WTF Community

Day 442

Updated 4/6/2018 10:23 AM PDT

1/ Robert Mueller has evidence that questions Erik Prince's Congressional testimony about a chance meeting last year in Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, the manager of a state-run Russian investment fund close to Putin. George Nader, a cooperating witness with limited immunity, told investigators that he facilitated and personally attended a meeting between Prince and Dmitriev days before Trump was inaugurated. The goal of the meeting was to discuss foreign policy and to establish a line of communication between the Russian government and the incoming Trump administration. Prince told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in November that "I didn't fly there to meet any Russian guy," and the meeting with Dmitriev as unexpected. Prince founded the private military contractor Blackwater USA and is the brother of Betsy DeVos, who serves as Trump's Secretary of Education. As of late March, Mueller's team has not asked Prince to appear before the grand jury. (ABC News)


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2018/04/06/day-442/
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They are going to eat her alive :joy::joy::joy:

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Two EPA officials and a White House official have confirmed that Scott Pruitt lied when he said he didn’t know about and had nothing to do with the massive raises given to two of his staffers. This article adds that new disgrace to the ever growing pile of steaming scandal that sits atop Pruitt’s turf. The relevant paragraphs are quoted below. I watched the interview on Fox where he unabashedly delivered this lie and a slew of others and I could just tell at the time he was shoveling BS. And, sure enough, he was.

Pruitt spoke at length during a Fox News interview about his role in Greenwalt and Hupp getting raises of 52 percent and 33 percent respectively under an unusual maneuver involving their reappointment through a provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

In the interview Wednesday, Pruitt implied he was not involved in those decisions.

“I found out this yesterday and I corrected the action, and we are in the process of finding out how it took place and correcting that going forward,” he told correspondent Ed Henry.

Wilcox stressed in a statement Friday that Pruitt “does not know the details of staff salary nor does he make those kinds of personnel actions. … He was not aware the raises had transpired nor the means by which they transpired.”

But two EPA officials and a White House official told The Post that the administrator instructed staff to award substantial pay boosts to both women, who had worked in different roles for him in Oklahoma.

Pruitt is caught out in yet another bald faced lie.

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DHS is looking for a technology contractor to compile a database of 290,000 global news sources, including their social media postings.
:thinking: Hmmm, I have a feeling this isn’t just about cracking down on Fake News. What do you guys think?

Here’s the actual contract listing:

Project Scope:

Quote:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.”

The DHS wants to track more than 290,000 global news sources, including online, print, broadcast, cable, and radio, as well as trade and industry publications, local, national and international outlets, and social media, according to the documents. It also wants the ability to track media coverage in more than 100 languages including Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, with instant translation of articles into English.

The request comes amid heightened concern about accuracy in media and the potential for foreigners to influence U.S. elections and policy through “fake news.” Nineteen lawmakers including Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month, asking whether Qatar-based Al Jazeera should register as a foreign agent because it “often directly undermines” U.S. interests with favorable coverage of Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria.

Source:

Forbes follows up:

Then CNN follows up with a quote:

“Despite what some reporters may suggest, this is nothing more than the standard practice of monitoring current events in the media,” DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton tweeted after the Committee to Protect Journalists tweeted out a link to a Forbes article about the request. “Any suggestion otherwise is fit for tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorists.”

“Standard Practice”? :woman_shrugging:t2: Originally, I posted this as kind of joke, it reminded me of @matt ‘s new tool, https://currentstatus.io but this story keeps popping up on Twitter, but not as a joke… so I’m going to stick by my :woman_shrugging:t2: assessment. Who the fuck knows anything anymore? :pensive:

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@matt

1/ Robert Mueller has evidence that questions Erik Prince’s Congressional testimony about a chance meeting last year in Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev

This is a huge breaking development. (BTW, never would have spotted it if not for Matt featuring it here – thank you.) If Prince lied to congress, Mueller is now in a position to bring criminal charges against him and thus apply pressure on him to reveal what really unfolded at the Seychelles meeting – along with other pertinent information he may have.

Just a BTW about the Russian in question, Kirill Dmitriev: He has often been characterized as “well connected with the Kremlin,” but we haven’t known in what capacity. A recent article in the Financial Times has now revealed that Dmitriev does, indeed, have very close personal ties with Putin. Trump adviser’s Russian contact closely linked to Putin family, April 1, 2018. Since the FT requires subscriptions and this link may not work for you, I’ve quoted briefly from a couple relevant paragraphs below:

Although Mr Prince’s meeting with Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles . . . has been previously disclosed, Mr Dmitriev’s ties to the Putin clan have not been widely known. According to six people close to Mr Dmitriev, his wife is close friends with Mr Putin’s younger daughter. . . . Mr Dmitriev’s wife Natalia Popova was in the same year at Moscow State University as Yekaterina Tikhonova, Mr Putin’s younger daughter, and is the deputy director of her technology foundation, Innopraktika.

Ms Popova’s close friendship with Ms Tikhonova has made [Dmitriev] a powerful figure in the Kremlin, according to three people who work with Mr Dmitriev, a state banker, a fellow private equity executive and a person who knows him socially. Mr Dmitriev is a member of Innopraktika’s board and a former board member of petrochemicals giant Sibur, where Ms Tikhonova’s husband Kirill Shamalov is a senior executive. RDIF [Russian Direct Investment Fund] arranged a $1.75bn loan to a Sibur project in 2015. . . . Mr Dmitriev “rose to the top because he is part of the family,” a person who works on deals with RDIF said. . . .

I had little difficulty parsing the details here, but something that stood out to me is that RDIF may have become one of the Russian financial institutions of interest to investigators.

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Will We Stop Trump Before It’s Too Late? https://nyti.ms/2GFY3XO

Quotes from Madelaine Albright Opinion piece NYT 4.6.18

On April 28, 1945 — 73 years ago — Italians hung the corpse of their former dictator Benito Mussolini upside down next to a gas station in Milan. Two days later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker beneath the streets of war-ravaged Berlin. Fascism, it appeared, was dead.

To guard against a recurrence, the survivors of war and the Holocaust joined forces to create the United Nations, forge global financial institutions and — through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — strengthen the rule of law. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the honor roll of elected governments swelled not only in Central Europe, but also Latin America, Africa and Asia. Almost everywhere, it seemed, dictators were out and democrats were in. Freedom was ascendant.

Today, we are in a new era, testing whether the democratic banner can remain aloft amid terrorism, sectarian conflicts, vulnerable borders, rogue social media and the cynical schemes of ambitious men. The answer is not self-evident. We may be encouraged that most people in most countries still want to live freely and in peace, but there is no ignoring the storm clouds that have gathered. In fact, fascism — and the tendencies that lead toward fascism — pose a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II."

“Warning signs include the relentless grab for more authority by governing parties in Hungary, the Philippines, Poland and Turkey — all United States allies. The raw anger that feeds fascism is evident across the Atlantic in the growth of nativist movements opposed to the idea of a united Europe, including in Germany, where the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland has emerged as the principal opposition party. The danger of despotism is on display in the Russia of Vladimir Putin — invader of Ukraine, meddler in foreign democracies, accused political assassin, brazen liar and proud son of the K.G.B. Putin has just been re-elected to a new six-year term, while in Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, a ruthless ideologue, is poised to triumph in sham balloting next month. In China, Xi Jinping has persuaded a docile National People’s Congress to lift the constitutional limit on his tenure in power.”

“American leadership is urgently required. This was among the indelible lessons of the 20th century. But by what he has said, done and failed to do, Mr. Trump has steadily diminished America’s positive clout in global councils.”

PS @Pet_Proletariat and @MissJava. - not sure zi got the quote thing right…do I go to " symbol within this box. Long day for me…;-(

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@dragonfly9 you’re doing great sweetie lol. If you want to make it “officially” quoted you can highlight and click the quotes button, like so:

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Too little, too late, if you ask me. I will never excuse much less accept their hypocrisy in supporting trump.

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Yes…hypocracy screams here.

Dark article about the Evangelicals and T here. Trump and the Evangelical Temptation - The Atlantic

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Getting closer…

"A Donald Trump foreign policy adviser pushed government agencies to review materials from the dark web in the summer of 2016 that he thought were Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails, multiple sources with direct knowledge tell CNN.

Joseph Schmitz approached the FBI and other government agencies about material a client of his had discovered that Schmitz believed might have been Clinton’s missing 30,000 emails from her private e-mail server, sources say. The material was never verified, and sources say they ultimately believed it was fake.

His push is the latest example of Trump advisers who were mixed up in efforts to find dirt on Clinton during the presidential campaign. Schmitz was one of the first people Trump named to his campaign’s national security and foreign policy team. The team, showcased in a March 2016 photo, was thrown together early in Trump’s successful run as he faced mounting pressure to prove his ability to pull in high-level advisers who could help prepare him for the White House."

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@elaphe

I just don’t know :woman_shrugging:t2: But it is super creepy in this political climate.

Check out DHS’s response to snopes when they called to confirm the story. It’s at the very bottom of the page. :point_down:
Quote:

In response, we asked for clarification on the claim that this was “standard practice” and if that implied that the Department of Homeland Security already collected this data. Houlton sent us this reply:

You are embarrassing yourself with these questions and wild conspiracy theories. Just like you monitored the media to find this story, DHS does the same. Enjoy your weekend.

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Probably because we know they are pathological liars, starting with trump; it’s what corrupt autocrats do, they tell you that black is white, I am like a really smart person & the best thing ever to MAGA, I got the most votes, my crowd is bigger than anyone else’s, all is well (-what Russians?), & here, have some Cool-Aid. “Creepy” is an understatement. It’s called knowing what they’re up to!

And to be honest, my biggest fear is that the coming elections will be rigged, just like in Russia. We all know that in a real election, there’s a “blue wave” coming…but what if…???

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@elaphe

There’s a solution to that worry.
Get your paper mail in ballot here :point_down:

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While I agree we should use paper ballots, they still don’t preclude a miscount, especially with the conspiracy of corruption in the GOP and the stakes being so high. That’s what control of the media is all about too, “revising” the truth, aka “alternative facts”. Their game-plan is quite clear & sadly, we have far too many uneducated suckers, not to mention those with way too much money and influence, who have enabled this to go as far as it has already. I don’t mean to be overly-negative but I wonder how it felt to be in other countries who thought “it could never happen here”? I passed “disbelief” after the election…

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Yes, I feel the same hard cynicism about voting vs the influencers (SuperPAC and dark money, alt-facts - 'if we say it is true, ’ see Sinclair, not to mention outside influencers, hacked info, or for that matter power grids) and the low-information voter.

This kleptocracy admin-securing assets, resources, stacking the judges, and securing the media does wreek havoc and may create more of an autocratic government.

Perhaps an upsurge in youthful enthusiasm for creating a fairer government which might respond to better gun laws, better schools…things that Bernie spoke to them in particular, could lead the way.

We are hearing that Mueller and justice may prevail in getting this corrupt admin out of here, but the damage done is staggering. (From my liberal vantage point). But the loss of trust in our institutions is truly a destabilizing factor.

So I remain skeptical yet hopeful things could change.

Thankfully, R’s who are resigning see they have no path to win…but where are the politicians who have some integrity about the job at hand.

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@MissJava Super…thanking you. :blush:

I think it’s a desperation move to intimidate those actually reporting the news (aka the truth), otherwise why make it known? It’s still creepy though…to think we’ve lived long enough to see this shit happen?

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