Part 186, some of Russian meddling, and related, material from F6 big ones. These from a post Monday, 04/16/18, covering March 19, 2018, and headed, Masha Gessen on the Role of Anti-Putin Candidates in the Russian Election & Calls for Voter Boycott https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140064627
The first
Masha Gessen on the Role of Anti-Putin Candidates in the Russian Election & Calls for Voter Boycott
Full Show - McCabe: Corruption, Entitlement, Patronage, Perjury - 03/19/2018
Published on Mar 19, 2018 by Real News with David Knight [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC1L9FOMSaPgMyoLSnps47g , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC1L9FOMSaPgMyoLSnps47g/videos ] 19Mar18 Broadcast McCabe’s internal corruption of favoritism and patronage is exposed in an EEO lawsuit. But the outrage in Washington, DC speaks of the sense of entitlement and lifelong employment that runs throughout the bureaucracies from top to bottom. McCabe’s attempt to defend himself adds another charge of perjury to Comey. Then, President Trump ramps up the insane War on Drugs that has failed for half a century, there’s more to Facebook & Cambridge Analytica than the surface story, and William F Jasper joins to talk about China’s dictatorship, protected by globalists since Nixon. [from Alex Jones and his merry band of batshit bullshitters] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrtfULJso1I [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3dS_B7vY7g (with comments)]
As Knight simply parrots Trump in so many cases i'll slip these two in
McCabe was asked about media contacts on the day Comey was fired by Matt Zapotosky and Karoun Demirjian March 20 Email the author The troubles that led to the ouster of Andrew McCabe as FBI deputy director began the same day that his boss, James B. Comey, was fired, when FBI investigators exploring media leaks approached McCabe for a conversation, people familiar with the matter said. [...] McCabe — who was fired from the FBI last week 26 hours before he could retire with full benefits — acknowledges that he authorized two FBI officials to talk to a reporter, though he denies that doing so was inappropriate and claims he “answered questions truthfully and as accurately as I could amidst the chaos that surrounded me.” The inspector general has not yet released the report detailing the allegations against McCabe, though it has been described by people familiar with its contents who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/mccabe-was-asked-about-press-contacts-on-the-day-comey-was-fired/2018/03/20/ab5031f8-2b8d-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html?utm_term=.113c2cb770b4 -
On to the eighth
March 19: Team Trump fired Andrew McCabe. What does this mean for Russian probe?
Christopher Wylie: The Whistleblower Who Exposed Cambridge Analytica's Facebook Scam (HBO)
Published on Mar 19, 2018 by VICE News LONDON — Christopher Wylie played a big role in building one of the most effective political weapons of the digital age. Now he’s trying to make amends. The 28-year-old London-based Canadian is defying a non-disclosure agreement to blow the whistle on his former employer Cambridge Analytica, the controversial political analytics firm known for its work on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the U.S. and Uhuru Kenyatta’s in Kenya. He says the U.K.-based company, which he helped found in 2013, has built a powerful software program to predict and influence the choices of voters by using data harvested from 50 million leaked Facebook profiles. The data was collected by an app called thisisyourdigitallife, owned by the Cambridge-based academic Aleksandr Kogan, which was downloaded by about 270,000 people. Users were paid to take a personality test, which they were told would be used for academic research. They might not have known that it also harvested information on their Facebook friends, creating a vast data set that was ultimately sold by Kogan to Cambridge Analytica. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPvRaKQikE [with comments]
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The president abandons restraint regarding the special counsel - and there is expected to be much more to come.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower says company worked with Corey Lewandowski, Steve Bannon In a live interview with TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie, Christopher Wylie, a former employee of British company Cambridge Analytica, says the company misused personal Facebook data of some 50 million people to help influence the 2016 presidential election. Wylie says the company met with former Trump campaign manager (and current outside adviser) Corey Lewandowski, former chief strategist Steve Bannon as well as Russian oil companies. https://www.today.com/video/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-says-the-company-worked-with-trump-campaign-strategist-and-steve-bannon-1189326915651
Trump to Hire Lawyer Who Has Pushed Theory That Justice Dept. Framed the President MANCHESTER, N.H. — President Trump has decided to hire the longtime Washington lawyer Joseph E. diGenova, who has pushed the theory on television that Mr. Trump was framed by F.B.I. and Justice Department officials, to bolster his legal team, according to three people told of the decision. Mr. diGenova is not expected to take a lead role but will instead serve as a more aggressive player on the president’s legal team. Mr. Trump broke over the weekend from the longstanding advice of some of his lawyers that he refrain from directly attacking the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, a sign of his growing unease with the investigation. The hire has not been announced, and Mr. Trump frequently changes his mind and sometimes adjusts his plans based on media coverage. It was not clear whether Mr. Trump planned to hire other lawyers. Mr. diGenova has endorsed the notion that a secretive group of F.B.I. agents concocted the Russia investigation as a way to keep Mr. Trump from becoming president. “There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime,” he said on Fox News in January. He added, “Make no mistake about it: A group of F.B.I. and D.O.J. people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.” Little evidence has emerged to support that theory. Mr. Trump’s legal team has been in tumult in recent weeks. On Saturday, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, called on the Justice Department to end the special counsel investigation. Mr. Dowd said at the time that he was speaking for the president but later backtracked. According to two people briefed on the matter, he was in fact acting at the president’s urging to call for an end to the inquiry. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump did not tell his lawyers that he was in discussions with another Washington lawyer, Emmet T. Flood, about representing him. Mr. Flood represented former President Bill Clinton during his impeachment proceedings. Mr. diGenova did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. diGenova is law partners with his wife, Victoria Toensing. Ms. Toensing has also represented Sam Clovis, the former Trump campaign co-chairman, and Erik Prince, the founder of the security contractor Blackwater and an informal adviser to Mr. Trump. Mr. Prince attended a meeting in January 2017 with a Russian investor in the Seychelles that the special counsel is investigating. Mr. diGenova has worked in Washington legal circles for decades. He is a former Republican-appointed United States attorney for the District of Columbia. And he has served as an independent counsel in government waste, fraud and abuse investigations, notably a three-year criminal inquiry into whether officials in the George H.W. Bush administration broke any laws in their search for damaging information about then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton. In 1995, Mr. diGenova declared the investigation he led was “unnecessary.” And, he said, “a Kafkaesque journey for a group of innocent Americans comes to an end.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/politics/joseph-digenova-trump-lawyer.html
The problem with hindsight Over the weekend,President Donald Trump’s long-simmering feud with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election caught fire and this destructive blaze appears far from contained. Whether these flames die out or continue to consume Washington remains uncertain. And while much will depend on Mueller's progress and Trump's tolerance, for the foreseeable future, our politics will involve a fight over perception and plausible arguments. Both skeptics and believers will assert their theories about Trump's relationship with Russia, hoping they can persuade public opinion in advance of the 2018 midterm elections. For partisans, majority control of the Congress and future governing authority are what's at stake in this battle for perception. And since the majority of the public believes Mueller will conduct a fair investigation (61 percent), Republicans will wage this fight going uphill. In addition to the partisan broadsides, another debate has ensued among journalists, scholars and lawyers about whether or not Trump and his campaign engaged in a conspiracy, or actively colluded with Russian operatives before or after the presidential election. The stakes here are more about "getting it right, first," so as to burnish one's reputation as a political analyst or insightful observer. But there's a glaring problem with most of what has been written and said, whether by partisans or pundits, and it is this: Trump wasn't supposed to win the presidency. In other words, nearly all of the analyses that have been articulated have been bedeviled by the assumption that Trump and his team believed that Trump would become the president. We know this is not true. No one thought Trump would win — not even Trump. According to the book written by Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, on election night, Trump said: "Dave, can you believe this? We just started this to have some fun." Let me repeat, Trump said: "to have some fun." He did not say: "to win." Trump likely also thought that running for president would be "fun" because a presidential campaign would provide him with the biggest platform he could imagine to enhance his celebrity and increase the value of his personal brand. And with these greatly improved assets, he would be able to make more money — after he lost. In essence, for Trump to maximize his future development opportunities and revive his business (and perhaps, even solve son-in-law Jared Kushner's serious debt problem on 666 Park Ave.), he needed to win the Republican nomination and lose the general election. Then, he'd own 2017. The glitch in this plan was that Trump won. That inconvenient and unintended outcome of his campaign appears to have transformed Trump's business development strategy (i.e., make foreign friends, build a hotel in Moscow, and cultivate investor relationships to repay debt in New York) into a possible illegal conspiracy with an unfriendly foreign power. Considering this from another angle, had Trump lost the presidency, does one believe that either he or his campaign would be receiving such scrutiny? No. But the answer is "no" not because partisans want to delegitimize his win (as he seems to believe) or because the "deep state" and "the elites" are repulsed by all he stands for (even if they are). The answer is "no" because if he had lost, he wouldn't have the enormous power of the presidency at his disposal. If he had lost, he would not be in a position to compromise the country's interests to a hostile foreign power. If he had lost, he would have been merely a famous loser. In our upside down world, where social media friends and name identification are valued as real assets and connote one's net worth, famous losers can make far more money than discreet winners. And while Trump’s team (namely, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates) may have found themselves in some legal trouble for campaign finance violations for receiving foreign donations, it is much more likely that had Trump lost, there would be a Justice Department investigation of President Hillary Clinton's role with the Clinton Foundation rather than one of Trump. This doesn't have to do with which politician did the worse thing, it has to do with who now has the power to do harm to the United States of America. At the moment, that individual is Trump, and not Clinton. Had Trump lost, it would be different. The other problem is that cover-ups to put past behavior into a less embarrassing light tend to look like conspiracies in hindsight. More often than not, the truth is simpler: people make bad decisions, and when they realize their bad decision will become public, they try to cover it up with new actions that will alter people’s perceptions. Typically, these cover-ups make things worse, not better, and people get caught — not necessarily for the bad decision or mistake they made, but for not admitting their error or wrongdoing, and trying to cover it up. Viewed through this lens, when Trump’s activities and decisions during the campaign — from not investing any real money in his campaign infrastructure to hiring Manafort in March 2016 when it looked like he might lose the nomination to Sen. Ted Cruz, to the several meetings his campaign advisors had with influential Russians — it seems clear that Trump was attempting to execute an ill-considered business development strategy, not trying to win the presidency. In short, he failed by winning. Now, just because Trump likely was coordinating with Russia for business and not politics, doesn't mean that he should get away with unscrupulous behavior. At this point, Mueller seems highly likely to catch him and his staff for having engaged in a cover-up (e.g., obstruction of justice, perjury, destruction of evidence, etc.). Still with respect to engaging in a treasonous conspiracy with Russia to subvert American democracy, it's probably best to remember what Eric Trump said about his father's nature: "My father sees only one color — green." Lara M. Brown is director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. Follow her on Twitter @LaraMBrownPhD. http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/379084-the-problem-with-hindsight
A 'huge clue' may reveal that Mueller's endgame is to nail Trump for obstruction The special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly more interested in the activities of Donald Trump during his time as president than during his campaign activities. It suggests he's building a case that Trump obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey. Trump went on a Twitter tirade against the FBI over the weekend after reports that Mueller had subpoenaed the Trump Organization for documents related to its efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Comey and Andrew McCabe, another recently fired top FBI official, kept detailed memos about their conversations with Trump and will most likely be critical witnesses in the obstruction investigation. http://www.businessinsider.com/huge-clue-may-reveal-muellers-endgameto-nail-trump-for-obsturction-fbi-2018-3