The World's Most Important Political Prisoner

[Tom Scully]

Tom, thank you for your honest effort. But let as make a step back and define the rules of conversation for clarity, and also, who we both are, in the broadest terms. I mean I do not know who you are and I would be surprised, if you know who I am.
For the public we might as well be North Korean sockpuppets, playing propaganda theatre.
You and I know that we are not sockppuppets (what is that in this context, anyway).
I can prove I am a real person.
I suppose you can prove that as well and I trust you so far, but not everybody has to do this.

Let us also define the words along which we will speak. Assange might have a different meaning for you and me and for everybody listening.
The word Manafort might not be clear to everybody, or is it?

If you follow me so far, please acknowledge.

I am fairly well known, I guess.:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/...um/page/9/
Robert Charles-Dunne Posted June 16, 2013
....Both the ousted members found reasonable fault with Janney's book and demonstrated that some of the evidence presented was underwhelming at best, incorrect at worst. In fact, ex-moderator Tom Scully seemed to have located the man Janney accused of being Mary Meyer's murderer, a man whom Janney himself claimed he was unable to find. Most of the comments made by the ousted members seemed fair game to me. But then, I don't have a personal relationship with Peter Janney.
I believe that John has inadvertently admitted that he put his thumb on the scale in Janney's favour:
..

Carsten, I checked before adding the last quote box in my last post, to see if you had replied. I now know you did not see my
addition before you posted.

I assume you are not a U.S. resident but I do not know if it matters. I believe Assange is being subjected to a US extradition attempt,
but not for the justifications presented by Trump admin. officials. I believe Assange committed no as of yet known crimes until his 2016 involvement with Russian hackers and the Trump presidential campaign.

After the 2016 election, it seems former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and other Trump associates worked to reward Assange
by getting him out of London. Manafort seems to have felt too exposed by the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. One of Mueller's assigned tasks was to investigate if the Trump campaign conspired with members of Putin's government to achieve the office Trump now holds.

As the quote box I just added to my last post supports, Assange was involved with another US leaker, in 2017, and was attempting to
coerce Trump and his admin. to assist him in escaping the UK. By that time. Assange correctly perceived the Trump admin. considered him "too hot" to openly support or assist. Assange was reduced to making a threat to reveal further CIA secrets provided to him by leaker Schulte.

[URL="https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/06/11/on-joshua-schulte-and-julian-assanges-10-year-old-charges/"]

On Joshua Schulte and Julian Assange's 10 Year Old Charges

[/URL][URL="https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/06/11/on-joshua-schulte-and-julian-assanges-10-year-old-charges/"]https://www.emptywheel.net › 2019/06/11 › on-joshua-schulte-and-julian-...
[/URL]

Jun 11, 2019 - The WaPo has confirmed what Natasha Bertrand earlier reported: the extradition package for Julian Assange will only include the 10 year old ...

James Lateer believes the Mueller investigation was a "deep state" pushback against a Trump presidency. I believe Mueller conducted a reticent white wash, a tepid investigation that actually served to protect Trump.

One of the few things Mueller did accomplish was to create an atmosphere that has changed the relations between the Trump admin, and Assange from allies to a need to silence or at least permanently discredit Assange. The William Barr Justice Department is contradicting itself....it is pleading the opposite in UK extradition proceedings of what Barr claimed was the reason Mueller did not charge Assange.:

https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/05/24/th...clination/

....[FONT=&amp]We don't know what that redaction says, though the unredacted footnote makes it clear that in the case of emails stolen from Hillary, DOJ determined that sharing of stolen property does not constitute a crime.[/FONT][FONT=&amp]We do, however, have a sense of how the Attorney General understands this declination, because he used it to exonerate Trump, even in spite of Trump's active role in pushing Roger Stone to optimize the WikiLeaks releases for the campaign. In one of his explanations for the WikiLeaks declination one that may more directly allude to Stone's involvement Bill Barr said that publication of stolen emails would not be criminal "unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy."

The Special Counsel also investigated whether any member or affiliate of the Trump campaign encouraged or otherwise played a role in these dissemination efforts. Under applicable law, publication of these types of materials would not be criminal unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy. Here too, the Special Counsel's report did not find that any person associated with the Trump campaign illegally participated in the dissemination of the materials.

[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]In the case of election interference, then, Barr does not consider the publication of documents identified on a wish list that hackers subsequently steal to amount to joining a conspiracy.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]But in the case of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning's leak, his DOJ does.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]There's obviously a distinction: John Podesta's risotto recipes are not classified, whereas much of the stuff (but not all) Manning leaked was. But the role of a wish list is not functionally different, and Russian officers were charged both for hacking and dissemination.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]I'm still working on a post describing how unbelievably stupid the EDVA case is, (the charges "justifying" extradition of Assange) both for the press and for DOJ's hopes to lay a precedent.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]But at least at a structural level, the prosecution is also inconsistent with the decisions DOJ made about WikiLeaks on the election year operation....[/FONT]

[Carsten Wiethoff]

Tom, you are still going a bit too fast for my taste, but I am sure we can soon start the real conversation.
Before I give you and everybody my understanding of Assange and Manafort, I want to clarify some formalities.
1. Everybody, including the NSA is allowed to listen to and permanently record this conversation.
2. Everybody who broadly conforms to the Forum rules may join or leave the conversation at any time or start another conversation
3. I do my best not to leave the conversation permanently without notice, since I am genuinely interested in it
4. Timing is not very important on this issue, whether I take a minute, or an hour, or a day to respond, may depend on the other things I do in my life.
5. For listeners not speaking English I could provide a German simultanous translation, since I am a German native speaker. But I do not think that is a good idea, because it takes away from the conversation.
6. You and I are allowed to correct our texts for Spelling or Grammar, but not change the meaning retroactively.
7. If Spelling or Grammar issues remain, that is not important, as long as we get the meaning.
8. If we do not get the meaning of something that is said, we should ask for clarification.

Do You agree with that, or do you find it overly complicated?

[Tom Scully]

Tom, you are still going a bit too fast for my taste, but I am sure we can soon start the real conversation.
Before I give you and everybody my understanding of Assange and Manafort, I want to clarify some formalities.
1. Everybody, including the NSA is allowed to listen to and permanently record this conversation.
2. Everybody who broadly conforms to the Forum rules may join or leave the conversation at any time or start another conversation
3. I do my best not to leave the conversation permanently without notice, since I am genuinely interested in it
4. Timing is not very important on this issue, whether I take a minute, or an hour, or a day to respond, may depend on the other things I do in my life.
5. For listeners not speaking English I could provide a German simultanous translation, since I am a German native speaker. But I do not think that is a good idea, because it takes away from the conversation.
6. You and I are allowed to correct our texts for Spelling or Grammar, but not change the meaning retroactively.
7. If Spelling or Grammar issues remain, that is not important, as long as we get the meaning.
8. If we do not get the meaning of something that is said, we should ask for clarification.

Do You agree with that, or do you find it overly complicated?

Yes. I agree completely. I consider all of your points reasonable. I admit I do sometimes stop participating in forum threads because
of frustration with other participant(s) but I will inform you if I decide to stop replying.

You are saying I am presenting too many details or presenting them too rapidly. I'll end this with the last quote box in my last post on
the prior page.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/08/27/re...ical-gain/


REVISITING THE FIRST TIME PRESIDENT TRUMP BLABBED OUT CLASSIFIED INFORMATION FOR POLITICAL GAIN
August 27, 2019/18 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Cybersecurity, emptywheel, Mueller Probe, WikiLeaks /by emptywheel
OCTOBER 25, 2017

...That means Trump probably made the comments as the FBI was preparing a search of Schulte's apartment, the first step the FBI took that would confirm for Schulte that he was the main suspect in the leak. Trump's comments likely aired during the search, before the moment Schulte left his apartment with two passports while the search was ongoing.CIA had had a bit of advanced warning about the leak. In the lead-up to the leaks (at least by February 3), a lawyer representing Julian Assange, Adam Waldman, was trying to use the Vault 7 files to make a deal with the US government, at first offering to mitigate the damage of the release for some vaguely defined safe passage for Assange. The next day, WikiLeaks first hyped the release, presumably as part of an attempt to apply pressure on the US. Shortly thereafter, Waldman started pitching Mark Warner (ranking democrat of US Senate Intelligence Committee) who, with Richard Burr, (republican Chairman of that Senate Committee) could have granted Assange immunity in conjunction with SSCI's investigation). On February 17, Jim Comey told Warner to stop his negotiations, though Waldman would continue to discuss the issue to David Laufman at DOJ even after the initial release. Weeks later, WikiLeaks released the initial dump of files on March 7.
An early WaPo report on the leak (which Schulte googled for its information about what the CIA knew before WikiLeaks published) claimed that CIA's Internal Security had started conducting its own investigation without alerting FBI to the leak (though obviously Comey knew of it by mid-February). The same report quoted a CIA spox downplaying the impact of a leak it now calls "catastrophic."
By March 13, the day the FBI got its first warrant on Schulte, the FBI had focused on Schulte as the primary target of the investigation. They based that focus on the following evidence, which appears to incorporate information from the CIA's own internal investigation, an assessment of the first document dump, and some FBI interviews with his colleagues in the wake of the first release:...

[Carsten Wiethoff]

Tom, you are still going a bit too fast for my taste, but I am sure we can soon start the real conversation.
Before I give you and everybody my understanding of Assange and Manafort, I want to clarify some formalities.
1. Everybody, including the NSA is allowed to listen to and permanently record this conversation.
2. Everybody who broadly conforms to the Forum rules may join or leave the conversation at any time or start another conversation
3. I do my best not to leave the conversation permanently without notice, since I am genuinely interested in it
4. Timing is not very important on this issue, whether I take a minute, or an hour, or a day to respond, may depend on the other things I do in my life.
5. For listeners not speaking English I could provide a German simultanous translation, since I am a German native speaker. But I do not think that is a good idea, because it takes away from the conversation.
6. You and I are allowed to correct our texts for Spelling or Grammar, but not change the meaning retroactively.
7. If Spelling or Grammar issues remain, that is not important, as long as we get the meaning.
8. If we do not get the meaning of something that is said, we should ask for clarification.

Do You agree with that, or do you find it overly complicated?

Yes. I agree completely. I consider all of your points reasonable. I admit I do sometimes stop participating in forum threads because
of frustration with other participant(s) but I will inform you if I decide to stop replying.

Very good. one or two more things, quickly.
This may seem to the listeners and to you, Tom Scully, like verbal Jiu-Jitsu. Someting like the google terms of services. I refrain from quoting them here, and since they often change retroactively, it would also be of no use.
And I openly admit that I am very often frustrated from conversations, even with my best friends, because words are used that have no clearly defined meaning or bullying tactics are applied or blatant propaganda is sold as an honest opinion,or statement of fact. No medium, not even the alternatives, are free from that. Even good people, which are in the majority everywhere, even in media and government, sometimes use these unfair practices.
Definitely some of the worst words, that serious speakers should only use as bad examples, are "conspiracy theorist", "counterfactual", "conspiracy", "conspiracy theory", "extreme left", "extreme right", "Nazi", "Antisemite", "radical" in the political sense and a couple hundreds more. These words are used in all or nearly all contemporary media, but I dare anyone, to bring up a sensible and agreeable definition for them. Instead they are all used as weapons. By good and bad people alike. Without even recognizing it.
Tom Scully, good man, would you agree to that state of affairs, or do you have a different world view?

[Carsten Wiethoff]

Tom, did you just leave the conversation or is there an emergency, or other events?

[Carsten Wiethoff]

Tom, did you just leave the conversation or is there an emergency, or other events?

I did that on purpose.

[Carsten Wiethoff]

Ah, I forgot to mention, of all the Carsten Wiethoff people running around on earth, which are to the best of my knowledge, two (2), I am Carsten Wiethoff the Billionaire.

[Carsten Wiethoff]

Hey, Tom, I may have an IQ of about 130, but I am no longer the fastest. I also work normally, when I am not sick, fulltime in an extremely demanding Software Project involving Airplanes, Robots, Realtime Software, EtherCAT busses and a million more things. I am interested in learning who actually killed John F. Kennedy, but for a long time I know that Lee Harvey Oswald did not fire a shot that day.
To parse a footnote like yours:

Peter Janney's uncle was Frank Pace, chairman of General Dynamics who enlisted law partners Roswell Gilpatric and Luce's brother-in-law, Maurice "Tex" Moore, in a trade of 16 percent of Gen. Dyn. stock in exchange for Henry Crown and his Material Service Corp. of Chicago, headed by Byfield's Sherman Hotel group's Pat Hoy. The Crown family and partner Conrad Hilton next benefitted from TFX, at the time, the most costly military contract award in the history of the world. Obama was sponsored by the Crowns and Pritzkers. So was Albert Jenner Peter Janney has preferred to write of an imaginary CIA assassination of his surrogate mother, Mary Meyer, but not a word about his Uncle Frank.

would under good conditions take me 2-3 days, I mean to fully grasp, who all the people mentioned there are, even if I may have heard half of the names before.
How long, Tom, do you think, the average reader needs to parse that footnote. Does the average reader exist at all? I mean, does anybody even read the footnotes?

Trying to be helpful
Carsten

Late addition: I may have misquoted your footnote. It does not have anything to do with John F. Kennedy. Sorry!

[Carsten Wiethoff]

Hey, Tom, I may have an IQ of about 130, but I am no longer the fastest. I also work normally, when I am not sick, fulltime in an extremely demanding Software Project involving Airplanes, Robots, Realtime Software, EtherCAT busses and a million more things. I am interested in learning who actually killed John F. Kennedy, but for a long time I know that Lee Harvey Oswald did not fire a shot that day.
To parse a footnote like yours:

Peter Janney's uncle was Frank Pace, chairman of General Dynamics who enlisted law partners Roswell Gilpatric and Luce's brother-in-law, Maurice "Tex" Moore, in a trade of 16 percent of Gen. Dyn. stock in exchange for Henry Crown and his Material Service Corp. of Chicago, headed by Byfield's Sherman Hotel group's Pat Hoy. The Crown family and partner Conrad Hilton next benefitted from TFX, at the time, the most costly military contract award in the history of the world. Obama was sponsored by the Crowns and Pritzkers. So was Albert Jenner Peter Janney has preferred to write of an imaginary CIA assassination of his surrogate mother, Mary Meyer, but not a word about his Uncle Frank.

would under good conditions take me 2-3 days, I mean to fully grasp, who all the people mentioned there are, even if I may have heard half of the names before.
How long, Tom, do you think, the average reader needs to parse that footnote. Does the average reader exist at all? I mean, does anybody even read the footnotes?

Trying to be helpful
Carsten

Late addition: I may have misquoted your footnote. It does not have anything to do with John F. Kennedy. Sorry!

I did that on purpose.

[Carsten Wiethoff]

To Tom: I know that you are most likely sleeping right now.

To the audience: Some participation in the discussion would be nice now.