As if on cue, Individual-1 chooses to flout Congressional authority in terms of the Global Magnitsky Act, and to continue his support for Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bin Salman by not acting on investigations of Jamal Khashoggi’s killing.
By breaking the law Trump leaves himself open to criticism and perhaps an investigation that he may have been involved in green-lighting the Khashoggi murder or maybe even with the extortion of Jeff Bezos.
President Donald Trump has missed a deadline imposed by a bipartisan group of senators to identify the killers of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and to determine if the U.S. should impose sanctions on them.
"Consistent with the previous Administration’s position and the constitutional separation of powers, the President maintains his discretion to decline to act on congressional committee requests when appropriate," a senior administration official said Friday.
The group of lawmakers, led by Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and former Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn), last October in a letter ordered the president to identify the people behind Khashoggi's death within 120 days and decide whether to impose sanctions on the killers.
The letter was brought under the Global Magnitsky Act.
www.politico.com/...
What’s weirder in terms of speculation is that Saudi money may be involved with the National Enquirer’s recent troubles. They have been caught trying to extort Jeff Bezos, perhaps using the same technologies entangled in the MbS murder of Khashoggi, primarily because of hacking by various intelligence assets and/or agencies.
2. Let's start in 2017 -- when Muhammed bin Salman (MBS) consolidates power over Saudi Arabia and fumes about dissident Jamal Khashoggi writing for the Washington Post, saying he'd personally put "a bullet" in the U.S.-based journalist
3. In 2018, Khashoggi is murdered by Saudi agents inside their Turkish embassy. Mourning journalists at the Post vow to use all of the paper's assets in a relentless quest to expose the truth, including MBS's role, until "meaningful action is taken"
4. Meanwhile, the world is also learning that AMI, publisher of the National Enquirer, and its owner David Pecker, played a critical role in Donald Trump's rise to the White House, snuffing out would-be scandals and keeping dirt on POTUS 45 in a safe
5. During Trump's 1st year in the WH, the key players come together. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner forms close ties with MBS and possibly shares intelligence, while AMI's Pecker uses his Trump ties to get a White House meeting to tap Saudi billions
6. An apparent result of that meeting was AMI's publication of a ridiculous (and ridiculously overpriced) magazine that puffed up MBS's Saudi Arabia as a "magic kingdom" and was placed on racks in Walmart, etc.
7. Jump ahead to the near present. Last month, Post owner Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, announced he's getting a divorce, hours before his intimate "sexts" with a mistress are published by...AMI's National Enquirer
8. As often happens (remember Russia's 2016 election hacks) the news tends to obscure a somewhat more salient question: How did the National Enquirer get these texts. Bezos would not roll over. Instead, he hired a top investigator to find out
9. Last night, it all hit the fan. Bezos went public with a new blackmail effort by the Enquirer -- a threat to publish lewd or racy photos of Bezos and his paramour unless he dropped the probe of AMI's hacking
10. Critically, AMI wanted Bezos to falsely state that his investigation led to "no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.” The sensitive point, according to Bezos? The possible role of Saudi Arabia.
11. Talk about opening a Pandora's box! The Bezos-AMI affair should call attention to increased hacking wars that have consumed Saudi Arabia, its close ally the UAE and their newfound adversary Qatar, working with various mercenary types from the U.S. and Israel...
12. ...Is it a coincidence that just as the Bezos-AMI affair was exploding, Reuters exposed an operation called Karma in which "former U.S. intelligence agents" (!!!) helped the UAE hack the iPhones of its prominent adversaries.
13. Karma was apparently part of a broader effort, Project Raven. That's just the latest twist in growing web that involves Trump, the Saudis, shadowy intelligence firms, a weaponized Nat'l Enquirer, hacking and blackmail going back to the 2016 election.
14. Remember this Trump Tower meeting in 2016 that involved Don. Jr., an Israeli intelligence firm, and a promise of Saudi/UAE money to elect Trump? It might be a coincidence, but it hints at what's exploding right now
15. Why did Pecker's AMI panic at Bezos' investigation and the inference of Saudi involvement, and initiate a blackmail attempt, when it had just promised the Justice Department to refrain from criminal activity in the Michael Cohen case? It seems like an insane risk.
16. Is that because the Bezos investigation threatens to expose secrets of much greater significance than just a billionaire's sexts? Such as, the conspiracy behind Khashoggi's murder? Or behind the election of Donald Trump?
17. Stay tuned. You know what they say about Karma -- it's a bitch. -30-
And now we have further questions about how much the US intelligence community knows about all of these matters, aside from the Mueller/SDNY possibilities — remember that there was a Flynn, Manafort, Bannon, and Kushner project for Middle-East nuclear power plants that had Saudi and Russian financial involvement. Something else for Congressional committees to look at soon.