Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Ex-FBI Director Mueller appointed DOJ Special Counsel

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • So it is still a kangaroo court after all. Maybe four more years can fix that?

    Comment


    • Originally posted by surfgun View Post
      So it is still a kangaroo court after all. Maybe four more years can fix that?
      Four more years of...Trump? Fixing something? After the last four years of doing...what, exactly?

      Ehhhh...I'm afraid I have some bad news for you surfgun:

      Click image for larger version  Name:	5TdSZwg.jpg Views:	2 Size:	129.1 KB ID:	1479217
      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

      Comment


      • Originally posted by surfgun View Post
        So it is still a kangaroo court after all. Maybe four more years can fix that?
        "Kangaroo court" -- one that doesn't bow to surfgun's preconceived notions.
        Trust me?
        I'm an economist!

        Comment


        • Justice Dept. records of centrifuge within the Mueller farce.

          https://www.justice.gov/oip/foia-lib...04_20/download

          Comment


          • U.S. Admits That Congressman Offered Pardon to Assange If He Covered Up Russia Links

            LONDON—Lawyers representing the United States at Julian Assange’s extradition trial in Britain have accepted the claim that the WikiLeaks founder was offered a presidential pardon by a Congressman on the condition that he would help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.

            Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer, told the court that she had attended a meeting between Assange, then Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and pro-Trump troll Charles Johnson at Assange’s hide-out, the Ecuadorian embassy in London, on August 15, 2017.

            Robinson said the two Americans claimed to be emissaries from Washington and “wanted us to believe they were acting on behalf of the president.” The pair allegedly told Assange that they could help grant him a pardon in exchange for him revealing information about the source of the WikiLeaks information that proved it was not the Russians who hacked Democratic emails.

            “They stated that President Trump was aware of and had approved of them coming to meet with Mr. Assange to discuss a proposal—and that they would have an audience with the president to discuss the matter on their return to Washington, D.C.,”
            Robinson said.

            The White House has denied that Trump took part in any such plan.

            The claim itself is not new—Assange’s lawyers previewed the allegation in a pre-trial hearing in February—but this is the first time Robinson’s testimony has been heard in full. The WikiLeaks lawyer said Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal a year after emails that damaged Hillary Clinton in the presidential race had been published, when the Russia investigation was gathering pace. The stolen DNC emails posted by WikiLeaks were hacked by Russian operatives.

            After Robinson read her testimony in a London courtroom on Friday, lawyers representing the U.S. accepted the witness statement as accurate and confirmed they had no intention of cross-examining the claim. They did dispute, however, that President Donald Trump gave his blessing for the pardon offer.

            James Lewis, who was representing the U.S. government, said: “The position of the government is we don't contest these things were said. We obviously do not accept the truth of what was said by others.”

            Rohrabacher, who was known as Putin’s favorite congressman, partially corroborated the claim back in February, saying at the time: “I spoke to Julian Assange and told him if he would provide evidence about who gave WikiLeaks the emails I would petition the president to give him a pardon... He knew I could get to the president.”

            Rohrabacher said he followed up the meeting by calling then White House chief of staff John Kelly to discuss the pardon. However, the ex congressman said he never spoke to Trump about it.

            Regardless, Assange turned the offer down, his lawyers said.

            Assange has argued that he should not be extradited to the U.S. because the American case against him is politically motivated. He spent almost seven years hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in Central London, claiming that he would be jailed in the U.S. if he wasn’t granted asylum. He was kicked out of the embassy last year.
            ______________

            They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast....

            “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

            Comment


            • Mueller refuses to testify about his corrupted investigation (he does not have enough time).
              https://www.nationalreview.com/news/...eller-refused/

              Comment


              • Originally posted by surfgun View Post
                Mueller refuses to testify about his corrupted investigation (he does not have enough time).
                https://www.nationalreview.com/news/...eller-refused/
                Ahh, we're right back to that hypocritical faux-outrage thing again.

                Mueller, unlike virtually every person within Trump's justice obstructing grasp, has already testified before Congress.....over a year ago.

                Here's a complete transcript, if you're interested. Which I doubt.

                Click image for larger version

Name:	190724-robert-mueller-full-testimony-ew-118p_9f7e5d3a6485cb076b997e5f64fe1a78.fit-2000w.jpg
Views:	164
Size:	470.0 KB
ID:	1566040
                “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                Comment


                • Originally posted by surfgun View Post
                  Mueller refuses to testify about his corrupted investigation (he does not have enough time).
                  https://www.nationalreview.com/news/...eller-refused/
                  Wow. I don't know if you realize this but you are not even qualified to shine his shoes much less critique his professionalism. Yet, that is what people do when they know they can't possibly measure up so they instead try to tear down to their low level.

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by tbm3fan View Post

                    Wow. I don't know if you realize this but you are not even qualified to shine his shoes much less critique his professionalism. Yet, that is what people do when they know they can't possibly measure up so they instead try to tear down to their low level.
                    His professionalism, that prohibited him the ability to police his small band of miscreants that tainted his whole investigation?

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by surfgun View Post

                      His professionalism, that prohibited him the ability to police his small band of miscreants that tainted his whole investigation?
                      Not surprising that you believe that. Of course, you don't believe that Russia interfered with the 2016 election and the Trump Campaign wholeheartedly welcomed and invited that interference either, do you.

                      Because...Trump told you so.


                      H.R. McMaster On Trump and Russian Interference:

                      As for the president, McMaster told us foreign policy was not his favorite subject. McMaster would brief to the limits of Mr. Trump's attention, then watch him shoot from the hip.

                      Scott Pelley: The president was speaking to reporters on Air Force One in late 2017. The president was asked about the Russian cyber assault on the 2016 election. Mr. Trump said of Russian President Putin, quote, "Every time he sees me, he says, 'I didn't do that,' and I really believe that when he tells me that. He means it." What was your reaction after the president said that?

                      H.R. McMaster: Well, my reaction was one of surprise, disappointment, disbelief.

                      Scott Pelley: Later the same day, the president went before cameras and said he didn't mean it.

                      President Trump: I'm surprised that there's any conflict on this. What I said there is that I believe he believes that…

                      Scott Pelley: Did you have a hand in the president's retraction?

                      H.R. McMaster: I did, and others. We had a conversation with the president afterwards we said, "your answer to that question will be misconstrued as a complete denial of Russian meddling when we know it's incontrovertible. It's just, it's just a fact."
                      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                      Comment


                      • Originally posted by surfgun View Post

                        His professionalism, that prohibited him the ability to police his small band of miscreants that tainted his whole investigation?
                        I know many Trump supporters are fairly dense but there are some who take it to a whole other level. Like I said you wouldn't know true professionalism or ethics even if it slammed you in the face head on. Actually pretty sad but not unexpected...

                        Comment


                        • Trump's Helsinki summit with Putin was 'soul crushing' for Mueller's team and showed them Russia had won a 'servile' American president

                          Prosecutors and FBI agents working in the special counsel Robert Mueller's office were shell-shocked when they watched President Donald Trump publicly side with Russian President Vladimir Putin following a bilateral summit in Helsinki in 2018, according to a new memoir by the former Mueller prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann.

                          The Trump-Putin press conference came just days after the special counsel's office indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers on multiple felony charges related to the 2016 "hack-and-dump" operation against the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

                          It was the first time Mueller's team directly pointed a finger at the Russian government for meddling in the 2016 election, and it corroborated a 2017 assessment by the US intelligence community that concluded Putin ordered Russia's interference campaign.

                          But days later, during the Helsinki summit, the American president stood next to the Russian leader and said he trusted Putin over the US intelligence community.

                          Trump said he didn't "see any reason why" Russia would be responsible for the election meddling.

                          "I have President Putin," Trump said. "He just said it's not Russia I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be."

                          Back in Mueller's office, the comments were "surreal" and "soul crushing," Weissmann wrote in his book, "Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation," which hit shelves on Tuesday.

                          "By this time, Trump not only had the conclusions of the original intelligence assessment, but the incontrovertible proof" from Mueller's team "to expand on and corroborate it," he wrote. "Still, Trump said, Putin 'was extremely strong and powerful in his denial,' and that was apparently enough for him."

                          The president's comments were "profoundly alarming" and also sparked "general amazement" for the FBI agents working in Mueller's office, Weissmann said.

                          "It was like they'd built up a mountain of incriminating evidence only to watch the prosecutor suddenly decide to call off the case and go home, just because the defendant said he wasn't guilty," he added.

                          Weissmann continued: "The scene in Helsinki should have been stunning to the average American viewer, but for those within our office who'd poured energy into pinning down these facts, it was profoundly alarming. Here was our own president kowtowing to Putin, denying the election interference he had perpetrated on our nation and siding with a bloody dictator over a bipartisan consensus in the Senate and the nonpartisan conclusions of the IC that Putin had attacked our democracy."

                          The event set off "alarm bells" for Weissmann and another prosecutor in Mueller's office, Jeannie Rhee. Mueller, meanwhile, "looked exasperated" during the team's daily meeting that evening and speculated that Trump had financial reasons for caving to Putin.

                          The special counsel "commented that, if the president was in the tank with Putin, 'It would be about money' — that is, that Trump was motivated by money and his fawning behavior toward Putin could be explained by his seeking to make a buck in Russia,"
                          Weissmann wrote.

                          Trump eventually walked back his comments following a "bipartisan uproar" back in the US, but Weissmann and Rhee both thought it was clear that the Russian government "had now gotten what it had worked so hard for: a servile, but popular, American leader," he wrote.
                          _______________

                          An American President, servile and submissive to the Russians....and a Republican, no less. And Trump's followers simply did not, and do not, care one bit.

                          Can you imagine if Ronald Reagan was alive to witness this? Trump's cultists would tear Reagan limb from limb if he dared to call Trump what Trump is: A traitor to the Republican Party and a traitor to the United States.


                          “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                          Comment


                          • Justice Department must release redacted portions of Mueller report dealing with criminal charges before Election Day, judge rules

                            The US Department of Justice improperly censored portions of the Mueller report dealing with potential criminal charges and Russia's hacking of the Democratic National Committee, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

                            In response to a complaint brought by BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold, US District Judge Reggie Walton ruled that Attorney General William Barr's department must release the redacted segments — including portions related to the 2016 Trump campaign's interest in DNC emails stolen by Russia — by November 2, a day before the US election.

                            According to BuzzFeed, the ruling means the Justice Department "will be obliged to unveil at least 15 previously blacked-out pages from volume one of special counsel Robert Mueller's 448-page report" on Russian electoral interference.

                            In March 2020, the same judge, appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush, chastised Attorney General Barr for having issued a "distorted" and "misleading" summary of the Mueller report.

                            In March 2019, Barr falsely claimed that the report had exonerated Donald Trump, asserting that Mueller had found no evidence of coordination between the president's 2016 campaign and Russia. In fact, the report detailed many contacts between the Trump camp and Russian government assets, though the special counsel said those contacts were not enough to demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that crimes had occurred.
                            __________



                            “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                            Comment


                            • Oldest Living CIA Agent Says Russia Probably Targeted Trump Decades Ago

                              On Aug. 18, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 1,300-page report characterizing the involvement of Russian intelligence operatives with officials of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign as an “aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” The report detailed the longstanding relationship between Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, and a Russian intelligence operative named Konstantin Kilimnik, while also describing the links of other Russian intelligence figures to Trump family members, notably Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner, and to such Trump confidants as Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, briefly the president’s national security adviser.

                              As to be expected, President Trump immediately denounced the report as “a hoax” (never mind that it was authored by a Republican-controlled committee), while his inner circle adopted their usual stance on such matters, either staying mum or decrying the committee’s work as a tired retread of last year’s Mueller report. The real scandal, the president declaimed, was the deep state “witch hunt” against him that spurred these investigations in the first place.


                              If this latest chapter in the four-year Russiagate drama is unlikely to change many minds, at least one person has examined the Senate’s findings with both great interest and alarm. His name is Peter Sichel and, at the age of 97, he is the last surviving member of the early CIA that faced off with the Soviets at the start of the Cold War.

                              An escapee from Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s, Sichel served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the United States’ wartime intelligence agency, during World War II. In October 1945, just months after war’s end, he was dispatched to Berlin to take charge of the local clandestine wing of an embryonic American intelligence outfit called the Strategic Services Unit, a precursor to the CIA. That posting placed Sichel at ground zero of the Cold War already beginning to take shape between the Soviet Union and its wartime Western allies, and gave him a front-row seat in observing precisely how the Soviets were taking over in Eastern Europe.

                              “Most people have this idea that they came in and grabbed all those countries by force,” Sichel explained, “but that is not true. In almost every case, they worked within the structure of the prewar political parties and just gradually coopted them.”

                              Through his contacts in Soviet-controlled eastern Germany, Sichel witnessed how the Soviets first coerced the local left and center-left political parties to join together, and to then accept the overall leadership of the embryonic German communist party. “They did this both by threats—if a political figure resisted, he could be threatened with arrest as a Nazi war criminal—and enticements. Remember, Germany was in absolute ruins at the time, so it didn’t take much—the offer of a car or an allotment of food—to bring people in line. Their ambition was to take over the political parties, but to pretend it was the will of the people.”

                              Sichel’s early 1946 report on the methods the Soviets were using to coopt the eastern German political parties was the first detailed examination of the phenomenon, one soon emulated in the other Eastern European nations under their military control. Once they comprised a sizeable minority in the government, the communist-led coalitions would then start taking control of key ministries, notably the police and internal security services, until they could take over outright. One of the ultimate beneficiaries of this approach, a Hungarian communist leader named Matyas Rakosi, called it “salami tactics,” the process of joining the existing political system and then slicing away at it until there was nothing left.

                              In this regard, one revelation in the Senate Intelligence Committee report stood out to Sichel. Contrary to most previous assumptions, Senate investigators found that the Russian intelligence campaign to gain influence with the Republican party began well before Trump emerged as a viable candidate, in keeping with Vladimir Putin’s scheme to help thwart a Hillary Clinton presidency however he could. This fit with the pattern the old CIA hand had seen in Eastern Europe.

                              “One great advantage the Soviets always had over us,” Sichel explained, “is that they played the long game. We thought in terms of quarters, whereas they thought in terms of years or even decades. They were opportunistic, willing to let matters gradually develop until the right political faction or right leader to support had emerged.”

                              “Scattered throughout the Senate report is a litany of instances in which Trump’s associates left themselves open to Russian blackmail.”

                              This found echo in the years prior to 2016 in the series of ties that Putin, an old KGB man himself, fostered with right-wing political figures and fringe groups across the breadth of Europe. However much those ties may have appeared to run counter to Putin’s open nostalgia for the good old days of Soviet communist rule, they shared the common ground of ultra-nationalism.

                              This paid great dividends for the Russian ruler, for these same nationalist groups were at the forefront in their respective countries in calling for the dissolution or weakening of NATO and the European Union, two long-term Putin goals. For the same reason, the Russian leadership could only have been thrilled by Trump’s steady climb toward the Republican nomination. Far more than with any other Republican running for president, Trump’s xenophobic, America First rhetoric dovetailed with Putin’s own version, while Trump’s promise of a diminished American role on the global stage was the stuff of Russian fantasy. Little wonder that Putin’s minions would do anything in their power to help propel the hotel magnate and reality show host into the White House.

                              But of course, one can’t rely on jingoistic fraternity alone to achieve one’s goals, and limning the pages of the Senate Intelligence Committee report is the specter of another old KGB standby: kompromat, or blackmail. During his Cold War days in Berlin, Peter Sichel had to remain constantly vigilant against kompromat schemes targeting himself and his CIA colleagues, as well as western German political figures. “The KGB were absolute masters at it,” he recalled, “and they would use whatever they could get their hands on. A favorite was honey traps [or sexual entrapments], but bribes, favors, whatever they could find. And once they had their hooks into you, they owned you.”

                              Scattered throughout the Senate report is a litany of instances in which Trump’s associates left themselves open to Russian blackmail: Manafort’s many dealings with Kilimnik; the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting at which Donald Jr., Jared Kushner, and Michael Flynn met with Russian intelligence operatives who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton; the backchannel communications between Flynn, by then Trump’s national security adviser-designate, and the Russian ambassador.

                              “The past four years have been very, very good for Vladimir Putin.”

                              “The key thing is that all of them then lied about it to investigators,” Sichel explained, “and that’s where the potential blackmail comes in. Imagine if the FBI hadn’t caught Flynn out, and he had remained in his post. The Russians knew he lied—I’m sure they taped all their communications with him—so they would have had him over a barrel forever.”

                              In this way, the old spymaster contended, the various investigations into Russiagate have actually been of great service to Trump.

                              “I know he doesn’t see it this way,” Sichel said, “but by having all this stuff brought out in public, it removes the blackmail threat. The smartest thing Trump could have done when all this started to break was to just come out and say, ‘Yes, it appears there was Russian involvement with my campaign, but that’s over with now, I’m the president, so let’s move on.’ But he didn’t do that, obviously. Perhaps there were reasons why he couldn’t.”

                              Even long-retired intelligence officers tend to be circumspect by nature—Sichel left the CIA in 1960—and while he left that last comment to dangle, his allusion seemed fairly clear. After all, what to make of an American president whose foreign policy initiatives have included weakening NATO and urging on the fracturing of the European Union. Who has repeatedly tried to reinstate Russia into the G-8 council of industrialized of nations, over the strenuous objections of America’s European allies, and who defends Putin’s propensity for killing his political opponents by stating, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.” And it’s not as if Trump’s obeisance to his Russian friend is a thing of the past. On Aug. 20, two days after the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Putin’s principal surviving political opponent, Alexei Navalny, was left near death by a poison almost certainly administered by Russian intelligence agents. Even as European leaders have lodged protests against the Kremlin and demanded an investigation, President Trump has yet to say a word on the matter. Hardly an original thought, but did Sichel think the president himself could be hostage to Russian kompromat?

                              “Well, I couldn’t possibly say,” he replied, “because I think we’re still in the early stages of unlocking all that has gone on. What I can say is that the past four years have been very, very good for Vladimir Putin. And if Trump is reelected, the next four will be even better.”
                              __________

                              A weak-minded fool in debt up to his eyeballs? Yeah, no opportunity there....
                              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                              Comment


                              • The direct links between the Clinton Campaign, the Obama Administration, political operatives within the intelligence community and a former British spook are coming to fruition.
                                Back in 2016 the MSM insisted that it was all unsubstantiated hysteria that the Trump Campaign was spied upon. But guess what, it actually happened and the misinformation campaign against the Trump Administration would continue......
                                https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tru...robe-documents

                                Comment

                                Working...
                                X