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Ghost of J. Edgar Haunts Flynn Investigation

By Coleen Rowley – Consortium News – May 18, 2020

In this time of unprecedented political polarization, it’s disappointing but not surprising to see the Justice Department’s recent request to dismiss its prosecution of retired General Michael Flynn causing yet another media firestorm to swirl around Attorney General William Barr.

Obama Administration former officials, like the hyperventilating authors of this New York Times’ op-ed, “The Appalling Damage of Dropping the Michael Flynn Case,” go so far as to claim that dropping the case “embeds into official U.S. policy a shockingly extremist view of law enforcement as the enemy of the American people.”

In stark contrast, other former FBI agents, myself included, are appalled at Bureau and other “national security” officials’ numerous suspicious departures from standard FBI/Department of Justice policies that have finally been brought to light, marking this most bizarre investigation aimed at “get(ting) Flynn to lie.”

Flynn was asked to “a friendly chat” with the FBI on Jan. 24, 2017, for which he was told he would not need a lawyer present. The interview was part of the FBI’s Russiagate investigation, a purported scandal that has now all but totally collapsed.

The agents wanted to speak with him about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the then Russian ambassador to the U.S., while Flynn was on the Trump transition team as incoming national security advisor. Having already read the transcripts of those intercepted conversations there was nothing the agents could learn from Flynn.

According to FBI administrative notes released earlier this month, an official identified in the press as Bill Priestap, then assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, asked whether the only aim of the upcoming interview with Flynn was to get him to lie about his conversations with Kislyak. “Our goal is to determine if Mike Flynn is going to tell the truth about his relationship with Russians,” said Priestap in a hand-written note. But Priestap was having second thoughts.

“I agreed yesterday that we shouldn’t show Flynn [REDACTED] if he didn’t admit,” he wrote, the redaction presumably meaning the transcript of Flynn’s calls with Kislyak. “I thought about it last night, and I believe we should rethink this. What is our goal? Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?… Protect our institution by not playing games.”

Flynn was indeed formally charged with lying to an FBI agent and on Dec. 1, 2017 pled guilty after Russiagate Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly threatened to prosecute his son. Flynn was fired by Donald Trump after Flynn lied to the vice president about the conversations with Kislyak.

Kislyak. (Flickr)

In those conversations, Flynn asked that the Russians not retaliate for the Obama administration sanctions on Moscow imposed for the now debunked Russiagate allegations. Russia eventually decided not to retaliate. Flynn also asked on behalf of Israel that the Russians veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning illegal Israeli West Bank settlements, which Obama was planning to abstain on. Russia refused this request.

Upon release of the FBI documents this month, Flynn sought to undo his guilty plea and last week the Justice Department dropped the case. The judge, however, has not yet agreed and has asked for expert opinion.

Law Rarely Used

Many former FBI agents will probably recall being instructed in FBI training school (as I was) that Title 18 US Code 1001 (lying to an FBI agent) is mainly to caution a suspect not to lie, in order to get him or her to tell the truth to further an investigation.”

We were taught (and later learned by experience) that, for a lot of reasons, violation of this provision of “lying to the FBI” would almost never be prosecuted, especially if it was the sole “crime” committed. One reason for this was, at least in my law enforcement experience, that many, if not most, people who are embarrassed to be suspected of wrongdoing, do lie, or at least partially fudge the truth during initial interviews, as it’s a natural ego-defense.

So “getting” someone to lie, if that’s “the goal” (as admitted in the released FBI administrative notes on the Flynn case), is actually very easy. If the green light is now on to use T 18 USC 1001 law in this manner, the sky’s the limit. The FBI could lock up the world. In one of the released emails, FBI attorney Lisa Page shows how rare prosecution under 1001 is by writing:

“I have a question for you. Could the admonition re 1001 be given at the beginning of the interview? Or does it have to come following a statement which agents believe to be false? Does the policy speak to that? (I feel bad that I don’t know this but I don’t remember ever having to do this! Plus I’ve only charged it once in the context of lying to a probation officer.)”

‘Rewriting’ the 302

Peter Strzok during congressional hearing in July 2018.

Fired FBI Agent Peter Strzok, a zealous Russiagater who took part in the Flynn interview, and (his paramour) Page, appear in the Flynn case to have run roughshod over basic FBI legal policy by heavily editing the 302  form of the interview, as aptly detailed by retired supervisory agent Thomas Baker and other FBI agents. While Strzok asked Flynn the questions, his partner at the interview, Agent Joe Pientka, took the notes, which Strzok and Page, who wasn’t present, edited, according to released text messages between them.

The rules drilled into new agents are about the need to take verbatim notes, to be timely in documenting an interview on the FD-302 form for use in court, and to disallow edits by supervisors or attorneys who weren’t even present at an interview. These policies—all flouted in the Flynn case—were developed and designed to ensure accuracy during the Hoover era, long before tape recording equipment existed.

302s Only

Hoover’s FBI power was such that the Bureau could usually successfully insist, under federal rules of evidence and trial discovery, that only the final, polished FD-302 interview form would ever be handed over and made public at a trial.

The FBI and DOJ would always fight tooth and nail against “open file discovery,” claiming that other rough investigative and “administrative” documents in a file were not “relevant” and could therefore be kept hidden from the defense at trial.

It wasn’t until a few years after Hoover’s death that courts stopped FBI agents from destroying their contemporaneous interview notes and made the “1A envelope” preserved notes discoverable so that defense attorneys could check to see how closely the content of an agent’s FD-302 transcription conformed to his/her contemporaneous notes.

But the art of transcribing from rough notes in one’s own words what a suspect or defendant said does inherently allow even the most conscientious investigators some leeway, enabling the final 302 court document to be not as accurate as an actual recording of the interview.

In a conspiratorial “ends justify the means” situation that Strzok and Page believed themselves to be operating in, or in the case of any hell-bent, prosecution-focused, overzealous rogue agent(s), the old-fashioned FD-302 Hoover way is, and always was, susceptible to outright abuse.

(It may be appropriate to note that similar over-zealousness to benefit trial prosecutors was long practiced in the FBI laboratory until a top FBI agent-scientist and whistleblower blew the lid off related abuse that allowed FBI managers to rewrite and “strengthen” scientific results obtained by the agents who actually performed the forensic laboratory tests and analysis.)

Hoover. (Flickr)

Anyway, that’s why most other state and local law enforcement agencies in the country went (and/or were forced to go) to tape recording of confessions and other important interviews in the 1980’s to 1990’s. However the FBI bureaucracy long resisted the move to recording devices.

Over the decades, as voice and video recording equipment became more and more prevalent and easy to use, defense attorneys and even judges started to hammer FBI agents about why they continued their old-fashioned reliance on individual agents’ note-taking abilities and memories.

Nevertheless, for nearly 40 years FBI directors and special agents in charge (SACs) would continue arguing about the difficulty of using modern technology to record interrogations and interviews. They always contended (at least in internal arguments, but never publicly admitted on a witness stand) that allowing agents to testify and tell juries what a defendant said could always be relied upon as more successful for the prosecution than allowing a jury to hear a tape or video recording of exactly what a defendant said.

It was well known and even proudly pointed out internally that in “he said-she said” disputes, a jury would always tend to believe the FBI agent over a defendant.

The Flynn 302 fiasco illustrates how FBI managers recognized what an advantage the final “written in your own words” 302 is when it’s declared to be the only relevant document (no “administrative documents,” early drafts, etc. need ever be handed over in discovery) when juries will almost always believe the FBI agent over a defendant. It is rare for administrative documents to become public, as they have in the Flynn case.

Of course if Strzok and his fellow FBI agent had asked Flynn for his consent to be tape recorded, Flynn would have undoubtedly quickly realized this was not a friendly interview by agents attempting to actually gain counter-intelligence about Russia.

Not Material

That brings up a whole n’other problem with the Flynn case that again harkens back to Hoover and his pre-Church Committee abuses.

Barr and (former FBI agent, now U.S. Attorney) Jeffrey Jensen concluded, after reviewing the complete file, that Flynn’s “lying to the FBI” was not “material” to a bonafide matter under FBI jurisdiction, but merely predicated upon the entirely specious “Russiagate” counter-intelligence investigation of Flynn that Strzok and Page deliberately kept open on a technicality, even after the FBI ordered it closed because there was no reasonable basis to believe Flynn had ever colluded with the Russian government.

The Flynn case furnishes a sterling example of the post 9-11 “war on terror” having demolished the “wall” that separates intelligence gathering from criminal investigation.

While fraught with problems and contradictory DOJ guidance, the “wall” had existed for a valid reason after Church Committee discovery of abuses under Hoover et. al. who so easily used “national security” and “counter-intelligence” as a pretext to surveil, investigate and use COINTELPRO “disrupt and dismantle” activities to go after America’s national leaders, allowing a way around 4th Amendment protections.

Robert Mueller giving testimony on July 24, 2019. (C-Span screenshot)

I and other former FBI agents believe the egregious plotting to railroad Flynn and “get him to lie,” requires dismissal of these charges. A number of additional significant problems with the Flynn investigation and prosecution are enumerated by attorney and award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald in his excellent 1 ¾ hour-long detailed expose at The Intercept and by Scott Ritter, who focuses on “why innocent people plead guilty given plea bargaining” abuses in our justice “system.”  Neither Greenwald, Ritter nor I happen to be fans of Flynn or Trump. But wrong is wrong.

It’s hardly extremist to realize that FBI and other law enforcement officials have, over the years, made terrible mistakes, and in some cases, engaged in outright wrongful conduct, sometimes in rogue operations and other times more systemically.

I will venture to say that FBI “entrapment” type actions in manufacturing crimes, as was practiced on Flynn, got its early start as a more normalized standard procedure after 9-11 with Robert Mueller’s FBI gravitating to using con-artist type informants to infiltrate Muslim communities in order to identify, coerce and entrap the more emotionally vulnerable members into committing acts that the FBI could take credit for as “preventing” terrorism.

The FBI found it increasingly difficult to prevent real terrorism spurred by successive administrations committing war crimes that killed so many foreign civilians.

Some FBI and other law enforcement wrongdoing has come to light, like the systemic torture operations perpetrated by certain Chicago police officials; the FBI’s decades-long tolerance for employing murderous mobsters as their “top echelon” informants; the Bureau’s spying on and attempted blackmail of Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders, as well as law enforcement’s racial profiling and wrongful shootings.

In all too rare instances, innocent people are exonerated. Rather than being happy that this bit of justice is finally happening in the Flynn case, however, Russiagate proponents and Democratic partisans seem especially incensed since the always-flimsy charges of Flynn’s “lying to the FBI” was about all Special Prosecutor Mueller’s probe could show for their nearly two-year long, $32 million dollar massive effort.

We should pay heed to Scott Ritter’s admonition:

“The Obama national security team abused its power by unmasking Flynn’s identity, then leaked Flynn’s identity to the press, using this press reporting to justify the continuance of a baseless counterintelligence investigation in order to set a perjury trap intended to place Flynn in legal jeopardy. This is not how American justice is supposed to be dispensed, and the fact that Flynn had to undergo this ordeal should send a shiver down every American’s spine, because if left unchecked, there but for the grace of God go us all.”

Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI special agent and division legal counsel whose May 2002 memo to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller exposed some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of TIME magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. Her 2003 letter to Robert Mueller in opposition to launching the Iraq War is archived in full text on the NYT and her 2013 op-ed entitled “Questions for the FBI Nominee“ was published on the day of James Comey’s confirmation hearing. Assigned to the Omaha, Jackson, MI, New York City field offices, and to the U.S. embassy in Paris, and consulate in Montreal, Rowley taught constitutional law to FBI agents in Minneapolis. 

May 19, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

A Plague From Harvard 

By Bill Willers | Dissident Voice | May 18, 2020

Practically speaking, government might do well to maintain a more vigorous countermisinformation establishment.

— Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule

In 2008, Harvard law professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule published “Conspiracy Theories” with the Social Services Research Network, and a year later in The Journal of Political Philosophy under the title “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures”. In time, the contents became known to a shocked public, because the authors, to summarize, recommended that citizen groups failing to believe official accounts of events should be covertly penetrated by governmental agents who would then work to bring opinion into line with that desired by the government. They called the strategy “cognitive infiltration” and wrote that “conspiracy theorists”, which they equated with “extremists”, suffer from “crippled epistemology”, “cognitive blunders”, even forms of mental illness. To make contact in order to rehabilitate disillusioned citizens, the authors suggested that “Government agents … might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories.” Sunstein, ironically, lists an area of particular interest as “constitutional law”.

While the Harvard professors attempt to wax expert in the area of mass psychology (an odd place for legal scholars to dwell), their principle concern, rather than theories in general, were those surrounding 9/11, with readers assured: “Our focus throughout is on false conspiracy theories, not true ones.” This indicates that their article was an attempt to depict the government’s official explanations of events on 9/11 as beyond doubt, when , in fact, they have been, on many fronts, shown to be false. By the time the article was written, experts from myriad disciplines had already been spotlighting the many physical impossibilities throughout the official account, these including several books by theologian David Ray Griffin. It is not plausible that the authors could have been unaware of such a considerable body of investigation.

Because of their focus on 9/11, one must conclude that it was the single most important element prompting the article by Sunstein and Vermeule. To strengthen their rejection of claims of governmental complicity regarding 9/11, the authors wrote: “But when the press is free, and when checks and balances are in force, government cannot easily keep its conspiracies hidden for long.” Given the extensive history of governmental deceptions that come to light only years later (e.g. here, here, here), one cannot accept such a level of claimed naïveté’ as anything but fake. In addition, it is of more than passing interest that in 2009, following publication of “Conspiracy Theories”, President Obama, an alumnus of Harvard Law, chose Sunstein to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs of OMB.

*****

Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

—  Jack Goldsmith, 2020

For Jack Goldsmith, Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard, maintaining social order and its “norms” overrules unwanted dissenting voices that are inevitable when free speech is unqualified, and it is presupposed that citizens may “sift and winnow” freely for truth. Goldsmith also invokes “Russia’s interference in the 2016 election”, a claim disproven, revealed as nothing more than a pop-gun of social media insertions that, beside the long history of U.S. interventions and “regime changes” (de facto invasions) reveal either rank hypocrisy or too high a level of ignorance for a prominent legal figure.

Goldsmith writes “These constitutional limits [i.e., the 1st and 4th Amendments] help explain why, since the Russian electoral interference, digital platforms have taken the lead in combatting all manner of unwanted speech on their networks—and, if anything, have increased their surveillance of our lives.” Ah, yes, he maintains, the U.S. Constitution interferes with government’s potential desire to invade privacy and to control mass freedom of expression, so we’re fortunate that, for out own good, Silicon Valley giants identify and block “misinformation”. Furthermore, he adds, “[T]he government has been in the shadows of these developments, nudging them along and exploiting them when it can.” How true, and how convenient it is that Silicon Valley serves as an indirect means for evasion by government of the 1st and 4th Amendments.

While Facebook and Twitter censorship “policies” are subject to change, governmental-private sector “collaboration” is a constant. And as Goldsmith assures us, “Facebook relies on fact-checking organizations and ‘authorities’ (from the World Health Organization to the governments of U.S. states) to ascertain which content to downgrade or remove.” Governments to validate censorship? Really! Moreover, the WHO has lost trustworthiness, as its funding has shifted from nation states to private sources, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in particular, with its deep ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

*****

Many children are taught to believe in God. I came to believe in the power of systems analysis.

— Lawrence Summers

Currency should be becoming technologically obsolete.

— Kenneth Rogoff

Harvard Professor then President of Harvard, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Clinton Administration and later Director of Obama’s Economic Council, Lawrence Summers has been, and continues to be, a guiding light at the center of the economic system that has brought us to our present condition. If anyone would qualify as the face of the globalist’s deregulated “free market” pushing for the privatization of everything, of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that, since 1933, had protected depositors from high-risk investment/gambling practices of too-big-to-fail banks, of the protection from regulation of convoluted derivative “instruments”, it would be Summers.

More recently, Summers and fellow Harvard economics professor Kenneth Rogoff, have been promoting a reduction of “anonymous” (Rogoff’s usage) cash in society. In 2016 Summers authored a Washington Post article favoring “killing” the $100 bill, and in the same year, Rogoff published a book, The Curse of Cash. For both, the argument begins with the concept of phasing out large denomination bills on the basis that they are favored forms used in money laundering, tax-evasion and criminal activities such as drug running. Rogoff also complains that cash “handcuffs” central banks, and that without large bills bankers would be able take negative interest rates as low as 4 or 5% should they desire to force spending. As savings accounts are cropped, savers would be forced to spend. It would no longer be a matter of personal choice, but that’s OK with systems analysts.

But the ultimate goal was stated bluntly by, ironically, Steve Forbes:  “The real reason for this war on cash — start with the big bills and then work your way down — is an ugly power grab by Big Government.” And all signs point to exactly that. Summers was a chief economist of the World Bank, and Rogoff was a chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. That Rogoff’s above quote regarding the removal of physical money from society is indeed the ultimate goal was made clear by IMF Director Christine LaGarde in her 2018 “Winds of Change” speech, in which she presented the plan for a new digital currency, stating specifically that it would not be anonymous. Why not? “Doing so would be a bonanza for criminals.”

Well, it would also be a bonanza for government, however tyrannical it might become. It would create a dystopia in which all exchanges can be — and most certainly would be — made a part of one’s digital dossier. When physical money is no longer available (now it is being depicted as a spreader of germs), all exchange would be electronic, and that would render the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution null and void. Privacy would be a thing of the past. The inevitable result would be a self-editing citizenry, fearful of having access to life’s necessities cut off. Any individual that might become an irritant to government could simply have digital access to money snuffed. This is not wild speculation; it has happened.

*****

The totalitarian legal and economic philosophy emanating from Harvard’s upper strata is based on a coldly analytic efficiency requiring a regimentation that is at odds with the autonomous (and anonymous!), even creative, democratic chaos of a free society. This is not a trivial matter, because Harvard students graduate into high positions that await them throughout government and media. Becoming aware of their abundance in the halls of power and communication is eye-opening, and when you start adding the graduates of Yale and other Ivy League schools, you have to conclude that the Ivys, socially and politically connected as they are, run the show. All members of the U.S. Supreme Court were associated with either Harvard or Yale — as student or faculty — as were all four Presidents from 1989 to 2016. And when you look at a rundown of principals at America’s “newspapers of record”, the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s a clear picture of Ivy League dominance.

This, per individual, is not in itself a negative. But considered together, it reeks of intellectual incest. In 2014, Yale professor William Deresiewicz wrote “Excellent Sheep“, a searing indictment of Ivy education which he described as perpetuating the prestige and affluence of a privileged elite. Students, which he found generally to be intellectually incurious and conformist (“content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them”), are educated to be leaders while actually becoming isolated from the very society they are supposed to lead. And because, with elite diplomas in hand, they actually do make their ways into positions of real influence, they carry with them the entrenched sclerotic values of an old guard that is an element of a globalist initiative dedicated to resisting opposing interests.

Bill Willers is an emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He is founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land, and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press. He can be contacted at willers@uwosh.edu.

May 18, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Dr. Judy Mikovits: Truth about her Arrest and the One Issue Media can’t “Debunk”

Ben Swann | May 15, 2020

One on One w/Dr. Judy Mikovits:

May 17, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Operation Warp Speed vaccine czar oversaw infamously BOTCHED vaccine for swine flu

By Helen Buyniski | RT | May 16, 2020

US President Donald Trump’s bid to rush a coronavirus jab to market by the end of 2020 has worried some Americans, even before he named it “Operation Warp Speed” and appointed the developer of a failed swine flu vaccine to run it.

Nearly a third of Americans might refuse a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, according to a poll conducted earlier this month by Civic Science. The percentage has likely gone up since then, as the 2,900 respondents to that survey gave their answers before Trump announced on Friday that the 12-to-18-month timeline for vaccine development – already unheard-of in the pharmaceutical industry – would be stepped up with an eye toward rolling out a shot by the end of the year.

It’s not just the shockingly abbreviated timetable that has Americans worried about their safety regarding the proposed vaccine – the head of the initiative already has one botched jab under his belt, and he’s invested (literally) in several of the vaccine candidates under development.

GlaxoSmithKline vaccine chairman Moncef Slaoui was appointed by Trump on Thursday to run the task force his administration is calling Operation Warp Speed. Slaoui spent 30 years with GSK, which is one of dozens of pharmaceutical companies working on a vaccine; he’s also earned close to half a million dollars as a director of Moderna, currently tapped as one of the leading candidates in the vaccine race. Watchdog groups like Public Citizen have already raised alarms about his conflicts of interest, but that’s the least of his problems.

As chief of vaccines at GSK, Slaoui oversaw the development of the disastrous Pandemrix vaccine for swine flu, a shot that was rushed to market without proper testing in the midst of a 2009 epidemic, during which public health officials were shrieking about enormous death tolls that never materialized, with some claiming the death toll would rival the 1918 influenza pandemic (sound familiar?).

The result of the hasty approval process was an unsafe, ineffective shot that left over a thousand recipients permanently brain-damaged, some 80 percent of them children. Forty percent of NHS staffers were vaccinated under false pretenses, told the shot was safe and effective. The UK government was forced to pay out millions of pounds in compensation, as GSK had refused to supply the drug to governments until it was indemnified against lawsuits.

Pandemrix was never approved for use in the US, and it’s possible Trump is unaware his vaccine czar was involved in the sordid debacle. However, the US has had a similar policy of indemnifying vaccine manufacturers in place since 1986, meaning any damage caused by an unsafe coronavirus vaccine will come out of Uncle Sam’s pocket.

GSK’s checkered past isn’t exactly a secret stateside. The firm had the dubious distinction of paying out in 2012 what was the largest fine ever paid by a pharmaceutical firm, after admitting to what the Justice Department called “the biggest healthcare fraud in history,” shelling out $3 billion as punishment for, among other things, concealing the deadly side effects of its diabetes drug Avandia.

Of course, GSK is hardly the only drug company cutting corners. Moderna, the favorite to “win” Operation Warp Speed, has never brought a vaccine to market before, and the mRNA vaccine it is developing is a type that’s never been approved for use in humans. Worse, the company is actually skipping animal trials completely, with its chief medical officer Tal Zaks insisting that he didn’t think the intermediate step – carried out to avoid subjecting humans to unnecessary harm – was necessary.

Several other companies are also skipping animal trials in their rush to cross the finish line first and score what is likely to be a very lucrative contract to vaccinate seven billion people – that’s at least in the words of Bill Gates, who despite a lack of public health credentials has an apparent leverage at the World Health Organization through sheer financial muscle.

However, even the most jab-happy scientists have cautioned against rushing a coronavirus shot to market. Tropical disease specialist Peter Hotez, who worked on a shelved vaccine for SARS – another coronavirus – testified before Congress that the SARS vaccine effort ended badly for the experimental animals. Many fell victim to a condition called “immune enhancement” in which they developed a severe and often fatal version of the disease they’d just been vaccinated against when exposed to the virus anew.

“I understand the importance of accelerating timelines for vaccines in general, but from everything I know, this is not the vaccine to be doing it with,” Hotez told Reuters in March. The “record” for vaccine development is four years, he said, advising against rolling out any vaccine without monitoring for adverse effects for at least a year.

Mainstream media presents “vaccine hesitancy” as the province of science-hating conspiracy theorists. But while many vaccines are life-saving, it’s not difficult to understand those Americans who are willing to wait for a proven safe jab instead of jumping on board Trump’s Operation Warp Speed express. With the current record-breaking pace of testing, it may not be long before we learn which of the vax poll respondents are the wisest (and the healthiest).

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

May 17, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | | Leave a comment

FBI no longer trusted? ODNI says spies will take over US election security briefings

RT | May 15, 2020

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has reassigned the job of counter-intelligence briefings to US political campaigns and candidates from the FBI, presumably over the misconduct during the 2016 election.

Going forward, all intelligence-based threat briefings to “candidates, campaigns and political organizations” will be provided by the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, the acting head of ODNI Richard Grenell announced on Friday.

The announcement went almost unnoticed in Washington until pointed out by filmmaker Mike Cernovich, who said it amounted to “a polite way of saying that the FBI is no longer trusted.”

Donald Trump Junior confirmed that interpretation, saying that the FBI and other institutions has been “corrupted at the top and need a thorough cleaning before they gain back the trust Americans once bestowed upon them.”

The change is but the latest reform Grenell has pushed through at the ODNI since he took over as acting chief in February. It follows last week’s revelations that the FBI sought to entrap President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn after the 2016 election, first getting him fired from the White House and then improperly prosecuted for perjury.

Previously, the DOJ inspector-general found that the FBI sought to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016 while using counterintelligence “defensive briefings” as cover, and obtained four FISA warrants to do so based mainly on the fraudulent “pee tape” dossier compiled by British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

At the time, the FBI, CIA and the ODNI provided fuel and cover for Democrat accusations that Trump had “colluded” with Russia to win the election, which have since been shown as entirely unfounded.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security will still work with the intelligence community to “identify and integrate threat information,” but the task of briefing candidates and campaigns will be entrusted to NCSC Director Bill Evanina, overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate earlier this month.

Evanina “will act swiftly to deliver the timely and thorough assessments to those affected by potential malicious influence,” the ODNI said, describing the change as an “important improvement and simplification” of the current process.

Congressman John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) has been nominated to take over as permanent ODNI director, but his Senate confirmation is still pending.

May 15, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Senate Foreign Relations Committee to vote on $38 billion package to Israel

Prime Minister Netanyahu meeting with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez in January 2014. (Jerusalem Post )
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | May 15, 2020

While millions of Americans are out of work due to the coronavirus, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is poised to vote for a 10-year package to give Israel $38 billion.

The vote was scheduled for Wednesday May 14th, but the committee meeting was postponed. Phone calls and emails to the committee asking when the vote will be taken have not been returned. (There don’t appear to have been any public announcements or media reports that the vote had been scheduled.)

The legislation is a top priority for AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee),

The bipartisan bill – S.3176 – was introduced by an Israel lobby favorite, Marco Rubio (R-FL). It is cosponsored by 19 Republicans and 18 Democrats, despite the fact that Israel has a long record of human rights  violations.

A related bipartisan bill was passed by the House of Representatives on July 23, 2019, H.R.1837. The House suspended the rules and passed the bill with a voice vote. The House bill was introduced by another Israel lobby favorite, Rep Ted. Deutch (D-FL-22), and has 150 Republican cosponsors and 142 Democratic cosponsors.

U.S. media have largely failed to tell Americans about this legislation.

Voters wishing to give their opinion on the legislation can reach the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by phoning the Capitol switchboard (202-225-3121) and asking for each Senator by name. An operator will connect callers to the Senator’s office, where they can leave a message.

The AIPAC website features a video of an AIPAC official describing their work to procure aid for Israel even during a time of financial devastation to the US:

May 15, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel Perfecting Surveillance Tech

Leave it to the Mossad and Shin Bet to profit militarily and financially from virus

By Philip Giraldi | American Free Press | May 11, 2020

Israel’s external spy organization Mossad and its internal espionage equivalent Shin Bet have reputations that are much larger than their actual successes, but the one area where they have excelled is electronic intelligence gathering. Recent electronic spying around the White House and other federal buildings in Washington carried out by the Israeli Embassy demonstrates that Israel does not differentiate much between friends and enemies when it conducts espionage. In fact, spying targeting the U.S. is probably its number one priority due to the fact that the Jewish state is so heavily dependent on American support that it feels compelled to learn what discussions relating to it are taking place behind closed doors.

Israeli penetration of U.S. telecommunications began in the 1990s, when American companies like AT&T and Verizon, the chief conduits of the National Security Agency (NSA) for communications surveillance, began to use Israeli-produced hardware, particularly for law enforcement-related surveillance and clandestine recording. The devices had a so-called back door, which meant that everything they did was shared with Israel. Israeli cyber-specialists even broke into classified networks with the NSA and FBI aware of what was going on but unwilling to confront “America’s best ally.” President Bill Clinton once quipped to Monica Lewinski that they should avoid using the Oval Office phone because someone might be listening in. He was referring to Israel.

To be sure, the Jewish state’s high-tech sector has been much assisted in its effort by “own goals” provided by the United States, which allows Israel to bid on government contracts relating to national security, virtually guaranteeing that any technical innovations will be stolen and re-exported by Israeli high-tech companies. Major technology innovators like Intel, which works with the NSA, have set up shop in Israel and have publicly stated, “We think of ourselves as an Israeli company as much as a U.S. company.” Vulture capitalist Zionist billionaire Paul Singer has recently been accused of steering highly paid U.S. tech sector jobs to Israel, jobs that are lost to the American economy forever.

So, Israel is a leader in using electronic resources to carry out espionage and collect information on various targets of interest. Israel is also an innovator, and its close relationship with the U.S. intelligence community (IC), most particularly the NSA, means that technologies and procedures developed by the Jewish state will inevitably show up in America.

The U.S. is in any event working hard on its own tools for managing the public, spurred by Covid-19 hysteria. Special ID cards could help track the health status of individuals. This status would be recorded and updated on a chip readable by government scanners that, by some accounts, might be either carried or even permanently embedded in everyone’s body. Another plan being promoted in a joint venture by Apple and Google that appears to have White House support involves “add[ing] technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19. People must opt into the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population” with monitoring done by central computers. Once the legal principle is established that phones can be manipulated to do what is now an “illegal search,” there are no technical or practical limits to what other tasks could also be performed.

DEVELOPMENTS IN ISRAEL

With those steps being taken to control the movements of possibly infected citizens in mind, some recent developments in Israel are, to put it mildly, ominous. The Jewish state is currently achieving multi-level 24/7 surveillance of everyone residing in the country conducted in real time. Investigative reporter and peace activist Richard Silverstein describes in some detail why it is happening now, what it means, and how it works.

Per Silverstein, Israel, like every other authoritarian state, is currently taking advantage of the distraction caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political fortunes seemed to be on the wane due to three hung elections, exploited the fear of the virus to assume emergency powers and obtain Knesset approval to use a highly classified national database “compiled by the Shin Bet and comprising private personal data on every Israeli citizen, both Jewish and Palestinian. In the aftermath of 9/11, Israel’s Knesset secretly assigned its domestic intelligence agency the task of creating the database, which was ostensibly meant as a counterterrorism measure.”

The database, nicknamed “The Tool,” includes names, addresses, phone numbers, employment, and educational information but it goes well beyond that in using phone tracking data to record every phone call made by the individual to include names and numbers of those called and the geo-location of where the call was made from. Phone tracking also enabled Shin Bet to create a log of where the caller traveled in Israel and the occupied territories. Internet use, if active on the phone, was also recorded. It is as complete and total surveillance of an individual as is possible to obtain and it does not involve any human participation at all, every bit of it being done by computer.

Netanyahu publicly proclaimed his intention to use the database, stating that it would be employed to combat the coronavirus, which he described as a threat to national survival. As a result of the claimed crisis, he and his principal opponent, Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz, were able to come to terms on April 20 to form a “national emergency unity government” with Netanyahu as prime minister yet again. The exploitation of the fear of the virus plus that revelation about Israel’s powerful technical tool to thwart it produced a victory for Netanyahu, who effectively portrayed himself as a strong and indispensable leader, erasing the stigma resulting from his pending trial on charges of massive corruption while in office. One of the first steps Netanyahu will reportedly take is to replace the attorney general and state prosecutor who were seeking to send him to prison, effectively taking away the threat that he might go to prison.

The exposure of the existence of the database inevitably led to charges that Netanyahu had, for personal gain, revealed Israel’s most powerful counterterrorism weapon. There were also concerns about the significance of the huge body of personal information collected by Shin Bet, to include suggestions that it constituted a gross violation of civil liberties. But carefully stoked fear of the virus combined with some political deals and maneuvers meant that use of the data was eventually approved by the Knesset security committee at the end of March.

Israel, which has closed its borders, and which still has a relatively low level of coronavirus infections and deaths, has already started using the Shin Bet database while also turning the attempts to deal with the disease as something like an intelligence war. The information obtained from “The Tool” enables the police and military to determine if someone were standing near someone else for more than a few minutes. If the contact included someone already infected, all parties are placed under quarantine. Any attempt to evade controls leads to arrest and punishment of a six-month prison term plus a $1,500 fine. Armed soldiers patrolling the streets are empowered to question anyone who is out and about.

Mossad is also involved in fighting the virus, boasting of having “stolen” 100,000 face masks and also respirators from a neighboring country presumed to be the United Arab Emirates. Silverstein observes that “Israel’s far-right government has militarized the contagion. Just as a hammer never met a nail it didn’t want to pound, it is only natural for a national security state like Israel to see Covid-19 as a security threat just as much or more than a health threat.” And when it comes to bioweapons, Israel is no parvenu. Ironically, the hidden story behind the “war on the coronavirus” is that Israel is itself one of the most advanced states in developing and testing biological weapons at its lab at Nes Tziona.

Returning to the emergence of “The Tool,” hardline Defense Minister Naftali Bennett has also suggested monetizing the product by selling a “civilian version of it,” to include its operating system, analytic capabilities, and setup details to foreign countries, including the United States. Israel has already successfully marketed to security agencies and governments a similar product called Pegasus, which has been described as the most sophisticated malware on the market.

Like The Tool, Pegasus does data mining and real-time analysis of individuals based on a range of collection techniques. The Israeli cyber company NSO Group that markets Pegasus was recently involved in an attempt to hack Facebook-owned secure communications system Whats-App, targeting journalists and political activists, on behalf of an unknown client. Ironically, it is believed that Facebook had earlier used NSO Group’s somewhat shadowy services. Perhaps more notoriously, Pegasus was also used to monitor contacts and establish physical location in the case of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi intelligence agents in Istanbul.

So, Americans should beware when confronted by the new cyber-security software being promoted by Israel because the Jewish state is also exporting its own vision of a centrally controlled militarized state where all rights are potentially sacrificed for security. As whistleblower Edward Snowden has already revealed, the NSA has the capability to collect vast amounts of information on citizens. If the United States government falls for the bait and moves in the Israeli direction, using that data to enable the surveillance and manage all the people all the time, the temptation will be great to employ the new capability even if its use is not strictly speaking warranted.

And there will be no one there to say nay to the new powers, not in Congress, on the Supreme Court or in the White House. And the media will be on board, too, arguing that security against external and internal threats requires some infringements of individual rights. It is one of the ironies of history that the United States of America, with its vast resources, large population and legacy of individual freedom, has been becoming more like its tiny militarized client state Israel. It is a tendency that must be resisted at all costs by every American who cares about fundamental liberties.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

May 14, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption | , , , | Leave a comment

Does Trump know his own government indirectly bankrolls some key promoters of the ‘Russiagate’ hoax?

By Bryan MacDonald | RT | May 13, 2020

US President Donald Trump was elected on a promise to “drain the swamp.” Almost four years later, the Washington think-tank racket is as murky as ever, and the gravy train keeps rolling.

The false ‘Trump/Russia collusion’ narrative has been dead for so long now that it’s hard to remember what killed it, whether it was the Mueller Report or simply death by a thousand cuts.

Here is what we know: ‘Russiagate’ was a giant scam, and many of those who promoted it knowingly lied for a considerable length of time. Their aim was either to undermine Trump’s presidency or prevent any improvement in US relations with Russia.

Most of the journalists who facilitated the hoax also knew it was nonsense. But their loathing of Trump – and in some cases Russia, too – trumped ethical considerations. Thus, much of the general public was, for years, fed a diet of grifters and washed-up old spooks pushing a scam.

Funded by the government

The crazy thing is that many of its chief architects work for Washington think tanks funded by the US government. Given Trump has taken no obvious steps to curtail public funding for these lobby groups, it means the president’s own cabinet has been effectively bankrolling activists who are out to smear and destroy him.

Take Evelyn Farkas. A rabidly anti-Russia official in Barack Obama’s government, she was subsequently looked after with a gig at NATO’s Atlantic Council adjunct. This has become a traditional route in DC. When one party loses power, its apparatchiks are placed in a sort of think-tank racket cryonics chamber from which they can be reanimated in future, if their own tribe gets back into the White House.

Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, told MSNBC TV in 2017 that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election.

But, as Townhall reports, “during an interview with the House Intelligence Committee in June 2017, where she was under oath, she admitted she didn’t have any information about collusion during that interview.”

As its correspondent Katie Pavlich points out, “through dozens of House Intelligence Committee transcripts and after a lengthy Special Counsel investigation, it was clear from the beginning ‘Russian collusion’ with the Trump campaign was a made-up talking point that was used as a political weapon.”

Farkas’ involvement fits a pattern. Her dad came from an elite Hungarian family who had their status diluted after the Soviets installed a communist government in Budapest following World War Two. Farkas’ background is important, because US media ignores how many of the people who pushed the ‘Trump-Russia’ hoax come from East European migrant families with an axe to grind against ‘the Russians’.

‘Stolen’ emails

The idea that Russia stole emails from the Democratic National Congress (DNC) was based on information from CrowdStrike. This cybersecurity firm was the source of the allegation that Russian intelligence agencies had hacked the DNC’s servers. You may remember the ‘Fancy Bear’ and ‘Cozy Bear’ narrative which was popularised by US media at the time.

CrowdStrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch was born in Moscow and moved to the US with his family at the age of 14. Like Farkas, he is also attached to the Atlantic Council, and his first published involvement with the pro-NATO pressure group was in 2012.

Back in 2016, he was lionised by mainstream US media, with Esquire, for instance, saying he was “our special forces (and Putin’s worst nightmare)” and “leading the fight to protect America.”

It has now emerged that the following year, his partner at CrowdStrike Shawn Henry told Congress – in closed-door testimony, previously buried – that CrowdStrike had “no concrete evidence that the data was exfiltrated from the DNC.”

In other words, as journalist Aaron Mate has pointed out, “CrowdStrike, the very firm behind the accusation that Russia hacked & stole DNC emails, admitted to Congress that it has no direct evidence Russia actually stole (or) exfiltrated the emails.”

Pushing the hoax

Of course, promoting ‘Russiagate’ wasn’t limited to the immigrant community. The likes of Bill Kristol, Michael McFaul, John Podesta and Clint Watts are all connected to the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS), another DC lobby group which receives US government funding.

Watts was front and centre in pushing the hoax, while McFaul was at one point ubiquitous on cable news shows waffling on about Russia helping Trump to win the 2016 election. Podesta, meanwhile, alleged his emails were hacked by Russia while he was chair of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign.

The GMFUS receives over $1 million annually from both the US State Department and USAID. Meanwhile, the Atlantic Council gets between $500,000 and $999,000 a year from the same State Department and $100,000 to $249,000 from each of the US Air Force Academy and the US Department of Defence.

Which means Trump’s government is partially funding the people who tried to destroy his presidency, based on a falsehood obvious to honest observers from the very start. So much for the US president’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp.”

Bryan MacDonald is an Irish journalist based in Russia. He has written for RT since 2014. Before moving to Russia, Bryan worked for The Irish Independent, the Evening Herald, Ireland on Sunday, and The Irish Daily Mail. Follow him on Twitter @27khv

May 14, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Flynn ‘unmasking’ documents show involvement of senior Obama administration officials, including Joe Biden

RT | May 13, 2020

A newly published list of US officials who were interested in National Security Agency (NSA) records on Trump adviser Michael Flynn includes President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, as well as Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden is listed as requesting the unmasking on January 12, 2017, the same day the Washington Post published a story claiming that Flynn had misreported his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, based on leaked NSA information.

Flynn unmasking documents f… by RT America on Scribd

Yet on Tuesday, Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he “knew nothing” about the investigation of Flynn, and accused the Trump administration of using the former adviser’s case as a “diversion” from the Covid-19 pandemic.

The unmasking log was provided by the NSA to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last week, and sent by the Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Richard Grenell to two senators who requested it, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), who published it on Wednesday.

In addition to Biden, the document shows that then-DNI James Clapper made three unmasking requests about Flynn, CIA Director John Brennan made two, and FBI Director James Comey made one.

Biden’s campaign reacted at first by lashing out against the CBS reporter who published the documents, with his rapid response director Andrew Bates calling Catherine Herridge “a partisan, rightwing hack who is a regular conduit for conservative media manipulation ploys.”

Bates later removed the tweet and issued a follow-up, calling the unmasking perfectly normal behavior by US officials concerned “over intelligence reports of Michael Flynn’s attempts to undermine ongoing American national security policy.”

The documents show Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff at the time, made an unmasking request on January 5 – the very day Obama met with all the intelligence principals, and a day after FBI agent Peter Strzok intervened to keep the case on Flynn open despite the lack of any “derogatory” evidence. Strzok would later be sent by Comey to interview Flynn and edit the notes of that interview (the “302”) to imply Flynn had lied to him, resulting in the former general’s prosecution by special counsel Robert Mueller.

What the documents also show is that the Obama administration’s interest in what the NSA might have on Flynn began soon after the November 2016 election, with then-US envoy to the UN Samantha Power filing an unmasking request on November 30. She filed six more after that, the last dated January 11, 2017.

Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak about US sanctions against Russia was on December 29, 2016, after Obama suddenly announced the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats and seizure of two diplomatic properties, citing Moscow’s alleged “meddling” in the presidential election.

Evidence that only recently emerged in the Flynn case showed that the leadership of the FBI and the Department of Justice sought to interview him using the pretext of the Logan Act, an 18th-century law which has never been used to prosecute anyone, and did not apply in this instance since Flynn was not a private citizen, but an official of the incoming administration conducting routine business during the presidential transition. This new evidence led the DOJ to announce last week it was dropping all charges against Flynn.

Between the manufactured pretext to go after Flynn and the prior revelation that four FISA warrants used to spy on the Trump campaign via adviser Carter Page had been entirely based on the discredited ‘Steele dossier’, the Trump administration has argued that they were unfairly targeted by its predecessor in what amounted to an illegal coup.

May 14, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘The Biggest Political Crime’: Does Obamagate Mean Treason, Sedition or Both?

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 13.05.2020

On Sunday, President Donald Trump lashed out at his predecessor Barack Obama on Twitter accusing him of “the biggest political crime in American history” and calling it “Obamagate”. Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel has explained what the president may have meant and why former Obama officials should prepare themselves for a political storm.

Donald Trump’s ire came on the heels of Obama’s leaked conference call in which the ex-president lambasted the DOJ’s decision to drop charges against ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Commenting on the audio leak released by Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff on Friday, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said that Obama “should’ve kept his mouth shut”: “I think it’s a little bit classless, frankly, to critique an administration that comes after you”, the senator said.

‘The Biggest Political Crime in American History’

By accusing Obama of “the biggest crime” President Trump may have alluded to either treason or sedition or both, described in 18 US Code Chapter 115, suggests Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel.

“With many months behind them, and ample resources, John Durham and others likely have found solid evidence that Barack Obama violated his oath of office numerous ways, and subsequently attempted to overthrow the results of the 2016 election”, the analyst believes.

Echoing Ortel’s assumption, Flynn’s defence attorney Sidney Powell presumed that President Obama was in on a plot to ‘frame’ Michael Flynn during her interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures”.

“The whole thing was orchestrated and set up within the FBI, [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, [Former CIA Director John] Brennan, and in the Oval Office meeting that day with President Obama,” Powell noted.

Having said that “Powell is a brilliant, honest lawyer who does homework assiduously and well” the Wall Street analyst does not rule out that the defence attorney has evidence supporting her assertion.

“I believe that Michael Flynn, appointed by Obama, grew to protest many reckless foreign policies, having access to damaging classified information that most of us have not seen and may never see”, Ortel says. “Flynn’s refusal to stand down after being fired in 2014, and his stubbornness infuriated Obama, suggesting that Flynn may hold secrets that Obama cannot have revealed. In short, Barack Obama is scared because he should be scared”.

Obama Distorts Facts While Speaking About Flynn’s “Crime”

Speaking to the 3,000-member Obama Alumni Association the former president highlighted: “There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free”. However, Obama was immediately called out by The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for making a grave mistake.

“Mr. Flynn was never charged with perjury, which is lying under oath in a legal proceeding. Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI in a meeting at the White House on 24 January 2017 that he was led to believe was a friendly chat among colleagues”, the editorial board stressed.

While one can only guess whether intentionally or unintentionally Obama distorted the facts, he and many his supporters “hold the public in contempt, sure that most who follow politics never call politicians out for their lies and for their misdeeds”, Ortel remarks.

The Trump administration seems determined to get to the bottom of the outgoing Obama administration’s role in targeting Trump campaign aides, according to the Wall Street analyst.

Thus, acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has recently declassified a list of former Obama administration officials involved in the “unmasking” of Michael Flynn in his talks with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, according to ABC News. The list – which was apparently delivered to AG William Barr – is believed to be “much larger than anything involving Flynn”.

“Unmasking (exposing the names of Americans who are associated with targets of counter-intelligence investigations) is a serious potential offence, especially when the investigation in question is launched on spurious pretences”, Ortel explains. “What we are likely soon to find is that many Obama co-conspirators obstructed investigations that were opened or should have been opened, and then rigged or attempted to rig elections inside and outside the United States”.

Republicans Pushing for Further Declassifications

Having expressing gratitude to the DNI Grenell and AG Barr for their effort “to bring transparency to the Russian investigation”, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley requested even more materials to be declassified, including:

·         the transcript of Flynn-Kislyak conversation;

·         the Susan Rice memo about the 5 January 2017 meeting between President Obama, Vice President Biden, FBI Director James Comey, and Deputy AG Yates on the Russian investigation;

·         the mysteriously missing original transcript of Flynn-FBI interview (302) authored by agent Joe Pientka.

“The underlying records to the Flynn case and Russia investigation are more important than ever”, Grassley insisted in his 12 May letter. “Congress, and most importantly the public, must fully understand the wrongdoing that occurred so that it is never repeated”.

According to Ortel, the revelations are likely to have a domino effect and may even affect “major allied nations including Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia”, which presumably played a role in the “Spygate” scandal.

“Fearing consequences of a Trump victory, Obamagate co-conspirators manufactured hoaxes to turn eyes away from their own massive crimes”, the analyst says. “Soon we may learn how many fair critics of Obama and of unregulated globalism were illegally targeted and harmed by the Obama presidency”.

Although the mainstream left-leaning media have denounced “Obamagate” as Trump’s “favourite distraction tactics”, it seems that very soon many people, especially Barack Obama and the Clintons, will found themselves between a rock and a hard place, the Wall Street analyst believes.

May 13, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Spygate: Why Did Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama Seem So Determined to Impede and Topple Trump?

By Ekaterina Blinova | Sputnik | May 12, 2020

US Attorney John Durham who is currently conducting an investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe should take a look at a role played by Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation in sparking and fanning the Russiagate scandal, says Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel.

The newly released House Intelligence Committee’s transcripts shed some more light on Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor who apparently told then Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos in March 2016 that Moscow had “damning” Hillary Clinton emails. According to one of the transcripts, Mifsud was heard bragging he was a member of the Clinton Foundation.

​Additionally, in a November 2017 interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica the Maltese professor also admitted that he was in the organisation: “I am a member of the European Council on Foreign relations and you know which is the only foundation I am member of? The Clinton Foundation”. At the same time, Mifsud flatly denied that he had told Papadopoulos about the Clinton emails.

Mifsud & Downer Both Tied to Clinton Foundation

The exposure has prompted a lively debate among social media users, who recollected that following the controversial conversation with Mifsud, Papadopoulos had a drink with the Australian high commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer, also known for his ties with the Clinton Foundation.

​Following this historic meeting Downer approached the FBI to inform the bureau – in a breach of diplomatic protocols – that Papadopoulos somehow knew that the Russians “had dirt” on Hillary Clinton. This information became the trigger for launching the Crossfire Hurricane op against the Trump campaign on 31 July 2016.

“Mifsud was a small donor according to notoriously unreliable and materially false disclosures on the Clinton Foundation website”, says Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst who has been looking into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud for several years. “I suspect he may have been involved with the ‘Clinton Global Initiative’, a forum where Clinton supporters (for the most part) interacted with connected globalists, in theory to promote smart giving, but in practice to advance substantial for-profit activities”.

Ortel expresses hope that US Attorney John Durham and his team appointed by AG William Barr to investigate the origins of Crossfire Hurricane operation “will examine Mifsud and every person and project claimed in particular by CGI, which seems to have been a forum where money traded for influence while hiding in plain sight”.

Former Australian diplomat and politician Downer seems to be a bigger fish, according to the analyst.

“As Australia’s foreign minister, Downer channeled millions of his taxpayers’ money towards international projects in the name of ‘Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative’ (and similar sounding variants) as well as ‘Clinton Climate Initiative’ starting in 2006”, Ortel elaborates. “None of these entities lawfully existed. And there has never been a proper accounting for these grants. Moreover, Downer and Australia signed multiple agreements with Bill Clinton and Ira Magaziner who held themselves out to be lawfully appointed representatives of the Clinton Foundation when they never were”.

According to the Wall Street analyst “Downer had and has much to lose from a Trump victory, so it is not surprising that he has apparently played such an important role attempting to frame Donald J. Trump and others who threaten to expose and punish crony globalists”.

“From the day Hillary announced her second presidential run, she and her backers did all they could to rig the primaries and then the general election”, he says. “Downer’s known and suspected actions, like Mifsud’s are not surprising. They likely gained and thought they would gain more from another Clinton presidency”.

Clinton Knew That Her Campaign Funded Dirt Digging on Trump

Hillary Clinton had either direct or indirect ties with many participants of the Trump-Russia saga, including Mifsud and Downer who initially sparked the so-called Russiagate scandal and Fusion GPS, the firm behind the infamous anti-Trump “dirty” dossier which played a crucial role in “justifying” FBI surveillance operations against Trump aides.

Citing newly released testimonies, American investigative journalist John Solomon reported on 11 May, that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and Hillary Clinton had been aware that her campaign had funded opposition research and sought for dirt on Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election.

“I think she was – she knew that we had an opposition research staff in-house”, Podesta said in a testimony. “We, the campaign, directly purchased some opposition research… I think that I only learned subsequently that the payments were made through Perkins Coie, 50 percent from the campaign, 50 percent from the DNC”.

Ortel is not surprised that Hillary Clinton appears to be deeply involved in how the Trump-Russia investigation started. According to him, the roots of the “Clinton corruption run deep”, starting in Arkansas where Bill Clinton served as a governor and attorney general.

“Once the Clinton’s moved to the White House, the scale of their corrupt and suspicious activities expanded to the national and international stages”, the Wall Street analyst presumes. “From 1997 onwards, a key instrument in swapping cash for influence has been the network of Clinton ‘charities’ that has never been properly regulated anywhere”.

He suggests that if one wants to understand why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama seemed so “determined to impede or topple President Trump”, “Durham and his team must go back into history comparing sums that donors claim they sent towards the Clinton Foundation, with the Foundation’s public filings, submitted many places, under penalties of perjury”.

“Unlike the botched attempts to set perjury traps against Flynn and others, the Clinton Foundation public record, evident in plain sight includes multiple confessions of making false statements under oath”, the analyst highlights. May the long overdue indictments, prosecutions, convictions, fines and incarcerations soon begin”.

May 12, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

The ‘See-No-Evil’ Phase of Russiagate

By Patrick Lawrence | Consortium News | May 11, 2020

The long, destructive conspiracy theory known as Russiagate, the mother of them all, at last evaporates into thin air. No shred of it remains as of back-to-back disclosures over the past couple of weeks. Where does this leave us? What is to come of this momentous turn of events?

Among those not inclined toward hysteria or copious quaffs of Democratic Party Kool–Aid, it has long been a question how those who concocted and sustained the tales of Russian “meddling,” “collusion,” and mail hackery would manage their embarrassment — not to mention their potential legal liabilities — once their edifice-built-on-sand collapsed, as it was destined from the first to do.

The early signs are as some predicted: They will slither quietly off the stage without comment, they will deny their incessant, ever-vehement accusations, they will profess to weariness, they will insist there are more important things to think about now.

Here is a tweet from one Bob F published Saturday. Our Bob touches nearly all of the above-noted bases. His mentions of Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté, and Jimmy Dore reference two journalists and a talk-show host who identified the fraud from the first and had the scruples not to surrender to the liberal totalitarianism we have suffered these past three years:

Yes, Bob, lets. This is a brilliant specimen of the flaccid cowardice we’re now to witness many times over. Reassuringly enough, a modest twitter storm followed. Here is a reply from Kathy Woods, a consistently insightful commentator in Twitterland:

For good measure, here is another response to Big Bob, this one addressing his implicit assertion of Democratic Party virtue in the Age of Trump:

There is anger abroad as Russiagate finally unwinds, plainly. This is an excellent thing. And Ms. Woods is right: It is important to make the sun shine on what became, before the end, a scandal of historic proportions. There is a chance of achieving the “complete exposure” Woods asks for, but it remains a question, as of now, whether this will come to pass.

Two weeks ago the Justice Department made public documents showing that when, in January 2017, prosecutors wanted to close the collusion case against Michael Flynn, who briefly served as President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, because they found “no derogatory information” against him, Peter Strzok, the philandering F.B.I. agent later found to be shaping an “insurance policy” against a Trump victory in the 2016 election, cajoled them into keeping it open — absence of evidence be damned.

Two Other Developments

The Strzok revelations turned out to be prelude to the two other developments further demolishing the Russiagate narrative. Last Thursday Justice finally dropped its case against Flynn altogether. We now know he was the victim of a perjury trap when questioned about his contacts with Sergey Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington in 2016. “Get him to lie so we can prosecute him,” was the FBI’s directive.

Yet worse, Flynn’s guilty plea was in response to prosecutors’ threats to indict his son if he pled otherwise. Tell me the difference, please, between this kind of stuff and the treatment of the accused in the postwar show trials in Eastern Europe.

On the same day the Justice Department dropped the charges against Flynn, the House Intelligence Committee released documents showing that the FBI had no evidence that Russia pilfered the Democratic National Committee’s email archives by hacking into its servers in mid–2016. The FBI had none because CrowdStrike, the patently corrupt cyber-security firm on which it (inexplicably) relied, never gave it any: It had none, either — contrary to its many claims otherwise.

The taker of cake here is that the documents also show that the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by the inimitable (thank goodness) Adam Schiff, knew there were no grounds to allege Russian involvement in what wasn’t a hack by anyone, but a leak, probably by someone with direct access to the DNC’s servers.

My Consortium News colleague Ray McGovern has just detailed the collapse of the “Russians-hacked-it” ruse.

No evidence anywhere along the line of collusion, none of Russians stealing mail. There is a simpler way to put this: No Russiagate.

In truth, there has been evidence aplenty of the Russiagate fraud for some time, due in part to the researches of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, VIPS, of which McGovern is a principal. The problem has been to secure official acknowledgement of three years’ worth of wrongdoing. We now have it, even if it arrives with no admission whatsoever of responsibility.

Enter Perception Management 

Now come the lies, the dissembling, and the media’s “perception management.”  Tucker Carlson, the Fox News presenter, offered a funny-but-not-funny catalog of the liars who now stand exposed, none more thoroughly than the egregious Schiff, who ought to resign over this, and Evelyn Farkas, another Obama-era holdover with absolutely no regard for the truth. Loretta Lynch, Obama’s A–G, will also have things to answer for, assuming answers for her misconduct are required of her.

Among the press and broadcasters, it has been a spinfest this past week — led, naturally, by The New York Times, given no one in the media dares venture a syllable for which the Times has not signaled prior approval. The paper’s report on the dismissal of the Flynn case marked the judgment down as “the latest example of Attorney General William P. Barr’s efforts to chisel away at the results of the Russia investigation.” I lost count of the mentions of Flynn’s “lying” and “guilty plea” after nine. No reference to the perjury trap set for Flynn, or the threat to indict his son.

The Times ran two further pieces hatcheting Flynn and Barr in Saturday’s editions, here and here, and a straight-out character assassination of Flynn on Sunday, casting him as some kind of pathological split personality. The Gray Lady doth protest too much, in my view.

The press vastly over-invested in the Russiagate narrative from the first, and now appears set to throw yet more money after all the bad. This is not a good sign. It suggests that our troubled republic simply cannot accept its errors, leaving us unable to learn from them. This is why America in its post-democratic phase cannot self-correct. It is why we have no assurance that another Russiagate, in whatever form, will not be visited upon us.

“Attorney General William P. Barr’s efforts to chisel away at the results of the Russia investigation”? Absolutely. We have to hope he gets somewhere. Committed Russiagaters now take to charging that Barr is corrupting an otherwise snow-white Justice Department. Say what? Given all we now know, this starts to tip into the zone of black humor.

Barr and his investigators are fully armed as of last week. They have all they need to get to the bottom of this dark ocean. They have it in their power to bring to justice the three architects of the Russiagate scam when it was in motion — ex–C.I.A. Director John Brennan, ex–Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, ex–F.B.I. Director James Comey — for what amounted to an attempt to depose a president in a bloodless coup. These are the Democratic Party’s answer to former President Richard Nixon’s infamous “plumbers,” if you ask me.

Whether Barr and his investigators get the task done is to a great extent a matter of politics and bureaucratic warfare that will at best be partially visible to us in coming months. It is a question of how far he will be permitted to go.

Succeed or fail, the record is at least and at last straight.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” (Yale).

May 12, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

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