Russian Connection 5: In Which We Plan Sleepovers

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About Benckowski and Scott Schools resigning from DOJ.  (not new I think)

[fraurosena]

The fact that Russia officials are strongly interested in this hacker is rather suspicious, don't you think?

Jailed Russian of Interest in U.S. Election Probe, Official Says

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A Russian charged with hacking LinkedIn is of great interest in a U.S. probe of election meddling, according to a Justice Department official, even as his own lawyers complain he hasn’t cooperated with them since landing in a California jail in March.

The mystery around Yevgeniy Nikulin deepened Friday when a federal judge asked why his lawyers, who want him evaluated for possible mental illness, chose a San Francisco psychiatrist with a troubled past at California’s medical board.

And Nikulin’s defense team -- led by a New York-based attorney seasoned in representing Russians and Eastern Europeans charged with serious crimes in the U.S. -- says Russian officials have shown unusually strong interest in his case, arranging at least once to visit him in jail when the attorneys weren’t present.

The lead attorney, Arkady Bukh, said he remains concerned, maybe ”paranoid,” over Nikulin’s safety after a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned earlier this year in England with a nerve agent.

“They are very active, by far more active than any other case," Bukh said of Russian embassy officials. “Now it’s less frequent, but earlier in the case they were calling almost every day. I have no duties to them. They’re not my client.”

Bukh said Nikulin probably didn’t cooperate when officials from the Russian consulate visited him at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of San Francisco. Representatives of the Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nikulin is accused by the U.S. of hacking LinkedIn and Dropbox in 2012, one of the largest data breaches in the country’s history when some 117 million login codes were stolen. His extradition to the U.S. from the Czech Republicin March heightened diplomatic tensions with Russia, which has been accused by American intelligence officials of hacking the Democratic National Committee’s email server while interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

Moscow had a dueling request with Prague officials to extradite Nikulin to Russia, which said when he was first arrested in 2016 that the U.S. was “hunting for Russian citizens across the world.”

Prosecutors are as eager to find out what, if anything, Nikulin knows about election meddling as they are to get to the bottom of the LinkedIn and Dropbox hacks, said the U.S. Justice Department official, who declined to be identified without authorization to discuss the case.

Federal marshals said that when Nikulin first arrived in San Francisco he physically confronted guards and tried to escape from custody -- and he was shackled for his next court appearance.

Ever since, his attorneys have said, he’s been unwilling to work with them. Valery Nechay, a lawyer helping Bukh, said Nikulin often “just stares off blankly or starts laughing at very serious moments.”

The lawyers won court approval this month, with no objections from prosecutors, for a psychological evaluation of Nikulin to determine whether he’s mentally incompetent to assist in his own defense.

But two days after the defense lawyers submitted the name of their chosen psychiatrist, Alexander Grinberg, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered Bukh and prosecutors to provide him with more information on Grinberg’s “probationary status with the California Medical Board arising out of complaints of unprofessional conduct and gross negligence.” The judge set an Aug. 27 deadline for both sides to comment.

Bukh said he’s not aware of the complaints against Grinberg, who has a 2-star rating on Yelp and a 4.5-star rating on healthgrades.com. Grinberg, whose voicemail has greetings in English and Russian, didn’t immediately respond to a phone call seeking comment.

 

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He lied but it's okay because reasons

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So eventually when Mueller releases his report Trump may hide all the incriminating parts huh.

 

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I have a feeling that when Mueller releases his report, the full, un-redacted text just might be released to the American people. Oh, and indictments.  You can't hide those. 

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I'm sure it's just a coincidence

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I too had lots of jet fuel to sell when I was a student.

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[onekidanddone]

Seriously I thought just about everyone had jet fuel in college. 

There was this one dude who couldn’t afford jet fule poor chap. He had rocket fule instead and we all felt sorry for him. 

Edited September 3, 2018 by onekidanddone

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Ooh another character I've completely missed.

[fraurosena]

So this was what Roger Stone was going on about....

Jerome Corsi, Conspiracy Theorist, Is Subpoenaed in Mueller Investigation

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Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy theorist and political commentator with connections to the former Trump adviser Roger J. Stone Jr., has been subpoenaed to testify on Friday before the grand jury in the special counsel investigation into Russia’s election interference and whether Trump associates conspired with the effort, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

The lawyer, David Gray, said that he anticipates that investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, plan to ask Mr. Corsi about his discussions with Mr. Stone, who appeared to publicly predict in 2016 that WikiLeaks planned to publish material damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

”He fully intends to comply with the subpoena,” Mr. Gray said, adding that the subpoena was not specific about the topic but that he and his client anticipated “it has to do with his communications with Roger Stone.”

Mr. Mueller’s team appears to be zeroing in on Mr. Stone as a possible nexus between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, which was used by Russian intelligence officers to spread information stolen from Democrats, according to an indictment by Mr. Mueller’s team. Another former associate of Mr. Stone, the New York political gadfly Randy Credico, is also expected to testify before the grand jury on Friday.

Mr. Stone has maintained that he had no contact with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and that he learned what WikiLeaks was doing through public sources and from Mr. Credico, who had a friend in common with Mr. Assange.

Mr. Corsi, who has worked with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his Infowars operation, has dealt with Mr. Stone on and off for years. Mr. Corsi was also one of the people whom President Trump, before he was a candidate, contacted for information about former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate in pressing the false claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States.

Mr. Corsi’s name came up when federal agents stopped and detained a professor and author, Ted Malloch, at a Boston airport last March. Mr. Malloch told NBC at the time that, among other questions, federal investigators asked him about Mr. Stone, whom he had met a handful of times, about WikiLeaks and about Mr. Corsi, who had helped edit one of his books.

In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last year, Mr. Stone, who had predicted in a 2016 tweet that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, would face his “time in the barrel,” said he based his tweet off research given to him by Mr. Corsi, whom he identified as an investigative journalist. He said that Mr. Corsi’s research was drawn from public information related to Mr. Podesta’s brother, the lobbyist Tony Podesta.

John Podesta’s private email account was hacked in 2016 and some of the content was posted by WikiLeaks in October 2016, just as Mr. Trump was facing questions about the “Access Hollywood” tape on which he was recorded in 2005 boasting about grabbing women by their genitals.

 

 

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[fraurosena]

More info on what kind of person Jerome Corsi is. He apparently wrote a NYT Bestseller called "Killing the Deep State". Until recently he worked for Infowars, and he's also connected to Qanon.

The dark overlord of the deranged far-right

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The far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi’s latest book, Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump, contains none of the fantastic tales of child sex dungeons and MS-13 contract killings for which his current employer, Infowars, is famous. Cranks like Corsi can openly traffick in that sort of nonsense on YouTube, but even the most injudicious conservative publishing houses — here it’s Humanix Books, which is owned by the right-leaning Newsmax Media — require some level of sourcing. As a result, Corsi must rely on a duller strategies, like tediously recounting the details of ancient Clinton scandals, whining about Robert Mueller being mean, and mentioning liberal boogeymen George Soros and Saul Alinsky at every possible opportunity.

What can be gleaned from this mishmash of wacko talking points that make up Corsi’s 13th book? Perhaps that we must take Corsi as he is: a cockroach, able to squeeze through the cracks in American political discourse again and again. But mostly, his ability to tailor his propaganda for whatever audience he deems profitable makes him an instructive case study in the persistence of far-right misinformation.

To understand Corsi’s evolution into an essential cog in the right-wing smear machine, we must recall the events preceding the 2004 presidential election. In August of that year, Corsi and a failed lawyer named John O’Neill published their now-discredited debut Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. The book spuriously accused Kerry of having lied about his service in Vietnam, for which he earned three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star. Perfectly suited to the climate of comically overwrought nationalism, it became a #1 New York Times bestseller despite a scathing review from that paper. “If John Kerry loses the presidential election,” the review opens, Unfit for Command “will go down as a chief reason.” The smears worked, and “swiftboating" entered the lexicon as shorthand for a dishonest political attack before fading from public memory. Looking back, so many of the details feel eerily prescient — the book was peddled by Sean Hannity and Sinclair Media Group, mainstream cable news gave Corsi and O’Neill ample airtime in the name of fairness, and the liberal commentariat offered plenty of handwringing with their righteous condemnation. John McCain even condemned the whole thing, only to accept donations from the group’s financial backers a few years later. How did we not see Trump coming?

In his media career, Corsi has reshaped himself around the contours of white rage with a cunning ambition not seen in the careers of comparatively shortlived far-right darlings like Glenn Beck, Orly Taitz, and Milo Yiannopoulos. During the Bush years, Corsi emerged as a frothing militarist. His 2005 book Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians beat the drum for war with Iran, just as Unfit for Command accused John Kerry of treason for his outspoken anti-war activism in the early 1970s. But the Bush-era jingoism faded fast, and, in a stunning about-face Corsi in 2007 became a 9/11 truther calling for Bush to be impeached. His 2008 No. 1 bestseller The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality and articles for Tea Party hub WorldNetDaily hit on every possible conservative obsession of the time — Obama’s birth certificate and alleged homosexuality, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, and the much-feared “choom gang.”

In 2015, while some fellow anti-Obama partisans like Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson recoiled at Trump’s vulgarity, Corsi latched onto him with a passion absent from his defenses of John McCain and Mitt Romney. This was a natural alliance, given Trump’s own misplaced distrust of “globalists” and propensity for conspiracy theories, and it instantly paid off. Corsi hopped aboard Pizzagate, the debunked rumor that Clinton campaign manager John Podesta ran a child-sex ring underneath a D.C. pizza restaurant, and joined the effort to diagnose Hillary Clinton with everything from Parkinson’s disease to autism. His service in the 2016 election won him a job at Infowars, and in May 2017 he was even able to spend a whole day in the White House Press Corps pretending to be a real journalist.

Corsi’s current beat is 8chan, the imageboard formed in 2013 by users too racist for 4chan. Here, the pseudonymous user “QAnon” posts dubious insider information from the “deep state” chronicling the progress of a supposed investigation of a massive global Satanic pedophilia ring. According to QAnon, who claims to be in direct contact with Trump, the Mueller investigation is actually a diversion created to distract from the real investigation of Democratic crimes. These include Hillary Clinton and John Podesta supposedly personally creating ISIS, planning the 2012 Benghazi attack, and orchestrating last year’s shooting in Las Vegas — all in order to enrich the Rothschilds, the Saudi monarchy, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Satan. Corsi has appointed himself the “decoder” of these messages — which are already in plain English and use relatively little jargon for a supposed insider — and he has devoted countless hours to explaining them in video chats on YouTube since the posts began last November. Though the messages have incorrectly predicted John Podesta’s arrest twice now, tens of thousands of people still jump at the chance to watch Corsi croak about QAnon’s political significance. For him, this is the grift that never stops giving.

Killing the Deep State resembles the current incarnation of Hannity more than Corsi’s recent work on Satanic sex cults. The first few chapters are devoted to the anti-Trump bias of figures in the Mueller investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which may come as a surprise to followers of Corsi’s QAnon videos. Per Corsi, it turns out that the special counsel isn’t actually investigating Pizzagate and Benghazi behind the scenes while also pretending to investigate Trump. “The central premise of this book,” Corsi writes, “is that President Trump is the target of a coup d’état being undertaken by the Deep State, including the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies that maintain a commitment to a globalist New World Order.”

Hyperbole aside, everything Corsi outlines is far-right boilerplate. When Clinton lost the election, the Deep State lost the opportunity to “continue running the international drug trade while supporting the military-industrial complex in a policy of perpetual war.” Even through drug abuse and military spending have steadily increased under Trump, the Deep State apparently still considers him a threat. Does that make sense? No. Does the intended audience care? Probably not.

The Deep State’s fiercest warrior, Corsi writes, is former FBI head and current special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who has “joined forces with the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and Deep State intelligence agency operatives who are out to destroy the Trump administration.” Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez, representing the “hard-left wing of the Democratic Party,” uses the fortune of financier George Soros to unleash the “anarchistic violence of the Occupy, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter movements.” For their part, the mainstream media enables violence against innocent conservatives like Richard Spencer, who Corsi confuses with anti-Islam author Robert Spencer. Meanwhile, the far-left extremists running social media platforms silence users like “@PatrioticPepe,” for which they “must be investigated for employing algorithms that screen out or otherwise suppress conservative and libertarian postings.”

What should be done to defend Trump against the forces who intend to destroy him? According to Corsi, the White House should first stop holding press conferences. Then, Trump should shore up public support by ending the Federal Reserve, a libertarian pet issue. Finally, “to defeat the false ‘Russia collusion’ narrative, Trump must begin criminal prosecutions against Hillary Clinton and her supporters, including the Podesta brothers, John and Tony.”

As these measures are plainly implausible, Corsi suggests a deus ex machinaon the last page: “The premise of this book,” he helpfully writes for the second time, “is that President Trump will be saved because the crux of the argument to remove him from office is founded in the corrupt politics that gave rise to Hillary Clinton’s doomed presidential candidacy in 2016.” Which corrupt politics? For Corsi, they are the Democrats who “champion radical groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa in a United States of America in which the National Football League loses fans because a group of athletes kneel in protest to the playing of the national anthem.”

Of course. Underneath all the layers of fantasy and conspiracy in Jerome Corsi’s universe — the Satanic pedophile rings, the false flag school shootings, the secret payments to ISIS — it all boils down to impotent rage over black people on TV. How nice of him to simplify it for us.

Could it be that Corsi is Q? 

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11 hours ago, fraurosena said:

More info on what kind of person Jerome Corsi is. He apparently wrote a NYT Bestseller called "Killing the Deep State". Until recently he worked for Infowars, and he's also connected to Qanon.

The dark overlord of the deranged far-right

Could it be that Corsi is Q? 

Unless there's some sort of crazy plan he's cooked up, I don't think he is. At the time that article was written, he was totally on the QAnon bus and had even figured out how to make money off of it, but he has since done a 180 and is now anti-Q.

So, maybe you are wondering what happened to make him change his mind?  Q started calling out those who were profiting from QAnon and told the Q faithful to be wary of those folks. So, long story short, Q was interfering with Corsi's grift, so Corsi said Q was a scam, and then switched over to the anti-Q MAGA side.

Grifters gotta grift.

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We have nothing to hide 

 

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8 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

From the daily beast article: 

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Democrats on the House intelligence committee tried to investigate Simes’ relationship to Trump’s campaign, but Republican committee Chairman Devin Nunes blocked their efforts.

 

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[fraurosena]

After yesterday's news that the presidunce would not be answering any of Mueller's questions, neither in an interview or in writing, Giuliani's now backpeddling fast, and not even excluding a sit-down interview (just not on obstruction!). Jay Sekulow is simply stating that negotiations are still ongoing.

Giuliani says deal near for written questions from Mueller

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President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani says a deal is near for Trump to provide written answers to questions from special counsel Robert Mueller, but Giuliani disputed a report that Trump has entirely ruled out a sit-down interview with the prosecutor probing the Trump campaign's ties to Russia.

"I think we're pretty close to an agreement, maybe this weekend," Giuliani told POLITICO Thursday night about the prospects of a deal for written responses to questions on alleged collusion between the campaign and Russia before Trump took office.

However, the former New York City mayor said the two sides remain at odds over questioning on issues of obstruction of justice and on whether Trump should be questioned in person by Mueller's team on any issue.

Earlier Thursday, the Associated Press reported that Giuliani said a decision had been reached that Trump would not voluntarily submit to an interview on alleged efforts to thwart the Russia probe.

"That's a no-go. That is not going to happen," Giuliani told the AP. "There will be no questions at all on obstruction."

But Giuliani told POLITICO there has been no final decision on that issue.

"We're very opposed to that [but] we're not closing it off 100 percent," Giuliani said. "We don't want to mislead [prosecutors] and have them think it's easy, but we have also not closed our mind to it."

A spokesman for Mueller's office declined to comment.

Asked about the AP report, Giuliani said: "It's a little complicated. I think the AP got it a little wrong, but it could be my fault and I didn't describe it right."

Another attorney for Trump stressed Thursday night that the discussions with Mueller's office are still in progress and made no mention of any final decision.

"I don't discuss our ongoing negotiations with the special counsel's office," lawyer Jay Sekulow said.

 

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