Aaaand, Mifsud has never been a Russian agent.Quote:
As you can see, the WaPo has just published a big stinker on Mifsud by attempting to provide cover for Mueller & the FBI's EC for Crossfire Hurricane. Everybody knew that Mifsud was NOT a Russian asset. I agree with Bongino that something is about to be declassified.
Weissmann will be lying his ass off. He's stood in court and has done it repeatedly.Quote:
THE most important part will be the Weissman behind closed doors testimony. The Democrats will just run with whatever they want since there will be no way to go against it.
My only hope is something big drops before the 17th which makes all the testimony go away by either Mueller and team won't show up, or the House committees cancel it.
On the bright side, at worse - the report's details will start trickling out throughout late Summer and into this Fall ... 3-5 months before the first primaries.will25u said:
"They are now in the process of drafting the report. I would expect that it will be a draft that will be completed in short order."
Ratcliffe said that he does not expect that the report will be made public "any time real soon," though he is hopeful it will be released before Congress breaks for its August recess.
LINKQuote:
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) called former special counsel Robert Mueller an "anal opening" ahead of the former FBI chief's public testimony before Congress.
"He's done some irreparable damage to some things and he's got to answer for them," Gohmert told Politico. He is one of 25 Republicans on the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees who get to grill Mueller during the back-to-back hearings scheduled later this month.
The Texas lawmaker added that his reading of the former special counsel's report did little to temper his animosity toward Mueller: "It reinforced the anal opening that I believe Mueller to be."
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We must start with the Italian media's chatty references to political characterizations of Link Campus in Italy: as a sort of policy incubating center for the "Five Star Movement" which functions as a political party, although it doesn't like to call itself one and as the nexus of a "Third Republic." This is worthwhile, so stay with me.
The latter reference "Third Republic" is a specific allusion to recent Italian history, immediately recognizable to those who followed the national politics in the 1990s, and who refer to the reforms that swept Silvio Berlusconi into office in 1994 as the inauguration of the "Second Republic." (I happened to be stationed in Italy with the U.S. Navy at the time, and remember the drama well.)
The First Republic was the government cobbled together in 1946 out of the aftermath of the Mussolini years. Italy has been in the Second Republic since 1994; the reference to a "Third Republic" evokes a sense that the current agitation for reforms and change of direction is like the prelude to the Second Republic. In some ways, it's not unlike the allusion of current France-watchers to the potential for a Sixime Rpublique, or "Sixth Republic," to be emerging on the horizon.
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In other words, all of the restiveness of Europe and its roiling socio-political divisions is in that reference to Link Campus being connected to the Five-Star Movement and its aspirations for the future of Italy.
The Five-Star Movement was founded by entertainment personality Beppe Grillo in 2009. The chief political representative now is Luigi Di Maio, serving in the Italian parliament as party head and a senior minister in the current government (deputy prime minister and the minister of economic development, labor, and social policies). The Five-Star Movement, the Italian Democratic Party (the DP; legacy social democrats), and the Lega Nord, or Northern League, are the principal parties in the current governing coalition.
The Five-Star Movement isn't linked to the surging "populists" in this scenario. The agenda of Di Maio and the movement he is now the front-man for started as a grab-bag of oddities and tellingly, although the movement is anti-euro (currency zone), none of those oddities is traditional national sovereignty for Italy, as Trump supporters would define it. A reasonably accurate listing of them can be found in the well-sourced Wikipedia entry:Quote:
The "five stars" are a reference to five key issues for the party: public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, right to Internet access, and environmentalism. The party also advocates e-democracy, direct democracy, the principle of "zero-cost politics," degrowth and nonviolence.
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..."Recent revelations by The Hill prove that the Office of Special Counsel's (OSC) claim that they had a legitimate basis to include Paul Manafort in an investigation of potential collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government is false," Downing told me. "The failure to disclose this information to Manafort, the courts, or the public reaffirms that the OSC did not have a legitimate basis to investigate Manafort, and may prove that the OSC had no legitimate basis to investigate potential collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government."...
I really want to know how they got the renewals. FISAs are only supposed to be renewed if they are "bearing fruit". It doesn't seem Manafort's could have shown any evidence he was a Russian agent and there is no way Page's was showing evidence he was a Russian agent, yet it was renewed 3 times. I sure hope the IG report exposes the fraud on the court. Seems to me some judges should be going ballistic over the fraud perpetrated on their courts.drcrinum said:
Several things:
1) This article is based upon an actual interview with Deripaska.
2) Agreed, we knew most of this information already, although it was based upon leaked info.
3) Mueller is set to testify on July 17. Quite a bit of new info has now come out from the Mueller Report plus additional investigations. Putting it altogether now raises a big red flag.
Manafort had been under a FISA for his Ukraine activities beginning circa 2014; it expired or was discontinued in early 2016. Sometime over the summer of 2016, Manafort was again placed under a FISA. For what reason? It's a subject apparently addressed in Rosenstein's memo to Mueller in August 2017. And remember, FISAs have to be renewed every 3 months. There are a number of things which have surfaced to indicate that Manafort shouldn't have been under a FISA: 1) The Ukrainian black ledger was bogus; 2) Kilimnik was a US State Department asset & clearly not linked to Putin/Russia; 3) Deripaska during his FBI interview stated that Manafort was not dealing with Russia. Was the FISA court appraised of these findings? Was Manafort provided with these findings? Mueller it seems ignored these findings. It smacks of FISA abuse and coverup IMO.
Good questions, alldrcrinum said:
Several things:
1) This article is based upon an actual interview with Deripaska.
2) Agreed, we knew most of this information already, although it was based upon leaked info.
3) Mueller is set to testify on July 17. Quite a bit of new info has now come out from the Mueller Report plus additional investigations. Putting it altogether now raises a big red flag.
Manafort had been under a FISA for his Ukraine activities beginning circa 2014; it expired or was discontinued in early 2016. Sometime over the summer of 2016, Manafort was again placed under a FISA. For what reason? It's a subject apparently addressed in Rosenstein's memo to Mueller in August 2017. And remember, FISAs have to be renewed every 3 months. There are a number of things which have surfaced to indicate that Manafort shouldn't have been under a FISA: 1) The Ukrainian black ledger was bogus; 2) Kilimnik was a US State Department asset & clearly not linked to Putin/Russia; 3) Deripaska during his FBI interview stated that Manafort was not dealing with Russia. Was the FISA court appraised of these findings? Was Manafort provided with these findings? Mueller it seems ignored these findings. It smacks of FISA abuse and coverup IMO.
Perhaps. Or just sort of willfully ignorant.Deepin theHart80 said:
I just figured the FISA court, or least certain judges was in on this like the rest of the bunch
Probably for the best. American billionaires will just walk away from you and leave it there. Russian billionaires play by the Russian billionaire rulebook and (big hint) it ends with people they don't like being disappeared.captkirk said:
When he says "Get Lost", CNN reporter gets the picture
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...But a close examination of the report shows that none of those headline assertions are supported by the report's evidence or other publicly available sources. They are further undercut by investigative shortcomings and the conflicts of interest of key players involved:
- The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events, indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party emails, or how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.
- The report's timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to its narrative, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication of Democratic Party emails not only before he received the documents but before he even communicated with the source that provided them.
- There is strong reason to doubt Mueller's suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange.
- Mueller's decision not to interview Assange a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.
- U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as "Russian dossier" compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.
- Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking.
- Mueller's report conspicuously does not allege that the Russian government carried out the social media campaign. Instead it blames, as Mueller said in his closing remarks, "a private Russian entity" known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
- Mueller also falls far short of proving that the Russian social campaign was sophisticated, or even more than minimally related to the 2016 election. As with the collusion and Russian hacking allegations, Democratic officials had a central and overlooked hand in generating the alarm about Russian social media activity.
- John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller's investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate. Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump....
Assange has said repeatedly the emails were physically handed over by a Democrat insider.drcrinum said:Quote:
...But a close examination of the report shows that none of those headline assertions are supported by the report's evidence or other publicly available sources. They are further undercut by investigative shortcomings and the conflicts of interest of key players involved:
- The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events, indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party emails, or how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.
