RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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Imagine for a moment that an American "deep state" a la Turkey's or Pakistan's was real and not the feverish imagination of self-parodying ideologues. Let's go through the contingencies, shall we?
1. This website would prohibit Americans from discussing the "deep state."
2. What the far-right considers a concerted spook attempt to remove Donald Trump from power would not have been an attempt but a reality and Donald Trump would now be in prison.
3. Fox News would be taken off the air for advancing these allegations, not the highest-rated cable news network.
4. Robert Mueller's report would not be the subject of such Talmudic exegesis because it would have consisted of broadbrush and (even to liberals) eyebrow-raising accusations against the president, his campaign and his inner circle.
5. Pompeo, a Trump loyalist, would have spent the 18 months or so of his directorship of the CIA exposing the Agency as a collective of putschists. Instead, he confirmed WikiLeaks/Assange -- enablers of his own appointment -- as a 'hostile non-state intelligence service'.
6. The stories appearing in the New York Times and Washington Post, all based on leaks from these agencies, would be much, much worse for Trump because they'd be concocted whole-cloth to damn him -- such are the machinations of true deep states.
7. Trump would have appeared on FaceTime or Vine (or simply tweeted, as is his wont) at least eighty times by now proclaiming himself the subject of a coup by Gina Haspel and her minions.
8. John Bolton would have said: "The U.S. has received credible intelligence that Iran is plotting to attack Americans in the Middle East... But, to be honest, this is probably bullshyt because the the intelligence comes from the 'deep state' and fukk them, you know?"
9. Former CIA and FBI officials defending Trump or repudiating their colleagues' opinions on the Steele dossier or the Mueller investigation would be disappeared, not given contributorships on cable news networks.
10. Bill Barr's letter to Congress would have never have seen the light of day, whereas a live-feed from Bill Barr's bedroom would have.
In short, people who traffic in this nonsense term about the U.S. discredit the real victims of authoritarian regimes and treat those they try to persuade as historically illiterate jackasses.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
@śïñe•qúå_nøn wrong thread on some of those tweets
New subpoena for Roger Stone's former aide offers glimpse at ongoing investigation
New subpoena for Roger Stone's former aide offers glimpse at ongoing investigation
NATASHA BERTRAND06/07/2019 05:26 PM EDT
Andrew Miller, a former Roger Stone aide, turned over text messages with Roger Stone following a grand jury subpoena. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
A former aide to political operative Roger Stone has turned over to a grand jury all of his text messages with Stone from October 2016 to March 2017, as well as the written agenda for Stone while he was at the Republican National Convention in 2016.
The aide, Andrew Miller, turned over the documents in response to a federal grand jury subpoena following his two-hour testimony last Friday before the body, according to communications between Miller’s lawyer and the government that were reviewed by POLITICO.
The subpoena offers a glimpse into the government’s ongoing investigation of Stone, an informal Trump campaign adviser who was indicted in January on charges of lying to Congress and the FBI about his dealings with WikiLeaks during the 2016 election. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting a trial, set for November.
Under Justice Department policy and court rulings, grand juries are not supposed to be used to investigate a criminal case that’s already been filed, although they can be used to add new charges or to charge new defendants.
It’s still unclear what additional crimes D.C. prosecutors are investigating, however. But the prosecutors recently revealed in court filings that they had 18 search warrants approved against Stone — dating back to August 2017 — for potential crimes that he wasn’t charged with earlier this year, including conspiracy, wire fraud, and foreign contribution bans.
Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Miller testified before a new grand jury rather than the one convened by Mueller that Miller was initially fighting, and that he was held in contempt over.
In the emailed communications obtained by POLITICO, Miller’s pro bono attorney, Paul Kamenar of the National Legal Policy Center, asked D.C. U.S. Attorney Michael Marando for an explanation.
“I simply noted that the original grand jury my client was ordered to appear before was 17-1 and that the contempt order was for not appearing before that one,” Kamenar wrote Marando. “While you may have the authority to have a witness appear before other grand juries as you assert, I believe, as I asked at the hearing last week, that a new subpoena issue would have clarified the matter.”
Marando replied only that prosecutors planned “to seek immediate contempt” before the judge if Miller did not plan to comply with the new grand jury subpoena for documents.
An attorney for Stone, Grant Smith, said, “We are aware from news reports that Mr. Miller recently appeared in front of the Grand Jury. We are unaware of anything that may have been asked of, or from Mr. Miller."
The new subpoena suggests that the grand jury wants to know more about Stone’s involvement in the Republican convention — where he gave speeches and schmoozed with journalists — and about his conversations with one of his most trusted aides during a period that included WikiLeaks’ release of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, the presidential transition and Trump’s inauguration.
Mueller’s team scrutinized the Trump campaign’s activities at the convention after it was reported that it had softened an amendment to the Republican platform to be more favorable to Russia. It was during the Republican convention, moreover, that Russian hackers sent a file to WikiLeaks with instructions on how to download stolen Democratic National Committee documents. WikiLeaks released the internal emails on July 22, 2016, the last day of the convention and just before the start of the Democratic National Convention.
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