Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby Windy » Fri Mar 24, 2017 4:17 pm

Aquila89 wrote:Devin Nunes, House Intelligence Chairman said that members of Trump's team may have been surveilled incidentally, when they communicated with foreign target of U.S. surveillance. This, as Nunes himself has said does not prove Trump's claim, that Obama personally ordered a wiretap of the phones at Trump Tower.

So Trump supporters (Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart, etc.) naturally declared that Trump has been vindicated. Bill Mitchell tweeted: ""Trump always ends up being right. It's almost a little freaky." Trump retweeted this. Yes, he claims to be infallible now.

What does it matter if Trump's bullshit is disproven? His supporters just latch on something vaguely similar to what he said and declare that he's always right about everything, forever.


Funny how as soon as the claims of Obama wiretapping come out, he flees to Polynesia. Makes you wonder...
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby blehblah » Sun Mar 26, 2017 1:38 pm

Nunes is certainly doing a bang-up job of... erm... something.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... evin-nunes

Nunes has been under scrutiny over the past week for other reasons. He is reported to have gone missing on Tuesday night, under mysterious circumstances. The Daily Beast reported that Nunes received a message on his phone while travelling in a Uber car with a senior committee staffer in Washington, and then left the car abruptly without telling the staffer where he was going.

The next day he called a press conference, without telling his senior staff what he was going to say, and announced that he had seen “dozens” of intelligence reports that showed US intelligence agencies had “incidentally collected” material on members of the Trump transition team.

[...]

Nunes did not share the intelligence material he claimed to have seen with Democratic members of his committee, and instead outraged them further by briefing Trump. He said later: “I had a duty and obligation to tell him because, as you know, he’s taking a lot of heat in the news media.”


Nunes is doing a bang-up job of demonstrating why an independent investigation would be helpful.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/24/politics/ ... elligence/

Nunes said House investigators are still negotiating when Manafort will testify and whether he will testify in an open hearing or in a closed briefing.


Nunes has actually said Manafort can decide if he wants it public or private, which is a bit nuts. It is interesting that Manafort suddenly wants to clear the air.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/21/politics/ ... t-ukraine/

Leshchenko has built a career exposing political corruption in Ukraine, first as an investigative journalist and now as a lawmaker. He often receives tips and documents, sometimes mailed anonymously to his office.

On Tuesday, Leshchenko laid out his case to reporters in a press conference holding up copies of the document and the Party of Regions ledger side by side: "This transaction was a payment for political consultancy according to the Black Ledger. But this fake invoice and fake contract signed by Paul Manafort is not about political consulting. It's about selling of computers."

Asked if he believes this is evidence of money laundering in a CNN interview, he said: "I believe this issue needs to be investigated and this issue has to be checked. But in my experience, this looks like money laundering and wire fraud."


Money laundering, you say?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... story.html

The U.S. government investigation of President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, crossed the Atlantic earlier this year to the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus, once known as a haven for money laundering by Russian billionaires.

Treasury agents in recent months obtained information connected to Manafort's transactions from Cypriot authorities, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The request was part of a federal anti-corruption probe into Manafort's work in Eastern Europe. The Cyprus attorney general, one of the country's top law enforcement officers, was also aware of the American request.


This is worth a listen (I caught about half of it in the car the other day):

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-33 ... -1.4035193

It has been pointed-out that plenty of backroom types do consulting gigs in foreign places when their party is out of power. However, it seems to have been well known that Manafort was into far shadier shit than the usual consulting. His involvement in Ukraine, ties back to Russia, and involvement in situations widely known to be part of Russian money laundering, all smells pretty rotten.

But, hey, according to Spicer, Manafort was just a minor player, a volunteer stuffing envelopes, or something.

Who knows what Trump knew, and when. I agree with the guy interviewed by CBC radio, though... the FBI will inevitably grind through everything, and no matter what Trump's team drops in the way, the FBI will get to the bottom of it. Maybe there's not much to it, but it is not looking good.
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby cmsellers » Thu Mar 30, 2017 5:40 am

So this whole thing is looking increasingly like Watergate, and the White House Counsel under Nixon, John Dean says the White House is in "coverup mode."

The chair of the House Intelligence Comittee, Devin Nunes, has been acting as if he was involved in the Russia communications himself, and the House investigation has ground to a halt, while the FBI and Senate investigations are still ongoing.

It seems very clear that this is a scandal which is going to damage the Trump administration bigly and lead to a lot of investigations, possibly even prison time for some Trump aides. The big question is whether it will be possible to make anything stick to Trump himself. I don't imagine that Trump is great at covering his tracks, so I suspect that it's the willingness of his lackeys to be fall guys which will determine if this is another Watergate or just another Iran-Contra.
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby blehblah » Thu Mar 30, 2017 2:03 pm

If I had to guess, I'd say Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort are in deep trouble.

Flynn, for fairly obvious reasons.

Manafort, for a whole lot of reasons, which are not going away.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/manaf ... ag-n739156

A bank in Cyprus investigated accounts associated with President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, for possible money-laundering, two banking sources with direct knowledge of his businesses here told NBC News.

Manafort — whose ties to a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin are under scrutiny — was associated with at least 15 bank accounts and 10 companies on Cyprus, dating back to 2007, the sources said. At least one of those companies was used to receive millions of dollars from a billionaire Putin ally, according to court documents.


As the article points-out, having bank accounts abroad is not illegal. On the other hand, if your activity is raising red flags at banks in freaking Cyprus, you should take a long, hard look at your activity and wonder whom else may find that activity worthy of further inspection.

Offshore banking in Cyprus is not illegal, and the island has long been known as a hub for moving money in and out of Russia. Several U.S. lawmakers have raised questions about Manafort's business dealings in Cyprus.

A spokesman for Manafort told NBC News in a statement that all the accounts were set up at the direction of clients in Cyprus, a common banking center for Russians and Ukrainians, "for a legitimate business purpose."


Hmmm... let's see if investigators are satisfied with the "totes legit, ya'll" reasoning.

There is a whole bunch of shady stuff, even if it is sometimes hard to tell what's real, and what's being blown out of proportion since there's quite a feeding frenzy about anything between the Trump team and Russia.

Like what Kushner was up to.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/29/politics/ ... sian-bank/

When President Donald Trump's son-in-law and aide Jared Kushner voluntarily appears before the Senate intelligence committee, he will describe his interactions with Russians during the transition as a point man "looking for the right person to engage with on Russia," and nothing more, according to a source familiar with what transpired.

[...]

In their meeting, Kislyak suggested Kushner also meet with Gorkov, whom Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed in February 2016 as chairman of VneshEconomBank, a Russian state development bank that has been under US sanctions since July 2014.

The bank, known as VEB, and its ties to the Russian government could have easily been identified in an internet search. But the Trump transition "had no mechanism for vetting anyone" and it was not done, the source said.


Okay, maybe it was nothing - Kushner simply didn't Google who he was meeting with, which is a Russian bank that the keen observer will note is subject to US sanctions. I mean, Kislyak suggested it, and obviously a bro wouldn't let a bro down.

Probably, it's just a political thing... and... erm...

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/29/politics/ ... veb-agent/

As federal prosecutors in New York prepared their case against a man accused of covertly working for Russian intelligence two years ago, they began raising questions about an unidentified "third party" paying the defendant's legal bills.

The defendant's benefactor turned out to be VneshEconomBank, the same financial institution at the center of a recent controversy over its chairman's meeting with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and one of his top White House advisers.

On the one hand, it should be no surprise that bank, also known as VEB, was paying for Evgeny Buryakov's legal defense -- Buryakov was one of its employees, after all.

But what made the matter more complicated was that Buryakov was charged with illegally gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government and the Russian government owned the bank that provided his cover.


Well, okay, that might look bad, but maybe we should think of it this way; the bank employed the defendant, so they were being a caring, compassionate company - like the ACLU of Russian banks. Why do you hate the ACLU?
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby Cobra-D » Thu Mar 30, 2017 4:24 pm

Apparently FBI director Comey wanted to go public about the investigation as far back as June, even goIng so far as writing up op-ed but was stopped by the Obama administration because they felt it would be better if it was collaborated with other agencies before going public.

So pretty much Trump winning is Obama's fault
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby Kivutar » Thu Mar 30, 2017 4:27 pm

Cobra-D wrote:So pretty much Trump winning is Obama's fault


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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby cmsellers » Thu Mar 30, 2017 5:33 pm

Part of me is developing an elaborate conspiracy theory in which Obama is playing three-dimensional chess.

Clearly, Obama saw that the Republicans' obstructionism was working, and the only way to take back the state houses and the House was to expose them for the fraud they are. So he subtly helped Trump win, gambling that the Republicans wouldn't get anything done once they were in power, and the whole Russia-ties investigation would blow apart the Trump presidency. In fact, maybe his roasting of Trump back in 2013 was intended to provoke him to run, because he knew Donald Trump is the only man who could destroy the Republican Party.

And now Obamacare is safe, the Republican Party is alienating Millennials like you wouldn't believe, and all that it cost him was Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court. Obama is winning so hard you won't believe how hard he's winning, people.
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby IamNotCreepy » Thu Mar 30, 2017 6:02 pm

cmsellers wrote:Part of me is developing an elaborate conspiracy theory in which Obama is playing three-dimensional chess.

Clearly, Obama saw that the Republicans' obstructionism was working, and the only way to take back the state houses and the House was to expose them for the fraud they are. So he subtly helped Trump win, gambling that the Republicans wouldn't get anything done once they were in power, and the whole Russia-ties investigation would blow apart the Trump presidency. In fact, maybe his roasting of Trump back in 2013 was intended to provoke him to run, because he knew Donald Trump is the only man who could destroy the Republican Party.

And now Obamacare is safe, the Republican Party is alienating Millennials like you wouldn't believe, and all that it cost him was Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court. Obama is winning so hard you won't believe how hard he's winning, people.


I'm not so much worried about things in the long run, because Trump is certainly going to fail, and the pendulum will swing hard to the left. Progress marches on.

What I'm worried about is all the destruction and suffering it will take before he fails hard enough.
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Fri Mar 31, 2017 12:36 am

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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby Kivutar » Fri Mar 31, 2017 1:17 am

Deathclaw_Puncher wrote:Mike Flynn offers to testify in exchange for immunity.


And there weren't any takers.

They've got the goods, with or without him.
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby Cobra-D » Fri Mar 31, 2017 1:19 am

Deathclaw_Puncher wrote:Mike Flynn offers to testify in exchange for immunity.



Damn beat me to it. Usually when someone asks for immunity they have to have something bigger to offer up, really interested to see what it could be.
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby Aquila89 » Fri Mar 31, 2017 2:46 pm

“When you are given immunity, that means that you probably have committed a crime.” - Michael Flynn in 2016
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby cmsellers » Fri Mar 31, 2017 3:03 pm

It also usually means (as Cobra said) that someone more important has committed a bigger crime.

Hopefully Flynn's not just blowing smoke, and can take down the energizer orangutang.
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby blehblah » Fri Mar 31, 2017 3:34 pm

Aquila89 wrote:“When you are given immunity, that means that you probably have committed a crime.” - Michael Flynn in 2016


There are loads of examples of Team Trump piling-on Clinton staffers about immunity.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... cde2e95c53

Yet,

Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt (excuse for big election loss), by media & Dems, of historic proportion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2017
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Re: Of Trump, Russia, and tapps

Postby Cobra-D » Fri Mar 31, 2017 8:06 pm

So before Obama left the White House officials compiled a list of document serial numbers pertaining to the Russian probe and delivered it to senior members of the senate intelligence committee. Just in case Trump tried anything funny.
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Last edited by Cobra-D on Fri Mar 31, 2017 10:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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