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How the ‘Twitter Files’ have exposed a senior FBI official’s role in manipulating the outcome of the 2020 US election

By Felix Livshitz | RT | December 9, 2022

Internal Twitter documents and communications published by the journalist Matt Taibbi have provided devastating detail on a sweeping censorship operation conducted by the social network. They expose the central role played by a senior FBI agent in potentially influencing the outcome of the 2020 US election.

Immediate reaction to the Twitter Files was mixed, but overwhelmingly the mainstream American media has rushed to pour cold water on Taibbi’s bombshell disclosures, with, for example, The Washington Post branding them a “dud” and CNN claiming they “largely corroborated what was already known.”

Such responses are quite extraordinary given that the Twitter Files offers incontrovertible evidence of one of the largest, most influential global social networks taking extraordinary measures – usually reserved to prevent the dissemination of child pornography – to block information on its platform.

In particular, Twitter banned, both publicly and privately, the sharing of a New York Post article, based on the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, pointing to possible corruption on the part of his father, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The report reinforced existing concerns about Hunter’s role with Burisma, for which he received up to $50,000 per month from the Ukrainian energy giant over a five-year period for attending a handful of corporate events.

The material exposed by Taibbi shows that a decision was made by individuals at the highest levels of Twitter – with direct connections to Biden’s Presidential campaign – due to apparent fears the laptop contents had been hacked and/or had been released as part of a Russian information operation. This was despite there being zero evidence or even a vague suggestion that either was the case, and significant internal concerns.

The Twitter Files show how, among the top brass involved in the suppression of this hugely significant story was the social network’s legal vice president Jim Baker, a former FBI general counsel. He was coincidentally also fundamental to the Bureau’s multiple attempts to fraudulently concoct a link between Trump’s campaign and Russia, one way or another.

It’s clear that many staffers didn’t believe there were grounds to ban the New York Post story on the basis of Twitter’s policies on sharing hacked materials. One communications department official wrote that they were “struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” while their superior fretted, “can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”

However, their legitimate worries were overruled. Twitter later reversed this ban but by that point the false specter of Russian meddling had been so successfully cemented – including via a joint letter signed by over 50 senior US spies – that the story was largely discredited in the eyes of many Americans and, thus, ignored. It is only now, with Biden safely in the White House, that other outlets have begun to verify the laptop’s contents as not only real, but damaging.

Baker was central to overruling subordinates about the basis for banning the story. In an email published by Taibbi, he announced it was “reasonable for us to assume that they may have been” hacked.

It is not explained why it was “reasonable” to make this assumption, especially as Baker himself acknowledged there were instead indications that “the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes.” Which is, of course, a total contradiction in terms. So the ban went ahead, despite internal concern about the decision.

“Hacking was the excuse but, within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold,” an anonymous Twitter source told Taibbi. “But no one had the guts to reverse it.”

One of the reasons Baker’s intervention may have cut through initial misgivings, and no staffers then had the “guts to reverse it,” could’ve been his status as resident Russian “disinformation” expert at Twitter. He left the FBI in June 2018 on undisclosed grounds, although it was later confirmed he was the subject of a criminal Justice Department investigation due to alleged leaking to the media of scurrilous innuendo about Trump’s non-existent relationship with the Kremlin at the time.

Questions were also asked about whether, as General Counsel, Baker played any role in greenlighting or overseeing various failed FBI counterintelligence investigations into Trump’s election team. Known as Crossfire Hurricane, these related probes were built on extremely shaky foundations, and led to no evidence supporting suspicions of Trump-Russia ties being unearthed, but still remained open under internal pressure, in contravention of established investigative protocols.

A subsequent internal review found 17 separate “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI’s court submissions for warrants that it applied for to spy on campaign staffer Carter Page.

More recently, Baker testified at the trial of Michael Sussmann, a well-connected Washington DC lawyer tied to the Democratic party. He was charged by Attorney General John Durham with lying to the FBI when he presented to the Bureau falsified evidence of contact between Trump Tower and Moscow via Russia’s Alfa Bank, in the summer of 2016.

Sussmann claimed he was not representing a client in doing so, when in reality he was acting on behalf of the Democrats, and billed them for the service. Baker would’ve known anyway that this cover story was a lie, as he and Sussmann were longtime friends, but he recorded the delivery as the uninterested, selfless act of a concerned citizen. Quite why he wasn’t charged for procedural misconduct is not known.

It’s also not known why such dealings didn’t torpedo his professional credibility upon leaving the Bureau. Departing an organization like the FBI under such a dark cloud would normally mean the end of someone’s career. Instead, Baker was snapped up by Twitter to be the right hand man of Vijaya Gadde, the company’s head of legal.

Throughout her time at the social network, she was derided as its censor-in-chief, and leaked documents reveal she regularly consulted with the Department of Homeland Security on how best to restrict inconvenient facts online. It’s understandable why Baker would be such an attractive hire for Gadde.

He was by that point clearly an expert in perpetuating false claims of “disinformation” and “Russian meddling” for political purposes, to tremendous effect. The Russiagate hoax almost took down President Trump, and meant his term in office was spent ramping up tensions with Moscow rather than improving relations as he’d repeatedly promised on the campaign trail.

It could have been calculated within Twitter HQ that Baker would be willing to play a similarly destructive role the next time round, and prevent Trump from getting re-elected in the first place. Helping suppress the damaging material facts contained in the New York Post may have done just that.

December 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Can Germany’s plan for confrontation with Russia work?

By Drago Bosnic | December 8, 2022

On November 14, Der Spiegel published a report according to which leaked documents of the German Ministry of Defense indicate that the Bundeswehr is preparing for a war with Russia. The secret draft titled “Operational guidelines for the Armed Forces” was authored by the German Chief of Defense Staff, General Eberhard Zorn. It was written in late September and according to General Zorn, “an attack on Germany can potentially happen without warning and can cause serious damage, even existential. Therefore, the defense capabilities of the Bundeswehr are essential for the survival of the country.” The German Chief of Defense Staff stressed the need for a “mega-reform” of the Bundeswehr, adding that “for approximately 30 years, the focus placed on missions abroad no longer does justice to the current situation, with possible consequences that endanger the system.”

Instead, General Zorn thinks it’s crucial for Germany to focus on “the Atlantic defense of the Alliance,” with the “capacity to provide visible and credible deterrence, to dominate Germany’s military action plan.” In this regard, specifically, “the Bundeswehr must arm itself for a forced war, since a potential confrontation on NATO’s eastern flank has once again become more probable.”

The draft clearly identified Russia as the “immediate threat”. However, the designation makes little sense, as Russia is now over 1,500 km away from Germany, with Belarus, Poland and Ukraine standing between the two countries. While it made some sense for Germany to maintain a large, highly trained military force with constant combat readiness during the (First) Cold War, as the USSR had approximately half a million soldiers in East Germany at the time (in addition to other Warsaw Pact member states), the situation is effectively reversed nowadays.

It’s precisely NATO that’s encroaching on Russia’s western borders, with the crawling expansion including coups and other interventions in various Eastern European and post-Soviet states. This aggression by the political West forced Moscow’s hand, culminating with the February 24 counteroffensive. However, the German plan has already been set in motion and no matter how ill-conceived it is, an analysis of how it could play out is in order. The plan certainly isn’t new, as it has been in the works for well over half a year. Back in early March, the German government announced it would allocate approximately €100 billion to upgrade the Bundeswehr, which has become a mere shadow of what it was during the heydays of the (First) Cold War.

The 2021 budget for Bundeswehr was approximately €50 billion. If Berlin was to increase that by close to 100%, it would put extreme pressure on the struggling German economy. Such a massive upsurge in military spending wouldn’t only take away from other branches of the government, but it would also come at a time when the sanctions boomerang from the failed economic siege of Russia is ravaging all of the European Union. The bloc hasn’t even begun recovery from the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s already facing severe economic contraction resulting from anti-Russian sanctions and policies. Much of Germany’s prosperity was based on access to cheap Russian energy, which is now a thing of the past thanks to Berlin’s suicidal subservience to “Euro-Atlantic values”.

In essence, this means that Germany is doomed to massively increase military spending while having significantly fewer resources at its disposal to do so. This doesn’t even factor in how the German people would react to such a momentous foreign (and, to a large extent, domestic) policy shift. As the EU’s largest and most important economy, Germany would also cause shockwaves throughout the bloc if it were to go ahead with such a plan. With Russian energy supplies either gone or effectively unaffordable, any government in power in Berlin would have virtually the entire German private sector against it, with the notable exception of the arms industry, which would be the only one not contracting thanks to increased orders for the Bundeswehr.

On the other hand, even this plan is bound to hit several major snags before it’s even put in motion. The US Military Industrial Complex dominates in NATO, making it the primary beneficiary of German (re)militarization. Domestic weapons production has atrophied significantly in the last 30 years, while the globalization of the world economy led to the rest of it being outsourced to other countries, both in Europe and elsewhere around the globe.

New reports indicate that Berlin’s decision to supply weapons and munitions to the Kiev regime is severely depleting German stockpiles, a problem further exacerbated by the significant slowdown of component imports from China. This is also the result of the German government’s self-destructive push for an economic decoupling of the EU and the Asian giant. Beijing has been extremely patient with the bloc’s subservience to Washington DC, but it seems this patience has now run out.

Another major issue will be the reaction of other EU members. With the notable exception of the clinically Russophobic Baltic states and Poland, the rest of the bloc is extremely concerned with the economic fallout of the failed sanctions war on Russia. As the German economy contracts, the rest of the EU will almost certainly follow suit, causing massive political instability.

At least half a dozen European governments have already fallen, while the neoliberal elites in Brussels are now forced to contend with new anti-liberal political parties in power in several EU member states. This is bound to cause further rifts within the bloc. It will be followed by the general militarization of the EU, which will further erode the already falling living standards and cause more political instability. This will turn Europe into an economically devastated bulwark that serves no other purpose except to contain Russia while the US shifts focus to the Asia-Pacific region.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

YouTube censors RT Balkans

RT | December 6, 2022

YouTube, the Google-owned video platform has blocked the channel of Belgrade-based RT Balkans. No explanation was given for Monday’s move, which came about three weeks after the launch of the Serbian-language outlet in a region saturated by Western media coverage.

RT Balkans reported the ban on Monday evening, pointing out that the most recent video posted on the channel was their interview with the Russian ambassador to Serbia, Aleksandr Botsan-Kharchenko.

“Why are owners of the Western media space so afraid of RT’s Serbian-language reporting?” the outlet asked. “Their move mainly speaks about the lack of media freedom in the West, especially since the posts on your YouTube channel in no way violated the company’s rules of conduct.”

The Serbian-language news site was launched on November 15, with plans to begin TV broadcasts by 2024. It was able to open a YouTube account and post content even though the Google-owned platform had previously banned all “Russian” media.

Enacted in March, the ban followed demands by the EU to block RT and Sputnik channels in the bloc’s territory. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in May, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki explained the platform had created a new policy regarding “verified violent events,” which puts “denial or trivialization” of the conflict in Ukraine in the same category as denying the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, YouTube continued to operate in Russia so that its citizens could have access to “independent news,” she said, adding that one of the lessons of the conflict in Ukraine is that “information can be weaponized.”

RT sued YouTube in May. In October, an arbitration court in Moscow ruled that video platform must unblock RT’s accounts or face a daily fine of 100,000 rubles ($1,694), doubling every week. The same court had frozen Google’s assets in Russia, valued at 500 million rubles ($8.4 million), to ensure the verdict could be enforced.

December 7, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Western price cap on Russian oil likely to be another spectacular failure

By Ahmed Adel | December 6, 2022

The price cap imposed by the West on oil from Russia will actually have negative consequences in the long term as it once again reaffirmed to the international community that Western-centric banking and shipping insurance schemes cannot be trusted as reliable partners.

Western oil sanctions went into effect on December 5, with the European Union stopping all shipments of Russian oil arriving by sea. In addition, the EU, as well as G7 countries and Australia, imposed a limit on the price of oil transported by sea at $60/barrel. The West expects that this will cripple the Russian economy and force Moscow to end its special military operation in Ukraine.

However, this will spectacularly fail.

Sanctions have not instigated an end to the military operation, and in fact they have forced financial mechanisms independent of western institutions to be established. Although the world economic system was already slowly heading towards de-Dollarisation, the anti-Russia sanctions have only sped up the process as important economic players like China, India and Egypt have found methods to bypass western sanctions.

It is recalled that Russia had previously introduced the Mir card system as an alternative to Western financial systems, despite there being a lot of scepticism about it. Now, Mir is being adopted all over the world, and the same can certainly be done in the shipping and shipping insurance industry.

The imposition of an oil price cap has made non-Western countries think about how to break free from Western payment systems and shipping channels. Many countries are already pre-emptively establishing these mechanisms to avoid the same teething problems that Russia has experienced since February 2022.

Washington warned the EU on December 1 that the $52 cited recently for Urals crude oil may not reflect the overall level at which Russian oil has been trading. An unnamed US official has said that Urals has been trading at a $17-$23 discount to crude, which would make it higher than the $52 cited by some media. It is for this reason that the EU set the oil price cap $8 above that cited figure.

For their part, Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania have all voiced their opinion that the price cap on Russian crude oil insured and shipped by Western companies should be set at Russia’s production cost – $20-$30 per barrel. Those levels were dismissed as having very little chance of being supported by other EU members.

The introduction of a price cap on Russian seaborne oil at $60 per barrel is already a risky strategy to begin with and has uncertain results. Therefore, the Polish-Baltic proposal was never going to be approved. Oil market participants were already fearing a $60 cap to begin with, forcing Biden administration officials trying to reassure that the newly agreed cap will not lead to supply disruptions and volatility in the price after it went into effect.

None-the-less, experts fear that “over-compliance” on the restrictions could affect pricing.

“One of the big potential issues is going to be over-compliance, intermediaries deciding that the risk is too great and not engaging,” said Adam M. Smith, a partner at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher and a former adviser at Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees sanctions. “Banks have historically been very risk-averse — as they should be — in the sanctions space and I think over-compliance in that context can be expected.”

Due to the price cap, many countries may stop any action for a while so that they can analyse all the risks, including decisions which could lead to sanctions from Western countries.

“That’s a real risk,” said Hunter Kornfeind, an oil market analyst at Rapidan Energy Group. “There could be a multi-week lull when some buyers are reluctant to move barrels as they wait and see. It’s not going to be like the whole trade shuts down, but there could be some who take a step back.”

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak pointed out that Russia will not export oil to countries that set price caps. According to him, such restrictions mean that by interfering with the market, Moscow will only interact with buyers willing to work under normal market conditions.

For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated that Moscow will not deliver anything abroad if it is against its interests. He warned that the introduction of oil price caps could have “grave consequences for global energy markets.”

Although the full impact of what the price cap is not yet known, the attempts to further financially and economically isolate Russia are likely to be another spectacular failure.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

December 6, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

US, EU Reportedly Lose Track of $200 Billion in ‘Frozen’ Russian Funds

Samizdat – 06.12.2022

Western countries froze a huge chunk of the Russian Central Bank’s emergency reserve cushion in February in a bid to punish Moscow for its military operation in Ukraine. Officials in Washington and Brussels have since vacillated as to whether these funds can be seized outright and given to Kiev as “reparations.”

The United States and its European allies are having trouble actually locating two thirds or more of the Russian assets they froze earlier this year “because they do not know where exactly they are,” Charles Lichfield, a senior finance expert at the Atlantic Council, has indicated.

Speaking to Estonian media, Lichfield, the deputy director of the Washington-based think tank’s GeoEconomics Center, and expert on Russia’s central banking system, said Western countries actually seized closer to $80-$100 billion, not $300 billion, as has been widely reported.

Lichfield explained that the “freeze” on Russian assets obligated foreign banks not to allow for their transfer back to Russia, on penalty of losing their ability to transact in dollars and euros. However, some Asian and African banks may not have felt the need to respond to requests for information from Western authorities regarding transactions involving Russia, he said.

The US Treasury triumphantly announced in June that Washington and its allies had blocked or frozen some $300 billion in Russian state assets, plus $30 billion worth of assets of sanctioned individuals, including Russian tycoons.

Last week, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen proposed creating a special structure to manage the assets and “invest them.”

However, EU officials specified to media that Brussels couldn’t simply seize the Russian assets to use them in Ukraine because the bloc adheres to the principle of state immunity.

In the US, officials have expressed similar hesitation. Last month, lawmakers proposed a provision in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act bill to allow for the transfer Russian assets to Ukraine, but the idea was met with opposition amid fears that the idea had not been “fully litigated.”

Russian officials have slammed the asset freeze as a form of “theft.”

The West’s actions have also prompted Chinese regulators and banks to brainstorm ways to keep their own assets stashed abroad safe if the US and its allies move against them in the way they have against Russia.

Russia’s frozen assets were previously estimated to constitute close to half of the country’s $640 billion reserve cushion. According to the Central Bank’s year-end report for 2021, the largest portion of its foreign currency and gold was stored in China (16.8 percent), followed by France (9.9 percent), Japan (9.3 percent), the United States (6.4 percent) Britain (5.1 percent), Canada (2.7 percent) and Australia (2.5 percent), with more than 51 percent thus located in states which have slapped sanctions on Moscow.

December 6, 2022 Posted by | Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Parent groups revolt over French power outage plan

RT | December 3, 2022

Closing schools to combat the energy crisis in France is unacceptable, French parents’ groups announced this week, after the government instructed regional authorities to brace for potential localized power outages.

Schools were not prioritized by planners in the event of limits to the energy supply network during the winter.

“Parents do not want school closures. We have seen the impact of closures on students,” Valerie Desouche, Deputy Secretary of the National Union of Autonomous Parents’ Associations (UNAAPE), told BFM TV on Thursday, referring to the lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She added that it was “unthinkable” not to treat schools as a priority during the energy crisis.

“We want schools to be open at all costs,” Desouche said. “We can’t put children’s education second.”

Vice President of the Federation of Parents for Public Education (PEEP) Laurent Zameczkowski also urged that schools be prioritized, saying “During the health crisis, we did everything to keep the schools open, and now the energy crisis will be the reason [to shut them down]?”

The group released a statement on Wednesday, arguing that “energy austerity cannot be done at the expense of the health and the future of students.”

According to France Info radio, the government plan entails potential outages between 8am and 1pm and between 6pm and 8pm that could last for up to two hours. Priority sites include hospitals, police stations and fire stations, but not schools, which could be forced to cancel some lessons.

“We are not saying that there are going to be power cuts, but that it is not impossible,” government spokesman Olivier Veran said on Thursday. France, together with many other European countries, has been looking for ways to conserve energy and been bracing for possible outages as Western states try to curb Russian oil and gas exports as part of sanctions over the Ukraine conflict.

December 3, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

OSCE nothing more than a branch of NATO

By Ahmed Adel | December 2, 2022

The West is attempting to turn the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) into a subsidiary organisation of NATO, which is paradoxical because it is meant to be concentrated on peacebuilding, unlike the Atlantic Alliance which fosters tensions to justify its existence in a post-Soviet world. It is for this reason, among others, why Poland refused to grant a visa to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, thus barring him from attending the OSCE meeting held on December 1 and 2 in Lodz.

Poland claims it refused to grant Lavrov a visa because he is on the list of people who have been sanctioned. However, this does not explain why many from the Russian delegation were also denied visas despite not being on a sanctions list.

This weak excuse is to justify Warsaw’s consistent policy of provocation against Moscow, especially in the context of the current war in Ukraine. Poland and the West are hoping that by humiliating Russia, the country will withdraw from the OSCE. The West are desperate for Russia to withdraw so as to be able to implement and impose whatever it wants on the OSCE.

It is recalled that Moscow very effectively blocked the 2022 OSCE budget. Without a Russian withdrawal, the West will not be able to put the OSCE under its complete control, something that should be avoided as it would undermine the very foundation of the organisation – serving as a platform where Western and Eastern Europe could discuss and resolve issues.

Rather, the OSCE today has turned into a political tool of the West and effectively has no meaning or role anymore. With the OSCE descending into childlike behaviour by barring Russian delegates and top diplomats, it does seem that the organisation has become redundant as it is appearing more like a Euro-focussed political wing of NATO.

The OSCE meeting in Poland was essentially a two-day event for speakers to bash Russia.

None-the-less, Moscow is unlikely to be deterred by these provocations and will remain committed to its responsibilities as an OSCE member. This is likely to ensure that paths of reconciliation are always open despite Western attempts to close them.

The Kremlin might also believe that the OSCE’s uptick in provocations is because Poland is the current chairman. Russian policymakers might also believe that tensions will relax when North Macedonia takes over the chairmanship in 2023. It could be for this reason that Lavrov called out Poland by highlighting that its “anti-chairmanship” was taking the OSCE to its “most miserable place ever in this organisation’s history.”

It can be argued though that the OSCE has always been geopolitically against Moscow. It is recalled that the American establishment boasted that they had inserted a Trojan horse into the Eastern Bloc with the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, the roots of today’s OSCE.

The Helsinki Accords stresses the respect for human rights and equal rights, a result of Western insistence because the Soviets were instead mostly interested in finalising Germany’s borders. The West is not interested in human rights though, and rather their main interest is ideological, economic and military hegemony all over the world, with human rights only being weaponised as one vehicle of achieving this goal.

Effectively, it can be argued that the OSCE was born as a trap for Moscow. When “security”, “cooperation” and “Europe” are in the name of the OSCE but it turns into an organisation completely dominated by promoting US interests, the argument is made that the organisation now resembles something like a branch of NATO.

Playing its own role in serving Western interests, Ukraine continues to call for Russia to be kicked out of the OSCE entirely, with Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba claiming in a tweet that the “OSCE is on a highway to hell because Russia abuses its rules and principles.”

“Everything has been tried in regards to Russia: to please, to appease, to be nice, to be neutral, to engage, not to call a spade a spade. The bottom line: It would be better for OSCE to carry on without Russia,” he added.

However, this is once again an example of Kiev’s classic projection of portraying their own illiberal values as that of Russia. In fact, it is Europe’s own unwillingness to “call a spade a spade,” such as whitewashing Ukraine’s fascistic policies and pretending it was a Western-styled liberal country, which ultimately led to war.

Proving that the OSCE is now nothing more than a branch of NATO, US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said, when speaking in Lodz, that Russia had “failed demonstrably to break the OSCE.”

If the OSCE is anything other than a branch of NATO, it must be questioned why the US Under Secretary of State was an honoured guest at a Europe-focussed and Europe-based organisation, which was initially established to connect Western and Eastern Europe together, while Russia’s top diplomat and other officials were barred.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

December 2, 2022 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Trump Says Justice Department is ‘Corrupt’

Samizdat – 27.11.2022

WASHINGTON – Former US President Donald Trump has accused the US Department of Justice (DOJ) of corruption and of making false allegations against him.

“The ‘Justice’ Department is CORRUPT. Offered Christopher Steele $1,000,000 to lie about me, paid Russian a fortune to ‘get Trump,’ told Facebook not to mention the Hunter Biden Laptop before the Election, ‘it was Russian disinformation,’ when they KNEW it was not,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday.

Last month, Trump said that the decision by a US jury to acquit Russian national Igor Danchenko on charges of lying to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) regarding the Trump-Russia collusion probe shows the disgraceful nature of the US justice system.

The case against Danchenko started last November, when he pleaded not guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about his role in the discredited “Steele Dossier” used to allege collusion between Trump and the Kremlin during the 2018 US presidential election.

The prosecution contended that Danchenko lied to the authorities about the sources of information given to former British spy Christopher Steele for the dossier on purported contacts between Trump and Russian officials. The indictment against Danchenko accused him of fabricating the information.

A Special Counsel investigation did not find any proof of collusion between Trump and Russia.

Senior FBI intelligence analyst Brian Auten testified in court in October that the FBI had offered $1 million to Steele to provide evidence to back his allegations.

November 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Milan Prosecutor Approves Extradition of Russian Governor’s Son to US

Samizdat – 26.11.2022

ROME – Milan prosecutor’s office submitted to the court a positive decision on the extradition of the son of Russian Krasnoyarsk Territory’s governor, Artem Uss, to the United States, the Il Giorno newspaper reported on Friday.

Artem Uss was arrested in Italy on a US warrant on October 17. Alongside four other Russian citizens, he was accused of money laundering and evasion of sanctions. The 40-year-old has denied any wrongdoings and rejected voluntary extradition to the United States.

According to the media, Uss during Friday’s hearing stated that he had never been to New York and his last visit to the US had occurred 25 years ago, when he was 14 years old, adding that information provided by the US Department of Justice was false.

The prosecutor’s office also reportedly rejected appeal of Uss’s lawyers to put him under house arrest in Milan.
Uss’s lawyer Vinicio Nardo refused to give Sputnik his comments on the case.

On October 28, Moscow court issued a warrant in absentia for the arrest of Uss for money laundering and put him on the Russian interior ministry’s register of wanted persons.

November 25, 2022 Posted by | Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Western-led ‘international’ organizations have no future

By Drago Bosnic | November 21, 2022

On November 18, the Polish foreign ministry stated that it will not allow a Russian delegation to attend the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) summit next month. OSCE is one of the most prominent regional security organizations in the world and its stated goal is to establish a viable security framework that would prevent conflicts in Europe and beyond. However, the reality is a bit different from the organization’s publicly altruistic intentions. The Associated Press asked the Polish foreign ministry if Russia would be denied entry to the OSCE’s December conference and Spokesman Lukasz Jasina responded that it would.

Russia, one of the most important members of the organization, as well as a key player in European security, is being denied entry due to politics. The very fact that this is even possible calls into question the purpose of OSCE or any similar organization dominated by the political West. This year, Poland is chairing the 57-nation organization, with the annual ministerial conference scheduled to be held in the city of Lodz on December 1-2. When asked if Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would be attending the conference, Jasina responded, “We are not expecting a visit by minister Lavrov to Lodz.”

“Delegations should be adjusted to the current EU regulations and not include persons that are sanctioned by the European Union,” according to an announcement by the Polish OSCE Chairmanship. “…a number of Russian nationals were added to the list of sanctioned individuals, including Minister Lavrov,” it added.

OSCE should be excluded from EU regulations, as the very purpose of the organization is to be a forum for security dialogue between European and other countries and prevent any escalation or spillover of local conflicts. By denying Russia the opportunity to attend the December 1-2 confidence in Lodz, precisely this security dialogue is being prevented, eliminating the need for OSCE altogether. However, in recent months, certain events have led many to believe the organization is hardly a neutral one, as its actions have often been used to aid one side in a particular conflict.

For instance, the war in Donbass, which has been going on for nearly a decade, and which has taken the lives of around 15,000 local men, women and children by early 2022, pushed the role of OSCE into more of a gray area. Its mission in Donbass, which the organization itself claims to be “arms control, promotion of human rights, early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management” failed back in April. In fact, it has continually been failing for over 8 years, as the Kiev regime’s shelling of the people of Donbass never stopped. Worse yet, it turned out that OSCE didn’t just fail to prevent the conflict, but it might have even done certain things to facilitate it.

In a rather disturbing revelation by war correspondent Alexander Sladkov, the organization was using high-resolution cameras, originally placed to conduct ceasefire monitoring, to relay DNR and LNR positions to the Kiev regime forces which then used the provided data to target or correct their artillery fire. The OSCE mission provided their observation data, captured by cameras and other monitoring equipment they installed over the years. In essence, OSCE was spying and effectively waging war on the side of the Neo-Nazi junta. To make matters worse, the provided monitoring data also included the movement of regular Russian military personnel in the early days of the special military operation.

The report was heavily censored by the mainstream propaganda machine, making it virtually impossible for most people in Europe to see how a supposedly impartial international organization effectively became a party to the conflict which could not only undermine security in Europe, but the world as well. To make matters worse, these issues aren’t only limited to the OSCE, but many other apparently “international” organizations, including the United Nations. Back in February, twelve Russian UN diplomats were ordered to leave the US after being accused of being “intelligence operatives engaged in espionage.” The same pretext could be used to expel virtually anyone deemed a “security challenge” by the US, which would affect entire nations or groups of nations the ability to defend their interests at the UN.

The latest G20 summit held in Bali was also a clear indicator that the world is moving away from Western-led “international” organizations. While most members were trying to focus on actual global issues, the G7 members within the G20 were effectively trying to hijack the summit and make it entirely Ukraine-focused, which failed for the most part. All of this is happening at a time when BRICS is expanding across the world, with approximately a dozen major nations showing direct interest in joining the organization. The BRICS+ framework allows countries to maintain their sovereignty while becoming members of the world’s largest truly international organization.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

November 21, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Hungary reveals cost of sanctions on Russia

RT | November 18, 2022

The Hungarian economy is losing billions of dollars due to Western sanctions on Russia, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday.

“The policy of sanctions,” which has led to a drastic surge in energy prices across the EU, will cost his country’s economy $10 billion a year, he stated.

Orban explained that the pressure on the Hungarian budget will result in cuts to social spending, adding that from this perspective, Hungary’s stance against the sanctions “doesn’t seem to be excessive.”

Earlier this week, speaking with local media, he said that “the policy of sanctions is a way to war,” and stressed that the main goal for Budapest is to avoid a Europe-wide recession.

The Hungarian leader is a vocal critic of the EU’s approach towards the conflict in Ukraine, and has repeatedly said that the sanctions imposed on Moscow are hurting the EU more than they hurt Russia.

Hungary’s economy heavily relies on Russian energy, and the government has resisted EU plans to completely ban oil and gas imports from the country. After tense negotiations, Budapest received several exemptions from the bloc-wide restrictions on purchases of Russian fossil fuels.

November 18, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

The press are completely crazy and they are going to get us all killed

The heedless jingoistic war rhetoric of the German media

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | November 16, 2022

Yesterday, at around 3.40 in the afternoon, a rocket exploded in the Polish village of Przewodów. Two people died. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky immediately blamed Russia, later going so far as to characterise the alleged attack as a message from Putin to the G20 summit. Then the Associated Press reported that they had heard from “a senior U.S. intelligence official” claiming that “Russian missiles” were responsible for the attack, and thereafter the worst German journalistic actors embarked upon an evening of dark speculation about the proper NATO response to a Russian attack on Poland. Higher brow outlets, like ZDF, merely ran inflammatory headlines about Russian rockets, with the crucial information – that the rockets were Russian-made, while their immediate origins were unclear – buried in the body of the piece. Bild, on the other hand, went all-in, with this incredible rant from chief editor Johannes Boie:

The Russian army has bombed Poland, the AP news agency reports, citing a US intelligence official.

Two people are dead, murdered!

Accidental or not – this is an armed attack on NATO territory!

The two most likely possibilities are, first, that Putin’s soldiers hit Poland by mistake. They are often poorly trained and drunk. In this case, the tyrant must apologise formally, beg for forgiveness on bended knee, so to speak, while armed NATO fighter jets fly around his country.

He is not used to that. When his troops shot down a passenger plane in 2014, killing 298 people, there were no consequences.

Or alternatively, Putin attacked NATO on purpose. In this case, the alliance must hit back hard, because NATO cannot simply let its territory be bombed or let its citizens die in a hail of Russian bombs. Putin will only respond to force.

Should the unlikely third possibility be true, that the explosion was the result of Ukrainian air defence, then – indeed – the Russians are also to blame. For they are playing with fire on the NATO border.

The mad tyrant is bringing us ever closer to World War 3.

This morning, Boie’s paper carried a front-page headline screaming “Putin fires rockets at Poland.”

Now that both Poland and the Americans have clarified that the explosion was likely caused by a stray Ukrainian air defence missile, the story has disappeared entirely from the top of Bild.de. I guess they’re not so interested in extracting apologies from a kneeling Zelensky. Meanwhile, that other major Axel Springer organ, Welt, are running damage-control pieces, like this one from obnoxious mediocrity Clemens Wergin, claiming that “Without Russia’s war crimes, it never would’ve come to the accident in Poland.”

There are a few observations to make about this little storm in a teacup. The first is that, despite appearances, not all of the American government and not all of NATO have completely lost their minds. Scholz, Macron and others called for caution and avoided open statements of blame, and today we’ve seen a clearly coordinated campaign to shift direct responsibility away from Russia. The second is that there are, however, plenty of powerful people, in NATO and elsewhere, who are indeed totally, stratospherically crazy. These include very probably that anonymous senior intelligence official who spoke to the Associated Press, and also a great part of the media, who have made a habit out of printing reheated Ukrainian press releases as news, and who have never quite recovered their senses since they lost them in the great Corona panic.

It must be fun to rage about the tyrannical evils of Russia and the democratic virtues of the NATO countries, most of which have spent the last three years denying their allegedly free citizens all manner of basic rights and freedoms. It’s also incredibly, incredibly dangerous. A direct NATO attack on Russia would be a catastrophe for Europe. Maybe somebody should try to rein in the press and wean them from their crisis addiction before they happen upon another pretence to invoke Article 5. There’s no guarantee the next one will be clarified so quickly.

November 16, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

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