The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Matt Allison]

Russiagate was not a "hoax"; all anyone has to do to understand that is to read the Mueller Report.

[Benjamin Cole]

2 hours ago, Matt Allison said:

Russiagate was not a "hoax"; all anyone has to do to understand that is to read the Mueller Report.

Russiagate was worse than a hoax.  

We have to ask how and why government police and judicial authorities became an arm of the Democratic Party (and vice-versa) and why M$M amplified and cheer-led the whole charade. 

Yes, they all loathed Trump.  I get that. In my personal opinion, Trump is not qualified to be President---too mercurial, too self-indulgent, too bombastic. 

But that is not why the Deep State went after him---which they clearly did, even before he became President.

If the Deep State torpedoes Trump, they will also sink any outsider who tries to become President.

In other words, you are stuck with Hillary Clinton-Liz Cheney apparatchiks  forever.  And they do not work for you, or the employee class in America. 

[Benjamin Cole]

3 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

I think this is worth a deeper discussion. Clearly informers are not provocateurs. But the line gets crossed, as this article suggests, and we should all be concerned with provocateurs. DEA informants who commit crimes - old news, not usually good news. Informers embedded into political groups who then become active promoters of illegal acts by those groups - a large and important subject. The most extreme examples I can think of lie at the heart of the Strategy of Tension. Maybe the fascist infiltrators into the Red Brigades were working for private not government groups, but that’s a thin line. In a few of the most dramatic cases such as Fontana or Bologna the crimes themselves were committed by infiltrators who, with the preplanned complicity of major media and elected government, blamed the bombings on the Red Brigades, whose dedicated left wing membership had nothing to do with those acts or the planning thereof. In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot FBI informants infiltrated a Moslem group tied to the Blind Sheik and then led them down a terrorist path which they participated in. Or go way back, closely examine the life of Paul, a Roman agent who infiltrated the activists around Rabbi Jesus and then after Jesus’s Roman death proceeded to ‘convert’ on the road to Damascus and proceed to divide the Jewish followers of Jesus. That’s a long tale. 
Back to recent events - the woman who grabbed the microphone out of Bernie Sanders hand at a Black Lives Matter event in Seattle during the 2016 election campaign for president, an act that confused and outraged me enough to cause me to look more closely, turned out to be the daughter of Tea Party activists. Was she an informant inside Black Lives Matter? I can tell you that this moment in time made me doubt that organization, even though I am firmly on their side. A few years later black clad Antifa rioters created mayhem and destroyed property in Berkeley while people were protesting UCB’s decision to allow a racist far right speaker a podium on campus. Result - people think anti racist protestors are violent anarchists. Over the past several years many such incidents occurred. Long before right wingers started calling Antifa a government infiltration, I came to the conclusion that they were in part a creation of those seeking to discredit progressives.  I have yet to see a trial exposing the work of infiltrators into any left wing protest groups. Funny thing - well meaning organizers on the left seem unprepared and/or unwilling to look more closely at those people who commit violence in their names, and cops and courts fail to hold them accountable. 
Flash forward to recent events that Ben posts about, articles showing that courts are now looking at infiltrations of right wing groups by government agencies. It looks likely to me that some of this is true, a twist on the age old infiltrations of the left wing. Hoover himself forbade his agents to join the John Birch Society, but not so the CPA Communists. I have family knowledge of this, so I have no doubts about Hoover’s agenda. 
So the question I will pose here is where the heck is the so-called Liberal media when acts are committed by infiltrators into progressive or left wing movements? Why is it that the Right wing media can take up the cause when their protest movements are infiltrated?
How much proof do we need that mainstream media lies as a matter of course? Aren’t we all here on this forum partly because we know in our bones this is true? Look at the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (Ben - share how you felt about that. Did you see this as a looming disaster, something which the intervening years has shown us to be true, regardless of our positions at the time)? Did our media lie? Surely, and massive global protests did not stop Bush and his cronies. In fact the MSM made fun of the protests by focusing their cameras on the Bay Area kooks protesting literally everything in costume. Protest movements on the left are an endangered species thanks to their ineffectiveness. Recent protesters  in London by climate activists are labeled tools of Big Oil, who are seeking to control the environmental movement by funding these radicals. Greta Thunberg is a tool of her parents. 
Ben - if you want or need respect for your anti-government POV, address the history of infiltration and other forms of marginalization of progressive movements. 
 

Paul--

Thank you for your open-minded assessments. 

Yes, the government has long infiltrated and undermined political groups across the spectrum. Government agents repeatedly have acted as provocateurs. 

If the establishment senses even a hint of a threat to their grip on power....expect preemptive strikes.

It is not about ideology. It is about control. Ideologues are useful idiots.

Today's US globalists are deep into bed with CCP. 

What ideology is that? 

 

[Benjamin Cole]

9 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Ben,

    IMO, you're overgeneralizing here by positing some equivalence between genuine Deep State black ops and Trump's Russiagate and 1/6 scandals.  To date, all of the evidence in Russiagate and 1/6 points to Donald Trump, notwithstanding the M$M propaganda minimizing Trump's documented ties to Russia and the 1/6 attack on Congress.

    Also, you never answered my old question about how the 1/6 attack on Congress could have conceivably benefited anyone but Trump, himself.  Cui bono?

 

W.-

I have answered the "cui bono?" question a few times, though perhaps not to your satisfaction. 

1. The 1/6 occupation of the Capitol was likely just a scrum. 

2. If the 1/6 was instigated, who benefitted? The 1/6 event was a huge black eye for the entire populist-alt-right movement, who were uniformly portrayed as anti-democratic racist savages in the M$M (no doubt, some are).

3. What elements in our nation have the repeatedly proven skill set and resources to act as infiltrators, instigators and provocateurs? 

4. Who could have arranged for entirely thin police protection of the Capitol (6,000 police in the Capitol and Metro squads, but where were they?), and who ordered the police to stand down? Why were 500 police from neighboring jurisdictions able to move the crowd onto the Capitol lawn and arrest them? (The WaPo account).

4. Cui bono? If cui bono is the standard, who benefitted from the Russiagate-hoax witch-hunt? 

To quote myself, shed the red-blue kool-aids, the pretend Donk-'Phant schisms, the left-right blinders, the culture war divisions. 

I do not adhere to either of the major parties, or the M$M, and I am not a believer in Trump. 

When Hillary Clinton and Liz Cheney embrace...find another narrative to believe. 

 

 

 

[W. Niederhut]

It Wasn’t a Hoax

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/trump-russia-senate-intelligence-report/620815/

November 25, 2021

Excerpt

The factual record on Trump-Russia has been set forth most authoritatively by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina. I’ll reduce the complex details to a very few agreed upon by virtually everybody outside the core Trump-propaganda group.

1. Dating back to at least 2006, Trump and his companies did tens of millions of dollars of business with Russian individuals and other buyers whose profiles raised the possibility of money laundering. More than one-fifth of all the condominiums sold by Trump over his career were purchased in all-cash transactions by shell companies, a 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found.
2. In 2013, Trump’s pursuit of Russian business intensified. That year, he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Around that time, Trump opened discussions on the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow, from which he hoped to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars, if the project advanced to completion,” in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
3. Trump continued to pursue the Tower deal for a year after he declared himself a candidate for president. “By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found. Trump’s representatives directly lobbied aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in January 2016. Yet repeatedly during the 2016 campaign, Trump falsely stated that he had no business with Russia—perhaps most notably in his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, in October 2016.
4. Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to “harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Again, that’s from the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
5. The Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos “likely learned about the Russian active measures campaign as early as April 2016,” the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote. In May 2016, Papadopoulos indiscreetly talked with Alexander Downer, then the Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, about Russia’s plot to intervene in the U.S. election to hurt Clinton and help Trump. Downer described the conversation in a report to his government. By long-standing agreement, Australia shares intelligence with the U.S. government. It was Papadopoulos’s blurt to Downer that set in motion the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, a revelation authoritatively reported more than three years ago.
6. In June 2016, the Trump campaign received a request for a meeting from a Russian lawyer offering harmful information on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump advisers accepted the meeting. The Trump team did not obtain the dirt they’d hoped for. But the very fact of the meeting confirmed to the Russian side the Trump campaign’s eagerness to accept Russian assistance. Shortly after, Trump delivered his “Russia, if you’re listening” invitation at his last press conference of the campaign.
7. WikiLeaks released two big caches of hacked Democratic emails in July and October 2016. In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”
8. Through its ally Roger Stone, the Trump campaign team assiduously tried to communicate with WikiLeaks. Before the second WikiLeaks release, “Trump and the Campaign believed that Stone had inside information and expressed satisfaction that Stone’s information suggested more releases would be forthcoming,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In late summer and early fall 2016, Stone repeatedly predicted that WikiLeaks would publish an “October surprise” that would harm the Clinton campaign.
9. At the same time as it welcomed Russian help, the Trump campaign denied and covered up Russian involvement: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the Intelligence Committee found.
10. In March 2016, the Trump campaign accepted the unpaid services of Paul Manafort, deeply beholden to deeply shady Russian business and political figures. “On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with a man the Intelligence Committee identified as a Russian intelligence officer. “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services … represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee found. Through 2016, the Russian state launched a massive Facebook disinformation program that aligned with the Trump campaign strategy.
11. At crucial moments in the 2016 election, Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals: scoffing at NATO support for Estonia, denigrating allies such as Germany, and endorsing Britain’s exit from the European Union.
12. Throughout the 2016 election and after, people close to Trump got themselves into serious legal and political trouble by lying to the public, to Congress, and even to the FBI about their Russian connections.

 

All of these are facts that would be agreed upon even by the latter-day “Russia hoax” revisionists and, for that matter, anybody this side of Breitbart or One America News Network.

Edited November 29, 2021 by W. Niederhut

[Jeff Carter]

2 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

It Wasn’t a Hoax

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/trump-russia-senate-intelligence-report/620815/

November 25, 2021

Excerpt

The factual record on Trump-Russia has been set forth most authoritatively by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina. I’ll reduce the complex details to a very few agreed upon by virtually everybody outside the core Trump-propaganda group.

1. Dating back to at least 2006, Trump and his companies did tens of millions of dollars of business with Russian individuals and other buyers whose profiles raised the possibility of money laundering. More than one-fifth of all the condominiums sold by Trump over his career were purchased in all-cash transactions by shell companies, a 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found.
2. In 2013, Trump’s pursuit of Russian business intensified. That year, he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Around that time, Trump opened discussions on the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow, from which he hoped to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars, if the project advanced to completion,” in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
3. Trump continued to pursue the Tower deal for a year after he declared himself a candidate for president. “By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found. Trump’s representatives directly lobbied aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in January 2016. Yet repeatedly during the 2016 campaign, Trump falsely stated that he had no business with Russia—perhaps most notably in his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, in October 2016.
4. Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to “harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Again, that’s from the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
5. The Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos “likely learned about the Russian active measures campaign as early as April 2016,” the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote. In May 2016, Papadopoulos indiscreetly talked with Alexander Downer, then the Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, about Russia’s plot to intervene in the U.S. election to hurt Clinton and help Trump. Downer described the conversation in a report to his government. By long-standing agreement, Australia shares intelligence with the U.S. government. It was Papadopoulos’s blurt to Downer that set in motion the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, a revelation authoritatively reported more than three years ago.
6. In June 2016, the Trump campaign received a request for a meeting from a Russian lawyer offering harmful information on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump advisers accepted the meeting. The Trump team did not obtain the dirt they’d hoped for. But the very fact of the meeting confirmed to the Russian side the Trump campaign’s eagerness to accept Russian assistance. Shortly after, Trump delivered his “Russia, if you’re listening” invitation at his last press conference of the campaign.
7. WikiLeaks released two big caches of hacked Democratic emails in July and October 2016. In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”
8. Through its ally Roger Stone, the Trump campaign team assiduously tried to communicate with WikiLeaks. Before the second WikiLeaks release, “Trump and the Campaign believed that Stone had inside information and expressed satisfaction that Stone’s information suggested more releases would be forthcoming,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In late summer and early fall 2016, Stone repeatedly predicted that WikiLeaks would publish an “October surprise” that would harm the Clinton campaign.
9. At the same time as it welcomed Russian help, the Trump campaign denied and covered up Russian involvement: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the Intelligence Committee found.
10. In March 2016, the Trump campaign accepted the unpaid services of Paul Manafort, deeply beholden to deeply shady Russian business and political figures. “On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with a man the Intelligence Committee identified as a Russian intelligence officer. “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services … represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee found. Through 2016, the Russian state launched a massive Facebook disinformation program that aligned with the Trump campaign strategy.
11. At crucial moments in the 2016 election, Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals: scoffing at NATO support for Estonia, denigrating allies such as Germany, and endorsing Britain’s exit from the European Union.
12. Throughout the 2016 election and after, people close to Trump got themselves into serious legal and political trouble by lying to the public, to Congress, and even to the FBI about their Russian connections.

 

All of these are facts that would be agreed upon even by the latter-day “Russia hoax” revisionists and, for that matter, anybody this side of Breitbart or One America News Network.

In his Atlantic piece, David Frum argues the practice of journalism is essentially partisan, as it invariably serves the interest of one or another party. By this formula, Frum repudiates professional journalism’s codes of ethics and practice, which include the principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability.  (See https://guides.lib.uw.edu/research/commstudies/ethics)   It’s like arguing that seeking the truth of the JFKA should be discouraged because of the potential reputational harm to various institutions.

So why should anyone consider Frum’s version of the “factual record” as anything but a cherry-picked partisan prosecutor’s brief? - which it in fact is.  The Senate Intelligence Committee Report is hardly definitive, and the other linked Atlantic writer concedes as much (“Russiagate was not a Hoax” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/russiagate-wasnt-a-hoax/615373/). While acknowledging the report’s allegations are “incendiary”, the writer also manages to allow that it “doesn’t definitely settle the question”, doesn’t provide a “comprehensive understanding”, only “fills in the gaps somewhat”, is “maddeningly elliptical”, and finally “the truth remains elusive.”

Here’s a take on the poor performance of the MSM by an actual journalist:

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/11/24/five_trump-russia_collusion_corrections_we_need_from_the_media_now_-_just_for_starters_804205.html

[Benjamin Cole]

2 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

It Wasn’t a Hoax

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/trump-russia-senate-intelligence-report/620815/

November 25, 2021

Excerpt

The factual record on Trump-Russia has been set forth most authoritatively by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina. I’ll reduce the complex details to a very few agreed upon by virtually everybody outside the core Trump-propaganda group.

1. Dating back to at least 2006, Trump and his companies did tens of millions of dollars of business with Russian individuals and other buyers whose profiles raised the possibility of money laundering. More than one-fifth of all the condominiums sold by Trump over his career were purchased in all-cash transactions by shell companies, a 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found.
2. In 2013, Trump’s pursuit of Russian business intensified. That year, he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Around that time, Trump opened discussions on the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow, from which he hoped to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars, if the project advanced to completion,” in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
3. Trump continued to pursue the Tower deal for a year after he declared himself a candidate for president. “By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found. Trump’s representatives directly lobbied aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in January 2016. Yet repeatedly during the 2016 campaign, Trump falsely stated that he had no business with Russia—perhaps most notably in his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, in October 2016.
4. Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to “harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Again, that’s from the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
5. The Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos “likely learned about the Russian active measures campaign as early as April 2016,” the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote. In May 2016, Papadopoulos indiscreetly talked with Alexander Downer, then the Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, about Russia’s plot to intervene in the U.S. election to hurt Clinton and help Trump. Downer described the conversation in a report to his government. By long-standing agreement, Australia shares intelligence with the U.S. government. It was Papadopoulos’s blurt to Downer that set in motion the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, a revelation authoritatively reported more than three years ago.
6. In June 2016, the Trump campaign received a request for a meeting from a Russian lawyer offering harmful information on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump advisers accepted the meeting. The Trump team did not obtain the dirt they’d hoped for. But the very fact of the meeting confirmed to the Russian side the Trump campaign’s eagerness to accept Russian assistance. Shortly after, Trump delivered his “Russia, if you’re listening” invitation at his last press conference of the campaign.
7. WikiLeaks released two big caches of hacked Democratic emails in July and October 2016. In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”
8. Through its ally Roger Stone, the Trump campaign team assiduously tried to communicate with WikiLeaks. Before the second WikiLeaks release, “Trump and the Campaign believed that Stone had inside information and expressed satisfaction that Stone’s information suggested more releases would be forthcoming,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In late summer and early fall 2016, Stone repeatedly predicted that WikiLeaks would publish an “October surprise” that would harm the Clinton campaign.
9. At the same time as it welcomed Russian help, the Trump campaign denied and covered up Russian involvement: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the Intelligence Committee found.
10. In March 2016, the Trump campaign accepted the unpaid services of Paul Manafort, deeply beholden to deeply shady Russian business and political figures. “On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with a man the Intelligence Committee identified as a Russian intelligence officer. “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services … represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee found. Through 2016, the Russian state launched a massive Facebook disinformation program that aligned with the Trump campaign strategy.
11. At crucial moments in the 2016 election, Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals: scoffing at NATO support for Estonia, denigrating allies such as Germany, and endorsing Britain’s exit from the European Union.
12. Throughout the 2016 election and after, people close to Trump got themselves into serious legal and political trouble by lying to the public, to Congress, and even to the FBI about their Russian connections.

 

All of these are facts that would be agreed upon even by the latter-day “Russia hoax” revisionists and, for that matter, anybody this side of Breitbart or One America News Network.

W-

Even if this entire above account was true...the Deep State would have about 10,000 times the resources and influence over the course of US policy as the Trumpers do. 

JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton and Bush Jr., Obama, Trump...they come and go, and the Deep State remains, today more powerful than ever. 

Trump was interesting in that he was an outsider. That does not him a saint or a  criminal. It does mean he lacked allies in the right places. Trump will join the past presidents soon enough. 

From Hillary Clinton to Liz Cheney, that is the red-blue, which is that everyone is purple. Even Tulsi Gabbard has decided to change her tune.  

[Matt Allison]

At this point, these are just nonsensical anti-American rants lol

[W. Niederhut]

16 hours ago, Jeff Carter said:

In his Atlantic piece, David Frum argues the practice of journalism is essentially partisan, as it invariably serves the interest of one or another party. By this formula, Frum repudiates professional journalism’s codes of ethics and practice, which include the principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability.  (See https://guides.lib.uw.edu/research/commstudies/ethics)   It’s like arguing that seeking the truth of the JFKA should be discouraged because of the potential reputational harm to various institutions.

So why should anyone consider Frum’s version of the “factual record” as anything but a cherry-picked partisan prosecutor’s brief? - which it in fact is.  The Senate Intelligence Committee Report is hardly definitive, and the other linked Atlantic writer concedes as much (“Russiagate was not a Hoax” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/russiagate-wasnt-a-hoax/615373/). While acknowledging the report’s allegations are “incendiary”, the writer also manages to allow that it “doesn’t definitely settle the question”, doesn’t provide a “comprehensive understanding”, only “fills in the gaps somewhat”, is “maddeningly elliptical”, and finally “the truth remains elusive.”

Here’s a take on the poor performance of the MSM by an actual journalist:

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/11/24/five_trump-russia_collusion_corrections_we_need_from_the_media_now_-_just_for_starters_804205.html

Jeff,

     Arguing about the M$M here is a bit of a straw man.  I'm the last person around here who would trust M$M coverage of intel or military black ops.  But let's recall that the M$M actually excoriated Buzz Feed for having the audacity to publish the unverified Steele Dossier in (?) January of 2017.   The publication of the Dossier was widely denounced as a journalistic scandal.  Secondly, let's recall that Dean Baquet put the kibosh on any 2016 NYT news stories about Trump's ties to Russia, while publishing weekly front page articles-- usually based on anonymous FBI sources-- about Hillary's Emails.

     Instead of trying to simply kill the messenger here, David Frum, how about addressing the specific facts from the Senate Intelligence Report on Russiagate which Frum has outlined in his recent Atlantic article?

     I would ask Ben Cole the same question.

[Benjamin Cole]

9 hours ago, Matt Allison said:

At this point, these are just nonsensical anti-American rants lol

Matt:

Are you the face of the modern-day Donk Party?

That is, you and fellow Donks regard concerns about the national security state to be "anti-American"? 

[Benjamin Cole]

22 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

It Wasn’t a Hoax

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/trump-russia-senate-intelligence-report/620815/

November 25, 2021

Excerpt

The factual record on Trump-Russia has been set forth most authoritatively by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina. I’ll reduce the complex details to a very few agreed upon by virtually everybody outside the core Trump-propaganda group.

1. Dating back to at least 2006, Trump and his companies did tens of millions of dollars of business with Russian individuals and other buyers whose profiles raised the possibility of money laundering. More than one-fifth of all the condominiums sold by Trump over his career were purchased in all-cash transactions by shell companies, a 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found.
2. In 2013, Trump’s pursuit of Russian business intensified. That year, he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Around that time, Trump opened discussions on the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow, from which he hoped to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars, if the project advanced to completion,” in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
3. Trump continued to pursue the Tower deal for a year after he declared himself a candidate for president. “By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found. Trump’s representatives directly lobbied aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in January 2016. Yet repeatedly during the 2016 campaign, Trump falsely stated that he had no business with Russia—perhaps most notably in his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, in October 2016.
4. Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to “harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Again, that’s from the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
5. The Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos “likely learned about the Russian active measures campaign as early as April 2016,” the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote. In May 2016, Papadopoulos indiscreetly talked with Alexander Downer, then the Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, about Russia’s plot to intervene in the U.S. election to hurt Clinton and help Trump. Downer described the conversation in a report to his government. By long-standing agreement, Australia shares intelligence with the U.S. government. It was Papadopoulos’s blurt to Downer that set in motion the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, a revelation authoritatively reported more than three years ago.
6. In June 2016, the Trump campaign received a request for a meeting from a Russian lawyer offering harmful information on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump advisers accepted the meeting. The Trump team did not obtain the dirt they’d hoped for. But the very fact of the meeting confirmed to the Russian side the Trump campaign’s eagerness to accept Russian assistance. Shortly after, Trump delivered his “Russia, if you’re listening” invitation at his last press conference of the campaign.
7. WikiLeaks released two big caches of hacked Democratic emails in July and October 2016. In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”
8. Through its ally Roger Stone, the Trump campaign team assiduously tried to communicate with WikiLeaks. Before the second WikiLeaks release, “Trump and the Campaign believed that Stone had inside information and expressed satisfaction that Stone’s information suggested more releases would be forthcoming,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In late summer and early fall 2016, Stone repeatedly predicted that WikiLeaks would publish an “October surprise” that would harm the Clinton campaign.
9. At the same time as it welcomed Russian help, the Trump campaign denied and covered up Russian involvement: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the Intelligence Committee found.
10. In March 2016, the Trump campaign accepted the unpaid services of Paul Manafort, deeply beholden to deeply shady Russian business and political figures. “On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with a man the Intelligence Committee identified as a Russian intelligence officer. “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services … represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee found. Through 2016, the Russian state launched a massive Facebook disinformation program that aligned with the Trump campaign strategy.
11. At crucial moments in the 2016 election, Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals: scoffing at NATO support for Estonia, denigrating allies such as Germany, and endorsing Britain’s exit from the European Union.
12. Throughout the 2016 election and after, people close to Trump got themselves into serious legal and political trouble by lying to the public, to Congress, and even to the FBI about their Russian connections.

 

All of these are facts that would be agreed upon even by the latter-day “Russia hoax” revisionists and, for that matter, anybody this side of Breitbart or One America News Network.

W--

I don't understand.  This means what? 

1. In 2013, Trump’s pursuit of Russian business intensified. That year, he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Around that time, Trump opened discussions on the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow, from which he hoped to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars, if the project advanced to completion,” in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

 

OK, Trump staged a beauty contest in Russia. He wanted to build a tower in Russia and make money. That means he is a Russian stooge? A bit of a leap, no? Isn't this the old guilt by association and innuendo standard? 

BTW, my take is that Putin is an ugly murderous thug. 

I will tell you something I think is a lot more serious. 

Fauci was on air over the weekend touting the "wet market" origins of the C19 pandemic. Why? 

I am not a virologist. 

So, of the thousands and thousands of wet markets in China, C19 started at the one in Wuhan, next to the lab where gain-of-function research was being done on thousands of coronaviruses. I may not be a virologist, but I have some minimal detective skills.

Why is Fauci touting to wet market theory of C19?  

If you think Trump's business arrangements in Russia totally compromised him, what do you make of the Donk Party donor class and their gigantic involvement in CCP-dominated China? BlackRock, Apple, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Universal Studios, the NBA, et al? 

The irony? China is last major Communist nation on earth, and becoming more communistic by the day under Xi. 

Russia long ago became a capitalist kleptocracy, affiliated with the Orthodox Church. 

Like I said, what goes on today has little to do with ideology. Ideologues are useful idiots. 

Trump was a Moscow stooge, and C19 came from wet market. And Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. 

Those are M$M narratives. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[W. Niederhut]

37 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

W--

I don't understand.  This means what? 

1. In 2013, Trump’s pursuit of Russian business intensified. That year, he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Around that time, Trump opened discussions on the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow, from which he hoped to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars, if the project advanced to completion,” in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

 

OK, Trump staged a beauty contest in Russia. He wanted to build a tower in Russia and make money. That means he is a Russian stooge? A bit of a leap, no? Isn't this the old guilt by association and innuendo standard? 

Ben,

You conveniently left out the subsequent, damning facts that Frum listed-- from the Senate Intelligence Report on Trump's involvement with Russian officials, and Russian meddling in the 2016 election to put Trump in the White House.  (At the time, the Committee was controlled by Trump supporter, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC.))

Here they are for your careful consideration.

And, in reviewing these FACTS, let's try to stay focused on your claim that Russiagate was a hoax, shall we?

• Trump continued to pursue the Tower deal for a year after he declared himself a candidate for president. “By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found. Trump’s representatives directly lobbied aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in January 2016. Yet repeatedly during the 2016 campaign, Trump falsely stated that he had no business with Russia—perhaps most notably in his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, in October 2016.
• Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to “harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Again, that’s from the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
• The Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos “likely learned about the Russian active measures campaign as early as April 2016,” the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote. In May 2016, Papadopoulos indiscreetly talked with Alexander Downer, then the Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, about Russia’s plot to intervene in the U.S. election to hurt Clinton and help Trump. Downer described the conversation in a report to his government. By long-standing agreement, Australia shares intelligence with the U.S. government. It was Papadopoulos’s blurt to Downer that set in motion the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, a revelation authoritatively reported more than three years ago.
• In June 2016, the Trump campaign received a request for a meeting from a Russian lawyer offering harmful information on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump advisers accepted the meeting. The Trump team did not obtain the dirt they’d hoped for. But the very fact of the meeting confirmed to the Russian side the Trump campaign’s eagerness to accept Russian assistance. Shortly after, Trump delivered his “Russia, if you’re listening” invitation at his last press conference of the campaign.
• WikiLeaks released two big caches of hacked Democratic emails in July and October 2016. In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”
• Through its ally Roger Stone, the Trump campaign team assiduously tried to communicate with WikiLeaks. Before the second WikiLeaks release, “Trump and the Campaign believed that Stone had inside information and expressed satisfaction that Stone’s information suggested more releases would be forthcoming,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In late summer and early fall 2016, Stone repeatedly predicted that WikiLeaks would publish an “October surprise” that would harm the Clinton campaign.
• At the same time as it welcomed Russian help, the Trump campaign denied and covered up Russian involvement: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the Intelligence Committee found.
• In March 2016, the Trump campaign accepted the unpaid services of Paul Manafort, deeply beholden to deeply shady Russian business and political figures. “On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with a man the Intelligence Committee identified as a Russian intelligence officer. “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services … represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee found. Through 2016, the Russian state launched a massive Facebook disinformation program that aligned with the Trump campaign strategy.
• At crucial moments in the 2016 election, Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals: scoffing at NATO support for Estonia, denigrating allies such as Germany, and endorsing Britain’s exit from the European Union.
• Throughout the 2016 election and after, people close to Trump got themselves into serious legal and political trouble by lying to the public, to Congress, and even to the FBI about their Russian connections.

Edited November 30, 2021 by W. Niederhut

[Jeff Carter]

Frum , at best, has assembled a laundry list of “talking points” rather than “facts”. He explicitly bemoans that professional journalists are now carving up the basic premises of “Russiagate”, particularly as new information regarding its origins is uncovered. Looks like the final redoubt - the Alamo of the true believers - is the Senate Subcommittee Report which, as noted at the time of its release, is an extremely poor product characterized by unsupported allegations and weak speculations.

Frum’s “indisputable facts” wither on examination:

1-3. Entirely irrelevant. It was not illegal for Americans to have contact or business with citizens from the Russian Federation. The Trump Tower deal was almost entirely the initiative of Felix Sater - nothing was built, no money was exchanged.

4 - The Committee do not possess any kind of intercept revealing any kind of Putin directive authorizing any kind of operation directed at US politicians. They instead utilize backward reasoning i.e. the emails were purloined by a “GRU hack” (a contentious supposition to begin with), therefore Putin “must have” ordered it.

5 - Papadopoulos allegedly learned of a so-called “active measures campaign” from Josef Misud. Mifsud was not subject to anything but an early cursory interview which did nothing to clarify the issue, and there was no follow up. No follow up, despite the presumed importance of the contact.

6 - The offer of “harmful information” was a pretence to arrange a meeting about other matters. The Trump campaign may have desired “dirt” on their opponent, but clearly so did their opponent want dirt on them, and was much more successful in obtaining it. The Russian lawyer also dined with associates of Clinton (Fusion GPS) at the same time.

7 - Wikileaks has consistently denied receiving the emails from Russians or participating in any kind of “intelligence campaign”. No one from Wikileaks was ever interviewed by representatives of the FBI, the Senate Subcommittee, or the Mueller investigation. Again - no one from Wikileaks was ever interviewed.

8 - Roger Stone had at best extremely limited communications with Wikileaks representatives, and his “predictions” were merely the repetition of publicly available open source information.

9 - Denying something that probably did not ever happen is not exactly a “cover up”.

10 - Manafort’s longtime right-hand man Kilimnik worked over a decade for an offshoot of the NED in Moscow, and was a valued information source for the US Embassy in Kiev. Neither Mueller or the Senate Subcommittee has been able to actually explain what they think he did, not has it been revealed what exactly led to his designation of “Russian intelligence officer”. Kilimnik, as well as most persons who knew or worked with him, denies the allegation.

11 - Policies associated with the Trump campaign “supporting Putin” were based on a notion of turning the Russians towards the US and away from China, so as to better pursue a Cold War against the latter - as was clearly articulated by those involved in promoting these notions in the weeks ahead of the Republican convention.

12 - Yes, but as has been seen since, so have persons “close to Clinton”. Seems like there was a lot of lying going around on both sides of the fence.

[Benjamin Cole]

 It was Papadopoulos’s blurt to Downer that set in motion the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, a revelation authoritatively reported more than three years ago.

 

As the great Gertrude Stein once said "There is no there, there." 

This Papadopoulos-Downer conversation turns out to be less than nothing.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/11/24/five_trump-russia_collusion_corrections_we_need_from_the_media_now_-_just_for_starters_804205.html

W-

But as I said before, why are you whipping this old dead Trump horse so much? 

Surely, you are aware when it comes to clandestine, subversive resources, and control over M$M narratives, the national-security-state has 10,000 times the power of the Trump crowd? 

Russia? Some websites Moscow operated? Comments made on social media platforms by fakes?  They got simple polling results from Trump people?

This is picayune peanuts. 

Why did Hillary Clinton lose? Well, primarily the US electoral college system. That and she was an uninspiring candidate. 

 

 

 

 

[Kirk Gallaway]

Major Russia Gate  suspect Michael Flynn who at one time was a devoted q -anon, is  shown here reciting the Q-Anon oath "where we go one, we go all. .

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/07/politics/michael-flynn-qanon-video/index.html,

But now Ben's claims  of our utter helplessness before  a virtual false flag metaverse created by the NSS "Deep State" takes on a frightening new dimension  as Flynn has now called Q anon "nonsense" and says  it's a CIA disinformation campaign! How could we have been so naive!

https://www.businessinsider.com/flynn-said-he-thinks-qanon-is-disinformation-total-nonsense-2021-11

Which is right up Ben's alley. I'm sure  Ben will prove conclusively that the trail will lead directly to the masterminds, the dreaded "Three MS.kateers, Liz Cheney ,Hillary Clinton, and Amy Klobuchar!

But  if that isn't enough, now Trump ally and member of his legal team, Lin Wood claims the "Stop the Steal" as being yet another  Deep State campaign! The implications of this are stunning. It appears Ben's suspicions that the storming of the Capitol was lead by FBI provocateurs was just the namby pamby tip of the iceberg, and literally everybody who was at the Capitol on 1/6 was a "deep state" operative. Some are claiming it the greatest cinematic assemblage since the filming of "The 10 Commandments" and "Ben Hur" combined!!

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-ally-lin-wood-stop-the-steal-deep-state-campaign-2021-11