Today Roger Stone has been sentenced to 40 months in prison for lying to Congress, obstruction of justice and witness tampering in the Russia/Mueller case. This, of course, has thrown Donald Trump in a twitter tizzy as he whines and complains about the “unfairness” over his longest political advisor being prosecuted for denying that he was in communication with Russian Intelligence (Guccifer 2.0), Wikileaks and also with the Trump campaign sharing information back and forth between both camps.
Robert Mueller’s report declared that no one in the “Trump campaign coordinated with the Russia campaign effort” but that’s only true because Roger Stone wasn’t technically part of his campaign. He had informed the campaign through contacts with links to RT that Wikileaks planned to release emails from John Podesta’s account months before it happened, then when the WaPo questioned the campaign about the Access Hollywood tape, they contacted Stone who reached out to Wikileaks and had the Podesta emails released just 30 minutes after the WaPo report was posted.
On October 7, 2016, The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasts about groping women, dealing a major blow to the Trump campaign just a month before the election. Twenty-nine minutes after the tape was published, WikiLeaks began posting Podesta’s stolen emails online. WikiLeaks continued to post leaked Podesta emails throughout October 2016; in a concerning twist of events, Russian news outlet RT seemed to know about these leaks before they happened. On both October 13 and October 22, 2016, RT tweeted about a new batch of Podesta emails 30 minutes before WikiLeaks announced their release.
Longtime Trump associate Roger Stone also seemed to foreshadow these leaks, tweeting “it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel” in August 2016. Although Stone initially denied having any contact with Wikileaks, he later revealed that he communicated with WikiLeaks through an intermediary. Stone did not reveal whether he talked with this intermediary about the Podesta hack, and he reiterated his denial of any “advance knowledge of the plan by WikiLeaks to publish [Podesta’s] hacked emails.”
Stone was lying. He knew all about the Podesta hack, he specifically requested that Wikileaks begin releasing their hacked emails at a strategic moment when it would help Trump the most and do the most damage to Clinton’s campaign. That is “coordination.” That is collusion. That is a conspiracy.
Trump has been on a jihad to completely erase and expunge the Mueller report and all it’s findings. As part of that effort, he has issued a set of pardons for lying corrupt white-collar scumbags like Michael Milken and Bernard Kerik. The truly amazing pardon is naturally the one he issued for former Apprentice contestant Rod Blagojevich who had been sentenced to 14 years for trying to sell Barack Obama’s former senate seat. This pardon was apparently part of his vendetta against James Comey because Trump believes that Rod received a “raw deal” from the “Comey gang.”
As he was defending his commutation of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s (D) prison sentence on Wednesday, President Donald Trump dragged one of his favorite punching bags onto the scene.
Arguing that the disgraced ex-governor “did not sell” Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat (he was arrested before he could do so), Trump lamented Blagojevich’s eight years in prison.
“He paid a big price,” Trump tweeted. “Another Comey and gang deal!”
Blagojevich was prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald who had also prosecuted Scooter Libby, another of Trump’s pardonees, for his involvement in obstructing justice in the Plame Scandal. Blaming this on Comey is typical Trump because it’s factually nonsense. James Comey had been Deputy Attorney General during the Bush administration and he had left that position in 2005, three years before Blagojevich was arrested in 2008. He didn't return to become FBI Director until 2013, which was two years after Blago's trial had completed and he'd been sentenced in 2011.
Simply put, Comey had nothing to do with this case either from the DOJ or the FBI. He is a friend of Patrick Fitzgerald who is part of his defense team, but that’s simply “guilt" by association. It’s also interesting that Scooter Libby committed obstruction by blocking evidence that he was originally told that Plame was a CIA employee by Dick Cheney and instead falsely claimed that he’d learned about it from Meet the Press host Tim Russert — compared to Stone's who falsely claimed under oath that he’d communicated with Randy Credico, when in reality his conduit was through Jerome Corsi.
The other big bombshell this week is that Julian Assange’s lawyer revealed that his client was offered a pardon by Trump through former Congressman Dana Rohrabacher in exchange for claiming that Russia had nothing to do with the hacked and stolen emails he had released through Wikileaks.
The Assange lawyer outlined a potential deal for Assange in 2017 that was allegedly offered roughly two years before he was eventually indicted in the U.S. Per the alleged deal, supposedly conveyed by Rohrabacher on behalf of President Trump, Assange would announce that Russia had nothing to do with the emails and documents that Wikileaks released during the 2016 election.
In return, Assange would get something very simple: a pardon.
The alleged deal raises a host of questions about what may have been an early effort to counter the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Assange reportedly was asked not only to issue a statement disavowing any ties to Russia, but also to supply a hard drive that, Rohrabacher claimed, would “exonerate Russia.”
Yeah, because we really need to “exonerate Russia.”
It’s not like they already trying to influence the 2020 election in order to re-elect Trump or anything.
Cybersecurity experts have been warning that it isn’t a question of whether or not the Russian government under President Vladimir Putin will try to interfere in the United States’ 2020 election — it’s a question of how successful they will be and the ways in which they will make an attempt. Three security experts (Alex Finley, John Sipher and Asha Rangappa) address this concern in a February 19 article for Just Security, warning that troubling vulnerabilities remain in the United States’ election system.
Last week, the article notes, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the House Judiciary Committee that “Russia’s disinformation campaign to interfere in the 2020 election is underway.”
According to Finley, Sipher and Rangappa, “Ex-KGB officer and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal was never simply to place a Manchurian candidate in the Oval Office, but rather, to permanently destabilize the West, damage U.S. credibility and undermine those very things that make democratic countries special. Putin aimed for chaos, and Donald Trump was the chaos candidate in 2016.”
Putin, the security experts warn, “will continue to attack, namely because his objectives haven’t changed and the United States has not done anything to defend or deter him from this course of action.”
On Russian talk shows, pro-Kremlin pundits have been cheering for Trump and hoping he will be reelected. As they see it, a second Trump term would serve Russian interests.
“We can be confident that the 2020 election cycle will provide the Kremlin opportunities to pursue further subversion, disinformation and deception,” Finley, Sipher and Rangappa assert. “We should expect to see a barrage of disinformation, from fake think tanks, fake media outlets, false social media accounts, false identities, trolls and bots to launder fringe narratives into the mainstream and hijack the public discourse. Lies will target the Democratic nominee — as the corruption conspiracy about former Vice President Joe Biden shows, this step began long ago — as well as seek to divide the Democratic vote.”
So that’s just peachy. And yet when the current DNI Joseph Macguire informed Congress of that status of Russia interference efforts for 2020 last week, it infuriated Trump and he decided to have Macguire replaced with German Ambassador Richard Grennell who has no experience with intelligence matters.
On top of all this, we have yet another set of Right-wing White Supremacists trying to stir up attacks on police and Liberals, because of course, we do.
The loosely organized movement is trolling for members on mainstream platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Twitter, in addition to 4chan and other fringe sites, to promote a second Civil War, reported NBC News.
“When you have people talking about and planning sedition and violence against minorities, police, and public officials, we need to take their words seriously,” said Paul Goldenberg, of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.
Hate groups have pushed for anti-government violence in the past, but the “boogaloo” movement appears to be new development in the spread of far-right extremism.
The nonprofit Network Contagion Research Institute has been tracking social media posts, memes and comments and found examples of the “boogaloo” phenomenon spreading online and showing up at real-world events.
Here are the remaining events for the week:
February 14th —
February 15th —
February 16th—
February 17th —
February 18th—
February 19th —
February 20th --