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demmiblue's JournalHouse Intel schedules business meeting as expectations for vote on secret memo grow
Source: The Hill
The House Intelligence Committee could vote as early as Monday evening to release a controversial memo authored by committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) alleging surveillance abuses at the Department of Justice.
The panel issued a last-minute notice of a business meeting at 5 p.m. for "consideration of pending committee business and other matters." The memo did not specify a vote on the memo, but one has been expected amidst a crescendo of calls from the right.
A committee spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment and Nunes has not committed publicly to holding the vote.
Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/371180-house-intel-schedules-business-meeting-as-expectations-for-vote-on
Trump Tower Russian Lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Exposed in Swiss Corruption Case
Source: The Daily Beast
LONDON—The Moscow operation behind the now infamous Russian-Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 included a direct attempt to enlist a foreign country’s law enforcement official as a virtual double-agent, according to a court case in Switzerland.
One of Switzerland’s top investigators has been fired after allegations of bribery, violating secrecy laws and "unauthorized clandestine behavior" in meeting with the very same Russian actors linked to the Trump Tower encounter.
Details of the explosive case have been published by investigative reporters for the Tribune de Genève and Tages-Anzeiger newspapers in Switzerland. The officer, named only as Victor K., traveled to Moscow—against the expressed wishes of his superiors—where he spoke to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower.
The meeting was reportedly set up by Deputy Russian Attorney General Saak Albertovich Karapetyan—from the same rogue department that was apparently responsible for offering intel on Hillary Clinton to be shared at the Trump Tower meeting and the Kremlin’s further plots to influence American politics.
Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-tower-russian-lawyer-natalia-veselnitskaya-exposed-in-swiss-corruption-case?source=twitter&via=mobile
Notice posted for employees at the Wynn Las Vegas:
https://twitter.com/rebeccaballhaus/status/957697345617047555
Mark Warner: We've Had New Information That Raises More Questions
Source: Politico
Congress late last year received “extraordinarily important new documents” in its investigation of President Donald Trump and his campaign’s possible collusion with the 2016 Russian election hacking, opening up significant new lines of inquiry in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe of the president, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) says in an exclusive new interview.
Warner, the intel committee’s top Democrat, says “end-of-the-year document dumps” produced “very significant” revelations that “opened a lot of new questions” that Senate investigators are now looking into, meaning the inquiry into Trump and the Russia hacking—already nearly a year old—will not be finished for months longer. “We’ve had new information that raises more questions,” Warner says in the interview, an extensive briefing on the state of the Senate’s Trump-Russia probe for The Global Politico, our weekly podcast on world affairs.
Warner also warns about a “coordinated” attack by the president and “Trump zealots” in the House of Representatives to undermine the legitimacy of the investigations against him, an effort Warner says includes the president’s threats to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and other officials as well as a secret Republican memo alleging “shocking” FBI surveillance abuse against Trump that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is now threatening to release. Warner calls out Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in arguably more explicit terms than any Democrat has yet, saying he has read the underlying classified material used in the memo and that Nunes misrepresented it as part of a McCarthyite “secret Star Chamber” effort to discredit the FBI probe of the president.
“We’re seeing this coordinated effort to try to impede the investigation,” Warner says. The Nunes memo, which is apparently drawn from information contained in the same late-2017 document dumps that has caused the Senate panel to expand its inquiry, is based on “fabrications” and “connecting dots that don’t connect,” Warner asserts.
Read more: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/29/mark-warner-global-politico-216545
The Plot Against America
Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.Source: The Atlantic
His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship. Manafort would swim naked with his boss outside his banya, play tennis with him at his palace (“Of course, I let him win,” Manafort made it known), and generally serve as an arbiter of power in a vast country. One of his deputies, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists, “You have to understand, we’ve been working in Ukraine a long time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure … In every ministry, he has a guy.” Only a small handful of Americans—oil executives, Cold War spymasters—could claim to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. The power had helped fill Manafort’s bank accounts; according to his recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.
From Our March 2018 Issue
Manafort had profited from the sort of excesses that make a country ripe for revolution. And in the early months of 2014, protesters gathered on the Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, and swept his patron from power. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych sought protective shelter in Russia. Manafort avoided any harm by keeping a careful distance from the enflamed city. But in his Kiev office, he’d left behind a safe filled with papers that he would not have wanted to fall into public view or the wrong hands.
Money, which had always flowed freely to Manafort and which he’d spent more freely still, soon became a problem. After the revolution, Manafort cadged some business from former minions of the ousted president, the ones who hadn’t needed to run for their lives. But he complained about unpaid bills and, at age 66, scoured the world (Hungary, Uganda, Kenya) for fresh clients, hustling without any apparent luck. Andrea noted her father’s “tight cash flow state,” texting Jessica, “He is suddenly extremely cheap.” His change in spending habits was dampening her wedding plans. For her “wedding weekend kick off” party, he suggested scaling back the menu to hot dogs and eliminated a line item for ice.
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-manafort-american-hustler/550925/
Poll: 2 percent say they've benefited from GOP tax plan with raise or bonus
Source: The Hill
Only two percent of American adults reported receiving a bonus, a bump in pay or another perk due to the Republican tax cuts passed in December, a new survey found.
Nearly a quarter of respondents, 24 percent, in a Reuters/Ipsos poll said they think they will pay less in taxes due to the legislation. Twenty-seven percent believe the bill will increase the amount they pay in taxes, while 23 percent did not anticipate the bill altering their pay.
A quarter of the respondents polled said the new legislation made them more enticed to cast a ballot for a Republican, while a third of those surveyed said this for Democrats.
Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/finance/domestic-taxes/371163-poll-2-percent-say-theyve-benefited-from-gop-tax-plan-with
Trump: Polar ice caps are 'at a record level'
Source: The Hill
"The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records. They’re at a record level," Trump told British television host Piers Morgan in an interview set to air Sunday night on ITV News.
Trump also reportedly appeared to lump global warming and climate change together.
"I mean, look, it used to not be climate change. It used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place," Trump said.
Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/371129-trump-polar-ice-caps-are-at-a-record-level
Hillary Clinton Let Him Stay. Women Say His Harassment Continued.
Touching, inappropriate comments, and an untenable work environment: A woman who worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign made those complaints about her boss, a faith and values adviser, in 2007. He was punished, but not fired, by Clinton. Six years later, still in her world, he landed the top job at a pro-Clinton super PAC as a well-connected operative close to “the boss lady.” There, former staffers say, his behavior wasn’t any different.Source: BuzzFeed News
Senior aides on the campaign wanted to fire him, according to three officials with knowledge of the process, but Hillary Clinton decided against doing so.
Not only was the adviser, Burns Strider, not pushed out — he thrived after her campaign, landing a senior role at a super PAC preparing for her next presidential bid. In that job, he exhibited the same kinds of inappropriate behavior toward women who worked there, particularly two young female subordinates.
In at least three separate instances between 2007 and 2015, women who worked for the Clinton campaign or the pro-Clinton PAC said that Strider, 52, harassed them at work.
Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/hillary-clinton-let-him-stay-women-say-his-harassment
I am glad this creeper has been exposed (a man of faith... ugh). I hope is is permanently shunned from any formal involvement in Democratic politics.
Wendy Williams Says She's Sick of the #MeToo Movement
Source: The Cut
A recent grassroots campaign has put the singer back in the news several months after women claimed he held them in a sex cult. Using the hashtag #MuteRKelly, two women are trying to remove R. Kelly’s music from Atlanta radio and get him banned from the industry.
“What is this, ten years too late?” Williams told the live audience this morning on The Wendy Williams Show. “It’s not gonna work. Black people aren’t really good at protesting. Not since the King march.” (#MuteRKelly is already responsible for helping cancel the musician’s concerts in eight cities.)
Williams also brought up R. Kelly’s legal marriage to underage musician Aaliyah.
Read more: https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/wendy-williams-sick-of-me-too-movement-discusses-r-kelly.html
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimderogatis/r-kelly-underage-woman-speaks-out?utm_term=.vmGdxxlJR#.ye2DrrVg7
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