• New Steele Memo: Russia stopped Trump from appointing Romney as Sec. of State
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[URL]http://www.newsweek.com/christopher-steele-memo-romney-trump-830494[/URL] [IMG]https://i2.wp.com/mediabiasfactcheck.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/leftcenter01.png?w=700&ssl=1[/IMG] [QUOTE]Russia believed it effectively blocked former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney from being President Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of state, according to an unpublished memo penned by the same author of the Trump-Russia dossier. Steele’s other memo, unlike the 35-page dossier published in January of last year and denounced by Trump and a number of Republicans, cited a single source. Yet its content was still startling. It claimed that Russia had somehow reached Trump and asked for a secretary of state who could possibly alleviate sanctions put in place for its annexation of Crimea and work with Russia on security concerns. Romney said last year that Trump's defeated opponent Hillary Clinton had encouraged him to go for the position. After much speculation and even a dinner together at Trump Tower, Trump did not offer Romney the spot, instead opting for former ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson, who has a longstanding relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.[/QUOTE]
Honestly finding it hard to be shocked anymore by what comes out of Trump's government these days. Just more nails for Mueller to hammer into his coffin.
"Make America great again!.. Cuz I sure as hell ain't doing it!"
Not that it would have made a hell of a lot of difference considering Romney's decision to play kiss-ass with Donald for that sweet sweet blessing.
Friendly reminder that if Trump made this decision to drop Sanctions against Russia and adopt policies favorable to Russian interests in compliance with Russian requests that he do so, either because they had blackmail material on him, or with the understanding that doing so would secure the release of blackmail material on his political opponent (or both), he has committed a criminal conspiracy of epic proportions that is so vast in its damage and implications that it amounts to Treason in everything but technicality, and he should spend the rest of his life in prison, alongside any co-conspirators involved in the quid pro quo arrangement.
A lot of coffins with a lot of nails. I hope Mueller buries them all.
Does this man just appoint people he's heard of randomly?
[QUOTE]former ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson, who has a longstanding relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.[/QUOTE] I'm sure this is completely unrelated to [URL="https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1595119"]the other thread about how Tillerson's State Department has been allocated tens of millions of dollars in funding to combat Russian meddling and not only has it not spent anything on fighting back, Tillerson is already convinced there's no way to stop them.[/URL] [QUOTE=doomkiwi;53179047]Does this man just appoint people he's heard of randomly?[/QUOTE] He appoints who his handlers tell him to, it looks like. Paul Manafort stopped Trump from choosing Chris Christie (who despite his many flaws is critical of Russia) as his VP by literally delaying his plane to go offer Christie the job until the big orange baby could be talked into offering it to good little Christian muppet Mike Pence. Paul Manafort appears to have been a Kremlin agent for at minimum five or six years and is currently up Shit Creek without a boat. Drain the swamp, replace it with traitors, that's how you make America great again.
[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;53179089]I'm sure this is completely unrelated to [URL="https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1595119"]the other thread about how Tillerson's State Department has been allocated tens of millions of dollars in funding to combat Russian meddling and not only has it not spent anything on fighting back, Tillerson is already convinced there's no way to stop them.[/URL] He appoints who his handlers tell him to, it looks like. Paul Manafort stopped Trump from choosing Chris Christie (who despite his many flaws is critical of Russia) as his VP by literally delaying his plane to go offer Christie the job until the big orange baby could be talked into offering it to good little Christian muppet Mike Pence. Paul Manafort appears to have been a Kremlin agent for at minimum five or six years and is currently up Shit Creek without a boat. Drain the swamp, replace it with traitors, that's how you make America great again.[/QUOTE] Gee, I wonder why Manafort, who is now known to have been operating as Kremlin agent, wouldn't want a VP nominee who was critical of Russia.
Right I've finished reading through the entire 15,000 word New Yorker article on which this Newsweek report draws. Here are the parts which stood out to me [quote][Despite] Republican claims to the contrary, Steele’s interest in Trump did not spring from his work for the Clinton campaign. He ran across Trump’s name almost as soon as he went into private business, many years before the 2016 election. [B]Two of his earliest cases at Orbis involved investigating international crime rings whose leaders, coincidentally, were based in New York’s Trump Tower.[/B] ... “It was as if all criminal roads led to Trump Tower,” Steele told friends.[/quote] The part in the article about this is kind of lengthy so I'll just summarise: Remember when the FBI raided FIFA in 2015 and arrested a bunch of officials? That's because Christopher Steele was paid by England's Football Association to investigate whether Russia had rigged the selection process for the 2018 World Cup. He concluded that they did, and tipped off the FBI that FIFA was a shitshow of corruption, which led them to launch an investigation. There's a lot of stuff about Steele's past and his work with MI6 and then his private firm Orbis [quote]Burrows [Steele's business partner] said that on several occasions Orbis [their company] had warned authorities about major security threats. Three years ago, a trusted Middle Eastern source told Orbis that a group of isis militants were using the flow of refugees from Syria to infiltrate Europe. Orbis shared the information with associates who relayed the intelligence to German security officials. Several months later, when a concert hall in Paris, the Bataclan, was attacked by terrorists, Burrows and Steele felt remorse at not having notified French authorities as well. [B]When Steele took his suspicions about Trump to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016, it was in keeping with Orbis protocol, rather than a politically driven aberration.[/B][/quote] There's another Steele dossier which predates the Trump one, codenamed Project Charlemagne, which details Russian interference in European politics inc. Italy, France, the UK and 'elsewhere': [quote]Even before Steele became involved in the U.S. Presidential campaign, he was convinced that the Kremlin was interfering in Western elections. In April of 2016, not long before he took on the Fusion assignment, he finished a secret investigation, which he called Project Charlemagne, for a private client. It involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union—France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany—along with Turkey, a candidate for membership. The report chronicles persistent, aggressive political interference by the Kremlin: social-media warfare aimed at inflaming fear and prejudice, and “opaque financial support” given to favored politicians in the form of bank loans, gifts, and other kinds of support. [B]The report discusses the Kremlin’s entanglement with the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen.[/B] (Le Pen and Berlusconi deny having had such ties.) [B]It also suggests that Russian aid was likely given to lesser-known right-wing nationalists in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.[/B] The Kremlin’s long-term aim, the report concludes, was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to “destroy” the E.U., in order to end the punishing economic sanctions that the E.U. and the U.S. had imposed on Russia after its 2014 political and military interference in Ukraine.[/quote] [quote][Steele launched the Trump investigation and then] Within a few weeks, two or three of Steele’s long-standing collectors came back with reports drawn from Orbis’s larger network of sources. Steele looked at the material and, according to people familiar with the matter, asked himself, “Oh, my God—what [I]is[/I] this?” He called in Burrows, who was normally unflappable. Burrows realized that they had a problem. As Simpson later put it, “We threw out a line in the water, and Moby-Dick came back.”[/quote] AFAIK previously unreported info that GCHQ intercepted communications between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016: [quote]Robert Hannigan, then the head of the U.K.’s intelligence service the G.C.H.Q., had recently flown to Washington and briefed the C.I.A.’s director, John Brennan, on a stream of illicit communications between Trump’s team and Moscow that had been intercepted. [B](The content of these intercepts has not become public.)[/B] [/quote] The latter part of the article is about the process of how Steele took the dossier to the FBI and Obama was eventually briefed on it, but most of that has been reported before. There's some new stuff about the aftermath of the dossier being leaked to the public: [quote]Unsurprisingly, the salacious news leaked in no time. Four days after Comey briefed Trump, CNN reported that the President-elect had been briefed on a scandalous dossier supplied by a former British intelligence operative. Almost instantly, BuzzFeed posted a copy of Steele’s dossier online, arguing that the high-level briefing made it a matter of public interest. BuzzFeed has declined to reveal its source for the dossier, but both Orbis and Fusion have denied supplying it. By a process of elimination, speculation has centered on McCain’s aide, Kramer, who has not responded to inquiries about it, and whose congressional testimony is sealed.[/quote] [quote]In Russia, there were rumors of a more primitive kind of justice taking place. During Glenn Simpson’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, his lawyer asserted that “somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier.” Who that could be has been the subject of much media speculation. One possibility that has been mentioned is Oleg Erovinkin, a former F.S.B. officer and top aide to Igor Sechin, the Rosneft president. On December 26, 2016, Erovinkin was found dead in his car. No official cause of death has been cited. No evidence has emerged that Erovinkin was a Steele source, and in fact Special Counsel Mueller is believed to be investigating a different death that is possibly related to the dossier. (A representative for Mueller declined to answer questions for this article.) Meanwhile, around the same time that Erovinkin died, Russian authorities charged a cybersecurity expert and two F.S.B. officers with treason.[/quote] [quote]It’s too early to make a final judgment about how much of Steele’s dossier will be proved wrong, but a number of Steele’s major claims have been backed up by subsequent disclosures. His allegation that the Kremlin favored Trump in 2016 and was offering his campaign dirt on Hillary has been borne out. So has his claim that the Kremlin and WikiLeaks were working together to release the D.N.C.’s e-mails. Key elements of Steele’s memos on Carter Page have held up, too, including the claim that Page had secret meetings in Moscow with Rosneft and Kremlin officials. Steele may have named the wrong oil-company official, but, according to recent congressional disclosures, he was correct that a top Rosneft executive talked to Page about a payoff. According to the Democrats’ report, when Page was asked if a Rosneft executive had offered him a “potential sale of a significant percentage of Rosneft,” Page said, “He may have briefly mentioned it.” And, just as the Kremlin allegedly feared, damaging financial details have surfaced about Manafort’s dealings with Ukraine officials. Further, his suggestion that Trump had “agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue” seems to have been confirmed by the pro-Russia changes that Trump associates made to the Republican platform. Special Counsel Mueller’s various indictments of Manafort have also strengthened aspects of the dossier. Indeed, it’s getting harder every day to claim that Steele was simply spreading lies, now that three former Trump campaign officials—Flynn, Papadopoulos, and Rick Gates, who served as deputy campaign chairman—have all pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and appear to be coöperating with the investigation. And, of course, Mueller has indicted thirteen Russian nationals for waging the kind of digital warfare that Steele had warned about. On January 9th, Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, filed a hundred-million-dollar defamation lawsuit against Fusion. He also sued BuzzFeed. Cohen tweeted, “Enough is enough of the #fake #RussianDossier.” Steele mentioned Cohen several times in the dossier, and claimed that Cohen met with Russian operatives in Prague, in the late summer of 2016, to pay them off and cover up the Russian hacking operation. Cohen denies that he’s ever set foot in Prague, and has produced his passport to prove it. A congressional official has told Politico, however, that an inquiry into the allegation is “still active.” And, since the dossier was published, several examples have surfaced of Cohen making secretive payments to cover up other potentially damaging stories. Cohen recently acknowledged to the Times that he personally paid Stephanie Clifford, a porn star who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, a hundred and thirty thousand dollars; it is widely believed that Trump and Clifford had a secret sexual relationship.[/quote] The Romney part is in there too of course but that's already in the OP
[QUOTE=doomkiwi;53179047]Does this man just appoint people he's heard of randomly?[/QUOTE] I don't think it's random that his secretary of state happens to be a former Exxon executive who so closely worked with the Russian government to explore oil sights there that he was given the Order of Friendship by Putin himself.
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