Wednesday, April 18, 2018 10:54:26 PM
Part 185, some of Russian meddling, and related, material from F6 big ones. These from a post Sunday, 04/15/18,
covering March 18, 2018, and headed, Andrew McCabe: Rep. Gutierrez offers job to secure pension
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140051041
The first seven
Andrew McCabe: Rep. Gutierrez offers job to secure pension
AM Joy
3/18/18
Rep. Gutierrez says ‘it was patently unfair and political’ that Andrew McCabe was fired as deputy director from the FBI by Attorney General Jeff Sessions late
Friday night. Joy Reid and her panel discuss the numerous offers from elected officials in Congress to employ McCabe so that he can collect his FBI pension.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/andrew-mccabe-rep-gutierrez-offers-job-to-secure-pension-1188943427979 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GbJ299Zyvw [with comments]
*
Russia’s Vladimir Putin expected to win election
AM Joy
3/18/18
As Russia holds presidential elections that are expected to re-elect Vladimir Putin, Joy Reid and her panel[, including/
specifically Masha Gessen,] discuss how the Russian elections are actually, ‘a ritual with a pre-ordained outcome.’
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/russia-s-vladimir-putin-expected-to-win-election-1188949571973 [a must-watch]
*
Trump: General questions Putin’s influence over president
AM Joy
3/18/18
Gen. Barry McCaffrey tweeted that Donald Trump is a ‘serious threat to national security’ who appears to be influenced by
Vladimir Putin. McCaffrey and Joy Reid discuss why the president is apparently not responding to hostilities from Russia.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/trump-general-questions-putin-s-influence-over-president-1188955203812 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KgMyVA58UU [with comments]
*
Stormy Daniels interview air date highly anticipated
AM Joy
3/18/18
Stormy Daniels has not been criticized by Donald Trump on Twitter, where the president often addresses opponents. Joy
Reid and her panel discuss why this may be, and what might happen ahead of Daniels’ coming television interview.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/stormy-daniels-interview-air-date-highly-anticipated-1188986435606 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz7dY1sM2o4 [with comments]
*
Cambridge Analytica: Facebook data of 50 million allegedly seized
AM Joy
3/18/18
Cambridge Analytica is coming under fire for reports that the Facebook data of 50 million users was allegedly stolen by the company for use by
the Donald Trump presidential campaign. Joy Reid and her panel discuss how this could ‘add a new dimension’ to Robert Mueller’s investigation.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/cambridge-analytica-facebook-data-of-50-million-allegedly-seized-1188990531822 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTCtuKAAbRw [with comments]
*
Trump: After McCabe firing is Mueller next?
AM Joy
3/18/18
After the firing of former deputy director of the FBI Robert McCabe by Jeff Sessions, many are wondering whether Donald Trump will attempt to have Robert
Mueller fired. Joy Reid and her panel discuss whether Republican leadership would stand up to the president if the special prosecutor was removed.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/trump-after-mccabe-firing-is-mueller-next-1188997187540
--
DOJ Planning Criminal Indictments of McCabe, Comey and Others
Published on Mar 18, 2018 by The Alex Jones Channel [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsye7V9psc-APX6wV1twLg / https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel , https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ColATMQobsM [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecnW7xBR5Y4 (with comments)]
Yep, i agree it's good to watch some of the spin these extreme-right conspiracy
clowns preach. It's important to hear what so many Americans are taken to believing.
Leaving one more of Alex Jones' there - then there are those of the far-right religious delusion-dilemma dark-corner donkeys
RWW News: Lance Wallnau Says 'The Spirit Of Darkness Wants To Neutralize This Presidency'
Published on Mar 19, 2018 by RWW Blog [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMXqRHe8n1TX5iDvkLS62rw / https://www.youtube.com/user/RWWBlog , https://www.youtube.com/user/RWWBlog/videos ]
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/lance-wallnau-the-spirit-of-darkness-wants-to-neutralize-this-presidency/
[from March 18, 2018]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biqGJBRqgVo [with comments]
Those sort of short eruptions i can handle, though in including that one i have strayed a long way from my supposed-to-be Mueller focus.
Leave six, and slip in one of the many cartoon videos there
Unless She Says I'm A Wildcat In Bed | Our Cartoon President | SHOWTIME
Published on Mar 16, 2018 by SHOWTIME
Our Cartoon President sits down with Cartoon Anderson Cooper to discuss Stormy Daniels.
[Episode 7 originally aired March 18, 2018]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1P7cmL0BUc [with comments]
To "stashed March 18, 2018:"
Trump campaign consultant took data about millions of users without their knowledge
Facebook’s recent suspension of Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that played a key role in President Trump’s 2016 campaign, highlights the rapid rise of a company that claimed it had reached new heights in marrying the art of political persuasion with the science of big data.
Four years after the company began offering Republican political candidates the promise of groundbreaking tools for delivering political messages tailored to the psychological traits of voters, serious questions remain about its tactics and effectiveness.
What is clear is that the services Cambridge Analytica offered are increasingly coveted by modern political campaigns. Yet Facebook users had few indications of how their personal data was collected, refashioned and deployed on behalf of candidates.
A Cambridge University professor working for Cambridge Analytica in 2014 created an app, called Thisisyourdigitallife, that offered personality predictions and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.”
The professor, a Russian American named Aleksandr Kogan, used the app to gain access to demographic information — including the names of users, their “likes,” friend lists, and other data. Once obtained by Cambridge Analytica, political campaigns could use those profiles to target users with highly tailored messages, ads or fundraising requests.
Facebook said 270,000 people downloaded the app. But people familiar with how such systems work — including a former Cambridge Analytica employee — said the app would have given Cambridge access to information on the friends of each of those people, a number that almost certainly reached into the tens of millions.
The Observer of London and the New York Times reported Saturday that Cambridge Analytica had gained access to information on 50 million Facebook users, citing internal documents and interviews with former employees and associates.
Facebook declined to confirm or deny this number. It issued a statement noting its past actions to limit access to this kind of personal information, which, until changes were made in 2014 and 2015, was routinely available about any users who did not explicitly act to prevent the release of what “like” buttons they had hit.
“In 2014, after hearing feedback from the Facebook community, we made an update to ensure that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list,” the statement said.
Facebook on Friday banned Kogan, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica and a former Cambridge employee for improperly sharing the data and failing to destroy it after concerns arose about it in 2015. Facebook had asked the parties back then to certify they would not abuse data, but it did not take further action beyond that warning.
Despite Facebook’s concerns in 2015, the social network continued to work with Cambridge Analytica. During the presidential election, Facebook employees assisting Donald Trump’s digital operation worked in the same office as Cambridge Analytica workers, according to a video by the BBC. One former Cambridge employee, Joseph Chancellor, continues to work at Facebook as a user-experience researcher, according to Facebook’s public website.
Some critics said Facebook’s actions on Friday were an insufficient response to a far-reaching data grab that had informed the decision-making of multiple political operations. Trump’s campaign paid Cambridge Analytica at least $6 million for data analysis in the final five months of a close election.
“This is more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a statement. “Whether it’s allowing Russians to purchase political ads, or extensive microtargeting based on ill-gotten user data, it’s clear that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency.”
Cambridge Analytica — which was funded by Trump supporter and hedge fund executive Robert Mercer, and once had on its board the president’s former senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon — has denied wrongdoing. The company has said its “psychometric profiles” could predict the personality and political leanings of most U.S. voters.
“We worked with Facebook over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of Facebook’s terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all Facebook data and their derivatives had been deleted,” Cambridge Analytica said in a statement Saturday.
The company’s actions in the United States and abroad have generated scrutiny from government investigators in Britain and the United States, who have been looking at Russian interference in elections.
In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had requested documents from Cambridge Analytica, including copies of emails of any company employees who worked on the Trump campaign. On Saturday, a day after Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy (D) said she was opening up a probe into Facebook in response to news reports about Cambridge Analytica.
Elizabeth Denham, Britain’s information commissioner, also said Saturday that she was investigating whether Facebook data “may have been illegally acquired and used.”
The investigation is part of a broader probe, launched last year, into how political parties are using data analytics to target voters. “It is important that the public are fully aware of how information is used and shared in modern political campaigns and the potential impact on their privacy,” Denham said in a statement.
Cambridge Analytica has faced ongoing allegations in Britain that it was involved in the 2016 E.U. referendum, or Brexit vote. The head of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, recently appeared before a British parliamentary committee that is investigating fake news and denied claims that his company worked for Leave.E.U., a pro-Brexit group.
While Nix was giving evidence, the co-founder of Leave.E.U., Arron Banks, tweeted “Nix & Cambridge Analytica are compulsive liars.”
Despite years of reports of developers abusing data, Facebook’s processes for dealing with developers who broke the company’s rules were lax, said two former Facebook employees whose job it was to review data use by third parties. The company does not audit developers who siphon data, the people said. If a developer was found to have broken the rules — usually because of a story in the news — the company would give them a warning or kick them off the platform, but it did not take steps to ensure that data taken inappropriately had been deleted, they said.
Sandy Parakilas, a former privacy manager at Facebook, said that during his tenure at Facebook, the company did not conduct a single audit of developers.
Facebook “relied on the word of Kogan and Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, rather than conducting an audit, which they had a right to do in the case of Kogan. They did not investigate further even after it became clear that CA had bragged about having 5,000 data points on every American, data which likely came from Facebook. They only banned Kogan and CA yesterday to get in front of the press cycle,” Parakilas said. “During my 16 months at the company, I don’t recall Facebook ever using its audit rights on a developer.”
Technology researchers also criticized Facebook and Cambridge over the weekend.
“Cambridge Analytica overstates their capabilities because they play in the shadows. They willingly cheat and ignore privacy rules and data ethics in order to win,” said social media analyst Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.
Analysts raised legal questions about Facebook’s actions on Saturday, including if it ran afoul of its 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. That decree specified that Facebook must give consumers clear and prominent notice and obtain their express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established.
The question of whether Cambridge used the data from the 270,000 people to mine information about their friends could constitute a breach of its agreement, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.
In a statement, Facebook said, “We reject any suggestion of violation of the consent decree. We respected the privacy settings that people had in place. Privacy and data protections are fundamental to every decision we make.”
After launching its services for congressional candidates in the 2014 cycle, Cambridge Analytica made a dramatic public entry into U.S. presidential politics in 2015, working on what was touted at the time as a groundbreaking voter outreach effort on behalf of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). At first, Cruz campaign officials credited Cambridge’s “psychographic targeting” techniques — including its use of Facebook data — with elevating Cruz to the top tier of presidential hopefuls. But later, some officials expressed disappointment in some of Cambridge’s work.
The company initially surveyed more than 150,000 households across the country and scored respondents using five basic traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Cruz campaign officials said the company developed its correlations in part by using data from Facebook that included subscribers’ likes. That data helped make the Cambridge data particularly powerful, campaign officials said at the time.
Cambridge’s work for the Cruz campaign ultimately proved uneven, according to campaign officials, who said that while the firm’s data scientists were impressive, the psychographic analysis did not bear fruit as hoped.
Cambridge Analytica then moved on to serve as the Trump campaign’s data-science provider. While company officials said they did not have sufficient time to employ psychographics in that campaign, they did data modeling and polling that showed Trump’s strength in the industrial Midwest, shaping a homestretch strategy that led to his upset wins in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
SCL, Cambridge’s parent company, has said it has worked in 100 countries, including serving military clients with techniques in “soft power,” or persuasion. Nix described it as a modern-day upgrade of early efforts to win over a foreign population by dropping propaganda leaflets from the air.
Among its clients: NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, which hired SCL to conduct a two-month training session in 2015 at its Riga, Latvia, facility for NATO personnel, followed by additional sessions in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, officials said. The nearly $1 million contract was financed by Canada, as part of its support to help NATO allies counter Russia’s influence in the region.
SCL’s main offering, first developed by its affiliated London think tank in 1989, involves gathering vast quantities of data about an audience’s values, attitudes and beliefs, identifying groups of “persuadables,” and then targeting them with tailored messages. SCL began testing the technique on health and development campaigns in Britain in the early 1990s, then branched out into international political consulting and later defense contracting.
In a 2015 article for a NATO publication, Steve Tatham, a British military psychological operations expert who leads SCL’s defense business outside of the United States, explained that one of the benefits of using the company’s techniques is that it “can be undertaken covertly.”
“Audience groups are not necessarily aware that they are the research subjects and government’s role and/or third parties can be invisible,” he wrote.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-campaign-consultant-took-data-about-millions-of-users-without-their-knowledge/2018/03/17/bab541f4-2a18-11e8-ab19-06a445a08c94_story.html
Cambridge Analytica responds to Facebook announcement - and in so doing brazenly lies
https://ca-commercial.com/news/cambridge-analytica-responds-facebook-announcement
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dnOxyKRnynR9qKMlaFxsNZmNdsHrM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
After McCabe firing, Trump attacks FBI, and his lawyer says Russia probe must end
President Trump escalated his assault on federal law enforcement agencies Saturday while one of his attorneys argued that the controversial firing of a top FBI official was reason to end the Justice Department special counsel’s expansive Russia investigation.
After Attorney General Jeff Sessions acted late Friday night on Trump’s publicly stated wishes to fire former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe — just hours before he was set to retire with full benefits — the president celebrated the ouster as a triumph that exposed “tremendous leaking, lying and corruption” throughout law enforcement.
The move emboldened McCabe, who said in a public statement that his dismissal was a deliberate effort to slander him and part of an “ongoing war” against the FBI and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
Like former FBI director James B. Comey, who was fired by Trump last year, McCabe kept contemporaneous memos detailing his fraught conversations with the president, according to two people familiar with the records. The danger for Trump is that those memos could help corroborate McCabe’s witness testimony and become damaging evidence in Mueller’s investigation of whether Trump has sought to obstruct justice.
Trump asked McCabe in an Oval Office meeting in May whom he voted for in the election and complained about the political donations McCabe’s wife received for her failed 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign. In addition, Comey confided to McCabe about his private conversations with Trump, including when the president asked for his loyalty. Both had been probing links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.
McCabe’s firing — coupled with the comments from Trump and his personal attorney, John Dowd on Saturday — marked an extraordinary acceleration of the battle between the president and the special counsel, whose probe Trump has long dismissed as a politically motivated witch hunt.
Trump said in a Saturday night tweet: “The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!”
Dowd said in a Saturday morning statement, “I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier.”
Dowd’s defiance was a dramatic shift for a legal team that had long pledged to cooperate fully with Mueller. The White House has responded to requests for documents, and senior officials have sat for hours of interviews with the special counsel’s investigators.
The statement was first reported by the Daily Beast, which explained that Dowd said he was speaking on behalf of Trump. Dowd later backtracked, telling The Washington Post that he was speaking only for himself.
Trump has been known to direct surrogates to make bold claims publicly as a way of market-testing ideas. Dowd declined to say whether he consulted with the president before issuing his statement. “I never discuss my communications with my client,” he said.
White House officials had no comment as to whether Dowd’s statement was delivered at the behest of his client, but they insisted it was not part of a coordinated administration strategy, and one official described the statement as ill-advised.
Still, officials acknowledged that Trump shares his lawyer’s sentiment that the Mueller investigation should come to a swift conclusion.
“We were all promised collusion or nullification of his election or impeachment,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “We were promised something that never came to be.”
The official added that Trump “just thinks they should wrap it up. He sees it becoming a big fishing expedition.”
For months now, the president has raged in private conversations with friends and advisers over the intensifying investigation. People familiar with his thinking said he has been especially agitated by Mueller’s probing into the financial and other records of his private business, the Trump Organization — an intrusion that he said in an interview last year would cross a red line.
Sessions fired McCabe as an outgrowth of an investigation by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is examining the FBI’s handling of its probe of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. In the course of that broad review, Horowitz’s investigators found that McCabe had authorized two FBI officials to speak to the media about an ongoing criminal probe and then — in the investigators’ view — misled them about it.
White House officials said they did not believe Trump had explicitly ordered Sessions to fire McCabe in recent days. But he arguably did not have to: The FBI’s former No. 2 official had long drawn Trump’s ire, and the president has publicly called for his dismissal. Trump has been furious at Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the Mueller probe. White House officials said the embattled attorney general is perpetually trying to prove his worth to Trump and had to have known that firing McCabe would please the boss.
Indeed, Trump hailed McCabe’s dismissal in a gleeful tweet at 12:08 a.m. Saturday as “A great day for Democracy.”
That drew a stern rebuke from former CIA director John Brennan, who responded on Twitter: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America ... America will triumph over you.”
After Dowd issued his statement Saturday, Trump reiterated his claim that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and Russians, and he attacked federal agencies that are under his command. But he stopped short of echoing Dowd’s call for an end to the Mueller probe.
Trump tweeted: “As the House Intelligence Committee has concluded, there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. As many are now finding out, however, there was tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice & State. #DrainTheSwamp.”
Trump was referring to last week’s announcement by Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee that they were concluding their own investigation of Russian interference in the election, though a separate investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee remains underway.
In another tweet, Trump repeated his now-familiar attacks on McCabe and Comey. Some Trump allies said they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI.
“This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI’s going to win,” said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “You can’t fight the FBI. They’re going to torch him.”
Trump’s lawyers have long spoken privately about what they view as political bias inside the FBI and in the early stages of the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to two top White House advisers.
Since late summer, Dowd and attorney Jay Sekulow have warned the president about what they saw as mounting evidence of pro-Clinton bias among senior FBI officials. Trump took some comfort in their predictions that pieces of this information would surface publicly over time in inspector general reports and responses to public information requests.
Dowd and White House lawyer Ty Cobb have publicly asserted that they are working collaboratively and cooperatively with Mueller’s investigators, voluntarily providing dozens of witnesses and hundreds of thousands of pages of records. Dowd told The Post in January that Trump was providing the special counsel “the most transparent response in history by a president.”
But behind the scenes, Dowd has told colleagues that the probe was poisoned. He has blamed it on an anti-Trump faction of law enforcement officials he derisively calls “the Comey crowd,” which includes McCabe, who was Comey’s deputy when the FBI began investigating Russia’s intrusions and possible links to the Trump campaign.
Democrats on Saturday quickly rushed to protect the Mueller probe, as former national security officials defended McCabe’s character and raised questions about the manner in which he was fired.
Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, tweeted: “Every member of Congress, Republican and Democrat, needs to speak up in defense of the Special Counsel. Now.”
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned of “severe consequences from both Democrats and Republicans” should Trump try to curtail or interfere with Mueller’s investigation.
“Mr. Dowd’s comments are yet another indication that the first instinct of the president and his legal team is not to cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller, but to undermine him at every turn,” Schumer said in a statement.
McCabe’s firing just short of his 50th birthday on Sunday, is likely to cost him significant pension benefits. One House Democrat, Rep. Mark Pocan (Wis.), offered McCabe a job to work on election security in his office “so that he can reach the needed length of service” to retire.
The dismissal once again drew the FBI into a political controversy as those inside the bureau already fear the institution’s reputation may not survive unrelenting attacks from Trump and his allies.
“Certainly the FBI is in the barrel, and they badly want to get out of it — the workforce does,” said former FBI assistant director Ron Hosko. “But headlines like this are not the way out.”
Inside the FBI, the mood was tense this weekend, with some agents exchanging messages about how they might help McCabe and expressing anger at what they saw as a cruel and vindictive dismissal.
But McCabe was not universally loved inside the bureau. Some agents resented him for what they felt was a rapid rise through the ranks in his 22 years there. And officials noted that misleading investigators is a fireable offense, though they were curious about how the evidence would show McCabe had done so.
Horowitz, the inspector general, had been investigating broad allegations of misconduct in the Clinton email case since early last year, but he zeroed in on McCabe over the last few months.
McCabe, who briefly served as acting FBI director after Comey’s firing, technically stepped down from his deputy post after now-director Christopher A. Wray was told of what the inspector general had found.
McCabe remained an FBI employee, but the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which handles employee discipline, later recommended he be fired. The inspector general’s report has not been made public.
On Thursday, McCabe pleaded with Justice Department brass to be spared. Late into the evening Friday, top officials drafted their own report on what McCabe had done. Just before 10 p.m., it was emailed to him and his attorneys. Minutes later, Sessions announced McCabe had been fired, effective immediately.
McCabe countered with a lengthy statement Friday night claiming his innocence — and pledging to fight back against Trump.
“All along we have said nothing, never wanting to distract from the mission of the FBI by addressing the lies told and repeated about us,” McCabe wrote. “No more.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/after-mccabe-firing-trump-attacks-fbi-and-his-lawyer-says-russia-probe-must-end/2018/03/17/8250a7f6-29df-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html
Andrew McCabe Was Fired Less than Two Days Before Retiring
The ex-FBI deputy director was a target of criticism from President Trump.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a19467552/andrew-mccabe-fbi-fired/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dyeuV4qJlWhekeMkRB7-GOjBYKMyM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Trump lawyer’s efforts to suppress Stormy Daniels started in 2011
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-lawyers-efforts-to-suppress-stormy-daniels-started-in-2011/2018/03/17/56924c54-29db-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html
Trump’s adversaries steal the spotlight after wild 24 hours
Stormy Daniels and Andrew McCabe have a bigger platform than ever before.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/17/trump-mccabe-stormy-daniels-spotlight-469114
Trouble for Trump if Mueller meets Stormy
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/17/opinions/stormy-daniels-trump-mueller-opinion-callan/index.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dXbv2bcneRzUlPMl7khO-CAteTj5M?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Is America on the Verge of a Constitutional Crisis?
As the Trump presidency approaches a troubling tipping point, it’s time to find the right term for what’s happening to democracy.
By Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/is-america-on-the-verge-of-a-constitutional-crisis/555860/
President Trump hails McCabe's firing, lawmakers express outrage
The firing and Trump's response early Saturday sparked outrage from Democrats and former members of the intelligence community.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/president-trump-hails-mccabe-s-firing-lawmakers-push-release-ig-n857556
Trump Continues Barrage Against Special Counsel Mueller, Fired FBI Deputy McCabe
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/18/594702972/trump-continues-barrage-against-special-counsel-mueller-fired-fbi-deputy-mccabe
Donald Trump sure looks like he is planning to fire Robert Mueller
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/18/politics/trump-tweets-mueller-mccabe-analysis/index.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/daq5AkBfJp2GalMnLu_gXQf7cq67M?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Trump said Mueller’s team has ‘13 hardened Democrats.’ Here are the facts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2018/03/18/trump-said-muellers-team-has-13-hardened-democrats-here-are-the-facts/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dZWqXWMX70KznZMV3xUdAQQ85n0gM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
AP Exclusive: Kushner Cos. filed false NYC housing paperwork - AP
When the Kushner Cos. bought three apartment buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood of Queens in 2015, most of the tenants were protected by special rules that prevent developers from pushing them out, raising rents and turning a tidy profit.
But that's exactly what the company then run by Jared Kushner did, and with remarkable speed. Two years later, it sold all three buildings for $60 million, nearly 50 percent more than it paid.
Now a clue has emerged as to how President Donald Trump's son-in-law's firm was able to move so fast: The Kushner Cos. routinely filed false paperwork with the city declaring it had zero rent-regulated tenants in dozens of buildings it owned across the city when, in fact, it had hundreds.
While none of the documents during a three-year period when Kushner was CEO bore his personal signature, they provide a window into the ethics of the business empire he ran before he went on to become one of the most trusted advisers to the president of the United States.
"It's bare-faced greed," said Aaron Carr, founder of Housing Rights Initiative, a tenants' rights watchdog that compiled the work permit application documents and shared them with The Associated Press. "The fact that the company was falsifying all these applications with the government shows a sordid attempt to avert accountability and get a rapid return on its investment."
Kushner Cos. responded in a statement that it outsources the preparation of such documents to third parties that are reviewed by independent counsel, and "if mistakes or violations are identified, corrective action is taken immediately."
"Kushner would never deny any tenant their due-process rights," it said, adding that the company "has renovated thousands of apartments and developments with minimal complaints over the past 30 years."
For the three Queens buildings in the borough's Astoria neighborhood, the Kushner Cos. checked a box on construction permit applications in 2015 that indicated the buildings had zero rent-regulated tenants. Tax records filed a few months later showed the company inherited as many as 94 rent-regulated units from the previous owner.
In all, Housing Rights Initiative found the Kushner Cos. filed at least 80 false applications for construction permits in 34 buildings across New York City from 2013 to 2016, all of them indicating there were no rent-regulated tenants. Instead, tax documents show there were more than 300 rent-regulated units. Nearly all the permit applications were signed by a Kushner employee, including sometimes the chief operating officer.
Had the Kushner Cos. disclosed those rent-regulated tenants, it could have triggered stricter oversight of construction crews by the city, including possibly unscheduled "sweeps" on site by inspectors to keep the company from harassing tenants and getting them to leave.
Instead, current and former tenants of the Queens buildings told the AP that they were subjected to extensive construction, with banging, drilling, dust and leaking water that they believe were part of targeted harassment to get them to leave and clear the way for higher-paying renters.
"It was noisy, there were complaints, I got mice," said mailman Rudolph Romano, adding that the Kushner Cos. tried to increase his rent by 60 percent, an accusation the company denied. "They cleaned the place out. I watched the whole building leave."
Tax records show those rent-regulated units that numbered as many as 94 when Kushner took over fell to 25 by 2016.
In Kushner buildings across the city, records show frequent complaints about construction going on early in the morning or late at night against the rules, improper or illegal construction, and work without a permit.
At a six-story walk-up in Manhattan's East Village that was once home to the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the Kushner Cos. filed an application to begin construction in late 2013 that, again, listed zero rent-regulated tenants. Tax records a few months later showed seven rent-regulated units.
"All of a sudden, there was drilling, drilling. ... You heard the drilling in the middle of night," said one of the rent-regulated tenants, Mary Ann Siwek, 67, who lives on Social Security payments and odd jobs. "There were rats coming in from the abandoned building next door. The hallways were always filled with lumber and sawdust and plaster."
A knock on the door came a few weeks later, and an offer of at least $10,000 if she agreed to leave the building.
"I know it's pretty horrible, but we can help you get out," Siwek recalls the man saying. "We can offer you money."
Siwek turned down the cash and sued instead. She said she won a year's worth of free rent and a new refrigerator.
New York City Council member Ritchie Torres, who plans to launch an investigation into permit applications, said: "The Kushners appear to be engaging in what I call the weaponization of construction."
Rent stabilization is a fixture of New York City that can bedevil developers seeking to make money off buildings. To free themselves of its restrictions, landlords usually have to wait until the rent rises above $2,733 a month, something that can take years given the small increases allowed each year.
Submitting false documents to the city's Department of Buildings for construction permits is a misdemeanor, which can carry fines of up to $25,000. But real estate experts say it is often flouted with little to no consequences. Landlords who do so get off with no more than a demand from the city, sometimes a year or more later, to file an "amended" form with the correct numbers.
Housing Rights Initiative found the Kushner Cos. filed dozens of amended forms for the buildings mentioned in the documents, most of them a year to two later.
"There is a lack of tools to go after landlords who harass tenants, and there is a lack of enforcement," said Seth Miller, a real estate lawyer who used to work at a state housing agency overseeing rent regulations. Until officials inspect every construction site, "you're going to have this incentive for landlords to make life uncomfortable for tenants."
New York City's Department of Buildings declined to comment specifically on the false application documents but said it is ramping up its monitoring of construction, hiring 72 new inspectors and other staff under city laws recently passed to crack down on tenant harassment.
"We won't tolerate landlords who use construction to harass tenants — no matter who they are," said spokesman Joseph Soldevere. He added that two of the Queens buildings are under investigation by a tenant-harassment task force.
Exactly how much money the Kushner Cos. earned from the buildings mentioned in the documents is unclear. Of those 34 buildings, only the three in Queens and a fourth in Brooklyn appear to have been sold. The company also likely made money by reducing the number of rent-regulated tenants and bringing in those who would pay more.
Jared Kushner, who stepped down as CEO of the Kushner Cos. last year before taking on his advisory role at the White House, sold off part of his real estate holdings as required under government ethics rules. But he retained stakes in many properties, including Westminster Management, the Kushner Cos. subsidiary that oversees its residential properties. A financial disclosure last year showed he still owns a stake in Westminster and earned $1.6 million from the holding.
Back in Queens, the mailman Romano was one of the few rent-regulated tenants who fought back.
He hired a lawyer who found out he was protected from the 60 percent rent hike by law, something Romano did not know at the time. And he said his rent, which was set to increase to $3,750, was restored to $2,350.
Romano is still in the building where he has lived for nine years, with his wife, four children and his guests from the construction days — the mice.
"I still haven't gotten rid of them."
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/ap-exclusive-kushner-cos-filed-false-documents-nyc-53832620
original https://apnews.com/002703e70347481cb993027d04f543cc
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dPxSAEt7RGol7XMFvKqh_17wsaDyM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Republicans Don’t Appear Too Concerned About Mueller’s Potential Firing
One GOP senator insists the White House wants Mueller “to be able to finish the investigation.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/republicans-mueller-firing_us_5aae6cace4b0c33361b14366
Rep. Trey Gowdy To Trump’s Lawyer: If You Have An Innocent Client, ‘Act Like It’
The attorney’s call to end the special counsel probe is a disservice to the president, said Gowdy.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trey-gowdy-trump_us_5aae62c9e4b0c33361b13a02
Reuters: Sources Contradict Sessions’ Testimony He Opposed Russia Outreach - Reuters
The accounts raise new questions about Sessions’ testimony regarding contacts with Russia during the campaign.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/reuters-sources-contradict-sessions-testimony-he-opposed-russia-outreach_us_5aae8779e4b0c33361b18439
original https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-sessions-exclusive/exclusive-sources-contradict-sessions-testimony-he-opposed-russia-outreach-idUSKBN1GU0NC
Retired 4-Star Army General Calls Trump A ‘Serious Threat To National Security’ - Barry McCaffrey
The president is “refusing to protect the U.S. from Russian attacks.”
"Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr Putin."
[ https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/974748724176941056 ]
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mccaffrey-calls-trump-threat-to-national-secuirity_us_5aadf16ee4b0337adf8451cd
Democrats Flood Andrew McCabe With Federal Job Offers To Save His Pension
The former FBI deputy director was fired two days before he was set to retire with his pension.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democrats-offer-andrew-mccabe-job-after-firing_us_5aadc716e4b05b2217ff4c72
Report: FEC Probing Whether NRA Took Russian Funds For Trump Campaign
The NRA spent $21 million backing Trump in the 2016 election.
The NRA spent a record amount on 2016 elections, including $21 million to back Trump and $14 million to attack Hillary Clinton.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fec-probing-nra-russia-election-funding_us_5aadab7ee4b0c33361b0f887
James Comey Fires Back At Trump, Vowing To Reveal Who’s ‘Honorable’ — And Who Isn’t
The former FBI director is about to bare his history with the president in a new book.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/comey-fires-honorable-tweet-back-at-trump_us_5aad913ae4b05b2217ff456e
covering March 18, 2018, and headed, Andrew McCabe: Rep. Gutierrez offers job to secure pension
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140051041
The first seven
Andrew McCabe: Rep. Gutierrez offers job to secure pension
AM Joy
3/18/18
Rep. Gutierrez says ‘it was patently unfair and political’ that Andrew McCabe was fired as deputy director from the FBI by Attorney General Jeff Sessions late
Friday night. Joy Reid and her panel discuss the numerous offers from elected officials in Congress to employ McCabe so that he can collect his FBI pension.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/andrew-mccabe-rep-gutierrez-offers-job-to-secure-pension-1188943427979 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GbJ299Zyvw [with comments]
*
Russia’s Vladimir Putin expected to win election
AM Joy
3/18/18
As Russia holds presidential elections that are expected to re-elect Vladimir Putin, Joy Reid and her panel[, including/
specifically Masha Gessen,] discuss how the Russian elections are actually, ‘a ritual with a pre-ordained outcome.’
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/russia-s-vladimir-putin-expected-to-win-election-1188949571973 [a must-watch]
*
Trump: General questions Putin’s influence over president
AM Joy
3/18/18
Gen. Barry McCaffrey tweeted that Donald Trump is a ‘serious threat to national security’ who appears to be influenced by
Vladimir Putin. McCaffrey and Joy Reid discuss why the president is apparently not responding to hostilities from Russia.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/trump-general-questions-putin-s-influence-over-president-1188955203812 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KgMyVA58UU [with comments]
*
Stormy Daniels interview air date highly anticipated
AM Joy
3/18/18
Stormy Daniels has not been criticized by Donald Trump on Twitter, where the president often addresses opponents. Joy
Reid and her panel discuss why this may be, and what might happen ahead of Daniels’ coming television interview.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/stormy-daniels-interview-air-date-highly-anticipated-1188986435606 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz7dY1sM2o4 [with comments]
*
Cambridge Analytica: Facebook data of 50 million allegedly seized
AM Joy
3/18/18
Cambridge Analytica is coming under fire for reports that the Facebook data of 50 million users was allegedly stolen by the company for use by
the Donald Trump presidential campaign. Joy Reid and her panel discuss how this could ‘add a new dimension’ to Robert Mueller’s investigation.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/cambridge-analytica-facebook-data-of-50-million-allegedly-seized-1188990531822 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTCtuKAAbRw [with comments]
*
Trump: After McCabe firing is Mueller next?
AM Joy
3/18/18
After the firing of former deputy director of the FBI Robert McCabe by Jeff Sessions, many are wondering whether Donald Trump will attempt to have Robert
Mueller fired. Joy Reid and her panel discuss whether Republican leadership would stand up to the president if the special prosecutor was removed.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/trump-after-mccabe-firing-is-mueller-next-1188997187540
--
DOJ Planning Criminal Indictments of McCabe, Comey and Others
Published on Mar 18, 2018 by The Alex Jones Channel [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsye7V9psc-APX6wV1twLg / https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel , https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ColATMQobsM [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecnW7xBR5Y4 (with comments)]
Yep, i agree it's good to watch some of the spin these extreme-right conspiracy
clowns preach. It's important to hear what so many Americans are taken to believing.
Leaving one more of Alex Jones' there - then there are those of the far-right religious delusion-dilemma dark-corner donkeys
RWW News: Lance Wallnau Says 'The Spirit Of Darkness Wants To Neutralize This Presidency'
Published on Mar 19, 2018 by RWW Blog [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMXqRHe8n1TX5iDvkLS62rw / https://www.youtube.com/user/RWWBlog , https://www.youtube.com/user/RWWBlog/videos ]
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/lance-wallnau-the-spirit-of-darkness-wants-to-neutralize-this-presidency/
[from March 18, 2018]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biqGJBRqgVo [with comments]
Those sort of short eruptions i can handle, though in including that one i have strayed a long way from my supposed-to-be Mueller focus.
Leave six, and slip in one of the many cartoon videos there
Unless She Says I'm A Wildcat In Bed | Our Cartoon President | SHOWTIME
Published on Mar 16, 2018 by SHOWTIME
Our Cartoon President sits down with Cartoon Anderson Cooper to discuss Stormy Daniels.
[Episode 7 originally aired March 18, 2018]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1P7cmL0BUc [with comments]
To "stashed March 18, 2018:"
Trump campaign consultant took data about millions of users without their knowledge
Facebook’s recent suspension of Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that played a key role in President Trump’s 2016 campaign, highlights the rapid rise of a company that claimed it had reached new heights in marrying the art of political persuasion with the science of big data.
Four years after the company began offering Republican political candidates the promise of groundbreaking tools for delivering political messages tailored to the psychological traits of voters, serious questions remain about its tactics and effectiveness.
What is clear is that the services Cambridge Analytica offered are increasingly coveted by modern political campaigns. Yet Facebook users had few indications of how their personal data was collected, refashioned and deployed on behalf of candidates.
A Cambridge University professor working for Cambridge Analytica in 2014 created an app, called Thisisyourdigitallife, that offered personality predictions and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.”
The professor, a Russian American named Aleksandr Kogan, used the app to gain access to demographic information — including the names of users, their “likes,” friend lists, and other data. Once obtained by Cambridge Analytica, political campaigns could use those profiles to target users with highly tailored messages, ads or fundraising requests.
Facebook said 270,000 people downloaded the app. But people familiar with how such systems work — including a former Cambridge Analytica employee — said the app would have given Cambridge access to information on the friends of each of those people, a number that almost certainly reached into the tens of millions.
The Observer of London and the New York Times reported Saturday that Cambridge Analytica had gained access to information on 50 million Facebook users, citing internal documents and interviews with former employees and associates.
Facebook declined to confirm or deny this number. It issued a statement noting its past actions to limit access to this kind of personal information, which, until changes were made in 2014 and 2015, was routinely available about any users who did not explicitly act to prevent the release of what “like” buttons they had hit.
“In 2014, after hearing feedback from the Facebook community, we made an update to ensure that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list,” the statement said.
Facebook on Friday banned Kogan, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica and a former Cambridge employee for improperly sharing the data and failing to destroy it after concerns arose about it in 2015. Facebook had asked the parties back then to certify they would not abuse data, but it did not take further action beyond that warning.
Despite Facebook’s concerns in 2015, the social network continued to work with Cambridge Analytica. During the presidential election, Facebook employees assisting Donald Trump’s digital operation worked in the same office as Cambridge Analytica workers, according to a video by the BBC. One former Cambridge employee, Joseph Chancellor, continues to work at Facebook as a user-experience researcher, according to Facebook’s public website.
Some critics said Facebook’s actions on Friday were an insufficient response to a far-reaching data grab that had informed the decision-making of multiple political operations. Trump’s campaign paid Cambridge Analytica at least $6 million for data analysis in the final five months of a close election.
“This is more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a statement. “Whether it’s allowing Russians to purchase political ads, or extensive microtargeting based on ill-gotten user data, it’s clear that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency.”
Cambridge Analytica — which was funded by Trump supporter and hedge fund executive Robert Mercer, and once had on its board the president’s former senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon — has denied wrongdoing. The company has said its “psychometric profiles” could predict the personality and political leanings of most U.S. voters.
“We worked with Facebook over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of Facebook’s terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all Facebook data and their derivatives had been deleted,” Cambridge Analytica said in a statement Saturday.
The company’s actions in the United States and abroad have generated scrutiny from government investigators in Britain and the United States, who have been looking at Russian interference in elections.
In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had requested documents from Cambridge Analytica, including copies of emails of any company employees who worked on the Trump campaign. On Saturday, a day after Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy (D) said she was opening up a probe into Facebook in response to news reports about Cambridge Analytica.
Elizabeth Denham, Britain’s information commissioner, also said Saturday that she was investigating whether Facebook data “may have been illegally acquired and used.”
The investigation is part of a broader probe, launched last year, into how political parties are using data analytics to target voters. “It is important that the public are fully aware of how information is used and shared in modern political campaigns and the potential impact on their privacy,” Denham said in a statement.
Cambridge Analytica has faced ongoing allegations in Britain that it was involved in the 2016 E.U. referendum, or Brexit vote. The head of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, recently appeared before a British parliamentary committee that is investigating fake news and denied claims that his company worked for Leave.E.U., a pro-Brexit group.
While Nix was giving evidence, the co-founder of Leave.E.U., Arron Banks, tweeted “Nix & Cambridge Analytica are compulsive liars.”
Despite years of reports of developers abusing data, Facebook’s processes for dealing with developers who broke the company’s rules were lax, said two former Facebook employees whose job it was to review data use by third parties. The company does not audit developers who siphon data, the people said. If a developer was found to have broken the rules — usually because of a story in the news — the company would give them a warning or kick them off the platform, but it did not take steps to ensure that data taken inappropriately had been deleted, they said.
Sandy Parakilas, a former privacy manager at Facebook, said that during his tenure at Facebook, the company did not conduct a single audit of developers.
Facebook “relied on the word of Kogan and Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, rather than conducting an audit, which they had a right to do in the case of Kogan. They did not investigate further even after it became clear that CA had bragged about having 5,000 data points on every American, data which likely came from Facebook. They only banned Kogan and CA yesterday to get in front of the press cycle,” Parakilas said. “During my 16 months at the company, I don’t recall Facebook ever using its audit rights on a developer.”
Technology researchers also criticized Facebook and Cambridge over the weekend.
“Cambridge Analytica overstates their capabilities because they play in the shadows. They willingly cheat and ignore privacy rules and data ethics in order to win,” said social media analyst Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.
Analysts raised legal questions about Facebook’s actions on Saturday, including if it ran afoul of its 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. That decree specified that Facebook must give consumers clear and prominent notice and obtain their express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established.
The question of whether Cambridge used the data from the 270,000 people to mine information about their friends could constitute a breach of its agreement, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.
In a statement, Facebook said, “We reject any suggestion of violation of the consent decree. We respected the privacy settings that people had in place. Privacy and data protections are fundamental to every decision we make.”
After launching its services for congressional candidates in the 2014 cycle, Cambridge Analytica made a dramatic public entry into U.S. presidential politics in 2015, working on what was touted at the time as a groundbreaking voter outreach effort on behalf of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). At first, Cruz campaign officials credited Cambridge’s “psychographic targeting” techniques — including its use of Facebook data — with elevating Cruz to the top tier of presidential hopefuls. But later, some officials expressed disappointment in some of Cambridge’s work.
The company initially surveyed more than 150,000 households across the country and scored respondents using five basic traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Cruz campaign officials said the company developed its correlations in part by using data from Facebook that included subscribers’ likes. That data helped make the Cambridge data particularly powerful, campaign officials said at the time.
Cambridge’s work for the Cruz campaign ultimately proved uneven, according to campaign officials, who said that while the firm’s data scientists were impressive, the psychographic analysis did not bear fruit as hoped.
Cambridge Analytica then moved on to serve as the Trump campaign’s data-science provider. While company officials said they did not have sufficient time to employ psychographics in that campaign, they did data modeling and polling that showed Trump’s strength in the industrial Midwest, shaping a homestretch strategy that led to his upset wins in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
SCL, Cambridge’s parent company, has said it has worked in 100 countries, including serving military clients with techniques in “soft power,” or persuasion. Nix described it as a modern-day upgrade of early efforts to win over a foreign population by dropping propaganda leaflets from the air.
Among its clients: NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, which hired SCL to conduct a two-month training session in 2015 at its Riga, Latvia, facility for NATO personnel, followed by additional sessions in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, officials said. The nearly $1 million contract was financed by Canada, as part of its support to help NATO allies counter Russia’s influence in the region.
SCL’s main offering, first developed by its affiliated London think tank in 1989, involves gathering vast quantities of data about an audience’s values, attitudes and beliefs, identifying groups of “persuadables,” and then targeting them with tailored messages. SCL began testing the technique on health and development campaigns in Britain in the early 1990s, then branched out into international political consulting and later defense contracting.
In a 2015 article for a NATO publication, Steve Tatham, a British military psychological operations expert who leads SCL’s defense business outside of the United States, explained that one of the benefits of using the company’s techniques is that it “can be undertaken covertly.”
“Audience groups are not necessarily aware that they are the research subjects and government’s role and/or third parties can be invisible,” he wrote.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-campaign-consultant-took-data-about-millions-of-users-without-their-knowledge/2018/03/17/bab541f4-2a18-11e8-ab19-06a445a08c94_story.html
Cambridge Analytica responds to Facebook announcement - and in so doing brazenly lies
https://ca-commercial.com/news/cambridge-analytica-responds-facebook-announcement
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dnOxyKRnynR9qKMlaFxsNZmNdsHrM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
After McCabe firing, Trump attacks FBI, and his lawyer says Russia probe must end
President Trump escalated his assault on federal law enforcement agencies Saturday while one of his attorneys argued that the controversial firing of a top FBI official was reason to end the Justice Department special counsel’s expansive Russia investigation.
After Attorney General Jeff Sessions acted late Friday night on Trump’s publicly stated wishes to fire former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe — just hours before he was set to retire with full benefits — the president celebrated the ouster as a triumph that exposed “tremendous leaking, lying and corruption” throughout law enforcement.
The move emboldened McCabe, who said in a public statement that his dismissal was a deliberate effort to slander him and part of an “ongoing war” against the FBI and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
Like former FBI director James B. Comey, who was fired by Trump last year, McCabe kept contemporaneous memos detailing his fraught conversations with the president, according to two people familiar with the records. The danger for Trump is that those memos could help corroborate McCabe’s witness testimony and become damaging evidence in Mueller’s investigation of whether Trump has sought to obstruct justice.
Trump asked McCabe in an Oval Office meeting in May whom he voted for in the election and complained about the political donations McCabe’s wife received for her failed 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign. In addition, Comey confided to McCabe about his private conversations with Trump, including when the president asked for his loyalty. Both had been probing links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.
McCabe’s firing — coupled with the comments from Trump and his personal attorney, John Dowd on Saturday — marked an extraordinary acceleration of the battle between the president and the special counsel, whose probe Trump has long dismissed as a politically motivated witch hunt.
Trump said in a Saturday night tweet: “The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!”
Dowd said in a Saturday morning statement, “I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier.”
Dowd’s defiance was a dramatic shift for a legal team that had long pledged to cooperate fully with Mueller. The White House has responded to requests for documents, and senior officials have sat for hours of interviews with the special counsel’s investigators.
The statement was first reported by the Daily Beast, which explained that Dowd said he was speaking on behalf of Trump. Dowd later backtracked, telling The Washington Post that he was speaking only for himself.
Trump has been known to direct surrogates to make bold claims publicly as a way of market-testing ideas. Dowd declined to say whether he consulted with the president before issuing his statement. “I never discuss my communications with my client,” he said.
White House officials had no comment as to whether Dowd’s statement was delivered at the behest of his client, but they insisted it was not part of a coordinated administration strategy, and one official described the statement as ill-advised.
Still, officials acknowledged that Trump shares his lawyer’s sentiment that the Mueller investigation should come to a swift conclusion.
“We were all promised collusion or nullification of his election or impeachment,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “We were promised something that never came to be.”
The official added that Trump “just thinks they should wrap it up. He sees it becoming a big fishing expedition.”
For months now, the president has raged in private conversations with friends and advisers over the intensifying investigation. People familiar with his thinking said he has been especially agitated by Mueller’s probing into the financial and other records of his private business, the Trump Organization — an intrusion that he said in an interview last year would cross a red line.
Sessions fired McCabe as an outgrowth of an investigation by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is examining the FBI’s handling of its probe of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. In the course of that broad review, Horowitz’s investigators found that McCabe had authorized two FBI officials to speak to the media about an ongoing criminal probe and then — in the investigators’ view — misled them about it.
White House officials said they did not believe Trump had explicitly ordered Sessions to fire McCabe in recent days. But he arguably did not have to: The FBI’s former No. 2 official had long drawn Trump’s ire, and the president has publicly called for his dismissal. Trump has been furious at Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the Mueller probe. White House officials said the embattled attorney general is perpetually trying to prove his worth to Trump and had to have known that firing McCabe would please the boss.
Indeed, Trump hailed McCabe’s dismissal in a gleeful tweet at 12:08 a.m. Saturday as “A great day for Democracy.”
That drew a stern rebuke from former CIA director John Brennan, who responded on Twitter: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America ... America will triumph over you.”
After Dowd issued his statement Saturday, Trump reiterated his claim that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and Russians, and he attacked federal agencies that are under his command. But he stopped short of echoing Dowd’s call for an end to the Mueller probe.
Trump tweeted: “As the House Intelligence Committee has concluded, there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. As many are now finding out, however, there was tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice & State. #DrainTheSwamp.”
Trump was referring to last week’s announcement by Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee that they were concluding their own investigation of Russian interference in the election, though a separate investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee remains underway.
In another tweet, Trump repeated his now-familiar attacks on McCabe and Comey. Some Trump allies said they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI.
“This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI’s going to win,” said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “You can’t fight the FBI. They’re going to torch him.”
Trump’s lawyers have long spoken privately about what they view as political bias inside the FBI and in the early stages of the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to two top White House advisers.
Since late summer, Dowd and attorney Jay Sekulow have warned the president about what they saw as mounting evidence of pro-Clinton bias among senior FBI officials. Trump took some comfort in their predictions that pieces of this information would surface publicly over time in inspector general reports and responses to public information requests.
Dowd and White House lawyer Ty Cobb have publicly asserted that they are working collaboratively and cooperatively with Mueller’s investigators, voluntarily providing dozens of witnesses and hundreds of thousands of pages of records. Dowd told The Post in January that Trump was providing the special counsel “the most transparent response in history by a president.”
But behind the scenes, Dowd has told colleagues that the probe was poisoned. He has blamed it on an anti-Trump faction of law enforcement officials he derisively calls “the Comey crowd,” which includes McCabe, who was Comey’s deputy when the FBI began investigating Russia’s intrusions and possible links to the Trump campaign.
Democrats on Saturday quickly rushed to protect the Mueller probe, as former national security officials defended McCabe’s character and raised questions about the manner in which he was fired.
Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, tweeted: “Every member of Congress, Republican and Democrat, needs to speak up in defense of the Special Counsel. Now.”
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned of “severe consequences from both Democrats and Republicans” should Trump try to curtail or interfere with Mueller’s investigation.
“Mr. Dowd’s comments are yet another indication that the first instinct of the president and his legal team is not to cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller, but to undermine him at every turn,” Schumer said in a statement.
McCabe’s firing just short of his 50th birthday on Sunday, is likely to cost him significant pension benefits. One House Democrat, Rep. Mark Pocan (Wis.), offered McCabe a job to work on election security in his office “so that he can reach the needed length of service” to retire.
The dismissal once again drew the FBI into a political controversy as those inside the bureau already fear the institution’s reputation may not survive unrelenting attacks from Trump and his allies.
“Certainly the FBI is in the barrel, and they badly want to get out of it — the workforce does,” said former FBI assistant director Ron Hosko. “But headlines like this are not the way out.”
Inside the FBI, the mood was tense this weekend, with some agents exchanging messages about how they might help McCabe and expressing anger at what they saw as a cruel and vindictive dismissal.
But McCabe was not universally loved inside the bureau. Some agents resented him for what they felt was a rapid rise through the ranks in his 22 years there. And officials noted that misleading investigators is a fireable offense, though they were curious about how the evidence would show McCabe had done so.
Horowitz, the inspector general, had been investigating broad allegations of misconduct in the Clinton email case since early last year, but he zeroed in on McCabe over the last few months.
McCabe, who briefly served as acting FBI director after Comey’s firing, technically stepped down from his deputy post after now-director Christopher A. Wray was told of what the inspector general had found.
McCabe remained an FBI employee, but the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which handles employee discipline, later recommended he be fired. The inspector general’s report has not been made public.
On Thursday, McCabe pleaded with Justice Department brass to be spared. Late into the evening Friday, top officials drafted their own report on what McCabe had done. Just before 10 p.m., it was emailed to him and his attorneys. Minutes later, Sessions announced McCabe had been fired, effective immediately.
McCabe countered with a lengthy statement Friday night claiming his innocence — and pledging to fight back against Trump.
“All along we have said nothing, never wanting to distract from the mission of the FBI by addressing the lies told and repeated about us,” McCabe wrote. “No more.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/after-mccabe-firing-trump-attacks-fbi-and-his-lawyer-says-russia-probe-must-end/2018/03/17/8250a7f6-29df-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html
Andrew McCabe Was Fired Less than Two Days Before Retiring
The ex-FBI deputy director was a target of criticism from President Trump.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a19467552/andrew-mccabe-fbi-fired/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dyeuV4qJlWhekeMkRB7-GOjBYKMyM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Trump lawyer’s efforts to suppress Stormy Daniels started in 2011
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-lawyers-efforts-to-suppress-stormy-daniels-started-in-2011/2018/03/17/56924c54-29db-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html
Trump’s adversaries steal the spotlight after wild 24 hours
Stormy Daniels and Andrew McCabe have a bigger platform than ever before.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/17/trump-mccabe-stormy-daniels-spotlight-469114
Trouble for Trump if Mueller meets Stormy
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/17/opinions/stormy-daniels-trump-mueller-opinion-callan/index.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dXbv2bcneRzUlPMl7khO-CAteTj5M?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Is America on the Verge of a Constitutional Crisis?
As the Trump presidency approaches a troubling tipping point, it’s time to find the right term for what’s happening to democracy.
By Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/is-america-on-the-verge-of-a-constitutional-crisis/555860/
President Trump hails McCabe's firing, lawmakers express outrage
The firing and Trump's response early Saturday sparked outrage from Democrats and former members of the intelligence community.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/president-trump-hails-mccabe-s-firing-lawmakers-push-release-ig-n857556
Trump Continues Barrage Against Special Counsel Mueller, Fired FBI Deputy McCabe
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/18/594702972/trump-continues-barrage-against-special-counsel-mueller-fired-fbi-deputy-mccabe
Donald Trump sure looks like he is planning to fire Robert Mueller
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/18/politics/trump-tweets-mueller-mccabe-analysis/index.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/daq5AkBfJp2GalMnLu_gXQf7cq67M?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Trump said Mueller’s team has ‘13 hardened Democrats.’ Here are the facts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2018/03/18/trump-said-muellers-team-has-13-hardened-democrats-here-are-the-facts/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dZWqXWMX70KznZMV3xUdAQQ85n0gM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
AP Exclusive: Kushner Cos. filed false NYC housing paperwork - AP
When the Kushner Cos. bought three apartment buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood of Queens in 2015, most of the tenants were protected by special rules that prevent developers from pushing them out, raising rents and turning a tidy profit.
But that's exactly what the company then run by Jared Kushner did, and with remarkable speed. Two years later, it sold all three buildings for $60 million, nearly 50 percent more than it paid.
Now a clue has emerged as to how President Donald Trump's son-in-law's firm was able to move so fast: The Kushner Cos. routinely filed false paperwork with the city declaring it had zero rent-regulated tenants in dozens of buildings it owned across the city when, in fact, it had hundreds.
While none of the documents during a three-year period when Kushner was CEO bore his personal signature, they provide a window into the ethics of the business empire he ran before he went on to become one of the most trusted advisers to the president of the United States.
"It's bare-faced greed," said Aaron Carr, founder of Housing Rights Initiative, a tenants' rights watchdog that compiled the work permit application documents and shared them with The Associated Press. "The fact that the company was falsifying all these applications with the government shows a sordid attempt to avert accountability and get a rapid return on its investment."
Kushner Cos. responded in a statement that it outsources the preparation of such documents to third parties that are reviewed by independent counsel, and "if mistakes or violations are identified, corrective action is taken immediately."
"Kushner would never deny any tenant their due-process rights," it said, adding that the company "has renovated thousands of apartments and developments with minimal complaints over the past 30 years."
For the three Queens buildings in the borough's Astoria neighborhood, the Kushner Cos. checked a box on construction permit applications in 2015 that indicated the buildings had zero rent-regulated tenants. Tax records filed a few months later showed the company inherited as many as 94 rent-regulated units from the previous owner.
In all, Housing Rights Initiative found the Kushner Cos. filed at least 80 false applications for construction permits in 34 buildings across New York City from 2013 to 2016, all of them indicating there were no rent-regulated tenants. Instead, tax documents show there were more than 300 rent-regulated units. Nearly all the permit applications were signed by a Kushner employee, including sometimes the chief operating officer.
Had the Kushner Cos. disclosed those rent-regulated tenants, it could have triggered stricter oversight of construction crews by the city, including possibly unscheduled "sweeps" on site by inspectors to keep the company from harassing tenants and getting them to leave.
Instead, current and former tenants of the Queens buildings told the AP that they were subjected to extensive construction, with banging, drilling, dust and leaking water that they believe were part of targeted harassment to get them to leave and clear the way for higher-paying renters.
"It was noisy, there were complaints, I got mice," said mailman Rudolph Romano, adding that the Kushner Cos. tried to increase his rent by 60 percent, an accusation the company denied. "They cleaned the place out. I watched the whole building leave."
Tax records show those rent-regulated units that numbered as many as 94 when Kushner took over fell to 25 by 2016.
In Kushner buildings across the city, records show frequent complaints about construction going on early in the morning or late at night against the rules, improper or illegal construction, and work without a permit.
At a six-story walk-up in Manhattan's East Village that was once home to the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the Kushner Cos. filed an application to begin construction in late 2013 that, again, listed zero rent-regulated tenants. Tax records a few months later showed seven rent-regulated units.
"All of a sudden, there was drilling, drilling. ... You heard the drilling in the middle of night," said one of the rent-regulated tenants, Mary Ann Siwek, 67, who lives on Social Security payments and odd jobs. "There were rats coming in from the abandoned building next door. The hallways were always filled with lumber and sawdust and plaster."
A knock on the door came a few weeks later, and an offer of at least $10,000 if she agreed to leave the building.
"I know it's pretty horrible, but we can help you get out," Siwek recalls the man saying. "We can offer you money."
Siwek turned down the cash and sued instead. She said she won a year's worth of free rent and a new refrigerator.
New York City Council member Ritchie Torres, who plans to launch an investigation into permit applications, said: "The Kushners appear to be engaging in what I call the weaponization of construction."
Rent stabilization is a fixture of New York City that can bedevil developers seeking to make money off buildings. To free themselves of its restrictions, landlords usually have to wait until the rent rises above $2,733 a month, something that can take years given the small increases allowed each year.
Submitting false documents to the city's Department of Buildings for construction permits is a misdemeanor, which can carry fines of up to $25,000. But real estate experts say it is often flouted with little to no consequences. Landlords who do so get off with no more than a demand from the city, sometimes a year or more later, to file an "amended" form with the correct numbers.
Housing Rights Initiative found the Kushner Cos. filed dozens of amended forms for the buildings mentioned in the documents, most of them a year to two later.
"There is a lack of tools to go after landlords who harass tenants, and there is a lack of enforcement," said Seth Miller, a real estate lawyer who used to work at a state housing agency overseeing rent regulations. Until officials inspect every construction site, "you're going to have this incentive for landlords to make life uncomfortable for tenants."
New York City's Department of Buildings declined to comment specifically on the false application documents but said it is ramping up its monitoring of construction, hiring 72 new inspectors and other staff under city laws recently passed to crack down on tenant harassment.
"We won't tolerate landlords who use construction to harass tenants — no matter who they are," said spokesman Joseph Soldevere. He added that two of the Queens buildings are under investigation by a tenant-harassment task force.
Exactly how much money the Kushner Cos. earned from the buildings mentioned in the documents is unclear. Of those 34 buildings, only the three in Queens and a fourth in Brooklyn appear to have been sold. The company also likely made money by reducing the number of rent-regulated tenants and bringing in those who would pay more.
Jared Kushner, who stepped down as CEO of the Kushner Cos. last year before taking on his advisory role at the White House, sold off part of his real estate holdings as required under government ethics rules. But he retained stakes in many properties, including Westminster Management, the Kushner Cos. subsidiary that oversees its residential properties. A financial disclosure last year showed he still owns a stake in Westminster and earned $1.6 million from the holding.
Back in Queens, the mailman Romano was one of the few rent-regulated tenants who fought back.
He hired a lawyer who found out he was protected from the 60 percent rent hike by law, something Romano did not know at the time. And he said his rent, which was set to increase to $3,750, was restored to $2,350.
Romano is still in the building where he has lived for nine years, with his wife, four children and his guests from the construction days — the mice.
"I still haven't gotten rid of them."
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/ap-exclusive-kushner-cos-filed-false-documents-nyc-53832620
original https://apnews.com/002703e70347481cb993027d04f543cc
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dPxSAEt7RGol7XMFvKqh_17wsaDyM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Republicans Don’t Appear Too Concerned About Mueller’s Potential Firing
One GOP senator insists the White House wants Mueller “to be able to finish the investigation.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/republicans-mueller-firing_us_5aae6cace4b0c33361b14366
Rep. Trey Gowdy To Trump’s Lawyer: If You Have An Innocent Client, ‘Act Like It’
The attorney’s call to end the special counsel probe is a disservice to the president, said Gowdy.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trey-gowdy-trump_us_5aae62c9e4b0c33361b13a02
Reuters: Sources Contradict Sessions’ Testimony He Opposed Russia Outreach - Reuters
The accounts raise new questions about Sessions’ testimony regarding contacts with Russia during the campaign.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/reuters-sources-contradict-sessions-testimony-he-opposed-russia-outreach_us_5aae8779e4b0c33361b18439
original https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-sessions-exclusive/exclusive-sources-contradict-sessions-testimony-he-opposed-russia-outreach-idUSKBN1GU0NC
Retired 4-Star Army General Calls Trump A ‘Serious Threat To National Security’ - Barry McCaffrey
The president is “refusing to protect the U.S. from Russian attacks.”
"Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr Putin."
[ https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/974748724176941056 ]
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mccaffrey-calls-trump-threat-to-national-secuirity_us_5aadf16ee4b0337adf8451cd
Democrats Flood Andrew McCabe With Federal Job Offers To Save His Pension
The former FBI deputy director was fired two days before he was set to retire with his pension.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democrats-offer-andrew-mccabe-job-after-firing_us_5aadc716e4b05b2217ff4c72
Report: FEC Probing Whether NRA Took Russian Funds For Trump Campaign
The NRA spent $21 million backing Trump in the 2016 election.
The NRA spent a record amount on 2016 elections, including $21 million to back Trump and $14 million to attack Hillary Clinton.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fec-probing-nra-russia-election-funding_us_5aadab7ee4b0c33361b0f887
James Comey Fires Back At Trump, Vowing To Reveal Who’s ‘Honorable’ — And Who Isn’t
The former FBI director is about to bare his history with the president in a new book.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/comey-fires-honorable-tweet-back-at-trump_us_5aad913ae4b05b2217ff456e
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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