If I wasn't painfully aware of how proudly psychotic Trump supporters can be I might even believe this van is a lazy attempt at smearing the right
RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
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storyteller
Superstar
bbc.com
Trump-Putin: US president invites Russia's leader to Washington
4-5 minutes
Image caption The two leaders held a bilateral summit in Finland in July
President Donald Trump has invited his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to visit Washington next year, US National Security Adviser John Bolton says.
It is unclear if Mr Putin has accepted the invitation.
The two leaders have met several times on the sidelines of international meetings but have held only one bilateral summit, in Helsinki in July.
They are expected to meet briefly in Paris next month to mark the centenary of the end of World War One.
Speaking at a news conference in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, Mr Bolton said: "We have invited President Putin to Washington after the first of the year [2019] for basically a full day of consultations. What the scheduling of that is we don't quite know yet."
Why might a visit be controversial?
The invitation comes amid strained relations between the two countries.
Mr Bolton visited Moscow earlier this week to convey US plans to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty - a landmark nuclear deal.
Russia denies Washington's claims that it has breached the treaty and has warned that withdrawal would be a "dangerous step".
Special investigators in the US are also examining alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia sought to influence the election in favour of President Trump. Russia rejects the allegations and Mr Trump denies there was any collusion.
Earlier this month, the US government charged a Russian woman over her alleged role in a Kremlin-backed campaign to influence next month's US mid-term congressional elections.
In an interview with Reuters news agency on Friday, Mr Bolton made a list of complaints against Russia including its alleged election meddling; its involvement in Crimea and eastern Ukraine; the nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter in the UK; and its involvement in the Middle East.
"It will be helpful if they [the Russians] stop interfering in our election... get out of Crimea and the Donbass in Ukraine... stop using illegal chemical weapons to conduct assassination attempts against Russian exiles in the West, and if they would be less intrusive in the Middle East," he said.
Mr Bolton said such behaviour was what had prompted US sanctions against Russia.
Image copyright EPA
Image caption John Bolton (R) recently held talks with President Putin in the Kremlin
July's meeting in the Finnish capital was most notable for Mr Trump appearing to cast doubt on his own administration's assertions that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.
It prompted a rare admission from Mr Trump that he had misspoken.
Following that meeting, the White House said President Trump had issued an invitation for Mr Putin to visit Washington in the autumn.
However, that was withdrawn amid an apparent lack of enthusiasm from the Kremlin, and claims in the US that Mr Trump was trying to be too cosy with the Russian leader.
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
hope he makes trump wait then rejects the meeting, but he will most likely accept and fukking embarrass him.
Where in the World is Elena Khusyaynova?
By Quinta Jurecic
Friday, October 26, 2018, 10:17 AM
A tweet allegedly sent by a member of the conspiracy in connection with which Khusyaynova was charged, as reproduced by the Justice Department.
On Monday, Oct. 22, a Russian media outlet known as the Federal News Agency (FAN) published a video of a round-faced woman sitting at a desk, looking directly into the camera. Her name, she announced, was Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, and she was FAN’s accountant. Three days earlier, the United States had unsealed court documents charging her with involvement in a Russian conspiracy to influence both the 2016 presidential election and the upcoming 2018 midterm elections.
The video was also published with English subtitles on USA Really, an English-language website linked to the Kremlin and identified by the Daily Beast as a subsidiary of FAN. Khusyaynova’s statement was an exercise in trolling: She expressed innocent surprise at the charges against her and voiced her wish for America to be made great again.
Perhaps this kind of thing shouldn’t be surprising coming from an employee of an entity described by the Justice Department as having engaged in a years-long influence operation carried out through politically incendiary posts on social media. But given the specific procedural mechanisms used by prosecutors handling the case, the video is very odd indeed. It suggests that—if the person in the video is who she says she is—Khusyaynova has not been arrested either by the U.S. or by any cooperating law enforcement agency and is still in Russia. And that’s incongruous with the manner in which the government charged her in the first place.
The docket in Khusyaynova’s case in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia shows that the government filed the complaint and affidavit and obtained an arrest warrant on Sept. 28. At that point, the case was sealed from public view.
Prosecutors typically charge defendants using criminal complaints when the government needs to make a sudden move. To secure an indictment, a prosecutor must convince a grand jury that the government has presented probable cause that the defendant committed a crime, while use of a complaint allows the government to proceed only by alleging probable cause through an accompanying affidavit. Indictments offer certain procedural benefits for prosecutors over complaints, but the lack of the additional hurdle of going before a grand jury means that a complaint can make for a better—faster and more agile—tool in a pinch. This is almost certainly why accused Russian spy Maria Butina was charged by a complaint, rather than an indictment—investigators feared that Butina was preparing to flee the country, according to court documents.
The complaint in Butina’s case was kept under seal until she was successfully taken into custody, consistent with law enforcement’s not wanting to tip its hand in advance of an arrest. So, too, with the complaint against Khusyaynova—except that, a month after a warrant was issued for her arrest, the FAN accountant appears to remain a free woman. The video doesn’t indicate her location, but presumably Khusyaynova is somewhere sufficiently shielded from the law enforcement agencies of the United States or cooperating nations that she feels comfortable mocking the criminal charges against her. Of course, it’s possible that the woman in the video is not in fact the woman described in the complaint, but there’s no other sign that Khusyaynova is in custody, and by now there surely would be if that were the case.
What’s more, the complaint against Khusyaynova has now been unsealed, which suggests that law enforcement may have given up hope of arresting her—though it’s not obvious why the government moved to unseal the complaint in the first place. There are several stories that can be told to fit this set of facts: Perhaps, for example, the government might have moved quickly in the hope of taking advantage of a hypothetical trip by Khusyaynova outside Russian borders and into a jurisdiction friendly to U.S. law enforcement, only for the opportunity to fall through. Notably, however, this doesn’t explain why the complaint was unsealed.
But at the moment, the facts are sufficiently sparse that the only thing clear is that there’s a puzzle piece missing. Analyzing the Khusyaynova complaint on the day it was unsealed, a group of writers on Lawfare, including me, advised readers to “[l]ook for the answer to one set of questions”: “Where is Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, and is she a free woman?” The public now seems to have an answer to this—at least in part. The question now is why.
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88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
You support this.
He does!
Poetical Poltergeist
Precise and cold hearted
Obama spit some fire. Liked the speech.
Poetical Poltergeist
Precise and cold hearted
Poor Donnie Doll Hands.
Cat piss martini
Veteran
:Obamalaughing:
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:obamaswag:.
:obamaumad:
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Obama is officially on the attack. This is Day 1.
Obama da gawd has returned.