Assange-Manafort fabricated story is a plot to extradite WikiLeaks founder – Max Blumenthal

Assange-Manafort fabricated story is a plot to extradite WikiLeaks founder – Max Blumenthal

The apparently fabricated report by The Guardian linking Russiagate and Manafort to WikiLeaks is laying the case to arrest and extradite Julian Assange to the US, investigative journalist Max Blumenthal told RT.

WikiLeaks is ready to sue Britain’s Guardian newspaper for a “fabricated Manafort story” that accused Julian Assange of secretly meeting President Donald Trump‘s former election campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Manafort agreed to take part in the Mueller probe over Russia’s alleged meddling into the 2016 US election but he denies co-operating with Russia or ever meeting Assange.

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The author of the report, Luke Harding, based his claim on “sources” and a document “written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency and seen by the Guardian,” which the newspaper didn’t publish.

Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal asks why they didn’t provide actual “evidence from the visitor logs of the Ecuadorian Embassy which are closely watched.”

“Why not show CCTV? London is the most heavily surveilled places on Earth. Why not show that? Why rely on a single Ecuadorian source who appears to be an Ecuadorian intelligence source with the MI6 on the other hand of the line and the US on the other?” he said in a comment to RT.

He believes that it is a fabrication of a story to lay the case for the arrest and extradition of Julian Assange “by tying him to a figure who is hatching out a plea deal with Robert Mueller, by tying him to the Russiagate scandal in the US.”

Blumenthal noted that this story was being met with more skepticism than usual – “even in official circles in Washington” – and that “it might have failed.”

However, he added, “once the allegation is made, the damage is done.”

“Many people might have read this story and seen some commentary about it and news on CNN and judge that Assange did meet with Paul Manafort,” he pointed out.

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‘Guardian has become bulletin board for fabricated national security state propaganda’

Although WikiLeaks is going to sue over this story and both WikiLeaks and Paul Manafort deny the allegations, the article is still on The Guardian’s website.

“It is a sad commentary on what The Guardian has become – basically a bulletin board for fabricated national security state propaganda,” Blumenthal said.

According to the journalist, this story brings together the Russiagate scandal in Washington with the plot to extradite Assange.

“We know that there is an indictment of Julian Assange, it may be made public tomorrow,” he said. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with the Ecuadorian foreign minister earlier in the week, which might be a sign that it could be made public, Blumenthal explained.

Recalling that Paul Manafort is working out a plea deal with Robert Mueller, Blumenthal argued that the report may have been “an attempt to put the squeeze on Manafort because he is not providing enough information.”

“This apparently fabricated story was planted through Luke Harding… in order to lay the case for the arrest and extradition of Julian Assange,” he said.

If arrested and extradited, Blumenthal explains, Assange would be the first journalist who published classified information in the US to be tried under the Espionage Act. That, he noted, would basically deprive the WikiLeaks founder of “any real legal defense or an ability to mount a defense and would see him put on trial in a district court in Northern Virginia where the conviction rate on national security prosecutions is close to 100 percent.”

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Former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon thinks the US will go to any lengths to fix charges against Assange.

“It has been an open secret for many years that there has been a secret grand jury convened in Virginia trying to find any charge or probably make up a new law just to prosecute Julian Assange as a revenge for the fact that he shone a very bright light on some very murky and dark details of what the American state was doing,” she explained.

According to Machon, it is useful for the American establishment and the Democrats “to conflate everything with one big mess: Paul Manafort, the Mueller probe, Donald Trump, WikiLeaks as all part of big Russiagate-type thing.” She added that when you actually “pick the details, none of that hangs together whatsoever.”

In her opinion, Julian Assange is becoming a pawn in “a very high stakes game within American Washington politics.”

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‘They’re just bad people’ – NYT columnist on Trump supporters

‘They’re just bad people’ – NYT columnist on Trump supporters

President Trump meets young black Republicans at an event in October © Reuters / Cathal MacNaughton

Why would anyone work for President Donald Trump? Aside from a shared ideological vision, advancing one’s own career, or chasing a sniff of political power, one New York Times columnist has a better explanation: They’re just bad people.

In a failed attempt to understand life outside the morally superior left coast, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argues that many Trump supporters are simply “bad people,” of two kinds: “the immoral and the amoral.”

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Goldberg wasn’t writing about the MAGA-hat wearing middle-Americans who turn out in droves for Trump’s rallies, nor the conservative-leaning average Joe who would have voted for a kick in the head before Hillary Clinton. Instead, she was talking about the revolving cast of aides, officials, and lawmakers who’ve worked for the Trump administration or lent political support to his policies.

They’re the Steve Bannons (a “quasi-fascist with delusions of grandeur”), and the Anthony Scaramuccis ( a “political cipher who likes to be on TV”), the Ivanka Trumps and the Lindsey Grahams. Out of them all, Goldberg finds the apolitical figures, the ones only in it for the paycheck, the worst.

“Trump is unique as a magnet for grifters, climbers and self-promoters,” she wrote. “In part because decent people won’t associate with him.”

Of course, all of this is predicated on the belief that ‘Orange Man Bad,’ a belief that many of the New York Times’ readers likely share with Goldberg. The columnist ponders out loud how these people could work for Trump without feeling “shame or remorse” at his “belligerent nationalism and racist conspiracy theories.” What exactly these conspiracy theories are, however, Goldberg does not explain. Instead, we’re expected to know instinctively that Trump is, for whatever reason, bad.

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The idea that anyone who works for Trump is “bad” by association is simplistic and no doubt appealing to many in the media and the #Resistance. However, reality is more complicated. Trump aides and officials have their own careers to advance, their own dreams and ambitions, and their own car payments to make. The institutions of Washington, DC will endure long after Trump leaves office, and many of these bureaucrats will still need work.

Take Mary Kissel, named this month as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s new foreign policy adviser. Kissel is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has been sharply critical of and even openly hostile to Trump’s policies before. Is Kissel’s move to the State Department a surrender of her anti-Trump media credentials, or simply a career upgrade?

What about the officials who served in past administrations? Surely the New York Times fretted over the 29 Google employees who took up jobs in the Obama White House? After all, Obama presided over the largest expansion of mass surveillance in history, and defended the National Security Agency even after it emerged that it gathered vast amounts of call, email and internet data from millions of Americans.

Some moves through the revolving door that existed between Google and the Obama White House were reported, but the morals of the employees themselves were never questioned. Because, while these moves raised questions about the cosy relationship between Washington, DC and the tech industry, they were at an individual level, career moves. Besides, they were working for Obama, who came with a tacit seal of approval from much of the mainstream media.

Things are different in 2018, however. Trump (who Goldberg actually called “the orange emperor” in her previous column) is bad, and anyone who works for him is bad and should feel bad. Life sure is black and white on the pages of the Gray Lady.

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Wait–Did Twitter’s CEO Just Share A Post Calling For ‘Civil War,’ Wiping Out The GOP, And How We Should Be Like CA?

By Matt Vespa

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Well, if there were any lingering doubts about Twitter’s perceived bias against conservatives, look no further than what CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted out last night. Apparently, a “good read” is a post co-written by a Center for American Progress senior fellow that calls for “civil war,” the destruction of the GOP, and the adoption of how California runs everything from sea to shining sea. Yeah, bipartisanship is dead, so mob rule is what’s needed.

Now, to be fair, the “civil war” will be won at the ballot box and demographic shifts, namely through the  so-called emerging Democratic majority, but the overall theme is quite explicit: conservative Republicans are not welcome until they reform. In other words, until they break to the power of progressivism. First, if California’s politics is the future of the country, I’d rather chug bleach.

Second, the whole post, which was written by Ruy Teixeira and Peter Leyden on Medium, is what you’d expect from the coastal elite. They say the tax bill is not popular; it is. Even BET’s founder said the bill has helped bring black workers back into the work force. Over 250 companies have doled out bonuses to their workers. Over three million workers have benefitted from this legislation. It’s a tax cut for the middle/working classes of America that Democrats universally opposed.

In all, the post notes the similarities between our first civil war and this one. We had two separate Americas. Two separate economic models in each sphere. Trump is apparently the harbinger of the GOP’s doom. How many times have people said this only to be proven incorrect? Remember when (now) two-time presidential loser Hillary Rodham Clinton was supposed to win 2016 in a landslide? Also the post cites California as the basis for this GOP collapse argument. California Republicans are a different breed; they’re not really conservative. It’s a deep-blue state. Are we shocked that the GOP doesn’t do well in such environments. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is hardly a prime example of those leading the conservative movement, though Terminator and Predator are some of my favorite movies of all time.

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Nothing alarming about social media mogul advocating to eliminate an entire side https://t.co/kULzaAr8CT

— Amy (@AmyOtto8) April 7, 2018

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In California, the GOP is pretty much a lighter version of the Democratic Party. So, if there is a liberal Republican and a liberal Democrat on the ballot, or a conservative Democrat and a Republican in a red state scenario, the latter in both cases will usually win. Why should a GOP voter entertain voting for a Democrat when there is a solid conservative running in an election?

Just look at Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. He was a very liberal Republican Senator; so liberal that he’s now a Democrat. Yet, in 2006, Sheldon Whitehouse booted him because Democrats had a hard-core liberal on the ballot (and RI is a blue state), despite both Chaffee and Whitehouse being pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and strongly against the Bush tax cuts. Yet, beyond this—there are many ways to skin the electoral cat. The Democratic base was not enthused by Clinton. I don’t think they will be enthused by their 2020 choices, many of which are no-names and have rigid regional appeal. And the so-called emerging permanent Democratic majority (because public opinion doesn’t change *eye roll*) was turned off by Trump—and he still won.

Well, here are parts of the post. Debate amongst yourselves:

Trump is doing exactly what America needs him to do right now. He’s becoming increasingly conservative and outrageous by the day. Trump could have come into office with a genuinely new agenda that could have helped working people. Instead, he has spent the past year becoming a caricature of all things conservative?—?and in the meantime has alienated most of America and certainly all the growing political constituencies of the 21st century. He is turning the Republican brand toxic for millennials, women, Latinos, people of color, college-educated people, urban centers, the tech industry, and the economic powerhouses of the coasts, to name a few.

The Republican Party is playing their part perfectly, too. They completely fell for the Trump trap?—?and that’s exactly what America needed them to do.

[…]

Now the entire Republican Party, and the entire conservative movement that has controlled it for the past four decades, is fully positioned for the final takedown that will cast them out for a long period of time in the political wilderness. They deserve it.

[…]

America is desperate for a functioning political supermajority that can break out of our political stasis and boldly move ahead and take on our many 21st-century challenges. The nation can’t take much more of our one step forward, one step back politics that gets little done despite the need for massive changes.

America today has many parallels to America in the 1850s or America in the 1930s. Both of those decades ended with one side definitively winning, forming a political supermajority that restructured systems going forward to solve our problems once and for all. In the 1850s, we fought the Civil War, and the Republican Party won and then dominated American politics for 50 years. In the 1930s, the Democratic Party won and dominated American politics for roughly the same amount of time.

America today is in a similar position. Our technologies, our economy, our geopolitics are going through fundamental changes. We are facing new challenges, like climate change and massive economic inequality, that must be addressed with fundamental reforms.

America can’t afford more political paralysis. One side or the other must win. This is a civil war that can be won without firing a shot. But it is a fundamental conflict between two world views that must be resolved in short order.

California, as usual, resolved it early. The Democrats won; the Republicans lost. The conservative way forward lost; the progressive way forward began. As we’ve laid out in this series, California is the future, always about 15 years ahead of the rest of the country. That means that America, starting in 2018, is going to resolve it, too.

Whatever the case, the conclusion to all of these posts about the end of conservatism/GOP should always be wait and see. We don’t know—and frankly for the people who thought the Obama years realigned the country, brought about a high mark for liberal politics, and the marked the end of conservatism were dead wrong. In 2010, the GOP retook the House. In 2014, they recaptured the Senate—all while expanding their power at the state and local level.

Enthusiasm is surely with the Democrats—and they could do well in 2018. But Democrats have tons of candidates and division among the Left. Civil wars erupting during primaries can happen. In Texas, it already has, showing the gulf between the establishment and progressive (i.e. Bernie-ite) wings of the party is wide and the wounds are still raw. It’s quite possible the Left fumbles the ball at the goal line come Election Day. We’re over 200 days way from the midterms. I’d take this with a grain of salt, but say you do read the whole piece and blood pressures go through the roof—I redirect you to Mr. Kurt Schlichter.

TRUMP WAS RIGHT: CHILDREN SMUGGLED, TRAFFICKED FROM MIGRANT CARAVAN

Trump Was Right: Children Smuggled, Trafficked From Migrant Caravan

Watch disturbing reports on global child smuggling rings

Infowars.com – NOVEMBER 27, 2018

Multiple mainstream outlets have reported that caravan members – including children – are being exploited by sex traffickers, which confirms President Trump was right when he warned this would happen.

In a tweet from Nov. 21, the president said there were “a lot of criminals in the caravan:”

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Correspondingly, local cartels are responsible for kidnapping at least 100 members of the caravan, including children, according to British media outlet The Independent.

“Around 100 members of a refugee and migrant caravan traveling towards the U.S. have reportedly fallen victim to organized crime as they moved through Mexico,” reads the report. “The Los Zetas cartel was likely to be behind the disappearances.”

Additionally, kidnappers have offered rides on fruit trucks to the traveling migrants, according to HuffPost Mexico.

“There we began to see that fruit trucks were coming to us, of those that carry 16 to 23 tons of food, they offered us transport, charging up to 150 pesos per person, we started to document plates to images of the drivers, alert the migrants that they did not do it, but in despair people took it in.”

“All I could do was try to open the boxes of the trucks, which were locked with padlocks.”

This also sheds light on how, over the past several years, international media has reported on the sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers:

However, the U.N. reportedly “cannot” punish peacekeepers from other countries, meaning that only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators have served jail time.

MSNBC’s Eddie Glaude: “I Overestimated White People,” I Didn’t Think They Would Put Trump In Office

By Ian Schwartz

Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. said he “overestimated” white people in 2016 and didn’t think they would put someone like Donald Trump in office. Glaude expressed fear of a Trump loss and what the president and his supporters will do. He also accused the president of “doubling down” on the rhetoric that caused the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting by introducing the Fourteenth Amendment to the discussion.

“Nothing is going to get better after this midterm,” Glaude said Wednesday on MSNBC. “Everything is going to get more intense, and it may even get worse. But let me say this. Not only did he not do all the things you just laid out. He introduced birthright citizenship. He doubled down. He doubled down on what motivated them to go in there and kill 11 people. He doubled down like a moral monster.”

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: I was critical of Hillary Clinton and get hemmed up on Twitter every day for criticizing Donald Trump because people believe I’m responsible, in part, for Donald Trump being in the White House. What I did wrong in 2016 is I overestimated white people. I didn’t think white people would put him in office.

So here he is running around the country appealing to our darker angels, appealing to our hatred and fears and I’m supposed to believe that Delaware County in Ohio is not going to vote for him. That the suburbs in Pennsylvania aren’t going to vote for him? Aren’t going to vote for him in Florida?

So part of what I do know is that it’s going to require young people, it’s going to require people of color, it’s going to require African-Americans like they showed up in Alabama and Virginia. It’s going to require us to turn out in massive numbers because I made a mistake in 2016. And the evidence is not in yet. I know it sounds cynical, but this man doubled down after 11 beautiful people were shot and killed while worshiping. Jefferson Town, Kentucky, murdered, shot in the back of the head for what? For what? Some ideal of whiteness that Donald Trump represents and spews out of his mouth every single day.

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