Amid quite a few blockbuster stories this week the one that Cambridge Analytica was specifically funded and directed by a Russia Oil Company Lukoil, to develop information specifically about American Voters according to the New York Times.
Lukoil was interested in how data was used to target American voters, according to two former company insiders who said there were at least three meetings with Lukoil executives in London and Turkey. SCL and Lukoil denied that the talks were political in nature, and SCL also said there were no meetings in London.
The contacts took place as Cambridge Analytica was building a roster of Republican clients in the United States — and harvesting the Facebook profiles of over 50 million users to develop tools to analyze voters’ behavior.
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“I remember being super confused,” said Mr. Wylie, who took part in one of the Lukoil meetings.
“I kept asking Alexander, ‘Can you explain to me what they want?’” he said, referring to Mr. Nix. “I don’t understand why Lukoil wants to know about political targeting in America.”
“We’re sending them stuff about political targeting — they then come and ask more about political targeting,” Mr. Wylie said, adding that Lukoil “just didn’t seem to be interested” in how the techniques could be used commercially.
Now Cambridge Analytica in fairness disputes the claims of Mr Wylie, although they’ve already been purged by Facebook for doing exactly what he’s said. They also claimed that they didn’t do any business with Russia but then…
On two promotional documents obtained by The New York Times, SCL said it did business in Russia. In both documents, the country is highlighted on world maps that specify the location of SCL clients, with one of the maps noting that the clients were for the firm’s elections division. In a statement, SCL said an employee had done “commercial work” about 25 years ago “for a private company in Russia.”
So sometimes you perhaps should consider the source.
Now Wylie has also claimed that both Steven Bannon and Corey Lewandowski were in contact with Cambridge Analytica in 2014 before Trump even announced he was running for the White House, and although I find that intriguing what I’d really like to know is — did any of their personal user data about American Voters get into the hands of the St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency which has been indicted with 19 counts of “Conspiracy to Defraud America” by Robert Mueller’s investigation which also began in 2014, and if so could Cambridge Analytica become a co-conspirator in that case?
We do know that after the election Jared Kushner was incredibly proud of his work with Cambridge Analytica which they used to specifically target voters.
“We found that Facebook and digital targeting were the most effective ways to reach the audiences. After the primary, we started ramping up because we knew that doing a national campaign is different than doing a primary campaign. That was when we formalized the system because we had to ramp up for digital fundraising. We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff. Doing it state by state is not that hard. But scaling is a very, very hard thing. They gave me a lot of their subcontractors and I built in Austin a data hub that would complement the RNC's data hub. We had about 100 people in that office, which nobody knew about, until towards the end. We used that as the nerve center that drove a lot of the deployment of our ground game resources.
This is also quite similar to what Brad Pascale has said about the Trump online team’s efforts using Cambridge Analytics.
“If I had to characterize what the Trump campaign did, they automated Facebook’s best [advertising] practices at a very large scale. I think that statewide campaigns will try to do the same kind of thing in 2018,” said Colin Delany, founder of Epolitics. “I’m wondering if any new technology is going to come out of the resistance. It’s possible. I think a lot of what you are seeing is training and capacity building.”
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The Trump campaign took voter files from the Republican Party, which had people’s electoral histories—age, gender, address, party registration and voting histories. They took more personalized data by Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm run by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, which boasted it had pyschologically profiles of every voter.
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The campaign put all that voter profiling data into Facebook’s advertising supercomputers, which had its own deep profiles of users based on their pages, communications and networks. Facebook provided staffers to every major campaign in 2016 to facilitate this process. From that data merging and data mining, Parscale oversaw an operation that identified 13.5 million Facebook users in 16 states that it deemed were persuadable. It targeted those individuals with the kind of personality-driven content that social media emphasizes—more opinion, belief and bias than facts.
The Trump campaign didn’t just send out original content, noted Melissa Ryan, who writes the Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter. “The Trump campaign put out relatively few ideas of their own,” she explained on Medium.com. “Instead they chose to validate and amplify the conversation happening online. They didn’t need to confirm or deny anything, they simply gave Trump’s army their megaphone… [It] put their supporters one content front and center, taking a backseat in their own campaign.”
It has always been quite stunning how similar Kushner’s operation had been to the project running out of St. Peterburg by the so-called Internet Research Agency.
Beginning as early as 2014, the Russian organization Internet Research Agency began operations to interfere with the US political system, including the 2016 elections, according to the indictment.
The defendants allegedly posed as US persons, created false US personas and operated social media pages and groups designed to attract US audiences, the indictment reads. Two of the Russians also allegedly traveled to the United States in 2014 to gather intelligence for their operations.
The Internet Research Agency had a "strategic goal to sow discord in the US political system" including the election, according to the indictment.
Russians posted "derogatory information about a number of candidates," according to the indictment. They bought ads and communicated with "unwitting" people tied to the Trump campaign and others in order to coordinate political activities.
The indictment mentions a February 2016 memo to Internet Research Agency staff telling them to post political content on US social media sites and "use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them)." The reference to Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who challenged Clinton for the Democratic nomination, shows that the Russian government decided early on to oppose Clinton.
The only question was, was any of the tactics and data developed by Cambridge Analytic shared with others in Russia. Now we know,
yes it was, it was shared with and specifically developed in coordination with Lukoil. Although Lukoil isn’t owned by the Russian government it’s CEO Vagit Alekperov,
has met with Mr. Putin on a number of occasions.
So it’s not completely out of line to consider the possibility that the Cambridge project may have been requested by Putin and then the data they produced shared and implemented by the IRC, but that isn’t definitive — yet. It’s just possible. And just consider the counter argument — why exactly was a Russian Oil company not interested in anything they could actually use for their own commerce, but in how to manipulate and target American Voters if they didn't intend to manipulate American Voters at some point?
Even if they Lukoil didn't share with the IRA specifically or directly, we still have people in the Trump campaign — Bannon, Lewandowski and Kushner — interacting with a company that is in bed with Russians in order to impact American Voters during an election. That sure smells like collusion to me.
Now these two things are tied together at the hip.
“Former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Joe DiGenova will be joining our legal team later this week,” said Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s personal lawyers. “I have worked with Joe for many years and have full confidence that he will be a great asset in our representation of the President.”
Mr. diGenova has endorsed the notion that a secretive group of F.B.I. agents concocted the Russia investigation as a way to keep Mr. Trump from becoming president. “There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime,” he said on Fox News in January. He added, “Make no mistake about it: A group of F.B.I. and D.O.J. people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.”
Trump has now hired that guy. But that shouldn’t be surprising since he’s now opening rage-tweeting that the Mueller investigation never should have started [Yeah, well actually it began in July 2016 remember?] And the attorneys he already had included John Down have claimed that Rosenstein should fire Mueller — because, reasons.
All of this is clearly a ploy to play to the rubes within the GOP who still support the Trump Crime family. Not a single inch of this will make a dent in a court of law, it won’t affect anything that Mueller does but it might make a difference in Congress if a case for impeachment is presented by Mueller to the government.
This is their alibi. That the FBI was “biased” against them. That anyone who is ever critical only does so because of “bias” not because they have a legitimate case or argument. It’s literally like “playing the race card” but for Conservatives. You can’t possibly disagree honestly with a bad thing conservatives say or do unless it’s because you HATE THEM, and therefore anything you claim isn’t valid. This is why conservatives are always claiming that people who complain about bigotry and actual bias are “playing a card” for sympathy — that’s exactly what they do all the time.
Well, that kind of nonsense may stop a Republican Congress from doing anything but a Democratic Congress with Intel Chairman Adam Schiff will go a whole lot farther picking up all the missed leads and ignored threads that the Nunes-Conaway led Intel committee has ignored.
And all of this is pretty funny because the reason the Christopher Steele went to the press in the first place is because he felt the FBI was blowing him off and were in the tank for TRUMP.
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.
“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.
This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.
The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”
The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia”, with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.
The Anti-Clinton bias at the FBI was so bad, one of their own twitter accounts actually went rogue during the election.
It’s come to this: The FBI, America’s premier law enforcement agency, just had to decide whether to investigate one of its own Twitter accounts to see if it had an anti-Hillary Clinton bias.
The account in question, @FBIRecordsVault, burst into the news earlier this week after abruptly posting records related to Bill Clinton’s last-minute — and deeply controversial — pardon of financier Marc Rich. An FBI official said in an interview that the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility referred the matter to its Inspection Division for a possible investigation into whether anyone in the FBI had intentionally released the documents to hurt Hillary Clinton.
The official said the bureau’s internal watchdog opted against opening a formal investigation. Still, the fact that such a decision even had to be made highlights the crisis engulfing the bureau in the days since FBI Director James Comey stunned observers inside and outside the bureau by notifying Congress just 11 days before the election that he was renewing the dormant probe into Clinton’s private email server.
Now the Trumpsters are accusing them of the exact opposite, even when Comey’s re-opening the Clinton case probably cost her the election. Even when McCabe’s communications with the WSJ for which he has been fired for — were about negatives issues regarding Clinton. Even though Peter Strzok actually drafted the letter that Comey ultimately sent to Congress about finding Huma Abedine emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer. Even though FBI and DOJ were actually in a power struggle over reopening the Clinton case with the election being so near with the FBI being for doing so — and the FBI with Comey in the lead won that fight.
And also Comey, McCabe and Mueller are all Republicans.
But yeah sure, let’s just ignore the 4 guilty pleas and 20 indictments that Mueller has already achieved and just pretend we’re only talking about any of this — is because of Trump-hate.
Right — that’s plausible.
This is update (#43) to the Trump Russia Corruption Timeline — details are as follows.
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March 12th —
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Democrat Conor Lamb pulls ahead of Repub Rick Saccone in the PA-18 district special election which Trump had previously dominated and CNN says ‘They’re in big trouble’:
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WSJ reports that Republicans on House Intelligence Committee are moving to end Russia probe ahead of midterm losses.
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Polls indicate the Putin will win his re-election with 69 percent of the vote.
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Stormy Daniels offers to pay back the $130k to Michael Cohen, but he hasn’t responded yet.
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Bombs planted in packages left on the doorsteps of homes in minority neighborhoods in Austin Texas kills a black teenager and critical injures two others including a 75 year old Latina.
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Officials from Qatar declined to cooperate with Mueller as he investigated the meeting which included George Nader and Republican donor Elliot Broidy. Obama NSC spokesman Ned Price claims that they did this as a favor to Trump and they’ll be expecting a favor in return. They believe Trump endorsed a blockade imposed by the UAE and Saudi Arabia as retaliation by Jared Kushner, who unsuccessfully tried to get their finance minister to invest of 666 Park Ave.
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Writing over at Townhall.com, Trump fan Kurt Schlichter thinks civil war against “U.S Troops, Liberals and Democrats” is more likely today than it has been in the past because “the central tenet of the Democrat Party platform is now hatred and contempt for Normal Americans.”
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British PM Theresa May states that the nerve agent used against former FSB spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter was manufactured in Russia and presents a serious threat to international security. Russia says “Nah… wasn’t me. Somebody else did it, nobody saw me do it, nobody can prove anything!”
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Huckabee-Sanders announces Trump’s “Gun Plan” which closely resembles the Florida plan and basically gives the NRA everything they want, leaving the question of Semi-Automatic Rifle bans or age requirements to the states. She’s also asked about the poisoning of Sergei Skripal which she denounces and says the U.S. will offer all available aid to England, but she never says the word “Russia’ and calls the attack “indiscriminate” — when it seems they discriminated quite a bit on exactly who their target was going to be.
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Leaks to reporters at Buzzfeed, WSJ and New York Magazine from Trump’s own legal team show they’re scrambling in desperation as Mueller and Stormy Daniels close in.
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House GOP intel committee cancels on pending interview requests, shuts down the Russia/Trump probe and releases draft report — which rejects conclusion Putin wanted to help Trump. Former FBI agent Phil Mudd says “he wouldn’t wipe his ass” with their report.
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Sam Nunberg tells Ari Melber that Mueller is looking into Trump’s payoff to women. Quoting a section from Michael Wolff’s “Fire & Fury” in which former White House adviser Steve Bannon suggested one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers “took care of” a hundred women via settlements.
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House Intell Committee member Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) admitted his panel has “lost all credibility” after waffling on whether or not he accepts his party’s conclusions on the Russia probe.“Two things: From what I said last week is we have gone off the rails and now we’re a political forum for people to leak information to drive the day’s news. We have lost all credibility and we’re going to issue probably two different reports.”
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Trump’s personal aide John McEntee is briskly escorted out of the WH in the middle of the night without his coat or personal property.
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March 13th —
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Wapo reports that Sam Nunberg and another witness told Mueller that Roger Stone met with Julian Assange in 2016. Another associate told Mueller that Stone revealed in spring 2016 that Assange told him that WikiLeaks had obtained emails that would torment top Democrats such as John Podesta, then campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton.
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FBI agents who travelled to Bangkok to interview the Belarus “Sex-Guru” Anastasia Vashukevich who claims she has evidence of Russian collusion — but were denied by Thai officials saying only attorney’s and family could visit her, however CNN reporters have previously been allowed to speak with her in jail.
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ICE official James Schwab quits in disgust because he ‘couldn’t bear the burden’ of lying for the Trump administration” They had asked him to perpetuate false claims against Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf blaming her for “864 criminal aliens and public safety threats remain[ing] at large in the community,”
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Michael Isakoff and David Corn’s new book Russian Roulette confirms that Papadopoulos was personally authorized by Trump to try and setup a face-to-face meeting with Putin during the campaign in 2016.
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Rachel Maddow interviews Isakoff and Corn and discusses the Moscow Pee Tape allegations where they point out Trump and Emin visited a Vegas club called “The Act” which has performances of simulated urination as well as other key aspects of their book.
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Rex Tillerson finds out that he’s been fired via a Tweet and that he’s being replaced by CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Reports are that Trump did this because Tillerson had blamed Russia for them nerve agent attack on former FSB spy Sergei Skripal, but apparently Tillerson wasn’t told this.
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CNN reports that John Kelly had asked Tillerson to resign, but he had refused — hence the tweet-firing.
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Bloomberg reports that two months after Kushner joined the WH as a senior adviser, his family sold off a $103 Million stake in a property they own in Brooklyn to a Japanese company, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, whose major shareholder is the Japanese government.
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CNN reports that sources have told them that John McEntee was fired by the WH because he’s being investigated by Homeland Security for serious financial crimes.
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Reports are that Kellyanne Conway accompanied former HHS Sec Tom Price on four of his taxpayer funded private jet trips — for which he has repaid the government $59,000.
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Moscow mocks Tillerson being fired : “Have they started blaming Russia yet for the Washington staff changes?” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a text message sent to AFP.
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Vox reports that Tillerson gets to keep $Millions in tax breaks from Exxon stock he sold off in order to comply with ethics and conflict of interest rules.
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Trump’s new pick to head the CiA Gina Haspel has a history as an undercover agent and was directly involved in the Bush era torture program in Thailand including the destruction of evidence.
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Tillerson unlike Comey, Flynn and so many others, gets to make a farewell statement during which he calls out Russia, but says just about nothing about Trump.
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Judge tells Manafort that he ‘faces the very real possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison’
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Analysis by Politico shows that Republican-backed ads mentioning tax cuts in Pennsylvania’s 18th congressional district have been “essentially non-existent” since the start of March. This panics many in the GOP who realize their “But we gave you lunch money!” plan to stay in power seems to be falling on it’s face.
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British PM Theresa May does what Trump will never do : Hold Russia Accountable by demanding answers from their ambassador and planning retaliation for their chemical attack on British soil.
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Trump himself mumble mouth’s through a semi-condemnation. "It sounds to me like it would be Russia based on all the evidence they have. It sounds to me like they believe it was Russia and I would certainly take that finding as fact. As soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be."
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Meanwhile another Russian ex-pat and Putin Critic, Nikolai Glushkov is found dead at his London home.
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Trump then fires the State Dept aide who confirmed that Tillerson was fired via tweet, which contradicted from the WH Narrative [i.e.. LIE] that this had been planned and discussed for weeks, and it had nothing to do with Tillerson blasting Russia for their UK attack.
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Trump tweets a financial justification for his wall — as he comes to view wall samples in San Diego — that comes from a bigoted anti-semitic group of Holocaust deniers who think it will “drop the crime” rate by as much as $18 Billion.
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House Intel member Trey Gowdy writes a letter stating that “Russia had disdain for Secretary Clinton and was motivated in whole or in part by a desire to harm her candidacy or undermine her Presidency had she prevailed” which directly contradicts Rep. Conaway’s draft report which claims “Russia didn’t meddle.”
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Rep. Schiff announces the House Intel Democrats will release their own minority report and it will include evidence of collusion and will “seek to rebut the GOP conclusions” and “detail all the investigative avenues that House Republicans declined to take — the interviews that they didn’t conduct, and the leads that they didn’t try to chase down and verify.” He produces a 21 page “Status of the Investigation” document which lists witnesses not interviewed and document not yet reviewed which include Kellyanne Conway, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Sergei Millian, Deutsche Bank, Sean Spicer, Reince Preibus, Cambridge Analytica, Crowdstrike, Bayrock, Facebook, Google and Twitter. Also Individuals they would like to bring back include Bannon, Lewandoski, Hicks, Don Jr, Kushner, Michael Cohen and Erik Prince.
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March 14th —
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Black leaders in Austin see signs that package bombings are hate crimes. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
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The Forward reports that Tillerson may be been fired to protect Kushner and his side plot to use the UAE to blockade Qatar, which was potentially in retaliation for the Qatar finance minster not granting his family a loan on 666 Park Ave.
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Trump picks CNBC’s Larry Kudlow to replace Gary Cohn as economic advisor and the stock market tanks 200 points. Other CNBC reporters are crest fallen as the stock fall.
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New York Times reports that an internal recommendation has been given to Sessions arguing that McCabe deserves to be fired over allowing his staff to talk to reporters, even though he will officially retire next week. Firing him early would cancel his pension.
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Students from thousands of schools across the nation walkout of class and stand silent for 17 minutes in honor of the Parkland victims. Six White Guys stand in the cold in Ohio to protest that protest. Chicago Police pick one black teenager Aminah Green to arrest out of a crowd of hundreds.
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Rand Paul's announces that he will vote “No” on the confirmation of torture implementer Gina Haspel for CIA Director.
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Moscow vows to retaliate to Britains expulsion of their diplomats. [Interesting they didn't retaliate to Obama’s diplomat expulsion after Michael Flynn said “we’ll review everything.”]
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Professional Mountain climber who crested Everest 7 times says he could get over Trump’s border wall samples “easily.” [Pitons man, it’s all about the pitons...]
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UN Ambassador Nikki Haley admits that Russia was responsible for the chemical attack on England that nearly killed Sergei Skripal and his daughter. [??!!!]
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Don Jr. and his wife Vanessa are getting divorced [And who wouldn’t want the get the fracking heck OUT of that family right now?]
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25 House Dems write letter stated Kushner must be fired because it’s: ‘Impossible to have faith’ that he won’t enrich himself’ [That actually should go for Trump too.]
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According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, Trump has discussed firing Sessions and replacing him with current EPA chief Scott Pruitt. Since Pruitt, unlike Sessions, has not recused himself from being involved in Russia-related matters, he would be completely free to shut down the probe.
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Maddow lays out what Trump says and what the facts are — constantly diverge.
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Religious groups are creating a set of underground safe houses for the undocumented to be protected from ICE.
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Stormy Daniels Lawyer points out that a 2nd Trump Lawyer who works for the organization in California, Jill Martin, signed paper work related to the NDA and Arbitration but she says “she acted as an individual” just like Michael Cohen.
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Morgan Pehme, who wrote and directed the Netflix documentary film Get me Roger Stone tells Ari Melber that Stone was obsessed with reaching Juliane Assange because he had said he had “more Hillary emails” and he wanted to “destroy Hillary Clinton.” They had even made plans to travel to London to meet Assange, but those plans fell through.
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Mike Pence is headlining a fundraiser for his brother’s congressional bid at Trump’s D.C. hotel.
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CNBC reports that John Dowd, the lawyer defending Donald Trump during the Russia investigation, broke campaign finance law by donating more than is legally permissible to the Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign by $300 above the limit.
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Axios reports that Trump staffers are living in terror and fear inside ‘the most toxic working environment on the planet’.
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Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz offers to plead guilty if prosecutor will waive the death penalty.
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Senate votes to weaken Dodd-Frank.
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Jimmy Kimmel goes shopping at the Trump Organization Online Store and finds that not one of the products they buy were made in America, and some are missing federally required country of origin notifications prompting them to file a complaint with Federal Authorities.
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March 15th —
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Adam Schiff wonders ‘Had a Russian nerve agent been used on someone in our country, could we count on on [Trump]? [To fight back and defend us? Fuck no!]
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CNN panel does a “March Madness dead weight bracketing’ of which Trumpster is likely to go next — VA Sec Adam Schulkin with his armed person guard and EPA exec Scott Pruit and his ‘soundproof booth” and both Ben Carson and Ryan Zinke’s insane spending all rank highly.
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Trump tries to tweet-splain his making up BS about a trade deficit to tell Canada’s Justin Trudeau.
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Kellyanne Conway snaps at Fox and Friends for mentioning the massive WH turnover rate, while Trump apparently auditions new aides by watching them on TV.
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The Trump Admin levied sanctions for Russian Election Meddling — The measures target five entities and 19 individuals — including the FSB, Russia’s top spy service; the military intelligence agency [GRU] and 13 people recently indicted by Robert Mueller, [This will be news to Trump!]
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Former DOJ Official Matthew Miller calls a new filing from Manafort’s attorney “silly” because it tries to claim charges should be dropped because they don’t specifically involve “Russia meddling”. [Even though they actually do since much of the money Manafort laundered came from Russia via Oleg Deripaska.]
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RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel claims ‘There is no chaos inside the White House’. [Riiight!]
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Mueller subpoenas the Trump Organization for documents related to their past dealing with Russia. which may include the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant, his various attempts to open Trump Tower Moscow and the $200 Million he’s received directly from Russian in real estate rentals and sales.
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Fox News Chief Intelligence Correspondent Catherine Herridge claims this is a breach of Mueller’s authority, and that he has already exceeded it when he began investigating links between Kushner and the UAE for which she directly blames Rosenstein since he has to approve all expansion of Mueller’s investigation.
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Politico reports that Trump’s lawyers finally admit that he may have to be interviewed or testify and begins to prep him for being possibly interviewed personally by Mueller as soon as next week.
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CREW charges that Steve Mnuchin has spent nearly $1 Million in tax payer funds on private flights back and forth across the country.
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AP reports that Russia had hacked into the American Energy Grid until they were recently discovered and expelled, this information had been known for some time according to Wired but was just suddenly leaked to AP now. [This may be why Haley sudden condemned the Russia chemical attack in England and magically mysteriously we can has sanctions now!]
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Sens. Grassley, Graham, Cornyn and Tillis from Judiciary want a Special Counsel for the Special Counsel because Session’s call to have the Inspector General to analyze things isn’t strong enough. [Yes, really man.]
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Kris Kobach’s “expert” witness undercuts his claims of rampant voter fraud.
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New research, conducted by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, revealed playing violent video games for prolonged periods does not make adults more aggressive. "We did not find relevant negative effects in response to violent video game playing," said lead author Simone Kühn. "The fact that we assessed multiple domains, not finding an effect in any of them, mak�-.tes the present study the most comprehensive in the field.”
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Shep Smith takes a swipe at Hannity and Tucker : “They don’t have rules, they can say whatever”
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Seth Rich’s parents say “Our son was Murdered Again” by the fake news stories promoted by Hannity and Fox.
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Sen. Feinstein calls on CIA to release docs related to Haspel’s involvement in torture.
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CREW publishes portions from a Treasury Dept. Inspector General report that documents that Sec. Mnuchin spent nearly $800,000 in tax payer money on military plane flights.
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March 16th
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Corn and Isakoff tell Chris Cuomo that Mueller has subpoenaed TrumpOrg records to look at his relationship with the Agalarov their previous attempt to cement a $Billion deal over Trump Tower Moscow in 2013, and the Don Jr/Veselnitskaya meeting. Cuomo also tries to get Felix Sater to open up about the Russia investigation but he resists going into details.
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Stormy Daniels lawyer says she was threatened with physical harm if she didn’t comply with the NDA deal, and that he’s been contacted by at least 6 other women with similar stories.
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Arizona student who participated in national walkout says they were “hit on the thigh” as corporal punishment from the school.
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Rumors circulate that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster is leaving over his tension with Trump. Reports are that Trumps wants someone more fun, but the WH denies everything.
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Charlottesville resident Deandre Harris who was severely beaten bloody by White Supremacist during their “Unite the Right” march is found not guilty of assault against racist Harold Cruz for swinging a flashlight at him while Harold was trying to impale someone else with a flagpole.
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Hannity slaps back at Shep Smith: “He’s ‘clueless’ about the ‘REAL NEWS’ I do everyday” [Yeah, so are you]
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Vanessa Trump hires a criminal defense lawyer in her divorce filing against Don Jr.
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Adam Schiff and House Dems are reportedly considering making a criminal referral of perjury to the FBI against Roger Stone, Carter Page and Erik Prince based on their testimony to the Intel committee.
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London police determine that Russian dissident and Putin critic Nikolai Glushkov was murdered in his home due to “compression of the neck.”
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Jeff Sessions fires Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe one day before he becomes vested for an increased pension on his 50th Birthday, and 2 days before his scheduled retirement.
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Facebook bans Cambridge-Analytica for misusing the personal data from 270,000 people.
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Felix Sater admits to Chris Hayes that he did work on Trump Tower Moscow using funding from VTB Bank [which is sanctioned].
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Michael Cohen files a motion to have the Stormy Daniels suit moved to Federal Court, then accuses her of 20 violations of the NDA totally $20 Million in fines. and hires another attorney to help him on the case.
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The FISA Court Review panel rules against the DOJ on keeping all FISC decisions secret admit numerous press and FOIA inquiries.
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Julia Kayyem wonders “Are the Trump people stupid” for firing Andy McCabe because now he’s unleashed rain Hell on them.
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Russia expels 23 British diplomats and closes some of their consulates in response to their punishment over the Salisbury Chemical Attack on Sergei Skripal.
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Trump celebrates firing McCabe while he reveals that Trump was obsessed with his wife’s run for Virginia Senate and that he kept notes just like Comey did which have already been turned over the Mueller.
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Comey Claps back at Trump’s happy dance over McCabe and warns that the American People will hear my story soon, because he has a book coming out.
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WH denies reports that Trump is ready to fire HR McMaster. [Watch this space, we’ve been to this rodeo before...]
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March 17th —
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March 18th —
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March 19th —
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Gretchen Carlson’s attorney Nancy Erika Smith.explains to Chris Cuomo that Trump is screwed in his battle with Stormy Daniels. After Trump said publicly that he didn’t know Daniels — “then he wanted to go to arbitration in late February”, she claimed “he waived his claim that he gets to go to a secret court system.” Cohen is clearly function on Trump’s behalf and the NDA isn’t valid since Trump didn’t sign it.
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Axios reports that Mueller is looking into Trump’s actions after the election which indicates that he is targeting the coverup and obstruction issues.
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Bombs continue to be set in Austin Texas, now using trip wires. Police offer a $115,000 reward for information.
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Trump Dating Website invites Don Jr to join since his wife has filed for divorce.[He’s a catch!]
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Former FBI agent Asha Rangappa points out the McCabe’s memos will be trusted by the courts over Trump’s recollections. [So will Comey’s]
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GOP candidate Rick Saccone won’t concede the PA-18 race, but is also already running somewhere else.
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Trump rage-tweets “Witch Hunt” claiming that there should have never been a Mueller investigation [ignoring that they already have 4 guilty pleas and 20 other indictements] and saying he has too many Democrats on his Team [So we’re applying Affirmative GOP Action rules now? You need token Republicans to prove impartiality?]
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Hannity does a big segment claiming “Not Jailing Hillary was the biggest abuse of power in the history of America” [Really, it wasn’t.]
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Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie claims that they were working with Corey Lewandowski and Steve Bannon in 2015 before Trump announced his campaign, and that Cambridge Analytica “took fake news to a new level by pairing it with algorithms” to make it more effective at targeting and modifying beliefs.
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NYTimes reports that Trump plans to hire Fox News correspondent and conspiracy theorist Joe diGenova since he claims the real crime was “letting Hillary go” and that the entire investigation of Trump is a Frame Job by Dem partisans at the head of the DOJ. [Even though Comey, McCabe and Mueller are all Republicans]
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Vice reports that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers to entrap politicians around the world. [So of course they would be the last people develop and share Facebook targeting and manipulation tools with Russian intelligence… although what’s he’s describing sounds exactly like something that was attempted against Alexander Navalny by pals of the Belarusian “sex guru” who had an alleged affair with Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska and now wants to give her info to the US in order to keep from being departed back to Russia from a Taiwanese Jail.]
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Wapo reports that Trump’s lawyers have recently met with Mueller and given him an outline of potential areas of inquiry for his interview with Trump.
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Bloomberg reports that on top of everything else, Michael Flynn had a secret business relationship with computer chip maker Bijan Kian who he had tried to help get defense contracts while he was head of the DIA.
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After he was fired by Obama in 2014 he was brought onto the board of Kian’s company Greenzone Systems Inc., who won a $1.1 Million contract with the DoD’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, which works with the DIA.
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Flynn tried to sell Kian’s computer chips during his Saudi trip to secure the Nuclear Power plant deal.
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Kian had met with Homeland Security Official supposed over his chips, but instead used the meeting to demonize Turkish dissident Fattulah Gulen, whom Flynn had been paid $530k to attack and kidnap.
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Lastly Kian had worked with Flynn on a proposal to create a private intelligence force which would answer directly to the NSA and circumvent the CIA.
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Rep. Matt Gaetz goes on Anderson Cooper and spouts more of his “Biased FBI Cabal yadda yadda nonsense” when in fact the biased partisan cabal includes himself, Devin Nunes, GOP members of House Intel and Trump.
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March 20th —