Comrade Trump

[frank ryan]

Trump thinks the FBI is falling apart.

Trump attacks his own FBI in a series of tweets

President Donald Trump attacked his own FBI in a series of tweets on Sunday morning and said the law enforcement agency's reputation is "in tatters."

The president was responding to reports that a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller's team investigating Russian election meddling because of anti-Trump text messages.


He said after years under fired FBI director James Comey, "with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more)," the agency's reputation "is in tatters - worst in history!'" The president also retweeted a tweet suggesting FBI Director Chris Wray "needs to clean house."

The president said earlier Sunday he never asked Comey to stop investigating ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/03/trum...of-tweets.html

[Uncle Ted]

Trump thinks the FBI is falling apart.

Trump attacks his own FBI in a series of tweets



https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/03/trum...of-tweets.html

Make the FBI great again!

[Uncle Ted]

Trump thinks the FBI is falling apart.

Trump attacks his own FBI in a series of tweets



https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/03/trum...of-tweets.html

Speaking of the FBI...

New documents reveal FBI's Clinton cover-up
[...]
The organization I head, Judicial Watch, asked the FBI on July 7, 2016, for any records that might pertain to the infamous tarmac meeting. We had to sue after we were ignored by the agency.


Then the FBI told us flat-out that it couldn’t find any records. And we now know that was flat-out untrue. Because, in responding to another one of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, the Justice Department gave us heavily redacted documents that showed there were additional documents tucked away at the FBI headquarters.
[...]
Now we know why the FBI played shell games. The documents show that FBI officials were concerned solely about the leaking of details of the tarmac meeting. None of the documents show top agency officials cared one whit about the propriety of the meeting itself, but only about who blew the whistle on the covert tête-à-tête.


In one email, an FBI official writes “we need to find that guy.” And in another we learn that the Phoenix FBI office was contacted “in an attempt to stem any further damage.” An FBI official working on Lynch’s security detail even goes so far as to suggest non-disclosure agreements to keep the full facts from coming forth.


No wonder the FBI didn’t turn these documents over until we caught it red-handed, hiding and lying about them.


Simply put, the FBI appears to be fully complicit in a cover-up that attempted to influence a presidential election for a favored candidate – Hillary Clinton. And the truth was trampled on a Phoenix tarmac.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/...-cover-up.html

"Heavily redacted documents" is an understatement!...
3o1BoRYn4X18sWbfnZxfcFM_Ga_Kvp_PzuappuGpe78.jpg

[frank ryan]

Feinstein: Senate Russia probe building obstruction case against Trump

WASHINGTON — A Senate investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election has revealed a possible obstruction of justice case against President Donald Trump, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said on "Meet The Press" Sunday.

"The [Senate] Judiciary Committee has an investigation going as well and it involves obstruction of justice and I think what we're beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice,” Feinstein, the panel's top Democrat, said.

“I think we see this in the indictments, the four indictments, and pleas that have just taken place and some of the comments that are being made," Feinstein added, referencing the indictments of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates, who face charges that include conspiracy and money laundering that were uncovered during Special Counsel Bob Mueller's investigation into potential links between Trump and Russia. Also charged in connection to the Mueller investigation are Trump's former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who both pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

"I see it in the hyper-frenetic attitude of the White House, the comments every day, the continual tweets. And I see it most importantly in what happened with the firing of Director [James] Comey, and it is my belief that that is directly because he did not agree to ‘lift the cloud’ of the Russia investigation. That’s obstruction of justice,” Feinstein said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...-trump-n826031

[PaloAltoCougar]

Trump saying that he fired Flynn because he lied to the FBI (which is a change from the original reason given: Flynn lied to Pence) provides further ammo for his critics trying to make an obstruction/collusion case. I don't find it quite as troubling, but I think it's yet another reason why Trump's team has to be praying fervently their boss will not get subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. If he is, he won't have counsel to rein him in, and he'll continue to think he's the smartest guy in the room and can talk his way through anything. Mueller's examination would carve him up like Christmas turkey.

[Walter Sobchak]

Trump saying that he fired Flynn because he lied to the FBI (which is a change from the original reason given: Flynn lied to Pence) provides further ammo for his critics trying to make an obstruction/collusion case. I don't find it quite as troubling, but I think it's yet another reason why Trump's team has to be praying fervently their boss will not get subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. If he is, he won't have counsel to rein him in, and he'll continue to think he's the smartest guy in the room and can talk his way through anything. Mueller's examination would carve him up like Christmas turkey.

The ratings would be great. I can guarantee.

[frank ryan]

The ratings would be great. I can guarantee.

Best season finale of The Apprentice ever!

[Walter Sobchak]

Brian Ross suspended from ABC News for four weeks without pay.

Embedded Tweet

Embedded Tweet

[frank ryan]

2016 RNC Delegate: Trump Directed Change To Party Platform On Ukraine Support

President Trump may have been involved with a change to the Republican Party campaign platform last year that watered down support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine, according to new information from someone who was involved.

Diana Denman, a Republican delegate who supported arming U.S. allies in Ukraine, has told people that Trump aide J.D. Gordon said at the Republican Convention in 2016 that Trump directed him to support weakening that position in the official platform.

ltimately, the softer position was adopted.

Denman is scheduled to meet this week with the House and Senate Intelligence committees to discuss what she saw, said two sources familiar with the briefings.

Investigators in Congress and elsewhere want to ask the San Antonio-area woman about how her proposal supporting Ukraine changed in the course of last year's convention.

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/04/56831...kraine-support

[Crockett]

[frank ryan]

Manafort is busy on bail

Manafort worked on op-ed with Russian while out on bail, prosecutors say

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was ghostwriting an op-ed while out on bail last month with a Russian who has ties to the Russian intelligence service, Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Muller's team said Monday.

In a new filing Monday afternoon, Mueller's investigators said Manafort was working on an editorial in English as late as last Thursday and that it related to his political work for Ukraine, which factored into his money-laundering and foreign lobbying criminal charges.
The filing asks for the court to revisit a bail agreement Mueller's office and Manafort's lawyers made jointly last week. The court had not yet approved a change to his $10 million unsecured bail and house arrest.
"Even if the ghostwritten op-ed were entirely accurate, fair, and balanced, it would be a violation of this Court's November 8 Order if it had been published," prosecutors wrote. "The editorial clearly was undertaken to influence the public's opinion of defendant Manafort, or else there would be no reason to seek its publication (much less for Manafort and his long-time associate to ghostwrite it in another's name)."

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/politi...nce/index.html

[Uncle Ted]

Frank is going to love this...

Mika Brzezinski: "Noose" Tightening On Trump Family; "Might Go To Jail For The Rest Of Their Lives"

The hosts of MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' laid out their vision of the rise and fall of President Trump, who according to them "has no idea that he’s going down" over his contacts with Russia.


"The list has gotten so long of people who have claimed they didn’t have a meeting with Ambassador Kislyak or who left something off their disclosure form, or said, ‘The meeting I had with Russians was about adoption,’" co-host Willie Geist explained. "You have to just, as a layman even, to see a pattern, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, K.T. McFarland... I don’t know if it’s ignorance or arrogance or some combination of the two to under sworn testimony say, ‘I’m going to say this thing and they’ll never find out about it.’"

Later, Mika Brzezinski weighed in: "Knowing them, I think they’re shocked that the noose is tightening. I don’t know if they were arrogant or just incredibly un-self-aware and really dumb about what the job was about, how important it was, and how under the microscope every move you made would be. I think they just thought they’d go in there and flimflam and riff through it."

"I think they’re shocked that the noose is tightening and that people might go to jail for the rest of their lives," she added.
[...]

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/vi...eir_lives.html



Lock them up!

[Walter Sobchak]

Seems that at least one meeting with Russians was at the behest of the Israeli government to convince Russia to veto an UN vote condemning Israeli settlements... evidence of incoming Trump admin "colluding" with Israel, not Russia. lolz.

Frank... do you subscribe to The Nation?

The Trump Team Definitely Colluded With a Foreign Power—Just Not the One You Think

Friday’s indictment of former national-security adviser Michael Flynn has confirmed that Donald Trump’s inner circle colluded with a foreign power before entering the White House—just not the foreign power that has been the subject of our national fixation for the past year. To be sure, the jury is still out on Russia, though there are new grounds for questioning the case for a plot tying the Kremlin to Trump Tower. But with Flynn’s plea, we can now say for certain that the Trump team did collude—with Israel.

To recap, Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his conversations with then–Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the period after Trump’s November 2016 victory. As Foreign Policy previously reported, Flynn reached out to Kislyak as part of “a vigorous diplomatic bid” to undermine President Obama’s decision to allow a December 2016 Security Council resolution condemning illegal Israeli settlement building in the Occupied Territories. The indictment fills in some details.

According to the charge sheet, Flynn first made contact with Kislyak to discuss the Israel vote. We found out this weekend his reason for doing so. “[Special counsel Robert] Mueller’s investigators have learned through witnesses and documents that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel asked the Trump transition team to lobby other countries to help Israel,” The New York Times reported after Flynn’s court appearance on Friday. “Investigators have learned that Mr. Flynn and [Trump son-in-law Jared] Kushner took the lead in those efforts”—efforts which failed to change a single vote, including Russia’s, which backed the measure in defiance of the Trump-Netanyahu subversion attempt.

In short, the first known contact between the Trump campaign and Russia after the election occurred in the service of a different foreign power, Israel, and was ultimately fruitless.

[...]

Only time will tell whether Flynn has something to offer Mueller, or whether Mueller has gotten from him what he can. In the meantime, more than a year after the election, we still have exactly zero evidence of any cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Russian government—nor, it must be repeated, any evidence to back up US intelligence officials’ claims that the Russian government meddled in the election. We do have instances of Trump campaign figures’—namely, Donald Trump Jr. and low-level adviser George Papadopoulos—making contact with people that they thought were Russian government intermediaries. But whatever they were told or believed, there is still no proof that their contacts led to an actual Kremlin connection.

What we do have is evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Israel to subvert the US government’s official position at the United Nations Security Council. Yet reaction to that news has been quite a departure from the standards of Russiagate when it comes to foreign meddling.

[...]

But there has been no outrage from democracy-defending #Resistance stalwarts over Saban’s comments (and the Israeli subversion effort he endorsed). The same for news of Kushner’s failure to disclose his leadership of a group that funded the illegal Israeli settlements that he tried to protect at the United Nations. And now we await to see how those who agonize over foreign influence on Trump will respond to his reported plans to move the American embassy to Jerusalem—”a decision that would break with decades of U.S. policy and could fuel violence in the Middle East,” as Haaretz notes.

It is unlikely that Trump will be challenged on Israel, because his approach is harmonic with a bipartisan consensus cemented in large part by the financial contributions of billionaires like Saban and his Republican pro-Israeli government counterpart, Sheldon Adelson. Hence, there are no editorials or opinion pieces denouncing Israel’s “Plot Against America,” or “War on America,” or warnings that “Odds Are, Israel Owns Trump,” or explorations of “What Israel Did to Control the American Mind.” Likewise, there will be no new groups forming dubbed the “Committee to Investigate Israel” or the “Tel Aviv Project.” In fact it is more than likely that, going forward, the media will give Israelgate the same treatment as cable’s top Russiagate sleuth, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, gave during her exhaustive Flynn coverage so far, which is to not even mention it.

[frank ryan]

Whistleblower: Flynn told ex-partner Russia sanctions would be ripped up



https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...ripped-n827031

[Uncle Ted]

This whole Russian thing is getting pretty interesting... Rep. Jim Jordan grilled FBI Director Wray about the Russian connection to the Steele Dossier:

JORDAN: Remember a couple things, director... about the dossier. The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign --which we now know were one in the same-- paid the law firm, who paid Fusion GPS, who paid Christopher Steele, who then paid Russians to put together a report we call the dossier, filled with all kinds of fake news National Enquirer garbage.

It has been reported that this dossier "was all dressed up" by the FBI, taken to the FISA court where it was painted as a legitimate intelligence document, that it became the basis for granting a warrant to spy on Americans.

I'm wondering if that all actually took place, it sure looks like it did...

I think Peter Strzok, head of counterintelligence at the FBI, Peter Strzok, the guy who ran the FBI's Clinton investigation, did all the interviews, Peter Strzok, the guy who was running the Russia investigation at the FBI, Peter Strzok, Mr. Super Agent at the FBI, I think he is the guy that took the application to the FISA court.

And if this happened, if you have the FBI working with the Democrats' campaign, to take opposition research, dress it all up and turning it into an intelligence document to take it to a FISA court so they can spy on another campaign, if that happened, that is as wrong as it gets...

You could clear it all up, we sent you a letter two days ago. Just release the application, tell us what was in it. Tell us if I'm wrong. But I don't think I am. I think that is exactly what happened, and people who did that need to be held accountable.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/vi...er_strzok.html

And just who was Peter Strzok sending all these anti-Trump text messages to?

PICTURE EXCLUSIVE: Married FBI lawyer who exchanged 10,000 texts with her anti-Trump agent lover who was a key player in Mueller's Russia probe and helped clear Hillary is seen for the first time

• Lisa Page, who exchanged anti-Trump text messages with Peter Strzok, her FBI agent lover, was seen for the first time since the affair was exposed
• Strzok was dismissed from Robert Mueller's Russia probe over the conversation and was relocated within the FBI over the summer, it was reported Saturday
• Page, a lawyer, was also involved in Mueller's investigation but left the probe before the messages were discovered
• Page, 38, is married to non-profit executive Joseph Burrow who was seen wearing his wedding ring on Wednesday morning
• Strzok was a part of former FBI Director James Comey's Hillary Clinton email probe, and changed the wording in Comey's assessment from 'grossly negligent to 'extremely careless'
• Strzok was also involved in questioning Michael Flynn before he was prosecuted for lying to the Bureau
• The DOJ said they would be handing over the messages to Congress. It is currently going through more than 10,000 messages between the couple that span month

[...]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...seen-time.html

Damn, maybe the Russians did play a part in this election... Is this Lisa Page chick a Russian agent? I can't wait for these 10,000 text messages get released! Screw that House of Cards crap with that ball grabbing Kevin Spacey (really, a Norwegian royal?!?). The real life house of cards is much more interesting.