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Excerpts
A Russian activist has died in prison days after describing being tortured and expressing fear for his life, according to his lawyer, which is believed to be the first known death in custody of a Russian opponent of the war in Ukraine.
Anatoly Berezikov, 40, died about a month after he was detained by police in his home in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and charged with misdemeanors, which he denied. His lawyer, Irina Gak, said he was known to have put up posters around the city promoting the antiwar initiative called “I Want to Live,” which helps Russian servicemen in Ukraine to surrender, and that it had made him a target.
The Rostov region police told local media that Mr. Berezikov was found without signs of life in his cell on Wednesday, an account that tried to portray his death as a suicide. The police declined to provide additional details when contacted by The New York Times, and no other official has commented on Mr. Berizikov’s death.
Mr. Berezikov is believed to be the first person in Russia to die in police custody after being jailed and accused of opposing the invasion of Ukraine. Tens of thousands of Russians have been detained since the start of the invasion under draconian laws that criminalize criticism of the war but most were released soon after.
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Interesting Articles
The Intelligencer
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/trump-and-desantis-want-to-destroy-the-civil-service.html
- Since 1883, we have had a civil service designed to end the “spoils system” where presidents were allowed to reward political supporters with appointed officers and also fire federal employees who had not sworn loyalty to them.
- (Note: Scandal over Alberto Gonzalez’ firing of federal prosecutors under the Bush Administration.)
- Donald Trump wants to tear that apart and establish his own loyal servants. This is just one of the steps toward establishing an authoritarian state.
- Trump, in October of 2020, issued an “executive order creating a new Schedule F classification of political appointees to include most policymaking positions in the higher levels of the bureaucracy. Like a lot of alarming things Trump proposed, Schedule F didn’t get implemented, and Joe Biden quickly revoked the executive order and restored the traditional civil service.”:
- Trump however, is already threatening to put such a policy in place if he returns to power.
- “Those involved in the effort to revive Schedule F told Government Executive last week that they have identified 50,000 federal employees that could be fired under the proposed new authority, although they hope to fire only a fraction of that total to create a “chilling effect” to keep the rest of them in line.”
- DeSantis is also threatening to implement such a policy.
- “So a Republican Party that once invented and then championed the idea of a nonpartisan civil service is now fighting to dismantle it. That means a new class of federal appointees charged with a partisan agenda will arrive along with a new GOP president, in positions of authority. It’s one of many underestimated implications of the 2024 presidential contest.”
Quote from Keith Olberman: “Arrest Trump while we still can.”
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Today, the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Georgia permitted the public release of Security Analysis of Georgia’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices, a 96-page report that describes numerous security problems affecting Dominion voting equipment used in Georgia and other states.
— Read on freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/06/14/security-analysis-of-the-dominion-imagecast-x/ -
Donald Trump was indicted in Florida. Could he also face charges in New Jersey?
— Read on www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/trump-indictment-florida-new-jersey-classified/674393/ -
Legal Analysts Say Jack Smith Signaled More Serious ‘Leaking’ Charges For Trump in New Jersey
— Read on www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/legal-analysts-say-jack-smith-signaled-more-serious-leaking-charges-for-trump-in-new-jersey/ar-AA1cxSC8 -
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Folks, i just cannot understand why nothing is done about all this. We know so much. These are excerpts from the ThomHartman article.
Does Trump’s goal appear to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia?”
— Read on hartmannreport.com/p/how-much-damage-has-the-trump-putin-dfbIn 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).
The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.
In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.
The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.
Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.
Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement
Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a tripcorroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.
In 2017, Erdogan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House
The plot thickened when America learned, from a blockbuster 2022 report in Axios by Jonathan Swan, that just before leaving office, back on October 21, 2020, Trump had signed Executive Order 13957.
It would allow him to instantly fire as many as 50,000 senior federal employees encompassing the Civil Service management of every government agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, large parts of the Pentagon, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees.
And it wouldn’t stop there. As Donald Moynihan wrote for Slate about this “Schedule F” Executive Order:
“Schedule F would burn down the civil service system. It would be a government of the lawless leading the incompetent. …
“Government data unfavorable to the administration would be suppressed or altered. Public statements about what government actors are actually doing would become rarer and less believable. And questionable actions by the security forces to target political enemies and protect friends could become routine.
“Career public employees would be forced to choose between their oath to the Constitution—in effect, their oath to serve the public—and keeping their job. They will have their loyalty questioned based on which political organizations they associated with in college, or voter registration, or social media activity. Some will not go along with the program. They will be fired. Or never join the government in the first place.”
Trump didn’t have the time to push that executive order through the federal bureaucracy, but it gives us a clear picture of his vision for a second Trump administration.
From campaigning to destroy NATO to opposing aid to Ukraine to demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”
After all, it’s not like we’ve never had a rightwing coup attempt before in this country: wealthy Republican industrialists tried to kidnap and kill President Franklin Roosevelt 92 years ago and turn America into an Italian/German-style fascist state “friendly to capitalism.”
Not a single one of those conspirators was ever arrested or tried; why not try again?
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Judge Cannon, who’s previously made pro-Trump rulings, could influence the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith against Donald Trump.
— Read on www.vox.com/2023/6/13/23757893/aileen-cannon-donald-trump-jack-smith-indictment-mar-a-lago-maga -
At a basic level, Russia likely fears that an economically prosperous, democratic Ukraine might offer the Russian population the prospect of an alternative political and economic system other than an authoritarian-ruled kleptocracy.
— Read on mwi.usma.edu/what-is-russias-strategy-in-ukraine/
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