Defense Secretary James Mattis wanted us to stay in Paris accord. Trump said no. Mattis wanted us to stay in the Iran deal. Trump said no. Mattis wanted less pressure on NATO. Trump said no. Mattis wanted to keep soldiers in Syria. Trump said no. Mattis wanted to hang around until February… Trump said no.
…President Donald Trump on Sunday pushed the Pentagon chief out the door two months earlier than planned (read more)
My philosophy about people in general has always been that stubborness is tolerable, stupidity is tolerable, but stubborness and stupidity are a bridge too far.
Yeah, that's one of the rumors out there ==> that he was picked by the U.S. Army Military Intel.
There is a behind the scenes story - Story of Q - that tells of a certain number of upper level military personnel that were set to run a coup d' etat against the Obama administration. But, decided to hold off & try to persuade one of two men to run for the presidency. Trump was the first that they approached. If he declined, then they would try to convince their other choice.
That's the story behind Qanon.
Last edited by turiya, 26th December 2018 at 02:28.
Arguably the biggest story of 2018 is how much we have learned about institutional political corruption within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). With that level of new knowledge in mind, some earlier stories about the DOJ and FBI take on an entirely different light.
Here’s one from late 2016 – You might not know the name Marc Turi but if you are familiar with the Benghazi Brief, or more specifically with Operation Zero Footprint, you’ll likely know the issues.
Arms dealer says Obama admin used him as a scapegoat
(Oct 11, 2016)
Marc Turi was the guy who constructed the covert weapons shipments into Libya to overthrown Mouamar Gaddaffi (2011) and send weapons to the Libyan Transitional National Government supported by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
During the original phase of the Libyan uprising, early February 2011, the first defector from the official Gaddaffi regime was a foreign justice minister named Mustafa Abdel Jalil.
Jalil became the international face of the anti-Gaddaffi elements within the Libyan government. However, Jalil was an extremist Brotherhood member and somewhat of a patsy. When we were outlining his ideology, and the extremists who were behind him, almost no-one was paying attention.
Following Jalil’s moves was ultimately what enabled CTH to construct the Benghazi Brief so accurately – because during the shell game Mustafa Jalil was the pea.
Justice Minister Mustafa Jalil (pictured above) formed a loose coalition of extremist forces within Eastern Libya; however, behind Jalil were Muslim Brotherhood members who were released from the Cairo prisons by Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood head Mohammed Morsi.
When Morsi opened the prisons and released the Brotherhood, the key person released was Mohammed al-Zawahiri.
Mohammed al-Zawahiri is the brother of al-Qaeda’s #2 guy Ayman al-Zawahiri who was/is running al-Qaeda from Afghanistan.
[left Mohammed al-Zawahiri (Egypt) – right Ayman al Zawahiri (Afghanistan)]
You might remember when the U.S. Cairo Egyptian embassy protest began on the morning of September 11th 2012 (before the Benghazi attack), it was Mohammed al-Zawahiri who was talking to CNN’s Nic Robertson about the release of the Blind Sheik (pictured below). This video has been scrubbed almost everywhere because it entirely undercuts the White House narrative on the origin of the Cairo Protests.
After his release from jail, Mohammed al-Zawahiri crossed the border into Eastern Libya (Benghazi) and coordinated with Mustafa Abdel Jalil. This was the origin of the crisis started by Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Susan Rice, Samantha Power and President Obama .
Jalil, the patsy, was presenting a sympathetic moderate appearance toward Western media and Western politicians like France’s Sarkozy and the U.S. Hillary Clinton. However, Zawahiri and Jalil’s goal, openly stated after Libyan victory, was to get the U.S. and NATO allies to be the air force of al-Qaeda against their adversary President Gaddaffi.
Not only did Sarkozy, Clinton and eventually Obama, fulfill the request, they ended up shipping weapons (via CIA/Panetta) directly to Eastern Libya, to Zawahiri and Jalil.
The Muslim Brotherhood, via Mohammed Zawahiri, almost immediately directed many of those CIA weapons from Libya to his al-Qaeda brother in Afghanistan and to their ideological brothers in Syria who later identified themselves as ISIS.
Within weeks, U.S. aircraft operating in Afghanistan began seeing surface to air missiles used against them for the first time in a decade. Ultimately, this is the biggest issue with the weapons shipments and the reason no one in the Obama administration ever wanted to discuss the program.
Under the code name “Zero Footprint” Marc Turi originally drew up the plan to coordinate the flow of weapons from the U.S. through the intermediary of Qatar into Libya. Those U.S. weapons ended up in Libya and Syria being used by the enemies of the U.S., specifically al-Qaeda. [All Citations within The Benghazi Brief]
In February of 2012 Asst. Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro admitted the State Department had been attempting to relocate and buy-back those weapons since August of 2011. However, on September 11th 2012, while those efforts were still ongoing, the attacks in Benghazi against the U.S. State Department Ambassador Chris Stevens took place, and four Americans were killed.
In 2014 the DOJ filed charges against Marc Turi essentially for non registered weapons shipments. Turi’s defense was that the weapons were unregistered because the State Department and the CIA needed covert cover. Elements within the CIA confirmed the basic outline for Turi’s assertion.
In 2015 Turi provided Fox News with documents and email exchanges he had with high-level members of Congress as well as military, and State Department employees to back up his claim that the Obama administration authorized in 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, a covert weapons program that spun out of control.
Marc Turi’s legal defense team said if the DOJ was going to prosecute him for the arms shipments, his defense would necessarily reveal how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was actually the driver of the entire program.
The DOJ tried to claim “national security” issues and keep the aspects relating to the U.S. State Department and Secretary Clinton under wraps during the pre-trial motions. However, in October of 2016 a federal judge ruled the defense was allowed to use the documented evidence Turi possessed to defend himself.
The case was slated to begin trial on November 8th, 2016; ironically the same day as the U.S. presidential election. As a direct consequence of the October ruling, the DOJ announced they were dropping all the charges. The motive was transparently to protect Hillary Clinton:
[…] Federal prosecutors faced a Wednesday deadline to turn over discovery documents to the legal team of American Marc Turi, who had been charged with selling weapons to Libyan rebels. Late Tuesday, an announcement came that the government was dropping the case, which was set to go to trial on Nov. 8 – the day American voters choose between Clinton and GOP nominee Donald Trump. The move may avert a release of potentially explosive documents.
“I am glad this horrific five-year ordeal is over and I am pleased to be able to move on with my life,” Turi told Fox News in a statement. “The American public has the right to know that an injustice was committed against an innocent American.” (read more)
When all of this information originally surfaced in 2016 we knew the DOJ and FBI were bad, but we had no idea the level of corruption within both institutions. Today, in 2018 we have an solid understanding of how politicized the DOJ and FBI were during the latter years of the Obama administration.
In hindsight, all of these political maneuvers to defend Hillary Clinton from scrutiny make a lot more sense. Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, James Comey and Andrew McCabe were part of a highly political apparatus within government working primarily toward political goals.
This Pandora’s box is open now; everyone can see it; it cannot be closed. No-one will ever look at the DOJ and FBI the same way. Both organizations are still in denial. Even with Trump officials they still think they can simply cover-up their history and get away with it.
Perhaps they are right. Perhaps they will all get away with it…. however, no-one will ever look at the DOJ and FBI the same way.
"...the American people can hear nothing but the screeching of incensed hawks on both sides of the political aisle. That screeching is the sound of the Deep State expressing its deep displeasure and even pain."
"The recent actions of the President and the Treasury Secretary, however, have been erratic and are creating uncertainty and instability in the markets. It would be in our nation’s best interest if they stopped what they are doing."
In response to the US's decision to withdraw, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the IDF would "increase efforts" against Tehran’s entrenchment in Syria as a result.
Former UK spy Christopher Steele admitted in a London court that he was hired to help Hillary Clinton contest the results of the 2016 election in case Trump won, according to the Washington Times.
Steele assembled an anti-Trump "dossier" of opposition research investigative firm Fusion GPS, which was in turn hired by DNC law firm Perkins Coie LLP. The document used "a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure," and "a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin," according to Vanity Fair. In other words, Hillary Clinton - through Steele and other intermediaries - was working with Russians against Donald Trump.
He said the law firm Perkins Coie wanted to be in a position to contest the results based on evidence he unearthed on the Trump campaign conspiring with Moscow on election interference.
His scenario is contained in a sealed Aug. 2 declaration in a defamation law suit brought by three Russian bankers in London. The trio’s American attorneys filed his answers Tuesday in a libel lawsuit in Washington against the investigative firm Fusion GPS, which handled the former British intelligence officer.
In an answer to interrogatories, Mr. Steele wrote: “Fusion’s immediate client was law firm Perkins Coie. It engaged Fusion to obtain information necessary for Perkins Coie LLP to provide legal advice on the potential impact of Russian involvement on the legal validity of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election.
“Based on that advice, parties such as the Democratic National Committee and HFACC Inc. (also known as ‘Hillary for America’) could consider steps they would be legally entitled to take to challenge the validity of the outcome of that election.” -Washington Times
During the election, Clinton told voters that Donald Trump would "threaten democracy" if he didn't promise to accept the results of the 2016 election - after Trump suggested he might not accept the results of a "rigged" contest.
Now listen to Hillary when she thought she was going to win the election:
Meanwhile Clinton was open to challenging the election more than ten months after her historic loss - if only there were a way. "There are scholars, academics, who have arguments that it would be, but I don’t think they’re on strong ground. But people are making those arguments. I just don’t think we have a mechanism," Clinton told NPR in September 2017.
The dossier Steele produced was used as the basis for an FBI FISA surveillance warrant application to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Notably, the agency never told the FISA court that the dossier their application hinged on was paid for by the DNC and Clinton's campaign, although it did indicate that it was opposition research.
The mainstream media used still-unverified key claims within the dossier to fuel a conspiracy theory that President Trump conspired with the Russian government to win the 2016 US election.
Meanwhile, as we reported earlier Monday, FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn't believe a key claim contained in the "Steele Dossier," the document the Obama FBI relied on to obtain a surveillance warrant on a member of the Trump campaign.
The Post's Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats, reports the Daily Caller's Chuck Ross.
"We’ve talked to sources at the FBI and the CIA and elsewhere — they don’t believe that ever happened," said Miller during the October event which aired Saturday on C-SPAN.
We literally spent weeks and months trying to run down... there's an assertion in there that Michael Cohen went to Prague to settle payments that were needed at the end of the campaign. We sent reporters to every hotel in Prague, to all over the place trying to - just to try to figure out if he was ever there, and came away empty. -Greg Miller
Meanwhile, Trump is still living under the spectre of Russian collusion, while Hillary Clinton actually colluded Russians in her plan to challenge the 2016 election.
Researchers Identify 200 Websites That ‘Reliably Echo Russian Propaganda’ to Millions of Americans
Infowars, WikiLeaks and Drudge Report are among those counted
Russia had a hand in spreading fake news to millions of Americans during the election cycle, according to two independent research groups, PropOrNot and Foreign Policy Research Institute.
The Washington Post was the first media outlet to report PropOrNot’s findings that there are over 200 websites described as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.” The most recognizable names on the list of “sites that reliably echo Russian propaganda” include Alex Jones’ Infowars, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks and Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report. Others include The Federalist Papers, ZeroHedge, the Free Thought Project and USAPoliticsNow.
PropOrNot wrote, “Please note that our criteria are behavioral. That means the characteristics of the propaganda outlets we identify are motivation-agnostic. For purposes of this definition it does not matter whether the sites listed here are being knowingly directed and paid by Russian intelligence officers, or whether they even knew they were echoing Russian propaganda at any particular point: If they meet these criteria, they are at the very least acting as bona-fide ‘useful idiots‘ of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further scrutiny.”
PropOrNot, which launched this year “as an effort to prevent propaganda from distorting U.S. political and policy discussions,” describes itself as “an independent team of concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs.”
The organization estimated that false stories either planted or promoted by Russia’s sophisticated disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times on Facebook.
One such story, debunked by The Daily Beast, was a WikiLeaks claim about Hillary Clinton’s health in wake of being treated for pneumonia after looking ill at a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York. While the Daily Beast’s explanation of Clinton’s “decision fatigue” — a term WikiLeaks uncovered in a Clinton email and interpreted as an illness (it’s not) — reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times, a version of the story spread by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times.
“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” Clint Watts, a researcher for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told The Washington Post. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”
Watts’ research was published earlier this month under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy” on War on the Rocks, an online platform for analysis, commentary, debate and multimedia content on foreign policy and national security issues.
Watts, along with co-authors Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger, argued before election day that while Russia’s propaganda effort may benefit the Trump campaign, “the ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy.”
The strategy relies on a complicated mix of elements that contribute to the spread of disinformation through social media trolling, conspiracy theory websites (Infowars), parody news sites, data dumps (WikiLeaks) and news aggregators (Drudge Report). Watts and company explain:
“A small army of social media operatives — a mix of Russian-controlled accounts, useful idiots, and innocent bystanders — are deployed to promote all of this material to unknowing audiences. Some of these are real people, others are bots, and some present themselves as innocent news aggregators, providing ‘breaking news alerts’ to happenings worldwide or in specific cities. The latter group is a key tool for moving misinformation and disinformation from primarily Russian-influenced circles into the general social media population. We saw this phenomenon at play in recent reports of a second military coup in Turkey and unsubstantiated reports of an active shooter that led to the shutdown of JFK Airport. Some news aggregators may be directly controlled by Russia, while other aggregators that use algorithmic collection may be the victims of manipulation.”
Russia, however, has repeatedly denied any such manipulation, along with Kremlin propaganda outlet RT, formerly called Russia Today, which told the Washington Post on Friday it “adamantly rejects these claims” of producing or helping to spread fake news stories during the U.S. election.
PropOrNot launched the YYYcampaignYYY Friday, asking others to help identify Russian propaganda circulating online by manually marking suspicious headlines, social media accounts or websites with YYY on both sides while pushing back against the person who posted “as kindly as possible.” The organization has even created a Google Chrome plugin that will highlight links to alleged Russian propaganda sites while browsing.
I hope everyone, even the Fake News Media, is having a great Christmas! Our Country is doing very well. We are securing our Borders, making great new Trade Deals, and bringing our Troops Back Home. We are finally putting America First. MERRY CHRISTMAS! #MAGA 3:18 PM - 25 Dec 2018
Press Secretary Sarah Sanders....
Sarah Sanders
@PressSec
President Trump and the First Lady traveled to Iraq late on Christmas night to visit with our troops and Senior Military leadership to thank them for their service, their success, and their sacrifice and to wish them a Merry Christmas.
President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump deliver remarks to U.S. military during a surprise visit to Al Asad Air Base in Iraq.
During his remarks President Trump outlines his determination to remove U.S. military from Syria and to hold regional allies accountable to retain stability and security.
Additionally President Trump directly addresses the notion that any withdrawal from the region means a reconstituted terror threat that might strike the U.S: “if that was to happen, they would suffer consequences like never before.” “That’s not a threat, that’s going to be a fact.” … “If anything were to happen at all.”
Retail sales this holiday season are higher than at any other time, but a close look we see people have been charging like crazy, savings rate is falling and debt is moving up.
US home sales have collapsed, home prices are way out of the reach of the everyday American.
Stock market has declined prior to Christmas and on Christmas eve, now Trump is saying buy the dip, why would he say this, is it because he has the magic wand.
____________________________________
The First Alarm Is About To Ring, The
Clock Is Ticking Down - Episode 1750b
(Dec 26, 2018)
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