Tuesday 19th of March 2024

may has not realised that her and boris were the idiots who demolished the tories...

may and boris

Theresa May has accused Russia of meddling in elections and planting fake stories in the media in an extraordinary attack on its attempts to “weaponise information” in order to sow discord in the west.

The prime minister spoke out against “the scale and nature” of Russia’s actions during an address at the lord mayor’s banquet, saying it was “threatening the international order on which we all depend”.

Listing Russia’s attempts to undermine western institutions in recent years, she said: “I have a very simple message for Russia. We know what you are doing. And you will not succeed. Because you underestimate the resilience of our democracies, the enduring attraction of free and open societies, and the commitment of western nations to the alliances that bind us.

“The UK will do what is necessary to protect ourselves, and work with our allies to do likewise.”

Her speech is a serious escalation of the UK’s warnings about Russia as Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, prepares to visit Moscow before the end of the year as part of a strategy of cautious engagement with Vladimir Putin’s administration.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/13/theresa-may-accuses-rus...

 

going down the shit-chute...

Any way you look at it — this is a government in crisis and the Prime Minister appears powerless to deal with it.

Ministers in her government go ‘rogue’ or ‘freelance,’ meanwhile, Brexit continues to unravel.

This takes me to Boris Johnson. He still sits at that Cabinet table but his behaviour in the last few weeks has been utterly shocking — arguably as bad as any of his sacked colleagues.

How has he been able to avoid the sack is completely bewildering.

His stupidity has endangered Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British citizen being held in jail in Iran, because Johnson incorrectly suggested she had been working with journalists in there – when she had in fact been on a family holiday, introducing her young daughter to her grandparents

read more:

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/stupid-arrogant-equal-measure...

fake twitter twits and brexit...

 

Concern about Russian influence in British politics has intensified as it emerged that more than 400 fake Twitter accounts believed to be run from St Petersburg published posts about Brexit.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempting to influence UK politics out of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US.

One of the accounts run from the Kremlin-linked operation attempted to stir anti-Islamic sentiment during the Westminster Bridge terror attack in March in a bogus post claiming a Muslim woman ignored victims – a claim that was highlighted by mainstream media outlets including Mail Online and the Sun.

For days after, the tweeter was gleefully sharing press clippings. “Wow … I’m on the Daily Mail front page! Thank you British libs! You’re making me famous,” he said, referring to an article that appeared on Mail Online and which still bore the tweet at the time of writing.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/14/how-400-russia-run-fake-ac...

 

It is obvious that 419 twitter accounts from naughty Ruskies swung the Brexit vote in favour of getting out of Europe. Of course Nigel Farage and his cronies using 3,456,789 (I made this number up) twitter accounts had nothing to do with Brexit

 

In September 2006, Farage became the UKIP Leader and led the party through the 2009 European Parliament Election, when it won the second highest share of the popular vote, defeating Labour and the Liberal Democrats with over two million votes. He stepped down in November 2009 to concentrate on contesting Buckingham, the constituency of the Speaker, John Bercow, at the 2010 general election, coming third. In November 2010, Farage successfully stood in the 2010 UKIP leadership contest,[10]following the resignation of Lord Pearson of Rannoch.

Farage announced his resignation as leader when he did not win the South Thanet seat in Kent at the2015 general election, but his resignation was rejected and he remained in his post. In June 2016, Farage was a prominent supporter of the successful campaign for a vote in favour of leaving the EU inthe UK EU membership referendum.[11] 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage

 

... And Brexit had nothing to do either with Boris-the-Clown...:

Johnson became the centre of media interest in early 2016 when he refused to clarify his support for Brexit. In February 2016 he endorsed Vote Leave in the "Out" campaign for the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, 2016.[297] He labelled Cameron's fears on the matter as "greatly over exaggerated". Following this announcement, which was interpreted by financial markets as making Brexit more probable, the pound sterling slumped by nearly 2% to its lowest level since March 2009.[298] When Obama urged the UK to remain in the EU, Johnson alleged that the President was motivated by anti-British sentiment caused by his Kenyan ancestry.[299] The comments were condemned as racist and unacceptable by several Labour and Liberal Democratic 

read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson

 

 

 

 

 

not in the UK...

The UK prime minister has explained her previous statement, accusing Russia of alleged interference in foreign states' affairs, a claim repeatedly denied by Moscow as groundless.

"I spoke on Monday about the issue of Russian interference in elections. We have seen that taking place in a number of countries in Europe. The foreign secretary… made a specific point about what was happening here in the United Kingdom. I the speech I gave on Monday I was saying that the examples I gave of Russian interference were not in the United Kingdom," UK Prime Minister Theresa May has stated at the parliament, adding that the issue the Intelligence and Security Committee would study the issue with regard to the Brexit vote.

The explanation comes a day after Prime Minister May accused Russia of meddling in other states' affairs, spreading "fake stories" in media, aggressive policies "to sow discord in the West," accusations slammed by Moscow as "irresponsible" and "groundless."

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, "It is quite understandable that an external enemy, with Russia chosen for this role, is needed for the distraction of the public opinion. It is rather regrettable, especially given that pragmatic and efficient global policy would better correspond to the country’s ambition to turn into 'Global Britain.'"

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201711151059125493-theresa-may-britain-ru...

outrageous...

Russia is outraged that the US security services give to mass media data on bank transactions of the Russian diplomatic missions to mass media, the Russian Foregn Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told journalists at her weekly press briefing.

"The US security services giving to the media data on banking transactions of the Russian diplomatic missions, not only in the United States, but around the world," Zakharova said.

She called on the US authorities to "stop playing such games and return to normal, responsible diplomatic communications."

Earlier this week the BuzzFeed portal reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was scrutinizing more than 60 money transfers of the Russian Foreign Ministry to the country’s embassies, with a note saying that the funds were to be used "to finance election campaign of 2016."

Moscow has also called on the US authorities to stop exerting pressure on the Russian diplomatic missions in the US.

On Media Law

Russia’s new foreign agent law for media became a forced response to repressive measures against Russian media, primarily RT, Maria Zakharova said.

“We were forced to take these steps, these response measures in light of the blatantly repressive actions, steps against Russian media, first of all Russia Today [RT’s former name] television channel,” she told journalists.

On Relations With Spain

Russia is calling on Madrid to provide specific evidence of its alleged interference in the Catalonia situation, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/201711161059148359-russia-us-diplomatic-mi...

incompetence runs in the blue-blood conservatives...

The world recently commemorated the centennial of the Russian Revolution, which resulted from the flagrant incompetence of that country’s ruling class in confronting a moment of overwhelming national crisis. The barricades are not yet out in the streets of modern-day London, but a certain sense of déjà vu is appropriate. At the least, we are likely witnessing the slow-motion suicide of the Conservative Party, and, conceivably, of British conservatism more broadly defined.

In the British case, the crisis involves the nation’s referendum vote in June 2016 to withdraw from the European Union. Opinions may differ about the virtues of Brexit as an idea—I opposed it—but once it was decided, most everyone agreed that the process of extraction had to be implemented with great care and single-minded dedication. The actual response of the Conservative government has been deplorable to the point of unforgivable—inept, slipshod, insouciant, and ignorant of even the basic realities of law and process.

Admittedly, the process of withdrawal would be extraordinarily difficult even for a generation of godlike political sages. Withdrawal proceeds under the so-called Article 50, which provides a strict two-year timetable for negotiation and ratification. The British government implemented the article in March 2017. By March 29, 2019, then, Britain will no longer be a member of the EU. Before that point, the two sides must reach agreement on a series of thorny primary issues, including the so-called divorce bill, the sum that Britain must pay to settle outstanding liabilities. Estimates for this bill range from $60 billion to $100 billion. Scarcely less sensitive is the question of Ireland and the virtually inevitable border that must be created between the EU Republic of Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland.

Only after those preliminaries have been agreed to can negotiation can then move to determining the future trade relationship between Britain and the EU, an extremely complex and time-consuming dance of interests. When the EU and Canada recently discussed a similar deal, negotiations took seven years, and almost collapsed due to last-minute politicking. The Canadian agreement, incidentally, did not include financial services, which are a fundamental part of the British economy. So all that has to be accomplished before March 2019, but actually, the timetable is even tighter than that. As any deal must be ratified by the legislatures of all EU member states, a solid draft must realistically be presented by around October 2018.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/britains-incompetent-con...

"inadequate response."?

 

In October, UK Prime Minister Theresa May accused Russia of interfering in Britain's affairs, claiming that Russian state media "sow discord in the West."

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — UK parliamentarians "took offense" at Twitter after it failed to provide evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum and asked Twitter "to dig dipper [deeper?]," RT and Sputnik Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said on Friday.

 

On Wednesday, Twitter wrote to Damian Collins, head of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons, which is leading the inquiry into the matter. The company explained that it had identified only one account likely funded from Russian sources, which promoted content related to the Brexit referendum during the campaign period. The account belonged to the broadcaster RT and published six referendum-related ads, having spent $1,031 on them. On Thursday, Collins called the information the IT giant had provided an "inadequate response."

In his statement Thursday, Collins said that he had asked Twitter to provide the committee with a list of accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency and any other Russia-linked accounts that it had removed and examples of any posts from these accounts which were linked to the United Kingdom.

 

 

The parliamentarian also criticized Twitter by saying that journalists and academics had so far provided more information about activities on the social network than the company itself. The parliamentarian also set January 15 as a deadline for Twitter to provide the relevant information at his request.

READ MORE: RT Editor-in-Chief Glad There Are Concerns in US Over Interpretation of FARA

Facebook also faced criticism from Collins on Wednesday after the company said in response to his inquiry that a mere $0.97 was spent by Russia's Internet Research Agency on the referendum-related ads. Google, which has also been asked for input in the probe, said it had found no evidence of Russian interference.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201712151060020469-uk-russia-brexit-meddl...

 

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an error on the side of the bus...

The end of the post-Brexit transition period will see Britain's weekly contribution to the EU increase to 438 mln pounds (about $604 mln US), according to UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.

In an exclusive interview with The Guardian, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said that the Brexit campaign' claim that the UK's contribution to the EU budget would remain 350 mln pounds ($482 mln) per week was an underestimate.

"There was an error on the side of the bus. We grossly underestimated the sum over which we would be able to take back control," he pointed out.

The Vote Leave campaign members, including Johnson himself, had earlier used a bus emblazoned with the slogan: "We send the EU £350 million a week — let's fund our NHS (National Health Service) instead." Johnson was harshly criticized for spearheading the campaign.

READ MORE: UK Foreign Minister Johnson Sees No Trace of Russia's Influence on Brexit

The Foreign Secretary noted that Britain's weekly contribution to the EU already stands at 362 million pounds ($499 mln) and would increase to 438 million pounds (about 604 mln dollars) by 2021, the last year of an expected post-Brexit transition period.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201801161060781255-uk-johnson-vote-leave-...

the UK ruling class creates rubbish...

As the UK political establishment rips itself to pieces over Brexit, a far greater crisis continues to afflict millions of victims of Tory austerity.

A devastating UN report into poverty in the UK provides incontrovertible evidence that the enemy of the British people is the very ruling class that has gone out of its way these past few years to convince them it is Russia.

Professor Philip Alston, in his capacity as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, spent two weeks touring the United Kingdom. He did so investigating the impact of eight years of one of the most extreme austerity programs among advanced G20 economies in response to the 2008 financial crash and subsequent global recession.

What he found was evidence of a systematic, wilful, concerted and brutal economic war unleashed by the country's right-wing Tory establishment against the poorest and most vulnerable section of British society – upending the lives of millions of people who were not responsible for the aforementioned financial crash and recession but who have been forced to pay the price.

From the report's introduction:

"It…seems patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty. This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see the immense growth in foodbanks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep despair that leads even the Government to appoint a Minister for Suicide Prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard of levels of loneliness and isolation."

Though as a citizen of the UK I respectfully beg to differ with the professor's claim that such social and economic carnage seems "contrary to British values," (on the contrary it is entirely in keeping with the values of the country's Tory establishment, an establishment for whom the dehumanization of the poor and working class is central to its ideology), the point he makes about it being "obvious to anyone who opens their eyes," is well made.

For it is now the case that in every town and city centre in Britain, it is impossible to walk in any direction for more than a minute before coming across homeless people begging in the street. And the fact that some 13,000 of them are former soldiers, casualties of the country's various military adventures in recent years, undertaken in service to Washington, exposes the pious platitudes peddled by politicians and the government as reverence for the troops and their 'sacrifice,' as insincere garbage.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/444375-uk-un-extreme-poverty/

 

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the sad truth...

 

The sad truth about Russian election interference

 

by Robby Mook, a CNN political commentator — Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign manager.

New filings by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on Friday provided fresh clues about where the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is headed. Mueller’s filing said President Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, was contacted in 2015 by a “Russian national” seeking “synergy” between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. The special counsel’s team also said Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, lied about meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the U.S. government has linked to Russian intelligence.

The Mueller filings made news, of course. But how much has what we know about Trump and Russia really changed since 2016? Not as much as you might think.

On the Friday before the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, Russian agents released, through WikiLeaks, thousands of emails stolen from the DNC. The timing caused maximum harm at a critical moment in the Democratic contest. As campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, I appeared two days later on two Sunday political talk shows, ready for an avalanche of questions about the emails, which I got. But rather than focusing on the content of the documents, I thought it was important to discuss why they were released in the first place.

“Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” I told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “The Lead.” I wasn’t offering my opinion; I was stating what cybersecurity experts had determined.

Weeks before the emails’ release, the Russian connection was already clear: The Post article that on June 14 broke the news of the DNC hack said in its headline that “Russian government hackers” were the culprits. Vice News’s Motherboard reported two days later that some of the technology used to process the stolen documents employed Russian language settings, and one username referred to the first head of Soviet intelligence.

The affinity between Trump and the Russian government by that point was already so apparent that Politico Magazine’s May/June issue had run a lengthy article referring to him as “The Kremlin’s Candidate.” Also in May, Trump had named Paul Manafort as his campaign chairman. Manafort had been a lobbyist and consultant for pro-Vladi­mir Putin Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, before Yanukovych’s ouster in a 2014 coup, and an adviser to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

At the Republican National Convention in mid-July, the Trump campaign, seemingly out of the blue, had twisted arms to make the GOP platform more Putin-friendly. Unusually, the convention was attended by the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Earlier that month, Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page had given a speech in Moscow criticizing the United States for its “often hypocritical focus on democratization” and praising the Putin regime.

We knew all of this at the Democratic National Convention. And yet when I and other members of the campaign repeated that Russia was responsible for the hack and was doing this to help Donald Trump, many in the press seemed skeptical, treating the assertion as mere spin. A lot of people appeared to believe that the idea of Russia helping Trump was far-fetched. Even some of our staunchest supporters seemed to think I might have lost my marbles.

Election Day was long gone before Russia’s interference in the campaign — and the possibility of the Kremlin’s coordination with agents of the Trump campaign — was widely accepted. Even today, some people still muse about whether the Trump political operation could have been in contact with culprits of the DNC hack. Yet longtime Trump associate Roger Stone said repeatedly in 2016 that he had been communicating with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Lately, Stone has denied being in touch with Assange, and last week Stone’s lawyer informed the Senate Judiciary Committee that his client would invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to testify in the committee’s Russia investigation.

Obviously, much more evidence about Russia’s interference has come out since 2016. But I’m not sure we’ve learned the bigger lesson: Why did it take two years and dozens of indictments for so many to believe that Russia was not only behind the DNC hack but may also have been in cahoots with the Trump campaign, when there was so much evidence at the time?

It’s as if something needs to be secret or hidden to truly matter. If it’s sealed in a courtroom, it must be a bombshell, but if it’s out in the open, it’s just not as serious.

Trump will not be the last of his kind. The next time so much evidence about a candidate is sitting out in plain view, let’s hope it gets a good look before Americans cast their votes.

 

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-sad-truth-about-russian-election-interference-is-that-we-knew-about-it-before-election-day/2018/12/09/

 

The sad truth is that Robby Mook is still peddling (and "believing" — he could not still believe this, could he?) that "the experts" said that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump..." 

Under no circumstances have the experts explained how such Russian state actors broke into the DNC servers — nor really why. The same "experts" are the one who sold us (not to me) the "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" mantra. It is useful for the narrative that Russia is bad. But there is about 99.9 % chances that the emails came from someone disenchanted with the DNC doing some dirty dealing to sink Bernie. A simple check of the then servers of the DNC would have sorted this out quick-smart but if I remember correctly the DNC did not want the FBI to investigate the servers.

Assange categorically said he did not get the info from the Russians. One could say that the Russians got the info and then passed it on to some other parties till it reached Assange. But Assange is smarter than the average hacker. He would know by the type of encryption where these came from. 

In fact the sad thing is that Robby Mook is still deluded about the value of these emails. Of course they were damaging. Not the release of the emails, but the content thereof which the public was entitled to know about. 

 

The sad truth is both Trump and Clinton were/are/will be liars. The Russians have nothing to do with that — and Putin would have known that any of them would do the dirty on him — and Russia in general. 

The sad thing is that the Russians did not help Trump be elected. Hillary did by being flippant and deceitful. Mr Murdoch did. The evangelicals did. The colleges of voters did. The undemocratic election system in America did. Moronic America did.

 

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no crime so far in that steamy pile...

 

By Peter Van Buren

 

A baby born when Robert Mueller started his investigation would be talking by now. But would she have anything to say?

We last looked at what Mueller had publicly—and what he didn’t have—some 10 months ago, and I remained skeptical that the Trump campaign had in any way colluded with Russia. It’s worth another look now, but first let’s give away the ending (spoiler alert!): there is still no real evidence of, well, much of anything significant about Russiagate. One thing that is clear is that the investigation seems to be ending. Mueller’s office has reportedly even told various defense lawyers that it is “tying up loose ends.” The moment to wrap things up is politically right as well: the Democrats will soon take control of the House; time to hand this all off to them.

Ten months ago the big news was Paul Manafort flipped; that seems to have turned out to be mostly a bust, as we know now he lied like a rug to the Feds and cooperated with the Trump defense team as some sort of mole inside Mueller’s investigation (a heavily-redacted memo about Manafort’s lies, released by Mueller on Friday, adds no significant new details to the Russiagate narrative.) 

George Papadopoulos has already been in and out of jail—all of two weeks— for his sideshow role. Michael Avenatti is now a woman beater who is just figuring out he’s washed up. Stormy Daniels owes Trump over $300,000 in fees after losing to him in court. There still is no pee tape. And if you don’t recall how unimportant Carter Page and Richard Gates turned out to be (or even who they are), well, there is your assessment of all the hysterical commentary that accompanied them a few headlines ago.

The big reveal of the Michael Flynn sentencing memo on Tuesday was that he will likely do no prison time. Everything of substance in the memo was redacted, so there is little insight available. If you insist on speculation, try this: it’s hard to believe that something really big and bad happened such that Flynn knew about it but still wasn’t worth punishing for it, and now, a year after he started cooperating with the government, still nobody has heard anything about whatever the big deal is. So chances are the redactions focus on foreign lobbying in the U.S.

This week’s Key to Everything is Michael Cohen, the guy who lied out of self-interest for Trump until last week when we learned he is also willing to lie, er, testify against Trump out of self-interest. If you take his most recent statements at face value, the sum is the failed negotiations to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, which went on a few months longer than was originally stated, and that we all knew about already.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York submitted a sentencing memo Friday for Cohen, recommending 42 months in jail. In a separate filing, Mueller made no term recommendation but praised Cohen for his “significant efforts to assist the special counsel’s office.” The memos reveal no new information.

Call it sleazy if you want, but looking into a real estate deal is neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor, even if it’s in Russia. Conspiracy law requires an agreement to commit a crime, not just the media declaiming that “Cohen was communicating directly with the Kremlin!” Talking about meeting Russian persons is not a crime, nor is meeting with them.

The takeaway that this was all about influence shopping by the Russkies falls flat. If Putin sought to ensnare Trump, why didn’t he find a way for the deal to actually go through? Mueller has to be able to prove actual crimes by the president, not just twist our underclothes into weekly conspiratorial knots. For fun, look here at the creative writingneeded to even suggest anything illegal. That doesn’t sound like Trump’s on thin ice with hot shoes.

Sigh. It is useful at this point of binge-watching the Mueller mini-series to go back to the beginning.

The primordial ooze for all things Russiagate is less-than-complete intelligence alleging that hackers, linked to the Russian government, stole emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016. The details have never been released, no U.S. law enforcement agency has ever seen the server or scene of the crime, and Mueller’s dramatic indictments of said hackers, released as Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, will never be heard of again, or challenged in court, as none of his defendants will ever leave Russia. Meanwhile, despite contemporaneous denials of the same, is it somehow now accepted knowledge that the emails (and Facebook ads!) had some unproven major effect on the election.

The origin story for everything else, that Trump is beholden to Putin for favors granted or via blackmail, is opposition research purchased by the Democrats and carried out by an MI6 operative with complex connections into American intelligence, the salacious Steele Dossier. The FBI, under a Democratic-controlled Justice Department, then sought warrants to spy on the nominated GOP candidate for president based on evidence paid for by his opponent.

Yet the real spark was the media, inflamed by Democrats, searching for why Trump won (because it can’t be anything to do with Hillary, and “all white people and the Electoral College are racists” just doesn’t hold up). Their position was and is that Trump must have done something wrong, and Robert Mueller, despitehelping squash a Bush-era money-laundering probe, lying about the Iraq War, and flubbing the post-9/11 anthrax investigation, has been resurrected with Jedi superpowers to find it. It might be collusion with Russia or Wikileaks, or a pee tape, or taxes, packaged as hard news but reading like Game of Thrones plot speculation. None of this is journalism to be proud of, and it underlies everything Mueller is supposedly trying to achieve.

As the New York Times said in a rare moment of candor, “From the day the Mueller investigation began, opponents of the president have hungered for that report, or an indictment waiting just around the corner, as the source text for an incantation to whisk Mr. Trump out of office and set everything back to normal again.”

The core problem—at least that we know of—is that Mueller hasn’t found a crime connected with Russiagate that someone working for Trump might have committed. His investigation to date hasn’t been a search for the guilty party—Colonel Mustard in the library—so much as a search for an actual crime, some crime, any crime. Yet all he’s uncovered so far are some old financial misdealings by Manafort and chums, payoffs to Trump’s mistresses that are not in themselvesillegal (despite what prosecutors simply assert in the Cohen sentencing report, someone will have to prove to a jury the money was from campaign funds and the transactions were “for the purpose of influencing” federal elections, not  simply “protecting his family from shame”), and a bunch of people lying about unrelated matters.

And that’s the giveaway to Muller’s final report. There was no base crime as the starting point of the investigation. With Watergate, there was the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters. With Russiagate you had…Trump winning the election. (Remember too that the FBI concluded forever ago that the DNC hack crime was done by the Russians, no Mueller needed.)

Almost everything Mueller has, the perjury and lying cases, are crimes he created through the process of investigating. He’s Schroeder’s Box: the infractions only exist when he tries to look at them. Mueller created most of his booked charges by asking questions he already knew the answers to, hoping his witness would lie and commit new crimes literally in front of him. Nobody should be proud of lying, but it seems a helluva way to contest a completed election as Trump enters the third year of his term.

Mueller’s end product, his report, will most likely claim that a lot of unsavory things went on. But it seems increasingly unlikely that he’ll have any evidence Trump worked with Russia to win the election, let alone that Trump is now under Putin’s control. If Mueller had a smoking gun, we’d be watching impeachment hearings by now.

Instead, Mueller will end up concluding that some people may have sort of maybe tried to interfere with an investigation into what turned out to be nothing, another “crime” that exists only because there was an investigation to trigger it. He’ll dump that steaming pile of legal ambiguity into the lap of the Democratic House to hold hearings on from now until global warming claims the city of Benghazi and returns it to the sea. That or the 2020 election, whichever comes first.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan.

 

 

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mueller's crime...

Conspiracy theory buff Jerome Corsi has sued Robert Mueller and a handful of federal agencies for allegedly attempting to blackmail him into lying about being a middle man between Wikileaks and the Trump campaign.

Corsi, the former Washington bureau chief of Alex Jones’ controversial site, InfoWars, filed a lawsuit on Sunday which claims that special counsel Robert Mueller threatened him with prison unless he agreed to falsely confess to being a liaison between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Republican political strategist Roger Stone, who was an adviser to Trump's presidential campaign.

The suit, which seeks $100 million in actual damages and $250 million in punitive damages, also accuses the FBI, CIA and NSA of having placed Corsi under illegal surveillance “at the direction of Mueller.”

The illegal surveillance and blackmail operation, the suit alleges, aimed to bring about a “legal coup d'etat” which would challenge Trump’s legitimate electoral victory.

Corsi became a person of interest in Mueller’s probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin after it emerged that he sent an email alerting Stone that Wikileaks planned to release emails stolen from John Podesta – two months before the secrets-leaking site did so.

In November reports emerged that Corsi was negotiating a plea deal with Mueller, but a deal appears to have never been reached. Last week, Corsi filed a formal complaint with the Justice Department alleging prosecutorial misconduct by Mueller and his team.

President Trump has repeatedly called the Mueller probe a “witch hunt” instigated by Democrats.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/446081-corsi-sues-mueller-wikileaks-trump/

 

 

 

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If this information is correct, then the Mueller inquiry is worth many millions of dollars for two and a half rabbit's farts... This is not even "entrapment". It's plain blackmail and dishonest stupidity put together.