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Brian Schmidt

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  1. Oliver Stone has gone full in on Putin lately too, basically parroting the ‘dear leader’ rhetoric of Russian propaganda. As to the Ukraine conspiracy theory pushed by Trump/Giuliani, there are two parts, one of which is true and one false. One is that it was really Ukraine, and not Russia, that hacked the DNC server. I don’t think there’s any evidence to support that it was Ukraine. (But I’m not fully convinced at least some of the leak didn’t come from a domestic source). But, DNC-Clinton campaign/Ukrainian cooperation is demonstrably true. It’s obvious why Ukraine would prefer a Clinton administration to a Trump administration, and the Manafort leaks that prompted his departure as Trump campaign chair were a result of this cooperation. I don’t think anything DiEugenio or Greenwald are saying is untrue.
  2. Speaking of J. Edgar Hoover, it's not difficult to imagine Barr having a little bit of Hoover power after he's in custody of all this damaging material.
  3. Perhaps the "resuscitation" crew strangled him. That might explain the ambiguous articles coming out about screams coming from his cell as corrections workers were screaming, "breathe, Epstein, breathe!" That way, they wouldn't have to worry about a video capturing someone going in his cell beforehand.
  4. Epstein did in fact work there from 1974 to 1976, but it was Barr who hired him shortly before he left. "Donald Barr, Dalton’s headmaster and father of Attorney General Bill Barr, hired Epstein to teach math and science...Epstein was without a college degree when he was hired, but Barr, thought of as “no nonsense,” saw promise in the young man who was in his early 20s at the time." Apparently the 'Epstein-Barr problem' is a running joke for the graduates of Dalton in the mid-70's. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-dalton-school-math-teacher-yearbook-photos-125122535.html https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jeffrey-epstein-math-science-students-memories_n_5d28cf17e4b0060b11ebf987?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAK0IFdy2O6mJZGjEKscxHrUvHDv9Ndh-qxOhy4_BaSt16op9uH1Gs13xwR-FMax9wCX0cKxJJJEjkRYKa1TwtlBej5l7lqxtp4f1OuxjfvuZJ9gisHbJDJshmh6c5VJLHK_dO63sbIADkzgrMFLoEz1GWYENvD_H4ffNMU00uVTG
  5. Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and William Barr Last winter, Mitch McConnell handpicked Bill Barr to “save the Republican Party.” If Barr could somehow navigate the party through all of Trump’s scandals, he saw a hefty monetary reward for himself in the private sector. Barr was pitched to Trump as the attorney general who helped resolve the Iran Contra investigation while downplaying his long professional relationship with Robert Mueller. By summer, few could foresee just how much of an intriguing pick Barr would be. In 1974, shortly before resigning as headmaster, Donald Barr – William Barr’s father – hired a young Jeffrey Epstein as a professor at the Dalton School despite having no college degree himself. Oddly enough, around this time Donald wrote a science fiction novel involving child sex slavery. After Epstein’s dismissal from Dalton in 1976, he began his finance career at Bear Stearns before eventually managing his own fund for high wealth clients. Contemporary reporting suggests Epstein’s main source of wealth may have been associated with underage sex trafficking to rich and powerful men. The extortion and blackmail that ensued may have kept his investment fund afloat and guaranteed him cash flow. Throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and Tom Barrack frequented the Manhattan and Palm Beach social scene together. Trump and Epstein were once called each other’s “wingmen” and Epstein even introduced Trump to his future wife, then Melania Knauss. In November 2004, Trump and Epstein had a falling out over a real estate deal. Epstein was readying a bid of $40 million for the Mansion de L’Amitie, a Palm Beach property, when Trump – privy to Epstein’s plans – came in at $41 million and snatched the property from him. Trump would go on to resell the property to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million four years later. In Siege, Michael Wolff implies that Epstein, furious at Trump, was ready to spill the beans on Trump’s shady sources of capital for the purchase. It’s curious timing that only a few months later Epstein would be ensnared in his first underage sex investigation. In 2009, Bill Barr joined the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, the same firm that represented Jeffrey Epstein and a year earlier had negotiated the sweetheart deal with Alexander Acosta – himself a Kirkland & Ellis alumni who would go on to be a member of the Trump cabinet. Kirkland & Ellis continued to represent Epstein through 2011. It is for this reason that Barr initially recused himself from the Epstein case on July 8th. After consulting with ethics officials and speaking with Trump directly, a day later Barr issued a clarification that he was only recusing himself from the internal Justice Department investigation of Acosta and was still overseeing Epstein’s prosecution. Shortly before the 2016 election, a woman came forward claiming she had been raped by Epstein and Trump in 1994 when she was 13. Another of Epstein’s accusers was lured into his sex ring while working at Trump’s Mar a Lago. Over the years Epstein has been personally associated with many of the world’s richest and most powerful men including Prince Andrew, Ehud Barak, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Glenn Dubin, George Mitchell, and Bill Richardson. Just a day before Epstein’s death, unsealed court documents named Dubin, Mitchell, Richardson, Prince Andrew, and Alan Dershowitz as being involved in underage sex with a single victim. Epstein’s death undoubtedly comes as a relief to many powerful men. His death – less than three weeks after a failed suicide attempt or attack – in the same federal prison that recently housed El Chapo had conveniently given him little oversight the night of his death. As attorney general, Barr ultimately has supervision of the prison. Barr’s Justice Department reportedly has possession of films, pictures, and diaries from Epstein’s residences. William Barr, who just a month earlier un-recused himself from the Epstein case, now decides the fate of this evidence and the people it implicates – possibly his own boss. Will he indeed save the Republican Party?
  6. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/50-years-woman-mysteriously-drowned-160355147.html This is the same story my boss told me about a year and a half ago. The part that’s missing from the article is Kennedy was having an affair with the woman in the front seat of the car and he was drunk, hence the need for a cover-up. Also in his version, she wandered into the backseat herself, so “Betty” might not really exist.
  7. The “spook lawyer” Tom Green that Wheaton mentions deserves a thread of his own. He’s one of those Forrest Grump type characters in right-wing history. He represented Robert Mardian in Watergate, Richard Secord (and was meeting with several Iran Contra principals before, during, and after the scandal broke) during Iran Contra, Dennis Hastert, and most recently Rick Gates in the Russian Interference investigation. I wonder how privy he is to inside information from Jenkins and Quintero. My company has the law firm he works for on retainer. Maybe I could set up an interview 🤣
  8. The loans in questions had to do with business dealings primarily in Las Vegas, so Guarantee's Texas footprint would be irrelevant.
  9. Lance, It appears you have limited knowledge of the insurance industry and financial instruments in general. Insurance policies, mortgages, and other loans are bought and sold between existing financial institutions that don't merge or go out of business. This all depends on the mix of assets they want to hold, the amount of risk they want in their portfolio, and geographic and regulatory considerations. But companies spin off certain assets and take on others all the time. This is a regular part of business in the financial and insurance sector. This is what happened with Guarantee and Rio Grande. I looked into this years back and some of Guarantee's assets were indeed sold to Rio Grande. In order to do a proper analysis on all of this, one would need to go back and look at specific records to see if this was because of or involving the alleged Mafia loans. And it would probably include going to a physical location and getting a hold of these records - not just searching for them online, where this level of detail likely doesn't exist. In any event, this is an admittedly tenuous connection between Marcello and Rio Grande, let alone Marcello and Witt. But this isn't why I think Witt is suspicious. To my thinking, I already believe there was a conspiracy that killed Kennedy for other reasons. This makes it even more suspicious, IMO, that the exact spot where Kennedy was shot there would be a man pumping an umbrella next to a man pumping his fist in a militant fashion. Witt's statements to the HSCA conflict with what is shown by various films and photographs and his lack of memory of certain things seem dubious to me. That doesn't mean he had anything to do with a conspiracy or was necessarily lying. But it opens two possibilities: that it was really him and the whole circumstance and testimony was somewhat improbable but true, or he wasn't really the Umbrella Man but testified because he was under pressure from someone. Having scant information on him and a clean criminal record, your guess is as good as mine as to why he would have done this. This is why I mentioned the connection between Marcello and his employer at the time in a one-off fashion. You obviously picked up that the connection was probably pretty tenuous and decided TO MAKE SOME SENSATIONAL POST IN A DRAMATIC WAY TO TRY TO DISCREDIT THIS AS "COMPLETELY BOGUS." If that's the card you're going to continue playing, I don't have an interest in having a debate about it because it's not productive. This gets to my final point about selectively challenging some of my information. I also mentioned that David Lifton's friend knew Witt's dentist and that he told his dentist about being the Umbrella Man a year before the HSCA. This suggests that Witt was telling the truth. But could you imagine if I said that Witt told his dentist that he wasn't the umbrella man? You would have immediately attacked it as, "A wild conspiracy theorist who lives in Southern California somehow has a mutual friend to a dentist in Dallas that has Witt as a client?" Show me the proof! Maybe if you were consistent in your scrutiny, you would have mentioned this too.
  10. But to a larger point, how come you’re not taking issue with some of the more benign things I found out about Witt? It seems to me you’re the one with the preconceived ideas. I said I was agnostic about Witt. Obviously you’re not. I made the comment that Rio Grande had connections to Marcello via Gaurantee Life (which Rio Grande later took on some assets). But it isn’t certain that these assets were even connected to the loans to Marcello in any way. And even if they were, Witt simply working for the company doesn’t make him guilty of anything, or even suspicious. By saying that I wasn’t implying Witt was mob connected. I was laying out everything I knew about Witt and potential connections to anyone and everything JFK assassination related, because well....this is a JFK assassination message board. I never said for sure Witt was connected to anything (If I was more sure I would have said so. The intent of this message board is to lay out even subtle and remote connections that other experts can research and build upon. It’s been fruitful to the research community about other things over the years. It’s the point of a message board. So to jump the gun and pretend this is a court room is silly. So is using this to try to discredit the whole JFK research community and their research bona fides. And FWIW, not everything can be known by an hour’s worth of Google searching. I suggest reading up on some things before instantly attacking everything in a blanket way. When you said The Umbrella Man is a “highly fictionalized” film...yeah, it IS fiction. It doesn’t even pretend to be about The Umbrella Man. It’s about a conspiracy theorist who becomes obsessed with JFK lore and is a critical look at the conspiracy community. Check it out. You might like it😉
  11. Lance, I never said the two merged. Both companies were still in existence decades after the assassination. I’ll have to find the documents I referenced, but what I said is true. In any event, I never made the claim that Witt and Marcello were connected. Rather that FBI documents connect Marcello to the Rio Grande Insurance Company.
  12. Lance, Gaurantee Reserve Life Insurace was under FBI investigation for allegedly lending money to mob figure Marcello (and Trafficante and Roselli). Their assets would be spun off to Rio Grande Insurance around the time of the assassination. There are declassified FBI documents about this. The movie quote you found about this was probably one of my old posts in this forum telling people about the movie (The Umbrella Man) and how it was funny they knew about this relatively obscure fact. Right-winger is a synonym for conservative.
  13. I don't think someone can say in good faith that there is nothing suspicious about a guy pumping an umbrella up and down on a clear day in the exact spot in front of where the president gets assassination. People who dismiss a connection of the Umbrella Man to a potential conspiracy outright, IMO, are trying too hard to be "rationally minded." I'm agnostic as to whether the Umbrella Man was really Louie Steven Witt. I've done a bit research on him. He just died in 2014. I checked his criminal record but it was clean. I've interviewed some of his coworkers and his niece. His niece said he was a strange guy who didn't talk much and didn't like to talk about the Umbrella Man. At the time of the assassination, he worked for the Rio Grande Insurance Company, which had connections to Carlos Marcello. After that, he was a warehouse manager. I found a guy who worked for him but he said he never mentioned the Kennedy assassination or that he was there at all. The guy didn't find out he was the Umbrella Man until years later during the HSCA. Also, it turns out Witt was a union representative--so much for being such a right-winger like he said during his testimony (although to be fair, back in the day before the hyper polarization, some conservatives were union supporters). If I remember correctly, one of David Lifton's close friends knew Witt's dentist and claimed he heard Witt tell him he was the Umbrella Man a year before the HSCA.
  14. The photo is from the filming of Oliver Stone’s JFK. David- could you tell me more about the Vidal/Hargraves correspondence? Did members of their families admit to them being DCM and UM?
  15. Found this article on WhoWhatWhy today. FWIW I don't believe the Zapruder film was tampered with, but the demonstration that Jackie seems farther back on the trunk of the car in the Nix film than the Zapruder film is interesting. I don't really know what to make of it -- could just be an optical illusion. https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/07/12/jfk-assassination-film-proof-of-tampering/
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