Security footage shows Georgia county Republican chair, election official present during breach of voting equipment

PBS, Politics Sep 6, 2022 12:40 PM EST

ATLANTA (AP) — Two months after the 2020 presidential election, a team of computer experts traveled to south Georgia to copy software and data from voting equipment in an apparent breach of a county election system. They were greeted outside by the head of the local Republican Party, who was involved in efforts by then-President Donald Trump to overturn his election loss.

A security camera outside the elections office in rural Coffee County captured their arrival. The footage also shows that some local election officials were at the office during what the Georgia secretary of state’s office has described as “alleged unauthorized access” of election equipment.

Security footage from two weeks later raises additional alarms — showing two people who were instrumental in Trump’s wider efforts to undermine the election results entering the office and staying for hours.

The security video from the elections office in the county about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta offers a glimpse of the lengths Trump’s allies went to in service of his fraudulent election claims. It further shows how access was facilitated by local officials who are entrusted with protecting the security of elections while raising concerns about sensitive voting technology being released into the public domain.

Georgia wasn’t the only state where voting equipment was accessed after the 2020 presidential election. Important information about voting systems also was compromised in election offices in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Colorado. Election security experts worry the information obtained — including complete copies of hard drives — could be exploited by those who want to interfere with future elections.

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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/security-footage-shows-georgia-county-republican-chair-election-official-present-during-breach-of-voting-equipment

From the Kellogg Institute:

Monsignor Oscar Romero y Galdamez, fourth archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated while presiding at a memorial Mass in the Carmelite chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia on March 24, 1980. The Archbishop was standing behind the altar, preparing the gifts of the offerty, when two mercenaries approached the chapel and fired a single shot from a U.S. military assault rifle. Archbishop Romero died within minutes from shock and blood loss. He died as a martyr and a prophet, as the greatest source of hope for millions of oppressed and impoverished Salvadorans, and as the greatest threat to the greed and arrogance of the oligarchy of 14 families that ruled El Salvador as if it were their own fiefdom.

Romero had undergone a Metanoia that transformed him from a timid defender of non- controversial virtues into a towering champion of the faith and of the faithful. He had discovered, in his own words: “The word of God is like the light of the sun. It illuminates beautiful things, but also things which we would rather not see.”

Much of the illuminated reality was utterly unconscionable. Less than a month after his installation as archbishop of El Salvador, his friend and colleague Rutillo Grande, SJ, was machine-gunned as “punishment” for helping peasants organize to secure self-determination. Soon after, a right-wing paramilitary group ordered all Jesuits to leave the country or to face execution. Although Fr. Grande’s murder had enormous impact on Romero, he realized that it was not an isolated incident. Literally tens of thousands of men, women, and children were murdered by military and para-military death squads under the guise of “anti-communism,” “law and order,” and “maintenance of traditional values.” On one day alone—January 22, 1979—paramilitary snipers killed 21 people and wounded 120 more while they were staging a peaceful protest march through downtown San Salvador. In rural areas, campesinos were murdered on a daily basis and their bodies were left to rot on road sides, as warnings to others who might “forget their place.” The death squads, commanded by Major Roberto D’ Aubuisson, a Salvadoran army officer who founded the right-wing ARENA political party, and self-proclaimed “fuhrer of San Salvador”— routinely murdered, tortured, raped, and looted with absolute impunity. The police and the courts existed primarily to exonerate the guilty and to punish those victims who dared to speak about the mistreatment they had suffered.

Beyond the overt violence, Oscar Romero saw institutionalized social and economic injustice on a pervasive scale. Two percent of the population controlled 57 percent of the nation’s usable land, and the 16 richest families owned the same amount of land utilized by 230,000 of the poorer families. The use of the comparative, rather than the superlative, is intentional since the poorest families had no land whatever, and were forced to sleep in ditches and muddy fields. Hungry farm workers were beaten or shot for eating a piece of the very produce they had grown. Mines and factories operated under the theory that it was cheaper to replace a dead or crippled worker than to repair defective equipment. Sixty percent of all babies died at birth, and 75 percent of the survivors suffered severe malnutrition. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children died from diseases that could have been cured by basic medications.

Facing such realities, Archbishop Romero began to ask his now-famous questions: “How can Christians do such things to each other? What can the Church do to help?” He found his answer in the realization that he had been called to Christ a second time, to the Christ who spoke to him in the Beatitudes. He found it also in the principles of the Liberation Theology that he had once condemned; in the voices that had risen at the Second General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate at Medellín, Colombia, and in the simple yet powerful truth of Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez’ dictum: “To know God is to do justice.”

In the last sermon Romero preached, only one day before his assassination, he spoke directly to the military: “I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen, and policemen: each of you is one of us. The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear a man telling you to kill, remember God’s words, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you; in the name of God I command you to stop the repression.”

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https://kellogg.nd.edu/archbishop-oscar-romero



Simply for putting the Gospel in action, he became an enemy of the rich and powerful.

John Durham's secret criminal investigation reportedly involved Trump, not Clinton or the FBI

PETER WEBER
The Week, January 27, 2023

Excerpt…

When Durham and Barr made a very unusual trip to Italy in September 2019, "Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes," the Times reports. Barr and Durham "decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore," but instead of assigning it to another prosecutor, Barr had Durham quietly investigate the matter, "giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time."

"Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned, and whether anyone at the White House ever found out," the Times adds. This "extraordinary fact" that Durham opened a criminal investigation of Trump "has remained secret," though "a garbled echo became public" when the Times, in October 2019, reported that Durham's review had become a criminal inquiry, presumably (but erroneously) because "Durham had found evidence of potential crimes by officials involved in the Russia inquiry."

Barr, "who weighed in publicly about the Durham inquiry at regular intervals in ways that advanced a pro-Trump narrative, chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening," the Times notes.

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https://theweek.com/arizona/1020435/arizona-legislature-exempts-itself-from-state-public-records-law

A hearty welcome to DU, GGoss! Outstanding OP and thread!

Personally, I think Barr will claim he covered up for Trump in order to keep “Anti-Putin” national security operations secret, meaning don’t rock the boat wherein the rich get richer and the rest of humanity can drop dead.

Fourth, as disturbing as the McGonigal indictments are, there is some solace in the fact that they don’t contain a charge of espionage. That means, as far as we know, McGonigal didn’t do what Robert Hanssen did: share classified national defense information with foreign powers. McGonigal held a much higher, and even more sensitive, position than Hanssen did. If McGonigal had sold secrets to adversaries, the damage could be almost insurmountable. If there’s anything to be thankful for here, it’s that maybe — just maybe — FBI New York’s top spy catcher had a line that even he would not cross.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/arrest-fbi-agent-linked-russian-oligarch-major-blow-rcna67060

“He who excuses himself, accuses himself.” — Gabriel Meurier



Trump Blasts Charles McGonigal After Arrest: 'Rot In Hell'

BY EWAN PALMER
Newsweek, 1/24/23

Donald Trump reacted with glee after a former FBI official who was involved in the investigation into the alleged ties between the former president's 2016 campaign team and Russia was arrested.

Charles McGonigal, 54, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI's New York office, is accused of secretly working for a U.S.-sanctioned Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, as well as conspiring to commit money laundering.

Prosecutors said that McGonigal is alleged to have tried to help Deripaska get off the sanctions list after leaving the FBI in 2018. He is also alleged to have taken money off the Russian billionaire in 2019 in order to investigate a rival oligarch.

Snip…

In a post on Truth Social after the Department of Justice announced the charges, Trump said: "The FBI guy after me for the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX, long before my Election as President, was just arrested for taking money from Russia, Russia, Russia. May he Rot In Hell!"

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https://www.newsweek.com/trump-charles-mcgonigal-russia-arrest-sanctions-1775988

And its Agents o’ Chaos.



Going by the situation, the Democratic Party can make a good case for a nationwide sweep in ‘24.

He was first to let the traitor Trump off the hook in 2016.

The FBI was then run under James Comey, who Trump fired “at will” in 2017.

Trump and Wray let McGonigal stay at FBI until 2018, when he retired or got canned.

Anyone hear from Frank Figliuzzi?

And WHY are there so many in the House, Kev?

They should be locked up, if not standing in the unemployment line (Thanks, Santos!).

Doesn’t let Turtle and his turd band in the Senate off the hook, neither.

All the traitors need to be held to account. Otherwise, they’ll try, try, try again.

The “Picture of Progress” over the last century.



Billionaires are collectively adding $2.7 billion to their fortunes daily — and their growing share of wealth shows trickle-down doesn't work

* A new report from Oxfam looks at how much wealth billionaires have accumulated.

* The report finds billionaires are collectively adding $2.7 billion to their fortunes daily, as inflation eats up workers' wages.

* As top tax rates fell, billionaire wealth grew — and Oxfam says wealth taxes are one solution.

by Juliana Kaplan and Madison Hoff
Business Insider, January 16, 2023

The rich are getting richer, and it's an ever-growing problem as everyone else sees their wages eaten up by rising inflation.

A new report from Oxfam, called "Survival of the richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality," finds that the richest 1% are increasingly capturing more and more wealth — snatching up two-thirds of all new wealth in the world since 2020.

"That's astonishing, right? Because it's the richest 1% grabbing twice as much money as the rest of humanity, the 99% of us, put together," Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America's director of economic justice, told Insider.

Snip…

The report finds that billionaires' fortunes are collectively growing by $2.7 billion daily, "even as inflation outpaces the wages of at least 1.7 billion workers, more than the population of India."

That's based on the difference between billionaires' wealth from March 18, 2020, adjusted for inflation, and November 30, 2022. Oxfam's analysis showed that there was a $2.6 trillion increase in this wealth during this time.

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https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-add-billions-fortunes-daily-shows-trickle-down-not-real-2023-1

Richest times in human history, rot.