www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/08/15/ukraine-russia-war-latest-counteroffensive-vladimir-putin/
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WEDNESDAY 16 AUGUST 2023
Georgia Prosecutor
read://https_abovethelaw.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabovethelaw.com%2F2023%2F03%2Fprosecutor-fani-willis-is-investigating-trump-by-sheer-coincidence-the-ga-legislature-has-decided-to-investigate-prosecutors%2F
“Republicans love small government and local control. Right up until they don’t.”
There is a satisfying irony to seeing this expansive law, passed by a lot of old white men to target people of color, come back to bite them in the butt.
Jack Smith
Smith, after a struggle with Twitter, got access to Trump’s Twitter account. The reason for this was most probably to get access not to the public tweets, but to gain access to deleted and draft tweets. Also, Trump evidently used other people’s phones to post on Twitter. This will give Smith information on who was around Trump at what time, who, for example, attended a meeting.
Terrorists, evidently use drafts as a way of exchanging information. Write a draft and then never send it. Give someone else the password and they can go in and read the message and delete it without ever putting it on the internet. The shoe bomber terrorist reportedly communicated with his handlers in this manner.
Smith can also see any other accounts that were logged into the Trump account. There are those who think that the Trump Twitter account was a group effort.
Roger Stone
Ari Melber played a video of Roger Stone dictating a coup memo to a staffer before the presidential race had even been called for Biden. This tape was part of a documentary made by a Danish reporter in which the reporter shadowed Stone. The reporter didn’t feel comfortable giving the tapes to law enforcement, so decided to release the tape publicly as he did tonight.
The documentary is “A Storm Foretold.” The reporter told Ari Melber that there was an encrypted group of people (Friends of Stone) that were copied on the memo and other communications. Christoffer Goldbrandsen also told Melber that Stone was present at the hotel coup management hotel on the night of Jan. 6, but that Stone was not part of the “ballroom group”, i.e., the group surrounding Eastman. Stone was part of a separate group of Oath Keepers who also met at the hotel.
Immediately after the Jan. 6 coup fell apart, Stone (according to the filmmaker) was terrified he was going to jail. He started calling Trump and begging for a pardon. When it became obvious that Trump was not going to pardon him, Stone started ranting that Trump had betrayed Guilliani, that Trump had betrayed him. That Trump had betrayed everybody and deserved a long sentence in prison to think about it.
“I don’t suppose that’s on tape.” Melber asked.
“It is.” Responded Goldbrandsen.
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Tuesday 15 August 2023
Things I’ve been thinking about and trying to figure out.
I’ve just come back from once again struggling against the American Medical System. I don’t even want to get started on what’s wrong with it. It is a testament to how propagandized people in this country are because most of them believe this is the best medical system in the world. I’ll just leave this topic with the words of Chris Rock: My mother was sick when I was poor, and my mother was sick when I was rich. If people knew the difference in treatment, they would be rioting in the streets.
Ukraine:
The counteroffensive is not going as well as expected. There have been no dramatic sweeps of territory, or reclaiming of formerly taken territory. The reason for this, or part of the reason, is the extent to which the Russians were allowed to dig in during the month’s long cease in the fighting. There are miles, literally miles of fortifications on the border lines – miles of mine feeds, trenches, heavy artillery. And, the West seems determined to dribble and drabble out this equipment as if time didn’t matter. It does.
I was listening to a podcast about Western training of Ukrainian military fighters. The man talking owned a training business in Ukraine. He said that when the West (and Nato) take soldiers out of the front and ship them off for training, this is the most very basic training. The soldiers have so much experience they could teach the instructors. The Western forces are not at all familiar with fighting a WWII style battle. Their experiences in Afghanistan or Iraq are not similar. As always, the Ukrainian man was quick to stress how much the Ukrainians appreciated the training and any funding that came their way, but the training needed to adapt to the situation.
Ben Norton is exorcized because Zelensky met with Andriy Biletsky, the founder of what some people call a neo-Nazi organization, the Azov regiment. Many people I have heard talk about the situation say that Ukraine has a neo-Nazi problem like the United States has a neo-Nazi problem. They are there, but they do not dominate the political terrain.
Trump and Political Corruption
The entire story about what happened in Coffee County, Georgia is enough to make your mind spin. Doubts about whether the voting was accurate which Trump has been feeding for months, led officials there to allow private companies and other individuals access to the Dominion machine innards. I am not a computer person and I have no earthly idea what the true implications of this are. But, I know it’s not good when individuals can come in and search around in a computer’s hard and soft ware and copy anything they please.
There are people who argue that because of this breach (not the only one) all the voting machines in Georgia are compromised. Gabrien Sterling, of course, has been assuring people that everything is alright. Of course he has to unless he wants to admit that he and Brian Kemp spent an ungodly amount of money on the Dominion Voting Machine system.
This is a difficult issue to talk about. Because Republicans have taken over the intellectual terrain surrounding vote fraud, to even raise the issue gets you shouted down. But, the system Kemp, et. al. installed in Georgia came with stickers that said not “I voted” as before, but “I secured my vote.” I fear this is protesting too much. Why all the emphasis on the “secured.” It is part of a massive and very expensive campaign to convince Georgia voters that their votes would be counted.
But, the marked ballots the Kemp administration is so proud of – a piece of paper that records your votes in a way you can see your votes in front of you, is a phony. When you walk over and put this ballot (with the printed information about how you voted) into the reader, it does not read the words you can see. It reads a bar code that you have no ability to verify. The poll workers cannot read the bar code. And, if there is an audit, the machines simply re-read the bar code. So, it is impenetrable while looking totally verifiable. I don’t like it. Not one little bit.
Georgia
Oh, just before I go, Georgia recently passed a law that the Governor and some commission he is supposed to establish can remove any prosecutor. But, we were assured that this wouldn’t take effect until 2025. Then, there was a modification to the law that makes it applicable within a few months. THERE IS A REASON FOR THIS MODIFICATION. Watch for it.
Well, nod to Keith, I’ve done almost all the damage I can do for one night. Good night. May a kitten find you.
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After a June gathering in Fort Worth sponsored by a new company, Influenceable, social media leaders began backing the suspended Texas attorney general and a controversial human trafficking film. Those who favor transparency in political advocacy are concerned.
— Read on www.texastribune.org/2023/08/14/influenceable-texas-politics-ken-paxton/The event was sponsored by a fledgling company, Influenceable LLC, that recruits young, conservative social media figures to promote political campaigns and films without disclosing their business relationship. On its website, the company touts itself as the “world’s largest network of digital activists” and offers clients the power to “cultivate a community of influencers to leverage their credibility” with audiences.
Now Influenceable appears to be recruiting young conservatives to parrot claims that the attorney general is the victim of a political witch hunt and, more recently, to promote a series of videos alleging that the Texas Legislature is secretly controlled by Democrats intent on destroying Paxton and other conservatives.
The company’s emergence comes amid Republican initiatives to connect with young Americans who tend to be more supportive of liberal policies.
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www.nytimes.com/2023/08/14/nyregion/fbi-mcgonigal-oligarch-nyc.html
Excerpts
he was privately courting the oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, who figured prominently in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The case has raised unsettling questions about the F.B.I.’s ability to detect corruption within its ranks. Prosecutors suggested that Mr. McGonigal traveled extensively while at the bureau, meeting with foreign officials and businesspeople who, on the surface, had nothing to do with his job. Agents are required to report such contacts and certain financial transactions and to take lie-detector tests, but the bureau relies heavily on the integrity of the people it has placed in positions of trust.
Mr. McGonigal is charged with are technical. Between the two indictments, he is accused of concealing details of his finances and activities overseas, violating U.S. sanctions and laundering money. Some charges carry potential prison sentences of up to 20 years, but a judge could impose far less.
What most shocked former colleagues was Mr. McGonigal’s boldness. He had behaved in ways that he most likely knew would get him caught. In 2020, two years after his retirement, he spoke on a panel about the corruption of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., Russia’s counterpart to the F.B.I., including its agents’ participation in money laundering and acting as “private contractors” for businessmen and criminals.
“It has really become an organization that is rogue, in my opinion, and is at the behest of those who can pay for the services they offer,” he said.
By then, prosecutors said, Mr. McGonigal had already accepted cash from a former Albanian intelligence officer — and had begun working with Mr. Deripaska.
He joined Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, a nearby Catholic church. He registered to vote as a Republican
By early 2016, Mr. McGonigal was running the bureau’s Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section in Washington, where agents analyzed Russian and Chinese hacking and other foreign intelligence activities.
In that senior position, Mr. McGonigal became aware of the initial criminal referral that led to the investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane — an inquiry into whether Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and associates were coordinating with Russia.
Over dinner in Manhattan one evening in 2017, Mr. McGonigal was introduced to a man who would figure heavily into his undoing: Agron Neza, an Albanian-born businessman living in Leonia, N.J., who is labeled “Person A” in the Washington indictment. As a young man, Mr. Neza had worked for the Albanian State Intelligence Service before moving to the United States. Now, balding and bearded, Mr. Neza was brokering deals overseas.
In August 2017, according to prosecutors, Mr. McGonigal proposed the men make their own deal, in which Mr. Neza would lend him $225,000 in cash.
On one occasion, Mr. McGonigal opened an F.B.I. investigation into a lobbyist for the Albanian prime minister’s main political rival, the prosecutors said. On another, prosecutors said, he helped secure an oil drilling license benefiting Mr. Neza and others.
Mr. Deripaska. A billionaire metals magnate seen as shrewd and ruthless, Mr. Deripaska built his fortune after the fall of the Soviet Union, as state resources were taken over by businessmen with close ties to the Kremlin. He also cultivated ties to the West, hosting parties in Europe, courting politicians and hiring lawyers and lobbyists to look after his interests.
He did business with Paul Manafort, a lobbyist and political adviser who later served as chairman of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. F.B.I. agents attempted to recruit Mr. Deripaska as an informant, in part to find out whether Mr. Manafort had been a link to the Kremlin, which Mr. Deripaska denied.
In April 2018, the Treasury Department added Mr. Deripaska to its sanctions list, citing his ties to the Kremlin and accusations that he laundered money and threatened rivals, among other things. Before the sanctions were made public, Mr. McGonigal reviewed a list with Mr. Deripaska’s name on it, the New York indictment said.
By late 2018, prosecutors suggested, he was laying the groundwork for a future business relationship with Mr. Deripaska.
Mr. McGonigal is accused of setting up an internship at the New York Police Department for the daughter of an unnamed aide to the oligarch — a reference to the Russian businessman Evgeny Fokin, according to people familiar with the case. (A senior police official said that the woman received a multiday “V.I.P.-type” tour of specialized units, not an internship.) Mr. McGonigal had been introduced to Mr. Fokin by a former Russian diplomat who had become an interpreter for U.S. courts, prosecutors said.
Mr. McGonigal began working for Mr. Deripaska, prosecutors said. He and the former diplomat connected the oligarch with an American law firm, Kobre & Kim, in 2019 to aid in getting the sanctions lifted.
They referred to Mr. Deripaska as “the individual” or “the Vienna client” in electronic communications, and Mr. McGonigal met with Mr. Deripaska and others in London and in Vienna, prosecutors said.
Mr. McGonigal was paid $25,000 per month by the law firm for the sanctions-related work, using Mr. Deripaska’s money, prosecutors said.
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www.nytimes.com/2023/08/14/us/trump-georgia-election-results.html
Excerpts
a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country. But perhaps nowhere were there as many attempts to intervene as in Georgia
There was the infamous call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his narrow loss there. Mr. Trump and his allies harassed and defamed rank-and-file election workers with false accusations of ballot stuffing, leading to so many vicious threats against one of them that she was forced into hiding.
They deployed fake local electors to certify that Mr. Trump had won the election. Within even the Justice Department, an obscure government lawyer secretly plotted with the president to help him overturn the state’s results.
And on the same day that Mr. Biden’s victory was certified by Congress, Trump allies infiltrated a rural Georgia county’s election office, copying sensitive software used in voting machines throughout the state in their fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.
losing Georgia, the only Deep South state among them, seemed particularly untenable for Mr. Trump. His margin of defeat there was one of the smallest in the nation. Republicans controlled the state, and as he would note repeatedly in the aftermath, his campaign rallies in Georgia had drawn big, boisterous crowds.
asserted that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden and changed the election outcome — false claims that became part of Dominion defamation suits against Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and a number of others.
lawyer advising Mr. Trump had hired a company called SullivanStrickler to scour voting systems in Georgia and other states for evidence of fraud or miscounts; some of its employees joined several Trump allies on the expedition.
“We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County with employees of the company on Jan. 7, recalled in a recorded phone conversation. Mr. Hall said that with the blessing of the Coffee County elections board, the team had “scanned all the equipment” and “imaged all the hard drives” that had been used on Election Day.
A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler would later release a statement saying of the company, “Knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.”
Others would have their regrets, too. While Mr. Trump still pushes his conspiracy theories, some of those who worked for him now reject the claims of rigged voting machines and mysterious ballot-stuffed suitcases. As Mr. Sinners, the Trump campaign official, put it in his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last summer, “It was just complete hot garbage.”
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Saturday 12 August 2023
A few Issues I’ve been thinking about: Note: This is a revised version of yesterday’s post with added references.
Iran (MSNBC Jose Diaz Balart)
• The US has made an agreement with Iran to free American hostages. In exchange, the US will free up Iranian money that has been frozen due to sanctions. (Expand)
• While activists like Masih Alinejad are happy prisoners are going to be released, she commented on MSNBC that she considered the deal between the two countries a “betrayal.” There are limitations on how the released funds can be spent, but once the money gets in the hands of the Iranian government, it will likely be used as it sees fit.
• Diaz-Balart pointed out and Alinejad agreed that Iran has been making drones and other weapons and transferring them to Ukraine to kill people.
Why would anyone want to fund this kind of government?
Masih Alinejad and others point out that giving funds to an openly oppressive government in Iran is an extremely bad move.
RICO
• I felt like I had been given a gift last night when the MSNBC news programs started to be more and more sure that Fanni Willis was going to charge Donald Trump and others under the RICO statute.
• This Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act was passed federally primarily to go after drug cartels, but it has been used in a number of very different circumstances. Instead of charging the defendant with one crime, the prosecutor is allowed to prosecute an “organization” and the people involved in it for activities that benefit the organization illegally over time. Usually, the organization has been the Mafia, or a particular mafia family. (Note: Get better explanation of RICO)
• Fanni Willis has successfully used the Georia RICO statute to prosecute educators who conspired and colluded to change standardized test scores in Atlanta (Reference)
• I am delighted, delight that she is seriously thinking about using the Georgia RICO statute for Trump. My only hope is that the Republican Party will be the “criminal organization.” The designation of the organization will be fascinating.
• I used to write about the war on drugs and state crime, I have written about the RICO statute and how it has been used to impose stiff punishments on drug-involved individuals.
Data on RICO
• According to Alex Wagner’s (MSNBC) show last night, the Georgia RICO statute is even more broad and comprehensive than the federal RICO.
• For example, in federal RICO the “organization” must have been operating for a certain amount of time. In Georgia RICO, however, this requirement is narrower. So, a recently formed group would fit under Georgia RICO where it might not under federal RICO.
• According to Wagner, white good-ole-boys in the Georgia legislature were looking at the increases in black crime in Atlanta in 1979. All they could think about was imprisoning blacks and imprisoning them for a long time. So, they wrote a draconian RICO statute for the purpose.
• Well, now, hopefully that will come back to haunt their sorry asses as we see Donald Trump and others (Stone, Guilliani, Powell for example) prosecuted as members of a criminal enterprise. I love it.
The Media
• The corporate media is full of hosts and guests who are now, after the indictment, saying what they should have been saying since 2016 but were too afraid to.
• The problem with MSNBC (which I watch most often) is that they stock their shows and make “MSNBC Contributors” people who are conventional, governmentally involved and dependent on government for their careers.
• Andrew Weissmann, for example, is a career government worker. (Positions) He has been in some government positions or other for essentially his entire adult career. He is not going to seriously criticize the Justice Department (DOJ). And, true to form, he has consistently over the past few years refused to really call out Merrick Garland for his profound irresponsibility in not charging Donald Trump and his co-conspirators the month after he left office. But you can see how someone who has worked for DOJ and probably depends on DOJ recommendations for future work, is not going to risk alienating the DOJ, no matter what DOJ does or does not do.
• Harry Litman is another example. Career government worker, never going to take on the criminal irresponsibility of Merrick Garland. (Note: Include the story of the guffaw of the other lawyer.)
• This “part of the system” mentality has led people like the seemingly reasonable nice principled Barbara McQuade to say that Trump should not be imprisoned because it would be “inconvenient” for the Secret Service. I thought my head would explode.
• Then, another former official, Mary McCord, argued that Trump should be provided with a SCIF because it would be “cheaper” than making him go and look at discovery documents.
• So, we should pay to build a secure room in Mar-a-lago (cost) for Donald Trump after he stole and then probably distributed and sold, classified information.
• I don’t care if it’s “inconvenient” or “cheaper” to treat Donald Trump like he’s a King. (Quote from judge). He is a criminal defendant, and he should be treated just like any working of lower-class defendant. In fact, Donald Trump’s crimes are worse. He’s a rich, privileged, spoiled man who has been exploiting the cracks in the legal system for decades. He has no excuses.
• We can afford to enforce democracy. If we can’t, if we are too cheap or too lazy to enforce democratic norms, we should admit that we don’t really care about accountability or democracy.
Well, as Keith Olbermann says, “I’ve done all the damage I can do today.”
Posted the above Saturday
Additional Sources
RICO
Britannica definition of RICO
read://https_www.britannica.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.britannica.com%2Ftopic%2FRacketeer-Influenced-and-Corrupt-Organizations-Act
Legal Dictionary, RICO
Primer on RICO
Georgia RICO
https://www.findlaw.com/state/georgia-law/georgia-racketeering-laws.html
Text Georgia RICO statute
Willis prosecutes educators under RICO
TRUMP
SCIF at Mar-a-lago
Request to Reestablish Scif
Trump seeks to reestablish secure facility at Mar-a-Lago to review classified evidence
Cost to build scif
JUDICIAL SYSTEM
Judge in Jack Smith’s case against Trump
Protective Order
Judge’s Comments
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/11/judge-warns-trump-speed-trial-00110870
IRAN Hostages
Criticism of deal
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-754485
NYT
PBS
WEISSMANN
Career
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/andrew-weissmann-selected-chief-criminal-divisions-fraud-section-0
LITMAN
Career
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/harry-litman/
Lawyer for Greenberg who laughed
Fritz Scheller
Video of Scheller
Associate of Greenberg
Law, Power, and Justice 