Attorney's file on Roger Stone, LaRouche and Russia influencing the 2016 presidential election

[Douglas Caddy]

Trump Asserts Executive Privilege Over Full Mueller Report

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/us/politics/congress-contempt-barr.html

 

[Douglas Caddy]

5 Takeaways From 10 Years of Trump Tax Figures

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/us/trump-tax-figures.html

[James DiEugenio]

The Epoch Times is an interesting site.  

It looks like it was founded by some dissident Chinese.  But they do some interesting reporting.

Here is Daniel Lazare's take on Mueller

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/05/06/top-10-questions-about-the-mueller-report/

 

I did not read the report yet.  But man, if you will not even admit that Sater has been FBI for almost twenty years?  

[Robert Harper]

Epoch Times not only gives journalism some of its reputation back, it also offers on its You-Tube site "Declassified"--an anchor named Gina Shakespeare--who not only seems to know the material and speak clearly, she's also quite pleasing on the eye. The reported "Spygate" first and did it masterfully.

[Paul Brancato]

6 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

The Epoch Times is an interesting site.  

It looks like it was founded by some dissident Chinese.  But they do some interesting reporting.

Here is Daniel Lazare's take on Mueller

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/05/06/top-10-questions-about-the-mueller-report/

 

I did not read the report yet.  But man, if you will not even admit that Sater has been FBI for almost twenty years?  

I’m sorry - being an FBI informant is not the same as being FBI. 

the direction this article takes strikes me as very sinister propaganda. It skims around the edges but does not look seriously at the very obvious relationship between Trump and Oligarchs in Russia and elsewhere, and with shady banks like Alfa and Cyprus. We are still missing pieces, but I’m afraid Consortium News has slipped over the edge. Writing a smear without even being able to look at the whole report or the supporting documents - what kind of journalism is that? 

There is a serious move towards totalitarianism in the US and elsewhere. This is a Constitutional Crisis. 

[Joe Bauer]

History is repeating itself .

Nixon during Watergate and the battle over the White House tapes, tried to get Elliot Richardson and then William Ruckleshaus to fire Archibald Cox. 

Both refused and resigned.

Solicitor General Robert Bork did Nixon's bidding and was later rejected for the Supreme Court as a result.

Eventually however, this attempt at subverting Congressional investigative authority helped force Nixon to resign.

Trump is doing the exact same type of Congressional authority obstruction. 

Telling Congress he is overriding their authority and exercising "Executive Privilege" in refusing Mueller and McGahn to testify to them.

If Congress lets Trump get away with this abuse of power, there is no longer a 
3 branch "Balance Of Power" constitutional government structure as we know it.

Some say this situation is our own "Rubicon" and Trump is our own version of "Julius Caesar."

IMO this is an analogy worth contemplating.

 

[James DiEugenio]

OMG, here we go: comparisons to Watergate and the Saturday Night Massacre? Trump as Julius Ceasar?

Constitutional crisis?

What is next? Iran /Contra?

As I have said before, Mueller was not a special prosecutor.  He was working for the DOJ.  Thanks to Ken Starr there is no special prosecutor law anymore.

Therefore, the AG had the right to redact info.  As I have said, the Dems can always go to court on this.  And I really wish they would.  I think they will win.

Mueller had two years to indict someone out of the White House for conspiracy.  As far as I can see, he did not do it.  But some people got caught in the crossfire e.g. George P. and Cohen. Strzok gets canned.

And somehow they still would not turn into John Dean.  And that is the problem with this case.  There is not one person who has lead us upward in the conspiracy to compromise the USA by the Russians.  Today, the Steele Dossier, which started it all, is hardly even mentioned as evidence. 

Now its the redacted Mueller Report. OK, go to court and get it unredacted.

But the bottom line is that redacted or unredacted where is the plot?  One can introduce classified material in courts, there are ways to do this.  But evidently Mueller did not even go that route.  And yet no one here considers the fact that maybe Strzok, a very high official in the FBI counterespionage unit, may have been right.  Maybe its because: There is no there there.

 

[James DiEugenio]

If the above is true, then I think there is a rather logical deduction.

The Dems have learned from the GOP.

Gingrich and Delay essentially turned the Republican party into a gang of rightwing Koch/Scaife agents.  And they did this by promising to run candidates to the right of any Republican who defied them.  And they did.  Club for Growth being an example.

Therefore, they were essentially clubbed into line on both Whitewater/Lewinsky and the phony WMD BS.  

I think the Dems have learned their lesson in pure political theater terms, of which Gingrich and DeLay were stage magicians at creating something out of nothing e.g. the congressional check cashing "scandal" and Jim Wright's royalties.

So they see this as payback in some ways. And although I object to it, if that is what they re doing, I really cannot blame them in light of the past.

BTW, I have to agree with the whole Trump losses being an old story.  This was talked about during the campaign in 2016.  The only difference I can see is that the total losses are maybe about 18 per cent higher than  those estimates.  Now, if you get his taxes from the years since, that is a story.

Edited May 9, 2019 by James DiEugenio

[Sandy Larsen]

43 minutes ago, Robert Wheeler said:

Taxes paid in subsequent years are going to be minimal for a few years. Prior year losses offset gains in future years. He might show $100 million of gains and income for 199X and zero taxes paid. No one has to like it and it might make for some MSNBC hysterics, but it’s how the tax code works.

So Trump had zero net income over like a fifteen year span? Jeez, no wonder he had to take the The Apprentice job.

 

[Jeff Carter]

On 5/8/2019 at 1:20 AM, Bob Ness said:

It is established fact that the Russians have taken these measures in: 2014 Ukrainian elections, 2016 Dutch referendum on the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, 2016 Brexit referendum, 2016 US elections, 2017 Catalan independence referendum, 2017 German elections, 2017 French elections, 2018 Italian elections,Georgia (2008, ongoing), Ukraine (2014, ongoing: annexation of Crimea, invasion of eastern Ukraine), Montenegro (2016 coup plot) - these are only the quick ones I could find. The Canadians suspect the Russians of interference and several other countries do also but I'm not going to look any more for you....

These things are established well beyond anything you're able to counter with. When you say that these issues are not established you are quite simply wrong. End of story.

 

This is a prime example of how “established fact” can be manufactured. The technique is a version of the “stovepiping” perfected by members of the Bush2 administration in the lead up to the Iraq War in 2002/03. Information is seeded into the mainstream media, it gets repeated, others start to refer to it, and soon enough through repetition it appears as verified established “fact” or common wisdom. But a close reading of the information tells a different story.

Assertions of foreign meddling in a democratic sovereign process are serious and should bring the attention of Intelligence services. Certainly that happened in the US, as can be read in the Intelligence Community Assessment published in January 2017. That Assessment asserted a wide-ranging Russian election meddling operation, although the factual basis for this appeared to rely on the forensic work of a private company hired by the DNC which cannot be verified. The Assessment

Itself states that these conclusions might be wrong. It was initially presented as the conclusions of the entire Intelligence community, later downgraded to three agencies, later downgraded to handpicked individuals from three agencies. The assertions have not been verified or proven and therefore are not “established fact”.

The only other country which had its Intelligence services investigate alleged Russian meddling was Germany, and their inter-agency report found no evidence of such activity:

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/geheimdienste-bnd-keine-beweise-fuer-desinformations-kampagne-putins-1.3365839

The headline translates as: “BND: No evidence of Putin’s disinformation campaign”. That headline anticipates a common trend, whereby much-repeated assertions get publicized amid an absence of actual evidence. Let’s go through Bob’s list of “established facts”:

No evidence of Russian meddling in Catalan. A German intelligence official speculated that it was “plausible” that such had occurred based on what he described as “reliable information”. But there are no details available of what the Russians allegedly did or how they did it.

No evidence of Russian meddling in French elections. Assertions of Russian “intent” were combined with an unattributed alleged “hack” on candidate Macron to lead to such speculation. The speculation came from the involved political party, and has been amplified by think tank analysis which cannot attribute any specific malign player. The French Intelligence services have not weighed in.

No evidence of Russian meddling in Brexit. There has been no finding or assessment from a British Intelligence service. There have been allegations and suspicions expressed by UK political figures, which appears to form the whole of this assertion.

No evidence of Russian meddling in Netherlands. In 2016, the Dutch Intelligence service AIVD made mention of Russian intent to exert its influence on democratic Western societies (plural), without specifying any threat to elections. During the Dutch elections, some public figures warned of Russian  fake news and influence operations, without identifying any specific activity.

No evidence of Russian meddling in Italian elections. Newspaper reports claim Russian money may have financed a right-wing candidate, but there is no evidence that such ever happened. No official Italian Intelligence finding or investigation has been undertaken.

No evidence of Russian meddling in Canada. Again, politicians, including a cabinet member with a Ukraine Nationalist background, have made vague and unspecified assertions of potential future operations.

Ukraine. Of course, the largest meddling operation in that country was the foreign-sponsored Maidan coup in February 2014, which has spawned years of social and economic instability. The largest and most influential  foreign sponsor, the United States, crucially recognized the illicit coup formation as a “legitimate” government, thus scuttling an advanced international mediation effort.

The United States budgets billions of dollars every year to spread "influence" in other countries - that is an established fact. And yet, faced with a statistically insignificant Facebook ad campaign allegedly schemed by a foreign adversary to "sow division" , the US engages in a multi-year hysterical freak-out which may itself irrevocably damage the union. Crazy times we live in.

[Douglas Caddy]

A Second Look at the Steele Dossier

 

 https://www.justsecurity.org/44697/steele-dossier-knowing/?fbclid=IwAR2LOfP5TEbJGkM_EIIxxVKkQ2WtNAotOCQv2OFnm0d5Zl0sBfDjjMzjQ3M

[Douglas Caddy]

 

[Cliff Varnell]

3 hours ago, Jeff Carter said:

The United States budgets billions of dollars every year to spread "influence" in other countries - that is an established fact. And yet, faced with a statistically insignificant Facebook ad campaign allegedly schemed by a foreign adversary to "sow division" , the US engages in a multi-year hysterical freak-out which may itself irrevocably damage the union. Crazy times we live in.

Trump's people continue to ignore the fact that Trump's behavior is the main driver of the "hysterical freak-out."

There's one guy who definitely concluded the Russians interfered in the 2016 election -- Donald Trump.  To what degree the Russians interfered is a moot point.

800 former Federal prosecutors signed on to a statement saying as a private citizen Trump would be in jail for obstruction of justice.

Trump's loyal apologists will never acknowledge Trump's behavior, nor can they acknowledge the unprecedented rigging of the 2016 election by the GOP.

 

 

[Jeff Carter]

21 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

I’m sorry - being an FBI informant is not the same as being FBI. 

the direction this article takes strikes me as very sinister propaganda. It skims around the edges but does not look seriously at the very obvious relationship between Trump and Oligarchs in Russia and elsewhere, and with shady banks like Alfa and Cyprus. We are still missing pieces, but I’m afraid Consortium News has slipped over the edge. Writing a smear without even being able to look at the whole report or the supporting documents - what kind of journalism is that? 

There is a serious move towards totalitarianism in the US and elsewhere. This is a Constitutional Crisis. 

Hi Paul - Lazare merely says that Sater was an FBI informant - which is not a smear. His source is a March 2017 article from the Los Angeles Times where Sater freely admits being an FBI informant for many years. Lazare does not infer Sater is currently an FBI informant, he simply wonders why that qualifier was not included in Mueller's Report. It may have be deemed irrelevant - but it is true that suspicions over a Trump Tower project in Russia were a not insignificant part of the Russiagate narrative. Such suspicions may have seemed less plausible if the key initiator of this project was understood to have an FBI informant background. 

As per Trump and the oligarchs, Craig Murray ( who has an indirect role in a part of this saga) wrote this today: "On the wider question of the corrupt Russian 1% having business dealings with the corrupt Western 1%, all I have to say is that if you believe that is limited in the USA by party political boundaries, you are a fool."  The shady activity should be looked into, but it won't because it will consume too many persons and interests.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/category/uncategorized/

 

[Paul Brancato]

3 hours ago, Douglas Caddy said:

A Second Look at the Steele Dossier

 

 https://www.justsecurity.org/44697/steele-dossier-knowing/?fbclid=IwAR2LOfP5TEbJGkM_EIIxxVKkQ2WtNAotOCQv2OFnm0d5Zl0sBfDjjMzjQ3M

Very credible article.