you should also be aware of his comments about Trump possibly being compromised after Helsinki.

 
rockaction said:
Taibbi has been one of the few well-sourced observers on the beat that hasn't called things for the big guy before, and probably won't stop now. I appreciate the coverage, much like I appreciated his Wall St. coverage. He's just not going to say what people want, regardless.   
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I agree, but he should at least be consistent with his own prior statements.

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
His statements about Trump possibly being involved in money laundering and even subject to compromise. 
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That's fine. If it's true, then that's really important. I've said from the beginning that I want everything to come out. That means if the president of our country is compromised, then I want to know that. I just don't want partisan hysteria to cast a net that tramples procedure or that justifies all ends despite means taken to achieve said ends. There has to be a line drawn somewhere lest we completely hamstring every president from here on out.  

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
His statements about Trump possibly being involved in money laundering and even subject to compromise. 
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I have Saints.  Like, a lot:

ren hoek said:
I don't think anyone doubts Trump has been involved with some sort of money laundering/financial crimes.  Frankly I'd be surprised if he wasn't.  
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ren hoek said:
As far as the money trail, I think it would have more to do with money laundering in real estate than anything else, but I'm open to being proven wrong if it comes out that way.  Again, very bad, but not really inline with the 'treasoner in chief' stuff.  
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ren hoek said:
I'm not here saying Trump is innocent.  As I've mentioned before, I wouldn't be surprised if they uncover some money laundering or something.  But that's a far cry from 'Trump colluded with the Russians and is beholden to a foreign power" or whatever.  No.  He's just a corrupt ### hole
Click to expand...


ren hoek said:
No, I agree. There is probably potential money laundering stuff, porn star payments stuff, some of the backdoor stuff Flynn did with Israel/Turkey etc., stuff that is wholly unrelated to collusion that Trump wants to keep covered up.  
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Are you or anyone else ever going to acknowledge how destructive this Russia stuff has been on our political discourse and civic wellbeing? 

 
ren hoek said:
I have Saints.  Like, a lot:

Are you or anyone else ever going to acknowledge how destructive this Russia stuff has been on our political discourse and civic wellbeing? 
Click to expand...
Yes...Trump and his campaigns dealing with Russia, lying about its contacts with Russia, Russia’s interference with our election, and the lack of backbone in the Senate to deal with it has been very destructive. Also destructive are those that take the word of Putin and Assange over that of American intelligence

 
ren hoek said:
I have Saints.  Like, a lot:

On 5/18/2018 at 1:12 PM, ren hoek said:
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I appreciate you taking the trouble to pull these responses, but I was talking bout Taibbi himself having specifically referenced these things.

But given your posts elsewhere, acknowledging apparently Putin's reliance on such things and Trump's embroilment in such things, why the mockery of instances of people raising just that, even dating so far back as in 2015-16?

And good lord, crap like this:

ren hoek said:
Proponents cheered the seizure of records from Trump’s lawyer Cohen, sending a message that attorney-client privilege is a voluntary worry if the defendant is obnoxious enough.
Click to expand...
Trump hired a Manhattan law firm just to litigate this for Cohen. A federal judge reviewed these at great cost to the government and Cohen. And then after looking at it the judge saw that Cohen wasn't providing attorney services at all but instead was enmeshed in bag man duties and personal majordomo role, Trump dropped him, left him holding the costs of handling Trump's dirty work. 

 
ren hoek said:
Are you or anyone else ever going to acknowledge how destructive this Russia stuff has been on our political discourse and civic wellbeing? 
Click to expand...
I have no idea how many times I have to point to the report and quote from it. I rely on its findings and I trust in it, including the campaign-state findings on coordination/conspiracy. 

 
rockaction said:
That's fine. If it's true, then that's really important. I've said from the beginning that I want everything to come out. That means if the president of our country is compromised, then I want to know that. I just don't want partisan hysteria to cast a net that tramples procedure or that justifies all ends despite means taken to achieve said ends. There has to be a line drawn somewhere lest we completely hamstring every president from here on out.  
Click to expand...
I don't think constant obstruction by Trump to learn the truth is "hysteria".  How about we get a peak at his tax returns to start. Seriously, if there's nothing there, what's the big deal? 

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
And good lord, crap like this:

Trump hired a Manhattan law firm just to litigate this for Cohen. A federal judge reviewed these at great cost to the government and Cohen. And then after looking at it the judge saw that Cohen wasn't providing attorney services at all but instead was enmeshed in bag man duties and personal majordomo role, Trump dropped him, left him holding the costs of handling Trump's dirty work. 
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It does appear to display a less-than-comprehensive understanding of the facts, the law, and the concept of "attorney-client privilege."

 
Bucky86 said:
I wonder if Putin gave Trump a list of names he approved of?
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I dunno, I'd like to put a laughing emoji but the State department didn't even issue a readout on that discussion until after TASS reported it in Russia. In short, it's not even clear the WH told his own IC or State department about the call.

 
More from same article linked above...

There is another curious Russian common denominator: Six of Sweden’s alt-right sites have drawn advertising revenue from a network of online auto-parts stores based in Germany and owned by four businessmen from Russia and Ukraine, three of whom have adopted German-sounding surnames.

The ads were first noticed by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which discovered that while they appeared to be for a variety of outlets, all traced back to the same Berlin address and were owned by a parent company, Autodoc GmbH.

The New York Times found that the company had also placed ads on anti-Semitic and other extremist sites in Germany, Hungary, Austria and elsewhere in Europe.

Rikard Lindholm, co-founder of a data-driven marketing firm who has worked with Swedish authorities to combat disinformation, dug deeper into the Autodoc network.

Hidden beneath the user-friendly interface of some of the earliest Autodoc sites lay what Mr Lindholm, an expert in the forensic analysis of online traffic, described as “icebergs” of blog-like content completely unrelated to auto parts, translated into a variety of languages. A visitor to one of the car-parts sites could not simply access this content from the home page; instead, one had to know and type in the full URL.
Click to expand...

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Hope Hicks’ Attorney says she wasn’t calling Michael Cohen about Stormy Daniels on October 8. She was calling about the (alleged) pee tape.

- This has been noted but now Hicks’ lawyers are saying it plainly, the sex tape rumor was already circulating before Steele.

- And Trump was on the call about it.
Click to expand...
"And now, to the compromising material," he said. "Yeah, I did hear these rumors that we allegedly collected compromising material on Mr. Trump when he was visiting Moscow. Well, distinguished colleague, let me tell you this: When President Trump was at Moscow back then, I didn't even know that he was in Moscow. I treat President Trump with utmost respect, but back then when he was a private individual, a businessman, nobody informed me that he was in Moscow."

Putin then segued to all the rich and powerful people who visit Russia and how he can't keep track of them.

"Well, let's take St. Petersburg Economic Forum, for instance," Putin said, referencing an annual event for bigwigs. "There were over 500 American businessmen, high-ranking, high-level ones. I don't even remember the last names of each and every one of them. Well, do you remember -- do you think that we try to collect compromising material on each and every single one of them? Well, it's difficult to imagine an utter nonsense of a bigger scale than this. Well, please, just disregard these issues and don't think about this anymore again."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/16/politics/kompromat-russia-trump/index.html

 
Overstock CEO resigns after crazy press release revealing affair with Maria Butina

>>Mr. Byrne said in a separate interview that he had met Ms. Butina at a libertarian convention in Las Vegas in 2015. Over the course of their relationship, he said, Ms. Butina spoke increasingly about meeting or seeking to meet people involved in the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, President Trump and others. That, he said, had made him wary. He eventually began communicating with the F.B.I. about his interactions with her.<<

 
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SaintsInDome2006 said:
Overstock CEO resigns after crazy press release revealing affair with Maria Butina

>>Mr. Byrne said in a separate interview that he had met Ms. Butina at a libertarian convention in Las Vegas in 2015. Over the course of their relationship, he said, Ms. Butina spoke increasingly about meeting or seeking to meet people involved in the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, President Trump and others. That, he said, had made him wary. He eventually began communicating with the F.B.I. about his interactions with her.<<
Click to expand...
this is him on Fox *explaining* things

 this is him on Fox clarifying things further

 
well, well well

Seth Abramson

@SethAbramson

(THREAD) MAJOR BREAKING NEWS (CNN): Convicted Kremlin agent Maria Butina's longtime boyfriend confirms that Don Jr. met secretly with Kremlin agents for an hour during the 2015 NRA Conference in Knoxville; Don Jr. therefore lied to Congress about collusion. Please RT and read on.

1/ This story is still developing—and confusing enough that only those who've researched the Trump-Russia case for years understood its import when it first broke; many others are currently misreporting it. I'm going to do my best to get this 100% right for you—as it's huge news.

2/ SUMMARY: All agree Butina was a Kremlin agent working for a Kremlin official—Torshin; all agree she used sex to access targets; all agree she infiltrated the NRA and aimed to infiltrate Team Trump; all agree her job was to end sanctions. We *didn't* know Jr. met with her team.

3/ BACKGROUND (all taken from PROOF OF CONSPIRACY, the Mueller Report, and major-media sources): in early 2015, the future top Trump adviser on Russia, Dmitri Simes, met with Putin; thereafter, he helped Alexander Torshin and Butina gain access to top federal banking officials.

4/ Torshin and Butina wanted access to banking officials as part of what is now confirmed as a Russian intelligence operation aimed at—among other things—gaining confidential data about the Ziff Brothers, whose Clinton donations the Kremlin thought could be used against Hillary.

5/ During the period Simes—the former top Trump adviser on Russia who now makes $500,000/year working for the Kremlin's TV network, RT—was aiding Torshin/Butina, he was trying to Torshin's aid for the top funder of his pro-Kremlin think tank, the Center for the National Interest.

6/ Filings in the Butina case confirm that—in early 2015—Butina/Torshin aimed to infiltrate the NRA and, if possible, Trump's campaign. Butina's ex-boyfriend, Patrick Byrne, has now confirmed Butina *spoke* of infiltrating four campaigns, but in fact only focused on one: Trump's.

7/ We don't know exactly who puts the FBI onto Russia's activities—though to be clear both the hacking and propaganda operations run by the Kremlin in 2016 had *already begun* by Spring 2015. We also know the FBI was investigating George Papadopoulos as a possible Israeli agent.

8/ Given that it later prosecuted Butina, made Torshin an unindicted co-conspirator, got warrants on Papadopoulos, and turned Simes into the shocking "star" of Volume 1 of the Mueller Report, there's a reasonable chance—but we don't know—that the FBI was long tracking all four.

9/ The upshot to this part of the story is this: FBI agent Peter Strzok was running an FBI probe in early 2015 that believed—it turns out, 100% correctly—that Kremlin agents under Putin's control sought to infiltrate Trump's 2016 campaign. Tonight we got *major* new news on this.

10/ Butina's ex-boyfriend—businessman Patrick Byrne—tonight *confirmed* to CNN that Butina said she had "close ties" to "four of the top seven oligarchs in Russia" and that she was in a position to orchestrate him (Byrne) meeting *one-on-one with Putin himself*. This is 100% new.

11/ Byrne further *confirms* to CNN that Butina said she was working for Torshin, a Kremlin official, and that she'd been tasked with infiltrating Trump's campaign. She said the purpose was "peace"—which is the term the Kremlin uses (systematically) to refer to sanctions relief.

12/ We've long known that at the spring 2015 NRA Conference in Knoxville, Donald Trump Jr. made contact with Torshin; both men claimed that they randomly found themselves near one another and spoke only briefly of inconsequential things—and that's what Don Jr. told Congress, too.

13/ We don't know Torshin's full story—as he fled to Russia. Likewise, we don't know Simes's full story—as he took a job for the Kremlin in Moscow. But in my 2018 book PROOF OF COLLUSION, I wrote of a major-media story that hinted Don Jr. *might* have been lying about Knoxville.

14/ CORRECTION: I mean Nashville, Tennessee, not Knoxville, Tennessee. My sister went to University of Tennessee in Knoxville, so it's more on my brain than it is with most people. Wherever I wrote Knoxville above, I'm speaking of Nashville. OK, to continue with this major story:

 
It should matter but it doesn't. Breaking laws, purjury, meeting with Kremlin agents, none of it matters to a certain segment of the electorate

Search your feelings you know this to be true.  @cosjobs

 
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