Jan 31

Today’s News 31st January 2018

  • "Oh Yeah, 100 Percent" – Trump Tells Republican He'll Release The Memo

    After what even the mainstream-est of mainstream media admitted under duress was a solid SOTU address…

    Nearly half of those who watched President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday reacted “very” positively to the speech, according to a snap CNN/SSRS poll.

    According to that survey, the results of which were announced on-air on CNN, 48 percent of respondents said they had a “very positive” reaction to the speech — Trump’s first since taking office. Only 22 percent said they had a “somewhat positive” reaction to the speech, while 29 percent reacted negatively.

    Sixty-two percent of respondents said that the policies outlined by the president on Tuesday would move the country in the right direction, according to the CNN/SSRS poll. By comparison, 35 percent said they would move it in the wrong direction.

    Which was followed by the exact opposite from The Democratic Party’s official response…

     

    It appears President Trump has managed to set another narrative as he left the House Chamber.

    As Trump shook hands up the aisle after his SOTU address, Rep. Jeff Duncan called out to Trump, asking him “Let’s release the memo,” referring to the House Intelligence Committee’s FISA memo.

    As the following clip shows, Trump responded instantly: “Oh yeah, don’t worry, 100%.

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    So that seems pretty clear.

    As The Hill notes, Republican members of the committee said on Tuesday that they are working on a transcript of the closed-door vote and will release it when its finished. 

    CBS News reported on Tuesday that representatives from the FBI, DOJ, National Security Agency and Office of the Director of National Intelligence are reviewing it.

    Rep. Trey Gowdy said this week on Fox that the memo is “embarrassing” to Democrats. Gowdy said:

    My Democratic colleagues didn’t want us to find this information. They did everything they could to keep us from finding this information. I think it will be embarrassing to Adam Schiff once people realize the extent to which he went to keep them from learning any of this. That would be the embarrassment…. if it were up to Adam Schiff, you wouldn’t know about Hillary Clinton’s email. You wouldn’t know about the server. You wouldn’t know about the dossier. I do find it ironic that he has his own memo right now because if it were up to him, we wouldn’t know any of it.

    Is it any wonder Nancy Pelosi was making faces…

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  • Economic Collapse: Will Cryptocurrency Save The Financial System?

    Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    In the second article of my three part series, I addressed how we got to the current state of this financial chaos. In this last article, I explain where we are heading and how cryptocurrency could be the last chance to create a sustainable economic system.

    Where to go from here?

    If trust and sustainability were the two conditions that allowed for the transition from physical gold to paper currency, it is from this basis that we must start to analyze where we are going and what effects the next economic crisis could have.

    In 2008, confidence in central banks saved the global economy. But as Mario Draghi said, the bazooka of quantitative easing was fired and a second hit during a crisis would have proved ineffective. The reason is complex and must be clearly explained. Most people are paid in a currency deposited in the bank, because that is where one keeps one’s currency, able to withdraw it at any time. But in the event of an economic crisis, priority is given to the banks, whatever remaining liquidity being for the customers. The reason why there was no bank run in 2008, which would have led to the collapse of the global banking system, lies in the trust that ordinary people continued to place in the financial system, courtesy of what the corporate-controlled media told them.

    The problem concerns the next financial crisis and how the world population will react. The path already seems to be traced, especially in geopolitical terms. Countries like China and Russia have created their own alternative banking and financial system to escape dollar sanctions; but they have also begun to de-dollarize by accumulating gold and using different payment methods to the US currency. In the same way, the desire to escape from a centrally controlled financial system, and the attendant need to remain anonymous, has produced a technological evolution known as cryptocurrency, much as the need to quickly communicate and globally exchange data in real time produced the Internet. Both evolutions find common roots in the American security services. The Internet stems from a DARPA project, and blockchain was outlined in NSA documents back in 1996.

    It is easy to imagine that governments and central banks have been caught flat footed by the birth of the cryptocurrencies, but it would be better not to underestimate nations that have been ruling the world for decades and have their finger on the pulse. Although Washington’s aggressive foreign policy has accelerated de-dollarization, one must consider the reason why cryptocurrencies have not been declared illegal.

    Let us go back for a moment to the devastating effects of the loss of the gold standard. Looking at a chart, it is easy to see how the start of world debt coincided with the end of the dollar being linked to gold. This has led to an increase in inflation, calmed only by false economic data and a powerful financial manipulation by central banks in collusion with each other. Purchasing power has plummeted and the average person has as a result become impoverished.

    When the ordinary person is overwhelmed by debts and sees his purchasing power steadily declining over the years, while continuously being told by the media that the exact opposite is happening, dissatisfaction and frustration increases to a point of passing a tipping point.

    In the US in 2008, the burden of the bailout fell on the shoulders of ordinary citizens. Once bitten, twice shy.

    People are placing less and less trust in the media and the banks.

    From Gold to Money to Crypto.

    In this sense, we can perhaps understand why bitcoin and blockchain technology have been able to prosper in complete freedom. It is conceivable that the project reflects an evolving world in which paper money disappears in favor of the digital one. How this transition could take place, and why some nations devoted to de-dollarization will find themselves in a privileged position compared to economies entirely tied to the dollar is a matter open to debate. The possible economic-shift must be considered real and probable for the sustainability of many nations, accompanied by the inevitable technological change and the need to anchor the global economy back to real values. The natural passage is a return to physical gold or to virtual gold, precisely the block chain and the value we bring with it.

    We should not underestimate the power of central banks and their plans to invent their own cryptocurrency as a mean to perpetuate their Ponzi scheme.

    What will make the main difference in the future is what backs up these virtual currencies.

    For example, Russia and China have accumulated many tons of gold and diversified their assets, dumping USD in exchange for tangible goods. A Crypto-Yuan or Ruble will eventually be valued more than an empty crypto-dollar without any counter-value. In a not to long distant future, Yuan and Ruble will be backed with gold or other financial assets like bitcoin while new virtual currencies will continue to perpetuate their empty value as with fiat currency. No surprise that with the next financial crisis, fiat money will pour into gold and crypto market looking for a safe haven from the devaluing dollar.

    In the next couple of years we can expect central banks such as those of the US, Europe and Japan develop their own crypto-currency and start pushing conversion from fiat money into their crypto, advancing their project of keeping the system centralized. We should not exclude drastic measures, such as banning non-state-actor cryptos, from governments when central banks start realizing having lost their competitive edge on currency manipulation.

    The last straw will be related to US military power trying to enforce the use of USD. In a scenario of steady economic and military decline of power, the US will find itself unable to force certain countries to use their currency, therefore losing its main weapon to create chaos in the world to advance its geopolitical goals. Without the dollar as the main world reserve currency, Washington will be forced to reconcile with the rest of the world, understanding that the unipolar moment is over and the neoliberal hegemonic planes to rule the world are forever gone.

  • The Jeff Bezos Empire In One Giant Chart

    With a fortune largely tied to his 78.9 million shares of Amazon, the net worth of Jeff Bezos continues to be on the rise.

    In November, Bezos became only the 2nd man in history to amass a 12-figure net worth and has surpasses Bill Gates as the world’s richest man…

    Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins previously showed how Bezos built Amazon from scratch, but, after making more headlines today along with Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett, today’s infographic focuses on the extent and reach of Jeff Bezos and his Amazon Empire…

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    ALL STREAMS LEAD TO AMAZON

    Jeff Bezos makes investments and acquisitions through multiple vehicles:

    Amazon makes acquisitions and investments that relate to the company’s core business and future ambitions. This includes acquisitions of Whole Foods ($13.7 billion in 2017), Zappos.com ($1.2 billion in 2009), Twitch.tv ($970 million in 2014), and Kiva Systems ($780 million in 2012). It also includes investments in everything form failed dot-com company Kozmo.com (2000) to Twilio, which successfully IPO’d in 2016.

    Bezos Expeditions manages Jeff Bezos’ venture capital investments. Over the years, this venture arm has put money into Twitter, Domo, Juno Therapeutics, Workday, General Fusion, Rethink Robotics, Business Insider, MakerBot, and Stack Overflow. More recent investments include GRAIL, a startup that recently raised over $900 million to cure cancer before it happens, as well as EverFi, an edtech startup.

    Jeff Bezos also invests money on a personal level. He was an angel investor in Google in 1998, and has also put money in Uber and Airbnb. (Note: these last two companies are listed on the Bezos Expeditions website, but on Crunchbase they are listed as personal investments.)

    Nash Holdings LLC is the private company owned by Bezos that bought The Washington Post for $250 million.

    Bezos Family Foundation is run by Jeff Bezos’ parents, and is funded through Amazon stock. It focuses on early education, and has also made an investment in LightSail Education’s $11 million Series B round.

    It’s also worth noting that Jeff Bezos is the founder of Blue Origin, an aerospace company that is competing with SpaceX in mankind’s final frontier.

    EARLY GROCERY AMBITIONS

    While the Whole Foods acquisition is the latest talking point for Amazon, it is certainly not the company’s first foray into the groceries business.

    Interestingly enough, the company actually invested heavily in HomeGrocer.com in 1999, a company that delivered groceries from large warehouses to homes. Sales peaked at $1.5 million per day, but unfortunately HomeGrocer couldn’t make it through the Dot-com bust.

    This postponed Amazon’s grocery ambitions, but it wouldn’t stop them.

  • The "Dirty Game" To Fuel Ethnic Proxy War Across The Greater Middle East

    Authored by James M. Dorsey via Al–Masdar News,

    Turkish allegations of Saudi, Emirati and Egyptian support for the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) threatens to turn Turkey’s military offensive against Syrian Kurds aligned with the PKK into a regional imbroglio. The threat is magnified by Iranian assertions that low-intensity warfare is heating up in areas of the Islamic republic populated by ethnic minorities, including the Kurds in the northwest and the Baloch on the border with Pakistan.

    Taken together, the two developments raise the specter of a potentially debilitating escalation of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran as well as an aggravation of the eight-month-old Gulf crisis that has pitted Saudi Arabia and its allies against Qatar, the latter which has forged close ties to Turkey.


    Image via al-Masdar News.

    The United Arab Emirates and Egypt rather than Saudi Arabia have taken the lead in criticizing Turkey’s incursion into Syria designed to remove US-backed Kurds from the border region and create a 30-kilometer deep buffer zone. UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash said the incursion by a non-Arab state signaled that Arab states would be marginalized if they failed to develop a national security strategy.

    Notably Egypt, for its part, condemned the incursion as a “fresh violation of Syrian sovereignty” that was intended to “undermine the existing efforts for political solutions and counter-terrorism efforts in Syria.”

    Despite Saudi silence, Yeni Safak, a newspaper closely aligned with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), charged that a $1 billion Saudi contribution to the reconstruction of Raqqa, the now Syrian Kurdish-controlled former capital of the Islamic State, was evidence of the kingdom’s involvement in what it termed a “dirty game.” Analysts suggest that Saudi Arabia may have opted to refrain from comment in the hope that it could exploit the fact that Iran, a main backer of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, has refused to support the incursion.

    Nevertheless, Saudi, UAE and Egyptian support for the Syrian Kurds would jive with suggestions that the Gulf states are looking at ways of undermining regimes in Tehran and Damascus by stirring unrest among their ethnic minorities.

    Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, according to recent reports in state media, said it had recently seized two large caches of weapons and explosives in separate operations in Kurdish areas in the west of the country and a Baloch region on the eastern border with Pakistan. It said the Kurdish cache seized in the town of Marivan included bomb-making material, electronic detonators, and rocket propelled grenades while the one in the east contained two dozen remote-controlled bombs.

    The ministry further accused Saudi Arabia of providing the weapons but offered no evidence to back up its claim. The ministry has blamed the kingdom for a number of weapons seizures in the past year. And Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard  said earlier this month that it had captured explosives and suicide vests in the south-eastern province of Sistan and Baluchistan that had been smuggled in by a jihadist group that operates out of the neighboring Pakistan region of Balochistan. Separately, a Guard commander said that three Guards and three Islamic State militants had been killed in a clash in western Iran.

    Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman vowed last year that the battle between his kingdom and the Islamic republic would be fought “inside Iran, not in Saudi Arabia.” Former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to Britain and the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, told a rally of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), a controversial Iranian opposition group that “I, too, want the fall of the regime.”

    At the same time a Saudi think tank, the Arabian Gulf Center for Iranian Studies (AGCIS), believed to be backed by Prince Mohammed, called in a study published last year for Saudi support for a low-level Baloch insurgency in Iran. In the study, published by the Riyadh-based the Arabian Gulf Centre for Iranian Studies, Mohammed Hassan Husseinbor, a Washington-based Baloch lawyer, researcher and activist, argued that the “Saudis could persuade Pakistan to soften its opposition to any potential Saudi support for the Iranian Baluch… The Arab-Baluch alliance is deeply rooted in the history of the Gulf region and their opposition to Persian domination.”

    Pointing to the vast expanses of Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan Province, Mr. Husseinbor went on to say that “it would be a formidable challenge, if not impossible, for the Iranian government to protect such long distances…in the face of widespread Baluch opposition, particularly if this opposition is supported by Iran’s regional adversaries and world powers.”


    Iran’s minority politics. Source: John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University

    Futhermore, Washington’s conservative Hudson Institute, which prides itself on the Trump administration having adopted many of its policy recommendations, last year organized a seminar which featured speakers that included Baloch, Iranian Arab, Iranian Kurdish and Iranian Azerbaijani nationalists.

    And to top it all off Pakistani militants have claimed that Saudi Arabia had in the last year stepped up funding of militant madrassas or religious seminaries in Balochistan that allegedly serve as havens for anti-Iranian fighters.

    The specter of ethnic proxy wars in Iran, Pakistan, and Syria threatens to further destabilize the greater Middle East and complicate Chinese plans to develop the Pakistani deep-sea port of Gwadar, a crown jewel of China’s Belt and Road initiative.

    Fuelling ethnic tensions further risks Iran responding in kind. Saudi Arabia has long accused Iran of instigating low-level violence and protests in its predominantly Shiite oil-rich Eastern Province as well as in Bahrain.  It also risks aggravating war in Yemen, regionalizing the Turkish-Kurdish confrontation in Syria, and pushing the Middle East ever closer to the brink.

  • One Million People Are Waiting To Trade Crypto With Robinhood

    Robinhood Financial, the”fastest-growing online brokerage in history”, announced last week that it was getting into cryptocurrency trading. And since then, Bloomberg reports, more than one million people have put their names on the company’s waiting list in four days…

    Digital currency trading will mark the first paid product for Robinhood, which became wildly popular among millennials by letting anyone buy and sell small amounts of stock without fees. The company said it’ll only charge for cryptocurrency transactions to recoup the costs associated with trading the assets and won’t take a commission.

    Still, the total transaction costs will be lower compared with Coinbase’s 1.5% to 4% fees in the US. Robinhood is already allowing users track the price, news, and set up alerts on those and 14 other top crypto coins, including Litecoin and Ripple.

     

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    Robinhood Financial LLC said last week it plans to let its users buy and sell digital coins without fees starting in February. It’ll roll out the option gradually, with the intention of having it available to customers in most states by midyear.

     

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    That won’t be easy, as even the biggest exchanges are suffering from slow trading, rising transaction fees and other issues as demand for crypto has skyrocketed. Complaints about Coinbase Inc., one of the largest crypto exchanges instance, have surged recently as transaction times has soared and the company has frequently been forced to cut off trading and withdrawals when cryptocurrency prices are plunging. Stripe Inc., an online credit-card processor, recently said it would stop accepting bitcoin payments because of the rising fees.

    According to Bloomberg, the extremely long waiting list for Robinhood crypto trading proves that consumer interest in the crypto craze isn’t slowing even after Bitcoin tumbled more than 50 percent from its mid-December record as regulators step up scrutiny. Not even one of the biggest thefts in crypto history could spoil the excitement.

    That could bode well for the crypto market, which has suffered from lackluster performance since the start of the year following its best year on record.

  • On Disinformation & The Dossier

    Via EmptyWheel.net,

    Since we’re going to be obsessing about the dossier for the next while again, I want to return to a question I’ve repeatedly raised: the possibility that some or even much of the Christopher Steele dossier could be the product of Russian disinformation.

     

    Certainly, at least by the time Fusion and Steele were pitching the dossier to the press in September 2016, the Russians might have gotten wind of the project and started to feed Steele’s sources disinformation. But there’s at least some reason to believe it could have happened much sooner.

    Former CIA officer Daniel Hoffman argues the near misses are a mark of Russian disinformation

    A number of spooks had advanced this idea in brief comments in the past. Today, former CIA officer Daniel Hoffman makes the arguement at more length at WSJ.

    There is a third possibility, namely that the dossier was part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot targeting both parties and America’s political process. This is what seems most likely to me, having spent much of my 30-year government career, including with the CIA, observing Soviet and then Russian intelligence operations. If there is one thing I have learned, it’s that Vladimir Putin continues in the Soviet tradition of using disinformation and espionage as foreign-policy tools.

    Hoffman points to what I consider the dossier’s abundance of near-misses (such as events involving the correct person in the wrong place or time) on correct information to back his case.

    The pattern of such Russian operations is to sprinkle false information, designed to degrade the enemy’s social and political infrastructure, among true statements that enhance the veracity of the overall report. In 2009 the FSB wanted to soil the reputation of a U.S. diplomat responsible for reporting on human rights. So it fabricated a video, in part using real surveillance footage of the diplomat, that purported to show him with a prostitute in Moscow.

    Similarly, some of the information in the Steele dossier is true. Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, did travel to Moscow in the summer of 2016. But he insists that the secret meetings the dossier alleges never happened. This is exactly what you’d expect if the Kremlin followed its usual playbook: accurate basic facts provided as bait to convince Americans that the fake info is real.

    John Sipher, in our joint interview with Jeremy Scahill admitted such a thing was possible, though that the dossier still tied the hack to “collusion.”

    The Russians are the best in the world at this disinformation and deception. I don’t think, based on what we saw in the June, the first of his reports, that the Russians would have controlled all of those sources and controlled that whole narrative. It just doesn’t seem to make sense to me. And if in fact they did control the information that was given to Mr. Steele at that time, you have to wonder what was the point. If they were trying to send a message that they had compromising information on Mr. Trump, that might be that they wanted Mr. Trump to know what they had so he would act accordingly. In terms of using kompromat you don’t have to go to the person and make the quid pro quo, you just have to let them know that you have the information and they’ll do the right thing. So, I do agree, as time went by, and as she mentioned, for example, that what GPS Fusion information had in the connections they had there’s, it’s certainly possible that the Russians could have come across some of these sources and provided disinformation especially as time went by. I don’t think that that’s out of the realm of possibility.

    Nevertheless Sipher argued in response to Hoffman that the content of the dossier would rule against it being disinformation.

    [Hoffman] did not address the content. If was disinformation, it was designed to hurt Trump.

    The content of the dossier would have led Democrats to be complacent about the hacking

    But I can think of several ways the information in the dossier, if it was disinformation, would help Trump. I have already noted how, if Democrats had used the intelligence provided by Steele in the very earliest reports in the dossier to gauge the risk posed by the hack, they would have been lulled into complacency, because Steele’s first reports clearly said any kompromat the Russians wanted to dump was old intercepts from Hillary’s trips to Russia, and even Steele’s first report after the WikiLeaks dump would not only not confirm Russia was behind the release, but would also contradict a year of public reporting on APT29 to claim that Russia had not had success breaching targets like the State Department and Hillary.

    On June 20, Perkins Coie would have learned from a Steele report that the dirt Russia had on Hillary consisted of “bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct.” It would also have learned that “the dossier however had not yet been made available abroad, including to TRUMP or his campaign team.”

    On July 19, Perkins Coie would have learned from a Steele report that at a meeting with a Kremlin official named Diyevkin which Carter Page insists didn’t take place, Diyevkin “rais[ed] a dossier of ‘kompromat’ the Kremlin possessed on TRUMP’s Democratic presidential rival, Hillary CLINTON, and its possible release to the Republican’s campaign team.” At that point in time, the reference to kompromat would still be to intercepted messages, not email.

    On July 22, Wikileaks released the first trove of DNC emails.

    On July 26 — days after Russian-supplied emails were being released to the press — Perkins Coie would receive a Steele report (based on June reporting) that claimed FSB had the lead on hacking in Russia. And the report would claim — counter to a great deal of publicly known evidence — that “there had been only limited success in penetrating the ‘first tier’ foreign targets.” That is, even after the Russian hacked emails got released to the public, Steele would still be providing information to the Democrats suggesting there was no risk of emails getting released because Russians just weren’t that good at hacking.

    In fact, in his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, in one of the few instances in either congressional appearance where he admitted that Steele was hired at almost precisely the same moment the Democrats were trying to get the FBI to make a public statement attributing the hack to Russia, Glenn Simpson explained that the Democrats did use Steele’s intelligence to “manage” the aftermath of the hack.

    MR. SIMPSON: Well, this was a very unusual situation, because right around the time that the work started, it became public that the FBI suspected the Russians of hacking the DNC. And so there was sort of an extraordinary coincidence. It wasn’t really a coincidence but, you know, our own interest in Russia coincided with a lot of public disclosures that there was something going on with Russia.

    And so what was originally envisioned as an original — as just a sort of a survey, a first cut of what might be — whether there might be something interesting about Donald Trump and Russia quickly became more of an effort to help my client manage a, you know, exceptional situation and understand what the heck was going on.

    I also think it’s creepy that Guccifer 2.0 promised what he called a dossier on Hillary on the same day Steele delivered his first report, June 20, and delivered documents he claimed to be that dossier the next day.

    There are multiple ways the Russians may have learned of the Steele dossier

    Hoffman lays out a number of the reasons I believe Steele’s production process might have been uniquely susceptible to discovery.

    There are three reasons the Kremlin would have detected Mr. Steele’s information gathering and seen an opportunity to intervene. First, Mr. Steele did not travel to Russia to acquire his information and instead relied on intermediaries. That is a weak link, since Russia’s internal police service, the FSB, devotes significant technical and human resources to blanket surveillance of Western private citizens and government officials, with a particular focus on uncovering their Russian contacts.

    Second, Mr. Steele was an especially likely target for such surveillance given that he had retired from MI-6, the British spy agency, after serving in Moscow. Russians are fond of saying that there is no such thing as a “former” intelligence officer. The FSB would have had its eye on him.

    Third, the Kremlin successfully hacked into the Democratic National Committee. Emails there could have tipped it off that the Clinton campaign was collecting information on Mr. Trump’s dealings in Russia.

    I’d flesh out another, one the Republicans have been dancing close to for the last year. Because Fusion GPS did business with both the Democrats and, via Baker Hostetler, anti-Magnitsky lobbyists Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin at the same time, it created a second source via which the Russians might learn that Hillary had a dossier. In addition to Simpson himself,  Fusion researcher Edward Baumgartner also worked with both Baker Hostetler and the Democrats at the same time. Simpson tried to minimize the overlap and the possibility for revealing the dossier, especially in his Senate testimony.

    Q. We had talked about work for multiple clients. What steps were taken, if any, to make sure that the work that Mr. Baumgartner was doing for Prevezon was not shared across to the clients you were working for with regard to the presidential election?

    A. He didn’t deal with them. He didn’t deal with the clients.

    But the publicly released financial data shows a clear overlap in those projects and Baumgartner’s comments to BI show he worked quite closely with Veselnitskaya.

    Baumgartner, a fluent Russian speaker, said he was hired by Fusion to serve as “an interface” with Veselnitskaya, who does not speak much English. They worked “very closely” together in Washington and Moscow, Baumgartner said, reviewing documents and finding witnesses who could bolster Prevezon’s case.

    Simpson attended a dinner in DC on June 10, attended by both Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin, in the aftermath of the Trump Tower meeting at which (per Simpson) “we had drinks before;” Baumgartner’s vague memory suggests he did too. When asked if Baumgartner knew Akhmetshin, which is virtually certain, Simpson said, “I don’t know.” So there were at least opportunities where people working on both campaigns might have disclosed details about the project for the Democrats (though both Simpson and Baumgartner said Baumgartner didn’t know about the Steele part of the project).

    One other detail makes it more likely that Russians succeeded in planting at least some disinformation: both Luke Harding (who worked closely with Steele on his book) and Simpson describe Steele’s sources drying up as the focus on Trump’s ties to Russia grew. Simpson’s statement on this grossly understates (as he often does) how much focus there already publicly was on the Russian hack by the time he hired Steele.

    So, you know, when Chris started asking around in Moscow about this the information was sitting there. It wasn’t a giant secret. People were talking about it freely. It was only, you know, later that it became a subject of great controversy and people clammed up, and at that time the whole issue of the hacking was also, you know, not really focused on Russia. So these things eventually converged into, you know, a major issue, but at the time it wasn’t one.

    So if Steele’s regular sources were drying up, it makes it far more likely any new ones would be easy to compromised.

    Russians seem to have planned to use the dossier to discredit the investigation — just as they are using it

    Finally, I want to turn to another reason why I think parts of this may be disinformation. At least two of the reports — the Alfa Bank report (which was pretty clearly a feedback loop on another dodgy story) and the depiction of what should have been the Internet Research Association but was instead targeted at Webzilla, seem custom made to prepare the kind of lawfare that has discredited the dossier. Indeed, Alfa Bank and Webzilla’s owners both sued, suggesting they feel like they can survive discovery.

    Look, now, at this detail from the letters Chuck Grassley sent out to the DNC, its top officials, and the Hillary campaign, and its top officials, trying to find out how much they knew about and used the dossier. Grassley also asks for any communications to, from, or relating to the following (I’ve rearranged and classified them).

    Fusion and its formal employees: Fusion GPS; Bean LLC; Glenn Simpson; Mary Jacoby; Peter Fritsch; Tom Catan; Jason Felch; Neil King; David Michaels; Taylor Sears; Patrick Corcoran; Laura Sego; Jay Bagwell; Erica Castro; Nellie Ohr;

    Fusion researcher who worked on both the Prevezon and Democratic projects: Edward Baumgartner;

    Anti-Magnitsky lobbyists: Rinat Akhmetshin; Ed Lieberman;

    Christopher Steele’s business and colleagues: Orbis Business Intelligence Limited; Orbis Business International Limited.; Walsingham Training Limited; Walsingham Partners Limited; Christopher Steele; Christopher Burrows; Sir Andrew Wood,

    Hillary-related intelligence and policy types: Cody Shearer; Sidney Blumenthal; Jon Winer; Kathleen Kavalec; Victoria Nuland; Daniel Jones;

    DOJ and FBI: Bruce Ohr; Peter Strzok; Andrew McCabe; James Baker; Sally Yates; Loretta Lynch;

    Grassley, like me, doesn’t believe Brennan was out of the loop either: John Brennan

    Oleg Deripaska and his lawyer: Oleg Deripaska; Paul Hauser;

    It’s the last reference I’m particularly interested in.

    When Simpson talked about how the dossier got leaked to BuzzFeed, he complains that, “I was very upset. I thought it was a very dangerous thing and that someone had violated my confidences, in any event.” The presumed story is that John McCain and his aide David Kramer were briefed by Andrew Wood at an event that Rinat Akhmetshin also attended, later obtained the memo (I’m still not convinced this was the full memo yet), McCain shared it, again, with the FBI, and Kramer leaked it to Buzzfeed.

    But Grassley seems to think Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was in on the loop of this. Deripaska is important to this story not just for because he owns Paul Manafort (he figures heavily in this worthwhile profile of Manafort). But also because he’s got ties, through Rick Davis, to John McCain. This was just rehashed last year by Circa, which has been running interference on this story.

    There is a report that Manafort laid out precisely the strategy focusing on the dossier that is still the main focus of GOP pushback on the charges against Trump and his campaign (and Manafort).

    It was about a week before Trump’s inauguration, and Manafort wanted to brief Trump’s team on alleged inaccuracies in a recently released dossier of memos written by a former British spy for Trump’s opponents that alleged compromising ties among Russia, Trump and Trump’s associates, including Manafort.

    “On the day that the dossier came out in the press, Paul called Reince, as a responsible ally of the president would do, and said this story about me is garbage, and a bunch of the other stuff in there seems implausible,” said a personclose to Manafort.

    [snip]

    According to a GOP operative familiar with Manafort’s conversation with Priebus, Manafort suggested the errors in the dossier discredited it, as well as the FBI investigation, since the bureau had reached a tentative (but later aborted) agreement to pay the former British spy to continue his research and had briefed both Trump and then-President Barack Obama on the dossier.

    Manafort told Priebus that the dossier was tainted by inaccuracies and by the motivations of the people who initiated it, whom he alleged were Democratic activists and donors working in cahoots with Ukrainian government officials, according to the operative.

    If Deripaska learned of the dossier — and obtained a copy from McCain or someone close to him — it would make it very easy to lay out the strategy we’re currently seeing.

    Update: Welp, here’s why Grassley wants to know who among the Democrats spoke with Cody Shearer.

    The FBI inquiry into alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 US presidential election has been given a second memo that independently set out many of the same allegations made in a dossier by Christopher Steele, the British former spy.

    The second memo was written by Cody Shearer, a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s.

    [snip]

    The Shearer memo was provided to the FBI in October 2016.

    It was handed to them by Steele – who had been given it by an American contact – after the FBI requested the former MI6 agent provide any documents or evidence that could be useful in its investigation, according to multiple sources.

    The Guardian was told Steele warned the FBI he could not vouch for the veracity of the Shearer memo, but that he was providing a copy because it corresponded with what he had separately heard from his own independent sources.

    Among other things, both documents allege Donald Trump was compromised during a 2013 trip to Moscow that involved lewd acts in a five-star hotel.

  • Unknown Group Pays $175 Million For 74,000 Acres In Nevada For Mysterious Ethereum Project

    Earlier this month, we reported that a Russian businessman had purchased two vacant power stations in the Perm region with the intention of setting up a large crypto mining operation – the latest sign that miners are moving to fill the void left by China’s crackdown on cryptocurrency miners, who had previously enjoyed heavily subsidized power.

    As for North America, we’ve already noted that miners are clustering in Winnipeg City, Manitoba, the town with the cheapest electricity on the whole continent.

    And now, a mysterious new industrial scale cryptocurrency project is coming to Nevada: As the Nevada Independent reports, a little-known company focused on blockchain technology and bitcoin has purchased a huge chunk of land at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center.

     

    Map

    The park has managed to attract dozens of tech firms, including several notable names. Back in 2014, it made headlines when Tesla selected the park as the site for its Gigafactory. Google and Switch also have campuses there. 

    All told, Blockchains bought 74,000 acres for $175 million – the largest deal since the park was developed in 1998, and more than the Gigafactory and the other corporate campuses.

    A little-known company focused on the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin has purchased a huge chunk of land at a Northern Nevada industrial park.

    Storey County Commissioner and Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center broker Lance Gilman said he closed escrow last week on the sale of 67,125 total acres of land to Blockchains, LLC, a business that studies and develops applications for blockchain distributed ledger technology, the decentralized platform that makes up the backbone of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

    Though Gilman said he was prohibited from discussing terms of the sale, which is expected, he said that total value of the 74,000 acres in land sales closed this month at the park, including the sale to Blockchains, was worth about $175 million.

    “There’s no question — they’re going to have a major footprint in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center,” he said.

    But little information is publicly available about the company or its intentions, though Gilman says they now own more than 104 square miles at the industrial park. The land sale was first reported by Nevada Newsmakers.

    According to the company’s website, which provides only a vague description of what the company does, Blockchains, LLC is a “premier innovator” in the blockchain industry, specializing in “financial services, software development of distributed applications (Dapps) for the Ethereum blockchain.”

     

    Park

    But Lance Gilman, the real-estate agent who sold the plot to Blockchains, said he was unable to provide details about the company’s plans, saying only that he believes they’ll be building a corporate headquarters and a research lab. He said the company said it will release more information soon. 

    But given the association with cutting-edge tech that the park’s developers have nurtured, Gilman said he’s “proud” to have a cutting edge blockchain company in the park.

    Gilman told Nevada NewsMakers “I believe they envision a product that will showcase all of the capabilities of the block chain technology.”

    Gilman said that he and his partner believed it would take generations to sell all of the land in the park. But thanks to interest from a slew of tech companies, they managed to do it in less than 20 years. The park only has 250 acres of land left for sale, according to Nevada Newsmakers.

    While the details are still fuzzy, one could be excused for suspecting that the company intends to build a lavish campus. As Newsmakers reported, the park’s owners believe Blockchains’s plans will “mesh perfectly” with the “Emerald City” concept the developers are planning: That project involves a lake in the middle of a 500-acre town center that would double as a holding reservoir for treated water to be used by the park’s residents.

    * * *

    Blockchains, LLC was registered in Nevada in May 2017 by California attorney Jeffrey Berns, a partner at the law firm of Berns Weiss LLP. According to his LinkedIn, Berns has been the president of “Berns Inc.,” which owns the URL Blockchains.com, and states that the company’s plan is to “stay in a somewhat of a stealth mode until approximately second quarter 2018.”

    In addition to virtual currencies, Berns Weiss LLP focuses on class-action lawsuits against financial services companies, and has won millions of dollars in settlements against the likes of Ticketmaster, Cisco Systems and Home Loan Center.

    Tesla, one of the anchor tenants at the park with its lithium ion battery production “Gigafactory,” owns slightly more than 2,800 acres at the park. Google purchased 1,210 acres at the park last year, and data center giant Switch operates a 2,000 acre campus at the park, which covers over 107,000 acres in rural Storey County.

  • Trump Calls For $1.5 Trillion Infrastructure Plan

    President Donald Trump was widely expected to discuss his long-anticipated infrastructure plan tonight, particularly since the White House leaked an outline for a plan to generate $1 trillion in spending through public-private partnerships. Tonight, Trump unveiled an even more ambitious sum, requesting Congress present an infrastructure bill for $1.5 trillion to rebuild America’s roads, airports and rails.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Lamenting that it can take up to 10 years for a permit to be approved to build a simple road Trump demanded that the infrastructure plan also clear away the red tape surrounding the permitting process.

    As previously discussed, Trump’s framework under discussion for modernizing U.S. roads, bridges, waterways and other public works calls for allocating at least $200 billion in federal funds over 10 years to spur states, localities and the private sector to spend at least $800 billion and as much as $1.6 trillion. Ultimately, however, the government may be on the hook for the full amount, which would have to be funded with incremental debt.

    As Bloomberg notes, White House infrastructure adviser DJ Gribbin has said the administration plans to send detailed principles to Congress a week or two after Trump’s State of the Union speech to begin the legislative process.

    Excerpted from the speech:

    I am asking both parties to come together to give us the safe, fast, reliable, and modern infrastructure our economy needs and our people deserve.

    Tonight, I am calling on the Congress to produce a bill that generates at least $1.5 trillion for the new infrastructure investment we need.

    Every Federal dollar should be leveraged by partnering with State and local governments and, where appropriate, tapping into private sector investment — to permanently fix the infrastructure deficit.

    Any bill must also streamline the permitting and approval process — getting it down to no more than two years, and perhaps even one.

    In response, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nathan Dean says that Trump’s call for $1.5t for the new infrastructure is going to fall flat with Congress, noting that there isn’t enough time for Congress to agree on such a broad package before they turn their attention to the 2018 elections, not to mention coming to a bipartisan agreement over budget concerns.

    As Dean further says, “all of this infrastructure talk in Washington is going to have little impact on total U.S. infrastructure growth in 2018.”

    Meanwhile, Democrats are already questioning the plan and key groups are at loggerheads over the question of funding.

    And so, despite the massive spending commitment, which could mean as much as $1.5 trillion in new debt, there was little reaction in the ten year, which was modestly lower on the news, as it either has had plenty of time to price the news debt in, or simply does not believe that it will happen.

     

  • Watch Live: The Democratic RebuttalFest

    After listening to the President’s address (or not in some cases for those who decided to skip it), members of The Democratic Party decided that one rebuttal was not enough.

    In keeping with the division theme, The Democrats are planning six rebuttals to Trump’s first official State of The Union address.

    The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti provides a helpful guide to all of them… just in case you’re in the mood for more long-winded speeches to explain just what the ‘issues’ really are…

    The Official Response: Right after Trump’s speech concludes, the Democrats will try to convince voters that they are more in touch with issues affecting the “real Americans” who populate “flyover country.” They will do this with a speech from, Sen. Joseph Kennedy III, a third-generation Senator from America’s most notable “royal family,” who will give his rebuttal from a coastal hideaway in Massachusetts.

    The Spanish-Language Response: Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman will give the Democrats’ “Spanish-language” response, despite the fact that she is not yet a member of Congress. Guzman is one of ten Democrats who were swept into the Virginia statehouse in a landmark victory in 2017 — quite the feat — but she isn’t exactly ready to help the Dems connect with average voters. She may be best known for quipping to the Huffington Post that, “We cannot be centrist any more.”

    The Bernie Sanders Response: Not to be outdone by a freshman lawmaker, Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders will deliver his own State of the Union response, but unlike his Democratic colleagues, Sanders will not deliver his remarks from a prepared speech. Rather, he’ll respond on the fly, largely from a set of talking points he’s already released. Expect plenty of conspiracy theories starring the Koch brothers.

    The Socialist Response: Wait! Were you concerned that Bernie Sanders would demand enough free stuff in his rebuttal to Donald Trump? Well, then, you’re in luck, because the Working Families Party, which considers itself an “independent minor party” pushing the larger Democratic Party to the left, will fill in the blanks with their response to Bernie Sanders’ response to Sen. Joe Kennedy’s response to Donald Trump.

    The Maxine Waters Response: In a fair world, Maxine Waters’ State of the Union response would just be “IMPEACHMENT” scribbled on a poster board. But because she’s booked on BET, she’ll give a heartfelt argument for booting the President from office based, largely, on a set of imagined criteria, and what she feels are personal insults.

    No embeddable live feed for Maxine we are afraid to say. Link here to the BET site, she is due to begin tomorrow night at 10pmET.

    The Celebrity Response: This happened on Monday night, so you won’t be able to catch it live, but if, after all of this, you still feel the need to experience yet a stranger version of a State of the Union response, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Moore, and others, including the “artistic directors” of the Women’s March, have put together an excruciatingly long video from their “People’s State of the Union” event, calling for “resistance” and a host of economic policies that will never impact them personally.

    *  *  *
    We suspect by the end of all these, the results will be summed up as follows…

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