The Russia Hoax - Not
PVW said:
nohero said:
"Men, that is, like Paul Manafort, with his dyed-black pompadour and penchant for pinstripes."
The reporter can't help it if the protagonists act like stock characters. That's what these guys are like.
Relatedly, that's my biggest complaint about Trump -- he's just not believable as a character. He looks, talks, and acts like a spiteful liberal caricature of the worst excesses of the Republican party. It's simply not credible that he's a real person and not a cartoon somehow brought to life.
If Trump did not exist and someone created a fictional character that was exactly like him, no one would take the creator seriously.
Unfortunately the character himself would still have a huge fan base.
nan said:
nohero said:
"Men, that is, like Paul Manafort, with his dyed-black pompadour and penchant for pinstripes."
The reporter can't help it if the protagonists act like stock characters. That's what these guys are like.
It makes him sound ridiculous, but provides zero evidence that he was hatching a secret plan with a "Russian spy," revealed six years later, just when the mainstream media needed freshly injected propaganda.
Russiagate: The Dark and Stormy Night Edition. Available now in time for holiday gift giving.
The meeting in the Grand Havana Room was reported on in 2019. You asked above why none of this was reported in the MSM. It was. Also, Manafort was interviewed for the NYT story.
How Manafort’s 2016 meeting with a Russian employee at New York cigar club goes to ‘the heart’ of Mueller’s probe
eta - The WAPO article is behind a paywall so I'll quote some of it:
"Court records show that Manafort was joined at some point by his campaign deputy, Rick Gates, at the session at the Grand Havana Room, a mahogany-paneled space with floor-to-ceiling windows offering panoramic views of the city.
The two Americans met with an overseas guest, a longtime employee of their international consulting business who had flown to the United States for the gathering: a Russian political operative named Konstantin Kilimnik.
The Aug. 2, 2016, encounter between the senior Trump campaign officials and Kilimnik, who prosecutors allege has ties to Russian intelligence, has emerged in recent days as a potential fulcrum in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation.
One subject the men discussed was a proposed resolution to the conflict over Ukraine, an issue of great interest to the Russian government, according to a partially redacted transcript of the Feb. 4 hearing."
here's a non-paywalled link for the above WAPO article
cramer said:
nan said:
nohero said:
"Men, that is, like Paul Manafort, with his dyed-black pompadour and penchant for pinstripes."
The reporter can't help it if the protagonists act like stock characters. That's what these guys are like.
It makes him sound ridiculous, but provides zero evidence that he was hatching a secret plan with a "Russian spy," revealed six years later, just when the mainstream media needed freshly injected propaganda.
Russiagate: The Dark and Stormy Night Edition. Available now in time for holiday gift giving.
The meeting in the Grand Havana Room was reported on in 2019. You asked above why none of this was reported in the MSM. It was. Also, Manafort was interviewed for the NYT story.
How Manafort’s 2016 meeting with a Russian employee at New York cigar club goes to ‘the heart’ of Mueller’s probe
eta - The WAPO article is behind a paywall so I'll quote some of it:
"Court records show that Manafort was joined at some point by his campaign deputy, Rick Gates, at the session at the Grand Havana Room, a mahogany-paneled space with floor-to-ceiling windows offering panoramic views of the city.
The two Americans met with an overseas guest, a longtime employee of their international consulting business who had flown to the United States for the gathering: a Russian political operative named Konstantin Kilimnik.
The Aug. 2, 2016, encounter between the senior Trump campaign officials and Kilimnik, who prosecutors allege has ties to Russian intelligence, has emerged in recent days as a potential fulcrum in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation.
One subject the men discussed was a proposed resolution to the conflict over Ukraine, an issue of great interest to the Russian government, according to a partially redacted transcript of the Feb. 4 hearing."
We went over Kilimnik's "ties to Russian intelligence" previously on MOL. There is no there there. He seemed more likely to work for US intelligence than Russian. This NYTs piece is romantic speculation because the Democrats really need Russiagate to be real.
Accused Russiagate 'Spy' Kilimnik Speaks -- and Evidence Backs His 'No Collusion' Account'
nan said:
cramer said:
nan said:
nohero said:
"Men, that is, like Paul Manafort, with his dyed-black pompadour and penchant for pinstripes."
The reporter can't help it if the protagonists act like stock characters. That's what these guys are like.
It makes him sound ridiculous, but provides zero evidence that he was hatching a secret plan with a "Russian spy," revealed six years later, just when the mainstream media needed freshly injected propaganda.
Russiagate: The Dark and Stormy Night Edition. Available now in time for holiday gift giving.
The meeting in the Grand Havana Room was reported on in 2019. You asked above why none of this was reported in the MSM. It was. Also, Manafort was interviewed for the NYT story.
How Manafort’s 2016 meeting with a Russian employee at New York cigar club goes to ‘the heart’ of Mueller’s probe
eta - The WAPO article is behind a paywall so I'll quote some of it:
"Court records show that Manafort was joined at some point by his campaign deputy, Rick Gates, at the session at the Grand Havana Room, a mahogany-paneled space with floor-to-ceiling windows offering panoramic views of the city.
The two Americans met with an overseas guest, a longtime employee of their international consulting business who had flown to the United States for the gathering: a Russian political operative named Konstantin Kilimnik.
The Aug. 2, 2016, encounter between the senior Trump campaign officials and Kilimnik, who prosecutors allege has ties to Russian intelligence, has emerged in recent days as a potential fulcrum in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation.
One subject the men discussed was a proposed resolution to the conflict over Ukraine, an issue of great interest to the Russian government, according to a partially redacted transcript of the Feb. 4 hearing."
We went over Kilimnik's "ties to Russian intelligence" previously on MOL. There is no there there. He seemed more likely to work for US intelligence than Russian. This NYTs piece is romantic speculation because the Democrats really need Russiagate to be real.
Accused Russiagate 'Spy' Kilimnik Speaks -- and Evidence Backs His 'No Collusion' Account'
You called the article in the NYT "creative storytelling" and asked why it had never been reported before. It was and the NYT piece contains a lot of the information in the WAPO piece.
eta - A lot of what is the NYT article is also in court documents.
The end. At least for me it is.
nan said:
tjohn said:
Why does it take a spy to share polling data?
The polling data was nothing secret. It was numbers from Real Clear Politics. It was not some special secret numbers. It was never used to influence the election in any way.
...
If this guy was a Russian Spy than that's a huge problem for the US government who had this guy listening to top secret stuff for ten years. That's a much bigger story than his getting some useless poll data.
This is a podcast (not a video). Listen starting at 43.48.
To be clear, the "numbers from Real Clear Politics" are simply top line numbers from a poll. The actual raw data is where the true value of a poll resides and it is the cross tabs and statistical modelling resulting in chi-squares and p-ratios of said data that other campaigns and foreign entities would want to get their hands on.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Nan is a Russian “operative”. If this was 1952, MOL would have been under scrutiny from the CIA and the FBI…poor Jamie would have had to answer some uncomfortable questions…
Jaytee said:
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Nan is a Russian “operative”. If this was 1952, MOL would have been under scrutiny from the CIA and the FBI…poor Jamie would have had to answer some uncomfortable questions…
You do know Joseph McCarthy was a fake, right? He was not really finding spies under beds. He was using his power to control people into turning against innocent people. Just checking because it sounds like you think he was really doing good and wish we had him back.
Also, you might want to check out that free speech thing that is supposed to be one of the positive things about this country. Not everyone is going to agree with you. Just because someone does not agree with you does not mean they are committing crimes against their country.
News Flash: saying no to foreign policy leading to nuclear war is not a treasonous act.
Putin-connected businessman admits interference in U.S. elections
"Kremlin-connected entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin admitted Monday that he had interfered in U.S. elections and would continue to do so — confirming for the first time the accusations that he has rejected for years.
“We have interfered, are interfering and will continue to interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way,” Prigozhin said in remarks posted on social media.
In 2018, Prigozhin and a dozen other Russian nationals and three Russian companies were charged in the U.S. with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord and dividing American public opinion ahead of the 2016 presidential election won by Republican Donald Trump. They were indicted as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference.
The Justice Department in 2020 moved to dismiss charges against two of the indicted firms, Concord Management and Consulting LLC and Concord Catering, saying they had concluded that a trial against a corporate defendant with no presence in the U.S. and no prospect of meaningful punishment even if convicted would likely expose sensitive law enforcement tools and techniques."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/putin-connected-businessman-admits-interference-in-u-s-elections
The same Yevgeny Prigozhin who is admitting/boasting about election interference also controls the Wagner Group mercenaries.
yahooyahoo said:
I guess Nan has no comment......
She's waiting for the new talking points
Oh, suddenly my opinion is so wanted!!!!!! I think I will embed my answer in ten videos that you will all be required to watch first. I was going to comment here that it seems the Democrats have revived Russiagate out of mothballs just for the midterms. Hopefully, that ends starting tomorrow. But, I'm very busy these days and I'd rather just be on the Ukraine thread because that's relevant. This is a distraction.
Anyway, I did try to look for talking points to save time but there were none, probably because it's a non-story dressed up to titillate the Dems. This is the colorful guy with the sad sack troll farm who was indicted by Muller and who was willing to go to trial but then Muller suddenly dropped the case with a flimsy excuse--but really because the evidence was going to be so embarrassing for Muller. You know, pictures of Jesus talking to a boy about not masturbating and saying "We can beat it together."
The Grayzone covered all of this previously. The guy did all this on his own, not related to Putin, who would probably also be embarrassed to be associated with that guy's troll farm. I think the guy does a much better job with the Wagner Group because he's also known as bad chief. He gets people out of jail to join the Wagner Group and then kills them if they try to get away (or so I'm told on some YouTube videos--not my usual ones). Anyway, why the guy is now bragging he interferes with elections, I have no idea. He's probably just pulling your chains. He probably wants attention. And if he is telling the truth, don't worry -- he sucks at whatever he is doing on-line.
I really don't know because why would you admit you are interfering with elections and we don't have any evidence? The article tells about him saying that but provides no details or examples of what he is claiming or any timelines. That makes me wonder if this is just a bad translation and they guy said something else. Again, I don't know. Perhaps more information will come out but don't hold your breath because retro-Russiagate season is over.
As I have said multiple times, all countries spy on each other and may try to interfere in elections (especially the one we live in). However, there has been no proof that the Russians did this in 2016, and even if this guy had gone to trial, his evidence would not have demonstrated real influence on the election.
So, we will see.
Here are an article that discuss Yevgeny Prigozhin:
https://thegrayzone.com/2018/02/20/why-is-a-russian-troll-farm-being-compared-to-9-11/
Excerpt:
MAX BLUMENTHAL: First of all, this indictment tells us how thin Mueller’s evidence is. I know that might sound absurd to people who’ve been watching wall to wall coverage of this on MSNBC and CNN, but this is an indictment of 13 employees of a troll farm in Saint Petersburg, run by a literal hot dog salesman, who has no established or proven connection to Russian intelligence or the Russian government. It was an extremely sloppy operation that has even been identified in the Mueller indictment, as you said, as at least partly commercial operation.
Let me just go into some of the chronology and history of this operation and then we can kind of get into the details of the indictment. You have Yevgeny Prigozhin was a caterer in the 1990’s in Russia, you know, after the Cold War when the market opened up to oligarchs and it just became a complete free for all and what he would do is, basically, sell American junk food at inflated prices. He got a lot of catering contracts, not only with Russian elites who would like to go eat in his restaurants and eat gourmet hot dogs but with school cafeterias. The food was so bad that parents in Moscow began to complain. They said that their kids were getting fat, you know, they’re basically being set up for diabetes like American high school kids were. And so, Prigozhin decided he needed a PR effort to push back.
He started a troll farm and began hiring journalistic rejects in Moscow for like $1,200 dollars a month to fill up comment threads on negative articles. It was the beginning of what’s known as talk backs in other parts of the world, but we simply call them comment threads. And so, he flooded them with trolls and it was basically to defend his own commercial operation.
In 2013, the Internet Research Agency, his troll farm, allegedly began to fill up comment threads on articles about Alexei Navalny, who was emerging as the main opposition leader to Vladimir Putin in Russia, painting Navalny in a negative light. A year later they started their translation department where they began doing what they are accused of in the indictment, which is taking out ads under false identities on Facebook and Twitter and social media partly with a commercial intention. But it’s important to note the chronology because this began in 2013, revved up in 2014 and really was not directed at any specific US election.
There’s a good article actually, in the New York Times, by Neil MacFarquhar, who found that, who concluded, you know, this is one of the New York Times’ staff writers, I’m quoting him directly, “The intelligence services of Russia were not involved in running the organization.” He referred to the Internet Research Agency’s posts on Facebook and elsewhere, as graffiti, just trash on Twitter and said that the charges laid out in the indictment actually correspond with Vladimir Putin’s position that rouge patriots are responsible not only for trolling, but also for email hacking and cyber attacks connected to the US election.
So, basically, this actually supports the Russian position that the FSB and the military intelligence armed group had very to do, if anything, with any meddling in the 2016 election. This is a freelance operation carried out by someone who might of gotten contracts from the Kremlin but has no known connection. It was extremely sloppy, unlike other alleged Russian intelligence hacking operations, which are elaborately concealed and MacFarquhars reporting totally contradicts the headline that the New York Times gave it, which says that this operation points at the Kremlin. Again, we’re talking about 13 employees of a troll farm who are indicted here and it’s being treated as Pearl Harbor and 9/11 by the American political establishment.
What we can say is that there were hundreds of Facebook groups set up by the Internet Research Agency, some of them related to puppies. We’ve talked about this before, that there were cute puppy images that were apparently a part of this commercial scam. There was, the main probe, Bernie Sanders’ page, the one that we know of, was a buff Bernie LGBT themed coloring book where Bernie Sanders is depicted shirtless and extremely ripped with chiseled pecs and arms. I really don’t understand how this helped Bernie Sanders in any way but who it does help and who this entire narrative helps, the narrative that’s laid out in the indictment, which appears to be cherry picking evidence is it supports the Democratic establishment narrative.
How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled
The review by John Durham at one point veered into a criminal investigation related to Donald Trump himself, even as it failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.
too bad nan's not around to give us the Grayzone's view on why this story is B.S.
My understanding is there are two revelations here.
Durham tried to suppress (with Barr’s help) his own finding: that the DOJ acted properly when it initiated its investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities.
The Durham was tipped off to evidence of a crime by Donald Trump but chose not to pursue an indictment.
There was also this:
- Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Durham used grand-jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Durham has cited in any case he pursued.
here's some interesting reading about some questionable editorial decisions made by The Nation.
https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/04/russia-and-the-us-press-the-article-the-cjr-didnt-publish/
It's actually got two subjects. One is about the pro-Putin stance The Nation had developed before the war (largely due to Stephen Cohen, husband of Katrina vanden Heuvel, owner of The Nation).
The other is an examination of the b.s. story that the DNC hacked itself back in 2016.
When reading this piece, please keep in mind how things match up with paul and nan's posts on these two subjects.
(will cross post in a Russian thread.)
drummerboy said:
here's some interesting reading about some questionable editorial decisions made by The Nation.
https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/04/russia-and-the-us-press-the-article-the-cjr-didnt-publish/
It's actually got two subjects. One is about the pro-Putin stance The Nation had developed before the war (largely due to Stephen Cohen, husband of Katrina vanden Heuvel, owner of The Nation).
The other is an examination of the b.s. story that the DNC hacked itself back in 2016.
When reading this piece, please keep in mind how things match up with paul and nan's posts on these two subjects.
(cross-posted to Russia Hoax thread)
According to the article, The Nation got it wrong when it questioned the allegation that Trump engaged in collusion with Russia, and the allegation that Russia paid the Taliban bounties to kill US soldiers.
You are aware that both of those stories were fabrications, right?
And on the DNC email hack, you are aware that Crowdstrike has admitted it never had concrete evidence that the "hack" was conducted by Russia, right?
When reading this piece I kept thinking about how the falsehoods presented matched up with the confused, major-media-induced posts by drummerboy on these two subjects.
(cross-posted from the Whatabout thread. If you want to reply to me, please go there, because I don't follow this thread)
paulsurovell said:
And on the DNC email hack, you are aware that Crowdstrike has admitted it never had concrete evidence that the "hack" was conducted by Russia, right?
Tedious and dishonest.
The response on this thread, to that same claim, on June 4, 2022.
drummerboy said:
nan said:...the head of Crowdstrike said under oath that they really had no way of telling if it was the Russians who hacked the DNC servers.
The following is on Crowdstrike's corporate web site.
==================================================
Did CrowdStrike have proof that Russia hacked the DNC?
Yes, and this is also supported by the U.S. Intelligence community and independent Congressional reports.
Following a comprehensive investigation that CrowdStrike detailed publicly, the company concluded in May 2016 that two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries breached the DNC network.
To reference, CrowdStrike’s account of their DNC investigation, published on June 14, 2016, “CrowdStrike Services Inc., our Incident Response group, was called by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the formal governing body for the US Democratic Party, to respond to a suspected breach. We deployed our IR team and technology and immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR…. At DNC, COZY BEAR intrusion has been identified going back to summer of 2015, while FANCY BEAR separately breached the network in April 2016.”
This conclusion has most recently been supported by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2020 issuing a report [intelligence.senate.gov] validating the previous conclusions of the Intelligence community, published on January 6, 2017, that Russia was behind the DNC data breach.
The Senate report states on page 48:
“The Committee found that specific intelligence as well as open source assessments support the assessment that President Putin approved and directed aspects of this influence campaign.”
Furthermore, in his testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee, Shawn Henry stated the following with regards to CrowdStrike’s degree of confidence that the intrusion activity can be attributed to Russia, cited from page 24:
- HENRY: We said that we had a high degree of confidence it was the Russian Government. And our analysts that looked at it and that had looked at these types of attacks before, many different types of attacks similar to this in different environments, certain tools that were used, certain methods by which they were moving in the environment,and looking at the types of data that was being targeted, that it was consistent with a nation-state adversary and associated with Russian intelligence.
You all will probably jump all over me and call me names. That is what you do. However, I think many here owe Paul an apology.
Props to Aaron, @ggreenwald, @mtaibbi and everyone else on the liberal-left who told the truth about RussiaGate from the beginning. They were slandered, blacklisted, betrayed by so-called friends, and they deserve credit. https://t.co/EoMKxJ55LJ
— Martyr Made
terp said:
You all will probably jump all over me and call me names. That is what you do. However, I think many here owe Paul an apology.
An apology for what?
terp said:
You all will probably jump all over me and call me names. That is what you do. However, I think many here owe Paul an apology.
hold your horses… whatabout the twelve Russian intelligence officers who were indicted?
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It makes him sound ridiculous, but provides zero evidence that he was hatching a secret plan with a "Russian spy," revealed six years later, just when the mainstream media needed freshly injected propaganda.
Russiagate: The Dark and Stormy Night Edition. Available now in time for holiday gift giving.