9/26/2019
9/26/2019
By Joshua Caplan
In the nine-page document, the so-called “whistleblower” claims that the president was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” While characterizing the Trump-Zelensky call based on hearsay, it accuses the White House of attempting to conceal records related to their conversation. Further, it claims President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is a “central figure” in the effort and alleges U.S. Attorney General William Barr “appears to be involved as well.”
“The interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals,” the complaint states. “The president’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”
The transcript of the call was released Tuesday, showing no pressure to investigate Biden, and President Zelensky denied in person that he felt any such pressure from the conversation. Nonetheless, following the transcript’s release House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) reaffirmed her support for a formal impeachment inquiry, accusing the president of using “taxpayer money to shake down other countries for the benefit of his campaign.”
“Either the President does not know the weight of his words or he does not care about ethics or his constitutional responsibilities,” the speaker added. “The transcript and the Justice Department’s acting in a rogue fashion in being complicit in the President’s lawlessness confirm the need for an impeachment inquiry. Clearly, the Congress must act.”
The so-called “whistleblower’s” complaint was released shortly before acting National Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire appeared before the House intelligence committee to discuss the handling of the complaint. The hearing began at 9 a.m. EDT and is being streamed live.
“This complaint is a roadmap for our investigation, and provides significant information for the committee to follow up on with other witnesses and documents,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement Thursday before the hearing.
Following the complaint’s release, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement: “Nothing has changed with the release of this complaint, which is nothing more than a collection of third-hand accounts of events and cobbled-together press clippings—all of which shows nothing improper.”
Last week, Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson appeared before the committee to discuss the whistle-blower complaint in a closed session. It was Atkinson who first received the complaint and thought it serious enough to report to Congress.
The complaint was made available to lawmakers Wednesday and was viewed by members of the House and Senate intel panels.
President Trump and Giuliani have said they encouraged Ukraine in other conversations to investigate the Bidens for pressuring Ukraine to fire Kiev Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the gas company Hunter Biden worked for.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this year, Biden forced out former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin as he was investigating an energy company called Burisma Holdings, which was paying Biden handsomely as a member of its board. The former vice president even boasted to the Council of Foreign Relations last year that he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid unless the prosecutor was fired. (He did not tell the audience about his son’s role.)
On Tuesday, President Trump said he asked White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to withhold the aid from Ukraine roughly one week before he spoke with Ukraine’s leader.
“As far as withholding funds, those funds were paid,” President Trump said ahead of his address before the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. “They were fully paid.”
“I want other countries to put up money. I think it’s unfair that we put up the money,” he added. “Then other people call me. They said, ‘Oh, let it go.’ And I let it go. But we paid the money, the money was paid.”
Meanwhile, President Trump and his allies appear none-too-worried about the Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry and have not only suggested it’s a sign that Pelosi has lost control of her caucus, but that it will bolster the president’s 2020 re-election chances.
“[Speaker Pelosi’s] been taken over by the radical left, the whole Democrat Party. You take a look at what’s happening in the media today. The whole party is taken over by the left and thank you very much — my poll numbers have gone up,” the president said Wednesday.
Of the impeachment probe, House Republican leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told Breitbart News that Democrats “lost their minds” and predicted it will “backfire on them” in the 2020 election.
“The left has officially lost their minds — they are so fixated on their imaginary impeachment that they are getting nothing else done,” said McCarthy. “266 days in power and what have Nancy Pelosi and the Socialist Democrats accomplished? Absolutely nothing.”
On Wednesday, President Trump’s reelection campaign announced – along with the Republican National Committee (RNC) – that $5 million had been raised following Pelosi’s announcement of the impeachment inquiry.
“In the 24 hours since news of Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment announcement, @realDonaldTrump’s campaign & @GOP have BLOWN OUT fundraising!” Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale wrote on Twitter.
“$5 Million combined in 24 hrs. Donors in all 50 states Huge groundswell of support leading to Trump landslide in 2020!” he added.
Read the redacted version of the partisan federal employee’s complaint below:
House Intel ‘whistleblower’ complaint by Breitbart News on Scribd
The UPI contributed to this report.
Apparently a product of the company’s campaign to uncover cases of retaliation, the document is a cache of personal accounts submitted by Google employees to an internal company forum.
The document was first revealed by Recode earlier this month, but Motherboard published it in full.
Writing anonymously, Googlers describe cases of their managers’ unethical business decisions, ill treatment of minorities and women within the company, and the tech giant’s attempts to keep some unpleasant things ‘in the family’.
One employee writes that their “reputation has been damaged both inside the company and throughout the industry at large” by the retaliation against them, while “the person who had been perpetuating the retaliation simply received additional “managerial coaching.”
A female employee “experienced blatant racist and sexist things from my coworker” and after reporting them “was warned that things will get very serious if continued.”
No one protected me, the victim. I thought Google was different.
Her claims are echoed by those of her colleague: “I whistle blew a colleague who used the N-word in jokes. HR found nothing conclusive. I was on track to becoming our team’s tech lead, but now I can barely even get an invitation to lunch.”
Having an active position on social issues is also not welcomed at Google, apparently, as detailed by another Googler: “They [directors] made terrible comments about people in all kinds of protected situations — including saying that a woman could not receive an ‘exceeds expectations’ because she had recently been on leave and that someone should be rated downward for being ‘too much of an activist.’”
Google has neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the accusations. But Eileen Naughton, Google’s vice president of People Operations, said they are working hard to bring cases of inappropriate treatment to light: “Reporting misconduct takes courage and we want to provide care and support to people who raise concerns. All instances of inappropriate conduct reported to us are investigated rigorously.”
In March, Google decided to pay $135 million to two former executives accused of sexual harassment. While last year, around 20,000 Google employees took part in a global protest urging the corporation to stop forced arbitration for issues of sexual harassment and discrimination and release a transparency report on sexual abuse in the company. Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton, who stood at the core of the protest, later published an internal open letter, claiming they faced retaliation from the company for their action. Whittaker quit Google in July.
September 25, 2019
Great America is one of the top Super PACs supporting President Donald Trump’s re-election.
The organization has reportedly spent six figures to run the ad on Fox News Channel. They also launched a website, InvestigateBiden.com, which hosts a petition urging Congress to act.
On Wednesday, the White House released a transcript of a July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukraine’s president, in which he asked the leader about Biden’s involvement in the prosecutor losing his job. The former Vice President’s son, Hunter Biden, was on the board of directors for a Ukrainian energy company that was being investigated by the prosecutor.
“What does white privilege really look like?,” the ad begins. “Weeks after Joe Biden visits China as vice president, his son secures a private billion dollar deal with the Bank of China. After Biden is named America’s top diplomat to Ukraine, his son joins Ukraine’s largest private gas producer with no relevant experience and lands another million dollar deal. And before Ukraine’s top prosecutor can investigate the shady dealings of Biden’s son, he gets the prosecutor fired, then brags about it.”
The ad features Biden boasting at the Council of Foreign Relations about how he got the prosecutor fired.
“I said I’m telling you, you’re not getting a billion dollars,” Biden says in the ad. “I said you’re not getting a billion and I’m going to be leaving here in six hours, if the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well son of a bitch. He got fired.”
“Instead of another failed presidential witch hunt, House Democrats should investigate one of their one – Joe Biden,” the ad asserts.
9/25/2019
By Danielle Ryan
Perhaps a worse sin than his purposeful omission of Assange’s pertinent case, though, is Sulzberger’s utterly disingenuous claim that before Donald Trump came along, the US government was “the world’s greatest champion of the free press.”
Readers who make it to the end of the piece would be none the wiser as to the fact that Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, waged a war on whistleblowers, prosecuting more of them than all previous US administrations combined and paving the way for Trump’s further attacks.
Assange’s name may be appearing less frequently in the news these days, but Sulzberger will be well aware that the Australian whistleblower and WikiLeaks co-founder is still a prisoner at London’s top security Belmarsh Prison, despite the fact that his sentence for skipping bail is up.
Though he was due for release on September 22, a court ruled that Assange must stay in prison until his extradition hearing next year, citing his “history of absconding.” In other words, the whistleblower who exposed US war crimes managed to evade persecution by US authorities once before — and the British government is determined not to let that happen again.
Sulzberger knows all this but consciously chose to ignore it in favor of anecdotes about the heroism of the Times’ own reporters around the world and the Trump administration’s reluctance to stand up for journalists, American and otherwise. Some of the stories he tells are indeed worrying and deserve to be told — but let’s be clear: No defense of the free press is sincere and complete without a strong and unambiguous defense of Julian Assange.
Nonetheless, the piece was praised by mainstream journalists on Twitter. “A call to arms,” said NYT columnist Jim Rutenberg. “The best analysis” of the damage Trump has done to the free press, said Brazilian journalist Rosental Alves. “A powerful defense,” of journalism, declared Gannett CNY editor Jeffrey Platsky.
But Sulzberger’s things-were-great-and-then-Trump-happened tone is typical of the overly simplified manner in which US media elites have been framing the Trump presidency from the outset. From targeting whistleblowers, to deporting migrants, to turning a blind eye to Saudi atrocities in Yemen — if Obama did it, it was fine, admirable and initiated without malice. If Trump does it, it’s unacceptable, reprehensible and rooted in evil — even if there is little meaningful difference in outcomes.
Without a hint of Assange-related irony, Sulzberger warns that governments around the world are targeting journalists who have been “exposing uncomfortable truths and holding power to account.” The current administration has “retreated from our country’s historical role as a defender of the free press,” he continues, throwing in a quote from the late Senator John McCain — chief senate warmonger and friend to Ukrainian neo-Nazis and Syrian terrorists, who the intrepid muckrakers over at the Washington Post once lauded for his ability to “make journalists love him.”
Truly explosive stuff; someone find these risk-takers a free cell at Belmarsh immediately.
Back at home, Trump’s attacks on the media have served to “undermine” the public’s faith in journalists, Sulzberger argues, noting that the president has tweeted about“fake news” 600 times since taking office. There is no denying that Trump has undermined the public’s already waning faith in the free press by labelling all reporting which displeases him as “fake.”
Yet, what Sulzberger fails to acknowledge is how the media has been so helpful to him in this regard. Times editor Dean Baquet admitted recently that three years of Russiagate coverage which essentially amounted to nothing had left the paper of record “flat-footed.” Trump, of course, took full advantage of the genuinely abysmal coverage of his presidency.
Concluding, Sulzberger assures the reader that he has raised his concerns with Trump personally, to no avail, and warns that threatening to prosecute journalists for doing their jobs gives repressive leaders around the world “implicit license” to do the same. Someone should remind him that if Trump bears responsibility here, he rightfully shares it with Obama.
As for those repressive leaders, they need look no further than Assange — and when they examine his case, they’ll be emboldened further, knowing that even his fellow journalists failed to stand up and loudly advocate for him.
SEPTEMBER 25, 2019
Two teenage brothers fatally attacked a man at an agricultural fair in Maryland after he refused to give them money, authorities said.
John Weed, 59, of Mount Airy was at the Great Frederick Fair Friday evening when the 15-year-old and 16-year-old approached him, authorities said. Several minutes after he declined to give them $1, the 15-year-old knocked him unconscious, prosecutors said.
“I think it’s despicable, and it tells me a lot about how these young people view this person by the very fact after they had him on the ground they taunted and they spit on him,” Frederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins said. “That to me shows hatred and disgust and despise.”
Medics flew him to the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. He died there Saturday, the sheriff’s office said.
The 15-year-old boy was charged with first-degree assault, second-degree assault and reckless endangerment, the sheriff’s office said. His 16-year-old brother was charged with second-degree assault. They are charged as juveniles but the prosecutor may ask that they be tried as adults.
Like most of Maryland, it used to be a very nice place to live but just so happens to be going downhill in accordance with a massive population shift.
UPDATE: John Weed’s niece Jessica set up a GoFundMe to help defer “legal cost, medical bills, and funeral costs.”
On Friday September 20th, Jay (John Weed) went to the Great Frederick County Fair to spend an evening of fun and laughter with his sister, his nieces, their loves ones and his great niece and nephew. At 5:30pm he fell victim to an unprovoked, physical assault. He was air lifted to Shock Trauma in Baltimore, where they did everything they could to save his life. The damage to his brain was too severe. He was not coming back. Late Saturday afternoon with his Mother, Father and sister by his side he passed away. Please help my family during this extremely difficult time. We never imagined such a great man would have to die like this. We are seeking justice for him but will have to fight. Anything you can do is appreciated and will be used towards legal cost, medical bills, and funeral costs.
RIP, Jay.
9/25/2019
By Mark Dice – 9/25/2019
Tom's Blog 