Published on Mar 27, 2019
With Mueller done, is it time to investigate the FBI? (DEBATE)
THE FBI IS PART OF THE DEEP STATE
With the Mueller report finished and President Trump cleared of colluding with Russia, the spotlight is now on the FBI leadership that opened the investigation. RT’s Crosstalk guests think the agency has a lot to answer for.
After a two year media circus, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report cleared President Trump of colluding with Russia to rig the 2016 election, a conclusion that Trump says brings him “complete and total exoneration.”
However, constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz argued that Mueller should have never been appointed in the first place. “It was a mistake to appoint a special counsel because there was no evidence of a crime,” Dershowitz said. Rather, he argued, Mueller’s appointment by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was a knee-jerk reaction to the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.
Mueller’s probe was launched just over a week after Comey was unceremoniously fired in May 2017. Before then, the FBI had been conducting its own investigation into the supposed collusion. That investigation, Dershowitz continued, was based on lies.
A dossier of salacious gossip – gathered by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign – was presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as evidence to authorize the wiretapping of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, even though Comey later admitted he knew the dossier was unverifiable.
“I think the FISA court was defrauded,” the lawyer told RT. “You can show information to the FISA court which isn’t particularly compelling, as long as you tell the court what the source is, and alert it to the… conflicts of interest. You cannot provide material to the court, claiming it’s credible, when you yourself know that it lacks credibility.”
Troublingly, former National Security Agency leader William Binney added,
Among Republicans, talk of investigating the FBI and Department of Justice has risen above a chatter in recent days. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) told reporters on Monday that he will investigate the FBI’s alleged FISA abuse and subsequent investigation, an investigation that Trump called “an illegal takedown that failed.”
“What makes no sense to me is that all of the abuse by the Department of Justice and the FBI – the unprofessional conduct, the shady behavior – nobody seems to think that’s much important. Well that’s going to change, I hope,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) gave Graham his blessing on Tuesday, saying the issue of whether the FBI conspired to hinder Trump’s election is “a legitimate question.”
“We’re headed that way,”presidential historian Doug Wead noted.
GOOGLE Helping Beijing Build ‘Global Digital Dictatorship’…
By Gordon G. Chang
Google’s decision to help China is paving the way for Beijing’s ‘digital dictatorship.’ Ultimately, Washington must make a political decision to criminalize such collaboration.
General Joseph Dunford, America’s top military officer, has announced he will be meeting with Google representatives this week to talk about the company’s assistance to China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, first stoked the controversy over Google on March 14 during his appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military,” he said.
“We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing that there is that indirect benefit,” he added later. “Frankly, ‘indirect’ maybe not be a full characterization of the way it really is. It’s more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military.”
Google issued a firm denial in response to Dunford’s comments. “We are not working with the Chinese military,” a spokesperson said. “We are working with the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense, in many areas including cybersecurity, recruiting and healthcare.”
But Dunford is correct. The denial, even if technically accurate, is nonetheless misleading. Google maintains arrangements that it either knows or should know directly benefit the Chinese military.
For instance, in December 2017 the company announced the formation of the Google AI China Center in Beijing.
Due to Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s announced policy of “civil-military fusion,” there is no longer any meaningful distinction between civil and military research, especially in areas like AI that Xi has determined China must dominate. As Bob Work, once U.S. deputy defense secretary, said of the new facility in the Chinese capital, “Anything that’s going on in that center is going to be used by the military.”
Similarly, acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan sounded the alarm at that Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on March 14. “The fusion of commercial business with military is significant,” he said. “The technology that is developed in the civil world transfers to the military world. It’s a direct pipeline. Not only is there a transfer, there’s also systematic theft of U.S. technology that facilitates even faster development of emerging technology.”
Dunford, in comments last Thursday, pointed to the requirement of having Communist Party cells in companies. The cells, he said, will lead to the transfer of intellectual property to the Chinese military.
The Daily Beast asked Google if its AI China Center hosts a Communist Party cell but has not received a reply.
Google’s AI center in Beijing is not the only project of concern. “Google is partnering with several state entities for various projects to expedite their research,” Bandon Weichert, a national security analyst specializing in emerging technology, told The Daily Beast.
The company is already participating in AI research at Tsinghua University, one of China’s two premier institutions, and is cooperating with Peking University, the other top institution, and the University of Science and Technology of China.
The LAST RECORDS: Chicago Police Department Releases Jussie Smollett Investigation Files Before Case Is Sealed
Wednesday morning, the Chicago Police Department fulfilled a Freedom of Information Act request from WGN News and CWB Chicago, and released complete but redacted files from the Jussie Smollett investigation — the last such documents that can be expected, according to CPD’s spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi.
The documents, first posted by CWB, show the progression of a police investigation that began on January 29th, when Smollett and his friend summoned Chicago Police to Smollett’s downtown apartment to file a police report, indicating that Smollett had been assaulted and battered while walking home from a local Subway sandwich shop.
You can find File #1 on CWB’s page here, and File #2 here. Both files are heavily redacted, and were apparently resubmitted to the Chicago Police Department on Tuesday, after the Cook County State’s Attorney dropped all charges against Smollett, apparently in anticipation of FOIA requests.
There are several items in CPD’s investigative files that have not appeared in prior reporting, including that, by late January, just days after Smollett reported the incident to Chicago Police, the police had shifted their investigation, reclassifying it from an “aggravated battery” to a “public peace violation” or false police report.
By January 31st, it appears that CPD detectives had requested surveillance footage from buildings surrounding Smollett’s residence, and had determined that it was likely Smollett had either orchestrated or fabricated the “hate crime” initially reported to police.
The files also catalog CPD’s interactions with the now-infamous Osundairo brothers — the two men Smollett allegedly hired to help him carry out the attack. CPD interviewed the Osundairo brothers several times, connecting the pair to the scene of the crime through a hot sauce bottle that one brother admitted he had filled with bleach, and then poured on Smollett during the attack. A New York Post reporter later found the hot sauce bottle while poking around the scene of the alleged crime.
The brothers also indicated that a $3500 check they’d received from Smollett was for more than just “training,” which they charged only $30 to $50 per hour for.
According to the reports, police investigators and prosecutors worked hard to keep developments of the case — particularly grand jury witnesses like the Osundairo brothers — out of the public eye, driving witnesses to and from courthouses outside of downtown Chicago, so that they could testify without triggering a media frenzy.
Perhaps most interestingly, the files show that the Chicago Police Department cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the Smollett case as early as late January, as well. According to one of the files, the FBI requested — and received — a copy of a the results of a search warrant served on Smollett’s Apple iCloud account. The FBI is reportedly still conducting its own investigation into Smollett over a letter sent to Smollett at Fox Studios containing a “white powder” that turned out to be crushed Tylenol.
Although the files don’t provide much more in the way of damning evidence against Smollett, the circumstances surrounding their release are part of an interesting twist in the Smollett case. After the Cook County State’s Attorney decided to drop the 17 charges against Smollett, the court case was wiped off the books — a highly unusual move — and Smollett’s records were sealed.
According to CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, speaking to Chicago’s ABC news affiliate, Wednesday’s document release is the final release — all other documents pertinent to the investigation and case against Smollett are going under seal.
Initially, the order delivered on Tuesday was not read to apply to city or police records. An updated order, issued Wednesday morning, now covers all records pertinent to the Smollett case.
The Chicago Police have gone on the offensive against the prosecutor’s office following yesterday’s developments. In a tweet issued yesterday afternoon, Gugliemi took on Jussie Smollett’s proclamation of innocence, noting that “Chicago police detectives did an excellent investigation and their work was reaffirmed by an independent grand jury who brought 16 criminal counts. In our experience, innocent individuals don’t forget bond & perform community service in exchange for dropped charges.”
The Fraternal Order of Police — Chicago’s primary police union — has already delivered a request to the United States Attorney’s office in Chicago requesting that a federal investigaiton into the decision to clear Smollett of all charges.
SPAIN: MIGRANTS GANG RAPE 12-YEAR-OLD, LET HER FRIEND GO BECAUSE SHE’S MUSLIM
Residents accuse local mayor of covering up the attack
MARCH 27, 2019
A group of migrants in Spain subjected a 12-year-old girl to a brutal gang rape but let her friend go because she was a Muslim, with residents complaining that the Mayor of the town helped cover up the incident.
The incident occurred on March 18th last year but full details only just came to light in a report by Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
According to the report, the attack in Azuqueca de Henares began when the 12-year-old girl was playing with several friends in the Lavadero de Azuqueca park just after 1pm in the afternoon.
A group of Moroccan youths and one Nigerian then arrived, some of whom were known to the victim.
The youths then kidnapped the girl and one of her friends, taking them to an abandoned building nearby. After a discussion in Arabic that lasted several minutes, the perpetrators decided to let her friend go free because she was “North African” and a Muslim.
The youths then took the Spanish girl to a bathroom, knocked her down, undressed her, held down her hands and feet, covered her mouth and then began to anally rape her one by one.
https://bit.tube/play?hash=QmWJ3q9KWQ5xF6WDTYp5EVQpXJ8jtgeesTLGLYHPqdGfhi&channel=251530
At least 5 different individuals took part in the attack, according to the victim, one of whom was 18-years-old and therefore legally an adult.
The girl screamed out as she was then raped vaginally. Her friends who were outside attempted to intervene but were threatened to stay away by one of the suspects who was carrying a stick.
“Anyone who comes in doesn’t come out,” he told the girls.
The attack lasted a full 45 minutes before the victim was allowed to leave.
Three of the youths involved in the attack received 3 years of “confinement,” while one of the adults involved received “preventive detention”. Another adult involved in the attack is still at large.
Local municipal groups wrote a letter condemning Mayor Jose Luis Blanco, who they accused of helping to cover up the full details of the incident. No official details were released about the incident, with the newspaper learning of it via pupils at the local school.
Meet The Michelle Obama Chief Of Staff Who Kept Jussie Out of Jail
By
Former Michelle Obama chief of staff Tina Tchen has now been exposed as the person who intervened with Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx to convince the judge to drop charges against hate hoaxer Jussie Smollett, a close friend of the Obama family.
Tchen runs the Times Up Legal Defense Fund, as reported by nextshark. By January, the fund — which focuses on sexual harassment advocacy — had raised more than $14 million.
Disgraced hate-crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett has longstanding ties to the Obamas.
Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx is pulling a favor for the Obamas by getting their “close friend” Jussie Smollett off with no charges. George Soros’ money largely helped put Foxx in office.
“If Fox wants to be D.A. or go any further, she’s going to have to kiss the Obamas’ ass,” our source in Chicago politics tells BLP.
The Chicago Sun-Times just confirmed it: “Foxx’s call to Johnson came after an influential supporter of the “Empire” actor reached out to Foxx personally: Tina Tchen, a Chicago attorney and former chief of staff for former First Lady Michelle Obama, according to emails and text messages provided by Foxx to the Chicago Sun-Times in response to a public records request.
Tchen passed Foxx’s number to a relative of the actor, and the ensuing conversations with the family member were cited by Foxx last month as the reason she recused herself from Smollett’s prosecution as the actor faces disorderly conduct charges for allegedly making a false police report.
Text messages show Tchen contacted Foxx on Feb. 1, three days after Smollett said he was jumped by two men as he walked home from a sandwich shop near his Streeterville home. Tchen texted Foxx to set up an early morning phone call.
“I wanted to give you a call on behalf of Jussie Smollett and family who I know. They have concerns about the investigation,” Tchen wrote in a text sent before 5 a.m., seeking to set up a call with Foxx before Tchen left on an 8 a.m. flight to New York.
A few hours later, Foxx received a text from a relative of Smollett, who said she’d received the number from Tchen.”
Chicago Sun-Times passage ends
The pro-Bernie Sanders group Reclaim Chicago is sweet on Foxx as a politician (Obama still hasn’t endorsed anyone).
Reclaim Chicago works for the “Bernie Sanders Revolution” in Chicago:
Here is what Reclaim Chicago had to say about the Smollett hoax verdict, in which the judge dismissed charges in return for community service:
The Jussie Smollett case is a sad commentary on our celebrity obsessed society as well the fact that real hate crimes against Black LGBTQ in Chicago each year go without the same attention from police and the media.
This article talks about the increase of racially motivated hate crimes against Black LGBTQ across the country over the past few years. Of the 57% of all race related hate crimes, 28.4% were against African Americans, and “the next most frequent targets involved sexual orientation at 17.6 percent.” The article also talks about how these victims are often not believed by police and are more likely the victims of police violence.”
Here is Jurnee Smollett Bell’s Instagram post as Barack Obama was leaving office in January 2017:
“Feeling a lot of emotions. I remember meeting then Senator @barackobama 9 years ago. I’d been invited to introduce him in Nevada during the primaries. He was the underdog, the odds were stacked against him. Said he was too young, too black, too different…he was an other. I’ve always been an other so I saw myself in him. My own relative told me I was wasting my time, going state to state, knocking on doors for this guy with the funny name. I can’t tell you how many people hung the phone up on my sister @jazzsmollettwarwell and me as we clocked in our hours, phone banking. Working as if this was a full time job, I worked for free, because this work was food for my soul. They whispered that you couldn’t do it. That we couldn’t do it. And then tried to block you even when we proved them wrong. TWICE. You will go down as the greatest president who did the most with the least help from his “congressional leaders”. So I thank you for being you. Unapologetically. Your very existence demanded that I take the limits off my own. Before you, I lived in a world of boundaries and limits. You were audacious enough to dream big, and demanded we dream even bigger. So thank you for all you’ve given us. We will keep dreaming, keeping fighting, keep knocking on doors, keep traveling and spreading the gospel truth. Because it never was about you, it was about us, the “others”. Yes we can. Yeswe did. Yes we will.#powertothepeople ✊🏽 #ThanksObama #tbt #mypresident
And here is Jussie Smollett with Obama:
CIVIL WAR: Democrat Elite Moves to Crush Grassroots Primary Challengers Before 2020
By Shane Trejo
The powers atop the Democratic Party are scared of socialist upstarts gaining steam and stopping the party from beating Trump next year
The Democratic Party elite has seen enough of its young upstarts like Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-MA). They are purging firms and consultants that are willing to work with primary challengers against incumbent Democrats heading into 2020.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) announced last week that they are blacklisting any vendors from work in the party unless they agree to a loyalty oath of sorts indicating that they will not challenge incumbent Democrats.
The form reads as follows: “I understand the above statement that the DCCC will not conduct business with, nor recommend to any of its targeted campaigns, any consultant that works with an opponent of a sitting Member of the House Democratic Caucus.”
The Intercept published an op/ed written by a far-left activist detailing how the restrictive move from the party elite is creating fissures within the grassroots heading into 2020:
“Like many women in their 20s across America, I feel inexplicably hopeful and manifestly seen when I watch Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez take on the stale and insular political dynamics of Washington…
Ocasio-Cortez’s unapologetic energy in Washington cannot be separated from her decision to run against Joe Crowley in Queens, New York. Every action Ocasio-Cortez takes carries the same fearlessness that prompted her not to wait her turn…
Yet instead of embracing Ocasio-Cortez and the fresh path she has opened, the DCCC and other national “Democratic” organizations are wrapping their arms more tightly around the heavily white, male incumbent Democrats in Washington.”
Between this and the disenfranchisement of Bernie Sanders supporters, the grassroots left is beginning to get the picture that the Democratic elite is not on their side. In fact, the Democratic brass treats their constituents in a similar manner that Republican leadership is known to treat theirs.
The New York Times received word in 2014, near the peak of the tea party phenomenon, that “top congressional Republicans and their allies” were working to “deny [Tea Party-backed candidates] any Senate primary victories, cut into their fund-raising and diminish them as a future force in Republican politics.”
“I think we are going to crush them everywhere,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said at the time, referring to tea party upstart primary challengers. “I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country.”
McConnell may have been arrogant but was not wrong in making his boast. With the one lone exception of libertarian economist Dave Brat upending Rep. Eric Cantor in Virginia, every single tea party challenger was put down in 2014. State senator Chris McDaniel came the closest to defeating incumbent Thad Cochran, but lost in a run-off election following extreme corruption. The movement would never quite recover.
“I know this: Politics doesn’t like losers. If you don’t have anything to point to, it is kind of hard to keep it going,” McConnell said of his opposition, kicking dirt into their face while they were down.
The Democratic Party elite hopes to replicate the success that the Republican Party bosses had during the Obama presidency in derailing their ascendant grassroots rebellion, but the far left is very much aware of what is happening and does not plan to go down lightly.
With the civil war ongoing for the soul of the Democratic Party, that does not bode well for their chances in 2020. The extremists in their midst will likely cause great division heading into the presidential election, and that has to be music to President Donald Trump’s ears.
Washington told Ukraine to end probe into George Soros-funded group during 2016 US election – report
An NGO co-funded by George Soros was spared prosecution in 2016 after the US urged Ukraine to drop a corruption probe targeting the group, the Hill reported, pointing to potential shenanigans during the US presidential election.
Bankrolled by the Obama administration and Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) was under investigation as part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into the misallocation of $4.4 million in US funds to fight corruption in the eastern European country.
As the 2016 presidential race heated up back in the United States, the US Embassy in Kiev gave Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko “a list of people whom we should not prosecute” as part of the probe, the Hill reported. Ultimately, no action was taken against AntAC.
Lutsenko told the paper that he believes the embassy wanted the probe nixed because it could have exposed the Democrats to a potential scandal during the 2016 election.
A State Department official who spoke with the Hill said that while the request to nix the probe was unusual, Washington feared that AntAC was being targeted as retribution for the group’s advocacy for anti-corruption reforms in Ukraine.
AntAC wasn’t just the benefactor of well-connected patrons – at the time it was also collaborating with FBI agents to uncover then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business dealings in Ukraine. Manafort later became a high-profile target of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged Russian collusion, and was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for tax fraud and other financial crimes.
Lutsenko divulged in an interview with the Hill last week that he has opened an investigation into whether Ukrainian officials leaked financial records during the 2016 US presidential campaign in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.
While AntAC may have failed to help the FBI find the Russia collusion smoking gun, the group’s activities constitute yet another link between the anti-climactic Russiagate probe and Soros, a Democrat mega-donor who bet big on Hillary Clinton taking the White House in 2016.
In 2017, the billionaire philanthropist siphoned money into a new group, the Democracy Integrity Project, which later partnered with Fusion GPS to create the now-infamous Steele dossier.
Spokespersons for AntAC and the Soros umbrella group Open Society Foundations declined to comment on the Hill’s scoop.
Ironically, the prosecutor general who had preceded Lutsenko, Viktor Shokin, resigned under pressure from Washington – which accused Shokin of corruption.
Virtuous US officials continue to make similar demands of Ukraine’s justice system. Earlier this month, Washington urged the Ukrainian government to fire its special anti-corruption prosecutor, again over accusations of administrative abuse.
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PROSECUTE THE PROSECUTORS . . .
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