The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.
Showing posts with label Russiagate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russiagate. Show all posts

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Russiagate redivivus

Manafort associate is Russian spy, may have helped coordinate e-mail hack-and-leak, report says

The Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report released Tuesday that a key associate of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is a Russian intelligence officer who may have helped coordinate the Russian hacking and leaking of Democratic emails, and that Manafort himself may have had knowledge of the effort before the emails were leaked.

According to the bipartisan Senate report, Manafort associate and ex-employee Konstantin Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer who may have had links to the hack-and-leak operation of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, which hacked the emails of prominent Democrats and provided them to WikiLeaks.

Friday, August 14, 2020

Remember those claims the FISA warrants for Carter Page were hinky? Hmm.

In first criminal case from Durham probe, former FBI lawyer to plead guilty for altering document

Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith is expected to plead guilty Friday on charges that he doctored a document used in the application process authorizing surveillance against for a former Trump campaign aide -- part of the first criminal case brought by U.S. Attorney John Durham in his investigation examining the origins of the Russia probe.

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz had previously outlined Clinesmith's conduct in his report released last year examining the Russia investigation, and referred Clinesmith to the DOJ for prosecution after finding he had altered an email from the CIA that was used by the government in the final FISA renewal application authorizing surveillance of former Trump aide Carter Page.

"He will be pleading guilty," Clinesmith's attorney Justin Shur told ABC News in a statement Friday. 

"Kevin deeply regrets having altered the email. It was never his intent to mislead the court or his colleagues as he believed the information he relayed was accurate. But Kevin understands what he did was wrong and accepts responsibility."

The news of Clinesmith's plea was first reported by the New York Times.

The first FISA application targeting Page was first approved in October of 2016 and signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. 

The first renewal came in January of 2017 under Yates’ signature, the second came in April of 2017 signed by Acting Attorney General Dan Boente and third and final renewal application was filed under the signature of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in June of 2017.

Clinesmith’s alteration only impacted that final renewal application in June of 2017 and was not relevant to the earlier FISA warrants. 

Horowitz's report last December outlined numerous errors and omissions by the FBI agents who handled the applications for Page, and the DOJ subsequently declared the final two applications were, including the one implicating Clinesmith, while declining to take a position on the first two applications.

Thursday, July 2, 2020

This is just hilarious

The Lincoln Project's Fellow Traveler.

Mother of God, if they weren't doing this for laughs they have no idea what's funny and what's not.

Saturday, June 27, 2020

It is no accident . . .

. . . that Frost/Nixon is now on Netflix.

I had forgotten what a swine Nixon was in ways tawdry and contemptible as well as larger and more frightening.

He and Trump are much of a muchness, the key differences being that Nixon was by far much better informed, much smarter, took his job a lot more seriously, and did it way, way better.

He really was a loyal man who wanted to leave America better off and stronger, within the limits of his insuperable petty vindictiveness and consuming ambition.

Trump would trash America in a fit of pique - if he hasn't already - and otherwise could not care less about the country or his actual job as president.

He is useless or worse in pretty much all respects, and has been since day one.

Thursday, June 25, 2020

Treason: Bozo slams America with another body blow.

Poll finds sharp partisan divide over coronavirus as cases spike

This is Trump's doing. Keep that in mind.

Trump Follows Through on Threat to ‘Slow the Testing Down’

The Department of Health and Human Services has announced it will pull funding from more than a dozen drive-through testing sites across five states, including Texas, at the end of the month.

The move has left top Democrats incensed: 

“The pandemic is clearly getting worse in states nationwide,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the ranking Democrat on the health committee, said in a blast to reporters, “and instead of trying harder to stop it, President Trump is apparently trying harder to hide it.”

Resources are not the issue. 

This move comes after Democratic senators called out the administration for failing to spend nearly $14 billion that Congress appropriated to increase testing.

GOP senators push back on Trump administration plan to end support for testing sites

Texas Sens. John Cornyn (R) and Ted Cruz (R) on Thursday sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) protesting the administration’s plans to cut back federal support of drive-thru COVID-19 testing sites in Texas and other states.

The senators called the testing sites “critical to Texas’ testing capacity” at a time the number of coronavirus cases in the state is spiking, hitting a peak of 5,551 new cases on Wednesday.

“Now is not the time to end a program that is working and successfully increasing testing capacity — especially for underserved communities in the state. Due to the recent rise of COVID-19 cases in Texas, cities need additional time to prepare for the transition to state and local control of the testing sites,” the senators wrote in a letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar and FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor. 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday the state will pause its reopening plan and ordered hospitals to halt elective surgeries to help deal with the crush of new cases.

I think I know why this is happening.

Many people have told me that Alex Jones has told them many people have told him that Trump is sabotaging testing as part of his term-long effort to undermine the national security of America to the advantage of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

It fits in with everything he has done to botch the federal response to this virus and wreck the American economy, everything to sabotage the response to the Floyd demonstrations, everything to undermine America's intelligence services and national security establishment and the confidence of Americans in them, and everything else he has done to weaken American institutions and subvert the US Constitution over the course of his entire term.

All of it for Putin and to wreck America.

Anyway that's what many people are telling me Alex Jones has said many people have told him.

Friday, May 15, 2020

Obamagate? At worst it's a Flynngate.

All they've got so far to be the worst political crime in history is the "unmasking" of Flynn.

And this is a rehash of a scandal cooked up by the Trumpists in the midst of Russiagate, trying to delegitimate the origins during the campaign of what later became the Muller investigation.

Friday, January 31, 2020

At what point do they all decide to back Trump in a coup?

Most of the upper echelon in the White House and part of the Cabinet, at least, are co-conspirators, as are at least some in the House and the Senate, in Ukrainegate or Russiagate or both.

None of them is in a like case with Trump, protected from immediate prosecution by an arbitrary monarchist dogma of the Justice Department.

None of them, Trump included, is protected from eventual prosecution.

Trump might pardon everybody, but no court has upheld the idea of a presidential self-pardon or of the validity of pardons transparently intended to obstruct justice - though that was the egregious intent of Ford's pardon of Nixon that no one ever challenged.

And so might the Duce first and the others in consequence come to support the idea of a coup, an altogether unconstitutional declaration by Trump that the election of 2020 or 2024 will not take place or will be ignored, as their only path to safety from eventual prosecution, imprisonment, and ruin?

And then as in Rome at the time of Augustus and in England at the time of Charles I and in so many other places at so many other times it will all depend on what the military wants to do.

They are all sworn to defend the constitution and to disobey illegal orders, but does the rot go further than we think?

Are high level military officers, generals and admirals, in a position to put aside the constitution, themselves participants in either Ukrainegate or Russiagate, like Flynn?

Many Democrat opinionators have said for months that exactly this coup is coming, and many Republicans have urged that either successful deposition of Trump or the actions of the next Democratic president regarding gun rights will and ought to provoke a civil war.

The Republican civil war looks like all mouth and bullshit to me.

But the idea of a coup by the crime boss in the White House to protect himself and his cronies - and so, of course, as Rudi the Dick would insist, to further the public good - looks increasingly likely, especially when we consider how much compelling evidence of crime upon crime continues to pile up in public against all of them, and will continue over all that time.

Admiral Mullen Sounds Alarms Over Trump's Nixonian Enemies List

Perhaps he and we should worry more about a purge of non-Trumpists from the higher ranks of the military, starting with the Joint Chiefs.

And an even wider purge of non-Trumpists from at least the leadership of the entire national security apparatus and the "deep state" in general.

The constant barrage of Democratic propaganda to the effect that Trump is pathetically stupid is very dangerous and might well make us miss what he and his leading allies are certainly cunning enough to prepare.

Sunday, January 5, 2020

And Americans have had about enough, anyway

Our Poll Finds A Majority Of Americans Think The Evidence Supports Trump’s Removal

And they support witness at the senate trial.

And they support new witnesses related to revelations since the articles were voted.

And they want those damned subpoenas obeyed.

Wednesday, January 1, 2020

A sign of how he would play his role in an impeachment of the president?

Would he be a genuine opponent of disinformation and fake news, or a Jim Jordan / David Nunes / Lindsey Graham opponent?

Americans 'take democracy for granted', supreme court chief warns

Supreme court Chief Justice John Roberts has urged federal judges to promote public confidence in the judicial system, while warning that Americans have come to “take democracy for granted”.

In his annual report on the state of the judiciary, the George W Bush-appointee, who will preside over Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, said civic education had “fallen by the wayside”.

“In our age,” he wrote, “when social media can instantly spread rumour and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.”

Roberts did not mention Trump but his statement was widely interpreted as part of an ongoing effort to shield the judicial branch from executive harassment.

Monday, December 30, 2019

Vlad's boy in DC

Trump's latest call with Putin raises more questions than it answers

Per Trump, the real bad guy and corrupt guy and enemy of the US is the president of Ukraine, and not the president of Russia.

That he takes this line is more important and more revealing than the Biden shtick.

Monday, December 23, 2019

Payback is a bitch

Joe Scarborough is fine with the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump but he will not let  anyone get away with denying that Clinton, too, committed impeachable offenses.

It wasn't about Lewinsky so much as perjury before congress and in court, suborning perjury, witness tampering, and more.

A whole lot of Democrats in the senate seem to have been as impervious to evidence as today's senate Republicans.

And as unwilling to agree that the offenses involved deserved removal from office.

Like Scarborough, I always loathed the Big Dog.

But I suspect for opposite political reasons, if perhaps for very similar ones related to Clinton as a person, a human being, and a man.

Yes, I'm thinking a whole lot of Republicans believe, like Scarborough, that the Democrats' refusal to remove Bill from office was sheer partisan defiance of his manifest just deserts.

And that may provide them much peace of mind concerning their own current refusal to remove the Duce.

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Pelosi angrily rejects a question that slanders her with a Trumpist talking point

They cannot deny he did what he did and cannot convince anyone it wasn't illegal or it doesn't matter.

So it's all bullshit about Democrats hating him for his unexpected victory over Hillary that they wish out of hatred and resentment to delegitimate and overturn.

She's not one to make it easy.

Nancy Pelosi tells Sinclair reporter James Rosen: ‘Don’t mess with me!’

“Do you hate the president, Ms. Speaker?” the reporter, James Rosen from the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, asked during Pelosi’s weekly press briefing at the Capitol.

“I don’t hate anybody. We don’t hate anybody. Not anybody in the world. Don’t accuse me,” she said, leaving the podium to approach Rosen and pointing at him as she spoke.

He then interrupted her, saying he was asking about a charge from a GOP lawmaker during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing Wednesday that Democrats wanted Trump gone only because they didn’t like him.

“I did not accuse you. I asked you a question. Rep. [Doug] Collins yesterday suggested that the Democrats are doing this simply because you don’t like the guy. I think it is an important point,” he said, referring to the Georgia lawmaker, a fervent Trump backer.

He was as good as heckling her, making very sure to repeat the allegation to her face as provocatively as possible.

Pelosi then walked back to the podium and continued to lecture Rosen.

“This is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the president’s violation of his oath of office. And as a Catholic, I resent your using the word hate in a sentence that addresses me,” she said, adding that she prays for Trump.

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

The most criminal White House gang since Nixon

And the most revolting president in living memory.

A devoted and devout Trumpist in six hours of testimony says they were all in on it, Trump, Pence, Pompeo, Giuliani, Mulvaney, and numerous others.

Gordon Sondland Directly Implicates Trump, Top Aides In Ukraine Shakedown

And the Republican Party is still committed to responding by screaming nothing but the most utter horseshit.

Baseless accusations, tawdry conspiracy theories, projections, absurd and irrelevant demands, character assassination, vicious denigration, and evil screams.

Sort of a Kavanaugh defense.

The entire party is a national disgrace.

Fucking banana republic, eh?

PS.

This is the Republican White House, today.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

The rot now runs all the way down

Rank partisan solidarity is all Trump’s defenders have left

Probably taking a bribe, not offering one and not soliciting one, is the example cited in the constitution of what would count as a high crime or misdemeanor.

But never mind.

He was subordinating US foreign policy and congressionally authorized spending to his personal interest as a politician campaigning for reelection, holding congressionally authorized defense money for Ukraine for ransom, that being a very specific quid pro quo, that being the president of Ukraine publicly and with great fanfare launching an investigation, not at all called for by any known facts, into corruption on the parts of Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

And pretty much the entire body of Republicans in the US legislature is committed to defending that, and to defending him at every step of the way, with no matter what disgusting and low methods, of the impeachment process launched by Democrats in the House of Representatives.

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

I can't really see that having sex with an intern is an impeachable offense, though it was way worse than merely tacky.

But Trump's entire term has been an uninterrupted string of impeachable offenses, and the Republicans will give him a pass on all of them.

That is how far their republicanism and devotion to the constitution and the historic American republic are all fake news.