W. Niederhut

I hate to interrupt this rather touching, romantic spam-fest between Kevin Hofeling and Ben Cole, but I notice that Kevin has continued to highjack his own the thread about Trump and the Deep State, which originated with posts about the JFK Records and Kevin's erroneous thesis that Trump, like JFK, has been an heroic adversary and victim of the Deep State. In the process, both Kevin and Ben have also doubled down on the false, ubiquitous Trumpaganda trope in the MAGA media (since 2019) claiming that "Russiagate is a hoax." This false trope about "the Russiagate hoax" was relentlessly amplified by Rupert Murdoch's propaganda empire, (Fox, NY Post, et.al.) and by Putin's propaganda affiliates in the U.S., after Bill Barr halted Mueller's investigation and misrepresented Mueller's findings-- while blocking Congressional and public access to the unredacted Report. Kevin and Ben have also, happily, discovered CIA Operation Mockingbird-- with help from Tucker Carlson-- and are now endeavoring to educate us about the CIA's alleged use of Mockingbird to victimize Trump, their heroic adversary of the Deep State. The problem is that this thesis is nonsense. The other problem is that Kevin and Ben, like other denizens of the MAGA-verse, have completely overlooked the reality of MAGA-verse propaganda in the U.S. media; especially the media empires of Trump's Ministers of Propaganda-- viz., Rupert Murdoch, Robert Mercer, et.al.-- and the nexus between Trump's MAGA propagandists and Putin's cyber warfare ops in the U.S. since 2015. Here's the big picture that Kevin and Ben are missing-- in relation to their erroneous thesis about Trump and the Deep State. Trump isn't a victim of the Deep State. He's a compromised Russian asset. PROMOTING A CULTURE WAR: HOW PUTIN USED TRUMP TO SEIZE ALMOST TOTAL CONTROL OVER THE REPUBLICAN PARTY Posted by Thom Hartmann | Mar 1, 2024 There is little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They are gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy. Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check. Most recently, the three-year “Biden bribery” hysteria Republicans in the House have been running — including thousands of hits on Fox “News” and all over rightwing hate radio — turns out to have been a Russian intelligence operation originally designed to help Trump win the 2020 election. The Russian spy who had been feeding this phony info to Jordan and James Comer is now in jail. Over the past two years, as America was using Russia’s terrorist attacks on Ukraine to degrade the power and influence of Russia’s military, Putin was using social media, Republican politicians, and rightwing American commentators to get Republican politicians on his side and thus kill off U.S. aid to Ukraine. The war in Gaza is making it even easier, with Putin-aligned politicians like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeting: “Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.” Russia’s battlefield, in other words, has now shifted from Ukraine to the U.S. political system and our homes via radio, TV, and the internet, all in the hopes of ending U.S. aid to the democracy they have brutally attacked. And the momentum is following that shift: Russia is close to having the upper hand in Ukraine because of Putin’s ability — via Trump and Johnson — to get Republican politicians to mouth his talking points and propaganda. Now, with Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson shutting down the House of Representatives so nobody can offer a discharge petition that would force a vote on Ukraine aid (and aid for Palestinian refugees, Taiwan, and our southern border), it is becoming more and more clear that Vladimir Putin is running the Republican party via his well-paid stooge, Donald Trump. I say “well paid” because Donald Trump would have been reduced to homelessness in the early 1990s if it were not for Russian money, as both of his sons have said at different times. He had burned through all of his father’s estate, even stealing a large part of it from his siblings. He’d lost or hidden almost two billion dollars running a casino. As Michael Hirsch noted for Foreign Policy magazine: He had been forced to repeatedly declare bankruptcy — sticking American banks for over a billion dollars in unpaid bills — after draining his businesses of free cash and stashing the money in places he hoped nobody would ever find. No American bank would touch him, and property developers in New York were waiting for his entire little empire to collapse. Instead, a desperate Trump reached out to foreign dictators and mobsters, who were more than happy to supply funds to an influential New York businessman…for a price to be paid in the future. He sold over $100 million worth of condos to more than sixty Russian citizens during that era, and partnered with professional criminals and money launderers to raise money for Trump properties in Azerbaijan and Panama. According to Trump himself, he sold $40 to $50 million worth of apartments to the Saudis. He then partnered with a former high Soviet official, Tevfik Arif, and a Russian businessman, Felix Sater, who had been found guilty of running a “huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia.” As the founders of Fusion GPS wrote for The New York Times in 2018: Thus, when it came time to run for president, Trump had to pay the price. He and the people around him were inundated with offers of “help” from Russians, most associated directly with Putin or the Russian mafia. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been paid millions by Putin’s oligarchs and ran Trump’s campaign for free. Reporters found over a dozen connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, and during the 2016 campaign Trump was secretly negotiating a deal to open a Trump tower in Moscow. Trump’s son and his lawyer met with Putin’s agents in Trump Tower. Putin’s personal xxxxx army, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) based out of St. Petersburg but operating worldwide, began a major campaign in 2016 to get Trump elected president. Manafort fed Russian intelligence raw data from internal Republican polling that identified a few hundred thousand individuals in a half-dozen or so swing states the GOP thought could be persuaded to vote for Trump (or against Hillary), and the IRA immediately went to work, reaching out to them via mostly Facebook. Mueller’s report and multiple journalistic investigations have noted that the most common message out of Russia then was directed at Democratic-leaning voters and was, essentially, “both parties are the same so it’s a waste of time to vote.” A report from Texas-based cybersecurity company New Knowledge, working with researchers at Columbia University, concluded, as reported by The New York Times: And it appears to have worked in suppressing the potential Black Democratic vote in swing states. A 2018 bipartisan Senate report found the Russian efforts consequential, as the BBC headline on that analysis summarizes: The news story summarizes: Between the information compiled by Oxford Analytica and the details passed along from the GOP to Prigozhin via Manafort, a mere margin of 43,000 votes across a handful of swing states —all microtargeted by Russia — handed the electoral college to Trump, even though he lost the nationwide vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million ballots. So now Trump has succeeded in making the entire GOP a party to his long-term debt to Putin and his oligarchs. “Moscow Mike” Johnson has blocked any aid to Ukraine for over a year; the last congressional appropriation for foreign aid was passed in 2022, when Nancy Pelosi ran the House. Meanwhile, under Trump’s and Putin’s direction, Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to damage the people of the United States. They believe it will help them in the 2024 election if they can ruin the U.S. economy while convincing American voters that our system of government is so corrupt (“deep state”) that we should consider replacing democracy with an autocratic strongman form of government like Putin’s Russia. Tucker Carlson is even suggesting that Russia is a better place to live than the US. They revel in pitting racial, religious, and gender groups against each other while embracing a form of fascism that pretends to be grounded in Christianity, all while welcoming Putin’s social media trolls who are promoting these divisions. Republican-aligned think tanks are working on Project 2025, a naked attempt to consolidate power in the White House to support a strongman president who can override the will of the people, privatize Social Security and Medicare, shut down our public school system, fully criminalize abortion and homosexuality (Sam Alito called for something like that this week), and abandon our democratic allies in favor of a realignment with Russia, China, and North Korea. Trump got us here by openly playing to the fears and prejudices of white people who are freaked out by the rapid post-1964 “browning” of America. Putin jumped in to help amplify the message a thousandfold with his social media trolls, who are posting thousands of times a day as you read these words. Now that Putin largely controls the GOP, today’s question is how far Republicans are willing to go in their campaign to bring the USA to her knees on behalf of Putin and Trump. When Congress comes back into session next week, will they take up Ukraine aid? Will they continue their opposition to comprehensive immigration and border reform? Will they keep pushing to privatize Social Security with their new “commission”? Will they work as hard to kneecap Taiwan on behalf of President Xi as they have Ukraine on behalf of Putin? Will they continue to quote Russian Intelligence propaganda in their effort to smear President Biden? Instead of just 7 Republicans going to Moscow to “celebrate” the Fourth of July, will the entire party move their event to that city like the NRA did? Or to Budapest, like CPAC did? Or will the GOP suddenly start listening to the rational voices left in their party, the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys who still believe in democracy (even if they want to gut the social safety net and turn loose the polluters)?

Poland activates air force as western Ukraine and Kyiv come under ‘massive’ Russian attack | Ukraine | The Guardian March 24, 2024 Thom Hartmann has already hypothesized that the recent terrorist attack in Moscow might be a second Putin/FSB false flag attack on Russian citizens-- to be used as a pretext for escalated bombing of Kyiv. Putin used a similar false flag terrorist attack in Russia 22 years ago -- blamed on Chechnya-- as a pretext to bomb Grozny back to the Stone Age and enhance his popularity.

Just for the Education Forum record, this is what Roger Odisio is erroneously referring to as my "rancid BS." Roger, can you answer these topical questions about Trump's history? Isn't posting facts and responding to relevant questions the essence of intellectually honest debates? Roger, With all due respect, this is complete hogwash. The MAGA manure published about the aborted Mueller investigation doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. Did Mueller ever subpoena Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, or Don, Jr.-- who attended the Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin asset, Natalia Veselnitskaya, in the summer of 2016? Did you ever read the transcript of Donald Trump's written responses to Mueller's inquiries? It's ludicrous. Next question. Why did long-term Kremlin employee, Paul Manafort, commit perjury in order to deny his 2016 campaign contacts with GRU agent Konstantin Kilimnik-- even after Manafort had entered a plea agreement to cooperate with Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in our 2016 election? Why did Trump and Manafort obstruct justice by, among other things, floating pardons to witnesses during Mueller's investigation? Finally, why did GHWB's favorite CIA lawyer, Bill Barr, promptly shut down Mueller's investigation, then lie publicly about Mueller's findings-- while blocking Congressional and public access to the unredacted Report? And, incidentally, the only reason that Mueller didn't indict Trump for multiple counts of obstruction justice was that DOJ guidelines did not permit him to indict a sitting POTUS.

Ben is still pushing his same old MAGA propaganda tropes denying Trump's J6 insurrection, which he calls a "scrum." We debunked Ben's false MAGA narratives, in detail, on the old 56 Years thread-- to no avail. They're BAAACCCKKK! And, as some of us will recall, (including James DiEugenio) Ben adamantly refused to watch the historic Congressional J6 hearings in 2022-- insisting, with the talking heads at Fox News, that the J6 hearings were a mere "circus." I will also point out that, when confronted with unwelcome facts about Trump's sordid history, both Ben and Kevin Hofeling have a habit of immediately changing the subject-- by posting true facts that we all know about the JFK assassination and coverup.

Ben, This is nonsense. You and Kevin Hofeling are a couple of spammers who are, obviously, incapable of engaging in a rational, evidence-based debate about the false MAGA premise that Donald Trump is a JFK-like victim of the Deep State. It's bunk that has been promoted by Trump, Fox News, and the MAGA media, to deflect blame for Trump's serious crimes and misconduct. What I notice about Kevin, in particular, is that he responds to the facts debunking his MAGA Trump-as-victim/Russiagate-as-hoax narrative by spamming the board with true JFKA facts that most of us have known for years--e.g., about the JFK assassination, James Douglass, the Deep State, Operation Mockingbird, etc. Then he falsely pretends that these accurate old facts somehow support his false Trump-as-victim MAGA narrative. They don't. Kevin's rhetorical spamming technique can be summarized as-- "Hey, look at all of this stuff! This old information about JFK, the CIA, and Operation Mockingbird is true, therefore Trump must be a similar victim of the Deep State." But the truth is that Kevin doesn't really understand the evidence about; 1) Trump's multi-decade history with Russia, 2) Putin's 2015 strategy of putting Trump in the White House, 3) the pervasive Trump/MAGA media denial of Russiagate, and 4) the fact that Trump has never been a victim of the Deep State (or Mockingbird.) Kevin is also clueless about the fact that people with graduate degrees from Harvard aren't typically "brainwashed"-- like Trump's MAGA dupes. As a newbie on the forum, Kevin doesn't understand his audience here, or the historical material in our archives. He's not preaching to the choir. He's a choir boy who thinks he's a rector.

Get a clue, fella. And spare us the lengthy cut-and-paste/YouTube posts, in lieu of intelligible, written arguments about the subject under discussion. Most of what you post on this forum is stuff that we've all known for years. Meanwhile, you haven't understood or rebutted a single fact that I have posted on this thread, about Trump, Russia-gate, and Trump's multi-decade involvement with Russian mafiosi, oligarchs, and Putin. Are you aware that Russian businessman, (and Trump Organization associate) Felix Sater, bragged in 2015 that Putin was going to put Donald Trump in the White House? Did you ever read the U.S. Senate Intel Report on Russian interference in our 2016 election, to put Trump in the White House? Did you read the Mueller Report? As for Operation Mockingbird, I have been studying and posting material about it on this forum for several years now--long before Tucker Carlson fans finally discovered the "Deep State" in 2017 (after Trump and Fox News tried to blame Trump's illegal involvement with Russia on Deep State persecution.) As an example, I started a thread tracking suspected Mockingbird censorship and misrepresentation of Oliver Stone's film, JFK Revisited, when the film premiered at Cannes a few years ago. At the time, your fellow Tucker Carlson fan, Ben Cole, expressed skepticism that Mockingbird was still in existence! Now Ben is "educating" us daily about Mockingbird in our M$M. As for 2024, I'm glad that you and Ben Cole finally know what Mockingbird is-- even if you mistakenly imagine that it was unfairly deployed against Putin's Orange Asset, Donald Trump. The truth is that we could have used a little Mockingbird outing of Trump's involvement with Russia prior to the 2016 election! Instead, newspapers like NYT (and their then editor Dean Baquet) put the kibosh on any pre-election coverage of Trump's involvement with Russia.

This is utter nonsense-- posted by a guy who never even read the Mueller Report-- as we all learned during the course of our detailed forum discussions with Ben on the 56 Years thread. The only thing "dubious" about Mueller's investigation is that Mueller refused to subpoena Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, or Don, Jr.-- and Bill Barr aborted the investigation before it could be properly completed. Trump floated pardons to multiple witnesses during Mueller's investigation-- obstructing justice-- then he pardoned Roger Stone and his partner (and long-term Kremlin employee) Paul Manafort, who had committed perjury during his grand jury testimony in order to conceal his 2016 campaign contacts with GRU agent Konstantin Kilimnik.

Geez...can we get Ben's MAGA spam off of this Ron Paul thread? I posted a detailed commentary for Ben on the subject of Kremlin and MAGA disinformation about Russiagate last night-- in response to Ben's deeply-flawed WSWS article about Russiagate and CIA infiltration of the Democratic Party. I pointed out to Ben that Kremlin-funded sites like WSWS have an objective of undermining Biden and the Democratic Party-- for the purpose of weakening U.S. support for Ukraine. (Kremlin-funded propaganda sites in the West are not confined to the right-wing MAGA media.) To my knowledge, Ben never read or acknowledged my rebuttal. Now Ben is simply spamming the board with more MAGA propaganda. I will concede that there is no dearth of MAGA propaganda denying Russia-gate. But spamming the board with it is not a way to engage in a rational, intellectually honest debate.

Sandy, I noticed that the original discussion on this thread-- about JFK, the JFK Records, Trump, and the Deep State-- went off on a multi-page tangent about Seth Rich and the DNC. But the Seth Rich/DNC story is merely one aspect of the much larger issue of Trump's history with Russia, and Russia's multi-faceted interference in our 2016 election on Trump's behalf. Let's also recall that Trump's relationship with the Russian mafia and oligarchs dates back over 30 years, and that Felix Sater had openly bragged as early as 2015 that Putin was going to put Trump in the White House. A Trump associate bragged that a business deal with Putin could “get Donald elected” - Vox I first read about that untold Trump/Russia history at Russ Baker's WhoWhatWhy site, (in 2016) but it was largely suppressed by the U.S. M$M prior to 2017. British journalist Catherine Belton has also written about it in detail in her book, Putin's People. Trump and his assorted media propagandists later (beginning in 2017) flooded the zone with excrement claiming that Trump had been a victim of the Deep State, after details began to surface about his history with Russia, and his numerous 2016 campaign contacts with Russian assets. This is why I have pointed out to Ben Cole, more than once, that the MAGA media only "discovered" the Deep State in 2017-- after Trump began to blame the Deep State for his misconduct. And, since Tucker Carlson's shocking commentaries last year about the CIA murdering JFK, many MAGA media pundits have continued to blame Trump's vicissitudes on the Deep State--even erroneously comparing Trump to JFK.

That's the debate I watched, Robert. But I think it was during the 2008 Republican Presidential primaries-- with McCain, Huckabee, Ron Paul, et.al. Ron Paul was like a fish out of water in those debates, for criticizing Bush & Cheney's imploding, "War on Terror." There was a great bumper sticker going around in those days-- "We're Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them."

Roger, With all due respect, this is complete hogwash. The MAGA manure published about the aborted Mueller investigation doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. Did Mueller ever subpoena Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, or Don, Jr.-- who attended the Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin asset, Natalia Veselnitskaya, in the summer of 2016? Did you ever read the transcript of Donald Trump's written responses to Mueller's inquiries? It's ludicrous. Next question. Why did long-term Kremlin employee, Paul Manafort, commit perjury in order to deny his 2016 campaign contacts with GRU agent Konstantin Kilimnik-- even after Manafort had entered a plea agreement to cooperate with Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in our 2016 election? Why did Trump and Manafort obstruct justice by, among other things, floating pardons to witnesses during Mueller's investigation? Finally, why did GHWB's favorite CIA lawyer, Bill Barr, promptly shut down Mueller's investigation, then lie publicly about Mueller's findings-- while blocking Congressional and public access to the unredacted Report? And, incidentally, the only reason that Mueller didn't indict Trump for multiple counts of obstruction justice was that DOJ guidelines did not permit him to indict a sitting POTUS.

Ben, More Pin-the-Tale-on-the -Donkey, eh? From an "apolitical," "non-partisan" guy like you? 🙄 But don't be deceived by your WSWS article here. It's riddled with numerous, blatant inaccuracies-- especially regarding Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election on behalf of Trump and the Republican Party. So, not surprisingly, WSWS has been identified by some as a left-wing Kremlin propaganda source.* (Though most Kremlin propaganda sources in the West are aligned with right-wing fascist movements.) As a Kremlin-funded source, one of WSWS's objectives would involve undermining Biden and the Democratic Party, to weaken U.S. support for Ukraine. *On Gutter Journalism and Purported “Anti-Imperialism” - New Politics As for bashing the Donks, let's briefly walk down Langley memory lane. 1) It's a bit specious to denounce Truman as a Democratic enthusiast of the CIA, especially in light of Truman's openly expressed criticisms of the Agency following JFK's assassination. Truman explicitly regretted signing off on giving the CIA unregulated operational license. 2) Eisenhower was delighted by the low cost of CIA black ops-- e.g., the assassination of Mossadeq and the Albeniz coup in Guatemala. He also, obviously, signed off on the Bay of Pigs op to oust Castro. 3) After the Bay of Pigs debacle, as we all know, JFK canned Allen Dulles and wanted to break Dulles' rogue CIA into a thousand pieces. 4) (See Robert Morrow for LBJ's history with the CIA.) 5) But no subsequent U.S. Presidents locked horns with the Company, with the notable exception of Nixon firing Richard Helms. 6) Gerald Ford appointed "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" CIA Director. Speaks volumes. 7) Jimmy Carter then replaced "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" with Stansfield Turner-- in the Church Committee era. Carter and Brezinski also recruited Osama Bin Laden and the Muslim mujaheddin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. 8 ) Reagan and GHWB restored CIA hardliners (including William Casey) to Agency leadership. This restoration of the post-Colby CIA played a major role in Reagan-era black ops like Iran-Contra, and CIA cocaine trafficking in the U.S. (Detailed by Gary Webb-- per Kill the Messenger.) 9 ) President GHWB promoted CIA lawyer Bill Barr to AG, to manage his pardons of the Reagan/Bush Iran-Contra convicts-- Casper Weinberger, Oliver North, et.al. 10) Clinton's relationship with the CIA is a bit of a mystery to me. According to John Schindler, the CIA was involved in some way with Osama Bin Laden and his mujaheddin ("Al Qaeda") militants, the Izetbegovic regime in Bosnia, and the KLA, during the Clinton/NATO bombing of the Yugoslavian rump state during the Kosovo War. 11) As CIA Director, George Tennant later facilitated the George W. Bush/Cheney/Neocon "War on Terror"-- even famously declaring that Iraq WMDs were "a slam dunk." Bush and Cheney's Deep State also implemented the Patriot Act-- which you erroneously attributed to Obama. 12) Much to my amazement, Obama retained Bush and Cheney's CIA/MIC man, Robert Gates, as Sec Def-- and he appointed the crafty administrator Leon Panetta CIA Director. Leon Panetta reportedly told Obama in 2009, "You can't just say, 'No' to these guys." 13) Trump appointed his favorite, West Point yes-man, Mike Pompeo, CIA Director, and "got rolled by the Deep State" in October of 2017, as Oliver Stone put it. So, in summary, the CIA has, obviously, remained ascendant in Republican and Democratic administrations since 1963-- although "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" and his son started our wars in Panama, (GHWB) the Persian Gulf, (GHWB) Afghanistan, (Dubya) and Iraq (Dubya.)

I wonder, Matt. IMO, with some slick, targeted marketing, RFK, Jr. and his billionaire donors could possibly put Mango Unchained back in the White House. If RFK, Jr. had any bona fide concern for the country, or the planet, he would drop out of this third party race.

Yes, I noticed that MAGA Ben has been praising Kevin Hofeling's alleged "apolitical," "non-partisan" MAGA media-based posts on the thread in which Hofeling compared Trump to JFK-- as an alleged victim of the Deep State. Yabba Dabba Doo! 🤥 Ben finally has another forum friend from the Tucker Carlson Testicle-Tanning Society to support his MAGA paradigms -- following the departure of Mathew Koch, et.al.

Amen, Ron. This bogus MAGA narrative about Trump being a JFK-like victim of the Deep State is complete nonsense. Trump isn't a victim. He's a malefactor. As for Ron Paul, the debate you refer to was in either 2008 or 2012-- during the GOP primaries. I recall appreciating Ron Paul's comments about "blow back" from the disastrous Bush-Cheney "War on Terror." His comments were not well received by McCain and the Republicans in 2008.

Dammit. Now RFK, Jr. and his Trump-affiliated donors are targeting Biden's Hispanic supporters. It looks like RFK, Jr. could, conceivably, put Mango Mussolini back in the White House-- a catastrophe... RFK Jr. relaunching JFK's Latino outreach campaign that gave birth to the Latino vote (axios.com)

Being "woke" is, obviously, part of the Biden snuff job on MAGA misogyny, bigotry, and homophobia... 🙄

Lev Parnas destroyed the MAGAts today-- including Giuliani, RoJo, and Sean Hannity. Little wonder that Fox News cut away from his damning testimony. Parnas calls out GOP rep at hearing for ‘doing the bidding’ of Russia | The Hill

Kevin, Geez. A little knowledge is, indeed, a dangerous thing. You, frankly, lose all credibility here by repeating the bogus Donald Trump/Fox News propaganda trope about the "Russiagate hoax." Russiagate was never a hoax. Like Ben Cole, you need to do some remedial reading about Putin's broad-based interference in the 2016 U.S. election on Trump's behalf. It happened. Did you study the U.S. Senate Intel Report on the subject? Among other aspects of Russiagate, Trump's 2016 Campaign Manager, Paul Manafort, was a long-term Kremlin employee who shared sensitive polling data with his Russian colleague, GRU agent Konstantin Kilimnik, during the 2016 Trump campaign. And Kremlin asset, Natalia Veselnitskaya, met with numerous Trump campaign staffers in 2016 to discuss Russian intel on Hillary Clinton. Manafort's partner, Roger Stone, also conferred with Julian Assange about hacked Russian "dirt" on Clinton, which was used to launch the 2016 Trump/Russian "Email-gate" psy-op. Manafort even committed perjury by lying about his 2016 campaign contacts with Kilimnik-- even after he had agreed to cooperate with Mueller's half-hearted, aborted investigation of Russiagate. Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, also lied to the FBI about his December 2016 phone calls with Sergei Kisylak. We've been around and around this Trump/Russiagate mulberry bush with your fellow MAGA media fan, Ben Cole, in recent years. And, unfortunately, the facts always tend to go into one MAGA ear and out the other in these discussions. Then the bogus MAGA narratives about history get re-posted, ad infinitum. As for my comments about Putin, Trump, and Operation Timber Sycamore, this is now the second time that you have misrepresented my comments. What I said (above) is that an alternative explanation for Trump de-funding Timber Sycamore in the summer of 2017 is that Putin may have instructed him to do so. It's an hypothesis, not an assertion of fact. Your claim is that Trump de-funded Timber Sycamore because he wanted to pursue peace-- as an heroic adversary of the Deep State, etc. But Trump's history of allegedly pursuing peace was checkered, at best, as I described above. Trump is not an idealist, nor a foreign policy wonk, like JFK. He's more analogous to an ass who responds to carrots and sticks-- bribes, and possible blackmail. He kowtowed to the Saudis in Yemen, and he has consistently kowtowed to Putin. John LeCarre probably said it best, after Trump's humiliating press conference with Putin in Helsinki. LeCarre said, "Putin, obviously, has Trump by the short hairs."

Kevin, There's nothing "radioactive" about discussing the JFK records and Donald Trump. In fact, I started a forum thread on the topic here a few years ago. Redundant falsehoods about Trump's true history need to be corrected. Nor is there anything "radioactive" about discussing inaccurate comparisons of JFK's peace initiatives (and his historic conflicts with the CIA and Joint Chiefs) and Donald Trump's bribery-based foreign policy record. Trump was never an heroic adversary of the Deep State. He was elected with the help of some FBI chicanery, and widespread sabotage of Hillary Clinton's candidacy by Russian hackers and the U.S. corporate media. What I pointed out is that it is simply historically inaccurate to claim that "the Deep State was against Trump before he was even elected." The truth is that Trump (and his MAGA pundits at Fox and elsewhere) promoted a series of bogus propaganda tropes about Trump being a victim of the Deep State beginning in 2017-- after the FBI initially questioned Michael Flynn about his December 2016 phone calls with Sergei Kisylak, and data began to emerge about Russian interference in the U.S. election on Trump's behalf. As for your revisionist history claiming that Trump was a peace-seeking adversary of the Deep State, it is inconsistent with a number of historical facts. 1) Trump green-lighted the genocidal Saudi war against Yemen. 2) He significantly increased non-combatant casualties committed by U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen, by changing U.S. Rules of Engagement. In fact, General Mattis had to talk Trump down from his demands for the murder of non-combatant women and children! 3) Trump's de-funding of Operation Timber Sycamore in Syria in the summer of 2017 may have been a response to instructions from Putin-- who had intervened against the CIA/MI6/Saudi/Israeli proxy war on behalf of the Assad regime. In effect, Trump turned Syria over to Putin. (I happen to agree with Putin's intervention.) For those of us who believe that Trump is a compromised Russian asset, this interpretation of Trump's 2017 Timber Sycamore intervention makes sense. It's what Putin wanted Trump to do.

I'm re-posting Ben Cole's (not Cohen) historically inaccurate statement (above) for Kevin Hofeling. Kevin Hofeling is confused here. Rather than repeating myself, I urge Kevin to study my evidence-based, accurate response to Ben's false, oft-repeated claim that the Deep State was "against Trump...even before he was elected." Kevin is unfamiliar with our previous forum discussions about this topic. He is also unfamiliar with my original forum thread about Trump and the JFK Records, from a few years ago, and with my previous forum posts about Operation Timber Sycamore. As I mentioned (above) Trump does deserve credit for de-funding Sycamore in 2017. As for comparing Trump to JFK on foreign policy matters, I should probably remind Kevin that Trump green-lighted the genocidal Saudi war against Yemen. Trump also killed more civilian non-combatants overseas in his first eight months as President than the Obama administration killed in eight years! JFK's policy decisions were generally based on rational, strategic, and ethical analyses. He had humanistic principles. In contrast, Trump's policy decisions were generally based on bribery, kickbacks, self-interest, and suspected blackmail (i.e., kompromat.) Trump responds to money. In that sense, JFK and Trump are diametric opposites. As an example, Michael Wolff described Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer, essentially, bribing Trump to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And the Saudis loaned Trump's son-in-law $2 billion, following Kushner's dubious tenure as Trump's Middle East envoy.

Here's a song in honor of Peter Navarro checking into prison today-- Flatt & Scruggs' classic, Doin' My Time!