Brand, Porter, Trolls & other recent headlines….
I’ll jump right into a discussion on the related articles taken from the newsfeeds the past few days. The big headlines recently were Rachel Brand stepping down from her Associate Attorney General position, & some key White House aides stepping down after disclosures of them beating their wives, which also contained plenty of fallout for Trump & Chief of Staff Kelly. There is also proof of Russian trolls still meddling, which Trump is ignoring. The Mueller team is so disciplined not to leak, which is a good thing for the investigation, but leaves us mostly in the dark about what they’re finding. Chances are when Mueller finally starts revealing things or hands out more indictments, there’ll be a whole group of bombshells we learn all at once, rather than before Mueller tightened up the ship & we were getting drips, drips, drips of leaks gradually coming out. The way Trump in coordination with the echo & congressional puppets like Nunes are dragging out all sorts of crazy conspiracies lately, it could be indicative they sense something big is soon coming out of Mueller.
And if Trump can fulfill his dream of getting rid of Rosenstein to throw the Mueller probe off track, that’s the significance of the Brand resignation, since she would have been next in line to replace Rosenstein in overseeing Mueller. Although there is word Brand would have recused herself anyway through conflicts of interest regarding the Rick Gates case, but either way it seemed she wanted no part of the hot seat from having the fate of the Russian investigation in her hands. But it is concerning this Trump/Nunes/echo narrative to besmirch the DOJ & FBI is nothing more than stirring up his base in wanting to remove Rosenstein, since it’s apparent Trump has instructed his henchmen to concoct any lie possible in derailing Mueller. That would be like Trump channeling Watergate’s Saturday Night Massacre & lead us straight into a constitutional crisis. Since that does look to be Trump’s intent, we again ask that same question, what is he hiding? And just because we’re not hearing much on the scandal, I’m confident there’s plenty going on behind the scenes on Mueller’s team. So stay tuned, since when the fireworks begin it could be explosive!
Reviewing some of the related articles, in this link trump-russia-isnt-about-t
While Mueller and his team don’t leak, signs that such evidence exists are clear from news reports, which contain only a tiny portion of what the special counsel’s office possesses. The fragmentary and often disconnected nature of those reports obscures the reasonable supposition that Mueller is well on his way to detailing conspiracy, wire fraud, illegal foreign campaign contributions, or all three. During Watergate, the special prosecutor had most of the evidence that doomed Nixon at least nine months before his August 9, 1974 resignation. Mueller, too, likely has the goods already, even without “smoking gun” tapes.
The conspiracy case–the heart of Mueller’s efforts– almost certainly boils down to an old-fashioned quid pro quo. Flynn’s “quid”—the substance of his recorded conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak— was lifting the sanctions that President Obama imposed on Russia in late 2016 and the earlier sanctions related to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. The “quo” was collusion (“conspiracy” in legal terms) with Russians to harm Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which Flynn effectively admitted was “material” to his lies after the election. Anyone associated with this deal is in deep legal trouble.
“The key question,” the jury instruction concludes, “is whether the defendant joined the conspiracy with an awareness of at least some of the basic aims and purposes of the unlawful agreement.” Don Jr.’s excitement over receiving Russian dirt on Clinton, Jared Kushner’s interactions with Cambridge Analytica and thus with Wikileaks, and Trump’s knowledge of these or other ties to Russians and his use of that knowledge in the campaign, all suggest such “awareness.”
Even without knowing any of what Mueller has learned from the many witnesses he has secretly brought before the grand jury, this timeline—and the jury instructions that would accompany it at trial— already offer a strong roadmap for prosecutors. The conspiracy charges that arise from it will likely send some of Trump’s friends and relatives to jail. And they won’t look so good for the president, either, if presented next year at his impeachment trial in the Senate.
From there we see the article from Woodward & Bernstein inside woodward-and-bernstein-
We’re here again. A powerful and determined President is squaring off against an independent investigator operating inside the Justice Department. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s mission is a comprehensive look at Russian meddling in the 2016 election — and any other crimes he uncovers in the process. President Donald Trump insists it’s all a “witch hunt” and an unfair examination of his family’s personal finances. He constantly complains about the investigation in private and reportedly asked his White House counsel to have Mueller fired. No wonder many people are making comparisons to the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when President Richard Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned. We covered that eerily similar confrontation for The Washington Post 45 years ago. Nixon didn’t know it at the time, but the Saturday Night Massacre would become a pivot point in his presidency — crucial to the charge that he’d obstructed justice. For him, the consequences were terminal. A retelling of the episode, adapted from “The Final Days,” as we called our book on the president’s last year, can illuminate the stakes.
Providing a perspective on this unfolding scandal & White House chaos come from the link conniving-lying-conspirat
But we know this much: Whether they bumbled and stumbled or colluded and conspired, they began lying about their connections to Russians and covering them up the minute Russia was mentioned. Sessions lied to the Senate about his meeting with Russians. Trump lied loudly and repeatedly, saying there had been no meetings with Russians by his campaign. When contacts between his campaign and Russians came out, he lied that they hadn’t been about the campaign. When the Trump Tower meeting with Russians was exposed, Trump conspired on Air Force One to produce a statement claiming the meeting was about “adoptions.” When that story fell apart, Trump began saying that nothing they did amounted to “collusion.” When it began looking more and more like some kind of collusion had gone on, Trump began claiming that none of what he had said or done amounted to “obstruction.” He tried to get James Comey to back off Flynn, and when he wouldn’t, he fired Comey. Dozens have either left their jobs in the White House or been fired. He’s threatening another round of firings in the White House, FBI and Department of Justice.
So the big question is this: If Trump and his people didn’t conspire with the Russians to steal the election, why have they risked so much with all of their lies and distractions and cover-ups and attempts to derail, if not actually obstruct, the investigation? I can see only two answers to that question. The first is: They actually did conspire to steal the election, so they know that they are guilty. The second is: Trump’s ego. If his people simply bumbled their way into meetings and other contacts with Russians, Trump himself took advantage of the “scandal” of the stolen DNC documents, so the Russians ended up helping him one way or another. His ego won’t let him live with the idea that he didn’t win the election by virtue of his own genius and the adoration of his millions of supporters. Either way, he’s in deep trouble. He’s facing the prospect of being interrogated by Mueller’s investigators. Two of his senior campaign officials have been indicted on multiple felonies. Two of his campaign advisers, one of whom ended up as his National Security Adviser, have pled guilty to lying to the FBI and are cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. All of the lies Trump and his people have told about Russians are now looking like a conspiracy to obstruct justice that puts numerous former campaign and White House officials in legal jeopardy and Trump himself increasingly vulnerable to indictment if not impeachment. Winning is such a bitch. Sad.
The article russia-is-our-adversar
Instead of debating whether or not Russia attempted to influence the 2016 elections—in ways that ranged from encouraging incorrect voting methods to promoting fake rallies to sharing false election stories—Americans should be debating how to counter this activity. The 2018 midterm elections are fast approaching, and the threat remains. Unfortunately, over the last year, the United States has demonstrated a lack of resilience to this infection. The current highly charged political environment is making it easier for the Russians to achieve their goal. The hyperbolic debate over the release of the FISA memos by the House Intelligence Committee further helps the Russians achieve their aim. Most recently, Russian social-media efforts used computational propaganda to influence public perceptions of this issue, and we found ourselves once again divided among party lines. When the public loses trust in the press, the Russians are winning. When the press is hyper-critical of Congress for executing oversight and providing transparency on the actions taken by the leaders of our law-enforcement agencies, the Russians are winning. When Congress and the general public disagree simply along party lines, the Russians are winning.
When there is friction between Congress and the executive branch resulting in the further erosion of trust in our democratic institutions, the Russians are winning. The cycle will not stop, and Russian influence operations will continue, unless we take immediate action.When we lose trust in our democratic institutions, we are left unable to leverage our most important power—the power of inspiration. Lincoln described the U.S. as “the last best hope of earth,” Kennedy called on Americans to be the “watchmen to the walls of world freedom,” and Reagan likened his country to a “shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.” They understood the power of a nation that believed in itself. If we choose to live in a society where mutual understanding is no longer a virtue, our enemies will continue to exploit the divide. While our armed services, intelligence community, and law-enforcement agencies continue to hold the line against our adversaries, and our civilian leaders work on a counter-covert-information strategy on a new plane of battle, every citizen must play a role, too. Americans must stop contributing to a corrosive political environment and reestablish a climate of bipartisanship. There is no better way to resist division than to be transparent, trust each other, and work together. The future of our democratic system is at stake.
With the other links below, in the first groups as always we see the Russian updates, such as the attempt to smear Christopher Steele of dossier fame among others, followed by links to international threats. There’s many articles on the Porter story, such as president-who-loves-making-fal
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