Moose & Squirrel v Boris & Natasha: what's the deal with the rooskies and trumpland?

[Ball Security]

The Steele Dossier was a collection of raw intelligence which led to many allegations. Some have been publicly confirmed by the Mueller report and ODNI. Some are plausible, but not specifically confirmed, and some have been debunked but not necessarily disproven.

 

Allegations that were in the raw intelligence of the dossier that have been publicly corroborated include that Putin favored Trump over Clinton, he ordered an influence campaign to harm Clinton’s campaign and undermine the public’s trust in elections, ordered cyberattacks on both parties, and multiple Trump campaign officials had secret contacts with Russian officials.

 

To dismiss the Steele Dossier by saying it was “debunked” plays into Putin’s hands.

 

We have the world’s mightiest military several times over, but without lifting a gun, Putin has successfully been able to divide our country against ourselves, sow distrust in our elections, and weaken our democracy. How? Because, collectively, we are a culture that celebrates, encourages, and rewards ignorance.

 

 

[Jumbo]

Every now and then we'll get a more right-wing guy who's deal is come into various political threads and post an article that's either from a ridiculous source that will be properly dismissed, or something from a reasonable source that all the lefties already know and have taken into account without that leading to them being persuaded to change their overall take on the matter.

 

Usually, even the reasonably sourced effort comes off poorly in terms of the strength of the content taken in context with all the other relevant info in the public arena on the matter, and pretentious in its assumption that everyone doesn't already know about it.

 

It usually doesn't come off as thoughtful and effective rebuttal, especially when there's little actual debating and dialogue from said poster, just the posting of links.

 

Nevertheless, such posts can be judged on their individual merits with an open mind. It's been awhile since such hasn't fallen into the trolling/drive-by category but if it doesn't, then it's just fine. 

 

Since trump and maga took over the gop, this forum has evolved into a heavily non right wing group although more than a few here identity as never trump GOP, or just ex GOP, or independent, etc.

 

As I often say, the Dems as a party are full of flaws of course, but overall the GOP is so much worse  that it's a "not even close, no contest" situation to me. 

 

It's not just "politics" on the table these days when discussing these matters. It's sane v crazy,  reality v delusion, critical thinking v emotional reactivity, decency v indecency, honesty v deception, ignorance v knowledge,  and on and on in the same vein.

 

The fact that the Steele dossier was not some singular death blow, when it comes to proving "collision" between the trump campaign and "Russians" is well known here to all the lefties and has been for a lot longer than two years.

 

The fact the money from an investigative body of government was paid to some independent intelligence operative is not unusual or even  startling or "automatic proof" that all or any of information obtained is false. Use of money is a standard tool in the filed, duh. It's a case by case analysis as to its propriety and the veracity of the source and product is certainly a matter that must be established. Ball Security summarized the Steele content well in the post above.

 

And while weaknesses among the Steele materials is a real thing, guys like Durham and Bill Barr are pretty slimy in terms of dishonesty, partisan bias, and low integrity themselves.

 

I'd argue that any intelligent, rational, logical, reasonably objective mind capable of a decent level of critical thinking would find Mueller's report pretty sound in concluding there was absolutely interest from the trump campaign in getting help in most any form from Russia or any other foreign entity for that matter. In fact, I suggest all you really have to do is look at the character of all the players involved and figure it's a no brainer.

 

Now how much direct coordinated involvement actually occured is another matter. Useful, and willing, idiots in the right places don't require a lot of direct "handling." Russia can do plenty of meddling with support from trump world without direct cooperation. But I suspect there was some of that amongst lower level types, there are many examples, particularly involving social media.

 

The transcending point is that there is a mountain of evidence and valid reasoning to think there were all kinds of links between Russian actors and interests and trump world.

 

That is still the more reasonable conclusion.

 

And certainly the level of GOP embracing of Russia these days is ridiculously, and disgustingly, obvious.

 

[TradeTheBeal!]

Trump’s “private” Oval Office meet-cute with Lavrov and Sisnyiak(i can’t remember this baloney) and the Russian press in 2017 was certainly revelatory for some of us.  Photo courtesy of RT…as no western press was invited.

 

 

Edited February 23 by TradeTheBeal!

[Skins24]

3 hours ago, Bang said:

The Fat ****ing orange guy is a Russian asset. He hasn't even really tried to hide it.

 

And the biggest problem (at least with this, lol) is that he doesn't even know. To purposely be one would require a certain level of intelligence that he has not yet displayed.

 

Frontline has many amazing documentaries.

One of them, Putin and the Presidents, gives a pretty good run down of how each of our past few presidents (from Clinton to Biden) have had to deal with this man. Which is insane considering Bush and Obama were two termers.

 

Putin, being KGB, knew how to play Trump like a fiddle. Though I imagine it didn't require much.

 

[The Evil Genius]

 

[Larry]

2 hours ago, Skins24 said:

Putin, being KGB, knew how to play Trump like a fiddle. Though I imagine it didn't require much.

 

Pretty sure Putin owned Trump long before he even decided to run.  

 

Trump's been profiting from Russian money laundering for how long?  

 

And the catalogue that Trump ordered his wives from, was published by who?  

 

[Spearfeather]

23 hours ago, Jumbo said:

The fact the money from an investigative body of government was paid to some independent intelligence operative is not unusual or even  startling or "automatic proof" that all or any of information obtained is false.

 

23 hours ago, Jumbo said:

Usually, even the reasonably sourced effort comes off poorly in terms of the strength of the content taken in context with all the other relevant info in the public arena on the matter, and pretentious in its assumption that everyone doesn't already know about it.

 

I understand money being used as an incentive for informants is not earth shattering and if everyone here knew about the reward offered, and my post about the exact amount that was offered to Steele , came off as redundant or " spamish ",  my apologies.

Yes, it's a small detail in a bigger picture that includes some things outside of the dossier, and those things are fair game, but part of that bigger picture also, are the actions " mistakes " and abnormalities by the FBI with regards to the investigation. 

Strzoke, and Comey were fired, Clinesmith was punished, and they should have been, and to me there seemed to be a lack of curiosity and scrutiny by some - not all of course - but particularly in the mainstream media, applied to the FBI.

 

Trump shouldn't be giving them the fodder so to speak,  but ...

 

Basically with this ...

 

Quote

Putin has successfully been able to divide our country ...

 

To me, the FBI made it even worse. 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 24 by Spearfeather

[skinsmarydu]

My first post in this thread  

 

Simone Sanders-Townsend just said someone referred to the GOP as the "Groupies of Putin". 

Coffee up the nose moment, which is never pleasant, but worth it. 

[China]

Why Isn’t Our Media Presenting Donald Trump as America’s Modern-Day Benedict Arnold?

 

Quote

“When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero!’ It’s really creepy.”
—Malcolm Turnbull, 29th Prime Minister of Australia

 

Donald Trump needs money. Apparently, many of the documents Trump stole from the White House are still missing. Including the binder with raw intelligence about American spies in Moscow.

 

Are they his “get out of jail free” card?

It’s as if the media doesn’t want to confront the possibility that a former president and current candidate is actually a traitor. But consider the facts.

 

We are right now in the midst of the third presidential election featuring massive interference from Russian intelligence. Most recently, we found that they sent an agent to the FBI to claim that Biden had taken a bribe in Ukraine: James Comer and Jim Jordan have been running with it, trying to use this Russian disinformation to damage Biden in his run against Trump this fall.

 

Similarly, the 2020 and 2016 elections featured substantial and persistent interventions by Russian intelligence to help get and keep Trump elected. One of the first things Trump did when he became president in 2017 was to invite the Russian Foreign Minister and their ambassador to the US for a secret meeting in the White House, where he gave them a spy we and Israel ran in Syria.

 

He had dozens of private phone conversations with Putin while in the White House, for which no meaningful records exist, and at Helsinki took Putin’s side against American intelligence to lie about Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

 

He stole thousands of top-secret (and above) classified documents from the White House, transported them to Florida, and stored them in publicly-accessible locations at Mar-a-Lago. It’s the perfect way to hand off intelligence to agents of foreign governments without getting caught.

 

He lied to both the National Archives, the FBI, and the American people about them. And now apparently many are missing.

 

Did Trump sell them already? Does he now have an overseas account with the hundreds of millions he’ll need to pay off his judgements? Or is he planning to sell documents that the FBI hasn’t yet found?

 

Prosecutors say that roughly 48,000 people visited Mar-a-Lago between the time in 2021 when Trump brought those documents from Washington to Florida and May 2022, when the FBI finally recovered as many as they could find. Of those people, only 2,200 had any sort of identity verification done, and only 2,900 passed through magnetometers that may have detected spying or photographing equipment.

 

For example, a female Chinese national, Yujing Zhang, flew into the US and went to Mar-a-Lago.

 

When she was finally caught by the Secret Service (after having her photo taken with Trump the day before on his golf course), they discovered on her person four mobile phones, a laptop, an external hard drive, and a thumb drive that was later discovered to contain spyware. There were, back in her hotel room, an additional 9 USB drives, five SIM cards for burner phones, and a bug-tracking device that could identify hidden cameras and microphones.

 

She claims she’s just a tourist and is now back in China; nobody knows how much time she spent in any of the many publicly-available rooms where Trump had stored our nation’s most sensitive and secret documents, including those involving nuclear war and spying on Russia and China.

 

And there was the notorious Russian-speaking Ukrainian woman, Inna Yashchyshyn, who went by the pseudonym Anna de Rothschild (complete with fake passport) to gain entrance to Mar-a-Lago. She was photographed on the golf course with Trump and Lindsay Graham, before spending hours wandering around Mar-a-Lago doing nobody-knows-what.

 

As former CIA director John Brennan said:

 

Quote

“I’m sure Mar-a-Lago was being targeted by Russian intelligence and other intelligence services over the course of the last 18 or 20 months, and if they were able to get individuals into that facility, and access those rooms where those documents were and made copies of those documents, that’s what they would do.”

 

Most likely “Anna” and Yujing Zhang were among the least competent of the spies who visited Mar-a-Lago. The good ones we’ll probably never know about.

 

For example, because Trump thinks it’s “upper class” to have people working at his resort who have “European” accents, the bug-infested resort hired scores of young people from European countries, typically paying them between $11 and $12 an hour.

 

That would present another great opportunity for foreign governments to get their people installed there in ways that would give them plenty of time to peruse the secret documents Trump was keeping out in the open.

 

Most concerning, though, is a 10-inch-thick binder of raw intelligence and assessments of Russia’s efforts to help Trump become president in 2016, which included reports and details from American spies in Moscow. The binder is missing, and multiple American spies and people working for US intelligence have been murdered. CNN reported about six weeks ago:

 

Quote

“The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.

 

“The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.”

 

Click on the link for more

Edited February 29 by China

[TheGreatBuzz]

A friend at VoteVets is hitting people up for short video. Who wants to write a 60 second script for me?

 

 

PS. @PleaseBlitz you gonna be in DC March 12th? 

[PleaseBlitz]

6 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

PS. @PleaseBlitz you gonna be in DC March 12th? 

 

Yes.  Why?

[TheGreatBuzz]

10 minutes ago, PleaseBlitz said:

 

Yes.  Why?

 

They're doing a demonstration that day. Wanna grab lunch?  😂

[PleaseBlitz]

Just now, TheGreatBuzz said:

 

They're doing a demonstration that day. Wanna grab lunch?  😂

 

Sure, I could do lunch.  Could also do drinks later.  Is the demonstration near the White House?  That would be most convenient. 

[TheGreatBuzz]

4 minutes ago, PleaseBlitz said:

 

Sure, I could do lunch.  Could also do drinks later.  Is the demonstration near the White House?  That would be most convenient. 

 

The Capital. I'll let you know if I hear more.

[PleaseBlitz]

17 hours ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

 

The Capital. I'll let you know if I hear more.

 

Can we brainstorm ideas for a sign for you to bring to the protest?  

[PleaseBlitz]

“PUTIN SUCKS

BOEBERT SWALLOWS”

 

 

[TheGreatBuzz]

6 minutes ago, PleaseBlitz said:

“PUTIN SUCKS

BOEBERT SWALLOWS”

 

 

 

Meh. We can do better.

 

So you're making this sign and I'll just come pick it up, right?

[China]

More winning for Trump: 

 

Trump is ordered to pay legal fees after failed lawsuit over the Steele dossier

 

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been ordered to pay a six-figure legal bill to a company founded by a former British spy that he unsuccessfully sued for making what his lawyer called “shocking and scandalous” false claims that harmed his reputation.

 

A London judge, who threw out the case against Orbis Business Intelligence last month saying it was “bound to fail,” ordered Trump to pay legal fees of 300,000 pounds ($382,000), according to court documents released Thursday.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

The Sneaky Snakey World of Donald Trump’s America

 

I’ll bet you didn’t know that it is possible in this great big world of ours to live a comfortable life being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing basically nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly, but the money you get is unattached to normal stuff we are all familiar with like a job, complete with job-related duties and office hours and a W-2 and maybe even a job title. The money can thus be described by what it is not, which is aboveboard and visible. Instead, this kind of money often ends up in the kinds of accounts said to be “controlled” by you or others, which is to say, accounts which may not, and often do not, have your name on them. 

 

We could describe this kind of money, then, as free floating. It’s just out there. Your function in life, if you are a man like our friend the lying Russian agent and Republican witness Alexander Smirnoff, is to make sure that some of it becomes “controlled” by you.

 

The Guardian published a fascinating story tonight in which it connected money paid to Mr. Smirnoff to firms connected to what the paper called “Trump associates.” It’s not a small amount of free-floating money, either. It’s $600,000, and according to The Guardian, it was paid to Smirnoff by a company called Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT) back in 2020, the same year he began his career as a witness against the family of Joe Biden by lying to the FBI.

 

There’s got to be a whole industry that just has a bunch of people sitting in an office somewhere coming up with company names like Economic Transformation Technologies and selling them to people, almost always men, who are setting up businesses and need something to call them. Note the “ies” on the end of the word “Technology” in the company title. That sort of clever twist—that it isn’t just one technology we’re talking about, but several, maybe even many—is what you’re paying for. 

 

Now why would ETT want to pay $600,000 dollars to a person who has been described as a “criminal, fixer and agent” who has two passports and ends up having connections to Russian intelligence agencies? Six hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, but in the world of people who traffic in information about, among others, Russian oligarchs, Ukrainian energy companies, and British holding companies with interests in Dubai and elsewhere, maybe it isn’t. Smirnoff, when he was arrested recently, was described to the judge considering whether or not to give him bail, as “having access” to as much as $6 million, three million of which was said to be held in accounts “controlled by” his girlfriend.

 

Click on the link for the full story

[88Comrade2000]