Part 182, some of Russian meddling, and related, material from F6 big ones. These from a post Tuesday, 04/10/18, covering March 15, 2018, and headed, Enough! A Million Students Walk Out of Schools to Demand Action on Guns in Historic Day of Action https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=139944492
Number six
Jeremy Scahill on Trump’s Cabinet Shakeup, the Mueller Probe & the Iraq War 15 Years Later
Published on Mar 15, 2018 by Democracy Now! Extended conversation with investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept. Scahill talks about Trump’s pick for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Erik Prince’s ties to China, Trump’s ties to Russia and the 15th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/15/jeremy_scahill_on_trump_s_cabinet [with embedded video, and transcript] [further to the "Jeremy Scahill: Gina Haspel Should Be Answering for Her Torture Crimes, Not Heading the CIA" Democracy Now! segment included as the third item in the post to which this is a reply] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK89bEpNT0g [with comments]
Twenty-seventh and eighth
Checkmate: BuzzFeed corners Trump lawyer demanding Stormy docs from WH
Slovak PM quits after journalist's murder but coalition stays in power BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - Long-serving Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico resigned on Thursday, passing his government to a deputy after the murder of an investigative journalist provoked the country’s biggest protests since the fall of communism. President Andrej Kiska asked Deputy Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini to form the next government, opening the way for the three-party coalition to stay in power even though tens of thousands of Slovaks are demanding early elections. The unsolved killing of 27-year-old reporter Jan Kuciak, who delved into fraud involving businessmen with political connections, has fueled public anger over corruption and threatened to bring down the coalition before the party leaders agreed a change of guard. Fico vowed on Thursday to remain in politics as the active leader of his Smer party. Pellegrini presented the president with a list of signatures showing coalition lawmakers supported the switch in prime ministers, guaranteeing a parliamentary majority. But Pellegrini, a former speaker of parliament, will face his first test already on Friday as the protests are scheduled to continue into a third week. Organizers are demanding new elections and a thorough investigation of Kuciak’s murder in late February. The events of the past few weeks have also exposed growing unease in some central European countries that governments may be backsliding on democracy almost 30 years after communism was pushed out of the region. President Kiska himself had urged a government shake-up or snap elections to restore public trust. “After two weeks of international shame, a denial of political responsibility and mass protests, we are back at the start, at a government resignation and change of prime minister,” Kiska said before Fico tendered his resignation to him. Fico had promised to step aside if Kiska allowed Smer, the biggest coalition party, to pick his successor. The government will continue with Smer, the Most-Hid party which represents the ethnic Hungarian minority, and the Slovak National Party that has shifted to center in recent years from the far right. Fico will stay on as caretaker prime minister until his successor is officially named. Kiska and Fico were opponents in the last presidential run-off vote and have battled again in the crisis. Fico has accused outside forces of trying to destabilize the country and questioned Kiska’s meeting last year with financier George Soros, echoing attacks on the Budapest-born billionaire by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. NOT GOING AWAY Protesters are also taking to the streets in the neighboring Czech Republic, a fellow member of the European Union and NATO. Thousands demonstrated last week against a Communist Party lawmaker being voted chairman of parliament’s police oversight commission despite his past as a riot policeman before the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Thousands of Poles also protested last year against an overhaul of the judiciary that has put the right-wing government in Warsaw in dispute with Brussels over safeguarding the rule of law. Fico has been the dominant figure in Slovak politics for over a decade, and despite keeping an anti-immigration line with central European neighbors has been trying to stand out from more euroskeptic leaders in the region. Last year, he called Slovakia a “pro-European island” in central Europe. He said he was not finished. “I told the president: rest assured, I’m not leaving politics, I want to be an active party leader,” he said. Slovakia’s economy has grown rapidly in the last decade and the country is a major car producer despite its small population of 5.4 million. But many accuse Fico of not clamping down harder on corruption and cronyism. Just before he was found shot dead along with his fiancee at his house outside of Bratislava, Kuciak had been looking into suspected mafia links of Italians with businesses in Slovakia. In his final report published after his death, Kuciak said one of the Italians had past business links with two Slovaks, including a former model, who later worked in Fico’s office. Both have resigned but deny connections to the murder. Their Italian former business partner has denied having connections with the mafia. No one has been charged over the killing. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-slovakia-crime-politics/slovak-pm-quits-after-journalists-murder-but-coalition-stays-in-power-idUSKCN1GR16Z
Dems say whistleblower emails show gov’t workers targeted for not backing Trump Two top House Democrats sent a letter to the White House and State Department Thursday saying that information from a whistleblower alleges officials are targeting career civil servants who supposedly don't support President Donald Trump. Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Eliot Engel of New York, ranking member on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, said the whistleblower alleges that high-level officials in the Trump administration have been coordinating with an outside network of prominent conservatives, including former GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich and a former adviser to Dick Cheney, to devise ways to undertake a "cleaning" of long-serving employees at the State Department. Trump officials have described certain State Department employees as a "leaker and troublemaker," "turncoat" and "Obama/Clinton loyalists," according to emails the lawmakers said they obtained from the whistleblower. "Over the past year, we have heard many reports of political attacks on career employees at the State Department, but we have not seen evidence of how extensive, blunt, and inappropriate these attacks are until now," the lawmakers wrote in the letter to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan that seeks documents about staffing decisions and interviews with officials. "They appear to have targeted these staffers despite being fully aware that they were career civil service employees and despite the career employees expressing willingness to support the policy priorities of the Trump Administration," their letter continues. Cummings and Engel quote from an email forwarded by Gingrich in which the former Cheney aide, David Wurmser, says, "I think a cleaning is in order here. I hear Tillerson actually has been reasonably good on stuff like this and cleaning house, but there are so many it boggles the mind..." In one case detailed in the Cummings-Engel letter, a 12-year State Department veteran raised concerns about being targeted by a conservative news outlet and emailed her boss at the State Department for help. Her supervisor then forwarded her email to the White House, where officials used her work under the Obama administration to question her loyalty to Trump. The employee was removed from her detail at the department, the lawmakers said. Cummings and Engel indicate that they have not confirmed the authenticity of the whistleblower emails. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/dems-say-whistleblower-emails-show-gov-t-workers-targeted-not-n856976
Russian Twitter trolls stoked racial tension in wake of Sherman Park rioting in Milwaukee before 2016 election https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/15/russian-twitter-trolls-stoked-racial-tension-wake-sherman-park-riots-milwaukee-before-2016-election/421439002/ referenced by: Report: Russia-linked accounts stirred discord in Milwaukee MILWAUKEE (AP) — Russia-linked Twitter accounts sought to spur racial and political discord in Wisconsin after a police officer’s fatal shooting of a black man sparked riots, a newspaper reported Thursday. The accounts sent more than 30 tweets during the August 2016 unrest in the city’s Sherman Park neighborhood following the shooting, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. The accounts garnered more than 5,000 retweets during the two nights of rioting. One of the accounts, @TEN_GOP, is named in a recent federal indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller. The account tweeted during the riots: “These photos are not from Iraq ... This is Obama’s America! #Milwaukee.” Another account claimed Black Lives Matters supporters were targeting “white people for a beat down.” Last year, jurors acquitted former officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown of homicide charges for fatally shooting Sylville Smith when Smith ran from a traffic stop. Heaggan-Brown is also black, but the shooting in the majority African-American neighborhood made already tense police-community relations boil over. Police arrested about 40 demonstrators during the riots and multiple officers were hurt. Protesters also set fire to eight businesses and a squad car. “To think that halfway around the world people are using this tragic series of events for partisan gain ... it’s daunting. It’s heartbreaking,” said Democratic state Rep. Evan Goyke, who represents the Sherman Park area. The Journal Sentinel reported the Russia-linked accounts appeared aimed at boosting then-candidate Donald Trump’s chances in Wisconsin and spread fake news to help the primary challenger of U.S. Speaker Paul Ryan, who had criticized Trump in the lead-up to the election. Trump was the first Republican to win Wisconsin since the 1984 presidential election. The tweets also sought to elevate the voice of former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke — a conservative firebrand who is one Trump’s biggest supporters — by quoting Clarke during the riots. The newspaper reported there is no indication Clarke was aware of what Russia was doing. “These are enemies of the United States who are trying to sow dissention in our country and on the streets of Milwaukee,” Mayor Tom Barrett said in a statement. The Journal Sentinel said it researched its story by using an NBC News archive of 203,000 tweets from 453 accounts that Twitter and Mueller have linked to Russia in their investigations. The newspaper said it also found images of some of the tweets by using other web archives. https://www.apnews.com/0fbbe03b42114fb19b5584632624b15b/Report:-Russia-linked-accounts-stirred-discord-in-Milwaukee