We're Taking Your President From You Ep. VII: Trump a Russian Agent? FBI investigated

[Skroe]

Hello friends. Big news late today. Among the biggest in some time in Trump-Russia land!

In the 18 months since we've began this series, so much has been revealed... so many people indicted or convicted, and so much evidence has come to light, that now more than ever that the inevitable and inexorably approaching day that sees Donald J. Trump, the illegitimate 45th President of the United States, take the long walk down loser lane as he resigns, is removed, and/or is indicted draws nearer and nearer. And make no mistake... he's symptomatic. The real target, is the alt-right, the fake-conservatives, the real-conservative opportunists, and the reactionaries that put him there. Taking their President Away from them, is an assault on them. To return America to a more docile, more serious and moderate place, the extremists must be sent back to the political fringe whence they came.

And if they think there is a happy ending for them in this, then they haven't been paying attention.


We're Taking Your President From You
UPDATE 1/11/19.

Before I post this, I just want to say I (many of us here) called this nearly two years ago. We *all* got it right from the start.

This is major, major news and connects a lot of dots and disparate plot lots.

Top Story in Saturday's New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/u...a-inquiry.html

WASHINGTON — In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.

Agents and senior F.B.I. officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude. But the president’s activities before and after Mr. Comey’s firing in May 2017, particularly two instances in which Mr. Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect of the inquiry, the people said.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed, days after F.B.I. officials opened it. That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller’s broader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them. It is unclear whether Mr. Mueller is still pursuing the counterintelligence matter, and some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening it.

The criminal and counterintelligence elements were coupled together into one investigation, former law enforcement officials said in interviews in recent weeks, because if Mr. Trump had ousted the head of the F.B.I. to impede or even end the Russia investigation, that was both a possible crime and a national security concern. The F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division handles national security matters.

If the president had fired Mr. Comey to stop the Russia investigation, the action would have been a national security issue because it naturally would have hurt the bureau’s effort to learn how Moscow interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Americans were involved, according to James A. Baker, who served as F.B.I. general counsel until late 2017. He privately testified in October before House investigators who were examining the F.B.I.’s handling of the full Russia inquiry.


“Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security,” Mr. Baker said in his testimony, portions of which were read to The New York Times. Mr. Baker did not explicitly acknowledge the existence of the investigation of Mr. Trump to congressional investigators.

No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials. An F.B.I. spokeswoman and a spokesman for the special counsel’s office both declined to comment.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for the president, sought to play down the significance of the investigation. “The fact that it goes back a year and a half and nothing came of it that showed a breach of national security means they found nothing,” Mr. Giuliani said on Friday, though he acknowledged that he had no insight into the inquiry.

The cloud of the Russia investigation has hung over Mr. Trump since even before he took office, though he has long vigorously denied any illicit connection to Moscow. The obstruction inquiry, revealed by The Washington Post a few weeks after Mr. Mueller was appointed, represented a direct threat that he was unable to simply brush off as an overzealous examination of a handful of advisers. But few details have been made public about the counterintelligence aspect of the investigation.

The decision to investigate Mr. Trump himself was an aggressive move by F.B.I. officials who were confronting the chaotic aftermath of the firing of Mr. Comey and enduring the president’s verbal assaults on the Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.”


A vigorous debate has taken shape among some former law enforcement officials outside the case over whether F.B.I. investigators overreacted in opening the counterintelligence inquiry during a tumultuous period at the Justice Department. Other former officials noted that those critics were not privy to all of the evidence and argued that sitting on it would have been an abdication of duty.

The F.B.I. conducts two types of inquiries, criminal and counterintelligence investigations. Unlike criminal investigations, which are typically aimed at solving a crime and can result in arrests and convictions, counterintelligence inquiries are generally fact-finding missions to understand what a foreign power is doing and to stop any anti-American activity, like thefts of United States government secrets or covert efforts to influence policy. In most cases, the investigations are carried out quietly, sometimes for years. Often, they result in no arrests.

Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.

Other factors fueled the F.B.I.’s concerns, according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Christopher Steele, a former British spy who worked as an F.B.I. informant, had compiled memos in mid-2016 containing unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail and bribe him.

In the months before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. was also already investigating four of Mr. Trump’s associates over their ties to Russia. The constellation of events disquieted F.B.I. officials who were simultaneously watching as Russia’s campaign unfolded to undermine the presidential election by exploiting existing divisions among Americans.

“In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself, you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability, America’s ability and the West’s ability to spread our democratic ideals,” Lisa Page, a former bureau lawyer, told House investigators in private testimony reviewed by The Times.

“That’s the goal, to make us less of a moral authority to spread democratic values,” she added. Parts of her testimony were first reported by The Epoch Times.

And when a newly inaugurated Mr. Trump sought a loyalty pledge from Mr. Comey and later asked that he end an investigation into the president’s national security adviser, the requests set off discussions among F.B.I. officials about opening an inquiry into whether Mr. Trump had tried to obstruct that case.

But law enforcement officials put off the decision to open the investigation until they had learned more, according to people familiar with their thinking. As for a counterintelligence inquiry, they concluded that they would need strong evidence to take the sensitive step of investigating the president, and they were also concerned that the existence of such an inquiry could be leaked to the news media, undermining the entire investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election.

After Mr. Comey was fired on May 9, 2017, two more of Mr. Trump’s actions prompted them to quickly abandon those reservations.

The first was a letter Mr. Trump wanted to send to Mr. Comey about his firing, but never did, in which he mentioned the Russia investigation. In the letter, Mr. Trump thanked Mr. Comey for previously telling him he was not a subject of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation.

Even after the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, wrote a more restrained draft of the letter and told Mr. Trump that he did not have to mention the Russia investigation — Mr. Comey’s poor handling of the Clinton email investigation would suffice as a fireable offense, he explained — Mr. Trump directed Mr. Rosenstein to mention the Russia investigation anyway.

He disregarded the president’s order, irritating Mr. Trump. The president ultimately added a reference to the Russia investigation to the note he had delivered, thanking Mr. Comey for telling him three times that he was not under investigation.

The second event that troubled investigators was an NBC News interview two days after Mr. Comey’s firing in which Mr. Trump appeared to say he had dismissed Mr. Comey because of the Russia inquiry.

“I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it,” he said. “And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”

Mr. Trump’s aides have said that a fuller examination of his comments demonstrates that he did not fire Mr. Comey to end the Russia inquiry. “I might even lengthen out the investigation, but I have to do the right thing for the American people,” Mr. Trump added. “He’s the wrong man for that position.”

As F.B.I. officials debated whether to open the investigation, some of them pushed to move quickly before Mr. Trump appointed a director who might slow down or even end their investigation into Russia’s interference. Many involved in the case viewed Russia as the chief threat to American democratic values.

“With respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life,” Ms. Page told investigators for a joint House Judiciary and Oversight Committee investigation into Moscow’s election interference.

F.B.I. officials viewed their decision to move quickly as validated when a comment the president made to visiting Russian officials in the Oval Office shortly after he fired Mr. Comey was revealed days later.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to a document summarizing the meeting. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

So let me put this in context.

" Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence."

Over the last few years, it's been reported that major media organizations were "sitting" on stories at the request of Robert Mueller and the Special Counsel's Office until the report was released or near release, and indictments were issues. This is a fairly common thing in law enforcement with cases with major media attention, and since it involves the President, it is even more sensitive.

This is (my speculation here) almost certainly one of them. It's a gigantic puzzle piece. It confirms something that was hinted at, stated indirectly, or wiggled around.

(1) The FBI was Investigating Donald Trump from almost the beginning. Remember everyone who said he wasn't under investigation. They were flat out wrong.

(2) The FBI was Investigation Donald Trump for exactly what many of us had expected them to be investigating him for - his Russia ties and if he was a Russian Agent carrying out Russian interests as President. This has never before been stated explicitly. Here, it is.

I big part of me wonders if this release, now, is "prepping the battlefield". With Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein looking to make his exit after the Mueller report is out - the time table for that says March sometime - the next 6-8 weeks will be crucial for the Special Counsel to start to prepare the American people if it intends to say "the President of the United States is compromised and a criminal".

This very well may be the opening act of that. It is the biggest bit of news since Trump's bad three weeks after the election.

Trump may revel in this shutdown. But Mueller is still on the hunt.




Prior Episodes
Episode I - 9/8/2017 - Mueller gives White House names of 6 aides he expects to question in Russia probe
Epidsode II - 10/29/2017 - What the Obstruction Case looks like
Episode III - 11/24/2917 - Flynn Pleads Guilty, Flips on Trump.
Episode IV - 12/31/2017 - Happy New Year
Episode V - 1/03/2018 - Bannon: June 2016 meeting 'treasonous'
Episode VI - 9/21/2018 - Resistance 8, Trump 0

[P for Pancetta]

Trump is such an ass, it always baffles me how some people can accept this turd of a man to wreak so much havoc in their own nation, allowing themselves to be pitted against each other while there are actual threats out there on which that wasted energy could have been spend instead. Then I saw two girls on the TV who thought Hiroshima and Nagasaki where different kinds of vegetarian sushi and everything was clear as day again.

[Edge-]

Then I saw two girls on the TV who thought Hiroshima and Nagasaki where different kinds of vegetarian sushi and everything was clear as day again.

Shit...they're not? So what the hell have I been ordering at sushi restaurants all these years?!

(/s)

After re-reading it, this is pretty fucking massive. I'm very interesting to know what, if anything they discovered. Muellers report seems like it'll be juicier and juicer with each passing day.

[Azadina]

Much of this has already felt like common knowledge to anyone outside Trump cult for long time, so...I dunno, it doesn't feel very exciting.

[Skroe]

Much of this has already felt like common knowledge to anyone outside Trump cult for long time, so...I dunno, it doesn't feel very exciting.

Well here's the thing. This is actually a huge deal because we can now replace inference from disconnected pieces with a factual center.

Or let me give you analogy. Imagine that the entire Trump Russia saga has been building a T-Rex skeleton. We know what a T-Rex skeleton is supposed to look like broadly. We've found, bit by bit the ribs and know where and in what order they go. We found a bunch, but not in order, the tail vertebrae. What this story is, is a big chunk of vertebra that connects the head and heck to some ribs. Now it looks a lot more like a T-Rex. But we still need many more vertebra, particularly the ones that connect the fore-body to the hip bones.

But the skeleton is far from complete.

[Azadina]

Well here's the thing. This is actually a huge deal because we can now replace inference from disconnected pieces with a factual center.

Or let me give you analogy. Imagine that the entire Trump Russia saga has been building a T-Rex skeleton. We know what a T-Rex skeleton is supposed to look like broadly. We've found, bit by bit the ribs and know where and in what order they go. We found a bunch, but not in order, the tail vertebrae. What this story is, is a big chunk of vertebra that connects the head and heck to some ribs. Now it looks a lot more like a T-Rex. But we still need many more vertebra, particularly the ones that connect the fore-body to the hip bones.

But the skeleton is far from complete.

I just want to fast forward to the part where certain unnamed individual, let's call the person....Individual 1, is hand cuffed and escorted to the individuals new government sponsored holiday resort. Preferably with daily twitter access.

[Wyrt]

Individual 1: Russian Agent.

[Dome Fossil]

I just want to fast forward to the part where certain unnamed individual, let's call the person....Individual 1, is hand cuffed and escorted to the individuals new government sponsored holiday resort. Preferably with daily twitter access.

"Do they have Twitter in prison? Asking for a friend." To quote Cubby's avatar.

[Stormspark]

"Do they have Twitter in prison? Asking for a friend." To quote Cubby's avatar.

You know, I think it would be amazing if Trump were allowed to tweet from prison. Just imagine the nonsense he would put out on a daily basis. It would provide endless entertainment.

[anveena]

Sounds like another nothingburger.

[Dome Fossil]

You know, I think it would be amazing if Trump were allowed to tweet from prison. Just imagine the nonsense he would put out on a daily basis.

As much schadenfreude as I'd get from that, I'd be worried that it would continue to contribute to the mental illness his base of supporters experience from being constantly exposed to his lies.

Then again, once Fox News is 100% against him, allowing him to keep tweeting would tear his base in half for years, maybe decades to come when he starts to rant about "Fox News is all Fake News, folks! Or Faux News as I call it! I invented that, nobody better copy it!" If it disillusions/depresses enough of his voters, the current GOP might actually dissolve like the Whig party when many of them stop voting.

[Yetanothernewbie]

Sounds like another nothingburger.

Uh oh! Mueller is threating your prime source of turnips! Better post nothing of value!

[Paranoid Android]

This is some incredible. A Presidential candidate and sadly the eventual President was working hand in hand with a hostile foreign country. This is material used by Tom Clancy (RIP) for international thrillers, were our President is influenced by a former KGB agent, who happens to be the authoritarian leader of the former Soviet Union.

[Edge-]

I just feel like reposting this in light of this information.

[Skroe]

This is some incredible. A Presidential candidate and sadly the eventual President was working hand in hand with a hostile foreign country. This is material used by Tom Clancy (RIP) for international thrillers, were our President is influenced by a former KGB agent, who happens to be the authoritarian leader of the former Soviet Union.

It's 'Stupid Tom Clancy.'

- - - Updated - - -

I just feel like reposting this in light of this information.

I've posted this before, but a somewhat distant familial relation is actually best friends with Judge Jeanine.

That person on TV? It's a character. It's an act. She does it because she had a messy divorce and needs to pay bills. The real "Judge Jeanine" is a very different, normal person. The Retirees who watch her show and buy her books to support her lifestyle have never seen the real Judge Jeanine.

Of course, also we can throw in that mix being "completely fucking evil" because playing such a character on TV is exactly the kind of thing that got our country into this mess.

[Zaydin]

It's 'Stupid Tom Clancy.'

- - - Updated - - -



I've posted this before, but a somewhat distant familial relation is actually best friends with Judge Jeanine.

That person on TV? It's a character. It's an act. She does it because she had a messy divorce and needs to pay bills. The real "Judge Jeanine" is a very different, normal person. The Retirees who watch her show and buy her books to support her lifestyle have never seen the real Judge Jeanine.

Of course, also we can throw in that mix being "completely fucking evil" because playing such a character on TV is exactly the kind of thing that got our country into this mess.

Wasn't she also an incredibly shitty prosecutor? Seen people blame her for the prosecution bungling the case against Robert Durst who murdered a person, dismembered the body and buried it and claimed it was all in self-defense when he got caught.

[Edge-]

I've posted this before, but a somewhat distant familial relation is actually best friends with Judge Jeanine.

That person on TV? It's a character. It's an act. She does it because she had a messy divorce and needs to pay bills. The real "Judge Jeanine" is a very different, normal person. The Retirees who watch her show and buy her books to support her lifestyle have never seen the real Judge Jeanine.

Of course, also we can throw in that mix being "completely fucking evil" because playing such a character on TV is exactly the kind of thing that got our country into this mess.

It wouldn't surprise me if some of the "firebrands" are very lovely people in person when they drop the act. Hell, when O'Reilly would go on the Daily Show or Colbert Report, once Stewart/Colbert got him comfortable I remember him being pretty reasonable and even...possibly likable.

But the characters they play are inexcusable, and I don't care how lovely they may really be. They're partially responsible for the devolution of the Republican party and conservative movement in the US, and consequently partially responsible for "helping" to give us Trump. They can rot.

[Skroe]

It wouldn't surprise me if some of the "firebrands" are very lovely people in person when they drop the act. Hell, when O'Reilly would go on the Daily Show or Colbert Report, once Stewart/Colbert got him comfortable I remember him being pretty reasonable and even...possibly likable.

But the characters they play are inexcusable, and I don't care how lovely they may really be. They're partially responsible for the devolution of the Republican party and conservative movement in the US, and consequently partially responsible for "helping" to give us Trump. They can rot.

One of the things I've tried to explain - rather unsuccesffully mind you - at a dinner party the other week was essentially this. Maybe it came off a bit apologetically, but it wasn't meant to be. It's more of a "know your enemy" kind of things.

Since it's topical at the moment, consider Steve Cortes, who is a CNN talking head, radio host and Trump supporter. He got into it the other day with Ana Navarro, who is an anti-Trump conservative. He called her a leftist (which is of course, ridiculous), and she let him have it.

Steve Cortes is fucking nothing without his talking head spots, which by the way, pay about $400 per appearance. I'm not quite sure what people expect of him. Before Trump came along, he was nothing. Ana Navarro has been a prominent Florida Republican and Presidential campaign staffer, which means powerful, for 20 years. Ana Navarro is at the point in her life and career she doesn't have to pay homage to Lord Trump of Alt-Reich, because her CNN gig is mostly side money. She has a successful consultancy and much more. But Steve Cortes - again, someone who was fucking nothing before Trump - has a radio shell, and sells books, that all say the same pro-Trump thing. So what happens if he were to turn on Trump? He loses listeners. He loses sales. He loses his livelihood.

I think it is a mistake people make that these people who work on campaigns and shill for Trump (or whoever else) on TV are all wealthy. Most aren't. Being on TV does not make you wealthy. Some are. Obvious O'Reilly and those level of people are very rich men. But a lot of these people who shill for Trump are making less than $120,000 a year on their own. And it's not like the things us people in normal jobs enjoy they necessarily have owing to the transient nature of their careers, like Healthcare and 401ks. THey often have to buy those on their own.

This is all a powerful incentive for these people to never turn against Trump and stop playing their "character" on TV. They have an interest not in honesty and analysis, but in selling their wares, which is Trump-aligned paraphernalia in one form or another. For them to be objective means that they put their career at risk. So they never do it.

If you wan an excellent example of this, consider Scott Jennings on CNN. He is someone who is historically in McConnell's orbit. This is a man who clearly has a very, very, very low opinion of Trump. Probably, in truth, very similar to mine. But because his livelihood is politics, he'll walk up to the line, but never quite step over badmouthing Individual-1, because he knows that if Trump survives as President, he'll have to work on campaigns one day as a good little Republican operate who kowtows America First "philosophy".


All three major Cable News Networks are rife with these kind of conflicts of interests, and they never should be on TV. They keep putting them on because, as we saw with Cortes vs Navarro, it can be tremendously entertaining and when clipped online, clickbaity. But the political operatives will never say what they really think, because unless they're safe in their careers, they have too much to lose.

Or to put it plainly, what's more likely to happen? Steve Cortes denounces Trump and loses the ability to pay for his kids school, or continues to play the 'Steve Cortes' character and sell his wares? Media saavy people get that about these people. Many Americans don't.

[Shalcker]

"No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials."

All you have working for you is conjecture and wishful thinking.

[Deletedaccount1]

"No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials."

All you have working for you is conjecture and wishful thinking.

Skroe's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.