www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/08/14/russia-ukraine-war-latest-ship-missiles-kherson/
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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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