1. This Russian meme helped tilt the 2016 US Presidential vote to Donald Trump.
A Facebook ad that cost the equivalent of $1, generated 71 impressions and 14 interactions.
Speaking of memes, the DNC (Democratic National Committee) was selling these during the 2016 nomination for the Democratic presidential candidate.
Hillary Clinton memorabilia
Bernie Sanders memorabilia
Hey DNC – why this meme…
Cropped 1941 Nazi Germany anti-Jewish poster. University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
… and not this? Just asking.
Image by DonkeyHotey
2. Wikileaks’s denial of collusion with Roger Stone is used as evidence of collusion.
Natasha Bertrand (Feb 27, 2018, The Atlantic) wrote: “Private Twitter messages obtained by The Atlantic show that Stone and WikiLeaks, a radical-transparency group, communicated directly on October 13, 2016 – and that WikiLeaks sought to keep its channel to Stone open after Trump won the election.” Nine paragraphs below, she says, “It is unclear whether Stone and WikiLeaks kept in touch, using Twitter or another platform, after the election.”
The emails published by Wikileaks confirmed that the DNC rigged the nomination against Bernie Sanders.
Western media claimed that Russian outlet RT scooped the email releases because it had a special relationship with Wikileaks – and didn’t just know how to refresh the Wikileaks website.
Carl Bildt, Co-Chair European Council on Foreign Relations, member Board of Trustees of the RAND Corporation, International Crisis Group and council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies
RT explained how to do journalism: “Members of [Clinton’s] team have also openly accused RT of involvement in the Podesta email hack due to its swift reporting on the WikiLeaks email releases, which have been shared publicly by the website around the same time every day over the past fortnight.”
Former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was given political asylum by Ecuador in 2012 and has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since then. He is in danger of being extradited to the US, where charges, including the possibility of US Espionage Act violation, have been laid against him.
3. Media frenzy
CNN’s Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb wrote on December 8, 2017, that Donald Trump Jr. had received an email on September 4 offering a decryption key and website address for hacked Wikileaks documents – evidence that he had a special contact in Wikileaks. However, the date on the email was September 14.
CNN made this correction: “The new details appear to show that the sender was relying on publicly available information. The new information indicates that the communication is less significant than CNN initially reported.”
4. You are treasonous if you meet with Russians – any Russians – if, and only if, you believe that meeting with Russians is not treasonous.
They met with Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergei Kislyak
Claire McCaskill, US Democratic Senator from Missouri. She met with Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergei Kislyak, and lied about it.
And who is Robbie Mook?
Norman Solomon writing at Huffpost quoted from the book Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes:
“Within 24 hours of [Hillary Clinton’s] concession speech,” the authors report, campaign manager Robby Mook and campaign chair John Podesta “assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
Finally, let’s never forget this Jake Tapper interview with Carter Page.
5. The Russian lawyer at the Trump Tower meeting.
Natalia Veselnitskaya is the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump, Jr. on June 9, 2016. At the time, she was in the US representing a Russian client Denis Katsyv in the lawsuit brought by Bill Browder against the company Prevezon Holdings. She gave written testimony to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary about that meeting. Veselnitskaya had been researching Browder’s activities in Russia and had asked friends to put her in touch with US lawmakers so that she could present her findings to them. Apparently, the intermediary, music publicist Rob Goldstone, had inflated his contacts with the US political class, and the best he came up with was Trump Jr.
From Veselnitskaya’s testimony to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Alexander Mercouris speculates at The Duran on whether or not, because of the strange role of Goldstone, this meeting was a sting on Trump Jr.
6. Reputable sources?
In October 2016, after Wikileaks published the Podesta emails, the Russian news outlet Sputnik posted a story that mistakenly attributed to Hillary Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal a quote from Kurt Eichenwald that was critical of Clinton. After Eichenwald pointed out the error, Sputnik took down the story, but the story spread after Donald Trump used it in a campaign speech. As Glenn Greenwald puts it,
“Eichenwald, with increasing levels of hysteria, manically posted no fewer than three dozen tweets last night about his story, each time escalating his claims of what it proved. By the time he was done, he had misled large numbers of people into believing that he found proof that: 1) the documents in the WikiLeaks archive were altered; 2) Russia put forgeries into the WikiLeaks archive; 3) Sputnik knew about the WikiLeaks archive ahead of time, before it was posted online; 4) WikiLeaks coordinated the release of the documents with the Russian government; and 5) the Russian government and the Trump campaign coordinated to falsely attribute Eichenwald’s words to Blumenthal.”
The Sputnik writer, Bill Moran, sued Newsweek over two articles written by Eichenwald that accused Moran of colluding with Russia and the Trump campaign. The suit was settled and Newsweek deleted the articles, although you can find them in various places on the internet (but you might not be able to “picture a headquarters or person”).
Of course, if we take Eichenwald’s advice, we would miss these sorts of things …
7. As James Comey says, “So many questions.”
Here are two Comey will not ask.
How did a sitting president (Obama) use his Justice Department, secret services and FBI to spy on the presidential campaign of an opposing party?
Peter Strzok (FBI, former lead agent on Hillary Clinton’s email server investigation and Robert Mueller’s team), Lisa Page (former FBI attorneyy and special counsel to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe), Bruce Ohr (Justice Department), Andrew McCabe (former FBI Deputy Director), James Comey (former FBI Director), James Clapper (former Director of National Intelligence), John Brennan (former CIA Director), Loretta Lynch (US Attorney General under Obama), Susan Rice (National Security Advisor under Obama), Samantha Power (former US Ambassador to UN) …
How did these countries influence the US 2016 election?
Britain: Christopher Steele (former MI6, dossier author); Sir Andrew Wood (ex-British ambassador to Russia); Sir Richard Dearlove (former head of MI6); Joseph Mifsud (Maltese academic, director London Academy of Diplomacy); Bill Browder (ex-US citizen, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, instigator of Magnitsky Act) …
Australia: Alexander Downer (diplomat)
Ukraine: Alexandra Chalupa (Ukrainian-American, staffer then consultant for DNC), Serhiy Leshchenko (member of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau) …
8. For any head of state to abuse the powers of the state, to whatever end, is always wrong.
Contender for the Democratic 2020 presidential nomination, Tulsi Gabbard, wants to prevent new cold wars and end US policies meant to overthrow foreign governments. Her campaign challenges powerful state entities and corporations that profit from war. When asked how she would defeat Donald Trump, she said she would focus on “restoring to the presidency honor, integrity and courage.”
Liberty Maniacs
Found Images 