Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Part 111, some of Russian meddling, and related, material from F6 big ones. These from one
Sunday, 01/14/18, headed, Trump takes credit for safest commercial aviation year worldwide
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=137675560

Into the second quarter, this pair

Trump lashes out at “deep state” Justice Dept.

The Beat With Ari Melber
1/2/18
Trump attacks the Department of Justice and suggests jailing Clinton aide Huma Abedin amid Mueller probe. Duration: 10:50
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari-melber/watch/trump-lashes-out-at-deep-state-justice-dept-1128074307503 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvpVFnx3m4s [with comments]

*

Nixon insider: Trump legal team might be in dark
The Beat With Ari Melber
1/2/18
John Dean sends warning to Trump legal team about Michael Flynn and Trump adviser George Papadopoulos told an
Australian diplomat Russia had “dirt” on Clinton during campaign, according to the New York Times. Duration: 6:42
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari-melber/watch/nixon-insider-trump-legal-team-might-be-in-dark-1128073283926

Skip one to

The White House’s 'deep state' obsession
All In with Chris Hayes
1/2/18
Donald Trump once again attacked his own Justice Department, calling
it 'Deep State Justice Department' in a tweet on Tuesday. Duration: 7:44
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/the-white-house-s-deep-state-obsession-1128043587798

Fifth farther down

Dossier didn't trigger Trump Russia probe; GOP pretends otherwise

The Rachel Maddow Show
1/2/18
Mark Mazzetti, Washington investigations editor for The New York Times, talks with Rachel Maddow about his reporting that
the Trump Russia investigation was triggered by a tip from U.S. allies, not the Christopher Steele dossier. Duration: 17:22
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/dossier-didn-t-trigger-trump-russia-probe-gop-pretends-otherwise-1128118339641 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvzJeNUKwdI [with comments]

See one the WaPo article mentioned

How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=137313092 .. ah, it is also in stashed .. see toward bottom

Next one

American identities hijacked to fake support for Trump policies

The Rachel Maddow Show
1/2/18
Rachel Maddow reports on an emerging pattern of public feedback on U.S. policy changes being stuff with fake comments from
the hijacked identities of real Americans to show artificial support for Trump administration policies. Duration: 13:50
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/american-identities-hijacked-to-fake-support-for-trump-policies-1128124483978 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbDtMD8rAwg [with comments]

Cruising into the second half

Fusion GPS: dossier did not spark FBI Russia investigation
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
1/3/18
Breaking News: Founders of the firm behind the Russian dossier speak out in a New York Times opinion
piece about President Trump’s ties to Russia and what congress is keeping a secret. Duration: 16:49
©2017 NBCNews.com
9originally aired January 2, 2018]
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/fusion-gps-dossier-did-not-spark-fbi-russia-investigation-1128196163894

From "stashed January 2, 2018:"

James Comey Expresses Hope For ‘More Ethical Leadership’ In 2018
The former FBI director tweeted that he’d like to see a focus on “the truth and lasting values” in the new year.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/comey-hopes-for-ethical-leadership_us_5a4abd75e4b0b0e5a7a80587

Though i haven't seen this as a heavy one add it to your list of Republican
diversionary branches stretching wide from the tree of the Mueller trunk.
Trump Accuses Former Clinton Aide of Failing to Follow Security Protocols - Huma Abedin
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/us/politics/trump-clinton-huma-abedin.html

Trump urges Justice Department to ‘act’ on Comey, suggests Huma Abedin should face jail time
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2018/01/02/trump-urges-justice-department-to-act-on-comey-suggests-huma-abedin-should-face-jail-time/

Trump suggests Huma Abedin be jailed after State Department email release
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/02/trump-huma-abedin-jail-email-release-319922
.. more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dbUw3BI0GY3C0PMrjdhwTrdK2DeSM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en

For Trump, a Year of Reinventing the Presidency
In ways that were once unimaginable, President Trump has discarded the conventions and norms established by his predecessors. Will that change the institution permanently?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/us/politics/trump-reinventing-presidency.html

The Republicans’ Fake Investigations
By GLENN R. SIMPSON and PETER FRITSCH
Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch, both former journalists, are the founders of the research firm Fusion GPS.
A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”
Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry.
In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.
We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.
Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.
We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.
Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.
We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.
The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.
We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.
We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.
We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manafort’s coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.
Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports.
Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?
What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.
We did not discuss that decision with our clients, or anyone else. Instead, we deferred to Mr. Steele, a trusted friend and intelligence professional with a long history of working with law enforcement. We did not speak to the F.B.I. and haven’t since.
After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary. We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power. We did not, however, share the dossier with BuzzFeed, which to our dismay published it last January.
We’re extremely proud of our work to highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties. To have done so is our right under the First Amendment.
It is time to stop chasing rabbits. The public still has much to learn about a man with the most troubling business past of any United States president. Congress should release transcripts of our firm’s testimony, so that the American people can learn the truth about our work and most important, what happened to our democracy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/opinion/republicans-investigation-fusion-gps.html
further to:
How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt - excerpted at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=137313092
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-russia-investigation-began-george-papadopoulos.html
-- more: https://www.google.com/search?q=republicans%E2%80%99+fake+investigations

This one is particularly ugly, brittle, bully boy shit.
Donald Trump’s Year of Living Dangerously
It’s worse than you think.
When President Donald Trump sat down for dinner on September 18 in New York with leaders of four Latin American countries on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly, anxieties were already running high.
There was the matter of Mexico and his promise to build that “big, beautiful wall,” presumably to keep not just Mexicans but all of their citizens out of the United States too. And the threat to blow up the North American Free Trade Agreement. And then, a month earlier, seemingly out of nowhere, Trump had volunteered that he was considering a “military option” in Venezuela as that country’s last vestiges of democracy disappeared. Amid the international furor over his vow to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea in the same golf-course press conference, the news that the president of the United States was apparently considering going to war with its third-largest oil supplier had gotten relatively little attention. But the leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Panama invited to the dinner remembered it well.
So, it turned out, did Trump. After the photo op was over and the cameras had left the room, Trump dominated the long table. His vice president, Mike Pence, was to his right; Pence had just spent nearly a week on a conciliatory, well-received tour of the region, the first by a high-ranking administration official since Trump’s inauguration. To Trump’s left was his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. “Rex tells me you don’t want me to use the military option in Venezuela,” the president told the gathered Latin American leaders, according to an account offered by an attendee soon after the dinner. “Is that right? Are you sure?” Everyone said they were sure. But they were rattled. War with Venezuela, as absurd as that seemed, was clearly still on Trump’s mind.
By the time the dinner was over, the leaders were in shock, and not just over the idle talk of armed conflict. No matter how prepared they were, eight months into an American presidency like no other, this was somehow not what they expected. A former senior U.S. official with whom I spoke was briefed by ministers from three of the four countries that attended the dinner. “Without fail, they just had wide eyes about the entire engagement,” the former official told me. Even if few took his martial bluster about Venezuela seriously, Trump struck them as uninformed about their issues and dangerously unpredictable, asking them to expend political capital on behalf of a U.S. that no longer seemed a reliable partner. “The word they all used was: ‘This guy is insane.’”
[...]
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/02/donald-trump-foreign-policy-analysis-dangerous-216202
.. more: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump%27s+year+of+living+dangerously