- US Marshals Arrest 2 Erdogan Supporters For Turkish Embassy Melee
Sen. John McCain must be pleased. US Marshals have arrested two Turkish men living in the US and charged them in the vicious beating of opponents of the Turkish regime who had been peacefully protesting outside the Turkish embassy in Washington last month.
The attack, which unfolded during a visit by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last month, triggered outrage from the US media and from lawmakers, including McCain, who condemned the attackers, warning that they should “get the hell out” of the US if they didn’t know how to follow its laws.
The Turkish government blamed the US government and the DC police for failing to corral the protesters. Last week, the House passed a bill officially condemning the attack.
The State Department identified the men as Eyup Yildirim and Sinan Narin, two American residents of Turkish descent who gathered to be part of Erdogan’s entourage that day. Yildirim, a 50-year-old construction company owner from New Jersey, faces charges of assault with significant bodily injury and aggravated assault. Narin, from Virginia, faces an aggravated assault charge, according to the Daily Caller.
The State Department is also weighing additional action “as appropriate under relevant laws and regulations.”
Both Yildirim and Narin were part of a group of Erdogan supporters who showed up at the Turkish embassy.
The protesters were members of the Kurdish ethnic group, a minority in Turkey who primarily live in a semi-autonomous region in the country’s southeast. Erdogan has in recent years cracked down on the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers Party, a group that has for years waged an insurgent campaign of violence in Turkey. The PKK is considered a terrorist group by both Turkey and the US.
And some of those attacked were women, including one who was allegedly beaten by the two men.
Here’s the Daily Caller.
Lucy Usoyan, the woman kicked and stomped by Yildirim, Narin and other Erdogan supporters, told TheDC that she went to the hospital where she was diagnosed with head trauma. Narin, who was first identified by The New York Times last month, acknowledged to the newspaper that he kicked Usoyan. But he claimed that he thought that Usoyan was a man. Usoyan, a Kurdish activist, said that she feared for her life during the assault. She also said that her doctor told her she would need six weeks to fully recover from the beating.
Erdogan can be seen watching the confrontation from a black Mercedes SUV. The president, who was in town meeting with US President Donald Trump, had just narrowly won a referendum vote granting him sweeping executive powers. The Daily Caller noted that Erdogan might have ordered the assault, according to audio recordings taken during the confrontation. The State Department has identified two of Erdogan’s bodyguards, who also participated in the assault.
"The Department would like to thank the Department of Justice and the investigative agencies for their diligence,” the State Department said in its statement.
“We are committed to holding those responsible for the violence on May 16 accountable. As we have previously stated, the events surrounding the conduct of Turkish Security personnel during President Erdogan’s visit to the United States is troubling.”
The Metro police department says that additional information about the case will be released on Thursday.
The video shows men in suits, apparently bodyguards and supporters of Erdogan, punching and kicking the protesters as the police tried to intervene. At one point, a man threw a bullhorn, two men could be seen bleeding from the head, and another man was on the ground being violently kicked. Two men were arrested following the brawl, though it’s unclear if it’s the same two men who were charged.
“All of the sudden they just ran towards us,” Yazidi Kurd demonstrator Lucy Usoyan told ABC, adding that she was attacked by a pro-Erdogan supporter quoted by the Associated Press.
“Someone was beating me in the head nonstop, and I thought, ‘Okay, I’m on the ground already, what is the purpose to beat me?’
Hours earlier Trump and Erdogan stood side by side at the White House and promised to strengthen strained ties despite the Turkish leader’s stern warning about Washington’s decision to arm a Kurdish militia.
While the two men arrested live in the US, the US government could try to punish the Turks another way, including through diplomatic channels. At least two lawmakers have called on the U.S. State Department to halt the planned sale of $1.6 million worth of firearms to the Turkish security detail, the Daily Caller reported.
- Is California Replacing Its 'Prison-Industrial Complex' With Something Worse?
Authored by Sarah Cronin via TheAntiMedia.org,
California made headlines last week when Governor Jerry Brown allocated a record $11.4 billion to the state’s corrections department in his May Revision to the budget, translating to $75,560 per individual — the highest per-inmate cost in the nation.
Media outlets ran amok with headlines comparing the costs of imprisonment to tuition at the country’s premier private university.
“That’s enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer,” quipped Don Thompson of the Associated Press.
Yet in consideration of decreasing prison populations and statewide ‘reforms,’ this five-figure sum is more alarming than amusing.
Since 2006, California’s inmate population has gone down by nearly a quarter, due in part to a Supreme Court mandate that found conditions in California’s notoriously overcrowded prisons to be ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ The inmate population further declined after California passed a proposition in 2014 that reduced sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders. Still, the annual corrections budget has continued to increase, with current costs now double what they were in 2005.
But the very same budget report that allocates $11.3 billion to corrections also predicts an additional population decrease of 11,500 inmates over the next four years.
So what gives?
Part of the answer, at least, comes down to prison unions.
“It’s an example of how powerful public-sector unions keep the state from getting spending under control, even when the need for such spending plummets,” wrote Steven Greenhut in an op-ed for the California Policy Center.
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) is one of the most powerful public sector unions in the state. In an article shared on the Prison Activist Resource Center, writer Tim Kowell tracked CCPOA’s massive legacy of influence in a timeline spanning over 50 years.
This includes a $2 million dollar campaign contribution that the CCPOA made to Brown’s gubernatorial bid in 2010, reportedly by funneling the money into independent campaign expenditures. This, CalWatch.org says, made Brown “Prisoner of the Guards Union.”
If the union has Brown in a bind, it could explain why correctional officers in California are the second-highest paid in the nation (the first is New Jersey), earning an average of $70,020/year.
“That’s more than the average salary of an assistant professor with a PhD at the University of California,” Kowell noted.
It’s no wonder, then, that incarceration costs are beginning to resemble the tuition fees of a top-tier university.
Further, as the Associated Press reported, California Correctional Peace Officers Association are currently negotiating the details of a contract that would cost taxpayers more than $1 billion over the next three years.
Nichol Gomez, spokeswoman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association Union, says the extra funds are needed for special programming.
“Vocational, academic, mental health and medical programs are not cheap, but we’re doing our best to provide programs that give people the best chance to succeed once released,” she said in an interview with the Associated Press.
California Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer, who also spoke with the AP, backed Gomez’s claims, attributing the increasing cost to “unique pressures,” such as prison healthcare and remote prisons.
What Palmer and Gomez are describing is consistent with a trend in recent years that has states investing more money in reform and rehabilitation than in prisons themselves. This has lead to the corporate privatization of these social services in what is now being called the “treatment-industrial complex.”
The treatment-industrial complex is similar in theory to the well-known prison-industrial complex. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has explained that “the financial incentive for private prison corporations is to keep people in custody or under some form of supervision for as long as possible at the highest per diem rate possible in order to maximize profits.“
The difference between the two is that instead of privatized carceral facilities, the treatment-industrial complex leads to outsourced social services, including privatized treatment centers and halfway houses.
The main players in the treatment-industrial complex are the very same ones involved in the for-profit prison industry. They are corporations like GEO Group, the second-largest private correctional facilities provider in the U.S. In recent years, they have strategically shifted their focus toward prison alternatives.
As the AFSC reports:
“In 2010, GEO Group acquired BI Incorporated, which makes electronic monitoring products, including GPS ankle bracelet monitors, voice verification technology, and alcohol monitors for individuals on home confinement. The company boasts of its newly reorganized ‘Community Services’ unit, which operates halfway houses, day reporting centers, and juvenile detention facilities. This segment represented 20% of GEO Group’s operations in 2012.”
According to their website, Geo Group owns 101 ‘Residential Reentry” “Day Reporting” facilities nationwide. California alone houses 23 of these sites, the most of any state.
As Politico reported last March, California is one of 25 states that contracts some or all of their correctional health care to private companies.
In last year’s Budget Act, California put aside $25 million for a community-based transitional housing program that “encourages cities and counties to support transitional housing that provides treatment and reentry programming to offenders released from the criminal justice system, and to any other persons who the applicant city or county believes may benefit.”
Notably, Brown’s May revision to the program asserts that “there is no limit on the amount the city or county may provide the facility operator.”
For corporations like Geo Group, this means that ‘rehabilitation’ is turning out to be a lucrative business.
As Michelle Chen of The Nation writes:
“On principle, reducing incarceration is necessary and just. But some activists fear private-sector solutions might pervert prison reform into a neoliberal variation of convict leasing, in which industry and state collude to ‘redeem” society’s undesirables.’”
In terms of the costs to taxpayers, criminal justice analyst Drew Soderborg told the Associated Press that “[r]eal savings won’t come unless the inmate population drops so low that the state can start closing prisons.”
Yet within so many vested interests involved in keeping correctional facilities open, that reality seems far-fetched. Even if prisons were to be shut down, the treatment-industrial complex indicates that the next iteration of for-profit prison institutions is already here, and they are already taking our money.
- Peak Economic Delusion Signals Coming Crisis
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
In my article 'The Trump Collapse Scapegoat Narrative Has Now Been Launched', I discussed the ongoing and highly obvious plan by globalists and international financiers to pull the plug on their fiat support for stock markets and portions of the general economy while blaming the Trump Administration (and the conservative ideal) for the subsequent crash. Numerous economic shocks and negative data which had been simmering for years before the 2016 elections are rising to the surface of the normally oblivious mainstream. This recently culminated in a surprise stock dive that stunned investors; investors that have grown used to the Dow moving perpetually upward, while the economic media immediately began connecting the entire event to Trump and the “Comey memos”, which likely do not exist.
My position according to Trump's behavior and cabinet selection is that he is aware of this agenda and is playing along. That said, there is another important issue to consider – the participation of the ignorant in helping the Ponzi con-game continue.
There is a famous investor's anecdote from Joe Kennedy, the father of John F. Kennedy, about the onset of the Great Depression – he relates that one day, just before the crash of 1929, a shoe shine boy tried to give him stock tips. He realized at that moment that when the shoe shiner is offering market tips the market is too popular for its own good. He cashed out of the market and avoided the crash that many people now wrongly assume was the “cause” of the Great Depression.
I don't know that this story is true, but if it is, it is an interesting example of peak economic delusion. We do not have quite the same investment environment as existed in those days. Today, algorithmic computers dominate the functions of the stock market, chasing headlines and each other, but this does not and will not save the economy from another depression. In fact, all they have done along with substantial aid from central banks is artificially elevate equities while every other fiscal indicator implodes.
But this farce in stocks could not succeed for so many years without help. I would say the real “shoe shine boys” of our era are actually the dullards in the mainstream financial media, stabbing in the dark and desperate to believe that the astonishing “recovery” since 2009 is real.
This attitude is evident in a recent article published by Bloomberg titled 'Prophets Of Doom With Too Much Gloom'. The piece focuses not on alternative analysts like myself which are usually targeted with the mentally lazy “doom and gloom” label by the MSM. Rather, the targets are “big names” in the investment world who now finally agree with what alternative analysts have been saying for some time. Names like Bill Gross and Paul Singer.
Bloomberg laments the sudden tide of negative predictions for their beloved Dow Jones and other exchanges from people who have the ear of the larger mainstream. Instead of considering their warnings and looking at the available evidence, Bloomberg instead decides to craft a conspiracy theory in which bond traders and hedge fund managers like Gross and Singer feel jilted by the unnatural rise in stocks and now scheme to lure investors away from the infinite fountain of wealth. Yes, that's right, Bloomberg accuses Gross and Singer of “stock envy”.
I say, Bloomberg is a modern day shoe shine boy.
Some might argue that Bloomberg is perfectly cognizant of the fact that the economy is in severe decline and that they are helping their central banker buddies keep the public in the dark through misinformation. While this may be true for Bloomberg himself and media elites like him, I think the average analyst at Bloomberg news is just as ignorant of the fiscal situation as most people. I think they are legitimately biased and will conjure whatever story they need to help them and others believe that the system is in ascendance rather than decline.
For those of us who were analysts before the derivatives crash of 2008, this mindset is nothing new. I remember the complete arrogance present in the mainstream just before the implosion; the sneering and attacks that were used in an attempt to silence anyone with the guts to openly suggest the fundamentals and the data did not support the investment exuberance. I remember many people asserting that that the economy's progress was unstoppable, that another crash like 1929 was impossible, that the real estate market was an invincible engine. They were all wrong, yet, they were so confident. Most of these same people still work in the financial press to this day. Imagine that…
I would prefer to point to the hard data on hand than mere mainstream opinion. Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but I've already seen mainstream analysts fail on numerous occasions.
First, consider the fact that the Federal Reserve, the key component along with other central banks around the world in the rise of stock markets, is now cutting off the flow of easy money through continued interest rate hikes. I predicted this move back in 2015 when almost everyone said the Fed would go to negative rates instead. Without no-cost Fed money to feed the machine, stock markets have essentially stalled, and now, there is talk of a “tech dump” on the horizon. With the vast majority of gains in equities the past year attributed to only five major companies, all of them tech oriented, this would be a disaster for stocks.
This is a considerable shift away from the last few years, in which it was expected by many that markets would expand exponentially for the foreseeable future. Now that the Fed's quantitative easing and near-zero interest rates have been removed as fuel, the true economic picture is becoming clear, even to the mainstream.
According to the Atlanta Fed, US GDP in the first quarter of 2017 has declined to 0.7% , going back to lows touched on in 2014 after the Fed reduced QE.
The US has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs since the year 2000, and this trend has accelerated in recent years. Manufacturing in the US only accounts for 8.48% of all jobs according to May statistics.
102 million working age Americans do not currently have a job. This includes the 95 million Americans not counted by the Bureau of Labor because they assume these people have been unemployed so long they “do not want to work”.
Thousands of retail outlet stores, the primary engine of the American economy, are set to close in 2017. Sweeping bankruptcies and downsizing are ravaging the retail sector, and internet retailers are not taking up the slack despite highly publicized growth. In 2016, online retail sales only accounted for 8.1% of all retail sales.
Oil inventories continue to amass as US energy demand declines. Declining energy demand is a sure sign of overall economic decline. OPEC and other entities continue to argue that “too much supply” is the issue; an attempt to distract away from the reality of lower consumption and the falling wealth of consumers.
Corporate earnings expectations continue their dismal path, suggesting that stock markets have been supported by central bank stimulus and blind investor faith in central bank intervention. The stimulus is now being cut off. How long before investor faith is finally lost?
These are only a few of the MANY data points that paint a very ugly picture for the US economy. The rest of the world is just as tenuous if not worse.
This is why when I hear the phrase “doom and gloom” I have to laugh and think of the shoe shine boys. These are people with limited experience in tracking the economy, or very short memories, or both. This is also the product of a vast misconception about economic crisis or collapse – the assumption that crisis and collapse are “events”, that they happen suddenly and without warning. If the nation does not look like a television zombie drama tomorrow, there must not be a collapse. In truth, economic collapse NEVER happens without warning, because as I have said ten thousand times and will say ten thousand times more, collapse is a process, not an event. The data points above show an economy that is in severe deterioration, not recovery. Stock markets are next, not that stock markets matter much in the grand scheme of things.
It is unfortunate that so many people only track stocks when accounting for economic health. They have crippled themselves and their own observations, and actually condescend when confronted with counter-observations and data. They help globalists and international financiers by perpetuating false narratives; sometimes knowingly but often unconsciously. And, when the system does destabilize to the point that they actually realize it, they will blame all the wrong culprits for their pain and suffering.
The question is not “when” we will enter collapse; we are already in the midst of an economic collapse. The real question is, when will the uneducated and the biased finally notice? I suspect the only thing that will shock them out of their stupor will be a swift stock market drop, since this is the only factor they seem to pay attention to. This will happen soon enough.
In the meantime, anyone who discusses legitimate data and warns of the dangers to come is a “doom and gloomer”. Mark my words, one day this label will be considered a badge of honor.
- These Are The Most, And Least, Expensive States For Car Drivers
The most expensive state for drivers isn’t what you’d expect. While conventional wisdom suggests that it costs more to be a driver in densely populated northeastern states with large, densely populated cities and bad winters, the truth is that states like New York and New Jersey don’t even crack the top five.
It turns out, in the state with the highest spending – rural Wyoming – gas accounts for 70% of drivers’ costs. In North Dakota, the No. 3 most expensive state for drivers, 69% of expenses are due to gas costs.
This color-coded graphic illustrates how much each state spends, while also breaking down the ratio between gas and insurance:
Meanwhile, states that have lower overall costs for drivers tend to have below average insurance and gasoline prices. But there does not appear to be a trend between a state’s overall cost to drivers and the size of the state’s population.
In some instances, the differences in costs between neighboring states make little sense. For example, North Dakota has one of the highest overall cost to drivers at $2,251, while nearby South Dakota is on the lower end of the spectrum at $1,883.
Based on an average of all 50 states, the national average insurance cost is around $887 per year and the national average gasoline spending is around $1,127 per year, for an average total driver spending cost of $2,014.
- We Want A Government So Small That We Can Barely See It
Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,
We need to fundamentally redefine the relationship between government and the people in this country. Today, we have become so accustomed to big government that most of us can’t even imagine another way of doing things. And I am not just talking about the federal government either. Even in a red state like Idaho, the state government has become a sprawling bureaucracy that requires 3.5 billion dollars a year to keep going. And all over the country many local governments are “supersized” as well. But this isn’t the way that our Founding Fathers intended for things to work. They intended to create a society where government is very limited and where liberty and freedom are maximized.
Back in 2015, U.S. Senator Rand Paul made headlines all over the country when he tweeted that he wanted “a government so small I can barely see it!”
In my opinion, we need 99 more senators that see things the exact same way.
The reason why we want the federal government to be so limited is because there is an inverse correlation between the size of government and the level of freedom and liberty that we are able to enjoy. In other words, every time government gets bigger, we lose more freedom and liberty. And when government becomes the center of virtually everything (like in North Korea), the result is nightmarish tyranny.
We have been trained to believe that government should be working to solve all of our problems, but the truth is that much of the time government is the problem.
Those that are constantly advocating big government solutions to everything are actually promoting an anti-liberty agenda. If we can get people to start understanding this, it will result in an enormous political shift in this country.
We need to start having more conversations about the proper role of government in our society. Government does have a role, but that role should be very limited. I really like how Idaho State Representative Karey Hanks made this point just recently…
What is the “proper function” of government? It is debated on TV, social media and election campaigns. Many people don’t care much, as long as they have gas in the car, a paycheck, food to eat and a little spare time. Life is good! How many people actually take the time to vote in any given election?
Laws were established by our Founding Fathers to preserve freedom–not restrict it. They believed laws should be enacted only to protect against physical harm, theft and involuntary bondage. Government should not be a means of compelling citizens to perform acts of charity against their will—“redistribution of wealth” in current terminology.
“Redistribution of wealth” is one of my pet peeves. The federal government should not be taking trillions of dollars away from some Americans and giving that money to other Americans.
But that is precisely what is happening, and if our Founding Fathers could see what is happening today they would be rolling over in their graves.
Of course the centerpiece of the system is the income tax. In 1913, a very basic income tax was introduced and most Americans were taxed at a rate of only one percent. But of course once the progressives get their feet in the door they are never satisfied, and so our tax system has just gotten bigger and more complicated with each passing year.
According to Forbes, Congress has made more than a change a day to the tax code since 2001, and at this point it is nearly four million words long…
How complicated? Since 2001, Congress has made nearly 5,000 changes to the Tax Code. That’s more than a change per day. The Tax Code is now about four million words, nearly as long as seven versions of War and Peace or the novel version of Les Miserables and just under four times the number of words in all of the Harry Potter books put together.
Americans spend approximately six billion hours complying with the tax code every year.
That breaks down to 8,758 lifetimes spent on taxes every 12 months.
How much better would our society be if the American people could spend all of that time on more productive matters?
If I run for Congress, and if I end up winning, one of my long-term goals will be to completely eliminate the income tax. But we will need a lot more liberty-minded people to win seats in Congress in order for that to happen, and so I am encouraging as many as possible to consider running in 2018.
We also need to dramatically reduce the red tape that is absolutely killing entrepreneurs and small businesses all over the nation.
And it isn’t just the federal government that is doing this. Sometimes it is state and local governments that are the worst offenders, and I want to share one example with you from right here in Idaho…
Miranda Hale, Nadia Saakyan and Micalah Howard are three innovative women who launched a mobile makeup-application business that fits today’s busy lifestyles. The trio came up with an original idea: Bring the make-up studio to help brides feel just a little more beautiful on their special day, no matter the location.
Yet, senseless state regulations ruined the trio’s dream. Idaho rules don’t allow the three to apply makeup anywhere outside of a licensed and inspected beauty salon.
This regulation, and hundreds more like it, were not built for the modern economy. Outdated regulations stifle innovation and kill jobs.
This is the sort of thing that I would expect to see in California, but unfortunately it is happening right here in my state.
If we sit back and do nothing, then nothing is going to change. The reason why we have so many rules and regulations is because control freaks tend to be greatly attracted to the world of politics. And once they get into positions of power, they love to lord it over the rest of us and impose as many rules and regulations as they possibly can.
It is time for those of us that believe in constitutional values to rise up and take our country back. It won’t be easy, but if we want this nation to have any sort of a future at all we have no choice but to act.
- Will Fear Of A Terror Lawsuit Stop The Saudis From Listing Aramco In the US?
The signing of a $350 billion arms deal between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the US might not be enough to convince the Saudis to bring the Aramco IPO – expected to be the biggest public offering in markets history – to New York City. While the Saudi royal family, who hosted the president in May during his first-ever official visit to a foreign country, would like to see Aramco – the kingom's state-owned oil company – list on the New York Stock Exchange, the executives who are nominally in charge of the company apparently told the Wall Street Journal that they’d prefer to list on the London Stock Exchange, where there’s less risk of being hit with a shareholder lawsuit.
Here’s WSJ:
Executives at Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as Saudi Aramco, are pushing Saudi Arabia’s king and his son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, on the merits of listing the state-owned oil company on the London Stock Exchange . Executives believe that listing in the U.S. would expose the company to greater legal risks, including from potential class-action shareholder lawsuits, according to these people.
But the Saudi Arabian royal court favors the New York Stock Exchange, according to the people familiar with the matter, in part because of the kingdom’s longstanding political ties to the U.S., and because the U.S. market represents the deepest pool of capital in the world.
A listing in New York, along with one on Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul exchange, has long been the favored listing option for Prince Mohammed, who is driving the IPO as part of a broader push to overhaul and diversify the country’s economy.
For months, the New York and London exchanges, along with other major global exchanges, have been pitching the merits of their trading venues, in some cases touting their existing crop of energy stocks and the breadth of their country’s energy sector to win the listing of what is likely to be the largest IPO in history.
The IPO could value Saudi Aramco as high as $2 trillion. In addition to fees generated, such a listing for an exchange promises to attract international investors looking for a piece of the giant oil producer, and that interest would generate greater trading volumes, the lifeblood of any stock market.
While WSJ neglected to elaborate on the executives’ reasoning – after all, plenty of foreign companies seem to have no issue listing their shares in the US, the world’s most vibrant IPO market – it’s likely that the Kingdom’s longstanding status as a financier of terror is one reason for their hesitation.
A few months back, Politico profiled a New York lawyer named Jim Kreindler who is representing more than 850 clients in a civil suit against the Saudi government seeking compensation for victims of the attacks.
Kreindler, who filed the lawsuit against the Saudis in a Manhattan court back in March, is the son of Lee Kriendler, who won a $3 billion judgment against Libya for the bomb that in 1988 destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
After the Supreme court ruled last year that nearly $2 billion in frozen Iranian assets must be turned over to the families of those killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut and other attacks for which Iran was found liable, it’s not out of question that a similar judgment could be made against Saudi Arabia. Especially since the release of the fabled “28 pages” that had been redacted from the 9/11 Commission’s official report on the Sept. 11 attacks appeared to support Kriendler’s argument that without financial and logistical support from members of the government of Saudi Arabia, the 9/11 attacks would never have taken place.
A decision on the venue is expected next month, WSJ reported, again citing one of its anonymous sources, though the timing could change. The paper’s sources tell it that a decision on the venue had originally been expected before the Islamic month of Ramadan, which started in late May.
Sources close to the royal family reportedly assured WSJ’s reporters that the listing would happen in New York – and it very well may. But what does it say that the people who are accountable for running Aramco view listing in the US as risky? The longstanding commercial ties between the US and Saudi Arabia – not to mention the praise of the Kingdom and its values offered by Trump during his visit – might be enough to satisfy the royals. But as WSJ reports, the planned sale of a 5% stake in Aramco – a stake worth between $1.5 and $2 trillion – could yield at least $75 billion in profits for the kingdom.
With that much at stake, it’s important to be realistic. And the fact remains that there are undeniable links between the Saudi government and the funding of terror.
- Mueller Is Investigating Trump For Possible Obstruction Of Justice: Wapo
If Trump wasn’t under investigation before for colluding with Russian spies to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, it seems that he may be now for claims that he intentionally obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey just over a month ago…at least according to more anonymous sources from the Washington Post which have proven themselves to be slightly less than completely ‘accurate’ several times in the recent past.
According to Wapo, this new revelation marks a “major turning point” in the investigation of the Trump administration and will get underway with interviews of numerous “senior intelligence officials” as early as this week.
The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said.
The move by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate Trump’s own conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said.
Five people briefed on the requests, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said Daniel Coats, the current director of national intelligence, Adm. Mike Rogers, head of the National Security Agency, and Rogers’ recently departed deputy, Richard Ledgett, agreed to be interviewed by Mueller’s investigators as early as this week. The investigation has been cloaked in secrecy and it’s unclear how many others have been questioned by the FBI.
And, like many of these stories from the past 6 months, the breathless headline from Wapo is followed, some 10 paragraphs into the story, with a slightly more realistic ‘hedge’ which suggests that the whole story may just another fishing expedition into prompting yet another infuriated response by Trump, which would assure he digs himself into an even deeper hole. Here is today’s ‘hedge’:
The interviews suggest Mueller sees the attempted obstruction of justice question as more than just a “he said, he said” dispute between the president and the fired FBI director, an official said.
Of course, as we pointed out last week, Senator Jim Risch did a masterful job of dismantled any ‘hopes’ of an obstruction of justice case when he essentially got Comey himself to admit there was no ‘there’ there:
Risch: “Boy you nailed this down on page 5 paragraph 3, you put this in quotes, words matter, you wrote down the words so we could all have the words in front of us now. There are 28 words there that are in quotes and it says, ‘I hope’, this is the President speaking, ‘I hope you can see your way claer to letting this go, to letting Flynn go…I hope you can let this go.'”
“Now those are his exact words, is that correct”
Comey: “Correct.”
Risch: “And you wrote them here and you put them in quotes?”
Comey: “Correct.”
Risch: “Thank you for that. He did not direct you to let it go.”
Comey: “Not in his words, no.”
Risch: “He did not order you to let it go.”
Comey: “Again, those words are not an order.”
Risch: “He said ‘I hope’. Now, like me you probably did 100’s of cases, maybe 1,000s of cases charging people with criminal offenses. And, of course, you have knowlege of the 1,000s of cases out there where people have been charged. Do you know of any case where a person has been charged for obstruction of justice, for that matter of any other criminal offense, where they said or thought they hoped for an outcome?”
Comey: “I don’t know well enough to answer. And the reason I keep saying ‘his words’ is I took it as a direction…”
Risch: “You may have taken it as a direction but that is not what he said. He said, ‘I hope.’ You don’t know of anyone who has ever been charged for hoping something, is that a fair statement?”
Comey: “I don’t as I sit here.”
Comey: “I took it as – this is what he wants me to do” when Trump said he hoped he’d lay off the Flynn, but I didn’t do it pic.twitter.com/Uoz4wf2ORg
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) June 8, 2017
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So, to summarize, for anyone who has managed to ignore all the mass hysteria of the past 6 months, the intelligence community basically forced Trump’s hand by slowly leaking out damaging innuendos and accusations over the past several months, all while refusing to confirm that he, himself, was never actually under investigation. In the end, those damaging leaks, combined with Comey’s refusal to confirm publicly that Trump was not under investigation, resulted in Comey’s sudden dismissal on May 9th. And now, even though he was never a target of any investigation, leaks from the intelligence community have forced a situation where Trump may be under investigation by the intelligence community, a rather confounding, if perhaps well-orchestrated, outcome.
- Ann Coulter Explodes: The Left is 'Trying to Incite Violence Against Trump and His Supporters'
Content originally published at iBankCoin.com
Ann Coulter thundered on the Mark Simone show today, in light of recent events — calling out the left for fomenting violence — all stemming from their refusal to accept the election results on November 8th, 2016.
“Hillary Clinton, the opponent, has announced she’s joining ‘The Resistance’, the resistance Mark Simone — a militaristic term. If Trump has lost the election and later turned around and said that ‘I am joining the resistance’, that would be a dog whistle for the militias, the right wing fascists, and in fact, we have left wing armed, masked, going around in groups, beating up conservatives, police being told to stand down, so that the left can beat up conservatives.”
Coulter then talked about actor Scott Baio, who was attacked last week at his daughter’s school last week for being a Trump supporter as being a minor occurrence in the larger scheme of left wing violence against conservatives, saying “that’s minor compared to the hospitalization, the blood, this is not just a bloodless coup that the left is pulling off through the bureaucracy, the democrats, and mostly through the media…but they are trying to incite violence against both Trump and his supporters.”
Touching on the appointment of Robert Mueller, Ann pointed out that he had hired ‘a bunch of never Trumpers’ , ridiculing Rod Rosenstein and the ‘hundreds of lawyers’ at the DOJ for recusing himself from such a minor case, in terms of scale.
“What there’s some huge conflict with Rod Rosenstein? He can’t oversee that investigation? No, the whole point of this is to put a never Trumper within the executive branch to make sure that Trump is prevented from ever fulfilling the promises that he made that put him in the White House.”
- Scalise Still "Critical", Will Require More Surgeries; Trump Urges "Pray For Steve"
While it appears some have already moved on from this morning's devastating actions in Virginia…
Some are still concerned and so MedStar Washington Hospital Center released a statement on the condition of the Majority Whip (via Rep. Scalise's Twitter account)…
"Congressman Steve Scalise sustained a single rifle shot to the left hip. The bullet travelled across his pelvis, fracturing bones, injuring internal organs, and causing severe bleeding.
He was transported in shock to MedStar Washington Hospital Center, a Level I Trauma Center.
He underwent immediate surgery, and an additional procedure to stop bleeding. He has received multiple units of blood transfusion.
His condition is critical, and he will require additional operations. We will provide periodic updates."
President Trump has just got back from visiting Majority Whip Scalise and tweeted his thoughts…
Just left hospital. Rep. Steve Scalise, one of the truly great people, is in very tough shape – but he is a real fighter. Pray for Steve!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2017
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