The Leisure Class amuses itself

The following is from the Caucus99percent site. This is where all the good writers from Daily Kos went after it became abundantly clear in 2016 that Kos had no tolerance for the Progressive / Populist / New Deal wing of the Democratic Party and went out of his way to annoy the Bernie Sanders supporters.

The Russia Hoax sickens me. I have precious little tolerance for these sorts of maneuvers but this is worse than even the 1950-60s. My problem is that I have seen Russia, read her literature, listened to her music, and marveled at her playwrights.

And Ice Hockey—it's damn easy to follow the game in Minnesota and watched when Herb Brooks spent six seasons at the University of Minnesota reverse-engineering the hockey theories of Anatoly Tarasov—the supreme genius of Russian hockey. His efforts were rewarded when he coached a bunch of college kids to a Gold Medal in 1980 beating the top ranked teams in the world to do it—vs Czechoslovakia 7-3, USSR 4-3, Finland 4-2. Their only blemish was a 2-2 tie against Sweden who had the utterly awesome Pelle Lindbergh in net. Tarasov himself, who through bureaucratic Soviet stupidity was no longer the coach of the Big Red Machine, recognized that Brooks was his peer. How can such a relationship NOT be a good thing? And yet 39 years later we are being told that our diplomats are criminals if they even talk with their peers in Russia—thanks for nothing Russia bashers.

For me, the Russians are fellow people of winter and I find it exceeding difficult to watch politicians and news media defame these people for some cheap political advantage. They have suffered through great hardships over the last 150 years, and I find it disgusting to watch an ignorant weasel like Adam Schiff look into the camera and tell us easily refutable lies about one of the great cultures in history.

Moreover, the world is facing a climate calamity. Time is running out quickly. Our tax money should be spent of remediation, NOT on some exercise of "who can tell the biggest whopper and get away with it."

If You Have Been Playing "THE RUSSIA HOAX" at Home, along with Our Studio Audience, You'll Want to Grab this Clue!

Submitted by Pluto's Republic on Thu, 01/17/2019

Over the past few months, the table has slowly turned. Now the clues are taking us back to the corrupt nest where this plot to destroy the 2016 election and sabotage American democracy began. Who will be the Insider who turns on all the rest of the vipers in the Greatest Crime Against American People in US History?

Just how dirty was that Dossier?

According to the Tyler Durdens, it is dirtier that anyone imagined. This story was originally broken at The Hill by Jon Soloman:

We now have insider testimony that — from the beginning — the Justice Department and the FBI were both fully aware that the notorious Steele Dossier was connected directly to and paid for by Hillary Clinton (and likely not the DNC). Hillary Clinton's lawyer from Perkins Coie eventually admitted to paying Fusion GPS, disguising the payments as legal bills when it was in fact opposition research.

The Dossier was thus contaminated and biased - a crucial detail which was omitted just weeks later from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant used to spy on the Trump campaign.

When the annals of mistakes and abuses in the FBI’s Russia investigation are finally written, Bruce Ohr almost certainly will be the No. 1 witness, according to my sources.

The former #4 Department of Justice (DOJ) official, Bruce Ohr - who had extensive contact with Steele, briefed "both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele's Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative's work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton's campaign and might be biased."

Ohr’s activities, chronicled in handwritten notes and congressional testimony I gleaned from sources, provide the most damning evidence to date that FBI and DOJ officials may have misled federal judges in October 2016 in their zeal to obtain the warrant targeting Trump adviser Carter Page just weeks before Election Day.

Ohr's activities also contradict a key argument made by House Democrats in their attempts to downplay the significance of the Steele Dossier; that the FBI claimed it was "unaware of any derogatory information" about Steele, and that the former MI6 operative was "never advised ... as to the motivation behind the research." The FBI further "speculates" that those who hired Steele were "likely looking for information to discredit" Trump's campaign.

There was no "speculation" going on by the FBI. Thanks to Ohr's warning, they absolutely knew about Steele's bias against Trump while working for a Clinton-funded project to gather harmful opposition research on him.

Ohr had firsthand knowledge about the motive and the client: He had just met with Steele on July 30, 2016, and Ohr’s wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion GPS, the same firm employing Steele.

“I certainly told the FBI that Fusion GPS was working with, doing opposition research on Donald Trump,” Ohr told congressional investigators, adding that he warned the FBI that Steele expressed bias during their conversations.

“I provided information to the FBI when I thought Christopher Steele was, as I said, desperate that Trump not be elected,” he added. “So, yes, of course I provided that to the FBI.”

When lawmakers pressed Ohr as to why he would volunteer that information to the FBI, he answered "In case there might be any kind of bias.... I tried to be clear that this is source information, I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware."

::

We now discover that Ohr’s early consultations about the creation of the Steele dossier weren’t limited to the FBI, whom he reached out to on July 31, 2016. Ohr disclosed that in August 2016 — nearly two months before the FISA warrant was issued — he was asked to conduct a briefing for senior Justice officials.

Those Ohr briefed included Andrew Weissmann, then the head of DOJ’s fraud section; Bruce Swartz, longtime head of DOJ’s international operations, and Zainab Ahmad, an accomplished terrorism prosecutor who, at the time, was assigned to work with Lynch as a senior counselor.

Ahmad and Weissmann would go on to work for Mueller, the special prosecutor overseeing the Russia probe.

::

So, Mueller has known all along that the FISA warrants were bogus, but the desperate cover-up team gave him carte blanche to dig through every part of the warrant victim's lives looking for crimes — anything at all that could be thrown out to the media and the American people, like red meat to hungry dogs.

Meanwhile, throughout 2018, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee repeatedly sought to downplay Ohr's connections to Steele. Democrats were relentless in their cover-up efforts pertaining to the illegally obtained FISA warrants, using already debunked assertions as facts. One example is the House Memo on the FISA warrants, which is heavily redacted except for the copy sitting on President Trump's desk.

The Memo defending the FISA warrants from House Democrats - led by Rep. Adam Schiff's (D-CA), says that Ohr's contact with the FBI only began "weeks after the election and more than a month after the Court approved the initial FISA application." In the Memo, Schiff insisted that Ohr only notified the FBI about Steele after Steele was fired by the FBI in November 2016 for improper contacts with the media.

Ohr's testimony, however, refutes Schiff's Memo making it clear he was in contact with both FBI and DOJ officials well before the FISA warrant or the 2016 US election.

Ohr divulged his first contact with the FBI was on July 31, 2016, when he reached out to then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and FBI attorney Lisa Page. He then was referred to agents working Russia counterintelligence, including Peter Strzok, the now-fired agent who played a central role in starting the Trump collusion probe.

Ohr explicitly made the point to the FBI back then that Steele seemed desperate to see Donald Trump defeated. He told the FBI that Steele — the UK spy that he and his wife were working with — was biased in the extreme. The FBI never tried to guess or speculate as to Steele's motives in the Dossier, as they so testified.

So there's that. And so much more. The involvement of CrowdStrike in the forensic work and the incubation of the Hoax is a bonanza of malfeasance that I cannot wait to see fully exposed. If it is exposed before the whole thing is deep-sixed. Rumors are flying that the case could be shut down, buried in irrelevance, and classified forever. more