Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:04 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:06 pm
0_0 » Mon Mar 05, 2018 12:04 pm wrote:i am under no obligation to answer questions from you slad, even less so when you obviously are very disingenious in how you quote me and are not interested in my answers anyway. and you started being rude by immediately attacking me for posting a video that wasn't recent enough and then when i post another video by saying it proves nothing and has nothing to do with the subject at hand when you havent even watched it. that is all for now.
by 0_0 » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:06 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:08 pm
0_0 » Mon Mar 05, 2018 11:53 am wrote:it proves the toxic effect this narrative has slad
seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 10:08 am wrote:to be fair I do not mind at all debating trump talking points
0_0 » Sat Mar 03, 2018 11:47 am wrote:There is still zero proof of any of that more than a year later.
what are you talking about 5 people have pled guilty .......if there was no proof why would they pled guilty?
and I would add they've pled guilty to small offenses because they are cooperating and giving evidence against othersThe full list of known indictments and plea deals in Mueller’s probe
1) George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty in October to making false statements to the FBI.
2) Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty in December to making false statements to the FBI.
3) Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair, was indicted in October in Washington, DC on charges of conspiracy, money laundering, false statements, and failure to disclose foreign assets — all related to his work for Ukrainian politicians before he joined the Trump campaign. He’s pleaded not guilty on all counts. Then, in February, Mueller filed a new case against him in Virginia, with tax, financial, and bank fraud charges.
4) Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and Manafort’s longtime junior business partner, was indicted on similar charges to Manafort. But he has now agreed to a plea deal with Mueller’s team, pleading guilty to just one false statements charge and one conspiracy charge.
5-20) 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were indicted on conspiracy charges, with some also being accused of identity theft. The charges related to a Russian propaganda effort designed to interfere with the 2016 campaign. The companies involved are the Internet Research Agency, often described as a “Russian troll farm,” and two other companies that helped finance it. The Russian nationals indicted include 12 of the agency’s employees and its alleged financier, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
21) Richard Pinedo: This California man pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge in connection with the Russian indictments, and has agreed to cooperate with Mueller.
22) Alex van der Zwaan: This London lawyer pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Rick Gates and another unnamed person based in Ukraine.0_0 » Sat Mar 03, 2018 11:47 am wrote:
but let's not pretend Trump is some kind of exception in this regard.
I definitely do not pretend
I can't believe you would say that....in order for you to say that you must have ignored everything in the trump threadsTrump Is Officially the Worst President Ever
…according to a new survey of political scholars.
Donald Trump comes in dead last in his debut ranking. Among Democratic scholars, he’s far and away last. Among independent scholars, he’s second to last. Even among Republican scholars, he’s bottom five.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... dent-ever/
no other president ever said he could shot someone and get away with it
no president says he'd like to be president for life
no other president has cuddled up to every frickin dictator on this planet
no president has ever had his very own propaganda network'Pure madness': Dark days inside the White House as Trump shocks and rages
Inside the White House, aides over the past week have described an air of anxiety and volatility - with an uncontrollable commander in chief at its center.
As one official put it: "We haven't bottomed out."
"Pure madness," lamented one exasperated ally.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Pur ... 725669.php
trump is KING!
The great danger in all of this is that a man who knows little but is pretending to know much can easily be manipulated by those who know more.Trump: King of Chaos
Charles M. Blow
MARCH 4, 2018
That seemed to be the descriptor most tossed around last week to capture the circus around Donald Trump.
But I think chaos is the fruit of this poison tree, not the root of it. That is to say that I don’t believe that Trump desires chaos because he feels most at peace when the world around him is experiencing pandemonium.
Rather, I believe that this chaos is the perpetual result of the absolute incompetence and idiocy of a preening philistine who has faked his way through life pretending that he knows more than he does and is tougher than he is.
He has two diametrically opposed impulses.
On the one hand, he latches on to outlandish ideas, or simple, emotional aspects of complicated issues, or conspiratorial drivel, and he vests the whole of his emotional energy into proving their veracity, often against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. President Obama wasn’t born in America. Obama used the F.B.I. to spy on him. There were good people on both sides in Charlottesville. The “fake news media” is the enemy of the American people. The whole Russia investigation is a hoax. He’s doing a good job as president.
On the other hand, and with other issues, his convictions are not fixed at all, but ephemeral and fleeting, changing from moment to moment, like the pattern of fog on a glass.
This is when you can see that he is clearly faking it. He wants so desperately to be right that he says whatever his audience — whether that be a small group or a filled arena, whether that be members of Congress or fans at a rally — want to hear and will respond to.
This is how you can get wildly vacillating positions and bold, empty promises in bipartisan meetings with the man — whether those meetings are about addressing DACA and immigration or about addressing gun control after the school shooting in Florida.
And one thing that clearly comes across in those meetings is how much he talks rather than listens. It’s all about what he believes, what he would do, how courageous he is, how conciliatory he is, how smart he is about the subject.
That is precisely how you know that none of it is true, and that he is simply stringing together a jumble of words into conflicting ideas. You see a fear of being exposed as an idiot and fraud. As Friedrich Nietzsche once put it: “Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.”
So Trump simply bulldozes his way through, boasting and bragging, distracting and dissembling, making promises without making sense.
People used to dealing with a sane, logical person who generally doesn’t lie and generally makes sense are left scratching their heads, wondering whether to believe what they have heard, whether to make plans and policies around it.
Believing anything Trump says is a recipe for a headache and heartache. The old rules no longer apply. We see the world as through a window — as it is, even if we are a bit removed from the whole of it.
Trump sees it as if in a house of mirrors — everything reflecting some distorted version of him. His reality always seems to return to a kind of delusional narcissism.
The only way that a person can live out a life in this fashion is to be a liar and a fraud. That’s why the majority of Americans find him unlikable and unfit. Character still matters.
The great danger in all of this is that a man who knows little but is pretending to know much can easily be manipulated by those who know more.
For instance, according to The New York Times, leading up to Trump’s hurriedly announcing his potentially disastrous steel and aluminum tariffs:
“Supporters of the tariffs have begun broadcasting televised ads in recent days during programs that Mr. Trump has been known to watch. One such ad ran on Fox News minutes before the president’s Twitter post on Thursday morning.”
He made the move against the advice of his own director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, and his defense secretary, Jim Mattis.
As is Trump’s wont, he doubled down defending his hasty decision by trying to render something fraught and nuanced as simple and easy.
He tweeted Friday, at 5:50 a.m. no less, that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Only a simpleton with no true comprehension of global trade systems would say such a thing. And he did.
As is the case most often with this man, the subjects aren’t simple, but his understanding is.
It is this constant attempt to render the big things small and to make his limited knowledge and ability appear not only sufficient but extraordinary, that leads to Trump’s constant state of chaos.
Trump keeps trying to bend the world to meet him, rather than rising to meet the world. That has never worked and never will. It only compounds the chaos.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/opin ... chaos.htmlMueller's leaked 'hit list' may indicate he's treating Trump's team like a 'criminal enterprise'
A grand-jury subpoena from the special counsel Robert Mueller's team reportedly targets most of Donald Trump's senior campaign team, including the president.
The news website Axios reported that Mueller would subpoena communications from nine leaders of Trump's campaign and Trump himself.
A former CIA officer said the subpoena indicated Mueller was treating Trump's team like a "criminal enterprise."
A grand-jury subpoena from the special counsel Robert Mueller's team reportedly targets the majority of Donald Trump's senior campaign team, including the president.
The subpoena, seen by and labeled a "hit list" by the news website Axios, asks for all texts, letters, handwritten notes, or communications of any kind starting from November 1, 2015, between one unnamed witness and the following people:
Carter Page, a former investment banker and campaign foreign-policy adviser.
Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign manager.
Hope Hicks, Trump's outgoing communications director.
Keith Schiller, Trump's former bodyguard and confidant.
Michael Cohen, the longtime personal attorney for Trump.
Paul Manafort, Trump's already indicted campaign chairman.
Rick Gates, the deputy chairman of Trump's presidential campaign who is now cooperating with Mueller.
Roger Stone, an adviser to Trump who left the campaign before November 1, 2015, but has admitted to having contact with
WikiLeaks, the organization that leaked hacked emails from the Democratic National Convention.
Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist under Trump.
And, finally, Donald Trump himself makes the list.
November 1, 2015, the start of the subpoena's request, came nearly five months after Trump announced his candidacy.
In response to the report, Ned Price, a former CIA official who advised President Barack Obama and resigned from the agency rather than work for Trump's administration, tweeted that the subpoena indicated "Mueller is treating it like a criminal enterprise."
Price pointed out that the inclusion of Roger Stone, who worked with the campaign only briefly and had no subsequent role in the White House — but was found to have communicated with WikiLeaks — may indicate the subpoena is not about questions of obstruction of justice but instead whether Trump's team colluded with Russia.
Trump has repeatedly denied obstructing justice in the investigation or colluding with foreign agents, making "no collusion" a rallying cry on Twitter.
http://www.businessinsider.com/muellers ... ise-2018-3
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:13 pm
How Trump’s 2020 campaign manager is connected to the Russia scandal
Brad Parscale is linked to a data firm that has become a focus of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Sean IllingFeb 27, 2018, 1:55pm EST
Brad Parscale, President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign digital director, arrives at Trump Tower, December 6, 2016, in New York City.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
President Donald Trump has named Brad Parscale to be his 2020 campaign manager.
On Tuesday morning, Trump released a statement calling Parscale a “longtime digital marketing strategist for President Trump” who was “essential in bringing a disciplined technology and data-driven approach to how the 2016 campaign was run.”
Trump is not being hyperbolic here: Parscale, who was in charge of the Trump campaign’s digital operations and worked closely with Facebook, Twitter, and Google to hone the campaign’s social media presence, was a huge part of why Trump won the White House. A 2017 profile on 60 Minutes called Parscale the “secret weapon” of Trump’s social media strategy.
“I understood very early that Facebook was how Trump was going to win,” Parscale said of the campaign’s use of social media during the 2016 presidential campaign. “I think we used it better than anyone ever had in history.”
But the young tech guru who ran the Trump campaign’s digital operations from his office in San Antonio is an extremely controversial choice to run the president’s 2020 campaign — particularly given that Trump’s 2016 campaign is still being investigated for potential collusion with Russia.
That’s because Parscale is intimately tied to a company called Cambridge Analytica, a shady data analytics firm that has become a major focus of both the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election and special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Here’s what you need to know.
The Cambridge Analytica connection
Cambridge Analytica is a data company that specializes in what’s called “psychographic” polling, which means it uses data collected online to create personality profiles for voters. It then uses that information to target individuals with content tailored to their specific profile.
Last December, Mueller requested that Cambridge Analytica turn over internal documents as part of his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.
The thread connecting Russia, the Trump campaign, and Cambridge Analytica is Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who was forced to resign after he reportedly lied to Vice President Mike Pence and the FBI about his phone conversations with a Russian envoy in 2016.
A series of reports last July by the Wall Street Journal’s Shane Harris, Michael Bender, and Peter Nicholas revealed that Peter Smith, a pro-Trump GOP operative, sought to acquire 30,000 deleted emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server. Two of the groups Smith reached out to had connections to Russia.
Smith told Harris that he was in regular contact with Flynn, who at the time was still working closely with Trump’s campaign. Harris also reported on intelligence assessments that outlined the efforts of Russian hackers to retrieve Clinton’s emails and pass them on to Flynn, who would then share them with the Trump campaign.
Via an August 2017 Associated Press report, we also know that Flynn was later forced to disclose “a brief advisory role with a firm related to a controversial data analysis company that aided the Trump campaign.”
That “data analysis” company was Cambridge Analytica.
We don’t know what data Flynn might have shared with the Russians (or vice versa). Nor do we know if — or to what extent — the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians to help their disinformation operation.
What we do know is that Russia was actively meddling in the 2016 presidential election in order to help Trump win the White House. We also know that part of its operation relied on manipulating Facebook’s algorithms to target specific voters.
And this is precisely the sort of work that Cambridge Analytica and Brad Parscale were hired to perform for the Trump campaign.
How does Parscale figure into all this?
Jared Kushner hired Cambridge Analytica to take over the Trump campaign’s data operations in 2016. Kushner also hired Parscale to develop the campaign’s online microtargeting strategy.
According to the New York Times’s Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim, Cambridge Analytica convinced Parscale to “try out the firm.” The decision was encouraged by Trump’s campaign manager at the time, Steve Bannon, who was also a former vice president of Cambridge Analytica.
We don’t know how instrumental Cambridge was to Parscale’s online strategy, but it seems reasonable to assume that it was important. Although Parscale denied during his 60 Minutes interview that the firm was useful, we know that the campaign’s digital operation was extraordinarily effective.
The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr reported that Trump’s campaign “was using 40-50,000 variants of ads every day that were continuously measuring responses and then adapting and evolving based on that response.” These ads were spread primarily through bots on social media platforms.
During that same 60 Minutes interview, Parscale insisted that allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia were “a joke.” But there’s a mountain of circumstantial evidence that suggests otherwise, and if it turns out that the Trump campaign did help Russia target voters, we’ll likely hear more about Cambridge Analytica and Parscale’s role.
It may turn out that Parscale did nothing wrong and had no connections to Russia’s disinformation campaign. But his proximity to all of this makes him an unusual choice to lead Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.
https://www.vox.com/2018/2/27/17058208/ ... -analytica
by 0_0 » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:16 pm
seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 03, 2018 11:23 am wrote:^^^^^^^^
Published on Dec 17, 2017
you could at least try and keep up with current events 0_0
even Hopsicker knows what's going on
since that all this below has happened and much more to come
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:20 pm
by 0_0 » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:25 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:28 pm
13 Russian Nationals Indicted by Grand Jury
... a mysterious server in Trump Tower which is suspected of compiling a massive database of hacked voter information with Russia’s Alfa Bank and the DeVos family-owned Spectrum Health, and you begin to see a clearer picture of how Cambridge Analytica may have gotten all this data. Cambridge Analytica’s ...
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40854&p=651489&hilit=DEVOS#p651489
Re: Deutsche Bank: A Global Bank for Oligarchs
... to his meeting with Gorkov. Less than a month after the secret Kushner/Gorkov meeting, Erik Prince, brother of Secretary of Education Betsy Devos, at the suggestion of UAE Crown Prince bin Zayed, met covertly with Kirill Dmitriev, a representative of Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) ...
search.php?keywords=DEVOS+&fid%5B0%5D=8
Caroline O.
Mueller's focus on UAE adviser George Nader "could also prompt an examination of how money from multiple countries has flowed through and influenced Washington during the Trump era."
Mueller’s Focus on Adviser to U.A.E. Indicates Broader Inquiry
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/us/p ... d=tw-share
George Nader "reinvented himself as an adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, and last year was a frequent visitor to President Trump’s White House."
Mueller's team interviewed him in recent weeks re. his potential influence on Trump admin policymaking.
1/
Nader "developed close ties to national security officials" during the Bush admin.
Erik Prince (Betsy DeVos' brother in law) hired Nader to help Blackwater (now called Academi) generate business deals in Iraq.
2/
Hey remember when the United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Erik Prince and a Putin ally as part of an apparent effort to establish a Trump-Putin back channel?
3/
https://www.washingtonpost.com
"[T]he UAE agreed to broker the meeting [w/ Erik Prince] in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump admin objective that would be likely to require major concessions to Moscow on US sanctions."
4/
"The Seychelles meeting came after separate private discussions in New York involving high-ranking representatives of Trump with both Moscow and the United Arab Emirates."
5/
Oh well look who was making "frequent trips to the White House during the early months of the Trump administration, meeting with Stephen K. Bannon and Jared Kushner to discuss American policy towards the Persian Gulf States..."
George Nader.
6/
Hey remember when Kushner, Bannon & Flynn secretly met w/ Jordan's King while Flynn was pushing a for-profit deal to partner w/Russia to put nuclear plants in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and 3 other Gulf countries?
7/
Trump Advisers Secretly Met With Jordan’s King While One Was Pushing A Huge Nuclear Power Deal
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/t ... gp54D6eoKa
As @SpyTalker reported in June, Flynn's plans to build nuclear plants in the Gulf would involve... compensating Russia for curtailing its relationship with Iran.
How convenient.
8/
http://www.newsweek.com/2017/06/23/flyn ... 23396.html …
I wonder if any of this could explain why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates "forgot" to tell the US government he was coming to meet with Flynn, Kushner, and Bannon during the transition period (late 2016)?
9/
https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/13/politics ... index.html …
Just gonna set this here...
Oh, and there's this: SCL Analytics, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, was hired to "wage a global social media campaign urging a boycott of Qatar."
The same boycott that Jared Kushner reportedly backed.
10/Caroline O. added,
Oh, and there's this: SCL Analytics, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, was hired to "wage a global social media campaign urging a boycott of Qatar."
The same boycott that Jared Kushner reportedly backed.
https://www.politico.com/tipsheets/poli ... ion-222775 …
Oct. 2017: "SCL Analytics, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent working on behalf of the National Media Council of the United Arab Emirates."
11/
https://www.politico.com/tipsheets/poli ... ion-222775 …
Dec '17: "Trump admin is considering a proposal by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a retired CIA officer, & Oliver North (Iran-Contra scandal) to provide CIA Dir Pompeo & the WH w/ a global, private spy network that would circumvent US intel agencies"
12/
TRUMP WHITE HOUSE WEIGHING PLANS FOR PRIVATE SPIES TO COUNTER “DEEP STATE” ENEMIES
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/04/tru ... e-enemies/
Oh look who else was interested in private security and intelligence operations: George Nader and his friend/business associate Elliott Broidy.
Imagine that.
13/
https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/970129292456755200
by 0_0 » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:34 pm
Please link to where I have EVER said "let's attack Russia" that was Nordic's talking point if Clinton WON the election
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:36 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:40 pm
State Dept. Was Granted $120 Million to Fight Russian Meddling. It Has Spent $0.
By GARDINER HARRIS
MARCH 4, 2018
Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, has voiced skepticism that the United States is capable of doing anything to counter Russian meddling. Pool photo by Lintao Zhang
WASHINGTON — As Russia’s virtual war against the United States continues unabated with the midterm elections approaching, the State Department has yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections or sow distrust in democracy.
As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department’s Global Engagement Center — which has been tasked with countering Moscow’s disinformation campaign — speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts.
The delay is just one symptom of the largely passive response to the Russian interference by President Trump, who has made little if any public effort to rally the nation to confront Moscow and defend democratic institutions. More broadly, the funding lag reflects a deep lack of confidence by Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson in his department’s ability to execute its historically wide-ranging mission and spend its money wisely.
Mr. Tillerson has voiced skepticism that the United States is even capable of doing anything to counter the Russian threat.
“If it’s their intention to interfere, they’re going to find ways to do that,” Mr. Tillerson said in an interview last month with Fox News. “And we can take steps we can take, but this is something that once they decide they are going to do it, it’s very difficult to pre-empt it.”
The United States spends billions of dollars on secret cybercapabilities, but these weapons have proved largely ineffective against Russian efforts on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere that simply amplify or distort divisive but genuine voices in the United States and elsewhere.
The role for the Global Engagement Center would be to assess Russian efforts and then set about amplifying a different set of voices to counter them, perhaps creating a network of anti-propaganda projects dispersed around the world, experts said.
“There are now thousands of former Russian journalists who have been exiled or fired who are doing counter-Russian stuff in exile who we could help,” said Richard Stengel, who as the under secretary for public diplomacy in the Obama administration had oversight of the Global Engagement Center.
Concerted campaigns to highlight the roles of Russian troll farms or Russian mercenaries in Ukraine and Syria could have a profound effect, Mr. Stengel said.
At the end of the Obama administration, Congress directed the Pentagon to send $60 million to the State Department so it could coordinate governmentwide efforts, including those by the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security, to counter anti-democratic propaganda by Russia and China. This messaging effort is separate from other potential government actions like cyberattacks.
Mr. Tillerson spent seven months trying to decide whether to spend any of the money. The State Department finally sent a request to the Defense Department on Sept. 18 to transfer the funds, but with just days left in the fiscal year, Pentagon officials decided that the State Department had lost its shot at the money.
With another $60 million available for the next fiscal year, the two departments dickered for another five months over how much the State Department could have.
After The New York Times, following a report on the issue by Politico in August, began asking about the delayed money, the State Department announced on Monday that the Pentagon had agreed to transfer $40 million for the effort, just a third of what was originally intended.
State Department officials say they expect to receive the money in April. Steve Goldstein, the under secretary for public diplomacy, said he would contribute $1 million from his own budget to “kick-start the initiative quickly.”
“This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation,” Mr. Goldstein said.
On Wednesday, Mark E. Mitchell, a top official in the Defense Department, said much wrangling remained before any of the promised $40 million is transferred to the State Department.
“We’re still a ways off,” Mr. Mitchell said.
The delays have infuriated some members of Congress, which approved the funding transfer with bipartisan support.
“It is well past time that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center gets the resources Congress intended for it to effectively fight Kremlin-sponsored disinformation and other foreign propaganda operations,” Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Wednesday.
Adele Ruppe, the center’s chief of staff, defended the administration’s broader efforts to counter Russian propaganda, pointing out that the State Department had provided $1.3 billion in assistance in 2017 to strengthen European resilience to Russian meddling. But that money was largely obligated during the Obama administration, and the Trump administration has proposed slashing that assistance by more than half for the coming year, to $527 million, and to $491 million for the next year.
While it waits for the funding transfer from the Pentagon, the center, which has a staff of around 60 people, including 23 contract analysts, will continue working on its original mission: countering jihadist and extremist propaganda.
Most of the center’s leaders are working in temporary assignments, a product of Mr. Tillerson’s halt in promotions. The analysts work in a warren of cubicles in the basement of a tired building that once housed the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor to the C.I.A.
The analysts are divided into five teams that largely work in four languages: Arabic, Urdu, French and Somali. The analysts said in interviews that they had notched some significant victories, including a video montage proving that the Islamic State had itself destroyed Al Nuri Grand Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, and a widely seen cartoon in French depicting the miserable life of an Islamic State fighter.
Still, these efforts are a small fraction of what Congress envisioned. A 2015 internal assessment found that the Islamic State had been far more nimble on social media than the United States had been. In May, Congress more than doubled the center’s budget, providing an additional $19 million over its earlier budget of $14 million. But by Jan. 1, the department had spent just $3.6 million of the additional $19 million, Mr. Goldstein said.
James K. Glassman, the under secretary for public diplomacy during the George W. Bush administration, said the center’s uncertain funding and temporary leadership reflected the administration’s lack of interest in countering either jihadist or Russian propaganda.
“They’ve got the vehicle to do this work in the center,” Mr. Glassman said. “What they don’t have is a secretary of state or a president who’s interested in doing this work.”
Mr. Tillerson is focusing his energies instead on drastically shrinking the department, leaving a significant part of its budget unused and hundreds of important decisions unmade.
Last year, the State Department spent just 79 percent of the money that Congress had authorized for the conduct of foreign affairs, the lowest such level in at least 15 years and well down from the 93 percent spent in the final year of the Obama administration, according to an analysis of data from the Office of Management and Budget.
Because of the hiring and promotion freezes that have left large sums unspent, as well as Mr. Tillerson’s refusal to delegate spending decisions, the department had a backlog of more than 1,400 official requests for Mr. Tillerson’s signoff at the end of last year, according to a former senior diplomat who left the department then.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/worl ... enter.html
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:43 pm
It’s not just Russia — Mueller is digging into Trump associates’ potentially corrupt foreign ties
He’s looking at Trump associates’ dealings with investors or governments in Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, and China.
Andrew Prokop
Mar 5, 2018, 10:50am EST
It’s now clear that special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is now looking into a whole lot more than just Russia.
A set of recent reports citing witnesses interviewed in Mueller’s probe all suggest that the special counsel is pursuing angles related to potentially corrupt foreign influence on a wide range of people in Trump’s orbit — with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, and China all being mentioned as subjects of his investigators’ questioning.
First, CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz, Kara Scannell, and Gloria Borger reported that Mueller was looking into Jared Kushner’s efforts to get foreign investors for his family real estate company’s projects during the transition — and that his investigators have asked witnesses about Kushner’s talks with a Chinese insurance company and with a former prime minister of Qatar.
Then, NBC News’s Carol Lee, Julia Ainsley, and Robert Windrem reported that Mueller’s team has also asked about Kushner’s conversations with potential investors from Russia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates — with an eye toward whether these business talks “later shaped White House policies.” (The report claims that Qatari officials claim to have evidence that Kushner coordinated with Gulf states to hurt Qatar, but have “decided against cooperating with Mueller for now out of fear it would further strain the country’s relations with the White House.”)
Then, this weekend, the New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti, David Kirkpatrick, and Maggie Haberman reported that businessman George Nader, an adviser to the United Arab Emirates government who visited the White House several times last year, had become a focus of Mueller’s probe. Investigators have specifically asked “about any possible attempts by the Emiratis to buy political influence by directing money to support Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign,” the Times reports.
Finally, Axios’s Jonathan Swan got a hold of a grand jury subpoena Mueller’s team sent to a witness this February. The subpoena demands “all communications” this person sent or received involving not only Trump himself, but nine other named Trump associates since November 1, 2015. In addition to the fact that the subpoena names many people, note that it is not limited in any way to Russia-related communications.
All this paints a picture of a very wide-ranging investigation that’s digging into not just Russian interference with the 2016 campaign and Russian ties to Trump, but potentially corrupt foreign influence involving a wide circle of Trump associates.
Is all this mainly about getting more leverage for the Russia case — or is Mueller pursuing something else big?
Now, Mueller’s investigation had already gone somewhat beyond Russia collusion, with last October’s indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates on charges based on work they did for Ukrainian politicians before the 2016 campaign. But Manafort and Gates worked for the faction of Ukrainian politicians aligned with the Kremlin, so this wasn’t all that far removed from Russia. The recent reports indicate a far broader focus (though other reports make clear he’s still also looking into the central question of Russian interference, too).
The big mystery, though, is whether Mueller is focusing on all these other topics mainly out of a desire to help him make a Russia-related case — or whether potential corruption related to Gulf countries and other foreign players are now a new focus in his investigation in and of itself.
The Manafort and Gates Ukraine charges, for instance, were widely believed to be pursued by Mueller’s team primarily because he wanted one or both of them to “flip” (as Gates eventually did). So perhaps these new areas of inquiry are mainly aimed at getting more leverage over Trump associates, so they’d feel pressure to cooperate and provide valuable Russia-related information.
Alternatively, Mueller could have discovered something big in his investigation unrelated to Russia — through records he’s uncovered, witnesses, or perhaps his three cooperating ex-Trump aides (Gates, Michael Flynn, and George Papadopoulos) — that seems serious and important enough to merit him devoting his resources to it.
Both seem like possibilities. Mueller has 17 prosecutors on his team, so he can look into many things at the same time. Still, he hardly has unlimited resources, and the Russian interference topic is enormously complex. But whether his team is asking these questions to get Russia-related leverage, or to look into what could be an entirely new scandal, it’s clear there’s some reason behind it. Only the special counsel’s team, however, knows what that is.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... er-mueller
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 1:46 pm
It’s OK to say it, Democrats: Russian interference helped Donald Trump
There’s no longer any room for doubt: The Russians helped Trump. Democrats have to wrestle with that and move on
No matter how damning the evidence against Trump gets with respect to Russia, Democrats have undoubtedly fumbled how to frame it.
They don’t know how to talk about it in the most basic terms — or, much more importantly, how to connect it to larger themes and issues higher on voters’ list of concerns. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s Feb. 16 indictment of three Russian entities and 13 individuals should have been a definitive turning point — and at some level, it clearly was. The possibility that President Trump might fire Mueller and shut down his investigation suddenly seems off the table. What’s more, as Marcy Wheeler noted, “This indictment offers a way for even self-interested Republicans to start acknowledging the reality of what happened.” It also potentially laid the groundwork for much more to come.
There are several events "that may one day serve as details in a larger conspiracy," Wheeler writes. "Most interesting, for the timing and location, are the twin anti-Hillary and pro-Trump events in NYC in June and July 2016." The apparent fact that there was a Russian-organized event outside Trump Tower "the day after WikiLeaks dropped the DNC emails, in particular, suggests the possibility of a great deal of coordination ... with people in the US.”
https://www.salon.com/2018/03/04/its-ok ... ald-trump/
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 2:04 pm
Trump has been laundering Russian money for decades:
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/ ... -syndicate
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