Quote:Mainstream Media as Arbiters of Truth
April 4, 2017

Exclusive: An angry mainstream U.S. media is shaking its fist at anyone who won't clamber onboard the Russia-gate groupthink bandwagon, reports Robert Parry.




By Robert Parry


The mainstream U.S. media is never more unctuous and unprofessional as when it asserts that it alone must be the arbiter of what is true and what is not, regardless of what the evidence shows or doesn't show.




New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)
For instance, New York Times columnist Charles W. Blow declared on Monday that the public can longer debate whether Russia leaked to WikiLeaks the emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta despite the failure of the U.S. government or private researchers to present evidence that establishes that claim as fact.


Blow acknowledged that "We are still not conclusively able to connect the dots on the question of whether there was any coordination or collusion between members of Donald Trump's campaign and the Russians … but those dots do continue to multiply at an alarming rate."


But Blow also asserted that "It is absolutely clear that the Russians did interfere in our election. This is not a debatable issue. This is not fake news. This is not a witch hunt. This happened."


Blow chastised people who still wanted evidence of this now non-debatable issue, seeing them at fault "because this fact [of the Russian meddling] keeps getting obscured in the subterfuge of deflection, misdirection and ideological finger-pointing about what has yet to be proven."


So, if you insist on asking for proof of the core allegation in Russia-gate, you are guilty of "subterfuge…, misdirection and ideological finger-pointing."


And if that indictment doesn't quiet you up, there's the column by The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr. who explains that the real victims in Russia-gate are the accusers who have promoted this guilt-by-association scandal that has impugned the integrity of a growing number of Americans who either talked to Russians or who expressed doubts about the investigation.


While the Russia-gate accusers have essentially deemed these Americans "traitors" or the Kremlin's "useful idiots" or some other derogatory phrase, Dionne sees the much greater offense coming from the people so accused who have complained about what they see as McCarthyism. Dionne writes:


"These days, any liberal who raises alarms about Trump's relationship with Russia confronts charges of McCarthyism, hysteria and hypocrisy. The inclination of many on the left to assail [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is often ascribed to partisan anger over his success in undermining Clinton's candidacy.


"There's no doubt that liberals are angry, but ask yourself: Shouldn't everyone, left, right and center, be furious over Russia's efforts to inject calumny and falsehood into the American political bloodstream?"


So, Dionne suggests that people who question the credibility of the Russia-gate allegations are somehow un-American by favoring the injection of "calumny and falsehood into the American political bloodstream." But that mainstream hostility toward skepticism has been at the heart of the Russia-bashing campaign that we have witnessed for the past several years.


Blacklisting Journalists


And, that campaign indeed has been replete with McCarthyism. You even have The Washington Post promoting a blacklist of 200 Internet news sites (including Consortiumnews.com and other prominent independent-minded outlets) as guilty of "Russian propaganda" for reporting skeptically on some State Department claims about the New Cold War.




The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Washington Post)
But Dionne also is dishonest in claiming that the alleged leaks blamed on Russia are false. The central allegation in Russia-gate is that the Russians obtained two batches of Democratic emails and released them to the American public via WikiLeaks. Even if that is the case, nothing in those emails was fabricated.


The emails represented real news including evidence that the DNC displayed improper bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders's insurgent campaign; excerpts of Hillary Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street that she was trying to hide from the voters; and revelations about pay-to-play aspects of the Clinton Foundation's dealing with foreign entities.


So, even if the Russians did give the emails to WikiLeaks although WikiLeaks denies that the Russians were the source the core reality is that the emails provided real information that the American people had a genuine right to know. But Dionne and the mainstream U.S. media have conflated this truth-telling with cases of "fake news," i.e., made-up stories that investigations have shown had no connection to Russia, simply to sleazy entrepreneurs seeking to make some money via lots of clicks. In other words, Dionne is lying or engaging in "fake news" himself.


Such phony journalism is reminiscent of other shameful chapters of the mainstream media's history of serving as propaganda conduits and marginalizing independent reporters who displayed professional skepticism toward the dangerous groupthinks of Official Washington.


A pivotal moment in the chaos that is now consuming the planet came on Feb. 6, 2003, when The Washington Post's editorial and op-ed pages presented a solid phalanx of misguided consensus that ruled out any further dissent about the existence of Iraq's WMD after Secretary of State Colin Powell presented his slam-dunk case before the United Nations the day before.


The Post's editorial board led by editorial page editor Fred Hiatt judged Powell's WMD case "irrefutable," an opinion echoed across the Post's op-ed page.




Washington Post's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.
"The evidence he [Powell] presented to the United Nations some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them," wrote Post columnist Richard Cohen. "Only a fool or possibly a Frenchman could conclude otherwise."


The Post's senior foreign policy columnist Jim Hoagland then demanded the surrender of any WMD-doubting holdouts: "To continue to say that the Bush administration has not made its case, you must now believe that Colin Powell lied in the most serious statement he will ever make, or was taken in by manufactured evidence. I don't believe that. Today, neither should you."


This enforced WMD consensus contributed to arguably the most disastrous U.S. foreign policy decision in history as President George W. Bush launched an illegal invasion of Iraq that got nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and spread bloody chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe. There was also the problem that no hidden caches of WMD were discovered.


So, you might assume that editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt and other prominent mainstream journalists who pushed the bogus WMD claims and pushed the few dissenters to the fringes of the public debate, received some appropriate punishments at least being unceremoniously fired in disgrace. Of course, if you thought that, you don't understand how the U.S. mainstream media works. To this day, Fred Hiatt is still the editorial-page editor of The Washington Post.


Slandering Dr. King


One might note, however, that historically the mainstream U.S. media has performed no better than it has in recent years.




Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, a powerful example of how dissenters have addressed injustice in America and given meaning to democracy.
Fifty years ago, on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of the most important speeches in U.S. history, taking to task American militarism and the Vietnam War. Famously and courageously, King denounced his own government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."


King, whose life was increasingly at risk, was then put at even greater risk by being denounced by The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Post blasted King for spreading what today we might call "fake news," accusing him of "sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy." The Times chimed in that King's words were "facile" and "slander" while urging him to focus instead on "the intractability of slum mores and habits," i.e. those lazy and immoral black folks. (Exactly a year later, King was shot dead.)


But you might ask, don't the Post and Times at least get the big investigative stories right and thus warn the American people about abuses to their democratic process? Well, not exactly.


Take, for example, the case of Richard Nixon conspiring with South Vietnamese leaders to sabotage President Lyndon Johnson's Paris peace talks in fall 1968 so Nixon could eke out a victory over Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon's manipulation of that election while half a million American soldiers were in the war zone was treated by the Post and Times as a conspiracy theory for nearly half a century, even as honest journalists chipped away at Nixon's denials by uncovering evidence of the deal that continued the war for another four years.


Some reporters, such as the Christian Science Monitor's Beverly Deepe, were onto the story in real time. Others, including Seymour Hersh, advanced knowledge about these events over the decades. Five years ago, I uncovered a top secret file that Johnson's National Security Adviser Walt Rostow dubbed "The X-Envelope" which contained wiretap proof of what Johnson called Nixon's "treason." Besides writing up the details, I posted the documents on the Internet so anyone could see for themselves.


Yet, as recently as last October, The New York Times ignored all this evidence when referencing the supposed "October Surprise" of 1968, citing instead of Nixon's peace-talk sabotage the fact that Johnson had ordered a bombing halt of North Vietnam. In other words, the Times was still promoting Nixon's version of the story nearly a half century later.


Only early this year, when a scholar uncovered some cryptic notes by Nixon's chief of staff H.R. Haldeman that seemed to reference Nixon's instructions regarding the sabotage did the Times finally deign to acknowledge the reality (because the Times published the finding on its op-ed page, which I guess makes it true). But the Times did so without acknowledging all the hard work that journalists had done over the years so the cryptic notes would fit into a complex puzzle that made sense.


Nor did the Times acknowledge its own role in obscuring this history for so long.


Rumor-Mongers


To add insult to the historical injury, the Times pretended that it was right to have ignored the earlier work. Times columnist Nicholas Kristof dismissively treated those decades of investigative journalism by writing: "Nixon's initiative, long rumored but confirmed only a few months ago, was meant to improve his election chances that year."




New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof.
"Long rumored"? The reality was that Nixon's perfidy had long ago been proven by independent-minded journalists but their work was ignored by The New York Times and pretty much everyone else in the mainstream media until the self-proclaimed truth monitors decided that the discovery of one new piece of the mosaic was the appropriate time to proclaim that the reality could now be accepted as a reality.


To explain the near half-century gap in the Times' failure to investigate this historic act of treason, the Times then smeared the journalists who had done the investigating as rumor-mongers.


So, in light of the mainstream media's dismal performance over the decades, what is one to make of the dictate now that we must accept that the Russians did leak the emails to WikiLeaks even if no one is showing us the evidence? It also appears that we are supposed to dismiss the contents of the emails as "fake news" (even though they are genuine) so that will buttress the narrative that Russia is undermining our democracy by disseminating "fake news."


Perhaps getting people to accept this false narrative is crucial to giving credibility to the Times' full-page ads professing the newspaper's undying love of the truth and to The Washington Post's new melodramatic slogan, "Democracy Dies in Darkness."


While there's no doubt that truth is important to an informed electorate, there is something scary when the mainstream media, which has such a checkered history of misreporting the truth, asserts that it is the one that gets to decide what the truth is.

Quote:During the transition between election and inauguration, Trump associates have phone conversations with foreign leaders. Those conversations are recorded by US intelligence agencies and turned into secret intelligence reports…

Former Obama National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, is accused of "unmasking" the names of Trump team members contained in those US intelligence reports and illegally leaking their names to the press. Bloomberg reports: "One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration."

In other words, US intelligence agencies, under Obama, were spying on Trump associatesand Rice obtained the names of those associates, which are supposed to be kept confidential.

Leaking the names to the press, in the current political atmosphere, would result in the impression that Trump associates were having improper conversations with foreign leaders, or even "colluding" with them. Lots of innuendo here.

The Susan Rice spying scandal points to what? More. Other Americans the Obama team spied on. Other Americans who were opposed to the Obama agenda. Other Americans who were critical of the Obama administration. Other Americans who were exposing the Obama administration.

For example, former CBS star investigative reporter, Sharyl Attkissonwho has sued members of the Obama team and several federal agencies. That lawsuit has just been referred to another venue by the judge in the case. He could have dismissed the suit, but he didn't. He wants it to proceed. He wants Attkisson to have her day in court.

You might remember Attkisson was uncovering highly embarrassing details about the gun-walking operation, Fast & Furious, and the attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi. She was making the Obama administration extremely uncomfortable.

But let me quote Judge Emet Sullivan's recent order transferring Attkisson's suit:

"In 2011at the same time that Ms. Attkisson was conducting investigations and issuing certain of her high-profile news reportsthe Attkissons began to notice anomalies in numerous electronic devices at their home in Virginia.' These anomalies included Ms. Attkisson's work-issued laptop computer and a family desktop computer turning on and off at night without input from anyone in the household,' the house alarm chirping daily at different times,' and television problems, including interference.' All of these electronic devices used the Verizon FiOS line installed in [the Attkissons'] home,' but Verizon was unable to stanch the anomalous activity despite multiple attempts. In January 2012, the Attkissons' residential internet service began constantly dropping off'."

"In February 2012, sophisticated surveillance spyware' was installed on Ms. Attkisson's work-issued laptop computer. A later forensic computer analysis revealed that Ms. Attkisson's laptop and the family's desktop computer had been the targets of unauthorized surveillance efforts.' That same forensic analysis revealed that Ms. Attkisson's mobile phone was also targeted for surveillance when it was connected to the family's desktop computer. The infiltration of that computer and the extraction of information from it was executed via an IP address owned, controlled, and operated by the United States Postal service.' Additionally, based on the sophisticated nature of the software used to carry out the infiltration and software fingerprints indicating the use of the federal government's proprietary software, the infiltration and surveillance appeared to be perpetrated by persons in the federal government."

"An independent forensic computer analyst hired by CBS subsequently reported finding evidence on both Ms. Attkisson's work-issued laptop computer and her family's desktop computer of a coordinated, highly-skilled series of actions and attacks directed at the operation of the computers.' Computer forensic analysis also indicated that remote actions were taken in December 2012 to remove the evidence of the electronic infiltration and surveillance from Ms. Attkisson's computers and other home electronic equipment."

"As Ms. Attkisson's investigations and reporting continued, in October 2012 the Attkissons noticed an escalation of electronic problems at their personal residence, including interference in home and mobile phone lines, computer interference, and television interference.' In November of that year, Ms. Attkisson's mobile phones experienced regular interruptions and interference, making telephone communications unreliable, and, at times, virtually impossible'."

"Additionally, in December 2012, a person with government intelligence experience conducted an inspection of the exterior of the Attkissons' Virginia home. That investigator discovered an extra Verizon FiOS fiber optics line. Soon thereafter, after a Verizon technician was instructed by Ms. Attkisson to leave the extra cable at the home, the cable disappeared, and the Attkissons were unable to determine what happened to it. In March 2013, the Attkissons' desktop computer malfunctioned, and in September of that year, while Ms. Attkisson was working on a story at her home, she observed that her personal laptop computer was remotely accessed and controlled, resulting in data being deleted from it. On April 3, 2013, Ms. Attkisson filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Department of Justice. The Inspector General's investigation was limited to an analysis of the compromised desktop computer, and the partially-released report that emerged from that investigation reported no evidence of intrusion,' although it did note a great deal of advanced mode computer activity not attributable to Ms. Attkisson or anybody in her household'."

"The Attkissons allege that the cyber-attacks' they suffered in [their] home' were perpetrated by personnel working on behalf of the United States.' Accordingly, they have asserted various claims against the United States and against former Attorney General Eric Holder, former Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe, and unknown agents of the Department of Justice, the United States Postal Service, and the United States, all in their individual capacities. Those claims include claims against the United States under the FTCA and claims against the individual federal officers for violations of constitutional rights under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Fed. Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971)…"

Spying, surveillance, harassment, interference, attempts at intimidation.

Are you noticing any significant mainstream news coverage of this case? Of course not.

Ordinarily, mainstream reporters protect their own colleagues, but here there is silence.

Let's call it what it is: PARTISAN POLITICAL SILENCE.

The silence is based on a principle they don't teach at journalism schools:

"We omit the news that contradicts our agenda. Our agenda IS the news."

Memo to the new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions: You could launch your own investigation into the Attkisson case. Bring it front and center. Uncover all the nasty details. Expose the perpetrators.

Now.

Lauren Johnson Wrote:Note that Steve Bannon, the populist heart and mind of Trump, has been kicked off the NSC bus.

Quote:

Trump Conspiracy Tweetstorms Are The Infowars Of The Left

Paul Blest
Tuesday 12:50pmFiled to: TWITTER

80.5K

23635[/url]




Illustration by Jim Cooke
The fastest-growing career in America is not, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics [url=https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm]would have you believe, in installing and repairing wind turbines. The fastest-growing career is doing 63 tweets in a row about why Donald Trump is a Manchurian president.


An increasing number of D-list Twitter celebrities are spewing unhinged takes and loosely-connected conspiracy theories about the still-developing story of Russia's attempts to interfere in the election. And they're building sizable online fanbases among frustrated liberals by telling them exactly what they want to hear.
Most recently, Seth Abramsona Huffington Post blogger, former attorney, and assistant English professor at the University of New Hampshire who once "remixed" mass shooter Elliot Rodger's last words into a poemhas emerged as the reigning king of diarrhea tweeting. Instead of simply threading his tweets like the rest of us plebes, Abramson has billed them as "mega-threads," and their repackaging and promotion often take the form of a snake eating its own asshole:

One such iteration of Mega Man's mega-threads, a 40-tweet thread (not including the appendix, footnotes, and acknowledgements), "The plot to sell America's foreign policy for foreign oil and steal an election in the bargain began at the Mayflower Hotel," was predicated on the idea that Trump moved a speech last April from the National Press Club to the supposedly smaller Mayflower hotel and lied about the reasonsincluding a need for a bigger event spacein order to arrange a secret meeting with ambassadors who were in attendance. Abramson alluded to one possible reason why, saying, "The #Russiagate scandal involves claims Trump was given 0.5% of Rosneft and aid in getting elected in exchange for lifting US sanctions"without sourcing that claim to anyone in particular. In typical self-congratulatory fashion, Abramson even suggested a name for the scandal should it break wide open because of his Tweets.

One major problem, as a late update to a glowing Daily Kos post about the thread pointed out, was that Abramson was wrong about the size of the event spacethe Mayflower is bigger than the National Press Cluband relied on the deceptive claim of neoconservative columnist Jamie Kirchick that the Center for National Interest has "ties to the Russian regime." Last year, the CNI's magazine called for "The United States [to] pursue confrontation [with Russia] where necessary and mutual interests without illusions where possible." Abramson's entire theory was built on faulty assumptions.
[Update, April 5: After publication of this piece, Abramson wrote that the event took place the Mayflower Hotel's secondary State Ballroom rather than its Grand Ballroom, something that he hadn't previously specified. The State Ballroom is indeed a smaller space than the National Press Club, but the hotel's website indicates it's possible for the State and East ballrooms to be combined. When I called, the hotel told me that the specific room used for the speech couldn't be disclosed for privacy reasons.]

In another thread this week, Abramson admitted that "citizen journalists"among whose numbers he counts himself and fellow conspiracist traveller Louise Menschare "more prone to mistakes." But in the same thread, he managed to take credit for reporting what the "mainstream media" won't even as he cited the BBC's reporting. It is a common thread in Abramson's writing: The idea that the American media won't "fully investigate" the Russian stories, when the fact is that the American media has been covering the story nonstop (and sometimes breathlessly) since before the election, and most of what Abramson himself knows has been culled from reporting done by American media outlets.
But the broader problem here is that there are so many unknowns that all it takes is a reasonably informed Twitter user to connect unrelated/innocuous/potentially spurious facts into a grand conspiracy. In many, many tweetsoften so manic and so creatively capitalized and punctuated as to be indecipherablea tweetstormer mixes prior reporting by others with their own speculation and passes it off as a comprehensive account of what may have happened. It's unfalsifiable by nature. And it finds an audience desperate to believe.
Comfort has become a cottage industry, and Russia is the most pressing subject of the moment. Abramson, for example, maintained until May 11 that it was still possible for Bernie Sanders to win the nomination. These columns, along with others by writers like H.A. Goodman, filled a need for Sanders fans. But while Goodman has continued to write about leftyissues like single-payer, Abramson has fully devoted himself to Russia. (It also appears that Abramson deleted all of his tweets before August 9.)
On Russia, Abramsonwho first wrote about Russian electoral interference in Decemberhas become the latest in a line of self-anointed experts tackling intensely complex legal and geopolitical questions which he believes himself better equipped to unravel than anyone else. When Eric Garland declared it time for some game theory on December 11, it kickstarted a movement of people devoted to fulfilling the Russian conspiracy fantasies of forlorn liberals everywhere.
Prior to the election, Garland mostly wrote mostly about business and markets for various outlets including The Atlantic and Harvard Business Review. But in a now-legendary thread of 127 Adderall-and-alcohol-fueled tweets, Garlandwho runs a "competitive intelligence consulting firm"laid out a scenario wherein Russian intelligence led by President Vladimir Putin had, in a flashback to Cold War espionage, destabilized seemingly every facet of American politics through a long series of covert operations.

The explanation that we're living in a spy novel absolves Democrats of responsibility for the election results. Garland's view fits perfectly with how some liberals would prefer to see the world: that leftists and right-wingers alike are nothing more than useful idiots of an all-knowing Putin, Hillary Clinton's campaign couldn't have done anything differently (like, say, go to Wisconsin), and, at its core, America is great because America is good. It is wish-fulfillment in its purest form.
The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, a dogged investigative reporter on Trump's finances, called Garland's thread "great writing, in a form that doesn't usually lend itself to greatness."

Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, referred to the rant as a "Federalist Paper for 2016."

(Writing more critically for Slate, Sam Kriss got closer to the truth when he called Garland's thread the "common roar of establishment liberalism in the age of Trump.")



While the brand of Game Theory Guy hasn't proven to be directly commercially successfulGarland's Patreon, as of this writing, has 23 contributors for a total of $197 a monthGarland has built a brand for himself, getting a lengthy profile in Business Insider and amassing a substantial Twitter following. On February 8 of last year, Garland had 4,802 Twitter followers; the day after his rant went viral, he had over 22,000. Four months later, he has over 85,000.
Then there's former British Tory MP Louise Mensch, who moved to the U.S. and calls herself a "conservative Republican." Mensch has emerged since Trump's election as some sort of go-to expert on the scandal, even being published in the New York Times opinion pages.
Since writing a story in November claiming that the FBI was granted a warrant from a FISA court to investigate the ties between Trump's campaign and Russia (the New York Times and the BBC disagree on whether this happened, while the Guardian reports the warrant was requested but denied), Mensch has peddled a litany of conspiracy theories. She's claimed that Russian agents killed Andrew Breitbart, said that xenophobia in England after the recent London terror attack was the doing of "partisans of Russia," and presented "informed speculation" that both Trump and Jared Kushner are "on tape at secret Russia spy meetingsKushner called at Trump Tower." She also thought Charlie Hebdo was a guy, and that the founder of Zionism was an anti-Semite (and threatened to mute him on Twitter, despite his having been dead for 113 years).

If all of this were confined to Twitter and blogs with names that sound like they're definitely going to give you a virus, it'd be hardly worth mentioning. These liberal Twitter all-stars, however, are emblematic of an InfoWars-style approach to the Russia story that's becoming endemic among too many Democrats, and only growing every time a new Garland pops up to tell them what they want to hear. Last week, the Center for American Progress, one of the leading liberal think tanks in the country, launched an initiative called the "Moscow Project," dedicated to its own investigation of the Russia mess. On Tuesday, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert asked unironically, "What kind of dossier does Moscow have on Nunes?" Never mind the fact that Devin Nunes was on the Trump transition team and seems to have landed Intelligence Committee Chair by sheer luckit's easier to believe that Russian agents have successfully blackmailed a Congressman than he might just be a partisan hack who's trying to protect a Republican administration from further scrutiny.
The idea that Russia attempted (at the bare minimum) to influence the election has merit. Yet we get more questions than answers every time a new Times or Post scoop is published, or when Nunes opens his mouth. These questions are all the harder to answer once you realize that the public hasn't gotten anything close to a full and transparent investigation, and most likely won't until Republicans are sufficiently frightened by the prospect of losing their seats in two years to do something about it. And in a way, that's what enables people like Garland and Abramson and Mensch to thrive. For a lot of people, wild speculation delivered with a veneer of authority sounds like the closest thing to the truth.
You need look no further than national security writer Marcy Wheeler to understand that there's a place for independent or "citizen" journalists, or at the various instances where the media has gotten big things wrong to know that you should read all stories, even in reputable publications, with a healthy dose of skepticism. But there's a large difference between making a genuine mistake and actively misleading readers because providing comfort is more important than providing truth. It's no surprise that the conspiracy tweetstorm market is thriving, because what the snake-oil salesmen are peddling is really themselves. What's disconcerting is how many people are buying it.

Quote:James Comey, the now former head of the FBI, is also the former General Counsel of Lockheed Martin., the largest defense contractor and weapons manufacturer in America and hedge fund advisor.

Lockheed Martin used to run significant information and payment systems at the Department of Defense. They appear to have spun their subsidiary out of the company after DOD closed their fiscal 2015, with $6.5 trillion of undocumentable adjustments. I wrote about it recently in Lockheed Cuts and Runs and Crazy Man vs. Criminal: Cut and Run, Monica Lewinsky and Real Trouble Ahead.

This is all part of our ongoing coverage of the financial coup d'etat and trillions of missing money: See Financial Coup D'Etat & Missing Money: Links and Financial Coup & Missing Money: Quotes

Here is what you need to know about James Comey. Everything he said or did related to Hillary Clinton or President Trump is unimportant. The fact that James Comey did and said nothing about $6. 5 trillion missing from your government in fiscal 2015 tells you all you need to know about James Comey.

Here is a description of the FBI's legal powers and authority. If the US government is missing trillions of dollars, don't you think it is the FBI's highest priority to figure out where the money went and get it back?

If I was a invisble, secret governing board responsible to preserve the trillions I had stolen, I would sure want to break up the country. It's a lot easier than explaining to people that you stole the money that they had saved to pay for health care and Social Security. I would also want to start WW III that would keep the power and money rolling my way. There is nothing like a dangerous fight to provide air cover for financial fraud. You can blow up a lot of records and make endless excuses.

You should also remember that the last time these folks engineered an impeachment process was when all the money started to disappear from the federal accounts and the federal mortgage programs were used to explode the mortgage fraud that lead to $27 trillion of bailouts for the banks.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Let me express my support for the President of the United States and his team. Who would ever have thought that we would have Donald Trump stand between us and a land war in the Middle East or nuclear war with Russia?

You should do the same regardless of your party affiliation or your choice of candidate. And every chance you get to speak with a federal public official or a member of the national press, you should ask one question:

WHERE IS THE MONEY?

Quote:This week on Clearing the FOG Radio we examine the issue of RussiaGate and the special counsel examining the Trump administration and President Trump. We will talk with former FBI agent, Coleen Rowley, about the backgrounds of former FBI director, James Comey and Special Counsel, Robert Mueller. Both have received a lot of positive commentary on their trustworthiness and reliability. We will discuss the history of both, their relationship and whether the public can trust them. Then, with reporter Max Blumenthal, we will discuss RussiaGate': what is the proof of Russian interference in US elections, is there evidence of collusion with the Trump administration and who is behind these accusations and why? For more information, visit http://www.ClearingtheFOGRadio.org.

Quote:America's WWE Hall-of-Famer internet troll president  currently lurking at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because that's how spectacularly unelectable the heiress to the Clinton dynasty was and is  has just made a series of tweets celebrating a ceasefire negotiation in Syria and calling for a constructive relationship with Russia. If you have a problem with this, it is because you are a reprehensible neocon piece of shit with whom I should not have to share a planet.

No offense.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/884008221970763776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fmedia%2Fc1678fb e2f1495f5b287a29b1388658b%3FpostId%3Dde0f0cec0e1f

The Twitterverse is of course already exploding, with McResistance Maddow muppets pounding out furious responses to Trump with heavy fingers and countless hysterical corporate media articles being written as I type the end of this sentence. A new article by the CIA-funded Washington Post is being frantically circulated about Russian hackers having infiltrated America's energy companies with no skepticism whatsoever, despite WaPo's having leveled a very similar accusation about Russian hackers infiltrating America's power grid a few short months ago which was proven to have been 100 percent false from top to bottom. These horrible omnicidal maniacs have somehow taken a ceasefire in Syria and an improvement in relations between two nuclear superpowers and twisted that into being a bad thing. This is unacceptable, inexcusable, and damn near unforgivable. These people are literally traitors to their species.

Let me say this as clearly as I can: there is no valid reason to oppose the de-escalation of tensions between two nuclear superpowers. None. If you think that Trump has done a bad thing by purportedly working toward these de-escalations, I want you off of my planet before your idiotic neocon warmongering gets us all killed, you amoral fucking psychopath. The world would literally be better off without you. No I am not joking, no I am not exaggerating my position to make a point, and yes, I mean you, personally.

[video]https://youtu.be/4B-o16fXXsc[/video]

Stephen Cohen, easily the foremost American authority on US-Russian relations, has been delivering the message over and over and over again with increasing urgency that the pressures arising from the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory have placed us in a situation that is in some crucial ways more dangerous than the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought us within a hair's breadth of nuclear annihilation. The fact that Trump faces unprecedented pressure to maintain escalations with a nuclear superpower under the threat of political repercussions should he ever yield an inch combined with Cohen's description of the following situation places us in a uniquely dangerous situation:

"You know it's easy to joke about this, except that we're at maybe the most dangerous moment in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever. And the reason is that we're in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented military buildup on Russia's border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are flying in the same territory. Anything could happen."

A 2014 report published in the journal Earth's Future found that it would only take the detonation of 100 nuclear warheads to throw 5 teragrams of black soot into the earth's stratosphere for decades, blocking out the sun and making the photosynthesis of plants impossible, starving every terrestrial organism to death that didn't die of radiation or climate chaos first. The United States and Russia currently have about 7,000 nuclear warheads apiece that we know of.

http://extranewsfeed.com/clinton-democrats-are-literally-neocons-a200dd02a6e9

So yes, I'm going to be fucking furious with anyone who feeds into those political pressures and tries to push the US president away from de-escalation and detente. These are my kids you're threatening. This is everything I've ever loved that your moronic partisan agendas are putting at risk. I don't care if you personally saw Vladimir Putin himself hacking a voting machine, there is no valid reason for you to support heightened tensions between two nuclear superpowers with innumerable moving parts where anything could go wrong in any instant. You don't get to push my species into extinction just because Rachel Maddow told you a scary bedtime story. You can fuck right off with that shit.

Every human being on earth should support Trump and Putin in de-escalating tensions between the US and Russia and want these two countries to get along. This has been the stupidest game of chicken that anyone has ever played, and it needs to end forever. If you have a problem with this, you need to get the fuck over yourself and go find some other way to masturbate your idiotic partisan loyalties. You hate Trump? Fine. You want to try and get him impeached? Fine. Do it some other way that doesn't involve risking the life of every organism on this planet.

This world is oh so beautiful, and life is oh so fragile, and our stay here is oh so tenuous. Our species has enough looming hurdles it's going to have to clear in the near future without having to worry about getting us all killed over some dumbass deep state power struggle. For the love of ever living fuck let's please get a fucking grip and put this Russia nonsense behind us once and for all.