#house intelligence

[atheistforhumanity]

House Intelligence Committee releases transcripts from Russia investigation

The House Intelligence Committee on Thursday released transcripts of interviews conducted by the panel during its Russia probe in 2017 and 2018 -- amid demands by Republicans to make them public after being cleared by the intelligence community.

Avoid The Truth at All Costs

This post is about the newly released transcripts by the House Intelligence Committee. In this post I want to focus on how Republican law makes worked to cover Trump’s tracks and how conservative media grossly misinforms the public. If you have any specific questions about what is contained in the transcripts, please send me an ask. 

I’ve linked the press release on the transcripts by Fox News above. It’s very brief and uninformative. Other than a quote by Adam Schiff, only one sentence mentions the actual contents of the transcripts. Whether Rep or Dem, very few people will gander at the transcripts themselves, and I don’t really blame anyone for that. That’s why we have journalists, right? But those who are convinced that Fox is a trustworthy source are pretty much being told “there’s nothing to see here.” People are acting on the presumption that if there was anything significant to report that Fox employees would have the integrity to tell them. Therefore, they will write off anything said by liberals. 

The technique that Fox News is using if very purposeful. There is no way you could read through these transcripts and not see anything of controversy that is worth reporting. So, instead of reporting the contents they simply refer to public comments already made that assures the public of no collusion. This is not small bias, this is very thoughtful avoidance of facts to push a desired belief. 

Republican Lawmakers Are Twice as Bad

The transcripts that were released are the text print outs of some 60 different interviews held by the House Intelligence Committee while investigating Russia. This also includes summary reports by the House Republicans and House Democrats. The information is not exactly new, because we received the findings from these interviews in the way of the Mueller Report(read my summary here). After doing some browsing for key highlights, I realized that all of these documents collectively show what was reported in the Mueller Report, but back it up with some extra detail. For anyone who read the Mueller Report, you’ll find a little more depth and detail in these transcripts. I still have a lot more exploring to do. 

However, it’s clear these documents only back up what was in the Mueller report. This is chiefly that the Russians made a cyber attack on our nation, and then approached the Trump campaign to offer a quid pro quo deal from their attack, and the Trump campaign welcomed, sought after, and took this help in all it’s forms. 

It was clear from public statements and actions of the House Republicans on the Intelligence Committee that they refused to acknowledge any wrong doing by Trump’s campaign and never supported in the purpose of the investigation. What the Minority Report shows it that House Republicans refused to fully investigate matters or seek answers to questions on virtually every issue. 

If you had read my summary of the Mueller Report in the past, I mentioned that the main reason the report did not definitively determine collusion to be proven was that the investigation was incomplete and had not discovered the answers to many details. 

Take the Trump Tower for example. This is something most people should have some recollection of. Don Jr. admits that the purpose of the meeting was to receive harmful information about Hillary Clinton. He also admits that the Russians lobbied for the removal of key sanctions. He admits that he would not have taken the meetings if he did not believe he was going to receive dirt on Hillary. The Majority Report downplays the significance of this meeting, and the Minority accuses the Majority of never trying to answer the larger questions, such as: What dirt did Russia have? Why are they so interested in Trump and his admin? What did Russia want out of this relationship? 

While investigating George Papadopoulos, House Republicans claimed that the emails connected to his attempts to link Trump and Russia were not verified, but they refused to take the next step in interviewing/investigating ancillary characters which Papadopoulos was in contact with. Basically, they discovered Papadopoulos made contact with a Russian agent about linking the Trump admin and the Kremlin, but they refused to explore the links and witnesses to find out how far his actions went or to confirm they even happened. 

Russians also made contact with the Trump admin through the NRA, this is related to the Butina scandal in the news. Unfortunately, the House Reps refused to dig deeper into the how, why, and who of Russia’s back channel through the NRA. 

To this date, for every major plot point we know about, there are many questions left unanswered and details unconfirmed. This is directly because the Intelligence Committee regularly ended it’s interest in matters at the surface level. That is a fact that’s bore out by the actions on record and public statements through out the investigation, which culminates in the Minority report as a refusal to act by the Reps.   

We never proved collusion 100% because Republicans stonewalled the investigation from the inside the entire time!

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

they’re doing it again and you need to be ready

Only this time, the call is coming from inside the White House.

This story is weird. It’s going to get weirder. If we don’t brace ourselves, then it’s going to work, again. If we do get a grip on it, we really might be able to make this a turning point against the regime. So even if you don’t usually care about the international intrigue, you do need to understand what’s going on with Trump, Ukraine, and the whistleblower.

The reporters and members of congress who are talking are being extremely careful with what they say. What we know is this:

The incident or incidents of concern happened by mid-August. A whistleblower somewhere in an American intelligence service decided that whatever had happened was serious enough to take to the inspector general (IG), who’s kind of like a federal agency’s internal affairs cop. The inspector general agreed that it was worth going through the process of reporting it.

The way that process is supposed to work is that the inspector general reports the concern to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who has to report it to the House and Senate intelligence committees within a couple of weeks. What actually happened is that the inspector general brought the issue to the DNI, who decided to ask the Department of Justice if he should pass the whistleblower’s concern to Congress. The rule on this is pretty straightfoward, so it’s not clear why he went to the DOJ. Unsurprisingly, the Trump-branded DOJ told the DNI not to report to Congress. Their excuse was – get this – that the whistleblower was concerned about something which wasn’t done by anyone in the intelligence community, so it wasn’t in the IG’s wheelhouse, so NO SNITCHIN’.

After those couple of weeks had passed, the IG contacted the intelligence committee and told them that a whistleblower had come forward but the brass were refusing to hand over the details, and House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff pulled the fire alarm. Last week, the inspector general testified behind closed doors to the House intelligence committee.

We still don’t know the substance of the complaint. We do know that it has something to do with a “promise” Trump made on a phone call with a foreign leader and that it had something to do with Ukraine.

Some other things we know which are definitely important and almost certainly relevant:

In a July 25th phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump asked him to open a bullshit investigation into some business that former Vice President Biden’s son Hunter had in Ukraine. Eight times.

President Zelensky also had an extremely weird meeting with Vice Pretender Pence and former National Security Advisor John Bolton during Pence’s trip to Poland in late August. A few days later Zelensky met with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he and his staff expressed confusion and alarm about communications they received from Trump friend and “lawyer” Rudy Giuliani.

Trump stalled on paying out $250 million of funds that Congress had set aside to support Ukraine’s military, then suddenly reversed himself in mid-September and agreed to pay up, plus an extra $140 million.

Giuliani melted down on CNN and admitted that he’s been trying to pressure the Ukrainian government to go after Biden.

While all this was going on, there were a handful of abrupt firings and resignations in some high-level national security positions. This included the Director of National Intelligence (that’s the person who’s supposed to be handing over information to Congress right now) and National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was in that strange meeting between Pence and the Ukrainian president.

Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine into prosecuting his political opponents is bad enough to be a major story on its own. It definitely deserves this degree of freak-out. But we also have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that it is not the whole story. There was no need to blow the whistle on that in August, because we knew about it in May. This whole thing has been a serious risk and a real pain in the ass for both the whistleblower and the inspector general. Normal people don’t do that unless they have a really good reason, and these aren’t normal people, they’re fucking spies. I would be extremely surprised if they were trying to give up government secrets just to add a little color to a story we already knew. It feels like there’s another shoe to drop on this.

Ukraine was not targeted for extortion at random. Trump did not throw a dart at a map. Ukraine was a relatively early domino in our current geopolitical clusterfuck. Back in 2014, Ukrainian protesters drove their corrupt Putin puppet president out of office. Putin retaliated by invading eastern Ukraine, Obama and other allied leaders retaliated with harsh economic sanctions against Russia, Putin retaliated by helping Trump sabotage the 2016 election, and Trump has been trying to pay him back by undoing all those sanctions. That $250 million in military aid Trump sat on is to help Ukraine defend itself from the Russian army, which is still occupying the Crimean peninsula.*

To add insult to injury, Trump supporters and other Russian propagandists have used Ukraine in their deflections from the Russian government’s attack on American democracy. Ukraine’s corrupt Putin puppet president was a client of former Trump campaign manager and current federal inmate Paul Manafort. When Manafort joined the Trump campaign, people naturally used information gathered in Ukraine to find out more about him. This, through some ham-fisted whatabout jujitsu, became THE REAL COLLUSION!!!! It was no such thing, of course, but you can imagine that in Trump’s mobster mentality, roping them into colluding with him now feels like justification for having accused them of collusion before.

And to be clear: this time it’s Joe Biden, for …. reasons. Whatever. The point is that they are lying and abusing their power to create scandal in order to make political opponents look as corrupt as they are, so that the press can sigh with relief and say “many scandalous people on both sides” and then squishy moderates/leftier-than-thou purity fetishists/politically disengaged people throw up their hands and say “well, they’re all corrupt, both sides, why bother showing up” and that only ever helps the right. Today the lies are about Biden. As soon as someone overtakes him in the polls, it will be that someone else. You have to be ready to challenge it.

Like I said. It’s going to get weird.

*Since it’s going to be coming up a lot! You’ll hear people refer to the country as “Ukraine” and “the Ukraine” interchangeably. That’s wrong; it’s just “Ukraine.” That mistake doesn’t sound insulting to most English speakers (if you’re reading this, you’re probably from “the United States”) and most of the people who make it aren’t trying to be insulting. But “the Ukraine” is what it was called under the Soviet Union, so it has kind of colonialist implications. It’s a grammatical dogwhistle like “Democrat Party”: people who don’t know better might pick it up innocently enough, but you do want to break or avoid the habit.

[phroyd]

Since when does the White House dictate whether a Congressional Hearing is scheduled and Who Can or Cannot Testify?!

Phroyd

[atheistforhumanity]

The house intelligence committee has finally been allowed to release their transcripts. This means we can now directly read their files and memos they kept during the Russia investigation. I’ll make a post about what can be learned after I sift through it. 

This image that you see if from the house intelligence committee government website. This is the heading of their release of the information. They are very clear about what is in this documents. 

[atheistforhumanity]

New Efforts at Obstruction of Justice by Trump

Last week two very important classified meetings were held by the Dept. of Justice. One meeting was attended by Rep. Trey Gowdy, Speaker Paul Ryan, Rep. Adam Schiff, Rep. Devin Nunes, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Rod Rosenstein, and Chris Wray. The second meeting was with the “Gang of Eight,” the leaders of both parties from both chambers, as well as the heads of the intelligence committees. 

These meetings were actually to discuss the validity of President Trump’s conspiracy theory claims. Some officials see these meetings as a way to humor the President and keep him from taking further action on his accusations. From the topic of these meetings we can deduce that they will be discussing in detail facts about the early stages of the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s campaign and the evidence surrounding the investigation. They would likely be discussing or mentioning other key details of evidence in the Russia investigation. That is why this meeting was classified.

Shockingly two people whom work Trump appeared at both meetings when they had absolutely no business attending. Those two people were Trump’s defense attorney Emmet Flood and Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly! They were not allowed to stay for the meetings, but tried to sit in on both. They stated that the President wanted to develop more openness around the investigation.

First, this meeting was classified so that alone bars these men from being there. It’s hard to view their appearance in any other light then them trying to learn what information the DOJ and FBI have against Donald Trump so they can destroy evidence, change their stories, and prepare to lie. That is unthinkably corrupt and immoral.

Think there is another explanation for them being there? Think again because we can thank Rudy Giuliani for clarifying their intentions, as he told politico, “We want to see how the briefing went to today and how much we learned from it. If we learned a good deal from it, it will shorten that whole process considerably.” He is literally saying they wanted to gain classified information, which they should not have. When he says “shorten the whole process” he means that if they know what evidence they are facing they will be better prepared to lie and get their stories straight before going into court.

This is such obvious obstruction of justice it proves to us two things. The first is that Trump is so desperate to keep himself out of jail that committing obvious Obs. of Jus. is a better strategy than letting the investigation run it’s course. The other is that the Republicans involved in the intelligence committee and others are willing to ignore ANY level corruption to our justice system in order to protect Trump.

[phroyd]

Nunes is a seriously dangerous man ... he’ll try to “Normalize” any and all information and sweep under the rug any incriminating evidence.

Phroyd

[dailyvideovault]

New video posted on: https://dailyvideovault.com/day-4-part-1-adam-schiffs-opening-statement/

Day 4, Part 1: Adam Schiff's opening statement

[cnnnewsnetwork-blog]

Schiff: Ryan Leaving Because Washington Is In ‘Complete Shambles’

Schiff: Ryan Leaving Because Washington Is In ‘Complete Shambles’

USA Paper: Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said early Thursday that Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is leaving Congress in part because GOP leadership has reduced Washington to “shambles.”

“I think part of the reason he’s leaving is the way the GOP has run Washington over the last couple over the years, it’s in complete shambles,” Schiff said on CNN’s “New Day.”

The ranking Democrat on the House…

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