(Pt I is here: ‘The Intercept’s Most Recent Screed against Julian Assange’;
Also, see a similar indictment a week or so later: ‘The Intercept Attacks WikiLeaks on Behalf of Democrats’, Danny Haiphong, blackagendareport.com, Dec. 6, 2017
“WikiLeaks has done humanity a service by exposing the Democratic Party as but another organ of the rich.”
Now you may wonder why I call this a con, a hoodwinking: ‘Free Press Group Ready to Cut Off WikiLeaks’; The Freedom of the Press Foundation routed half a million dollars to WikiLeaks. But Assange’s embrace of Trump split the group’s board, and now it’s on the verge of a major break; Kevin Poulsen and Spencer Ackerman, thedailybeast.com, Nov. 16, 2017
…and I’ll get to that in a minute or so. But yes, the self-same Spencer Ackerman, formerly at Firedoglake, then the Guardian, who did some good work there, especially on Chicago’s Dark Prison, Homan Square. His Twit name is still @attackerman. But what a fine journalistic magazine The Daily Beast do be (on Twitter): @thedailybeast “Scoops, Scandals and Secret Worlds”
“In May 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning national security reporter Spencer Ackerman left the Guardian and joined The Daily Beast. When asked about the move Ackerman said, “The Daily Beast is the place to do the kind of journalism that matters most right now…” , via The Daily Beast at Wikipedia
Aside from hitting Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in much the same vein as the Intercept did one day later (nah, it wasn’t a coordinated attack, I’m sure), they bring in some new testifiers, as well, many of which belong to the good whistleblower team, and their funding oligarch, as well. The title’s simply a grift to bring their collective indictments.
There are others, but among the most grievous is demonstrating that Assaange, or one of his team, threatened delicate flower Xeni Jardin’s life. (nom de plume meaning ‘protector of flowers’; born -_ Hamm’) A six by eight or so version of this photo is on the original piece of…’journalism’. Note how fragile and sensitive she looks.
Here’s how the authors allege that conversation went, with no evidence, I’d add, but that’s okay, including whether it we Assange messaging, or someone else using third person:
“She voiced some of her frustration in a tweet during the Charlotte rally. “Trump, his sons, and his surrogates are now dropping WikiLeaks into their anti-American rants like a hashtag,” Jardin commented. “Strangest of bedfellows.”
Assange was watching.
He responded in a series of direct messages to Jardin, at first referencing himself in the third person and the majestic plural, as he often does. “Since JA has never met or spoken to you we find it odd you should hold such a view,” read the message. “So what’s it based on?”
The messages went on to suggest Jardin praise Trump and his people for “doing something useful for once” by promoting WikiLeaks, “instead of, outrageously, suggesting that it is some form of anti-Americanism.”
“Hi there Julian. Is that a command?” Jardin shot back.
“If you can’t support the organization FPF [Freedom of the Press Foundation] was founded to support perhaps you should resign,” wrote Assange. After a pause, he repeated the suggestion. “You have a duty as a board member. If you can’t dispense it, perhaps you should resign.”
Knowing Assange’s reputation for vindictiveness, Jardin interpreted the messages as a personal threat.
She politely asked Assange not to contact her again, and then forwarded the exchange to the foundation’s board. “Oh my god,” replied Cusack, a friend of Jardin who’d joined the board at her invitation. “The only thing one can say is the pressure on him is incredible and everyone has a breaking point.” (Cusack declined to comment for this story; Assange did not immediately respond to a request to do so.)”
Note: they never say if he did later, or how he’d responded to questions of their cutting off his funding avenues.) Deeper into the article:
“Jardin says she felt unsupported in the meeting [one to discuss cutting off WikiLeaks’ funding channel], and four days later she told the foundation she was taking a leave of absence. Jardin is a cancer survivor, and she was then battling life threatening side-effects from treatment. “There is nothing like the threat of death to help you clarify what you spend your time on,” she says. On Dec. 2, she quietly resigned from the board, citing her health.”
“The next month, nine days after Trump’s election victory, Freedom of the Press Foundation held its board meeting. Jardin brought up the issue of Assange, his messages to her, and the foundation’s continued support of WikiLeaks.
Much had changed since the foundation was formed. Today it has a $1.5 million annual budget and a staff of 15. Taking donations for WikiLeaks and other groups has become only a tiny part of the foundation’s work. In 2013, for example, the foundation took over development of SecureDrop, an open-source tool designed to make it safer for whistleblowers to submit information to reporters. Under the foundation’s stewardship, SecureDrop today is running in dozens of newsrooms, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg.
That ‘news’ Tim Shorrock’s also saw, bless his heart.
Now you’ll remember that Buzzfeed, the NYT, and WaPo are all on the ‘approved list’ of PropOrNot, Democrat mouthpieces all, as well as Spox for the US Empire. Shorrock has a bit of fun on Twitter at Buzzfeed’s expense as well…But the organization has sure pared down the list; wonder whassup with that? Others besides Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism must have threatened them with lawsuits. Light bulb: look for it, ya great idjit!!! Eureka, here it is as of August 6. Whoa, Nellie, it’s long.
How did I miss that part of the Intercept’s reasons for nuking Assange’s whales was to demonstrate that as he’s partisan for Trump (“..in the final months of the campaign NBC reporters found, Trump referenced WikiLeaks 145 times”!), unreliable, and not worthy of receiving material from whistleblowers and longer? Was the fact that TI had outed whistleblower Reality Winner glaring enough to dry up sources until…some military insiders told them about Trump’s alleged plans to create his own spy agency with Erik Prince and Ollie North that would report to CIA Director Pompeo directly that Greyson Smythe had brought to the Café? I confess that I hadn’t clicked in, given my distaste for the Intercept.
But the simple fact has been: various individuals have continued to leak to individuals, but not to TI nearly as much. But as for the hidden agenda in this ‘news item’, at least the authors finally got to some of it:
“The symbolic import is much larger. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is something of a Justice League for the online privacy, transparency, civil liberties, whistleblower, and press-rights communities. Its board of directors includes Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower; Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers; open-internet pioneer John Perry Barlow; Citizenfour filmmaker Laura Poitras and her fellow Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald, the two journalists to whom Snowden provided his trove; the actor/activist John Cusack; Electronic Frontier Foundation activism director Rainey Reitman; technologist Micah Lee; and journalist/activist Timm, who founded the group with Reitman.”
And they finally get to the nitty-gritty:
“The foundation’s impending split with Assange is a microcosm of a broader anxiety over him amongst his erstwhile allies now that WikiLeaks has made common cause with extreme right-wing forces, principally Donald Trump [wd here: the DMs with Trump, Jr., but CNN says: “there may be more!!”] and Vladimir Putin. Some consider WikiLeaks’ transparency mission to dwarf Assange’s personal crusades and transgressions—which go beyond politics and into allegations of sexual assault.”…
…while some board members claim later that his personal decisions have nothing to do with cutting off their funding channel…if they do, of course. But the yellow journalistic hyperlinlink above goes to a BBC timeline that requires scrolling to the very end where one finds: ‘‘19 May 2017 Sweden’s director of public prosecutions announces that the rape investigation into Mr Assange is being dropped’. But get a load of this chicanery:
“Later, a rape allegation in Sweden, and Assange’s decision to take refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy rather than confront the case, cost him more support, particularly as he dodged a reckoning and portrayed himself as a political prisoner. (Assange claims he evaded the case for fear Sweden would extradite him to the U.S.)”
WTF? Of course Sweden would extradite him to Amerika! Good god-all-friday.
John Pilger provides the 411:
Ah, but Saint Snowden is really most sincerely bothered by “Assange’s wholesale dumping of stolen DNC emails”! One hit at Assange’s ‘partisan for Trump and Putin Assange to quip:
“Opportunism won’t earn you a pardon from Clinton.” And of course Ed wouldn’t whore for a pre-emptive pardon, would he? Nah.
But among his ‘lefty and libertarian’ former allies, Snowden had once stated that he stole the NSA documents to start a conversation, and that if people voted to be spied on, well, fine. And Glenn Greenwald once trumpeted that he’d vote for ‘any candidate, left, right or center, who opposed the NSA”
“Last year, Assange’s wholesale dumping of stolen DNC emails drew criticism from Edward Snowden. “Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped,” Snowden tweeted. “But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.”
There’s so much more there that could be considered, including a fishy-smelling report by AP (one of the SecureDrop agencies), Wikieaks and Saudi Arabia, but…this is already too long. As for The Intercept, they’ve been batting for the Dems and the Empire in some pretty creepy ways, recently extolling the magnificent virtues of the White Helmets (as did Democracy Now!), a disgusting psyop that had long been discredited even when Maz Hussain had written it. But this just in, and christ-in-a-canoe:
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
well, shiver me timbers; the intercept rubbish was written by…maz hussain again. loads of good internal link in it, a few in comments. and now GG is all over wikileaks twitter calling out cnn for writing the wrong dates on some of assange’s (more particularly ‘wikileaks” dms or some such). penance? pfffft.
pierre, obama, the cia and paypal. the kids on brit teevee (even the gurls) say “blow me”. yeah, that. someone ask why pompeo isn’t going after the intercept, lol. and their google traffic is only down by 19%, hey, ho. what.a.tool.of.the.imperium.
bushed here, been awake since 2:30, but before i shut down for the night, i’d like to honor john lennon who died 37 years ago today, may he rest in power. in this tribute, john whitehead had mentioned this song. since the season is upon us, i’ll use it.
‘John Lennon’s Most Radical Message’ by John W. Whitehead, dec. 8, CP.
an RIP to our daughter’s amigo Larry, who crossed a few hour ago when he was unplugged from life support. bless both of them. i consider it a miracle that our daughter traveled and helped to send him on his way.
Shinzo Abe, “War is over, if you want it”
Kim Jung Un, “War is over, if you want it”
Donald Trump, “War is over, if you want it”
Moon Jae-in, “War is over, if you want it”.
(It can’t hurt, can it?)
Condolences to your daughter. And to you and Mr. WD. I know this experience can’t be easy.
…and bibi netnyahu: ‘War is over, if you want it’.
narenda modi: ‘War is over, if you want it.’
yes, and thanks for your condolences. that our daughter has shown such feeling for another, not to mention traveling to help him twice sail away, once under life support, then a day later once it was turned off…is astounding, although i won’t give the particulars in public. but whooosh.
Thanks for prompting me to look up Xeni Jardin (Jennifer Hamm, Richmond VA) bio. I suspect that she has some #metoo experiences that a lot about Assange triggered, especially with someone’s prompting to Donald Jr. in Wikileaks’s name. Her reaction seems very much like some of the reactions over say, Al Franken. Just an intuition.
I think Snowden probably still thinks of himself as a patriotic American, just unfortunately sidelined in Russia.
Of course what comes as a shock (Clinton’s loss) and a surprise (Assange’s/Wikileaks? pushing links to Wikipedia archives toward the Trump campaign. This is truly disorienting as is the looniness with which the Democratic establishment and the Resistance ™ have been pursuing their quasi-opposition.
It will be interesting what comes out in the Mueller investigation relative to Wikileaks and whether it brings the long awaited Grand Jury of the EDVA (the CIA’s own) out of the closet and into a request for extradition. The route of delivery for the supposed “hacked” DNC and Podesta emails is still the least certain of what has been leaked from the investigation so far. Stuff we did not know about, like a Rykof Facebook post with Trump after the 2012 election of Obama and Rykof’s offering to help Trump out with something, now being read as getting elected President. Rykof and Trump were then working on the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Russia, I believe. That is one Russian that some in the media have already hopped on and which might get further play.
Unless there is material evidence from SIGINT of Assange or Wikileaks violating a US law, we know what they want to haul them up on — the Espionage Law of 1918, For Cablegate as much as anything else. Will that be germane enough Mueller’s case to tack it on?
There are two definite coming charges: obstruction of justice for firing Comey, bunches of perjury charges, and more to come. The charges on a bunch of the principle players have not be unsealed yet to put pressure on the rest–often good enough for at least a perjery charge. The news that Flynn Sr. was working with the prosecution brought the case to the John Dean moment (in Watergate terms). There’re still some things in Lewandowski’s testimony to to get pleadings on. Kushner will be before Mueller’s group soon.
There are enough things for the players to get enough jail time as Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Deane, Colson, and Gordon Liddy got. Oliver North had his charges dismissed on appeal (court immunized the testimony he gave very broadly).
Not everything is near close to totally being unsealed indictments. There might be other events we are not aware of yet. It’s going to be popcorn time soon. There might even be some declarations about what it was that the Democratic side did. Just to get the air cleared over the entire mess.
The current timing politically looks like 2018 as a referendum on Trump impeachment. I’m not sure that is going to be as helpful as a lot of people think, either for the Democrats or for clarity about what happened.
If Mueller is the straight-shooter he is said to be (which I vaguely remember some incidents that make me doubt), either Democrats or Republicans will have had an ajudication in his investigation and not the excuse for another round of controversy.
As for Assange, having some other nation’s dirty laundry would be a break, wouldn’t it.
much of what you’re bring on the mueller investigation is unfamiliar to me, as are soe of the names. but for now i’d like to say something about this: “I suspect that she has some #metoo experiences that a lot about Assange triggered, especially with someone’s prompting to Donald Jr. in Wikileaks’s name.” (the franken parallel is…partisan? doesn’t really matter… but:
while not knowing exactly what you mean, you may mean sexual harrassment/bullying. but phoooey on her reaction, imo. xeni’s words/accusations were very prevalent in the ackerman/pulson attack, but i reckon assange is living w/ plenty of his own #MeToo trauma…still, especially going on almost 8 years. he’s known absolutely as a rapist and pedophile, and his alleged female accusers never had accused him of rape, but the dark mayanne ny did, in reaction to hints, threats, and cues she was given by the US (again, see joun pilger above.) then along come these authors with this yellow rubbish: “Some consider WikiLeaks’ transparency mission to dwarf Assange’s personal crusades and transgressions—which go beyond politics and into allegations of sexual assault.”…
kee-rist. they pretend it’s he’s guilty, or hasn’t been cleared, and can assuage any guilt about that by using a link that almost no one will read to the final ‘tick-tock’, will they? and oh, no, as to ‘so cowardly as to not face the charges’, wellm he did onc, was allowed to go back to long, then another prosecutor in sweden opened the case, issued an interpol arrest red alert warrant. but shuck and jive, if they ever took the time, they’d have seen assange retweet the different coverage concerning ‘Signs of U.K. Misconduct in Assange Case‘ in nov. (foia requests dribbling out); sheesh, even the indyUK iirc reported it. he could have been interviewed in the UK and cleared long ago.
no matter who’d allegedly tweeted that stuff about ‘perhaps you should resign from the board’, it sure doesn’t rise to the level of harassment, imo. assange’s treatment DID, imo.
A lot of people thought Assange a lefty, not whatever type of cyberlibertarian he is. Having him come down for Trump was a huge shock to someone they thought of as an ally. They reacted as “if not an ally then he’s an enemy” when he might have been neither but had a different agenda altogether. USians often look at the world through USian spectacles. It’s damn easy to do. And the cheap shot would be to say, of course, Assange is ganging up like the other jerks pushing their last battle against the wimmen. Like Jane Hamsher, Xeni is fundamentally an entertainer who got pulled into blogging when it began to be a thing and then started her own blog. It is very easy to find certain “glamourous” fields with really hurt people in them as a result of boss harassment. The sexualizing of work is more epidemic in the 2000s than it was earlier. I don’t criticize people who have reactions to similar situations. But that’s me.
Assange was not the victim of harassment to prove power but outright extrajudicial punishment to try to shut him down. Yes, it’s still going on. And somebody is trying very hard to ensure that there are facts that can be alleged in order to submit them to the grand jury. With Trump’s people in office, the latitude with which that can be done isn’t unlimited. And likewise with Trump’s judges.
yes, xeni’s ‘boing-boing’ seems very like entertainment. https://twitter.com/xeni
and i do fault her for her over-reaction; those quotes are everywhere, as are barrett brown’ from mackey’s (?) intercept bang-bang assange. i was very glad to see so many of the comments equal to ‘blow me’, and maintain solidarity w/ assange, i’ll admit. perhaps such light-weights shouldn’t be on that board, although they haven’t decided what to do altogether yet. and yes, that’s just me; you’re a gentleman, i’m NOT a lady. and in this case, a beyotch. ;-) but there are a number of web pages w/ the FoTP board noting that if assange is charged, they assume that supporters (themselves?) might be charged as accomplices, and of course that other media organizations like the guardian should be as well, but that’s an old argument, isn’t it?
dunno left or right for assange, but aiding trump in those DMs did seem a bit desperate, whether written by him…or his team. but where the intercept’s GG is very selective about working w/ the military/cia, etc. to tell him what not to publish cuz it might hurt the war effort, wikileaks says: to hell with the war effort, of course (first big example was naming ‘afghanistan’ after GG wouldn’t.
his vault 7, vault 8 was the last straw for pompeo, though. ha; i was directed to ‘failed evolution’ by a commenter at b’s about the amerikan military’s announced plans to stay in syria on a conditional basis (diplo cables): ‘WikiLeaks paper shows probable signs that the US was preparing for a proxy war in Syria as early as 2006’
http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2017/11/wikileaks-paper-shows-probable-signs.html
anyhoo, thanks for your many comments, and i’ll respond to the others as i can. time to make dinner, a fire (bbrrrr), and tend to other chores. and you got snow! my stars. it’s so dry here all the skin on our bodies feels like dishpan hands, cracks and all.
One wonders if a lot of the motivation of the Ciinton/deep state team doesn’t have more to do with preventing Assange from slipping from their grand jury than for anything to do with Trump or Putin. But now that Trump is scofflaw about sexual harassment, Trump is up there with Assange. And it is easy to spin the Assange story with the same crowd. Just keep chanting Anita Hill and Emmett Till. Those are the stakes. And it is pretty clear that male power was involved in both of them.
Well,yes, being brought up Southern trained me to be a gentleman and treat ladies with respect even when one is saying, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Shocking to adults in 1939 it was. And they’ve not trusted Hollywood since.
ach, i’d thought you’d been signing off for the weekend, so i never took the time to respond again, instead focusing on the home front.
your thesis interesting, but IS trump up there w/ assange now? but yes, the story is spun and spun again with those of the same librul (?) bias. now putin/russia may be a whole ‘nother matter, given cold war 2.0, 2.25, etc.
and yes to anita hill and emmett till, so glad you reminded me of her, most especially. but as to assange/wikileaks, anti-war and the DMs w/ trumpeter, jr., i got to thinking that we need to remember that they were pre-election, and at the time, trump wanted détente w/ russia, out of nato, out of afghanistan, etc., not that he didn’t backtrack on all but one…and that, kinda sorta.
and i loved your being tickled about assange’s ‘new rule’. cripes, the UK won’t even allow him safe passage to a hospital; how cold is that? but vault 7 and vault 8 have caused pompeo to go full-tilt hysterical, unsurprisingly. not that i grasp all their implications, but one is that all wifi’s track a person, another that the cia can cause any communication, email, to look as though it came from another person, nation.
is it generational or geography that causes folks to call women ‘ladies’? you tickle me. and thanks for commenting on this thread. you are the sole one, ye gods and little fishes….
Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald about yesterday’s mainstream media big lie about what did Wikileaks know and when did it know it. (Team Trump got notified after publication). And other errors in attribution of Wikileaks relinking but someone else archiving. It was a pretty embarrassing day for the MSM. As Atrios says, need to form a “bloggers ethics panel”.
yes, i’d seen marcy had amended/updated her original piece, and good on her; at least i think that was the ‘archives’ story on busting cnn, earlier abc., for totally misleading info on the dates. is that the ‘Wikipedia archives’ you’ve mentioned? i thought he’d provide some search key passwords, but you know my memory.
assange, no wikileaks…i’ve forgotten, had been tweeting about it, although the source he gave was already behind a paywall for me this early in the month. i’ll need to answer your comments piecemeal, but as for “As for Assange, having some other nation’s dirty laundry would be a break, wouldn’t it?”…several things.
wikileaks on edits and curates files, they don’t hack, so that’s dependent on who offers, sends info, yes? but they/he have curated many of the cables and others, and always offer instructions on how to search the files, as the fella at the nation did for so long…greg _(yeah, i’ll recall it later) [On edit: greg mitchell, lol] kevin gostola said taught him journalism? have you ever searched any of the files? mind-boggling, eye-crossing, hegg-ache making labor. ;-)
but yes, he’d collated for peru, VZ, bolivia, ukraine, recently elected zimbabwe’s mnangagwa, i’d have to look at my wikileaks category here for more, but here’s what assange says are their top 10.
he’d published the russian spy files a month or more ago, detractors snooze ‘Old News’, and one linked to FP saying they had a russian source willing to drop a dime or three on the kremlin, assange/wikileaks turned them down as some old news, many unverifiable, but here’s what john helmer had to say in an internal link from fp. now i gotta say that fp my have another huuuuge axe to grind with wikileaks, and as john pilger said up yonder: discrediting that org has been a key notification from the pentagon/IT since….2008?
‘Wikilocks: Is Novaya Gazeta Paying To Publish Wikileaks, Or Is It Being Paid Not To Publish?’, john helmer, march 22, 2011
on second edit: macron, nope dinnae read carefully enuf; dunno about that issue.
Thank you for following up on publication of Wikileaks (and which) in Russia. Would be a very good story to have Novaya Gazeta pretend to publish and then not, with whatever narrative whoever paying Novaya Gazeta wanted.
What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. Isn’t information war grand?
Now we are being told that Russia is developing mid-range cruise missiles capable of toting small nukes. And guess who wants to build small (er, tactical) nukes? Are we going to boost the economies with mutually assured step up in nuclear weapons? I wonder what fly fell into the ointment after Obama and Putin signed the last nuke treaty?
I don’t know about Russia, but it sure has been an article of faith with the US military that they can never negotiate away major portions of nukes. And they will allow, even encourage breakout (cough North Korea, Iran) and that other “Axis of Evil” country run by, oh, what’s his name?
Have a great weekend. We just got a few flakes yesterday. Enough for grocery store lines for bread, milk, and TP and not much else.
Seems the GOP all got Roosian money (or was that Ukrainian money) during the last election. Makes them a little gunshy about talking opening about Roosia or Ukraine or other furrin donors.
Here’s the article from the Dallas Morning News.
i had to switch to I explorer (no adblocker) and it’s jumpin’ all over the place. but, seeing some of the names reminded me of something i’d seen on wikileaks with some sentences highlighted in yellow. first i found the manafort indictment (no yellow), so maybe the news got it from that and checked further? but arrrggh, scrolling back in time to sept 20 i found this:
are the names and whatnot the same? wasn’t he charged w/ money laundering? manafort. i just haven’t paid enough attention to memorize the cast of characters.
Yes, I believe that the first indictment Mueller pulled out of the barrel. There was something last fast that kicked Manafort out of leading the Trump campaign after Lewandowski had be kicked out. Manafort is tied to Ukrainian oligarchs as well and to some of Yanukovych’s old buddies before the EuroMaidan. Hoping that the public gets answers more than a weaponized legal process from Mueller. It’s going to take both together to have a settled case. There were lots of shenanigans going on last year at lots of levels. Having $4 billion in the collective kitty for all the players makes a lot of mischief.
It would not surprise me if most of those Dallas News Roosians had contributed in previous years. Also wouldn’t surprise me that the Obama crew didn’t know what exactly was going on with Russia during the Kerry years. And Vicky Nuland was not the person to create the policies to tell them.
I think which oligarch is whose is going to be a big point of confusion for the public given the public story that Putin is like Stalin or Brezhnev. Most people don’t remember the collapse of the Soviet Union or the pervasive McCarthyism of the 1950s and 1960s.
Excellent point:
Julian Assange
🔹 @JulianAssange
Dec 8
New rule: every time a “news” organization produces fake news name the controlling oligarchs (or CEOs)
NBC = Brian L. Roberts
CBS = Redstones
CNN = J Zucker+J Bewkes (CEOs)
New Yorker/Reddit/Wired = Newhouses
Daily Beast = Diller
FOX/WSJ = Murdochs
NYT = Sulzbergers
WaPo = Bezos
‘The US has way too many secrets‘, bloombergnews.com (and so do most governments)
you know, i’d actually read a lot of that yesterday. in the end: good whistleblower, bad whistleblower again. he swears they’re declassifying some of the NSA files, which makes a lot of sense.
oh, my, my. i clicked in to make sure that was the title in order to make it a hyperlink in edit, and found al hunt on the rampage. now believe me, there may be ample grounds to charge herr T w/ obstruction of justice, but to conflate all russians as having links to the kremlin, as did that dallas morning news piece, or assert what the inter community ‘assesses’ w/o proof to actual fact…is soooo bogus. Q: when former cia, nsc, et.al. declare that the spooks know who gave the dnc files to wikileaks, aren’t there some who posit that the reason they haven’t is that they don’t want to ‘tip their hands’…yet?
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-10/the-trump-russia-probe-is-about-to-get-uglier
If there is going to be court action off of Mueller’s investigation, the IC is going to have to lay some card on the table for the defense to poke at, and Mueller is going to have to have his best antidote to jury nullificiation in his summation statement. Do they have it or not?
My guess is that there was nothing before the election because of the screwed up way NSA surveils everyone and strores it; then goes searching when there is a case that requires it. All under the logics that warrantless surveillance is necessary because of the “imminent” danger of terrorism.
So the 17-agency statement was largely drawn from the Steele dossier providing hints for searches and then wanting to protect personnel and methods not saying anything specific.
If anything, Muellers interviews have provided grist for other searches to see if those phone calls occurred and if those messages were captured in the mix.
Binney has said that it is a half-assed design of a system and so it seems. Half-assed enough to cost triple or quadruple what a better system would.
morning. more from john pilger:
…including these tidbits:
“The leaked emails of Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, revealed a direct connection between Clinton and the foundation and funding of organised jihadism in the Middle East and Islamic State (IS). The ultimate source of most Islamic terrorism, Saudi Arabia, was central to her career.
One email, in 2014, sent by Clinton to Podesta soon after she stepped down as US Secretary of State, discloses that Islamic State is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Clinton accepted huge donations from both governments for the Clinton Foundation.
As Secretary of State, she approved the world’s biggest ever arms sale to her benefactors in Saudi Arabia, worth more than $80 billion. Thanks to her, US arms sales to the world – for use in stricken countries like Yemen – doubled. This was revealed by WikiLeaks and published by The New York Times.”
and this squib from craig murray on dec. 8:
“I am feeling particularly hostile to Donald Trump after his incendiary move on Jerusalem. But it remains the case that I have enough direct knowledge of events to be aware that the entire premise of the Russophobic “election-hacking” conspiracy theory is simple nonsense. I am therefore most amused that my friend Randy Credico, who stayed with Nadira and I in Edinburgh a few months ago, has now been subpoenaed by the Senate Inquiry on Russian meddling as the alleged go-between for Roger Stone and Julian Assange, on the brilliant grounds that he knows both of them.
I can tell you from certain knowledge this is absolute nonsense. While Randy is a delightful person who hides a shrewd political mind behind a deliberate crackpot façade, he is the most indiscreet person in the world. He is not anybody’s conveyor of secrets, he would tell it all impulsively on his next radio show! Where Russia fits into this mad conspiracy theory I have no idea. If I had any belief that it was the genuine intention of Senate or Special Counsel inquiries to discover the actual truth, I would be surprised they have never made any contact with me, as opposed to my fleeting houseguests. But as I am well aware the last thing they want to know is the truth, I am not surprised in the least.”
and gag me w/ three spoons, or four. zizek’s not only fond of rape jokes, but stooopid as well. ah, gates and the ‘progressive‘ mega-billionaires: a new way toward post-capitalism! you betcha.
‘Is it true that only progressive billionaires can save humanity?, Slavoj Žižek via RT, dec. 8
Craig Murray likely would not be responsive to one of Mueller’s subpoenas and likely would not have to be.
Questioning because Roger Stone trolled Mueller is my guess. Stone is playing with fire and will come up too cute by half. But so did John Brennan with Congress. I guess that we might have a flood of bullshit all around with this information war. Not good for ordinary worker bees and local shoppers like us. Elite gaming is too arcane a sport.
i can imagine that craig murray would refuse to testify, but why couldn’t he be compelled to answer a mueller subpoena? forgive me again, but i’d had to bingle ‘roger stone’ in my ignorance/forgetfulness. roy cohn> roger stone? the tweeter-in-chief.
yes to the many lies john brennan swore to congress.
his superiors sure did appreciate binney’s whistle-blowing, didn’t they?/s ‘backwards digging and searching good, but hard’, by yoda.
The UK government would want one of their former MPs to be compelled to testify then?
former ambassador, iirc, but would they want to prevent it, as assange is stuck in the ecuadorian embassy there, etc.? would they behave like sweden?