Claude Taylor? @TrueFactsStated 12h12 hours ago
Report: grand juries underway on multiple Trump-Russia conspirators, indictments expected

This just in from a source with knowledge of Comey's investigation. "two grand juries have convened and I know that one is almost complete."

The revelation comes from Washington insider Claude Taylor, who served in the the Bill Clinton administration. He says that according to his inside source, two grand juries are in progress in the Trump-Russia scandal, with one of them “almost complete” (link). So what now? It’s not clear who has initially been targeted, though they’re likely to be proverbial smaller sized fish who can be persuaded to provide damning evidence and testimony against a bigger fish in return for leniency. The end goal of the investigation is ostensibly to get to Donald Trump himself, being the biggest fish in the scandal.

Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn failed to register as a foreign agent at the time he was taking payments from intermediaries of the governments of Russia and Turkey. Trump’s former campaign manager is Paul Manafort is accused of having taken tens of millions of dollars from a pro-Kremlin benefactor in similar fashion. Trump’s former campaign adviser Roger Stone has admitted to contact with the Russian hacker who stole emails from Trump’s election opposition. Carter Page is alleged in a number of Russia-related incidents.
So take your pick as to whom the targets of these two initial Trump-Russia grand juries might be. But with one of them near completion, and indictments more or less automatic, we should begin finding out soon. Will the FBI have the two indicted individuals arrested in a public spectacle in order to pressure them to flip more quickly?


https://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/indictments-grand-juries-trump-russia/2498/

Louise Mensch?Verified account @LouiseMensch

EXCLUSIVE: Boris Epshteyn Paid Russian Hackers For Both Team Trump and FSB

SEOUL, South Korea — President Trump’s comment that he wants South Korea to pay for a missile defense system being set up in the country jolted its presidential race on Friday and surprised the government, leaving it scrambling to figure out the intentions of a close ally.

In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, Mr. Trump said that he wanted South Korea to pay for the system, known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, whose cost he estimated at $1 billion.

He also said that he wanted to renegotiate or terminate what he called a “horrible” trade agreement with South Korea because of a deep trade deficit. “Very soon,” he said when asked when he would announce his intention to renegotiate the pact. “I’m announcing it now.”

In South Korea, Mr. Trump’s comments shook the race to choose a successor to Park Geun-hye, the former president who was formally ousted last month after being impeached by Parliament in December. The election is on May 9.

The former head of intelligence law at the National Security Agency (NSA), April Doss, has been hired to work on the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election, her law firm confirmed in a press release on Wednesday.

Doss, who spent over a decade at the NSA and now chairs the Cybersecurity and Privacy practice at Saul Ewing, LLP, will serve as the committee's special counsel as it examines " allegations that Russia participated in a disinformation campaign intended to benefit President Donald Trump, and claims of potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia," the firm said.

Doss will join the committee on May 1.

The former NSA attorney testified before the House Judiciary Committee on March 1, 2017 in a public hearing over the reauthorization of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, according to her firm, which hired her one year ago.

Full disclosure: I’m not a medical professional. But at this point it doesn’t take a doctor to see the rather obvious pattern in front of us. Donald Trump’s mental lapses are growing more frequent, more alarming, cutting closer to home, and are now occurring multiple times per day. In fact if one were to judge Trump based on his past two days alone, one might conclude his mental capacity is all but fully vacated. Take a look at these several recent examples.

Beginning on Monday morning, Donald Trump was involved in a bizarre incident in which he took a hat from a kid, autographed it, and flung it into the crowd instead of handing it back to him (video link here). The kids yelled out to try to correct his strange behavior, but instead he responded by doing the same thing to another kid’s hat. This was in the same timeframe in which he couldn’t remember to put his hand over his heart during the National Anthem and had to be visibly nudged by his wife. But these minor incidents were merely warning shots.

By Monday evening, Trump had unwittingly revealed during a Fox News interview that he didn’t know the name of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, the one he’s been threatening to blow up for the past week. He also revealed that he believes thirty-two year old Kim Jong-Un is the same guy who’s been in power since the nineties. Trump doesn’t know that Kim and his late father Kim-Jong Il are two different people (Talking Points Memo). Worse, as recently as a few months ago, Trump’s words during the campaign made clear that he did know that these were two different leaders. In other words, he’s completely forgotten the key things that he previously knew about North Korea. And even if his advisers have tried to remind him, it appears he’s now incapable of hanging on to that information.

But perhaps Monday was just a singularly bad day for Donald Trump? As it turns out, he traveled to a political rally today in Wisconsin, the home state of Speaker Paul Ryan. The two Republicans don’t always get along, but they know each other quite well. And yet Trump kept referring to Paul Ryan as “Ron” during his speech today (Bipartisan Report). On their own, any one of these incidents could be seen as a mere gaffe, an absent moment. But strung together, they paint a picture of a man who’s become mentally vacant.

Claude Taylor? @TrueFactsStated

It's a one-two punch that will put Trump down. One is Russia-Putin. Two is his declining mental health. cc @LouiseMensch @docrocktex26

Russian state television has no doubt who is unpredictable enough to bring the world to war in the North Korean crisis, and it’s not the reclusive communist dictator Kim Jong-Un.

According to Dmitry Kiselyov, the Kremlin’s top TV mouthpiece, the riskiest is Donald Trump, the man Russian officials and propagandists hailed just a few weeks ago as just the kind of leader the world needed.

In the latest sign of the Kremlin’s abrupt about-face on its erstwhile American hero, Kiselyov pronounced Trump “more dangerous” than his North Korean counterpart. “Trump is more impulsive and unpredictable than Kim Jong Un,” he told viewers of his prime-time Sunday “Vesti Nedelyi” program, which earlier this year carried paeans to Trump for his pledge to warm up relations with Russia.

Kiselyov and his colleagues on other channels also went after Trump’s family, noting that Kim hadn’t given his four-year-old daughter an office in his residence, in contrast to Trump’s appointment of his 35-year-old daughter, Ivanka, to a White House role.

Conspiracy theorist and national security blogger Louise Mensch asserted that former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page took a recording to Russia of Donald Trump personally authorizing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime to hack the 2016 election.

In a column over the weekend, Mensch alleges that “sources with links to the intelligence community” believe that “Carter Page went to Moscow in early July carrying with him a pre-recorded tape of Donald Trump offering to change American policy if he were to be elected, to make it more favorable to Putin.”

The report claims that Page “was authorized directly by Trump to request the help of the Russian government in hacking the election.”

Mensch comes to the conclusion that Page, former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former aide Boris Epshteyn were “were all acting in concert as agents of the Russian state first and foremost, and Trump staffers second.”

Among the greatest foreign-policy dilemmas faced by former President Jimmy Carter is one that has never been publicly aired but is gaining new relevance. It concerns nuclear war, and how the U.S. government would survive it. Carter’s decisions remain classified, but documents newly declassified by the CIA, along with the archives at several presidential libraries, provide a new window into the White House’s preparations for an imminent apocalypse.

Today, such an apocalypse could be triggered by any number of nuclear-armed states, including North Korea and Pakistan. During Carter’s presidency, such anxieties were focused squarely on the Soviet Union. It was during that period that military planners in both the Soviet Union and United States began to grapple with what until then had been an unthinkable heresy: abandoning the Mutually Assured Destruction catechism that had governed global order since the 1950s and preparing for surviving an all-out nuclear war.

Carter and his White House were interested in more specific questions. If the presidency could survive after a nuclear war, what exactly would it do afterward? How could the surviving commander in chief be identified? Who would identify him? How would he fulfill the three main functions of the presidency: to be the chief executive of the government, the head of state, and the commander in chief of its armed forces?

Carter’s answers came in the form of Presidential Directive 58, which was issued in the final months of his presidency; Ronald Reagan amended those plans with his own presidential directive in 1983. Their contents inform the continuity of government plans that remain in effect for the Trump administration. They have been the object of a multibillion-dollar pastiche of programs and a magnet for conspiracy theorists around the world.
What follows is a glimpse at how the government developed some of its most closely held national-security secrets — and how the Trump administration, or any of its successors, might rely on them to survive the end of the world as we know it.