Russia Working to Destroy US Democracy and Press is AWOL.

[Kid Berwyn]

Last edited Mon Feb 26, 2024, 05:12 PM - Edit history (1)

Sure. Some news outlets have covered parts of the following stories.



My point is: Corporate McPravda is failing to spell out for viewers how the Trump-Russia-USA dots fit together.

FBI informant charged with lying about Joe and Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian energy company

BY LINDSAY WHITEHURST AND LISA MASCARO
AP, February 16, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — An FBI informant has been charged with fabricating a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company, a claim that is central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.

Alexander Smirnov falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016, prosecutors said in an indictment. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” according to court documents.

Prosecutors say Smirnov in fact had only routine business dealings with the company in 2017 and made the bribery allegations after he “expressed bias” against Joe Biden while he was a presidential candidate.

CONTINUES...

https://apnews.com/article/hunter-biden-burisma-fbi-informant-lying-6969656f6012780a23a4b8841ce2689b

DUer Kingofalldems asked WTF are the Sunday talk shows on all this? An excellent, existential question.



I can understand a weak man being led around by the nose, but the national news media?

Did the FBI’s Charles McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump?

The shocking indictments against the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York raise many dark questions.

By Craig Unger
The National Review, February 1, 2023

In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it?

Specifically, I knew that:

* Starting in 1980, an alleged “spotter agent” for the KGB began cultivating Trump as a new asset for Soviet intelligence.

* The Russian mafia laundered millions of dollars through Donald Trump’s real estate by purchasing condos in all-cash transactions through anonymous corporations that did not disclose real ownership.

* Trump Tower was a home away from home for Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the most brutal leaders of the Russian mafia, and at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the mafia held the deeds to, lived in, or ran alleged criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties.

* Trump was some $4 billion in debt when the Russians came to bail him out via the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm that was largely staffed, owned, and financed by Soviet émigrés who had ties to Russian intelligence and/or organized crime.

Much of my material came from FBI documents. A lot came from open-source databases. It made no sense. There was an astounding amount of data on the public record. The FBI had launched enormous investigations of the Russian mafia in the 1980s. They had staked out a New York electronics store that was a haven for KGB officers. They knew that’s where the Trump Organization bought hundreds of TV sets. They had their eyes on Ivankov and other Russian mobsters who were denizens of Trump’s casinos and bought and sold his condos through shell companies. They had to know that Trump laundered money for and provided a base of operations for the Russian mafia, which was, after all, a de facto state actor tied to Russian intelligence. They had to know that the Russians repeatedly bailed Trump out when he was bankrupt. They had to know that Russia owned him.

Snip…

As FBI director, Freeh had warned that Russian organized crime posed a grave threat to the United States that far transcended mere criminality. It is not clear how much he was paid by Prevezon after he switched sides, but Freeh later bought a $9.38 million mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, just a 10-minute drive from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.

Then there was the late James Kallstrom, who ran the FBI’s New York office in the mid-’90s and oversaw successful investigations into both the Italian Mafia and later the Russian mob. Kallstrom had developed close friendships with two key players in the Trump-Russia saga. He worked closely with then–U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani in the investigation of the Cosa Nostra network that led to the famed Mafia Commission Trial of 1985–1986. Going even further back, Kallstrom had also been friends with Donald Trump since around 1973, when Kallstrom was putting together a Trump-funded parade in New York to honor Vietnam veterans.

Continues…

https://newrepublic.com/article/170328/charles-mcgonigal-throw-2016-election

Gee. What kind of newsman ignores FBI corruption and pee-residential treason?



Oh, yeah. It's a horse race. Hooray for horsies. And news based on profit.

The news should be like health care. Nationalized. True. And available to all.

Rudy Giuliani 'may have been compromised' by the Kremlin, and FBI leaders didn't care, alleges special agent Johnathan Buma

* The real story of the FBI and Trumpworld is very different than what many Americans have heard, an FBI special agent told Insider in an exclusive video interview.

* Johnathan Buma says his FBI supervisors didn't care about his leads tying Giuliani to Russian intelligence.

* disclosures to the Senate raise questions about Giuliani and the origins of the Hunter Biden-Burisma story.

Mattathias Schwartz
Insider, Sat, September 16, 2023

The FBI is gradually emerging as the ultimate referee in US politics. FBI agents were the ones to carry out Robert Mueller's Trump-Russia investigation. FBI agents are the ones who showed up with a search warrant at the gates of Mar-a-Lago. Today, FBI agents are doing the pick-and-shovel work of digging into Donald Trump's allegedly criminal actions on January 6. They are also investigating Hunter Biden for the firearm-related charges that he was indicted for this week.

With the FBI holding so many cards, allegations of political bias within the bureau should concern everyone. Insider has now published a video interview with Johnathan Buma, a 14-year special agent working out of the bureau's Los Angeles Field Office. Buma is a counter-intelligence specialist who speaks Russian and holds an active Top Secret security clearance. He first raised the alarm through legally sanctioned whistleblower channels inside the FBI, and he remains employed there to this day.

According to Buma, the real story of the FBI during the Trump and Biden years is very different from the one that's being told in hearings held by the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

Snip…

1. FBI didn't care about Giuliani's possible Kremlin ties, Buma says

"Rudy Giuliani may have been compromised by individuals suspected of being involved in Russian counterintelligence influence operations," Buma told Insider. And within the FBI, he said, "I saw important intelligence information being suppressed."

Buma's concerns about Giuliani, a personal attorney for Trump during his presidency, center on the $300,000 his firm received from Pavel Fuks, a Ukrainian oligarch with close ties to Moscow. (A spokesperson for Fuks has denied that he has ties to the Russian security services.) Fuks traveled to Washington for Trump's 2017 inaugural, and he had previously approached Trump about building a Trump Tower in Moscow. According to Buma's disclosure, an FBI Intelligence Information Report asserted that Fuks was "a co-opted asset of the RIS" or the Russian intelligence services. Fuks's $300,000 payment to Giuliani's firm coincided with trips Giuliani made to Ukraine in order to gather information about Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and pressure Ukrainian officials to open an investigation.

Buma says that he raised concerns about Giuliani's possible ties to Russian intelligence to his FBI superiors, and that they simply weren't interested in following up. Not only that, he claims, they eventually prohibited Buma from doing any reporting related to Trump and his circle.

Continues…

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rudy-giuliani-may-compromised-kremlin-110101186.html

Golly. That wasn't printed last week, when the news about Comer's various phonies came out. THAT WAS LAST YEAR.

Can anyone share which MAJOR US NEWS BROADCASTER has tied the dots together for viewers? I think it's zero. they know a good thing for them when they see it: Fascism.

Thank goodness for DU. And while DU shares the news, it'd be better for the United States if EVERY CITIZEN and friend of Democracy knew.

[The Unmitigated Gall]

1. Been watching media fail since Iran-Contra.

But this current situation is beyond pathetic.

[Kid Berwyn]

12. The Daily Disinformation

Barr was there, too.



An amazing and disastrous fall. For those interested in how the media transformed from the guardian of democracy into another tool for oligarchs:

The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy

Additional important history to know...

Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda

The Attack on Democracy

The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.

John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.

Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.

This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.

Source: TUC Radio

Part 1: https://tucradio.org/podcasts/newest-podcasts/alex-carey-corporations-and-propaganda-part-one-of-two/

Part 2: https://tucradio.org/podcasts/newest-podcasts/alex-carey-corporations-and-propaganda-part-two-of-two/

[The Unmitigated Gall]

16. Outstanding. Thank you. nt

[czarjak]

2. A true Evangelical knows Russia will be Satan's ally according to New Testament prophecies.

Fact checkable. Easily. Believe or not.

[Kid Berwyn]

13. True believers in their own Whiteness.

This Forensic Recreation of Jesus Christ Is Not the Same Guy You Remember from Church

Natasha Noman
Yahoo.com, December 14, 2015

The world is familiar with the Western depiction of Jesus Christ in art: a be-robed, pale-skinned, svelte man with fair hair and eyes.

But Richard Neave has thrown a wrench in the Eurocentric depiction of Christianity's founding son. Using forensic data from the skulls of first century Jewish men, the British anatomical artist retired from University of Manchester, reimagined Jesus' face.

Neave looked at the skulls of Semites from around Galilee in Northern Israel, recreating them with the help of a series of computerized x-rays. He augmented his research — for example, for Jesus' hair — by examining drawings depicting the average man from this region and time to fill in the remaining gaps. Gone are the Princess Buttercup locks.

CONTINUES...

https://news.yahoo.com/forensic-recreation-jesus-christ-not-141028287.html

Our Evangelical friends also may want to learn about how much Neanderthal DNA they carry:

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals#:~:text=Because%20Neanderthals%20likely%20evolve%20outside,at%20el.%2C%202020).

[2naSalit]

3. K&R

[Kid Berwyn]

14. David Corn: GOP caught doing Moscow's dirty work.

The Smirnov Affair: MAGA Republicans Are Useful Idiots for Russian Intelligence

How GOP lawmakers got caught doing Moscow’s dirty work.

by David Corn
Mother Jones, February 23, 2034

In June 2020, a businessman and fixer named Alexander Smirnov, who was also an FBI informant, passed his handler at the bureau a potentially explosive tip: The owner of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, had told him that he had paid $5 million each to Joe Biden and his son Hunter so the elder Biden, then vice president, would stop an investigation into the firm. Last year, that allegation became a key component in the Republican effort to impeach the president. But according to federal prosecutors, it was all a lie. Nine days ago, Smirnov, an Israeli and American citizen who had worked with oligarchs over the years and had been a confidential FBI source for a decade, was indicted for making false statements to federal investigators.

Smirnov’s indictment is a big deal and blows up a huge chunk of the GOP’s impeachment drive. But, more important, his allegedly phony accusation did not occur in a vacuum. It is part of a larger story of the rotten relationship between Russian intelligence and the Trump cosmos.

A year before Smirnov dropped this (presumably counterfeit) dime on the Bidens, Rudy Giuliani—who at the time was Donald Trump’s personal lawyer—took a trip to Ukraine that he publicly said was for the purpose of digging up dirt on the Democratic presidential contender. Giuliani was particularly focused on the unfounded claim that Biden, as veep, had orchestrated the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to end a probe of Burisma. Giuliani’s agenda included pressing the Ukrainian government to launch investigations that could yield derogatory information about Biden. (These Giuliani machinations would lead to Trump’s first impeachment.) In the following months, Giuliani’s endeavor was aided by Russian operatives spreading disinformation about the Bidens. In fact, Trump’s own intelligence establishment and his Treasury Department would later publicly declare that Russian agents were mounting an operation to discredit Biden to help Trump win reelection.

It appears likely that Smirnov’s supposedly false statements to the FBI were connected to this covert Kremlin campaign. According to the prosecutors in the Smirnov case, in 2023 he told the FBI he had been in touch with Russian officials. Later, during an interview with the FBI after he was arrested, Smirnov admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence had been involved in “passing a story” about Hunter, according to court filings.

CONTINUES...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/02/smirnov-biden-fbi-comer-jordan-giuliani-russia-ukraine-burisma-impeachment/

PS: Thank you, 2naSalit!

[moondust]

4. Must please the oligarch bosses--or else!

Some of whom would likely prefer anarchy/no taxes/no regulation/etc.

August 2023:
Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision

[Kid Berwyn]

17. Living the Big Lie

Judge I. Lean Bannon -- come on down!



Just the Heritage Foundation's name for the thing, "Project 2025," sounds menacing. It's meant to. That's how NAZIs operate -- FEAR.



Unequal Justice: Trump 2024 and the Blueprint to End American Democracy

The far right Heritage Foundation created a platform for Trump that plots an authoritarian take-over of the country.

by BILL BLUM
The Progressive, Jul 27, 2023

Donald Trump nearly destroyed American democracy in his first term in office. If he is reelected, he plans to try to finish the job. This isn’t a matter of speculation; it’s a virtual certainty.

EXCERPT...

One of the project’s more disturbing aims is to bring all federal agencies under direct presidential control, ending the operational independence not only of the Department of Justice and the FBI, but also the Federal Reserve, which oversees the banking industry and regulates interest rates; the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees television, radio, and the Internet; and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which enforces antitrust and consumer protection laws.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought told The New York Times in an interview for a lengthy article published earlier this month on Trump’s plans for a second term. Vought ran the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump White House, and currently serves as the president of the Center for Renewing America, one of sixty-five ultra-right organizations that have come together to form Project 2025’s advisory board. (Others include the American Family Project, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America, America First Legal, the Claremont Institute, Moms for Liberty, Freedom Works, the James Madison Institute, and ALEC.)

“The President’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” John McEntee, another former Trump White House staffer, also told the Times. “Our current executive branch,” McEntee continued, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.” McEntee joined Project 2025 in May as a senior advisor, working on the initiative’s “personnel” pillar.

SNIP...

Dismantling the New Deal-era regulatory framework of the administrative state, as McEntee advocates, has long been a goal of the radical right. The right has also long advocated a bloated view of presidential power known as the “unitary executive theory.” The doctrine was popularized in the early 1980s by Ed Meese, who served as counselor to the President in Reagan’s first term, and as attorney general in his second term, before assuming a full-time post with the Heritage Foundation in 1988. Bill Barr, Trump’s last Senate-confirmed Attorney General, is another prominent proponent of the theory.

CONTINUES...

https://progressive.org/latest/trump-2024-and-the-blueprint-blum-20230726/

Dummy up all who worship at the Heritage Foundation trough if you want to be one of the winners in the New Age Feudalist Society. Apart from eating brains, they don't like people who have them.

[Irish_Dem]

5. The media is the propaganda arm of the PutinGOP.

[Kid Berwyn]

18. Control what they think to control what they do.

How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda

The FBI put a pause on briefings with tech companies due to an ongoing lawsuit, adding to a broader breakdown in a system meant to guard against influence operations and to ensure election integrity.

NBC News, Novembr 10, 2023
By Kevin Collier and Ken Dilanian

A once-robust alliance of federal agencies, tech companies, election officials and researchers that worked together to thwart foreign propaganda and disinformation has fragmented after years of sustained Republican attacks.

The GOP offensive started during the 2020 election as public critiques and has since escalated into lawsuits, governmental inquiries and public relations campaigns that have succeeded in stopping almost all coordination between the government and social media platforms.

The most recent setback came when the FBI put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies about Russian, Iranian and Chinese influence campaigns. Employees at two U.S. tech companies who used to receive regular briefings from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force told NBC News that it has been months since the bureau reached out.

In a testimony last week to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray signaled a significant pullback in communications with tech companies and tied the move to rulings by a conservative federal judge and appeals court that said some government agencies and officials should be restricted from communicating and meeting with social media companies to moderate content. The case is now on hold pending Supreme Court review.

SNIP...

Wray didn’t elaborate, but sources familiar with the matter told NBC News that all the FBI’s interactions with tech platforms now have to be pre-approved and supervised by Justice Department lawyers.

Continues...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/gop-muzzled-quiet-coalition-fought-foreign-propaganda-rcna103373

The above Ken D must be onboard, having once had his articles pre-approved by the CIA.

[Irish_Dem]

19. GOP, FBI, Russians, Chinese.

All keeps circling back to the same players.

[budkin]

6. AXIOS: BIDEN USES NOTES!

It’s that bad.

[onecaliberal]

7. Nah, they're just cheering it on.

[orangecrush]

8. It's international

Their oligarchs and our oligarchs have joined sides.

They are tired of our elections.

[Cha]

9. Stupid Shit Press Wants to Be Ruled by Russia.. Traitor Assholes.

[hay rick]

10. I frequently remark on the reporting failures of American media...

...and use the word "failures" when my suppressed belief is that "betrayals" is closer to the truth. Wouldn't want to sound hyperbolic, ya know...

[Silent Type]

11. Looks like a lot of media links for something not reported. And I've seen more.

[Kid Berwyn]

15. Appreciate your contribution.

Must ask: Do any of them that you read put the story into context?

Here's how David Corn put it:

This Moscow plot has been a matter of public record for years. In February 2020, intelligence officials briefed House lawmakers that Moscow was interfering in the election to assist Trump’s reelection. (This briefing, of course, angered Trump, who had refused to acknowledge that a covert program authorized by Russian leader Vladimir Putin helped him win the White House four years earlier, and he replaced the acting director of national intelligence.) Months later, William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, issued a statement declaring that Russia “is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden…Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian television.”

Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/02/smirnov-biden-fbi-comer-jordan-giuliani-russia-ukraine-burisma-impeachment/

[pecosbob]

20. They seemingly want to push a different topic...Biden's age.

A meme which analysis shows also originated in Russia.