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The Special Council Inquisition – Bad For Trump – And All of Us
The Trump administration made a huge mistake by not preventing the just announced special council investigation into the alleged, but likely non-existing "Trump-Russia" connections:
The Justice Department appointed a special counsel Wednesday to investigate possible coordination between President Trump’s associates and Russian officials — a clear signal to the White House that federal investigators will aggressively pursue the matter despite the president’s insistence that there was no “collusion’’ with the Kremlin.
Robert S. Mueller III, a former prosecutor who served as the FBI director from 2001 to 2013, has agreed to take over the investigation as a special counsel, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced. The move marks a concession by the Trump administration to Democratic demands for the investigation to be run independently of the Justice Department. Calls for a special counsel intensified after Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey last week.
It is weird that the WaPo report above calls this "a concession by the Trump administration to Democratic demands for the investigation". It further states that the White House was not informed about it until it had been made:
The White House did not learn of Rosenstein’s decision until just 30 minutes before the public announcement was made.
Anyway. This is bad and the Trump administration should have pulled all strings to prevent it. Such investigations NEVER stick to their original, limited tasks but extend further and further. The order the Acting Attorney General wrote includes language which allows for nearly unlimited digging in "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” It will thereby continue until -inevitably- some dirt will be found that can be blown out of all proportion and lead to prosecutions or impeachment.
Robert S. Mueller is also a bad choice as a special council as he is a former colleague and friend of former FBI director James Comey who Trump recently fired. From 2013:
Forged Under Fire—Bob Mueller and Jim Comey’s Unusual Friendship
Both men were rising stars mentored and guided by Eric Holder in the 1990s during Holder’s time in the Justice Department under the Clinton administration.
…
Mueller, now 68, and Comey, now 52, would become close partners and close allies throughout the years ahead.
…
Both, Comey and Mueller, were involved in the dramatic hospital scene at the bed of Attorney General Ashcroft to stop Bush's illegal program of spying on U.S. citizens. The program in question stopped for a moment but the spying simply continued under a different legal justification.
The attempts to smear Trump and those around him over foreign connections have entered absurd territory. The lead headline at McClatchy today is a. old news, b. confusing the timeline only to further throw dirt into the direction of Trump:
Flynn stopped military plan Turkey opposed – after being paid as its agent
One of the Trump administration’s first decisions about the fight against the Islamic State was made by Michael Flynn weeks before he was fired – and it conformed to the wishes of Turkey, whose interests, unbeknownst to anyone in Washington, he’d been paid more than $500,000 to represent.
The incoming Trump administration temporarily stopped the Raqqa campaign which the Obama administration had decided would be done with Kurdish forces. This was on January 17, only a few days before the Trump administration took over. The Obama administration itself had deliberated about the issue for over 8 month and its choice was not its preferred option:
Most of the shortcomings outlined by the Trump team were obvious to Obama’s advisers he added. In fact, the senior Obama administration official said, arming the Kurds was Obama’s Plan B, after it became clear that Plan A — using Turkish forces to take Raqqa — would not be feasible.
It is doubtful that Flynn's communication of the decision was influenced by money. Flynn had registered his lobbying under the Lobbying Disclosure Act with the Clerk of the House of Representatives effectively September 15, 2016. According to his later filling (pdf) at the Foreign Agent Registry, his consulting contract with the Turkish owned company had ended three month later, on November 15, 2016. The owner of the company Inovo, which had hired Flynn, is Ekim Alptekin, an ally of the Turkish President Erdogan. (Alptekin's lawyer ones asserted that the company had acted on behalf of Israeli gas interests. The two Israeli gas companies possibly involved both denied any such connection.) Alptekin himself denied any connection to Trump administration decisions and correctly noted that Trump had practically no chance of winning the election at the time Alptekin had hired Flynn who was then just one of many Trump advisors.
There is no reasonable relation between Flynn's lobbying for Turkish interest and the halt of the Raqqa campaign preparations. Attempts to drawn lines between the Turkish lobbying and Russian interests end up as convoluted rumor collections. With the Raqqa halt the Trump administration simply rejected to take responsibility for a military adventure (which had not even started) based on a dubious last-minute Obama decision. It wanted to review the issue and decide after its own assessment.
One has to ask why McClatchy is reporting this now? That Flynn had was lobbying for Alptekin's company was registered in September and first reported in November 2016. The temporary halt of the Raqqa campaign planing was decided on January 17 and reported on February 2 2017. Where then is the "news" value in this May 2017 McClatchy report?
A special council investigation will, of course, jump on such not-news reports like McClatchy's. He will dramatically invite witnesses and leak further rumors to the media – even when the basic facts show that there is nothing to it. Such investigations pursue death by a thousand cuts.
The Democrats, and especially progressives, work against their voters interest when they pursue a Trump impeachment which would let Vice President Pence take the White House:
Pence is a horror—fiscal sadist, misogynist, homophobe, lover of the carceral state.
Pence is way more conservative than Trump. With Republicans in power in Congress he could easily implement all the horrific policies he ever dreamed of.
But the borg and the Democratic leadership are not concerned about that:
Democrats cheered the [special council] announcement as a step forward in resolving the unanswered questions about Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election — and whether the president or anyone at the White House has interfered with the investigation.
Trump believes that better relations with Russia are important for the well-being of the United States, Pence would likely pursue an anti-Russian policy.
That, I believe, is the real issue here. There are no unbeseeming relations between Trump and Russia. Russia had little, if any, influence on the 2016 election. There was no "Russian meddling". But Trump's somewhat more friendly behavior towards Russia, which he campaigned for, is disliked by the-powers-that-are.
We can now expect a very long drawn special council investigation with lots of media leaks and reporting. It will drown out all other important issues. It will likely end badly for Trump and badly for peaceful global power relations.
Bob Mueller: Super Hero
(Oh wow, modern history completely revised!)
I awoke to Fake News stories this morning, about the former FBI director, Robert Swan Mueller III: utterly impeccable, fantastic previous performance, in fact, a paragon of performance virtue! ! ! (Does have quite the Deep State lineage, that Bob!)
The Nation is saved!
Or, maybe not . . . .
To recap old Bob’s performances: the FBI never solved the case of missing nuke secrets at Los Alamos, but certainly put poor Mr. Wen Ho Lee through the ringer; they appear to have never investigated the valid allegations of former translator and whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds — who was put under an official gag order for years; multiple contrived “counterterrorist” shams, when poor inner-city youths in Miami and Chicago (and elsewhere???) were set up — then busted — as probable terrorists; further deep penetration and compromising of the FBI by Chinese intelligence organizations, etc., etc., etc.
OK, under Bob Mueller’s watch, the notorious international crime lord, Martha Stewart, was jailed! Bravo, Bobby, and I’m sure American slept more soundly with Ms. Stewart off the streets!
I recall the FBI, under the directorship of Mueller, as one severely dysfunctional outfit, i.e., business as usual. (Remember the congressional after-action report on 9/11? Remember how FBI middle managers, Frasca and Maltbie, rejected all terrorist warnings from field agents Sinder, Cowley and Williams, et al.? Remember how Frasca and Maltbie were then promoted???)
Yes, Bob Mueller does have a history of “public service” — he was appointed chief of the DoJ’s criminal division by President George H.W. Bush when that BCCI investigation was getting closer and closer to the White House and old Bob made sure that it got no closer!
And to insure that Treasury was in line during that period, Bush family cousin, John Walker, had been appointed the chief enforcement officer there — the same John Walker, later appointed as a judge, who would have the future FBI director, James Comey, clerking for him.
Yes, Bob is the grandnephew of Richard Bissell, the CIA deputy director of plans, fired by President Kennedy before he was assassinated in Dallas.
Yes, Bob’s wife’s family name is Cabell — and it was deputy director of the CIA, Gen. Charles Cabell, who was also fired by President Kennedy, and Cabell’s brother, Earl Cabell, was indeed the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy had his brains splattered on a Dallas street!
Bob grew up in a wealthy family, we are told, so he needn’t have served in Vietnam in combat. Yes, Bob’s family wealth was on the Truesdale side of the family,that would be the same Truesdales who generations earlier were implicated in the bombing of competitors’ oil refineries for the Rockefeller family, and later ended up with a Rockefeller-previously-owned railroad. Typical Horatio Alger-type story, no doubt. (I’m not suggesting anyone search into the family background of Bob — those rich people are all saints, after all!)
I cannot comment on his military service, although it would be interesting to hear any former Marines’ comments who served under him?
I recall that George W. Bush, who would late appoint Bob as the FBI director, was ahead of me a bit when he entered enlisted basic training and his name was still a joke at Lackland AFB when I went through there: the politician’s son who went through enlisted basic training, then returned to Houston to miraculously, overnight, become an officer and jet pilot?!?!
Call me a radical progressive or call me a socialist — but never, ever call me gullible and stupid! (And wasn’t that Robert Swan Mueller III? And wasn’t there a chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, around 1962 or early 1963, named Swan, when they lost millions of dollars there? Always wondered how the CIA paid for those assassinations in ’63 and ’68?)
Recommended viewing and reading:
The Tiger Trap by David Wise
Jounalists for Hire by Udo Ulfkotte
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IClVKyb63m4&authuser=0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pCk1qc4JvI
Posted by: tommy cockles | May 18 2017 20:50 utc | 54
TIME magazine has just published a cover story on the Russian takeover of America: Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America. The cover image shows the White House turned into the Kremlin. I will list some of the key points below with quotes from the article:
1) Social media has become a danger to democracy.
The vast openness and anonymity of social media has cleared a dangerous new route for antidemocratic forces. “Using these technologies, it is possible to undermine democratic government.”
2) Democratic society must isolate itself from public opinion.
Russia may finally have gained the ability it long sought but never fully achieved in the Cold War: to alter the course of events in the U.S. by manipulating public opinion.
3) Russia spies on you.
The Russians “target you and see what you like, what you click on, and see if you’re sympathetic or not sympathetic.”
4) America is losing the cyberwar.
As Russia expands its cyberpropaganda efforts, the U.S. and its allies are only just beginning to figure out how to fight back.
5) Russia has clever algorithms that America lacks.
American researchers have found they can use mathematical formulas to segment huge populations into thousands of subgroups… Propagandists can then manually craft messages to influence them, deploying covert provocateurs, either humans or automated computer programs known as bots, in hopes of altering their behavior.
6) Russia has huge troll farms.
Putin dispatched his newly installed head of military intelligence, Igor Sergun, to begin repurposing cyberweapons previously used for psychological operations in war zones for use in electioneering. Russian intelligence agencies funded “troll farms,” botnet spamming operations and fake news outlets as part of an expanding focus on psychological operations in cyberspace.
7) You must trust mainstream media.
Eager to appear more powerful than they are, the Russians would consider it a success if you questioned the truth of your news sources, knowing that Moscow might be lurking in your Facebook or Twitter feed.
8) Russia invaded Ukraine in April 2014.
Putin was aiming his new weapons at the U.S. Following Moscow’s April 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
9) Hillary Clinton did not murder Seth Rich.
That story went viral in late August, then took on a life of its own after Clinton fainted from pneumonia and dehydration at a Sept. 11 event in New York City. Elsewhere people invented stories saying Pope Francis had endorsed Trump and Clinton had murdered a DNC staffer.
10) The evidence:
Russia plays in every social media space. The intelligence officials have found that Moscow’s agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. “They buy the ads, where it says sponsored by–they do that just as much as anybody else does,” says the senior intelligence official. (A Facebook official says the company has no evidence of that occurring.) The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, has said he is looking into why, for example, four of the top five Google search results the day the U.S. released a report on the 2016 operation were links to Russia’s TV propaganda arm, RT. (Google says it saw no meddling in this case.) Researchers at the University of Southern California, meanwhile, found that nearly 20% of political tweets in 2016 between Sept. 16 and Oct. 21 were generated by bots of unknown origin; investigators are trying to figure out how many were Russian.
Posted by: Petri Krohn | May 19 2017 0:57 utc | 71
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