- Only A Quarter Of Brits Know Who The Irish PM Is
With the Irish border the main sticking point in Brexit negotiations, Statista’s Niall McCarthy points out that it may come a surprise to hear that only a quarter of British people actually know who the Irish taoiseach or prime minister is.
YouGov tracks awareness levels of various international politicians among the British public (excluding Northern Ireland) and only 26 percent have heard of Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
You will find more infographics at Statista
That’s still a higher share than India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (23 percent) or Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison (15 percent).
- Annihilation Of Christian Life And People: Where Is The Outrage In The West?
Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,
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Islamic extremists have seen that the West has not mobilized to prevent them from repressing Christians, as if unconsciously there were a strange convergence between our silence and the ethnic cleansing project of the Islamic State, aimed at erasing Christians.
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“Religious liberty, the core value of western civilisation, is being destroyed across large parts of the world. Yet the West, myopically denying this religious war, is averting its gaze…” — Melanie Phillips, British journalist, The Times, November 17, 2014.
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The Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, just visited the Muslim survivors of the attack on the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Why does the same compassion not spur the British royal family to stop in Sri Lanka, their former colony, to meet the Christian survivors, before going back to England?
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The appeal of Asia Bibi’s daughters to help her mother met a deaf West. The UK refused to offer asylum to this persecuted Pakistani Christian family.
Sri Lanka after the jihadist massacre of Christians is not just a terrible succession of crying mothers and little coffins. Unfortunately, it also tells us a lot about the discouraging state of the West. Pictured: The funeral of one of the victims of the April 21 Easter Sunday attack in Sri Lanka. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)
“Where is the solidarity for the Sri Lanka’s Christians?” asked the British scholar Rakib Ehsan, a Muslim.
“The differences in tone and nature between the condemnations of the Christchurch and Sri Lanka terrorist attacks are striking. After Christchurch, there was no hesitation about stating the religious backgrounds of the victims and directing emotion and affection towards Muslim communities. Politicians took no issue with categorising the events in Christchurch as terrorism.
“In contrast, the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘Christianity’, along with their associated terms, have so far failed to feature in much of the reaction to the attacks in Sri Lanka.
“What is evident is not only a clear reluctance to specify the religious background of Christians who were killed in Sri Lanka, but also an absence of heartfelt solidarity with Christian communities across the world, which continue to suffer grave forms of persecution on the grounds of their faith.”
Rakib Ehsan asked the right question. But it might be rewritten as: Where is the Western solidarity for the Sri Lanka’s murdered Christians?
This is a drama in three acts. The first act consists of the Christians and other non-Muslim indigenous peoples being violated and murdered. The second act consists of Muslim extremists who create this genocide. And the third act consists of the indifferent West, which looks everywhere else.
The number of murdered victims in the April 21 Easter Sunday jihadist attacks in Sri Lanka is too terrible even to think about: 253 dead. Among the victims, 45 children were murdered. Their small faces and stories have begun to emerge. The Islamic terrorists knew there were many children in the three churches, and they deliberately targeted them with their bombs. Footage shows one of the bombers patting a young child on the head before he enters the St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, where “everyone has lost someone“.
The Fernando family had taken a photograph at the baptism of their third child, Seth. In Negombo they were all buried together. Father, mother and three children aged 6, 4, and 11 months. According to the New York Times:
“Fabiola Fernando, 6, was an elementary school student. In a photo posted to her mother’s Facebook page, she showed off a gold medal, a small smile on her face. Leona Fernando, 4, the middle child in her family, was learning to read and was holding a copy of “Sleeping Beauty” in the picture. Seth Fernando, 11 months, was the newest addition to the Fernando family. He was buried alongside his parents and two sisters.”
The silence of the Western intellectual world and the media is particularly deafening. The new humanitarian conscience seems to see only two groups: those who have the right to the compassion and protection of the international community, and those, such as Christians, unworthy of help or solidarity.
The deliberate murder of an 8-month-old baby, Matthew, in a Sri Lankan church apparently did not upset or chill the West, did not go viral on social media, did not to become a hashtag, did not to push the Europeans to crowd into their public squares, did not press the Islamic world to examine its conscience, did not to induce Western politicians and opinion-makers seriously to reflect on who killed that child, or on those who foment and finance the Islamist anti-Christian hatred.
Sudesh Kolonne was waiting outside St. Sebastian’s Church when he heard the blast. He then ran inside and searched for his wife and daughter. It took him a half hour to find their bodies.
The attacks also killed three children of a Danish billionaire. Another woman losther daughter, son, husband, sister-in-law and two nieces. A British father had to make a choice over which of his two children to save. Another British family was destroyed. To add horror to horror, the pregnant wife of one of the terrorists, when police raided her home, detonated a suicide vest, killing her own children.
The Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, just visited the Muslim survivors of the attack on the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, including children recovering in the hospitals. It was a gesture of humanity and compassion. Why does the same compassion not spur the British royal family to stop in Sri Lanka, their former colony, to meet the Christian survivors, before going back to England? Entire Christian families were decimated in the attack.
Where is the outrage in the West for the annihilation of Christian life and people? It feels as if there is no indignation, only silence, interrupted by bombs and “Allahu Akbar”. The history books of the future will not condone this Western betrayal. If the West had taken seriously the persecutions of Christians, now the bell would not toll for the death of the Christian presence — not only in historic lands of Christianity, but also for the West. Islamic extremists have seen that the West has not mobilized to prevent them from repressing Christians, as if unconsciously there were a strange convergence between our silence and the ethnic cleansing project of the Islamic State, aimed at erasing Christians.
The British author Melanie Phillips has called this persecution of Christians “our guilty secret.”
“Religious liberty, the core value of western civilisation, is being destroyed across large parts of the world. Yet the West, myopically denying this religious war, is averting its gaze from the destruction of its foundational creed in the Middle East and the attempt to eradicate it elsewhere. It is therefore no surprise that, faced with jihadist barbarities abroad and cultural inroads at home, the free world is proving so ineffectual”.
The jihadist attack in Sri Lanka was not only “the deadliest attack on Christians in South Asia in recent memory.” It was also the largest massacre of Christian children. But no newspaper has launched a campaign to raise awareness of European public opinion, no pro-Christian solidarity movement has arisen, no Western leader appears to have visited a church in solidarity, no Western church leaders had the courage to point out the culprits by calling them by name, no Western mayors hung photographs of the 45 children torn to pieces, no public square was filled in thousands saying “Je suis chrétien”.
A few years ago, at the height of the migrant crisis in Europe, a photograph conquered public opinion in the West. It was the famous picture of the three-year-old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who drowned off the coast of Bodrum, Turkey. That little migrant moved the West. His image went viral. The New York Times called it “Aylan Kurdi’s Europe“.
“For historical reasons, Angela Merkel feared images of armed German police confronting civilians on our borders,” wrote Robin Alexander, Die Welt’s leading journalist, in his book, Die Getriebenen (“The Driven Ones”). If photographs of migrant children spurred Europe’s leaders to open their borders, the photographs of murdered Christian children — such as the 45 in Sri Lanka — apparently left them indifferent.
The appeal of Asia Bibi’s daughters to help her mother met a deaf West. The UK refused to offer asylum to this Pakistani Christian family and take persecuted Christians.
“It is with indifference that we witness a catastrophe of civilization with no precedent”, wrote the French scholar historian Jean-François Colosimo, commenting on the destruction of Eastern Christianity. No religion, no community, is today more persecuted than Christians. Why, then, this silence by the West? Have we become so foreign to ourselves, to our roots and to our history, that we can contemplate this outbreak of jihadi violence without blinking an eye? Or are we so short-sighted that we hoped to buy “peace” with the Muslim extremists at the cost of abandoning those Christians? The same jihadi ideology that murdered Christian children in Sri Lanka, targeted European children in Nice, Manchester and Barcelona.
Sri Lanka after the massacre is not just a terrible succession of crying mothers and little coffins. Unfortunately, it also tells us a lot about the discouraging state of the West.
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- Mike Adams: Every Liberal City In America Is Headed Toward Venezuela
Authored by Mike Adams via NatrualNews.com,
Liberal cities across America are collapsing into Third World status. It’s not just the fact that San Francisco’s streets are now littered with drug needles and human feces, either. Seattle is also collapsing into rampant homelessness and drug addiction, creating an entire class of impoverished, homeless residents who are breeding grounds for HIV and other infectious diseases.
Yet Seattle’s liberal city leaders — like all “progressives” — are unwilling to take any action to resolve the problems in the first place. Instead, they enact new policies that make the problems worse while calling it “progress.”
Local reporter Eric Johnson recently released a documentary called Seattle is Dying which dared to document the city’s collapse into Third World status. (See video below.) But instead of working to resolve the root of the problem (i.e. brain dead liberal economic policies that always lead to destitution and collapse), the city’s elite have launched a P.R. campaign to brainwash local citizens with engineered happy messages that are dutifully broadcast by local news networks.
As Seattle’s City Journal reports:
Earlier this month, leaked documents revealed that a group of prominent nonprofits—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Campion Advocacy Fund, the Raikes Foundation, and the Ballmer Group—hired a PR firm, Pyramid Communications, to conduct polling, create messaging, and disseminate the resulting content through a network of silent partners in academia, the press, government, and the nonprofit sector. The campaign, #SeattleForAll, is a case study in what writer James Lindsay calls “idea laundering”—creating misinformation and legitimizing it as objective truth through repetition in sympathetic media.
This propaganda campaign, of course, is exactly what the vaccine industry does on a daily basis all across America. Monsanto and the GMO industry has been pursuing the same dishonest tactics for years. First, they fabricate industry lies and pay off doctors and health experts to sign their names to industry-funded junk science. Then they issue propaganda directives to the corporate-run media which dutifully broadcasts all their propaganda. From there, the tech giants shadowban and de-platform anyone who opposes the “official narrative.”
So now, Seattle’s wealthy elite are trying to brainwash the population into rejecting the evidence right in front of their own eyes. Seattle is rapidly turning into a s##thole liberal city, because liberals destroy everything they control.
See the “Seattle is Dying” mini documentary here:
As Charles Hugh Smith writes in his article, “America’s Forced Financial Flight: Fleeing Unaffordable and Dysfunctional Cities“:
Although it’s verboten to mention this in the we’re-so-fabulous local media, many of these high-cost urban regions are hopelessly dysfunctional. Taxpayers have ponied up billions of dollars in new taxes, fees and bond measures, and yet none of the problems that make daily life miserable ever get better.
The forced flight from unaffordable and dysfunctional urban regions is as yet a trickle, but watch what happens when a recession causes widespread layoffs in high-wage sectors and suddenly the hipster bistro that was always jammed is empty, and then shuttered. To replaced the taxes lost to layoffs and closed businesses, the political class will have no choice but to launch a frenzy of higher taxes, fees and surcharges on those left behind.
Every liberal city headed toward a Venezuela-style collapse
This story is about much more than just Seattle. What every American needs to understand is that liberals are right now in the process of economically gutting every major U.S. city that’s under their control.
Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Houston, Miami, Denver, Portland and other liberal cities are all headed toward total economic and humanitarian disaster. Leftist policies always breed homelessness, drug addiction, disease and starvation. In cities like Seattle, the government even pays for needles and drugs to continue supporting the substance abuse habits of local citizens. If liberals regain the White House in the future, they will do the same thing to America that they’re right now doing to Seattle.
Instead of solving problems, liberals would much rather portray those who suffer from the problems as “victims” of oppression. Yet it’s the liberal / Democrat policies that are creating these nightmare conditions to begin with, driving people out of jobs with mandatory minimum wage hikes, for example, that also cause business owners to flee the cities and states run by liberals.
Remember: Left-wing societies are characterized by authoritarian, wealthy elitists who rule over the impoverished masses while destroying the middle class. That’s exactly what’s happening across the West Coast liberal cities today.
Listen to my recent podcast which explains more about where this is all headed:
And get out of the liberal cities while you still can. Sooner or later, they are going to start confiscating pensions and private property to fund their insane spending sprees in a desperate effort to keep buying votes from the very same people they have trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness.
There will come a day when you can no longer sell your home in Chicago, for example, because the government’s confiscatory taxes on all real estate sales will make it nearly pointless to engage in real estate transactions at all.
It’s all going to hit the fan in the coming years, and liberal cities will collapse much like Venezuela. Get out while you can still sell your property for something close to its actual value. Buy a place in the country and practice self-reliance.
- Goldman Sparks Erdogan's Fury, Predicts Lira Will Crash To All Time Low In 12 Months
One month ago, on March 22, when the Turkish lira suddenly cracked, and suffered what was then its biggest one-day drop since last summer’s crisis as public attention turned to the sudden plunge in the nation’s reserves and the bank’s unexpected 150bps equivalent tightening in policy, JPMorgan FX strategists poured gasoline on the fire when – as the lira was sliding – they published a note recommending a 5.90 target on the USDTRY.
As JPM analysts Anezka Christovova and Saad Siddiqui wrote then, recommending a lira short, Turkish authorities would likely “attach less significance to lira stability and reduce FX reserve support” for the currency following March 31 elections, resulting in further lira weakness, adding that the pace at which Turkey’s burning net foreign reserves is “unsustainable” and therefore “FX reserve support will abate post local elections on March 31, which could lead to USDTRY trading substantially higher.”
Predictably, it also prompted Erdogan’s anger, with Turkey’s banking and capital markets regulators opening separate investigations into JPMorgan Chase the bank’s recommendation to short the lira.
Desperate to create a scapegoat for the sudden plunge in the currency, which as it turned out had since last summer been artificially propped up by local banks (while the central bank pretended not to intervene and thus misrepresented the true level of its reserves), Turkey delighted at the opportunity to blame the plunge in the lira, which is only just now restarting, on JPMorgan. As a result, the banking regulator BRSA said the JPMorgan analysts’ note had “misguiding and manipulative” content that resulted in volatility in markets and hurt the reputation of Turkish banks, according to state news agency Anadolu. The Capital Markets Board began its own investigation on similar grounds, according to a statement on its website.
In the month since then, the lira plunge has only accelerated, and whether the result of JPM’s short reco or the fact that the central bank was misrepresenting its reserves by roughly 100%, the lira has since plunged well below JPM’s 5.90 target, hitting 5.95 against the dollar on Friday; and so the fury at JPMorgan was promptly forgotten.
But now, a new bank has decided to take JPMorgan’s spot and provoke Erdogan’s ire, with a fresh lira short recommendation, that sees the Turkish lira crashing to its lowest level on record within 12 months.
In a note published late on Friday by Goldman Sachs, the bank’s FX strategist Zach Pandl has assured himself immediate detention, or worse, should he ever step foot on Turkish soil, by predicting that the Turkish central bank’s move away from boosting confidence in the lira is likely to send the currency sliding to levels last seen during the mid-2018 crisis, and worse.
According to Goldman, the unexpected removal last week by the central bank of its pledge for additional tightening if needed “opened the door” to both interest-rate cuts and further currency depreciation.
“Rates are still not high enough to restore confidence in the lira,” as indicated by continuing “dollarization”, or the increasing share of foreign-exchange deposits in the banking system, Goldman economists Murat Unur and Clemens Grafe wrote in separate note April 25 according to Bloomberg. They also wrote that the central bank will “need to take action to stabilize the lira,” adding that “savers require higher risk premia to be willing to hold a higher share of their deposits in TRY.”
As a result, Goldman projects TRY to fall to 6.25 in three months, 6.5 in six months, and crash to an all time low of 7 within 12 months, marking a 15% slide in coming year. On Sunday night, Lira was trading at 5.9500.
The full Goldman note is below:
TRY: TCMB opens the door to a cut (and more currency depreciation). On Thursday the TCMB kept its policy rate unchanged at 24%, but removed its tightening bias which stated, “if needed, further tightening would be delivered”. By removing this bias, the central bank opened the door to not only a rate cut at its next meeting on June 12 but also further currency depreciation. The sharp hike in policy rates last year was a necessary condition to stabilize the Lira; and while the policy rate is high enough to achieve a balanced current account, a renewed series of cuts will not help with anchoring inflation expectations or stemming the degree of ongoing dollarization in the economy. Our economists have raised their year-end inflation forecasts to +14% yoy by year-end, taking into account the depreciation of the Lira in recent weeks, and we are rolling our forecasts to show even further depreciation (USD/TRY to 6.25, 6.50 and 7.00 in 3, 6 and 12 months).
We expect Turkey will launch a probe into Goldman’s tentacular ways within 24 hours.
- Mexican Or Mexican't? Who Works The Most Hours Every Year?
While most Americans know May 1st as May Day, a holiday that once was celebrated with mayday poles and flowers, most people across the world know the day as Labor Day.
The story of how May 1st became Labor Day actually begins in the U.S. in 1886. As Statista’s Sarah Feldman notes, workers across the U.S. coordinated a multi-day protest starting on May 1st in multiple cities to agitate for an eight-hour workday. On the second day of protests, violence between police and peaceful protestors broke out in Chicago at an event that became known as the Haymarket affair. By 1889, the International Socialist Conference declared May 1st an international holiday for labor now known as International Workers’ Day.
That held true in the U.S. too, until 1958 when President Eisenhower, reacting to the anti-communist tensions of the early Cold War, signed a resolution naming May 1st “Loyalty Day” to avoid association with the universalist, workers first-language that the day was known for. Loyalty Day is not widely celebrated or commemorated in the United States, while Labor Day in the U.S. occurs during the first weekend of September.
Much like attitudes towards labor have changed over time and place, the current culture around working hours change based on where in the world a worker is employed.
You will find more infographics at Statista
According to the OECD in Mexico, the average worker works the most hours a year, putting in over 2,200 hours of labor. South Korea comes in second with slightly over 2,000 hours of work per year. The United States is just 34 hours above the OECD average, while the average German worker enjoys around 1,356 average annual hours of work, 390 hours below the OECD average.
- Spanish Election Ends With Hung Parliament, Forming New Government "Could Prove Challenging"
Spain’s ruling socialist party led by prime minister Pedro Sanchez is set to regain control with his left-leaning allies close to a majority following Sunday’s vote for Spain’s Congress of Deputies, although based on most all of the votes counted, he would need a handful of votes from Catalan separatists, which may prove to be problematic.
According to Goldman Sachs, based on a projections of votes counted by 11:45 pm BST (roughly 99.8% of the sections where votes have been collected for Congress and about 89% for the Senate) point to a hung Parliament, in line with indications from opinion and exit polls. In other words, as expected no party has won enough votes to form a government on its own. The Socialist Party (PSOE) is projected to be the party with the highest share of seats in Parliament. And while Goldman expects that it will take time for a new government to be put in place, a center-left coalition led by PSOE is likely to emerge as a government, potentially with the support of a moderate group of Basque separatists.
As Bloomberg adds, the ruling Socialists are on track to win 123 seats, up from 85 in 2016. Its left-wing ally Podemos platform has another 42 seats while the Basque Nationalists, another group close to Sanchez, has six. That would give Sanchez 171 seats, just shy of the 176 he would need for a majority. The moderate Catalan separatist group Esquerra Republicana has another 15 seats and has signaled its willing to help. This could give the 47-year-old premier a shot at forming Spain’s first stable government in almost four years and enable him to chart a way forward for the country after years of economic crisis and political turmoil.
It will mean a government in Madrid that seeks conciliation rather than confrontation with the separatists controlling Catalonia and will make him the standard bearer for social democracy in Europe
Notably, a second Sanchez government would reverse the trend of a collapse in voter support for Europe’s other center-left parties. He achieved this by boosting the minimum wage and pension payments while remaining committed to spending within the fiscal limits set by the European Union. While Sanchez had already served 10 months as the head of a minority government, he was forced to call a snap election when he failed to pass his budget.
Also of note: a new nationalist party has emerged “to motivate supporters, who have historically been less reliable than voters on the right” according to Bloomberg. Vox is set to win seats in parliament for the first time, but its 24 seats suggest it’s set to fall short of expectations and the huge buzz around their sudden emergence on the political scene. Vox’s parliamentary presence will mean Spain is no longer exempt from the right-wing populism that’s swept across Europe and the U.S. But unlike Italy and some other European nations, Spain remains a particularly enthusiastic member of the European Union. Not even Vox is suggesting pulling out.
The traditional conservative group, the People’s Party, lost about half its seats and will have 67 deputies in the new parliament.
Vote Highlights via Goldman:
On 28 April, all 350 seats in the Spanish Congress of Deputies were up for election, as well as 208 of the 266 seats in the Spanish Senate. According to projections based on votes counted by 11.45 pm BST, the allocation of seats in Congress is as follows:
- Socialist Party (PSOE) – centre-left: 123 seats (28.7% of votes)
- People’s Party (PP) – centre-right: 66 seats (16.7% of votes)
- Ciudadanos party – liberal: 57 seats (15.8% of votes)
- Unidos Podemos – left-leaning: 42 seats (14.3% of votes)
- Vox – right-leaning: 24 seats (10.3% of votes)
- Small regional parties: 38 seats (14.2% of votes).
1. The general election has delivered a hung Congress, with no party winning an absolute majority of seats. About 89% of votes have been counted for the Senate, and projections show that PSOE has a majority of seats (122 seats out of 208). A coalition government is likely to emerge but only after lengthy negotiations among political parties, which will likely start only after the regional and European elections on May 26. Forming a government could prove challenging given how fragmented Congress is.
2. A centre-left coalition of PSOE, Unidos Podemos and regional nationalist parties from the Basque Country, Valencia, the Canary Islands and Catalonia (including the separatist Catalan Republican Left, ERC and Catalan European Democratic Party, PdeCAT), would have the strongest majority in Congress, controlling 199 seats, of which 123 seats would be held by PSOE, 42 by Unidos Podemos and 34 by regional parties (of which 10 are from regional non-separatist parties, and 24 from separatist parties). But, it could prove challenging to form such a government, since regional nationalist parties, which did not vote in favour of the government budget in March causing the government’s collapse, would play a critical role in the coalition.
3. Two other possible coalitions would not have the majority of seats in Congress (176) needed to form a majority government. A centre-left coalition of PSOE and Unidos Podemos would have 165 seats and a centre-right coalition government formed by PP, Ciudadanos and Vox would have 147 seats. Finally, the centre-left coalition of PSOE and Ciudadanos would have an absolute majority of seats in Congress (180 seats), but, so far, Ciudadanos has denied the potential for such a coalition because of differences with PSOE over how to confront the separatist movement in Catalonia.
4. Given the fragmentation in Congress, the possibility of a minority government can not be excluded, or that a government cannot be formed as happened in 2015. Also, it could be possible that any coalition government that may eventually emerge will not remain in power for the entire term and that new elections will be necessary at some point in the future, before the end of the legislature.
5. Political and policy uncertainty will be of little consequence for the 2019 economic outlook, but the type of government that emerges from the general election could matter for Spain’s medium-term outlook.
- Tit For Tat? Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook?
Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,
Why did Robert Mueller end the Russia investigation when he did? He could have let it drag it out for another year or so and severely hurt Trump’s chances for reelection. But he didn’t do that. Why?
Of course, we’re assuming that the investigation was never intended to uncover the truth. If it was, then Mueller would have interviewed Julian Assange, Craig Murray and retired members of the Intelligence Community (Ray McGovern, Bill Binney) who have shown that the Podesta emails were leaked by an insider (on a thumbdrive) not hacked by foreign agents. Mueller would have also seized the servers at DNC headquarters and done the necessary forensic investigation, which he never did. He also would have indicted senior-level agents at the FBI and DOJ who improperly obtained FISA warrants by withholding critical information from the FISA court. He didn’t do that either. Mueller did none of these things which simply proves that his final report was what many people had expected from the very beginning; a purely political document that twists the truth to achieve Mueller’s particular objectives. But to understand what those objectives are, we need to determine what the real goals of the investigation were. So, here they are:
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To help sabotage Trump’s political agenda
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To create a cloud of illegitimacy over Trump’s election
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And to prevent Trump from implementing his plan to normalize relations with Russia.
These were the real objectives of the investigation, to create a forth branch of government (Special Counsel) that had the power to keep Trump permanently on the defensive while the media made him out to be either an unwitting accomplice in Russian espionage or, even worse, a traitor. The aim was to reign him in and keep the pressure on until a case could be made for his impeachment. Mueller played a key role in this travesty. His assignment was undermine Trump’s moral authority by brandishing the cudgel of criminal indictment over his head. This is how a D.O.J. appointee, who had never held public office in his life, became the most powerful man in Washington.
My question is simply this: Why did Mueller give up all that power when he did?
I think I can answer that, but first, we need a little more background. Check out this quote from candidate Trump in 2016:
“We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past…We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments…. Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States]… We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism …In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will.”
Imagine how terrified the foreign policy establishment must have been when they heard Trump utter these words. No more regime change wars? Are you kidding me? That’s what we do: Regime-Change-Is-Us., and now this upstart, New York real estate tycoon is promising to do a complete 180 and move in another direction altogether. No more destabilizing coups, no more bloody military interventions, instead, we’re going to work collaboratively with countries like Russia and China to see if we can settle regional disputes and fight terrorism together? Really?
At the same time Trump was promising this new era of “peace, understanding, and good will,” Hillary Clinton was issuing her war whoop at every opportunity. Here’s candidate Hillary trying to drum up support for taking on the Russians in Syria:
“The situation in Syria is catastrophic. And every day that goes by, we see the results of the Assad regime in partnership with the Iranians on the ground, and the Russians in the air…When I was Secretary of State, I advocated and I advocate today a no-fly zone and safe zones.”
Interesting, isn’t it? Here’s Hillary, the “liberal” Democrat, pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, stated clearly that “Right now… for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia.” In other words, if Hillary had been elected, she was all ready to flip the switch and start WW3 ASAP. Is it any wonder why the establishment loved her?
“We have to work more closely with our partners and allies on the ground,” boomed Hillary, meaning that she fully supported the continued use of jihadist proxies in the fight against Assad. “I do think the use of special forces, the use of enablers and trainers in Iraq, which has had some positive effects, are very much in our interests, and so I do support what is happening.”
War, war and more war, that’s the Hillary Doctrine in a nutshell.
It was Hillary’s relentless hawkishness that pushed leftists into the Trump camp, not that they ever believed that Trump was anything more than what he appeared to be, an unprincipled narcissist with an insatiable lust for power. But they did hope that his dovish comments would steer the country away from nuclear annihilation. That was the hope at least, but then everything changed. And after it changed, Mueller released his report saying: “Trump is not guilty after all!”
So, what changed?
Trump changed.
Think about it: In mid December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Syria within 30 days. But instead of withdrawal, the US has been sending hundreds of trucks with weapons to the front lines. The US has also increased its troop levels on the ground, the YPG (Kurdish militia, US proxies) are digging in on the Syria-Turkish border, and the US hasn’t lifted a finger to implement its agreements with NATO-ally Turkey under the Manbij Roadmap. The US is not withdrawing from Syria. Washington is beefing up its defenses and settling in for the long-haul. But, why? Why did Trump change his mind and do a complete about-face?
The same thing happened in Korea. For a while it looked like Trump was serious about cutting a deal with Kim Jong un. But then, sometime after the first summit, he began to backpeddle. He never honored any of his commitments under the Panmunjom Declaration and he never reciprocated for Kim’s cessation of all nuclear weapons and ballistic missile testing. Trump has made no effort to “build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula” or to strengthen trust between the two leaders. Then, at the Hanoi Summit, Trump blindsided Kim by making demands that had never even been previously discussed. Kim was told that the North must destroy all of its chemical and biological weapons as well as its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs before the US will take reciprocal steps. In other words, Trump demanded that Kim completely and irreversibly disarm with the feint hope that the US would eventually lift sanctions.
Trump made these outrageous demands knowing that they would never be accepted. Which was the point, because the foreign policy establishment doesn’t want a deal. They want regime change, they’ve made that perfectly clear. But wasn’t Trump supposed to change all that? Wasn’t Trump going to pursue “a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past”?
Yes, that was Trump’s campaign promise. So, what happened?
There are other signs of capitulation too; like providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi’s genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and “stop toppling regimes and overthrowing governments.” …’ At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the warhawks he once criticized.
Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon, he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump “the peacemaker” is no where to be found, while Trump the ‘madman with a knife’ is on the loose.
Is that why Mueller let Trump off the hook? Was there a quid pro quo: “You follow our foreign policy directives and we’ll make Mueller disappear?
It sure looks like it.
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- Kids' Extracurricular Activities Are Burying Parents Under A Mountain Of Debt
The extracurricular activities that used to just be “good old-fashioned fun” are now mandatory pieces to a college resume for kids. And the cost of these activities is pushing parents deep into debt and compromising them financially, according to MarketWatch. 8 in 10 parents in a new survey said that they’re hoping that signing kids up for extracurricular activities could help them bring in extra income someday. 66% of these parents have gone into debt to pay for things like soccer, ballet, dancing, and piano lessons.
CompareCards.com surveyed more than 700 parents with young children who participate in extracurricular activities. The more the parents spent, the more they believed that these activities would literally “pay off” in the long run. 90% of parents who dropped at least $4,000 a year believed their kid would earn money from that activity in the future, compared to 75% of parents who spent less than $1,000 who said the same.
Matt Schulz, chief industry analyst at CompareCards, said:
“And what the survey showed is, it’s not just sports parents who have these big dreams and big hopes for their sons and daughters; it’s music parents, it’s cheerleading parents, it’s debate team parents.”
The most popular activities included sports, reported by 30% of parents, music (16%), dance (15%), gymnastics (12%), cheerleading (9%), martial arts (8%), beauty pageants (3%) and debate teams (3%). 46% of parents said they spent more than $1000 annually and 27% said they’re spending more than $2000 quarterly.
This survey supports a University of Michigan poll that found 55% of parents said that school sponsored sports teams and extracurricular activities helped boost their child’s college application. Three times as many low income parents as high income said that the benefits of these activities are not worth the cost, indicating that the survey was skewed towards affluent parents.
62% of parents revealed they’ve actually gone into debt for their children’s activities and 33% of them are still paying off related debt. Almost 1 in 10 parents of those in debt owe more than $5000 and 27% owe more than $3000 in debt.
“They do hope that perhaps those efforts in terms of time and money may be rewarded with maybe a scholarship, or maybe a professional career,” Schulz continued. Families can wind up spending more than $200,000 in total on private school tuition, SAT tutors, living in a certain school district and these extracurricular activities to help groom their kids for getting into a good college.
Athletics alone can sometimes cost $100-$499 a month and sports play a big role because recruited athletes have been shown to receive the largest admissions advantages – as the recent college admission scandal just showed us. Music lessons are expensive at $40-$60 per hour, language lessons cost $30-$45 per hour and art lessons cost $30-$60 per hour.
Vered DeLeeuw says that she and her husband have spent about $20,000 on extracurricular activities for their daughters. They included dance, gymnastics, swimming and Hebrew lessons.
DeLeeuw said: “We live in an extremely competitive world, and it’s also a world where many parents feel that their kids are their most important investment and their proudest achievement. I will do a lot to increase their chances of success. And extracurricular activities are part of that — of enriching them, giving them more tools, helping them develop into the best people they can possibly be. Developing skills and talents outside of school is important. And in the case of the Hebrew School, for example, it’s also a way to preserve tradition, language and cultural identity.”
They recognize that spending over $20,000 was “money that did not end up in our nest egg”, however.
Gone are the days when kids could just sit around, watch a little TV and then go outside to play with their friends. Veronica Hanson enrolled her daughters, ages 5 and 7, into activities when they were just a few months old. Their resume since then has included swimming, music classes, Japanese lessons, Girl Scouts, acting, soccer, rock climbing, art, hiking, yoga, cooking, ballet and gymnastics.
Hanson said: “I have two daughters who are part of our world’s future. My husband and I invest everything we can into making sure our kids are global citizens who can contribute to progress. I think it’s important to let them explore a bunch of different things when they’re young.”
“It is a huge investment,” she continued. She says she spends about $7,000 per summer on activities alone.
Shelly Schneider drops $3,000 a year on her three children for theater group, vocal coaches, Girl Scouts, tee ball, soccer, football, and piano lessons.
She concluded: “Through all of these things, [the kids] are proving themselves and building confidence, building relationships and growing their little brains, and that’s very important. I believe the arts are a very important part of learning and opening up the brain to help you with other subjects. Learning music is proven to help with math and science. And if they learn to love science and math, that can really expand their careers.”
“It’s noble to support your kid in the pursuit of their dreams, but it’s also important for a parent not to do that in a way that can wreck their own dreams of being financially stable and retiring someday,” Schulz concluded.
- Did The Russians Really Interfere In US Elections?
Authored by Boyd Cathey via The Unz Review,
The Mueller Report is now public, and our Mainstream Media have filled the airways with all sorts of commentaries and interpretations. We know that – despite the very best efforts of the dedicated Leftist attorneys on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff – there was absolutely no coordination between members of the Trump campaign, or any of his staffers, with Russians. No additional charges have come as a result, other than accusations made earlier of “process crimes” (e.g. failure to report earnings on tax forms, failure to report lobbying work, or not telling investigators what they demanded to hear—“crimes” that practically every politician in Washington has been guilty of at one time or another and would normally not cause much of a stir). None of these involved Russia.
Of course, that finding has not satisfied many Democrats or the unhinged Leftist crazies in the media, who continue to have visions of “collusion”—a kind of communications Alzheimers that has poisoned our media now for years. Thus, Representative Eric Swalwell (who is one of nearly two dozen Democrats running for president) continues to assert that there was “collusion,” as does the irrepressible (and irresponsible) Adam Schiff: “it’s there in plain sight,” they insist, “if you just look hard enough, and maybe squint just a bit—or maybe have those specialized 3-D Russia glasses!”
Such political leaders—along with those further out in the Leftist loonysphere like Representatives Maxine Waters and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes—continue down their Primrose path of post-Marxist madness.
But beyond the collusion/coordination issue, the past couple of weeks have been filled with a swirling controversy concerning what is called “obstruction of justice.” And once again, the fundamental issues have been incredibly politicized. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had an obligation, if he and his minions discovered “obstruction of justice,” that is, concerted and illegal attempts to obstruct the investigations by the president or his staff, to present charges to the Department of Justice. Yet, all he was able to do was assemble a farrago of “he said/she said” instances, none of which rose to the level of criminal activity. Apparently President Trump told a subaltern “I wish would you fire Mueller,” or he wished in a speech in his joking style that “if the Russians had Hillary’s emails, they would release them,” or he had a private conversation with Vladimir Putin when they met (as all national leaders do!), or his son met with a Russian attorney who supposedly had some “dirt” on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which did not turn out to be the reason for the Trump Tower meeting at all).
None of the ten or eleven cited instances came anywhere close to being actionable or criminal under settled law. In each instance cited, the president’s actions (or desires) fell within his purview and authority under Article II of the Constitution. And regarding Trump’s desire to fire Mueller, he was on solid legal ground; the Supreme Court in its 1997 decision, Edmonds vs. the United States, declared that “inferior” officials, including an independent counsel, could be removed by presidential action as part of his delegated powers. And, in any case, Mueller was not dismissed.
Mueller had an obligation after examining these situations to make a finding; he did not. By so doing, by avoiding decisions and stringing out such instances in an obviously political sense, he abdicated his responsibility and did his best to impugn Donald Trump and his administration…and thus offer grist for continued Democrat attacks on the president…all the way through the 2020 election.
Mueller left it up to the Attorney General William Barr…and Congress…to decide how to proceed. And that is where we are today.
The one issue that both Democrats and most Republicans seem to agree on, the issue which both say is “proven conclusively” by Mueller is that the Russians “attempted to interfere and did interfere” in our 2016 election.
Interesting, is it not, that the Republicans who zealously defend the president and attack the obviously political nature of the Mueller Report would accept, as if on faith and without question, the accusations of Russian interference, also contained in the report?
Turn on Fox and watch, say, Martha MacCallum (e.g., “The Story,” April 24, 2019) declare “we all know now without doubt that the Russians tried to interfere” in our elections, or listen to most any GOP congressman repeat that same narrative with unquestioning certitude.
But that assertion – is it truly backed up factually? Where is the evidence, other than largely questionable information sourced from our largely discredited intelligence agencies which, as we know, had a determined goal of overthrowing the president by any means possible?
Almost three years have passed from the first fake news that appeared in the media on the subject of “Russian collusion,” a concerted effort launched to discredit at first the Donald Trump candidacy and then sabotage his presidency, including his efforts to stabilize Russian-American relations.
As proof of Russian actions, the Mueller Report cites the indictments against twenty-five Russian citizens who were indicted for attempted “interference” (those Russians are, let us add, quite conveniently out of the country and thus not prosecutable). When those indictments were issued, Russia pointed out the flimsy, unsupported and transparently made-up nature of the charges, and demanded that American authorities provide conclusive proof. Such requests were rebuffed.
In order to evaluate the evidence, the Russian government proposed reestablishing the bilateral expert group on information security that the Obama Administration had terminated, which could have served as a platform for conversation on these matters. The American side was also invited to send Justice Department officials to Russia to attend the proposed public questioning of the Russian citizens named by Mueller. Additionally, Russia offered to publicize the exchanges between the two countries following the publication of the accusations of cyberattacks, exchanges which were conducted through existing channels between October 2016 and January 2017.
Our government refused every offer.
A careful analysis, in fact, fails to show any substantial evidence of Russian cyberattacks and attempts to “subvert democracy.” By some estimates, possibly $160,000—a paltry sum—was spent by the Russians during 2016 on social media activities in the United States. Does anyone wish to discover and compare the amount the Chinese Communists or the Saudis would have expended during the same period, for their continued influence and power in Washington and inside-the-Beltway?
It is helpful to examine the charges that have been made, some included in the Mueller Report and accepted blindly by most pundits and politicians, both on the Left and by establishment conservatives.
The Russian government, via their embassy in Washington, has published a 120 page “white paper,” The Russiagate Hysteria: A Case of Severe Russiaphobia, responding to the accusations made against them since 2016. Obviously, the Russian document has a particular viewpoint and very specific goal, but that should not deter us from examining it and evaluating its arguments. (I have written on Russia and its relations with the United States on a number of occasions since 2015 and had pieces published by The Unz Review, Communities Digital News, and elsewhere. On my blog, “MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey,” I have authored a dozen columns addressing this question).
Here following I list twenty-one claims made regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election and in American domestic affairs. I follow each claim with the Russian response and how others, as noted, have also responded. In most cases I retain the original text, at times with my editing, but, in every case, with all the referenced sources.
These twenty-one claims should be examined more closely and more calmly, and the “Russophobic” hysteria we have experienced during the past several years needs to be put aside for the sake of rational investigative inquiry—and discovering how the Managerial State and global elites have attempted a “silent coup” against what’s left of our republic.
These claims and the responses deserve respectful consideration and detailed responses:
- CLAIM: Russia “meddled” in the U.S. elections by conducting influence operations, including through social media.
FACT
All of the claims of Russian trolls that surfaced over the last few years (such as Russians using the Pokémon Go mobile game and sex toy ads to meddle in the elections – ) are so preposterous and contradictory that they virtually disprove themselves.
Not to mention the absurdity of the whole notion of 13 persons and 3 organizations (whichever country they might represent) charged on February 16, 2018, by Robert Mueller with criminally interfering with the elections, affecting in any way electoral processes in a country of more than 300 million people.
It is telling that when pressed about the scope of the alleged influence campaign, representatives of American social media companies give numbers, that even if they were valid (and there’s no evidence of a connection to the Russian government), are so minuscule as to be basically non-existent. For example, Facebook has identified 3,000 Russia-linked ads costing a total of about $100,000. That’s a miniscule number of ads and a fraction of Facebook’s revenues, which totaled $28 billion. Facebook estimates that 126 million people might – the emphasis is on the word “might” – have seen this content. But this number represents just 0.004% of the content those people saw on the Facebook platform.
Significantly, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on December 11th, 2018 that “ad accounts linked to Russia” spent about $4,700 in advertising” to politically influence Americans during the 2016 presidential election season.
To further cast doubt on the allegations, an American watchdog group “Campaign for Accountability” (“CFA”) admitted on September 4th, 2018, that it deliberately posted propaganda materials on Google disguised as “Russian hackers from the Internet Research Agency” to check how they would be filtered for “foreign interference”. Google officials then accused the CFA as having ties to a rival tech company “Oracle”. In other words, corporate intrigues disguised as “Russian interference“.
As American media has admitted, out of several dozen pre-election rallies supposedly organized by Russians, Special Counsel Mueller mentions in his indictment that only a couple actually appear to have successfully attracted anyone, and those that did were sparsely attended and, almost without exception, in deep-red enclaves that would have voted for Trump anyway.
Amidst all the hysteria about the alleged Russian meddling it is worth reading various research studies which show, quoting “The Washington Post”, that it is Americans, in particular our intelligence service, that peddle disinformation and hate speech.
According to Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, the scale and scope of domestic disinformation is much larger than any foreign influence operation. And academics from the Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy document in their study that there had been major spikes in outright fabrication and misleading information proliferating online before the 2018 U.S. election. A “significant portion” of the disinformation appeared to come from Americans, not foreigners, the Harvard researchers said.
- CLAIM: Russian hackers accessed computer servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and leaked materials through Wikileaks and other intermediaries
FACT
As President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin noted in his interview with NBC on June 5, 2017, when flatly denying any allegations of Russia interfering in internal affairs of the U.S., that today’s technology is such that the final internet address can be masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one will be able to understand the origin of that address. It is possible to set up any entity that may indicate one source when, in fact, the source is completely different.
No evidence has been presented linking Russia to leaked emails. In fact, there are credible studies arguing that DNC servers are much more likely to have been breached by someone with immediate and physical access. In 2017 a group of former officers of the U.S. intelligence community, members of the “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity” (VIPS), met with then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo to present their findings.
Those findings demonstrated using forensic analysis that the DNC data was copied at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack ( , , ), thus suggesting that it was more likely a removable storage device used.
Another counterargument to the “Russian hackers” claim is that the DNC files published by Wikileaks were initially stored under the FAT (File Allocation System) method which is not related to internet transfers and can only be forwarded to an external device such as a thumb drive.
It is also suspicious that the DNC prohibited the FBI from examining the servers. Instead, a third-party tech firm was hired, “Crowd Strike”, which is known for peddling the “Russian interference” claims. And soon enough it, indeed, announced that “Russian malware” has been found, but again no solid evidence was produced.
According to the respected former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, the indictment by the Mueller team on July 13, 2018 of the 12 supposed Russian operatives was a politically motivated fraud. As Ritter explains, Mueller seems to have borrowed his list from an organizational chart of a supposed Russian military intelligence unit, contained in a classified document from the NSA titled “Spear-Phishing Campaign TTPs Used Against U.S. And Foreign Government Political Entities”, which was published by The Intercept online. As stated in that document, this is just a subjective judgement, not a known fact. Ritter concludes, that this is a far cry from the kind of incontrovertible proof that Mueller’s team suggests as existing to support its indictment.
Moreover, it is telling that the indictment was released just before the meeting between President Putin and Trump in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, seemingly as if the aim was to intentionally derail the bilateral summit.
- CLAIM: Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.
FACT
As concluded in the summary of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, the investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia
If the Mueller team, having all the resources of the U.S. government, after 22 months of work, many millions of dollars spent, more than 2800 subpoenas issued, nearly 500 search warrants and 500 witness interviews, didn’t find any evidence of “collusion”, it is simply because there was never any. The whole claim of collusion was launched and peddled by the same group of Democrats, liberal-leaning media and the so-called “Never Trump Republicans”, as it became clear that Donald Trump had real chances of winning the election. And later it morphed into a campaign to derail the newly-elected President agenda, including his efforts to mitigate the damage done to U.S.-Russian relations.
- CLAIM: Hacking of American political institutions was personally ordered by the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
FACT
This claim is based on nothing else but the infamous fraudulent “Steele Dossier”, paid for by political opponents [i.e., the Hilary Clinton campaign] of Donald Trump, and wild conjectures that “nothing in Russia happens without Putin’s approval” .
Needless to say, zero proof is presented. By the same logic, nothing in the U.S. happens without the President’s approval. For example, is he also responsible for Edward Snowden? After all, Mr. Snowden was doing work for the U.S. intelligence services. Or the deaths of all the civilians killed abroad by U.S. drone strikes? Every minute detail approved by the President?
- CLAIM: Russia did not cooperate with the U.S. in tracing the source of the alleged hacking.
FACT
Russia has repeatedly offered to set up a professional and de-politicized dialogue on international information security only to be rebuffed by the U.S. State Department. For instance, following the discussion between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Hamburg on July 7, 2017, Russia forwarded to the U.S. a proposal to reestablish a bilateral working group on cyber threats which would have been a perfect medium to discuss American concerns. Moreover, during his meeting with Donald Trump in Helsinki on July 17, 2018, Vladimir Putin offered to allow U.S. representatives to be present at an interrogation of the Russian citizens who were previously accused by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller of being guilty of electoral interference. Furthermore, in February 2019 the Russian government suggested publishing bilateral correspondence on the subject of unsanctioned access to U.S. electronic networks, which was conducted between Washington and Moscow through the Nuclear Threat Reduction Centers in the period from October 2016 to the end of January 2017.
Needless to say, all Russian offers were rejected. A conclusion is naturally reached that American State Department officials have little interest in hearing anything that contradicts their own narrative or the discredited version of the CIA.
- CLAIM: Russia is interfering in elections all over the world
FACT
No credible evidence has been produced not only of Russia’s supposed meddling in the U.S. political processes, but to support similar allegations made by the U.S. in respect to other countries. For example, former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster insinuated that Russia was interfering in the Mexican presidential elections of 2018. However, Mexican officials, including the president of the Mexican Senate Ernesto Cordero Arroyo, and Ambassador to Russia Norma Pensado during a press conference in Moscow in February, 2018, debunked this baseless claim.
Another example of fake news were reports saying that U.S. was increasingly convinced that Russia hacked French election on May 9, 2017. However, on June 1, 2017, the head of the French government’s cyber security agency said no trace was found of the claimed Russian hacking group behind the attack. On the other hand, the history of U.S. interfering in other countries’ elections is well documented by American sources (see: ).
For example, a Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H. Levin, has scoured the historical record and found 81 examples of U.S. election influence operations from 1946- to 2000. Often cited examples include Chile in 1964, Guyana in 1968, Nicaragua in 1990, Yugoslavia in 2000, Afghanistan in 2009, Ukraine in 2014, not to mention Russia in 1996! And how else could the current situation in Ukraine and Venezuela be described, with U.S. representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker openly pressuring Ukrainian voters to support the incumbent, and Washington possibly plotting a coup in Caracas?
- CLAIM: The lawsuit of the Democratic National Committee against the Russian Federation related to “interference in the election” has a legal standing.
FACT
The DNC filed a civil lawsuit on April 20, 2018 against the Russian Federation and other entities and individuals. Named as defendants in the lawsuit are the Russian Federation; the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU); the GRU operative using the pseudonym “Guccifer 2.0”; Aras Iskenerovich Agalarov; Emin Araz Agalarov; Joseph Mifsud; WikiLeaks; Julian Assange; the Trump campaign (formally “Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.”); Donald Trump, Jr.; Paul Manafort; Roger Stone; Jared Kushner; George Papadopoulos; Richard W. Gates; and unnamed defendants sued as John Does 1–10. The DNC’s complaint accuses the Trump campaign of engaging in a racketeering enterprise in conjunction with Russia and WikiLeaks.
Even irrespective of the fact that there was no “interference” in the first place, the case has no legal standing. Exercise of U.S. jurisdiction over the pending case with respect to the Russian Federation is a violation of the international law, specifically, violation of jurisdictional immunities of the Russian Federation arising from the principle of the sovereign equality of states.
- CLAIM: Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak was a spy.
FACT
In March of 2017 U.S. media began libeling Sergey Kislyak a “top spy and spy-recruiter” This preposterous claim was based on nothing but his contacts with Trump confidant Senator Jeff Sessions – carrying out work any ambassador would do. Per the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, among core diplomatic functions is ascertaining by all lawful means conditions and developments in the receiving state, and that certainly includes openly meeting leaders of Congress on Capitol Hill. Even former CIA Director John McLaughlin noted that Mr. Kislyak is an experienced diplomat, not a spy.
- CLAIM: Russian Embassy retreat in Maryland was an intelligence base
FACT.
Among the unlawful acts that U.S. administrations undertook was the expropriation of a legal Russian property in Maryland, a summer retreat near the Chesapeake Bay under the pretext it was used for intelligence gathering. But where is the supposed-treasure trove of alleged spy equipment that U.S. authorities reportedly found there? Why not show them publicly to back up the claim? After the expropriation and the claims, not a word – silence.
The retreat, “dacha” as Russians would call it, was bought by the former Soviet Union in 1972. Since then, it was used for recreation, including hosting a children’s summer camp and regularly entertaining American visitors. One of the more popular events was the stop-over during the annual Chesapeake Regatta, completed with an expansive tour of the property. Presumably U.S. intelligence services could have used this for years to inspect the property. Why was nothing ever mentioned before the Obama Administration action?
- CLAIM: The meeting in Trump Tower in New York on June 9, 2016 between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was to discuss compromising materials that Russian had on Hillary Clinton.
FACT
According to testimony provided to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Ms. Veselnitskaya focused on explaining the illicit activities of U.S.-British investor Bill Browder, wanted in Russia for crimes, and brought attention to the adverse effects of the so-called “Magnitskiy Act”, adopted by U.S. Congress in 2012 and lobbied for by Browder.
- CLAIM: Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, met with Russians in Prague to “collude”.
FACT
It was reported in American media that the Justice Department special counsel had evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, secretly made a trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign to meet with Russian representatives, a fact also mentioned in the discredited “Steele Dossier”. This was given as further evidence of “collusion”. But Cohen vehemently denied this – under oath. Passport records indicate that he never was in Prague. He was actually on vacation with his son at the supposed time. Given that he publicly turned on his former boss and still denied the fact of ever going to Prague disproves this claim further.
- CLAIM: Former member of the Trump campaign team Carter Page was a Russian intelligence asset.
FACT
According to members of Congress and journalistic investigations, the redacted declassified documents of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, also called the FISA Court) show that the main source used by U.S. counterintelligence to justify spying on Mr. Page was the fraudulent so-called “Steele Dossier”.
Thus, Mr. Page for obvious reasons was not accused by the team of Robert Mueller of being involved in a “Russian conspiracy”.
- CLAIM: On August 22, 2018, The Democratic National Committee filed a claim with the FBI, accusing the “Russian hackers” of infiltrating its electoral database.
FACT
Several days later members of the Democratic Party admitted that it was a “false alarm”, as it was simply a security check-up performed at the initiative of the Democratic Party’s affiliate in Michigan.
- CLAIM: On August 8, 2018 U.S. Senator Bill Nelson accused Russia of breaching the infrastructure of the voter registration systems in several local election offices of Florida.
FACT
Florida’s Department of State spokesperson, Sarah Revell, stated on August 9, 2018, that Florida’s government had not received any evidence from competent authorities that Florida’s voting systems or election records had been compromised. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI also could not confirm in any manner the accusations.
- CLAIM: In September, 2017 the U.S. media, referring to the Department of Homeland Security, accused Russia of “cyberattacks” on electoral infrastructure in 21 states during the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.
FACT
On September 27, 2017, Wisconsin and California authorities stated that their electoral systems were not targeted by cyberattacks. On November 12, 2017, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said in a CBS interview that the “hackers’ activity” had no significant consequences and did not influence the outcome of the elections. And, indeed, the source of those attacks was not clear.
- CLAIM: Russia meddled in the Alabama 2017 Senate elections to help the Republican candidate.
FACT
Despite the initial claims, it turned out that a group of Democratic tech experts decided to imitate so-called “Russian tactics” in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate racе. Even more jarring is the fact that one participant in the “Alabama project”, Jonathon Morgan, is chief executive of “New Knowledge”, a cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released in 2018 by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Once again, we have one of the main private sector players in hyping the Russian threat caught red-handed.
- CLAIM: Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign chairman, was a secret link to Russian intelligence.
FACT
Trump’s former campaign chairman was hit with two indictments from Mueller’s office. However, even as American media notes, both cases have nothing to do with Russia and stemmed from his years as a political consultant for the Ukrainian government and his failure to pay taxes on the millions he earned, his failure to report the foreign bank accounts he used to stash that money, and his failure to report his work to the US government. In his second case in Virginia, he was also chargedwith committing bank fraud to boost his assets when the Ukraine work dried up.
In fact, serious concerns have been raised in the U.S. that it was Ukrainian officials who tried to influence the 2016 elections by leaking compromising materials on Mr. Manafort.
The Ukrainian connection is also prevalent in the case of money transferred to accounts of American politicians. For instance, according to a “New York Times” article, Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk donated over 10 million dollars to the “Clinton Foundation while just 150 thousand dollars to the “Trump Foundation”.
- CLAIM: Russia compromised the Vermont power grid.
FACT
On December 31, 2016, “The Washington Post”, accused “Russian hackers” of compromising the Vermont power grid. The local company, “Burlington Electric”, allegedly traced a malware code in a laptop of one of its employees. It was stated that the same “code” was used to hack the Democratic Party servers in 2016. However, the “Wordfence” cybersecurity firm checked “Burlington Electric” for hacking, and said that the malware code was openly available, for instance, on a web-site of Ukrainian hackers. The attackers were using IP-addresses from across the world. “The Washington Post” later admitted that conclusions on Russia’s involvement were false.
- CLAIM: Russian Alfa Bank was used as a secret communication link with the Trump campaign.
FACT
In October 2016 a new “accusation” appeared, alleging that a message exchange between the Alfa Bank server and Trump organizations indicated a «secret» Trump – Russia communication channel.
However, the FBI concluded the supposed messaging was marketing newsletters and/or spam.
- CLAIM: Russia cracked voter registration systems during the 2016 U.S. elections.
FACT
In July 2016 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security accused Russia of gaining unauthorized access to electronic voter registration systems in Arizona. But on April 8, 2018, “Reuters”, referring to a high-ranking U.S. administration official, wrote there was no proof Russia had anything to do with the mentioned cyberattack.
- CLAIM: Russian Embassy bank transactions were linked to “election interference”.
FACT
American publication “Buzzfeed” repeatedly claimed that U.S. authorities flagged Russian Embassy financial transfers as suspicious, many of them dated around the 2016 election. In reality, the media outlet, by twisting the facts and placing them out of context, made routine banking transactions – salary transfers, payments to contractors – look nefarious. It is not uncommon for embassy personnel to receive larger payouts, transfer or withdraw larger sums of money at the end of their work. Furthermore, leaking of confidential banking information of persons and organizations protected by diplomatic immunity raised concerns about the likely involvement of security services.
The arrest in October 2018 of a U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network official, charged with leaking information both about the Russian Embassy accounts and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, provides further proof to the theory of political skullduggery.
* * *
Most of these responses have not been fully examined or addressed by major media, nor, for that matter, by Fox News, dominated as it is by an almost instinctive Neoconservative Russophobia (the one possible exception being Tucker Carlson).
For the American Left, since the collapse of Communism and the growth of a traditionalist nationalism (under Vladimir Putin), Russia has become a convenient target. When the Soviets were in power prior to 1991, the USSR was seen as a “progressive” presence in the world, even if by the requirements of American politics the Left was forced to make ritualistic condemnations of the more extreme elements of Soviet statecraft. Now that post-Communist Russia bans same sex marriage, glorifies the traditional family, and the conservative Russian Orthodox Church occupies a special position of esteem and prominence, that admiration has turned to fear and loathing. And that Russia and its president have been viewed as favorable to the hated Donald Trump doubly confirms that hostility and targeting.
For the dominant Neoconservatives and many Republicans, contemporary Russia is seen as “anti-democratic,” “reactionary,” and a threat to American world hegemony (and the refusal to bow to that hegemony, whether economically, politically, or culturally). Indeed, as a major intellectual force, Neoconservatism owes much of its origins to Eastern European and Russia Jews, many of whose ancestors were at direct odds with the old pre-1917 Tsarist state. That animus, those nightmares of pogroms and oppression, have never completely subsided. A modern traditionalist, Orthodox Russia is viewed as antithetical to their more liberal, even Leftwing ideas (e.g., increasing “conservative” acceptance of same sex marriage, “moderate” feminism, and a whole panoply of “forward looking” views on civil rights issues—all of which are present on Fox News.)
Memory of “the bad old days” has never disappeared.
None of this history should prevent a close examination of the current accusations against Russia, nor our search for the truth. Much—perhaps the future of Western civilization itself—depends on it.
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