While hysteria raged about possible Russian “interference” in the 2016 US election, British intelligence officials were secretly playing a “key role” in helping instigate investigations into Donald Trump, secret texts have shown.
“Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign country interfering in American affairs,” former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the ‘Russiagate’investigation.
The Guardian reported on texts between former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabeand Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, who now heads GCHQ. The two men met in 2016 to discuss “our strange situation” – an apparent reference to Russia’s alleged interference in US domestic politics.
British intelligence “appears to have played a key role in the early stages,” the report said.
Galloway said the revelation was not surprising because people “already knew” that British intelligence had played a part in the Russia-related investigations in the US. He recalled that it was former British spy Christopher Steele who drew up the now-infamous Steele dossier, which made multiple unverifiable and salacious claims about Trump and has since been largely discredited. Britain is “up to its neck in the whole Russiagate affair,” he said.
The texts also reveal that the Brexit vote was viewed by some in the FBI as something that had been influenced by Russia.
Asked what the UK stood to gain by trying to implicate Russia in a US election scandal at a time when then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was dismissing baseless claims of Russian interference in the Brexit campaign, Galloway noted that Johnson’s comments on Russia have appeared to strangely sway between friendly and antagonistic.
Johnson is like “a sofa that bears the impression of the last person to sit upon him,” the former MP quipped. What happens next will depend on who is leading the tango, “the orange man in Washington or the blonde mop-head in London.”
In June 2016, the FBI opened a covert investigation codenamed ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ into Trump’s now disproven collusion with Moscow, which was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Ultimately, the two-year-long probe that followed came up short, producing no evidence to prove a conspiracy or collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russia.
Once a shining beacon of hope for Russiagate true believers, it looks like Rachel Maddow has left her best days behind her; MSNBC’s conspiracy queen has seen her show plummet to fifth place in cable news ratings. What happened?
You rise fast and fall hard in the fickle world of television. Just last April, Maddow overtook Fox News’ Sean Hannity to claim the title of most-watched host across cable news. She had become a reliable source for Russigate aficionados to get their daily dose of crazy.
Sadly for Maddow, the latest data released by Nielsen shows her show in fifth place with a total audience of 2.4877 million viewers for July – behind Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingrahamand The Five (all Fox News shows).
For context, in January this year, Maddow still boasted an audience of nearly 3.3 million, which means she shed around 800,000 viewers in just six months. Maddow was also in fifth place among viewers in the 25-54 age range – the group most-favored by advertisers.
Ouch.
Once dubbed “the smartest person on TV” by Forbes (really), this is certainly not the big payoff Maddow was expecting, having dedicated three years of her career to breathlessly covering every twist and turn in the anticlimactic Trump-Russia “collusion” drama.
There’s no question that Maddow lost a major component of what had made her show so popular when former special counsel Robert Mueller showed up in March having found no evidence of conspiracy or collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
As former MSNBC host Krystal Ball noted last week in candid criticism of her former network colleague, Maddow had “built segment after segment, show after show, on building anticipation for a big reveal” that never materialized. Indeed, Maddow became something of an expert at promising her audience bombshells that never amounted to anything.
Recall the dramatic teaser tweet she sent out in March 2017 one hour before her show, claiming: “We’ve got Trump tax returns. (Seriously).”When the story turned out to be a big nothingburger (all she had was one boring form which revealed nothing particularly interesting), Maddow lashed out at her own viewers, saying people had “leapt” to conclusions.
Ball also accused Maddow of doing damage to the left, having become “swept up in the ratings bubble” that was being sustained by “feverish Russian conspiracy theories.”
It’s true. Seemingly convinced that the Russiagate story would end with Donald Trump being dragged from the White House in a dressing gown with shackles around his feet, Maddow had abandoned major issues that are important to the American left and trafficked in mental conspiracies and outright fear-mongering instead.
How about that time she suggested that Russia might kill the power in Fargo during a polar vortex and let everyone freeze to death? Or the time she spent three whole minutes dramatically building up to ‘reveal’ that Russia and North Korea share a border – followed by 15 more minutes trying to prove that Vladimir Putin had orchestrated and secretly controlled the Singapore summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un.
A study of her coverage by the Intercept last year showed that 53 percent of Maddow’s segments focused only on Russia over a six-week period between February and March.
Of course, there were no slaps on the wrist for Maddow at MSNBC HQ for getting stories drastically wrong or failing to deliver on her promises of Trump-destroying bombshells. In fact, it seemed the more dramatic and off-the-wall her coverage became, the more she was celebrated for it. This staggering fall from ratings grace can be her comeuppance.
Boo hoo, Rachel. If you need to cry, you could always use the piles of money you made from lies as tissues.
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer based in Dublin. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, teleSUR, RBTH, The Calvert Journal and others.
Twitter deemed presidential hopeful Kamala Harris utterly “destroyed,” after fellow candidate Tulsi Gabbard landed dizzying verbal haymakers on the former California prosecutor. Naturally, ‘Russian bots’ were swiftly blamed.
Wednesday night’s Democratic debate was not an enjoyable one for Harris, who went into the faceoff as a darling of the media and among the frontrunners for her party’s nomination. On the stage in Detroit, Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard grilled Harris on her record as California’s attorney general.
In under a minute, Gabbard shredded Harris to pieces for jailing more than 1,500 nonviolent marijuana offenders while admitting in a radio interview that she had smoked marijuana in college, and for her “tough-on-crime” stances. “She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row… she kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor… and she fought to keep the cash bail system in place,” Gabbard continued, leaving Harris unable to counter.
By Thursday morning, “#KamalaHarrisDestroyed” was trending on Twitter in the US.
Of course, any attack on an establishment Democrat is met with an equal and opposite reaction. Establishment pundits and their supporters responded with a familiar cry: “Russia!”Gabbard, they said, is propped up by Vladimir Putin, and #KamalaHarrisDestroyed is the work of “Putin’s bots and paid for shills.”
Even Harris’ press secretary, Ian Sams, labeled Gabbard’s supporters part of “the Russian propaganda machine.”
It’s worth noting that nobody shouting “Russian bots” did any data analysis to support their claims. Few noted too that, during the debate, ‘Tulsi Gabbard’ was the most searched for politician in every single US state, according to Google Trends.
But if the nefarious hashtag wasn’t the work of the Kremlin, then it must have been the work of the MAGA-hatted deplorables, some #resistance commenters argued.
That opponents would default to Russia to attack Gabbard is unsurprising. Running on an anti-interventionist, foreign-policy-focused platform, Gabbard has been accused of cosying up to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad for her opposition to military action in Syria and for meeting with Assad in Damascus. That stance alone led to accusations that she was more closely aligned with the position of the Kremlin than that of the White House.
At present, Gabbard is a long-shot candidate, and is polling at around one percent.
Political commentator Max Boot is celebrating the prospect of a majority-minority America in the next few decades.
Boot, a fierce critic of the President, was aghast at Trump telling a “group of congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from”and calling his majority-minority district “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,”where“no human being would want to live.”
Boot also criticized Trump for calling Al Sharpton a “con man” who “Hates Whites & Cops,” which, in his view, is a “white-nationalist device of labeling those who oppose racism as antiwhite racists.”
The fierce Never Trumper argues that “racism sells in America.”
However, Boot believes that “the political advantage from these attacks might be negated — and Trump might be deterred from launching more of them in the future” if the Republic Party “would call him out.”
Boot ultimately believes that “the Trump era will be seen as a sad last gasp of white resistance.”
He expanded:
A few decades from now, when the entire country ismajority-miinority, the Trump era will be seen as a sad last gasp of white resistance — a reprehensible episode that will be recounted alongside theMcCarthy era, the internmentof citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II, and thePalmer Raids. No one will remember or care who backed a corporate tax cut. When their grandchildren ask today’s Republicans what they did to oppose Trump’s racism, what will they say? “No comment”?
Boot has been a DC mainstay for the past few decades and established himself as one of the fiercest proponents of the failed Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.
Since Trump got elected in 2016, Boot has become an irate critic of the Trump administration.
The election of Trump was a rejection of Boot’s regime change fanaticism and has invalidated many of the policies he championed during the Bush years.
For that reason, Boot continues to harp on Trump.
Boot does raise a good point about demographic shift, however.
The majority of this has been caused by mass migration, which benefits Democrats at the polls.
For that reason, immigration reform is crucial, which will have to entail repealing birthright citizenship, anchor baby policies, chain migration, and tightening up pathways to citizenship.
The Left and its fellow travelers openly cheer about the demographic shift that Boot mentions because they know it will electorally benefit them.
However, for America, mass migration could cause a social calamity given the nature of America’s bloated welfare state and the strain mass migration could bring upon it.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) turned down an offer to tour a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) facility in Baltimore with HUD Secretary Ben Carson on Wednesday.
The agency extended an invitation on Tuesday but Cummings turned down the request.
When reporters asked Carson about why Cummings was not present at a press conference, he responded Cummings may have been absent due to a scheduling conflict but did not elaborate on why he skipped the tour.
Carson visited the Baltimore facility soon after a series of weekend tweets from President Donald Trump criticized Cummings for being a “brutal bully,”alleging his district was in disrepair because of his lack of oversight.
Cummings fired back, reportedly blaming racism and Trump for Baltimore’s problems.
While critics have called Trump’s remarks “racist,” not many people have been able to counter Trump’s claims about Baltimore’s corruption, high-murder rate, and rat problems.
President Trump: "Baltimore's been very badly mishandled for many years…Baltimore is an example of what corrupt government leads to…If they ask me, we will get involved."
“The government has been pumping billions of dollars to no avail. Baltimore is an example of what corrupt government leads to. … I feel so sorry for the people of Baltimore, if they ask me we will get involved,” Trump told a crowd of reporters Tuesday.
The PRIDE Act will give new handouts to homosexual couples.
By Shane Trejo
Last week, Democrats in the U.S. Houseapprovedthe PRIDE (Promoting Respect for Individuals’ Dignity and Equality) Act by a voice vote, unanimously rubber-stamping what is tantamount to reparations for homosexual couples.
The PRIDE Actamends the federal tax code to remove gender-specific language such as “husband” and “wife” that may be offensive to those practicing the LGBT lifestyle. It also allows LGBT members to claim tax benefits that they were denied before the Defense of Marriage Actwas unilaterally struck down by the robed lawyers on the Supreme Court in 2013.
The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that this new LGBT give-away could cost the taxpayers as much as $67 million. The Democrats are patting themselves on the back for pushing another handout.
“In passing the PRIDE Act, Democrats are honoring our diversity and providing long-overdue justice to countless same-sex couples across the country who have been denied critical tax refunds because of who they are and who they love,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said.
Sen. Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren (D-MA) is the lead sponsor for the Senate’s version of the PRIDE Act. This could be seen as an attempt on her part to buy votes as she campaigns for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency in 2020.
“The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade,” Warren said in a public statement. “We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right — Congress should pass the Refund Equality Act immediately.”
Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce noted in a column that the PRIDE Act opens the door to create more welfare schemes for the LGBT community. She called out Pocahontas in particular for her shameless pandering.
“What Ms. Warren doesn’t mention to people is the IRS already allows everyone to amend the last three years of returns,” wrote Bruce, who is a gay conservative herself.
“Instead, she wants couples to be able to amend their tax returns for the entire time they were married in one of the 10 states allowing gay marriage prior to federal recognition,” Bruce added.
Bruce gave an example of how the policy could be expanded in the future by Democrats who are always inventing new schemes to paper over their victim-group constituencies.
“But why stop there? What about all the gays and lesbians who never had a chance to marry at all because of the Clinton administration’s Defense of Marriage Act?” Bruce asked.
“That has to be asked because this has nothing to do with tax fairness and everything to do with reinforcing the politics of resentment and victimhood,” Bruce argued.
“For the Democratic Party machine, however, there can never be success, there always has to be a new appended wrong or violation, some new campaign to convince you that victimhood will never end, and you must always resent, well, everyone,” she added.
It is unlikely that the PRIDE Act will be passed, or even considered, by the Republican-led Senate.
A North Carolina gun shop is facing liberal backlash for using a promotional billboard to mock the four freshmen congresswomen known as “The Squad.”
The advertisement for Cherokee Guns shows Democrat Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), with the message “The Four Horsemen Cometh (are Idiots).
“Signed, the Deplorables,” it says.
The display was criticized Monday by far-left group Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), who called it “disgusting anti-government violent rhetoric.”
“Threats against members of Congress, particularly minority members are (rising) and it is driven by the president’s racial rhetoric,” said the coalition in a Facebook post.
Pressley – the “Ringo” of the Squad – also took to Twitter to condemn the humorous billboard, calling on Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) to take action against the gun shop.
“#Racist rhetoric from the occupant of the @WhiteHouse has made hate our new normal. We are still vulnerable. @RepMarkMeadows – Cherokee Guns is in your district & you and I serve on a committee together. Here’s your chance to finally do the right thing,” Pressley tweeted Tuesday.
Pressley’s criticism is rich given Antifa firebombed an ICE facility two weeks after she stood outside a similar facility warning the left “will bring the fire.”
However, Cherokee Guns doubled down in the face of the liberal outrage, announcing they would start giving away bumper sticker versions of the 4 Horsemen ad.
“Alright my fellow Infidels for Trump…due to OVERWHELMING demand…you may come by the shop (next week) and get your very own FOUR HORSEMEN COMETH STICKER…simple…eat a piece of bacon…tell us you’re voting for Trump in 2020…then get your limited edition bumper sticker!! (While supplies last!) Snowflakes and Liberals are not eligible…sorry…”the gun shop said on Facebook.
When contacted by a reporter, a Cherokee Guns employee explained how to deal with “threatening liberals” should they decide to get confrontational.
“Show them the door, or your gun, and tell them they can buy their own billboard and pay for it like I did,” the staff member reportedly said.
“The ‘Squad’ is a very Racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart,”Trump tweeted last week.
“They are pulling the once great Democrat Party far left, and were against humanitarian aid at the Border…And are now against ICE and Homeland Security. So bad for our Country!”
President Trump has been labeled a racist for using the word “infested” to describe Baltimore’s rat problem, but Elijah Cummings used the exact same word to describe the city back in 1999.
As the video below highlights, CNNslammed Trump for using the word “infested” to describe Baltimore, suggesting that the president was dehumanizing black people.
However, during 1999 testimony, Elijah Cummings referred to his own district as a “drug infested area.
I guess Elijah Cummings is racist too.
As we previously highlighted, Bernie Sanders also claimed Trump was “attacking” an American city by calling Baltimore rat infested yet Sanders himself repeatedly said the place resembled a “third world country” back in 2015.
Meanwhile, Benny Johnson visited residents in Rep. Cummings district to find out what life is really like there.
Common themes; Rats, trash, crime, corrupt politicians.
We are in a political firestorm over the condition of Baltimore. So what is life really like there? I spoke with residents in Rep. Cummings district. Here's what they had to say: Rats. Trash. Crime. Abandoned by politicians. Begging for change. Want the truth? Please WATCH @TPUSApic.twitter.com/rkHwwHc1kf
The expansion of home tech products to make life increasingly convenient requires consumer privacy sacrifices, the full extent of which won’t be revealed for years to come, but have been hinted at through a slew of missteps.
This past week Amazon hit headlines after its virtual assistant Alexa was caught passively recording couples arguing, having intimate family discussions and even having sex (apparently sex noises can trigger Alexa-activated Echo speakers).
Data is the new dominant commodity of the 21st century and the trade-off of convenience for privacy and security has been highlighted in a plethora of cases involving consumer ‘smart products’ in recent years.
Amazon Echo as murder witness?
Take the November 2015 case of James Bates, who was suspected of the murder of his friend Victor Collins at a house party in his home. Police issued multiple search warrants to Amazon in the landmark case, in an attempt to gain access to the records of Bates’ Echo device.
“I have a problem that a Christmas gift that is supposed to better your life can be used against you,”Bates’s attorney, Kimberly Weber, said at the time. Eventually, Bates himself decided to turn over the data, foregoing his right to privacy in the interest of proving his innocence and clearing his name.
Much like Amazon, Apple has been found surreptitiously recording users’ sexual encounters, drug deals and medical appointments, though more worryingly, these audio recordings were sent to human ‘graders’ for evaluation, according to recent, explosive revelations from a whistleblower.
Apple’s virtual assistant Siri stores users’ identifiable utterances for up to six months, before removing the unique user ID information and storing the clips elsewhere for up to two years – in the interest of improved customer experience, of course.
Google Mini & passive spying
Google’s domestic virtual assistant Google Mini has also been caught passively spying on consumers in their own homes. Worryingly, however, Google employs hundreds of so-called “language experts” to parse snippets of audio, some of which contain embarrassing or sensitive information, to better understand the nuances of human language.
In 2017, writer Artem Russakovskii went to the product’s unveiling at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco. After a couple of days he checked his voice activity log to find thousands of inadvertent entries that should never have been logged; the device had been spying on him 24/7 due to an apparent ‘hardware flaw’, as the company claimed at the time.
Hacking tech teddies
The idea for a teddy bear that allowed parents and children to share affection when long distances apart was good in theory, but ultimately proved terrifying in practice.
Through Cloudpets (and various other interpretations of the idea), children could record short messages for loved ones far away that would be transmitted via bluetooth to a nearby smartphone and beamed across the country or, indeed, the world.
Alas, it didn’t take long before data belonging to some 800,000 customers, totalling roughly two million messages between children and adults, which were stored in an online database, was hacked and held for ransom.
There was no encryption or authentication between the bluetooth devices in the stuffed animals and the smartphone app, meaning unscrupulous actors could invade people’s most heartfelt moments with their children.
Backdoor Barbie
Mattel’s ‘Hello Barbie’ was billed as the world’s first “interactive doll”complete with a microphone that records children and sends the messages to third parties for processing before a response is generated.
However, security researchers quickly discovered that the wifi-connected doll was vulnerable to hacking, and those with the relevant knowhow could access the doll’s system information, account information, stored data including audio files, and the doll’s built-in microphone.
Researcher Matt Jakubowski claimed that it was “just a matter of time until we are able to replace their servers with ours and have her say anything we want.”
But the ghoulish details didn’t stop there; hackers could theoretically take over a home’s wifi network via the doll and gain access to other connected devices such as laptops and phones, allowing them to pilfer a wealth of personal and financial information.
High-tech takeover
White hat hacking work by a team of researchers at China’s Zhejiang University showed how inaudible “commands” could be used to remotely trigger a potential victim’s smart device. The team used various clever strategies, including playing frequencies above 20kHz as the victim was recording, rendering the inaudible frequency as a trigger to access the device.
The researchers managed to hack the voice interfaces of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung devices and command them to, for example, visit specific malicious websites or even send emails and text messages all while dimming the screen and lowering the device volume to conceal the attack, leaving the victim completely unaware.
The team even managed to remotely place phone and video calls to listen in and observe the victim’s surroundings. They infamously also managed to hack the navigation system of an Audi SUV.
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