Taibbi: It’s Official – ‘Russiagate’ Is This Generation’s WMD

Authored by Matt Taibbi, excerpted from his serial book Hate Inc.,

The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it…

Note to readers: in light of news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation is complete, I’m releasing this chapter of Hate Inc. early, with a few new details added up top.

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Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

As has long been rumored, the former FBI chief’s independent probe will result in multiple indictments and convictions, but no “presidency-wrecking” conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman’s definition of “collusion” with Russia.

With the caveat that even this news might somehow turn out to be botched, the key detail in the many stories about the end of the Mueller investigation was best expressed by the New York Times:

A senior Justice Department official said that Mr. Mueller would not recommend new indictments.

The Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. Nobody even pretended it was supposed to be a fact-finding mission, instead of an act of faith.

The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” to him featuring the rhymey line: “Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup.”

The Times story today tried to preserve Santa Mueller’s reputation, noting Trump’s Attorney General William Barr’s reaction was an “endorsement” of the fineness of Mueller’s work:

In an apparent endorsement of an investigation that Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked as a “witch hunt,” Mr. Barr said Justice Department officials never had to intervene to keep Mr. Mueller from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step.

Mueller, in other words, never stepped out of the bounds of his job description. But could the same be said for the news media?

For those anxious to keep the dream alive, the Times published its usual graphic of Trump-Russia “contacts,” inviting readers to keep making connections. But in a separate piece by Peter Baker, the paper noted the Mueller news had dire consequences for the press:

It will be a reckoning for President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for Congress, for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and, yes, for the system as a whole…

This is a damning page one admission by the Times. Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper also ran suggesting “We don’t need to read the Mueller report” because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question: “Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?”

The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like themselves made a galactic error by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”

Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

Openly using such language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.

There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and…

Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.

For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something “so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan” against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecute.

The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so.

The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election.

The betrayal narrative was not reported at first as metaphor. It was not “Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be a spy for them.” It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing – crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump “will die in jail.”

In the early months of this scandal, the New York Times said Trump’s campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence; the Wall Street Journal told us our spy agencies were withholding intelligence from the new President out of fear he was compromised; news leaked out our spy chiefs had even told other countries like Israel not to share their intel with us, because the Russians might have “leverages of pressure” on Trump.

CNN told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA, who’d helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the President was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing short of treasonous.”

Hillary Clinton insisted Russians “could not have known how to weaponize” political ads unless they’d been “guided” by Americans. Asked if she meant Trump, she said, “It’s pretty hard not to.” Harry Reid similarly said he had “no doubt” that the Trump campaign was “in on the deal” to help Russians with the leak.

None of this has been walked back. To be clear, if Trump were being blackmailed by Russian agencies like the FSB or the GRU, if he had any kind of relationship with Russian intelligence, that would soar over the “overwhelming and bipartisan” standard, and Nancy Pelosi would be damning torpedoes for impeachment right now.

There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.”

Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.

#Russiagate debuted as a media phenomenon in mid-summer, 2016. The roots of the actual story, i.e. when the multi-national investigation began, go back much further, to the previous year at least. Oddly, that origin tale has not been nailed down yet, and blue-state audiences don’t seem terribly interested in it, either.

By June and July of 2016, bits of the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which had been funded by the Democratic National Committeethrough the law firm Perkins Coie (which in turn hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS), were already in the ether.

The Steele report occupies the same role in #Russiagate the tales spun by Ahmed Chalabi occupied in the WMD screwup. Once again, a narrative became turbo-charged when Officials With Motives pulled the press corps by its nose to a swamp of unconfirmable private assertions.

Some early stories, like a July 4, 2016 piece by Franklin Foer in Slate called “Putin’s Puppet,” outlined future Steele themes in “circumstantial” form. But the actual dossier, while it influenced a number of pre-election Trump-Russia news stories (notably one by Michael Isiskoff of Yahoo! that would be used in a FISA warrant application), didn’t make it into print for a while.

Though it was shopped to at least nine news organizations during the summer and fall of 2016, no one bit, for the good reason that news organizations couldn’t verify its “revelations.”

The Steele claims were explosive if true. The ex-spy reported Trump aide Carter Page had been offered fees on a big new slice of the oil giant Rosneft if he could help get sanctions against Russia lifted. He also said Trump lawyer Michael Cohen went to Prague for “secret discussions with Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers.”

Most famously, he wrote the Kremlin had kompromat of Trump “deriling” [sic] a bed once used by Barack and Michelle Obama by “employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show.”

This was too good of a story not to do. By hook or crook, it had to come out. The first salvo was by David Corn of Mother Jones on October 31, 2016: “A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump.”

The piece didn’t have pee, Prague, or Page in it, but it did say Russian intelligence had material that could “blackmail” Trump. It was technically kosher to print because Corn wasn’t publishing the allegations themselves, merely that the FBI had taken possession of them.

A bigger pretext was needed to get the other details out. This took place just after the election, when four intelligence officials presented copies of the dossier to both President-Elect Trump and outgoing President Obama.

From his own memos, we know FBI Director James Comey, ostensibly evincing concern for Trump’s welfare, told the new President he was just warning him about what was out there, as possible blackmail material:

I wasn’t saying [the Steele report] was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold [sic].

Comey’s generous warning to Trump about not providing a “news hook,” along with a promise to keep it all “close-held,” took place on January 6, 2017. Within four days, basically the entire Washington news media somehow knew all about this top-secret meeting and had the very hook they needed to go public. Nobody in the mainstream press thought this was weird or warranted comment.

Even Donald Trump was probably smart enough to catch the hint when, of all outlets, it was CNN that first broke the story of “Classified documents presented last week to Trump” on January 10.

At the same time, Buzzfeed made the historic decision to publish the entire Steele dossier, bringing years of pee into our lives. This move birthed the Russiagate phenomenon as a never-ending, minute-to-minute factor in American news coverage.

Comey was right. We couldn’t have reported this story without a “hook.” Therefore the reports surrounding Steele technically weren’t about the allegations themselves, but rather the journey of those allegations, from one set of official hands to another. Handing the report to Trump created a perfect pretext.

This trick has been used before, both in Washington and on Wall Street, to publicize unconfirmed private research. A short seller might hire a consulting firm to prepare a report on a company he or she has bet against. When the report is completed, the investor then tries to get the SEC or the FBI to take possession. If they do, news leaks the company is “under investigation,” the stock dives, and everyone wins.  

This same trick is found in politics. A similar trajectory drove negative headlines in the scandal surrounding New Jersey’s Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who was said to be under investigation by the FBI for underage sex crimes (although some were skeptical). The initial story didn’t hold up, but led to other investigations.

Same with the so-called “Arkansas project,” in which millions of Republican-friendly private research dollars produced enough noise about the Whitewater scandal to create years of headlines about the Clintons. Swiftboating was another example. Private oppo isn’t inherently bad. In fact it has led to some incredible scoops, including Enron. But reporters usually know to be skeptical of private info, and figure the motives of its patrons into the story.

The sequence of events in that second week of January, 2017 will now need to be heavily re-examined. We now know, from his own testimony, that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had some kind of role in helping CNN do its report, presumably by confirming part of the story, perhaps through an intermediary or two (there is some controversy over whom exactly was contacted, and when).

Why would real security officials help litigate this grave matter through the media? Why were the world’s most powerful investigative agencies acting like they were trying to move a stock, pushing an private, unverified report that even Buzzfeed could see had factual issues? It made no sense at the time, and makes less now.

In January of 2017, Steele’s pile of allegations became public, read by millions. “It is not just unconfirmed,” Buzzfeed admitted. “It includes some clear errors.”

Buzzfeed’s decision exploded traditional journalistic standards against knowingly publishing material whose veracity you doubt. Although a few media ethicistswondered at it, this seemed not to bother the rank-and-file in the business. Buzzfeed chief Ben Smith is still proud of his decision today. I think this was because many reporters believed the report was true.

When I read the report, I was in shock. I thought it read like fourth-rate suspense fiction (I should know: I write fourth-rate suspense fiction). Moreover it seemed edited both for public consumption and to please Steele’s DNC patrons.

Steele wrote of Russians having a file of “compromising information” on Hillary Clinton, only this file supposedly lacked “details/evidence of unorthodox or embarrassing behavior” or “embarrassing conduct.”

We were meant to believe the Russians, across decades of dirt-digging, had an emptykompromat file on Hillary Clinton, to say nothing of human tabloid headline Bill Clinton? This point was made more than once in the reports, as if being emphasized for the reading public.

There were other curious lines, including the bit about Russians having “moles” in the DNC, plus some linguistic details that made me wonder at the nationality of the report author.

Still, who knew? It could be true. But even the most cursory review showed the report had issues and would need a lot of confirming. This made it more amazing that the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, held hearings on March 20, 2017 that blithely read out Steele report details as if they were fact. From Schiff’s opening statement:

According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. Intelligence, Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin (SEH-CHIN), CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft… Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company.

I was stunned watching this. It’s generally understood that members of congress, like reporters, make an effort to vet at least their prepared remarks before making them public.

But here was Schiff, telling the world Trump aide Carter Page had been offered huge fees on a 19% stake in Rosneft – a company with a $63 billion market capitalization – in a secret meeting with a Russian oligarch who was also said to be “a KGB agent and close friend of Putin’s.”

(Schiff meant “FSB agent.” The inability of #Russiagaters to remember Russia is not the Soviet Union became increasingly maddening over time. Donna Brazile still hasn’t deleted her tweet about how “The Communists are now dictating the terms of the debate.” )

Schiff’s speech raised questions. Do we no longer have to worry about getting accusations right if the subject is tied to Russiagate? What if Page hadn’t done any of these things? To date, he hasn’t been charged with anything. Shouldn’t a member of congress worry about this?

A few weeks after that hearing, Steele gave testimony in a British lawsuit filed by one of the Russian companies mentioned in his reports. In a written submission, Steele said his information was “raw” and “needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified.” He also wrote that (at least as pertained to the memo in that case) he had not written his report “with the intention that it be republished to the world at large.”

That itself was a curious statement, given that Steele reportedly spoke with multiple reporters in the fall of 2016, but this was his legal position. This story about Steele’s British court statements did not make it into the news much in the United States, apart from a few bits in conservative outlets like The Washington Times.

I contacted Schiff’s office to ask if the congressman if he knew about Steele’s admission that his report needed verifying, and if that changed his view of it at all. The response (emphasis mine):

The dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and which was leaked publicly several months ago contains information that may be pertinent to our investigation. This is true regardless of whether it was ever intended for public dissemination. Accordingly, the Committee hopes to speak with Mr. Steele in order to help substantiate or refute each of the allegations contained in the dossier.

Schiff had not spoken to Steele before the hearing, and read out the allegations knowing they were unsubstantiated.

The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were unable to independently produce Steele’s results in the lab. Failure to reckon with this corrupted the narrative from the start. 

For years, every hint the dossier might be true became a banner headline, while every time doubt was cast on Steele’s revelations, the press was quiet. Washington Post reporter Greg Miller went to Prague and led a team looking for evidence Cohen had been there. Post reporters, Miller said, “literally spent weeks and months trying to run down” the Cohen story.

“We sent reporters through every hotel in Prague, through all over the place, just to try to figure out if he was ever there,” he said, “and came away empty.”

This was heads-I-win, tails-you-lose reporting. One assumes if Miller found Cohen’s name in a hotel ledger, it would have been on page 1 of the Post. The converse didn’t get a mention in Miller’s own paper. He only told the story during a discussion aired by C-SPAN about a new book he’d published. Only The Daily Caller and a few conservative blogs picked it up.

It was the same when Bob Woodward said, “I did not find [espionage or collusion]… Of course I looked for it, looked for it hard.”

The celebrated Watergate muckraker – who once said he’d succumbed to “groupthink”in the WMD episode and added, “I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder” – didn’t push very hard here, either. News that he’d tried and failed to find collusion didn’t get into his own paper. It only came out when Woodward was promoting his book Fear in a discussion with conservative host Hugh Hewitt.

When Michael Cohen testified before congress and denied under oath ever being in Prague, it was the same. Few commercial news outlets bothered to take note of the implications this had for their previous reports. Would a man clinging to a plea deal lie to congress on national television about this issue?

There was a CNN story, but the rest of the coverage was all in conservative outlets – the National ReviewFoxThe Daily CallerThe Washington Post’s response was to run an editorial sneering at “How conservative media downplayed Michael Cohen’s testimony.”

Perhaps worst of all was the episode involving Yahoo! reporter Michael Isikoff. He had already been part of one strange tale: the FBI double-dipping when it sought a FISA warrant to conduct secret surveillance of Carter Page, the would-be mastermind who was supposed to have brokered a deal with oligarch Sechin.

In its FISA application, the FBI included both the unconfirmed Steele report and Isikoff’s September 23, 2016 Yahoo! story, “U.S. Intel Officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” The Isikoff story, which claimed Page had met with “high ranking sanctioned officials” in Russia, had relied upon Steele as an unnamed source.

This was similar to a laundering technique used in the WMD episode called “stove-piping,” i.e. officials using the press to “confirm” information the officials themselves fed the reporter.

But there was virtually no non-conservative press about this problem apart from a Washington Post story pooh-poohing the issue. (Every news story that casts any doubt on the collusion issue seems to meet with an instantaneous “fact check” in the Post.) The Post insisted the FISA issue wasn’t serious among other things because Steele was not the “foundation” of Isikoff’s piece.

Isikoff was perhaps the reporter most familiar with Steele. He and Corn of Mother Jones, who also dealt with the ex-spy, wrote a bestselling book that relied upon theories from Steele, Russian Roulette, including a rumination on the “pee” episode. Yet Isikoff in late 2018 suddenly said he believed the Steele report would turn out to be “mostly false.”

Once again, this only came out via a podcast, John Ziegler’s “Free Speech Broadcasting” show. Here’s a transcript of the relevant section:

Isikoff: When you actually get into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, you know, we have not seen the evidence to support them. And in fact there is good grounds to think some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven, and are likely false.

Ziegler: That’s…

Isikoff: I think it’s a mixed record at best at this point, things could change, Mueller may yet produce evidence that changes this calculation. But based on the public record at this point I have to say that most of the specific allegations have not been borne out.

Ziegler: That’s interesting to hear you say that, Michael because as I’m sure you know, your book was kind of used to validate the pee tape, for lack of a better term.

Isikoff: Yeah. I think we had some evidence in there of an event that may have inspired the pee tape and that was the visit that Trump made with a number of characters who later showed up in Moscow, specifically Emin Agalarov and Rob Goldstone to this raunchy Las Vegas nightclub where one of the regular acts was a skit called “Hot For Teacher” in which dancers posing as college Co-Ed’s urinated – or simulated urinating on their professor. Which struck me as an odd coincidence at best. I think, you know, it is not implausible that event may have inspired…

Ziegler: An urban legend?

Isikoff: …allegations that appeared in the Steele dossier. 

Isikoff delivered this story with a laughing tone. He seamlessly transitioned to what he then called the “real” point, i.e. “the irony is Steele may be right, but it wasn’t the Kremlin that had sexual kompromat on Donald Trump, it was the National Enquirer.

Recapping: the reporter who introduced Steele to the world (his September 23, 2016 story was the first to reference him as a source), who wrote a book that even he concedes was seen as “validating” the pee tape story, suddenly backtracks and says the whole thing may have been based on a Las Vegas strip act, but it doesn’t matter because Stormy Daniels, etc.

Another story of this type involved a court case in which Webzilla and parent company XBT sued Steele and Buzzfeed over the mention their firm in one of the memos. It came out in court testimony that Steele had culled information about XBT/Webzilla from a 2009 post on CNN’s “iReports” page

Asked if he understood these posts came from random users and not CNN journalists who’d been fact-checked, Steele replied, “I do not.” 

This comical detail was similar to news that the second British Mi6 dossier released just before the Iraq invasion had been plagiarized in part from a thirteen year-old student thesis from California State University, not even by intelligence people, but by mid-level functionaries in Tony Blair’s press office. 

There were so many profiles of Steele as an “astoundingly diligent” spymaster straight out of LeCarre: he was routinely described like a LeCarre-ian grinder like the legendary George Smiley, a man in the shadows whose bookish intensity was belied by his “average,” “neutral,” “quiet,” demeanor, being “more low-key than Smiley.” One would think it might have rated a mention that our “Smiley” was cutting and pasting text like a community college freshman. But the story barely made news.

This has been a consistent pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step three (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the same publication.

That’s been rare. More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the “retraction” process to conservative outlets that don’t reach the original audiences.

This is a major structural flaw of the new fully-divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.

This has been the main difference between Russiagate and the WMD affair. Despite David Remnick’s post-invasion protestations that “nobody got [WMD] completely right,” the Iraq war was launched against the objections of the 6 million or more people who did get it right, and protested on the streets. There was open skepticism of Bush claims dotting the press landscape from the start, with people like Jack Shafer tearing apart every Judith Miller story in print. Most reporters are Democrats and the people hawking the WMD story were mostly Republicans, so there was political space for protest.

Russiagate happened in an opposite context. If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump politically, a fact that made a number of reporters queasy about coming forward. #Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public skepticism a complicated proposition.

Early in the scandal, I appeared on To The Point, a California-based public radio show hosted by Warren Olney, with Corn of Mother Jones. I knew David a little and had been friendly with him. He once hosted a book event for me in Washington. In the program, however, the subject of getting facts right came up and Corn said this was not a time for reporters to be picking nits:

So Democrats getting overeager, overenthusiastic, stating things that may not be [unintelligible] true…? Well, tell me a political issue where that doesn’t happen. I think that’s looking at the wrong end of the telescope.

I wrote him later and suggested that since we’re in the press, and not really about anything except avoiding “things that may not be true,” maybe we had different responsibilities than “Democrats”? He wrote back:

Feel free to police the Trump opposition. But on the list of shit that needs to be covered these days, that’s just not high on my personal list.

Other reporters spoke of an internal struggle. When the Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency was met with exultation in the media, New Yorker writer Adrian Chen, who broke the original IRA story, was hesitant to come forward with some mild qualms about the way the story was being reported:

“Either I could stay silent and allow the conversation to be dominated by those pumping up the Russian threat,” he said, “or I could risk giving fodder to Trump and his allies.”

After writing, “Confessions of a Russiagate Skeptic,” poor Blake Hounsell of Politicotook such a beating on social media, he ended up denouncing himself a year later.

“What I meant to write is, I wasn’t skeptical,” he said.

Years ago, in the midst of the WMD affair, Times public editor Daniel Okrent noted the paper’s standard had moved from “Don’t get it first, get it right” to “Get it first and get it right.” From there, Okrent wrote, “the next devolution was an obvious one.”

We’re at that next devolution: first and wrong. The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident.

Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia “bombshells” being walked back, I started to keep a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way.

In some cases the stories are only partly wrong, as in the case of the famed “17 intelligence agencies said Russia was behind the hacking” story (it was actually four: the Director of National Intelligence “hand-picking” a team from the FBI, CIA, and NSA).

In other cases the stories were blunt false starts, resulting in ugly sets of matching headlines:

Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility

Washington Post, December 31, 2016.

Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility

Washington Post, Jan. 2, 2017.

Trump Campaign Aides had repeated contacts with Russian Intelligence,” published by the Times on Valentine’s Day, 2017, was an important, narrative-driving “bombshell” that looked dicey from the start. The piece didn’t say whether the contact was witting or unwitting, whether the discussions were about business or politics, or what the contacts supposedly were at all.

Normally a reporter would want to know what the deal is before he or she runs a story accusing people of having dealings with foreign spies. “Witting” or “Unwitting” ought to be a huge distinction, for instance. It soon after came out that people like former CIA chief John Brennan don’t think this is the case. “Frequently, people who are on a treasonous path do not know they’re on a treasonous path,” he said, speaking of Trump’s circle.

This seemed a dangerous argument, the kind of thing that led to trouble in the McCarthy years. But let’s say the contacts were serious. From a reporting point of view, you’d still need to know exactly what the nature of such contacts were before you run that story, because the headline implication is grave. Moreover you’d need to know it well enough to report it, i.e. it’s not enough to be told a convincing story off-the-record, you need to be able to share with readers enough so that they can characterize the news themselves.

Not to the Times, which ran the article without the specifics. Months later, Comey blew up this “contacts” story in public, saying, “in the main, it was not true.“

As was the case with the “17 agencies” error, which only got fixed when Clapper testified in congress and was forced to make the correction under oath, the “repeated contacts” story was only disputed when Comey testified in congress, this time before the Senate Intelligence Committee. How many other errors of this type are waiting to be disclosed?

Even the mistakes caught were astounding. On December 1, 2017, ABC reporter Brian Ross claimed Trump “as a candidate” instructed Michael Flynn to contact Russia. The news caused the Dow to plummet 350 points. The story was retracted almost immediately and Ross was suspended.

Bloomberg reported Mueller subpoenaed Trump’s Deutsche Bank accounts; the subpoenas turned out to be of other individuals’ records. Fortune said C-SPAN was hacked after Russia Today programming briefly interrupted coverage of a Maxine Waters floor address. The New York Times also ran the story, and it’s still up, despite C-SPAN insisting its own “internal routing error” likely caused the feed to appear in place of its own broadcast.

CNN has its own separate sub-list of wrecks. Three of the network’s journalists resigned after a story purporting to tie Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund was retracted. Four more CNN reporters (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus) were bylined in a story that claimed Comey was expected to refute Trump’s claims he was told he wasn’t the target of an investigation. Comey blew that one up, too.

In another CNN scoop gone awry, “Email pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents,” the network’s reporters were off by ten days in a “bombshell” that supposedly proved the Trump campaign had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps. “It’s, uh, perhaps not as significant as what we know now,” offered CNN’s Manu Raju in a painful on-air retraction.

The worst stories were the ones never corrected. A particularly bad example is “After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced,” from the New York Times on Feb 18, 2018. The piece claimed Russians were trying to divide Americans on social media after a mass shooting using Twitter hashtags like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting.

The Times ran this quote high up:

 “This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”

About a year after this story came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder reported that the same outfit, New Knowledge, and in particular that same Jonathon Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity in an Alabama Senate race. The idea was to try to convince voters Russia preferred the Republican.

The Times quoted a New Knowledge internal report about the idiotic Alabama scheme:

We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet…

The Parkland story was iffy enough when it came out, as Twitter disputed it, and another of the main sources for the initial report, former intelligence official Clint Watts, subsequently said he was “not convinced” on the whole “bot thing.”

But when one of your top sources turns out to have faked exactly the kind of activity described in your article, you should at least take the quote out, or put an update online. No luck: the story remains up on the Times site, without disclaimers.

Russiagate institutionalized one of the worst ethical loopholes in journalism, which used to be limited mainly to local crime reporting. It’s always been a problem that we publish mugshots and names of people merely arrested but not yet found guilty. Those stories live forever online and even the acquitted end up permanently unable to get jobs, smeared as thieves, wife-beaters, drunk drivers, etc.

With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there’s a difference between indictment and conviction. The most disturbing story involved Maria Butina. Here authorities and the press shared responsibility. Thanks to an indictment that initially said the Russian traded sex for favors, the Times and other outlets flooded the news cycle with breathless stories about a redheaded slut-temptress come to undermine democracy, a “real-life Red Sparrow,” as ABC put it.

But a judge threw out the sex charge after “five minutes” when it turned out to be based on a single joke text to a friend who had taken Butina’s car for inspection.

It’s pretty hard to undo public perception you’re a prostitute once it’s been in a headline, and, worse, the headlines are still out there. You can still find stories like “Maria Butina, Suspected Secret Agent, Used Sex in Covert Plan” online in the New York Times.

Here a reporter might protest: how would I know? Prosecutors said she traded sex for money. Why shouldn’t I believe them?

How about because, authorities have been lying their faces off to reporters since before electricity! It doesn’t take much investigation to realize the main institutional sources in the Russiagate mess – the security services, mainly – have extensive records of deceiving the media.

As noted before, from World War I-era tales of striking union workers being German agents to the “missile gap” that wasn’t (the “gap” was leaked to the press before the Soviets had even one operational ICBM) to the Gulf of Tonkin mess to all the smears of people like Martin Luther King, it’s a wonder newspapers listen to whispers from government sources at all.

In the Reagan years National Security Adviser John Poindexter spread false stories about Libyan terrorist plots to The Wall Street Journal and other papers. In the Bush years, Dick Cheney et al were selling manure by the truckload about various connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, infamously including a story that bomber Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague.

The New York Times ran a story that Atta was in Prague in late October of 2001, even giving a date of the meeting with Iraqis, April 8, or “just five months before the terrorist attacks.” The Prague story was another example of a tale that seemed shaky because American officials were putting the sourcing first on foreign intelligence, then on reporters themselves. Cheney cited the Prague report in subsequent TV appearances, one of many instances of feeding reporters tidbits and then selling reports as independent confirmation.

It wasn’t until three years later, in 2004, that Times reporter James Risen definitively killed the Atta-in-Prague canard (why is it always Prague?) in a story entitled “No evidence of meeting with Iraqi.” By then, of course, it was too late. The Times also held a major dissenting piece by Risen about the WMD case, “C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports,” until days after war started. This is what happens when you start thumbing the scale.

This failure to demand specifics has been epidemic in Russiagate, even when good reporters have been involved. One of the biggest “revelations” of this era involved a story that was broken first by a terrible reporter (the Guardian’s Luke Harding) and followed up by a good one (Jane Mayer of the New Yorker). The key detail involved the elusive origin story of Russiagate.

Mayer’s piece, the March 12, 2018 “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier” in the New Yorker, impacted the public mainly by seeming to bolster the credentials of the dossier author. But it contained an explosive nugget far down. Mayer reported Robert Hannigan, then-head of the GCHQ (the British analog to the NSA) intercepted a “stream of illicit communications” between “Trump’s team and Moscow” at some point prior to August 2016. Hannigan flew to the U.S. and briefed CIA director John Brennan about these communications. Brennan later testified this inspired the original FBI investigation.

When I read that, a million questions came to mind, but first: what did “illicit” mean?

If something “illicit” had been captured by GCHQ, and this led to the FBI investigation (one of several conflicting public explanations for the start of the FBI probe, incidentally), this would go a long way toward clearing up the nature of the collusion charge. If they had something, why couldn’t they tell us what it was? Why didn’t we deserve to know?

I asked the Guardian: “Was any attempt made to find out what those communications were? How was the existence of these communications confirmed? Did anyone from the Guardian see or hear these intercepts, or transcripts?”

Their one-sentence reply:

The Guardian has strict and rigorous procedures when dealing with source material.

That’s the kind of answer you’d expect from a transnational bank, or the army, not a newspaper.

I asked Mayer the same questions. She was more forthright, noting that, of course, the story had originally been broken by Harding, whose own report said “the precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public.”

She added that “afterwards I independently confirmed aspects of [Harding’s piece] with several well-informed sources,” and “spent months on the Steele story [and] traveled to the UK twice for it.” But, she wrote, “the Russiagate story, like all reporting on sensitive national security issues, is difficult.”

I can only infer she couldn’t find out what “illicit” meant despite proper effort. The detail was published anyway. It may not have seemed like a big deal, but I think it was.

To be clear, I don’t necessarily disbelieve the idea that there were “illicit” contacts between Trump and Russians in early 2015 or before. But if there were such contacts, I can’t think of any legitimate reason why their nature should be withheld from the public.

If authorities can share reasons for concern with foreign countries like Israel, why should American voters not be so entitled? Moreover the idea that we need to keep things secret to protect sources and methods and “tradecraft” (half the press corps became expert in goofy spy language over the last few years, using terms like “SIGINT” like they’ve known them their whole lives), why are we leaking news of our ability to hear Russian officials cheering Trump’s win?

Failure to ask follow-up questions happened constantly with this story. One of the first reports that went sideways involved a similar dynamic: the contention that some leaked DNC emails were forgeries.

MSNBC’s “Intelligence commentator” Malcolm Nance, perhaps the most enthusiastic source of questionable #Russiagate news this side of Twitter conspiracist Louise Mensch, tweeted on October 11, 2016: “#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.”

As noted in The Intercept and elsewhere, this was re-reported by the likes of David Frum (a key member of the club that has now contributed to both the WMD and Russiagate panics) and MSNBC host Joy Reid. The reports didn’t stop until roughly October of 2016, among other things because the Clinton campaign kept suggesting to reporters the emails were fake. This could have been stopped sooner if examples of a forgery had been demanded from the Clinton campaign earlier.

Another painful practice that became common was failing to confront your own sources when news dispositive to what they’ve told you pops up. The omnipresent Clapper told Chuck Todd on March 5, 2017, without equivocation, that there had been no FISA application involving Trump or his campaign. “I can deny it,” he said.

It soon after came out this wasn’t true. The FBI had a FISA warrant on Carter Page. This was not a small misstatement by Clapper, because his appearance came a day after Trump claimed in a tweet he’d had his “wires tapped.” Trump was widely ridiculed for this claim, perhaps appropriately so, but in addition to the Page news, it later came out there had been a FISA warrant of Paul Manafort as well, during which time Trump may have been the subject of “incidental” surveillance.

Whether or not this was meaningful, or whether these warrants were justified, are separate questions. The important thing is, Clapper either lied to Todd, or else he somehow didn’t know the FBI had obtained these warrants. The latter seems absurd and unlikely. Either way, Todd ought to been peeved and demanded an explanation. Instead, he had Clapper back on again within months and gave him the usual softball routine, never confronting him about the issue.

Reporters repeatedly got burned and didn’t squawk about it. Where are the outraged stories about all the scads of anonymous “people familiar with the matter” who put reporters in awkward spots in the last years? Why isn’t McClatchy demanding the heads of whatever “four people with knowledge” convinced them to double down on the Cohen-in-Prague story?

Why isn’t every reporter who used “New Knowledge” as a source about salacious Russian troll stories out for their heads (or the heads of the congressional sources who passed this stuff on), after reports they faked Russian trolling? How is it possible NBC and other outlets continued to use New Knowledge as a source in stories identifying antiwar Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian-backed candidate?

How do the Guardian’s editors not already have Harding’s head in a vice for hanging them out to dry on the most dubious un-retracted story in modern history – the tale that the most watched human on earth, Julian Assange, had somehow been visited in the Ecuadorian embassy by Paul Manafort without leaving any record? I’d be dragging Harding’s “well placed source” into the office and beating him with a hose until he handed them something that would pass for corroborating evidence.

The lack of blowback over episodes in which reporters were put in public compromised situations speaks to the overly cozy relationships outlets had with official sources. Too often, it felt like a team effort, where reporters seemed to think it was their duty to take the weight if sources pushed them to overreach. They had absolutely no sense of institutional self-esteem about this.

Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump. Why bother having a press corps at all if you’re going to go that route?

This posture all been couched as anti-Trump solidarity, but really, did former CIA chief John Brennan – the same Brennan who should himself have faced charges for lying to congress about hacking the computers of Senate staff – need the press to whine on his behalf when Trump yanked his security clearance? Did we need the press to hum Aretha Franklin tunes, as ABC did, and chide Trump for lacking R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the CIA? We don’t have better things to do than that “work”?

This catalogue of factual errors and slavish stenography will stand out when future analysts look back at why the “MSM” became a joke during this period, but they were only a symptom of a larger problem. The bigger issue was a radical change in approach.

A lot of #Russiagate coverage became straight-up conspiracy theory, what Baker politely called “connecting the dots.” This was allowed because the press committed to a collusion narrative from the start, giving everyone cover to indulge in behaviors that would never be permitted in normal times.

Such was the case with Jonathan Chait’s #Russiagate opus, “PRUMP TUTIN: Will Trump be Meeting With his Counterpart – or his Handler?” The story was also pitched as “What if Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987,” which recalls the joke from The Wire: “Yo, Herc, what if your mother and father never met?” What if isn’t a good place to be in this business.

This cover story (!) in New York magazine was released in advance of a planned “face-to-face” summit between Trump and Putin, and posited Trump had been under Russian control for decades. Chait noted Trump visited the Soviet Union in 1987 and came back “fired up with political ambition.” He offered the possibility that this was a coincidence, but added:

Indeed, it seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back this far. But it can’t be dismissed completely. 

I searched the Chait article up and down for reporting that would justify the suggestion Trump had been a Russian agent dating back to the late eighties, when, not that it matters, Russia was a different country called the Soviet Union.

Only two facts in the piece could conceivably have been used to support the thesis: Trump met with a visiting Soviet official in 1986, and visited the Soviet Union in 1987. That’s it. That’s your cover story.

Worse, Chait’s theory was first espoused in Lyndon Larouche’s “Elephants and Donkeys” newsletter in 1987, under a headline, “Do Russians have a Trump card?” This is barrel-scraping writ large.

It’s a mania. Putin is literally in our underpants. Maybe, if we’re lucky, New York might someday admit its report claiming Russians set up an anti-masturbation hotline to trap and blackmail random Americans is suspicious, not just because it seems absurd on its face, but because its source is the same “New Knowledge” group that admitted to faking Russian influence operations in Alabama.

But what retraction is possible for the Washington Post headline, “How will Democrats cope if Putin starts playing dirty tricks for Bernie Sanders (again)?” How to reverse Rachel Maddow’s spiel about Russia perhaps shutting down heat across America during a cold wave? There’s no correction for McCarthyism and fearmongering.

This ultimately will be the endgame of the Russia charade. They will almost certainly never find anything like the wild charges and Manchurian Candidate theories elucidated in the Steele report. But the years of panic over the events of 2016 will lead to radical changes in everything from press regulation to foreign policy, just as the WMD canard led to torture, warrantless surveillance, rendition, drone assassination, secret budgets and open-ended, undeclared wars from Somalia to Niger to Syria. The screw-ups will be forgotten, but accelerated vigilance will remain.

It’s hard to know what policy changes are appropriate because the reporting on everything involving the Russian threat in the last two to three years has been so unreliable.

I didn’t really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now. I was told early on that this piece of the story seemed “solid,” but even that assertion has remained un-bolstered since then, still based on an “assessment” by the intelligence services that always had issues, including the use of things like RT’s “anti-American” coverage of fracking as part of its case. The government didn’t even examine the DNC’s server, the kind of detail that used to make reporters nervous.

We won’t know how much of any of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security services and looks at this whole series of events all over again with fresh eyes, as journalists, not political actors. That means being open to asking what went wrong with this story, in addition to focusing so much energy on Trump and Russia.

The WMD mess had massive real-world negative impact, leading to over a hundred thousand deaths and trillions in lost taxpayer dollars. Unless Russiagate leads to a nuclear conflict, we’re unlikely to ever see that level of consequence.

Still, Russiagate has led to unprecedented cooperation between the government and Internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, all of which are censoring pages on the left, right, and in between in the name of preventing the “sowing of discord.” The story also had a profound impact on the situation in places like Syria, where Russian and American troops have sat across the Euphrates River from one another, two amped-up nuclear powers at a crossroads.

As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don’t turn things around, this story will destroy it.

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Wise food company accused of setting up preppers for mass starvation by lying about daily food intake – lawsuit

blank (Natural News) Wise Company, a storable foods company, is now facing a class action lawsuit after being accused of false advertising — and for potentially setting consumers up to starve to death, should they ever actually try to survive on their products. According to the allegations, Wise Company engaged in “unlawful, unfair, and deceptive advertising…

Deposition Reveals Late Sen. McCain’s Role in Spygate Scandal

by Jeff Carlson, The Epoch Times: David Kramer, a longtime associate of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), revealed in an unsealed deposition that he had contact with at least 14 members of the media regarding the Steele dossier—a collection of 17 memos containing unverified allegations against Donald Trump. Additionally, Kramer gave a full copy of the […]

The post Deposition Reveals Late Sen. McCain’s Role in Spygate Scandal appeared first on SGT Report.

Convicted French cardinal meets pope after saying he would resign

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March 18, 2019

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Philippe Barbarin, the French Roman Catholic cardinal convicted this month of failing to report sexual abuse allegations, met Pope Francis on Monday after saying he planned to resign as archbishop of Lyon.

The Vatican’s daily list of papal audiences confirmed that the meeting took place but gave no details. It did not say if the pope had accepted any resignation.

Barbarin, 68, the highest-profile cleric to be caught up in the child sex abuse scandal inside the French Church, was handed a six-month suspended prison sentence on March 7.

Barbarin is appealing against the verdict. But after the hearing, he said he planned to travel to the Vatican and hand in his resignation.

The court in Lyon ruled that between July 2014 and June 2015 he covered up allegations of sexual abuse of boy scouts in the 1980s and early 1990s by a priest who is due to go on trial later this year.

Barbarin has denied concealing allegations that Father Bernard Preynat abused dozens of boys more than a decade before he arrived in the Lyon diocese in 2002. Preynat has admitted sexual abuse, according to his lawyer.

The trial put Europe’s senior clergy in the spotlight at a time when the pope is grappling with criticism over the Church’s response to a sexual abuse crisis that has gravely damaged its standing around the globe.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Alison Williams and Andrew Heavens)

EXCLUSIVE: INTERNAL FUSION GPS REPORT UNDERCUT STEELE DOSSIER ALLEGATION AGAINST RUSSIAN EXECUTIVE

by Chuck Ross, The Daily Caller: Fusion GPS tapped one of its contractors to investigate allegations made in the Steele dossier against Russian tech executive Aleksej Gubarev. The dossier alleged Gubarev was recruited as a Russian agent and took part in the hacking of Democrats’ computer systems. But the internal Fusion GPS report, published here for […]

The post EXCLUSIVE: INTERNAL FUSION GPS REPORT UNDERCUT STEELE DOSSIER ALLEGATION AGAINST RUSSIAN EXECUTIVE appeared first on SGT Report.

EXCLUSIVE: INTERNAL FUSION GPS REPORT UNDERCUT STEELE DOSSIER ALLEGATION AGAINST RUSSIAN EXECUTIVE

by Chuck Ross, The Daily Caller: Fusion GPS tapped one of its contractors to investigate allegations made in the Steele dossier against Russian tech executive Aleksej Gubarev. The dossier alleged Gubarev was recruited as a Russian agent and took part in the hacking of Democrats’ computer systems. But the internal Fusion GPS report, published here for […]

The post EXCLUSIVE: INTERNAL FUSION GPS REPORT UNDERCUT STEELE DOSSIER ALLEGATION AGAINST RUSSIAN EXECUTIVE appeared first on SGT Report.

NXIVM Sex Cult Leader Charged With Child Sex Exploitation, Possessing Child Porn

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The founder of NXIVM, a bizarre slave-master sex cult parading as a ‘self-help’ group, has been hit with new charges

In the new superseding indictment filed on Wednesday, prosecutors charged NXIVM leader Keith Raniere on two counts of sexual exploitation of a child and one count of possessing child pornography.

The court filing also revealed that Raniere and Clare Bronfman had an intimate relationship. Bronfman whose family has close ties to the Rothschild’s, was outed as aiding Raniere to run his “self help” group and also protecting him and other members, via a defense fund.

Federal prosecutors announced the new charges as the cults co-founder Nancy Salzman broke down in tears as she plead guilty to racketeering  charges in court.

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RT reports:  It is now alleged that Raniere, better known as ‘Vanguard’ or ‘Master’ within the secretive group, coerced underage girls to participate in porn photoshoots for more than 10 years. He then kept files with sexually explicit images and stored them on a hard drive.

The memorandum issued by the district attorney’s office stated that other high-ranking members of NXIVM that were put on trial along with Raniere were well aware of their leader’s sexual relationships with minors. One of the underage victims was identified as “a fifteen-year-old girl” who was working for the group’s co-founder, Nancy Salzman.

The same day new charges against Raniere were filed, Salzman pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge. The teen became “Raniere’s first-line slave” in the clandestine sorority group within NXIVM known as DOS, which stands for ‘dominant over submissive’ in Latin.

Another victim was described only as “a child” whose sexual relationship with the ‘guru’ was “known” and “facilitated” by other members.

Raniere was arrested in his luxury hideout in Mexico in March last year and flown to the US, where he, along with other prominent members, including Hollywood actress Allison Mack and liquor heiress Clare Bronfman, were indicted on a number of charges. Apart from the new child porn allegation, Raniere has already been charged with forced labor conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, sex trafficking, attempted sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking conspiracy, and conspiracy to commit identity theft.

The court papers described DOS as a pyramid structure with Raniere, who was the only man in the sorority, solely at the top. New members, or “slaves,” who were recruited into NXIVM were forced to give collateral to ensure that they would keep mum about the group. The collateral was sexually explicit images or videos, as well as true or untrue allegations made against themselves or their family which were filmed. The “slaves” were blackmailed into providing new collateral, sometimes as often as every month, which saw them signing over their assets or doing things that might kill their careers if made public.

Raniere is accused of subjecting members of DOS to physical and psychological torture such as self-induced sleep-deprivation. Raniere also instructed his female followers to have their genital areas branded with his initials and told them to survive on a 800-calorie diet, all under the guise of women’s empowerment.

NXIVM was funded by wealthy donors and through personal development courses. A five-day workshop cost as much as $5,000.

Apart from Salzman, who was removed from the list of defendants after her guilty plea, all other senior member of the group, including mastermind Raniere, are still fighting the charges.

Raniere was denied bail and is awaiting trial in custody, while Mack has been released on $5-million bond and placed under house arrest.

Hate Crime Hoaxes on the Rise in America

Triggered liberals are fabricating violence to “prove” their claims about oppression, anti-Semitism and racism. The latest: Television actor Jussie Smollett has been charged with multiple felonies for fabricating a bizarre racially motivated attack on him, then sticking with his story even as it publicly unraveled around him.

By John Friend

In late January, news broke alleging that Jussie Smollett, a black, gay, and at least partially Jewish actor who starred in the popular television program “Empire” was violently assaulted on the streets of Chicago at 2 a.m. by two white men purportedly wearing ski masks.

Smollett alleged that his attackers, apparently motivated by racial hatred and instigated by President Donald Trump, yelled racial and homophobic slurs at the actor before shouting, “This is MAGA country,” referring to the president’s signature campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” During the purported hate crime, the mysterious attackers also poured bleach on Smollett’s head and tied a rope around his neck in an attempt to lynch the actor, Smollett insisted in interviews with Chicago police and with the mass media.

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“How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine our Culture,” Brand new at AFP!

Many questioned the dubious narrative put forth by Smollett, which was then blindly repeated and amplified by the mainstream mass media in the immediate aftermath. Smollett would later appear as a guest on the popular “Good Morning America” news program, where he was interviewed about the alleged attack. During the interview, Smollett expressed outrage at those questioning his narrative of the purported hate crime.

“It feels like if I had said it was a Muslim or a Mexican or someone black I feel like the doubters would have supported me a lot more,” Smollett stated to host Robin Roberts during the interview. “And that says a lot about the place where we are as a country right now.”

Turns out, the doubters were right: Smollett faked the entire incident and was caught red-handed by Chicago police. Two Nigerian brothers were initially arrested as having been involved in the attack but were eventually released by police after an extensive interrogation during which they revealed Smollett had paid them to stage the attack. One of the brothers had a role in ”Empire,” and both knew Smollett personally.

According to CBS Chicago, the brothers told police that Smollett paid them $3,500 to participate in the entirely staged fake “hate crime,” and even directed them to purchase the rope used in the fake attack.

Despite Smollett’s narrative collapsing, the actor and his attorneys have doubled down and have expressed anger at the Chicago police’s findings that the alleged “hate crime” was in reality a staged, manufactured attack carried out at the behest of Smollett.

“As a victim of a hate crime who has cooperated with the police investigation, Jussie Smollett is angered and devastated by recent reports that the perpetrators are individuals he is familiar with,” a statement released to CNN by Smollett’s lawyers recently declared. “He has now been further victimized by claims attributed to these alleged perpetrators that Jussie played a role in his own attack. Nothing is further from the truth and anyone claiming otherwise is lying.”

Although the case is still under investigation, it is becoming increasingly clear that Smollett was involved in yet another hate crime hoax, which have proliferated in recent years, particularly under President Donald Trump. While fake “hate crimes” have been popping up with the direct assistance of the mainstream mass media and various left leaning organizations who hype and amplify the alleged crimes, real crimes committed against Trump supporters and conservatives often go unreported and, even worse, unpunished.

Intimidation Game, Strassel
Political correspondent Kim Strassel on increasing intimidation by the Left to bully Americans out of free speech. On sale now.

Throughout the 2016 election season, Trump supporters were regularly violently and verbally assaulted at various rallies and events across the country. Left-wing terrorists, who are in many cases affiliated with radical-far-left antifa groups, have caused mayhem and chaos at a number of events, including Trump’s inauguration in the nation’s capital, where private property was vandalized and destroyed. Richard Spencer, the political commentator and figurehead of the alt-right movement, was sucker-punched on live television during the inauguration by a masked antifa supporter. Unsurprisingly, the attacker has yet to be brought to justice.

In a positive development, University of California, Berkeley police recently arrested a 28-year-old man suspected of violently assaulting a conservative activist involved with Turning Points USA, who had set up a table with promotional material for the group on the campus. Hayden Williams, the young activist who was on campus to reach out to other conservatives, was assaulted after being confronted by two men who did not approve of his signs and recruitment table. The two men knocked over Williams’s table and tore up his signs before one of the men punched Williams in the face. The incident was caught on film and has since gone viral on social media.

Conservatives praised the arrest of Williams’s suspected attacker.

“Hopefully, this dark chapter will act as a wake-up call to those concerned about actual politically motivated hate crimes in America,” Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Turning Points USA, the conservative activist group that seeks to spread conservative ideals, stated following the arrest. “Berkeley and all college campuses across American should be safe havens for free thought and opinions—especially for a targeted conservative minority.”

HISTORY OF HATE HOAXES

In the wake of the “hate crime” hoax perpetrated by Smollett, it is important to recall other “hate crime” hoaxes that have been exposed since Trump assumed the office of the presidency.

“The Daily Caller,” a hard-hitting, politically incorrect conservative news outlet based in Washington, D.C. that was originally co-founded by Tucker Carlson, provided an excellent timeline of recent hate crime hoaxes, proving just how prevalent these manufactured outrages truly are.

The allegations and circumstances of alleged hate crimes are all too common: a minority verbally attacked by racist, insensitive, white Trump supporters, or racist and anti-Semitic graffiti sprayed on a minority’s home or on a synagogue. All too often, allegations of hate crimes are either exaggerated, committed by the individual making the allegations in the first place, or entirely manufactured.

What follows is a partial timeline of some of the more outlandish hate crime hoaxes we have witnessed over the course of the past three years:

  • In November 2016, shortly after Trump’s victory in the presidential election, churchgoers at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Bean Blossom, Ind. reported their place of worship had been vandalized with messages reading “fag church” and “heil Trump.” A swastika was also allegedly spray-painted on the building along with the other messages. It was later revealed that George Nathaniel Stang, 26, the organist at the church, had actually committed the acts of vandalism in an effort to “give local people a reason to fight for good,” according to a local NBC report.
  • A Muslim student at the University of Michigan made national headlines in the wake of Trump’s election victory by falsely claiming that an intoxicated young male student had threatened to light her on fire if she refused to remove her hijab. Upon further investigation, it turned out the female Muslim student had made the entire story up.

 

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  • A black woman in Delaware fabricated a narrative that she had been verbally assaulted and berated by four white Trump-supporting males shortly after the 2016 election at a gas station. The woman made a lengthy Facebook post describing the alleged encounter, only to later delete it. Police in Delaware where the alleged incident took place told local media outlets shortly after the woman’s allegations gained media attention that “no such reports have been filed” and that “they haven’t heard from the alleged victim or anyone with information about a confrontation that occurred,” it was reported.
  • In December 2016, reports emerged that a white couple’s home in Texas was vandalized with racial slurs and their vehicles were set on fire in an apparent hate crime. The husband later admitted to his wife that he himself vandalized their home and set their vehicles on fire in an attempt to stage a hate crime. The couple had set up a crowdfunding page on the popular “GoFundMe” website to solicit donations in the wake of the alleged hate crime. “My heart is heavy, and I have more questions than answers,” the man’s wife said following the revelation her own husband committed the crimes. “My children and I are in a state of shock and sadness.”
  • A young Jewish man with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship was caught making over a thousand fake bomb and shooting threats against a number of institutions and groups, including a number of Jewish community centers, in early 2017, an incident this newspaper has covered extensively.
  • A Michigan transgender and LGBTQ activist was recently arrested for burning down his own home, after police initially investigated the arson as a suspected hate crime. It has since been revealed the activist burned his own home down in an effort to generate more support and sympathy for his political activism.

John Friend is a freelance author based in California.

Pelosi: ‘I’m not for impeachment’ of Trump

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March 12, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump should not be impeached unless the reasons are overwhelming and bipartisan, given how divisive it would be for the country, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a Washington Post interview published on Monday.

“I’m not for impeachment,” Pelosi, the top U.S. Democrat, said in the interview, which was conducted last week.

“Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country,” she said. “He’s just not worth it.”

It was Pelosi’s most direct comment yet on Trump’s possible impeachment, a topic she has dealt with cautiously as it carries the potential to sharply split Democrats and the public ahead of next year’s White House and congressional elections.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government and whether Trump has attempted to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied wrongdoing and called the investigation a witch hunt.

Mueller is expected to send a report soon to Attorney General William Barr outlining his findings, and any evidence of wrongdoing could prompt Congress to take action against the president. Several panels in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are also investigating the president.

Although Pelosi said she believed it would be too divisive to impeach Trump, she characterized the president as unfit to hold office.

“No, I don’t think he’s fit to be president of the United States,” Pelosi told the Post, adding he was “ethically unfit, intellectually unfit, curiosity-wise unfit.”

Democrats face growing pressure from the left for impeachment, including a multimillion-dollar ad campaign from liberal billionaire Tom Steyer to build support for action against Trump.

The House Judiciary Committee, which would lead an impeachment inquiry, recently launched a broad probe of corruption, abuse of power and obstruction of justice allegations against Trump that could amount to impeachable offenses.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler has said he believes Trump has committed obstruction of justice, but that it is too soon to decide on impeachment.

“We do not now have the evidence all sorted out,” Nadler told ABC’s “This Week” program on March 3. “Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American public that it ought to happen,” Nadler added.

(Reporting by David Alexander; Editing by Peter Cooney and Tom Brown)

Jussie Smollett Indicted on 16 Felony Charges

Authorities claim the two attackers, who are black, have confessed to their role in the hoax after Smollett paid them $3,500 to stage the incident. Smollett may also face federal charges for mail fraud on allegations that he mailed a hate speech letter to himself.

R. Kelly freed from Chicago jail after child support paid

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March 9, 2019

By Gina Cherelus

(Reuters) – Singer R. Kelly was released from a Chicago jail on Saturday after a child support payment of more than $161,000 was made to an ex-wife, police said, ending his second incarceration in two weeks after a prior arrest on sex assault charges.

The performer, 52, was arrested on Wednesday over the unpaid support for three children he has with Andrea Lee. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office had said he would have to pay the full amount to be freed.

“I promise you, we’re gonna straighten all this stuff out,” Kelly told reporters and a smattering of fans who had gathered outside Cook County Jail. “That’s all I can say right now.”

Sam Randall, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, said in a phone interview on Saturday that the source of the payment was unclear, noting that the name section of the bond slip was left blank.

“Anonymity in this situation is pretty rare,” Randall said. “Typically that section of the form is filled out.”

Celebrity website TMZ cited sources close to Kelly as saying an unidentified benefactor helped him.

Kelly’s attorney, Steve Greenberg, declined to comment when asked by email whether the child support payment was made by Kelly or someone else.

Last month, Kelly was arrested and pleaded not guilty to charges he had sexually assaulted three teenage girls and a fourth woman. He has denied similar abuse allegations for decades. In 2008, the singer was tried on child pornography charges and found not guilty.

Kelly bailed out of jail on the sexual assault charges on Feb. 25 and had since complained of financial difficulties, saying in an interview with CBS that “so many people” had access to his bank account and had stolen from him.

In the interview, he also tearfully and angrily rejected allegations that he had sex with underage girls.

(Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York; Additional reporting by Peter Szekely in New York; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Richard Chang)

Lindsey Graham Doubles Down On FISA Abuse Probe As House Democrats Fire Up Post-Mueller Investigations

Days after the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee fired off 81 document requests for their post-Mueller investigations (in anticipation of a ‘disappointing’ Mueller report) – Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham has revived his committee’s probe into potential surveillance abuse by the FBI. 

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In a Thursday letter to Attorney General William Barr – just three weeks on the job, Graham asked for all FBI and DOJ documents which would explain what steps were taken to verify the Steele dossier before it was used by the FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant on a Trump campaign staffer. 

The FBI relied heavily on Steele’s report to obtain four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Republicans investigated whether the FBI misled the FISA court by relying on the dossier even though its allegations about Page were unverified. They also asserted the FBI failed to tell surveillance court judges that Steele was working on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign on an investigation of Donald Trump. –Daily Caller

Graham also notified Barr that he is investigating the FBI’s original decision making process behind opening up investigations of Trump campaign associates in 2016 – including, we assume, the decision to infiltrate the campaign using Stefan Halper – a former Oxford University professor and longtime intelligence asset who was paid over $1 million by the Obama Department of Defense between 2012 and 2018, with nearly half of it surrounding the 2016 US election. 

Furthermore, Graham has requested: 

  • All documents and communications originally shared with the Gang of Eight in May 2018 related to the Russia investigation. 
  • All “FD-302” forms for former DOJ #4 Bruce Ohr and any other individual at the Department, the FBI, or elsewhere in the federal government who received information from individuals outside the Department or the FBI that was used in the Carter Page FISA applications

A “302” serves to “report or summarize” witness interviews involved in FBI investigations – while Ohr’s testimony was recently found to have contradicted that of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson.

Read Graham’s letter below: 

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Adidas to pay equal bonuses for women’s soccer World Cup winners

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March 9, 2019

(Reuters) – Adidas-sponsored players on the team that wins the FIFA Women’s World Cup this year will receive the same performance bonus payments as their male counterparts, the sportswear company said on Friday.

The announcement follows news that the U.S. women’s national soccer team is suing their federation with allegations of gender discrimination, where all 28 members of the squad were named as plaintiffs in federal court.

The lawsuit filed by the team includes complaints about wages. The players said they had been consistently paid less than their male counterparts even though their performances have been superior.

Adidas’ head of global brands Eric Liedtke said the company wanted to help encourage the next generation of sportswomen.

“Today we are announcing that all Adidas athletes on the winning 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup team will receive the same performance bonus payout as their male peers,” Liedtke said in the statement https://twitter.com/adidas/status/1104162465703739396.

“We believe in inspiring and enabling the next generation of female athletes, creators and leaders through breaking barriers.”

The U.S. team’s lawsuit has found support from prominent American tennis players past and present, including Serena Williams, Bille Jean King and Sloane Stephens.

While the men’s soccer team failed to qualify for the World Cup in Russia last year, the U.S. women’s team will be defending their 2015 crown in France in June.

(Reporting by Rohith Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Rutherford)

Judge Rejects “Excessive” Mueller Recommendation and Sentences Manafort to 47 Months in Prison

None of the charges against Manafort involved allegations of collusion with the Russian government, but are instead related to his lobbying work for the Ukrainian government.

Trudeau Refuses To Apologize Over Corruption Scandal

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is taking a page out of President Trump’s book. During a Thursday press conference, Trudeau addressed the SNC-Lavalin corruption scandal for the first time since his former Attorney General and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould delivered damning testimony before a Commons committee and the public, detailing a campaign of political pressure and veiled threats over her refusal to offer a deferred prosecution agreement to a Quebec-based engineering firm.

During his press conference, Trudeau largely adhered to the version of events delivered by his former top aide Gerald Butts during a separate hearing earlier this week. The prime minister insisted that his government did nothing wrong by pushing Wilson-Raybould to seek a second opinion on the SNC-Lavalin case. Instead of trying to illegally bend the country’s justice system, Trudeau said he was merely “standing up for Canadian jobs.”

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Trudeau feared that prosecution of SNC-Lavalin over allegations that it bribed Libyan government officials could lead to the loss of as many as 8,000 jobs in Quebec, his home province, where he is still an MP, according to the FT

The prime minister insisted that “no inappropriate pressure” was brought to bear on Wilson-Raybould, and that he has spent his entire career “fighting for justice.”

“I’ve spent my entire political career fighting for justice,” Mr Trudeau said. “Since I started in politics I’ve always worked to the best of my ability to represent people faithfully, the SNC Lavalin [file] was no exception to this rule.”

However, Trudeau acknowledged that, with the benefit of hindsight, he would have done things differently, and that “mistakes were made.” He added that the only reason his office had pressed Wilson-Raybould about SNC-Lavalin was because he had heard she might be open to it.

Mr Trudeau added: “We felt Ms Wilson-Raybould was ready to consider other options, and we have learnt since she was not open to that. We have learnt since that every time we mentioned it, it was inappropriate. For me and my team to continue talking about such important issues, well, that’s part of our jobs.”

Most amazingly, Trudeau said that political considerations were not part of his calculus, and that the Canadian government is duty bound to stand up for workers.

Mr Trudeau said he had felt “preoccupied” with “the number of jobs involved”, but said his concerns were “separate from any electoral concerns.” He added: “I think people understand that a Canadian government always needs to stand up for workers, stand up for jobs and a strong economy, and that is something all Canadian governments do.”

Since the scandal broke last month, Trudeau’s Liberal Party has lost its polling lead ahead of a crucial election in October. The prime minister is also facing at least two investigations – one in the Commons and one by the Canadian government’s ethics office – and his political opponents have continued to call on him to resign. Perhaps the biggest blow to public confidence in his government came earlier this week when a member of his cabinet resigned because she said she could no longer support the government in good conscience.

Though the Liberals have mostly backed Trudeau, there’s little doubt that his political future has never looked so precarious.

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Ocasio-Cortez, Top Aide ‘Could Be Facing Jail Time’ If Their Control Over PAC Was Intentionally Hidden, Report Says

by Hank Berrien, Daily Wire: For the second time on Monday, socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti are facing bombshell corruption allegations that not only threaten to derail their future in politics but could potentially end up with both of them “facing jail time,” according to a former FEC […]

The post Ocasio-Cortez, Top Aide ‘Could Be Facing Jail Time’ If Their Control Over PAC Was Intentionally Hidden, Report Says appeared first on SGT Report.

Raiffeisen Bank shares slide on money laundering report

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March 5, 2019

LONDON (Reuters) – Raiffeisen Bank International shares sank on Tuesday after website Addendum.org said the Hermitage Fund filed a report to Austrian prosecutors containing allegations of money laundering.

Raiffeisen Bank declined to comment.

Shares in the Austrian bank were down 10.3 percent by 1031 GMT, set for their biggest fall in 11 months.

Raiffeisen was also named in an OCCRP investigation published on Monday, alleging the bank was a counterparty in a money laundering scheme.

(Reporting by Helen Reid and Danilo Masoni, Editing by Josephine Mason and Louise Heavens)

Spooked? Christopher Steele Cancels Appearance After Cohen Testimony Destroys Dossier Allegation

Former MI6 spy Christopher Steele has suddenly backed out of a planned video appearance at a pro-democracy gathering in Baltimore next week for a group founded by Trump-hating chess champ Garry Kasparov, according to Politico

The author of the largely unverified Trump-Russia dossier had been scheduled to discuss disinformation on a panel moderated by Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, which is set to include Atlantic Council fellow Evelyn Farkas – a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who notably slipped up on live TV and admitted in March 2017 that the Obama administration had been spying on the Trump campaign. 

Applebaum said that Steele had gotten “cold feet” last week and canceled on the advice of his legal counsel. As the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross notes, this would have been Steele’s first public remarks in the nearly two years since BuzzFeed published his dossier. 

Perhaps Steele was ‘spooked’ by testimony last week from former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who debunked a key claim in the dossier that he traveled to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin officials in order to arrange clandestine payments to hackers who stole emails from the Clinton campaign and the DNC. 

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Cohen only denied the Prague allegation during his open testimony, but GOP California Rep. Devin Nunes suggested on Monday that the former Trump fixer disputed all of the dossier’s allegations during a closed-door hearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last Thursday. –Daily Caller

Steele’s dossier was commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign through law firm Perkins Coie, which paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn commissioned Steele to assemble the collection of reports which relied heavily on Kremlin officials. 

The dossier was used by the US intelligence community to obtain a FISA surveillance warrant on Trump campaign aide Carter Page – along with anyone he was in communication with. Steele’s report claimed that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. 

The reports, which circulated among U.S. intelligence officials beginning in the summer of 2016 and were later published by BuzzFeed, helped set off a chain of events that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. In the years since Steele authored his reports, evidence has emerged of extensive contacts between Trump’s aides and various Russian state-aligned actors, while many of the most salacious allegations in Steele’s reports remain unconfirmed or at least partially debunked. –Politico

The conference Steele backed out of will continue without him – and “will examine and wrestle with the underlying threats to liberal democracy and propose strategies to reinvigorate it,” according to promotional materials. 

Also in attendance will be Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), former Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and former undersecretary of defense for George W. Bush Paul Wolfowitz, per Politico. It is being organized by the Renew Democracy Initiative chaired by chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. 

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Nordea shares hit as bank faces money laundering claims

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March 4, 2019

By Anne Kauranen

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Shares in Nordea, the Nordic region’s biggest bank, tumbled on Monday after Finnish public broadcaster Yle announced it would air a program later in the day containing allegations of money-laundering through the bank.

Yle said a large data leak showed that hundreds of millions of euros from suspicious sources had moved through Nordea, without giving any specific details.

Nordea shares fell almost 7 percent on Monday before recovering some of their losses to trade down 3.7 percent at 1115 GMT. The bank was one of the worst performing stocks of the European STXE 600 index, which was up 0.3 percent.

The bank’s Nordic peers Swedbank and Danske Bank have both faced allegations relating to a money-laundering scandal in the Baltic nation of Estonia.

The TV program will be made available online at 1500 GMT. Danish newspaper Berlingske, which has worked with Yle on the subject, will also publish a report on its website.

Nordea said it was aware of the upcoming report and has been in dialogue with both Yle and Berlingske.

“We have not yet seen the program or article,” it said in a statement.

“Based on what we have been invited to comment on, these are all issues that we have seen and commented on before and are therefore in line with previous statements made on AML (anti money laundering) issues,”

RIPPLE EFFECT

Nordea CEO Casper von Koskull is scheduled to be interviewed by Finnish TV after the program, at 1900 GMT, together with Pekka Vasara, the head of money-laundering investigations at the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation.

The Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority could not be immediately reached for comment.

“Another day, another bank, new allegations,” investment bank KBW said in a note to clients. KBW has an Underperform rating on Nordea stock.

Shares in DNB, Norway’s largest bank, were also down on the news of the upcoming media report.

DNB’s operation in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which dates back to 2006, merged in 2017 with Nordea’s business in the region, creating the third-largest Baltic bank under the name Luminor, with assets of 15 billion euros. Last September, Nordea and DNB agreed to sell a 60-percent stake in Luminor to a Blackstone private equity consortium for 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion), and said the deal was expected to close during the first half of 2019.

DNB declined to provide an immediate comment on the fall in its shares. The Norwegian financial regulator was not immediately available to comment.

Nordic financial watchdogs said in October they had received documents from Bill Browder’s Hermitage Capital Management, alleging Nordea had breached its responsibilities under anti-money laundering laws. The bank said it was working closely with authorities and had reported all suspicious transactions.

Danske, Denmark’s largest lender, is being investigated in five countries over some 200 billion euros ($226 billion) of suspicious payments from Russia, ex-Soviet states and elsewhere that were found to have flowed through its Estonian branch.

Swedbank is under investigation from both Estonian and Swedish regulators after a television report last month alleged that money laundering could have occurred in relation to at least 40 billion Swedish crowns ($4.30 billion) transferred between Baltics accounts at Swedbank and Danske between 2007 and 2015.

(Additional reporting by Johan Ahlander in Stockholm, Terje Solsvik in Oslo, Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen; Writing by Gwladys Fouche in Oslo; Editing by Jason Neely/Keith Weir)

UK: NHS Child Sex Change Clinic Chief Resigns After Disturbing Report from Staff

London: Marcus Evans, a governor with the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, resigned from the non-profit organization that is part of the NHS to protest the group’s dismissal of allegations that the clinic was ‘fast-tracking’ children into gender reassignment due to intense pressure from LGBT campaigners.

BOOM! James O’Keefe’s undercover Project Veritas PROVES that Facebook is censoring, targeting conservative publishers

blank (Natural News) For more than a year conservative publishers online have been complaining that Facebook’s Left-wing speech Nazis have been censoring, downgrading, and otherwise burying their content even from followers of their pages. And for nearly as long the social media behemoth has claimed that such allegations aren’t true, that Facebook absolutely does not censor…

Justin Trudeau CRISIS: Canada PM’s popularity PLUNGES after scandal, Conservatives AHEAD

CANADA’S Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing a difficult election campaign after a new poll saw the scandal-hit leader’s approval ratings plummet.

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Source: Tom Nellist

Canadians are due to go to the polls in October but Mr Trudeau is battling to maintain his popularity after becoming embroiled in claims his aides pressured former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to ensure construction firm SNC-Lavalin avoided a corruption investigation. The 47-year-old insists there was no wrongdoing but 41 percent of Canadians disagreed with Mr Trudeau in a Leger poll for news agency The Canadian Press. Just 12 percent believed he hadn’t done anything wrong following the allegations which has left his Liberal Party in turmoil.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Nat Geo show “StarTalk” shelved over allegations of sexual assault against multiple women

blank (Natural News) Celebrity pop-astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is watching his career swirl the toilet following numerous allegations from four different women who say he sexually assaulted them. Tyson’s “StarTalk” show, which would have been cruising along in its fifth season, has reportedly been shelved until all details come forward about his improprieties. At that time,…
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