Germany’s parliament is debating possible child exploitation of a well
known environmental activist.
One America’s Kristian Rouz looks into the
matter.
Friday, September 27, 2019
WWWP Weekend Open Thread
I'm sure everyone knows the drill.
It's an open thread for the whole weekend.
pics, gifs, memes, music videos,
random thoughts, jokes ... post 'em if you got 'em.
Utopia is One Vote Away!
Medicare for All - assume 200,000,000 people added to the system at an average cost of $2,500 a month = $6 Trillion dollars annually.
College for All - assume 100,000,000 people added to the system at an average cost of $2,000 a month = $2.4 Trillion dollars annually.
Housing Benefits for All - assume 50,000,000 people added to the system at an average cost of $1,000 a month = $.6 Trillion dollars annually.
Universal Basic Income - assume 320,000,000 (remember the Democrats have promised everyone this benefit) people added to the system at an average cost of $1,000 a month = $3.84 Trillion dollars annually
The New Green Deal - Current estimates of this rather vague proposal stands at between $10 and $93 Trillion over 10 years so let's just say maybe $2 Trillion annually.
So we have Democrats promising $14.84 Trillion dollars annually. Of course the obvious question is - Who will pay for this added costs?
So what will these crazy ideas do for the permanently employed in America?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/192356/number-of-full-time-employees-in-the-usa-since-1990/
Notice when Obama was elected the number of permanently employed Americans was. 120.0 million, when he left office it was 123.8 million.
So under President Obama's policies he created 3.8 million permanent jobs in 8 years.
Today in 2018 (per this report) the number is: 128.6, so in two years President Trump's policies have added 4.8 million.
Current Bureau of Labor statistics say as of May 2019 states there are 131 million permanently employed.
So Trump has added 11 million in 2 and 1/2 years.
It seems to me shutting down the Oil and Gas industry will throw at least 1 million people out of work and possibly more.
Shutting down the auto industry for retooling will lay off another half million.
Shutting down the Chemical Industry (which is quite reliant on petroleum) is another 1 million people.
So, right away the Democrats place 2.5 million Americans out of work.
Since currently 11.1 million people are unemployed, Democrats will increase that to 13.6 which is 122% increase.
The Republicans had better put together some slick advertisements to explain to America what happens if they fall for this bullshit.
College for All - assume 100,000,000 people added to the system at an average cost of $2,000 a month = $2.4 Trillion dollars annually.
Housing Benefits for All - assume 50,000,000 people added to the system at an average cost of $1,000 a month = $.6 Trillion dollars annually.
Universal Basic Income - assume 320,000,000 (remember the Democrats have promised everyone this benefit) people added to the system at an average cost of $1,000 a month = $3.84 Trillion dollars annually
The New Green Deal - Current estimates of this rather vague proposal stands at between $10 and $93 Trillion over 10 years so let's just say maybe $2 Trillion annually.
So we have Democrats promising $14.84 Trillion dollars annually. Of course the obvious question is - Who will pay for this added costs?
So what will these crazy ideas do for the permanently employed in America?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/192356/number-of-full-time-employees-in-the-usa-since-1990/
Notice when Obama was elected the number of permanently employed Americans was. 120.0 million, when he left office it was 123.8 million.
So under President Obama's policies he created 3.8 million permanent jobs in 8 years.
Today in 2018 (per this report) the number is: 128.6, so in two years President Trump's policies have added 4.8 million.
Current Bureau of Labor statistics say as of May 2019 states there are 131 million permanently employed.
So Trump has added 11 million in 2 and 1/2 years.
It seems to me shutting down the Oil and Gas industry will throw at least 1 million people out of work and possibly more.
Shutting down the auto industry for retooling will lay off another half million.
Shutting down the Chemical Industry (which is quite reliant on petroleum) is another 1 million people.
So, right away the Democrats place 2.5 million Americans out of work.
Since currently 11.1 million people are unemployed, Democrats will increase that to 13.6 which is 122% increase.
The Republicans had better put together some slick advertisements to explain to America what happens if they fall for this bullshit.
Rep. McCarthy Plans to Force Democrats on Record Again with Impeachment Inquiry Vote
Earlier this week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi decided to push forward with an impeachment inquiry when she announced it at a press conference. However, she has not yet scheduled any votes on the what comes next, and many people seem to think that she’s running interference for her Democrat colleagues so they won’t have to take a public position in support of forcibly removing President Trump.
The Democrat vote for Pelosi’s decision to proceed with the impeachment inquiry went as expected, with all 231 of them voting in favor. What that does, however, is point squarely to the fact that no Democrat can now stay in the closet about the issue — it’s fish, or cut bait. They want to impeach. There’s no hiding it for them now. Of course, every Republican voted against moving to impeach. However, one Republican, in particular, Kevin McCarthy, has a plan to force the Democrats further into the public’s view. He has a plan in place to force a second vote once on the resolution previously presented on Wednesday. This time the desired effect is to force them to vote on the record so that we can all see who wants the president ousted.
This from Breitbart News:
House Republican leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) intends to force House Democrats to take another controversial vote by Friday sometime, forcing them on the record on their intent to forcibly impeach President Donald Trump, all as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to refuse to schedule any actual vote formally opening House impeachment proceedings.
If Speaker Pelosi refuses to seek approval of the whole House in the critical decision of impeachment—as is longstanding practice and precedent—I will again give all members the opportunity to go on record so their constituents can know where they stand on this issue.— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) September 26, 2019
McCarthy announced his intent to force a second vote, on the same resolution as he did before on Wednesday night, via Twitter on Thursday afternoon in a tweet after acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Joseph Maguire testified earlier in the day and the public now has the so-called “whistleblower” complaint that sparked all of this.“The American people deserve to know where their elected representatives stand on this issue,” a senior House GOP aide involved in House floor proceedings told Breitbart News. “If Speaker Pelosi won’t hold that vote, we will.”
Interestingly enough, the word now is that they’ll be out of session for a two-week recess shortly (in other words, on vacation), presumably to give the Democrats time to regroup and strategize. They’ll never learn, it seems. Their attack this week seemed very amateurish, especially once Speaker Pelosi admitted to the fact that she hadn’t even read the transcript of Trump and Zelansky’s conversation. If she had even a scrap of sense, she wouldn’t have moved forward without knowing such an important detail. I think we can expect this will cost them dearly.
‘Used and dehumanized’: Dozens of boys found chained in Nigeria
September 27, 2019
By Garba Muhammad and Bosun Yakusak
KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) – More than 300 boys and men, some as young as five and many in chains and bearing scars from beatings, have been rescued in a raid on a building that purported to be an Islamic school in northern Nigeria, police said on Friday.
Most of the freed captives seen by a Reuters reporter in the city of Kaduna were children, aged up to their late teens. Some shuffled with their ankles manacled and others were chained by their legs to large metal wheels to prevent escape.
One boy, held by the hand by a police officer as he walked unsteadily, had sores visible on his back that appeared consistent with injuries inflicted by a whip.
Some children had been brought from neighboring countries including Burkina Faso, Mali and Ghana, police said, while others had been left by their parents in what they believed to be an Islamic school or rehabilitation center.
“This place is neither a rehab or an Islamic school because you can see it for yourselves,” Kaduna state’s police commissioner, Ali Janga, told reporters. “The children gathered here are from all over the country… some of them were even chained. They were used, dehumanized, you can see it yourself.”
Kaduna police spokesman Yakubu Sabo said seven people who said they were teachers at the school had been arrested in Thursday’s raid.
“The state government is currently providing food to the children who are between the ages of five and above,” he said. It was not clear how long the captives had been held there.
RELATIVES SUSPICIOUS
Reports carried by local media said the captives had been tortured, starved and sexually abused. Reuters was not immediately able to confirm those details.
One young man, Hassan Yusuf, said he had been sent to the school because of concerns about his way of life following a few years studying abroad.
“They said my lifestyle has changed – I’ve become a Christian, I’ve left the Islamic way of life,” said Yusuf, who did not specify the nature of his relationship with the people who sent him to the center.
As news of the raid spread, some relatives gathered near the compound, where a sign over the gate, topped with rolls of barbed wire, read: “Imam Ahmad Bun Hambal Centre for Islamic studies”.
Hassan Mohammed, told Reuters he was the uncle of three of the freed children who had been sent to the school by their mother after their father died. He said he grew suspicious about what was going on after the family was denied access to them.
“I begged, they said no, we can’t see these children until three months. When we went back home… we said the only thing now is we should report this issue to the police station, that is exactly what we did,” said Mohammed.
The rescued children have been moved to a temporary camp at a stadium in Kaduna, and would later be moved to another camp in a suburb of the city while attempts were made to find their parents, police said.
SCHOOL SHUTDOWNS?
Islamic schools, known as Almajiris, are common across the mostly Muslim north of Nigeria – a country that is roughly evenly split between followers of Christianity and Islam.
Parents in northern Nigeria, the poorest part of a country in which most people live on less than $2 a day, often opt to leave their children to board at the schools.
Such schools have for years been dogged by allegations of abuse and accusations that some children have been forced to beg on the streets of cities in the north.
Earlier this year, the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, himself a Muslim, said it planned to eventually ban the schools, but would not do so immediately.
“Any necessary ban on Almajiri would follow due process and consultation with relevant authorities,” said Buhari’s spokesman Garba Shehu in a statement issued in June.
“The federal government wants a situation where every child of primary school age is in school rather than begging on the streets during school hours,” the statement said.
A presidency spokesman did not immediately respond to calls and text messages seeking comment on the raid in Kaduna and whether it would alter the government’s approach to such schools.
Professor Ishaq Akintola, director of the Nigerian human rights organization the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC), said around 10 million children across the north of the country are educated at Islamic schools.
“Those responsible for abuse, if found guilty, should be held accountable but these schools should continue because shutting them down would deprive so many students of an education,” he said.
Akintola said Islamic schools needed funding to train teachers and improve the buildings.
source article
https://www.oann.com/more-than-300-people-mostly-children-found-in-chains-in-nigerias-kaduna/
By Garba Muhammad and Bosun Yakusak
KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) – More than 300 boys and men, some as young as five and many in chains and bearing scars from beatings, have been rescued in a raid on a building that purported to be an Islamic school in northern Nigeria, police said on Friday.
Most of the freed captives seen by a Reuters reporter in the city of Kaduna were children, aged up to their late teens. Some shuffled with their ankles manacled and others were chained by their legs to large metal wheels to prevent escape.
One boy, held by the hand by a police officer as he walked unsteadily, had sores visible on his back that appeared consistent with injuries inflicted by a whip.
Some children had been brought from neighboring countries including Burkina Faso, Mali and Ghana, police said, while others had been left by their parents in what they believed to be an Islamic school or rehabilitation center.
“This place is neither a rehab or an Islamic school because you can see it for yourselves,” Kaduna state’s police commissioner, Ali Janga, told reporters. “The children gathered here are from all over the country… some of them were even chained. They were used, dehumanized, you can see it yourself.”
Kaduna police spokesman Yakubu Sabo said seven people who said they were teachers at the school had been arrested in Thursday’s raid.
“The state government is currently providing food to the children who are between the ages of five and above,” he said. It was not clear how long the captives had been held there.
RELATIVES SUSPICIOUS
Reports carried by local media said the captives had been tortured, starved and sexually abused. Reuters was not immediately able to confirm those details.
One young man, Hassan Yusuf, said he had been sent to the school because of concerns about his way of life following a few years studying abroad.
“They said my lifestyle has changed – I’ve become a Christian, I’ve left the Islamic way of life,” said Yusuf, who did not specify the nature of his relationship with the people who sent him to the center.
As news of the raid spread, some relatives gathered near the compound, where a sign over the gate, topped with rolls of barbed wire, read: “Imam Ahmad Bun Hambal Centre for Islamic studies”.
Hassan Mohammed, told Reuters he was the uncle of three of the freed children who had been sent to the school by their mother after their father died. He said he grew suspicious about what was going on after the family was denied access to them.
“I begged, they said no, we can’t see these children until three months. When we went back home… we said the only thing now is we should report this issue to the police station, that is exactly what we did,” said Mohammed.
The rescued children have been moved to a temporary camp at a stadium in Kaduna, and would later be moved to another camp in a suburb of the city while attempts were made to find their parents, police said.
SCHOOL SHUTDOWNS?
Islamic schools, known as Almajiris, are common across the mostly Muslim north of Nigeria – a country that is roughly evenly split between followers of Christianity and Islam.
Parents in northern Nigeria, the poorest part of a country in which most people live on less than $2 a day, often opt to leave their children to board at the schools.
Such schools have for years been dogged by allegations of abuse and accusations that some children have been forced to beg on the streets of cities in the north.
Earlier this year, the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, himself a Muslim, said it planned to eventually ban the schools, but would not do so immediately.
“Any necessary ban on Almajiri would follow due process and consultation with relevant authorities,” said Buhari’s spokesman Garba Shehu in a statement issued in June.
“The federal government wants a situation where every child of primary school age is in school rather than begging on the streets during school hours,” the statement said.
A presidency spokesman did not immediately respond to calls and text messages seeking comment on the raid in Kaduna and whether it would alter the government’s approach to such schools.
Professor Ishaq Akintola, director of the Nigerian human rights organization the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC), said around 10 million children across the north of the country are educated at Islamic schools.
“Those responsible for abuse, if found guilty, should be held accountable but these schools should continue because shutting them down would deprive so many students of an education,” he said.
Akintola said Islamic schools needed funding to train teachers and improve the buildings.
source article
Fusion GPS Mouthpiece Accidentally Bolsters Trump’s Claim Of No Cover-Up
Sometimes evidence that pushes back on the liberal narrative comes from the oddest places.
In this case, we’ve been dealing with accusations all day that Trump tried to “cover-up” the Ukraine call by putting it on a top secret server. To be clear, regardless of motive, there’s nothing illegal about that. The President has absolute power to classify materials and handle White House communications. Regardless, this was supposedly a big scandal, although even the complainant seemed unsure of what he was actually alleging.
Of course, the more logical conclusion is that Trump put that call, along with many other calls, on the secure government server in order to stop the myriad of leaks that had been happening. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what the newest information points to.
That’s Natasha Bertrand, who made a name for herself throughout the Russia-gate fiasco by being a faithful conduit for Fusion GPS propaganda. She points out that the administration started storing calls on the more secure server after a myriad of leaks, including one involving the Australians. Makes sense, right? Of course, Bertrand isn’t meaning to help make Trump’s case here that the administration was simply trying to avoid leaks. Her piece centers on the ludicrous notion that making information more secure is somehow a “national security risk.”
Up is down, left is right. Less leaks means less secure or something. It not making sense is the point with media hacks like this.
Severely limiting the personnel able to view it would be the entire point. As noted in her original tweet, back in 2017, multiple private phone calls of Trump’s were leaked to the media in order to try to embarrass him. The natural reaction would be to limit access to stop the leaks by the intel community. Magically, the leaks did seem to stop and we haven’t seen another one involving a call until, you guessed it, this latest “whistle-blower” complaint which forced the release of the Ukraine call transcript. It’s almost like the intel community are partisan hacks and can’t be trusted?
Bertrand wasn’t done though. She then made this ridiculous claim.
As Redstate’s streiff points out, that’s not how any of this works. Barack Obama does not get to sign an EO stripping future President’s of their plenary power over classification. The order would only apply to subservient positions in the government.
So while Bertrand’s first tweet inadvertently bolster’s Trump’s case that the point of the storage situation was to avoid leaks, she can’t help but follow it up with a bunch of ludicrous nonsense. That’s the Fusion GPS way, who are no doubt feeding her these stories just as they did during the Mueller probe. The overarching point here is that Democrats currently have nothing. Even their biggest “bombshell” is easily explained away, not by back-filled claims, but by proven precedent. The system wasn’t set up for this Ukraine call in order to cover it up. It was setup long before to stop an avalanche of leaks. It did its job until the intel community decided to strike again in a different way.
Trump Has the Bad Guys Surrounded in Ukraine
Something can’t be a conspiracy theory if it really happened, right?
Yanukovych, who had been elected on the narrowest margin, immediately felt political pressure from the West. He hired The Podesta Group in 2011 to purchase some influence, but to no avail.
U.S. Senator and 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain flew to Kiev in December 2013 to foment a successful coup d’etat against Yanukovych, in the name of—get this—democracy.
Having ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected pro-Russia president to install a Western puppet, it was not long before Washington moved in to take its cut.
Vice President Joe Biden became liaison to Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), and his son, Hunter, was made a board member of Burisma Holdings, a top Ukrainian energy company.
Hunter had been kicked out of the Navy for cocaine use in 2014. Unlike drug addicts in Ohio, though, he was soon after paid something north of $3 million for his Ukraine work. Not as much as China was paying the Bidens for influence peddling, but still not bad.
The gravy train was rolling along until someone came on the scene and threatened to derail it. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump began to question NATO’s continued relevance and to criticize America’s foreign policy in Ukraine.
That’s when the puppet government in Ukraine fought back on behalf of its deep state overlords.
In a piece headlined “Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire,” Politico reported on January 11, 2017 that Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American operative, began doing opposition research for the Democratic National Committee about Trump and Russia in late 2015.
The Ukrainian embassy worked closely with Chalupa. As Politico reported, “The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”
Chalupa was so successful in fanning the Russian nonsense that on October 24, 2016, reporter Michael Isikoff portrayed her work as pivotal in a premature victory lap for the Clinton campaign at Yahoo News.
Then Trump won. The deep state was left to hand-off the Russia hoax to a special counsel and hope for impeachment.
The special counsel, though, determined that Trump and Russia did not collude. By then, the citizens of Ukraine were so fed up that they elected a comedian to the presidency.
Ukraine began pounding on the doors of U.S. prosecutors trying to provide evidence that showed a conspiracy to undermine American democracy. Then President Trump called the new Ukrainian president.
In the conversation, Trump addressed Ukraine’s role in trying to steal the 2016 election from him, specifically mentioning CrowdStrike and Joe Biden’s role in the mess.
I have explained CrowdStrike’s connection previously:
Incredibly, the DNC did not provide its allegedly hacked servers to the FBI for inspection. That task was left to CrowdStrike, a private contractor paid by the DNC.CrowdStrike’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a Russian expat and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank with an anti-Putin agenda.The Atlantic Council is funded by Ukrainian Billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a $10 million donor to the Clinton Foundation, with additional millions promised.On December 22, 2016, CrowdStrike caused an international stir when it claimed to have uncovered evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery computer app to help pro-Russian separatists.The Voice of America later determined the claim was false, and CrowdStrike retracted its finding. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense was forced to eat crow and admit that the hacking never happened.In other words, at the same time this “highly respected private company” was blaming the Russians for hacking the DNC computers, it was raising a false Russian flag on behalf of the government of Ukraine in its war with separatists.A reputable group of former intelligence officials, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), has been critical of CrowdStrike’s work, based on its own forensic analysis.
It was obvious Trump was getting close when Washington moved aggressively to protect itself. There was a leak disguised as a whistleblower complaint, followed by breathless coverage in the New York Times, that would portray the president’s attempt to investigate as an impeachable offense.
Masters of projection, the deep-state conspirators and their friends in the media have accused Trump of trying to collude with a foreign power to influence the 2020 election. Which is a way to deflect attention because the transcript shows the president trying to get to the bottom of Ukraine’s admitted interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Ukraine is the key to the Russia hoax, and it is willing to talk. The Trump Administration would be derelict not to encourage cooperation in the investigation. When the lid finally is blown off this scam, we will find that there was never any Russian interference at all.
The whole thing was always just a deep state plot run through the puppet government in Ukraine to get Trump. That’s not just a conspiracy theory. It is an actual crime.
Trey Gowdy and Mark Meadows Discuss Adam Schiff’s Scripted Pantomime
During today’s HPSCI hearing, Chairman Adam Schiff read from a manufactured script of the call between President Trump and President Zelensky. Apparently when scheduling the hearing, Chairman Schiff did not anticipate the actual transcript being released.
Former representative Trey Gowdy coordinates matching hairstyles with with Martha MacCallum, and discusses the manipulative display of Schiff:
While Gowdy was discussing with MacCallum, Representative Mark Meadows appeared on Fox Business with Lou Dobbs:
Complaint From So-Called ‘Whistleblower’ Is Riddled With Gossip, Blatant Falsehoods
The complaint from an anti-Trump "whistleblower," released Thursday, is a mix of gossip, hearsay, and misstatements of fact contradicted by publicly available evidence.
The formal complaint from an anti-Trump “whistleblower” alleging various crimes by President Donald Trump is riddled with third-hand gossip and outright falsehoods. The document was declassified by Trump Wednesday evening and released to the public Thursday morning. The complaint, which was delivered to the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees, follows the same template used in the infamous and debunked Clinton campaign-funded Steele dossier.
Rather than provide direct evidence that was witnessed or obtained firsthand by the complainant, the document instead combines gossip from various anonymous individuals, public media reports, and blatant misstatements of fact and law in service of a narrative that is directly contradicted by underlying facts. A footnote in the document even boasts about its use of “ample open-source information.”
Contrary to news reports asserting that the complaint included volumes of information incriminating Trump, it is instead based entirely on the president’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and various public media reports.
“I was not a direct witness to most of the events” characterized in the document, the complainant confesses on the first page. Instead, the complainant notes, the document is based on conversations with “more than half a dozen U.S. officials.” Those officials are not named, and their positions are not identified anywhere in the letter.
The complainant begins by falsely characterizing a July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, the transcript of which was released by the White House on Wednesday.
Trump made a “specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the U.S. cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike,” the complainant alleges. A review of the transcript of the call shows that while Trump mentioned Crowdstrike once during the call, he never made such a request about locating and turning over multiple servers to the U.S.
The complainant also falsely alleges that Trump told Zelensky that he should keep the current prosecutor general at the time, Yuriy Lutsenko, in his current position in the country.
“The President also praised Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Mr. Yuriy Lutsenko, and suggested that Mr. Zelensky might want to keep him in his position,” the complainant alleges, based on gossip he says he heard from unnamed White House officials.
Trump made no such suggestion to Zelensky, according to the transcript of the phone call.
While Trump did say that it was “unfair” that a prosecutor who was “very good” was “shut down,” it’s not clear that Trump was even referring to Lutsenko, as a previous prosecutor named Viktor Shokin was fired after he opened investigations into a Ukrainian energy company that placed Hunter Biden, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, on its board.
While Trump did say that it was “unfair” that a prosecutor who was “very good” was “shut down,” it’s not clear that Trump was even referring to Lutsenko, as a previous prosecutor named Viktor Shokin was fired after he opened investigations into a Ukrainian energy company that placed Hunter Biden, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, on its board.
Trump directly references Shokin later in the conversation.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that,” Trump said.
In 2018, Joe Biden bragged on camera that his threats to withhold a billion dollars in loan guarantees from Ukraine directly led to Shokin’s firing.
The complainant then alleges, without evidence, that efforts to secure the records of the call to prevent unauthorized access to classified information are themselves proof of corruption.
The transcript was “loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature,” the complainant claims. “One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.”
The complainant provides zero evidence beyond the opinion of an anonymous official that phone conversations between world leaders do not contain “anything remotely sensitive.” Trump formally declassified the transcript of the phone call, which had previously been classified as “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning the information could not be shared with uncleared U.S. individuals or any foreign nationals, earlier this week.
In a footnote, the complainant even alleges that the mere classification of phone calls between world leaders was itself a corrupt act.
Following the section on Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, the complainant then devotes several pages to summaries of various news articles as proof of the underlying allegations in the complaint. The complainant quotes George Stephanopoulos (an ABC News employee who previously served in President Bill Clinton’s White House), The Hill, Bloomberg News, Politico, Fox News, the New York Times, and even Twitter.
The document itself is riddled not with evidence directly viewed by the complainant, but repeated references to what anonymous officials allegedly told the complainant: “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials,” “officials have informed me,” “officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me,” “the White House officials who told me this information,” “I was told by White House officials,” “the officials I spoke with,” “I was told that a State Department official,” “I learned from multiple U.S. officials,” “One White House official described this act,” “Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me,” “I also learned from multiple U.S. officials,” “The U.S. officials characterized this meeting,” “multiple U.S. officials told me,” “I learned from U.S. officials,” “I also learned from a U.S. official,” “several U.S. officials told me,” “I heard from multiple U.S. officials,” and “multiple U.S. officials told me.”
A review of the entire complaint shows it is not so much an example of whistle-blowing, an act that can only be done by the individual holding the whistle, but an elaborate gossipy game of telephone between unnamed individuals whose motives and credibility are impossible to ascertain.
In fact, the Department of Justice (DOJ) found in its review of the complaint from the anonymous official that the intelligence community inspector general found “indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate.”
“The complaint does not arise in connection with the operation of any U.S. government intelligence activity, and the alleged misconduct does not involve any member of the intelligence community,” the DOJ legal opinion noted. “Rather, the complaint arises out of a confidential diplomatic communication between the President and a foreign leader that the intelligence-community complainant received secondhand.”
DOJ officials determined that the complaint was statutorily deficient since the president is an independent constitutional officer who is not subordinate to unelected intelligence agency bureaucrats. The DOJ opinion also determined that the complaint, which was based almost entirely on hearsay, was not “urgent” as required by statute and therefore not required to be submitted to congressional intelligence committees.
“Gossip-blower” is Male CIA Operative Formerly Part of White House NSC
Details are beginning to emerge about the deep state political operative within the intelligence apparatus who wrote a ‘whistleblower’ complaint based on second-hand information he heard on the intelligence grapevine about President Trump.
According to the New York Times the complaint derives from a male who was a former CIA operative on assignment within National Security Council (NSC), who left the White House and returned to the CIA:
(emphasis mine)
WASHINGTON — The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity.The man has since returned to the C.I.A., the people said. Little else is known about him. His complaint made public Thursday suggested he was an analyst by training and made clear he was steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law. (more)
The outlined profile, in combination with the political motive, have led many people to begin searching through: (1) current CIA operatives; (2) who come from the era of Brennan; and (3) were previously assigned to the White House (NSC); and (4) then removed; and (5) then returned to the CIA. That profile has led to suspicions of identity.
A strong possibility for the identity, a person who checks all the boxes of known attributes, follows a trail to Michael Barry:
JULY 2018 – A top intelligence official at the National Security Council (NSC) is reportedly leaving the White House.Michael Barry, senior NSC director for intelligence programs, is leaving the council as part of national security adviser John Bolton’s major staffing overhaul, two government officials told the Daily Beast.One source quoted in the report Tuesday said that Barry is leaving on “very good terms,” but that his departure will be a “tough loss.” Barry is reportedly returning to the CIA, where he served before joining the NSC. (link)
An October 2017 Politico article outlines Barry as he replaced Ezra Cohen Watnick [SEE HERE]. CIA operative Michael Barry was put in place by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster: “Michael Barry, became the National Security Council’s chief intelligence officer in September [2017] and is the primary liaison between the NSC, which coordinates US national security policy, and the CIA.” [LINK] “Michael Barry once worked on a CIA assassination program.”
Michael Barry was later removed by John Bolton [2018] after Bolton became National Security Advisor. [SEE HERE] “Barry’s departure is on “very good terms,” one source said, but it will be a “tough loss for the NSC.” According to the source, Barry is returning to the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served before joining the NSC staff. His detail from CIA to the NSC is coming up, The Daily Beast has learned” [2018 LINK]
Though it is speculation, the known profile fits this specific individual. Given the ‘whistleblower’ hired a well-known partisan political lawyer to represent his current accusations; and given the political nature of his claims with no direct evidence to support them; the motive of the deep state also matches the profile of Michael Barry.
Former Ukranian Prosecutor Viktor Shokin Sworn Affidavit Outlining Joe Biden Shakedown
John Solomon is reporting on a myriad of documents that highlight how Vice-President Joe Biden engaged in a pressure and influence campaign upon the government of Ukraine to financially benefit his son Hunter Biden. [SEE HERE] One of those documents is a sworn affidavit by former Ukrainian Prosecutor Viktor Shokin (pdf here and below):
New York Times, Washington Post Front Pages Deceptively Slice Ukraine Call Transcript To Implicate Trump
The New York Times and the Washington Post selectively cut up the transcript of a July phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the newspapers’ front pages to fit each paper’s misleading headline accusing Trump of requesting a favor that he never asked.
“Trump offered Justice’s aid for a probe of Biden,” reads the Washington Post front page.
“Trump asked for ‘favor in call, memo shows,” blares The New York Times.
Each paper prominently displays selectively edited passages of the transcript between the two leaders below the primary headlines, each omitting key text that shows each statement to be demonstrably false.
Accurate context is seen below in more of the transcript. It undermines the misleading headlines from the two newspapers. The elipses (…) are original to the transcript. This full text was left un-highlighted in the Times and completely off-page in the Post:
I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… the server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you and your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you said yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.
As the transcript shows, the “favor” in question was Trump seeking help with the Department of Justice’s probe into 2016 election meddling by Ukraine. Nowhere in the fully unclassified and unredacted transcript does it show Trump either demanding that Ukraine investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter as a favor or any offer of quid pro quo.
In fact, Trump’s later mention of the prosecutor who was fired seems to also relate to the two president’s larger discussion of rooting out political corruption. Zelensky notes that the previous Ukranian ambassador to the United States under his political opponent was “bad,” and that the previous Ukranian administration did not support U.S. interests. Trump responds:
Good because you had a prosecutor who was very good and was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that.The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it. It sounds horrible to me.
When Zelensky and Trump discuss this specific prosecutor, they make zero mention of any “quid pro quo,” of Trump using U.S. aid or other things Ukraine wants as a bargaining chip. Yet the Washington Post and New York Times selectively cut the transcript to make it appear as if that is the case.
Several other mainstream media organizations made the same stunning omission Wednesday in their reporting of the declassified transcript. CNN, MSNBC, and NPR all glossed over more than 500 words of the transcript and several different topics discussed to connect the word “favor” to Trump’s suggestion for Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens for their dealings with a Ukrainian energy company to weed out corruption in their country.
In 2014, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company. He made $50,000 a month despite no prior experience in the industry, all while his father managed U.S. policy on Ukraine as vice president. Joe Biden later bragged about playing a role in firing the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Hunter’s company with an explicit quid pro quo of $1 billion in withheld U.S. aid if the Ukranian government did not comply.
The focus in the media however, have not centered on the Bidens’ shady dealings with Ukraine but on an anonymous “whistleblower” complaint that was based on hearsay accusing Trump of conspiring with the Ukrainian president to investigate his political opponent. The charges mirror false allegations made three years ago accusing Trump of working with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, which, after three years of wall-to-wall coverage and a costly probe by a special counsel, were shown to be nothing more than a conspiracy theory.
Adam Schiff Did One Of The Most Insane, Disgusting Things Ever Done In A Congressional Hearing
There is no member of Congress more disgusting than Adam Schiff, and there are a lot of disgusting members of Congress.
He spent the last two years claiming to have super-secret proof of Trump colluding with Russia, being given a permeant spot the Sunday shows to constantly lie about what he actually knew. When it all came crashing down, he paid no price at all, still insisting the evidence was “in plain sight.”
Now, he’s found a new hobby horse. Namely, this Trump-Ukraine nonsense and that meant having a hearing today with the Intel Chief about the “whistle-blower” complaint.
How did Schiff open the hearing? By lying his butt off.
Schiff’s entire characterization and quoting of the transcript was patently false. It sought to apply context and motive where there was none. He simply made things up to push his narrative.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, herself no Trump fan, called out this insanity.
I should probably thank him though. Schiff gave the game away before the first whistle. This isn’t about facts, fairness, real investigations, or the rule of law. It’s about distorting an innocuous phone call and trying to manufacture an impeachment out of it. Nothing more. It doesn’t matter that there’s nothing impeachable in the transcript, nor the complaint. Schiff and the Democrats have their minds made up and they’ll say whatever they need to push through. All the while, they do so knowing the media won’t fact-check them or call them out.
Try to imagine what CNN would say if Devin Nunes got up in an official committee hearing and did that crap. Would they chastise him? You can bet your life on it. Instead, the media have basically ignored it, only reporting on Republican reactions (i.e. Republicans pounce) to the bizarre rant.
Schiff’s underhanded tactics likely don’t end with that public spectacle though. It’s looking more and more like he is one of the architects of this entire sideshow.
This is all planned. It’s too well laid out to not be. Schiff was pushing Fusion GPS talking points about Ukraine and Trump weeks before the whistle-blower complaint was even lodged. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a continuation of a long pattern, going back to his Mueller investigation antics.
Schiff is now claiming his fake reading of the trancript was a “parody ” that actually proves how serious this is. Give all of us a break. This guy is a clown and deserves to be treated as such.
As a side note, if you want a good litmus test for which conservatives you should ignore, simply see how they react to Schiff. If any “conservative” loses their mind over Devin Nunes but continues to not criticize Schiff (i.e. David French), that’s not someone to trust.
Whistleblower Story Implodes: Gov’t Official Specifically Calls Part Of Story False, Other Claims Fall Apart
One of the major problems with the whistleblower complaint that some in the mainstream media are glossing over is that the person wasn’t even on the phone call, so how could he/she know what was said?
The answer of course is that the person could not know. The person admitted in the complaint released today that he/she wasn’t on the call so anything could only at best be second hand information or hearsay. In other words rumor and innuendo.
Yet media was elevating that complaint over the representations of the people who actually were on the call and the transcript of what was really said. Adam Schiff even found that transcript so bland and non-impeachable that he had to make up his own version full of lies to deceive people.
Now, a specific fact alleged in the complaint of the ‘whistleblower’ claimed is being called false by a government official, according to a new breaking report.
According to Christina Ruffini, the State Department and Foreign Affairs Reporter for CBS News, a senior government official is saying that one of the people the whistleblower claimed was on the call was not in fact on the call.
Another problem in the story also emerged today, according to Fox.
And according to the whistleblower complaint, by mid-May, U.S. diplomat Kurt Volker sought to “contain the damage” from Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s outreach to Ukraine.But a July 19 text message conversation from Volker to Giuliani, provided to Fox News on Thursday, showed that Volker had in fact encouraged Giuliani to reach out to Ukraine — even sending Giuliani a message reading, “connecting you here with Andrey Yermak, who is very close to President Zelensky.”Additionally, the complaint said Trump “suggested that Mr. Zelensky might want to keep” his current prosecutor general, a claim not supported by the transcript.
There were of course other things wrong with the claim to begin with, such as the claim that there was a quid pro quo offered when there was none, as the transcript shows. Ukraine has also made it clear that they did not in any way feel pressured in the phone call, despite the whistleblower saying differently. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said it was a “normal call” and “no one pushed me.”
But now with these very specific items not holding up, will the mainstream media and Democrats finally admit that this is folly to string impeachment talk based on hearsay and rumor? Pretty hard to be a “whistleblower” about an event you weren’t even a part of. Could it possibly be that the people who were on the call and who actually heard what were said are more accurate than this alleged CIA person who wasn’t?
And there’s a far greater question media is missing here as well.
Why is this person being told about the call to begin with? What right did he/she have to be informed about any of this? How leaked to him and why? This indicates a problem within the intelligence community. And is this part of the IC rift with President Trump?
Is there any wonder that the Trump White House would want to shift information into more secure servers when you have leakers like this out there?
Congressional Republicans needs to start asking those essential questions and get our IC community in order. And Democrats and media need to find reality and stop pushing these kinds of stories based on nothing but what looks like pure political agenda.