W. Niederhut

Reality check. Manafort did stonewall Mueller's Russiagate investigation, and he also discussed U.S. Ukraine policy issues with Kilimnik-- before and after the 2016 election. He repeatedly lied about his 2016 contacts with Kilimnik, including the sharing of data about three key swing states-- Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania-- which Trump unexpectedly won by highly suspicious, razor-thin margins. Trump trailed Clinton in all three states in pre-election and exit polls, but unexpectedly won all three by a mere 80,000 total votes (combined.) Manafort and Kilimnik's GRU hackers knew precisely where to target their efforts in 2016 to put Putin's puppet in the White House Paul Manafort was 'a grave counterintelligence threat,' Republican-led Senate panel finds https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/08/18/senate-details-paul-manafort-ties-russian-intel-officer-kilimnik/3390437001/ August 18, 2020 ....In one of two meetings with Kilimnik during his tenure as Trump campaign chairman, "Manafort briefed Kilimnik on the state of the Trump Campaign and Manafort's plan to win the election," the Mueller report concluded. "That briefing encompassed the campaign's messaging and its internal polling data. According to Gates, it also included discussion of 'battleground' states, which Manafort identified as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota. Early last year, a federal judge found that Manafort had lied repeatedly to federal prosecutors about his contacts with Kilimnik, ultimately upending a plea agreement Manafort had struck with Mueller’s team. Among the contested exchanges, prosecutors asserted that Manafort lied about having provided polling data to Kilimnik. In 2018, Manafort and Kilimnik were charged together with attempting to obstruct Mueller’s investigation by seeking to block the testimony of at least two witnesses. The case prompted a judge to revoke Manafort’s bail and order him to jail to await separate trials on a slew of financial fraud charges in Alexandria, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., where he was ultimately convicted.

Herr Von Pein, To clarify this, do you actually believe that Oswald was a LONE Assassin in Dealey Plaza? 🤥 People are already rolling the Sisyphean JFKA stone back up the hill on your thread here, but perhaps we all need to step back and look at the landscape before continuing apace.

Nice dodge, Jeff. How about answering the question now? Why was Manafort willing to lie to the FBI and to Mueller's investigators about his 2016 campaign contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, even after agreeing to cooperate with the investigation in a plea deal? Does that sound like a guy who had nothing to hide about Trump and the Kremlin interference in the U.S. election? But let's call a spade a spade. The reason that some of the details of the 2016 Trump campaign's contacts with Kremlin assets remain "speculative" is that Manafort stonewalled the investigation, knowing that Trump would pardon him, if convicted. Manafort also floated a Trump pardon to his subordinate, Rick Gates, during the Mueller investigation, and had to be put in solitary for a while. Additionally, what role did Manafort (and Trump) play in the alteration of the 2016 Republican Party platform in Cleveland that undermined U.S. support for Ukraine in their border war with the Russian Federation-- subsequent to Putin's seizure of the Crimea?

So, is it true that David Von Pein used to trade baseball cards and Indiana Hoosier basketball cards with Mike Pence, before he became a devout convert to Allen Dulles's Lone Nutter cult?

Paul, Jeff Carter has been pushing Kremlin disinformation here for the past five years. Kilimnik is a GRU asset, and his long-term "business" association with Manafort mainly involved interfering in Ukrainian elections on behalf of Putin's puppet in Kyiv. From there, it was a very short leap to interfering in the 2016 U.S. election on behalf of Putin's puppet in Washington D.C., Donald Trump. Perhaps Jeff can explain why Manafort went to such great lengths to lie about his 2016 campaign contacts with Kilimnik during the Mueller investigation-- even lying to investigators after agreeing to cooperate in a plea bargain. Does Manafort sound like a guy who had nothing to hide? He also floated a Trump pardon to Rick Gates.

Geez... Read the references I posted for you, Ben. Trump's 2016 Campaign Manager, Paul Manafort, was a long-term Kremlin employee. You seem to be using Trump's standard trick of repeating lies/memes in the hope that people will believe them to be true.

Herr Von Pein, Do you mind telling us what you do for a living, and what funding sources you have for your JFK website? I'm curious about possible motives for your obvious devotion to promoting the Warren Commission Report. Everyone needs a hobby, but yours seems like a weird one.

My psychiatric opinion is that Trump is too narcissistic to listen to sound advice and delegate authority appropriately. He's very grandiose about his own flawed judgment and opinions, and his self-esteem is too fragile to tolerate confrontation or contradiction. That's why he, ultimately, surrounded himself with sycophants who did his bidding and told him only what he wanted to hear. According to Hutchinson, Trump's own Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, was relegated to resting on the couch in his office, answering frantic texts and declining to bother the Orange Emperor, during the January 6th debacle.

Ben, Speaking of kool aid drinkers, I think you may need an intervention to help you get off of that reality-distorting red stuff. As for the Senate Intel Committee, it was chaired by Richard Burr prior to January of 2021. The GOP delayed the release of their damning report about Russian interference in our elections, on behalf of Trump, as long as possible. And the Republicans in Congress, including those who had who persistently stonewalled investigations of Trump/GOP ties to the Kremlin, were not "bumped" from any committees by Cheney. They were bumped by the Democratic Congressional leaders elected by American voters. Rep. Bennie Thompson chairs the J6 committee, and he has been outstanding. It's a shame you didn't watch these truly historic hearings about Trump's serious crimes against the United States-- far, far worse than Watergate. One thing I will note. Since you have, at least, read the Wiki article on the Senate Intel Report, you now know that the so-called Russia Hoax was no hoax, right? You should erase the "Russia hoax" meme from your lexicon. Meanwhile, I posted the actual Senate Intel Report links for you and Wheeler yesterday, (on your other thread about Mueller) along with the scholarly Atlantic article, The Russia Hoax Was No Hoax.

Cassidy Hutchinson was a Trump insider who spilled some of the beans about Trump's seditious conspiracy but, unlike John Dean, she wasn't, apparently, complicit in any Presidential crimes. Cipollone must have been complicit on some level. According to Hutchinson, Cipollone was frantically trying to stop Trump from going to the Capitol with the armed mob. That kind of implies that Cipollone was fully aware of Trump's felonious plan to obstruct the Congressional certification of Biden's election, by inciting an attack on the Congress. One thing I noticed about Hutchinson's firsthand witness testimony is that Trump didn't really delegate much administrative authority to Meadows (or Cipollone.) His official staff seemed, more or less, sidelined from his loony executive decisions-- with the exception of Ornato's practical SS ops.

Manafort is also guilty of perjury-- lying about his 2016 campaign contacts with GRU asset Konstantin Kilimnik, even after he agreed to cooperate with Mueller's investigation as part of a plea bargain. He was directly reprimanded by the judge for his perjury and stonewalling for Trump. Manafort was also guilty of witness tampering-- floating a Trump pardon to his associate Rick Gates, during the grand jury investigation of Gates. You never did read the Mueller Report, eh, Ben? And you, obviously, never read the Atlantic article I posted TWICE for you, The Russia Hoax Was No Hoax, have you, Ben? Nor did you watch Hutchinson's J6 testimony. In a nutshell, you're willfully ignorant about both Russiagate, and January 6th, yet you presume to lecture to us about those subjects-- endlessly repeating the same erroneous Trumplican talking points.

Ben, Thanks for your latest observations about the Congressional J6 hearings you didn't watch. 🤥

There's a lot of there there, Ben. You have simply chosen to ignore the facts. Did you ever study that excellent Atlantic article by Franklin Foer that I posted for you, Russiagate Was Not a Hoax? * (I'll re-post it for you and Rob Wheeler.) * Russiagate Was Not a Hoax - The Atlantic

Ben, Thanks for your comical "update" on the J6 hearings, as perceived by people living in the MAGA-verse. I can, certainly, understand why you guys would want Hutchinson's firsthand witness testimony to be "inadmissible." It's quite damning. But, I must give you credit for providing some daily comic relief here, and a valuable perspective on how Trumplicans view the Congressional J6 hearings that they have so assiduously refrained from watching. 🤥 So, Hutchinson wasn't "vetted," eh? Did you hear that flamer from Glenn Greenwald or Tucker Carlson? And she wasn't a firsthand witness of the activities and conversations of Trump and Meadows, (Ornato, Cipollone, Engel, et.al.) who had a White House office nearly adjacent to the Oval Office? Did you read that silly spin at Breitbart or the Gateway Pundit? "Cheney-crats" and monkeymen in the trees? Matt was kind enough to provide documentation about the Trump mob guns on the Washington Mall, and you promptly changed the subject. Now you dismiss those Trumplicans with guns are mere "monkeymen in trees?" (BTW, do you really think Trumplicans are any less tribal and homicidal than other simians?) As for Liz Cheney, she has done an admirable job investigating Trump's serious crimes against the United States. I never thought I would approve of a Cheney, but she deserves her Profile in Courage Award.

Tony Ornato has some serious 'splainin' to do about what happened at the White House on January 6th. So does Mark Meadows. My hunch is that any testimony from them will be limited to; 1) misleading statements denying Trump's misconduct -- not made under oath-- leaked to the right wing media, 2) perjury, or, 3) pleading the 5th.

Geez, Robert. Surely, you aren't clueless enough to deny Trump's longstanding enmeshment with Putin's oligarchs. https://www.amazon.com/Putins-People-Took-Back-Russia-ebook/dp/B07VMZYK13 Do you also believe that Putin and the GRU didn't conspire to put Trump in the White House in 2016-- trolling social media and hacking multiple voter registration databases throughout the U.S.-- as the Republican-controlled Senate Intel Committee confirmed? https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume1.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf That Paul Manafort wasn't a long-term Kremlin employee prior to 2016? That Manafort didn't repeatedly lie about his 2016 campaign contacts with GRU asset Konstantin Kilimnik-- even after he agreed to cooperate with Mueller's investigation? That Michael Flynn didn't lie about his 2016 efforts to sabotage U.S. sanctions imposed against Russia for meddling in our election? That Trump didn't fire James Comey to shut down the FBI investigation of Flynn's Russia contacts, as Trump told Lavrov afterwards?

Well, I suppose that we should respect people's First Amendment right to post disinformation. But let's not indulge in the prevalent modern fallacies of "both sider-ism" and false equivalence when it comes to the Warren Commission's Lone Nut narrative. Does anyone here really doubt that the WCR Lone Nut narrative has been thoroughly and definitively debunked? Must we endlessly beat that dead horse on this forum? Sisyphus comes to mind.

Question. Did Bobby Engel drive the Secret Service vehicle that Mike Pence refused to enter at the Capitol on January 6th?

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In the same post where Ben admits that he never actually read the Mueller Report, he insists that Mueller, "did not have anything on Trump..." Huh? What about multiple counts of obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and stonewalling of critical evidence by key witnesses? Ben's concepts of both Russiagate and Trump's January 6th coup attempt seem to come not from primary sources, but from Trumplican pundits and propagandists in the right wing media. Surely, Mueller was Deep State, MIC player. But why did Mueller never subpoena Donald Trump, Don, Jr., Ivanka, or Kushner? IMO, he wasn't persecuting Trump, as Ben erroneously theorizes. He was landing the Republican Russiagate plane, with Rosenstein and Barr as co-pilots.

Interesting video commentary today by author Carol Leonnig about Tony Ornato, the Secret Service, and the possible Trump/Secret Service plot to remove Mike Pence from the Capitol on January 6th. Trump's Secret Service Detail 'Cheered on the Insurrection'—Carol Leonnig (msn.com)

IMO, something about Tony Ornato doesn't pass the sniff test. From what I can find on-line, he's a highly political former Secret Service agent who managed security for Trump's political stunts, including his Lafayette Square tear gas/Bible photo op and Trump's super spreader COVID rallies in 2020. I wonder if Vince Palamara has an opinion about Ornato and Brian Engel.

I agree, Chris. My wife and I really enjoyed touring Skye and the Scottish Highlands. I was merely joking about Mary McLeod's homeland, based on Trump's habit of disparaging emigres from "sh*thole" countries who come to the U.S. and have "anchor babies," as Mary McLeod did in the case of Donald's older siblings. 🤥

Joe, My hunch is that Trump's love of McDonald's has to do with his immense love for his first name and his ancestry in the Outer Hebrides. My wife and I toured the Isle of Skye many years ago, and almost everyone there is either a McDonald or a McLeod. I believe the same thing is true on the neighboring Isle of Lewis, where Trump's mother, Mary McLeod, was born and raised. As for the cuisine, when I eat at McDonald's I usually feel slightly dyspeptic and dysphoric, as if I had just mistakenly consumed too much grease. The Isle of Lewis: Did Donald Trump's Mother Emigrate From a Sh*thole Country? 🤥

Ben has been chugging the red Trump kool aid for years, while incessantly accusing others of imbibing. And he still won't answer the questions about whether he watched the Congressional J6 hearings. The fact is that Cassidy Hutchinson was a highly credible witness who was intimately involved in Trump and Meadow's affairs. IMO, Ornato and Engel are lying about the limo story to cover Trump's ass.