Joe Biden stands up to Putin in new PBS Frontline...

[Kid Berwyn]

…as VP and shows President Biden standing up to Putin now.



The program, “Putin and the Presidents” is online and on-demand:

https://www.pbs.org/video/putin-and-the-presidents-gmztxm/

Poppy Bush claimed victory in the Cold War and recommended capitalism-freedom for all the Russias, Bill Clinton sounded the alarm about Putin the KGB trained feller, Smirko Bush talked a lot after looking into his soul and inviting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, Obama stood up against the little dictator with VP Biden doing a lot of the work, and Trump seemed to actively do Putin’s bidding.

But it was Biden who said to Putin’s face, after Putin reminded him of what George W Bush saw: “I don’t think you have a soul.” Putin replied, “Then we understand each other.”

[thucythucy]

1. I saw this a few days ago.

Made me even happier that President Biden won the election, as he was right about Putin from the very start.

[Kid Berwyn]

3. Bully will keep at it and at it...

…until the victim gets up and punches the bully in the nose.

[Kid Berwyn]

4. One guy who won't let us forget is Craig UNGER.

Did the FBI’s Charles McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump?

The shocking indictments against the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York raise many dark questions.

By Craig Unger
The National Review, February 1, 2023

In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it?

Specifically, I knew that:

* Starting in 1980, an alleged “spotter agent” for the KGB began cultivating Trump as a new asset for Soviet intelligence.

* The Russian mafia laundered millions of dollars through Donald Trump’s real estate by purchasing condos in all-cash transactions through anonymous corporations that did not disclose real ownership.

* Trump Tower was a home away from home for Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the most brutal leaders of the Russian mafia, and at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the mafia held the deeds to, lived in, or ran alleged criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties.

* Trump was some $4 billion in debt when the Russians came to bail him out via the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm that was largely staffed, owned, and financed by Soviet émigrés who had ties to Russian intelligence and/or organized crime.

Much of my material came from FBI documents. A lot came from open-source databases. It made no sense. There was an astounding amount of data on the public record. The FBI had launched enormous investigations of the Russian mafia in the 1980s. They had staked out a New York electronics store that was a haven for KGB officers. They knew that’s where the Trump Organization bought hundreds of TV sets. They had their eyes on Ivankov and other Russian mobsters who were denizens of Trump’s casinos and bought and sold his condos through shell companies. They had to know that Trump laundered money for and provided a base of operations for the Russian mafia, which was, after all, a de facto state actor tied to Russian intelligence. They had to know that the Russians repeatedly bailed Trump out when he was bankrupt. They had to know that Russia owned him.

Snip…

As FBI director, Freeh had warned that Russian organized crime posed a grave threat to the United States that far transcended mere criminality. It is not clear how much he was paid by Prevezon after he switched sides, but Freeh later bought a $9.38 million mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, just a 10-minute drive from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.

Then there was the late James Kallstrom, who ran the FBI’s New York office in the mid-’90s and oversaw successful investigations into both the Italian Mafia and later the Russian mob. Kallstrom had developed close friendships with two key players in the Trump-Russia saga. He worked closely with then–U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani in the investigation of the Cosa Nostra network that led to the famed Mafia Commission Trial of 1985–1986. Going even further back, Kallstrom had also been friends with Donald Trump since around 1973, when Kallstrom was putting together a Trump-funded parade in New York to honor Vietnam veterans.

Continues…

https://newrepublic.com/article/170328/charles-mcgonigal-throw-2016-election

Shocking thing to read. And the publication is old school Republican, but Unger has been on to the BFEE gangsters since the S&Ls.

[Kid Berwyn]

6. Thank Rudy and Agent Donald.

And their chums in FBI, DOJ, etc.

I’m well aware of the strict secrecy that accompanies ongoing investigations as a matter of procedure. But once the Mueller Report was finally released, it became crystal clear that Robert Mueller’s investigation dealt only with criminal matters, not counterintelligence. Trump had been thoroughly compromised by Russia and was a grave threat to national security. But the FBI wasn’t doing anything about it!

One reason for that may have been that on far too many occasions, FBI men in sensitive positions ended up on the take from the very people they were supposed to be investigating. And on January 23, a bomb dropped: We learned that the latest of these is Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York, who ended up working for billionaire oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a major target in the Trump Russia investigation. McGonigal was indicted in Manhattan on charges of money laundering, violating U.S. sanctions, and other counts relating to his alleged ties to Deripaska. He was also indicted in Washington, where he was accused of concealing $225,000 he allegedly received from a New Jersey man employed long ago by Albanian intelligence.

Snip…

A few months later, Guerriero wrote an angry email about McGonigal to the man who had introduced them as a couple—William Sweeney, who just happened to be assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York City office. On a number of occasions, Guerriero had seen McGonigal leave huge amounts of cash around the house. At first, she thought it must be “buy money” for a sting operation or some other FBI procedure. Then she became suspicious. Among other things, she told Sweeney to look into McGonigal’s dealings in Albania, where McGonigal had traveled extensively and participated in transactions that later appeared in his indictments.

Snip…

What could be more perfect? Having installed a Putin surrogate in the Ukrainian presidency, in 2016, Manafort repeated that feat on a much bigger stage, as campaign manager guiding Trump into the White House. As Yale professor Timothy Snyder, a close observer of Ukraine, points out, “Russia was backing Trump in much the way that it had once backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.”

Which brings us back to McGonigal. After assuming his new job in October 2016, just a month before the election, he would have been in a position to undermine the bureau’s investigation into Deripaska and Manafort and to sabotage those investigations with disinformation. Similarly, he would have been in a position to leak the information about Anthony Weiner’s laptop that led to the reopening of the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election. Finally, he was in a position to have been a source behind the false exculpatory news published by The New York Times on October 31, 2016, a week before the election, with the headline that seemed give to Trump a clean bill of health: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”

Of course, McGonigal wasn’t the only FBI official who went over to the dark side. In 1997, four years after he had retired and returned to private practice, FBI Director William Sessions traveled to Moscow and alerted the world to the horrifying dangers of the brutal Russian mafia. A decade later, however, Sessions had no qualms about taking on as a client Ukrainian-born Semion Mogilevich, the so-called “Brainy Don” behind the Russian mafia, whom the FBI had put on its “Ten Most Wanted” list.

Continues…

https://newrepublic.com/article/170328/charles-mcgonigal-throw-2016-election

“They pray we don’t remember this.”

[Kid Berwyn]

8. Another guy who won't forget is Timothy SNYDER

The Specter of 2016

McGonigal, Trump, and the Truth about America

Timothy Snyder
January 26, 2023

We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.

On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests. One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI. Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016. Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018. Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch. And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska). This is obviously very bad for Trump personally. But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America.

Another is that we must revisit the Russian influence operation on Trump’s behalf in 2016, and the strangely weak American response. Moscow’s goal was to move minds and institutions such that Hillary Clinton would lose and Donald Trump would win. We might like to think that any FBI special agent would resist, oppose, or at least be immune to such an operation. Now we are reliably informed that a trusted FBI actor, one who was responsible for dealing with just this sort of operation, was corrupt. And again, the issue is not just the particular person. If someone as important as McGonigal could take money from foreigners while on the job at FBI New York, and then go to work for a sanctioned Russian oligarch he was once investigating, what is at stake, at a bare minimum, is the culture of the FBI's New York office. The larger issue is the health of our national discussions of politics and the integrity of our election process.

For me personally, McGonigal's arrest brought back an unsettling memory. In 2016, McGonigal was in charge of cyber counter-intelligence for the FBI, and was put in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. That April, I broke the story of the connection between Trump's campaign and Putin's regime, on the basis of Russian open sources. At the time, almost no one wanted to take this connection seriously. American journalists wanted an American source, but the people who had experienced similar Russian operations were in Russia, Ukraine, or Estonia. Too few people took Trump seriously; too few people took Russia seriously; too few people took cyber seriously; the Venn diagram overlap of people who took all three seriously felt very small. Yet there was also specific, nagging worry that my own country was not only unprepared, but something worse. After I wrote that piece and another, I heard intimations that something was odd about the FBI office in New York. This was no secret at the time. One did not need to be close to such matters to get that drift. And given that FBI New York was the office dealing with cyber counterintelligence, this was worrying.

The reason I was thinking about Trump and Putin back in 2016 was a pattern that I had noticed in eastern Europe, which is my area of expertise. Between 2010 and 2013, Russia sought to control Ukraine using the same methods which were on display in 2016 in its influence operation in the United States: social media, money, and a pliable candidate for head of state. When that failed, Russia had invaded Ukraine, under the cover of some very successful influence operations. (If you find that you do not remember the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, it is very possibly because you were caught in the froth of Russian propaganda, spread through the internet, targeted to vulnerabilities.) The success of that propaganda encouraged Russia to intervene in the United States, using the same methods and institutions. This is what I was working on in 2016, when a similar operation was clearly underway in the United States.

Continues…

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-specter-of-2016

Putin put Trump in power and some in the national security establishment were corrupted and lied about it.

[Kid Berwyn]

10. Hear any mention how FBI McGonigal story?

Charlie's Angles

The indictment of former FBI senior executive Charles McGonigal brings more questions than answers.

Greg Olear
Prevail, January 31, 2023

Excerpt…

Was McGonigal involved in the Anthony Weiner laptop op that ultimately gave Trump the election?

By Halloween 2016, McGonigal was an executive in the FBI’s New York field office. “Trumplandia,” as that station was dubbed, was the source of the pressure put on FBI director James Comey to make public the reopened investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. As I explain in Dirty Rubles:

On 2 October 2016, agents of the FBI’s New York field office seized a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, which had previously been confiscated by the NYPD in connection with his sexting-with-minors case. Comey wanted the laptop to be searched immediately for the alleged “missing” Hillary Clinton emails. But his order was ignored. Instead, Trumplandia agents sat on the laptop for weeks and did nothing with it. The closer it was to the election, they knew, the more explosive the laptop’s contents would be…whatever they were.

Then, in the waning days of October, rogue elements of the Bureau’s New York field office, through their mouthpiece at [the website] True Pundit, threatened to leak the “missing” emails supposedly found on the laptop. On 24 October 2016, FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe informed Comey that in his assessment, the True Pundit sources were “heavyweight”—whether the missing emails existed, he could not say; but there really were rogue FBI agents in the know leaking to True Pundit, so it was a possibility.

This was a bluff. In fact, the Trumplandia operators had no more idea of what was on the laptop than James Comey did. But the Director didn’t know that. Comey didn’t want to take the risk, and have legit missing emails leak. That would make it look like he was hiding something about Hillary Clinton that the American people needed to know. So he decided to get ahead of the story, to cover his ass. He wrote the letter to Congress that turned the election.

In short, Comey was coerced into sending the letter that turned the election. (He writes about the pressures in his book, A Higher Loyalty, and they are dramatized in the Billy Ray film The Comey Rule.)

Trump’s people didn’t need Hillary to actually be guilty. All they needed was the announcement of an investigation, and that was enough innuendo for the ruthless MAGA messengers to smear her and tank her campaign. (Trump pulled the same shit with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanding that Ukraine open an investigation into Joe Biden. Remember “I would like you to do us a favor, though?”)

The Weiner laptop was seized on 4 October 2016, two days after McGonigal was announced as special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division for the New York field office; per the FBI announcement, he formally began work there “at the end of October.” Prior to that, he was stationed in Washington, where he headed the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination section.

Presumably, McGonigal spent the weeks between the announcement and his assumption of the New York role liaising with his new colleagues in “Trumplandia.” And I certainly hope the fucking counterintelligence chief was read in on all the funny business by the time Comey sent his fateful memo on 28 October. He must have known about this.

Continues…

https://gregolear.substack.com/p/charlies-angles?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2FMcgonigal&utm_medium=reader2

[Kid Berwyn]

12. "What if the Deep State was real?"

Charles McGonigal and the Deep State

What if the Deep State was real?

Jonathan V. Last
Bulwark, January 28, 2023

Excerpt…

… Anne Applebaum once put the question the right way: why didn't the FBI investigate Trump’s connections to Putin much earlier? In retrospect, it seems as though the FBI investigation of Trump’s campaign and its Russian connections in 2016 was not only late, but weirdly understated.

If the McGonigal allegations are proven, then we have an entirely new set of problems. Not just that one political party was willing to become the cat’s paw of a foreign government, but that a key part of America’s law enforcement apparatus was in on the game.

In other words: An actual Deep State.

As always, projection is the sincerest form of Trumpism.

Source: https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/charles-mcgonigal-and-the-deep-state?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2FMcgonigal&utm_medium=reader2

Projection seems also to be a sign of guilt.

[crickets]

13. K&R for the post and the discussion.

Bookmarking to read a bit at a time later. It's difficult to read too much at once when the topic is this upsetting.

[Kid Berwyn]

14. Will Bunch connected the dots.

News and analysis that few papers, TV and radio stations have dared publish:

The NYT should tell readers whether it helped crooked FBI agents get Trump elected in 2016

The arrest of a high-level FBI agent on Russia-tied corruption charges raises stunning new questions about how Trump really won in 2016.

Will Bunch
Philadelphia Inquirer, January 29, 2023

It was arguably the most consequential “October Surprise” in the history of American presidential elections. In the waning days of the 2016 race, with polls showing Hillary Clinton clinging to a lead over Donald Trump, two last-minute stories broke that rekindled on-the-fence voters’ ethical doubts about Democrat Clinton and quashed a budding scandal around her GOP rival.

Except the “October Surprise” was no surprise to one key player: Rudolph Giuliani, the ex-New York City mayor and Trump insider who later became the 45th president’s attorney. Late that month, Giuliani told Fox News that the trailing Republican nominee had “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”

Just two days later, then-FBI director James Comey revealed the bureau had reopened its probe into Clinton’s emails, based on the possible discovery of new communications on a laptop belonging to disgraced New York politico Anthony Weiner. The news jolted the campaign with a particularly strong boost from the New York Times, which devoted two-thirds of its front page to the story — and the notion it was a major blow to Clinton’s prospects.

It was later reported that Comey was motivated to make the unusual announcement about the laptop because he feared leaks from the FBI’s New York field office, which, according to Reuters, had “a faction of investigators based in the office known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton.” Indeed, Giuliani bragged immediately after that he had sources in the FBI, including current agents.

Link to tweet

Continues…

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/mcgonigal-russian-oligarch-trump-2016-election-20230129.html#loaded

Thanks, crickets! This stuff is incredibly difficult to contemplate, the news media don’t like to rock the boat, yet the subject matter changed the course of our lives from 2016 to the present day. That’s why DU is so important: Democracy requires a Free Press.