New Updates on Mueller Probe…
Breaking News….Mueller indicts 13 Russians, click on links in the related articles below. I’ll review & give you my thoughts in the next message Tuesday.
The one hard & fast rule-of-thumb which we can use to look through an accurate lens of what’s really going on, is that Trump corrupts all those around him. That corruption seems to have infested much of the GOP. We really need to drain that corrupt swamp. So feast on the related articles below, which always start off with the latest Russian news. Trump & his accomplices have been lying, deflecting, diverting & denying their involvement with the Russians for over a year, which still goes on today as they give Russia a green light to continue flooding our society with false & destructive information. Team-Trump is hiding something. When Mueller wants to tell us what that something is, expect the country to be rocked & shocked. So let’s jump right into this week’s newsfeeds. Mueller’s team are very credentialed & very professional, so they just don’t leak. That’s why most of the evidence we’re not aware of….yet. But the most interesting news this week on the scandal came from reports Bannon spent a lot of time with Mueller, & Rick Gates looks to be flipping against Trump & Manafort, with Bannon & Gates both being ex-insiders & pose a real threat to Trump. That Bannon is dodging questions from the House Intel Committee doesn’t even matter much, since Mueller has the team who’ll hit pay dirt. Plus Schiff suggests overall the evidence is far stronger than we know, revealed in trump-russia-investigation-
Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said Wednesday that the panel had seen an “abundance” of evidence of collusion with Russia and obstruction by Donald Trump’s campaign and administration that is not yet public.
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Schiff said a lot of information was already in the public domain that pointed to extensive contacts between the Trump campaign team and the Kremlin, and later efforts by the Trump entourage to cover up those contacts. But Schiff said there was much more to come out.
He said: “There is certainly an abundance of non-public information that we’ve gathered in the investigation. And I think some of that non-public evidence is evidence on the issue of collusion and some … on the issue of obstruction.”
Trump has repeatedly asserted that there has been no collusion and no obstruction involving him or his team during the 2016 presidential election or since he took the White House.
Schiff, from California, added on Wednesday that the intelligence committee had also seen evidence pointing towards money laundering involving Trump’s circle, but had been hindered by the partisan deadlock that has paralysed its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
He said: “It is a tried and true maxim. As a former prosecutor, you follow the money. We have not been able to adequately follow the money. And I think the allegations on money laundering are credible enough that we ought to, in the exercise of due diligence, see if this was one of the other vectors of the Russian active measures campaign.”
The link no-one-wants-to-be-in-rod
After Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe because he failed to disclose contacts with the Russian ambassador, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein took over. But Republicans and President Donald Trump’s administration have grown increasingly frustrated with the investigation and have attempted to derail it, specifically in one instance with a memo authored by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.
Rosenstein’s future at the department has been murky, and it’s not clear if he would be fired by a president furious with an investigation that has heavily weighed on his presidency. Brand felt that there was a good chance she would soon be in the same position and could become the prime subject of an unwanted spotlight of criticism from all sides.
Brand’s reasons behind leaving the department highlight just how toxic the political climate has become surrounding the Russia investigation. Last week, when Trump was asked if he still had confidence in Rosenstein, he cryptically said, “You figure that one out.”
Brand has had a lengthy legal career and worked under both former President George W. Bush and former President Barack Obama. But the move also highlights the peculiar situation the president has put Republicans in, especially Republican careerists like Brand. For example, Rosenstein is a Republican, and so is FBI Director Chris Wray and even Mueller.
Here’s a related excerpt from the article justice-department-tur
Under normal circumstances, leaving the No. 3 Justice Department job to take the top legal job at Walmart wouldn’t warrant much scrutiny. But these are not normal circumstances.
Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand had only been at Justice nine months when she announced her resignation Friday. Her departure should alarm those who worry that President Trump will move to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That is because if Trump decides to launch a modern-day Saturday Night Massacre, she would have provided a measure of job security for Mueller. With Attorney General Jeff Sessions sidelined after recusing himself from Mueller’s Russia investigation, Mueller’s supervisor is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. He has indicated that if Trump were to ask him to terminate Mueller absent good cause, he would refuse. That would probably trigger Rosenstein’s removal from office — and Brand would have been in line to take his place.
Brand also would have taken over supervision if the president, without demanding that Mueller be axed, simply followed through on his hints that he will dismiss Rosenstein. The deputy attorney general is the target of a sustained smear campaign by the right-wing media, Republican House members and the president himself. His job is in perpetual danger. Brand’s exit raises the question of whether she was pushed aside to make way for another person more willing to take a hatchet to the Mueller investigation. According to NBC News, she saw the “slow-motion Saturday Night Massacre” coming and was searching for a way to escape the line of fire. The Walmart job is a rare and well-timed professional evacuation route.
Whatever the explanation, the caliber of Brand’s replacement will signal how worried we should be. If the president nominates a crony, that will be a sign of trouble. Brand’s precipitous departure has an ominous cast to it. Her exit is evidence of a dysfunctional Justice Department where people are fleeing what used to be considered dream jobs. One of the things we’ve learned in the last year is how much our democracy relies on personal integrity — at least as much as on written laws and rules. The people Brand leaves behind, including Francisco and Engel, would be wise to prepare for the toughest tests they have ever faced.
Inside the link christopher-steele-is-a-hero-a
Long before the U.S. intelligence community arrived at its conclusion that the Russians were trying to influence the presidential election, Steele had already sussed out the basic ingredients of the campaign. In June 2016, he already knew about ties between the Kremlin and Trump aides (specifically Carter Page and Paul Manafort), and he knew that Russian hackers had stolen documents from the Democratic National Committee that they planned to use against Hillary Clinton. Former CIA agent John Sipher has noted that several of Steele’s early assertions “turned out to be stunningly accurate.” Last Friday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) rebuked her Republican colleagues for recommending the criminal probe of Steele. She accused them of trying to undermine the FBI and the investigation being conducted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and of attacking Steele as a way of “deflecting attention from collusion and obstruction of justice investigations.” And then she added, almost as an afterthought: “Not a single revelation in the Steele dossier has been refuted.” Ouch!
Republicans keep trying to squeeze Steele into a role they think will neutralize him: the grubby Washington political operative, the kale-eating liberal hypocrite. Fox News, citing the thoroughly discredited Nunes memo, called Steele “more blabbermouth than Bond,” and “the spy who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.” But they struggle to make the characterization stick — probably because their version of reality is so at odds with everything we know about Steele’s life and career. We know that he spent two decades as an officer in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, sometimes known as “MI6”), where he enjoyed the highest esteem from his own bosses as well as his counterparts in the U.S. intelligence community. We know that he spent long stints in Russia, where he built up his knowledge of the country and language and cultivated a wide-ranging network of contacts. At one point he ran the SIS Russia Desk.
We also know that Steele investigated the case of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian defector who was assassinated — allegedly by the Kremlin — with a deadly radioactive poison in London in 2006. Steele knows only too well what happens to people who get in Putin’s way. Yet even this awareness didn’t divert him from his path as he began to expose the Trump-Russia nexus. There was a reason why he and his family went into hiding when his name was first made public last year. The risks are real. Some Moscow-watchers have followed the grim fates of a number of senior Russian officials who were likely involved in Operation Donald Trump. In early 2017, Oleg Erovinkin, an aide to Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin (arguably the second-most powerful man in Russia), mysteriously died in the back of his car. (Steele’s reporting offers considerable detail about Page’s links with Rosneft, Russia’s energy giant.) After Steele took his reporting to the FBI, two key officials in the cyber department of the FSB (Russia’s security service, and a successor of the KGB), as well as another cybersecurity expert, were arrested and spirited away. They haven’t been heard from since.
This, too, suggests just how high the stakes are — so much higher than the world of Washington’s petty partisan crusades. This is the world of Kremlin intrigue, where mysterious deaths are a common tool of statecraft. This is the world that Christopher Steele had to plumb, at considerable personal risk to himself, to chart Trump’s illicit entanglements. That the Republicans are so determined to destroy Steele’s reputation certainly isn’t making life easier for him. Happily, he doesn’t have to do much to prevail against them. He merely has to endure. The truth will find a way. The members of Trump’s party who are smart enough to understand this must be terrified.
Want more evidence of obstruction? It’s crystal clear in this excerpt from trump-asked-mcgahn-to-per
President Donald Trump asked the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, to call the Department of Justice last year and ask a senior official to persuade then-FBI director James Comey to publicly clear the president of wrongdoing in the Russia probe, The Washington Post reported. McGahn subsequently called then-Deputy Acting Attorney General Dana Boente last April and asked him to convince Comey to exonerate Trump, but the request fell on deaf ears, according to The Post. Boente is now the FBI general counsel. In addition to asking McGahn to contact the Justice Department about convincing Comey to exonerate him, Trump also personally appealed to Comey to do the same, and to let go of the bureau’s investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, on multiple occasions in early 2017.
The revelation of Trump’s request to McGahn comes as special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s election interference gets ever closer to ensnaring the White House. In particular, Mueller is examining whether Trump sought to obstruct justice when he fired Comey last May, and Wednesday’s report will likely contribute another piece of evidence to the special counsel’s case against the president. The White House initially said Comey was fired because of the way he handled the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business. Trump later said on national television, however, that “this Russia thing” was a factor in his decision. He also reportedly told two senior Russian government officials that firing “nut job” Comey had taken “great pressure” off of him. Trump invited additional scrutiny in December, when he tweeted that he had to fire Flynn last February because Flynn had “lied to the FBI” — a federal crime that Flynn pleaded guilty to one day before Trump sent out the tweet. Experts said at the time that if Trump knew Flynn had lied to investigators when he asked Comey to drop the FBI’s investigation into Flynn the day after the national security adviser was fired, it would significantly bolster the obstruction case against him.
The article now-available-200000-r
NBC News is publishing its database of more than 200,000 tweets that Twitter has tied to “malicious activity” from Russia-linked accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. These accounts, working in concert as part of large networks, pushed hundreds of thousands of inflammatory tweets, from fictitious tales of Democrats practicing witchcraft to hardline posts from users masquerading as Black Lives Matter activists. Investigators have traced the accounts to a Kremlin-linked propaganda outfit founded in 2013 known as the Internet Research Association (IRA). The organization has been assessed by the U.S. Intelligence Community to be part of a Russian state-run effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential race. And they’re not done. “There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 US midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday.
“The Russians utilize this tool because it’s relatively cheap, it’s low risk, it offers what they perceive as plausible deniability and it’s proven to be effect at sowing division,” he told the annual hearing on worldwide threats. “We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false flag personas, sympathetic spokesmen, and other means of influence to try to build on its wide range of operations and exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States.” “Frankly, the United States is under attack,” he said. The depth of this problem is still being understood. In January, Twitter emailed nearly 700,000 users to tell them they may have engaged with the Russian accounts. Less than two weeks later, Twitter announced the number of users notified had more than doubled.
Trump is to responsible leadership as the Cleveland Browns are to winning football. So in the link were-defenseless-against-
Trump’s refusal to defend our elections — a blatant instance of disregarding his oath of office — comes in the face of multiple calls to secure our election machinery. Max Bergmann, the head the Moscow Project for the Center for American Progress, told me “our democracy was attacked in 2016, and the intelligence community just unanimously told us that the Russians plan to do it again in the 2018 elections. Yet the response from Trump and the Republican Congress is a collective shrug.” Bergmann added: “There have been no Cabinet meetings on Russian interference, no agency has been charged with leading a response, and no election security legislation. Worse, the administration amazingly turned lemonade into lemons with the new Russia sanctions legislation by not sanctioning anyone.” He concluded, “this is a deliberate policy of appeasement that is practically inviting future attacks on our democracy.”
See more on this topic in part 2. That same message comes across in this excerpt from ex-cia-analyst-trump-givi
Former CIA analyst and National Security Council spokesman Ned Price accused President Trump of giving Russia “the green light” to meddle in upcoming U.S. elections by failing to punish the country for interfering in the 2016 election. “We have heard that President Trump has personally himself done absolutely nothing to help our national security establishment and infrastructure stop the next round of Russian meddling. That should be hugely troubling to all of us,” Price said. “Both what he has done and has not done are very clear signals to Moscow — a clear signal that they have the green light to continue.”
Under a group of links on our foreign dangers, the next group reveals more of Trump’s bungling. Even Melania is now involved in her own scandal (trump-inaugural-
That is what rot does. When the person at the top lacks basic humanity and decency and suffers from a dearth of morality, the people around them either become infected with the same, or they never had the needed values to stand up to the rot to begin with. Plain and simple.
From there we see the Stormy group. Trump’s personal lawyer claimed he paid the hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels out of his own pocket. Really? Sounds like it might be spin to deny campaign funds were used in the payoff. Or were any campaign laws violated? John Edwards, Gary Hart & other political figures lost their careers/electability over similar sex scandals, but this story hardly registers on the lead headlines over the symphony of chaos coming out of this White House. For any other president if such a sordid story broke, it would be huge news & not get lost in the mayhem of what is the Trump administration, but this presidency has managed to normalize moral debauchery. It also indicates how the GOP, their base & their preferred messaging sources have double standards from a decade or two ago, where principles & ethics in their political leaders now don’t matter nearly as much to them. This article comes from trumps-lawyer-just-made-t
“I’m warning you, tread very f—ing lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f—ing disgusting. You understand me?” he once told a journalist who had asked about allegations Ivana Trump made against her ex-husband. Cohen also has acted as a liaison between Trump and well-heeled figures in the former Soviet Union, which I promise has brought him to the attention of Robert S. Mueller III. But let’s step back for a moment and marvel at the fact that The Perfect Stormy has drawn so little attention compared to what would happen if it were any other president. Remember: The president may have had an affair with a porn star who was paid $130,000 in hush money to keep it quiet, and we treat it like it’s the third- or fourth-most scandalous thing that happened this week. This affair shows exactly why. If you sign on with Trump, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself doing some pretty unsavory things.
In addition to exploring the legal ramifications, this Stormy story could stay in the news awhile longer, as we see here in Porn-star-who-alleged-Trump
Stormy Daniels, the porn star whom Donald Trump’s attorney acknowledges paying $130,000 just before Election Day, believes she is now free to discuss an alleged sexual encounter with the man who is now president, her manager told The Associated Press Wednesday. At the same time, developments in the bizarre case are fueling questions about whether such a payment could violate federal campaign finance laws. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, believes that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, invalidated a non-disclosure agreement after two news stories were published Tuesday: one in which Cohen told The New York Times he made the six-figure payment with his personal funds, and another in the Daily Beast, which reported that Cohen was shopping a book proposal that would touch on Daniels’ story, said the manager, Gina Rodriguez. “Everything is off now, and Stormy is going to tell her story,” Rodriguez said.
Another story from the-trump-accuser-who-ref
As President Trump questions whether men accused of sexual misconduct are being denied “due process,” a restaurant owner here is awaiting word on whether her own legal claim against Trump will be allowed to move forward. Summer Zervos filed a defamation lawsuit a year ago in which she claims that Trump groped and sexually assaulted her. He called Zervos and other female accusers “liars.” Trump’s lawyers have fought to keep the case from going to trial, dismissing it as “totally meritless” and arguing that a state court has no jurisdiction over a sitting president. A New York judge is expected to rule any day on whether it should proceed. Zervos, a former contestant on Trump’s reality TV show “The Apprentice,” is the only one of about a dozen women who accused Trump of sexual misconduct shortly before the 2016 presidential election to have brought legal action. Her complaint details phone calls and meetings that could be used to verify — or refute — her allegations, and her attorneys could call other accusers to the stand to describe Trump’s behavior.
The last group of articles, I’m rooting for a Dem wave in November, not that I’m a big fan, but we must obliterate the toxic/deceptive swamp fever that has taken over the GOP mindset if we ever hope to fix the party. That’s where Mueller comes in. Draining the swamp will require cleaning house of Trump & all his men, including several of his sycophants in Congress, even if we need to endure Dem rule for awhile. Recent trends suggest voters are leaving the GOP in favor of becoming independents (fewer-republicans-more-indepe
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