Enjoy President Trump, Courtesy of The Kremlin

[L'Emmerdeur]

An interesting Twitter essay (collated into a more or less proper essay by 'threadreader') in which Trump's weekend in Moscow during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant is discussed. One intriguing item is a January, 2014 tweet from a Russian who associated with Trump during that weekend: She celebrates Trump's campaign for president of the US shortly after the pageant, well over a year before he publicly announced that he was running (June 2015). Click on the image below to read the essay.

[pErvinalia]

Honestly, if that didn't come from you, I would swear that must be a fake. The plot thickens!



(in b4 42: Lol, there's nothing to see here. She meant president of his hotel association. Lol. And even if she didn't, there's nothing illegal about hanging out in Russia and discussing running for president and then having myriad dodgy connections to Russia via his campaign and his campaign lying about those connections. Lol. It's all a beat up by Hillary and American Pravda CNN)

[L'Emmerdeur]

Honestly, if that didn't come from you, I would swear that must be a fake. The plot thickens!

As of November 26, 2017, that tweet is still up. Also, just to cover bases, a link to the original Twitter essay.

[Tero]

An explosive exposé that lays out the Trump administration’s ties to Moscow, and Russia’s decades-in-the-making political game to upend American democracy.

December 2016. Luke Harding, the Guardian reporter and former Moscow bureau chief, quietly meets former MI6 officer Christopher Steele in a London pub to discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s Russia connections. A month later, Steele’s now-famous dossier sparks what may be the biggest scandal of the modern era. The names of the Americans involved are well-known—Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page—but here Harding also shines a light on powerful Russian figures like Aras Agalarov, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Sergey Kislyak, whose motivations and instructions may have been coming from the highest echelons of the Kremlin.

Drawing on new material and his expert understanding of Moscow and its players, Harding takes the reader through every bizarre and disquieting detail of the “Trump-Russia” story—an event so huge it involves international espionage, off-shore banks, sketchy real estate deals, the Miss Universe pageant, mobsters, money laundering, poisoned dissidents, computer hacking, and the most shocking election in American history.

https://www.amazon.com/Collusion-Secret ... 6KWSHQW62J

[Tero]

Reader review
A Gripping, Non-Fiction, Timely Thriller
ByRichardon November 19, 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
Luke Harding’s Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, is technically too long to read in one sitting but, I have nearly done it. I couldn’t put it down. The book is only a few days old, but my copy is ragged and coffee stained. I am just now making amends to my significant other, returning to my normal routine of hygiene, reconnecting with life—and preparing myself for a second read.

This is the book you wish, for the sake of humanity, would be a work of fiction written by Le Carre, rather than a work of epic reporting that so disturbingly illustrates the principle that truth is stranger than fiction. Indeed, had Le Carre published this a couple of years ago, critics would have thought the old master had lost his way, for the story, while utterly gripping,even terrifying, is too farfetched.

Yet, here it all is masterfully reported by one of the great journalists of our time: the shocking, endless ties between Trump, and so many of Trump’s associates and political appointees who are now running our country, and Russia. Here are the secret meetings; the malodorous, international financial transactions; the hackings; strange doings of the candidate and eventual president; the endless, lurid, amoral, corrupt characters that connect Trump and Putin.

Of particular interest in this volume, something I haven’t seen anywhere else, are the detailed biographies of the Russians in this strange saga. In the daily media coverage, the backgrounds of the numerous Russian characters are rarely explored in any depth--yet they are crucial to understanding what is happening. Harding, onetime Moscow correspondent for The Guardian, brings all of these characters to life, with their charmed business biographies, and their nearly universal ties to both Putin and Russian intelligence. Particularly harrowing, a nightmarish excursion with a knife edge, is the exploration of the possible fates of Russians who may have been sources for Christopher Steele’s now famous Trump Dossier.

In the daily, often simplistic media grind, the background question seems to be: Is their an impeachable offense, a smoking gun? This book, in the depth and scope of its meticulousness reporting, raises a much different and, perhaps, more important question: With or without a provable crime at the hand of the president, is any of this even remotely acceptable? Is it tenable to have a President of the United States with so many corrupt associations? With mysterious, gravity-defying business transactions? With hidden tax returns? With his obsequiousness to a corrupt, brutal foreign leader? With such obvious doubts regarding his fundamental loyalty to the United States of America?

This book isn’t about connecting a few dots, this is about our president’s seemingly endless connections to dark forces that fear truth, loathe democracy, worship power and money, and are utterly ruthless in their remarkably successful tactics at home, and around the world. It’s all here in sobering, shocking detail. Read it, then hug your loved ones, and pray for the world.

[Tero]

A longer reader review
The last Warning before the end of our democracy?
ByHerbert L Calhounon November 21, 2017
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
The “big picture” of the Trump scandal is the scariest thing ever seen in the history of American politics: an immoral, greedy, barely literate, deeply incompetent, pro-Nazi racist with 62 million votes, has been elected as the 45th President of the USA.

This incompetent egomaniacal racist “moron,” (to quote his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson), willingly has financed his shaky debit-ridden real estate empire with a web of hidden loans from our number one enemy, Vladimir Putin, himself the ruling despot of a criminal oligarchic empire.

Grabbing Trump by the tail, with both “honey and money traps,” Putin parades a phalanx of dirt bags up and down Trump Tower, and then drags the American President around the globe behind him like a puppet on a string. Meanwhile, the Mueller investigation of Mr. Trump is clearly vectored towards uncovering just what is at the bottom of this sordid global procession involving our 45th President’s obsequious and incessant genuflecting towards the Russian dictator.

One thing this book makes crystal clear is that DJT is probably the most vulnerable man alive: Not only is he colossally stupid and ill-informed, with no impulse control and a knee-jerk tendency to lie, lie lie, but he also has an ego the size of Texas in constant need of stroking. And as a result, Trump’s “man-child tweets” have made him the laughing stock of the world.

Plus, since his Atlantic City Casinos all went belly-up, he has become such a credit risk that no respectable banks anywhere in the world will touch him with a ten-foot pole. And thus for three decades now, DJT has had to scrounge around the globe for money to keep his crumbling empire afloat. In the process, he has become vulnerable to, and an easy mark for, a whole new class of international predators: criminals and intelligence agencies willing to lend large amounts of unwashed cash to a floundering American businessman.

It does not take Rocket Science to see that as Mueller’s investigation marches on to its logical conclusion, there is better than an even chance that “Team Trump” will be found guilty of among other crimes, running a criminal enterprise, laundering large amounts of illicit cash, failing to file reports for foreign bank accounts, failing to register as a foreign agent, repeatedly lying to law enforcement and Congressional authorities, multiple counts of tax evasion, collusion in cyber crimes that helped elect him, multiple counts of obstruction of justice, and treason.

What we learn here too is that there is also a high probability that since 1987, Mr. Trump has been caught up in a set of KGB games well above his head and apparently also above his IQ too. His sons have already been captured on tape admitting that Russia, meaning Vladimir Putin, is now their primary financier.

Even Houdini could not survive a mess as big as the one Trump has built for his family and himself. Thus, all the trees in the Trump Tower forest inevitably will have to fall.

Long before the election, the intelligence agencies of most of our Western allies knew Trump was being “played” and setup for Russian “kompromate.” They tried vainly to warn us, but until Senator John McCain plopped Christopher Steele’s dossier on Obama’s desk, Obama, the press, and the FBI, just plugged their ears and watched Trump get elected? Seeing this, Buzzfeed felt it had on choice but to publish Steele’s dossier so that “we the people” could see what was going on behind the screen.

All one really needs to know about the authenticity of Steele’s dossier, is that once it was leaked, the Russian spies associated with it, began dropping like flies. Steele, an ex-British spy himself, ran for cover too, scurrying into hiding. Could “fake news” really cause this kind of reaction?

Once the cat was out of the bag about Trump’s vulnerabilities, the Russians put their foot on the accelerator and pressed their attack forward. Leading with honey and money traps, political corruption, illicit loans and cyber weapons of mass disruption, and with Wikileaks out front, Putin refined and “weaponized” every tool in his arsenal. The Russian attack on our democratic process now began in earnest.

Using Trump, his family, and his close cronies as point men, cutouts, spotters and paid collaborators within the enemy camp, Putin just picked off the low hanging fruit of our deeply divided political system one piece at a time. Every platform known to the post-modern world was used by Vladimir Putin to undermine our already shaky political and electoral process. And who could blame him?

Wittingly or not, Trump alone has become a singularly potent Russian ramrod for breaking up the Western Alliance and irreparably damaging our democratic institutions. For Putin it was “missioned accomplished:” His mission was both a tactical and a strategic success. QED.

But what should be most worrisome to Americans is that these same methods proved disastrous when targeted against our NATO allies. Despite this, against the US, everything Russian intelligence threw at us worked to perfection and beyond Putin’s fondest dreams. Why?

Here is a big hint: To save themselves from the ongoing Trump embarrassment, the die heart Republicans from the Bannon wing of the party, simply switched sides and began rooting for Vladimir Putin, calling the Trump scandal “fake news.” At the same time, while the Republicans were busy doing this, the Democrats all went mute; and like a pack of chicken-hearted rats, slid back into the woodworks never to be heard from?

In short, both sides watched this vulgar spectacle from the sidelines with mouths gaping as Trump and Putin continued to wreak havoc on, and ravage our Western Alliances and our nation’s democratic processes? Go figure?

So, even as the nation’s alliances and its fundamental institutions are still under severe attack, US politics remains the same old cut-throat zero-sum game? Does that not sound like no one is at home minding the store?

JFK’s assassination was the first, and it seems that DJT is the last canary in the coal mine to warn us that our political system is broken, perhaps irretrievably so. Five stars!

[Forty Two]

[Tero]

The secret word is oligarchy.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

'Michael Flynn, Trump's ex-national security adviser, pleads guilty to lying to the FBI; now cooperating with Russia probe'

Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI about his postelection contacts with Russia's ambassador to the United States — and is now cooperating with a probe into links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The charge against Flynn carries a maximum possible prison sentence of five years. Flynn's plea agreement calls for a recommended sentence of no more than six months in prison.

Flynn's son Michael G. Flynn, whose work for his father's consulting group was reportedly being scrutinized by investigators, is not expected to be charged, a source told The Washington Post.

Flynn surrendered Friday morning before the plea hearing in Washington federal court.

Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, pleaded guilty to a single criminal count of knowingly making materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements to FBI agents.

...

In a statement after the guilty plead, Flynn said it had been "extraordinarily painful to endure these many months of false accusations of 'treason' and other outrageous acts."

"But I recognize that the actions I acknowledged in court today were wrong, and through my faith in God I am working to set things right," Flynn said.

"My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the Special Counsel's Office reflect a decision I made in the best interests of my family and of our country. I accept full responsibility for my actions."

A leading criminal defense lawyer not connected to the case told CNBC that Flynn's plea is "a very big deal" because it signals Mueller believes information from Flynn will be used to successfully prosecute other Trump associates.

...

Speaking of the Flynn developments, Trump attorney Ty Cobb said: "The false statements involved mirror the false statements to White House officials which resulted in his resignation in February of this year."

"Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr. Flynn," Cobb said.

"The conclusion of this phase of the Special Counsel's work demonstrates again that the Special Counsel is moving with all deliberate speed and clears the way for a prompt and reasonable conclusion."

The Fox News take: "It was not illegal for Flynn to talk with the Russians." Which is true, and leads directly to the question of why did he lie about it? In any event, Flynn has signed a document saying that he will be cooperating with the investigation--it's likely that what he knows will help in the production of charges against other members of the Trump campaign and administration.

[L'Emmerdeur]

'Michael Flynn’s Guilty Plea Is Bad For Trump In Lots Of Ways'

The guilty plea of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — the fourth official from President Trump’s campaign implicated in criminal activity — is in several ways even more damaging to the president than special counsel Robert Mueller’s charges earlier this fall against Paul Manafort, who actually ran Trump’s campaign for a time. In short: Flynn’s plea is a sign that Mueller’s investigation has reached a more central place within Trump’s orbit, and that it could creep closer to Trump still. But let’s go through why in more detail.

Flipping — Mueller is charging Flynn only with perjury, even though there have been a number of other allegations against him, particularly about his lobbying work. Flynn’s guilty plea suggests that he is cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. In fact, ABC News is reporting that Flynn has told prosecutors that he is willing to provide potentially damaging information about the president. Indeed, Flynn was a top adviser on both the campaign and, briefly, in the White House. He could have damaging information about very senior officials in the administration, potentially including senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Trump himself.

[Tero]

Flynn too late. Now Trump will sign the tax law.

After that neither party will care what happens to Trump.

[Brian Peacock]

Yeah, that he's pleaded guilty to only a single charge is quite telling I think.

[Animavore]

Flynn to testify Trump 'directed him to make contact with the Russians':

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI on Friday, after being charged with one felony count in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

According to ABC News, Flynn is also prepared to testify against Trump, members of Trump's family and White House officials.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... t-with-the

[Animavore]

Funny enough.

[Animavore]