Excuse me, but if some Chicago activist, reactionary, liberal, progressive, Muslin, Kenyan, B L A C K , christian hating, anti-American, ACA-creating lying bastard had sold massive amounts to properties to people closely connected with Vlad Putin, not only would the GOP be screaming for impeachment, so would every news outlet, inlet, toilet, and every other “let” you could imagine.
Imagine the outrage. The nonstop attacks. The demands for “transparency” and access and all the other bullshit terms we see from the GOP in their efforts to disuade, distract, and dissemble. Just imagine if any other political figure, Dem, GOP, or Indie had such close ties to a criminal class supported and inserted by a foreign power buying seriously into your building projects.
Or, just imagine the story below with Obama being the gilt-laden, ostentatious, criminally minded, tenement owner instead of TRump.
There, indeed, was an FBI wiretap involving Russians at Trump Tower.
But it was not placed at the behest of Barack Obama, and the target was not the Trump campaign of 2016. For two years ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of unit 63A in Trump Tower in New York.
The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment of more than 30 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Known as the “Little Taiwanese,” he was the only target to slip away, and he remains a fugitive from American justice.
Five months after the April 2013 indictment and after Interpol issued a red notice for Tokhtakhounov, he appeared near Donald Trump in the VIP section of the Moscow Miss Universe pageant. Trump had sold the Russian rights for Miss Universe to a billionaire Russian shopping mall developer.
As I wonder at the lack of outrage at Trump’s many, bigly, YUGE, Russian mob and Russian govt. connections, I keep thinking back about 8 years ago, perhaps 9, when a junior US Senator from Illinois met with Dick Durbin, who strongly advised him to run for the highest office in the land. With some trepidation, and with some very experienced, solid, and honesty advice, he decided to run for president.
Simply put, WHERE THE FUCK IS THE OUTRAGE?
Unlike the current squatter residing in Marred A Lagoon and the Oval Office, Obama worked hard to be president. He studied the good, the bad, the dangerous, and the pitfalls. Even he succumbed to the Bubble Effect that infects every president. But he did his best to keep his office, his rep, and his people clean and above board.
Step back a few years and see the difference in coverage when a semi-progressive was in Illinois and about to be president. Here’s a history item which tells the difference in how Obama and Trump are treated.
In sharp contrast to his tough talk about ethics reform in government, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., approached a well-known Illinois political fixer under active federal investigation, Antoin "Tony" Rezko, for "advice" as he sought to find a way to buy a house shortly after being elected to the United States Senate.
The parcel included an adjacent lot which Obama told the Chicago Tribune he could not afford because "it was already a stretch to buy the house."
On the same day Obama closed on his house, Rezko's wife bought the adjacent empty lot, meeting the condition of the seller who wanted to sell both properties at the same time.
Rezko had been widely reported to be under investigation by the U.S. attorney and the FBI at the time Obama contacted him and has since been indicted on corruption charges by a federal grand jury in a case that prosecutors say involves bribes, kickbacks and "efforts to illegally obtain millions of dollars."
Obama was told that property developer Rezko could find him decent housing, as a US senator, AND could figure out a way where Obama bought a house. A house. ONE house. For residency. With not one bribe to be had.
Rezko later testified that the deal was actually a benefit to him, as the seller had a huge discount on the two adjacent properties if both sold at once. AND that no benefit (other than buying his own home for himself and 2 infants) ever passed to Rezko. Rezko, upon information and belief, sold a small plot suitable only for a fence between the two buildings, then sold the property for a profit. Not one dime to Obama.
And now we see hundreds of millions passing to Trump from Russian mobs in several locations. Multiple locations. Enough so to make Trump a bilionaire.
Just so you know, Putin’s time in the KGB served him well. Here is the cite to an older Atlantic study of Putin.
www.theatlantic.com/…
Here is a juicy excerpt:
Putin was an outsider even to Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika (restructuring or transformation). He was posted in Dresden during the critical period when Gorbachev took the helm of the USSR. Gorbachev was elected head of the CPSU in May 1985; Putin received his orders to relocate to Dresden that August. He remained there until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and returned to Soviet Leningrad early in 1990. After his tenure as a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin was specifically brought into Moscow in summer 1996 as an outsider -- he was an operative on a mission to collect information on, monitor, and ultimately help the Kremlin rein in Russia's unruly oligarchs.
In an interview she gave shortly after Putin was appointed prime minister in 1999, Russian analyst Lilia Shevtsova described him as "an outsider who previously served in St. Petersburg. ... He has not had the time to develop the personal relationships and the network of allies within the bureaucracy of the security services that is necessary to establish firm control." Shevtsova and many others cautioned in 1999 against seeing Putin "as some kind of superman" based on his previous, and brief, position as head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. They concluded that "he [Putin] will be greatly limited in what he is able to do."
And then this about how he figured out to prosper:
Not only is it likely that Putin engaged in some or all of these activities, it is virtually inconceivable that he did not. The KGB was stealing technological secrets everywhere it could. As for entrapping, compromising, and recruiting Westerners or people with connections to the West, that too was a permanent assignment for anyone in the KGB. Regardless of what exactly Putin did in Dresden, one thing is certain -- Dresden was not a political backwater in East Germany. While Putin was far removed from political events in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s, he was not outside politics or world events in Dresden. The GDR was imploding. Dresden was one of the centers of opposition within the German Communist Party to the retrograde Honecker regime -- an intra-party opposition in which Hans Modrow, the party's Dresden leader, was an active participant.
There is so much more, I strongly recommend the article. Because it talks about corrupting and gathering people like Trump.
Where is the media? Where is the outrage? WHERE IS AMERICA?