Enjoy President Trump, Courtesy of The Kremlin

[pErvinalia]

Technically redundant, but rhetorically useful.

Yep, that sums him up perfectly.

[pErvinalia]

Once again... what does this have to do with Trump?

My post, as you very well know, was in regard to your repeated regurgitation of the right-wing talking point that Steele's work was 'made up' etc. etc. The only use of Trump's name was when I was referring to Trump campaign workers.

This is just classic 42 tactics. Says demonstrably false thing, and then when he can no longer wriggle out of what he said, he falls back on the "off topic" defence. He doesn't seem to get the concept of owning what he says.

[Brian Peacock]

Carter Page accused academics who twice failed his PhD of bias

Carter Page, Donald Trump’s former foreign policy adviser, accused his British examiners of “anti-Russian bias” after they took the highly unusual step of failing his “verbose” and “vague” PhD thesis, not once but twice.

Page was a little-known oil consultant who lived and worked in Moscow when he joined Trump’s campaign in March 2016. The then-candidate named Page as one of five foreign policy advisers, calling him “Carter Page PhD” in a meeting with the Washington Post’s editorial board.

In fact, Page took three attempts to gain his doctorate from the University of London, finally succeeding in 2011.

In emails seen by the Guardian, Page compares his decade-long struggle to get a postgraduate qualification to the ordeal suffered by Mikhail Khodorkovsy – the Russian oligarch sent to a Siberian prison by Vladimir Putin.

In one unhappy note to his examiners, he writes: “Your actions to date have been far more destructive than anything I have personally experienced in my 39 years on this planet.” The fate of Khodorkovsky, he adds, represents “the closest analogy in recent history to my trials”....

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... _clipboard

Hmmm.

[Tero]

Full attack on Muller and FBI under way
http://www.businessinsider.com/mueller- ... an-2017-12

[Forty Two]

Full attack on Muller and FBI under way
http://www.businessinsider.com/mueller- ... an-2017-12

Oh, yes, the massive "attack." Three republicans have repeatedly said that members of the investigative team are biased. And, to think, all they have to go on is the words of certain FBI agents who show extreme bias.

That's a threat to democracy.

And, I wonder... did members of the party talk to the Trump administration about the investigation? I mean, if they did, that wouldn't mean anything, but we have to ask...did Republicans collude with Republicans to accuse a biased FBI team of being biased? Film at 11.

[L'Emmerdeur]

If anybody has been following developments in this case enough to be aware of what is actually going on, they likely know perfectly well that Rep. Jim Jordan, who was called a 'legislative terrorist' by former Speaker of the House John Boehner, has already essentially admitted talking with the White House about the Mueller investigation, as have two other Republican members of Congress.

'A trio of House Republicans lobbing attacks on Mueller have been in touch with the White House'

Whether this is significant or not remains to be seen. However, one of the primary constitutional duties of the legislative branch is to serve as a check and balance in relation to the executive branch. If there is coordination between members of the legislature and the executive which is aimed at derailing a lawful investigation of the executive, then those members are clearly violating a basic constitutional principle pursuant to a political agenda. Flippant dismissal of this possibility frankly displays a willingness to degrade the separation of powers and the rule of law.

[Seabass]

Frankly, anyone who doesn't hate Trump is morally bankrupt. It's like expecting people not to be biased against Hitler.

[Brian Peacock]

FBI investigates Russian-linked Cyprus bank accused of money laundering

The FBI has asked officials in Cyprus for financial information about a defunct bank that was used by wealthy Russians with political connections and has been accused by the US government of money laundering, two sources have told the Guardian.

The request for information about FBME Bank comes as Cyprus has emerged as a key area of interest for Robert Mueller, the US special counsel who is investigating a possible conspiracy between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin.

People familiar with the FBI request told the Guardian that federal investigators and the US Treasury approached the Central Bank of Cyprus in November seeking detailed information about FBME, which was shut down earlier this year.

One person familiar with the FBI request said it appeared to be connected to Mueller’s ongoing examination of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager who was indicted in October, and money that flowed between former Soviet states and the US through Cypriot banks.

The Central Bank of Cyprus, which in 2014 placed FBME under administration in a direct response to the US action and obtained full access to the bank’s data, declined to comment. The US special counsel’s office also declined to comment.

FBME has vigorously denied accusations that it has been a conduit for money laundering and other criminal activity.

...

Mueller’s team has separately issued a subpoena for information from Deutsche Bank. According to a person close to the bank, the subpoena was issued in the autumn. The German bank is Trump’s biggest lender.

Deutsche also worked as a correspondent bank for FBME. Internal emails seen by the Guardian show that executives from both banks were in contact in 2014 discussing accounts that were “on the radar” of US law enforcement....

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... laundering

[pErvinalia]

Probably anonymous sources..

[Brian Peacock]

Yeah, 'according to a person close to the bank' probably means 'we spoke to a vagrant begging outside one of the branches'.

[Tero]

A year after election, Trump still running for president against Hillary/FBI/ facts:
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/23/57321445 ... early-2018

[Tero]

Haha:
With Trump embroiled in a scandal that refuses to die over alleged ties between his campaign and Russia, Congress approved the sanctions against Russia this week. Without waiting for Trump to sign the new sanctions into law, Russia announced its response.

Russia has ordered the US to reduce its diplomatic presence in Russia – potentially forcing hundreds of embassy employees in the country to leave their jobs – after Congress approved a new wave of sanctions against Moscow over its interference in last year’s US election.

[Seabass]

Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options

The United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an all-out information battle during the Cold War. But the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the Bill Clinton administration and Congress in 1999 shuttered America’s preeminent global information agency.

“They thought it was all over and that we’d won the propaganda war,” said Joseph D. Duffey, the last director of the U.S. Information Agency, which was charged with influencing foreign populations.

When President Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia began searching for ways to make up for its diminished military. Officials seized on influence campaigns and cyberwarfare as equalizers. Both were cheap, easy to deploy and hard for an open and networked society such as the United States to defend against.

[Brian Peacock]

An excellent, prodding piece from Thomas Frank in the Gruniad today...

The Russian Facebook scandal damages liberals as much as the right

...Take a moment to look up some of these false-flag proclamations — the ones produced for Facebook pages such as “Being Patriotic”, “Secured Borders” or “Army of Jesus”. They are nothing like the polished and scientifically tested Madison Avenue products that once alarmed our parents’ generation. This was low-budget stuff: ugly, loud and stupid — hectoring declarations in brightly colored script over stock photographs.

The ads were clumsily written. They were rife with spelling errors and poor grammar. Their grasp of American history was awful. And over them all hovered a paranoid fear that the powerful were scheming to flip the world upside-down in the most outlandish ways: to turn our country over to the undocumented ... to punish the hardworking ... to crack down on patriots and Christians ... to enact Sharia law right here at home.

Which is to say, these Russian Facebook ads were exactly the sort of thing that real American rightwingers have been whispering for decades. The particulars have changed over the years, but the panic these ads try to evoke is precisely the same as it was when the right first discovered it could raise money by scaring people about Panama Canal giveaways and scheming communists in Nicaragua.

My favorite of these, without a doubt, is the one that shows Jesus arm-wrestling Satan to settle the election (to make things clear, the caption tells us that “Hillary is a Satan”). You are urged to “help Jesus win” by “liking” it. It is cheaply slapped together, pious and casually blasphemous at the same time. In other words, it is perfect.

For 70 years, conservatives trashed Democrats and liberals for being soft on communism if not outright agents of an enemy power. Today? It is the zealous defenders of American righteousness who seem to have been enlisted and played by Russian propagandists.

The St Petersburg trolls mimicked the red state ideology in its every paranoid detail: the proud defiant Southerner; the gun fetishist; the sniper with a heart of gold; the small-minded supporter of the local police force. What it all suggests (what it maybe was meant to suggest) is that now it’s the hyper-patriots and “real Americans” of the right who must live with the suspicion of being — yes — playthings of a foreign regime.

It boggles the mind. And yet liberals, who will embrace anything that might damage the right these days, weren’t really interested in this. Why?

Part of the reason, certainly, is because the Russian trolls also tried to mimic liberal activists such as LGBT and civil rights groups. More uncomfortable still is the way the Russian Facebook story struck at the very heart of the blue state ideology. For all too many Democrats, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can only be understood in one way: devices of human liberation. They empower the weak. They give us democracy as in the Arab Spring. They spread Americanism worldwide.

We must not criticize the social media platforms for this episode, declared an op-ed in the liberal New York Times shortly after the Russian ads were exposed, because “Facebook and Twitter are just a mirror, reflecting us”. It is the same argument that defenders of culture industries have made for decades: that commercial speech is basically the vox populi by other means; that makers of movies and advertisements and algorithms are always blameless; that if we dislike what they show us, we must look to ourselves...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... _clipboard

[Seabass]

Nothing to see here.