Part 183, some of Russian meddling, and related, material from F6 big ones. These from a post Friday, 04/13/18, covering March 16, 2018, and headed, 50 Years After My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, Revisiting the Slaughter the U.S. Military Tried to Hide https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009307
John Bolton's mustache is more qualified to be national security adviser than he is By David Rothkopf Editor's Note: David Rothkopf is a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of "Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power" and "The Great Questions of Tomorrow." https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/16/opinions/boltons-mustache-more-qualified-to-be-national-security-adviser-rothkopf/index.html
Porn actress Stormy Daniels physically threatened over Trump: lawyer WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels was physically threatened and warned to remain silent about her relationship with President Donald Trump, her lawyer told MSNBC and CNN on Friday. Attorney Michael Avenatti would not provide details about the threat against Stephanie Clifford, who uses Stormy Daniels as her professional name. He said Clifford would elaborate on it during a CBS “60 Minutes” interview broadcast on March 25. “My client was physically threatened to stay silent about what she knew about Donald Trump,” he said on CNN. “She’s going to be able to provide very specific details about what happened here,” Avenatti said of the “60 Minutes” interview. [...] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-daniels/porn-actress-stormy-daniels-physically-threatened-over-trump-lawyer-idUSKCN1GS20A
Porn star Stormy Daniels' crowdfunding campaign to battle Trump raises $150,000 in two days Former adult film star Stormy Daniels launched a crowdfunding campaign as part of her lawsuit against President Trump. In two days, the campaign raised more than $150,000. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, filed a suit against Trump to void a nondisclosure agreement barring her from discussing an alleged sexual affair with Trump between 2006 and 2007. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/16/stormy-daniels-crowdfunding-campaign-to-battle-trump-raises-big-money.html
James Mattis is linked to a massive corporate fraud and nobody wants to talk about it Better let a scandal slide than risk a nuclear war. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is implicated in one of the largest business scandals of the past decades, described by the Securities and Exchange Commission as an “elaborate, years-long fraud” through which Theranos, led by CEO Elizabeth Holmes and president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, “exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.” Basically, their biotech startup was founded on the promise of faster, cheaper, painless blood tests. But their technology was fake. Mattis not only served on Theranos’s board during some of the years it was perpetrating the fraud after he retired from US military service, but he earlier served as a key advocate of putting the company’s technology (technology that was, to be clear, fake) to use inside the military while he was still serving as a general. Holmes is settling the case, paying a $500,000 fee and accepting various other penalties, while Balwani is fighting it out in court. Nobody on the board is being directly charged with doing anything. But accepting six-figure checks to serve as a frontman for a con operation is the kind of thing that would normally count as a liability in American politics. But nobody wants to talk about it. Not just Trump and his co-partisans in Congress; the Democratic Party opposition is also inclined to give Mattis a pass. Everyone in Washington is more or less convinced that his presence in the Pentagon is the only thing standing between us and possible nuclear Armageddon. It’s an absurd, intolerable situation, but that’s life in America in 2018 — and a perfect illustration of how Trump’s unfitness for office exerts a corrosive influence throughout American life. [...] https://www.vox.com/2018/3/16/17124288/mattis-theranos-board-trump
A California Bank Closed Manafort-Linked Accounts In 2016 After Transactions Raised Suspicions Months later, companies behind his real estate development efforts with his then son-in-law declared bankruptcy. In March 2016, weeks before Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign, a company co-owned by Manafort and his son-in-law at the time, Jeffrey Yohai, opened a bank account in conjunction with real estate development efforts the pair were undertaking in Los Angeles. Two months later, the company opened a second account at the same bank. In mid-September, however, the bank forcibly closed the accounts due to a series of transactions the bank deemed to be suspicious, and a few days before the 2016 election filed a suspicious activity report, or SAR, with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). By law, banks must file suspicious activity reports when they spot transactions that bear hallmarks of money laundering or other financial misconduct. Such reports can support investigations and intelligence gathering — but by themselves they are not evidence of a crime. From there, things quickly went downhill. By the end of 2016, a related company controlled by Manafort and Yohai had filed for bankruptcy, as had the companies set up to handle three of the properties involved in the pair’s efforts. Jessica Manafort filed for divorce against Yohai in March 2017, which has since been finalized. By late September 2017, Yohai informed the court overseeing the bankruptcies that the ownership of new companies set up to handle the purchases of the properties while in bankruptcy was “misrepresented” to him and that Paul Manafort and others associated with those companies conspired to “mislead” the court and others involved “as to their true intentions and motivations.” Both the Wall Street Journal and Reuters have reported in recent months that the federal prosecutor in Los Angeles has taken interest in Yohai and Manafort’s efforts, with Reuters suggesting the California investigation could provide additional leverage to special counsel Robert Mueller in his attempts to get Manafort to cooperate with his investigation. CNN had previously reported that Yohai had spoken to prosecutors. What has not been reported, however, is information about the suspicious activity report. Mueller and his team have had access to the SAR about Yohai and Manafort’s accounts — on which Rick Gates, who has agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation, is an additional authorized signer — since this past September, BuzzFeed News has learned. And, after Mueller indicted Manafort and Gates this past October, the bank reviewed the account activity and filed an amended report, providing FinCEN with still more information. The Banc of California accounts, a fuller picture revealed, had funds totaling $2.6 million. Baylor Holding LLC — the company in whose name the accounts were opened — had listed properties valued between $16 million and $24 million and secured a $1 million line of credit in mid-2016 to be used for renovation and construction in preparing the properties for sale, according to the SAR reviewed by BuzzFeed News. Presented with the information contained in BuzzFeed News’ report, James Andrew Hinds Jr., a lawyer for Yohai, responded, “Mr. Yohai has nothing to add to your investigation into the matters outlined below.” A spokesperson for Manafort did not provide any comment. All of this happened surrounding the months in which Manafort was the chairman for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, with the first account being opened weeks before Manafort joined the campaign. The SAR was filed less than a week before Election Day. While Manafort's relationship with Yohai has figured in speculation in recent months about whether Mueller is interested in their business dealings, their work together has yet to appear in any of Mueller's public filings. But the interest has been explicit in Congress. As part of their investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, Sens. Lindsey Graham and Sheldon Whitehouse, the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, sent a letter in 2017 to FinCEN requesting access to any suspicious activity reports submitted by banks on Manafort, Yohai, and their real estate holding companies, along with additional names and businesses. FinCEN searched its database and pulled dozens of suspicious activity reports on Manafort and his businesses as well as several on Yohai and his businesses. The existence of those reports has not been previously reported and provides new insight into the range of information available to investigators interested in Manafort and Yohai’s business dealings. On March 10, 2016, Baylor Holding LLC — of which Manafort and Yohai are 50-50 co-owners — opened a checking account with the Banc of California, according to the SAR, which BuzzFeed News has reviewed. A little more than two weeks later, on March 28, it was announced that Manafort was joining Trump’s campaign. The SAR notes that Baylor opened a second account with the bank on May 10. The suspicious activity report notes that in May that Baylor’s company had secured a $1 million revolving line of credit to be used for “soft costs” related to the renovation and construction of short sale and foreclosure properties on the Westside of Los Angeles. Their company listed six properties valued at between $16 million and $24 million, according to the SAR. In the months that followed, Manafort worked — for free — for the Trump campaign, being named the campaign’s chairman in mid-May, attending the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June, and helping to wrangle delegates at the convention. He also communicated and met with a Ukrainian business associate with connections to a Russian oligarch in July and August, and, after the New York Times’ reported on a “secret ledger” detailing payments for Manafort by pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, resigned from the campaign on Aug. 19. Less than a month later, the Baylor Holding accounts were forcibly closed by the Banc of California. The reason, per the SAR, was a series of transactions that took place between Aug. 26 and Sept. 6 — tied to a loan in the amount of $402,572 — that the bank identified as account fraud activity. Both accounts were forcibly closed by the bank on Sept. 12. An amended suspicious activity report filed after Manafort’s initial indictment in October 2017 noted that the account had funds totaling $2.6 million and stated that transactions were flagged due to suspicion about the source of the funds, suspicious wire transfers and electronic fund transfers, suspicious use of noncash monetary instruments, and a transaction with no apparent economic, business, or lawful purpose. A bank spokesperson declined to comment. Just over three months later, Yohai would be going to court, filing for bankruptcy for Mt Yohai LLC — a company 70% controlled by Baylor Holding — and for three other companies created to run the sale of three of the properties at issue: 779 Stradella LLC, 1550 Blue Jay Way LLC (a property that involves an investment made by Dustin Hoffman and his son Jacob), and 2401 Nottingham LLC. Yohai is listed on the bankruptcy filings as the managing member of all five entities. In a January 2017 filing, Mt Yohai LLC claimed only one asset — a parcel of land, 2521 Nottingham Avenue, at the southern end of Los Angeles’s enormous Griffith Park — valued at $6.5 million and more than $2.1 million in liabilities. The bankruptcy court granted a motion approving the sale of the 2521 Nottingham Avenue property for a fraction of that claimed value — $1.8 million — as part of the ongoing bankruptcy proceedings this January. The purchaser, Thomas Fanning, owned 10% of Mt Yohai’s equity interests, according to bankruptcy filings, and a company Fanning runs, Bowery Design and Development, was owed more than $500,000 by Mt Yohai at the time of the bankruptcy filing — an amount that reduced the cash price of the sale to a little less than $1.3 million. The other Nottingham Avenue property-related bankruptcy case was dismissed in February 2017, and the other two remain pending. Meanwhile, two of the parties involved in these cases — Manafort and a creditor, Genesis Capital — also have been involved in a real estate transaction in New York that Reuters reported some lawyers say raises questions about the parties’ transparency to the bankruptcy court in California. And, as to Yohai, a photographer alleges — in yet another legal action — that he provided Yohai with $2.9 million for investments in NYC real estate that has not yet been repaid. This despite a promissory note that the photographer, Guy Aroch, alleges Yohai signed in late September 2016 acknowledging that repayment would be forthcoming that next month. https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/california-bank-closed-manafort-linked-accounts-in-2016
The Man Who Knew Too Little The most ignorant man in America knows that Donald Trump is president — but that’s about it. Living a liberal fantasy is complicated. March 10, 2018 GLOUSTER, Ohio — At first, the experiment didn’t have a name. Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d take a break from reading about the hoopla of politics. Donald Trump’s victory shook him. Badly. And so Mr. Hagerman developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan. He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016. “It was draconian and complete,” he said. “It’s not like I wanted to just steer away from Trump or shift the conversation. It was like I was a vampire and any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.” It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be. [...] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/style/the-man-who-knew-too-little.html
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