RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/390228-london-bridges-falling-down-curious-origins-of-fbis-trump-russia-probe
The bridge to the Russia investigation wasn’t erected in Moscow during the summer of the 2016 election.

It originated earlier, 1,700 miles away in London, where foreign figures contacted Trump campaign advisers and provided the FBI with hearsay allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, bureau documents and interviews of government insiders reveal. These contacts in spring 2016 — some from trusted intelligence sources, others from Hillary Clinton supporters — occurred well before FBI headquarters authorized an official counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.

The new timeline makes one wonder: Did the FBI follow its rules governing informants?
Here’s what a congressman and an intelligence expert think.

“The revelation of purposeful contact initiated by alleged confidential human sources prior to any FBI investigation is troublesome,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), an ally of President Trump and chairman of a House subcommittee that’s taking an increasingly aggressive oversight role in the scandal, told me. “This new information begs the questions: Who were the informants working for, who were they reporting to and why has the [Department of Justice] and FBI gone to such great lengths to hide these contacts?”

Kevin Brock agrees that Congress has legitimate questions. The retired FBI assistant director for intelligence supervised the rewriting of bureau rules governing sources, under then-director Robert Mueller a decade ago. Those rules forbid the FBI from directing a human source to target an American until a formally predicated investigative file is opened.

What a month! The anti-Trump venom persisted…and worsened. It came into sharper focus with the news that the FBI, under the Obama Administration, had inserted Stefan Halper as a spy (or informant, as the New York Times euphemistically called him) into the Trump campaign – ‘Operation Crossfire,’ as it was dubbed – “benign information gathering,” as James Clapper put it[1]. This is in addition to the dubiously obtained FISA warrants to surveil the Trump organization. Not since Lyndon Johnson spied on Goldwater in 1964 has the FBI been so blatantly used for political purposes. But, where is the outrage over the use of government to silence the opposition? Incredibly (and fortunately), it is having little effect on Mr. Trump’s policies here or abroad – like the tax bill, deregulation, North Korea, Jerusalem and Iran.

As for the latter, the EU is upset over Mr. Trump’s failure to recertify the Iran nuclear deal. Only a people who viewed Mr. Obama’s Iran deal through the commercial lens of their largest companies would be so unconcerned with a rogue nation that has used its new-found wealth to fund militarization and terrorism. Only a people protected by their big brother in North America would not fret about the nuclear ambitions of Iran.(Despite the EU having a slightly larger economy, the U.S. spends more than two and a half times what the EU does on defense, and a big slice of that spending is in defense of Europe.)

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Consider the month’s news: The spiking of the Iran nuclear deal (a deal which Mr. Obama realized the Senate would never support); setting a date (possibly) to meet with Kim Jong-un, and re-locating (finally) the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Curiously, but not surprisingly, the Left derided all three decisions. Nancy Pelosi criticized the President for meeting with Mr. Kim and then criticized him for renegotiating the terms. The movement of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem was accomplished, but both Iran (financial sanctions and a new deal) and North Korea (denuclearization of the Peninsula) remain works in progress. The Left is in denial: How does an outsider, a boorish, unprincipled ignoramus, with dyed-blonde hair, accomplish what sanctimonious political elites could not?

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3745/Russians-for-Hillary-3.aspx

The evidence leading to the big Veselnitskaya “shocker” — that the Russian lawyer was an informant for the Russian government all along — was a set of her emails, which suddenly and anonymously appeared in the electronic dropbox of Dossier, an organization set up by Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, “the former tycoon” the New York Times tells us (not oligarch?), “who was stripped of his oil holdings, imprisoned and then exiled from his native Russia.”

Note that the release date of the Veselnitskaya story, April 27, 2018, is the same as that of the final report by the House Intelligence Committee on Russia. What do you say Agent Veselnitskaya story was a little “insurance” against the report being a blockbuster? Nice distraction, if necessary.

On April 28, 2018, Bill Browder pops up on NPR to comment.

SIMON: Let’s start with the story of this lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. She told NBC, I am a lawyer. I am an informant for the Russian government – after claiming that she wasn’t anybody’s agent. You know her, right?

BROWDER: I know her really well. She was trying to repeal the Magnitsky Act, which I was very instrumental in passing. And she did a lot of terrible things in Washington and New York to try to do that. And she had always presented herself as some kind of private citizen. When she calls herself now an informant, I would say that doesn’t go nearly as far as what she really is. She is an agent of the Russian government. And the emails that came out yesterday pretty much prove that. And so what we know now is that an agent of the Russian government, proven by emails, showed up in Trump Tower, trying to get Donald Trump Jr. to convince his father to repeal an anti-Russian Magnitsky sanctions act.

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3744/Russians-for-Hillary-2.aspx

Yesterday, drawing mainly on interviews with the Senate Judiciary Committee, I set forth the direct statements and strong indicators that all four of the “Russians” in the infamous meeting at Trump Tower set up to assist in the election of Donald Trump were against the election of Donald Trump.

Thus a key vector of so-called “Russian collusion” was actually activated by a bunch of Russians for Hillary.

I put “Russians” in quotation marks above because three of the four have American and Russian citizenship both. One is even the longtime business partner of an American lawyer, Edward Lieberman, whose close associations with Bill and Hillary Clinton go back at least as far as when his late wife Evelyn was deputy chief of staff for President Bill Clinton.

In his Senate interview, Rob Goldstone, the Brit who coordinated the meeting via email with Don Jr., by the way, also revealed something of interest in his along these same political lines.

The bizarre series of relationships that led to this 20-minute meeting at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016 center on Goldstone’s capacity as the rep of a Russian pop star, Emin Agalerov, whose “Russian oligarch” father Agar Agalerov had partnered with the Trump organization to stage the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Approaching Don Jr., Goldstone dangled information from the Russian “Crown prosecutor” via Agar Agalerov via Emin Agalerov that was described as incriminating to Hillary.

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3743/Russians-for-Hillary.aspx

Earlier this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a set of transcripts of interviews and exhibits related to its “Inquiry into Circumstances Surrounding Trump Tower Meeting.”

I am looking at the interviews from the “Russian” side of the table, the people who sat across from Don Trump Jr. as he waited expectantly to hear an incriminating story about Hillary Clinton that never came: Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, Anatoli Samochornov, Rinat Akhmetshin, the Britisher Robert Goldstone. There is also the written testimony of Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Whether there is anyone who still believes this meeting was anything but a set-up from the get-go, it’s notable that these interviews show us there was not one Trump supporter among the Russians there to “help” Trump. You might even call this weird posse, “Russians for Hillary.”

Take Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze. He moved to the US in 1991 and became a US citizen in 2001, still retaining his Russian Federation passport. He is so pro-Hillary that until he learned that the meeting with Don Jr. would not feature information incriminating to Hillary, he didn’t even want to go.

Kaveladze: Look, I didn’t want to be a part of a meeting where some negative information on a Presidential candidate would be discussed. So, honestly, I was considering if I realized during the lunch that the meeting would be about negative information on Ms. Clinton, I ‘ m not going to go to that meeting .

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/may-jobs-numbers-are-bad-news-for-democrats.html

Friday’s monthly employment report was great news for anyone looking for a job in America – unless you happen to be a Democrat running for Congress.
That’s because voters who are employed are historically more likely to favor incumbents than those who are out of work.
With the jobless rate now down to 3.8 percent, Democrats in 435 House districts and 35 Senate races face a major challenge as they try to unseat Republican majorities in both chambers.

Among the many contentious topics swirling around this year’s campaign, none is more important than the perennial issue of employment. Voters who are employed are historically more likely to favor incumbents than those who are out of work.

That poses a major challenge for Democrats in 435 House districts and 35 Senate races who are looking to unseat Republican majorities in both chambers.