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Pelosi Aghast – Stone Indictment Proves That Trump Campaign Deliberately Campaigned For Trump
On Friday Roger Stone, a political consultant who in 2016 publicly supported the Trump campaign, was arrested on criminal charges filed by special counsel Robert Mueller. He has since been released on bail. Stone is indicted (pdf) in five cases for making false statements, one attempt of influencing a witness and an obstruction of a proceeding.
Since May 2017 the former FBI chief Mueller investigates an alleged collusion between Trump, his campaign and something Russian with regards to the 2016 election. No evidence has been produced so far that substantiate any such collusion. The people who fanatically claim that there must have been such a connection are now disappointed. The long awaited Stone indictment was one of their last straws. But there is absolutely nothing in it that hints at any collusion.
All these alleged crimes were committed in relation to an appearance of Stone before a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigation.
During the 2016 election Stone publicly claimed that he was in direct communication with Wikileaks and its editor Julian Assange. Steve Bannon, then part of the Trump campaign, asked Stone to ask Wikileaks at what time it would release new batches of emails that had been obtained from the Democratic National Committee. The Trump campaign was naturally interested in using these releases to attack the competing candidate Hillary Clinton.
Wikileaks and Assange denied that they had any relations or communications with Roger Stone. It later turned out that Stone had two contact persons, the New Yorker comedian Randy Credico and the conservative writer Jerome Corsi, who he MIGHT have had some contact or insight into Wikileaks. The indictment says nothing about their relations to Wikileaks.
During his appearance in front of the HPSCI Stone misremembered, contradicted or lied about several details related to his earlier false claim. He also asked Randy Credico to lie to the committee. Those are the only issues the indictment is about. It is about the lies of a notorious liar which became process crimes when he repeated them during an investigation. Stone himself denies emphatically that he committed any crime and promises to defend himself in court.
Nowhere does the indictment say that this has anything to do with the Trump campaign, Russia, Wikileaks or the not existing relations between them.
But some media will not tell you that. The New York Times falsely headlines:
Indicting Roger Stone, Mueller Shows Link Between Trump Campaign and WikiLeaks.
The first graph:
The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, revealed on Friday the most direct link yet between parallel efforts by the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks to damage Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election using Democratic Party material stolen by Russians.
bigger
There follow 28 paragraphs about the arrest and others issues, five pictures and the above graphic, but no explanation of the supposed link which, according to the indictment, Stone claimed to have but which never existed.
Stone claimed to have contact with Wikileaks. Bannon asked him to ask Wikileaks a questions. Stone had no relation with Wikileaks. He responded with second hand rumors and publicly available information. End of the story.
Mueller found no connection between the Trump campaign and anything Russia to influence the election. He indicted some people of issues unrelated to the elections. Others committed process crimes by lying to the investigation. He also indicted some Russians for money laundering and hacking. But those cases are quite dubious and will anyway never come in front of a court.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attempts to divert from this disappointing outcome of the Mueller investigation. The Russian influence turned out be nothing. The collusion claim is dead. She is not allowed to blame Hillary Clinton for being the most unlikable candidate who run a lame campaign. Who then can be blamed for the outcome of the 2016 election?
After some deep thinking Pelosi finally found the people who are guilty of winning Trump the election:
Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued this statement after Special Counsel Mueller released a seven-count indictment of top Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone, for lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction:
“The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people. …
Top Trump campaign officials deliberately tried “to influence the 2016 election”? Holy moley! They “subverted the will of the American people” by asking them to vote for Trump? Incredible! The Trump campaign worked to get Trump elected? Isn’t that illegal?
“In the face of 37 indictments, the President’s continued actions to undermine the Special Counsel investigation raise the questions: what does Putin have on the President, politically, personally or financially? Why has the Trump Administration continued to discuss pulling the U.S. out of NATO, which would be a massive victory for Putin?
Last week we listed the many good things Trump did for Russia which proves that he is totally under Putin’s influence. But that was meant as satire. In fact Trump made dozens of decisions that severely hurt Russia’s interests. He lauds NATO and uses it to press other states to buy more U.S. weapons.
Do the Democrats think that spewing such nonsense will attract voters? Or is it a diversion from the fact that they fail to attack Trump’s disastrous policies on all but the most minor issues?
What is needed is an alternative vision for how society and the economy should function. The problem is that money is the social contract/voucher system, which enables mass societies to function, but we treat it as a commodity to mine from society.
It is a medium of value, not a store. As with the body, blood is the medium and fat is the store, or for cars, roads are the medium and parking lots are the store. We own money like we own the section of road we are on, because its functionality is in its fungibility.
The question is; How do we store money? Well, for one thing, the government borrows up enormous amounts and spends it is ways that support the private sector, but don’t compete with it, from welfare to warfare. Where would Wall St be, without those trillions of dollars of government debt serving as the bedrock, to the casinos?
The government doesn’t really budget, which is to set priorities and spend according to necessity and ability. Instead they put together enormous bills, add enough pork to get the votes and the president can only pass or veto it.
Remember the “line item veto” proposal of GHW Bush? Obviously it wasn’t serious, as it would have taken a great deal of control away from the legislature, but what if they broke these bills into their items, had every legislator assign a percentage value to each item, put them back in order of preference and then the president draws the line? That would let congress and the senate set priorities, while the president is responsible for overall spending. “The buck stops here.”
Then there would be far less ability to pad the accounts in every way possible, but capitalism, as we know it, would implode.
As it is now, the end game will be when disaster capitalism/predatory lending come home to roost and all that old debt gets traded for public properties. Warren Buffet buys Yellowstone and Silicon Valley buy the water rights to the Colorado.
What needs to be understood is that while finance serves the entire society, it cannot directly be a function of government, as politicians live and die on the hope they provide and as we experience money as quantified hope, printing more money is a cheap high. The dawn of modern capitalism was when the Rothschilds took over the Royal Treasury from Charles 1, in exchange for his debts and started the Bank of England.
Government, as executive and regulatory, from tribal chiefs and elders, to kings and lords, to presidents and legislatures, is the central nervous system of society, while banking and finance, as the circulation of value around the various components of society, is the heart and arteries. They are separate, because they serve different functions.
That is what is needed. A next step for society. Currently the primary force holding this system together is the assumption that there is no alternative, other than total chaos, or a totalitarian socialism. So they can fight all they want and throw bones to their various sects, but like the monarchists would argue, mob rule could never work, so society was stuck with kings, we are supposed to accept banks as the mediating function of the entire society. We need to learn to store value in tangible assets, like healthy communities and environments, not have atomized cultures, with our bank account as our personal umbilical cord.
Posted by: John Merryman | Jan 27 2019 14:04 utc | 49
What conspiracy theories? This is an old one, but it was brought to mind, reading this paragraph from one of Gilbert Murray’s classics; http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35472/35472-h/35472-h.htm
“But this great result was not merely the triumph of a particular city; it was the triumph of an ideal and a way of life. Freedom had defeated despotism, democracy had defeated kings, hardy poverty had defeated all the gold of the East. The men who fought of their free will for home and country had proved more lasting fighters than the conscripts who were kept in the lines by fear of tortures and beheadings and impalements. Above all “virtue,” as the Greeks called it, or “virtue” and “wisdom” together, had shown their power. The words raise a smile in us; indeed, our words do not properly correspond with the Greek, because we can not get our ideas simple enough. “Virtue”[Pg 39] is what makes a man, or anything else, good; it is the quality of a good soldier, a good general, a good citizen, a good bootmaker, a good horse or almost a good sword. And “wisdom” is that by which a man knows how to do things—to use a spear, or a tool, to think and speak and write, to do figures and history and geometry, to advise and convince his fellow-citizens. All these great forces moved, or so it seemed at the time, in the same direction; and probably it was hardly felt as a dangerous difference when many people preferred to say that it was “piety” that had won in the war against “impiety,” and that the Persians had been destroyed because, being monotheists, they had denied the Gods. No doubt “piety,” properly understood, was a kind of “wisdom.” Let us take a few passages from the old Ionian historian, Herodotus, to illustrate what the feeling for Athens was in Euripides’ youth.”
Back in the day, things like society, religion, politics, economics, science, etc. all blended together and monotheism was effectively synonymous with despotism, as polytheism was with democracy and pantheism with republicanism.
The logical fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute, source of consciousness, would be that essence of sentience bubbling up through all of life, not an ideal of wisdom and judgment from which we have fallen. More the new born, than the wise old man. Consciousness, than the thoughts generated. The Ancients had diverse religious beliefs, that naturally accorded with their view on nature and social systems. Yet our western religious paradigm is of this top down, father figure lawgiver and his Ten Commandments. How has that worked out since? Divine Right of Kings was the effective political model for much of the succeeding 1800 years. The Catholic Church has been in decline since Martin Luther and now seems a nest of pedophiles. The Islamists haven’t exactly presented examples of divine wisdom and currently seem controlled by monolithic psychotics. The Jews finally got their country back, one they lost for dissing Roman pantheism, and seem bent on spiraling into a tribal absolute.
Maybe, if people really want to understand nature, they shouldn’t just focus on the surface spats, but on the forces driving them. We really are not as evolved as we assume we are. It’s just that we don’t have a lot of perspective on the situation.
Posted by: John Merryman | Jan 27 2019 21:35 utc | 65
Jen @43
Dan Bongino on Spygate: Obama, Mueller & The Biggest Spy Scandal In American History
Now, I like to break it down simply as to how they did this. They had Plan A, Plan B and Plan C, and the joke of the whole thing, and when I say joke I don’t mean funny, I mean a tragic joke, is it wasn’t known as Plan A, Plan B and Plan C; you know why? They thought Plan A was just fine, so it was just the plan. When Plan A failed they had to move on to Plan B and then Plan C was just the cleanup operation. Here’s how this whole thing starts against Donald Trump.
. . .
The first plan they do to hit the Trump team, folks, is they learn to manipulate things about queries in the NSA database.
But there’s a good guy in this, there’s a white hat, somebody in the government sniffs this thing out. That’s why I tell you, this wasn’t Plan A, this was the plan. They were going to unmask people, wiretap people and they were going to query this NSA database and get all the information they needed about the Trump team. But somebody smells a problem, and he’s not having it, and he’s the white hat, he’s the good guy in this story, and it’s Mike Rogers of the NSA.
Rogers smells a rat.
It’s like so about 10 days after the election of Donald Trump, someone goes up to visit Donald Trump in Trump Tower. Who visits him? Mike Rogers.
and what happens the very next day? Donald Trump evacuates Trump Tower and goes to Bedminster, New Jersey to never return for another meeting.
Rogers has this meeting, Trump evacuates Trump Tower. The very next day the Obama administration comes out and calls for somebody to be fired; who’s that somebody? Mike Rogers.
They move on to Plan B; what’s Plan B? They realize Rogers is onto them. They’re like hey folks, we better ease up on the unmasking and the tapping into the database, people are getting caught, this is probably not good, we’re leaving a massive paper trail, and what if we lose, right? They move on to Plan B. Plan B’s a cross fire hurricane. They say well, listen, if we can’t spy on them illegally let’s just spy on them legally. We have this beautiful thing called the FISA Court where we can walk into the FISA Court, we can get a warrant on somebody and when you get a warrant on somebody in the Trump team they have this beautiful thing for the Obama administration called the two hop rule. Well, it’s for everyone, it’s for Obama.
Meaning, if I spy on you, and you’re a member of the Trump team, I can hop to everybody you emailed and then everybody they emailed. So basically all I need to do is get a FISA warrant on the guy cleaning the floors in Trump Tower, and I’ve got everyone.
The problem with the FISA Court, unlike the unmaskings and the tapping into the database is they had to produce actual evidence in front of a judge.
So what does the FBI and the State Department and the DOJ do? They say well, we don’t really have any evidence, let’s just make it up. We’ve got this guy we worked with in the past, this guy Christopher Steele.
the dossier was already written back on April 17th of 2007. You go: what do you mean, I don’t get it. You mean 2017, right? No, no, no, no, no, I didn’t get that wrong.
It’s written right here in the Wall Street Journal, on April 17, 2007. Who’s the author of this critical Wall Street Journal piece? Glen Simpson and Mary Jacobi, his wife. Glen Simpson, the purveyor of Fusion GPS. The article is called, How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington.
They’re in a lot of trouble. Because they realize the dossier in and of itself is crap and a lot of people at the Bureau know it. They need to buttress it with some stuff to make it a little harder. Now is where the Michael Cohen story comes in, Trump’s lawyer.
In the dossier is a very specific allegation, right? That Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, went over to Prague to set up this whole information exchange with the Russians, right? Well, what’s the problem? Michael Cohen had never been to Prague, and his passport proved it.
Plan B falls apart because something happens in November, Donald Trump wins.
So they have to move on to Plan C. Plan C, I call it Clean Up on Aisle 4. Now they’re in trouble.
Who also quits? John Carlin. Who’s John Carlin? He’s the head of the Department of Justice National Security Division, the final division in the Department of Justice to put their John Hancock on the FISA warrant. He quits right after the election. Who did John Carlin work for? Now clean up on Aisle 4 is going to start to make sense. Who did John Carlin work for before he got there in the DOJ? He’s Bob Mueller’s chief of staff. He was Bob Mueller’s chief of staff. Now does Bob Mueller make sense? Clean up Aisle 4, get the mops out.
Posted by: pogohere | Jan 27 2019 22:42 utc | 66
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