Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Fox News"
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In 2015, Western European intelligence agencies began picking up evidence of communications between the Russian government and people in Donald Trump’s orbit. In April 2016, one of the Baltic states shared with then–CIA director John Brennan an audio recording of Russians discussing funneling money to the Trump campaign. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of the U.K. intelligence agency GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief Brennan on intercepted communications between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The contents of these communications have not been disclosed, but what Brennan learned obviously unsettled him profoundly. In congressional testimony on Russian election interference last year, Brennan hinted that some Americans might have betrayed their country. “Individuals who go along a treasonous path,” he warned, “do not even realize they’re along that path until it gets to be a bit too late.” In an interview this year, he put it more bluntly: “I think [Trump] is afraid of the president of Russia. The Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult.”
In July 2016, a loose-knit community of computer scientists and cybersecurity experts discovered a strange pattern of online traffic between two computer servers. One of those servers belonged to Alfa Bank in Moscow and the other to the Trump Organization. Alfa Bank’s owners had “assumed an unforeseen level of prominence and influence in the economic and political affairs of their nation,” as a federal court once put it.
The analysts noted that the traffic between the two servers occurred during office hours in New York and Moscow and spiked in correspondence with major campaign events, suggesting it entailed human communication rather than bots. More suspiciously, after New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau asked Alfa Bank about it but before he brought it up with the Trump campaign, the server in Trump Tower shut down. The timing strongly implied Alfa Bank was communicating with Trump..
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Russian propaganda and disinformation is bad enough as it is, but it's even worse when it's coming from fox, the current president, and his defenders like Graham, Nunes, Jordan, and Rudy. It should be reported that these traitors are all willing partners in Russia's disinformation campaign on America. And they should be treated as a threat to America, because that's exactly they are. They are all carrying water for Putin. By spreading Russian GRU lies, conspiracies, and propaganda, they have all become Putin's proxies here in America.
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For decades, raitor Trump has laundered billions of dollars for Russian organized crime figures and other oligarchs. Ultimately Trump's involvement with Russia's criminal underworld created an opening for Putin and his agents to manipulate and control him.
Trump has had contacts with the Russian mafia for 35 years. His properties have laundered money for them. The Russian mafia are connected to Russian intelligence. They were and still are, living and working in Trump's buildings. Trump has even partnered with them. There are many ways in which he’s compromised..
After the fall of the Soviet Union, you suddenly had trillions of dollars that have to be laundered. It opened the floodgates for the Russian mafia and for the oligarchs. A good way to launder that money is through real estate. Trump made it clear he was ready, willing and able to do that without asking any questions. Trump was $4 billion in debt after his casinos failed in Atlantic City. He came back thanks to the Russians.
The Republicans are also implicated. The Russians didn't just go after Trump: They went after the entire Republican Party. There is Russian money going into the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, the NRA, and then to Republican officials and candidates directly.
When Trump first visited Russia in 1987, he immediately came back and took out full page ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and Washington Post. These ads were very anti-NATO, anti-Western alliance, and that was exactly what the Russians want, even today.
Back in 1984, Trump had started laundering money for the Russian mafia. In ‘92, the Russian mafia had people like Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov, who was one of the key figures under the mob boss Mogilevich. The FBI was looking all over for him but he was actually in Trump Tower. A lot of the Russian mobsters were going to Trump Tower to launder money as well. Trump was completely overextended in Atlantic City. He ended up $4 billion in debt. He had no future at all until the Russians came to his aid.
Russian Oligarchs made Trump an offer that he could not refuse. Suddenly Trump started dealing with cash, because he couldn’t loans from American banks, except some from Deutsche Bank. He was so bankrupt that almost no Western bank could loan him a dime.
There were ways of laundering money that Trump had. The financing of building projects that involved $400 million or $500 million to build a skyscraper. Once the building was built, they could sell the condos through the shell companies, and limited liability corporations. This was done anonymously in all cash transactions with the Russian oligarchs and other people affiliated with the Russian mafia. They owned Trump before he ever met Putin. Trump became close with the oligarchs who were in turn close to Putin.
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David Bogatin:
In 1984, Soviet Army veteran David Bogatin purchased five luxury condos in Trump Tower for $6 million. The purchase was so substantial that Trump himself attended the closing. Three years later, he absconded to Austria and Poland after the discovery of his gasoline-bootlegging scheme, and his five apartments were seized by the government because he bought them to hide and launder money. In 1992, he became the first criminal returned to the US from Poland since the extradition treaty signed in 1927. A Senate investigation indicated he was a major figure in the NY Russian mafia..
Anatoly Golubchik, Vadim Trincher and Michael Sall:
These three individuals were convicted of taking part in an enormous illicit betting and money-laundering syndicate that ran out of Trump Tower. Each of them was a Trump condo owner, and operated out of Vadim Trincher’s Trump Tower apartment just three floors down from Trump’s penthouse. The Taiwanchik-Trincher Organization was a “nationwide criminal enterprise with strong ties to Russia and Ukraine” run by Anatoly Golubchik and Trincher, according to the Justice Department. They ran a sportsbook catering to Russian oligarchs and laundered tens of millions in proceeds through shell companies in Cyprus. Michael Sall helped them make domestic investments with the laundered capital.
Tevfik Arif:
Tevfik Arif was a former Soviet economist that built a chain of luxury hotels in Turkey and Kazakhstan, and a Bayrock partner involved in the Trump SoHo deal, which operated out of the 24th floor of Trump Tower NY In 2010, Arif was arrested by Turkish prosecutors and charged with setting up a prostitution ring.
Vyacheslav Ivankov:
Vyacheslav Ivankov implemented a money laundering scheme set up by the “boss of bosses” in the Russian mafia, Semion Mogilevich. Mogilevich arranged Ivankov’s release from a Siberian gulag, and soon afterward he went to NY where he presided over the Russian mob’s expansion in the States. He was known for torturing victims, and bragging about the murders he arranged. Ivankov was notoriously difficult to track, compared to a ghost by one FBI agent. The FBI discovered he made regular visits to the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, and was living in a luxury condo at Trump Tower. After being convicted of extortion in 1997, he was jailed for nine years and seven months. He died in 2009 at the age of 69 after being shot several times leaving a restaurant in Moscow..
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In her new book, Trump's niece says Trump was scarred by his father and developed habits of lying and self-deception that shadowed him into the White House.
"This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism," Mary Trump writes in her book. "Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be," she writes.
"In Donald's mind, even acknowledging an inevitable threat would indicate weakness. Taking responsibility would open him up to blame. Being a hero – being good – is impossible for him," she writes in the book.
Mary Trump, a 55-year-old psychologist, blames Trump's father for giving Donald his bad habits. Fred Trump Sr was a cold and forbidding patriarch who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps – demanding Trump to follow less-than-scrupulous real estate practices and eventually propping him up if his own initiatives failed.
"When things turned south in the late 1980s, Fred could no longer separate himself from his son's brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested," Mary Trump writes.
"His monster had been set free."
In the book she says that after Trump announced his White House run in 2015, Trump's sister, retired appeals court judge Maryanne Trump Barry, mocked him.
“He’s a clown – this will never happen,” Judge Barry said.
She also writes that In order to get into the prestigious University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, the future president paid someone to take his SAT.
"To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him," Mary Trump wrote. "That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records."
"The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor," she said. "Although more powerful people put Donald into the institutions that have shielded him since the very beginning, it's people weaker than he is who are keeping him there."
Putin, Kim Jong Un and Mitch McConnell, "all whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred," recognized after the election that Donald Trump's personal history and personality flaws made him vulnerable to manipulation, Mary Trump writes.
"His pathologies have rendered him so simple-minded that it takes nothing more than repeating to him the things he says to and about himself dozens of times a day – he's the smartest, the greatest, the best – to get him to do whatever they want, whether it's imprisoning children in concentration camps, betraying allies, implementing economy-crushing tax cuts, or degrading every institution that's contributed to the United States' rise and the flourishing of liberal democracy."
Trump's initial response to the coronavirus "underscores his need to minimize negativity at all costs," Mary Trump writes.
"Fear – the equivalent of weakness in our family – is as unacceptable to him now as it was when he was three years old," she said.
She points to Gov. Cuomo's response to his state's outbreak of COVID-19 cases as an example of "real leadership," further revealing the president as a "petty, pathetic little man – ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost to his own delusional spin."
At the end, Mary Trump writes "Donald isn't really the problem after all" – it is his enablers, from his father to the celebrity media to the congressional Republicans who acquitted him of impeachment.
"This is the end result of Donald's having continually been given a pass and rewarded not just for his failures but for his transgressions – against tradition, against decency, against the law, and against fellow human beings," she writes.
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Trump’s failure to respond to the coronavirus pandemic didn’t begin with the administration’s inability to send out the millions of test kits and the protective medical gear for health care workers. It didn’t start with Trump’s reckless and irresponsible messaging downplaying the crisis even as it’s worsened, nor with his mid-March insistence that social distancing measures could be lifted by Easter.
It began in April 2018 — more than a year and a half before the SARS virus. The Trump administration began dismantling the team in charge of pandemic response, firing its leadership and disbanding the team in spring 2018.
The cuts, along with Trump’s repeated calls to cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other public health agencies, made it clear that the Trump wasn’t prioritizing the federal government’s ability to respond to disease outbreaks.
Trump is now doing everything that he can to try and deflect blame and rewrite history.
Testing is one of the most crucial steps in battling epidemics. It lets health officials identify the infected and isolate them. They can then trace that sick person’s recent contacts to make sure those people aren’t sick and to get them into quarantine as well.
March 30, Trump said, "We have done more tests, by far, than any country in the world, by far."
He complained that his administration wasn't getting enough credit for overcoming what he claimed was a broken test system that he inherited. Both of those claims were blatant lies.
South Korea, which has been widely praised for its response to coronavirus, tested more than 66,000 people within a week of the first community transmission within its borders. By comparison, the US took roughly three weeks to complete that many tests.
And it was impossible for Trump to have inherited a broken testing system for COVID-19, when the coronavirus did not exist until late last year.
"What President Obama did leave Trump, was a global health infrastructure that we had set up, informed by the lessons of the Ebola outbreak,” Ben Rhodes, Former Deputy National Security Adviser under Obama said, referring to the NSC pandemic directorate that was dismantled by the Trump in 2018.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed. She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”
Trump has defended his record, arguing, “I’m a "businessperson." I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”
But experts argue that’s not how pandemic preparedness works, and that's definitely not how a virus works. “You build a fire department ahead of time,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security stated. “You don’t wait for a fire.”
Trump, being the stable genius that he is, believed it was smarter to wait and put together a fire department, AFTER a five alarm fire starts.
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On April 18, 2019, a redacted copy of Mueller’s report was released to the public. The Mueller report builds on the U.S. intelligence conclusion that there were two campaigns to elect Trump— one run by Trump and one run by the Russian government. The Mueller report clearly identified connections between the Trump campaign and Russia...
A total of 272 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia-linked operatives were identified, including at least 38 meetings. We now know that at least 33 high-ranking campaign officials and Trump advisers had or were at least aware of contacts with Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition, including Trump himself, Don Jr, Manafort, Flynn, Jared, Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Roger Stone, just to name a few. But what's worse, is the fact that they all lied about these contacts. None of these contacts were ever reported to the proper authorities. Instead, the Trump team tried to cover them up, every single one of them.
The question every American should be asking is why were there so many contacts(272) between Trump’s people and Russian officials and operatives, and why did Trump and his people lie about those contacts?
Helsinki July 16, 2018.
Trump: "My people came to me, Dan Coates came to me, and some others, they said they think it's Russia, I have President Putin, he just said it's not Russia . I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be. I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today."
Make no mistake, Putin is America's enemy, and not because we want him to be, he's America's enemy because that's what he has chosen to be. Trump is a Russian asset, and not because that's what we want him to be, he's a Russian asset because that's what he has chosen to be. We should treat them both accordingly with the choices that they have made..
Semper Fi...
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Trump looks, acts, and sounds like a mad man, and he's turned his white house into Barter Town from Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome.. It's nonstop chaos, pandemonium, betrayal, back-stabbing, buffoonery, thievery, treason, upheaval, nepotism, cronyism, bedlam, and sanctioned lawlessness.
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Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA and National Security Agency, said Kushner, who discussed plans with the Russan Ambassador, to establish a secret communication channel with the Kremlin — using Russian facilities — without any monitoring by the U.S. was “off the map” and like nothing he has seen in his lifetime. “What manner of ignorance, chaos, hubris, suspicion, contempt would you have to have to think that doing this with the Russian ambassador was a good or an appropriate idea?” Hayden stated.
On December 13th, 2016, at Russian Ambassador Kislyak’s urging, Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, a Russian banker who is close to Putin. Again, what jumps out from Kushner’s account of the meeting is the easy access that the Russians had to Trump's people —“I agreed to meet Mr. Gorkov because the Russian Ambassador has been so insistent,” and “said he had a direct relationship with” Putin, Kushner noted—and the obvious attempts to soften up Trump’s closest aides and family members. Gorkov, whose bank, Vnesheconombank, was affected by the Obama Administration’s sanctions against Russia..
Hayden was also convinced the Trump Tower meeting and Kushner’s secret meetings with the Russian Ambassador was a classic “soft approach” by Russian intelligence. Hayden argued that the meeting “is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like,” and that it may have been the “green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election.”
Hayden explained that the Russians would have learned several things from the approach.
No. 1 “Would they take the meeting? So, then you get the willingness.. No. 2, would they report the meeting?” Hayden suggested that Russian intelligence was sophisticated enough to know whether the Trump campaign reported the meeting to the F.B.I., which it didn’t. Not only did they not report the meeting, they lied about the meeting when asked. Kushner even lied about the meetings on his security clearance application. So, while Kushner and Don. Jr claimed that the meetings were irrelevant, from a Russian intelligence perspective it would have been seen as a clear signal. “At the end, they have established that these guys are willing,” Hayden said, pausing. “How do I put this? They did not reject a relationship.”
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On May 17, 2017, during a White House meeting days after Trump’s election, Obama warned Trump about Flynn, but Trump proceeded with hiring Flynn anyway. Longtime Trump confidant Chris Christie also directly advised Trump against hiring Flynn.
“If I were president-elect of the United States, I wouldn’t let General Flynn into the White House, let alone give him a job,” Christie said in 2017.
A number of red flags were raised about Flynn, beginning with his unusual paid trip to Moscow for an RT gala in December 2015 — an event in which he infamously sat directly next to Putin.
Both US and British intelligence officers were troubled about Flynn’s role in the Trump administration, given his dealings with Russia. But Trump being a traitor, and the very "stable genius" that he is, ignored all the red flags and decided to make Flynn his national security adviser anyway.
During the transition period, Flynn had phone calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in which he advised Kislyak not to respond to new sanctions Obama had placed on Russia for interfering (on Trump’s behalf) in the presidential election. Not only did Flynn undermine Obama’s (a sitting President) foreign policy, he then lied about it, telling FBI investigators during an interview conducted days after Trump’s inauguration that he and Kislyak did not discuss sanctions.
Flynn’s lies to the FBI prompted the DoJ to warn Trump ONCE AGAIN about Flynn. On January 26, 2017, acting AG Sally Yates, personally informed the White House that Flynn lied to the FBI about his calls with Kislyak, and therefore was at risk of being blackmailed by Russia. But instead of immediately taking action against Flynn, Trump instead rewarded Sally Yates for doing her job, and for her due diligence in warning him about Flynn, by firing her 3 days later. Let that sink in for a moment....take your time.
And now Trump the traitor has the unmitigated gall to try and blame Obama, and everyone else under the sun, for not warning him about Flynn.
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Today, Trump claimed that his authority is total. He finally admitted to seeing himself as a dictator.
At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation. In the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention, a lady asked Dr. Franklin: “Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
Benjamin Franklin replied: “A republic....if you can keep it.”
Today, Trump and Republicans are telling the American people that we can no longer keep it.
What say you my fellow Americans?
"The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you, would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked, but only that they be spineless.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“The actions of government, we are told, bear down only on imprudent souls who provoke them. The man who resigns himself and keeps silent is always safe. Reassured by this worthless and specious argument, we do not protest against the oppressors. Instead we find fault with the victims. Nobody knows how to be brave even prudentially. Everyone stays silent, keeping his head low in the self-deceiving hope of disarming the powers that be by his silence. People give despotism free access, flattering themselves they will be treated with consideration. Eyes to the ground, each person walks in silence the narrow path leading him safely to the tomb.”
― Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments
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