This is going to get challenged swiftly…
Most notably, the new law now states that those who illegally camp on state property would now face a Class E felony, punishable by up to six years in prison, rather than a misdemeanor. Felony convictions in Tennessee result in the revocation of an individual’s right to vote.
So much to unpack in this piece…
Officials in the U.S. State Department were surprised, too. Despite a department press release announcing the delivery, several senior officials working on the Russia portfolio in the department and elsewhere in the national security apparatus were unaware exactly how the 45 ventilators had ended up on American soil. Half of the shipment was paid for by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), one of the country’s sovereign wealth funds, which is under U.S. sanctions. (The sanctions do not prohibit all transactions between U.S. entities and the firm, but they have limited the fund’s interactions with American businesses.) And the fund’s CEO, Kirill Dmitriev, had been scrutinized by Congress and former special counsel Robert Mueller for his communications with Trump transition officials shortly after Moscow had meddled in the 2016 election.
But wait there’s more
Dmitriev was one of the main participants in the infamous January 2017 Seychelles meeting with former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, in which the two discussed a roadmap for U.S.-Russia cooperation in the new administration. In the years since, Kushner and Dmitriev have communicated—often at a distance, and at times through intermediaries—about ways the U.S. and Russia could work together. The conversations have touched on everything from creating a joint business council to increase investment, to working on a Middle East peace deal, to helping lead negotiations on a recent OPEC deal, to delivering those medical supplies, according to multiple senior officials.
And then, oh shit!
Two individuals familiar with the matter said Trump was briefed on the Dmitriev U.S.-Russia reconciliation plan ahead of his first call with Putin on Jan. 28, 2017. A White House readout of the call said Trump and Putin spoke for about an hour on subjects ranging from mutual cooperation in defeating ISIS to creating investment opportunities for both countries—two bullet points included in that reconciliation memo.
During the same time period, Kushner was beginning to lay the groundwork for the development of a Middle East peace plan—one Team Trump thought could evolve with considerable international buy-in, including from Russia. The idea for a peace plan had been in the works before Trump took into office, officials said. At an event before his inauguration, Trump spoke with reporters from the Times of London about the idea, saying Kushner would lead the peace plan process.
even more,
This spring, a few days after that Russian plane loaded with protective gear landed in New York City—the shipment made possible in part by Kushner’s “Project Airbridge”—Saudi Arabia and Russia struck a deal to cut oil production in order to stabilize the market that had been rattled by the coronavirus. OPEC and its allies agreed to cut production by 9.7 billion barrels a day in May and June after oil prices fell to 18-year lows. One senior administration official said Kushner and Dmitriev worked behind the scenes to help negotiate the deal.
During the last-minute negotiations, Dmitriev published an op-ed with CNBC saying the U.S. and Russia should work together to defeat the coronavirus.
“During World War II, American and Russian soldiers fought side by side against a common enemy,” Dmitriev wrote. “Just as our grandfathers stood shoulder to shoulder… now our countries must show unity and leadership to win the war against the coronavirus.”
Dmitriev’s article was viewed in the administration as the most recent proposal by the Russians to work with the United States. He often appears on television and publishes opinion articles in CNBC and other American media outlets proposing new pathways for cooperation between the U.S. and Russia. He also pitches ideas publicly at international forums, including in Davos. Dmitriev’s plan for cooperation on the virus seemed to those working on the Russia portfolio like a way the two countries could legitimately partner on a major international crisis.
In May, a U.S. Air Force aircraft landed in Moscow. Officials with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) carried out the delivery of a $5.6 billion shipment with ventilators meant to help Russia fight the virus—even though USAID ceased operations in the country in 2012. The agency did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
In its communiqué, the U.S. State Department used language similar to Dmitriev’s: “Particularly in times of crisis, we must work together—much like we did during the Second World War, when the people of our two nations and other allies fought valiantly, suffered great losses, and endured great hardship.”
Two months after that, the U.S. and United Kingdom intelligence communities accused hackers working for the Kremlin of breaking into the networks of groups working on a COVID-19 vaccine.
Is our state department now promoting the same policies discussed in the Seychelles meeting? The fuck guys?
WOW…there is a lot of back room negotiation going on with Kushner and Dmitriev to hammer out essentially a supposed US-Russian unified front on helping solve the Coronavirus problem, messing with Rusal and then a drop in oil prices, forge a Middle East Peace plan by targeting ISIS, getting some Russian help with the mid-west’s economy, all by way of back channel meetings at Davos, Bahrain. And all the while leaving out any State Dept personnel to help direct or coordinate what our Russian Policy should be from a National Security position.
A lot of Kushner getting in and acting with his father-in-law’s blessing, since according to T, Kushner is a very smart businessman.
We are seeing a LOT of reminders pre-election of the Russian role in election meddling, and on the flip side, seeing T 'n Co not batting an eye when our own US intel says that we should be wary of whatever Russia is going after.
From the Kushner/Trump real estate and power influence side, you see Kushner paving the way to have rich Russian friends in high places, and lines into Putin for future building in Russia. You see the Trump/Kushner hand in making the US want to believe that Russia is there to help us - see they sent ventilators (albeit broken), but then you see Russia buying our ventilators, and then you see Russia trying to steal the vaccine research.
And yes, it all started in the Seychelles, where Erik Prince just bumped into Dimitriev and had a beer. WOW
Yup…going after Trump’s business, and specifically Eric Trump who cancelled his interview…NY AG Leticia James is going after them.
The New York attorney general is investigating President Trump’s private business for allegedly misleading lenders by inflating the value of its assets, the attorney general’s office said Monday in a legal filing.
In the filing, signed by a deputy to Attorney General Letitia James, the attorney general’s office said it is investigating Trump’s use of “Statements of Financial Condition” — documents Trump sent to lenders, summarizing his assets and debts.
The filing asks a New York state judge to compel the Trump Organization to provide information it has been withholding from investigators — including a subpoena seeking an interview with the president’s son Eric.
The attorney general’s office said it began investigating after Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer,” Michael Cohen, told Congress in February 2019 that Trump had used these statements to inflate his net worth to lenders.
Well, Seattle-Tacoma and one in Dallas area seem to be doing the right thing…bringing back the sorting machines.
Postal workers in Washington State have reinstalled high-speed mail sorting machines—dismantled after controversial orders from the U.S. Postal Service— despite USPS orders not to put machines back in use.
After embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced he would pause recent controversial changes to U.S. Postal Service protocol, the service told workers not to reinstall removed equipment.
40 percent of the high-speed mail sorting machines in the Seattle-Tacoma area were disconnected or dismantled since the changes went into effect, according to KUOW Public Radio in Seattle , with workers in the Tacoma, Washington sorting plant saying eight of their 18 machines that sort and postmark letters were disconnected and pushed into a corner.
A sorting machine in Wenatchee, Washington was also reconnected, against the orders of the Postal Service’s head of maintenance, Kevin Couch.
Only two facilities, Seattle-Tacoma and one in Dallas, seem to be ignoring the Postal Service’s directive to leave decommissioned sorting machines out of use.
A circuit judge in Tallahassee has ruled that Florida’s schools reopening order, requiring “brick and mortar” schools to be open amidst a coronavirus pandemic, is unconstitutional.
Circuit Judge Charles Dodson on Monday granted a request for a court order to bar enforcement of the directive from Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran.
Dodson wrote in his decision that the Florida Education Association established that irreparable harm would be caused if schools were to reopen on a date set by officials in Tallahassee.
He writes that schools should “reopen when the local decision-makers determine” to do so upon advice of medical experts without the threat of a financial penalty from the state affecting the decision.
“This is what local school boards were elected to do,” continued Dodson. “Every witness testified that any decision to reopen schools should be based on local conditions … Such local decisions unequivocally serve the public interest.”
But as written, Dodson wrote, the order gave districts no choice but to reopen.
“The districts have no meaningful alternative,” Dodson wrote. “If an individual school district chooses safety, that is, delaying the start of schools until it individually determines it is safe to do so for its county, it risks losing state funding, even though every student is being taught.”
I guarantee this will NOT be the last act of civil disobedience from brave postal workers.
More revelations from Miles Taylor, ex DHS official
An interview from The Daily Beast and Miles Taylor tells us the graphic nature of what T wanted done to immigrants. It is so apparent from all the tell-all books, and here again, T is really unfit for office.
When it came to the border wall, Trump would dream up “sickening” medieval plots “to pierce the flesh” of migrants, rip all the families apart, “maim,” and gas them, Taylor claims. “This was a man with no humanity whatsoever,” Taylor says. “He says, we got to do this, this, this, and this, all of which are probably impossible, illegal unethical,” Taylor recalls, but he was writing them down as the president spoke. “And he looks over me and he goes, ‘you fucking taking notes?’”
We’d heard that T offered to pardon the immigration officers at the border, and Taylor re-iterates here.
From Axios
Why it matters: Taylor, who quit the Trump administration in 2019 and endorsed Joe Biden last week, is one of a number of Republicans seeking to stop the president’s re-election. Trump denied that he offered pardons to immigration officials when the allegations were first reported by the Washington Post and New York Times in August 2019.
What he’s saying:
"Even though he had been told on repeated occasions that the way he wanted to do it was illegal, his response was to say, ‘Do it. If you get in trouble, I’ll pardon you.’
It was made clear to the president that it was against the law for us to simply deny anyone entry across the southern border including people who were fleeing violence, persecution, danger. Under the law, they had the right to come in to try to seek refuge in the United States. He said, ‘I don’t care.’ His exact words were, ‘The bins are full.’
The president offered to pardon U.S. government officials for breaking the law to implement his immigration policy. That was the moment I decided I was going to have to quit the Trump administration."
This is T’s next move - nominate Chad Wolf for Homeland Security Secretary, instead of Acting DHS. More shoring up…
https://www.nbcnews.> com/politics/national-security/trump-nominate-chad-wolf-homeland-security-secretary-n1238049
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would nominate acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to the role permanently.
Wolf has been serving in an acting capacity since November of last year. The last Homeland secretary to be confirmed by the Senate, Kirstjen Nielsen, resigned in April 2019.
“I am pleased to inform the American Public that Acting Secretary Chad Wolf will be nominated to be the Secretary of Homeland Security,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “Chad has done an outstanding job and we greatly appreciate his service!”
Wolf said in a statement that he was honored to be nominated. “As the homeland faces evolving threats from natural disasters, violent opportunists, malign cyber actors, and transnational criminal organizations, the mission of DHS is as critical as ever,” he said.
Trump’s announcement comes after a government watchdog concluded that Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, the senior official performing the duties of deputy secretary, are not legally qualified to hold their positions.
FDA Head walks back his statement on Plasma being the something that is a truly effective treatment. He got criticized…and now he’s apologizing.
The Food and Drug Administration’s chief has undercut the agency’s assertion that it is basing its decisions on science, not politics.
At a White House event Sunday with President Trump, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn used a deeply misleading statistic to claim that a treatment the agency had just authorized for treating the coronavirus would save 35 lives out of every 100 people who get the treatment.
That false claim brought withering criticism from scientists, in news articles and on Twitter, who argued that it was a gross exaggeration of the benefits. On Monday evening, Hahn tweeted an apology, saying “The criticism is entirely justified.”
Hahn tried to explain his error by portraying it as a poor choice of words. "What I should have said better is that the data show a relative risk reduction not an absolute risk reduction."
Congress is now investigation Mike Pompeo over his decision to speak at the RNC, a blatantly illegal action for any Secretary of State.
In related news, Pompeo is FINALLY commenting on the poisoning of Aleksey Navalny now that the German hospital treating him has confirmed that Russia lied about it.
Oh look, Jacob Wohl and frequent co-conspirator Jack Burkman are robocalling people insisting that information obtained through voting by mail will be used to track down old warrants and outstanding debts and push mandatory vaccines.
This isn’t just racist, it’s election fraud. Somebody finally lock them up.
More vengeful actions by T 'n Co wanting to get ‘dossiers’ on Washington Post writers and other journalists, particularly David Fahrenthold, WAPO who has written extensively about the T’s finances, their lack luster or Non-charity, charity, for which Trumps had to get rid of.
This kind of pressure on journalists is a fascist move…and one that gives T his ‘gaslighting’ opportunities…See what they did, etc.
WTFery.
The White House said in a story published Thursday that it was compiling a “very large” dossier on a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter and others who it said are a "disgrace to journalism and the American people."
The astonishing revelation about the White House’s efforts to discredit reporter David Fahrenthold came after The Post requested comment for a Thursday story he wrote with two colleagues. The story, co-bylined by reporters Josh Dawsey and Joshua Partlow, detailed how President Trump’s company "charged the U.S. government more than $900,000" for hotel rooms fees among other services at Mar-a-Lago.
In a statement, White House spokesperson Judd Deere accused The Washington Post of “blatantly interfering with the business relationships of the Trump Organization” and demanded "it must stop."
"Please be advised that we are building up a very large ‘dossier’ on the many false David Fahrenthold and others stories as they are a disgrace to journalism and the American people," Deere said.
When asked by CNN Business for further information about the dossier, Deere declined to comment. Neither White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany nor White House director of communications Alyssa Farah responded to additional emails seeking comment.
Fahrenthold deferred a request for comment to a spokesperson for The Post who declined.
Fahrenthold, however, wrote on Twitter that if anyone knows “anything about a dossier the White House has supposedly compiled” on him, to let him know or provide him a copy.
Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for “casting doubt” on Trump’s “generosity toward charities” in his coverage. He has also reported on Trump’s businesses.
Last summer, The New York Times reported that allies of the White House had compiled dossiers on hundreds of people who work for top news organizations.
The White House’s boasting of building a dossier on Fahrenthold and other journalists is jarring, but perhaps not surprising from an administration that has branded the press as "the enemy of the people."
Trump and his allies have for years aimed to discredit journalists and news organizations, often through the use of lies and dishonest rhetoric.
See Gaslighting reference - Reversing the Discussion to what YOU did wrong…
Here’s evidence of the ugly disinformation campaigns which influence people…it is beyond menacing.
Fake Account and the tweet
Twitter has taken action to stop a spam operation that pushed messages from fake accounts about Black people abandoning the Democratic Party.
The company removed two fake accounts and deleted the account of a San Diego man who spammed the platform, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Wednesday.
The fake accounts were purported to be run by Black people whose viral tweets received tens of thousands of shares in the past month. One of the accounts, @WentDemToRep, logged over 11,000 retweets on a single tweet that claimed that the user was a lifelong Democrat who was pushed to vote Republican by the Black Lives Matter movement. The tweet was posted shortly after the account was created Tuesday.
The WentDemToRep account quickly tagged two other accounts in a reply, @PeterGammo and @KRon619, which were suspended at the same time Tuesday. The Twitter spokesperson said all three accounts were suspended for spam and, "specifically, artificially manipulative behavior."
Disinformation experts and national security agencies are gearing up for the election, anticipating that social media platforms will continue to be central to foreign and domestic efforts to mislead voters.
This raises more questions than answers about why a CIA officer, Anthony Schinella committed suicide despite the fact he was weeks away from retirement, and recently married. He also worked in the division which released the NIC reports that released the Russian bounties for US soldiers. This happened on June 14th and sometime after, the Bounty memo was reassessed as being ‘inconclusive.’
A high-ranking US intelligence official died by suicide in front of his wife, leading to a CIA investigation of the death, but public silence from his peers.
The death of Anthony Schinella, national intelligence officer for military issues, comes at a time when his expertise might have been crucial.
He shot himself in the front yard of his home in Arlington, Virginia, on 14 June, according to a medical examiner’s report seen by The Intercept .
Mr Schinella was just weeks away from retirement and had only recently married his wife, Sara Corcoran, a journalist. She was in her car in the driveway of the home and told The Intercept that she was trying to get away from Mr Schinella when she witnessed the suicide.
His work was particularly sensitive as the most senior military affairs intelligence analyst and as a member of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which prepares reports for senior policymakers in Congress and the president.
The work of the NIC has come under recent scrutiny following the uproar over the release of intelligence reports that Russia was paying the Taliban bounties to kill American troops in Afghanistan.
Shortly after the 26 June revelation in The New York Times , an NIC memo claimed that the intelligence regarding the bounties was inconclusive.
John Ratcliffe is undermining elections for Trump. Like he was hired to do.
oday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) released the following statement following the cancellation of all election security briefings for the Congress by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has informed us that it will no longer provide briefings to Members of Congress, including the House and Senate Intelligence committees, on foreign efforts to interfere in our upcoming election. This is a shocking abdication of its lawful responsibility to keep the Congress currently informed, and a betrayal of the public’s right to know how foreign powers are trying to subvert our democracy. This intelligence belongs to the American people, not the agencies which are its custodian. And the American people have both the right and the need to know that another nation, Russia, is trying to help decide who their president should be.
“The ODNI had requested the opportunity to brief the intelligence committees and the full U.S. House of Representatives in mid-September and has now cancelled those briefings and said it would hold no others. This is shameful and – coming only weeks before the election – demonstrates that the Trump Administration is engaged in a politicized effort to withhold election-related information from Congress and the American people at the precise moment that greater transparency and accountability is required. This keeps both the American people and the Congress in the dark, when both are in need of the information.
“Instead of transparency, the Trump Administration, including President Trump, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, has already sought to promote a false narrative of equivalence among the interests of several nations in U.S. elections and policy. The aims and actions of Russia, China and Iran are not the same. Only one country – Russia – is actively undertaking a range of measures to undermine the presidential election and to secure the outcome that the Kremlin sees as best serving its interests.
“We expect the Administration and Intelligence Community to keep us fully and accurately informed, and resume the briefings. If they are unwilling to, we will consider the full range of tools available to the House to compel compliance.”
